Epiphany on the SS Jamaïque

Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic, but Palestinians were not the only people experiencing it. Certainly the Jews have been visited by catastrophes, with pogroms, Inquisitions etc. Native Americans have been decimated, as have been, Armenians, the original people of Australia, Ugandans, Sudanese, Hindus. One of the worst massacres in the last century was that of Cambodians, at the instigation of Pol Pot who aimed to set up a communist agrarian paradise in their lands. This tale, based on real events in Pol Pot’s life suggests how the seed might have been planted.

Prek Sbauv

Killing Fields

He is such an eccentric, people would say, even if it’s not raining, he’d be carrying his umbrella. Norodom had an umbrella fixation. He loved rain, which gave him a valid reason for going out with his favourite implement, but he carried the umbrella like people wore hats, it was part of his costume. He was a showman and the world was his stage. That was the least negative thought he harboured about the obnoxious prince, his nemesis when he was growing up. All his life he would be haunted by Sihanouk.

He remembered the first time they met. They were both at the palace in Phnom Penh, where he had come on a visit to his mother’s cousin, Aunt Me-Ak, a consort of the aged King Sisowath Monivong. Sihanouk was wearing a shining blue silk shirt and gaberdine trousers, sporting a yellow bow-tie. He was only two years older, but being from the royal family he was self-assured, endowed and patronising everybody came naturally to him. Sâr shuddered as this half-baked fop approached him with false bonhomie, and greeted him in impeccable French, “Mon cher petit cousin Français.” Every word was tainted. They were not cousins, there were no blood links between them. He hated it when people made a show of speaking French, the language of the oppressor, the coloniser. However, what he disliked above all else was the epithet Français. And he knew why. He was born almost white, something many locals thought of as heaven-sent, but which also attracted obloquy, with the number of French officials, administrateurs and fonctionnaires all over the place. They were the police, the doctors and lawyers, the négociants. When the prince called him French, he was perpetuating the insidious gossip that Sâr’s mother had received some white man in her bed, and then giving birth to a little bastard. Subsequently, with the same sneer on his lips, Sâr would be his petit cousin Francais.

The whole world knew that Sok Nem was a pious woman, a devoted Buddhist, who was as unlikely to stray from the path of the dutiful wife as Norodom self-styled bourreau de coeur, was to resist trying to seduce any comely girl who had caught his fancy. In any case, in their house on the bank of the River Sen, teeming with farm-workers, servants, poor relatives and visitors, it would have been quite impossible for anybody to take anybody else to bed without attracting universal attention. Sok Nem never left the house except when she went to the temple in the company of at least four or five female companions. Logistically it was impossible for her to cheat on Saloth Prem. Whoever had, in all innocence, suggested the boy be called Saloth Sâr because of his whiteness_ Sâr being the khmer word for white_ has a lot to answer for.

It was because he hated the implication, known by everybody to be outlandish and unfounded, but still maliciously peddled, that he changed his name as soon as he was able to, although he claimed later that he wanted to protect the Saloth family by hiding their association with a dangerous revolutionary. To Pol Pot. He became prime minister of the country under that name, and it is also the name, second to Adolf Hitler’s that is universally associated with the pogroms of the Killing Fields, when 1.3 million people were massacred on his orders, for being enemies of the people.

His father Saloth Prem certainly never believed that his wife, who he loved dearly and respected above everybody else would ever look at another man, let alone a French one and take him to her bed, but a weak and unimaginative man, knowing what people thought, or pretended to think, he felt uneasy with the new baby, and never knew how to treat his new white son. He much preferred the older Suong who was dark as him.

Sok Nem was from a more distinguished family than her husband, and although she lived modestly, she was quite proud of her first cousin Me-Ak. She was very distinguished and was a member of the Royal Ballet, perhaps its most famous. King Sisowath Monivong saw her dancing one night, fell in love with her, and took her as his consort, to live in his palace in Phnom Penh, where she bore him a son. She was thus granted immense power. On a visit to her cousin Sok Nem in Prek Sbauv, whom she loved dearly, she took a shine to the young Sâr, possibly because he was so fair, and begged Sok Nem to let him come to live in the palace in Phnom Penh, where she had her own quarters.

Thus it was that one morning a few weeks later, Saloth Prem having given his consent, Aunt Me-Ak’s chauffeur arrived in her cherry-coloured Ford Model A, after an all-night drive to fetch him. Sok Nem fed him a copious breakfast, and the boy left with him before noon. They arrived in the capital shortly before sunset.

The arrangement was that he would board with her, and she would be responsible for his upkeep and education, according to a well-established practice in the country. It was where he was to meet his nemesis Norodom for the first time.

The boy took such a dislike for the prince that after his first meeting with him, he developed a condition which was akin to epilepsy, but manifested itself as tantrums fits. He felt his whole body harden, and began to tremble, like he had seen people with malaria. He rushed out into the yard and in a fit of uncontrollable rage he started kicking anything his feet could reach, trees, rubbish on the ground, and began pummelling walls and anything within his reach with his fists until they bled, all the time looking over his shoulders to check that nobody was witnessing his discomfiture. He always made sure that these tantrums stayed private. Feeling the anger rising, he would rush out into the woods away from gazing eyes and yield to it. It was important to him to give the appearance of a calm and well-behaved child, when in the throes of his fit. Making sure he was unobserved, he would swear and scream and felt that if anybody were to cross him just then, he would batter him to death.

On another occasion, his father had just bought him a strong pair of boots. It was strong but looked coarse. When a sister made a disparaging remark about how clumsy he looked in them, he pushed her away violently, rushed outside into the yard where the rooster was on top of a hen. He never understood why, but he hated him doing that. He took a few steps back, and rushing towards the two birds, he saw himself as a centre-forward taking a penalty and kicked as hard as he could. The proud Chanticleer rose, as if waiting for someone to head it in the goalpost, performing his last ever flight and fell to the ground dead. Nobody had seen him, and the dead rooster remained a mystery to the family. He never knew what happened to the hen.

Me-Ak was fun-loving and easygoing guardian, and was aware that she had no authority over young Sâr, who was struggling at school. The boy was shocked when she suggested that he moved in with his older brother who would control him better. He quite liked living with Aunt Me-Ak, but he had no say in this matter, and moved in with Suong.

Me-Ak said he would be welcome to spend week-ends at the palace, and continued to fuss over him and spoil him. He had turned fifteen but still looked like a twelve year old. He lived for when the time came when Me-Ak’s Ford would pick him up after school at the end of the week to take him to the palace.

Aunt and cousin got on famously, playing dominoes and chequers. One day, out of the boue, she asked him how he would like to have sex.

‘B-b-but you’re like my mother,’ he blurted out. She slapped him playfully on the cheeks.

‘Not with me, ninny, the very idea,’ she said shaking her head. She then explained that King Sisowath was besotted with young women, but was too old to satisfy them, therefore, as long as he knew that a woman was available to him, he turned a blind eye to her extra-curricular activities, as long as there was a pretence of hiding what she did to the rest of the palace.

‘That insufferable Norodom regularly avails himself of willing young hussies, and his grandfather pretends he does not know.’ she said. It was this which decided your Sâr.

Me-Ak arranged for seventeen-year old Neneh as his déniaiseuse, the one who would open the door for him. One Sunday afternoon, as arranged by Me-Ak, Neneh came to pick him up and led him to her private chamber. He found her childish and disliked her giggles. He sat on her bed, lost in thought, and she sat close to him, rubbing her body against his. He began trembling, with anticipation no doubt, but also with apprehension. She suddenly grabbed his hand and brought it to her breasts, saying, Play. This was what got him going. One thing leading to another, they soon found themselves completely naked. He had never seen anything half as beautiful his whole life. She started kissing him, pressing her tongue into his mouth, and he thought there was no sensation in the world to match this. When she made a grab for his dick, she let go immediately.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, and she began to laugh.

‘You’re not gonna penetrate me with this little worm smaller than my thumb, are you?’ she added. It’s the only one I have, he thought without saying anything.

‘Peut-être je peux te tailler une pipe,’ she said in French. Perhaps I should suck you. The orgasm felt delightful, but the memory of his first fuck would be a lasting pain for him. He would never become a slave to sex as Khieu Samphan or Ieng Sary would claim to be.

All his life he would remember the superior smile of Neneh, and her disparaging words, “you’re not gonna penetrate me with this little worm smaller than my thumb, are you?”, would ring in his ears at the most inappropriate moment, for example when Mao was telling him what a great leader he would turn out to be. Besides he knew that Sihanouk had a considerably bigger one, as he loved opening his fly and watering the landscape whenever there were other boys around. For the sole purpose of exhibiting about his endowment.

Sadly for Sâr, he continued to lag behind, and failed his Certificat d’Etudes Primaires Complémentaires two years running. After the first failure he took an axe to wild guava tree and inflicted a few dozen cuts to it before giving up, exhausted. He marvelled at how the tree recovered and was bearing juicy and attractive guavas within six months. It was as if the cuts had been beneficial to it. The second time he thought that he would go back to it and this time finish it off, but he ended up digging a circular trench half a metre deep around the goyavier. A ritual he never understood the sense of.

His seven siblings made a lot of fun of him, but his anger had been spent digging. He would never forget that incident, and later it would serve as a strong metaphor. Inflicting pain is a prelude to rehabilitation. It will justify his purges. What’s one million people suffering, if billions who will come afterwards earn a better life as a result?

it was only in 1943, aged eighteen that he finally received the certificat, and was finally accepted into the Lycée Sisowath. He was still living with brother Suong and his wife, and continued to visit Aunt Me-Ak and enjoy trysts with young consorts. Again he failed his brevet, and was ineligible to take the baccalauréat which would have enabled him to realise his ambition of going to university, something both he and his parents wanted. It confirmed the low opinion of himself that he had formed since childhood, and he started stammering and blinking. He hated these obvious signs of low self-esteem, and discovered that he could hide them by making himself artificially angry. Anger, he had discovered, was a vaccine against any ailment.

He managed to secure a resit and earned the brevet at the ripe old age of 24, and Me-Ak pulled some strings and arranged for one of the five available government scholarships to be awarded to him. And he sailed to Marseille on the SS Jamaïque, from where he took the train to Paris to attend a modest engineering school.

He found the metropolitan French were much more welcoming than he had expected; at home the French expatriates were overbearing, arrogant and behaved generally as if thy owned the place, but he struggled with the curriculum. Instead of trying to catch up, he spent all his time attending political debates, mixing with marxist students and became fascinated by communism. He joined the French C.P. and realised that he had finally found his niche. He read Marx and Mao, took part in lively discussions, and discovered that he had a flair for political theory, providing him with the seed of what turned out to be his political philosophy.

Inevitably he failed his engineering exams, and his bursary was stopped. He had no choice but to return to Cambodia. On the SS Jamaïque!

He was sea-sick most of the time. On top of that he became more depressed than he had ever been in his life. He had difficulty sleeping, and would often spend hours alone on the deck, watching the dark waves, finding their noise soothing. One night, he had an uncontrollable fit of weeping, and as there was nobody around, he did not rein in his tears and his sobs, and began screaming like a man possessed. I’ll never amount to anything in this world, I am a nobody. I’ve been lying to myself all these years that one day I will show the world who I really am. Now I know, I am a nobody with nothing to show anybody. Moins que rien. Just throw yourself overboard, it will be over in under five minutes. Nobody will miss you. For a few minutes he was convinced that in a matter of minutes he would take the literal plunge and it would all be over. The railing reached his chest, and only a slight effort would be enough to pull himself up to his navel. Then one, two, three and …

His Little Voice, a loyal companion all his life began suddenly to whisper a message. From God no less. You’re wrong my boy, you’re rueing your academic failure? Don’t. The divine powers do not want you to become an erudite, an engineer because they have a special role for you. You were made for political power. You have the gifts, all you need is the determination. You will need to be ruthless, pitiless even. You must have the guts to take harsh decisions. You must have clear-cut aims, think big, and not be squeamish about the lives of useless people who refuse to see reason. Ultimately you need to look after the majority. A few must be sacrificed if the many are to thrive. Be afraid of nobody. Let all be afraid of you. An aura of fear will work wonders. Act in such a way that the sight of you make the enemies of the state shit their pants, when the mention of your name gives them nightmares.

And he began laughing aloud. Everybody was sound asleep, and the waves crashing seemed to be applauding him, urging him on.