Dogs at the Perimeter

Mei

The next morning, before dawn comes, I walk out onto the wide boulevard of Côte-des-Neiges where the queue for the downtown bus winds along the sidewalk, serpentine, a half-dozen men and women lost inside their winter coats, a light snow falling on us, as fine as sand. I ask someone what day it is, and he says, “Tuesday. One more Tuesday.” He smiles and points out something on the horizon. The bus arrives and, gratefully, the people climb inside.

I begin walking, unsure where to go. I smell coffee from a nearby bakery, I see my little brother and myself, and the smell of bread permeates the air. We are caught outside when the air raid sirens begin. I try to pull him away. It is last night’s memory, when mortar fire started and the rockets began to fall, the middle of the hot season, the beginning of the last Khmer Rouge offensive. There is a shelter nearby, a dry, shallow well in which we sometimes hide, but in my panic I can’t find it. Instead, Sopham and I crouch against the wall of a building. He is carrying his drawing pencils in a blue cloth bag. The air turns to gas and the sidewalk heaves, splitting apart. I hold on to my brother, gripping him as if he is the world itself and an explosion will claim us together or not at all. His screaming becomes a wide emptiness, a pressure in the air blinding me, and in the darkness I hear a strange, familiar ticking — insects, the typewriter, a clock counting time, the melody of a piece of music — and then my brother repeating my name. He wipes my face with the sleeve of his shirt. The air explodes me from its grip and suddenly I see blood everywhere. Run, I hear him saying. Sister, sister. Come with me. Words begin to pour from him. He says there is another song he has learned but he cannot remember it, cannot remember. “My pencils,” he says, “look at my pencils.” But when I look all I see is the river, brown and churning, and a yellow boat idling, impossibly, on the surface. “Are you hungry?” he says. He asks me to find bitter sdao shoots for him to eat. I reach for the little purse in which I keep American coins but when I reach inside, the coins burn my fingertips. My brother takes the purse, turns it over, scatters the coins on the ground, and when I look down it seems as if they are writhing, they are melting on the road. We leave the money where it is and walk and walk, and my brother comes across a book of Buddhist prayers. We start laughing when we see it, the book seems like a trick of our father’s who often recited verses when he was drunk, when he had gambled our money away, as if beautiful lines would save him in the eyes of our mother. Still, he would come armed with verses, unfurling them like peacock feathers, dazzling the eyes so we would be blind to the fear and anxiety below. My brother carries the book and we walk on, calling for our father and then, out of the smoke, he appears and runs to us. It is unbelievable, it seems a miracle that he could appear just because we say his name. He raises my brother high, sets him on his shoulders, then he picks me up and begins to run.

“The bombs are coming,” I tell him. “They are coming, they are coming.”

I feel my legs floating, as if I am flying through the streets.

I’m standing at the intersection of Côte-des-Neiges and Queen Mary, snow settling on us, and a woman tells her child, We are safe as houses. The saying falls straight through me. The light turns green, nothing approaches, I begin to walk, and the low buildings seem to bend over me. I see my father in the shape of another person, walking up ahead. I see the suit of clothes he used to wear, the haircut he had, his briefcase and his scuffed, worn-down shoes. I run up to the man who is not my father, grab his elbow, and spin him around to face me. A stranger swears and flings me away.

I am home again, inside the safety of our apartment, my father is standing behind me, dictating the words I have to transcribe. When I type, I feel the machine as an extension of my hands, my father’s voice is rainfall, and I am a weed lifting up too fast, gangly and hungry and gaping in every direction. That typewriter, that gift, is my first real possession. Sometimes when I type, I pay attention to the words themselves, what they say and mean, but other times they are only strings of letters, arranged like beads, joined together by the metronome of the Olivetti. The words materializing on the page, this alphabet so different from the shivering, dancing Khmer script, seemed to me like crevices I could peer through, portholes into lives different, more gracious, than my own.

Someone says my Canadian name. Janie. Another woman turns and waves. I am standing in Montreal, on a white winter day, beneath unfamiliar buildings. I look everywhere for Janie. There are no trees, no forest anywhere, nothing to keep the light from falling through.

My father is a storyteller. He smiles and whispers at us to follow him, behind the curtain, into this starlit box. Hanuman, my favourite hero, wraps his giant hands around my little fingers. Tonight, he says, we will travel the world with Jambavan, the king of bears. My father can recite all the shiny strands of the Ramayana, he cajoles my brother and I with brave musketeers, with Tum and Teav and Molière. He gives us any story we ask for, especially tonight, because on this night, he says, the war is ending. Rocket fire burns the skies but tomorrow everything will change. Even as the shells fall down, our neighbours are dancing and welcoming the Khmer new year.

On the balcony, I sat down, leaning against my father’s body. I was afraid and I didn’t want to be apart from him. Fighting chipped away at the edges of the city, and Sopham pointed out the smoke advancing from the north, south, and west, like a necklace tightening. Tracer fire threw long lines into the darkness.

My father cradled his whiskey and called for the Communists to hurry up, to end the war once and for all. “Once the guns go quiet,” my father said, “the Khmer Rouge will put everything right. Then you, my dancing, kralan-eating children, will go back to school. No more running wild. No more fighting in the streets.” Our prime minister, otherwise known to us as Magic Sands, had fled the country. Monsieur le sableur des feés, our father called him, who defended our city with holy grains, who armed our soldiers with Buddhist scarves. Magic Sands had already been evacuated.

“Remember this night,” he said. “Mark it in your memories because tomorrow everything changes.” He smiled and shook his head and swirled the liquid in his glass. “Tomorrow, when your mother puts on her New Year’s finery, she’ll be the most beautiful woman in the city. The war is finished, little ones. We’ll gather all the sadness into a pot, pour it down the drains, and hear it rush into the sea. The king will wake up in the Royal Palace, and everything will be just as it was. As wonderful and as corrupt as it ever was.” He lay down, staring up at the sky. Beads of sweat trickled down his face, into his hair.

“I should have gone to France,” my father told us. “I should have carried your mother to Paris and we would have been poor together. You two, you and Sopham, you would have been born in the West, like champions!”

“Champions of what?” I asked.

“Champions of champions,” my brother said.

“We would have flown Air France,” my father said. “Just like that, on top of the world, sipping champagne. We would have set Europe on fire: your mother and your father, the beauty and the poet.”

“And me, Pak?”

“You, Sopham? The singer, of course.” My brother, frowning, did the twist for us.

“And me?”

What did he say? I try to remember.

Side by side, we stared up at the darkness, at the beckoning stars, doorways to other worlds and other galaxies. My father turned toward me, as if trying to read the future from my expression. He had curving, lifting, furrowing eyebrows. “You’ll be like the great Hanuman, leaping across oceans. Between you and the heavens, my sweet, nothing will hold you back.”

—

We heard someone running up the stairs. My mother was in the kitchen, making lunch, when the door behind her gave way. I saw a yellow knot in my brother’s fist, round as the sun, and then, behind it, a black shape against the wall. The shining darkness of a rifle, an AK, the barrel finding its way across the room. It buried itself in my father’s stomach.

“Wait,” my father said softly. “Wait.”

The boy stepped back. He swung the gun up and took aim at my father’s chest. More Khmer Rouge came in, they were faceless to me, black pants, black shirts, muddy feet, too big to fit inside the room. First they were in the kitchen, then beside me, then at the window.

Outside, a woman started screaming. “He’s not a soldier! It had nothing to do with him. Stop, please stop!” Gunfire then, drowning everything out.

“What is it?” my father said. I saw his mouth moving but his voice seemed to come from somewhere else. The soldiers pushed nearer. They were children, maybe teenagers, with small, lean bodies. “What work do you do?” the boy asked him.

“I’m a translator.”

“For the government?”

“No. Books, textbooks.”

The boy’s eyes drifted over my mother, over us.

“You have to evacuate the city,” he said. “All of you. Don’t take your things. You won’t be gone long. Three or four days at the most. The Americans are going to bomb us.”

“But why?” my father said, confused. “The war is over. They’ve already pulled out.”

The boy nudged his rifle up, pushing it against my father’s neck. “Take only the things you need,” he said, “nothing more. Don’t waste any time.”

When they left, the door, broken off its hinges, swung wide. My father’s hands travelled over his face, down his shirt. No bullet hole, no blood. He looked at his hands in disbelief. My mother told us to sit down at the table, to eat our food now, quickly, to come away from the windows, to come now, to hurry.

I followed my parents into the street. I thought the buildings, the hospitals, the banks and restaurants, the temples and market had all been tipped sideways, spilling everyone and everything into the road. There was no space to go back, to change direction, there was no room to breathe. I saw defeated soldiers wearing pristine uniforms, thin monks, lost children, rich men and poor men, I saw bodies curled on the sidewalk. Towers of rifles, strung with ammunition, lay jumbled on the street corners.

Our neighbour, Uncle Samnang, sat on the ground with a woman in his arms, weeping. “What happened to Uncle Samnang?” I asked.

My mother tilted my chin up, averting my eyes.

Money floated along the street, it flew up in bundles, dry and perfect, swirling above us. Sopham and I waved our hands to gather the bills. Everyone was talking but I didn’t understand, I heard names that I didn’t recognize, I looked up and saw the frangipani, pink as my mother’s silk shoes. In the midday heat, their heads drooped low, their fragile necks were bent. “I’m thirsty,” my brother said. We both carried small overnight bags. The straps rubbed against my shoulders. All I could smell was the sweetness of the flowers. My parents whispered to each other, back and forth, back and forth. We plodded on, stopping all the time because the crowd kept thickening, more and more people herded into the street. At the turnoff to Tuol Kok, my parents led us down an alleyway, into a courtyard. My grandfather’s house slouched down, all the shutters closed. My mother went inside. White sheets, white flags, hung from all the balconies, motionless in the hot air.

A woman stood in the shade, her blouse dark with sweat. She told us that all the hospitals had been emptied, the injured and dying had been thrown into the street wearing their hospital gowns, holding their own iv bags. Government soldiers had been shot on the road, students and teachers were being trucked away.

“They told us not to pack very much,” my father said sternly. “We’ll come home in a day or two.”

The woman’s long hair had fallen loose and it clung to her neck. “They told me, ‘Go back to your home village.’ Well, mine is up past Battambang, that’s three hundred kilometres away, and I haven’t been there since I was a girl. Getting there will take more than a few days, won’t it? And then what?”

My mother was standing in the doorway now. “He’s gone,” she said. “The doors are all broken. He’s already gone.”

We stood together, waiting in front of the house. A group of Khmer Rouge came and told us to get out of here, to move on.

The woman wandered off, scratching madly at her arms. “Watch your step,” she said. “Don’t fall into the holes.”

Back on the main road, the crowd trudged slowly, as if through mud. A voice, amplified by loudspeakers, prodded us north, then west.

Beside me, a man with no legs crawled forward on his elbows. My mother was crying noiselessly. I stared at the ground and then up at the sky, where the elegant buildings seemed to wilt in the heat. I saw white shutters, cars turned on their sides, crates of chickens, howling dogs, and, in every direction, a shifting wall of people. On my left, two Khmer Rouge were guarding an intersection. I wanted to see them, I tried to get nearer.

A woman was arguing with them. She wanted to take another road but they were refusing to let her pass. She persisted. “My husband and children were sent down Route 2,” she said. “If I hurry, I’ll be able to join them.” She put her hands together, bowed her head, touched her fingertips to her forehead in a sign of respect. Casually, one of the boys lifted his rifle and shot her. She was thrown backwards, her skull cracking against the pavement. Blood poured from her heart as if it would never stop. Within seconds, the boys had unclasped her watch, taken her necklace and her ring, and then rolled the body to the edge of the road. The woman’s hands still moved, her lips were speaking. One of the boys met my stare. “What are you looking at?” he said. He prodded the woman with his foot. “Does this belong to you?”

My father spoke my name, he pulled me away into the thicket of bodies.

My father disappeared. But still, even now, I imagine seeing him again. In my dreams, he tells me that time ran away from him. Time, only time. One day he blinked his eyes and thirty years had come and gone. Just last night, my father had knocked at my door, surprised and embarrassed, asking me where everyone had disappeared to, demanding to know why we hadn’t waited and why, all these years, we had never answered his calling.

“You didn’t have time to speak,” I said.

“Didn’t I?”

“On that day, it happened so quickly.”

“I had a list of things to tell you,” he said. There was snow in his hair, crystals on his eyelashes. “I had a list of things to tell little Sopham. Where is my boy? Where is Mother?” He stared at me, as if seeing me for the first time. “Why are you all alone here?”

Three days after we had begun walking, we reached a checkpoint. The men were separated and questioned one by one. Afterwards, my father was guided, alongside dozens of others, into a waiting truck, the soldiers pushing him into the vehicle as if he were a child. We lost sight of him but I heard him saying our names, my father’s thin voice rising out of the press of bodies.

“Are you afraid of us?” one soldier asked, circling the truck. “Why in the world are you afraid, my brothers? When did we ever betray you?”

“Let me down,” an old man said. “Please. I can’t breathe. There’s no air in here.”

A boy aimed his AK at the truck and told the man to be still. He called him mit, my friend, comrade, he said that the men in the truck were the lucky ones. They were going into the forest to study, they were educated men who would one day serve the country and Angkar.

“But what is Angkar?” the old man asked.

The boy looked at him, incredulous. “Angkar fought this war and won your freedom. Don’t you know?” He kept talking about Angkar, which meant the “organization,” and Angkar Leu, the “Greater Organization.” I understood the boy’s words but I couldn’t follow their meaning, it was as if another vocabulary, another history, had distorted the language I knew.

My mother went from one soldier to another, pleading with them to release my father. “Please,” she said desperately. “Let him stay with us.” Her hands were clasped together.

A soldier pushed her hands down. “Don’t beg,” he said. “Don’t demean yourself. Everyone is equal now.”

Sweat ran down my neck, down my back, it shone on the faces of the men as they bowed their heads against the sun. I heard my name spoken again and again, my father’s voice calling as if he wanted me to join him, or flee, or hold on. The Khmer Rouge watched us with such derision, such contempt, I couldn’t move, my limbs were frozen but things around me seemed to move faster, to grow tumultuous. Our religion was Buddhism and it taught us that life was suffering and that the cycle was eternal and would continue no matter our individual destinies. For the first time in my life, I saw the cycle, I saw its end, a lake, a nothingness on which we hovered.

The engine started and the truck pulled away. The soldiers watched until the men had disappeared, and then they lowered their guns.

My mother held us. She spoke into my brother’s hair, “It’s the dust, it’s the dust, my darling. Who will help us? All I can see is dust.”

The soldiers sent us south then east, then north again. Every night, we slept in the open, surrounded by hundreds of people until, bit by bit, the city people were gradually dispersed. There was a mountain, I remember, Phnom Chisor, that we skirted and climbed and descended, it was always there, growing larger or receding behind us. The farther we walked, the more silent the world became, stripped of traffic, blaring radios, air raid sirens, voices. Each morning, I woke believing my father had returned, but it was always my brother, prodding me awake, his eyes wide and alarmed. I saw purple skies, Martian seas against the saffron temples. I saw my mother trying to make a meal from the things we had scavenged. After weeks of walking, we were ordered to turn around, we were sent east across the river, into Prey Veng province.

My brother asked me if this wandering would last forever. Maybe the cities are truly gone, I said, and they have no place to send us. Gone how? he asked. Bombs, I said, but we had seen no airplanes, no fighters in the sky. He knew it, too, but didn’t say so.

The rainy season began. Somewhere near to Wat Chroy, a man met us on the road. By then, we were a group of sixty or seventy people. The man, who said his name was Kosal, had eyes that seemed to droop at the edges, as if his face could be nothing but sad. He said he was the Angkar here and that this cooperative was our destination. We looked around: we were standing in a fallow field, at the edge of a tattered village.

“What do you mean?” someone asked. “Our homes are in Phnom Penh.”

“Your homes are here,” Kosal said, smiling kindly. “Angkar wants you to remain with us.”

“But our belongings —”

Kosal nodded. “Tomorrow we’ll think about the rest. At oy té. You have nothing to fear.”

Staying near to one another, we made our camp for the night.

A teenaged boy was sent to guard us. He was tall, no more than fourteen years old, with an angular, mischievous face and a rifle slung across his back. He tapped the gun nervously, unable to keep his hands still.

The night sky came nearer, it was a cloth tightening around us, erasing the world. In my dreams, I saw bodies everywhere, infants and grown men, a wide-eyed girl, my brother, men built like steamships and others like sticks. I saw them all, as if we were on a road together, one body growing from the next, soaking into the ground. Above us, sugar palms stretched thinly up in the sky, into streaks of blue and golden light. I saw village houses, seated in a row. Here at our destination, I was the only one alive. I couldn’t move or speak, fear was a shunt in my chest, I wanted to cry out but I couldn’t even breathe.

I woke. I saw the tall boy with the gun, asleep against a tree, his mouth open, round like a baby’s.

“That boy,” my mother said, her voice low. “There’s something familiar about that boy.”

Our first day here began. We built three bare structures to shelter our group, and we covered each with a roof made of thatched palm leaves. They were dry and tough, my hands bled from weaving them together, everybody’s hands bled because we were city people used to paper, pens, and smooth typewriters. There were teachers, students, a dentist, a banker, drivers, machinists, a hotel manager, there were families like ours where the father had been sent away, there were dozens of children. Villagers came and went, watching us. Cautiously, my brother approached them. He asked them to advise us on the proper knitting of the leaves, and a boy his age stopped to help us. Sopham, my small, earnest brother, worked hard, harder than all the rest.

At mid-day, the banker came and sat beside us. He had joined our group only a few days before, but we had never seen him sober. Along the way, he had traded all his extra clothes for rice wine. “Slow down, child,” he said to my brother. “You must try not to draw attention to yourself.”

Sopham looked up. After a moment he said, “I don’t want to sleep in the open tonight. Smell the air, Uncle. It’s going to rain.”

“Which one of these men is your father?” the banker asked.

“They sent him to study.”

“To study,” the banker said. “Sent with his hands tied behind his back. Sent to the forest where there is no electricity, no school, no teachers, no books. Is that how an educated man studies? What theories will he memorize there?” He smiled at us because he was unhappy. “My eldest boy is one of them,” he said. “He went to fight with these jungle Communists but I always warned him, the Khmer Rouge are less than human, they have no soul, no pralung. They’ll cut your throat before they introduce themselves —”

“How dare you,” my mother said.

He looked up, startled.

“Get away from my children.”

“But, madam,” the banker said. “Have I said something untrue?”

Other voices hurried forward. Lower your voices. Those are rumours, only rumours. Can’t you see he’s drunk? They drew protectively around us, shutting him out.

“I’ve drunk nothing!” the banker said, shouting now. “Go on then, keep playing. Make your little houses! You have my pity.” He stood up, smoothed his clothes, and walked unsteadily away. My mother stared after him.

I saw the teenager with the gun watching us, an amused smile on his lips.

That night, we huddled together inside the makeshift hut. The shelter had no walls or floors. A chill crept in, eating its way under my clothes, around my feet, into my bones. Rain splashed against my face. I had never truly known the cold before, all my nerve endings felt seared awake, dipped in ice. The smell of food drifted over us, sweet and fragrant. My mother got up and walked to the village houses. When she returned, triumphant, she held an egg in her hands. “All they asked for was a ballpoint pen,” she said. Salt, pepper, and herbs had been pushed in through a tiny opening in the shell, before the egg was boiled. It was the best thing I had ever tasted, the salt made my mouth water with pleasure. My mother didn’t eat. She took a fragment of shell and traced a line against her wrist, over and over, until the shell disintegrated in her fingers. “Your father is in Phnom Penh,” she said wistfully. “He’ll be here soon. It isn’t far. Along Route 1, it’s just a hundred kilometres.” I breathed in the scent of the wet ground, all the bodies around us, a rotting smell that expanded like moisture in my lungs. The stars crept near, too close, too cold. My brother held my hand. There was a low moaning of children, complaining, asking for food, that never seemed to cease.

I begged my father, Come and find us before we disappear.

One or two at a time, in the night, people went away.

Don’t ask. Don’t look into the holes.

Here is the answer: Do you want to see?

Every day, the quiet expanded. There were gangs of boys who came and went, who boasted of the cleansing they had done. They were sly and unpredictable, at sudden moments they smiled at us and the smiles were as sharp as tiny cuts. Angkar had divided us into the pure and the impure. On one side were the peasants, the mulatan, the true Khmer. On the other were the April 17 people, the population that had been expelled from the cities.

“The wheel of history is turning,” Kosal said, lecturing us, his drooping eyes impervious to our hunger, to fear, to rage. “If you use your hands to try to stop the wheel, they will be caught in the spokes. If you use your feet to try to stop it, you will lose them too. There is no turning back.”

He called us the new people, he said we must abandon our diseased selves, we had to cut loose our dreams, our impurities, our worldly attachments. To pray, to grieve the missing, to long for the old life, all these were forms of betrayal. Memory sickness, Kosal called it. An illness of the mind.

In the hut that night, the banker sighed for everyone to hear, “If I lose my mind, forget everything, became ignorant, will I be cured, Monsieur Angkar?” He stayed alone in a corner and nobody answered him. “You imagine,” he whispered, looking at us, “that it will end. Don’t you?”

Every day, we woke on a knife edge and we ran along it. We crushed makloeu berries and used the dark juice to dye our clothes. We cut our hair. When the sky was still black, the adults were summoned to their work brigades. From four in the morning until nightfall, they ploughed the soil, dug canals, planted seedlings, then transplanted these seedlings to the fields. Twice each day, Angkar rationed us a bowl of water with two or three spoonfuls of rice. My mother would eat quickly and then sit very still, holding her shivering body. “I’m tired, my darling,” she told me. “I’ve never known such tiredness.”

At first, we children were left behind. We scavenged the nearby forest and collected firewood, roots, fruit, and tree bark. My brother, who had never fit in with boys his own age, who preferred to sit at home with his records, had an instinct for the wild. With the dentist’s son Oun, and a few of the village boys, he choked rabbits, twisted their necks, pulled them inside out. When we had meat, if for a moment I felt full, daylight seemed to expand again, colours returned and melted the tightness in my chest.

One of the mulatan, an old woman, tried to keep us occupied. She gave us seeds and spoke kindly about soil and water. She said the war had left Cambodia in disrepair. The Americans had bombed our schools, our roads and reservoirs. To survive, we had to feed our country. Food was our first defence, our most powerful weapon.

The seeds were like letters in my hands. Day after day, I knelt in the dirt, dragging weeds from the ground, imagining the beans, peppers, and cucumbers that would tangle around us.

“Feel my hands,” my brother said one morning, nearly crying. “See how they’re breaking.” We were working together in the garden.

His hands were scratched and rough.

“You’re imagining things,” I told him. “They’re just the same as always.”

“If we had a gun,” my brother said, “we could have all the food we wanted. If I had a rope …”

“Then what?”

Sopham wiped the sweat and tears from his face. After a moment, he said, “If Kosal could give you anything, what would you ask for?”

The sun was crawling up. In the fullness of a banana tree, I saw a figure reaching up into the leaves, trying to grasp the fruit, mistaking it for the sun. The picture, hallucinatory, swam in the air.

“Ask for something you can use,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s no good asking for the impossible.”

But we had a home, I thought, a life. Why should we be ashamed? Kosal’s world was the dream, I knew. Soon we would open our eyes and all of this would cease to be. I saw my father laughing, his stories like a page turning. I closed my eyes and willed him to keep walking, to come nearer.

I heard my brother’s voice. “Ask to be a mulatan, and not one of us. The mulatan always have enough. They have food they can’t even finish.”

In small groups, the older children were sent away. The driver and his wife, the machinist and two of his boys, became sick and died. The students, the teachers, the banker, they vanished. If a family asked for a missing person, Kosal answered them by saying, “I don’t know who you mean. I don’t know this person.” He had a cunning, dry expression in his eyes. He spoke slowly as if his words held threads of gold, he spoke softly and we had to lean in close to hear. “Why do you worry?” he would ask, a smile shading his face. “At oy té.”

One night, we were called to a meeting. Kosal stood before us. An old man, the hotel manager, knelt on the ground.

“Tell us,” Kosal said.

I saw sweat gleaming on the man’s face. He said, “What would you have me say, Teacher?”

“Tell us about your life.”

The old man stared up, uncomprehending.

Beside them, the teenager, Prasith, carried a length of rope hung diagonally across his chest, worn like an ammunition belt. He handled the rope in his hands obsessively, fitfully, winding the end around one wrist, letting it fall slack, then taking it up again. The old man begged forgiveness. “You were happy then, weren’t you?” Kosal said, interrupting him. “In the old society.” There was a tokoe, a gecko on the wall clicking and clicking. “You think you’re suffering now,” Kosal said. He spoke as if he were feverish and light and faultless. “You think you understand, but what do you know about pain? I had to add everything together. There was a cost to your happiness.” My mother tried to turn our faces away but Kosal rebuked her in his smooth, begging voice. He told us to pay attention, to learn from this man’s example. He said that we must make ourselves strong and self-sufficient, we must never rely on anyone else, we must be clean inside because purity was strength. He said, “If your life brings us nothing, why should we not obliterate you?”

In front of us, the old man tried to crawl free. He swung his head away to shield himself, from Prasith and from all the watching eyes.

I wanted to block out the sound that his throat made, the panic in his hands. “Don’t be afraid, mit,” the teenager said, touching the old man’s head, his face. “The earth is quiet. It will bring you quiet. Everything is only beginning again.”

My mother came back with her eyes alight and her hands shaking. She had a plan, she told us. The time had come to run away. We were to be reunited with our father. “Phnom Penh,” she said. “Norodom Boulevard. Of course he’s there.”

The world was upside down. I wanted to tell her there was no Phnom Penh, no Norodom, but it was like speaking to my father on those days when he couldn’t hear us, his drinking had turned the volume down low. We were the sun going down, we were nothing but projections of light on the wall.

“Escape to where?” my brother said gently. “Escape to what?”

Feverish, my mother held her hands over her ears. Her body was both skeletal and swollen.

“He’s been asking for you,” she said. “Father has the plane tickets already. The flight. We’ll go through Bangkok. See the water, see how it’s receding?” She turned to me. “Terrible girl. Why do you blame your father? They sent him to study. They know his worth.”

All night, my mother cried and twisted on the ground. Her legs were tender, bloated with water, she needed food, she needed vitamins, but all those things had vanished as if they’d never been. Kosal gave us medicine but the strange black pills dissolved on her tongue like charcoal.

“Ma,” I whispered. “They’re listening.”

My brother stroked her hands. “She doesn’t know us.”

She lay between us, feverish, laughing.

The stars were everywhere. My father came and knocked at the door, repeating my name like an incantation. From room to room, I ran, turning my back on him. I walked through the hallways, I found the staircase that led to the rooftop. My father was there waiting for me. He held my hand and pulled me through a window and into a hidden space. He was covered in dust, it slid into the air, it coated everything. I lay my father down. There were pills everywhere, in his hands, tumbling out of his pockets, cascading down and skittering along the floor, a thousand riels for a cupful, I remember, a thousand riels, sometimes less. The boys playing kick sandal by the riverside, the cyclo drivers asleep in their vehicles. Endless colour and movement, a wonder before my eyes. “Are we going home now, Pak? I’m hungry and the moon is already out.” His eyes were open. I filled this room with the names of books I remembered, I saw them on the thin, hard spines, floating on typeset pages, the texts of the Tipitaka, the Buddhist cannon, books by Alexandre Dumas, novels of Hak Chhay Hok and Khun Srun, I read their titles on clean sheets of paper that were rolled into the little typewriter my father had given me. My friends laughing when I had told them, puffed up like a tiger, that my father had given me this clattering machine, this grown-up beauty, something of my own.

“If I leave you,” I asked him, “where will I go?”

“My sweet, you can never travel far enough.”

Along the pitted road a truck came, churning up the ground with its thick tires. A beam of light advanced across the huts but I lay close to the earth, inside the darkness. Beside me, our friend, Oun, the dentist’s son, was reciting verses in Pali, I could hear the running of sound: There are trees bearing perpetual fruit, on these trees there are multitudes of birds. There also is heard the cry of peacocks and herons, and the melodious song of kokilas. There near the lake, the cry of birds who call, Live ye, Live ye. The birds roam the woods … Passages he had memorized in school, just as we had done. Words pushed out of his mind, they floated down on us like air.

“My son, my son,” his father said.

Oun’s voice fell silent, he moaned as if trying to reel the sentences back in again.

His father said, “Angkar is listening.”

There were spies, chhlop, everywhere. They came and waited in the darkness.

I fell asleep and became a small child again. I saw Wat Langka, its tiled rooftops, its rising eaves, stupas in the courtyard, the stone undulations of the Naga at the foot of the stairs. These were the forms that had coloured my earliest dreams. When my grandmother died, the monks had written her name on a slip of paper. They had set the words alight, watching the paper coil and burn, becoming ash inside a golden bowl. In the bright heat of morning, the monks’ voices had risen through the air, arcing up against the temple walls.

All mortal things are impermanent, their nature is to arise and decay, having arisen they cease, in their stilling is happiness.

I opened the door to our apartment but nothing was visible. All the walls had been folded away.

“Tell me a story,” my father said, his voice disembodied and sad. “My thoughts are dissolving. Don’t turn away,” he begged. “I was walking, the sky goes forever. Why is it changing to dust?”

I caressed his hands, I forced the pills between his lips.

—

The next morning, our mother could not stand. When Prasith came, we tried to tell him that she was ill and couldn’t work, but the teenager just watched us with a faint smile on his lips. Kosal, he said importantly, had granted us permission to take our mother to an infirmary.

Prasith raised our mother up from the floor and carried her out of the hut. Her eyes flickered open and she tried to nudge him away. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Your children are here.” Carefully, almost tenderly, he lay her inside a wooden cart. My brother and I took hold of opposite handles and began to push. Prasith led us away from the cooperative, his face tilted toward the clouds, as if luxuriating in the rising warmth. When our path joined another road, he gave us further directions and turned back.

“That boy,” my mother mumbled, barely conscious. “I know that boy.”

Nothing seemed real. The road we walked on was desolate and cratered and the sun never seemed to move, only to come steadily nearer, expanding into a dense fog. Twice, Khmer Rouge soldiers stopped us. They examined the permission slips Prasith had given us and then they waved us on, past workers who dissolved into the mist, past grey animals. Hours later, we arrived at the infirmary, a ruined concrete building where the nurses were only children and the sick lay everywhere on cots on the ground.

Upstairs, we found a place for our mother. There was no medical equipment but nurses came around with medicine, small white cubes that they stirred into bowls of water. Our mother was more alert now. She drank the medicine, her hands shaking, the water spilling. When the bowl was empty, she smiled weakly at us.

“Sugar,” she said. “It’s sugar.”

Heavy rains began, lightning bursts, flooding. Hurriedly, we unrolled the bamboo blinds that clung to the ceiling. They were tattered and the wind swung them back and forth. We sat close to our mother, trying to keep her warm. I watched as she stared feverishly into my brother’s face, looking for something, a detail beloved to her, a trace of someone I couldn’t see. Sopham’s eyes were like still ponds. I leaned my head against the wall, unable to rest.

Often, my father had gone away. He would return home, to Norodom Boulevard, with empty pockets and bloodshot eyes, he would say things like, “I got carried away. I started walking up Monivong and suddenly it was Tuesday but how that happened, I don’t know.”

“We don’t know,” my brother and I would echo. “We don’t know!”

“All I remember,” my father said once, his hands drifting limply in the air, “is looking up at the sky and thinking the sky would never go dark, it can’t get dark because a hard blue lid covers everything. ‘Whatever else we were intended to do, we are not intended to succeed,’ who said that? A great man. A great, good man. We are not. We are not …”

For as long as I could remember, my father treated his sadness with Valium, pills he had begun taking when he was a student in Phnom Penh. I used to buy his medicine for him, by the cupful, in the Chinese market. But later, as the war dragged on, when the Khmer Rouge controlled the Mekong River and everyday the airport came under worse bombardment, the market ran out of pills. My father stopped sleeping, ate little, and worried constantly. The rockets and mortar fire cracked his nerves and sometimes his eyes seemed strange and elongated to me, bloodshot, red-rimmed, and lost. He wrote lists of names, people he could appeal to for money or support, people who could transport us to the border. He tucked the lists into my clothes for safekeeping.

One night, my mother set empty plates on the dinner table and looked searchingly at us, at him.

He ran his index finger across a plate, as if to check for dust.

“Would you like to go out?” he asked, flustered. His long body stooped toward her, like a fishing rod. I yearned to go to him, to pull him back. Our mother was not like other mothers, she had never been shy or decorous or restrained.

“Into the city?” my mother said, dropping her voice. “So we can dine with all these military men waiting for what, the end of the world? And the cost of rice, don’t you realize? it’s up again and your wallet’s empty. There’s nothing here and tomorrow will be the same.”

My brother watched, bright with embarrassment.

“Shhh,” my father said, smiling weakly, eyes drifting to the window where voices rose like applause and touched the curtains, then dissipated back into the street below.

“Promise me, my love. We must get out. The war is ending but what does it mean?”

“I don’t know. I’ll get us out.”

“At least Sopham,” my mother said.

“I promise.”

Downstairs, I saw people lying in streams of water, their mouths open, the rain leaking in. The floor was littered with bodies, and I couldn’t differentiate the dying from the dead. There was no help for them. I hid upstairs, beside Sopham, unable to speak. Between us, the quiet had become habitual, we were wary of the spies and the chhlop, of saying the wrong thing. In Kosal’s cooperative, a teenager named Milia had been caught keeping a diary. When the spies found it, Milia had disappeared. She never came back and I lay awake at night, staring at the place she used to sleep. It was occupied by another girl, as if Milia had never been. The diary, too, with all its thoughts and secrets, had been swallowed up. I dreamed they were under the huts, Milia, the banker, reaching their arms up, trying to help us.

The torrential rains stopped. One of the nurses saw that my mother was stronger, and we were discharged.

Walking home, my brother and I took turns pushing the empty cart, our mother beside us, her steps tentative and weary. The sky was translucent, a watery gold that settled like steam over the distant fields. “Everything ends,” my mother said. “But we’re here. We’re together, even if all else must fade away.”

Prasith came to us. In our small patch of vegetables, he said, “Who owns all this?”

“Come and see,” he said, calling the other children. “Whose food is this?”

I told him that this garden was ours.

Prasith got down on his hands and knees and began digging at the dirt. He snuck his fingers deep into a hole and extracted the tiny, misshapen root, a sweet potato, the earth still clinging to its wrinkled skin. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Not yet. But you will: we no longer steal from the people.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“Steal,” he whispered.

He put the tiny root in my hand.

Devotion softened his face. He said that people had suffered, they had given their lives to end this injustice. “That’s why we fought this war,” he said, “so that all of us might be free.” He picked up a shovel that was lying nearby and began to dig, bringing up the roots and all the food. “I caught a boy stealing,” Prasith said. “He took a watermelon but I punished him. Would you like to know how?”

The dry grass bit my feet. His voice suffocated me but I tried to close my ears, to cloak myself. Prasith stepped nearer, the words flowing out of him as if they were music.

“How brave you are,” Sopham said, cutting him off. “You must be fearless to do a thing like that.”

Prasith turned.

My brother stood beside me.

The boy’s tone was mocking. “Are you?”

Sopham clasped his hands together. I willed him not to speak, not to show himself. “Yes,” he said evenly. “I’m not afraid of my brothers.”

Prasith stared, and then laughed. He held the shovel out. “Do your brother a favour,” he said, “and finish our work.”

Calmly, Sopham took the shovel and walked to the centre of our garden. I watched all the roots, all the seeds, come loose.

Prasith began trailing us across the fields. He would ramble excitedly. One moment sincere, the next, sly.

“If you want to be strong,” he said one day, “you have to become someone else. You have to take a new name.

“For instance,” he said, nodding at me, “you should take the name Mei.”

I stared, bewildered. We had been up since dark, digging canals to irrigate the fields. In a little while, we would be called back to work. Six more hours of digging and shifting soil.

“Mei, Mei,” he sang. The name, a common one, meant “lovely, beautiful.” His eyes were half-closed, heavy-lidded. “See this?” He lifted his shirt to reveal an unhealed scar. “This is shrapnel.”

My brother made a noise of disgust.

I averted my eyes.

“Shrapnel,” Prasith repeated, watching me, letting his shirt fall.

My brother had glimpsed a frog and now he dropped to his hands and knees. The tall grass shifted around him.

“B-52s,” Prasith said. “Whomp-whomp-whomp, like that, everywhere.” He tilted his head back and stared at the sky as if it might fall down on us. “The light, it breaks. It breaks people open as if they’re dogs or dirt. I looked up and there were no houses, no people. Just this hole.”

Shyly, he bowed his head. “I’m important here. But, really, not even Kosal has any power. Me or him, it’s like using an egg to break a stone.”

I couldn’t understand. “But who decides?”

Prasith smiled.

I persisted. “Who’s the stone?”

“Too slow, too fast, here’s the stone now.” He swung a bit of rope in the air, laughing at me. “Here it comes. What can you do to stop it?”

My brother stood up. He held the frog by its dark, crooked legs and then swung it, hard, against a rock. “Too late,” my brother said. “Too slow.”

The animal in Sopham’s hand convulsed.

I looked at it, sickened, starving. We could almost see through the frog’s skin, to its lungs and guts. Slowly, pitifully, its feet beat against nothing. I turned away. To hide the trembling in my hands, I kept walking, kept moving. When I turned back to look for my brother, I saw Prasith’s cooking fire, their two heads bowed together and white smoke that coursed into the sky.

I stood watching until they stood up, until they kicked the fire out.

That night, my brother showed me the treasure Prasith had given him. Two eggs, impossible things. We shared the first and gave the second to our mother. She ate it slowly, gratefully, her eyes closed, chewing the egg and then the shell itself. She told us that she had dreamed about our father. Pa had come with a knife, she said. He had cut us free.

Before we slept, my brother tied our wrists together, the way Prasith had taught him, so that if one of us were taken, the other would wake.

When Prasith restrained the boy, he didn’t resist. This is the way my brother described it to me. The boy, Tao, the eldest son of the machinist, had stood there, motionless. My brother stared at the ground. Prasith had given him new sandals to wear, and they felt heavy and unfamiliar to him, the rubber hot from the sun.

Calmly, Prasith took his own krama and tied it tightly around the boy’s face. It choked Tao’s breath and he stumbled and fell forward. Against his skin, the fabric of the krama grew dark with sweat or tears.

“Do you feel pity, Sopham?”

The air had become cold, Sopham told me. The sky, the colours, the feel of the air, the breath in his lungs, even the passing seconds were cold. My brother could feel the older boy watching him.

When Tao’s mutilated body lay between them, Prasith cleaned his knife carefully in the grass.

“I used to think it was strange,” Prasith said, “even terrible, but now I understand how it is.” There was a shivering in his voice. “We have to let the sand wash away so that everything that remains will be clearer, stronger.

“No one will ever invade our country again. No more fighting, no more wars. Do you see? We’re nothing but waterways. Nothing but drops of water.” He was staring at Sopham so intensely, my brother had the sensation that the edges of his body were being sheared away.

“Your father was a translator, wasn’t he?” Prasith said. “I think you went to Chatamukh School. Maybe there’s some part of you that remembers me.”

My brother studied the body, the soft creases of Tao’s clothing. He said, “It’s as if that time never was.”

Prasith began undoing the rope that bound Tao’s arms. They walked away, leaving the body where it was, folded over in the grass. “Look, this is what happens when people disappear,” Prasith said. “Bat kluon. What will we do? All the bodies are fading away.”

The seasons were changing, and all around me the harvest shone, brushed gold. I saw my brother and Prasith approaching from a distance. They walked confidently, arms relaxed, the rifle on Prasith’s back angled to the sky. I was watching them when Kosal came and told me, proudly, that my name was on a list. I looked up at him, uncomprehending. “Come,” he said, and I followed him behind the huts to where a line of girls was waiting.

He told me to stand with them.

I went to the end of the line.

Through the gap between the huts, I saw the pristine fields, strangely bright. My brother running toward me.

Kosal was speaking, addressing us. He said we had been chosen to join a children’s brigade, we would travel south, we would serve Angkar. Around us, the cooperative seemed unnaturally loud.

“For how long?” I asked.

He looked at me, a pleasant expression on his face. “Oh, not long.”

There were people now, shapes approaching. I looked up and saw Sopham. My entire body began to shake. I began walking away, in the direction of the huts, looking for my mother. Prasith was there, I had not seem him arrive, he took my hand and led me back. “Mei,” he said. “Where are you going?”

He returned me to the end of the line. “Everyone has a place,” he told me. “Everyone has a function.”

Sopham and my mother were together now. She was there, she was holding me. “They want to take me away,” I said. My mother’s eyes were swollen, gleaming.

“Hush, my sweet,” she said, caressing my face.

“Please, Ma.”

“Hush, my girl,” she said, her voice fading. “We have no choice.” In her hands were the tin plate and spoon that she used. She folded them into my hands. “You’ll come home soon. You must be brave.”

“Ma,” I begged. “Help me.”

Gently, so gently I do not know if I imagined it, she pushed me away.

A lone cadre escorted us, single file, along the narrow ridges of the rice fields. We were a dozen hungry children, slipping in the mud, running to keep up. I saw tanks and rusted farm machines lying abandoned in the open. Grass slid through them, sticking up like hair, and I told myself that I would see these same objects when I came back again, in a few days, in a week or two. We walked until the sun was high, and we kept walking past crops that were a verdant green, their stalks blurring in the heat. I couldn’t breathe, I felt my mother’s fingers pushing against me. Red clay coated my feet and clothes. You have no possessions, no history, no parents, the cadre said. Your families have abandoned you. The sleeve of her shirt fell back, exposing her slender arms, the colour of wet wood. I thought of my mother gazing at Sopham, going from soldier to soldier, pleading for my father. Open your hands, the cadre said. Let go. If you are pure of heart, you have nothing to be afraid of. This is the revolution that is coming, that is here.