Saloth Sar had visited them a few times after returning to Cambodia, but then he had disappeared and they had never seen him again. It was more than twenty years now since he, Loth Sieri, had set eyes on him. They had been treated no differently from anyone else during the Pol Pot time; they had not had the remotest idea that Pol Pot was their brother Sar, born in their house. They found out only afterward.
Was Saloth Sar born in that very house? I asked. Yes, they said, in the room beside us, right next to the veranda.
When he came back from France, I asked, had he ever talked about his life in Paris? What he'd done, who his friends were, what the city was like?
At that moment, with cows lowing in the gathering darkness, the journey to Paris from that village on the Sen River seemed an extraordinary odyssey. I found myself very curious to know how Loth Sieri and his brothers had imagined Paris, and their own brother in it. But no. The old man shook his head: Saloth Sar had never talked about France after he came back. Maybe he had shown them some pictures — he couldn't recall.
I remembered from David Chandler's biography that Pol Pot was very well read as a young man and knew large tracts of Rimbaud and Verlaine by heart. But I was not surprised, somehow, to discover that he had never allowed his family the privilege of imagining.
Just before getting up, I asked if Loth Sieri remembered his relative the dancer Luk Khun Meak, who had first introduced his family into the royal palace. He nodded, and I asked, "Did you ever see her dance?"
He smiled and shook his head; no, he had never seen any royal dancing, except in pictures.
It was almost dark now; somewhere in the north, near the minefield, there was the sound of gunfire. We got up to go, and the whole family walked down with us. After I had said goodbye and was about to climb onto the scooter, Sros whispered in my ear that it might be a good idea to give the old man some money. I had not thought of it; I took some money out of my pocket and put it in his hands.
He made a gesture of acknowledgment, and as we were about to leave he said a few words to Sros.
"What did he say?" I asked Sros when we were back on the road.
Shouting above the wind, Sros said, "He asked me, 'Do you think there will be peace now?'"
"And what did you tell him?" I said.
"I told him, 'I wish I could say yes.'"
8
On July 10, 1906, one month after their arrival in France, the dancers performed at a reception given by the minister of colonies in the Bois du Boulogne in Paris. "Never has there been a more brilliant Parisian fête," said Le Figaro, "nor one with such novel charm." Invitations were much sought after, and on the night of the performance cars and illuminated carriages invaded the park like an "army of fireflies."
While the performance was in progress, a correspondent spotted the most celebrated Parisian of all in the audience, the bearded, Mosaic figure of "the great Rodin…[going] into ecstasies over the little virgins of Phnom Penh, whose immaterial silhouettes he drew with infinite love."
Rodin, now, at the age of sixty-six, France's acknowledged apostle of the arts, fell immediately captive: in Princess Soumphady's young charges he discovered the infancy of Europe. "These Cambodians have shown us everything that antiquity could have contained," he wrote soon afterward. "It is impossible to think of anyone wearing human nature to such perfection; except them and the Greeks."
Two days after the performance Rodin presented himself at the dancers' Paris lodgings, at the Avenue Malakoff, with a sketchbook under his arm. The dancers were packing their belongings in preparation for their return to Marseille, but Rodin was admitted to the grounds of the mansion and given leave to do what he pleased. He executed several celebrated sketches that day, including a few of King Sisowath.
By the end of the day the artist was so smitten with the dancers that he accompanied them to the station, bought a ticket, and traveled to Marseille on the same train. He had packed neither clothes nor materials, and according to one account, upon arriving in Marseille he found that he was out of paper and had to buy brown paper bags from a grocery store.
Over the next few days, sketching feverishly in the gardens of the villa where the dancers were now lodged, Rodin seemed to lose thirty years. The effort involved in sketching his favorite models, three restless fourteen-year-olds called Sap, Soun, and Yem, appeared to rejuvenate the artist. A French official saw him placing a sheet of white paper on his knee one morning; he "said to the little Sap: 'Put your foot on this,' and then drew the outline of her foot with a pencil, saying 'Tomorrow you'll have your shoes, but now pose a little more for me!' Sap, having tired of atomizer bottles and cardboard cats, had asked her 'papa' for a pair of pumps. Every evening — ardent, happy, but exhausted — Rodin would return to his hotel with his hands full of sketches and collect his thoughts."
Photographs from the time show Rodin seated on a garden bench, sketching under the watchful eyes of the policemen who had been posted at the dancers' villa to ensure their safety. Rodin was oblivious: "The friezes of Angkor were coming to life before my very eyes. I loved these Cambodian girls so much that I didn't know how to express my gratitude for the royal honor they had shown me in dancing and posing for me. I went to the Nouvelles Galeries to buy a basket of toys for them, and these divine children who dance for the gods hardly knew how to repay me for the happiness I had given them. They even talked about taking me with them."
On their last day in France, hours before they boarded the ship that was to take them back to Cambodia, the dancers were taken to the celebrated photographer Baudouin. On the way, passing through a muddy alley, Princess Soumphady happened to step on a pat of cow dung. Horrified, she raised her arms to the heavens and flung herself, wailing, upon the dust, oblivious of her splendid costume. The rest of the troupe immediately followed suit: within moments the alley was full of prostrate Cambodian dancers, dressed in full performance regalia.
"What an emptiness they left for me!" wrote Rodin. "When they left… I thought they had taken away the beauty of the world… I followed them to Marseille; I would have followed them as far as Cairo."
His sentiments were exactly mirrored by King Sisowath. "I am deeply saddened to be leaving France," the king said on the eve of his departure. "In this beautiful country I shall leave behind a piece of my heart."
9
The trip to France evidently cast King Sisowath's mind into the same kind of turmoil, the same tumult, that has provoked generations of displaced students — the Gandhis, the Kenyattas, the Chou en Lais, among thousands of their less illustrious countrymen — to reflect upon the unfamiliar, wintry worlds beyond the doors of their rented lodgings.
On September 12, 1906, shortly after their return to Cambodia, the king and his ministers published their reflections in a short but poignant document. Cast in the guise of a royal proclamation, it was in fact a venture into a kind of travel writing. It began: "The visits that His Majesty made to the great cities of France, his rapid examination of the institutions of that country, the organization of the different services that are to be found there, astonished him and led him to think of France as a paradise." Emulation, they concluded, was "the only means of turning resolutely to the path of progress."
Over the brief space of a couple of thousand words the king and his ministers summed up their views on the lessons that France had to offer Cambodia. Most of these had to do with what later came to be called "development": communications had to be improved, new land cleared for agriculture; peasants had to increase their production, raise more animals, exploit their forests and fisheries more systematically, familiarize themselves with modern machinery, and so on. A generation later, Cambodian political luminaries such as Khieu Samphan, writing their theses in Paris, were to arrive at oddly similar conclusions, although by an entirely different route.