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for a few packets of cigarettes and a bottle of plonk, but when I sent it in with the story my editor said, ‘I don’t publish pornography, no matter how tasteless.’
    Back then – in ’61 – I felt pity for Kiry. But more: in the photograph of a naked, bleeding man I thought I caught a glimpse of hope and maybe even of greatness. I thought I saw a man who was a radical but who could still make friends with the entire world. And now?

1967
    Late one afternoon Nhem Kiry, Member of Parliament, left his tiny office. He retrieved his pushbike and rode out into the heavy Phnom Penh heat, but not before he tucked his white cotton shirt into his trousers so it wouldn’t flap in the wind. There would be creases in the shirt later but no matter; he was finished at the office for the day.
    Kiry rode slowly along Monivong Boulevard, upright in the saddle, his face so impassive that if his legs hadn’t been pumping he might have been mistaken for a statue. He veered around a cyclo and said to himself, ‘I am a happy person. I am a happy person.’ He cracked a smile but his mouth locked into place as if he was letting out a silent scream.
    Kiry was on his way to see his friend Bun Sody, who was forever telling him that he was too stern. Kiry did not agree: if he was more often sombre than full of joy and light then that was because life was a serious business.
    Besides, Kiry thought that Sody took things too far. Kiry had seen him tell some caustic joke and then collapse on the floor, shaking uncontrollably, his limbs crashing into furniture; he once saw him giggle with such gusto that he vomited all over himself. Kiry did not think there was anything that funny about life in Cambodia.
    While Sody played the clown, Kiry ventured into the countryside to listen to the poorest of the peasants tell how the authorities systematically and legally stole their rice. He remembered all the details of these stories – not names but places and paddy yields – and he built up in his mind a panoramic vision of miserable inequity.
    Whenever he said goodbye to these peasants, Kiry flashed a smile so full of empathy and genuine warmth that they knew for certain that he really and truly was on their side. It would have shocked Sody, had he seen it; and then, Kiry suspected, reduced him to a hopeless mess of giggles.
    Kiry rode on. Even as sweat began to run down his armpits, a sensation he disliked intensely, he showed no outward discomfort. He rode a bicycle to remind all of Cambodia that he had refused a free Citroën and a chauffeur. His parliamentary colleagues had finally come to understand that he was incorruptible, but not before they’d offered him everything from warehouses full of cognac to women of all shapes and sizes and nationalities to teenage boys to suitcases full of US dollars to a cottage in the south of France. He’d rejected it all, yawned politely in their faces, and from that day on they’d tiptoed around him as if he were a landmine half out of the dirt. Kiry carried on as best he could, drawing strength from what Gandhi once said: ‘First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.’
    Kiry turned left, as did two motorcyclists following an indiscreet thirty metres behind. Everywhere Kiry went these days, the secret police followed. Kiry knew that they reported to General Lon Nol but he suspected that Prince Sihanouk was in on it: for a man who went about with his eyes squeezed shut, Sihanouk seemed capable of seeing vast distances.
    Lon Nol had started rumours that Kiry was in communication with the communists in the jungle – which was true enough, for there was a certain man who delivered news and instructions in the dead of night. But now Lon Nol was publicly accusing him of orchestrating the peasant unrest out west. The very idea was ludicrous, Kiry thought. His constituents were in the south. Nobody in Kandal province was rioting or killing police, although Kiry would not have