Raksmey went directly to Dr. Christian-Holtsmark and informed him of the accusations. The troupe’s leader admitted that while the wire had been real, the transmission had been purely for dramatic purposes and had not contained any intelligence information. Tor Bjerknes was also alerted. He apologized for not asking permission before connecting the telegraph.
As they debated what to do, the group became aware of an intensifying light, at just the same time that young Lars Røed-Larsen raced into their guest hut and declared that the theater wagon was on fire. The entire troupe went outside to see that, sure enough, their wagon — the summation of years and years of labor — was now in flames, guarded by a ring of stiff-jawed Khmer Rouge guards. There would be no intervention. Their work was gone. Abandoning camp then and there was considered, but they discovered that their trucks had been moved to an unspecified location. The consensus was that they should wait until morning and then decide how to proceed.
The next few hours were restless ones. No longer was this regime a distant surrogate for reckless ideologism—“what was once theoretical had become intensely personal. . their hosts had become their potential judge, jury, and executioner” (822).
Sometime during the night — Røed-Larsen places it at 2:20, though this is without supporting evidence — Raksmey was visiting the outhouse when he met up with a young and frightened Lars, who, like the others, could not sleep and was additionally suffering from an upset stomach due to the foreignness of Khmer food. Raksmey reassured Lars that everything would work out in the end. At that point, the two of them heard “a series of loud pops” coming from the direction of the guest quarters. Lars attempted to run toward where his family was sleeping, but, realizing the pops were in fact gunshots, Raksmey instinctively held him back, pulling the boy into the shelter of the forest. Knowing that the group had been ambushed, Raksmey made the decision to take the by now extremely distraught Lars out of the camp immediately. They snuck through the forest, around the guard post, and headed back in the direction of the border. Avoiding roads and buildings, they did not have an easy time of it, and suffered multiple lacerations from barbed wire, vines, and low-hanging branches.
When they were only a hundred meters from the Thai border crossing, Raksmey stepped on a land mine. His left leg and part of his pelvis were liquefied by the explosion, and the left side of his face was partly sheared off. Hearing shots behind them, he waved for Lars to continue and leave him where he was. After attempting to drag Raksmey several meters, Lars finally gave up and, covered in blood, stumbled to the border crossing, where the stunned Thai officials took him into custody.
Buried at the end of a long footnote on page 845 of Røed-Larsen’s book, there is a subtle shift in perspective that is quite easy to overlook:
(Once across the border, Lars sat in the backseat of the government jeep and remained quiet, despite the barrage of questions coming from a Thai official, who was demanding to know exactly what had just transpired at Camp 808. At some point, a butterfly flew through the jeep’s window and alighted on his knee. The creature flexed its wings and shivered. It was an image I would never forget.)
Did you hear it? The sudden presence of that “jeg” haunts me. The rattle in the engine. Perhaps I am misreading what was only a minor typographical error, but the appearance of the first person is so unexpected and so out of place in the context of the book’s fifteen hundred pages that it calls into question nearly everything that has come before and everything that comes after. It was an image I would never forget. Who, may I ask, is the I here? Is it Per, the author? Is it Lars, the subject and stepbrother? Is it both author and subject? Or is it someone else entirely? That lone I, sounded like a trumpet at dusk, makes me long for a voice, a motive, a warm body beneath this ocean of words.
PART 5. THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS
1. NEW JERSEY
August 10, 2010
All that night, Radar scoured the land. The blackout and the ensuing curfew lent an eerie post-apocalyptic backdrop to his searchings. He dodged police barricades and wove around checkpoints, using his recumbent’s low profile and the cover of darkness to glide through the abandoned streets undetected. He visited four local hospitals, all of them overrun with patients and non-patients simply seeking out the comforts of electricity’s embrace. His father was not among them.
How intimate, to trace a person’s geography. It was almost like looking through his father’s wallet. Though it was the middle of the night, Radar still followed the route of Kermin’s favorite constitutional along the industrial shores of the Passaic, searching for that familiar hunched profile. He rode past the ghostly rail bridge, permanently frozen in a raised salute, but did not see his father seated at any of his customary benches. He visited J&A Specialties Electrics, in Belleville, site of Kermin’s semi-frequent pilgrimages for obscure radio parts. He swung by the Arlington Diner, where his father would eat exactly three-quarters of a Reuben and half of his slaw before casually dismissing the plate with a swipe of his hand.
Everything was closed, shuttered, dark. Humanity a distant dream.
He even crossed the Passaic and headed south, to his grandfather’s gravesite in Elizabeth, on the off chance that Kermin had sought out his father’s resting place for guidance.
Radar’s flashlight illuminated the engraved letters of the headstone:
DOBROSLAV RADMANOVIC
1910–1947
A GOOD MAN.
Radar had always found this summary a touch dismissive, but Kermin had explained that this was the state’s default epitaph when little was known about the deceased.
“Your son has gone missing,” Radar said to the gravestone.
Dobroslav, the good man, offered no reply.
With each successive foray, it became increasingly clear that he was not going to find his father in any of these places — that his father would not be found simply by looking for him. And yet, in spite of this, he kept looking. Just the act of looking made Radar feel productive, even if he knew he would most likely come up empty-handed. It also gave him time to process all that he had learned in that strange little cottage beneath the mall.
Kermin — the international puppeteer. Kermin — the genius designer. His pride at learning these descriptors was tempered by a certain sadness that he massaged with his velocity. He could not help but feel cheated, as if he had never actually experienced the real Kermin. He had only known his father as his closeted, curmudgeonly progenitor — who had gambled on the tiny television and lost, who had built a monstrous antenna in their backyard so he could communicate only with those farthest away from him and in doing so had shut out those who loved him the most. But Radar had never known his father as this. As a doer. A maker. One who had changed the course of history.