The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers (6 page)

Chanlina leans forward to touch a button on Sâr’s shirt. Her hair is saturated with the musky odour he detected upon entry. She reaches down and clasps Sâr’s trembling hand. Her fingers are warm—he feels his hand could melt in her grasp. All up his arm, the muscles relax.

“Are we eating?” he whispers.

“Later,” says Chanlina.

As Chanlina holds his hand—her grin wide, her eyelids drooping—Veata moves to unclasp the buttons on his shirt, pulling at the fabric. Kiri drops to her knees, unfastens Sâr’s belt, and shimmies his pants down his skinny legs. In a fit of panic, Sâr reaches down with his free hand to pull his pants up, but Kiri halts him with no more than a simple touch to his forearm. Veata pulls open his shirt and rubs Sâr’s sticky, hairless chest with the palms of both hands. Her touch is staggering, somehow soothing and igniting Sâr’s skin all at once. Now Kiri finds the soft skin on the underside of his testicles and strokes it gently with the tips of two fingers. Sâr can’t believe the sensation; nothing in
his life has ever felt like this. He does not have the words to describe or the thoughts to comprehend it. He does not look at either Veata or Kiri. His gaze is fixed on Chanlina who, standing before him, doing nothing other than clutching his trembling fingers in her own steady grip, remains by far the most erotic of the three. Sâr closes his eyes and moans, and then blushes at the realization that he’s made a sound. Chanlina releases his hand, brushes the hair away from her sleepy face, and reaches down to palm his penis. She begins to stroke him off with long, slow movements. It is another unexpected sensation, even better than the first, adding intensity and drive to his pleasure. Chanlina steps close to the boy, letting her sleek thigh touch his, gently laying her other hand on his forearm. When she plants a tiny kiss onto his mouth, Sâr tastes smoke on her lips.

The others move to help her, planting feather-light kisses on his soft belly, letting a stray finger reach up to tickle the protrusion of his nipple. He’s swimming in a sea of hands that paw and rub, clasp and squeeze. Nhean’s screams flatten, as soft and diffuse as if they were filtered through water. If that child is still in the room, he must inhabit another dimension. A wayward thought crosses Sâr’s mind:
so much better than a sutra
. The pulsing of his body, the incessant throbbing that’s plagued him all afternoon, shortening his breath, running his heart ragged, blurring his ability to perceive the division between things liquid and things solid, has now concentrated acutely in a single clutched, stroked, and teased part of his body. For a second he thinks he’s going to lose control of his bladder and piss everywhere. He doesn’t even care. He
bites down hard and moans, touches the silky knots forming in Chanlina’s hair. Somewhere through the room’s thin haze of opium smoke he detects a wall of brick, an old gas stove, a faded gingham curtain, a steaming pot of rice. That mundane world: distant, forgotten, and irrelevant. Someone’s hand squeezes his buttocks. Another’s nails scratch ticklish roads into the skin of his leg. His testicles are gripped and released, and then gripped again. The crown of his penis is rubbed, possibly licked. He’s pressing his eyes closed; he can’t bear to watch. He can’t believe this is happening. This couldn’t possibly be real. Too much awe, too much energy, too much heat in one place; it’s like staring straight into the Cambodian sun.

Someone giggles and another moans. Someone whispers his name. All this skin, so much silkiness around him, rubbing and enveloping him, all these muscles toned and firm from a decade or more of precise training. With his eyes shut, Sâr forgets the women’s names, forgets the details of their faces, and sinks into a pool of bliss. When he rouses long enough to let himself glance downward, he’s rewarded with the sight of Chanlina’s conical breast through the unbuttoned top of her blouse. The image fires his desire in new and unexpected ways. He feels a surge, a tensing, a longing that breaks boundaries. He suddenly needs them to stop. He doesn’t know what’s happening to him; he’s sure he’s going to piss himself. Sâr’s moan is almost a plea. The women, who don’t seem at all confused, concentrate on stroking him off—stronger now, quicker, using longer gestures—and the pleasure’s too great for him to bear. “Stop,” he whispers, but
too softly for it to matter. A white-hot firecracker explodes in his head, blinding him from inside, bouncing light off his skull and shooting down his neck and surging into his limbs and at last escaping in hard contractions that are met in the outside world with a giggle, a gasp, and a groan.

Sâr’s whimper of pleasure silences Nhean in his crib.

For the first time in hours, the young teenager sucks in a full inhalation. Every cell in his body feels oxygenated at last. His scrawny chest heaves. Sweat trickles down his brow, framing his face and wetting his cheeks. He blinks and focuses his gaze, observing the young women around him. Kiri has risen, and now leads her gooey hand over to the sink as if it were a wounded animal that she’s picked off the road. Chanlina rests on her heels and giggles, her fingers sticky and glued together in a viscous web, and holding in the cup of her palm a teaspoon’s worth of semen. Veata is sitting on the floor, leaning her weight onto her palms, hyperextending her elbows, and smiling at Sâr.

“Roeung’s brother,” she says. “What a nice boy.”

“I’m sorry,” says Sâr through his long gasps. “I think I … think—”

Veata laughs and shakes her head. Over by the sink, a chuckling Kiri waves a soapy hand and calls out: “Yes, you did!”

They’re laughing. This seems to be what they wanted, what they’d expected of him. It’s not a surprise to them.

Sâr turns and grins at Chanlina. Now that he can breathe, he suddenly wants more than anything to speak with her. He wonders if there might be some intimacy, a special connection
between them, different from what he feels with Veata and Kiri. But Sâr’s favourite dancer has unexpectedly turned sombre. Without matching his smile, she stands and goes to the sink, using her hip to nudge Kiri aside. Chanlina cleans the semen off her hand. It seems so perfunctory. Her cheeks are red and her breathing’s clipped. She needs something—but what? Sâr knows she’s unhappy and unsatisfied, but he’s incapable of detecting the signs of her own longing.

“Chanlina,” he says—the beginning of a question he can’t complete.

She doesn’t try to draw him out. Chanlina returns to her bed, picks up her pipe, and pulls the palm partition, but not quite far enough to hide herself completely. Sâr’s cheeks droop. She strikes a match, lights the pipe, and inhales. Chanlina leans back on her
sampot
, holding her breath for five seconds and then—as the opiates relax her muscles and frost her gaze—expelling the dark smoke. It forms an ominous cloud in the air before thinning and scattering. The room’s musky odour strengthens.

Sâr snatches his pants and pulls them up. He’s so quick to button his shirt that he fumbles several times before closing it askew. Chanlina inhales a second drag, lies back on her bed, and stares at the ceiling with blank eyes. It doesn’t look as if she has any intention of moving.

Now Nhean’s crying resumes and Veata hurries to the boy, withdrawing him from his crib and plopping him down on the floor. The baby stops crying, gapes at Sâr, and crawls to his favourite spoon, which he resumes munching as if no time has passed at all. In the kitchenette, Kiri stirs their
meal, fluffing the rice to make it look more appetizing. She lays the bowl in the middle of the floor and takes a seat on one of the woven mats.

“Come,” she says, nodding at Sâr. “Eat.”

Eating is the last thing Sâr wants to do.

“Come on,” Kiri commands with some irritation.

He moves to sit beside her.

Both Veata and Sâr scoop glutinous clumps of rice into their hands, and Nhean, smelling the
prahoc
, moans with hunger. Veata grabs the baby, lays him sprawled on her lap, and lets him suck on her breast.

No one mentions Chanlina or asks if she wants to eat. Sâr steals furtive glances at the almost closed partition and the enticing sliver of flesh that remains exposed. The girl is prostrate and submerged in some sort of dark reverie, her eyes open but empty, her mouth parted with a bit of drool pooling at the corner. He wants to say something but doesn’t know what. Between bites, Kiri half-heartedly sings the musical phrase that Sâr heard earlier through the door.

Without his furious charge of desire, the dancers’ small home now feels dingy and overheated, stifling and depressing. He doesn’t want to be here. He grabs some rice and takes a bite, but his eating lacks joy. The young women have abandoned their perfect postures and atrophied into older figures, more slumping grandmothers than strong girls. Veata rubs her lower back and sighs. The diffuse opium smoke irritates Sâr’s eyes. He rubs them dry with the corner of his shirt. He feels like a captive in this stuffy room. When the silence grows too awkward, Sâr forces himself to speak.

“I suppose,” he says, “you’ve been practising dances all day?”

“All week,” replies Kiri.

“All life,”
corrects Veata.

Kiri chuckles bitterly. “Yes, we practise all life.”

“Is it especially difficult to prepare for the New Year’s dances?” Sâr asks the question quietly, his eyes downcast, head barely raised, knowing full well the answer.

“Of course,” says Veata. “Very gruelling. Your sister’s hard on us.”

Sâr’s cheeks flush with shame.

“But the New Year is not half as difficult as the Water Festival,” says Kiri.

Veata groans in remembrance of last November’s dances.

“I’m never more tired than I am each year after the Water Festival,” Kiri adds. “We sleep for a month after that. I mean, when we’re not practising.”

Nhean chokes, coughing sharply, spraying droplets of breast milk all over his startled mother.

“Aayh, Nhean!” Veata cries as she pulls him away. Kiri chuckles while the boy wails in his mother’s arms. Veata brushes off the milk, pats the baby on his back until he’s calm, and lets him return to his meal.

“That sounds very difficult,” says Sâr. Each word sprouts thorns that torture his throat. His politeness feels grotesque—a trite and obvious dressing that can’t cover the crude purpose of his visit, the nakedness of his now-fulfilled desire. Sâr’s delicate hand reaches for another ball of rice in a gesture that feels forced, stupid, and obscene. He imagines
a machete falling, slicing the hand off his arm, the severed limb bleeding and pulsing beside the rice—he believes he deserves this fate. He scoops a ball of moist rice with his fingers and brings it to his lips, forcing himself to chew and swallow. The rice is thick and flavourless, a mass of glutinous paste, more like mortar in his mouth than food. The hunger he’s identified as his own feels remote and obscure. Nhean’s slurping makes him want to vomit. He has to get out of here.

Saloth Sâr
. He can still recall Chanlina’s smooth voice, singing his name.

There’s a hard rapping on the door. As the women widen their eyes and turn, Sâr’s body surges with adrenalin. Outside, Roeung calls to the dancers.

“Girls! Open up!”

Chanlina rouses from her drugged stupor and jolts up. “What?” she cries, blinking fast, trying to force her eyes to function.

“Evening practice in ten minutes. Have you eaten? Open the door!”

“The fan,” says Chanlina in a panic. “And the curtains!”

“One moment,
Lok Srey
Roeung,” calls Kiri as she stands. She runs to the window, opens the curtains, tries to fan some fresh air into the room with her hands. “We’re just cleaning up.”

Sâr stands, checks his shirt, and notices that it’s fastened incorrectly. He frantically re-buttons it while trying to slip on his clogs. Chanlina has managed to stand. She tucks her pipe beneath her pillow and works to tie her
sampot
. She represses all signs of intoxication; her motions are precise
and deliberate. Veata fans the air with her hand as she moves towards the door.

“We’re just finishing dinner,
Lok Srey
,” she calls.

“Let me in,” commands Roeung, her voice lacking menace.

Veata checks to make sure Chanlina’s dressed and Sâr’s prepared before she opens the door. Roeung steps inside and immediately scowls at the opiate smoke she can smell in the air. She opens her mouth to speak, but as soon as she sees her younger brother standing in the centre of the room, her expression freezes in blank astonishment.

“What are you doing here?”

“He just came by to say hello for a minute after school,” answers Kiri.

Sâr shifts his rucksack to the opposing shoulder and forces a smile for his sister.

“He said he was looking for you,” adds Veata, “and that you must’ve been with the King. We gave him some dinner. He played with Nhean. He’s very good with babies!”

Nhean, on the floor, blinks at the intruder.

“You should be home for dinner,” Roeung scolds Sâr. “Your brother expects you right now. He will be worried.”

“Yes,” says Sâr. “I was just going.”

“Well, go on, then. Go!” Roeung turns away from her brother and fans the air, giving Chanlina a hard stare. The dancer, standing motionless by her palm partition, regards the floor in a failed attempt at appearing innocent. “I hope you’re ready, Chanlina,” warns Roeung. “Lady Meak expects a full practice this evening.”

“I am ready,” whispers Chanlina. “I am always ready,
Lok Srey
Roeung.”

“I am going,” whispers Sâr as he stands by the door. “Goodbye, and thank you.” He stands tall, presses his hands before his lips, and bows so deeply to the women that they can’t help but giggle. Such reverence is more fit for the King than for his lesser wives, this group of common dancers.

“Bye,” says Veata, offering the boy a smile and a little bow.

Sâr scurries out of the house and quietly closes the door behind him. Although the sun is nearing the horizon, it still beats down on him with vengeance from its extreme angle. He squints, sighs, and wipes his sweaty brow. To stand in this open-air compound, despite the garbage pile by the wall, the grungy stone, and the weedy path—it is a real liberation. The expansive Cambodian sky is a welcome contrast to the compact darkness of the dancers’ home. Sâr hurries away, hoping he won’t encounter anyone else he knows.