Song for an Approaching Storm Read online

  PETER FRÖBERG IDLING

  SONG FOR AN

  APPROACHING

  STORM

  a fantasy

  Translated from the Swedish by

  Peter Graves

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  Later the real war was unleashed, to be conducted in secret by radio through the U.S. Embassy in Pnom Penh. South Vietnam was already a wasteland, deluged by high-explosives, poisons and fire. Mr. Kissinger had said that the dominoes were falling, so now it was the turn of Cambodia and Laos, delivered to the greatest holocaust ever to be visited on the East. It consumed not only the present, but the past; an obliteration of cultures and values as much as physical things. From the ashes that remained no phoenix would ever rise. Not enough survived even to recreate the memory of what the world had lost.

  Norman Lewis, A Dragon Apparent

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  I. SAR

  II. SARY

  III. SOMALY

  epilogue (retake)

  postlude

  Author’s Thanks

  Also Available from Pushkin Press

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  I. SAR

  Now we are sitting here in our weightless waiting

  With far too many wristwatches in a ticking little living room

  […]

  —while silence lets its wasted croquet ball

  roll against the wall

  SVEN ALFONS

  Rear-view Mirror Towards Dawn

  MONDAY, 22 AUGUST 1955

  You put the heavy matt-black bakelite handset back on its cradle. Your thoughts are already elsewhere, not at the other end of the wire.

  TUESDAY, 23 AUGUST 1955

  You’re standing in front of a car. It’s a black car and it belongs to you. You inherited it. You inherited it from a sister who got it from her lover. It’s not a new car, but twenty years ago it was a car for kings and prime ministers and its chrome and paintwork are gleaming. The headlamps are two big yellow eyes high up on the curve of the mudguards. There are two inverted Vs on top of the slim flutings of the radiator grill. The steering wheel is white.

  You’re holding the car keys in your hand.

  Presently you are going to get into the car and drive through the city, which has already been emptied by darkness. But stay a little while, stay for the few minutes of honey-coloured light that precede sunset.

  The evening is close and still. You can if you wish take your wallet from your portfolio case and take out the photograph. Let her smile at you, her head inclined slightly to the left. The well-manicured fingertips of her left hand are lying against her collarbone. Her dark hair has been curled and let down so that it frames her pale smooth face. Looking out beneath eyebrows that are just a shade too thick, her eyes meet yours. She is laughing her bright laugh, lips closing in a smile over even teeth, eyes holding yours for a moment before moving on. Then she stretches her back and the shot silk of her blouse shifts from chalk white to greyish pink. The waiter pours more wine but she moves her hand over her half-full glass to forestall him. And finally you succeed in dragging your eyes away from her and, still with the hint of a smile, look down at the white china in front of you. You cut a piece of duck breast, draw it through the gravy and slice a potato. Then you see one of her hands gently grasp her wine glass and involuntarily you follow the curving movement the glass makes on its way back up to her mouth.

  You’re standing in front of a car. Go and sit in the car. Start the engine, listen to its even rhythm. Then engage first gear and begin the journey as planned. Don’t take any detours apart from avoiding the district around Marché Abbatoir where the streets are muddy and potholed. Drive to the river smoothly, staying in the higher gears. The eye of the lighthouse will be drawing circles in the darkness of the bank where the Mekong and the Sap meet, and you will drive on along Quai Sisowath and Quai Norodom and Quai Lagrandière until you can park under the big trees outside the cathedral. You will have to wait there for a little while again, until the big silent shadow of a cyclo comes gliding up. After you’ve exchanged passwords, take a seat in the cyclo.

  Take a seat in the cyclo.

  He will take you somewhere quite different, somewhere far from starched linen napkins and dresses with high necks and gold embroidery.

  You are somewhere different. You are standing outside a simple house built on tall stilts. A glow in the windows suggests that there is a paraffin lamp alight inside. A pig can be heard grunting away in its pen. The dense banana palms are a darkness darker than the surrounding darkness. Behind you the cyclo departs after you have a momentary glimpse of its driver’s face, as he lights a fat cigarette rolled from green tobacco leaves. An elderly man, whose face seems to you almost frightening in the fluttering flame.

  Walk towards the house. Even though it may be a trap, walk towards the house with its steep steps. It could always be a trap. Push your hat back so you can look up without bending backwards. Tuck your handkerchief down into the breast pocket of your jacket so it won’t offer a white target for a marksman to aim at.

  You climb a steep concrete staircase. The night is full of all the animal sounds of night, but no other sounds. You’re carrying a portfolio case in your hand and in the portfolio there’s an elegant wallet and in the wallet is a photograph of a young woman who lies in your heart behind that white handkerchief.

  You have climbed a steep staircase and now you are standing on a veranda. The heels of your shoes have left a mark for every step you took across the check pattern of ceramic tiles on the veranda. Place the palm of your hand on the polished wood of the door and stand there for a moment. Consider your choices yet again. What might happen now? Anything at all might happen, but just think what will happen if a security policeman opens the door. It will be a tall slim man with sinewy hands and a scar on his left forearm. Or, perhaps, a thickset man with a low centre of gravity and with short hair like pig’s bristle on the back of his neck. Irrespective of what kind of man opens the door he will be the same sort of age as you, and he will be moving very quickly to catch hold of the sleeve of your jacket or to aim a kick at your crotch. There is also the possibility that he will strike the side of your head with a bamboo baton or will even be holding a loaded revolver in a two-handed grip.

  You think about what will happen after that, about how the story develops, branching and splitting time after time. Some of the lines it takes always lead to the men listening being impressed by your unsentimental and pleasant smile. How, against all odds, they let themselves be convinced by your explanation of why you are at this very place at this very time with a portfolio crammed with compromising material. And then they let you go with a stern warning and a wink. Or, at a later stage, you are granted a meeting with the prison governor, who believes the righteous indignation you feel at being lumped together with communists and assassins when you are innocent.

  But you know that this is just wishful thinking on the part of a mind under extreme tension, that the real story is the one in which the bamboo baton strikes the side of your head, in which you are confused by pain and tripped up before you can reach the staircase. The one in which the thickset man ties you in a chair with your hands behind your back and then without warning smashes your molars with a kick that knocks over both you and the chair. The one in which the bones in your fingers are broken one by one, even though you have betrayed your friends one by one.

  You stand there with the palm of your hand against the wooden door and those behind the door are waiting for you.

  Knock on the door.

  Knock once, twice, three times and wait
for the whisper from inside.

  Answer the whisper.

  You are sitting by a paraffin lamp. You are sitting in a room that loses itself in darkness beyond the circle of yellow light from the lamp. Two illuminated faces are suspended in front of you, one thin, the other wide across the jaw. The table is covered with sheets of paper with French words and long lines in your own language. A mosquito net is hanging furled up over a low bed. Like you, your companions are dressed in short-sleeved shirts and dark trousers. Their jackets are hanging over the backs of the chairs.

  You know the two men in front of you. You have known them for a long time. You met them at the discussion club at Vannsak’s place in Paris. Together you have fantasized about the life you are now leading, you have discussed it in cafés, after lectures, over cheap meals at cheap restaurants. The face with the wide jaw is called Yan. The thin face is Sok. You used to meet regularly on rue Lacepède at what, with time, came to be called a party cell. That is what you are doing now, too, even though the name of the street outside is unknown to you.

  You talk in low voices. If anyone were to be standing quietly beneath the window and listening, he would hear no more than a mumble. Your talk is concentrated, you exchange thoughtful glances and, with your fountain pens, scratch down words on sheets of paper the wet season has caused to swell.

  The meeting is marked by the feeling that there is a great deal at stake and that there is no time to lose. You listen attentively to the others but always with an ear open for noises that are not the normal noises of the night—dogs that begin to bark and the direction the barks are coming from, a car door closing, a shout of command, the pounding of running feet on the stairs.

  The day’s agenda lies in front of you. It was written in haste and there are many items—they form a blue-ink column that slopes inwards towards the centre of the page. There is less than three weeks left to the parliamentary election and even though you are not letting on about it, you have a feeling that the ground is shifting. That things are moving, moving almost imperceptibly, but moving in the wrong direction. But on an evening like this, with Yan and Sok on the other side of the table, it is not the right thing to say. Perhaps they too can sense the inexorable slide, but the three of you are here to plan for something different. You are here to plan for victory. It is a night to be serious and to be enthusiastic.

  There are tall drinks glasses on the table. Five of them, in spite of the fact that there are only three of you. Anything to confuse uninvited guests. The glasses contain dark jasmine tea and it glows the colour of amber in the weak light. A small round coaster sits on top of each glass to prevent it filling with drowning insects.

  You deal with point after point, passing documents to one another and drinking the lukewarm tea. Outside there is night, darkness and a blessed silence. Yan asks the American question. You have nothing new to say about it and you say so: in the current precarious situation Vannsak thinks you should leave it aside—and you agree with him.

  Yan asks the Chinese question, and then the French one, before returning to the American question. But you stick to your view.

  How to relate to the new imperialism, the new colonialist, can be addressed or not be addressed in the election campaign. The fact that the prince has signed a cooperation agreement with Washington is a weak point. It can be used. But your intuition tells you to steer clear of it. The prince has some hidden reason for the agreement. What it is, you don’t know.

  It is difficult to argue for something as personal as a feeling with men such as those sitting opposite you. So you remain silent behind your unwillingness to record the question on the order paper.

  Yan and Sok look at you but you stay silent, and in the end Sok makes a note and says, let’s proceed. Let’s proceed, he says, and although you cannot decipher his writing there is no need to. You know that your silence will be reported back to the centre. But you count on them understanding. It is not your job to push through the policies of the Organization. You are to be pragmatic. From your prominent but hidden position within the Democratic Party, your primary task is to keep Yan and Sok informed about that party’s internal affairs. Only secondarily to influence policy. The former is risky, the second directly dangerous.

  It is Sok’s responsibility to report those who fail to subordinate themselves to collective decisions. With his illegible writing he is putting his loyalty to the Organization above his friendship with you. The cause is more important than the individual. That is absolutely right and proper and you approve of his discipline and lack of sentimentality. It also means it is easier to read him. You recognize that Sok is a comrade the Organization can rely on, even if you can’t rely on him.

  You continue. Quicker now. The risk of discovery grows with every minute the three of you spend in the same room. The tension is infectious.

  You give an account of the strategies of Vannsak and the Democrats. Vannsak seems to you to have boundless energy and you tell that to your companions. Each of them runs an index finger down all the entries in his diary, which you have copied. You all feel it’s a pity he is no longer one of you. It is a long time since he—as a self-proclaimed proletarian—cut his ties with his well-off family.

  There was a time when he was red. Now he is more like pink.

  You mix dry cigarette smoke and tea and Yan reports the latest information about losses suffered by the People’s Party, the part of the Organization that does not work in secret. There have been disappearances and hospitalizations. The authorities dismiss any violence aimed at you as the settling of private grievances and it does not even merit a mention in the newspapers. It is hardly a sophisticated tactic, but it’s an effective one. Yan states that things are close to collapse.

  You read the names on a list in Yan’s handwriting but you cannot put a face to any of them. All of them are Meas’s men. Meas himself has managed to evade both batons and handcuffs. Acting as the official leader of the People’s Party as he does is a risky business. He is completely exposed to the state’s machinery of violence. But if he survives the election he will probably become the next chairman of the Organization. That will correspond to his perception of his own importance. Meas is a man to be watched. And to learn from. You work in secret, he in the open. Which is the more effective strategy is something you will soon be able to demonstrate empirically.

  Yan then gives a summary of the latest developments abroad. Your own country may be the target of your work but oppression is global, as is the struggle. In Paris you had friends from the whole French-speaking world, from countries you had not even known existed. The sense of being part of a worldwide context, of being one with a brotherhood that will force history to turn in a new and previously unforeseen direction, that sense is a constant source of comfort and inspiration. That is why you all carefully follow developments not just in the countries bordering your own but also in distant states. There are lessons to be learnt, for even if the preconditions are different, the resistance is the same. Yan reports on the French terror bombing that wiped out whole villages in Morocco, with hundreds of deaths. And you remember your Moroccan friends who joined the liberation movement. Yan tells of various attacks in Algeria, of French mobilization and of the mass arrests of Arabs in Paris. Of the disturbances in Tunisia. He moves on to the hard fighting in Gaza and you think of a Lebanese acquaintance, a friendly lanky fellow who was one of the founders of the Arab nationalist movement.

  A really motley collection, but nevertheless inextricably involved in a common vision of the future.

  Was that a noise or wasn’t it?

  Your eyes meet Yan’s. They meet Sok’s. Their faces remain utterly expressionless, only their eyes move. You all sit absolutely still and silence reigns outside. If there was a someone who revealed his presence a moment ago, that someone is now as motionless as the three of you. You and Yan quickly begin to gather up your papers. You lay one sheet carefully on top of another and place them silently in the portfolio case.

&
nbsp; Sok raises his hand and you all freeze again. You wish you could stop the dull thumping of the pulse in your ear but, you think, a heart is not like a knee that can be bent at will.

  You are sitting in a room with two revolutionary university teachers and a paraffin lamp that is burning with a steady flame. Outside there is silence and in that silence you imagine there are crouching men, their eyes gleaming in the moonlight as they approach.

  There was a time when you would have felt ill. You would have felt your limbs paralysed by panic. But that was then. You get used to things, even to things like this. Now you feel heavy and solid and prepared. In the sense that you have accepted what may happen.

  Yan gets up slowly, nods to you and to Sok. You see his face by the light of the paraffin lamp, the shape his mouth makes and then it all disappears. Nothing is left but sounds.

  You hear his footsteps moving towards the door.

  A grey panel opens in the blackness and his silhouette is outlined against it. The door closes on noiseless hinges and you wonder whether that is luck or a sign of careful preparation.

  You sit in the darkness with Sok and listen to him breathing slowly on the other side of the table. The sweat makes the palms of your hands prickle and you wait for Yan to take a look around, and then come and knock gently on one of the stilts supporting the house. You are waiting for the two small dry knocks that will free you from this situation.

  WEDNESDAY, 24 AUGUST 1955

  Your black Citroën is parked round the corner, its lights off and its engine cooling. It is standing on a street that until quite recently was still called rue Van Vollenhoven. You can’t remember what the street has been rechristened. They all have new names now. An independent country should have streets with independent names. But it does take a little time for people to change the habit of eighty years. So people apologize, say things like you know how it is, what’s it called again, and then they smile and use the old name.