I only once ever met someone who had known both Princess Soumphady and King Sisowath. Her name was Chea Samy and she was said to be one of the greatest dancers in Cambodia, a national treasure. She was also Pol Pot's sister-in-law.

She was first pointed out to me at the School of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh - a rambling complex of buildings not far from the the Wat Phnom where the UN's twenty-thousand-strong peacekeeping force has its headquarters. It was January, only four months before coutrywide elections were to be held under the auspices of Untac, as the UN's Transitional Authority in Cambodia is universally known. Phnom Penh had temporarily become one of the most cosmpolitan towns in the world, its streets a traffic nightmare, with Untac's white Land Cruisers cutting through shoals of careering scooters, mopeds and cyclo-pousses, like whales cruising through drifting plankton.

The School of Fine Arts was hidden from this multinational traffic by piles of uncleared refuse and a string of shacks and shanties. It's cavernous halls and half-finished classrooms were oddly self-contained, their atmosphere the self-sustaining, honeycomb bustle of a huge television studio.

I had only recently arrived in Phnom Penh when I first met Chea Samy. She was sitting on a bench in the school's vast training hall; a small woman with the kind of poise that goes with the confidence of great beauty. She was dressed in an ankle-length skirt and her grey hair was cut short. She was presiding over a class of about forty boys and girls, watching them go through their exercises, her gentle, rounded face tense with concentration. Occasionally she would spring off the bench and bend back a dancer's arm, or push in a waist, working as a sculptor does, by touch, moulding their limbs like clay.

At the time I had no idea whether Chea Samy had known Princess Soumphady or not. I had become curious about the Princess and her father, King Sisowath, after learning of their journey to Europe in 1906, and I wanted to know more about them.

Chea Samy's eyes widened when I asked her about Princess Soumphady at the end of her class. She looked from me to the student who was interpreting for us as though she couldn't quite believe she had heard the name right. I reassured her: yes, I really did mean Princess Soumphady, Princess Sisowath Soumphady.

She smiled in the indulgent, misty way in which people recall a favourite aunt. Yes, of course she had known Princess Soumphady, she said. As a little girl, when she first went into the Palace to learn dance, it was Princess Soumphady who had been in charge of the dancers: for a while the Princess had brought her up...

The second time I met Chea Samy was at her house. She lives a few miles from Pochentong airport, on Phnom Penh's rapidly-expanding frontier, in an area that is largely farmland, with a few houses strung along a dirt road. The friend who I had persuaded to come along with me to translate took an immediate dislike to the place. It was already late afternoon and she did not relish the thought of driving back through those roads in the dark.

My friend, Molyka, was a mid-level civil servant, a poised, attractive woman in her early thirties, painfully soft-spoken, in the Khmer way. She had spent a short while studying in Australia, on a government scholarship, and spoke English with a better feeling for nuance and idiom than any of the professional interpreters I had met. If I was to visit Chea Samy, I had decided, it would be with her. But Molyka proved hard to persuade: she had become frightened of venturing out of the centre of the city.

Not long ago she had been out driving with a friend of hers, the wife of an Untac official, when her car was stopped at a busy roundabout by a couple of soldiers. They were wearing the uniform of the `State of Cambodia', the faction that currently governs most of the country. `I work for the government too,' she told them, `in an important ministry'. They ignored her; they wanted money. She didn't have much, only a couple of thousand riels. They asked for cigarettes; she didn't have any. They told her to get out of the car and accompany them into a building. They were about to take her away when her friend interceded. They let her go eventually: they left UN people alone on the whole. But as she drove away they had shouted after her: "We're going to be looking out for you: you won't always have an Untác in the car."

Molyka was scared, and she had reason to be. The government's underpaid (often unpaid) soldiers and policemen were increasingly prone to banditry and bouts of inexplicable violence. Not long before I had gone to visit a hospital in an area where there were frequent hostilities between State troops and the Khmer Rouge. I had expected that the patients in the casualty ward would be principally victims of mines and Khmer Rouge shellfire. Instead I found a group of half a dozen women, some with children, lying on grimy mats, their faces and bodies pitted and torn with black shrapnel wounds. They had been travelling in a pick-up truck to sell vegetables at a nearby market when they were stopped by a couple of State soldiers. The soldiers asked for money; the women handed out some but the soldiers wanted more. The women had no more to give and told them so. The soldiers let the truck pass but stopped it again that evening, on its way back. They didn't ask for anything this time; they simply detonated a fragmentation mine.

Soon afterwards I was travelling in a taxi with four Cambodians, along a dusty, potholed road in a sparsely inhabited region in the north-west of the country. I had dozed off in the front seat when I was woken by the rattle of gunfire. I looked up and saw a State soldier standing in the middle of the dirt road, directly ahead. He was in his teens, like most uniformed Cambodians; he was wearing round, wire-rimmed sunglasses and his pelvis was thrust out, MTV-style. But instead of a guitar he had an AK 47 in his hands and he was spraying the ground in front of us with bullets, creating a delicate tracery of dust.

The taxi jolted to a halt; the driver thrust an arm out of the window and waved his wallet. The soldier did not seem to notice; he was grinning and swaying, probably drunk. But when I sat up, in the front seat, the barrel of his gun rose slowly until it was pointing directly at my forehead. Looking into the unblinking eye of that AK47, unaccountably, two slogans flashed through my mind; they were scrawled all over the walls of Calcutta when I was the same age as that soldier. One was `Power comes from the barrel of a gun' and the other `You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs'. It turned out he only had the first in mind.

Molyka had heard stories like these, but living in Phnom Penh, working as a civil servant, she had been relatively sheltered until that day when her car was stopped. The incident frightened her in ways she couldn't quite articulate; it re-awakened a host of long-dormant fears. Molyka was only thirteen in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. She was evacuated with her whole extended family, fourteen people in all, to a labour-camp in the province of Kompong Thom. A few months later she was separated from the others and sent to work in a fishing village on Cambodia's immense freshwater lake, the Tonlé Sap. For the next three years she worked as a servant and nursemaid for a family of fisherfolk.

She only saw her parents once in that time. One day she was sent to a village near Kompong Thom with a group of girls. While sitting by the roadside, quite by chance, she happened to look up from her basket of fish and saw her mother walking towards her. Her first instinct was to turn away; she thought it was a dream. Every detail matched those of her most frequently recurring dream: the parched countryside, the ragged palms, her mother coming out of the red dust of the road, walking straight towards her...

She didn't see her mother again until 1979, when she came back to Phnom Penh after the Vietnamese invasion. She managed to locate her as well as two of her brothers after months of searching. Of the fourteen people who had walked out of her house three and a half years before, ten were dead, including her father, two brothers and a sister. Her mother had become an abject, terrified creature ever after her father was called away into the fields one night, never to return. One of her brothers was too young to work; the other had willed himself into a state of guilt-stricken paralysis after revealing their father's identity to the Khmer Rouge in a moment of inattention - he now held himself responsible for his father's death.

Their family was from the social group that was hardest hit by the Revolution: the urban middle classes. City people by definition, they were herded into rural work-camps; the institutions and forms of knowledge that sustained them were destroyed - the judicial system was dismantled, the practice of formal medicine was discontinued, schools and colleges were shut down, banks and credit were done away with; indeed the very institution of money was abolished. Cambodia's was not a civil war in the same sense as Somalia's or the former Yugoslavia's, fought over the fetishism of small differences: it was a war on history itself, an experiment in the re-invention of society. No regime in history had ever before made so systematic and sustained an attack on the middle class. Yet, if the experiment was proof of anything at all, it was ultimately of the indestructibility of the middle class, of its extraordinary tenacity and resilience; its capacity to preserve its forms of knowledge and expression through the most extreme kinds of adversity.

Molyka was only seventeen then but she was the one who had to cope because no one else in the family could. She took a job in the army and put herself and her brothers through school and college; later she acquired a house and a car; she adopted a child - and like so many people in Phnom Penh - she took in and supported about half-a-dozen complete strangers. In one way or another she was responsible for supporting a dozen lives.

Yet now Molyka, who at the age of thirty-one had already lived through several lifetimes, was afraid of driving into the outskirts of the city. Over the last year the outlines of the life she had put together were beginning to look frayed. Paradoxically, at precisely the moment when the world had ordained peace and democracy for Cambodia, uncertainty had reached its peak within the country. Nobody knew what was going to happen after the UN sponsored elections were held; who would come to power and what they would do once they did. Her colleagues had all become desparate to make some provision for the future - by buying, stealing, selling whatever was at hand. Those two soldiers who had stopped her car were no exception. Everyone she knew was a little like that now, ministers, bureaucrats, policemen; they were all people who saw themselves faced with yet another beginning.

Now Molyka was driving out to meet Pol Pot's brother and sister-in-law: relatives of a man whose name was indelibly associated with the deaths of her own father and nine other members of her family. She had gasped in disbelief when I first asked her to accompany me: to her, as to most people in Cambodia, the name `Pol Pot' was an abstraction; it referred to a time, an epoch, an organisation, a form of terror - it was almost impossible to associate it with a mere human being, one that had brothers, relatives, sisters-in-law. But she was curious too, and in the end, overcoming her fear of the neighbourhood, she drove me out in her own car, into the newly-colonised farmland near Pochentong airport.

The house, when we found it, proved to be a comfortable wooden structure, built in the traditional Khmer style, with its details picked out in bright blue. Like all such houses it was supported on stilts, and as we walked in, a figure detached itself from the shadows beneath the house and came towards us: a tall, vigorous-looking man, dressed in a sarong. He had a broad, pleasant face and short, spiky grey hair. The resemblance to Pol Pot was startling.

I glanced at Molyka: she bowed, joining her hands, as he welcomed us in, and they exchanged a few friendly words of greeting. His wife was waiting upstairs, he said, and led us up a wooden staircase to a large, airy room with a few photographs on the bare walls: portraits of relatives and ancestors, of the kind that hang in every Khmer house. Chea Samy was sitting on a couch at the far end of the room: she waved us in and her husband took his leave of us, smiling, hands folded.

"I wanted to attack him when I first saw him", Molyka told me later. "But then I thought - it's not his fault. What has he ever done to me?"