Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

amusing first portrait of Keang, she disrupts the concentration of a sort of Western ascetic.
Keang makes a royal entrance into the Phnom Penh Press Centre, ‘greeting first one
acquaintance and then another. All the journalists she spoke to, male and female, were
laughing by the time she moved on’, until she passes by a newly arrived New York Times
correspondent. ‘He had a Vandyke beard and the air of a noted intellectual forced to analyze
tragedies whose implications could scarcely be comprehended by gross lesser mortals.’ He has
a ‘new and shining and stylishly slanted’ Panama hat which attracts Keang’s attention. ‘She
snatched it from Broinowski’s head and put it on and posed for him, smiling. It looked very
good on her.’ Broinowski manages ‘a pained smile’ but reaches for the hat, ‘his face growing
uneasy’. She runs off waving the hat in the air to the general applause of the other journalists,
followed by Broinowski, whose ‘desire to get his hat back far outweighed his dignity’,
shouting after her. He returns, red-faced and hatless, another sage fallen victim to an
apsarasas.
Langford still remains Keang’s most important victim. She disrupts his sense of
professional orderliness (HW, 260), points out to him his repressed anger and feelings (HW,
270), enthrals him with the beauty of Cambodia (HW, 268), awakens self-awareness of his
unique role in the Cambodian war (HW, 270), and finally even gets him to make the definitive
choice to take up a gun against the Khmer Rouge (HW, 377-78). Yet, once she has deflated the
ascetic photographer’s own built-up sakti, Keang assumes the role of Parvati, who is the sakti
of Shiva, to motivate Langford to accept the role for which he is destined. Colonel Chandara,
the leader against the Khmer Rouge who will need Langford’s help, makes this clear enough:
If you want to become Cambodian, he said, and make this your home,
you should perhaps look at Ly Keang. She greatly admires you. She’s a fine
girl.
—He’d surprised me again, and I answered carefully. Yes, she is, I said.
But I hardly know her. She’s closer to my friend Dmitri Volkov.
—She sees death in your friend, he said. She sees life in you. So do I.
(HW, 279)
An interesting but unexplored element of the apsarasas here is how they are the rewards
in paradise for heroes who fall in battle. If Koch were writing a saint’s life in the tradition of
- 211 -