Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

“I have been reading a new book about the seventies, by a man who I greatly respect. A filmmaker. Perhaps you know him?”

The name Rithy Panh, however, meant nothing to Robert.

“No matter. He wrote it in French. He made a film about the S-21 camp. He is interviewing the commandant, Duch — a mass murderer — and he makes a remarkable observation.” The doctor sat back in his chair and looked over at his daughter, waiting for her to say something. He had drilled these things into her since she was little but he seemed to want to know if she understood it after all. “He says that Duch hated Vincent van Gogh but had a noble love for Leonardo da Vinci, and in particular the Mona Lisa. Why does Duch the fanatic Communist and killer love the Mona Lisa ? Because, Duch says, she looks like a Khmer woman. There’s something Cambodian in her portrait. An heiress of the kingdom of Angkar perhaps? Or is it because the works of the Renaissance are so mathematical? Duch, you see, was a math teacher before he became one of the world’s most famous torturers. It’s so strange to me that someone like that would have an opinion about the Mona Lisa. He then says that Vann Nath, the man who painted all the images in the museum today, a man who survived the prison — one of only seven people to come out alive — was not a great painter. I think that made me angrier than anything. Vann Nath owns a restaurant these days — we should go over one day and eat there. He is a gentleman.”

“Daddy—” Sophal began.

“What is it?”

“Don’t you think Simon might be a bit overwhelmed by all this?”

“He lives here, doesn’t he? Don’t you, Simon?”

“Yes, sir.”

The “sir” was a little absurd, and the doctor laughed.

“You don’t have to call me sir, Simon. Are you overwhelmed?”

“Not at all.”

“See, he’s not overwhelmed. I can talk about my own country, can’t I? I want to tell you about this book. It’s a remarkable book. He talks about the nation. He says the nation is mysterious to him — as it is to me. What can you say about a nation that killed a quarter of its own population in three years? Such a nation, he says, is enigmatic, impenetrable. It’s a sick nation, maybe even an insane one. I quote word for word. But the world, he says, remains innocent. That’s the strange thing. The crimes of the regime were still human all the same. Those crimes were not a historical oddity, a geographical eccentricity. Not at all. The twentieth century, he says, reached its fulfilment in Cambodia in the Year Zero. The crimes in Cambodia can even be taken to represent the whole twentieth century. They were committed by the most educated people in the country, people who’d studied in Paris. The scholarship boys. The lucky ones. People who knew they were right and educated and well traveled. It was in the Enlightenment that those crimes took place. That’s what is so hard to understand.”

The doctor began to light his cigar. He smoked too much, that was his indulgence in late middle age, and a customary one at that. It made him feel more French, more relaxed.

“I think it was here that all the tendencies of your culture, Simon, reached their maximum point. Do you see what I mean? It all came from you. Had those boys not gone to the Sorbonne, if they had stayed in Buddhist schools, we would have had the usual Southeast Asian corrupt monarchy with a few minor crimes here and there, but nothing more. There would have been no exterminations, no total control. We would have stayed sane. At the prison here they used to conduct experiments, draining all the blood from women to see what would happen. They had already marked “to be destroyed” in the margins of their files. But it was not just us; it was a very European experiment. You destroy people in order to make ideas live. It’s a uniquely Western kind of behavior. Pol Pot was a good student, remember, and a very good carpenter. A gentle boy. He lived for ideas, which is why you had women being drained of all their blood in a converted school. We may have been insane then, but the insanity was not all ours. It was a way of looking at history that completely denied history. There are those who say we’ve always done that anyway — but not with an end in mind. We never wanted to make a perfect society. We are fatalists. We don’t believe in future perfection.”

When you thought about it, the domination of the nation by Western ideas and moods and movements and moral ideologies was a devastating spectacle. The doctor, however, was not recriminating. It was a salient thing about the Khmers, the lack of bitterness they had about it.

“First, you drop half a million tons of bombs on us, then you give us a deadly ideology like Communism which exterminates a quarter of the population, then you send your missionaries here to lecture us about our sexual behavior. I saw on CNN — it was Mira Sorvino, some actress I am sure you know, weeping outside a peasant’s house and screaming at them not to sell their children into indentured servitude. It was all for the camera. The peasants had no idea what she was talking about. But white people are remarkable people — they love charging around on crusade saving everyone. The carpet bombing and the missionaries and the NGOs — all unconsciously connected. You know all these anti-trafficking types. Most of them are evangelicals, missionaries. They seem wonderfully unable to find any trafficked people, but when they do get someone they force them into twenty hours of Bible study a week. No one ever mentions that. We’re like Africa in the nineteenth century to the men from Texas. We’re the place they do their conversions and fund-raising. They themselves live very well here, of course. Tax-free. I’m not saying they aren’t nice people who want to do good. But Duch was a nice boy who wanted to do good. They all think they are right and want to do good. It’s irrelevant. You’ve turned us into your experiment, that’s what I say. We’re just Cambodians after all. Too poor and weak to say no. We always need something from you. It’s only my daughter’s generation that is starting to say fuck off. I see a change in them — a stirring. I am very relieved to see it. They don’t seem to want to be your victims and experiment anymore. Am I talking rubbish, my dear Simon? Forgive me, it’s the wine. My wife says that not only do I smoke too much, but I drink too much as well.”

“It’s perfectly all right,” Robert said.

He was enjoying it immensely.

“Well,” Sar said, blowing out a complete smoke ring, “time will tell. If I am talking rubbish, time will tell. And I never talk to anyone anyway. The white people would be horrified if they heard. But we came to help — we’re sincere. You know how people think.”

The doctor laughed and flicked his ash. They began to eat chocolates and brandy and the stars became noticeably clearer. The talk became gentler and more personal. Robert felt more at home, and for a moment he thought that he could also belong to this family one day. It was far from being an impossible idea.

Davuth came down to the river at about noon and began his search for the man called Thy. He was not difficult to find. “He’s always up in the bar getting drunk,” the other boatmen told him.

There indeed Davuth found him, sitting alone and drinking shots of Sang Som diluted with dirty ice. He collared him in a friendly way and they got talking. The rains had held off that day and the whole room, the whole disheveled river hamlet, was filled with burning, corrosive light. Davuth was in his one good suit, neat and combed and shaved, and he had the look of a mildly respectable contractor on his way to the city. He had been up since dawn and he felt sharp and prepared. He had left his car with a man he knew and walked unnoticed into the jetty area. It was a new adventure, but it was it was more than a mere adventure. It was the beginning of a new life.