The Austrian shrank back, but plunged into battle a couple of minutes later, mustache bristling. "I like that station," he cried. His voice was high, terrier-like. "I like it, I want to listen to it."
The Russian jammed a tree stump of a knee across the radio and looked casually out the window. The Austrian snatched his hand back, but his defeat was only temporary. He turned to look out the window and sighed. "Such a beautiful country," he said, "such wonderful people — always smiling. But why are they always at war? Why can't they get on with building their country?"
He grinned at the Russian. "I suppose we'll be going to Russia next — eh, my friend?"
The Russian sprang bolt upright, sputtering. The veins on his temples bulged. "No," he barked, "no, not Russia, never, maybe Ukraine… But not Russia, never."
Then a truck appeared on the road ahead of us, gradually taking shape within a cloud of dust. It was packed with people, many of whom seemed to be wearing olive-green fatigues. A man was leaning over the driver's cabin, looking directly at us: he had an unusual-looking cap on his head. It was green and looked Chinese, like something a Khmer Rouge guerrilla might wear. The Russian and the Austrian were suddenly on the edge of their seats, straining forward.
The truck went past in a flurry of dust, the people in it waved, and we got a good look at the cap. There was lettering on it; it said "Windy City Motel."
7
I got blank stares when I asked where Pol Pot's village was. Pol Pot had villages on either side of Route 12, people said, dozens of them; nobody could get to them, they were in the forest, surrounded by minefields. I might as well have asked where the State of Cambodia was. Nor did it help to ask about Saloth Sar; nobody seemed ever to have heard of that name.
One of the people I asked, a young Cambodian called Sros, offered to help, although he was just as puzzled by the question as everybody else. He worked for a relief agency and had spent a lot of time in Kompong Thom. He had never heard anybody mention Pol Pot's village and would have been skeptical if he had. But I persuaded him that Pol Pot was really called Saloth Sar and had been born near the town; I'd forgotten the name of the village, but I had seen it mentioned in books and knew it was close by.
He was intrigued. He borrowed a scooter and we drove down the main street in Kompong Thom, stopping passersby and asking respectfully, "Bong, do you know where Pol Pot's village is?"
They looked at us in disbelief and hurried away: either they didn't know or they weren't saying. Then Sros stopped to ask a local district official, a bowed, earnest-looking man with a twitch that ran all the way down the right side of his face. The moment I saw him, I was sure he would know. He did. He lowered his voice and whispered quickly into Sros's ear. The village was called Sbauv, and to get to it we had to go past the hospital and follow the dirt road along the River Sen. He stopped to look over his shoulder and pointed down the road.
There was perhaps an hour of sunlight left, and it wasn't safe to be out after dark. But Sros was undeterred; the thought that we were near Pol Pot's birthplace had a galvanic effect on him. He was determined to get there as soon as possible.
He had spent almost his entire adult life behind barbed wire, one and a half miles of it, in a refugee camp on the Thai border. He had entered it at the age of thirteen and had come to manhood circling around and around the perimeter, month after month, year after year, waiting to see who got out, who got a visa, who went mad, who got raped, who got shot by the Thai guards. He was twenty-five now, diminutive but wiry, very slight of build. He had converted to Christianity at the camp, and there was an earnestness behind his ready smile and easygoing manners that hinted at a deeply felt piety.
Sros was too young to recall much of the "Pol Pot time," but he remembered vividly his journey to the Thai border with his parents. They left in 1982, three years after the Vietnamese invasion. Things were hard where they were, and they'd heard from Western radio broadcasts that there were camps on the border where they would be looked after and fed.
Things hadn't turned out quite as they had imagined. They ended up in a camp run by a conservative Cambodian political faction, a kind of living hell. But they bribed a "guide" to get them across to a UN-run camp, Khao I Dang, where the conditions were better. Sros went to school and learned English, and after years of waiting, fruitlessly, for a visa to the West, he took the plunge and crossed over into Cambodia. That was a year ago. With his education and his knowledge of English he had found a job without difficulty, but he was still keeping his name on the rosters of the UN High Commission for Refugees.
"My father says to me, there will be peace in your lifetime and you will be happy," he told me. "My grandfather used to tell my father the same thing, and now I say the same thing to my nephews and nieces. It's always the same."
We left Kompong Thom behind almost before we knew it. A dirt road snaked away from the edge of the city, shaded by trees and clumps of bamboo. The road was an estuary of deep red dust: the wheels of the ox carts that came rumbling toward us churned up crimson waves that billowed outward and up into the sky. The dust hung above the road far into the distance, like spray above a rocky coastline, glowing red in the sunset.
Flanking the road on one side were shanties and small dwellings, the poorest I had yet seen in Cambodia, some of them no more than frames stuck into the ground and covered with plaited palm leaves. Even the larger houses seemed little more than shanties on stilts. On the other side of the road the ground dropped away sharply to the River Sen: a shrunken stream now, in the dry season, flowing sluggishly along at the bottom of its steep-sided channel.
It was impossible to tell where one village ended and another began. We stopped to ask a couple of times, the last time at a stall where a woman was selling cigarettes and fruit. She pointed over her shoulder: one of Pol Pot's brothers lived in the house behind the stall, she said, and another in a palm-thatch shanty in the adjacent yard.
We drove into the yard and looked up at the house. It was large compared to those around it, a typical wooden Khmer house, on stilts, with chickens roosting underneath and clothes drying between the pillars. It had clearly seen much better days and was badly in need of repairs.
The decaying house and the dilapidated, palm-thatched shanty in the yard took me by surprise. I remembered having read that Pol Pot's father was a well-to-do farmer, and I had expected something less humble. Sros was even more surprised; perhaps he had assumed that the relatives of politicians always got rich, one way or another. There was an augury of something unfamiliar here — a man of power who had done nothing to help his own kin. It was a reminder that we were confronting a phenomenon that was completely at odds with quotidian expectation.
Then an elderly woman with close-cropped white hair appeared on the veranda of the house. Sros said a few words to her, and she immediately invited us up. Greeting us with folded hands, she asked us to seat ourselves on a mat while she went inside to find her husband. Like many Khmer dwellings, the house was sparsely furnished, the walls bare except for a few religious pictures and images of the Buddha.
The woman returned followed by a tall, gaunt man dressed in a faded sarong. He did not look as much like Pol Pot as the brother I had met briefly in Phnom Penh, but the resemblance was still unmistakable.
His name was Loth Sieri, he said, seating himself beside us, and he was the second oldest of the brothers. Saloth Sar had gone away to Phnom Penh while he was still quite young, and after that they had not seen very much of him. He had gone from school to college in Phnom Penh, and then finally to Paris. He smiled ruefully. "It was the knowledge he got in Paris that made him what he is," he said.