Free Figurehead by Patrick Allington

embassy. Be polite. Don’t let anyone hurt him. Do it now.’
    ‘Yes, comrade.’
    ‘And while you’re there, find out who’s hiding inside the embassy. I want a full list. I want to know if Lon Nol really went with the Americans. I want to know if they’re sheltering Sirik Matak and Long Boret and—’
    ‘Will you be all right here without me, comrade?’
    ‘Just get me that list. And see if you can be of any use at the hospital. Then go and see that everything is under control elsewhere.’
    ‘Elsewhere, comrade?’
    ‘Anywhere. I don’t care. Just go.’
    Sok approached the priest, who was arguing with one of the soldiers.
    ‘But I just came to collect a few things. My stoles are precious to me. One of them comes from Mexico. Peasant workers made it by hand, using the same cotton that—’
    ‘No.’
    ‘And my Bible. It’s in the vestry, just back there. My grandmother gave it to me the day I began school. I refuse to leave without it.’
    Sok stood so close to the priest that they could smell each other’s mouths. ‘Okay, but you have one minute. That is all. Then we will go to the embassy.’
    ‘Oh, I can walk there myself.’
    ‘We will escort you. The street is very dangerous.’
    ‘I’ll be fine.’
    ‘We will take you.’
    ‘Yes. All right.’
    ‘You should have run away with the Americans.’
    ‘Yes.’
    Finally it was quiet. Kiry sat on a pew, breathed deeply, held the rank air within his lungs, counted to ten and exhaled through pursed lips. None of the minor triumphs or quiet moments of self-satisfaction he had experienced in his life had prepared him for the elation that now threatened to immobilise him.
    He remembered the excitement of his boat trip to France – he was twenty-two years old – and the sense of accomplishment he attained simply by arriving safely in Marseille. That was a pleasant memory, he supposed, although the truth was he had vomited the whole way and had irritated Bun Sody, who was his cabin companion, by implying he knew so much more about the world than he did.
    From his time in Paris he remembered a deep conversation in a café with a young French woman about Lenin and Trotsky and the eternal revolution. His restrained delivery of his passionate argument so convinced her – he had long ago forgotten her name but she was tall and had long brown hair – that she followed him to his tiny apartment and stayed the night and most of the next day, an outcome he desired but would never have proposed. He was relieved when she left, having already come to believe that his moment of weakness had lost him thirty-six hours of reading time. When she knocked on his door a few days later, he pretended he was out. When he saw her in the street, he ducked into a doorway. When she wrote him a letter, he burned it, unopened.
    He recalled being joyfully mute when a panel of French academics heaped praise on his thesis. The work was rudimentary and speculative, he now knew. Still, he was proud that he’d produced a piece of research which somehow satisfied a panel of examiners who were at war with each other.
    He remembered his elevation to parliament. How proud his irretrievably frail mother had been. Now he knew – in truth, he’d always known – that Sihanouk had chosen him because of his apparent meekness. Still, he was proud of his reputation for incorruptibility and hard work. It had won him a second term in parliament, a useless time notable mainly because he had somehow achieved it against Sihanouk’s wishes. Still, the ordinary people had seen him in action and they considered him to be an honest patriot: what a useful tool that had been in the hard years that followed.
    Kiry thought about his mother. She had died in 1973. One day, walking home from the market, she tripped and fell. She lay in the street moaning quietly until her neighbours came and carried her to the hospital. But the wards and the corridors were full of soldiers, so she went home. Overnight her leg