The King’s Last Song

April 1967, April 2004

Luc is sixteen, loves sport, and is planning to study medicine.

He plays football and tennis even in the heat. His shoulders swell, his hips shrink. He is very handsome – long-nosed, thin-lipped but with a deeply sweet face. He plays outside so often that his brown hair is sun-streaked.

His cyclopousse driver has fallen in love with him. Arn is from somewhere in the country, near Kompong Thom. Luc finds him heartbreaking, for Arn lives in his pedal taxi with all his possessions folded under the seat. His bank is a back trouser pocket secured with a safety pin. There is a pouch for his comb and his toothbrush. He washes in public fountains, wearing his kramar around his waist, sleek, muscular and happy.

Arn is twenty-two, which to Luc is old, in another state across the border into adulthood. Doing anything which earns you a living, and which gives you independence in the city, seems exciting and glamorous. And Arn looks happy. He smiles when he talks about his sister’s troubles with a recalcitrant fiancé. He talks of his father and mother and cousins and how rich they are, relatively.

Arn’s face seems to melt slightly whenever he sees Luc. The smile goes softer, the eyes narrow and gleam, and dart back and forth between Luc’s face and the ground.

‘Monsieur. I see you and birds sing,’ he says.

‘Monsieur, I see you and I see the sky, with all the stars.’

Taken aback by Arn’s grandness of expression, Luc stumbles up onto the front seat. He is flummoxed by his own response, which is a heat around the heart. He always feels tension around Arn, sometimes unpleasant and anxious. Luc is dismayed if chance means he must take another driver’s vehicle. It is nonsense, but he feels that he has betrayed Arn. He worries if Arn’s feelings will be hurt and calculates when and how he can apologize.

And Luc is aware.

Aware that he looks back as often as he can at Arn’s thighs and calves. Aware that his own people – plump, pink, grey and precise – do not attract him. The female dancers of the Cambodian Royal Ballet are pretty and firm of flesh, but Luc is aware that they earn only his attention and admiration. He does not masturbate thinking about them.

When he masturbates, he thinks of the girdle of lean muscle that joins the stomach muscles to the slim hips of Cambodian men. His heart goes up into his mouth when he passes them washing, glossy as seals, in the public fountains. At times the full meaning of this sinks in and he becomes utterly miserable, staring at the walls of his mother’s villa, or watching the lights of the passing traffic on the ceiling, listening to faraway flowering music from the nightclubs of Phnom Penh.

Today, after the lycée, Luc descends to the courtyard with its mango tree. He wears his white tennis shirt, white shorts, and as he expected, Arn waits outside the gate.

‘Le Club, comme d’habitude, Arn,’ he says. It’s tennis day.

‘Oh, Monsieur,’ says Arn. For once he is not smiling. For once he stares moon-faced and unhappy. He sighs, glances down and pulls in his lips until they are as thin as Luc’s.

‘Arn. My friend?’ Calling Arn his friend always produces collywobbles. For it is perilously close to the truth.

‘Today is New Year. I wanted to do something with you.’

Luc knows what his mother would say: the boy only wants money; they need money; if you want to give him money, do so. But don’t get too involved. You can’t really help him, you know. Unless you turn him into one of us.

His mother has read Luc correctly as being soft-hearted. His mother is an old hand. All her Cambodian friends are rich. They have handsome sons who also go to the lycée. But they don’t break Luc’s heart by keeping their one pair of trousers folded under the seat of a pedal-driven taxi. Some of them harden Luc’s heart by boasting of their houses and cars. He does not think that these middle-class Cambodians might be trying to establish equal grounds for friendship.

Luc, perhaps, wants to pity his friends. In any case, whatever it is that has hold of his heart is far too strong. It grips like a crocodile, no argument possible, only acceptance.

‘D’accord. It will be nice to spend New Year with you.’ Luc’s tongue stumbles slightly over the words. ‘I can’t think of anyone I’d rather spend it with.’

‘Pardon?’

Luc has to explain the complicated French. By the time Arn understands both of them feel awkward and hurt. Arn’s smile is not like the sun, but like the moon – wan, faded. ‘I thought we go to lake. Sit on pier. I have bought a lunch.’

The thought of Arn buying him anything causes Luc an anguish of heart. Arn can’t afford to buy anything. He has to rent the machine, he hardly eats. ‘Arn, you shouldn’t have done that, please, let me pay you for the lunch.’

What can Arn do? He accepts Luc’s money, but he looks unhappy, for this has ruined the gesture. Luc knows that he wanted to pay, wanted to pay him back. For what? He wants to make something manifest, but the act is disproportionate. What has Luc done for him? Except be friendly and open and … and well yes something more, but how could he see that?

Luc feels bad, and Arn feels bad that Luc feels bad, but above all just wants …

… wants them to be, not equals, that would be stupid; nobody is anybody else’s equal in Cambodia. Luc knows that Arn just wants them to be who they are with each other. Which is? Friends, friends at least.

More than friends, Luc.

These are the feelings that people sing about in cheap songs. They are real, those cheap feelings. They turn out not to be pretty lies after all. They are demanding realities.

Luc’s eyes feel hot. They swell as if about to burst. Dear God, I’m going to cry. I don’t like this; I should go and play tennis with that wizened old coach who I don’t even like. Arn is whispering. ‘Maybe you go to tennis.’

‘No! It is a lovely idea. To celebrate New Year. Let’s go to the Boeung Kak Lake.’

Sometimes genius comes to Luc, as if a powerful, spiny but beautiful flower thrusts itself out of the heart of his life. Luc says, ‘Let me pedal you.’

‘Luc!’

‘No! I need the exercise. Really. I will pedal.’

Arn is smiling again and laughing. Luc stretches back and squeezes the brake. Laughing aloud Arn rises out of his seat and the cyclo wobbles from side to side, tipping slightly. Luc bounds out of the seat and pulls Arn who is weak with hilarity, forward to the wide, padded bench. ‘No, no, no!’ laughs Arn.

‘You are an old grandfather,’ Luc says in Khmer. ‘I respect you. You should rest, I will pedal.’

Arn shakes his head at his overturning young French friend. He takes hold of Luc’s pink hairless biceps and holds them. He swings up onto the seat and looks over the back.

Luc pedals. Shadows of trees flicker across his face. Women saunter past, trays on their heads. And for some reason Luc starts to sing an old Françoise Hardy song, about looking on while boys and girls love. He bellows as he pedals, grinning at Arn, whose face is turned towards his as steadily as the moon.

His song mingles with one by Sin Sisimuth coming from some passing Dansette. The voice of Sin is warm, the music trills like birds. The sound mingles with the savours of roadside cooking, the gasps of bananas deep-frying on mounds of earth baked into stoves, wafts of satay on skewers dripping over charcoal, and the sticky smell of all that fruit. The song harmonizes with the singing clatter of people speaking and the horse-like clopping of the feet of Luc’s own people, strolling in shorts and white shirts, more unbuttoned than they could ever be at home.

The song flowers alongside the modern apartments painted cream, with bougainvillaea purple along the tops of the walls, and the palm trees and the sprinklers and the uniformed children and Librairies crowded with books in Khmer and French and pootling little Citroën 2CVs peeping horns as sharp and bouncy as Cambodian smiles.

I love it! I love it, thinks Luc as he cycles. I never want to leave; this will be my home. Goodbye medical school, goodbye hospital. I will become a cyclopousse driver and live under the stars.

Arn laughs and covers his face. ‘Oh! I cannot afford your fare.’

Something comes over Luc and he leans back. ‘My fare costs everything, but I do not charge money.’

My fare is you.

‘Oh, Monsieur!’ and Arn permits himself a florid khutuy gesture that would not be conceivable in Kompong Thom. ‘I fear my purse is not big enough.’

Luc doesn’t get what he means but something hot and heavy impels him. ‘Ah, but it’s not always the amount, it’s the quality that is important. Is it fine stuff?’

‘Oh, oh.’ Arn is leaning forward and shaking his shoulder. ‘It is the finest stuff. For you. Oh, everyone is looking.’

Luc only now registers Arn’s embarrassment. ‘They know we are just having fun,’ he says gently.

There is a look on Arn’s face that Luc has never seen shining out of anyone else’s. It is a kind of surrender. Very quickly, as they buzz past buses and women in stalls and lunchtime workers on their way back to the bank or telegraph office, Arn lifts himself up onto his knees, turns around over the back of the seat, and pecks a kiss on Luc’s cheek.

He plainly could not help it. Luc doesn’t blame him. Arn was overcome. But Luc does not know what to make of it. In the end, he decides to pity. His friend could not help it, he got over-excited, he is from a different culture, and you have to be aware of imposing Western meanings. It was a familial kiss …

No it wasn’t.

Luc feels the dark.

You know what this is, Luc. So does Arn; his expression is full of both love and awareness. It is kindly but not exactly innocent.

Oh God, this is what it is. I am that. That thing.

He looks at Arn, his gently burnished face, and accepts. If it means I get Arn, then yes. Yes I am. That is me. I am that thing. And right now, nobody can see, and if they can see I don’t care.

Suddenly Luc shouts like John Wayne, and drives the pedals even harder and faster, and Arn chuckles and laughs. Luc lifts his feet off the pedals and just for a moment, he is flying.

In those days Boeung Kak Lake was a park that people could stroll around. Luc and Arn arrive and Arn’s friends cluster round to laugh and joke about the spectacle of a barang pedalling a cyclopousse. The laughter is good-natured. It’s New Year, you get to do crazy things. The two men … boys … are sent on their way with good cheer by the other drivers who agree to look after Arn’s machine. Arn goes to the latrines, but not to relieve himself.

He changes into his white shirt, and his perfectly creased khaki slacks.

They head out for the park, full of prostitutes at night, but families by day. Halfway to the lake they are pelted with water balloons by a gang of kids. They are nice kids, boys and girls all about fourteen, so Arn and Luc just laugh. They walk along the pier and all the cubicles are taken. Well they would be full, wouldn’t they, it’s April 13th.

Luc sighs. ‘We can always go back and sit on the grass.’

Except that the very last little cubicle, right at the end of the walkway out over the lake, is empty. Maybe nobody persevered all the way to the end of the pier; maybe a family has just vacated it. But there it is – hammocks and a charcoal stove and a view of the little lake, with its lotus pads and dreamy girls and serious boys in canoes.

Heartbreak time. Arn has bought them lunch, bundled up his kramar. The kramar serves as his pyjamas, his modesty patch, his head-dress, and his shopping bag. He unties it carefully, gently and there is sticky rice in vine leaves, soup in perfectly tied little bags that have spilled nothing, pork in sauce with vegetables.

Luc tells him it is a wonderful lunch and they sit and talk about the usual things. And Arn becomes overwhelmed. Because his unlikely dream has come true. The huge beautiful kindly barang is his.

‘Luc, I want to study,’ he says as he eats. ‘Luc, I am so happy. I know life will be just great. Everything in Cambodia good now. We have our Prince. Your people good to us, but the politicians go home, so now we can be friends.’

Arn sways from side to side as if to music as he says, ‘We all live together and work hard, so Cambodian business, Cambodian factories, Cambodian music, all do very well now. We will become modern country. We join the world as friends.’

‘Modern country,’ says Luc and lifts his hand as if raising a toast. ‘Friends.’

It is April 1967 and rice exports have collapsed and the news says that in a place called Samlaut, somewhere near Battambang, the peasants are in revolt. The Prince blames Khieu Samphan and the communists.

For now the old French song keeps singing in Luc’s head. Lovers, the lyrics tell him, don’t fear for tomorrow.

Arn would be fifty-eight now, thinks Luc waking up in a tent in the dark, reeking of insect repellent. Where is he?

Whenever Luc visits Phnom Penh, he peers at the moto-dops and elderly motoboys. He scans bus windows, taxis and stalls in the Central Market. Most likely Arn would be using a different name now and his face would be changed. Arn could be bald, fat, or sucked-dry skinny. But most likely … well …

One out of three men died.

Leaf 35

April is when the red hibiscus announces the change of seasons like the musician blowing his conch. April is after the harvest and before the rains. April is when the ox-cart falls back, lifting its long neck to sniff the wind. The oxen sleep under the house. Inside it people sleep or dance. Season of rest, season of labour, April is when we hoe the earth to guide the waters like children to their beds, making straight canals to bear new stone. April is when we lay courtyard pavements. The people kneel and drop the stones like eggs. They hoot like birds and bellow like elephants and laugh and start to sing. April is when we bear the temple stones up the ramps and rock them to sleep like uncles. Season of war, April is when the generals make one last effort before the rain to press on with the campaign. April is when we create. April is when we destroy.