In the meanwhile, within minutes of the king's departure from the port, a section of the crowd rushed up the gangplank of the Amiral-Kersaint to see the dancers at first hand. For weeks now the Marseille newspapers had been full of tantalizing snippets of information: it was said that the dancers entered the palace as children and spent their lives in seclusion ever afterward; that their lives revolved entirely around the royal family; that several were the king's mistresses and had even borne him children; that some of them had never stepped out of the palace grounds until this trip to France. European travelers went to great lengths to procure invitations to see these fabulous recluses performing in the palace at Phnom Penh; now here they were in Marseille, visiting Europe for the very first time.
The dancers were on the ship's first-class deck; they seemed to be everywhere, running about, hopping, skipping, playing excitedly, feet skimming across the polished wood. The whole deck was a blur of legs, girls' legs, women's legs, "fine, elegant legs," for all the dancers were dressed in colorful sampots which ended shortly below the knee.
The onlookers were taken by surprise. They had expected perhaps a troupe of heavily veiled, voluptuous Salomes; they were not quite prepared for the lithe, athletic women they encountered on the Amiral-Kersaint. Nor indeed was the rest of Europe. An observer wrote later: "With their hard and close-cropped hair, their figures like those of striplings, their thin, muscular legs like those of young boys, their arms and hands like those of little girls, they seem to belong to no definite sex. They have something of the child about them, something of the young warrior of antiquity, and something of the woman."
Sitting regally among the dancers, alternately stern and indulgent, affectionate and severe, was the slight, fine-boned figure of the king's eldest daughter, Princess Soumphady. Dressed in a gold-brown sampot and a tunic of mauve silk, this redoubtable woman had an electrifying effect on the Marseillais crowd. They drank in every aspect of her appearance: her betel-stained teeth, her chest-ful of medals, her close-cropped hair, her gold-embroidered shoes, her diamond brooches, and her black silk stockings. Her manner, remarked one journalist, was at once haughty and childlike, her gaze direct and good-natured; she was amused by everything and nothing; she crossed her legs and clasped her shins just like a man. Indeed, except for her dress she was very much like one man in particular — the romantic and whimsical Duke of Reichstadt, l'Aiglon, Napoleon's tubercular son.
Suddenly, to the crowd's delight, the princess's composure dissolved. A group of local women appeared on deck, accompanied by a ten-year-old boy, and the princess and all the other dancers rushed over and crowded around them, admiring their clothes and exclaiming over the little boy.
The journalists were quick to seize this opportunity. "Do you like French women?" they asked the princess.
"Oh! Pretty, so pretty…" she replied.
"And their clothes, their hats?"
"Just as pretty as they are themselves."
"Would Your Highness like to wear clothes like those?"
"No!" the princess said after a moment's reflection. "No! I am not used to them and perhaps would not know how to wear them. But they are still pretty… oh yes…"
And with that she sank into what seemed to be an attitude of somber and melancholy longing.
2
I only once ever met someone who had known both Princess Soumphady and King Sisowath. Her name was Chea Samy, and she was said to be one of the greatest dancers in Cambodia, a national treasure. She was also Pol Pot's sister-in-law.
She was first pointed out to me at the School of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, a rambling complex of buildings not far from the Wat Phnom, where the UN's twenty-thousand-strong peacekeeping force has its headquarters. It was January, only four months before countrywide elections were to be held under the auspices of UNTAC, as the UN's Transitional Authority in Cambodia is universally known. Phnom Penh had temporarily become one of the most cosmopolitan towns in the world, its streets a traffic nightmare, with UNTAC's white Land Cruisers cutting through shoals of careering scooters, mopeds, and cyclo-pousses like whales cruising through drifting plankton.
The School of Fine Arts was hidden from this multinational traffic by piles of uncleared refuse and a string of shacks and shanties. Its cavernous halls and half-finished classrooms were oddly self-contained, their atmosphere the self-sustaining, honeycomb bustle of a huge television studio.
I had only recently arrived in Phnom Penh when I first met Chea Samy. She was sitting on a bench in the school's vast training hall — a small woman with the kind of poise that goes with the confidence of great beauty. She was dressed in an ankle-length skirt, and her gray hair was cut short. She was presiding over a class of about forty boys and girls, watching them go through their exercises, her gentle, rounded face tense with concentration. Occasionally she would spring off the bench and bend back a dancer's arm or push in a waist, working as a sculptor does, by touch, molding their limbs like clay.
At the time I had no idea whether Chea Samy had known Princess Soumphady or not. I had become curious about the princess and her father, King Sisowath, after learning of their journey to Europe in 1906, and I wanted to know more about them.
Chea Samy's eyes widened when I asked her about Princess Soumphady at the end of her class. She looked from me to the student who was interpreting for us as though she couldn't quite believe she had heard the name right. I reassured her: yes, I really did mean Princess Soumphady, Princess Sisowath Soumphady.
She smiled in the indulgent, misty way in which people recall a favorite aunt. Yes, of course she had known Princess Soumphady, she said. As a little girl, when she first went into the palace to learn dance, it was Princess Soumphady who had been in charge of the dancers: for a while the princess had brought her up…
The second time I met Chea Samy was at her house. She lives a few miles from Pochentong airport, on Phnom Penh's rapidly expanding frontier, in an area that is largely farmland, with a few houses strung along a dirt road. The friend whom I had persuaded to come along with me to translate took an immediate dislike to the place. It was already late afternoon, and she did not relish the thought of driving back on those roads in the dark.
My friend, Molyka, was a midlevel civil servant, a poised, attractive woman in her early thirties, painfully soft-spoken, in the Khmer way. She had spent a short while studying in Australia on a government scholarship, and spoke English with a better feeling for nuance and idiom than any of the professional interpreters I had met. If I was to visit Chea Samy, I had decided, it would be with her. But Molyka proved hard to persuade: she had become frightened of venturing out of the center of the city.
Not long before she had been driving with a friend of hers, the wife of an UNTAC official, when her car was stopped at a busy roundabout by a couple of soldiers. They were wearing the uniform of the "State of Cambodia," the faction that currently governs most of the country. "I work for the government too," she told them, "in an important ministry." They ignored her; they wanted money. She didn't have much, only a couple of thousand riels. They asked for cigarettes; she didn't have any. They told her to get out of the car and accompany them into a building. They were about to take her away when her friend interceded. They let her go eventually: they left UN people alone on the whole. But as she drove away they shouted after her, "We're going to be looking out for you — you won't always have an Untác in the car."
Molyka was scared, and she had reason to be. The government's underpaid (often unpaid) soldiers and policemen were increasingly prone to banditry and bouts of inexplicable violence. Not long before, I had gone to visit a hospital in an area where there were frequent hostilities between State troops and the Khmer Rouge. I had expected that the patients in the casualty ward would be principally victims of mines and Khmer Rouge shellfire. Instead I found a group of half a dozen women, some with children, lying on grimy mats, their faces and bodies pitted and torn with black shrapnel wounds. They had been traveling in a pickup truck to sell vegetables at a nearby market when they were stopped by a couple of State soldiers. The soldiers asked for money; the women handed out some, but the soldiers wanted more. The women had no more to give and told them so. The soldiers let the truck pass but stopped it again that evening, on its way back. They didn't ask for anything this time; they simply detonated a fragmentation mine.