Now, when Roger Guy Folly says ‘twenty-one hundred hours’ and I look at the alarm-clock on our dresser, I can see it’s not the same time in our country. So, when it’s night here, in other countries it’s still bright daylight, with children out playing. When we’re up and about here, in other places people are sleeping, and when we’re sleeping here, people elsewhere are up. It’s pretty weird.
Papa Roger always agrees with what Roger Guy Folly says. Sometimes he shouts, turns to us, tells us to be quiet, and promises he’ll explain what’s being said in a few minutes because Maman Pauline gets sick of listening to things she doesn’t understand and countries she’s never heard of before. Papa Roger writes down the names of the people, towns and countries on a piece of paper for me.
For example, this evening Roger Guy Folly is telling us about a town called Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Phnom Penh is too complicated to pronounce. It’s complicated to write down too, but once you’ve done it, it’s as easy as swallowing. Otherwise how would the Cambodians manage to write it and say it every time, when they’re only human, like us?
Maman Pauline can’t say ‘Phnom Penh’.
Papa Roger says: ‘Pauline, it’s very simple. To say Phnom Penh you make your mouth really small, you breathe out through a little hole, like when you’re whistling, then you suddenly open you mouth wide, like when you’re surprised by something really bad that’s happened, which it usually has in Cambodia!’
Roger Guy Folly tells us that the Vietnamese army has just taken the town of Phnom Penh and driven out the wicked people called the Khmer Rouge even though they are Cambodian too. The wicked people were treating their own people very badly, though they’re communist like we are. So the Vietnamese — their country is just next to Cambodia — said: Since these Khmer Rouge are threatening our borders, let’s get on over to Cambodia and take Phnom Penh out of the hands of the Khmer Rouge, that will give the Cambodian people a bit of a break after all that torturing, killing and liquidating by the Khmer Rouge. When the Cambodians went into Phnom Penh there was practically no one left in the city because of the Khmer Rouge, who’d driven everyone out. The Khmer Rouge had been really looking for a fight for ages. They pushed their Vietnamese neighbours over the edge, after years and years of fighting, like most countries with a common border. And then what happens is, one country says: This is my territory, the territory of my ancestors, I want to get it back, by fair means or foul. The other country says: Oh no, it’s not your territory, it’s mine, and I won’t let you take it back by fair means or foul. I’m going to protect it by fair means or foul. And they start fighting by fair means or foul for years on end. That’s why when the Vietnamese went into Cambodia, the Cambodians were frightened to begin with and said to themselves: What are these Vietnamese guys going to do to us? Have they come to take our country from us by fair means or foul? As soon as the Cambodians realised that the Vietnamese were actually after the Khmer Rouge, many of them helped the Vietnamese army, because they’d had enough of being tortured, killed and liquidated. The government of the Khmer Rouge fled, and went to hide in the bush. Their boss is called Pol Pot and he’s so wicked he wiped out over a million and a half people, then fled when the Vietnamese invaded his country.
If I, Michel, was Cambodian, I would have supported Vietnam, no question. Not everyone likes the fact that Vietnam went into Cambodia to drive out the wicked Khmer Rouge. The Russians are ok with it, but countries like China or America and lots of others that secretly support the Khmer Rouge say: It’s wrong for Vietnam to go into Cambodia like that, we don’t agree, we’re going to carry on supporting the Khmer Rouge who are hiding in the bush. The Chinese even declared: We’re going to punish the Vietnamese too, we’re going to attack them good and proper, we’re going into their country like they went into Cambodia and we’ll see what happens then. Fortunately the Chinese plan failed.
The result is, it’s a mess down there: now there’s a new government in Cambodia and from now on their country’s called the Popular Republic of Kampuchea. So in a way they’re like our brothers, but I don’t know if our country is against Vietnam or for it, because Roger Guy Folly doesn’t mention us in all this. Why would he talk about us? Who wants our opinion? Our country is so small, it’s never mentioned in the news. If we have a conflict here one day, like what’s happening in Cambodia, then they’ll talk about us all the time, as if we were a big country. On the other hand, I prefer it if they don’t talk about us on the radio. Yes, I prefer being a little country, at least that way they leave us in peace; we can take it easy, which means no war, no grabbing another country’s cities, no Khmer Rouge here; no Pol Pot either, giving the Popular Republic of Kampuchea grief from where he’s hiding out in the bush.
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I feel really sick when Uncle René tells my mother that Papa Roger isn’t my real father, that he’s just a ‘foster father’. I don’t care for Papa Roger because he ‘fosters’ me, and he didn’t decide to be my father so he could do some ‘fostering’. Even ‘adoptive’ father’s better than that, at least that means he chose me and chose me after careful reflection. Papa Roger did actually see me before he decided to make me his child. Normally you don’t get to choose what your children look like, you don’t even see them before they come into the world. You wait for the doctor to say it will be a girl, or a boy. If Papa Roger really hadn’t wanted me when he first set eyes on me, he’d have left me alone with my mother. But I smiled at him that day — and according to Maman Pauline I was very happy, apparently that’s the moment when I came alive, and said to myself: ‘I, Michel, will be someone in life.’
Papa Roger is my father, that’s all there is too it. I don’t want to know if I’ve got a real father somewhere. I’ve no wish to see the face of some man I don’t know, who’s supposedly my real father. He’s a coward, who left Maman Pauline all alone in hospital when he had married her back in Louboulou, my mother’s village. He was a policeman there, before he brought my mother to live in the district of Mouyondzi where he’d been transferred to. Maman Pauline was a little girl to him. And only two years after they married, this policeman said to her: now I’m going to do what I like, I’m sending you back to your bush, if you don’t agree. If you dare open your mouth, I will take more wives if I feel like it, Miss village girl from Louboulou, I’ll have your family put in prison till the end of time.
Whenever Maman Pauline tried to speak, the policeman waved his pistol at her, like in a cowboy film and shouted: ‘What use to me are you, eh, Pauline? You’ve been pregnant twice. And twice the child was born dead, straight from your womb! So what use are you, eh? Your family are all sorcerers. They’ve put a gris-gris in your belly! You’ll never have children!’
The policeman had stopped sleeping at home. He turned up for a few minutes in the morning to change his clothes, then he’d rush off again, as though our house was occupied by demons. Maman Pauline kept her mouth shut. What could she say to the guy? She knew very well that he lived with other women he loved more than her, other women he could have children with, who wouldn’t die as they came out of their mother’s womb. Maman Pauline left the door open all night because the policeman got angry with her if she shut it. He wanted to come and go whenever he pleased, whatever time of day. But he only came every other day, then every third day, then once a week, then once a month. Then Maman Pauline saw him no more. She didn’t even try asking at the police station where he worked. By the time the policeman had been gone three months, she had another problem which made her very sad: her belly was getting bigger. And she stopped leaving the house — she didn’t want the neighbours to see. She waited till nightfall to go out and do her shopping, from the women who sold soup in the streets. She wore several pagnes, to hide her belly.