Soon afterward I was traveling in a taxi with four Cambodians along a dusty, potholed road in a sparsely inhabited region in the northwest of the country. I had dozed off in the front seat when I was woken by the rattle of gunfire. I looked up and saw a State soldier standing in the middle of the dirt road, directly ahead. He was in his teens, like most uniformed Cambodians; he was wearing round, wire-rimmed sunglasses, and his pelvis was thrust out MTV-style. But instead of a guitar he had an AK-47 in his hands, and he was spraying the ground in front of us with bullets, creating a delicate tracery of dust.
The taxi jolted to a halt; the driver thrust an arm out of the window and waved his wallet. The soldier did not seem to notice; he was grinning and swaying, probably drunk. But when I sat up in the front seat, the barrel of his gun rose slowly until it was pointing directly at my forehead. Looking into the unblinking eye of that AK-47, unaccountably, two slogans flashed through my mind; they were scrawled all over the walls of Calcutta when I was the same age as that soldier. One was "Power comes from the barrel of a gun," and the other "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." It turned out he had only the first in mind.
Molyka had heard stories like these, but living in Phnom Penh, working as a civil servant, she had been relatively sheltered until that day when her car was stopped. The incident frightened her in ways she couldn't quite articulate; it reawakened a host of long-dormant fears. Molyka was only thirteen in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. She was evacuated with her whole extended family, fourteen people in all, to a labor camp in the province of Kompong Thom. A few months later she was separated from the others and sent to work in a fishing village on Cambodia's immense freshwater lake, the Tonlé Sap. For the next three years she worked as a servant and nursemaid for a family of fisher-folk.
She saw her parents only once in that time. One day she was sent to a village near Kompong Thom with a group of girls. While sitting by the roadside, quite by chance, she happened to look up from her basket of fish and saw her mother walking toward her. Her first instinct was to turn away; she thought it was a dream. Every detail matched those of her most frequently recurring dream: the parched countryside, the ragged palms, her mother coming out of the red dust of the road, walking straight toward her…
She didn't see her mother again until 1979, when she came back to Phnom Penh after the Vietnamese invasion. She managed to locate her as well as two of her brothers after months of searching. Of the fourteen people who had walked out of her house three and a half years before, ten were dead, including her father, two brothers, and a sister. Her mother had become an abject, terrified creature after her father was called away into the fields one night, never to return. One of her brothers was too young to work; the other had willed himself into a state of guilt-stricken paralysis after revealing their father's identity to the Khmer Rouge in a moment of inattention — he now held himself responsible for his father's death.
Their family was from the social group that was hardest hit by the revolution, the urban middle classes. City people by definition, they were herded into rural work camps. The institutions and forms of knowledge that sustained them were destroyed — the judicial system was dismantled, the practice of formal medicine was discontinued, schools and colleges were shut down, banks and credit were done away with; indeed, the very institution of money was abolished. Cambodia's was not a civil war in the same sense as Somalia's or the former Yugoslavia's, fought over the fetishism of small differences: it was a war on history itself, an experiment in the reinvention of society. No regime in history had ever before made so systematic and sustained an attack on the middle class. Yet if the experiment was proof of anything at all, it was ultimately of the indestructibility of the middle class, of its extraordinary tenacity and resilience, its capacity to preserve its forms of knowledge and expression through the most extreme kinds of adversity.
Molyka was only seventeen then, but she was the one who had to cope, because no one else in the family could. She took a job in the army and put herself and her brothers through school and college; later she acquired a house and a car; she adopted a child, and, like so many people in Phnom Penh, she took in and supported about half a dozen complete strangers. In one way or another she was responsible for supporting a dozen lives.
Yet now Molyka, who at the age of thirty-one had already lived through several lifetimes, was afraid of driving into the outskirts of the city. Over the past year the outlines of the life she had put together were beginning to look frayed. Paradoxically, at precisely the moment when the world had ordained peace and democracy for Cambodia, uncertainty had reached its peak within the country. Nobody knew what was going to happen after the UN-sponsored elections were held, who would come to power and what they would do once they did. Molyka's colleagues had all become desperate to make some provision for the future — by buying, stealing, selling whatever was at hand. Those two soldiers who had stopped her car were no exception. Everyone she knew was a little like that now — ministers, bureaucrats, policemen, they were all people who saw themselves faced with yet another beginning.
Now Molyka was driving out to meet Pol Pot's brother and sister-in-law, relatives of a man whose name was indelibly associated with the deaths of her own father and nine other members of her family. She had gasped in disbelief when I first asked her to accompany me. To her, as to most people in Cambodia, the name Pol Pot was an abstraction; it referred to a time, an epoch, an organization, a form of terror — it was almost impossible to associate it with a mere human being, one who had brothers, relatives, sisters-in-law. But she was curious too, and in the end, overcoming her fear of the neighborhood, she drove me out in her own car, into the newly colonized farmland near Pochentong airport.
The house, when we found it, proved to be a comfortable wooden structure built in the traditional Khmer style, with its details picked out in bright blue. Like all such houses it was supported on stilts, and as we walked in, a figure detached itself from the shadows beneath the house and came toward us: a tall, vigorous-looking man dressed in a sarong. He had a broad, pleasant face and short, spiky gray hair. The resemblance to Pol Pot was startling.
I glanced at Molyka; she bowed, joining her hands, as he welcomed us in, and they exchanged a few friendly words of greeting. His wife was waiting upstairs, he said, and led us up a wooden staircase to a large, airy room with a few photographs on the bare walls: portraits of relatives and ancestors, of the kind that hang in every Khmer house. Chea Samy was sitting on a couch at the far end of the room. She waved us in and her husband took his leave of us, smiling, hands folded.
"I wanted to attack him when I first saw him," Molyka told me later. "But then I thought, it's not his fault. What has he ever done to me?"