Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

DANCING IN CAMBODIA 1993

ON MAY 10, 1906, at two in the afternoon, a French liner called the Amiral-Kersaint set sail from Saigon carrying a troupe of nearly a hundred classical dancers and musicians from the royal palace at Phnom Penh. The ship was bound for Marseille, where the dancers were to perform at a great colonial exhibition. It would be the first time Cambodian classical dance was performed in Europe.

Also traveling on the Amiral-Kersaint was the sixty-six-year-old ruler of Cambodia, King Sisowath, along with his entourage of several dozen princes, courtiers, and officials. The king, who had been crowned two years before, had often spoken of his desire to visit France, and for him the voyage was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

The Amiral-Kersaint docked in Marseille on the morning of June 11. The port was packed with curious onlookers; the city's trams had been busy since seven, transporting people to the vast, covered quay where the king and his entourage were to be received. Two brigades of gendarmes and a detachment of mounted police were deployed to keep the crowd from bursting in.

The crowd had its first brief glimpse of the dancers when the Amiral-Kersaint loomed out of the fog shortly after nine and drew alongside the quay. A number of young women were spotted on the bridge and on the upper decks, flitting between portholes and clutching each other in what appeared to be surprise and astonishment.

Within minutes a gangplank decorated with tricolored bunting had been thrown up to the ship. Soon the king himself appeared on deck, a good-humored, smiling man dressed in a tailcoat, a jewel-encrusted felt hat, and a dhotilike Cambodian sampot made of black silk. The king seemed alert, even jaunty, to those privileged to observe him at close range: a man of medium height, he had large, expressive eyes and a heavy-lipped mouth topped by a thin mustache.

King Sisowath walked down the gangplank with three pages following close behind him; one bore a ceremonial gold cigarette case, another a gold lamp with a lighted wick, and a third a gold spittoon in the shape of an open lotus. The king was an instant favorite with the Marseillais crowd. The port resounded with claps and cheers as he was driven away in a ceremonial landau, and he was applauded all the way to his specially appointed apartments at the city's Préfecture.

In the meanwhile, within minutes of the king's departure from the port, a section of the crowd rushed up the gangplank of the Amiral-Kersaint to see the dancers at first hand. For weeks now the Marseille newspapers had been full of tantalizing snippets of information: it was said that the dancers entered the palace as children and spent their lives in seclusion ever afterward; that their lives revolved entirely around the royal family; that several were the king's mistresses and had even borne him children; that some of them had never stepped out of the palace grounds until this trip to France. European travelers went to great lengths to procure invitations to see these fabulous recluses performing in the palace at Phnom Penh; now here they were in Marseille, visiting Europe for the very first time.

The dancers were on the ship's first-class deck; they seemed to be everywhere, running about, hopping, skipping, playing excitedly, feet skimming across the polished wood. The whole deck was a blur of legs, girls' legs, women's legs, "fine, elegant legs," for all the dancers were dressed in colorful sampots which ended shortly below the knee.

The onlookers were taken by surprise. They had expected perhaps a troupe of heavily veiled, voluptuous Salomes; they were not quite prepared for the lithe, athletic women they encountered on the Amiral-Kersaint. Nor indeed was the rest of Europe. An observer wrote later: "With their hard and close-cropped hair, their figures like those of striplings, their thin, muscular legs like those of young boys, their arms and hands like those of little girls, they seem to belong to no definite sex. They have something of the child about them, something of the young warrior of antiquity, and something of the woman."

Sitting regally among the dancers, alternately stern and indulgent, affectionate and severe, was the slight, fine-boned figure of the king's eldest daughter, Princess Soumphady. Dressed in a gold-brown sampot and a tunic of mauve silk, this redoubtable woman had an electrifying effect on the Marseillais crowd. They drank in every aspect of her appearance: her betel-stained teeth, her chest-ful of medals, her close-cropped hair, her gold-embroidered shoes, her diamond brooches, and her black silk stockings. Her manner, remarked one journalist, was at once haughty and childlike, her gaze direct and good-natured; she was amused by everything and nothing; she crossed her legs and clasped her shins just like a man. Indeed, except for her dress she was very much like one man in particular — the romantic and whimsical Duke of Reichstadt, l'Aiglon, Napoleon's tubercular son.

Suddenly, to the crowd's delight, the princess's composure dissolved. A group of local women appeared on deck, accompanied by a ten-year-old boy, and the princess and all the other dancers rushed over and crowded around them, admiring their clothes and exclaiming over the little boy.

The journalists were quick to seize this opportunity. "Do you like French women?" they asked the princess.

"Oh! Pretty, so pretty…" she replied.

"And their clothes, their hats?"

"Just as pretty as they are themselves."

"Would Your Highness like to wear clothes like those?"

"No!" the princess said after a moment's reflection. "No! I am not used to them and perhaps would not know how to wear them. But they are still pretty… oh yes…"

And with that she sank into what seemed to be an attitude of somber and melancholy longing.

2

I only once ever met someone who had known both Princess Soumphady and King Sisowath. Her name was Chea Samy, and she was said to be one of the greatest dancers in Cambodia, a national treasure. She was also Pol Pot's sister-in-law.

She was first pointed out to me at the School of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, a rambling complex of buildings not far from the Wat Phnom, where the UN's twenty-thousand-strong peacekeeping force has its headquarters. It was January, only four months before countrywide elections were to be held under the auspices of UNTAC, as the UN's Transitional Authority in Cambodia is universally known. Phnom Penh had temporarily become one of the most cosmopolitan towns in the world, its streets a traffic nightmare, with UNTAC's white Land Cruisers cutting through shoals of careering scooters, mopeds, and cyclo-pousses like whales cruising through drifting plankton.

The School of Fine Arts was hidden from this multinational traffic by piles of uncleared refuse and a string of shacks and shanties. Its cavernous halls and half-finished classrooms were oddly self-contained, their atmosphere the self-sustaining, honeycomb bustle of a huge television studio.

I had only recently arrived in Phnom Penh when I first met Chea Samy. She was sitting on a bench in the school's vast training hall — a small woman with the kind of poise that goes with the confidence of great beauty. She was dressed in an ankle-length skirt, and her gray hair was cut short. She was presiding over a class of about forty boys and girls, watching them go through their exercises, her gentle, rounded face tense with concentration. Occasionally she would spring off the bench and bend back a dancer's arm or push in a waist, working as a sculptor does, by touch, molding their limbs like clay.

At the time I had no idea whether Chea Samy had known Princess Soumphady or not. I had become curious about the princess and her father, King Sisowath, after learning of their journey to Europe in 1906, and I wanted to know more about them.

Chea Samy's eyes widened when I asked her about Princess Soumphady at the end of her class. She looked from me to the student who was interpreting for us as though she couldn't quite believe she had heard the name right. I reassured her: yes, I really did mean Princess Soumphady, Princess Sisowath Soumphady.

She smiled in the indulgent, misty way in which people recall a favorite aunt. Yes, of course she had known Princess Soumphady, she said. As a little girl, when she first went into the palace to learn dance, it was Princess Soumphady who had been in charge of the dancers: for a while the princess had brought her up…

The second time I met Chea Samy was at her house. She lives a few miles from Pochentong airport, on Phnom Penh's rapidly expanding frontier, in an area that is largely farmland, with a few houses strung along a dirt road. The friend whom I had persuaded to come along with me to translate took an immediate dislike to the place. It was already late afternoon, and she did not relish the thought of driving back on those roads in the dark.

My friend, Molyka, was a midlevel civil servant, a poised, attractive woman in her early thirties, painfully soft-spoken, in the Khmer way. She had spent a short while studying in Australia on a government scholarship, and spoke English with a better feeling for nuance and idiom than any of the professional interpreters I had met. If I was to visit Chea Samy, I had decided, it would be with her. But Molyka proved hard to persuade: she had become frightened of venturing out of the center of the city.

Not long before she had been driving with a friend of hers, the wife of an UNTAC official, when her car was stopped at a busy roundabout by a couple of soldiers. They were wearing the uniform of the "State of Cambodia," the faction that currently governs most of the country. "I work for the government too," she told them, "in an important ministry." They ignored her; they wanted money. She didn't have much, only a couple of thousand riels. They asked for cigarettes; she didn't have any. They told her to get out of the car and accompany them into a building. They were about to take her away when her friend interceded. They let her go eventually: they left UN people alone on the whole. But as she drove away they shouted after her, "We're going to be looking out for you — you won't always have an Untác in the car."

Molyka was scared, and she had reason to be. The government's underpaid (often unpaid) soldiers and policemen were increasingly prone to banditry and bouts of inexplicable violence. Not long before, I had gone to visit a hospital in an area where there were frequent hostilities between State troops and the Khmer Rouge. I had expected that the patients in the casualty ward would be principally victims of mines and Khmer Rouge shellfire. Instead I found a group of half a dozen women, some with children, lying on grimy mats, their faces and bodies pitted and torn with black shrapnel wounds. They had been traveling in a pickup truck to sell vegetables at a nearby market when they were stopped by a couple of State soldiers. The soldiers asked for money; the women handed out some, but the soldiers wanted more. The women had no more to give and told them so. The soldiers let the truck pass but stopped it again that evening, on its way back. They didn't ask for anything this time; they simply detonated a fragmentation mine.

Soon afterward I was traveling in a taxi with four Cambodians along a dusty, potholed road in a sparsely inhabited region in the northwest of the country. I had dozed off in the front seat when I was woken by the rattle of gunfire. I looked up and saw a State soldier standing in the middle of the dirt road, directly ahead. He was in his teens, like most uniformed Cambodians; he was wearing round, wire-rimmed sunglasses, and his pelvis was thrust out MTV-style. But instead of a guitar he had an AK-47 in his hands, and he was spraying the ground in front of us with bullets, creating a delicate tracery of dust.

The taxi jolted to a halt; the driver thrust an arm out of the window and waved his wallet. The soldier did not seem to notice; he was grinning and swaying, probably drunk. But when I sat up in the front seat, the barrel of his gun rose slowly until it was pointing directly at my forehead. Looking into the unblinking eye of that AK-47, unaccountably, two slogans flashed through my mind; they were scrawled all over the walls of Calcutta when I was the same age as that soldier. One was "Power comes from the barrel of a gun," and the other "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." It turned out he had only the first in mind.

Molyka had heard stories like these, but living in Phnom Penh, working as a civil servant, she had been relatively sheltered until that day when her car was stopped. The incident frightened her in ways she couldn't quite articulate; it reawakened a host of long-dormant fears. Molyka was only thirteen in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. She was evacuated with her whole extended family, fourteen people in all, to a labor camp in the province of Kompong Thom. A few months later she was separated from the others and sent to work in a fishing village on Cambodia's immense freshwater lake, the Tonlé Sap. For the next three years she worked as a servant and nursemaid for a family of fisher-folk.

She saw her parents only once in that time. One day she was sent to a village near Kompong Thom with a group of girls. While sitting by the roadside, quite by chance, she happened to look up from her basket of fish and saw her mother walking toward her. Her first instinct was to turn away; she thought it was a dream. Every detail matched those of her most frequently recurring dream: the parched countryside, the ragged palms, her mother coming out of the red dust of the road, walking straight toward her…

She didn't see her mother again until 1979, when she came back to Phnom Penh after the Vietnamese invasion. She managed to locate her as well as two of her brothers after months of searching. Of the fourteen people who had walked out of her house three and a half years before, ten were dead, including her father, two brothers, and a sister. Her mother had become an abject, terrified creature after her father was called away into the fields one night, never to return. One of her brothers was too young to work; the other had willed himself into a state of guilt-stricken paralysis after revealing their father's identity to the Khmer Rouge in a moment of inattention — he now held himself responsible for his father's death.

Their family was from the social group that was hardest hit by the revolution, the urban middle classes. City people by definition, they were herded into rural work camps. The institutions and forms of knowledge that sustained them were destroyed — the judicial system was dismantled, the practice of formal medicine was discontinued, schools and colleges were shut down, banks and credit were done away with; indeed, the very institution of money was abolished. Cambodia's was not a civil war in the same sense as Somalia's or the former Yugoslavia's, fought over the fetishism of small differences: it was a war on history itself, an experiment in the reinvention of society. No regime in history had ever before made so systematic and sustained an attack on the middle class. Yet if the experiment was proof of anything at all, it was ultimately of the indestructibility of the middle class, of its extraordinary tenacity and resilience, its capacity to preserve its forms of knowledge and expression through the most extreme kinds of adversity.

Molyka was only seventeen then, but she was the one who had to cope, because no one else in the family could. She took a job in the army and put herself and her brothers through school and college; later she acquired a house and a car; she adopted a child, and, like so many people in Phnom Penh, she took in and supported about half a dozen complete strangers. In one way or another she was responsible for supporting a dozen lives.

Yet now Molyka, who at the age of thirty-one had already lived through several lifetimes, was afraid of driving into the outskirts of the city. Over the past year the outlines of the life she had put together were beginning to look frayed. Paradoxically, at precisely the moment when the world had ordained peace and democracy for Cambodia, uncertainty had reached its peak within the country. Nobody knew what was going to happen after the UN-sponsored elections were held, who would come to power and what they would do once they did. Molyka's colleagues had all become desperate to make some provision for the future — by buying, stealing, selling whatever was at hand. Those two soldiers who had stopped her car were no exception. Everyone she knew was a little like that now — ministers, bureaucrats, policemen, they were all people who saw themselves faced with yet another beginning.

Now Molyka was driving out to meet Pol Pot's brother and sister-in-law, relatives of a man whose name was indelibly associated with the deaths of her own father and nine other members of her family. She had gasped in disbelief when I first asked her to accompany me. To her, as to most people in Cambodia, the name Pol Pot was an abstraction; it referred to a time, an epoch, an organization, a form of terror — it was almost impossible to associate it with a mere human being, one who had brothers, relatives, sisters-in-law. But she was curious too, and in the end, overcoming her fear of the neighborhood, she drove me out in her own car, into the newly colonized farmland near Pochentong airport.

The house, when we found it, proved to be a comfortable wooden structure built in the traditional Khmer style, with its details picked out in bright blue. Like all such houses it was supported on stilts, and as we walked in, a figure detached itself from the shadows beneath the house and came toward us: a tall, vigorous-looking man dressed in a sarong. He had a broad, pleasant face and short, spiky gray hair. The resemblance to Pol Pot was startling.

I glanced at Molyka; she bowed, joining her hands, as he welcomed us in, and they exchanged a few friendly words of greeting. His wife was waiting upstairs, he said, and led us up a wooden staircase to a large, airy room with a few photographs on the bare walls: portraits of relatives and ancestors, of the kind that hang in every Khmer house. Chea Samy was sitting on a couch at the far end of the room. She waved us in and her husband took his leave of us, smiling, hands folded.

"I wanted to attack him when I first saw him," Molyka told me later. "But then I thought, it's not his fault. What has he ever done to me?"

3

Chea Samy was taken into the palace in Phnom Penh in 1925, as a child of six, to begin her training in classical dance. She was chosen after an audition in which thousands of children participated. Her parents were delighted: dance was one of the few means by which a commoner could gain entry to the palace in those days, and to have a child accepted often meant preferment for the whole family.

King Sisowath was in his eighties when she went into the palace. He had spent most of his life waiting in the wings, wearing the pinched footwear of a crown prince while his half-brother Norodom ruled center stage. The two princes held dramatically opposed political views: Norodom was bitterly opposed to the French, while Sisowath was a passionate Francophile. It was because of French support that Sisowath was eventually able to succeed to the throne, in preference to his half-brother's innumerable sons.

Something of an eccentric all his life, King Sisowath kept no fixed hours and spent a good deal of his time smoking opium with his sons and advisers. During his visit to France, the authorities even improvised a small opium den in his apartments at the Préfecture in Marseille. "Voilà!" cried the newspapers. "An opium den in the Préfecture! There's no justice left!" But it was the French who kept the king supplied with opium in Cambodia, and they could hardly do otherwise when he was a state guest in France.

By the time Chea Samy entered the palace in 1925, King Sisowath's behavior had become erratic in the extreme. He would wander nearly naked around the grounds of the palace, wearing nothing but a kramar, a length of checkered cloth, knotted loosely around his waist. It was Princess Soumphady who was the central figure in the lives of the children of the dance troupe: she was a surrogate mother who tempered the rigors of their training with a good deal of kindly indulgence, making sure they were well fed and clothed.

On King Sisowath's death in 1927, his son Monivong succeeded to the throne, and soon the regime in the palace underwent a change. The new king's favorite mistress was a talented dancer called Luk Khun Meak, and she now gradually took over Princess Soumphady's role as "the lady in charge of the women." Meak made use of her influence to introduce several members of her family into the palace. Among them were some relatives from a small village in the province of Kompong Thom. One of them — later to become Chea Samy's husband — took a job as a clerk at the palace. He in turn brought two of his brothers to Phnom Penh. The youngest was a boy of six called Saloth Sar, who was later to take the nom de guerre Pol Pot.

Chea Samy made a respectful gesture at a picture on the wall behind her, and I looked up to find myself transfixed by Luk Khun Meak's stern, frowning gaze. "She was killed by Pol Pot," said Chea Samy, using the generic phrase with which Cambodians refer to the deaths of that time. The distinguished old dancer, mistress of King Monivong, died of starvation after the revolution. One of her daughters was apprehended by the Khmer Rouge while trying to buy rice with a little bit of gold. Her breasts were sliced off and she was left to bleed to death.

"What was Pol Pot like as a boy?" I asked, inevitably.

Chea Samy hesitated for a moment. It was easy to see that she had often been asked the question before and had thought about it at some length. "He was a very good boy," she said at last, emphatically. "In all the years he lived with me, he never gave me any trouble at all."

Then, with a despairing gesture, she said, "I have been married to his brother for fifty years now, and I can tell you that my husband is a good man, a kind man. He doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, has never made trouble between friends, never hit his nephews, never made difficulties for his children…"

She gave up; her hands flipped over in a flutter of bewilderment and fell limp into her lap.

The young Saloth Sar's palace connections ensured places for him at some of the country's better-known schools. Then, in 1949, he was awarded a scholarship to study electronics in Paris. When he returned to Cambodia three years later, he began working in secret for the Indochina Communist Party. Neither Chea Samy nor her husband saw much of him, and he told them very little of what he was doing. Then, in 1963, he disappeared; they learned later that he had fled into the jungle along with several well-known leftists and Communists. That was the last they heard of Saloth Sar.

In 1975, when the Khmer Rouge seized power, Chea Samy and her husband were evacuated like everyone else. They were sent off to a village of "old people," longtime Khmer Rouge sympathizers, and along with all the other "new people" were made to work in the rice fields. For the next couple of years there was a complete news blackout and they knew nothing of what had happened and who had come to power: it was a part of the Khmer Rouge's mechanics of terror to deprive the population of knowledge. They first began to hear the words "Pol Pot" in 1978, when the regime tried to create a personality cult around its leader in an attempt to stave off imminent collapse.

Chea Samy was working in a communal kitchen at the time, cooking and washing dishes. Late that year some party workers stuck a poster on the walls of the kitchen: they said it was a picture of their leader, Pol Pot. She knew who it was the moment she set eyes on the picture.

That was how she discovered that the leader of Angkar, the terrifying, inscrutable "Organization" that ruled over their lives, was none other than little Saloth Sar.

4

A few months later, in January 1979, the Vietnamese "broke" Cambodia, as the Khmer phrase has it, and the regime collapsed. Shortly afterward Chea Samy and her husband, like all the other evacuees, began to drift out of the villages they had been imprisoned in. Carrying nothing but a few cupfuls of dry rice, barefoot, half starved, and dressed in rags, they began to find their way back toward the places they had once known, where they had once had friends and relatives.

Walking down the dusty country roads, encountering others like themselves, the bands of "new people" slowly began to rediscover the exhilaration of speech. For more than three years now they had not been able to say a word to anyone with confidence, not even their own children. Many of them had reinvented their lives in order to protect themselves from the obsessive biographical curiosity of Angkar's cadres. Now, talking on the roads, they slowly began to shed their assumed personae; they began to mine their memories for information about the people they had met and heard of over the past few years, the names of the living and the dead.

It was the strangest of times.

The American Quaker Eva Mysliwiec arrived in the country in 1981; she was one of the first foreign relief workers to come to Cambodia and is now a legend in Phnom Penh. Some of her most vivid memories of that period are of the volcanic outbursts of speech that erupted everywhere at unexpected moments. Friends and acquaintances would suddenly begin to describe what they had lived through and seen, what had happened to them and their families and how they had managed to survive. Often people would wake up in the morning looking worse than they had the night before: they would see things in their dreams, all those things they had tried to put out of their minds when they were happening because they would have gone mad if they'd stopped to think about them — a brother called away in the dark, an infant battered against a tree, children starving to death. When you saw them in the morning and asked what had happened at night, what was the matter, they would make a circular gesture, as though the past had been unfolding before them like a turning reel, and they would say simply, "Camera."

Eventually, after weeks of wandering, Chea Samy and her husband reached the western outskirts of Phnom Penh. There, one day, entirely by accident, she ran into a girl who had studied dance with her before the revolution. The girl cried, "Teacher! Where have you been? They've been looking for you everywhere."

There was no real administration in those days. Many of the resistance leaders who had come back to Cambodia with the Vietnamese had never held administrative positions before; for the most part they were breakaway members of the Khmer Rouge who had been opposed to the policies of Pol Pot and his group. They had to learn on the job when they returned, and for a long time there was nothing like a real government in Cambodia. The country was like a shattered slate: before you could think of drawing lines on it, you had to find the pieces and fit them together.

But already the fledgling Ministry of Culture had launched an effort to locate the classical dancers and teachers who had survived. Its officials were overjoyed to find Chea Samy. They quickly arranged for her to travel through the country to look for other teachers and for young people with talent and potential.

"It was very difficult," said Chea Samy. "I did not know where to go, where to start. Most of the teachers had been killed or maimed, and the others were in no state to begin teaching again. Anyway, there was no one to teach. So many of the children were orphans, half starved. They had no idea of dance — they had never seen Khmer dance. It seemed impossible; there was no place to begin."

Her voice was quiet and matter-of-fact, but there was a quality of muted exhilaration in it too. I recognized that note at once, for I had heard it before: in Molyka's voice, for example, when she spoke of the first years after the Pol Pot time, when slowly, patiently, she had picked through the rubble around her, building a life for herself and her family. I was to hear it again and again in Cambodia, most often in the voices of women. They had lived through an experience very nearly unique in human history: they had found themselves adrift in the ruins of a society that had collapsed into a formless heap, with its scaffolding systematically dismantled, picked apart with the tools of a murderously rational form of social science. At a time when there was widespread fear and uncertainty about the intentions of the Vietnamese, they had had to start from the beginning, literally, like rag pickers, piecing their families, their homes, their lives together from the little that was left.

Like everyone around her, Chea Samy too had started all over again — at the age of sixty, with her health shattered by the years of famine and hard labor. Working with quiet, dogged persistence, she and a handful of other dancers and musicians slowly brought together a ragged, half-starved bunch of orphans and castaways, and with the discipline of their long, rigorous years of training they began to resurrect the art that Princess Soumphady and Luk Khun Meak had passed on to them in that long-ago world when King Sisowath reigned. Out of the ruins around them they began to forge the means of denying Pol Pot his victory.

5

Everywhere he went on his tour of France, King Sisowath was accompanied by his palace minister, an official who bore the simple name of Thiounn (pronounced Chunn). For all his Francophilia, King Sisowath spoke no French, and it was Minister Thiounn who served as his interpreter.

Minister Thiounn was widely acknowledged to be one of the most remarkable men in Cambodia; his career was without precedent in the aristocratic, rigidly hierarchical world of Cambodian officialdom. Starting as an interpreter for the French, at the age of nineteen, he had overcome the twin disadvantages of modest birth and a mixed Khmer-Vietnamese ancestry to become the most powerful official at the court of Phnom Penh: the minister simultaneously of finance, fine arts, and palace affairs.

This spectacular rise owed a great deal to the French, to whom he had been of considerable assistance in their decades-long struggle with Cambodia's ruling family. His role had earned him the bitter contempt of certain members of the royal family, and a famous prince had even denounced the "boy interpreter" as a French collaborator. But with French dominance in Cambodia already assured, there was little that any Cambodian prince could do to check the growing influence of Minister Thiounn. Norodom Sihanouk, King Sisowath's great-nephew, spent several of his early years on the throne smarting under Minister Thiounn's tutelage: he was to describe him later as a "veritable little king," "as powerful as the French résidents-supérieurs of the period."

The trip to France was to become something of a personal triumph for Minister Thiounn, earning him compliments from a number of French ministers and politicians. But it also served a more practical function, for traveling on the Amiral-Kersaint, along with the dancers and the rest of the royal entourage, was the minister's son, Thiounn Hol. In the course of his stay in France, the minister succeeded in entering him as a student in the École Coloniale. He was the only Cambodian commoner to be accepted; the other three were all princes of the royal family.

Not unpredictably, the minister's son proved to be a far better student than the princelings and went on to become the first Cambodian to earn university qualifications in France. Later, the minister's grandsons too, scions of what was by then the second most powerful family in Cambodia, were to make the journey to France.

One of those grandsons, Thiounn Mumm, earned considerable distinction as a student in Paris, acquiring a doctorate in applied science and becoming the first Cambodian to graduate from the exalted École Polytechnique. In the process he also became a central figure within the small circle of Cambodians in France. The story goes that he made a point of befriending every student from his country and even went to the airport to receive newcomers.

Thiounn Mumm was, in other words, part mentor, part older brother, and part leader, a figure immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever inhabited the turbulent limbo of the Asian or African student in Europe — that curious circumstance of social dislocation and emotional turmoil that for more than a century now has provided the site for some of the globe's most explosive political encounters. The peculiar conditions of that situation, part exile and part a process of accession to power, have allowed many strong and gifted personalities to have a powerful impact on their countries through their influence on their student contemporaries. Thiounn Mumm's was thus a role with a long colonial genealogy. And he brought to it an authority beyond that of his own talents and forceful personality, for he was also a member of a political dynasty — the Cambodian equivalent of the Nehrus or the Bhuttos.

Among Thiounn Mumm's many protégés was the young Pol Pot, then still known as Saloth Sar. It is generally believed that it was Thiounn Mumm who was responsible for his induction into the French Communist Party in 1952. Those Parisian loyalties have proved unshakeable: Thiounn Mumm and two of his brothers have been members of Pol Pot's innermost clique ever since.

That this ultraradical clique should be so intimately linked with the palace and with colonial officialdom is not particularly a matter of surprise in Cambodia. "Revolutions and coups d'état always start in the courtyards of the palace," a well-known political figure in Phnom Penh told me. "It's the people within who realize that the king is ordinary, while everyone else takes him for a god."

I heard the matter stated even more bluntly by someone whose family had once known the Thiounns well. "Ever since their grandfather's time," he said, "they wanted to be king."

Be that as it may, it is certainly possible that the Thiounns, with their peculiarly ambiguous relationship with the Cambodian monarchy, were responsible, as the historian Ben Kiernan has suggested, for the powerful strain of "national and racial grandiosity" in the ideology of Pol Pot's clique. That strain has eventually proved dominant: the Khmer Rouge's program now consists largely of an undisguisedly racist nationalism whose principal targets, for the time being, are Vietnam and Cambodia's own Vietnamese minority.

A recent defector, describing his political training with the Khmer Rouge, told UN officials that "as far as the Vietnamese are concerned, whenever we meet them we must kill them, whether they are militaries or civilians, because they are not ordinary civilians but soldiers disguised as civilians. We must kill them, whether they are men, women, or children, there is no distinction, they are enemies. Children are not militaries but if they are born or grow up in Cambodia, when they will be adult, they will consider Cambodian land as theirs. So we make no distinction. As to women, they give birth to Vietnamese children."

Later, shortly before the elections, there was a sudden enlargement of the Khmer Rouge's racist vocabulary. No matter that its own guerrillas had been trained by British military units in the not-so-distant past, it began inciting violence against "white-skinned, point-nosed UNTAC soldiers."

6

The more I learned of Pol Pot's journey to France, and of the other journeys that had preceded it, the more curious I became about his origins. One day, late in January, I decided to go looking for his ancestral village in the province of Kompong Thom.

Kompong Thom has great military importance, for it straddles the vital middle section of Cambodia; the town of the same name lies at the strategic heart of the country. It is very small: a string of houses that grows suddenly into a bullet-riddled marketplace, a school, a hospital, a few roads that extend all of a hundred yards, a bridge across the Sen River, a tall, freshly painted wat, a few outcrops of blue-signposted UNTAC land, and then the countryside again, flat and dusty, clumps of palms leaning raggedly over the earth, fading into the horizon in a dull gray-green patina, like mold upon a copper tray.

Two of the country's most important roadways intersect to the north of the little town. One of them leads directly to Thailand and has long been one of the most hotly contested highways in Cambodia, for the Khmer Rouge controls large chunks of territory on either side of it. The State troops who are posted along the road are under constant pressure, and there are daily exchanges of shells and gunfire.

The point where the two roads meet is guarded by an old army encampment, now controlled by the State. A tract of heavily mined ground runs along its outer perimeter; the minefield is reputed to have been laid by the State itself, partly to keep the Khmer Rouge out, but also to keep its own none-too-willing soldiers in.

Here, in this strategic hub, this center of centers, looking for Pol Pot's ancestral home, inevitably I came across someone from mine. He was a Bangladeshi sergeant, a large, friendly man with a bushy mustache. We had an ancestral district in common in Bangladesh, and the unexpectedness of this discovery — at the edge of a Cambodian minefield — linked us immediately in a ridiculously intimate kind of bonhomie.

The sergeant and his colleagues were teaching a group of Cambodian soldiers professional de-mining techniques. They were themselves trained sappers and engineers, but as it happened, none of them had ever seen or worked in a minefield that had been laid with intent to kill, so to speak. For their Cambodian charges, on the other hand, mines were a commonplace hazard of everyday life, like snakes or spiders.

This irony was not lost on the Bangladeshi sergeant. "They think nothing of laying mines," he said in trenchant Bengali. "They scatter them about like popped rice. Often they mine their own doorstep before going to bed, to keep thieves out. They mine their cars, their television sets, even their vegetable patches. They don't care who gets killed. Life really has no value here."

He shook his head in perplexity, looking at his young Cambodian charges. They were working in teams of two on the minefield, an expanse of scrub and grass that had been divided into narrow strips with tape. The teams were inching along their strips, one man scanning the ground ahead with a mine detector, the other lying flat, armed with a probe and trowel, ready to dig for mines. By this slow, painstaking method, the team had cleared a couple of acres in a month's time. This was considered good progress, and the sergeant had reason to be pleased. Generally speaking, Bangladeshi military units have an enviable reputation in Cambodia and are said to do thoughtful developmental work wherever they are posted, in addition to their duties.

In the course of their work, the sergeant and his colleagues had become friends with several Cambodian members of their team. But the better they got to know them and the better they liked them, the more feckless they seemed, the more hopeless the country's situation appeared. This despite the fact that Cambodians in general have a standard of living that would be considered enviable by most people in Bangladesh or India; despite the fact that Kompong Thom, for all that it has been on the battlefront for decades, is neater and better ordered than any provincial town in the subcontinent. Despite the fact that the sergeant was himself from a country that had suffered the ravages of a bloody civil war in the early seventies.

"They're working hard here because they're getting paid in dollars," the sergeant said. "For them it's all dollars, dollars, dollars. Sometimes, at the end of the day, we have to hand out a couple of dollars from our own pockets to get them to finish the day's work." He laughed. "It's their own country, and we have to pay them to make it safe. What I wonder is, what will they do when we're gone?"

I told him what a longtime foreign resident of Phnom Penh had said to me: that Cambodia was actually only fifteen years old; that it had managed remarkably well, considering it had been built up almost from scratch after the fall of the Pol Pot regime in 1979, and that in a situation of near-complete international isolation. Europe and Japan had received massive amounts of aid after the Second World War, but Cambodia, which had been subjected to one of the heaviest bombings in the history of war, had got virtually nothing. Yet Cambodians had made do with what they had.

But the sergeant was looking for large-scale proofs of progress — roads, a functioning postal system, Projects, Schemes, Plans — and their lack rendered meaningless those tiny, cumulative efforts by which individuals and families reclaim their lives — a shutter repaired, a class taught, a palm tree tended — which are no longer noticeable once they are done, since they sink into the order of normalcy, where they belong, and cease to be acts of affirmation and hope. He was the smallest of cogs in the vast machinery of the UN, but his vision of the country, no less than that of the international bureaucrats and experts in Phnom Penh, was organized around his part in saving it from itself.

"What Cambodians are good at is destruction," he said. "They know nothing about building — about putting things up and carrying on."

He waved good-naturedly at the Cambodians, and they waved back, bobbing their heads, smiling, and bowing. Both sides were working hard at their jobs, the expert and the amateur, the feckless and the responsible: doughty rescuer and hapless rescued were taking their jobs equally seriously.

Later I got a ride with an Austrian colonel in an UNTAC car, a white, air-conditioned Land Cruiser. He was a small, dapper, extremely loquacious man. He'd spent most of his working life on UN missions; he rated the Cambodia operation well above Lebanon, a little below Cyprus. But he was still planning to get out of Kompong Thom — too much tension, too many shells overhead.

We stopped to pick up a Russian colonel, a huge man, pear-shaped, like a belly dancer gone to seed. His khaki shorts looked like bikini briefs on his gigantic legs.

The Russian reached for the radio, which was tuned to the UNTAC radio station, and turned it off. "Yap, yap, yap, yap," he said, glaring at the Austrian.

The Austrian shrank back, but plunged into battle a couple of minutes later, mustache bristling. "I like that station," he cried. His voice was high, terrier-like. "I like it, I want to listen to it."

The Russian jammed a tree stump of a knee across the radio and looked casually out the window. The Austrian snatched his hand back, but his defeat was only temporary. He turned to look out the window and sighed. "Such a beautiful country," he said, "such wonderful people — always smiling. But why are they always at war? Why can't they get on with building their country?"

He grinned at the Russian. "I suppose we'll be going to Russia next — eh, my friend?"

The Russian sprang bolt upright, sputtering. The veins on his temples bulged. "No," he barked, "no, not Russia, never, maybe Ukraine… But not Russia, never."

Then a truck appeared on the road ahead of us, gradually taking shape within a cloud of dust. It was packed with people, many of whom seemed to be wearing olive-green fatigues. A man was leaning over the driver's cabin, looking directly at us: he had an unusual-looking cap on his head. It was green and looked Chinese, like something a Khmer Rouge guerrilla might wear. The Russian and the Austrian were suddenly on the edge of their seats, straining forward.

The truck went past in a flurry of dust, the people in it waved, and we got a good look at the cap. There was lettering on it; it said "Windy City Motel."

7

I got blank stares when I asked where Pol Pot's village was. Pol Pot had villages on either side of Route 12, people said, dozens of them; nobody could get to them, they were in the forest, surrounded by minefields. I might as well have asked where the State of Cambodia was. Nor did it help to ask about Saloth Sar; nobody seemed ever to have heard of that name.

One of the people I asked, a young Cambodian called Sros, offered to help, although he was just as puzzled by the question as everybody else. He worked for a relief agency and had spent a lot of time in Kompong Thom. He had never heard anybody mention Pol Pot's village and would have been skeptical if he had. But I persuaded him that Pol Pot was really called Saloth Sar and had been born near the town; I'd forgotten the name of the village, but I had seen it mentioned in books and knew it was close by.

He was intrigued. He borrowed a scooter and we drove down the main street in Kompong Thom, stopping passersby and asking respectfully, "Bong, do you know where Pol Pot's village is?"

They looked at us in disbelief and hurried away: either they didn't know or they weren't saying. Then Sros stopped to ask a local district official, a bowed, earnest-looking man with a twitch that ran all the way down the right side of his face. The moment I saw him, I was sure he would know. He did. He lowered his voice and whispered quickly into Sros's ear. The village was called Sbauv, and to get to it we had to go past the hospital and follow the dirt road along the River Sen. He stopped to look over his shoulder and pointed down the road.

There was perhaps an hour of sunlight left, and it wasn't safe to be out after dark. But Sros was undeterred; the thought that we were near Pol Pot's birthplace had a galvanic effect on him. He was determined to get there as soon as possible.

He had spent almost his entire adult life behind barbed wire, one and a half miles of it, in a refugee camp on the Thai border. He had entered it at the age of thirteen and had come to manhood circling around and around the perimeter, month after month, year after year, waiting to see who got out, who got a visa, who went mad, who got raped, who got shot by the Thai guards. He was twenty-five now, diminutive but wiry, very slight of build. He had converted to Christianity at the camp, and there was an earnestness behind his ready smile and easygoing manners that hinted at a deeply felt piety.

Sros was too young to recall much of the "Pol Pot time," but he remembered vividly his journey to the Thai border with his parents. They left in 1982, three years after the Vietnamese invasion. Things were hard where they were, and they'd heard from Western radio broadcasts that there were camps on the border where they would be looked after and fed.

Things hadn't turned out quite as they had imagined. They ended up in a camp run by a conservative Cambodian political faction, a kind of living hell. But they bribed a "guide" to get them across to a UN-run camp, Khao I Dang, where the conditions were better. Sros went to school and learned English, and after years of waiting, fruitlessly, for a visa to the West, he took the plunge and crossed over into Cambodia. That was a year ago. With his education and his knowledge of English he had found a job without difficulty, but he was still keeping his name on the rosters of the UN High Commission for Refugees.

"My father says to me, there will be peace in your lifetime and you will be happy," he told me. "My grandfather used to tell my father the same thing, and now I say the same thing to my nephews and nieces. It's always the same."

We left Kompong Thom behind almost before we knew it. A dirt road snaked away from the edge of the city, shaded by trees and clumps of bamboo. The road was an estuary of deep red dust: the wheels of the ox carts that came rumbling toward us churned up crimson waves that billowed outward and up into the sky. The dust hung above the road far into the distance, like spray above a rocky coastline, glowing red in the sunset.

Flanking the road on one side were shanties and small dwellings, the poorest I had yet seen in Cambodia, some of them no more than frames stuck into the ground and covered with plaited palm leaves. Even the larger houses seemed little more than shanties on stilts. On the other side of the road the ground dropped away sharply to the River Sen: a shrunken stream now, in the dry season, flowing sluggishly along at the bottom of its steep-sided channel.

It was impossible to tell where one village ended and another began. We stopped to ask a couple of times, the last time at a stall where a woman was selling cigarettes and fruit. She pointed over her shoulder: one of Pol Pot's brothers lived in the house behind the stall, she said, and another in a palm-thatch shanty in the adjacent yard.

We drove into the yard and looked up at the house. It was large compared to those around it, a typical wooden Khmer house, on stilts, with chickens roosting underneath and clothes drying between the pillars. It had clearly seen much better days and was badly in need of repairs.

The decaying house and the dilapidated, palm-thatched shanty in the yard took me by surprise. I remembered having read that Pol Pot's father was a well-to-do farmer, and I had expected something less humble. Sros was even more surprised; perhaps he had assumed that the relatives of politicians always got rich, one way or another. There was an augury of something unfamiliar here — a man of power who had done nothing to help his own kin. It was a reminder that we were confronting a phenomenon that was completely at odds with quotidian expectation.

Then an elderly woman with close-cropped white hair appeared on the veranda of the house. Sros said a few words to her, and she immediately invited us up. Greeting us with folded hands, she asked us to seat ourselves on a mat while she went inside to find her husband. Like many Khmer dwellings, the house was sparsely furnished, the walls bare except for a few religious pictures and images of the Buddha.

The woman returned followed by a tall, gaunt man dressed in a faded sarong. He did not look as much like Pol Pot as the brother I had met briefly in Phnom Penh, but the resemblance was still unmistakable.

His name was Loth Sieri, he said, seating himself beside us, and he was the second oldest of the brothers. Saloth Sar had gone away to Phnom Penh while he was still quite young, and after that they had not seen very much of him. He had gone from school to college in Phnom Penh, and then finally to Paris. He smiled ruefully. "It was the knowledge he got in Paris that made him what he is," he said.

Saloth Sar had visited them a few times after returning to Cambodia, but then he had disappeared and they had never seen him again. It was more than twenty years now since he, Loth Sieri, had set eyes on him. They had been treated no differently from anyone else during the Pol Pot time; they had not had the remotest idea that Pol Pot was their brother Sar, born in their house. They found out only afterward.

Was Saloth Sar born in that very house? I asked. Yes, they said, in the room beside us, right next to the veranda.

When he came back from France, I asked, had he ever talked about his life in Paris? What he'd done, who his friends were, what the city was like?

At that moment, with cows lowing in the gathering darkness, the journey to Paris from that village on the Sen River seemed an extraordinary odyssey. I found myself very curious to know how Loth Sieri and his brothers had imagined Paris, and their own brother in it. But no. The old man shook his head: Saloth Sar had never talked about France after he came back. Maybe he had shown them some pictures — he couldn't recall.

I remembered from David Chandler's biography that Pol Pot was very well read as a young man and knew large tracts of Rimbaud and Verlaine by heart. But I was not surprised, somehow, to discover that he had never allowed his family the privilege of imagining.

Just before getting up, I asked if Loth Sieri remembered his relative the dancer Luk Khun Meak, who had first introduced his family into the royal palace. He nodded, and I asked, "Did you ever see her dance?"

He smiled and shook his head; no, he had never seen any royal dancing, except in pictures.

It was almost dark now; somewhere in the north, near the minefield, there was the sound of gunfire. We got up to go, and the whole family walked down with us. After I had said goodbye and was about to climb onto the scooter, Sros whispered in my ear that it might be a good idea to give the old man some money. I had not thought of it; I took some money out of my pocket and put it in his hands.

He made a gesture of acknowledgment, and as we were about to leave he said a few words to Sros.

"What did he say?" I asked Sros when we were back on the road.

Shouting above the wind, Sros said, "He asked me, 'Do you think there will be peace now?'"

"And what did you tell him?" I said.

"I told him, 'I wish I could say yes.'"

8

On July 10, 1906, one month after their arrival in France, the dancers performed at a reception given by the minister of colonies in the Bois du Boulogne in Paris. "Never has there been a more brilliant Parisian fête," said Le Figaro, "nor one with such novel charm." Invitations were much sought after, and on the night of the performance cars and illuminated carriages invaded the park like an "army of fireflies."

While the performance was in progress, a correspondent spotted the most celebrated Parisian of all in the audience, the bearded, Mosaic figure of "the great Rodin…[going] into ecstasies over the little virgins of Phnom Penh, whose immaterial silhouettes he drew with infinite love."

Rodin, now, at the age of sixty-six, France's acknowledged apostle of the arts, fell immediately captive: in Princess Soumphady's young charges he discovered the infancy of Europe. "These Cambodians have shown us everything that antiquity could have contained," he wrote soon afterward. "It is impossible to think of anyone wearing human nature to such perfection; except them and the Greeks."

Two days after the performance Rodin presented himself at the dancers' Paris lodgings, at the Avenue Malakoff, with a sketchbook under his arm. The dancers were packing their belongings in preparation for their return to Marseille, but Rodin was admitted to the grounds of the mansion and given leave to do what he pleased. He executed several celebrated sketches that day, including a few of King Sisowath.

By the end of the day the artist was so smitten with the dancers that he accompanied them to the station, bought a ticket, and traveled to Marseille on the same train. He had packed neither clothes nor materials, and according to one account, upon arriving in Marseille he found that he was out of paper and had to buy brown paper bags from a grocery store.

Over the next few days, sketching feverishly in the gardens of the villa where the dancers were now lodged, Rodin seemed to lose thirty years. The effort involved in sketching his favorite models, three restless fourteen-year-olds called Sap, Soun, and Yem, appeared to rejuvenate the artist. A French official saw him placing a sheet of white paper on his knee one morning; he "said to the little Sap: 'Put your foot on this,' and then drew the outline of her foot with a pencil, saying 'Tomorrow you'll have your shoes, but now pose a little more for me!' Sap, having tired of atomizer bottles and cardboard cats, had asked her 'papa' for a pair of pumps. Every evening — ardent, happy, but exhausted — Rodin would return to his hotel with his hands full of sketches and collect his thoughts."

Photographs from the time show Rodin seated on a garden bench, sketching under the watchful eyes of the policemen who had been posted at the dancers' villa to ensure their safety. Rodin was oblivious: "The friezes of Angkor were coming to life before my very eyes. I loved these Cambodian girls so much that I didn't know how to express my gratitude for the royal honor they had shown me in dancing and posing for me. I went to the Nouvelles Galeries to buy a basket of toys for them, and these divine children who dance for the gods hardly knew how to repay me for the happiness I had given them. They even talked about taking me with them."

On their last day in France, hours before they boarded the ship that was to take them back to Cambodia, the dancers were taken to the celebrated photographer Baudouin. On the way, passing through a muddy alley, Princess Soumphady happened to step on a pat of cow dung. Horrified, she raised her arms to the heavens and flung herself, wailing, upon the dust, oblivious of her splendid costume. The rest of the troupe immediately followed suit: within moments the alley was full of prostrate Cambodian dancers, dressed in full performance regalia.

"What an emptiness they left for me!" wrote Rodin. "When they left… I thought they had taken away the beauty of the world… I followed them to Marseille; I would have followed them as far as Cairo."

His sentiments were exactly mirrored by King Sisowath. "I am deeply saddened to be leaving France," the king said on the eve of his departure. "In this beautiful country I shall leave behind a piece of my heart."

9

The trip to France evidently cast King Sisowath's mind into the same kind of turmoil, the same tumult, that has provoked generations of displaced students — the Gandhis, the Kenyattas, the Chou en Lais, among thousands of their less illustrious countrymen — to reflect upon the unfamiliar, wintry worlds beyond the doors of their rented lodgings.

On September 12, 1906, shortly after their return to Cambodia, the king and his ministers published their reflections in a short but poignant document. Cast in the guise of a royal proclamation, it was in fact a venture into a kind of travel writing. It began: "The visits that His Majesty made to the great cities of France, his rapid examination of the institutions of that country, the organization of the different services that are to be found there, astonished him and led him to think of France as a paradise." Emulation, they concluded, was "the only means of turning resolutely to the path of progress."

Over the brief space of a couple of thousand words the king and his ministers summed up their views on the lessons that France had to offer Cambodia. Most of these had to do with what later came to be called "development": communications had to be improved, new land cleared for agriculture; peasants had to increase their production, raise more animals, exploit their forests and fisheries more systematically, familiarize themselves with modern machinery, and so on. A generation later, Cambodian political luminaries such as Khieu Samphan, writing their theses in Paris, were to arrive at oddly similar conclusions, although by an entirely different route.

But it was on the subject of the ideal relationship between the state and its people that the king and his ministers were at their most prescient. It was here, they thought, that Europe's most important lessons lay. "None should hesitate to sacrifice his life," they wrote, "when it is a matter of the divinity of the king or of the country. The obligation to serve the country should be accepted without a murmur by the inhabitants of the kingdom; it is glorious to defend one's country. Are Europeans not constrained by the same obligation, without distinction either of rank or of family?"

Alas for poor King Sisowath, he was soon to learn that travel writing was an expensive indulgence for those who fell on his side of the colonial divide. In 1910 the Colonial Ministry in Paris wrote asking the king to reimburse the French government for certain expenses incurred during his trip to France. As it happened, Cambodia's budget had paid for the entire trip, including the dancers' performance at the Bois du Boulogne. In addition, the king, who was ruinously generous by nature, had personally handed out tips and gifts worth several thousands of francs. In return he and his entourage had received a few presents from French officials. Among these were a set of uniforms given by the minister of colonies and some rosebushes that had been presented to the king personally at the Elysée Palace by none other than the president of the republic, Armand Fallières. The French government now wanted to reclaim the price of the uniforms and the rosebushes from the Cambodians.

For once the obsequious Minister Thiounn took the king's side. He wrote back indignantly, refusing to pay for gifts that had been accepted in good faith.

The royal voyage to France found its most celebrated memorial in Rodin's sketches. The sketches were received with acclaim when they went on exhibition in 1907. After seeing them, the German poet Rilke wrote to the master to say, "For me, these sketches were among the most profound of revelations."

The revelation Rilke had in mind was of "the mystery of Cambodian dance." But it was probably the sculptor rather than the poet who sensed the real revelation of the encounter: the power of Cambodia's involvement in the culture and politics of modernism, in all its promise and horror.

10

As for King Sisowath, the most significant thing he ever did was to authorize the founding of a high school where Cambodians could be educated on the French pattern. Known initially as the Collège du Protectorat, the school was renamed the Lycée Sisowath some years after the king's death.

The Lycée Sisowath was to become the crucible for Cambodia's remaking. A large number of the students who were radicalized in Paris in the fifties were graduates of the lycée. Pol Pot himself was never a student there, but he was closely linked with it, and several of his nearest associates were Sisowath alumni, including his first wife, Khieu Ponnary, and his brother-in-law and longtime deputy, Ieng Sary.

Among the most prominent members of that group was Khieu Samphan, one-time president of Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea and now the best known of the Khmer Rouge's spokesmen. Through the 1960s and early 1970s, Khieu Samphan was one of the preeminent political figures in Cambodia. He was renowned throughout the country as an incorruptible idealist: stories about his refusal to take bribes, even when begged by his impoverished mother, have passed into popular mythology. He was also an important economic thinker and theorist; his doctoral thesis on Cambodia's economy, written at the Sorbonne in the 1950s, is still highly regarded. He vanished in 1967, and through the next eight years he lived in the jungle, through the long years of the Khmer Rouge's grim struggle, first against Prince Sihanouk, then against the rightist regime of General Lon Nol, when American planes subjected the countryside to saturation bombing.

Khieu Samphan surfaced again after the 1975 revolution, as president of Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea. When the regime was driven out of power by the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, he fled with the rest of the ruling group to a stronghold on the Thai border. As the Khmer Rouge's chief public spokesman and emissary, he played a prominent part in the UN-sponsored peace negotiations. Later, in the months before the elections, it was he who was the Khmer Rouge's mouthpiece as it reneged on the peace agreements while launching ever more vituperative attacks on the UN. The Khmer Rouge's maneuvers did not come as a surprise to anyone who had ever dealt with its leadership; the surprise lay rather in the extent to which UNTAC was willing to go in appeasing them. Effectively, the Khmer Rouge succeeded in taking advantage of the UN's presence to augment its own military position while sabotaging the peace process.

In 1991 and 1992, when Khieu Samphan was traveling around the world making headlines, there was perhaps only a single soul in Phnom Penh who followed his doings with an interest that was not wholly political: his forty-nine-year-old younger brother, Khieu Seng Kim, who lives very close to the school of classical dance.

The school's ability to surprise being what it is, I took it in my stride when I met Khieu Seng Kim one morning, standing by the entrance to the compound. A tall man with a cast in one eye and untidy grizzled hair, he was immediately friendly, eager both to talk about his family and to speak French. Within minutes of our meeting we were sitting in his small apartment, on opposite sides of a desk, surrounded by neat piles of French textbooks and dogeared copies of Paris-Match.

The brick wall behind Khieu Seng Kim was papered over with pictures of relatives and dead ancestors. The largest was a glossy magazine picture of his brother Khieu Samphan, taken soon after the signing of the peace accords, in 1991. The photograph shows the assembled leaders of all the major Cambodian factions: Prince Sihanouk; Son Sann, of the centrist Khmer People's National Liberation Front; Hun Sen, of the "State of Cambodia"; and of course Khieu Samphan himself, representing the Khmer Rouge. In the picture everybody exudes a sense of relief, bonhomie, and optimism; everyone is smiling, but no one more than Khieu Samphan.

Khieu Seng Kim was a child in 1950, when his brother, recently graduated from the Lycée Sisowath, left for Paris on a scholarship. By the time he returned with his doctorate from the Sorbonne, eight years later, Khieu Seng Kim was fourteen, and the memory of going to Pochentong airport to receive his older brother stayed fresh in his mind. "We were very poor then," he said, "and we couldn't afford to greet him with garlands and a crown of flowers, like well-off people do. We just embraced and hugged and all of us had tears flowing down our cheeks."

In those days, in Cambodia, a doctorate from France was a guarantee of a high-level job in the government, a sure means of ensuring entry into the country's privileged classes. Khieu Samphan's mother wanted nothing less for herself and her family. She had struggled against poverty most of her life; her husband, a magistrate, had died early, leaving her with five children to bring up on her own. But when her son refused to accept any of the lucrative offers that came his way despite her entreaties, once again she had to start selling vegetables to keep the family going. Khieu Seng Kim remembers seeing his adored brother, the brilliant economist with his degree from the Sorbonne, sitting beside his mother, helping her with her roadside stall.

In the meanwhile, Khieu Samphan taught in a school, founded an influential left-wing journal, and gradually rose to political prominence. He even served in Sihanouk's cabinet for a while, and with his success the family's situation eased a little.

And then came the day in 1967 when he melted into the jungle.

Khieu Seng Kim remembers the day well: it was Monday, April 24, 1967. His mother served dinner at seven-thirty, and the two of them sat at the dining table and waited for Khieu Samphan to arrive; he always came home at about that time. They stayed there till eleven, without eating, listening to every footstep and every sound; then his mother broke down and began to cry. She cried all night, "like a child who has lost its mother."

At first they thought that Khieu Samphan had been arrested. They had good reason to, for Prince Sihanouk had made a speech two days before, denouncing Khieu Samphan and two close friends of his, the brothers Hu Nim and Hou Yuon. But no arrest was announced, and nor was there any other news the next day.

Khieu Seng Kim became a man possessed. He could not believe that the brother he worshipped would abandon his family; at that time he was their only means of support. He traveled all over the country, visiting friends and relatives, asking if they had any news of his brother. Nobody could tell him anything. It was only much later that he learned that Khieu Samphan had been smuggled out of the city in a farmer's cart the evening he failed to show up for dinner.

He never saw him again.

Eight years later, in 1975, when the first Khmer Rouge cadres marched into Phnom Penh, Khieu Seng Kim went rushing out into the streets and threw himself upon them, crying, "My brother is Khieu Samphan, my brother is your leader." They looked at him as though he were insane. "The revolution doesn't recognize families," they said, brushing him off. He was driven out of the city with his wife and children and made to march to a work site just like everybody else.

Like most other evacuees, Khieu Seng Kim drifted back toward Phnom Penh in 1979, after the Pol Pot regime had been overthrown by the Vietnamese invasion. He began working in a factory, but within a few months it came to be known that he knew French and had worked as a journalist before the revolution. The new government contacted him and invited him to take up a job as a journalist. He refused; he didn't want to be compromised or associate himself with the government in any way. Instead, he worked with the Department of Archaeology for a while as a restorer and then took a teaching job at the School of Fine Arts.

"For that they're still suspicious of me," he said with a wry smile. "Even now. That's why I live in a place like this, while everyone in the country is getting rich."

He smiled and lit a cigarette; he seemed obscurely pleased at the thought of being excluded and pushed onto the edges of the wilderness that had claimed his brother decades ago. It never seemed to have occurred to him to reflect that there was probably no other country on earth where the brother of a man who had headed a genocidal regime would actually be invited to accept a job by the government that followed.

I liked Khieu Seng Kim; I liked his quirky younger-brotherishness. For his sake I wished his mother were still alive — that indomitable old woman who had spread out her mat and started selling vegetables on the street when she realized that her eldest son would have no qualms about sacrificing his entire family on the altar of his idealism. She would have reminded Khieu Seng Kim of a few home truths.

11

According to his brother, Khieu Samphan talked very little about his student days upon his return from France. He did, however, tell one story that imprinted itself vividly on the fourteen-year-old boy's mind. It had to do with an old friend, Hou Yuon. Khieu Seng Kim remembers Hou Yuon well; he was always in and out of the house, a part of the family.

Hou Yuon and his brother Hu Nim played pivotal roles in the Communist movement in Cambodia: along with Khieu Samphan, they were the most popular figures on the left through the sixties and early seventies. Then as now, Pol Pot preferred to be a faceless puppeteer, pulling strings behind a screen of organizational anonymity.

The two brothers were initiated into radical politics at about the same time as Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot; they attended the same study groups in Paris; they did party work together in Phnom Penh in the sixties, and all through the desperate years of the early seventies they fought together, shoulder by shoulder, in conditions of the most extreme hardship, with thousands of tons of bombs crashing down around them. So closely linked were the fortunes of Khieu Samphan and the two brothers that they became a collective legend, known together as the Three Ghosts.

Khieu Samphan's acquaintance with Hou Yuon dated back to their schooldays at the Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh. Their friendship was sealed in Paris in the fifties and was the subject of the story Khieu Samphan told his brother on his return.

Once, at a Cambodian gathering in Paris, Hou Yuon made a speech in which he criticized the corruption and venality of Prince Sihanouk's regime. He was overheard by an official, and soon afterward his government scholarship was suspended for a year. Since Khieu Samphan was known to be a particular friend of his, his scholarship was suspended too.

To support themselves, the two men began to sell bread. They would study during the day, and at night they would walk around the city hawking long loaves of French bread. With the money they earned, they paid for their upkeep and bought books; the loaves they couldn't sell they ate. It was a hard way to earn money, Khieu Samphan told his brother, but at the same time it was also oddly exhilarating. Walking down those lamp-lit streets late at night, talking to each other, it was as though he and Hou Yuon somehow managed to leave behind the nighttime of the spirit that had befallen them in Paris. They would walk all night long, with the fragrant, crusty loaves over their shoulders, looking into the windows of cafés and restaurants, talking about their lives and about the future…

Hou Yuon was one of the first to die when the revolution began to devour itself: his moderate views were sharply at odds with the ultraradical, collectivist ideology of the ruling group. In August 1975, a few months after the Khmer Rouge took power, he addressed a crowd and vehemently criticized the policy of evacuating the cities. He is said to have been assassinated as he left the meeting, on the orders of the party's leadership. His brother Hu Nim served for a while as minister of information. Then, on April 10, 1977, he and his wife were taken into Interrogation Center S-21—the torture chambers at Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh. He was executed several months later, after confessing to being everything from a CIA agent to a Vietnamese spy.

Khieu Samphan was then head of state. He is believed to have played an important role in planning the mass purges of that period.

For Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot, the deaths of Hou Yuon, Hu Nim, and the thousands of others who were executed in torture chambers and execution grounds were not a contradiction but rather a proof of their own idealism and ideological purity. Terror was essential to their exercise of power. It was an integral part not merely of their coercive machinery but of the moral order on which they built their regime, a part whose best description still lies in the line that Brückner, most prescient of playwrights, gave to Robespierre (a particular hero of Pol Pot's): "Virtue is terror, and terror virtue" — words that might well serve as an epitaph for the twentieth century.

12

Those who were there then say there was a moment of epiphany in Phnom Penh in 1981. It occurred at a quiet, relatively obscure event: a festival at which classical Cambodian music and dance were performed for the first time since the revolution.

Dancers and musicians from all over the country traveled to Phnom Penh for the festival. Proeung Chhieng, one of the best-known dancers and choreographers in the country, was among those who made the journey; he came to Phnom Penh from Kompong Thom, where he had helped assemble a small troupe of dancers after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea. He himself had trained at the palace since his childhood, specializing in the role of Hanuman, the monkey god of the Ramayana epic, a part that is one of the glories of Khmer dance. This training proved instrumental in Proeung Chhieng's survival: his expertise in clowning and mime helped him persuade the interrogators at his labor camp that he was an illiterate lunatic.

At the festival he met many fellow students and teachers for the first time after the revolution: "We cried and laughed while we looked around to see who were the others who had survived. We would shout with joy: 'You are still alive!' and then we would cry thinking of someone who had died."

The performers were dismayed when they began preparing for the performance: large quantities of musical instruments, costumes, and masks had been destroyed over the past few years. They had to improvise new costumes to perform in; instead of rich silks and brocades, they used thin calico, produced by a government textile factory. The theater they were to perform in, the Bassac, was in relatively good shape, but there was a crisis of electricity at the time, and the lighting was dim and unreliable.

But people flocked to the theater the day the festival began. Onesta Carpene, a Catholic relief worker from Italy, was one of the handful of foreigners then living in Phnom Penh. She was astonished at the response. The city was in a shambles: there was debris everywhere, spilling out of the houses onto the pavements, the streets were jammed with pillaged cars, there was no money and very little food. "I could not believe that in a situation like that people would be thinking of music and dance," she said. But still they came pouring in, and the theater was filled far beyond its capacity. It was very hot inside.

Eva Mysliwiec, who had arrived recently to set up a Quaker relief mission, was one of the one of the few foreigners present at that first performance. When the musicians came onstage, she heard sobs all around her. Then, when the dancers appeared, in their shabby, hastily made costumes, suddenly everyone was crying, old people, young people, soldiers, children—"You could have sailed out of there in a boat."

The people who were sitting next to her said, "We thought everything was lost, that we would never hear our music again, never see our dance." They could not stop crying; people wept through the entire performance.

It was a kind of rebirth: a moment when the grief of survival became indistinguishable from the joy of living.