Figurehead (31 page)

A group of Thai military officers arrived, chattering like children. They crammed into the hut, forcing Chea and Kiry against the wall. They filed past and peered at Pol Pot. The last officer in the queue took a camera from his bag and began taking snapshots of Pol Pot’s corpse. He paused, stood in the middle of the hut and put a fresh roll of film into the camera. He crouched down and took a rapid series of photographs of Pol Pot’s face. The camera’s flash lit up the dim space and cast silhouettes across the concrete walls.

Kiry saw that Nuon Chea was about to erupt. He took his elbow and led him into the sun. They walked to the river, sat on a rock and watched the brown water flowing slowly past and around the bend, where they could hear women thrashing clothes.

‘What now? What now but fishing?’ Chea said.

They stayed sitting on the rock by the river, silent. Soon after midday, Kiry’s granddaughter Kunthea came looking for him. But before she got close Kiry called out, ‘Not now. Go back.’ She ran away, crying.

‘You spoke harshly to the child,’ Chea said.

‘Yes,’ Kiry said.

Soon after, Chea’s wife brought them food and water but Chea refused to take his medicine. When his wife insisted, Chea took the packets of pills and launched them into the river. Then he grabbed at his shoulder and let out a low moan.

In the middle of the afternoon, four soldiers carried Pol Pot to a clearing. They dumped him on a pyre made of wood and old rubber tyres and the sodden mattress he had died on. They set him alight.

Kiry and Chea stayed by the river until the last of the black smoke had cleared. By then, Chea’s bad leg had seized up. Two of Ta Mok’s soldiers came and carried him along the winding path that led back to the village. Kiry followed on behind.

* * *

On the morning of the press conference Nhem Kiry was nervous, then lethargic, then nauseous and then finally so deeply irritated that he could not sit still or think clearly. He sent his daughter, Yat, and his granddaughters, Kunthea and Minea, downstairs to the breakfast buffet. He supposed they would inflict permanent damage on his reputation for frugality by devouring more croissants and fruit than a peasant family could possibly consume in a month. But he desperately needed peace and quiet to prepare for the traumatic day that lay ahead.

The day before had been bad enough. It began before dawn, when Kiry had snuck out of the village – stealth was best, he’d decided, even though he doubted that anybody, least of all Ta Mok, now cared whether he came or went. A couple of soldiers waited for him along the track. Kiry had bribed them to make sure they turned up, but he suspected that they wanted out just as badly as he did. They drove a few kilometres to a rendezvous point, where a government helicopter swooped out of the sky and pulled them in. Kiry arrived in Phnom Penh in time to shower and take lunch with Hun Sen. The food was bland and, worse, he had to spend an hour genuflecting before him. Then Hun Sen told him he had to front the media to explain himself, and Kiry almost felt like fleeing back to Ta Mok in Anlong Veng.

He had brought little Kunthea and Minea to Phnom Penh because they were oblivious to tension. They treated nothing seriously, which was exactly the attitude Kiry wanted to imitate. The night before, he had urged them to drink all the Coke and Sprite in the hotel-room bar fridge. It was the best – the only – revenge he could think of, but the excess sugar had transformed his girls – Yat as well as the children – into a giggling mess of limbs spread-eagled across the king-sized bed. Kiry joined in by downing two cans of Heineken, the first of which he almost enjoyed. ‘Cold and bitter,’ he said. ‘Just like me.’ Then he opened a bottle of Johnny Walker Black, sniffed it and pronounced it fake. He tipped it down the bathroom sink, an act that deeply shocked Kunthea. Kiry took her hand. ‘When we leave, let’s steal the towels,’ he said.

Kiry was relieved that Kolab had chosen to stay away from Phnom Penh. Not that she would have said anything much. But she would have denounced Kiry – herself too – with constant sighing, or by gazing at the ground in silence or by picking at her food. She had stayed in Pailin in their new wooden home. After everything he had put her through, Kiry knew she had hoped for a more palatial abode in a more cosmopolitan city. ‘It’s not Shanghai, it’s not Paris,’ she said. ‘But anything is better than another year in Anlong Veng.’

Overnight, Kiry’s sinuses had reacted badly to the air-conditioner. He blew his nose, one nostril at a time, but the tissue was bone dry. So he ran the shower hot and placed a few drops of eucalyptus oil on a flannel, a neat trick that a diplomat friend had once taught him. He stood under the shower, closed his eyes and allowed the fumes that rose with the steam to clear his head.

He shaved with a Braun two-headed electric razor. Although he preferred a blade – he liked the feel of steel on his cheeks, the smooth finish, the reliability – he had taken to cutting himself. ‘Your skin gets thinner as you get old,’ Kolab had told him. ‘Thank you for yet another startling revelation,’ he had replied. But he supposed she was right. And today, of all days, parading himself before all those people and cameras, he did not want scabs on his throat or blood spots on his collar.

Outside, Kiry’s minders – government policemen with fake Ray-Bans and obsolete firearms – scrabbled about in the corridor like rats. He wished they would keep quiet, but he was grateful to have protection from the pushy journalists and the indignant locals.

He washed himself with a tiny bar of soap that came wrapped in waxy paper. Once wet, the soap smelt rather like over-heated peanut oil. When it had washed away, Kiry checked his skin for stains. He used his own shampoo: a few days earlier at a Bangkok salon – on the eighth floor of the ‘Sixth Biggest Shopping Mall in Southeast Asia,’ a claim he found ludicrous – a European-trained stylist had dyed his hair chestnut brown. Kiry liked the result, the colour as well as the wave she had blown through it, but he knew from experience that he needed to treat his hair with great care now or it would shrivel up.

He dried and powdered himself and dressed in a new camel-coloured safari suit which contrasted nicely, he decided, with his new hair colour. He put a single blue ballpoint pen, relieved from the hotel lobby, and a blank piece of paper folded in quarters into his breast pocket.

A government official nudged Kiry in the back. He took an erratic path, as if he was negotiating a minefield of microphones, spotlights and fat electric cords. The government official took his elbow but Kiry shook him off. He didn’t want anybody writing that he needed help to stand up. But then the noise in the room hit him, the waves of people pushing towards him from every direction, and his legs turned heavy. The minder grabbed him again and this time Kiry let him lead him through the throng.

Kiry sat alone behind a table on a slightly elevated stage. He folded his hands on the white linen cloth and fastened a pleasant and patient look onto his face. The mob was already shouting its interrogation. Kiry was unable to locate a fully formed question in the tangle of accusations. It was as though everybody in the room was hurling burning words at him. Should he duck or douse the flames with his glass of water? Should he sit still and let himself catch alight?

He considered absconding. He could have snuck back to his room, legitimately too, for it seemed that no amount of sleep was enough for him at the moment. Or he could have retired to the hotel’s piano bar, out on the balcony, with the
Phnom Penh Post
and a gin and tonic (he’d heard that the piano player, a backpacker from Finland, had a wonderful repertoire). Or he could have donned a wig and sunglasses and taken a stroll around the Central Market.

Instead Kiry leant into the microphone. ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It would be most helpful if you could ask one question at a time.’ He sat back, waited for the voices to dull and then pointed at one man.

‘You: do you have a question?’

‘Do you think that the Cambodian people will accept the blanket amnesty that has been bestowed upon you? Do you think they should?’

‘As you know, Hun Sen, the very honourable prime minister of the royal government, has warmly welcomed me. I spent a most enjoyable time with the honourable prime minister yesterday and we agreed that the time for fighting is over. If you demand that I tell you who was wrong and who was right, if you carry on and on and on accusing particular people of this and that – and if you expect me to do it too – then we Cambodians will never be reconciled. If we keep talking like this the war will never end.’

‘Do you expect to see King Sihanouk while you are here?’

‘If he invites me to visit him then of course I will go: he is my king,’ Kiry said. ‘But I suspect he is a very busy king.’

‘He’s in Beijing,’ somebody called. ‘He’s been there for weeks.’

‘I’m deeply shocked to hear it,’ Kiry said.

‘You were a very senior member of the Khmer Rouge hierarchy. Do you accept personal responsibility for the million or more deaths that occurred in the Democratic Kampuchea regime?’

Kiry stared at the table as he replied. ‘That story is old and stale. When you persist in asking these questions, when you dig up the past and turn it upside down and dissect it and examine it under a microscope, well, I cannot see any purpose. The way this country developed is so complicated ... too complicated for me to explain in a few words today. Please don’t keep stirring things up about the war.’

‘Will you at least tell the Cambodian people that you are sorry for all their suffering?’

Damned BBC, Kiry thought. But, given the sudden silence, there seemed no way to avoid the question. Kiry leaned close to the microphone and whispered, ‘I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry.’

‘Say it in Khmer.’

‘Yeah. Say it in Khmer.’

Kiry sensed his face contorting. He tried to maintain a mild expression, but the strain left him feeling as if the blood vessels were popping in his eyes. With a supreme effort he controlled himself. ‘
K’nyom somtoah nah
,’ he muttered.

‘Do you have a message for Ta Mok? Is it time he surrendered too?’

Kiry ignored the question, but he imagined Mok standing on the veranda of his garish villa, one arm snaked around a fake Roman pillar like it was a Thai prostitute, telling his followers that Kiry had betrayed them all.

‘Why should you go free when every single family in Cambodia has suffered because of what you did? Have you no shame?’

‘I know that some people talk about these things. I am not deaf. I read. I recently listened to a radio broadcast in which some of my countrymen were talking about the family members they lost. Even my own wife tells me such stories before she goes to work in the paddy fields each day. It is normal for people who have lost family over the years to feel grief and resentment. But I am sure that most of our fellow Cambodians have many more basic problems to resolve in the present and in the future. Let bygones be bygones: that is the only way for us to achieve peace and stability at last.’

‘Why should the Cambodian people put up with your defection?’ an American hollered from the back of the room. ‘Why should the world?’

‘The world? The
world
?’ Kiry began, but then paused long enough to rein in his indignation. ‘It is not for me to say, it is for others. But let me say this—’

‘No. Answer the question. Why should the world accept your defection? Why shouldn’t you face trial for crimes against humanity?’

‘I cannot answer that. I cannot judge myself. History will be my judge.’

‘Hasn’t history already judged you?’

‘It is far too soon to be talking about history. I’ll be dead and gone – and you too, my friend – long before everything will make proper sense. What’s good today will one day seem bad; and today’s criminals are destined to be the heroes of the future. But I will say this … No: that’s it. That’s all. I’ve got nothing else to say.’

The morning sun was mild as Kiry and his family left Phnom Penh for a few days’ holiday at the Seaside Hotel in Sihanoukville. The road was smooth. Kiry sank into the bucket seat of the late model Toyota minivan and was asleep before they passed Kompong Speu. Kunthea woke him ten kilometres out of Sihanoukville to show him a truck that had rolled off the road and was lying on its side. ‘It looks like a buffalo,’ Kiry said. Kunthea giggled.

After they arrived, Kiry sent his family to paddle in the Gulf of Thailand. ‘Don’t drown,’ he called after them cheerfully. ‘Take your time.’ Alone at last, he sat cross-legged on the floor of the room and ate a plate of crabs which the hotel had brought in live from nearby Kep. He twisted claws. He cracked shells open with a small hammer. He worked methodically and made a pile of meat before he began to eat. He sipped pineapple juice and looked for a football match on the television but had to make do with a breathless, mildly amusing Thai soap opera set in a hospital ward.

He slept. Ants streamed up from the floor and invaded the crab shells. Flies followed. A couple of geckos ran laps across the ceiling. A waiter came to remove the plate but Kiry slept through his polite knocks. Late in the afternoon, Kunthea leapt onto the bed: ‘I went into the water, all the way to my belly button.’

He stood under a cold shower with his arms raised and his eyes open. He was still sluggish when he emerged, so he ordered coffee. ‘Real coffee. Do you understand me?’ The hotel manager brought it himself, accompanied by a government official.

‘Your car is here,’ the government official said.

‘What car?’

‘Your car for touring Sihanoukville.’

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘It’s all organised. It’s on your itinerary. Hun Sen insisted. Please don’t worry, the driver is very friendly.’

Kiry drank his coffee slowly, changed his shirt, tidied his hair and stepped outside. A middle-aged man in a tuxedo grinned broadly and ushered Kiry into the back seat of a Toyota sedan. He stared out his window at the unremarkable streets as the driver wound to the top of a hill so they could look down on the port.

The driver then sped from beach to beach and finally stopped by a private patch of sand, halfway between two umbrella villages. Kiry stripped to his shorts and, like Kunthea, went in as far as his belly button. He stared at the flat sea and at the blurred horizon, where the light rubbed out the water. It amazed him that Europeans came here simply to go swimming.