Read Online The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers by Anton Piatigorsky - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Anton Piatigorsky
Ads: Link
amusing.
You are a fool, Saloth Sâr. Why did you let them know what you wanted? Why did you ever tell them your name? You are nothing but a plaything for the king’s superfluous wives. They will tell your sister Roeung. They know all your secrets. They know you
. Sâr’s face heats into crimson red; he wishes he could rip the sod beneath his feet and bury himself inside it.
Although his humiliation is complete, the desire to return to those dancers surges through him, churning his blood and swelling his veins. His feet are tapping inside their clogs. Were it not for the evening’s rehearsal and his sister’s interruption, Sâr knows he’d be crossing the wide avenue again right now, en route to the royal compound. “I am weak,” he says out loud. His desire dampens at theacknowledgement and his eyes fill with tears. “I am weak and exposed.”
Despair nails him to the bench. He regards the serene vista before him. How wide the river is. How slow and peaceful. Sâr pans north and spies dozens of covered boats permanently moored at jutting angles along the shore of the river. He sees the peasants’ tiny plots of cultivated riverbank, their tobacco and vegetables. These are seasonal gardens, since that coastal slope will be submerged a few weeks into monsoon season, when the swollen Mekong River overwhelms the Tonle Sap and—amazingly, majestically, almost incomprehensibly—reverses the flow of the Tonle Sap away from the sea and back into the great lake. The river’s reversal is the origin of much of his childhood joy. Days upon days of sweet torrential rain, cooling the air, burying whole villages, transforming the dusty roads of his hometown into deep canals. He loved the way his parents’ home, raised on its mangrove piles, became an island every year. He recalls sitting on their porch in early monsoon season, watching the water encroach and bury the earth. Now, thinking of it, Sâr begins to feel a vague hope. Can’t his desire, like the April heat, be quenched by a change of season? If the rain can reverse the flow of a wide and mighty river, why can’t he change his personal direction? His decadence is no more solid than the ground beneath his parents’ home. Why can’t he also flood his path and flow in reverse?
Sâr leans forward and bites his lip. Maybe it’s possible. Maybe he can do it. The sole requirement, it seems, is aproper loss of self. Don’t monks achieve nirvana? Didn’t the Buddha achieve nirvana? There must be some means for a layperson to disappear.
He recalls the previous November’s Water Festival, when his cousin Meak and his sister Roeung invited him to the open-air Chan Chhaya Pavilion to witness the annual dances. Sitting on one of the raised viewing platforms, his back pressed against the balustrade, Sâr absorbed the light of a thousand candles—although he himself, outside their range, was bathed in the more diffuse glow of the evening’s full moon. The scene impressed him deeply. He remembers how King Monivong daintily extracted an Abdullah cigarette from a bejewelled tin on a side table and offered it to a nearby guest. He remembers the king’s wide-brimmed crown and sacred sword, his rigid posture in the large throne underneath the interior arch, while the muscular arm of a statuesque servant held the royal seven-tiered parasol (about which Sâr had heard so much) above his head. He also remembers, to the right of Monivong, displeased like a child by his less ornate chair, the Résident Supérieur dressed in a European suit. He wore gaudy insignia on his breast to designate his authority as colonial governor of the Cambodian protectorate of French Indochina. He sipped gin and quinine with his legs crossed effeminately, waiting for the evening’s dances to begin.
That dance was the first time Sâr had seen Chanlina. She was stunning, no older than seventeen. At first he could only look at her, although she was merely one of theseven motionless background Apsaras,
You are a fool, Saloth Sâr. Why did you let them know what you wanted? Why did you ever tell them your name? You are nothing but a plaything for the king’s superfluous wives. They will tell your sister Roeung. They know all your secrets. They know you
. Sâr’s face heats into crimson red; he wishes he could rip the sod beneath his feet and bury himself inside it.
Although his humiliation is complete, the desire to return to those dancers surges through him, churning his blood and swelling his veins. His feet are tapping inside their clogs. Were it not for the evening’s rehearsal and his sister’s interruption, Sâr knows he’d be crossing the wide avenue again right now, en route to the royal compound. “I am weak,” he says out loud. His desire dampens at theacknowledgement and his eyes fill with tears. “I am weak and exposed.”
Despair nails him to the bench. He regards the serene vista before him. How wide the river is. How slow and peaceful. Sâr pans north and spies dozens of covered boats permanently moored at jutting angles along the shore of the river. He sees the peasants’ tiny plots of cultivated riverbank, their tobacco and vegetables. These are seasonal gardens, since that coastal slope will be submerged a few weeks into monsoon season, when the swollen Mekong River overwhelms the Tonle Sap and—amazingly, majestically, almost incomprehensibly—reverses the flow of the Tonle Sap away from the sea and back into the great lake. The river’s reversal is the origin of much of his childhood joy. Days upon days of sweet torrential rain, cooling the air, burying whole villages, transforming the dusty roads of his hometown into deep canals. He loved the way his parents’ home, raised on its mangrove piles, became an island every year. He recalls sitting on their porch in early monsoon season, watching the water encroach and bury the earth. Now, thinking of it, Sâr begins to feel a vague hope. Can’t his desire, like the April heat, be quenched by a change of season? If the rain can reverse the flow of a wide and mighty river, why can’t he change his personal direction? His decadence is no more solid than the ground beneath his parents’ home. Why can’t he also flood his path and flow in reverse?
Sâr leans forward and bites his lip. Maybe it’s possible. Maybe he can do it. The sole requirement, it seems, is aproper loss of self. Don’t monks achieve nirvana? Didn’t the Buddha achieve nirvana? There must be some means for a layperson to disappear.
He recalls the previous November’s Water Festival, when his cousin Meak and his sister Roeung invited him to the open-air Chan Chhaya Pavilion to witness the annual dances. Sitting on one of the raised viewing platforms, his back pressed against the balustrade, Sâr absorbed the light of a thousand candles—although he himself, outside their range, was bathed in the more diffuse glow of the evening’s full moon. The scene impressed him deeply. He remembers how King Monivong daintily extracted an Abdullah cigarette from a bejewelled tin on a side table and offered it to a nearby guest. He remembers the king’s wide-brimmed crown and sacred sword, his rigid posture in the large throne underneath the interior arch, while the muscular arm of a statuesque servant held the royal seven-tiered parasol (about which Sâr had heard so much) above his head. He also remembers, to the right of Monivong, displeased like a child by his less ornate chair, the Résident Supérieur dressed in a European suit. He wore gaudy insignia on his breast to designate his authority as colonial governor of the Cambodian protectorate of French Indochina. He sipped gin and quinine with his legs crossed effeminately, waiting for the evening’s dances to begin.
That dance was the first time Sâr had seen Chanlina. She was stunning, no older than seventeen. At first he could only look at her, although she was merely one of theseven motionless background Apsaras,
Similar Books
