Instead of slamming the desk or roaring with anger, the more likely response to such insolence, the teacher quietly closed the book he had been reading, looked up slowly, and smiled. He nodded his head a few times, as if to encourage the students to continue their inquiry and critique. The whole class, abandoning Rimbaud’s poetic reflection on youth and war, suddenly burst into debate. They pondered the pervasive use of French, particularly in academic and official settings, among the Cambodian intelligentsia in general—even in an avant-garde institution like Chomroeun Vichea—and what that said of the Khmer national identity.
One student asserted that for him it was a matter of pride to speak French, to prove that Cambodians are not the buffoons the colonialists had thought them to be, that the Khmer race, like any human race, was capable of varied linguistic expressions, even the languages of the so-called civilized. No, it was revenge, argued an aspiring writer, a character more irreverent, more dangerously flippant, than his friend Prama. “Because knowing a language well gives you the tools to expose a system of thinking from within!” Then, half jokingly, the would-be novelist explained that while he could never utter expletives in his own “lovely native tongue,” he found it was easy to do so in French. Vulgarity, he rationalized, was not part of Cambodians’ innate speech, and thus, the only undeniable influence of the French and their erstwhile colonial administration on him and those they subjugated was obscenity, which, in his well-read opinion, was the very essence of colonial practice. “Colonialism, both concept and application, is obscene at best and, ironically, barbaric at worst because it reveals the ignorance of those blind to their own savagery!” The whole class stood up and clapped, rowdy as a crowd watching a street performance.
The teacher said nothing, and it was difficult for the students, even the more astute and perceptive among them, to tell what he thought of their circuitous detour from the subject of French literature. Once the class had settled down again, the instructor, who stood before them with a face as composed and benign as a bodhisattva, returned to Rimbaud’s collection and the last lines of “Guerre,” the prose poem about the potent dream of war:
Je songe à une Guerre de droit ou de force, de logique bien imprévue.>
C’est aussi simple qu’une phrase musicale.
For the first time that morning, Tun felt he understood Rimbaud’s poetry, or at least the metaphor. Certainly the allusion to music was something he could grasp. But perhaps what drew him was the way the poem was read, the melody, the tenderness and poignancy, the irony with which the teacher recited the final line.
Teera’s father failed to return that night after her birthday, or the next night, or the one after. But true to her words, her mother tried to prepare her for what was to come. Weapons of war, Channara explained when distant howls and roars intermittently broke the almost funereal silence around them. She told Suteera about rockets and bombs and grenades, painting them with her terrible, beautiful words, illustrating them with her graceful hands, her dancelike gestures. Rockets, she said, looked like banana blossoms. They whistled as they flew through the air. Grenades hissed like snakes before exploding. If one rolls through our gate, you must run from it as fast as you can, Suteera. You must not touch it, go near it, or mistake it for a fruit—a custard apple gone gray. And bombs? Suteera wanted to know. Bombs were unpredictable, her mother explained. You’d never know when one would drop from the sky, but if it did, you’d feel it—its awful power. Bombs came in all shapes and sizes, gifts from the Americans, who rained them down on towns and villages, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands. If one lands on our estate, it’d be the end of us.
In this way the days passed into weeks, the weeks into months, with the screams of war growing louder, at times deafening, until its monstrous presence replaced her father’s ghostly absence. One sees the agony of a people in that woman’s face, her mother wrote in a newspaper about an encounter she’d had with a peasant woman who’d lost half of her face during a rocket attack, and who, with her children, had fled their war-ravaged village to the city, as had the countless refugees living on the streets. Bullets and rockets rain down on us like a new kind of monsoon. Her mother’s words ricocheted through her grandfather’s circles, angering him and others supporting the American intervention.
Only many years later, as an adult, a student of history, did Teera come to understand what her mother had tried to explain about the war—that their small country was caught in the much larger political mayhem of the American conflict in Vietnam, that in 1969 President Nixon authorized a secret bombing campaign on Cambodia in order to destroy Vietnamese Communist forces hiding there, and that by 1973, when Congress finally knew and put a stop to it, the indiscriminate carpet bombing had left hundreds of thousands of Cambodians dead and millions displaced. The United States bombed Indochina with three times the tonnage of bombs used in all of World War II; Cambodia alone was hit with three times more tonnage than Japan.
Knowing this, it’s easy for Teera to see now why Cambodians, educated and uneducated alike, were so ready to believe the Khmer Rouge when a mere two years later, on that fateful April morning in 1975, upon seizing the capital, the guerrillas claimed the American warplanes would return to drop more bombs, this time on Phnom Penh itself.
In hindsight, Teera believes that people like her mother and grandfather, those with a deeper understanding of international politics, may have known it was a straight-out lie. Still, even if they’d known, by that time they had no choice but to leave the capital as ordered, joining the entire urban population, now some two million displaced peasants in addition to the seven hundred thousand original city dwellers—a gargantuan mass for so small a city—all forced at gunpoint in the mass evacuation to the countryside.
But for the young Suteera, the chaos began weeks before the Khmer Rouge victory. One night in March, a year after her father had disappeared, just as she grew certain she would never see him again, he suddenly returned, cloaked in the din and chaos of mortar explosions rattling the city. “I’ve come back to celebrate your birthday,” he told her happily, as if he’d only been gone a few days, as if a whole year hadn’t passed.
She had the urge to hurt him, to tell him she wasn’t a child—his child—anymore. She wanted desperately to wound him so he couldn’t escape again. But she had the distinct feeling that words, whatever she said, wouldn’t make a difference. She couldn’t have been more right.
Her father stayed with them for several more days and, on the night of her ninth birthday, vanished again. This time she had been prepared. She wouldn’t allow herself to be tricked into accepting something she didn’t want. She’d refused a party, a celebration of any sort. In any case, it wouldn’t have been possible to celebrate with the war raging all around them, with the Khmer Rouge closing in on the city. Still, she would not allow him to sing to her, as a gift or otherwise. If she couldn’t make him stay, then she would not be serenaded into accepting his departure.