Song for an Approaching Storm Read online

  Your car is parked on what used to be rue Van Vollenhoven, right by the only newspaper stand on the street, Les nouvelletés françaises, and before going to sit in the open-air restaurant of the Hôtel International on rue Angkor, which has remained rue Angkor, you bought today’s edition of Cambodia. The printing costs of the newspaper are paid with French money, and as a result of that it is a paper a schoolteacher with conservative values could well be seen reading.

  If the scene is viewed from the other side of the street: an open-air restaurant in shadow. The hotel stands on a street corner and the sun has sunk down behind the frontage. The rays of the sun have moved on past the painted sign and the windows, which now look grey. They are now only shining on the dome up on the hotel roof and on the thin sharp spire. A waiter dressed in black and white has closed the parasols. Spread out among the tables are a young couple, two men on their own and a small group. The traffic at the crossroads is light and you are one of the men on his own.

  Short-sleeved white shirt, dark trousers and an immaculate side parting.

  You are sitting drinking a cup of coffee from the hotel’s French coffee set, the moss-green one with gold rims. A cigarette is slowly burning to ash in the ashtray and you are reading a respectable conservative newspaper.

  You are apparently reading a respectable conservative newspaper, but if anyone were to sit behind you, he or she would see that what you are actually leafing through is a different paper. A newspaper in a smaller format with worse print and with opinions of a substantially more radical kind. It is called Solidarity and your older brother is the editor. But no one can see it because the only thing behind the back of your chair is the ochre-coloured wall of the Hôtel International.

  You are waiting for company to join you and while you wait you look over the top of the newspaper every so often and watch the people going through the crossing. The street is the busiest street in the city, with cafés and dirty shoeshine boys. It runs through the swarming centre of the Chinese quarter but ends at the square in the French Premier Quartier, surrounded by ponderous official buildings in the French style. The Post Office, the Banque de l’Indochine, the Hôtel Manolis, the police station, the Café de la Poste, the Restaurant La Tavèrne. In other words, a street between two worlds.

  You let your gaze follow first one person, then another. People of Chinese origin are common in districts such as this. But there are even more foreigners here than other places. Various kinds of Westerner for the most part, but also bearded men in turbans.

  And apart from them you can also see your own countrymen. They are like you, but you are not like them. There is a sort of tenderness in the way you think that thought.

  You are one of the few people here who has seen the world beyond the horizon. Who has had the benefit of being educated at the world’s leading seat of learning. You are not, however, referring to the lectures on wireless technology you missed at the Ecole Violet in Paris. No, the actual process of leaving your home country as one of the twenty-two scholarship holders of 1949 is—in your view—the most important examination anyone can take. You have lived at the heart of the empire and met people from its every corner. It was more than just a shared experience: you all shared the same longing for freedom and independence for your native countries. Together with young people from all over the world, you worked as a volunteer road-builder in Yugoslavia. You have seen what people can achieve if there is just one goal and everyone is working towards it.

  Unlike your countrymen, you have seen things like that. You know the kind of things they can’t know.

  It is because of experiences of that sort that comrades such as Samouth and Van Ba have chosen you. The men who are the leaders of the movement that is going to liberate the people you can see in front of you; the men who are going to take them on beyond national independence; the men who are going to give them real justice.

  You can admit it to yourself: you are a man with possibilities. Compared to your fellow-countrymen you have the qualifications to achieve something of real importance. Through Somaly, your fiancée, you have contacts at court and you know both the revolutionaries in the jungle and the politicians in the capital. You have a background few others can match, a position that no one can.

  But though the future may well be yours, it has not arrived yet. That is something you learned during your months with the partisans. They thought you were more use to them emptying the latrines than as an ideologist. You resigned yourself to that fact. All work is of equal importance. Someone has to dig shit into the fields if soldiers are to have food on their plates.

  When you went to join the partisan movement, you thought you would be able to say later that you took part in the armed struggle. You steer clear of that these days. That sort of claim could rebound on you if anyone in your circle happened to talk to the people who actually filled the latrine buckets.

  But at least the march to the front turned out to be the short cut you had thought it might be. It has given you an advantage over better educated people who have been involved longer than you but who are still in Paris. They are undoubtedly superior to you when it comes to theory, but not any longer when it comes to practice.

  You are drinking your coffee from a moss-green cup with a gold rim and you are waiting for someone to join you, someone who is arriving in a cyclo at this very moment. He is a man the same age as you, with a receding hairline and restless movements. His name is Vannsak and he pays the driver more than he is asked. As usual. His black tie-knot is crooked and you get up to shake hands with him, as has become the habit in the city among modern men like you.

  Vannsak, who lived across the street from you in Paris. Vannsak, the poet, and now the politician too. He was the one you new arrivals could always turn to with questions and problems. You had nowhere to live. He fixed a flat for you. You didn’t have any pots and pans. He lent you his. Your Paris years would have been quite different without him.

  And you, too, would have been quite different. This man, who is now squeezing your right hand with his right hand and placing his bulging briefcase on the table with his left, is the man who took you to discussion clubs with him. It was in his living room that you met most of those who now make up the Organization. You have sometimes described your personal development as dependent on certain key figures, people able to open the doors that you yourself cannot. There have been several key figures of that kind, people you’ve had electrifying conversations with. Who have enabled you to see completely new connections when your thoughts were wearing thin.

  There have been a number of them, like Mumm, Samouth and Meas. But none of them has been as important as Vannsak, for he was the first.

  But that was then. Now you think he lacks the courage to remain a true visionary. You feel that his arguments have become more and more muddled, when you compare them with the spellbinding clarity they had when you first met. Instead of summoning all his strength in order to raise reality to the vision, he takes the easy way out and drags the vision down to reality.

  But you are not sitting here at the Hôtel International outdoor café in order to confront Vannsak with his ideological compromises. There is another reason. Or, to be more precise, reasons, since your role is a double rather than a single one. And neither of those roles involves being his secretary, which is your actual official function. On the contrary, the two of you have equal status in the discussion. In a couple of weeks’ time this independent country’s first independent parliamentary election will take place, and both you and Vannsak have belonged to the Democrats for the last decade. Even as a teenager you used to distribute their flyers as part of the well-orchestrated make-believe democracy of the colonial period. From a political point of view things hadn’t really been properly thought through, but then, in a political sense, you hadn’t thought things through for yourself at that time. In those days, moreover, the item at the top of the party agenda was something as straightforward as national liberation.

  V
annsak has manoeuvred his way into the party leadership since then. You have followed. Now the two of you meet on working days and holidays to discuss strategies, produce statements and formulate responses. Unlike your opponents the two of you stick to the issues. You don’t accuse your adversaries of drunkenness and bigamy. You put forward concrete proposals for concrete improvements to real schools and real health care and real administration. You name names, you add up figures. You talk about what is achievable and what is not achievable. And it seems to work. Your audiences grow in number with every meeting—in spite of the fact that you avoid bandying insults or wooing the public in the crudest manner possible. The voters seem prepared to shoulder the responsibility which, as you are constantly telling them, is theirs and theirs alone.

  Both of you don’t tell them, however. It is Vannsak who shouts this mantra into the microphones. You stay at a proper distance from any platform. That’s a necessary precondition of your other role. The role that considerably fewer people know about. What Vannsak and the others do not know is that you also carry a very different party card. Back in your modest house on the southern outskirts of the city. It’s a little book with thin paper covers on which the words Parti communiste français are printed, and you have hidden it well. Consequently, Vannsak has no idea that the conversation you are about to begin once he’s ordered his coffee will be reported back to the centre of the Organization. To people whose names even you don’t know, whose faces could pass along the street in front of both of you without either of you reacting.

  But what you do know is that somewhere in that dark centre your loyalty is being recorded, along with every small radical formulation you manage to place in Vannsak’s speech. It is not a case of rewriting a whole party programme. But every slight shift can be of service to the Organization. If not now, then later. And that is why you must never be seen in the company of representatives of the People’s Party.

  There are presumably people who knew you in France and now wonder why you only associated with revolutionaries in Paris whereas here you have joined the Democrats. Why you seem to have completely changed your social circle. On the other hand, no one is more radical than when a student and you are now over thirty. And, of course, the man whose portfolio case you carry is your old mentor Vannsak, a man who had moved from red to pink.

  So their thoughts remain just that—thoughts, not suspicions.

  Outwardly you are a Democrat and nothing but a Democrat, the respectable secretary to one of the leading figures in the opposition party. Inwardly you are the Organization’s indispensable link-man.

  And then there is yet another role, one that no one but you knows that you are playing. It is confusingly like your first role.

  It involves a twenty-three-year-old woman whose photograph you have in your wallet. A woman whose significance you deny to the Organization. Like a man devoted to the cause, you sometimes think. Like the disciple Peter, you think rather more often. Because the door the Organization believes you have closed is still wide open.

  If events take their proper course Vannsak and the Democrats are going to win the election. The two of you have definitely not discussed what will happen after that. But the work you are currently doing at his side is hardly going to come to an end once the voting papers have been counted. You can’t really hope to be a minister, but permanent secretary is a possibility. Your organizational talents are respected, as is your ability to win the trust of the humble as well as of the elevated. That portfolio case on the table may already contain a draft proposal whereby you are entrusted with a coordinating function in a future government.

  A well-paid and well-respected office of that kind is what your fiancée Somaly expects you to get. Her family even more so. You do, of course, come from a good background back in your home district, but oxen and day-labourers are hardly a match for the royal blood that—slightly diluted—runs through the veins of your beloved.

  In other words: no state office, no wedding.

  You remember that remarkably cool day, the year the rains stopped earlier than anyone could remember, when you stood at the edge of the royal pavilion while the rowing races were taking place down on the brown river. An island of calm in the chaotic sea of people gathered to celebrate the festival. You remember how you saw her among all the other reserved and haughty figures who were slowly circulating in the shade of the gilded roof. In terms of external appearance—dress, hair, jewellery—she blended in with the other young women who had reached an age when they could be introduced into society. But unlike all of the others, who seemed so anxious to please that all their individuality was masked by a kind of blank and nervous smile, she stood out as being consciously unapproachable. As if there were a kind of darkness around her, in contrast to all the gold and the glitter that characterized the context. You yourself had felt uncomfortable in your white court dress, having been invited there by your sister, who was still welcome in the pavilion even though the old king had been dead for a decade.

  You remember the way your eyes, with a will of their own, returned time after time to that sulky-looking girl, who could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen years old. You remember how, to your surprise, you saw an acquaintance of yours conversing with her as if they were old friends. How, even though you didn’t really know each other well enough for such confidences, you eventually asked him in a quiet voice: Who is she?

  And how he had sighed and answered: Not you too.

  You had become flustered and asked what he meant.

  All the men ask that, he explained.

  Then he said: She is called Somaly, the daughter of Princess Rasmi. And no, she is not promised in marriage. Her father, however, is a reprobate.

  You remember what a put-down it felt to be nothing more than one of all the men. No better nor different from all the rest of them. You against all of them—the competition seemed hopeless.

  Later, however, she was to become yours.

  And the future for the two of you will be decided by a free general election in which only a handful of those with the right to vote know that there is anything at stake for you and her apart from the distribution of seats in the National Assembly.

  You are sitting with your back to the wall of the Hôtel International watching Vannsak put sugar into his coffee. The two of you have still not said more than a few words of greeting. It’s as if you have so many important things to discuss that you no longer waste words on idle chat.

  Everything seemed so simple during your last year in Paris and your first months back at home. You were completely taken up with the worldwide movement you were part of. You loved the conversations at the discussion club which, after a while, became secret meetings in even more secret cells. With the utmost secrecy you became a member of the French Communist Party.

  And then you returned home as a man with a mission. The countryside was totally dominated by liberation movements that were slowly starving the towns of necessities. It seemed to you that the revolution was on the point of happening.

  But the conflict did not break out. The colonial power simply packed its bags and left. One by one the posh villas in the Premier Quartier emptied. Their defeat in Vietnam turned out to be a victory for your country too. That meant that the freedom struggle came to a rather inglorious conclusion and the result was that the touchpaper that could have ignited the revolution was snuffed out.

  There is no doubt that the unjust system still exists, but the possibility of overthrowing it by violent means has become no more than a hypothetical proposition.

  Which is why—without the Organization knowing—you have introduced new factors into your calculation. Might it not be possible to achieve change by parliamentary means? It is not for nothing that the countries around the Mekong River were the diamonds in the French colonial crown. There are resources here that many other undeveloped countries cannot even dream of. It ought to be possible to build a new Uruguay here, surely? By means of a very, very slow rev
olution, one cloaked in reforms? Because you are well aware of the fact that however unjust the distribution of welfare may be, a number of the important preconditions of revolution are absent. For example: (1) a politically conscious proletariat. Or: (2) serfdom among the agricultural workers. It was possible to mobilize the poor peasant proprietors for national liberation, but they are unwilling to take up arms to solve more complex problems.

  The road to revolution seems to be a long and winding one. It may be easier to achieve your aims by democratic means. So which to choose?

  Indeed, which to choose? If only it was just a question of politics. But it isn’t. Your fiancée Somaly, whom you almost forgot during your endless discussions with Mumm in Paris or when you were listening to Samouth explain Hegel’s dialectic in the partisan camp, is ever present in your thoughts these days.

  That is not the way it was meant to be. When you went to meet her for the first time after four years apart, you intended to break off your engagement. Falling in love is no more than a sentimental and egotistical weakness, something one can free oneself from through dedication and practice. And that is what you had done. How could you ever hope to dedicate your life to the struggle if you had a spoilt bourgeois woman at your side?

  With Parisian self-confidence and unimpeachable ideological rectitude, you were going to put an end to what you had promised the Organization to put an end to.

  But just the way she entered the room, just the way she walked over to you from the door. Everything that had attracted you so strongly when you first saw her at the rowing races had deepened and matured into something even more beautiful. It drove every rational intention out of your mind. And that was before—without any sign of shyness—she took your hands in hers and said your name.