Like Kamm, the theater troupe encountered moments of surreality during their visit. Each member of the troupe, upon entering the compound, was issued a “Democratic Kampuchea” visa, written in flowery Khmer longhand by an old Khmer Rouge officer with beautiful penmanship. The man lingered over this job of drawing up visas, as if this were the last good deed he might do in the world. No matter that Democratic Kampuchea existed only in the minds of these men.
At some point, an offer was made by the troupe, translated by Raksmey, to provide some evening entertainment in the form of a puppet show. Questions were passed up the chain of command, and some superior, probably Khieu Samphan himself, granted permission. Never mind that such artistic practice had been banned in Democratic Kampuchea while the Khmer Rouge was in power, or that most puppeteers and actors in the country had been murdered. In this time, at this mountain base, such a show apparently was a welcome treat for the weary Khmer Rouge contingent.
Kirkenesferda’s entrance into the jungle compound must have been an odd spectacle. Who knows what these battle-hardened cadres thought as the theater wagon rumbled into camp. The wagon and generator were set up in a little clearing next to the rusty radio tower that the Khmer Rouge was using to communicate with its Chinese allies as well as the remaining far-flung Khmer Rouge factions along the Thai border. Chairs were assembled for the audience, and several rudimentary floodlights were installed as house lighting.
The view from 808 was spectacular. Perched on the edge of a steep precipice, one could see for miles and miles into the heart of Cambodia, a land now enduring mass displacement, famine, and widespread disease due to its hosts’ astonishing negligence of the citizens’ most basic needs. Presumably, such a spot was chosen for security reasons, but the stunning vistas on that evening, particularly as the sun set against a jungled horizon, brought both visitor and host to congregate at the overlook point, lending an air of contemplation to the proceedings as they silently admired nature’s vast depth of field.
At first, the guests were treated well, if not quite up to par with Kamm’s profuse testimony. They were fed a robust meal and given plenty to drink, mingling with Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, and several paunchy Khmer Rouge higher-ups. The mood was described as “festive and expectant” (694) about the upcoming show. Raksmey was very much in the middle of it all, dressed now in the simple black outfit of the Kirkenesferda puppeteer, which was reminiscent of the black uniforms formerly worn by their Khmer Rouge hosts, who now sported the dull hunter green of the jungle rebel. Perhaps the Khmer Rouge wardrobe shift was another effort by the rulers to distance themselves from their disastrous years in power, though many still wore the familiar red-checkered krama of the revolution. The puppeteers wore simple black masks around their necks. When the time came, they would disappear behind their puppets.
Raksmey mingled, joking in three languages, steering the conversations, complimenting the officers, saying little about himself or his acquaintances. He negotiated a starting time for the performance, the practicalities of electricity, housing, protocol. As darkness descended and the floodlights went up, Raksmey directed people to their seats. He was the perfect mediator. It was as if he had been training for this evening his entire life. Writes Røed-Larsen, “though [Raksmey] was the group’s newest addition, on that night he was also their most essential member. . (For the moment at least), he was Kirkenesferda’s lifeline” (703). It must be noted that the ease with which he took up this ambassadorial role was in marked contrast to the shy reclusion in which he had lived while at CERN, listening to Britten’s Les Illuminations on repeat until the vinyl had begun to erode.
Despite Raksmey’s social high-wire act, there were two circumstances beyond his control that would later lead to catastrophe. The first was that, unbeknownst to him, Tor Bjerknes had wired a telegraph key into the Khmer Rouge radio tower. This was to beam out the somewhat superfluous and altogether harmless signal “What hath God wrought?” on an obscure frequency. Transmitting this echo of Morse’s first telegram in 1844 was a practice that Kirkenesferda had maintained before each of their bevegelser, or movements, to date. However innocuous the signal, permission was not requested from their hosts, and Raksmey had no knowledge of the wiring or the transmission.
Second, and perhaps more serious, was the coincidental and unannounced visit of Pol Pot himself to the camp, a visit that, due to security concerns, not even Khieu Samphan had been made aware of. Pot normally lived two hundred kilometers to the south, in the Cardamom Mountains, in a top-secret Khmer Rouge compound called Office 131. He presumably had made the risky and arduous trip to 808 in order to discuss political strategy with Samphan and Sary face-to-face. Pol Pot must have been surprised to see that in his absence, a theater troupe had been invited to perform at the camp, but we cannot know his initial response, since prior to the show there was no witnessed confrontation between Pol Pot and Samphan.
The great irony is that Kirkenesferda — as they would do for their bevegelse in Sarajevo sixteen years later — had theatrically “reserved” certain seats in the audience for the major political players in the current conflict. There was a seat set aside for former U.S. president Richard Nixon; for Prince Norodom Sihanouk; for Chairman Mao Zedong and Vietnamese prime minister Ho Chi Minh, both already deceased; for Thailand’s acting prime minister, General Kriangsak Chomanan; for Hun Sen, the Vietnamese-installed head of state in Cambodia; and for Pol Pot. These were meant to be symbolic, a kind of “meta-material extension of the stage” (718), as Røed-Larsen terms it, but just before the curtain went up, the real Pol Pot emerged from a building and took the seat reserved for him, causing a stir in the audience, which also was unaware he was in camp. Raksmey was the only one who saw what had happened. It would only be after the show that the troupe’s other members discovered that Pol Pot was in attendance.
What happened next is covered in some detail by Røed-Larsen, who, as always, takes great pains to document every second of each of Kirkenesferda’s bevegelser. Kirkenesferda Tre was to be the troupe’s most complex creation to date, though the show would start ordinarily enough. When the curtain opened, traditional Khmer shadow puppets made from tanned buffalo hide appeared against a white screen. A scene from the epic Reamker play unfolded, in which the ten-headed monster Krong Reap, disguised as an old man, kidnaps the beautiful Neang Seda. The Reamker is a Buddhist adaptation of the Hindu Ramayana and a mainstay of Cambodian theater. As was custom, the play was accompanied by a live, but hidden, four-piece Khmer pinpeat band, even though this music had not been heard by many of those present in more than four years. At this point, one cannot help but wonder what the audience of fallen Khmer Rouge elites were thinking: here was a traditional Khmer art form, part of a rich cultural heritage that they had attempted to eradicate during their time in power, now being enacted for them. The play itself was amusing—“the hijinks of disguise [is a] universal wellspring of humor” (722) — and apparently soldiers were laughing at the antics of Krong Reap trying to behave like an old man.
Fig. 4.13. Traditional Khmer Lkhaon Nang Sbek, featuring a scene from the Reamker epic.
From Cohen, M., “Khmer Shadow Theatre,” p. 187
If this puppetry was vaguely confrontational in its very reenactment, this was by far the least controversial aspect of the show. The piece quickly veered off the rails: in the middle of the scene, metallic bird rod puppets came down from above and began to attack Krong Reap and Neang Seda, ripping off pieces of their arms and legs and gathering them into a nest. The birds sported antennae made from television radials, beautifully latticed rice paper wings, and flowing tails of magnetic cassette tape and pocket-watch gears, and they wielded “abnormally long and crooked beaks cut from shellac records and whalebone” (735). The Khmer shadow puppets, or what was left of them, fled the stage.