The Disappeared (11 page)

Do not hate me for saying such a thing, borng samlanh. Do not think me perverse. I watched your frantic eyes under your eyelids when you slept, watched the rage and resignation at war under your skin. Borng samlanh, let me look in your place for a while. Do not hate me for naming the Sublime at Tuol Sleng. Do not hate me for wanting to chisel your name, Serey, into the rhythm of my words.

Beside you on the bench in the sunshine that day at Tuol Sleng I said, We must speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

You said, I feel nothing.

Our baby was growing and I found fabric at the Russian market and a teapot, blue colored plates and new chopsticks and a basket for a bassinet.

In the mornings you brought me coffee from the Vietnamese bakery and you ate rice porridge with me but we no longer made love one more time before you left. I loved your dark eyes in the morning.

People live omissions their whole lives. And silence turns into lies.

Here, now, listen to my whisper of shame. As our baby grew, I grew tired of your nightmares. I wish now I had admitted this to you, borng samlanh. I wandered through your city, practicing your language, talking with Sopheap and Chan and Mau, dreaming of teaching again, dreaming of a future. One day I put Chan’s hand on my stomach to feel our baby kicking. She grew very still, listening with her experienced old fingers.

She said, A woman needs another woman to lean on so she can find her strength. I will make you a new tea. Your time is getting closer.

Chan’s hands had hauled dead bodies. Stripped their flesh. But I wanted their comfort. Dust is dust is dust. Bones work
their way to the earth’s surface each rainy season. I wanted to feed on joy like the radiant gods.

Against your closed doors I did not want to admit that your pain and silence would be part of our child. I tried to pretend we could make something new. The morning of Pchum Ben I said, Let’s go to the temple and make an offering for my mother, for your mother and father and brother. In the shuttered coolness I placed your hand on my stomach and for the first time you felt our baby moving inside me. I watched your wonder and your hair was loose and your eyes were bright. You were so beautiful. When the baby stopped kicking you lay back and said, Samlanh, I will go to the temple with you to make the offerings for our parents but we cannot make an offering for my brother. He survived.

You found him by your old front door. You were not sure.

Sokha, is it you? Are you still alive?

You were a stranger to him.

Sokha, it is me, your brother. Sokha, Mak? Pa?

When you said Mak he recognized you. Still he could not speak and you already had your arms around him and you whispered, Our grandmother? Our grandparents in Sras Srang?

You felt his thin fingers on your back and his head shaking no against your neck. You said, I have never felt another body like this on mine. He was bones and skin, but his heart was beating like a rock against mine. And I never wanted to let him go.

Sokha walked from Battambang, passed piles of bodies along the way. He listened to the incessant buzzing of flies crawling over bodies grotesquely swollen. He no longer saw the blue sky or the struggling blossom, only mats of maggots heaving over human flesh. Each time he saw a new pile of bodies he ran away, but the rotting stench of the dead stained the insides of his nostrils. He startled at smells.

All over Cambodia people startle at cigarette smoke and rotting garbage and gasoline, surrogate odors of torture and
dead bodies and bombs. A bad smell makes them jump, as people in other places startle at sudden noises. They call this rumseew, making the brain spin. People suffer stiffness in their necks from jerking in the direction of smells. They suffer from dizziness and nausea and call their discomfort a weak heart.

You said, My brother could not bear the smell of meat cooking.

But the city was trying to pick itself up again. Near the palace and the river, food vendors began to push broken carts along the sidewalks and cyclopousse drivers wired old bikes together. People discovered again the passion of speech. They began to shed the disguises they had used to survive. There were those who could not reveal themselves, the torturers, the prison guards, the soldiers. For them there was no exhilaration in language. Virtue is terror, terror virtue. Without slogans, they found themselves speechless.

In the yellow bedroom looking over Bleury Street long ago I had listened eagerly to the cheerful stories of your childhood.

Each New Year your family traveled from Phnom Penh up the river to the temples to visit your father’s parents in Sras Srang. You flew homemade kites with Leap and the village children along the shore of the lake. You scratched messages into the rocks. Monkeys chitta-chitted from the temples and you said that spirits, neak ta, sramay, were everywhere. There was the story of the outdoor cinema. But I think it was your grandparents who went to it, not you. The traveling cinema came to the village with movies from China and Russia, hung a sheet up near the wat, and families brought their own mats.

Your grandfather fought for Lon Nol and he had an ivory Buddha sewed under the skin on his ankle. He let you and Sokha touch the hard bump through the folds of his old skin. He told you about a short film they always played at the beginning of the cinema. It showed a blindfolded rebel just before sunrise. Twelve Sihanouk soldiers raised their guns and shot at him. One soldier had a blank so no one could know the murderer. Every year this short film played before the movie. The blindfolded rebel died over and over, year after year, his
head jerked, the ground splashed with blood, his knees folded beneath him.

You sat up naked in bed to tell this part. You lifted your arms as if you were firing a gun. You put your arms behind your back as if you were the rebel. You fell over dead and I jumped on you and brought you back to life again. Before me, your brother played this game.

You were always first. First to fly a kite, go to school, play an instrument, go abroad. Sokha studied hard in school and your mother praised him. But your father said to him, Are you first like your brother?

Your life and Sokha’s was a single stream that divided around a rock, one part falling into thin air over a precipice and the other meandering along the earth in a different direction.

As war came closer, your mother begged to send Sokha to Montreal but your father said, No! How can Serey keep studying and take care of his younger brother?

Sokha said to you, I pretended I could not read. Our leaders said, Reading and writing are unnecessary for the proper cultivation of the earth. Angka is correct, bright and wonderful. I was put in a kang chhlop band to spy. We hid under the floors of stilt houses and listened and reported. I was glad I had no parents to report on. Angka said, Your brigade is the hope of the nation. We repeated, We are the hope of the nation. We sang:
We the children have the good fortune to live the rest of our time in precious harmony under the affectionate care of the Kampuchean revolution, immense, most clear and shining
.

Their words were burned into him. Sokha repeated phrases
you had never heard: Live or die for the greatness of the revolution. Expel all enemies.

Who were enemies?

Those who spoke a foreign language. Those who played music. Those who read and studied. City people. Monks.

Sokha told you he took a message from his unit into the wat behind his camp. In the yard a woman was tied, naked from the waist up, just out of reach of her baby who cried for her breast. The child was not strong enough to sit up, and she could not bend close enough to let him suckle. The woman whispered to Sokha, Help my baby.

A soldier shouted, Move on! Do not worry about her. She will soon be summoned to the mountain.

The revolutionary initiative is self mastery
.

There was no radio, no news from outside the forest. The soldiers’ way was the only way.

You said to me, While these things were happening to Sokha, I was playing in a band and making love with a sixteen-year-old girl.

Angka never makes a mistake
.

It had been a long time since Sokha slept in a room with a door and a roof. You gave him a toothbrush and he had to learn again how to use it. He had to learn again to smile, with his lips, with his eyes. He was tempted by forgotten smells, clean rain, clean skin. But inside his nostrils the air stank of corpses and burning hair and diarrhea. Iron in his soul.

Better to kill an innocent person than to leave an enemy alive
.

I see your long silence as I see war, an urge to conquer. You used silence to guard your territory and told yourself you were protecting me. I was outside the wall, an intoxicating foreign land to occupy. I wondered what other secrets you guarded. Our disappeared were everywhere, irresistible, in waking, in sleeping, a reason for violence, a reason for forgiveness, destroying the peace we tried to possess, creeping between us as we dreamed, leaving us haunted by the knowledge that history is not redeemed by either peace or war but only fingered to shreds and left to our children. But I could not leave you, and I could not forget, and I did not know what to do, and always I loved you beyond love.

The first day of the evacuation of Phnom Penh your family moved only a half kilometer from home, the crowds were so big. Sokha could still see your front door when night fell and he begged your father to let him run back to sleep in his bed. Your father covered his mouth. He said, We will go to Sras Srang and you will sleep in your grandparents’ house. Sokha slept in the backseat of the car beside your grandmother. At dawn the soldiers demanded the car and everyone got out except your grandmother. A soldier yelled at your father to give him the keys and he said, Bawng, let us keep it to push my wife’s mother in. She is old.

The soldier looked in, said, She is Vietnamese, and he shot her. Your mother screamed and reached for her and the soldier shot her too. Your father grabbed Sokha and whispered, Do not stand up even if they call you, and he threw him into a ditch of tall grasses. The soldiers yelled at your father, Where is the boy? and your father pointed to the opposite side of the road. Then the soldiers shot your father and ran in the direction he pointed. Sokha lay all day in the grass and listened to the sound of people’s feet shuffling along the road and soldiers shouting and at night he crawled out of the ditch. He was ten years old. The
whole city was walking away and for a while he walked behind another family pretending he was with them.

After you told me this story, you looked out the window and said, All those years in Montreal after they closed the borders, I dreamed of my parents. But they died on the first day. All those years I was dreaming about the dead.

I slept the deep sleep of pregnancy. You traced your hand over my skin and you put your ear against my stomach. You said in your soft voice, Is it moving?

This moment is today, or tomorrow. Now that the baby moved, I wanted to call Papa, tell him there would soon be a grandchild, hear his voice, ask forgiveness, offer forgiveness. But I delayed, thinking, Tomorrow, I will call him tomorrow.

I dreamed I was trying to feed a garter snake to a baby. I asked you to kill the snake and you thrashed at it with a stick but when the baby picked it up to eat again it was still alive.

I wakened and watched the early light that bore the city’s million songs and the hungry cries of children who did not yet know the stories of this place. I wanted everything for my baby. Your father wanted everything for you. My father wanted everything for me, except the one I loved.

The children were taken from their parents to live in children’s units. Their leaders sent them to bed, said, Sleep like death.

Sometimes children forgot to put a tool away or stole food. They confessed at rien sot circles each night.

The leaders said, Young comrades, now we will reflect on the day and correct our faults. In this way we cleanse ourselves of mistakes that hinder the revolution.

One boy confessed that he fell asleep after lunch and did not replace the rattan rod on the shelter because of his laziness.

The leader frowned at him, but it was not dangerous because the boy was still a strong worker. Then the leader pointed to the next boy in the circle and that boy said, I did not clean up the supplies shelter today. The leader said, Obey Angka. Angka selects only those who are never tired.

Sokha said, One time I had nothing to report. I had worked hard all day. I had eaten only a half can of rice. I had to think of something so I pointed across the circle at one of the weakest boys and I said, I heard Heng singing an anti-revolutionary song.

The leader’s eyes turned hard but he said nothing and sent the boys to bed.

A few nights later Heng was pulled out of his hut. The next day at dawn the children were planting rice and two soldiers came by and threw a boy’s body parts into the paddy where they worked.

Fertilizer, they said.

Sokha leaned back and closed his eyes. His dry lips opened and he sang in his still sweet voice:

We the children love Angka limitlessly

The light of revolution, equality and freedom shines gloriously.

Oh, Angka, we deeply love you.

We resolve to follow your red way
.

The kites were red and green and golden flying over the river, honoring the wind spirit, Preah Peay, priming the winds to bring the monsoons. In ancient times the kites were called mother-baby kites but now they were called khleng ek because they had a pipe that caught the wind and moaned and whistled, spinning in arcs and twists. The bodies of the kites were great ovals attached to smaller kites shaped like the roof of a temple, and children ran on thin, hard legs while older men trained out the kite strings with patient hands.