Pol Pot by Philip Short

their knees and elbows on the floor, and their hands raised together before their heads. The King sits above them, enthroned on a dais, sitting cross-legged like an Indian idol. When he enters or leaves, all present prostrate themselves three times. No one has the right
    to speak unless the King addresses him . . . and no one may publicly disagree with anything the King says.
    The symbolism was explicit: the heads of the courtiers, in Khmer culture the most sacred part of the body, were beneath the King’s feet. A special vocabulary had to be used when addressing him, and all those not of royal blood, even the grandest ministers, were, in the consecrated formula, ‘we who carry the King’s excrement on our heads’.
    Sâr used to visit the palace to see his sister, Roeung, and the Lady Meak, each of whom occupied a small wood-and-brick house in the precinct reserved for secondary wives. There he sometimes encountered Sihanouk’s mother, later to become Queen Kossamak. When she passed, he remembered, he and the other children would fall to their knees. Towards the end of his life, he would look back on those visits with
    nostalgia
    , speaking of the Queen, in particular, with affection.
    There may have been another reason why Sâr’s visits to the palace remained engraved on his memory. The harem of a Cambodian king in the 1930s was awash with repressed sexuality. As well as his official wives, King Monivong had innumerable concubines and serving girls, most of them in their teens or early twenties. Monivong was elderly and not in good health. Necessarily, most of these young women were physically unsatisfied.
    At fifteen, Sâr was still regarded as a child, young enough to be allowed into the women’s quarters. Decades later, two of the palace women, living out their old age on French government stipends in Paris, remembered ‘Little Sâr’, who used to come to visit them wearing his school uniform, a loose, white shirt with baggy trousers and wooden shoes. The young women would gather round, teasing him, they remembered. Then they would loosen his waistband and fondle his genitals, masturbating him to a climax. He was never allowed to have intercourse with them. But in the frustrated, hothouse world of the royal pleasure house, it apparently afforded the women a vicarious satisfaction.
    *
    Roeung by then enjoyed the King’s favour. Monivong himself had supervised the furnishing of her house and had given her jewellery and a motor-car. She, too, recalled Sâr’s visits — and she remembered, also, that ‘whenever he had something serious to say, he would make a
    joke
    of it.’
    It would be wrong to read too much into that. In Khmer culture,
    politeness
    — which, as Nhep noted, was another of Sâr’s early characteristics — always implies indirection. None the less, it offers an intriguing glimpse of a child who would spend the rest of his life dissimulating his thoughts behind an impenetrable wreath of smiles and laughter. The sense’ of fun, moreover, was genuine. Not only Nhep, but all Sâr’s friends during his schooldays remembered him as an amusing companion — ‘a boy it was
    nice to be with’
    , as one of them put it — and even Suong, his elder brother, whom the neighbours regarded as rather strait-laced, agreed that young Sâr was an
    ‘adorable child’
    who ‘wouldn’t hurt a chicken’ and never caused them any worry.
    The one black spot was his academic record. Chhay was evidently a gifted student and sailed through his exams. Sâr did not. He should have passed his primary school leaving certificate — the Certificat d’Etudes Primaires Complémentaires — in 1941. But it seems he did not obtain it until two years later, when he was already eighteen, having twice been held back a year, common practice in the French educational system when children have difficulty keeping up. Nhep, who attended an elementary school in the southern part of Phnom Penh, was also an indifferent student