I Am Radar

1. LA SEULE VÉRITÉ PLANTATION, MEKONG RIVER, FRENCH PROTECTORATE OF CAMBODIA

March 2, 1953

Tien was squatting on his haunches in the shade of a banana tree, smoking the last of his three cigarettes, trying to ignore the heat that was beating down on him in waves. He had been up since before dawn, when the mists still hung heavy, tapping 445 rubber trees by the light of a kerosene headlamp that burned hot against the skin of his forehead. The trees could only be cut in the cool dawn air, when they would bleed enough to fill the collecting cups before their spiral incisions dried up in the tropical sun. Tien had half an hour remaining before he had to brave the midday heat and begin the collection, retracing his route from that morning. He could no longer separate this cycle from the pulse of life itself: Cut, drain, retrieve. Repeat. It was as natural as breathing.

He took another drag from the cigarette, slowly, longingly, a breeze bending a twig, and then he heard a noise coming from the ditch behind him, a sound like the hushed whistle of a teakettle left to simmer on a stove. Tien ran the back of his thumb against his lip and shook the ash from the tip of his cigarette. He did not move. It was too hot to move, too hot for anything except that which was absolutely necessary. In heat like this, you had to decide your actions long in advance.

The sound came again, insistent, louder this time. Tien closed his eyes, the image of a woman coming into his mind: a torso, naked and white in the light, a shawl of saffron dragged across the thin curve of her shoulders. The woman turned her face toward him, and that elemental ache returned, but then the vision evaporated as the sound came a third time, now forming into a cry that could only have arisen from the lungs of a human. Tien exhaled, carefully stubbed out his cigarette, and placed it into an overflowing tin can, the label peeled clean. He got down on all fours and peeked over the edge of the ditch, afraid of what he might see.

What he saw stunned him: a naked baby, floating in the scoop basket of a conical sedge hat. The child, exposed to the heat of the sun, was shriveled, a deathly pale yellow-green, the size and color of a pomelo fruit. Too tiny to be alive. But it was alive: now it was moving an arm and again making that strange whistling sound.

“Come,” Tien called to the others. “Come. Come quickly. Look what I’ve found.”

The others looked, blinking in wonder. It was agreed: this was the smallest baby they had ever seen. It was agreed: the child would not survive.

Tien fished the hat from the water and wrapped the baby in his red checkered scarf.

“Go get Suong. She can give him some milk,” he said to Keo.

As they waited, there was much debate among the men. What to do? Was it a test? A trap? The baby looked Cambodian, perhaps Laotian, and the first thought was that it must’ve been one of the workers on the plantation who had delivered the baby and then abandoned him. This theory was passed around and digested and eventually rejected. None of the women workers had been far enough along to deliver even a baby as tiny as this.

Suong arrived at the ditch, the sweat catching in the crinkles of her eyes. It was much too hot for a child to be in the sun. She took him to the shade of the banana tree, where she coddled the child, pinching at the diphthonged knees, the miraculous little legs, no bigger than her fingers. The child’s coloring was all wrong — he was suffering from disease. She lifted him to her breast, humming a wordless song, but he would not take the nipple.

“He’s sick,” she said. “He’s too small to drink. He will die.” Her tense shifted. “He’s dead.”

• • •

AT LEAST this was the version of events described in Brusa Tofte-Jebsen’s obscure novella Jeg er Raksmey (Neset Forlag, 1979), which utilizes the usual mixture of pictures, diagrams, and prose that was so popular in Scandinavian literature at the time. Yet Jeg er Raksmey was also another sad example of a book written but hardly read; it sold barely half of its listed first run of 750 copies before the rest were sent to the pulper in Lysaker. The slim book did have one notable (if not surprising) reader: Per Røed-Larsen. In a section of Spesielle Partikler entitled “En elementær partikkel er en partikkel som ikke kan brytes ned til mindre partikler” (“An elementary particle is a particle that cannot be broken into smaller particles”), Røed-Larsen devotes a mind-boggling amount of time and space refuting the factual basis of Tofte-Jebsen’s story, despite Tofte-Jebsen’s making no claim that his book is anything but fiction. Røed-Larsen disagrees. “[Jeg er Raksmey] is near-truth posed as fiction and I can think of no worse crime,” he writes. “It has thus become my beholden duty. . to set the record straight. We must stick with the facts and only the facts” (591).

In particular, Røed-Larsen is bothered by Tofte-Jebsen’s claim that the child was discovered in a floating hat. In building up a case against such an origin story, Røed-Larsen references (among other things) the improbable buoyancy quotient of a newborn’s (even an unusually small newborn’s) staying afloat inside the leaky and unstable containment vessel of a palm-leaf nón lá hat (591–93). Much more likely, Røed-Larsen argues, was that the child was given directly to Tien by one of the women on the plantation, sans floating hat.

No matter. Regardless of how he was discovered, what cannot be disputed is that the child had chosen a most unusual landing point for his entrance onto the stage. Owned by the de Broglie family for three generations, La Seule Vérité was one of the few French rubber plantations still operating along the banks of the Mekong. In 1953, France was already seven years deep into its dirty war with the Viet Minh, unable to relinquish its Indochine colonies without a protracted, bloody fight that would culminate the following spring on the slopes of Dien Bien Phu. La Seule Vérité, perched on an oblong bend in the river, was both of this empire and wholly separate from it, a place that had gracefully excused itself from the normal laws of both space and time.

Fig. 4.1. Nón lá Hydrostatic Buoyancy Analysis

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 592

After some discussion, the workers decided to present the baby-who-was-dead-but-not-dead-yet to the manager of the plantation, Capitaine Claude Renoit. Capitaine Renoit had lost a leg early in the war and had come to La Seule Vérité to sulk and wax on about the decline of everything that once was great about the land. But he was an honest man, and he treated the workers as well as they could hope for. He did not believe in an excess of suffering, and so he would know what to do with the child. If he gave permission for the little thing to die, then the child’s spirit would not blame them when it found no place to rest.

Renoit was sitting on the patio, thumbing at a glass of Courvoisier, the ledger sheets splayed out before him. A fleeing diplomat had given him the bottle in Saigon for services rendered on the battlefield, and Renoit had been saving the cognac for a special occasion ever since, but it was becoming more and more likely that he would die before a worthy occasion came, so he had broken the seal and let the old liquid cut through the heat of his body. These grapes were from Napoleon’s time, when empires were carved with simple gestures of the hand. Renoit found himself wondering whether, if the worst were to happen, he would kill himself or let another man have the pleasure. He had seen enough to know that in every death, someone suffered and someone triumphed, and often those two were the same person.

He was startled out of his reverie by a group of coolies coming up the hill from the rubber fields. Someone must have died again. This was both annoying and somehow exhilarating.

We’re still making the rubber. We’re still dying to make the rubber. It didn’t matter what the ledger sheets said. La mort est notre mission civilisatrice, Renoit thought, and took a sip of the cognac.

When presented with the baby, Renoit, like all the others, was taken with the child’s almost mystical diminutiveness. Its fingers like tiny spiders, toes like grains of rice.

“What the hell do you want me to do?” Renoit said to Tien, who was offering the child with outstretched arms, like a gift. “He’s one of yours. Fais-en ce que tu veux.”

Tien bowed. His heart sank. As he feared, the blood would now be on his hands. He turned away, sheltering the child, who had suddenly grown quiet, as if sensing the imminence of his doom.

It was then that Jean-Baptiste emerged from the main house. He was carrying a wireless, intently swinging its long, spindly antenna toward the sky, fishing for an elusive, invisible signal.

“Why ever did we get this thing? I wasn’t worried about receiving the news before,” he said. “But now I can’t seem to live without it.”

Jean-Baptiste saw the crowd of workers around Renoit.

“This heat’s miserable. Even the radio waves have wilted.” He paused. “Did someone die?”

“Not yet,” said Renoit.

Tien’s hopes rose. He offered the baby, still wrapped in his scarf, to the master of the house.

Jean-Baptiste studied Tien closely.

“Whose child is this?” he said. He put down the radio, still expelling its plush blanket of static, and took the small creature in his hands.

“Whose child is this?” he said again.

Tien bowed. “He is yours, Monsieur de Broglie.”

2

As Tofte-Jebsen points out, it might at first seem curious that Jean-Baptiste de Broglie, reluctant sovereign of La Seule Vérité, would be one of the last remaining kmaoch sbaek sor (“white ghosts”) in the twilight of a dying empire, especially considering his almost total indifference to the actual business of running a plantation. But dig beneath the surface and you will discover an uncommon resolve; Jean-Baptiste, willingly or unwillingly, had inherited that strange but effective colonial alchemy of nostalgia, loyalty, and imperial duty.

Jean-Baptiste’s grandfather, Henri de Broglie, had been part of the first wave of eager settlers to the newly formed French Protectorate of Cambodia in the 1870s. Henri was an early champion of the magnificent ruins of Angkor, and through a series of articles in respected periodicals such as Le Globe and Le Petit Parisien, he had helped to popularize their “rediscovery” among Western audiences. At the time, the temples still fell under the jurisdiction of the Kingdom of Siam, and Henri was part of the diplomatic delegation that had negotiated their successful return to the Cambodian people.

“The Khmers are a friendly but short-sighted race,” he wrote in an editorial in Le Petit Journal. “If they are to achieve anything in the future, they must see what magnificence was possible in the past.”

Along the way, Henri had forsaken Catholicism for his own Westernized version of the local Theravada Buddhism: he borrowed selectively from Khmer traditions but also subtly aligned spiritual enlightenment alongside the tenets of Rousseau’s rational enlightenment. For Henri, ascendancy to nirvana meant total mastery of one’s own domain using the latest advances in technology. It was a convenient alteration: such cultural blending allowed him to shirk responsibility for his actions by locating himself in the ethically ambiguous space between the colonizer and the colonized.

While on a tour of Brazil in 1882, Henri visited a rubber plantation and witnessed the cultivation of hevea trees. He watched in fascination as the men made a V-shaped incision into the soft bark of the plant and then siphoned the milky sap through a half-moon spout into the hollow shell of a coconut. Later, Henri would dip his hand into a great steel drum of warm latex, the rubber coating him like a second skin. Sensing his guest’s great admiration, the plantation owner gave Henri a pair of black rubber boots that smelled of wet ash.

“I am certain that nearly all of man’s inventions in the next 100 years will be made of this material,” he later recorded in his journal. “There is a life to its texture that brings me great comfort.”

He brought back a jar full of hevea seeds and a notebook of instructions for its cultivation, and founded La Seule Vérité in the heart of the colony, on the banks of the Mekong, the great river that would deliver his crop to the world. The plot was expansive but perhaps two hundred kilometers farther upstream than it needed to be. This choice, like all others, was made defiantly, un défi du cœur.

“The river is the spine of the colony, from which all life comes and goes,” he wrote. “My house is built between the fourth and fifth vertebrae. . And the view does not disappoint.”

Sometimes the surface of the river was so calm and wide, one could not believe there was any movement at all — it resembled not a river but a thousand-year-old lake. This curving stretch of the Mekong, like the bend of a woman’s knee, inevitably affected all those who passed through it. Either they fell in love with the way les heures bubbled and moaned here or else they urged their capitaine to push through to the next turn, wondering who would ever choose to live in such a place.

The house itself was a lavish, two-story affair built of Italian marble and local rosewood, surrounded by rolling bushes of bougainvillea. It was one of the first rubber plantations in all of Indochine, and for years it stumbled along, producing little from immature trees for a nearly nonexistent Asian market. Henri, undeterred, continued plotting his rise to wealth and fame, writing at length of rubber’s sturdy flexibility, extolling the great rubber farms of Brazil, Java, and the newly formed Congo Free State in Africa.

Henri was a notorious cataloger. He recorded nearly everything that went on at La Seule Vérité in obsessive detail, documenting tree height, wages, temperature, flooding, bird species, even his own bowel movements. Fearful that someone might get hold of these notes and decode his secrets, Henri kept the large calfskin tomes locked in a vault. Years later, when his son and then grandson were able to glimpse their contents, such worries seemed superfluous: the ledgers did indeed contain a wealth of information, but their system of organization was beyond mortal comprehension. Columns of numbers, labeled only with a series of initials, would intersect graphs and tables of equally opaque figures. An unidentified chart could just as easily have been referring to kilograms of rubber output as to kilograms of excrement produced. Henri’s system existed only in the world of the system itself.

Henri married a Khmer woman from the north named Kolthida. Unlike in the British colonies, where race lines were drawn quite clearly, such intermarriages were not unheard of in French Indochina, but the union did not help Henri’s reputation in Saigon as a rogue colonist who had lost himself with the natives upriver. Yet Koko, as she came to be known, would quietly prove her detractors wrong: she spoke good, clean French and quickly mastered the intricate art of judging the world from beneath a parasol. Her wardrobe featured full-length corsets, ordered specially slim and narrow from Paris, and she subtly inflected her formal ensembles with a touch of tasteful local flair — a bright Khmer scarf or a snail shell bracelet that clicked and tinkled as she strolled the paths. On the mantel in the drawing room she installed two traditional Lakhon Khol masks from the Reamker epic: Sophanakha, the demon seductress, and Hanuman, the noble monkey warrior. The masks smelled of blood, but Henri eventually grew accustomed to this.

Like her husband, Koko managed to toe the finest of lines between the exploiteur and exploité: she ran her house with an iron first, commandeering the servants in a stiff mixture of French and Khmer, and surprised their respected visitors from Phnom Penh by playing a repertoire of jigs on a piano that was always slightly out of tune from the constant damp. These visitors would later remark in private to Henri what an admirable job he had done with the native woman. He accepted their congratulations — for him, the miracle was not that Koko had adapted so well, but why such adaptation did not take place all across the colony.

“Nearly anything can be cultivated anywhere, given the right care and attention,” Henri said to his bemused guests. “Certain environments demand more care and attention, but this is not a failure of the cultivar. Any failure lies squarely on the shoulders of the cultivateur.”

Then he would take them through the young hevea grove. The trees were planted at precise distances such that no matter where one stood, the rows would form and re-form into an infinite kind of order. There was no way to unbind them.

Koko bore Henri a son, André, who, despite his Khmer lineage, looked very much like a round-faced Frenchman left out in the sun to ripen, a true Indochine français.

Henri would not live to see his grand vision come to fruition. On December 31, 1899, five minutes before the dawn of the new century, he succumbed to a swift and brutal case of hemorrhagic dengue fever. The servants, unsure of what to do, lit off the fireworks anyway. The explosions flushed open the night, momentarily revealing the great jungles beyond before their dying embers streamed down into the cool, black river, where they hissed and sizzled into silence.

On New Year’s Day, as word of Henri’s death spread up and down the river, more news came to join it: Koko had disappeared during the night, taking with her a box full of jewelry and several thousand francs. Despite some efforts by colonial forces to locate her, she would never be seen or heard of again. There were rumors, of course: that she had fled to Paris and had opened a successful Indochine-themed lounge and nightclub; that she had been murdered for her jewels by a group of masked men near the Laotian border. One story even claimed she had used witchcraft to assume the appearance of a white man and now ran a nearby plantation.

“The only way you can still tell who she once was,” said one of the characters in Tofte-Jebsen’s novella, “is to catch her sleeping and shine a torch into her eyes. A person can never change their eyes when they dream” (56).

André de Broglie, barely nineteen years old and now an orphan, was left to manage the plantation on his own. Luckily, his hand was steady, and the fledgling century would witness the swift rise of an automobile driven on the rubber pneumatic tire. Seemingly overnight, the global demand for latex exploded. La Seule Vérité—primed by Henri’s hubris for just such an explosion — eventually grew to thirty thousand hectares, with a workforce of more than six hundred indentured Vietnamese laborers.

When he was twenty-four, André floated down to Saigon and returned with a wife standing upon his prow. Eugenia was the eldest child of Pierre Cazeau, the stately, arrogant owner of the Hôtel Continental, on rue Catinat. She was also deaf. Her tutors had spent the first thirteen years of her life attempting to teach her how to speak like a hearing person, as was dictated by the popular pedagogy of the time. Her tongue was pressed, her cheeks prodded, countless odd intonations were coaxed forth from her lips. Cumbersome hearing horns were thrust into her ears, spiraling upward like ibex horns. It was a torture she finally rejected for the revolutionary freedom of sign, which she taught herself from an eighteenth-century dictionary by Charles-Michel de l’Épée that she had stumbled upon accidentally on the shelf of a Saigon barbershop.5 Based on the grammatical rules of spoken language, L’Épée’s Methodical Sign System was unwieldy and overly complex: many words, instead of having a sign on their own, were composed of a combination of signs. “Satisfy” was formed by joining the signs for “make” and “enough.” “Intelligence” was formed by pairing “read” with “inside.” And “to believe” was made by combining “feel,” “know,” “say,” “not see,” plus another sign to denote its verbiage. Though his intentions may have been noble, L’Epée’s system was inoperable in reality, and so Eugenia modified and shortened the language. In her hands, “belief” was simplified into “feel no see.” Verbs, nouns, and possession were implied by context.

Fig. 4.2. L’Épée’s Methodical Sign System

From de l’Épée, C.-M. (1776), Institution des sourds et muets: par la voie des signes méthodiques, as cited in Tofte-Jebsen, B., Jeg er Raksmey, p. 61

One could not quite call her beautiful, but the enforced oral purgatory of her youth had left her with an understanding of life’s inherent inclination to punish those who least deserve it. Her black humor in the face of great pain perfectly balanced her new husband’s workmanlike nature. She had jumped at the opportunity to abandon the Saigon society that had silently humiliated her, gladly accepting the trials of life on a backwater, albeit thriving, plantation. Her family’s resistance to sending their eldest child into the great unknowable cauldron of the jungle was only halfhearted — they were in fact grateful to be unburdened of the obstacle that had kept them from marrying off their two youngest (and much more desirable) daughters.

André painstakingly mastered Eugenia’s language. Together, they communed via a fluttering dance of fingertips to palms, and their dinners on the veranda were thus rich, wordless affairs, confluences of gestures beneath the ceiling fan, the silence broken only by the clink of a soup spoon, the rustle of a servant clearing the table, or the occasional shapeless moan that accentuated certain of her sentences, a relic from her years of being forced to speak aloud.

Eugenia began to paint. She painted the rows and rows of rubber trees. She painted the bougainvillea. By torchlight, she painted the flowers of the Epiphyllum oxypetalum cactus that bloomed only once a year, and only at midnight. Her paintings were better than they should have been, primarily because of her unusual color palette: nothing appeared as it should. Colors were reversed, dulled, heightened. Eugenia claimed that this was how a blind person would see the world if he or she were to suddenly gain sight.

André had inherited the de Broglie curse of recording everything possible. In the vault next to his father’s giant sheepskin books, he began to accrue his own ledgers. Unlike his father’s records, André’s notes were organized, fastidious, and — perhaps most important—legible. Yet even his rigorous accounting did not always tell the full story, either. For instance, when he wrote, “1906 — 8 personnes contractent la syphilis,” he did not recount that one of these eight cases was actually himself, and that the source of the outbreak was a prostitute who had arrived from Phnom Penh under the guise of being one of the worker’s sisters attempting to escape a battered marriage. The prostitute then proceeded to purvey her services for a month before she was found drowned in the Mekong, her mouth stuffed full of stones. Her death was dutifully noted in the tally for that year without comment: “mortalité totale — 26 (1 de vieillesse, 5 du paludisme, 2 de la dengue, 4 d’une maladie cardiaque, 7 d’une pneumonie, 3 de la tuberculose, 3 de causes inconnues, 1 par noyade).” Flip forward a few pages and you will find the total profit for this year as well: “1,931,398 FF”—an astounding amount, considering time, place, and circumstance.

As their fortune grew, André remained keenly aware that he was reaping the delayed fruits of his father’s persistence, that nearly every one of his triumphs was not the result of his own doing but rather a by-product of his predecessor’s brilliance. Yet instead of neutering his sense of achievement, such knowledge exonerated him from ever having to find his own way. His destiny had set him free. Henri’s gravestone, which André paid a visit to every Sunday, presided over the plantation from a hilltop. Its inscription, a phrase of the Buddha’s that a local boatman had reportedly recounted for Henri, read thus:

CE QUE TU AS ÉTÉ DÉCIDE DE CE QUE TU ES.

CE QUE TU FAIS MAINTENANT DÉCIDE DE CE QUE TU SERAS.

Tofte-Jebsen translates this as: “What you are is what you have been. What you’ll be is what you do now” (89).

Jean-Baptiste, full of jaundice, came forth into this cauldron of patrimony and newfound wealth in the monsoon season of 1907, nearly killing his young mother in the process. He was a sickly child, whose first years were marked by a succession of illnesses that kept him bedridden and unable to venture outdoors. A hawkish, unpleasant French tutor (Tofte-Jebsen assigns this tutor no name or gender) was brought in from Phnom Penh to teach Jean-Baptiste in his bedroom, which became a sanctuary not just for restless sleep but for intercontinental and even interstellar travel through the crates of books that arrived on the slow boat from Paris. He developed a devout love of reading, devouring the tales of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas by candlelight as lizards flicked across the ceiling. Later, he read Keats and Blake and Coleridge and pined for an English countryside he had never seen. He wished desperately that he had grown up in the open expanse of the heathered moorland instead of the equatorial cage of Indochine.

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

When he was thirteen, having outgrown his tutor’s expertise, and being well enough to weather the dangers of the outside world, he requested admission to the Collège Lanessan, in Saigon. Eugenia remained reluctant; she worried not just for her son’s fragile health but about exposing him to Saigon’s colonial aristocracy. Yet André supported the idea: it was evident that in this new world born from the ashes of the Great War, the successful businessman had to possess not just local wisdom but worldly knowledge—mondanités, as the French say. Perhaps he saw a lack of mondanités as one of his own shortcomings — André much preferred to stay at home, tending the books rather than searching out inspiration in some remote corner of the globe. He knew such complacency soon would not be enough: the owner of a plantation in Indochina now needed to understand the shifting markets in Europe just as well as the flooding cycle of the Mekong. Morse’s telegraph, Marconi’s radio, and now the proliferation of Bell’s telephones — which had just begun appearing in the more stylish salons of Saigon — these were all contributing to a swiftly shrinking globe. André was a child of the last century, but his son was coming of age in a new age.

When Jean-Baptiste was fourteen, he made his first journey to Europe. He and Eugenia — who also had never ventured out of the colonies — traveled by steamship to visit Monsieur Pascal Vernon, a distant uncle in Paris. On the occasions when her son was either unable or unwilling to act as her interpreter, Eugenia communicated by using a little writing pad that hung around her neck. Although slightly involved, such a method of communication seemed to curry her favor wherever they went. Tofte-Jebsen claimed that the pad from that trip remained intact many years later, providing a kind of oratory receipt of their travels: “Allons nous asseoir près de la fenêtre?”. . “Cette crème brûlée est passée”. . “Pardon, mais que cet homme est bête.”6

Jean-Baptiste’s intoxication with La Ville Lumière was evident in his short (but precise) journal entries. After managing to skip the lines at Notre Dame due to his mother’s “déficience,” he called the famous cathedral “splendide” and “comme un cauchemar plaisant.” He wondered about the similarities of the gargoyles to “les démons d’Angkor.” They also managed to jump the queue at La Tour Eiffel, which he labeled “majestueuse, mais incomplète.” Yet his real attention was drawn back again and again to the nature that cushioned the more famous aspects of the urban landscape. He filled an entire sketchbook with renderings of the city’s trees in autumn — the chestnuts of Montmartre, the long rows of London planes lining the Champs-Élysées, the distinguished canopy of a weeping willow guarding a curve of the Seine like a great Chinese firework frozen in mid-explosion. He came to realize, even before he could articulate the thought, that a place was defined by the manner in which it came up for air.

Tofte-Jebsen lingers (96) on an account of a strange episode that occurred the day before they were to head back home. For the first time since her enforced oral schooling, Eugenia encountered another deaf person, at the Marché aux Fleurs et aux Oiseaux at the Île de la Cité. The woman was a Parisian, out on a Sunday to buy daffodils for her apartment. At first excited for such a meeting, Eugenia animatedly began to sign a barrage of questions and comments, only to be met by confusion. Soon the pad was brought out and it was determined that the woman could decipher only one in three of Eugenia’s signs. The reasons were manifold: L’Épée’s dictionary, from which she had taught herself sign, turned out to be very much out of date, long ago cast away for the more modern and practical LSF (la Langue des Signes Française). She herself had greatly manipulated L’Épée’s turgid system to make it more streamlined, largely abandoning his strict adhesion to oral grammar. On top of this, her own realization of each of L’Épée’s signs, taken from two-dimensional, static diagrams, was a singular interpretation. She had taught herself in isolation, with no one to learn from or to converse with. She had thus invented her own dialect, a dialect so particular as to be incomprehensible to all others. Her language was uniquely her own, an island of marooned expression.

This discovery sent Eugenia into a deep depression, which lasted the entire journey back to Indochina. Not only was she an outcast from the society of the hearing; she was an outcast from her own kind. She vowed never again to venture abroad. La Seule Vérité became her only domain.

In contrast to his mother, Jean-Baptiste could not be contained. After that first taste of Paris, he traveled abroad every summer, initially with Uncle Pascal and then on his own, visiting much of Europe, including those English foothills that he had so often dreamed about. His travels then took him farther afield: to North America, where he visited New York City, Niagara Falls, and the Grand Canyon; to Brazil, where he floated the Amazon and saw a vast array of flora, winged fauna, and flesh-eating fish; and to India, where he fell ill in Calcutta, remaining bedridden for three weeks, suffering from feverish flashbacks to his immobile childhood and the stale, molding odor of his tutor’s breath as he (or she) read to him from Plato’s Republic.

André, at first supportive of his son’s boundless interest in the world, soon grew worried that he might one day leave and never return. It was his hope that Jean-Baptiste would absorb a certain degree of mondanités but then eventually grow tired of such adventures and settle down to the more mundane task of managing the planation. André therefore tolerated his son’s sojourns as long as he attended to his schooling and was home every Christmas.

The schooling, of course, was not a problem — Jean-Baptiste was a naturally brilliant student. When he turned seventeen, he was one of two dozen in the colony offered a place at the Sorbonne.

Once back in the heart of Paris, Jean-Baptiste quickly dropped the course in economics that he had qualified for and instead took up philosophy, specializing in metaphysics, while also making the occasional informal foray into medicinal botany during his free time. He would spend his afternoons in the botanical gardens, splayed out on a bench reading Kant and a young German philosopher named Martin Heidegger.

When his head grew too full with questions of phenomenological hermeneutics, he would stroll through Jardin des Plantes and sketch the curated flora from far-flung lands, including those from his own. The plants’ structural certainty soothed him in the face of great doubt. On each of his annual returns to Indochina, he would bring back a new specimen for the gardens of La Seule Vérité. Eugenia became his horticultural partner in crime, and together they cultivated a collection of more than two hundred exotic plants that rivaled the great botanical gardens of Saigon. Her surreal chromatic paintings of the flowers hung throughout the house, presenting the unsuspecting visitor with a mildly hallucinogenic experience.

In 1931, Jean-Baptiste helped design the Indochina Pavilion at the Colonial Exposition in the Bois de Vincennes. A reconstruction of Angkor Wat’s central tower complex was built next to a Laotian fishing village and an exact copy of La Seule Vérité’s rubber-processing hall, where the latex was squeezed into sheets and then hung to dry. Jean-Baptiste oversaw its re-creation. Forty full-grown hevea trees were shipped in from Brazil and planted in their orderly rows. At first they would not bleed, so a mixture of goat’s milk fortified with flour was concocted to mimic the appearance of fresh latex.7

Fig. 4.3. Pavillon de l’Indochine à L’Exposition Coloniale Internationale de 1931, Bois de Vincennes, Paris

From Tofte-Jebsen, B., Jeg er Raksmey, p. 98

The organizers of the exhibition asked Jean-Baptiste to give several on-site lectures about the biological wonders of Southeast Asia, and it was during one of these lectures, which was halted prematurely by a rare tropical downpour, that he sought shelter beneath the Angkor Wat simulacrum with a pretty woman who shyly introduced herself as Leila Cousaine. She was from Normandy. She was in town with her parents for their annual shopping excursion, and a friend had told her about the wonders of the exposition, which she had decided to reconnoiter for herself. She admitted her admiration for his talk and said she had always dreamed of traveling the world but lacked the valor and constitution to do so. Jean-Baptiste noticed immediately that the color of her eyes did not match — her left was a luminous shade of aquamarine and her right was a reddish flint tone that had a way of catching the light at certain angles. He wanted to ask her about this particularity but instead made a hasty and embarrassed dinner invitation for the following evening, which she accepted on the condition that her father gave his consent.

They dined at an art deco brasserie in Montparnasse. The meal was halting and awkward — Jean-Baptiste oscillated between lecturing her on plant species and asking questions that came off as impertinent. After a while, he fell into a kind of half silence marked by inappropriate humming. Leila, clearly intimidated by her partner, spent most of the meal with eyes downcast, answering his queries without enthusiasm. Toward the end, as they waited for a pair of crèmes brûlées that couldn’t come fast enough, Jean-Baptiste, thinking nothing could make the evening go worse, mustered up the nerve to ask her his original question, albeit without asking a question at all.

“Your eyes,” he said.

“My eyes?” she said, glancing up at him, briefly revealing the pair of mismatched wonders before maneuvering her gaze once again to the hem of the tablecloth.

“They are. .” He drifted. “I’ve never seen them before.”

“Of course you haven’t seen them before. We’ve never met before yesterday, Monsieur de Broglie.”

“Yes,” he said, embarrassed. “I suppose we haven’t. But your eyes are different. That is, they are different from each other.”

“My mother says they make me look wolfish.”

“Wolfish? Heavens, no. They’re beautiful,” he said. “Truly. I could live a thousand years and never see something so beautiful.”

She blushed and flashed him a cautious smile, her first true smile of the evening.

“The Cambodians believe the eyes never change,” he said. “You can go through an infinite number of reincarnations, but your eyes will always remain the same. It’s how we recognize our friends and enemies across time. So perhaps you came from two different people. Or one person and one wolf.”

She laughed, miming a snarl and raising a mock paw. The moment vanished just as quickly as it had appeared.

“Will you ever go back?” she asked, recovering. “Back to Indochina, I mean.”

“Of course,” he said, still staring at her lips. “It’s my home. My father and mother are still there. They expect me to come back.”

“Yes, but how do you know it’s your home? You seem so at ease here.”

“I feel at ease here.”

“Then your home is where you were born?”

He shook his head. “Your home is where you will be buried.”

“That’s a little morbid, isn’t it? I mean, for me, a home is where I shall want to live.”

He straightened his napkin. “Forgive me.”

“For what?”

“I’m not used to a lady’s company. I grew up under isolated circumstances. You must have thought me a worldly gentleman, only to be sorely disappointed when you met the insensitive impostor before you.”

“On the contrary,” she said. “But then you must find me so boring. ‘Une petite nonne normande,’ as my sister says.”

“Not at all,” he said quickly. “It’s not every day that you meet a wolf.”

That night — in the transience of that snarl, in the delicate collision of their words — a mutual acknowledgment of need was established. Not quite love, but something more useful, which would eventually grow into a kind of interdependence. On paper, such a thing was not all that different from love.

Leila came to tolerate Jean-Baptiste’s habit of leaving a conversation in midsentence to examine leaf structure and, as it turned out, such tolerance was just enough. They were married in 1933, in the gardens of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, in front of her family and a small collection of scientists and acquaintances from the colonies. Eugenia and André elected not to make the trip.8

During those fleeting years in Paris, as fascism began to rear its ugly head to the east, Jean-Baptiste lived a charmed life of fitful ideas. He started and did not finish a thesis on Heidegger (Dasein, Terreur, et le Regret du Colonialisme) and then started and did not finish a thesis on epiphytic orchid propagation. Everything was captivating from a distance, but as soon as he got too close to a topic, his interest began to wane. He enjoyed dropping in at the laboratories of the Polytechnique and listening to lectures on physics and astronomy by the visiting scholars, because most of what they said he could only marginally understand, and this kept him hungry.

One of these lectures was given in the dead of winter by Georges Lemaître, a bespectacled, portly priest from Belgium who was the first person to propose that the universe was expanding, much to the twin annoyance of the Catholics and Einstein, who both claimed that Lemaître was meddling in territory beyond his comprehension.

Monseigneur Lemaître’s talk at the Polytechnique was on how one might go about calculating the precise age of the universe, an act he did not see as being at odds with his faith. As he put it: “Even God enjoys a birthday party. One common mistake is to attempt to solve scientific problems with religion and religious problems with science. Each must be solved in the state in which it arises.”

Impressed by Jean-Baptiste, who lingered after the lecture and asked several probing questions about measuring stellar luminosity, Lemaître invited him to attend an atomic physics conference in Copenhagen the following week.

Jean-Baptiste took the sleeper up to Denmark, and over the course of four utterly chilly, utterly magical days, he rubbed shoulders with some of the greatest minds of a generation — men like Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli, who were ferociously negotiating the framework of quantum mechanics over stale pints of lager at the Hviids Vinstue, a poorly lit pub that smelled like the bilge of a ship.9

The crew of physicists did not seem to mind that Jean-Baptiste was not a scientist, that he was instead a middling botanist and deficient philosopher who hailed from an Oriental plantation. Such credentials appeared, rather, to gain him credence in their eyes; his place outside of their discipline encouraged them to use him as a confessional booth for their unformed theories. After the day’s formal sessions, he would find himself in intimate interlocution with the men as they strolled through the streets of the city, lit brightly by a constellation of white lanterns, their conversations dancing across a range of quantum theories that would set his head spinning. At the Hviids Vinstue, he was often used as a prop when someone was trying to illustrate a particular point. Sometimes he was an electron, sometimes a quark, sometimes a vast celestial body. They would orbit him in circles, knocking over chairs, spilling beer, laughing at their own audacity, all the while arguing about charge, position, spin. His involvement in these impromptu demonstrations — even simply as a flexible bit of mass — gave him goose bumps. Pauli teasingly referred to him as “Your Highness.” Heisenberg ignored him. Bohr — Bohr was the best of the lot. Bohr knew, in that way that few great men do, exactly how much of the universe could never be understood at all. The limits of the known world did not bother Bohr — instead, he viewed our peaceful coexistence with the unknown as a testament to the capacities of the human mind.

“If you admit you are uncertain,” he said once, “then you are that much closer to certainty.”

Tofte-Jebsen recounts how, on the final evening, the conference members had paid a visit to the university’s cyclotron, a sleeping giant of a machine that struck Jean-Baptiste as “the altar of the new secular religion” (107). Afterwards, he found himself back at the pub, deep in an argument with Bohr about the nature of free will. The others, exhausted by the week’s negotiations, had already headed home, but Bohr persisted, and Jean-Baptiste got the feeling that it was strictly for his benefit, though he was unsure why such a genius would want to spend any time with a colonial dilettante like himself.

That evening, a pipe had burst in the flat above, and the pub was unusually humid. Every now and then, little drops of condensation would fall upon their heads and into their beer mugs.

“Are you comfortable with complementarity?” Bohr asked him.

“I’m not sure. .” Jean-Baptiste’s English was excellent, but around Bohr he always felt a bit like a child again.

“Most people aren’t. They don’t want to hear about something being both true and not true at the same time. They don’t want to believe that Schrödinger’s cat can be both dead and alive until the moment they open the box. Most people don’t want to push their minds to accept both possibilities at once. But for me, such concurrence is beautiful — necessary, even. The universe is not based on truth but on possibility.”

Jean-Baptiste took a slow drink from his mug. “But surely there are things that are just true? What about the forces that govern us? Laws? Causality?”

“Causality is a siren. She enchants and she tames,” said Bohr. “Look at Einstein. He’s come undone. He’s trying to explode our framework, and he’s convinced he will, all because he cannot release himself from the temptations of locality. He cannot free himself from If this, then that. Don’t tell me it’s a failure of imagination. Don’t tell me it’s because of the numbers. I’ll tell you what it is: we are confined to consequence. We can survive the now only because we claim to know what comes next. We are terrified of the truth: that by saying If this, we have already destroyed then that.”

Jean-Baptiste shook his head. “Your entire framework is based on the unobserved theory—”

“Observation is precisely the problem. Observation, as we understand it, is the nemesis of understanding,” said Bohr. “We’re obsessed with this act of witnessing — yet witnessing is an action that irrevocably affects the subject. As it turns out, we can only witness the witnessing.”

Jean-Baptiste left that evening — damp and bewildered, his core shaken by the steadiness, the utter generosity, of Bohr’s belief in the uncertain. On the train back to Paris, he sat in a state of agitated confusion, nursing a brandy as the lowlands slid past. Yet he had never felt more alive. It was as if he had suddenly jumped orbits and could now feel the heat of the sun against his skin.

• • •

“I DIDN’T OPEN IT,” his wife said as soon as he came through the door. She pointed to a telegram from Saigon that was propped up on the dining room table.

He sat down, laced open the envelope, read the fifteen words, and then read them again.

It was midafternoon, but the sun had already begun to sink. Jean-Baptiste left the house and walked through the cold and empty streets, following a familiar path through the Cimetière du Père Lachaise. The dew had frosted in the grass. In a hickory tree, a lone raven pecked at its feet, its brethren having left long ago for balmier skies. At some point, Jean-Baptiste placed his hand on the surface of one of the gravestones. To his surprise, he found the stone warm to the touch.

“What will you do?” Leila asked when he returned. Her voice revealing the slightest tremor.

“There’s nothing to be done,” he said. “I must go and take my place.”

His father, André de Broglie, was dead.

3

Leila did not try to dissuade him. She packed her possessions into a pair of steamer trunks, and together they made the long, grueling trip to La Seule Vérité. A journey is never measured by its distance alone, but rather by its chapters: they took the overnight train to Marseille; then a steamer to Saigon, stopping in Alexandria, switching boats first in Bombay and again in Singapore; then a riverboat up the Mekong, pausing in Phnom Penh for supplies before heading on to the plantation that was to be their new home.

Eugenia welcomed her son’s return, if only for the company he provided. She had never harbored the same grand illusions about the de Broglie lineage as her husband did. For her, the rubber plantation, even during its heyday, had been something to tolerate rather than celebrate. Deafness was a shroud that had taught her to study life’s details while always ensuring she could never fully touch them, and this distance had afforded her a shrewd kind of wisdom. As Tofte-Jebsen writes, “She haunted a stage not of her own design” (110). Eugenia had known for a long time that her only son’s heart was not in the business, but she could not bring herself to release him from his burden. Selfishly, she wanted him close, to suffer as she had suffered.

If Jean-Baptiste ever resented the millstone of his familial duty, he did not express it. He buried his father on the hilltop, next to his grandfather, in a quasi-Christian ceremony that also incorporated local animistic funeral rites performed with incense and flowers freshly cut by André’s distraught workers. They had clearly loved him. When Jean-Baptiste walked past them they would bow, tears in their eyes. At first he tried to go out of his way to be friendly with them, telling jokes, querying them on their work, even joining them for the early-morning tap, but after being met with only confused silence, he eventually stopped trying. Knowing he could never fill the gulf left behind by his late father, Jean-Baptiste delegated responsibility for the day-to-day rubber operations to a young, wily Algerian man named Raouf, whom he brought in from Phnom Penh, meanwhile busying himself with a series of complicated projects that became less and less relevant to the family business.

The combination to the vault containing all of the ledger books had somehow been lost. Jean-Baptiste considered blowing open the door but instead had it moved by fifteen men to the basement, where it would stand unopened for forty years. He bought another safe, the same model, and put it in the old safe’s place, though he never used it.

“If they have come this far, a safe will not stop them,” he said to no one in particular.

His first item of business was to construct a telegraph line. The line would cut east through the jungle, meeting with National Road No. 7 down to Kratié, before heading twenty-five kilometers south through the rice fields into Vietnam, to the northern station at Saigon. The construction of the line took six months and came at an enormous expense: Jean-Baptiste hired two teams of three hundred laborers to work from either end and spent nearly a quarter of the family’s savings on the project. When it was finally finished, he sat in the telegraph room beneath the stairwell in the main hall and breathed deep. The smell of blood in the wires.

Jean-Baptiste tapped out a message to Monseigneur Lemaître, the astronomer-priest in Brussels, and imagined the electromagnetic flashes hurtling their way through the thick foliage. The quiver of signal. The promise of contact. He was a part of the world now.

Under Lemaître’s distant instruction, Jean-Baptiste built a domed rosewood observatory on the hilltop shared by his grandfather’s and, now, his father’s gravestones. The dome rose up like a moon, a wooden effigy to the invisible planets suspended above. Two months later, the telescope arrived from Paris, lashed like a cannon to a barrel-stave barge that was filled with bleating livestock. The device was installed inside the observatory with much fanfare, an ancient Khmer man bowing a high-pitched tune on a three-stringed fiddle, and awed locals came from miles around to look through its eyepiece at the rings of Saturn. Jean-Baptiste began taking meticulous notes on the rotation of the constellations, the regularity of comets, and a star that Lemaître had informed him was about to disappear, had in fact already disappeared — they were watching a death from the past, echoed across the great expanse. After barely a full moon cycle, however, the novelty of the telescope had worn off and Jean-Baptiste grew bored with his astronomical observations.

Fig. 4.4. Jean-Baptiste de Broglie to Georges Lemaître, telegram, July 16, 1938

From Tofte-Jebsen, B., Jeg er Raksmey, p. 113

One morning, he was leafing through the pages of a French science journal when he came across a dazzling array of radiographic photos: bony hands with wedding rings, open-mouthed skulls, a bullet lodged inside a buttock. He had stumbled upon his next calling.

“These rays have a very high frequency — four times that of visible light, and so they can penetrate where light cannot,” he wrote to Lemaître. “I mean this with no offense, but to see inside the depths of a human body is even more exciting than glimpsing the heavens. It’s almost enough to make me believe in God again. To think: it’s all right here, right in front of us. We need only make it visible.”

He constructed a giant but erratic Tesla coil in their wine cellar and then connected this to a footlong cathode ray tube that he had ordered from Tokyo. The results were far from immediate as the coil sparked and churned, causing the radio receiver in his study to erupt into static, and the cutlery in the corner of the cellar to take on an ethereal glow. It was not an exact science: he blew through three transformers and constantly overwhelmed their fragile power supply, which had been tenuously wired only a year before from a hydroelectric dam on a tributary of the Mekong. Gradually, though, after much experimentation, he began to home in on the correct amount of voltage needed to operate the X-ray tube with some precision.

His wife became his primary subject. At first, the intensity of the X-rays was either too powerful or too weak, the images coming out white and misty, as if her body were suspended in an English fog. In time, he figured out how to master the machine. The first clear photograph was of her hand, with the darkened orbit of a wedding ring just visible — a re-creation of the photo he had first seen in the journal. Ignoring her protests, he hung this in their bedroom.

“I feel like I’m witnessing my own death,” she said.

“Nonsense,” he said. “You’re witnessing your life.”

Despite her hesitancy at being documented so intimately, he X-rayed every inch of her skeleton again and again. Fully clothed, she lay on the examining table as he unveiled her with his machine. He could hear her breath before the X-ray sprang noisily to life, shuddering, groaning, sending its stream of photons flying into her body. Afterwards, he would develop the images alone in the red-tinged darkness of his closet, the negatives emerging wet with solution, his hand trembling as he handled the proof of his wife’s conquest. He had ventured where no one had ventured before, including himself, for their actual lovemaking was a passionless, fumbling affair, done under cover of night. Jean-Baptiste hung the ghostly X-rays of his wife’s bones in the hallways, the drawing rooms, even the bathrooms — an ethereal gallery of possession.

Meanwhile, Leila suffered. From the beginning, his wife had been a poor match for the tropics — she pined for the familiarities of home, for the comforting spray of the sea during her walks along the bluffs. She could not grow used to the heat, the damp, the insects, the constant smell of cooking rubber, the natives that watched her every move. Her melancholy was stoked by a long correspondence with her mother in which she savored the most banal news from their village. A dog had borne puppies. Her niece had made a paper hat for Bastille Day. The house at the end of the pier had collapsed during a storm. Jean-Baptiste could not appease her homesickness, even as he imported maps of the Seine’s curvatures and the Channel Islands, novels, fine linens, silverware, oil pantings, and custom-made marionettes crafted in the finest workshops of Paris. Their drawing room became an elaborate museum of his placations, but no earthly object could quell her misery. Yet when Jean-Baptiste offered to take Leila to Paris and Normandy for Christmas, she refused, oddly, saying there was too much to be done at the plantation. In the end, she spent the holiday doing nothing except writing her letters back home and reading the same Russian tragedies over and over again.

Leila and Eugenia tolerated each other, but in private each complained of the other’s shortcomings. Eugenia viewed her daughter-in-law as a spoiled priss who lacked both backbone and a sense of humor, while Leila saw her mother-in-law as a terrifying, controlling matriarch who heard more than most hearing people and cared only for her spooky portraits of phantasmagoric flowers. Leila had done her best to learn Eugenia’s obscure language of signs, but it was as if Eugenia willfully chose not to understand Leila when she signed, shaking her head and insisting that her son act as their translator.

Leila’s despair grew with each passing year, for despite their awkward attempts beneath the mosquito nets, no child came therefrom. Jean-Baptiste’s mother was strangely content with the absence of any progeny, despite the uncertainty that such a scenario brought to the question of inheritance.

“You must at least be where you are,” Eugenia signed to her son. “And she is no place at all.” Though the matter was a delicate one, a doctor from Phnom Penh was brought in to examine Leila. He could find nothing wrong.

“Sometimes one simply cannot,” the doctor said over tea. “It’s the way of things.”

Jean-Baptiste became intent on fixing the problem, not necessarily because he wanted a child but because there was a problem to be fixed. Having heard the amazing tales of traditional medicine passed among the workers, he eventually sought advice from a kru Khmer, a local shaman. Jean-Baptiste was not enthusiastic about the fact that their inability to conceive would almost certainly become common knowledge among the workers, but in his mind the potential for success outweighed this invasion of privacy. The kru Khmer, after visiting with Leila one afternoon, prescribed a fertility tea made of palm root and Psychotria bark.

Even Raouf weighed in on the matter: “You must have more sex.”

“Thank you, Raouf, but this is none of your concern.”

“You must have much more sex.”

Tien, a hardworking young foreman whom Jean-Baptiste had come to trust, delivered the shaman’s tea to Leila each morning, laying down a paper-thin orange tablecloth and pouring the kettle with much formality. He would sit with her while she sipped the tea and nibbled the lemon cakes that were baked to temper the bitter taste of the bark. In this way, Leila began to learn Khmer. The mornings were marked by Tien’s lilting singsong voice entwining with her laughter. She was a fast learner, and soon they spoke only in his native tongue, the tea left to simmer, untouched.

“Khnhom sraleanh anak,” she said to Jean-Baptiste. “This means ‘You look like a beautiful flower.’”

After encountering a group of young students walking upstream to the regional lycée, Leila became excited at the idea of using her newly acquired language skills to teach the children French. Jean-Baptiste, relieved that his wife had expressed interest in anything besides the Normandy postal system, arranged for Tien to shuttle her by riverboat up to the school three days a week.

It was an instant revelation. Her whole demeanor changed. She began standing upright, carrying herself with a newfound determination. Her eyes burned, full of life. Once again she started to dress smartly, taking particular care with her hair and makeup. She was now often gone late into the evening, returning home exhausted and content.

“They know so little,” she breathed beside him in bed. “But then, they also know so much. Sometimes I don’t know who’s learning more — me or them.”

“My darling,” he said. “I am so glad.”

His wife now taken care of, Jean-Baptiste turned back to his own projects. He briefly flirted with the idea of building a cyclotron like the one he had seen during the conference in Copenhagen, but after some investigations, he resolved himself to the impossibility of its creation in such a remote location. Soon after this, the telegraph line to Saigon stopped working. Somewhere in that vast jungle, there had been a breach in the wire. The telegraph room in the main hall fell silent. When an engineer was sent out to ride the entire length of the line and came back without locating the rupture, Jean-Baptiste resigned himself to defeat. If the world would not have him, he would not have it.

• • •

“HOW’S SHE GETTING on at the school?” Eugenia signed to Jean-Baptiste as they all sat at the dinner table one evening.

“Mother,” Jean-Baptiste signed. “Really, how am I supposed to know this?” He turned to Leila, who was sitting beside him. “She wants to know how you are faring at the lycée?”

“Oh,” said Leila. “Fine.”

“Very well, thank you,” she signed to her mother-in-law, though Eugenia looked on blankly.

“That is, the children are wonderful,” she said aloud.

“Ask her which child holds the most promise,” Eugenia signed to her son.

“Mother,” Jean-Baptiste signed back. “Ask her yourself. She can sign. You know this.”

“They are all clever,” Leila signed helpfully. “They make me happy.”

Eugenia shook her head, swallowing a small bite of pork shoulder. “There’s always one who stands above the rest,” she signed to her son. “Tell her to be truthful with us.”

“I couldn’t follow,” said Leila. “What did she say?”

“I said you must not lie to us. We are your family,” Eugenia signed.

“What’s she saying?” said Leila. “I can’t follow when she goes so fast. Something about the family?”

Jean-Baptiste sighed. “She’s excited for you. She said she wishes she had your patience.”

Eugenia bristled but said nothing. Leila, aware that she was being sheltered, resorted to her nervous habit of turning her wedding ring in circles. Jean-Baptiste rose from the table and switched on the Zenith. A symphony by Schubert came on, full blast. The strings pulled and churned. The radio had become an instrument of retaliation, a playground beyond his mother’s perception.

• • •

IT WAS NOT LONG after this that Eugenia followed her daughter-in-law to work. She waited for Leila to disappear down the river, then unmoored one of the dugouts and paddled after them. She had never been out in the river alone before, and she found navigating the boat difficult, for she could not balance her strokes to make it travel in a straight line. The bow always wanted to go one way or the other. Though the red waters appeared glassy, the current was deceptively strong. By the time she had rounded the bend, she was already sweating into her dress, and her boots were soaked with river water brought in by the bite of the paddle.

She looked for Leila’s boat at the school’s dock but could not find it, nor did she see Tien coming back her way. She continued slowly upriver, past the school and its overgrown landing strip, and she was just about to turn around, thinking she had simply missed them in passing, when she saw the boat, tucked into a little cove, half hidden by the sagging branches of a river palm. With some trouble, she beached her dugout close by and stepped out into the muck. She saw no sign of Leila or Tien anywhere, so she carefully followed the path up from the cove some ways into the forest. Thinking she had made a wrong turn, she decided to turn back to her boat, but then she spotted the outline of a hut through the dense foliage. She approached, quietly, pausing outside. Lacking any aural faculties, she did what she always did: she turned to her other senses. Eugenia sniffed and smelled it immediately: the distant, sweet fragrance of opium, a scent she had not smelled since her days in Saigon. Above her, the forest moved, birds twittered, twigs crackled, but inside her head there was only the silence and the wet fragrance of the drug, and she closed her eyes and she was a small girl again, staring at her mother lying on the bed next to a man who was not her father. The heat, the stillness of the room, the light from the blinds streaming across their bodies.

The walls of the hut were made of dried leaves wrapped tightly into bundles using a kind of vine. Finding a small gap in the wall, Eugenia hiked up her dress and leaned in close. Her vision adjusted to the darkness of the interior. Shapes emerged — forming, unforming, forming again. She blinked and returned her eye to the peephole. There was Leila, lying on a blanket, the hourglass of her buttocks white against the hut’s soft gloom. A candle flickered. Eugenia shifted her position to gain a better view. She gave a little gasp. Leila was wearing a mask. Eugenia recognized it as the mask from the drawing room, the black Sophanakha demoness, grotesquely missing both ear and nose. The dark head was much too large for her slender white frame; occasionally her head swayed with the weight of the wood. In front of her, he moved, shirtless and also masked, dancing, a monkey warrior, his simian face frozen in a horrible grin. The man glided around the room and then came to her and grasped the end of a long pipe. Delicately, he twisted the bowl flush into the candle’s flame, working at the white glob of opium with a pin before swinging the mouthpiece to her, like a flute. The pipe disappeared into the mouth of the mask. She pulled, released, her shoulders shrinking with the exhalation, and again that elemental smell rose up and took hold of Eugenia’s consciousness — strong and sweet, seemingly everywhere and nowhere at once. The silence in her head roared.

Eugenia watched for some time, long enough for the masks to come off, long enough to know how far this had come. She felt oddly calm, filled with a sense of the familiar, as if she were watching a ritual she had witnessed many times before. She left only after Leila was asleep and he had risen and was moving toward the door. She ran then, not caring if they saw or heard, tripping once, the leaves in her hair, her boot unlaced, her elbow bleeding into the silk of her dress. She jumped in the boat and pushed off, and she did not paddle, but let the river take her back home as she breathed and stared at the grey silence of the sky.

That evening, a storm moved in. The three of them ate dinner on the porch as the rain hammered at the corrugated tin roof. Leila seemed unusually nervous. She apologized, claiming she was not feeling well, and requested to be excused early, but Eugenia put a hand on her arm and signed that she had something to say. Leila’s eyes smoldered in the candlelight. She looked back and forth between husband and mother.

“It occurred to me today,” Eugenia signed, “that we should start our own school.”

“A school?” Jean-Baptiste signed. “Here?”

Leila’s eyes widened with surprise. An uncontrolled shiver passed over her.

“Yes. Right here. Leila’s no doubt developing considerable expertise at the lycée, but why not utilize her talents closer to home? Where she could have more control over the lessons and would not have to travel so far every day?”

A silence filled the room. Outside, the rain drummed at the roof.

“Well,” said Jean-Baptiste, looking at his wife.

“We certainly have the space,” Eugenia reminded them.

“I think it’s a brilliant idea,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I love it. What do you think, Leila? Could you manage?”

Leila looked down at her hands. Her cheeks were flushed.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “They need me up there. I couldn’t just abandon—”

Eugenia rapped the table, catching them both off guard. “I’m sure they’ll make do,” she signed. “Just think of the possibilities!”

“She’s right, you know. This could be a great opportunity. No offense against your lycée, but the French colonial education system’s a failure.”

“On what grounds can you say that?” said Leila.

“The great mistake of the French is to re-create France in Indochina,” said Jean-Baptiste. “We must instead teach them éléments of science and rationalism, yet modify the course in such a way that the Khmer might understand. We’ll use their terms. We’ll use their beliefs. We’ll make the course of study relevant. This is how you reach and change the native mind.”

“We already have a little revolutionary on our hands, don’t we?” Eugenia signed. “Maybe there’ll be room for my son at this school. That is, if she agrees to it.”

A gust of wind rose and extinguished one of the candles, a thin thread of smoke curling and dissolving into itself.

“How can you be so sure you can change a native mind?” Leila said, her face now in half shadow.

“You can always change a mind,” Eugenia signed. “A mind is there to be changed.”

“Please excuse me,” Leila said, laying down her napkin. “I’m not well.”

After she left, Jean-Baptiste sipped cognac in the library while his mother worked on her embroidery. Outside, the storm had begun to fade.

“I’m sure she’ll come round once she feels better,” he signed. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to make a real difference. We should have thought of this long ago.”

“Good ideas take time,” Eugenia signed as she tautened the thread.

“About that man who takes her to work. .” she signed.

“Tien?”

“I’ve caught him thieving. The masks on the mantel. I think we should fire him.”

“Thieving?” Jean-Baptiste got up to look. The masks were indeed gone. “Are you sure, Mother? Tien has been with us since birth. This place is his home.”

“Maybe he’s become too comfortable.”

“But where would we send him? This is the only life he knows. And he cares for Leila so.”

“That is precisely the problem.”

“Mother, you mustn’t always take your misery out on others,” he signed.

The needle stopped in midair.

“I’m sorry,” he said aloud.

“I’m only reporting what I see. I’m not telling you how to run your own plantation.” The needle plunged again.

“I appreciate your candor, Mother. It’s true. Sometimes we may lose our way. God knows I have.”

He lit a cigar and studied the empty mantel, listening to the last of the rain and the quiet thrush of the needle and thread.

• • •

THE NEXT DAY, Jean-Baptiste called Tien into his cluttered office.

“I have been informed of your theft,” he said.

Tien bowed his head. Slowly, he fell to one knee and then the other. He brought his hands together in prayer but said nothing, simply remaining motionless in this position.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, stand up, Tien,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I’m not going to punish you. We all make mistakes. And I’m not going to ask why you did it. You know it’s wrong. But this place cannot run without you. If there’s something you need, please just ask me. I will give you anything within my power.”

Tien looked at him, stunned. “You will not kill me?”

“Kill you?” Jean-Baptiste laughed. “Are you mad? We aren’t barbarians. No, Tien, your conscience will provide all the punishment required.”

Tien began to quietly weep into his hands.

“Pull yourself together, man. It’s all right. Forgive and forget,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Listen, we’re starting a school. Here at the plantation. So Leila will no longer need your ferry services. You’ll have more time for your work here.”

Tien bowed, wiping at his face with the back of his sleeve.

“And Tien? Return the bloody masks. They have some sentimental value, I think, though I can’t recall what that is.”

Tien left the office, bewildered and teary-eyed. He promised to work hard, to do good, and to never betray his master again. The next day, the masks were returned, smelling of a scent that would gradually fade with time.

• • •

AFTER SOME ENCOURAGEMENT, Leila eventually warmed to and even embraced the idea of a school on the plantation grounds. They made a clearing in the forest next to the rubber house and built a one-room schoolhouse — LA SEULE ÉCOLE, read the wooden sign that hung over its entrance. Thirty-five little desks and a chalkboard arrived from Saigon by riverboat. The first day, there were already too many children for the desks; those who could not sit stood patiently in the back as Leila drew out the French alphabet and gestured at the letters’ bulbs and cursive tails. When she came to the S, Leila wiggled her index finger like a snake, hissing conspiratorially, and the children covered their mouths and laughed. She already had them. She spoke their language and the children loved her, and she loved them back.

That first semester before the rainy season, word spread quickly of the smiling white woman with two different-colored eyes whose school was open to all. Soon, a hundred children were crowding into the small room, struggling to get a glimpse of the board. Eventually the desks were cast aside and the children sat in neat little rows on the floor. Jean-Baptiste’s grand visions of a Khmer rationalism were never quite realized, but nonetheless, in only a few short months, the students made great strides in their writing and arithmetic. Some began to read. Even Tien and the men would come to listen to her during their lunch break, a look of amusement covering up the awe at what they were witnessing.

“However could I have lived without this?” Leila said to her husband as they prepared for bed one evening. “They feel like my own.”

Jean-Baptiste smiled. He reached for her hand.

“My dear,” he whispered.

“Thank you for being so patient with me,” she said. “I know I’m your burden.”

“You’re my gift. My wolf.”

“I haven’t been true to you.”

“We’re all trying. I know it isn’t easy. We’re all trying. It’s the best we can do.”

She extinguished the lantern and then she came to him, her hand moving quickly inside his pajama bottoms. He inhaled, sharply. Her forwardness caught him off guard, for they had not been together in some time. She shivered out of her chemise and rose up, white in the moonlight. He whispered a word and fell backwards into the bed. A dead lizard had dropped onto the mosquito net, its silhouette like a dark star against a white sky. He closed his eyes and raked his hands against her back. Beneath the skin, he could feel the heaving roll of her bones. Bones he knew better than his own.

• • •

LEILA’S COLLAPSE CAME just as the second semester was beginning. She was standing at the blackboard, writing the word l’honnêteté, applying the accent aigu on the third and final e, when she shuddered and fell, striking her chin on the edge of her desk. She lay on the ground, lifeless, a thin trickle of blood running from her nose and down to the point of her lips. The children crowded around her. They whispered to themselves, some held hands, a few began to cry. Then, from out of nowhere, Tien appeared. He held Leila’s head in his arms, wiping away the blood with his scarf.

“Khnhom sraleanh anak,” he said tenderly. “Sophanakha.” There was a growing pool of blood between her legs. He picked her up in his thin arms and carried her back to the house.

“She shouldn’t work so hard,” Eugenia later signed to her son in the hallway outside their bedroom. “Some people aren’t designed for the stress of the tropics.”

“Stop.” Jean-Baptiste signed.

“She doesn’t belong here.”

“Stop,” he said aloud, grabbing her hands. “She needs us. Please understand. I need you to understand.”

Eugenia’s diagnosis proved premature. Leila could barely rise from bed. It was not simply a matter of stress or jungle fatigue. Nor did it appear to be malaria or any of the more common tropical maladies. Her skin became translucent, her lips dull and grey. She developed large, pus-filled blisters up and down the length of her arms and legs. Her back began to peel in large sheets, making it extremely painful for her to lie supine.

The doctor was brought back in from Phnom Penh. The man spent some time examining her, taking notes, asking her questions. She was conscious but feverish. Her answers emerged as half sentences, words without tethers.

After some more prodding, the doctor came downstairs, shaking his head.

Jean-Baptiste offered him some brandy, an offer he refused, pondered, and then accepted. Eugenia watched as the two men sipped their drinks.

“What did you find?” asked Jean-Baptiste.

“She was pregnant,” the doctor said. “I couldn’t say for sure, but it was early in her term. Two months at most. The child’s gone. I’m sorry.”

“Pregnant?” Jean-Baptiste said, bewildered, nearly dropping his glass. “But she never told me.”

“I’m not sure she knew,” he said.

“So this is why she’s sick?”

The doctor shook his head. “There are a number of diagnoses I could give you. Smallpox, pemphigus, shingles. But none of these are quite right. Has she been exposed to anything unusual recently?”

“Only the children,” Jean-Baptiste said. “Maybe she contracted something from them.”

“But there have been no outbreaks in the population that you know of?”

Jean-Baptiste stared at him. “She was pregnant?” He put his head in his hands. “Good God. We were going to have a child?”

Eugenia touched the back of his neck. She made a small sign against his skin with her fingers. He was trembling.

The doctor walked through their house with his glass of spirits, rubbing his beard. He lifted up the arm of one of the marionettes and let it fall. He put a finger to the missing nose of the Sophanakha mask. He leafed through several of Jean-Baptiste’s science journals. At one point he stopped in front of a wall in the drawing room, where a framed X-ray of Leila’s radius hung in a golden frame.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“An arm,” said Jean-Baptiste.

“Your wife’s arm?”

“Yes. Why?”

The doctor left without pronouncing anything definitive, only that he had read about several cases of patients becoming sick after being exposed to high doses of radiation from an X-ray machine. Their symptoms were similar to Leila’s.

“I’m no expert,” the doctor said. “But there seems to be some destructive force hidden within the ray itself. An invisible killer.”

After he was gone, Eugenia sat with her son, whose eyes had lost all life.

“Your machine’s not what made her sick,” Eugenia signed. “I know it. She has a weak constitution.”

Jean-Baptiste shook his head. “She’s stronger than you will ever know, Mother.”

During the night, he went down to the cellar with a candle and directed its glow at the chassis of the defunct X-ray machine, now covered in a spectral scrim of spiderwebs and dust. There was a metallic scent of blood in the air. He ran his hands over the cool wires of the Tesla coil and then took a hammer and smashed the tubes one by one, the glass jumping and tearing at his wrists. He fell to the ground, weeping, wiping the blood from his hands across his eyes, nose, and mouth.

Upstairs, he knelt by his wife’s bedside. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I never meant for it to be like this.”

“I’ve betrayed you,” she whispered. “I am the wolf.”

• • •

EUGENIA, WHETHER OUT of guilt or obligation, began tending to her daughter-in-law day and night, dabbing at the dark fluid that trickled from her nose, changing the dressings on the lesions, and reading to her from the lavish collection of novels that filled the house’s study. Her voice was at once too loud and too soft, the words helpless newborns, but Leila listened and smiled and held on tight to Eugenia’s hand.

Jean-Baptiste stalked the grounds like a ghost. Every part of the place now pointed to his folly, to his childish insistence on tinkering with the unknown. Everywhere he went, he could not escape his own shadow. With the telegraph line long dead, he was forced to write to a friend in Paris, Dr. Luc Jeunet, who he remembered had been one of the doctors to treat the great Madame Curie when she had become ill.

I fear I may have inadvertently poisoned my wife with the X-rays from my machine. I know now I was playing with an invisible kind of fire. The images were so brief. How could they have such a profound effect on her tissue? From what I understood, it takes prolonged exposure, years, to become dangerous. Nothing so fleeting. Yet words cannot describe the terror and shame that I now harbor in my soul if my actions are indeed the cause of her rapid decline. Please let me know what treatment course we should pursue and whether anything can be done.

I await your timely reply, JBdB

Desperate for any help, he once again sought the services of the kru Khmer. The shaman was a round man who seemed to smell unusually bad, but there was an air of wisdom in his movements that was both disquieting and comforting at the same time. The man had lived a thousand lives and had forgotten nothing.

He spent nearly ten minutes pressing at Leila’s skin, until she groaned. Eugenia, furious, sent him away.

“Why do you let that fraud into our house?” she signed.

Yet the shaman returned the next day, this time accompanied by Tien. He brought with him a small pouch of bark and roots that, despite Eugenia’s protestations, they concocted into a thick soup. The room became filled with a decaying, earthen odor. Leila tilted her head up to meet the bowl. She struggled to take only a few sips of the foul-tasting brew. Then the shaman removed a series of small glass cups from his bag. He lit a match inside each, heating the air within before bringing one of the cups to each of Leila’s lesions.

“What is he doing?” Eugenia signed from the corner of the room. “How can you let him do this?”

“The cups,” Jean-Baptiste pointed. “What are they for?”

“She is too hot,” said Tien. “He is making her cool.”

Eugenia blew out a sound of disapproval.

“How do they expect to make her cool with hot bark soup and matches against her skin?” she signed.

The shaman produced a coin from his pocket, said some words in his language, and began dragging it across Leila’s forehead, between her breasts, down her arms.

“She is hot,” Tien said. “She has the hot wind inside her. We must release the wind.”

Eugenia could not take it anymore.

“Stop this at once!” she said aloud. She seized the shaman’s hand and pushed him away. The coin fell to the ground, rolling beneath the bed. He stared at her with a look of curious amusement and then carefully bowed and left the room.

“Mother,” Jean-Baptiste said, stooping down to retrieve the fallen coin, “this is their way. They have been doing this forever.”

“It isn’t our way,” she signed. “I won’t let my daughter be scraped to death by some witch doctor.”

“The coin’s French,” he said, holding it up to the light.

“I don’t care what it is. This cannot go on any longer.”

“Please,” he said. “Please. We need all the assistance we can find right now. Let them do what can be done.”

After this, Tien came every day with the shaman’s soup. Under Eugenia’s disapproving eye, he rubbed the coin against Leila’s forehead and the space between her shoulder blades. Yet Tien was painstakingly tender with his ministrations: he would speak to each part of her body and carefully roll her over, as if turning over a very delicate manuscript. Her body emaciated and weak, Leila could no longer eat the soup, but he served it to her anyway, in careful little spoonfuls. The soup dribbled down her chin, coming to rest in the hollow of her neck before he wiped it away with a small cloth he kept in his back pocket, all the while singing lullabies to her in Khmer.

“Send him away,” Eugenia signed angrily. “We all know his coin does nothing. I’m fine managing her myself.”

“He cares for her,” Jean-Baptiste signed to his mother. “He brings her hope. He brings me hope. And maybe this is enough.”

“I don’t trust him. I’ve never trusted that one,” she signed. “There are things you don’t know.” She stopped, glancing over to Leila’s bed.

“You think me a fool,” he said. “I am not a fool.”

The next day, a monk dressed in saffron and umber robes arrived from upstream. He was standing at the bow of a small boat, carrying a gnarled stick in his hands. Thin as a rail, he looked nearly a hundred years old, but his gaze was steady and clear. Tien greeted the monk at the dock and led him by the arm to the main house. They talked quietly, as if they had known each other for a long time.

“It is a great honor,” Tien said to Jean-Baptiste. “He has come a long way.”

“Why is he here?” asked Jean-Baptiste.

The monk settled in by Leila’s bedside with his eyes closed, sitting very still. Eugenia watched him wearily, several times shooting an exasperated glance in Jean-Baptiste’s direction. And then the monk took Leila’s thin, yellowing hand. He looked up at Eugenia and smiled.

“She is at peace,” he said. “She is ready for the wheel to turn.”

The following morning, as the sun rose over the vast rows of rubber trees, the wheel turned. At the exact moment of her death, she was alone, and when the living returned to her bedside shortly thereafter, they found the faintest smile on her lips, as if she had known this would happen all along.

4

Though local custom dictated that the body be put on display for seven days before being cremated, Jean-Baptiste made arrangements to have Leila buried immediately, next to the de Broglie men on the hilltop by the observatory. A large crowd had gathered for the ceremony. The plantation workers were there, but so were the schoolchildren, and more came from the forest, streaming in from every direction. The monk mingled among them, chattering softly, clearly displeased with the break from tradition.

“He says her soul will not be able to escape if we put her in the ground,” Tien said to Jean-Baptiste.

“What do you think, Tien?”

He put his hands together and bowed. “Madame has her own beliefs.”

“And she’s my wife. Tell him that. She’s my wife, Tien. Tell him we’re not like you. Tell him we don’t believe in reincarnation. Tell him we only believe in what we can see.”

Jean-Baptiste read a passage from Corinthians and a short excerpt from one of Darwin’s notebooks. (Tofte-Jebsen does not identify which.) He gestured for the monk to say a prayer. The monk stepped forward and bowed, but did not speak. He began to make slow, lazy motions with his hands, like birds coming to roost.

“What’s he saying?” Jean-Baptiste signed to his mother.

“He doesn’t speak with his hands,” his mother signed. “I don’t understand.”

It was conveyed that the children would like to sing a song. They gathered shyly, the littlest ones in front. A nervous silence. And then they began. A lullaby: “Au clair de la lune.” The volume was all wrong, words were mispronounced, the thread was lost and verses repeated, but the effect was instant and unmistakable. It melted those assembled like a great wave. Jean-Baptiste wept openly. Next to him, Eugenia leaned into her son, trembling. After the children were finished, they heard a commotion behind them. The crowd parted and revealed Tien on the ground, inconsolable. Tears were streaming down his face. Two workers with scarves wrapped around their heads took him by the waist and led him away.

Jean-Baptiste drafted a letter to his wife’s family. It would be the second most difficult letter he ever wrote. He apologized for taking their daughter to a foreign land. He told them about the school that she had started. How much the children had loved her. About their song at her funeral. He told them she had not died alone. He said he would send them a small pension as long as he was able. He mentioned nothing of the radiation, of the machine in the basement that could see through their daughter into the worlds within, of the baby that had not come into the world. Inside the envelope he enclosed the small French coin the kru Khmer had used to treat her.

After only two days, a letter from Paris arrived on the mail boat. At first he thought Leila’s parents were already replying, that somehow the laws of space and time and steamship had collapsed, but then he realized the letter was not from them but from his friend Luc, the doctor. The letter began with a description of the chaos in the city, the sense of an imminent Nazi invasion.

I envy you to be so far away from this mess in your little jungle paradise, but then I hesitate to call it a paradise with this news of your wife’s illness. The list of symptoms you describe match those we have seen in our patients exposed to a high level of radiation. Radium used to be a commonly prescribed treatment, but as we have learned more of its effects, we now know how serious acute radiation poisoning can be. You are correct in asserting that the severity of the poisoning usually corresponds with the length and amount of exposure, and so I think this good news in your wife’s case. Her exposure was not prolonged, and if radiation is indeed the culprit, I see no reason why she won’t recover. Regardless, I would not be too hard on yourself. You did not know of its effects, just as many before you did not know.

We must all be in a mood of forgiveness these days as ordinary men have been pressed to make extraordinary decisions. Many of the physicists have already fled to London and the United States. Bohr’s still in Denmark — he refuses to leave despite the German occupation. There are rumors that the United States and Britain are already developing a powerful bomb built on the process of irradiating atoms. The Germans may build one too, and no one wants to be forced to work for them. I do not doubt if it will be built — it is only a question of when. Once it gets the bit between its teeth, there’s no stopping the horse.

What a mess we’ve created in this gentle world we used to call home.

Well, take care. God bless & best of luck. May we all make it out of this alive.

Yours, faithfully,

Luc Jeunet

It would be the last letter he received from Paris for nearly six years. One month later, the Nazis were marching past the London plane trees on the Champs-Élysées.

Perhaps Jean-Baptiste should have left then, and given up on an enterprise he had never believed in. But he did not leave, and he did not give up, not as the war in Europe spread across the world and the Japanese lay claim to the peninsula. The news of the silent takeover came in rumors and hearsay from the perpetually cheery boatmen who plied the Mekong. It did not seem to matter to them who was in charge. The French colons were still running the day-to-day operations in the capital, but the Japanese were the new masters. “Sdech muoyothngai,” the locals called them. “King for a day.”

At La Seule Vérité, the world remained unchanged. Their little patch of earth remained. Day fell into night and back into day. The trees were cut and bled, the latex collected, pressed, dried into strips, and stored in the warehouse.

Jean-Baptiste began to smoke. The opium was brought up the river from the Kampong Cham poppy fields by a toothless man who laughed at every utterance Jean-Baptiste made. Sensing his mother’s disapproval, he never smoked in the house, only in a remote hut on the outskirts of the property where he couldn’t hear the sound of the machines or the tap, only the birds and the rain and the beat of his own heart. Occasionally a worker would join him with a pipe, but most often it was just him and the trees and the dull sense that what had begun had already ended.

The monotony was broken one day when a military patrol boat hushed around the bend of the Mekong, the imperial flag of the red-spoked sun flapping damply at its stern. A Japanese naval officer wearing a peaked hat bowed formally to Jean-Baptiste as he mounted their dock and introduced himself in polite but halting French as Lieutenant Sakutaro Matsuo. Jean-Baptiste returned the bow and invited the lieutenant to take a brandy with him on the porch.

As they sat sipping the Darroze Bas-Armagnac from Château de La Brise, their bodies enveloped by the jungle heat, Jean-Baptiste studied his guest. Matsuo refused to take off his hat, even as sweat began to run down the arrowhead of his temples and along the thin eave of his jawline. The slim mustache balanced on his upper lip could not hide the rawness of his youth. Jean-Baptiste sensed a lingering, misplaced terror beneath the lieutenant’s pristine movements, beneath the tightness of that button-snap collar. It was the kind of terror men spent their entire lives trying to ignore.

Matsuo straightened, as if remembering his duties, and laid out the demands of the occupying forces: Jean-Baptiste must hand over his entire rubber supply to the Japanese army and continue to produce for them indefinitely or else face certain arrest.

“They will send you away to work on the Burmese Railway,” said Matsuo. “It is a long railway. It is never finished.”

“Excellent,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I love projects that have no end.”

The man’s pinkie had begun to quiver. Jean-Baptiste wanted to reach across the table and still this tremor.

He smiled, assuring the officer of their cooperation.

“We don’t want trouble,” he said. “I don’t care who flies the flag, just as long as we’re able to make our beautiful rubber. I live only to make that rubber. We’ll do what we can. Here, have some more Darroze. They say it opens the heart. God knows when we’ll get it again.”

“Thank you,” said Matsuo, though he looked as if he had had quite enough.

The lieutenant sweated into his uniform as Jean-Baptiste, with great flourish, signed all the requisite documents.

“I see the Japanese are as fastidious with their documentation as they are with their own mortality.”

“Pardon?”

“Tell me,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Do you think you’ll ever see Japan again?”

The young man look startled.

“I do not know what you mean,” he said.

“Japan, your home.”

“This is Japan.”

“Is it?” Jean-Baptiste laughed. “I hadn’t heard. Maybe you’ll do better here than we have done.”

“What have you done?”

“Too much,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Or perhaps not enough. Well, my dear Sakutaro, if this is your home already, then I insist you spend the night.”

“My orders—”

“To hell with your orders. You’re in the jungle, my friend. There are different rules here.”

The lieutenant seemed to be weighing his options. “My boatman—” he said.

“We’ll take care of him. He’ll get on with the workers. They like news that they don’t make up themselves.”

In the end, Matsuo reluctantly relented. After dinner was served, Eugenia excused herself, sensing that this dance did not include her. Jean-Baptiste and the lieutenant sat long into the night. Jean-Baptiste did most of the talking, recounting the story of his life, of other lives, of lives never lived, placating the young man with the last of the Darroze and, when this ran out, some half-turned merlot, and, when this was gone, an old bottle of Cordon Bleu that he found in his laboratory. When there was nothing left to say or drink, the two men, having come to an unspoken understanding, stumbled up to Jean-Baptiste’s room, where they shared a pipe of opium and spent the rest of the night together.

The next morning, Lieutenant Matsuo, eyes bloodshot and uniform askew, skipped the elaborate array of quail eggs and split pomelo for breakfast, hurriedly boarded his boat without further comment, and disappeared down the channels of the Mekong to wherever he had come from.10

The rubber they produced for the Japanese during the war years was weak and unstable: Jean-Baptiste had ordered his men to interrupt the coagulation process by pouring in a peroxide solution so that the latex would snap under any sort of duress.

“They’ll never land their planes on tires made from this,” Jean-Baptiste said to Tien as they stood over the bubbling vats of latex. “But then, I suppose their planes were never designed to land, were they?”

“Why do we make this if it is no good?” Tien asked.

“Sometimes when something is bad, it can be good,” he said. “You understand?”

Tien rolled his head slowly from one shoulder to the other, an ambiguous gesture of comprehension. “And when something is good, it can be bad,” he said.

Jean-Baptiste laughed. “Yes, Tien, that is probably more the truth of it.”

• • •

TOWARD THE END of the war, the Japanese, sensing their own demise, briefly turned over power in Cambodia and Vietnam to local governments. Cambodia became “Kampuchea” and roman lettering was abandoned for Khmer script. The arrangement lasted less than a year, however, before the French colons finally managed to reestablish control of the peninsula. Yet the damage was already done. In Vietnam, the Viet Minh, having tasted independence, and now backed by a steady stream of armaments from China and the Soviet Union, refused to fall back into imperialisme as usual, and so another war began. Grenades were thrown into movie theaters, roads attacked at night, garrisons shelled from the safety of the jungle. The slow noose began to tighten. All wars end badly, but with this war there could be no doubt of its outcome.

The bend in the river persisted. The news whispered up the Mekong was never good, but the remoteness of their location, a result of Henri’s reckless imagination, now insulated them from all conflicts. King Sihanouk was busy negotiating Cambodia’s independence from France and had largely managed to avoid becoming embroiled in the war between the Communist and colonial forces by using a shifting veil of neutrality that had left Phnom Penh’s French population in limbo. There had been whispers of insurgencies — one plantation upstream in Phumi Hang Savat was razed, its owners stabbed and disemboweled, their kidneys reportedly eaten raw by members of the guerrilla army Khmer Issarak.11 This story, told often and in graphic detail, did much to hasten the shuttering of homes along the river as families retreated to the relative safety of Saigon, where they would dream often of the land they had abandoned in the heart of the colony. Once considered too docile to pose any real problems to remote colonial rule, the Cambodians, now led by their young and crafty king, were embracing a new age of self-government. Abroad, potent seeds of malcontent were also being sown: a nascent Khmer Communist movement incubated in Paris, where a handful of Khmer students — including the soft-spoken Saloth Sar, who would later assume the nom de guerre Pol Pot — were beginning to debate how best to graft Marxism onto the slippery landscape of their homeland.

Yet even in this volatile climate of the early 1950s, as the Cold War giants began to take sides in Southeast Asia, as Sihanouk navigated a perilous transition to monarchical rule, as the floods came and went, when everything and nothing seemed possible, Jean-Baptiste did not budge. Occasionally they could hear the rumble of guns in the far distance, and once an Issarak rebel group moved through the plantation in the night and stole some chickens, but in general, the violence did not pierce the sheltered confines of their universe. It was as if that idle bend in the river provided them with an invisible, protective force field.

Still, Jean-Baptiste was not blind to the danger that lurked all around them, and at his mother’s prompting, he broke the silence of the severed telegraph by buying a wireless radio transceiver that he could use to contact Phnom Penh in an emergency, though if they were to be attacked, it was clear no radio would ever save them.

When Raouf the Algerian caretaker left to fight for his homeland in North Africa, Jean-Baptiste brought in Capitaine Claude Renoit to manage the business — or what remained of it. Capitaine Renoit was a war veteran with a bum leg. He meant well but lacked any sense of urgency when it came to the whole enterprise of rubber, and this suited Jean-Baptiste just fine. Operations became haphazard, shipments irregular. Tien and the men still bled the trees and loaded the stacks of latex onto barges, but it was all done out of tradition and not necessity. The center was no longer holding. Maybe the center had never held.

Eugenia, whose health had begun to decline but whose energy had not, spent her days painting the same Paphiopedilum appletonianum orchid plant. She had set up her easel and paints in the old telegraph room, and though Jean-Baptiste thought it ridiculous that she would squeeze herself into the smallest room in the house when they had so much space at their disposal, Eugenia claimed the tightness of the quarters gave her an urgency that she translated onto the canvas. She was prolific in her output: some days she would produce three or four paintings of the flower, all wildly different, all exactly the same. The paintings began accumulating in the warehouse, next to the racks of latex — shelves and shelves of the same blossom, repeated in every imaginable color, its two sagittal petals outstretched in greeting or malice, depending upon the canvas. When he gave a tour of the plantation to the rare visitor, Jean-Baptiste liked to joke to their guests that they were in the business of modern art making, merely amusing themselves now and then with some light rubber production. This was not far from the truth. More than one visitor left with a surreal orchid rendition tucked beneath his arm — whether out of guilt, appreciation, or morbid fascination, it was never clear.

• • •

“I’LL NEED A VAT of rubber,” Jean-Baptiste informed the Capitaine one day. “About seventy-five liters.”

“Seventy-five? That will take a couple of days. . weeks, maybe.”

“Is this not a rubber plantation? Are we not supposed to have rubber in bountiful supply?”

“Well, yes. .” Renoit seemed embarrassed. “We’ll see what we can scare up. May I ask what you will be using it for?”

“To make a rubber mold.”

“Of what?”

“Of myself,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I’m making a dummy. For medical purposes.”

The first rubber mannequins to emerge were white, grotesque beings with elephantine arms and strange leaks spilling from their hips. The clay that Jean-Baptiste was using for a cast could not hold the heated rubber; it seeped and bubbled and broke free from its confines. After this failure, he sent away for a bronzed mold of himself to be made in a navy foundry in Saigon. A month later, he received the molding, along with a note:

Très joli corps. Je l’épouserais volontiers. X

The bronze worked magnificently. He finally managed to find the right mixture of rubber and solution to give the mannequin a lifelike texture. When he made his first fully formed being, it was as if he had given birth. Jean-Baptiste painted the body white, then filled in the details of the face, taking care to get the coloring of the lips just right. For some reason, the lips suggested life more than any other aspect. Once the being had life, he went about giving it death: he painted on the telltale burns and lesions resulting from radiation poisoning. He wrote up a key for the mannequin, explaining each manner of wound, each degree of burn in relation to the amount of radiation exposure. He made four of them, each more convincing than the last, and then sent these radioactive dummies to four of the major French hospitals in the colonies.

“In the event you should have a case of acute radiation syndrome,” he wrote. “These models will instruct you on the symptoms of exposure. They are my gift to your institution.”

He did not have to wait long for a reply. The hospitals wrote back quickly, thanking him for his dummies, effusive about their usefulness. In fact, all four — plus the teaching hospital in Saigon — requested more mannequins, but would he mind not decorating them with any symptoms? The hospitals wanted them for more general purposes, and plain white dummies would suffice.

Jean-Baptiste had found a new calling. The dying plantation briefly came to life again as the source of the region’s rubber medical mannequins. A small force of the workers, including Tien, were trained in casting the mannequins and painting on a face that vaguely resembled a sleepy Jean-Baptiste. Every month, the piles of bone-white bodies were loaded onto a boat that floated down the Mekong with its curious cargo, inspiring strange legends in the villages of a white sorcerer turning men into dolls — particularly after one boat capsized and the dummies were found floating in the river for weeks afterwards. The mannequin trade proved fleeting, however, for soon the hospitals claimed they had enough, that in fact they had too many; they had dummies coming out of the closets, and they were getting in the way of the live patients. Please, they wrote, would he cease and desist his shipments, for the safety of everyone involved? Reluctantly, Jean-Baptiste put the production plans on hold and La Seule Vérité slipped back into its eddy.

Sometimes, in the early evening, before the night grew too thick, Renoit, Eugenia, and Jean-Baptiste would congregate wordlessly in the living room and play a few records on the phonograph. After a few minutes it was always necessary for someone to get up (usually Eugenia, oddly, since she was the only one who could not hear the music) and fan the revolving vinyl so that the record would not warp and melt in the heat. After a while, even she stopped attending to the apparatus, and eventually the records began to melt, one by one, the music evaporating into a nighttime chorus of crickets.

5

Tofte-Jebsen sums it up nicely: “The child, as only a child can do, changed everything in an instant” (122).

After Tien had turned over the baby and left with the other men for the afternoon collection, Renoit and Jean-Baptiste sat on the veranda, sipping the remarkable cognac and staring at the tiny infant. They had placed him in a fruit bowl, because they did not know where else to put him. Perhaps sensing a shift in the mood, Eugenia shuffled outside from her telegraph studio and saw the baby squirming among the tangerines.

“What is that?” she signed.

“That? That’s a baby,” said Jean-Baptiste. “A human baby,” he added.

“To whom does he belong?” She carefully lifted the child into her arms.

“He’s mine, apparently,” said Jean-Baptiste.

“He’s sick,” she signed to him with one hand. “Where did he come from?”

“From there.” Jean-Baptiste pointed to the rubber trees. Or the sky. It was not clear.

“He’s going to die, you know,” said Renoit. “I wouldn’t get too attached. It will only lead to suffering.”

“We’re all going to die.”

“Touché, my friend,” Renoit said, conducting a finger through the heat. “She is brief, this life, and then she leaves us when she realizes her mistake.”

“What shall I call him?” Jean-Baptiste asked.

“Something native,” said Renoit. “Something easily said and easily forgotten.”

“André,” Eugenia said aloud.

Jean-Baptiste was briefly caught off guard by hearing the name of the patriarch spoken in his mother’s curious, flattened speech. André.

He shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “Raksmey.”

“Raksmey?” said Renoit. “Isn’t that a woman’s name?”

“There was a student named Raksmey. Leila often spoke of him. I believe it means ‘ray of light.’”

“Ray of light?”

“He needs a doctor,” Eugenia signed. “I’ll get on the wireless and summon Dr. Moreau.”

“Raksmey de Broglie?” said Renoit.

“It doesn’t sound right, does it?” said Jean-Baptiste.

“Are you listening to me?” Eugenia signed.

“Anything can sound right if you say it enough,” Renoit laughed. “The French have learned this over many years.”

“Then he’ll be Raksmey Raksmey,” said Jean-Baptiste. “He came from himself.”

He looked around for the subject in question, but the baby had already disappeared with Eugenia into the coolness of the great hall.

• • •

FOR THE FIRST WEEK, the child did not eat. Bound to the fate of his discovery, Tien came by every morning to check on Raksmey’s progress. On the third day, he arrived bearing a cradle that he and the others had fashioned from rubber wood. Leila’s old dressing room, unused for years, was hastily converted into a makeshift nursery. Suong came in the mornings with her cousin to breast-feed the infant, but he still would not take her milk.

“He won’t survive,” she said. “He doesn’t want this world. He’s waiting for the next.”

Yet he did not die. He did not eat, but he did not die. He persisted — a silent newt, wriggling, only now and then emitting his shrieking whistle that raised goose bumps and brought everyone in the house to a standstill. Who was this creature? And from where had he come?

Eugenia’s bond with the little one was instantaneous and deep. She slept beside him on a rickety cot and connected a string between his ankle and the first knuckle of her pinkie. When she felt a tug in the darkness, she would come to him and hum songs without pitch, deep songs, songs that slept in the marrow of her bones. Her previous indifference to Leila’s infecundity melted away as her heart was thawed by that peculiarly intimate distance of grandparenthood. It was true: all she had wanted was this.

“At some point during the first of those long nights,” writes Tofte-Jebsen, “with the string stretched taut between them, the question of who Raksmey Raksmey belonged to, a question that would linger on in the patronymic repetition of his name, became irrelevant. He was theirs. He was hers. He was all she had” (123).

The child floundered at the brink of death’s door, and Jean-Baptiste lost his lifelong ability to sleep soundly through the night. When he did manage to doze off, he found himself dreaming of Bohr inside that humid Copenhagen pub, drops of condensation swelling and descending upon them. Bohr, who had finally escaped Nazi-occupied Denmark in the middle of the war, who had fled to America, where he reluctantly consulted with Oppenheimer on the bomb that was to be dropped halfway across the world, thirty-five hundred kilometers northeast of La Seule Vérité on a bustling port city in southern Japan shaped like the tail of a bird. Jean-Baptiste thought he had felt his teacup tremble that day, felt the earth wobble and wander on its axis. What had gone through Bohr’s mind when he heard the news? When he saw the images of shirts burned into backs, of faces removed, of the miles and miles and miles of torn wood and concrete rubble? Of the single domed building at the epicenter that had somehow managed to survive the godly forces at work? What had he thought then? That the hands of men had banished indeterminacy? That from that point forth, nothing would be left to chance? Once again, we had become the masters of our own world. There was nothing we could not know.

Or maybe he had thought: Now we can know nothing.

One night he was awoken from one of these dreams — of Bohr, of mushroom clouds, of what exactly he could not remember — by the child’s cries. He went to the nursery and found Eugenia still asleep. The string had fallen from Raksmey’s ankle. He thought of waking his mother but instead went to the baby, scooped up all of that uncertainty with both hands. The baby fell quiet. He could feel its warmth, feel its breath against his neck. He thought: This boy is breathing. This boy is alive. One day he will become a man like me. And it was then that the idea first came to him. He held the baby and walked out to the veranda and listened to the insects calling open the night. A flash of heat lightning. He brought a finger to the child’s cheek. Raksmey. Raksmey Raksmey. The idea circling in his mind. After a while, he returned his son to the nursery, retied the string, and fell back into a restless sleep, believing the idea would fade into the darkness.

Except that when he awoke the next morning, the idea was still there. It lingered. And grew. He was haunted by its possibility. He could not look at the child without being consumed by everything that could be done. He paced the veranda, sweating, mumbling beneath his breath. So taken was he that he could not sleep a wink the following night. He knew that the window to make such a decision was narrow, that time was already being wasted, and so the next evening he went to the hilltop where Leila lay beside his father and his grandfather and watched as the first stars appeared. He asked for his wife’s permission. He did not say anything aloud, but asked in his mind. He waited. He heard nothing. Felt nothing. There was no one there. Just him and the stars, emergent. It was enough.

Jean-Baptiste hurried back to his study. Under the light of a single candle, he wrote the following on a sheet of La Seule Vérité letterhead.

I, Jean-Baptiste de Broglie, on this date, 27 August 1953, do hereby declare my intentions for the child Raksmey Raksmey, found on the property of the rubber plantation La Seule Vérité in the French Protectorate and Kingdom of Cambodia:

1) If the child survives, it shall be my ambition to train and nurture him with a singular goal: to become Cambodia’s first native quantum physicist, in the humanist mold of Niels Bohr. This will be an exercise in testing the boundaries of predetermination, and, while being far from conclusive on the absolute nature of free will, shall at least form a body of evidence that will allow us to debate what is bound to chance and what can be dictated a priori.

2) To this end, I shall document my raising of him henceforth in the utmost detail, the sum of which I hope will provide a valuable resource for future researchers. Every bit of input — be it gastronomic, intellectual, or spiritual — shall be entered into the ledger. Time will tell if this equation will eventually lead to the output of a physicist — not just a meddling scientist, but a great one, one who changes the very course of history.

Signed and witnessed by me alone,

JBdB 9/3/195312

He creased the paper twice with his thumb and sealed it inside an envelope using the plantation’s wax stamp. He then placed the envelope into a carved wooden box that he hid beneath a loose floorboard. He went to bed that night and slept soundly for the first time in days.

Jean-Baptiste decided to tell no one of his intentions; he only let Eugenia know that he would be keeping a detailed journal of the child’s behavior.

“His behavior? How can you think about such things when we don’t even know if he will survive?” she signed.

“We all have our ways,” he said. In his notebook, he entered:

09:04, R.R. REFUSES MILK, FLEXES TOES.

The following morning, Tien brought the kru Khmer over to the house. To both of the men’s surprise, Eugenia embraced the shaman.

“Please help us,” she said aloud. “Please.”

She turned to Tien. “Thank you,” she said.

He bowed. When he looked at her again, there were tears in his eyes.

The kru Khmer determined that the baby’s wind had grown cold from a premature birth. He was trying to grow smaller so that he might be able to crawl back into the womb. The forces inside him must be warmed, to reverse this trend and encourage the child to start eating the food of this world. This was done with a hot green liquid smeared across his body and a single needle, exposed to the heat of a flame and then plunged into the bottom of his neck, just above the small lump of his seventh cervical vertebra. Eugenia, clearly taken aback at the sight of the piercing, did not protest. A prayer was intoned. Incense lit. More prayers. Another coin was produced, this time of ambiguous origin, and rubbed in spirals down the child’s back. From somewhere outside, a monkey squawked in surprise. The smoke from the incense shivered and righted itself again.

All of this was recorded in Jean-Baptiste’s little black book. Life happened twice: once in real time and again in the book.

The next day, the child took Suong’s breast into his mouth and began to nurse. This, too, was noted. Eugenia, previously never one for celebration, hiked up her skirts and began to dance with her son in circles, her old body flush with new life.

The kru Khmer returned, but unnecessarily so. The sickness had been lifted. Raksmey grew stronger; his skin shifted from yellow to a shimmering light brown. By the third week, he had gained a voice and begun to cry like a normal infant, on average 16.5 times a day, Jean-Baptiste noted. He also noted at what point Raksmey could follow a finger across his field of vision (2.5 months), at what point the baby could recognize movement and then a specific object at ten feet (3.5 months), fifteen feet (3.9 months), and twenty-five feet (4 months). He recorded precisely when Raksmey sat without aid (6.2 months), gained independent dexterity of his limbs (7.3 months), began to crawl (9.8 months), stood without assistance (12.5 months), and then began to walk (13.9 months).

He bought an unwieldy German reel-to-reel Magnetophon left over from the Japanese occupation and recorded hours of Raksmey’s sounds. High-pitched squeals, exploratory ohs, and wet, boneless words, not unlike his grandmother’s speech. All of these he categorized according to frequency, length, vowel type. Using this data, he created a massive wall chart of Raksmey’s preverbal musings, a flowing sea of intonation. The chart would survive until the very last days of La Seule Vérité.13

Fig. 4.5. “R.R. Sounds & Noise, 0.5–1.5 years”

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 588

When he was not recording, Jean-Baptiste would sit and read to Raksmey from the great novels of his youth. Les Misérables. A Tale of Two Cities. Gulliver’s Travels. When he felt the narratives were growing too fantastical, he would switch to papers on quantum mechanics, though often he could barely grasp what he was reading himself.

“Why read to him like this?” Eugenia signed. “I can understand more than he can, and I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

“Information is conserved,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Everything I say finds its way in there, and everything that goes in will eventually come out. We may not fully understand it yet, but I’m convinced that nothing can be lost.”

“The child cannot even speak!”

“Speech is not a prerequisite for comprehension. I think you, of all people, would be the first to agree.”

“If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that comprehension is not an idea, it’s an act,” she signed, her hands shimmering back and forth. “You must be able to use what you understand.”

“It’s not as simple as that. You cannot ascribe a timeline to understanding. When we learn, when we act, when we speak — we draw upon a lifetime of experience. Who knows the origin of our thoughts? They come from deep places, from before we knew what to call them. I’m merely enriching the foundations of the subconscious from which Raksmey may draw his later conclusions.”

In the nursery’s newly installed bookshelves, Jean-Baptiste began to assemble the library for Raksmey’s education. He also selected objects from his past projects and placed them around the room: the telegraph switch, the Tesla coil, a small telescope, a copper-wire mobile, a shortwave radio. He filled the nursery with exotic succulents and orchids from their botanical garden and installed a portable Victrola that alternately played Bach and several rare shellac recordings of Khmer and Vietnamese stringed music. On the mosquito netting above his son’s bed, Jean-Baptiste painted Greek constellations and famous equations from physics:

“He is sleeping in his father’s museum. You’re going to suffocate him.”

“Not suffocate. Elucidate. Illuminate. You remember I spent my own childhood trapped in a bedroom, but my mind was able to roam free.”

Luckily, Raksmey, unlike the youthful Jean-Baptiste, was not bound by illness and could flee the confines of his bedroom. Though unusually small, he overcame the sickness that marked his birth and grew into a bright-eyed, curious toddler. As soon as he gained bipedal mobility, he could not be corralled for long. There were many times that Eugenia or Jean-Baptiste turned their back only to find that Raksmey had run outside, deep into the gardens. And soon they had no choice but to let him run.

Jean-Baptiste’s black notebooks began to gather on the shelf in his study, at the rate of two per month, which later became three and then four. Either there was more to look for or Jean-Baptiste was learning how to look.

Tofte-Jebsen includes a sample of his observations:

— RR’s eyes are a light shade of brown, like almond paste. Seem to be lighter than when he was born. As far as I can tell, both are the same color, though the outer ring of his right iris is darker, giving the illusion of a protruding pupil.

— RR’s hair is almost jet black, natural counterclockwise swirl, splotch of lighter hair on the back/left side of his head, about 4 cm down from crown. present since birth.

— food preference (at 1 year) rice w/ pork, bananas, and jackfruit. will refuse water spinach, bok choy, and most greens. (I don’t blame him.)

— a mole. nape of the neck, recent. possibly where the needle went in?

— always sneezes in twos, half-second interval between. never three, like me.

— birthmark on left ankle, just above the talus bone, in the shape of a longtail boat w/ square sail. simple. beautiful.

— RR can wink his left eye, but not his right, seems to happen more frequently when tired.

— his first word is not a word: a salute, as in “hello” in sign language, which he performs when E. walks into room. she returns the sign, cups hand to face, then rocks, “my lovely son.” he giggles. for him, gestures are words, words are gestures. (131)

At two years, Jean-Baptiste took his son’s measurements with a tailor’s tape:

1. Length: 78cm tall.

2. Weight: 10.3kg.

3. Left pinkie: 2.75cm.

4. Right pinkie: 2.7cm.

5. Penis: 2.1cm.

6. Circumference of head: 53cm.

This last measurement Jean-Baptiste found particularly interesting, for it was slightly above average, which was quite incredible, considering the diminutive size of the boy’s body.

“It’s a good thing. We must put the entire universe inside of it,” Jean-Baptiste said to his mother. “Lemaître says it’s expanding.”

“His head or the universe?” Eugenia signed.

“The mind is the last frontier, Mother.”

“How about we leave his head alone?” she signed. In her language, the sign for head, a sweeping of the pointer finger around the face that ended at the temple, was very similar to the sign for dream, except that the circle moved away from the head, ending with the fingers pointing toward the heavens. Her gesture fell somewhere between the two, an ambiguity that Jean-Baptiste did not ask her to resolve.

“I cannot stop,” he signed. “This is like asking a man to stop breathing.”

Raksmey became trilingual and bimodal: Jean-Baptiste instructed Suong and Tien to address Raksmey in Khmer, while he spoke in French and occasionally English to the child, and Eugenia communicated with him exclusively through sign. By 2.5 years, Raksmey already had a working vocabulary of four hundred fifty words in French, one hundred words in English, at least three hundred signs, and sixty words in Khmer, though this was only an estimate, given that Suong and Tien were less than exact with their observational notes and exit interviews. Raksmey put what he knew to good use: he was already utilizing sophisticated, multi-morphemic constructions (“Tien go to work, he cut the tree when it cold”). Jean-Baptiste noticed that Raksmey had developed a subtle stutter when speaking in French, such that when he would stumble on a word, he would often introduce Eugenia’s sign language to talk around it.

Throughout Raksmey’s fourth year, Jean-Baptiste began to engage him in a series of science experiments usually done only in primary and secondary schools — measuring the point of vaporization, testing Hooke’s law with springs, mapping electrical fields using a voltmeter. In the half hour before lunch, they would go out into the forest and Jean-Baptiste would drill Raksmey on various species of plants in the garden. Together they would do drawings of leaf structure and take rubbings from the bark. Raksmey was left-handed, though Jean-Baptiste purposefully trained him to use both hands during his writing and experiments. He continuously used advanced-level vocabulary around the child and noticed a 15 percent retention and reuse of new terms within a week of their introduction. Soon Raksmey began acquiring vocabulary at an exponential rate, beginning with five to ten words per week and quickly advancing to twenty to twenty-five words per week by year’s end.

Eugenia, at first disapproving of Jean-Baptiste’s neurotic methods, eventually acquiesced. “Thus, they settled into their de facto roles,” writes Tofte-Jebsen. “He became the instructor of the mind, while she became the silent nurturer of the heart” (140).

“You can’t hear sounds?” Raksmey asked her once. It was a watershed, duly recorded in Jean-Baptiste’s notebook. Evidence of a theory of mind: he understood his grandmother as a being unto herself, one who operated under a different set of rules.

Fig. 4.6. “Sign for Machine”

From Tofte-Jebsen, B., Jeg er Raksmey, p. 149

“No,” she signed. “That’s why I have you.” Thereafter, she and Raksmey played a game in which she asked him, “What do you hear now?” and he would tell her, in sign and spoken words and also movement, like a little play.

“There are machines in the rubber house,” he said, signing the word for machine—interlocked fingers, palms turned to the chest. “They sound like. .” And then he danced up and down with his arms in the air and shook his head back and forth, blubbering air out through his lips.

“Thank you,” she signed, laughing. “I understand now.”

When he was not working with his father or explaining the world of sound to his grandmother, he spent much of his time alone. He had trouble relating to children his own age, and most were not sure how to approach him. He looked like them, but he was clearly not one of them.

One day Raksmey came home crying.

“What is it?” said Jean-Baptiste. “Are you injured?”

“He’s not injured,” Eugenia signed. She got down on one knee. “What did they say?”

Raksmey wiped his eyes. “Prak called me barang.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Jean-Baptiste said as he noted this in his book. “Do you know what this means?”

Raksmey shook his head.

“It’s a butchering of the word français. It’s spoken by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Barang means anything which is not them. Are you a Frenchman?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you aren’t. You’re as Khmer as they are.”

“But he called me that.”

“You must learn not to hear them,” Eugenia signed.

“No,” said Jean-Baptiste. “You must learn why you are right and they are wrong.”

Later that evening, Eugenia brought up the idea of sending him to the regional lycée, which had shut down during the war but had recently been reopened by a pair of American missionaries.

“It might be good for him to be around more children. We don’t want him to grow strange.”

“You don’t understand the project at hand,” Jean-Baptiste signed. “Raksmey’s not going to be just another boy sitting on a mat, repeating his times tables to some Bible-thumping American from Texas. He’s destined to become the most famous person Cambodia has ever produced.”

“He’ll certainly be the most famous person you have ever produced,” she signed, fingers slapping palms.

“I can see your sarcasm, thank you. But we cannot trust his future to a middling lycée in the middle of nowhere. We must control as much of the input as possible. These are the critical years.”

“You’re mad, Jean-Baptiste!” she signed. “You cannot control him like this! Why must you try to control everything?”

“I’m not trying to control everything. Only one thing. And if I can’t determine the outcome. . well, then this is almost as interesting as if I can.”

“He’s a child! Not an experiment!”

“All children are experiments, whether they like it or not. Most are just very sloppy experiments.”

“You’re a selfish man, Jean-Baptiste!” she signed. “When did you become so egotistic? You were not like this as a boy.”

But the experiment continued. There could be no stopping the experiment. At 3.2 years, Jean-Baptiste noted, Raksmey had developed an imaginary companion, Rasey. Initially Jean-Baptiste thought of informing his son of the nonexistent nature of Rasey, but Eugenia pleaded with him not to. “He doesn’t have anyone else; at least let him have this.”

“But it’s no one! He doesn’t exist!”

“He exists for your son. Who are we to argue? To him, Rasey might be more real than we are.”

And so, real or not, Rasey became part of the household. They even laid out a place at the dinner table for him, making sure never to serve him any vegetables, for apparently Rasey was allergic and could die if he accidentally ate even one. Like Eugenia, Rasey was also deaf; he did not speak, but he could (conveniently) read minds. As they learned from Raksmey, Rasey had a habit of getting into trouble — he would often get lost in the jungle, fight tigers, hop on the backs of eagles, and dive with sharks in the ocean. It was difficult to tell Rasey not to do these things, because he would pretend he couldn’t hear you (which he couldn’t).

“It’s very frustrating,” Raksmey told them. “He’s like a child.”

“Isn’t he a child?” Eugenia asked.

“No,” said Raksmey. “Rasey is forty-seven years old.”

Jean-Baptiste reluctantly recorded Rasey’s many adventures, recounted in exquisite detail by Raksmey, who had realized long ago how to take advantage of having a resident scribe registering his every move. Jean-Baptiste did not like including such fictions, but he came to accept them as psychological data rather than simply fantasies. It was a slippery distinction: everything was data, yet not everything could go into the notebooks.

On one occasion, Raksmey came into his father’s study and pointed to one of the first medical mannequins.

“Who is that?” he asked.

“Well, I suppose. . I suppose that is me,” said Jean-Baptiste. Indeed, there was a distinct resemblance.

“And what are those, Papa?” Raksmey asked, pointing to the shelves of notebooks. There were now hundreds of them, stretching from floor to ceiling, an intimidating fortress of black spines.

“Those are you,” said Jean-Baptiste.

Raksmey seemed content with the answer. “There are many more of me than you, yes?”

When he was not busy with his studies, Raksmey would roam the property, often following Tien around like an obedient dog, watching carefully as he tapped the trees and collected the sap. Tien showed him how to apply just enough pressure to the curved blade with the pad of his thumb to slice through the bark into the soft layer of phloem that lay beneath. A streak of white fluid would appear in the wound and run down the spiral groove.

“The tree must bleed, but not bleed too much,” Tien said, and Raksmey would nod.

Tien even made Raksmey his own little bucket so that he could take part in the collection. Despite his heavy load of latex, Tien always found a way to hold the boy’s hand wherever they went. Jean-Baptiste noted this bond with a touch of envy. Their connection was easy, gentle, unspoken — everything that he and Raksmey were not. Sometimes Jean-Baptiste saw them resting their heads together, talking softly in Khmer.

“What were you two speaking about?” he asked Raksmey once.

“Nothing so important,” said Raksmey. “Tien was telling me stories about the beginning of the world.”

“You know those stories aren’t true.”

“Yes,” Raksmey nodded. “But I didn’t want to make Tien sad.”

When it was too hot to do anything else, he would lie on his back in the river as the women chattered and washed their clothes. There was an old rope swing tied to an ancient bombax tree that allowed him to swoop out and release into the deeper part of the river. He would expunge all breath from his lungs and let himself sink and sink until his face came to rest on the bottom, and sometimes he would even let a bit of mud come in between his lips. A part of him wanted to live down here forever, to never go back up to the world of his father’s constant observation.

Fig. 4.7. “The Island of Rak”

From Tofte-Jebsen, B., Jeg er Raksmey, p. 153

When Tien was in a good mood, he would take Raksmey across the widest part of the river on a bamboo raft to a thin little island that Raksmey had dubbed Rak — the one place on earth where he could make all the rules. The trouble with making rules was that you then had to follow them. On one of his first visits to the island, Raksmey had decided that only Rak could be spoken on the island of Rak. Rak was a language consisting of just one word—Rak—which stood for everything. At first, this limited their conversations.

“Rak,” said Raksmey.

“Rak,” Tien agreed.

But after a while, a certain freedom and understanding came from such limitations. There was no need for any other word.

“Rak,” said Raksmey.

“Rak,” Tien agreed.

A river carp that Raksmey had named Rak could usually be found lazing in the shallows of this island, pecking at the insects that skittered across the surface of the water. Raksmey sometimes wondered if it was the same fish that he saw each time or whether there were many Raks inhabiting this role. He wondered if this mattered.

When he was not out on the river, Raksmey particularly enjoyed climbing the bony lattice of a strangler fig that had engulfed an old rosewood tree in the lower gardens. Thirty feet off the ground, he would call down to them, “Ha-ha! You can’t get me!”

“We can get you,” Jean-Baptiste said to him from below. “But we’re choosing not to at this very moment.”

“Rak!” Raksmey yelled.

“What did you say?” Jean-Baptiste called.

“I think you may have a little athlete on your hands,” said Renoit, coming up from behind him.

“No,” said Jean-Baptiste, shielding his eyes from the sun. He made a notation in his book. “We do not have a little athlete.”

“He climbs like a monkey.”

“Bodies wither. Intellect persists.”

“All I know is you can’t keep a good man down. If he wants to be a climber, he’ll find a way to be a climber.”

“You’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Be careful up there, Raksmey!”

“Rasey says he won’t come down,” Raksmey yelled from above. “I must observe him and make sure he doesn’t fall.”

“Rasey does not need to be observed! Come down right now,” Jean-Baptiste called up.

“Or maybe a wrestler?” said Renoit. “The little man would be a son of a bitch to bring down in a match—”

“Claude!” Jean-Baptiste turned upon him. “Don’t joke about this. This isn’t a kind of game. This is my son.”

Renoit held up his hands. “I’m envious of such possibility. To think: a lifetime of mobility. How quickly it fades when that which is dear is stolen from us.” He slapped at his wounded leg. “La liberté est un fugace don.”

Despite Raksmey’s inclination to spend his days in the trees, Jean-Baptiste’s rigorous methods of education had created a brilliant mind. Or rather allowed an already brilliant mind to blossom. By the time he was seven, Raksmey was reading well beyond his age. He, like his father, was a swift reader, who could take in books just as quickly as they were put before him. And yet he appeared indifferent to their contents.

“What did you think?” Jean-Baptiste asked after Raksmey had devoured Saul Bellow’s new novel, Henderson the Rain King, in a day.

“Boring,” Raksmey said with a shrug. “Too much talking.”

“Human discourse is important. It cannot all be chasing lions and such.”

“Can I go out and play?”

“Complete your experiments first,” said Jean-Baptiste, shaking his head. “You can make a lion out of words, you know. More powerful than any beast in the jungle.”

“Yes, Papa,” said Raksmey.

The years passed, marked only by the notches in the trees and the cyclical monsoons that broke the heat for three months every year. Eugenia’s vision began to fade and Jean-Baptiste fell and broke his ankle, which slowed him considerably. He and Renoit would limp around the plantation and bicker at each other. In other ways, time stood still at La Seule Vérité, as it always seemed to do. Tofte-Jebsen puts it rather elegantly: “If you stared at a river long enough, you started to believe that the water, and not the earth, was the one true thing” (160).

Much to Jean-Baptiste’s delight, Raksmey began to show a natural inclination for the sciences, moving through advanced textbooks with ease. Their science lessons were conducted in Jean-Baptiste’s basement laboratory, the same laboratory that had housed his many failed experiments. Raksmey, unlike his father — who was impatient and often allowed his mind to wander — was a born experimentalist. The two of them took up Jean-Baptiste’s old radiation research, dusting off the jars of radium, even building a linear particle accelerator that utilized new superconductive technologies Raksmey had discovered in a science journal. While his father had been interested primarily in documenting radiation’s destructive effects, Raksmey became fixated on the beneficial powers of the radiation beam in decreasing tumor size. His methods were much more disciplined than Jean-Baptiste’s — there was always a control, always a second and third retrial, even if the results were favorable. In short, he was not just curious — he was a scientist. After a while, Raksmey was making observations about radiation treatment that Jean-Baptiste had never come close to considering, tuning frequency, wavelength, and fractionation to the specific types of cancerous tissues. Jean-Baptiste noted each of Raksmey’s discoveries in his notebook, and next to one he could not help writing an overeager underline: Ça se passe.

Still, everything that Raksmey did, even if procedurally defined by great discipline, was also inflected by a sleepy indifference, a weary adherence to the rules, as if he were performing for an audience that had not shown up. He would go about his work with quick, precise movements, but there would be no joy on his face, no excitement at the possibility of discovery.

Jean-Baptiste also noticed that Raksmey had a habit of whispering to himself while he worked. Eventually he realized that Raksmey was actually communicating with Rasey, who had not been banished by the blossoming of Raksmey’s intellect, but instead had morphed into a subtle, constant presence, a benign sounding board of knowledge. Watching his son move with equal parts meticulosity and insouciance, Jean-Baptiste found himself oscillating between awe, frustration, and jealousy, as if Raksmey knew a secret that none of them were in on.

“Do you enjoy this?” he finally asked his son one day. Having donned lead smocks, they were exposing a rat’s splenic tumor to radiation from Raksmey’s linear accelerator while modulating the degree of fractionation by quarter steps.

“Enjoy what?” Raksmey asked, intent on aligning the beam.

“The lab? Our work? Science?”

“What is it, Papa?” Raksmey looked up. “Have I done something wrong?”

“No. You haven’t done anything wrong. I just want to know your desire. What do you want to be?”

“I want to be like you.”

“No, you don’t. You have a much better chance than I do.”

“Chance for what?”

Jean-Baptiste sighed. “Maybe it’s time.”

“Time for what?”

“For you to go away.”

“Away?”

“To school.”

“Are you angry with me, Papa?”

“I fear I can no longer give you what you need.”

“Papa!”

Raksmey ran to his father and hugged him. Their embrace, weighed down by the clumsiness of their lead aprons, felt oddly disembodied. Later, Jean-Baptiste would comb through his notebooks and confirm what he had suspected in that moment: it was the first time he had ever hugged his son. He had no rational explanation for this, only that maintaining the necessary distance between the observer and the observed — the fact that he always carried notebook and pencil in hand so as to be ready to capture life’s spontaneities (like an embrace) in real time — had prevented him from actually embracing his son in real time. He did not note this absence in his notebook.

The rest of that day, Raksmey was unusually quiet, glumly stalking through the house. In the afternoon, Jean-Baptiste saw Tien and Raksmey paddling across the river to their island.

“What did you say to him?” Eugenia signed.

“That it might be time for him to go to school.”

“To school? But you were against sending him to the lycée!”

“Not just any school. To Saigon. To my school. They’ve changed the name to Collège René Descartes, but it’s still the same place.”

“Saigon?” she said aloud. “Is it safe?”

“Of course it’s safe. It’s Saigon.”

“The Americans have moved in.”

“The Americans will make it safe.”

“The French did not make it safe.”

“The French are fools. The Americans are much more practical.”

“You really think they are any different from us?”

Jean-Baptiste, caught in the quicksand of his thoughts, did not respond.

At dinner that night, Raksmey broke his silence.

“I’ll go,” he said. “I want to go.”

Eugenia let her soup spoon clatter into her saucer. She flipped her hands on the edge of the table, palms down, a gesture that could’ve meant “stay,” or “death,” or nothing at all.

“It’s for the best, I think,” said Jean-Baptiste, nodding. “You’ve outgrown us. Sooner than I thought. They have resources that we don’t have here.”

Raksmey was staring at his grandmother, who was staring at her hands.

“Will I make friends?” he asked.

“Of course you’ll make friends,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Everyone makes friends someday.”

“But what if they don’t like me?”

“The only reason they wouldn’t like you is if they’re jealous of you.”

Eugenia abruptly got up from the table and left the room.

“Did I say something?” said Raksmey.

“She’ll miss you. She doesn’t have much in her life, and when you leave she’ll be alone again.”

“You’ll be here.”

“It’s true. Sometimes I forget about me.”

Raksmey was quiet. Then he said: “Tien said the world is a big and small place.”

“Did he?”

“He said as soon as you think you’ve seen everything, you realize there’s much more to see and you’ll never see it all. And as soon as you think you’ll never see anything, you realize everything’s the same,” he paused. “Is that true?”

“Tien can be a wise man when he wants to be,” said Jean-Baptiste.

“But he said he’s never left here. So how does he know all of this?”

6

There were no openings at Collège René Descartes.

“But in the tropics,” writes Tofte-Jebsen, “no never means no” (173). Given Jean-Baptiste’s unique legacy as one of the school’s best pupils, and given his generous offer to fund a new library, the rector was able to make an exception and set aside a place for Raksmey Raksmey de Broglie. (The last name had been added on the forms to gently remind the administration of his heritage.)

Inquiries were also made about the safety of the journey down the Mekong. News of the security situation, received from boatmen and garbled reports over the wireless, was unreliable and dependent on whoever was doing the reporting. There had been rumors of government instability since President Ngo Dinh Diem’s assassination the previous year, of American planes dropping bombs in the north, of Chinese troops amassing at the Laotian border, of Vietnamese Communists attacking monks, of Khmer insurgents attacking supply routes — but then, there had always been rumors. If repeated often enough, a rumor could become truth; if repeated still more, the news would drift back into the uncertain realm of rumor. “Reality,” Tofte-Jebsen wrote in a 1976 letter to Orientering, “has little bearing on truth; truth is instead a confluence of time and story.”14

It was decided that they would all make the trip together, as both Eugenia and Jean-Baptiste realized they had not left La Seule Vérité in the decade since Raksmey’s arrival. Eugenia, who had just turned seventy-nine, was not in particularly good health, and Jean-Baptiste thought she should stay behind, but she would not hear of it. She insisted on seeing Raksmey delivered safely from the jungles with her own eyes. Secretly, she also wanted to revisit the city of her childhood one last time so that she could make a kind of peace with it. Her parents were long dead; her sisters, having left for Paris decades before, were also dead. The city was not the same city that had tortured her so, but she still wanted it to see her, to see how she had survived and outlived them all. She thus requested that they stay at the Hôtel Continental, her family’s old establishment, now under the ownership of a shady Corsican mafioso and renamed the Continental Palace.

At the docks on the morning of their departure, Tien held Raksmey close. He pressed something into his hand and bowed to the little boy, who solemnly returned the gesture.

“Rak,” he said.

“Rak,” Raksmey agreed.

When they were on the boat, Raksmey signed to Eugenia, “Rasey is staying here with Tien so he won’t get lonely.”

As they made their way down the huge, muddy river, weaving past nameless islands, the channels splitting and splitting and coming together again, Raksmey spent the entire trip perched on the bow, watching the landscape slip past. He saw workers hunched thigh deep in rice fields, herds of weary, low-backed buffalo, men tossing nets into the shallows, packs of children waving frantically as they passed. It was his country, yet he had never seen it. He knew the half-life of radium 225, but he did not know the curves of the Mekong, the scent of rotting cassava, the sweeping glint of sunlight across the floodplains of Kampong Cham. Hundreds of villages dotting the vast basin. Specks of people fanning out across the paddies, swaying against the heat of a flickering horizon. A long, spindly bamboo bridge filled with bicyclists and women with fruit on their heads. Raksmey asked no questions, merely watched, the faintest of smiles hanging on his lips, the spray from the river occasionally leaping over the bow and wetting his brow.

They reached the wonder of Phnom Penh in the late afternoon. The ringed spires of the wats and the Royal Palace rose through the thin layer of smoky sweat that hung across the city. The smell of something metallic and unburnable, burning nonetheless. After docking their boat, they shuffled through the throngs amassed along the riverfront to a four-story guesthouse on the boulevard near the place where the Tonle Sap spilled out into the Mekong.

That evening, Raksmey held fast to Eugenia’s hand on the way to the restaurant as bicycles and motos sped past, clipping at their heels. Having known only the rhythm of the rubber trees, he was paralyzed into a kind of awed silence by this swarm of fluctuating humanity. There were more people here on a single street than he had seen in his entire life. Hawkers wielding dripping pig heads yelled out prices to an indifferent crowd. A boy, not much younger than Raksmey, tore by them after a loose chicken, diving beneath a car to snatch at the terrified bird. Loud pop music played from an open window. A crowd of young monks in orange robes enveloped them and then moved silently on: an oasis of calm amid the urban hustle.

“What do you hear?” Eugenia signed to him as they wound through the city.

Raksmey closed his eyes to listen, and promptly tripped over a curb.

“Careful,” Jean-Baptiste said. “In a place like this, you must keep your eyes open. Always open.”

Raksmey stopped, listening. He tried to pick out one sound, but there was simply too much.

“I hear everything,” he signed to Eugenia. Then: “I don’t hear anything.”

“Yes,” she signed. “I know what you mean.”

Later he sat at the window of their guesthouse, staring at the twinkle of streetlamps. A lone firework exploded above the river. Someone moaned from another room. Cars honked and zipped by along the boulevard. The scent of spilled gasoline wafted up from below. Next to the window, a strip of sticky flypaper whispered in the breeze. A fly had recently gotten stuck and was buzzing loudly in short, frequent intervals.

“There’s so much,” said Raksmey.

“Try to get some sleep,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Tomorrow will be even longer.”

“It’s funny to think this place was here this whole time,” said Raksmey, touching the trapped fly.

• • •

THE NEXT DAY, they departed before dawn, pushing out into a misty river that prevented them from seeing more than half a kilometer ahead. Soon the fog burned off, but the current — unsettled by some unseen force — became choppier. The river appeared to be flowing both ways, so their progress was slow and laborious. At one point they rounded a bend and came across a Buddhist wat in flames, the temple rippling against the jungle heat, the monks running to the river for water.

“What happened?” Raksmey asked.

“I don’t know,” said Jean-Baptiste.

When the monks saw their boat, they began to jump up and down, calling out for help.

“We should help them,” said Raksmey. He looked down and saw ash floating on the surface of the river. A half-burnt page.

Jean-Baptiste shook his head. “We can do nothing.”

“Why?”

But his father gave no answer.

After an eternity, the river opened and parted into the salamander islands of the delta. They passed clusters of floating markets teeming with long-tail boats, bunches of fish hanging from their sterns. They passed a large container ship that had become beached on a sandbar, its crew lazily playing cards on the deck. One of the men formed an imaginary gun with his hand, aimed, and shot at Raksmey as they went by.

Finally, as the sun began to sink behind them, they could see it: the place where all things went, the great expanse of the South China Sea.

Raksmey turned to his grandmother. “You cannot see the end,” he signed.

“We must have faith,” she signed. “If there was no end, then all of the water would flow out and the ocean would be empty.”

The wind picked up. It began to rain. They sought shelter in the boat’s little cabin, listening to the raindrops hammer at the thin metal roof. Raksmey curled up in Eugenia’s lap and quickly fell asleep to the lull of the motor and the roll of the waves against the hull. A leak from the roof began dripping onto Eugenia’s head, but she did not move, fearing she would disturb the child. The water collected and ran down her neck. She put her hand on the bulb of his cheek and smoothed his hair.

“Little one,” she signed against his skin. “How do you say goodbye?”

Hampered by a steady headwind and a whipping rain that increased in intensity as they worked their way up the coast, they arrived in Saigon late that night, cold and hungry, caught in the middle of a tropical downpour. It was too late to head to the collège as planned, so they hurriedly loaded their luggage into the back of a tuk-tuk, clambered into another, and directed this little caravan directly to the hotel.

Much was as Eugenia remembered it from her youth, though the facade now read CONTINENTAL PALACE in an art deco sans serif and the street signs were all in Vietnamese, an attempt by the state to shed the language of its colonizers. They stood, waterlogged, in the bright white-marble lobby, blinking at the legacy of Pierre Cazeau’s audacity. A group of American officers emerged from the elevator, holding their hats in their hands. One of them delivered a punch line and the rest burst into laughter.

“This is where your grandmother grew up,” said Jean-Baptiste. “She was high society.”

“High society?” Raksmey repeated. “What’s this?”

Eugenia wobbled, steadied herself, and then tumbled over their luggage and onto the floor.

“Grandma!” Raksmey yelled.

The American officers came rushing over to help.

“I’m fine,” she signed, shooing them away. “It’s been a long trip.”

They did not understand her signs, so they lifted her up and placed her in a plush chair next to a palm plant. She was annoyed at all the attention, but her face had drained of its color and she’d begun to shiver uncontrollably.

“Someone should call a doctor,” one of the officers said loudly.

“I’ll do it!” yelled another.

“Does she speak English?” asked another.

“She does not speak. She’s deaf,” Jean-Baptiste said in English.

“Deaf, eh? My old lady’s deaf,” said the officer. “Selectively deaf.”

“Let’s get you upstairs, Mother,” Jean-Baptiste signed. “You shouldn’t have come to Saigon.”

“I’m fine,” she said aloud, but her voice quavered, and she did not protest when a bellhop brought over a wheelchair.

When they got her into the room, it was discovered that she was already running a high fever. The doctor arrived, bearing pills and a hot water bottle. Swaddled inside the blankets, a shell of herself, Eugenia was too weak to complain.

Raksmey sat by her bed, staring at his grandmother, lying prone beneath a headboard of two ornamental dragons locked in combat.

Eugenia moved her hands from beneath the covers. “Don’t look so worried,” she signed. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“Your father owned this hotel?” he signed.

“Yes,” she signed. “This was back when the French were in charge. My father was a. .” She paused, her hands searching for the word. She waved her fingers and floated her hands upward. “He was a proud man. He was used to getting his way.”

“He died?”

“In 1911. Four years after your father was born. He never met Jean-Baptiste. I don’t think he wanted to meet Jean-Baptiste.”

“Why not?”

“Sometimes we’re related to people purely out of chance. We don’t love them; they’re simply there, like the forest.”

“He was mean to you?”

“Not so mean. He didn’t understand who I was, that’s all. We can’t expect people to understand all the time, can we?” She closed her eyes. “Tell me, Raksmey, what do you hear now?”

The answer to their game felt vitally important. As if he could make everything better simply by giving the correct response. He closed his eyes and imagined a world where there was nothing but sound. Nothing but the compression of air molecules, bouncing this way and that. No light, no objects, no jungle, no animals, no love, no fire, no death. Only sound.

He listened and heard piano music drifting down the corridor. A woman’s laughter, rising, joined by a man’s, before both fell silent again. The faint ting of the elevators opening and closing next to their room. The rattle of silverware on a cart in the hallway. Rain tiptoeing against a windowpane.

How to say this to her? He scratched his nose and took a breath, then he put his mouth up to her ear and hummed. He hummed, and from his lips he gave her everything he heard. She smiled, her eyes closed, taking in the little boy’s vibrations.

• • •

THE NEXT MORNING, she was gone. The bed was neatly made, and there was no sign of her anywhere in the room or the hotel. The staff in the lobby had not seen her come or go.

Jean-Baptiste was furious.

“What was she thinking? Wandering off like that in the middle of the night? Unwell? Deaf and blind? Doesn’t she have any sense at all?”

After giving a description to the hotel manager and a representative from the police, he told Raksmey to gather his things.

“We will not let the lunacy of an old woman derail the whole purpose of coming here.”

“But what if she’s in trouble?”

“Don’t worry about her. You’ve got enough to worry about. We came here to get you to school, and that’s exactly what we’ll do.”

“But—”

“Raksmey, she’ll be fine. Has she ever not been fine? She’s going to outlive us all. We’re going. No arguments.”

Saigon was in a state of low-grade unease. The president’s assassination in a U.S.-backed coup had created a vacuum in the country’s leadership. On nearly every corner, young policemen in oversize helmets stood at attention, thumbing at their surplus Kalashnikovs. On the way to the collège, they passed three jeeps carrying American troops, their faces set in hard expressions, their skin pasty in the gleam of the morning sun.

Raksmey watched from the back of the tuk-tuk as they crisscrossed the broad, palm-lined boulevards, weaving through waves of traffic, gliding through the roundabouts like electrons circling a nucleus. He tried to chart their route, but he could not read the street signs. It was the first time he had encountered a language he did not understand.

“What does that say?” he asked Jean-Baptiste, pointing to a bright yellow banner above a shop.

“I don’t know.”

“Why do they write like this?”

“Because they’re Vietnamese. Because they’re trying to be their own country now.”

“Why don’t they speak Khmer?”

“Vietnam’s a different country than Cambodia. Everyone has their own language.”

Raksmey thought about this. “If I’m Cambodian, why don’t I go to school in Cambodia?”

“A fair question,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I suppose it’s because I went here once upon a time, before it was Vietnam. And because you are my son. And sons do what their fathers did.”

Looking above them, Raksmey noticed a complex system of wires connecting all of the buildings. The wires came together in tangled bunches, following the roads, exploding apart, rejoining again.

“What are those?” he asked.

“Electricity,” Jean-Baptiste said. “Telephone. Telegraph. This is what makes a city possible.”

“Don’t people make a city possible?”

“Yes. You’re right. People plus electricity make a city possible.”

“And food.”

“And food.”

“And language.”

“Yes, Raksmey, we could extend this list indefinitely. To include everything in the city. The list would fill the city itself.”

Raksmey was quiet as they moved through the streets. He could drive like this all day. One among many.

“I like you, Papa,” he said after a while.

• • •

THE RECTOR OF COLLÈGE René Descartes was a young, exuberant Vietnamese man named Han Mac Than, who had taken control of the collège the year before, just after President Diem’s assassination. Monsieur Than wore circular glasses that were too small for his face and a white three-piece suit that was too large for his slender frame. He combed his hair long and to the side like the young people did, but he had a purposeful, self-assured air that put both Raksmey and Jean-Baptiste at ease, though for different reasons.

“We are on the verge of a new era,” he said to them in his office. “Independence has given many Vietnamese a fresh perspective on life. This is a very important time. We must make our own way. There can be no more excuses for failure. You cannot blame the Frenchman. Blaming the Frenchman is like blaming a ghost. There’s nothing there. The only one you can blame is yourself.”

“You can still blame us,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I give you my permission.”

The rector looked confused, then he laughed, quickly and uncomfortably.

“Of course,” he said. “I understand you’re joking now. We can all make many jokes now.”

“Just as soon as the Americans leave.”

“Ah,” the rector said, opening his hands. “What can I say? Saigon is a popular place. Many ideas, many forces at work, not all of them. .” He turned to Raksmey, who had remained silent throughout their conversation. “It’s a good place to come and study. Do you like to study?”

“Yes, Monsieur,” Raksmey said quietly.

“And tell me, what is your favorite subject?”

Raksmey looked at his father. Jean-Baptiste motioned for him to speak.

“Molecular physics,” Raksmey whispered, shrinking down into his seat.

Monsieur Than raised his eyebrows. “Well, welcome to René Descartes, Raksmey.”

“I’ve left my instructions in here,” said Jean-Baptiste, sliding a thick envelope across the table.

“Instructions?”

“Raksmey is used to a rigorous education program. Obviously this school will represent some kind of break from that, but I’d like to ensure as much continuity as possible. There are certain. . aspects of his development that I’d like you to keep track of.”

Monsieur Than leaned back in his chair. “Many parents are nervous when they first drop off their children here. They wonder, what will we do to them? Well, I can assure you he will be in good hands.”

“Read the materials. This is a little different. I’ve been involved in a. . project.”

“We aren’t going to turn your son into a Communist, if that’s what you’re worried about, Monsieur. We believe in a basic set of ideals, but we also teach open-mindedness. Tolerance. It’s the only way this region will survive.”

Monsieur Than offered to give them a tour of the grounds, but Jean-Baptiste explained that his mother had gone missing and that he must get back to the hotel.

“I’m sorry to hear this,” said Monsieur Than. “But Saigon is not such a big town. I’m sure you’ll find her.”

“I’m sure,” said Jean-Baptiste.

Outside, he paused at the gates of the collège.

“Please, take care of him,” he said to the rector. “He means a great deal to me. You’ll quickly see the caliber of child you have on your hands.”

“It’s what we do here,” said Monsieur Than. “The future of this country depends on them.”

“He’s Cambodian.”

Monsieur Than smiled. “I don’t discriminate. Cambodia’s problems are our problems. And our problems are Cambodia’s. We’re all in this fight together.”

Jean-Baptiste bent down to Raksmey. “And you take care of them. Be nice. Chew with your mouth closed. Don’t show off.”

Raksmey looked at his father, his eyes wide with terror.

“Don’t worry,” said Jean-Baptiste. “We’ll find her.” And he hugged his son for the second time in his life.

• • •

THEY DID NOT FIND HER. Two weeks went by. Despite a citywide search, despite inquiries into various underground factions that might have had grounds to kidnap her or worse, Eugenia remained missing. All avenues of inquiry turned up nothing. Even the American army had been sent notice of her disappearance and were on the lookout at their checkpoints around the city and as far north as Bien Hoa.

That first morning after Eugenia disappeared, the maid had discovered something unusual inside the bed: a smooth, polished stick figure, wrapped in a roll of twine that had been threaded through pieces of bone-white seashell. When shaken, the figurine made a thin rattling noise. Jean-Baptiste had never seen this wooden effigy before and was convinced it could not have been in his mother’s possession. He propped it up by the window, and though he was not a religious man, he took to kneeling in front of the stick creature each evening and praying for her safe return.

He spent several days searching the city from the back of a tuk-tuk, scanning the sea of faces. Every old white woman he spotted from a distance caused his pulse to quicken, even if he also knew, in his heart of hearts, that it was not her, that it would never be her. This simultaneous expectation and resignation wore him to the bone. Eventually he stopped looking.

Jean-Baptiste also began to worry about his son. He did not want Eugenia’s disappearance to have a negative effect on Raksmey’s first days at the collège. In fact, the more he was away from Raksmey, the more nervous he became that Monsieur Than had not properly studied his instructions. Vital aspects of his development might even now be going unnoticed and unrecorded. The possibility drove him mad. This initial break-in period was crucial for developing Raksmey’s positive attitude toward an institutional education. How could he have left such important data collection in the hands of others? His notebooks would suffer, were already suffering.

In the middle of his third week in the city, he returned to the school. He found Raksmey on the sporting grounds, playing football, a game he had never taught the boy. He realized there was so much he had not done, a million opportunities not taken, a million chances for growth lost and gone forever. What a ruse! What a sham — to raise a child when failure is almost certainly guaranteed! He very nearly turned around then and there, to leave and never to return, but Raksmey spotted him on the sidelines and came running over.

“There you are,” said Jean-Baptiste. “How’re you getting on? Do you like football?”

“Yes,” said Raksmey, flushed from his exertions. “Did you find Grandma?”

Jean-Baptiste got down on one knee. “Yes, of course,” he said. “She had just gone out to find her old house, and she had gotten lost. How silly of her. Apparently she had left a note for us but it had slipped underneath the bed.”

Raksmey studied him. “But she was sick.”

“You know your grandmother. She’s never one to let anything keep her down,” he said. “Have you made any friends here?”

Raksmey shrugged. “Some of the boys are mean.”

“Yes, well, this happens, unfortunately. And I’m afraid it won’t change, wherever you go. These boys are scared of their own deficiencies.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“How are the studies? Are they difficult?”

“They put me with the oldest class in science. It’s a bit easy. But the boys laughed at me. They said I was un phénomène de la nature.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” said Jean-Baptiste.

Raksmey blinked at him.

“Okay, go out and play. Score some goals!”

“They won’t let me score,” Raksmey said and ran off.

Monsieur Than joined him on the sidelines. He was carrying a rolled-up umbrella, even though the sky was clear.

“You were right,” said the rector. “Raksmey is most unusual. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a student quite like him.”

“You need to protect him. The other children don’t understand.”

“Boys can be like that. We’ll make sure he gets the attention he deserves.”

“Did you get my instructions?” Jean-Baptiste asked.

“Yes, I wanted to talk with you about this—”

“I’ve been thinking,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I believe this break has caused too much discontinuity in the experiment. I’d like to do the observations myself, at least for the first month or so. Then I can train one of your own teachers to pick up after me. But it’s critical right now—”

Monsieur Than cleared his throat.

“Monsieur de Broglie, I admire what you’ve done with Raksmey. You’ve clearly taught him a great deal. But you’ve sensed there are things that. . that you cannot teach him. This, I assume, is why you’ve brought him to us.”

The whistle blew. Raksmey had fallen. He looked over to where Jean-Baptiste and the rector were standing and then pulled himself up. Another boy slapped him on the back of the head. Jean-Baptiste instinctively cringed.

“I realized I could not be everything for him,” Jean-Baptiste said, staring at the boys milling about. “He needs socialization with other children.”

“Among other things,” said Monsieur Than. “He also — and please do not take this the wrong way — he also needs to be away from his father for some time.”

Jean-Baptiste took a step back. “What do you mean? I made him into who he is!”

“No, Monsieur de Broglie, you did not make him—”

“Where would he be without me?”

“Nor did his mother make him. Nor did God, nor Buddha, nor whomever you ascribe your ascendant powers to. Raksmey can only make himself, and in order for him to do this, your project — as honorable as it is — must end here. I won’t force you. You’re free to withdraw Raksmey from the collège at this very moment. But if you choose to keep him here, if you truly wish for us to be partners, then you must agree to entrust him to us and to let him go. I would ask that you leave and visit us again in four months. I know this may seem harsh, but it’s absolutely necessary. For you as much as for him.”

• • •

JEAN-BAPTISTE STAYED in Saigon for two more weeks. At night, in search again of that beautiful, horrific sensation du familier, he began to frequent an opium parlor in District 5. The door was tended by a madam named Phuong. She never smiled as she took his money. The dimly lit parlor, which consisted of a damp cement room adorned with a meager collection of pillows and dull green army mattresses, was populated by potbellied French colonials who had lost their way; sleepy-eyed American servicemen on R&R, happy enough to wax melancholic about the impending war; the occasional Chinese diplomat who took his drug and said nothing at all.

Jean-Baptiste lay there in the gloom and thought of his wife, of his mother, of his father, of Raksmey, of Tien, of the river and the jungle, the jungle that had become his jungle. He thought of everything that had come to pass, all the words spoken and not spoken, everything said and done and never done, and the promise of a forgiveness that would never come. The depth of his loneliness surprised and soothed him. Stumbling home from the parlor late one night, his left hand bleeding from an incident he could not recall, he realized he would always be alone — that he had always been alone.

There was nothing left but to leave.

“Please,” he told the hotel’s concierge. “If my mother shows up, tell her to wire this number in Phnom Penh. They’ll get word to me. Give her this letter. Tell her I’m not angry. Tell her I love her.”

“Monsieur,” the concierge said, bowing.

“You’ll tell her?”

“Monsieur?”

“You’ll tell her everything?”

The concierge bowed again. “I will try,” he said.

Jean-Baptiste packed his bags and hers, including the little wooden doll, and started back to the place from which he had come.

7. MARCH 1975

There were only five other people on his flight to Phnom Penh, and none appeared to be Cambodian. Raksmey squinted out the airplane window at the rolling green expanse of his country. He had not been home in eleven years. The plane lurched, then steadied itself. In the distance, something burned, the smoke pooling pleasantly in the air. From this height the world was in miniature, like a museum exhibit, content with its own beauty, wanting of nothing.

After his passport was stamped by a plump, bored army officer, Raksmey wandered through what looked to be an abandoned airport. Inside the main terminal, a series of plastic buckets filled with greasy mechanic’s tools were lined up next to a deserted security checkpoint. Nearby, a lone worker mopped at the floor, though the floor appeared to be clean.

As he was walking past the shuttered airport café, Raksmey heard someone call his name — once, twice. He turned, and there was Tien, standing in a white short-sleeved shirt and slim blue slacks. The two men embraced, laughed, nearly falling into a dusty ficus tree.

“You survived?” Tien asked in Khmer, holding on to Raksmey’s shoulder as if he might fly away.

“Survived what?” Raksmey answered in French.

“Sometimes the Khmer Rouge shoot at planes coming to land.” Tien switched to French.

“No one told me this!” said Raksmey.

“Better not to know,” Tien smiled. “How is life in Europe? You are a big man now?”

Raksmey held up his arms. “Not so big.”

“Where do you live?”

“Geneva,” said Raksmey. “Switzerland.”

“Your father. .” His voice caught. “He said you are working inside a tunnel. Like a rabbit.”

“It’s a collider. A big tunnel, like a circle,” said Raksmey, tracing a loop with his finger. There were new lines beneath Tien’s eyes and across his forehead. “Things here are not good?”

Tien shook his head. “Not so good. Maybe you should not come.”

“I had to come.”

Tien smiled, nodded. “Yes,” he said.

“Rak,” said Raksmey.

“Rak,” said Tien.

• • •

THEY WALKED OUT into the heat. Raksmey almost gasped as the heavy air strangled him. His pores flexed open, his breath shortened, his pupils dilated and then contracted with this sudden transfer of energy. The molecules in his skin began to sputter and churn, tuning themselves to the temperature of the world, and yet his body settled into an enduring weariness, his walk morphing into an improvised lean. It was out of this paradox — of quick molecules and slow bodies — that the great, beautiful sadness of the tropics arose, causing men and country alike to fall and rise and fall again. When Raksmey felt this familiar malaise, felt his skin both alive and dead, he knew he was finally home.

Tien hailed a tuk-tuk. They wove through a quiet, sullen Phnom Penh. Women hanging up laundry eyed them warily as they passed.

“You live here now?” asked Raksmey.

“I’m having trouble,” said Tien. His voiced quavered.

“I brought you something,” said Raksmey. From his pocket he produced a coin. He placed it in his friend’s palm. “Rak.”

Tien stared at the little silver circle. His eyes grew moist.

“The world is not so big,” he said.

“Very small, in fact,” said Raksmey.

They rode through the city, past a marketplace that had been bombed. Streaks of soot rising from broken windows.

“Tell me, Tien, did he suffer?”

Tien shook his head. “No. He did not.”

“You saw?”

“When he went, he went like this.” He clapped his hands around the coin.

“Tell me, Tien. Tell me everything. I want to know.”

• • •

AND SO ENDS that slim little wonder that is Jeg er Raksmey. In a review of the novella in Vinduet, Røed-Larsen declares this ending “a curious failure of invention for a man whose only gift was an overactive imagination” (125). Other reviews complained about how such an ending left too much unexplained. Dagfinn Møller writes, in the final issue of Profil, that “this last line. . a plea for information, for anything concrete. . becomes the voice of a reader left in the lurch” (102).

Tofte-Jebsen never responded publicly to these criticisms, but in a lecture at the Bergen Offentlige Bibliotek in 1983, he advanced this theory of fiction making:

If you grow too comfortable with your book, I say dismantle it (“demontere det”). Put it into a paper bag and heave it out the window. . no matter if it hits someone in the street. You have to clear the decks before you grow complacent. If you’ve lived with even one eye open you’ll know what I’m talking about — change is the only force that keeps us alive.

He then, it is said, walked out in the middle of the lecture.

Regardless of Tofte-Jebsen’s motives, if we are to discover anything more about Raksmey’s story, we must turn exclusively to Røed-Larsen’s account in Spesielle Partikler. Keep in mind that Røed-Larsen’s Raksmey is not Tofte-Jebsen’s Raksmey (and vice versa). We thus may sense a distinct break in character. To make matters worse, Røed-Larsen points to the nearly impossible challenge of establishing facts in post-independence Cambodia, renamed Democratic Kampuchea. After seizing power in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge regime famously declared that time had been reset to “Year Zero,” effectively wiping the slate clean of all Western influence, including historical written records.

Despite such formidable historiographical conditions, Røed-Larsen has done a remarkable job piecing together a crude timeline of Raksmey’s whereabouts from 1965 to 1979, which we may now summarize here.

In the mid-sixties, Raksmey spent three years at Collège Réne Descartes, in Saigon, under the personal tutelage of Rector Than; by all accounts, he excelled magnificently. When the American war in Vietnam began to accelerate, Rector Than had Raksmey graduate early, at age fifteen, while simultaneously convincing the admissions office at the École Polytechnique, in Paris, to admit him, despite his young age. Jean-Baptiste did not come to Saigon to see his son off. Instead, he sent him a letter, a copy of which apparently found its way into Per Røed-Larsen’s possession and was translated in Spesielle Partikler (640):

10 August 1968

Dearest Raksmey,

You must forgive me. I have not been well & am only now recovering from my illnesses. Please do not see my absence as having any reflection on my feelings towards your departure, which I regard with utmost excitement & pride. I have been getting updates from Rector Than about the rapid progress of your application. Your acceptance to the Polytechnique comes as no surprise, though I must admit it does bring me into a certain state of rumination.

You no doubt realized my great aspiration for you to become a physicist, an aspiration that guided the movement of my hand in nearly every choice I made while raising you. I recorded your progress in the volumes upon which I now gaze, volumes that seem lifeless without their subject. I now see this singular mind-set for what it is: a foolish defense which offered me shelter from myself. By sticking to my regime, I could deflect the fear I felt as my love for you grew. When we found you, you were so small, so sick, in the very borderlands of quietus. If only you could have seen the impossibility of your own existence! Your continued survival, against such odds, was extraordinary, & transformed us all — some for the better & some, like myself, I fear for the worse. My wife — whom in my head I still consider your mother — has never left me, & her legacy was alive & well when you floated by in your basket. My project was my way of rescuing you, but it was also my way of rescuing me.

Please, Raksmey, my dearest Raksmey, I beg for your forgiveness & I urge you, as you depart on the biggest journey of your life, to forget all that I have taught you & to listen only to the voice inside your own heart, if such a feat is still possible, given all the damage I have wrought. I am a selfish old man, a jealous, vindictive fool, who had no business doing what he did. Know that whatever path you choose, I will love you no less or no more. I am sorry for what I have inflicted upon you & no doubt what I will continue to inflict with the legacy of my actions. Nothing would make me so happy, or serve me so justly, as to see you decide to take up the profession of a cobbler, a mechanic, or a composer. Anything but the methods of science that I so bound you to.

Be well, my dear Raksmey, Raksmey. I have given you all & here I have nothing left to give.

With highest admiration,

your father,

Jean-Baptiste de Broglie

In the fall of 1968, Raksmey traveled to Paris to begin his studies at the École Polytechnique. He did not return home before this journey. Indeed, since that boat trip down the Mekong with his father and grandmother, Raksmey had not set foot in Cambodia.

Save his impeccable school transcript, not much is known about his time in Paris, about how young Raksmey navigated the trials of a large urban university in the late sixties, about whether he experimented with drugs, sex, or le rock and roll, or whether he simply stuck to his studies, as his prodigious academic record suggests. He took an average of eight classes per semester and graduated in four years, with a highly unusual dual master’s in quantum devices and applied particle physics. He also hosted a weekly classical music show on the university’s radio station, called La Vie Rallentando. What is most interesting is that Raksmey seemed intent on ignoring the advice of his father, which came either too late or too early. He would become Cambodia’s first (and only) particle physicist.

Accordingly, Raksmey promptly began work on a doctoral degree in quantum electrodynamics at the Polytechnique. He was offered, after some testy political negotiation within the department, a coveted fellowship at CERN, the international particle physics laboratory straddling the border between France and Switzerland. Only twenty-one at the time, Raksmey was the youngest doctoral student in CERN’s history. Under the mentorship of the theorist Dr. Abdus Salam and the experimentalist André Rousset, Raksmey wrote his dissertation, “On the Electroweak Interaction of Neutrinos with Quarks via Z Boson Exchange,” utilizing experimental research from CERN’s newly constructed Gargamelle bubble chamber. Several key points of Raksmey’s dissertation would later contribute to Dr. Salam’s winning the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979.

Fig. 4.8. “A neutral current event, as observed in the Gargamelle bubble chamber”

Image from R. Raksmey’s 1974 dissertation, “On the Electroweak Interaction of Neutrinos with Quarks via Z Boson Exchange,” as reproduced in Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 651

Raksmey was quite clearly an eager and brilliant disciple of Salam, but he also struggled with social interaction. He had a small collection of English poetry in his apartment, as well as “several novels by Latin American authors” (653), including Julio Cortázar, and he enjoyed listening to Bach, Debussy, Shostakovich, and Britten. When not doing lab work, he often went hiking alone in the Swiss Alps.

In Spesielle Partikler, Røed-Larsen also cites rumors — although these remain unconfirmed — that Raksmey developed an intimate (possibly sexual) relationship with an older man, Dr. Alan Ferring, who was visiting the Gargamelle team from Berkeley, California. This relationship — if indeed it existed at all — must have been brief, for in September 1974 Ferring returned to his wife and family in California. Dr. Ferring apparently refused to be interviewed for Røed-Larsen’s book.

Fig. 4.9. Manifest from AF 931, Bangkok — Phnom Penh, March 2, 1975

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 670

This much we do know: on March 2, 1975, Raksmey flew back to Cambodia after hearing news of his father’s death. Raksmey was listed in the passenger manifests of the Air France flights from Paris to Bangkok and from Bangkok to Phnom Penh — Flight 931, one of the last commercial flights to land in Cambodia.

Regarding the circumstances of Jean-Baptiste’s death, Røed-Larsen, lacking much concrete evidence, contends that a small squad of Khmer Rouge troops, possibly heading southwest from their camp in Ratanakiri, near the Vietnam border, came upon La Seule Vérité by accident. Their movement was in the context of a larger dry-season mobilization of Khmer Rouge troops to Kampong Thom before a final push toward Phnom Penh down Highway 5.

According to Røed-Larsen, the encounter at La Seule Vérité was not without precedent. During the two years before, there had been plenty of fighting in the area between Khmer Rouge rebels and various divisions of Lon Nol’s woeful Khmer National Armed Forces. In 1973, an American B-52 had mistakenly dropped a payload of phosphorus bombs on the lycée, only three kilometers upriver, killing seventeen schoolchildren and the two missionaries from Texas. The school had burned for three days. Yet for the most part, La Seule Vérité had remained relatively unscathed by both the American war in Vietnam and the civil war raging in Cambodia. Rubber collection had completely ceased about five years earlier, following Capitaine Claude Renoit’s suicide, in 1969, and only a skeleton crew of five or six men remained with Jean-Baptiste at the time, maintaining the grounds, cooking, and ostensibly providing protection from hostile factions. On several occasions, representatives from the undermanned Cambodia National Army had recommended that Jean-Baptiste abandon his home and retreat to Phnom Penh, as they could no longer guarantee his safety. He had politely but firmly dismissed their counsel each time.

What happened on the night in question is not known. Tien managed to escape, but the plantation was burned, and it is unclear what was rescued from the fire. One can assume that all of Jean-Baptiste’s notebooks on Raksmey’s development — numbering perhaps 750—were destroyed, though less certain is the fate of André’s and Henri’s ledgers, which presumably remained locked in the basement safes. And what of Jean-Baptiste’s wager with himself concerning the fate of his only son, squirreled away in a rosewood box beneath the floorboards? Or the Reamker masks on the mantel? Or the strange wooden puppet discovered in place of his mother, which had found a home next to the inkwell in his study?

Fig. 4.10. Map showing movements of Northern Sector Khmer Rouge

rebels from Ratanakiri to Phnom Penh (January — April 1975)

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 650

In the years of conflict that followed, the plantation was used as a refuge for several Khmer Rouge divisions, vagrants, and prisoners of the regime, and then by the Vietnamese troops during their 1979 invasion. Over the course of this period, the grounds were apparently picked clean. Røed-Larsen recounts how, many years later, in 1995, the property was examined by a ministerial housing inspector and the resulting report made no mention of a safe in the basement or any miscellaneous scientific equipment. The property was valued at 290 million riel, or about $75,000, a prohibitive price to anyone but the most elite provincial ministers.

Not surprisingly, given the site’s obscure location and the country’s ongoing economic woes, the property was never redeveloped. The state attempted to seize the plantation on several occasions, but the estate’s legal status remained unresolved, particularly since Raksmey Raksmey de Broglie was never officially located. Many travelers on the Mekong have remarked at the unusual sight of the main house’s grand ruins, just visible from the river, surrounded by rows and rows of overgrown hevea trees. Locals pass along several competing stories about its onetime inhabitants, involving sorcerers, the CIA, and even Pol Pot himself. The name La Seule Vérité has been completely lost to time.

After landing in Phnom Penh in March 1975, Raksmey attended a brief funeral ceremony for his father inside a small wat near the university, as it was no longer possible to travel back through Khmer Rouge territory to the plantation. The Mekong was now mined all the way up to the Laotian border. Days after this, flights out of the country were suspended, and Raksmey was prevented from returning to his lab in Switzerland. He and Tien shared a small flat in the Khan Chamkarmon district of Phnom Penh for a little over a month, waiting, with the rest of the city, for the imminent arrival of the Khmer Rouge. No one knew what this would mean, though many diplomatic organizations, including the U.S. embassy, took no chances and evacuated all of their members.

Finally, on April 15, 1975, trucks and tanks full of battle-weary Khmer Rouge soldiers streamed into the city down Highway 5 and “liberated” Phnom Penh. They were met by a jubilant populace, who hoped that this signaled the end of the endless civil war. Peace could now prosper in a region that had not seen peace in many years. It was not long, however, before Cambodians came to terms with the reality of these liberators. Within days, the entire city — all two million inhabitants — was ordered to leave for the countryside. The Khmer Rouge had begun its surreal war against time.

In pursuit of a total socialist order that eradicated the individual and shunned all Western influence, the Khmer Rouge bombed the national bank and symbolically burned its currency in the streets. They turned the National Library into a horse stable and pig farm, and nearly all of the books — both Khmer and French — were indiscriminately destroyed or used for cooking fires, toilet paper, or rolling cigarettes. Røed-Larsen includes a famous photograph of three young Khmer Rouge cadres standing around a torn-up copy of Dante’s Inferno, smoking cigarettes rolled from its pages, a look of weary amazement in their eyes.

Knowing that religious traditions could pose the most serious threat to their plan to socially engineer the populace, the Khmer Rouge forced the Buddhist monkhood, the spiritual backbone of Khmer society, to disband. Their sutras were seized and burned; their wats were turned into granaries or fish sauce factories, the altars pushed aside to make room for great barrels of fermenting anchovies. The Khmer Rouge leadership wisely co-opted several familiar Buddhist notions — such as selflessness and transcendence — for use in their extreme form of Marxist ideology, with spiritual nirvana replaced by the perfect embodiment of the state, Angkar.

Yet monks were by no means the only targets of the Khmer Rouge. Intellectuals, academics, artists — anyone with a perceived connection to the West, including those spotted simply wearing spectacles — were all rounded up, tortured, and, in most cases, summarily executed. Eventually, in a sign that the system was rotting from within, the paranoid Khmer Rouge leadership began to turn on their own ranks, arresting hundreds of Khmer Rouge cadres suspected of being traitors to the Angkar cause. Those who did the arresting were then arrested, and so on.

Røed-Larsen wonders (656) why, given their disdain for historical transcripts, the Khmer Rouge kept such comprehensive records at the Tuol Sleng, or “S-21,” security prison, a former Phnom Penh high school that had been converted into a torture camp. The place was run with astonishing efficiency by Comrade Duch, a former mathematician. Perhaps sensing the chasm left by the erasure of the written word, Comrade Duch began to forge a new history, a new kind of truth.

The S-21 documentation division, including a young photographer named Nhem En, meticulously recorded every arrival to the camp. Following strict orders, Nhem En would remove the new prisoner’s blindfold and then take a series of photos: facing the camera, in profile, occasionally from the back. After a prominent prisoner died of torture, he would also take postmortem photos, the pools of blood like black ink against the white cement floors. Nhem En faced immediate execution if the photos were not up to Comrade Duch’s exacting standards. He thus took great care with the lighting, the placement of the prisoner in the frame, the shallow depth of field. His art kept him alive, but it also became something alive itself.

Fig. 4.11. Tuol Sleng prisoner #4816

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 658

Of the seventeen thousand prisoners who passed through Tuol Sleng, only seven survived. Nhem En’s black-and-white photographs of the prisoners remained in a file cabinet in the school’s old cafeteria after the Khmer Rouge fled the city, though at some point the photographs became separated from their files, so many of the images live on in a liminal, unidentified state. A man resembling Tien is pictured among these photographs, #4816, although, without proper documentation, one cannot be sure if it is actually him or someone else entirely:

Yet even just this act of immortalizing a prisoner in a photo, filled with its soft palette of greys and marked by the subject’s vacant stare of simultaneous comprehension and disbelief, was more attention than the vast majority of the regime’s victims received. Most were never documented by their killers. They slipped into death anonymously, silently, leaving no proof of their existence or of their abrupt demise.

It is here that Røed-Larsen (and by extension we) enter the realm of conjecture. Following the “liberation” of Phnom Penh, Raksmey was able to disguise himself as a peasant and evade execution, presumably because he was mostly unknown to the population. After walking out of the city with the rest of its inhabitants, he was sent to work up north in the rice fields in the Preah Vihear region, near Tbaeng Meanchey district. He survived only by completely abandoning his identity and pretending he was deaf and mute — for more than two years, he did not speak. It must be said, his deafness was a dangerous choice, for those with disabilities were also culled. Raksmey, however, compensated for this with tireless work in the fields, and thus ingratiated himself with the Khmer Rouge district leaders, who were less ruthless than in other sectors. As Røed-Larsen writes, “Cruelty is always local. . [it] depends not upon the system which creates it but the hand that serves it” (660).

In the evenings, Raksmey would smile and clap as his exhausted comrades chanted songs pledging their allegiance to Angkar. When the Khmer Rouge cadres gave lectures on the triumphs of the Kampuchea state, Raksmey made sure his head was downcast, his eyes dull and empty, so that the chiefs would not detect any hint of life or understanding in them. He thus lived two lives: a life inside the crevices of his mind, where he unwound particles and debated the theories of subatomic quantum mechanics late into the night with an apparition of Dr. Salam, and another that comprised his outward actions during the day, where he was deaf and mute. A simpleton. Eager to please, eager to serve the great and powerful Angkar. Even in the darkest hours of the night, he made sure that his two lives never crossed paths, never greeted each other.

“Angkar!” he would yell with the others in a mangled voice of incomprehension. It was the only word he allowed to pass his lips — two declaratory vowels draped in vague consonants. It was not so much a word as a breath and release: “Ang-kar! Ang-kar!”

During the monsoon season of 1977, he and two others managed to escape their work camp by foot, over the Dângrêk Mountains and into Thailand. One of the men died en route after stepping on a land mine, and the other succumbed to illness as soon as he reached the safety of Thailand.

In Bangkok, Raksmey took up a research assistantship in the physics department of Chulalongkorn University for Dr. Randall Horwich, the friend of a colleague at CERN. Dr. Horwich must have been surprised at who had crawled into his lab from Democratic Kampuchea, which at the time remained an impenetrable mystery to the world. It was a fortuitous arrival that would help to jump-start Dr. Horwich’s career. Together, they co-published an important theoretical paper in 1979 on the mass of up quarks in the Pakistan Journal of Pure and Applied Physics. This paper precipitated Dr. Horwich’s move to CERN in 1980, where he would work on the UA1 experiment, which definitively discovered W and Z bosons and won its research heads a Nobel Prize.

If nothing else, Raksmey’s reentrance into the world of record keeping did yield valuable evidence of his survival: along with the theoretical paper, Per Røed-Larsen managed to track down his letter of hire at Chulalongkorn, several pay stubs, and a university work transcript. There is also one improbable document that stands out from the rest: a handwritten letter, purportedly written by Raksmey to his friend Sebastian Ouellette, a fellow researcher at CERN.

The letter is dated April 18, 1975:

My dear Sebastian,

The Khmer Rouge have finally arrived in Phnom Penh. Yesterday everyone was very glad to see them, people were clapping and cheering in the streets. Many think this is the end of the war though I fear for the worst. . I tried to speak with one of the soldiers but he only screamed at me to back away. His eyes were dead. When I saw this, I knew very bad things are ahead. These soldiers have not been trained to run a country. They are trained to kill. Maybe I’m wrong about this. I hope. I hope.

I’m mailing you this letter on the off chance it will get out of Cambodia. Most probably it will never arrive. I miss you and our laboratory in the fields. It feels so incredibly far away right now. What a privilege it is to work there. If anything happens know that I will never forget you.

Fondly,

Raksmey de Broglie

P.S. I had the strangest dream last night. It was very vivid. I was on a river, lying in a boat. I’m not sure what river. It wasn’t the Mekong. But then suddenly I felt as if I was no longer alone. I felt another person was with me — there was no one else on the boat but I felt whole, as if I had found my other half. When I woke up this morning I was still filled with this feeling of completion. I wonder what it means? Maybe I am just suffering from nerves.

Miraculously, this letter survived, according to Røed-Larsen, although it was delayed somewhere along the way and was not delivered to CERN until five years later.

Per Røed-Larsen also includes a telegram sent to Raksmey while he was staying in Bangkok. The telegram was sent from Kirkenes and received on November 10, 1979:

Fig. 4.12. The initial telegram, November 10, 1979. The only surviving piece of communication between Raksmey and Kirkenesferda.

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 670

8

After some negotiation, including several telephone calls, Dr. Christian-Holtsmark gradually made clear to Raksmey the extent of his request. Raksmey was to help negotiate their passage to the highly secretive “Camp 808,” just north of Anlong Veng on the Thai border, where the Khmer Rouge had retreated to a jungle base following the Vietnamese invasion. It is unclear how much Raksmey came to understand, over the course of these transmissions, the extent of Kirkenesferda’s ideology or motives, or what they planned to do once they had entered the camp. These telephone calls were not recorded, nor did Raksmey keep any journal or notebook, so Røed-Larsen is left to speculate why, given his horrific experience at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime, he would have agreed to place himself so dramatically in harm’s way on behalf of an unknown group. Røed-Larsen is quick to stress that, once onboard, Raksmey was not merely a hired gun, as Kirkenesferda did not believe in mercenary fixers. Writes Røed-Larsen, “From the minute they landed, [he] was accepted into the group, full stop, as an equal player. . Kirkenesferda’s eighth official member” (675).

Raksmey met Kirkenesferda at the Bangkok airport the day after Christmas. The team consisted of Dr. Christian-Holtsmark, the de facto leader of the troupe and director of the show; Tor Bjerknes, the primary puppet-maker; Ragnvald Brynildsen, Tor’s mentor and aging Kirk patriarch; Professor Jens Røed-Larsen, who was responsible for the theoretical physics in the show; Siri Hansteen, his wife, who had designed much of the mise-en-scène; and their child, young Lars Røed-Larsen, puppet savant and torchbearer for the next generation.

In Bangkok, they hired two canopy trucks and drove to Sangkha, just north of the Choam border crossing into Cambodia. At the time, the Thai military were collaborating closely with the exiled Khmer Rouge army, providing cross-border supplies and support in exchange for a political allegiance that would act as a buffer to the perceived threat of a growing Vietnamese empire. It was critical for Thailand that Cambodia function as a self-governed country with an actual populace and not just as a cavernous Vietnamese puppet state. Such a calculated realpolitik approach had already led to horrific humanitarian failures, as many Cambodians who had fled the Khmer Rouge to the relative safety of Thailand were now forced at gunpoint to return to their homeland. Military trucks dropped them at the border, often in the middle of the minefields, leaving the refugees paralyzed in a state of territorial limbo: they could go neither forward nor backward, and so they remained exactly where they were until starvation eventually gave them the courage to test their fate in the sea of mines.

Raksmey turned out to be a wise choice as both guide and counselor: somehow he managed to coerce and/or bribe the Thai border guards into letting him and the other performers through the blockade and into Cambodian territory. The rough track into the mountains wound through several live minefields, and it was not unusual for them to pass half-exploded cows or carts blown to bits, their onetime owners nowhere to be seen. After crossing into Cambodia, Raksmey again managed to convince the Khmer Rouge soldiers guarding Camp 808 to let them through. Røed-Larsen explains:

[Kirkenesferda’s entrance] seems entirely improbable until you consider that at the time the Khmer Rouge were attempting to boost their image as one of the legitimate government factions that would take part in the anti-Vietnamese Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK). . Realizing any hope in future political viability lay with disassociating themselves from their failed occupation, [Pol Pot and his loyalists] rebranded the Khmer Rouge as the Party of Democratic Kampuchea (PDK) and embarked on a (short-lived) PR blitz to counter the reports only just now beginning to emerge of genocidal horrors during their three and a half years in power (681).

One must thus assume that Kirkenesferda caught a murderous regime in a unique window of existential recalibration. Khieu Samphan, the prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea — once upon a time one of the most secretive governments in modern history — was now the charming public relations figurehead attempting to resurrect the PDK’s image. Barely a month after Kirkenesferda’s unprecedented visit in December, he would invite a group of prominent Western journalists to dine at 808.

“Reality was suspended,” recalls Henry Kamm of that trip, in his book Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land. The New York Times journalist describes his strange January 1980 sojourn to 808’s oasis of indulgence in a region of squalor:

The Khmer Rouge guest camp was the very latest in jungle luxury. That evening the soldier-waiters filled the table with platters of Cambodian, Chinese, and Western dishes of infinite variety and saw to it, following the prime minister’s discreet, silent commands, that the visitors’ plates stayed filled. The best Thai beer, Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch, American soft drinks, and Thai bottled water were served; the ice to cool them, which also must have been brought in from Bangkok hundreds of miles away, never ran out. The contrast between the real Cambodia and the holiday resort atmosphere was shocking (178).

Kamm makes no mention of Kirkenesferda’s visit only a few weeks prior, which is no wonder, for Samphan and the rest of the Khmer Rouge leadership would have done their best to eradicate all evidence of the disastrous events that transpired on December 30, 1979.

Like Kamm, the theater troupe encountered moments of surreality during their visit. Each member of the troupe, upon entering the compound, was issued a “Democratic Kampuchea” visa, written in flowery Khmer longhand by an old Khmer Rouge officer with beautiful penmanship. The man lingered over this job of drawing up visas, as if this were the last good deed he might do in the world. No matter that Democratic Kampuchea existed only in the minds of these men.

At some point, an offer was made by the troupe, translated by Raksmey, to provide some evening entertainment in the form of a puppet show. Questions were passed up the chain of command, and some superior, probably Khieu Samphan himself, granted permission. Never mind that such artistic practice had been banned in Democratic Kampuchea while the Khmer Rouge was in power, or that most puppeteers and actors in the country had been murdered. In this time, at this mountain base, such a show apparently was a welcome treat for the weary Khmer Rouge contingent.

Kirkenesferda’s entrance into the jungle compound must have been an odd spectacle. Who knows what these battle-hardened cadres thought as the theater wagon rumbled into camp. The wagon and generator were set up in a little clearing next to the rusty radio tower that the Khmer Rouge was using to communicate with its Chinese allies as well as the remaining far-flung Khmer Rouge factions along the Thai border. Chairs were assembled for the audience, and several rudimentary floodlights were installed as house lighting.

The view from 808 was spectacular. Perched on the edge of a steep precipice, one could see for miles and miles into the heart of Cambodia, a land now enduring mass displacement, famine, and widespread disease due to its hosts’ astonishing negligence of the citizens’ most basic needs. Presumably, such a spot was chosen for security reasons, but the stunning vistas on that evening, particularly as the sun set against a jungled horizon, brought both visitor and host to congregate at the overlook point, lending an air of contemplation to the proceedings as they silently admired nature’s vast depth of field.

At first, the guests were treated well, if not quite up to par with Kamm’s profuse testimony. They were fed a robust meal and given plenty to drink, mingling with Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, and several paunchy Khmer Rouge higher-ups. The mood was described as “festive and expectant” (694) about the upcoming show. Raksmey was very much in the middle of it all, dressed now in the simple black outfit of the Kirkenesferda puppeteer, which was reminiscent of the black uniforms formerly worn by their Khmer Rouge hosts, who now sported the dull hunter green of the jungle rebel. Perhaps the Khmer Rouge wardrobe shift was another effort by the rulers to distance themselves from their disastrous years in power, though many still wore the familiar red-checkered krama of the revolution. The puppeteers wore simple black masks around their necks. When the time came, they would disappear behind their puppets.

Raksmey mingled, joking in three languages, steering the conversations, complimenting the officers, saying little about himself or his acquaintances. He negotiated a starting time for the performance, the practicalities of electricity, housing, protocol. As darkness descended and the floodlights went up, Raksmey directed people to their seats. He was the perfect mediator. It was as if he had been training for this evening his entire life. Writes Røed-Larsen, “though [Raksmey] was the group’s newest addition, on that night he was also their most essential member. . (For the moment at least), he was Kirkenesferda’s lifeline” (703). It must be noted that the ease with which he took up this ambassadorial role was in marked contrast to the shy reclusion in which he had lived while at CERN, listening to Britten’s Les Illuminations on repeat until the vinyl had begun to erode.

Despite Raksmey’s social high-wire act, there were two circumstances beyond his control that would later lead to catastrophe. The first was that, unbeknownst to him, Tor Bjerknes had wired a telegraph key into the Khmer Rouge radio tower. This was to beam out the somewhat superfluous and altogether harmless signal “What hath God wrought?” on an obscure frequency. Transmitting this echo of Morse’s first telegram in 1844 was a practice that Kirkenesferda had maintained before each of their bevegelser, or movements, to date. However innocuous the signal, permission was not requested from their hosts, and Raksmey had no knowledge of the wiring or the transmission.

Second, and perhaps more serious, was the coincidental and unannounced visit of Pol Pot himself to the camp, a visit that, due to security concerns, not even Khieu Samphan had been made aware of. Pot normally lived two hundred kilometers to the south, in the Cardamom Mountains, in a top-secret Khmer Rouge compound called Office 131. He presumably had made the risky and arduous trip to 808 in order to discuss political strategy with Samphan and Sary face-to-face. Pol Pot must have been surprised to see that in his absence, a theater troupe had been invited to perform at the camp, but we cannot know his initial response, since prior to the show there was no witnessed confrontation between Pol Pot and Samphan.

The great irony is that Kirkenesferda — as they would do for their bevegelse in Sarajevo sixteen years later — had theatrically “reserved” certain seats in the audience for the major political players in the current conflict. There was a seat set aside for former U.S. president Richard Nixon; for Prince Norodom Sihanouk; for Chairman Mao Zedong and Vietnamese prime minister Ho Chi Minh, both already deceased; for Thailand’s acting prime minister, General Kriangsak Chomanan; for Hun Sen, the Vietnamese-installed head of state in Cambodia; and for Pol Pot. These were meant to be symbolic, a kind of “meta-material extension of the stage” (718), as Røed-Larsen terms it, but just before the curtain went up, the real Pol Pot emerged from a building and took the seat reserved for him, causing a stir in the audience, which also was unaware he was in camp. Raksmey was the only one who saw what had happened. It would only be after the show that the troupe’s other members discovered that Pol Pot was in attendance.

What happened next is covered in some detail by Røed-Larsen, who, as always, takes great pains to document every second of each of Kirkenesferda’s bevegelser. Kirkenesferda Tre was to be the troupe’s most complex creation to date, though the show would start ordinarily enough. When the curtain opened, traditional Khmer shadow puppets made from tanned buffalo hide appeared against a white screen. A scene from the epic Reamker play unfolded, in which the ten-headed monster Krong Reap, disguised as an old man, kidnaps the beautiful Neang Seda. The Reamker is a Buddhist adaptation of the Hindu Ramayana and a mainstay of Cambodian theater. As was custom, the play was accompanied by a live, but hidden, four-piece Khmer pinpeat band, even though this music had not been heard by many of those present in more than four years. At this point, one cannot help but wonder what the audience of fallen Khmer Rouge elites were thinking: here was a traditional Khmer art form, part of a rich cultural heritage that they had attempted to eradicate during their time in power, now being enacted for them. The play itself was amusing—“the hijinks of disguise [is a] universal wellspring of humor” (722) — and apparently soldiers were laughing at the antics of Krong Reap trying to behave like an old man.

Fig. 4.13. Traditional Khmer Lkhaon Nang Sbek, featuring a scene from the Reamker epic.

From Cohen, M., “Khmer Shadow Theatre,” p. 187

If this puppetry was vaguely confrontational in its very reenactment, this was by far the least controversial aspect of the show. The piece quickly veered off the rails: in the middle of the scene, metallic bird rod puppets came down from above and began to attack Krong Reap and Neang Seda, ripping off pieces of their arms and legs and gathering them into a nest. The birds sported antennae made from television radials, beautifully latticed rice paper wings, and flowing tails of magnetic cassette tape and pocket-watch gears, and they wielded “abnormally long and crooked beaks cut from shellac records and whalebone” (735). The Khmer shadow puppets, or what was left of them, fled the stage.

For those familiar with the Reamker epic, the performance of which could often stretch to twelve hours, this aerial attack by apocalyptic Frankenstein birds was an affront to the very form of Lkhaon Nang Sbek. Before the Khmer Rouge came to power, the Reamker was performed by a wide range of puppeteers, actors, and dancers, from regional groups on up to the Royal Cambodian Ballet. While each performer was allowed a certain personal flourish, it was also critical that they stayed within a strict, familiar framework. Every Cambodian knew the story by heart, so it was not uncommon for audience members to leave and return over the course of the day, instantly recognizing where they were in the story. Thus, the manner of Kirkenesferda’s narrative disruption was deeply forbidden. The group had painstakingly honored the form with their meticulous reenactment, only to completely disregard it with their experimental blitzkrieg.

Soon the birds returned with more items for their nest: tiny musical instruments, presumably taken from the pinpeat band, who had begun to stop playing one by one as the birds stole their instruments, until only a fiddle remained. Left alone, the fiddle started to play wild, chaotic strokes — an excerpt from John Cage’s Freeman Etudes.

Fig. 4.14. Notations from “Freeman Etude #18,” by John Cage

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 749

The birds brought still more things to the nest: numbers, pieces of mathematical equations, Greek symbols. When the nest had grown to tremendous proportions, it began to tremble and then exploded, sending the birds flying offstage. The fiddle music ceased. The stage went black except for a single red spotlight. A mist appeared, and then puppet figures, dressed in those same familiar black outfits of the Khmer Rouge, began to move around the stage, their faces masked by krama scarves. One by one, these scarves came off, revealing tiny television screens instead of faces. Each screen showed the curiously gentle visage of Pol Pot, smiling, nodding, on a loop. There were two dozen, then three dozen Pol Pot figurines wandering around the stage, smiling, nodding to one another.

Each of these puppets, designed by Kermin Radmanovic and Tor Bjerknes, was an astonishing work of art — the inner mechanics of their one-off design were complex beyond belief. But while exceedingly intricate, each puppet had also been carefully designed to withstand the rigorous environment of the humid jungle, for a single short circuit would have ruined the entire choreography of the show.

Fig. 4.15. Figure of Sequence 9a, 12: “Intermingling puppets, cascading, choreographed Brownian motion.”

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 768

The fiddle music returned, amplified and warped, as if fed through a synthesizer. The lights shifted, flickering; the steam billowed toward the audience. The Pol Pot puppets started to vibrate with increasing violence, and when the boiling reached a certain point, they collapsed onto the stage. An 8mm projector began projecting video of marching troops from Maoist China, superimposed on diagrams from Henrik Bohr (Niels’s son) and H. B. Nielsen’s “Hadron Production from a Boiling Quark Soup” (Nuclear Physics, 1977), depicting the dissolution of quark soup bubbles and hadron decay immediately following the Big Bang.

As the smoke began to clear, the puppet bodies rose up again, but now their robes had come off, and the figures were revealed to be birdlike themselves — half avian and half humanoid, a circulatory system of electrical wires and twine intermingled within their skeletons. Yet by all accounts, what was astonishing about this part of the show, from both a technical and an emotional standpoint, was that the body parts of the figurines began to interchange: arms were traded between figures, heads were swapped. The stage, as Røed-Larsen writes, “had become an elaborate marketplace of beingness” (776).

Fig. 4.16. “Revised Dock & Pulley System. Reverse Ball & Socket Joint Guywire v4.3.”

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 777

While this flurry of exchange took hold of the puppets, the footage of Pol Pot’s face on the headscreens being passed back and forth was gradually replaced by images of prisoners from S-21, photographs that had been released only months before. The Khmer Rouge leaders were staring into the eyes of the very victims they had helped to execute. Yet these victims were not dead; they were performing in an act “of nostalgia-play, re-animation, re-appropriation. . the executed dancing for the executioners” (828).

Slowly, the trading of body parts diminished and each figure became identifiable again. The music stopped. The figures collected toward the front of the stage and formed a line, facing the audience. Their screens flickered and then, as one, displayed a long equation:

An expression of the uncertainty principle in harmonic analysis.

One of the puppets in the middle of the equation’s head was not like the others. His screen still showed a cheerful Pol Pot — the puppet had in fact been displaying this image the entire time. In an unsettling act of coordinated scrutiny, all the other puppets turned their screen heads toward him. Then his screen went blank, except for a dot, which winked out the Morse code:

Curtain down.

“A terrible silence followed,” writes Røed-Larsen. “You could hear a sewing pin drop — if such a sewing pin had still existed in Cambodia” (788). Everyone turned to Pol Pot, the impromptu guest of honor, in order to read his response to such an audacious display of insubordination. The small man sat perfectly still, and then his face broke into a broad grin and he started to clap, vociferously, as the Khmer Rouge were prone to do during important ceremonies. A sigh of relief must have passed over Khieu Samphan and his comrades. Everyone stood, joining in the applause. The crucial moment had passed.

Under orders, the assembled Khmer Rouge soldiers dispersed, preparing to secure the camp for the night. The Kirkenesferda troupe quietly went about the mundane task of disassembling their lights and packing up their theater wagon, though their heads and hearts were no doubt buzzing with that unique post-show mixture of adrenaline, sadness, hunger, and relief. Once they were finished, a Khmer Rouge cadre escorted them to their quarters.

Shortly after this (Røed-Larsen does not offer an exact amount of time), Ieng Sary approached Raksmey. His demeanor had changed drastically. He was now furious, and he accused the group of being CIA operatives.

“I have read my history,” Røed-Larsen reports Sary saying to Raksmey (801). “I know the puppeteers of Europe were also spies. They were the only ones who were allowed to cross over borders, because no one suspected them.” As evidence, he produced part of the telegraph wire that had been connected to the radio tower. Caught unaware, unsure whether such a wire was a fabrication, Raksmey did his best at damage control, assuring his hosts that if the wire had indeed existed, then certainly no message had been sent, and that their position had not been transmitted to a foreign entity (as Sary claimed). Raksmey promised a full report on the wire’s purpose. Sary, threatening imprisonment or worse, reluctantly retreated to discuss the situation with the senior Khmer Rouge officers, including Pol Pot, who presumably had been behind this sudden change in attitude.

Raksmey went directly to Dr. Christian-Holtsmark and informed him of the accusations. The troupe’s leader admitted that while the wire had been real, the transmission had been purely for dramatic purposes and had not contained any intelligence information. Tor Bjerknes was also alerted. He apologized for not asking permission before connecting the telegraph.

As they debated what to do, the group became aware of an intensifying light, at just the same time that young Lars Røed-Larsen raced into their guest hut and declared that the theater wagon was on fire. The entire troupe went outside to see that, sure enough, their wagon — the summation of years and years of labor — was now in flames, guarded by a ring of stiff-jawed Khmer Rouge guards. There would be no intervention. Their work was gone. Abandoning camp then and there was considered, but they discovered that their trucks had been moved to an unspecified location. The consensus was that they should wait until morning and then decide how to proceed.

The next few hours were restless ones. No longer was this regime a distant surrogate for reckless ideologism—“what was once theoretical had become intensely personal. . their hosts had become their potential judge, jury, and executioner” (822).

Sometime during the night — Røed-Larsen places it at 2:20, though this is without supporting evidence — Raksmey was visiting the outhouse when he met up with a young and frightened Lars, who, like the others, could not sleep and was additionally suffering from an upset stomach due to the foreignness of Khmer food. Raksmey reassured Lars that everything would work out in the end. At that point, the two of them heard “a series of loud pops” coming from the direction of the guest quarters. Lars attempted to run toward where his family was sleeping, but, realizing the pops were in fact gunshots, Raksmey instinctively held him back, pulling the boy into the shelter of the forest. Knowing that the group had been ambushed, Raksmey made the decision to take the by now extremely distraught Lars out of the camp immediately. They snuck through the forest, around the guard post, and headed back in the direction of the border. Avoiding roads and buildings, they did not have an easy time of it, and suffered multiple lacerations from barbed wire, vines, and low-hanging branches.

When they were only a hundred meters from the Thai border crossing, Raksmey stepped on a land mine. His left leg and part of his pelvis were liquefied by the explosion, and the left side of his face was partly sheared off. Hearing shots behind them, he waved for Lars to continue and leave him where he was. After attempting to drag Raksmey several meters, Lars finally gave up and, covered in blood, stumbled to the border crossing, where the stunned Thai officials took him into custody.

Buried at the end of a long footnote on page 845 of Røed-Larsen’s book, there is a subtle shift in perspective that is quite easy to overlook:

(Once across the border, Lars sat in the backseat of the government jeep and remained quiet, despite the barrage of questions coming from a Thai official, who was demanding to know exactly what had just transpired at Camp 808. At some point, a butterfly flew through the jeep’s window and alighted on his knee. The creature flexed its wings and shivered. It was an image I would never forget.)

Did you hear it? The sudden presence of that “jeg” haunts me. The rattle in the engine. Perhaps I am misreading what was only a minor typographical error, but the appearance of the first person is so unexpected and so out of place in the context of the book’s fifteen hundred pages that it calls into question nearly everything that has come before and everything that comes after. It was an image I would never forget. Who, may I ask, is the I here? Is it Per, the author? Is it Lars, the subject and stepbrother? Is it both author and subject? Or is it someone else entirely? That lone I, sounded like a trumpet at dusk, makes me long for a voice, a motive, a warm body beneath this ocean of words.