Highways to a War (59 page)

I glanced at Langford; but he was listening in silence, his face showing nothing.

“When the city falls,” Aubrey said to me, “have you considered staying?”

I’d considered it, I said; but not with much enthusiasm. The Khmer Rouge didn’t seem likely to respect press neutrality.

“Now you’re seeing them as bogeymen, as the Americans do,” Aubrey said. “But our friends speak from ignorance about the Khmer Rouge, believe me. I know a little more about them. So do some of my colleagues in Foreign Affairs: it’s been our business to know. I know some of the KR leaders personally. Met them originally in Paris: just boys, then. And I maintained friendships with them here in Phnom Penh, when I was First Secretary here in the sixties. Real friendships: links that can be revived. You’ve got to realize what they’re actually like, Harvey—it might surprise you.” His voice took on a soothing tone, and he smiled: I began to see why Mike called him Uncle Aubrey. “They’re not monsters,” he said. “They’re Left Bank Marxist intellectuals: idealists. Somewhat naive. In other words, the sort of people we can deal with. And we will.”

Mike drained his cognac and put it down with a rap. He said nothing, but his raised eyebrows and faint smile caused Hardwick to glance at him sharply.

“Michael doesn’t agree,” he said. “I respect his experience of the Khmer Rouge soldiers in the field, Harvey, but not even
he
knows very much about the KR leadership.” His voice had an edge to it, and for the first time the hardness showed clearly: a particular kind that I’ve usually come across otherwise in senior policemen. But still Langford sat back and remained silent, his face mild and untelling, like a dutiful son hearing his father out.

Aubrey turned back to me. “Sihanouk has said in his broadcasts from Peking that the KR will only execute those they regard as traitors,” he said. “Things will settle down after that, we can depend on it. Then we’ll need to understand the regime—and not only Canberra but Washington will desperately need insights. That’s why a correspondent of your caliber should stay, Harvey. The links I’m talking about could be interesting to you. Links that our American friends simply can’t come by.” He drew on his cigar, watching me.

I’ll have to disappoint you, I told him. I’m a cowardly journalist: I don’t take chances. And I have a wife to consider. I’ll be out on the first helicopter, when the Khmer Rouge arrive.

Aubrey’s eyes remained fixed on my face, and his smile vanished. “Really,” he said, and said no more; he turned away to signal for a waiter.

He’d understood me, and now wasted no more time: the topic was dismissed.

 

 

 

 

A little later, he excused himself; he had a dinner appointment with an old and dear friend from the French embassy, he said.

Left alone, Mike and I sat on in a faintly awkward silence. Then I said: Your Uncle Aubrey doesn’t waste time. Does he usually try and recruit every journo he meets?

He grinned, fingering an ashtray. “Not usually,” he said. “But he’s dead keen to find people to hang on here, after the Khmer Rouge win. People who can report on the new regime.”

I asked him if he intended to be one of them.

He stared at me for a moment, leaning back. In all these years, he and I had never discussed his association with Hardwick—and I’d never even hinted at my assumption that Aubrey was an ASIS man. But tonight had seemed a good opportunity. Everything had conspired to create it: the deepening mutter of disaster in the darkness beyond the umbrellas; the drunken, nervy laughter that came from underneath them; the sense of everything ending. And I was right; when Langford spoke again, he took my knowledge for granted.

“No,” he said finally. “I’ll be staying—but not: for Uncle Aubrey.” He looked away from me, still toying with the ashtray, and didn’t enlarge on this. Then he said: “Aubrey got me started as a combat cameraman when I was young and in trouble, a long time ago. I owed him for that. So I gave him a bit of operational intelligence over the years: stuff I picked up when I was moving around-stuff that his Foreign Affairs people couldn’t get. Some of it raised his stocks in London and Washington, as well as in Canberra. That was the ultimate feather in the cap for Aubrey. Our intelligence people love it when the CIA listens to them. He reckoned that some of it went as high as the Oval Office.”

He looked up at me quickly, putting down the ashtray. “I know what you’re thinking, Harvey. But there’s never been a conflict of interest. There would have been, for a words man like you; you’d have owed information like that to ABS first. But it didn’t arise for a photographer: it was nothing but background to me. And I really wanted to help Aubrey, back in the sixties. He’s quite an extraordinary bloke: not just any old spook.”

He felt in the pocket of his loud, aquamarine shirt and found a single, deformed cigarette there—no doubt scrounged. He leaned forward and lit it from the lamp, continuing to gaze into the flame with a faraway expression. “Aubrey’s Special Operations,” he said. He kept the cigarette in his mouth, which made his words indistinct, and his voice—no doubt deliberately—was softer than usual, so that I had to lean over to hear him. “He’s crucially involved, here and in Vietnam. He’s an adviser to the U.S. military, among other things. There’s not much that old bloke hasn’t been involved with, in his time. This is a man who started with British MI6 before World War Two, Harvey, when he was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. He practically founded Australian Intelligence, under MI6 instructions.”

He paused, drawing on his bent cigarette, expecting me to be impressed.

I made a suitable grunt; but to tell you the truth I found his respect quaint, considering the life he’d led himself. He was revealing things not just about Aubrey Hardwick but about himself—rather as people tend to do when they speak of a parent or a lover. Uncle Aubrey was a figure from that War of wars which had loomed over both our childhoods, and which dwarfed the present conflict as legend always dwarfs reality. For Mike, Hardwick was a survivor out of legend: a flesh-and-blood artifact of whom he’d always be in partial awe—legendary though Langford himself might have become in the eyes of others. I wonder if it’s always like this, as eras give way to one another? A hall of mirrors: reality emulating some previous
legend,
and then itself becoming legend, while not quite believing it can be so—transfigured only by death. There’s a pathos about it, don’t you think?

Mike was continuing to talk. “So I did what I could for the old boy. I even used to believe I was doing some good, in a way. Helping to stop the Communist takeover in Asia. Now you’ll think I’m a hawk, or naive, or both. Well, I
was
bloody naive in the sixties, Harvey, that’s for sure.”

You’ve changed your views, then, I said.

“Oh yes,” he said. “I’ve changed them, all right.” He expelled smoke with a slow, regretful hiss.

“I used to believe that the Americans would save Vietnam; save Cambodia,” he said. “Well, we know now what a joke that is, don’t we? The South’s fighting for its life, and there’s no hope left. Nixon promised the South that he’d back them all the way with money and arms, and never see them defeated. Now Nixon’s gone, Congress is breaking all the promises: so the South’s finished. And you know what they’re going to do in Cambodia. They’ll shoot through soon and leave these people for dead: leave them to the Khmer Rouge. Even the arms and the food will stop. And the politicians and the spooks will go and start a new game, after that. Aubrey’s getting ready: you heard. Bloody sickening, mate.”

I’d no reason to doubt the feeling behind his words. Yet the odd thing was that they were spoken with the same lack of emphasis—even casualness—as always. He would always be like this: always the mild detachment, I thought, so that you wondered how strongly he felt about anything. I never heard him sound bitter or enraged: it was what was most attractive about him; it was why so many people liked him. He seemed to have been born unable to get angry or overinvotved—and yet what he was actually saying now was totally at odds with that. In made him the enigma he still is to me.

We know all this, Snow, I said. But come on, what can you do? It’s just about over now. The Lon Nol lot were too corrupt, too disorganized. They’re beaten.

He leaned towards me, and put both hands deliberately on the table. In him, the action was as arresting as a more violent gesture would have been in someone else. His voice remained low, but now I thought I heard a hint of vehemence in it. “No,” he said. “They’re
not
beaten, Harvey. That’s the lie that’s being put out so that they can be finally left in the shit. But they’re still holding most of the provincial capitals—right? And that’s where most of the population is now: the towns are crammed with refugees from the Khmer Rouge—people who are there because they’ve had a taste of what’s coming. If the Yanks did a real airlift, the Government could still win. Don’t you see?”

I looked at him dubiously, but I wasn’t going to argue. He leaned back again, stubbing out the tortured cigarette, and seemed to relax. “Maybe you think it’s a government not worth saving,” he said. “And I don’t think much of it, either. But the ordinary Khmer troops are still fighting like tigers for their families and their homes and their temples.” He gestured vaguely towards the drive. “It’s all so hopeless, but they’re so bloody brave. They know this government’s all they have. Yes, it’s rotten; but it gives them a chance against tyranny. Because what’s coming is real tyranny, mate: so much worse you won’t believe it. We’re not talking about the North Vietnamese any more: they might have been tolerable, by comparison.”

You think so? I said.

“I bloody know so.” He pointed at our fellow correspondents around the pool. “But these guys don’t know, the Government here doesn’t know, even their military brass don’t know—and Aubrey doesn’t know. He really does have a lot of links here that go back a long way: the high officials and the military and a lot of the royal family are his buddies, from his days as a diplomat here. But he’s too old to go into the field himself, and he’s got no field agents who can possibly get near the Khmer Rouge. No one can penetrate them.”

He was silent for a moment, and I saw that the legend, the surrogate father, was being rejected.

“He won’t listen to me,” Mike said. “Aubrey’s living in the sixties. He thinks it can go back now to the way it was under Prince Sihanouk: his favorite time in Cambodia. He remembers the nice young students he knew then, who’ve grown up to be cadres. He believes that bullshit he and his Foreign Affairs mates are putting out about Khmer Rouge intellectuals. He’s not in touch.”

Well, we’ll all be gone soon, I said.

“Not me,” he said.

Surely he wasn’t serious about that, I said.

“I’m staying,” he said. “With Ly Keang.” His voice remained unemphatic.

Why? For Aubrey? You’re crazy, I said. Get out: bring Ly Keang with you.

He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he looked towards the drive, speaking so softly that I had to strain to hear. “It’s not for Aubrey,” he said. “It’s for us; for Cambodia.” He looked at me. “Ordinary people get used and abused all the time in this world —I learned that when I was young. And I’m on no one’s side but theirs now, Harvey: the ordinary people here.”

He drained his cognac and soda. “It’s bloody politicians who’ve destroyed this country, isn’t it, Harvey? And some of them have never even seen the place. The farmers back home are right: never trust a politician.” He grinned without amusement. “There’s no way you can use people and save them at the same time,” he said. “That’s not the way.”

So what is the way? I asked.

“Fight
with
them,” he said. “That’s what I’ve decided. That’s where Aubrey can still be useful: he can get us some of the help we’ll need. The arms. The underground backing. We’ll need all of it we can get.”

I suddenly felt as though I were dreaming. His manner was so normal: almost happy. And yet what he was saying was unreal.

We? I said.
We?

“Colonel Chandara’s outfit,” he said. “The Free Khmer. Ly Keang and I are going to be with them when they regroup: probably on the Thai border. This is my country now, mate. I’m staying to fight.”

I sat and stared at him: I’ve forgotten now what my next speech consisted of. Helpless remonstrances, no doubt: useless efforts at making him see what I considered to be his madness.

A few seconds later, the Khmer Rouge Bloodbath Song rose from a few tables away: looking across, we saw that the singers were Bill Wall and a couple of British correspondents. Bill was looking in our direction, beckoning to us to join them. Standing to obey, I found that I’d become fairly drunk. Langford had too, I think.

So the scene begins to distort and fade: the dark garden, the empty blue oblong of the pool, the strings of colored lights in the trees, the light tropical suits and dresses, the white and brown faces, and the old hotel’s ranks of secretive windows, whose closed nineteenth-century shutters had once hidden French colonial intrigues and boredom and adulteries, and were now hiding the more frantic intrigues and ringing phones and quick fornications of my colleagues of the international press, who had made the Royal hum like a beehive for these past five years. Soon (if I can allow myself a moment of elegy for this lost period of my life) the humming would stop, and we too would be gone; soon, any night now, we too would be nothing but after-images, hanging in the air of the old Hotel le Royal: the important ringing of our phones stilled, our jokes and all our wild urgencies and deadlines as archaic and faintly ridiculous as the concerns of the French planters. But for now, and perhaps for the last time, here we were, seated at our small round table, singing into each other’s faces while a dubious and uneasy Chinese waiter watched us. The tune was “She was Poor but She Was Honest”: