When The

By Pico Iyer

Someth May distinctly remembers his mathematics tutor at a private school in Cambodia (now Kampuchea). He was a thin man with short gray hair who drove around town on a "rusty old sky-blue Mobylette." It made a terrible noise that his laughing students likened to a "tubercular cough." He always dressed simply, allowed no jokes and demanded punctuality, but he was a popular teacher who never punished his charges. At the end of each lesson, the mild man in sandals generally delivered a brief lament for the corruption of their society.

A little later, that society was annihilated. The tutor, Khieu Samphan, turned out to be one of its executioners as a leader of the Khmer Rouge, which disposed of roughly 2 million Cambodians -- nearly a quarter of the country's population -- in just four years.

The singular achievement of Cambodian Witness, a quiet, devastating memoir of this genocide, is to reveal the faces behind the numbing statistics and, more terrifying, to show how familiar they look. The fanatics who unleashed the bloodbath were usually, it seems, the people next door.

Cambodian Witness begins, happily enough, with an easeful and exotic tour of prerevolutionary life in the capital of Phnom Penh, where May's father was a doctor. The narrator's earliest memory is of fighting with his siblings for the free toy inside his mother's packages of Tide, and the household he describes with clear-eyed affection is governed by all the rites of any middle-class family anywhere -- watching TV on weekends, anxiously awaiting exam results, going for picnics in the countryside. The narrator himself appears to have been a regular little scamp who delighted in gambling with rubber bands, spraying his friends with Pepsi at his elder sister's wedding and lining up with his schoolmates in a bright new uniform to greet a foreign dignitary with the cry of "Long life to Jacqueline Kennedy!"

Yet behind the placid routine lie the very particular shadows and superstitions of Cambodian culture. May sets his story against the backdrop of his country's night world, a place of sorcerers and omens, in which dreams of blood mean money on the way and the hooting of an owl portends miscarriage. One day he drops in on a friend to find the boy spouting gibberish while a cross-legged magician tries to exorcise his "evil spirit" with the branch of a star-fruit tree.

Another morning, in April 1975, as the Mays are relaxing over breakfast, the capital is suddenly stormed by the Khmer Rouge, and everything is abruptly swallowed up in the shadow world. As the country descends into anarchy, the 17-year-old narrator becomes a fugitive. Packing up his treasured copies of Animal Farm and Rebecca, he is driven in the family Land Rover through a boulevard of corpses, out into the wasted fields. Suddenly, the children who loved to listen to ghost stories are living them.

In the pages that follow, May conjures up the terror of a sunless dreamscape. He recalls abrupt summonses, moonlit interrogations in the fields and the quiet dawn in which he had to start digging his own grave -- before being reprieved for hard labor. He describes daytime marches through a desolate land of phantoms. "There was dew on the vegetation, and I washed my face in it. Deer were calling through the mist. We passed through alternating areas of thick forest and cassava fields. The stilted huts in the fields were empty and there was no one on the track."

He also registers the everyday details of a nation's collective suicide: people are said to be feasting on corpses; ten-year-olds take their own lives; in a single paragraph May laconically records the deaths of three of his siblings. Some of these horrors may seem almost routine to those who have seen the film The Killing Fields or read Molyda Szymusiak's The Stones Cry Out, a recently published memoir that covers much the same killing ground. Yet May is unusually sensitive to the monstrous ironies of a world turned inside out. While some peasants starved, others, suddenly allowed to eat, gorged themselves till they burst. Having outlawed all emotion and distinction, the Khmer Rouge found that they had also abolished all expertise, so that the "whole society was working at maximum -- and brutally enforced -- inefficiency." And even after the murderers were routed, there was no release: the Cambodians who were still left found themselves squeezed between their two bitter enemies, the Thais and the Vietnamese. Those who survived the degradation, May admits, did so only by embracing it.

Throughout the dark nights of unreason, May never tries to explain the horror. The real horror, he knows, is that it cannot be explained. Nor does he permit himself any self-pity or sensationalism. The first time he panicked throughout the long ordeal, he writes, was when he had to rush his pregnant sister to a hospital three days after their bewildered arrival in Washington. Assisted in that sudden release and encouraged to learn English by British Poet-Journalist James Fenton, whom he had met in Phnom Penh, the author, now 29, gets it all down with a straightforward vividness that chills the bones. / His portrait of Cambodia lost would in any circumstances be vital anthropology; in the light of what came after, however, it also assumes the weight of almost unbearable elegy.