Free Figurehead by Patrick Allington Page A

blew up like a balloon, hard and black. One by one her organs rebelled, so that by the time she died a few days later the doctor could only guess at the cause. It was weeks before Kiry heard the news and months before he learnt the details.
    Kiry thought about his brother Goy, older by one year. Goy had been a burly boy with manly shoulders, whereas Kiry was skinny and prone to falling over and skinning his knees. Inexplicably, Kiry always won their races to the well to collect water – even though he had the handicap of carrying the buckets. Kiry was twelve years old before he, too, learnt to lose on purpose. He wondered where Goy was now: probably limping to Kandal Province, assuming – fool that he was – that his well-connected brother would rescue him.
    Inside an annex at the back of the cathedral, Kiry located a winding staircase. He began to climb and was pleased that his legs grew stronger and that he felt, at last, properly connected to the earth.
    At the top of the tower he broke a couple of rotten wooden slats and leaned against the cold metal of a brass bell. As he admired the view his sandals crunched down on dried pigeon droppings. He was deaf – or indifferent – to the sounds the city made as it expelled its inhabitants: the din of two million shuffling people, the crying toddlers, the murmured survival plans that families debated and disputed, the occasional bursts of gunfire, the cries of the living as they saw corpses in gutters and floating like logs down the Sap River, the raucous backfires as victorious soldiers taught themselves to drive.
    He could see a broken line of people leaving Calmette Hospital. Inside the hospital, Akor Sok herded the ill and the injured down a set of stairs and onto the street. ‘Come on, keep moving, keep moving,’ Sok ordered a woman with a bandage covering a useless eye, then a hobbling youth with shrapnel embedded in his thigh, then a man clutching his bloated bladder, then a woman holding a limp four-year-old girl, her operation aborted, her stomach wide open.
    Kiry could see Wat Phnom, now abandoned. The smart monks had discarded their robes and transformed themselves into peasants, just as the sensible soldiers from Lon Nol’s army had shed their khaki skins. The beggars had left too, suddenly no more disadvantaged than anyone else, indistinguishable from the privileged citizens who wore their oldest clothes into the street and strapped their jewels and their dollars to their bodies.
    From this vantage point, Kiry let out a single whoop of delight. He felt as if he was flying and he didn’t care whose shoulders he had leapt from. Anything was now possible. The view from the sky was so spectacular that nothing else mattered.
    * * *
    Make no mistake, Prince Norodom Sihanouk has heard every single ridiculous rumour about the new Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia. He’s heard about the mass killings of so-called ‘class enemies.’ He’s heard about chronic food and medicine shortages. He’s heard that his own role as head of state will be purely ceremonial and he’s even heard that his freedom and safety will be jeopardised if he returns to Cambodia.
    As is so often the case, the truth is very different. Prince Sihanouk is currently in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, where he spoke with this reporter. Shortly, with great optimism, with a song in his heart, he and his wife, Monique, will return to their beloved Phnom Penh.
    Prince Sihanouk acknowledges that the Khmer Rouge have largely emptied the cities but he points out that most people returned to their home provinces, that families were not separated and that no one was forced to leave Phnom Penh if they preferred to stay. ‘I am so proud that Cambodians are the first in the world to create a classless society,’ he says. ‘And the evacuation could not be avoided. Lon Nol had turned Phnom Penh into a Sodom and Gomorrah.’
    This reporter has not yet visited the new Cambodia but understands, from