Dogs at the Perimeter

Rithy

Sopham had heard singing in the fields. This is the way he described it to me, later on, in the caves.

In the middle of a harvested field, he and Prasith had come to a sala, a meeting place, where a group of boys sat singing, a teenaged girl watching over them. When the song ended, Teacher called my brother forward. She asked his name.

“Rithy,” he said.

“Can you add these numbers together, Rithy?”

“No.”

“Can you read?”

“Some.”

“What work did your father do?”

“He had a stand in the market. He sold palm sugar.”

“How old are you?”

“Nine.”

The questions kept coming but he answered them all, concealing himself like a stem overlaid with branches. His new name, Rithy, meant “strength.” In Phnom Penh, in the temple schools, a new name had been a rite of passage, a bridge from one shore of life to the next, the symbol of a transformed existence. While Sopham answered questions, Prasith stood beside him, listening carefully, nodding as my brother spoke.

The noonday sun scorched the grass. “Fine,” Teacher said at last, when all her questions were done. “You can stay.”

Prasith left to return to Kosal’s cooperative. Before they separated, he told my brother to be careful, that the spies were everywhere, Angkars climbing over Angkars. He said that, in our old cooperative, everyone, including our mother, was safer alone.

“She was relieved that you were leaving, wasn’t she?” Prasith said. “Just like when your sister went away. Mei’s school is just like this one.”

He climbed onto his bicycle and pedalled slowly into the sky’s orange haze.

Each morning, Teacher rounded them up to practise military drills: running, digging, hiding, loading their weapons, aiming, and firing. There was no ammunition, and sometimes the guns themselves were made of soft wood, newly carved and still smelling of the forest. The boys threw rocks at targets and screamed belligerently, cursing spies and agents and counter-revolutionaries. The Americans and the Vietnamese were pressing at the borders, Teacher said, and every child, every Cambodian, must defend their country. We are pure, she said, we are free within ourselves.

“Children become Masters,” Teacher said. “The bread outgrows the basket.”

They sang everyday. Later on, they sang when they carried out the punishments. Sopham had always had a beautiful voice. Before, our mother used to say that he sounded like In Yeng, and it had been In Yeng records that had crowded my brother’s bedside in Phnom Penh. He used to approach the record player with a kind of earnest pleasure, resting his forehead against the wooden case when the music started. He didn’t play kick sandal or tot sai with the gang of kids on our street. Those records had been like water to him. He drank and he drank, he was never satisfied.

They had songs to sing even if the words were foolish. Let us destroy the white and glorify the black! Let us dignify the unlettered and eradicate the learned! The judgments were foolish too, but the boys followed orders anyway, there was nothing to be gained in arguing. For them, plastic bags were weapons. Farm tools were weapons. He tried not to dirty his bare hands. Even up to the last moment, he told the guilty not to be afraid. My brother would walk back at night, across the fields, invisible even to himself. When morning came, the sky seemed a little less vivid, a shade lighter, but the shapes around him were clear, pristine.

He slept in a house with a dozen other boys and they ate rice everyday, there was meat sometimes and always vegetables. In the fields, they saw battalions of workers and they marvelled at the clumsiness of the city people who fell in the mud and broke the implements and injured the animals with their stupidity. Until now, he’d had no idea how vast these rice fields were, how much effort and waste and life were needed to feed a country as small and weak as his. There was too much water and there was too much sun. There were broken dams and flooded crops, there were crabs in the mud and shoddy seedlings. There were closed doors all over this country so farmers died without anyone noticing, they had died generation after generation, from starvation and swindling and finally bombs, until Angkar came and turned the world upside down.

“Your parents deceived you,” Teacher said, “They told you to eat and drink, but how could you when your brother had nothing? When your sister was dying of thirst?”

No city, he thought, could ever be as beautiful as here. The tall stalks of swaying rice, golden brown. Families of sugar palms and coconut trees diminishing into the horizon.

Days passed when he endeavoured to be strong, uncorrupted. He was afraid to think too hard about the Centre, which people said existed in Phnom Penh, in the abandoned buildings beside the river. Angkar was all powerful. Angkar never slept because the Centre consisted of every one of them, watching and listening, reporting and punishing. Everywhere you are, there is the Centre.

Occasionally Prasith came on his bicycle and they walked together in the fields, using long sticks to prod the softest mangoes from the trees. The fruit always helped. He craved sugar and sweetness but against his will these things jogged old memories, dormant images like furniture in a pitch-black room. When Sopham asked about our mother, Prasith said she was the same, the very same. My brother asked if he could see her, but Prasith replied that it was impossible.

“The spies are watching your mother,” he said. There was a new edge in Prasith’s voice, the boy seemed older and more wary. “The new Angkar suspects everyone. Even Kosal has been arrested.”

Sopham saw the bruises of a thousand eyes upon them.

“One day, you’ll go east and defend the country,” Prasith said, trying to reassure him. “We’ll both go east. I would be proud to be a soldier.”

My brother hoped that this was true. To fight an enemy, a real enemy, would be a relief. He took a breath and said the words he had prepared. “My mother used to tell us that you looked familiar to her.”

Prasith’s face was empty of expression. “My father and your father knew each other. I lived there, in Phnom Penh, but not for long.” When he looked at Sopham, his eyes were calm, untroubled. “But they’re ghosts now, aren’t they?”

On the day Teacher told him that he had been chosen, my brother was happy but he didn’t reveal it. What is Sopham? he asked himself. He is a seed in the dirt, belonging to no one. Rithy will survive for a little while, and then he, too, will disintegrate. If only he could have counselled our father, my brother thought. Maybe this knowledge would have protected him; our father had not known how to cleave his soul.

Teacher told him that he had been selected to work in a security office. The office consisted of a small prison, run by a Khmer Rouge named Ta Chea, and it was housed in a concrete building that used to be a school. First, my brother was a guard and then, later, he was brought into the little rooms where the enemies were questioned. He was the youngest of all the interrogators and Chea told my brother that he should be proud. There are many prisons like ours, Chea said, all over the new country. The interrogators were pulling truth from the bleakest corners, they were the hands and the eyes of Angkar, they were the ones, the only ones, who refused deception. “Don’t be afraid,” Chea told him. “You have a strong character and an upright mind. They can’t harm you.” He said it was my brother’s goodness that cut the prisoners, it was his honesty that sought the truth.

The prisoners arrived blindfolded and tied with rope. My brother studied them as each session began, chilled and fascinated. One night, Prasith arrived. My brother saw his friend helped down, gently, from a truck. His interrogator asked Prasith to give a biography and to name all the remaining members of his family. Then he had to repeat his life story, over and over. Kosal had betrayed Prasith before he died. The teenager was corrupt, Kosal had said, his only aim to sabotage the revolution. He had gone to school in Phnom Penh, his father had worked as a driver for the French Embassy. All this time, Prasith had kept this information hidden. During the bombings, the B-52s had spared almost no one in his village yet Prasith had somehow managed to survive. He was a traitor of the worst kind, an insect to be purged, a boy who had always put his own survival first. My brother knew this was true. Somehow, Prasith had never completely believed. Maybe Angkar was right, maybe the country had always been most vulnerable from within.

The dying always beg for water. In the prison, the interrogator’s job is to trace all lines to the enemy, to lay bare the networks of connection, and then to follow this taint to every corner of the country. My brother was taught to do this methodically, calmly, without losing control. Chea kept track of the names that surfaced during each prisoner’s interrogation. He noted them in a ledger, then he sent messages to the cooperative leaders: a sheet of white paper, folded four times, containing only names, a date, and the place of the summons.

Chea rotated the interrogators regularly. By the time my brother saw him, Prasith was already dying, his mind had come apart. He didn’t recognize Sopham.

“You must do whatever is necessary,” Chea said, turning the pages of Prasith’s file. “You must make Prasith uncertain about the question of life and death, you must let him hope that he may survive.”

Our mother had always spoken of the pralung, which is something like the idea of the soul. Sometimes, Sopham told me, the people who survived the longest in prison were the ones who had too great a pralung, too many souls, for it took so long to remove them. A body did not have to die, he learned, for the pralung to be damaged, to grow crooked, become wasted, to finally disappear. He saw people who never cried and people who wept continuously from the moment they entered the prison.

“Most beloved and respected Angkar,” Prasith had said. “Most beloved. Most respected.” His words were disjointed. “I swear to you on all that I love, I have never betrayed you. Please don’t abandon me here. I swear to you, the enemies surround us.”

My brother became familiar with the workings of the human body, with the tissue and the blood and the organs and the delicate, fragile forces that held a boy together. Cut this knot here, and the hand or the leg or the heart becomes useless. It was both mysterious and simple. Every day, my brother fought to banish all the unnecessary raging inside himself, to become as devoted and steadfast as Chea.

Before he died, Prasith told detailed, fantastic tales, he admitted freely to being a spy, he described America as a place where citizens lived on airplanes or underground, leaving the surface of the country empty as a sheet. The CIA had recruited him at a young age, he said. They had sent him messages hidden inside pieces of clothing. They had signalled to him from the cockpits of their planes. The truest believers, he said, describing the agents he worked for, were the most indifferent monsters.

My brother became obsessed with water. His throat felt parched and rough, he hallucinated about water, he hoarded it in plastic bags and left these in the fields. Sometimes he stood and gazed at the shackled enemies and drank water in front of them as if to prove it was still there, it still existed within their reach. When it rained, he sat and watched the water moving over the ledges of the concrete building, seeping into the ground, falling and falling from the nothingness above. He watched it gathering in the clay jugs behind the building where the enemy was sometimes brought to be forced down under the clear, clean water. A blessing turned into a torture.

“I just went on with all the same things,” he told me. “What did it matter if I believed or not? Ta Chea told me to think of him as my father. He said he would protect me as a father would.”

In the prison, he let music run in his head. He thought about his hero, In Yeng, the singer, and wondered what had happened to those recording studios in Phnom Penh, to the television screens and singers, to the machines and microphones and boxes of records. Music, he knew, was recorded on to strips of brown tape, tape that spun around and around a metal reel. You could store music in canisters, you could lift it in stacks. If tomorrow the Khmer Rouge disappeared and he could return home, would he go? His collection of records might still be there but he knew that when he put his fingertips to the wooden case, when he set the needle against the grooves, the record might spin and spin and leave him wanting. Now the singer would be an executed man. Now all the reels of tape would have burned away and what joy was there to be had in such a return? My brother was nine years old. He had committed murders, he told me. He had tried to save himself and he had seen things that even our father, until the end of his life, could never have imagined.

A woman named Chanya came into the prison. They kept her for three weeks and, every night, she was interrogated. Her confession was nearly complete when Chea sent my brother to her. The woman was dying, on the table where she had been shackled, her arms and legs were impossibly thin. Her voice was so weak, he had to lean over her to catch the words.

“I’m hungry,” she whispered.

“I have rice for you.”

“Please. Just a spoonful. Please.”

He gave her the rice, and then a sip of water.

“Thank you, my son. You are kind.”

The next morning, before dawn, he found himself seated beside her again. The gaps between her sentences had grown longer. He did not light the candle.

“You must tell him,” she said. Her eyes stared up at the stained, dingy ceiling.

“Tell who?”

“Your father. Your brothers.”

He hesitated, thinking. And then he said, “If only I could find them.”

“They’re in the caves.”

“Which caves?”

“You know. The place your father hid when he fought the Americans. The men are waiting for you.”

“No, I can’t find the way by myself.”

“But the map, my son. He drew it so carefully.”

“They took it from me.”

She breathed heavily. “What is that sound?”

It was the splashing of water in the buckets outside. “The children are washing in the river.” A sad smile touched her lips. He was an instrument, he told himself, only an instrument. “After school today,” he continued, “I stopped at the market. I bought you kralan from the lady with the curly hair and the gold tooth.” He kept talking. The words seemed to soothe her. After a long time, she turned her head. “It’s sweet,” she said. “This kralan, still warm.”

That evening, he was sent to her again. Her eyes were closed. He thought she was unconscious and he repeated her name. “Give me your hand,” she said. He reached out and held her. Weakly, she ran her thumb over his fingers. “You’ve been chewing your fingernails again. Down to the quick. My poor Tooch. Always so nervous.”

Between their hands, there were two small pieces of paper. They were rolled up, small as a stem, tucked into a gold ring that was so narrow, it could only have belonged to a child. He slid them free and opened them. On the first scrap, a map had been drawn. The paper had been folded so many times that the ink lines of mountains and jungle paths bled into the creases. “Poor little Tooch,” she said, letting him go, turning her face away. “My poor boy.”

She was taken from the prison that night and killed. Sopham locked himself in a storage room and used a candle to study the map. He could still hear the woman’s breathing, the shallow exhalations. When he was small and learning to tie his first knot, our mother had told him that a rope almost never breaks within the knot itself. Instead a rope is weakest just outside the entrance to a knot, where the load is greatest. The map showed a way to the heavily guarded Vietnamese border, into the caves and out again. The second scrap of paper held a single phrase, written so lightly he almost didn’t see it.

The river has flooded this year.

A smuggling ring, he thought. A code.

He returned to the map. If disciplined, perhaps he could travel there in a single day. My brother knew that Angkar would seek his family out, uncles and aunts, cousins, friends. They would be identified and arrested. He no longer believed that our mother was alive. Who was left? Only his sister. Only me.

When he could see the map in his mind’s eye, my brother burned the papers. He placed the ashes on his tongue where they turned to paste and little by little dissolved.

He waited for the hot season to end. In the forest beyond the prison he hid lighters, clothing, uncooked rice, paper, pencils, candles, a good knife. Rithy existed and survived. He waited and kept his hands and his face impeccably clean but inside, there was someone else, a boy who watched, who had no need for language, who saw everything but never spoke, a boy who waited in the dirt for the end of one season and the start of another.

When news arrived at the prison that a girl at the reservoir was searching for Prasith, my brother, ever reliable, asked permission to bring her to the security office. He had done this before for other enemies. Chea, suspicious of everyone but my brother, agreed. Sopham hid his supplies on his body. He set off on an old bicycle, carrying the travel pass that Chea had given him.

Every day, hauling mud in the bottom of a vast, dry reservoir, I followed Bopha’s tracks. Our work unit, made up of three dozen girls, moved from project to project. Sometimes we hauled mud or shit, or we dug with our bare hands, or we gathered wood. Sometimes we just marched from one destination to another, guided by a brutal but confused cadre. Bopha, Chan, Thida, Srei, Vanna, so many more, these are the children I remember. Oun, the dentist’s son, arrived here, too, part of a children’s mobile unit.

At night, I slept beside Bopha. We were the same age, we had the same blunt haircut, the same hollow bellies, but her eyes were bright and questioning and alive. Somehow, months of working in our brigade had not dulled them. When she laughed, she covered her eyes with her hands. All I would see was her upturned mouth, pale lips, a flash of teeth, stained fingers.

Every few weeks, Bopha would leave the reservoir at night. She would walk into the fields, through the blackness, until she reached the cooperative where her older sister lived. These nights were always the worst for me. My terror grew and grew, choking my breath. I wanted every noise, every approach, to be hers. Somehow, Bopha always succeeded in avoiding the patrols. When she returned before dawn, I held her more tightly, I watched her constantly, I did not want to let her disappear.

I recognized my mother everywhere, in the groups of women whose arms and legs were thin as blades, who dug endlessly at the ground. I tried to climb away into my mind, there were tunnels there, lakes, shelters within shelters. Memories came to me like objects sliding off a shelf. Week after week, I tried to convince myself to go back, just as Bopha did, but I kept putting it off. The darkness held a terror for me. Many times, I dreamed that I went home but my mother was already gone. No trace of her, no record, remained. Everything I knew had gone away. All around me, hour after hour, I heard the steady crack of shovels against earth.

At the height of the dry season, Oun beckoned to me across the reservoir. Briefly, a line connected us, taut for a moment, before he dropped his eyes. Slowly, cautiously, we drew nearer to each other, until we were side by side. Oun set his basket down, pretending to be occupied with it. “I went back,” he said. “I saw my mother.” I tried to shield my eyes from the glare of the sun. He hesitated, picking some rocks out of the basket. “Sopham was gone, sent away like us.” One by one, the rocks came out. “I heard your mother was ill and that Angkar sent her to the infirmary.” “Oun,” I said. I saw the basket lifting, and then his bare feet, dark against the soil. The sun was nearly in the centre of the sky. It had taken him this long to reach me. “Do you know the place?” he asked me. His words came quickly now, rushing out. “It’s where my father died. You must know it. In this sub-district, there’s only the one infirmary.”

I glimpsed a cadre walking toward us.

“I know it,” I whispered.

Desperately, I pushed my hands into the warm mud, digging, busying myself. Time slowed. The morning light had solidified around us, holding each object, making every outline, all the shapes and all the people, precise unto themselves. I looked up. The cadre was watching us from a distance.

“Go,” Oun said, moving away. “Don’t wait.”

I remember very little of the journey. Bopha gave me her sandals, which were newer than mine and in better condition, and then we went, moving through the impossible blackness, quickly, carefully. We had learned to be wary of injury. Wounds didn’t heal anymore. In the heat and humidity, the smallest wounds could become infected. In the reservoir, people died from negligible things, a cut, a piece of rotten food, a single mistake made in a moment of exhaustion. As we ran, I saw Oun and the other children, I saw the cadre, Vuthy, who took care of us and who tried to be kind, but of Sopham or of my mother, my thoughts were bare. Not even their faces came to me. It was as if I could not lift them out from the darkness. We walked on and on, the night stretching around us.

At the edge of a road, Bopha took my hand. She was continuing on to see her sister, and we had agreed to meet back at the reservoir by morning. “Don’t stay away too long,” Bopha said before letting go. Within seconds, the shape of her had vanished into the emptiness.

People slept on straw mats or on the filthy tiled floor, with nothing to cover them or to keep the rats away. A girl wearing a long apron gave me a candle so that I could search for my mother. Slowly, I moved between the bodies, circling once, and then again, and again. I glimpsed a woman’s loose clothing, her dark hair, and finally her face, childlike now, young again. My mother was so very thin, I had not recognized her.

There was no food in the infirmary. People lay covered in flies, too weak to climb out to use the latrine, unable to scavenge and feed themselves. They groaned and cried for water. My mother’s hands were so tiny, they could fit inside my own. I stroked her hair and whispered her name. I said that her girl had come back, I had come to take her home. The wind blew inside and cooled us. A memory came to me of the sugar water she had drunk, perhaps a year ago now. It seemed like it must be a different girl, a different mother. She opened her eyes and looked at me as if from a great distance.

“Are we going home now?” she asked finally. Yes, I said. The lie felt bitter on my lips. “He’s there,” she said. “Father.”

A boy came and said he was a doctor and he gave me a white paste to rub on my mother’s chest. The paste was chalky and strange, it smelled of the earth and some herb I couldn’t identify. She asked me where my brother was.

When I told her I didn’t know she said, “He went away with that boy. They went away and then the boy came back alone.”

Gently, I rubbed the paste onto her skin and as I did so, tears began to run from her eyes. I could not bear it. I blew the candle out.

The night passed slowly. The infirmary was never still. People called to ghosts who were not there, living ones or lost ones, names that no one answered to. The words filled the space like an incantation. Unable to sleep, I got up and went outside. First light came, I thought of Bopha waiting for me, and the mud of the reservoir seemed to grow brighter in my imagination, all the black-clothed workers, war slaves, the cadres sometimes called us, though the war had ended long ago. Here, in the infirmary, there were mothers and fathers and children, but hardly any who belonged to each other. Infrequently, the nurses came through. They were hardened now, more unforgiving than they had been before. I saw a woman being sent back to her work unit. Stone-faced, unable to weep, she left a bundle of food beside her son. Rice, fruit. By evening, the food had disappeared but the boy had not moved. I had hideous, nightmare dreams about my brother. On the third morning that I was there, I saw the nurses lift the boy’s body and carry it away. All day, my mother did not open her eyes.

I scavenged, going farther and farther afield because the land near to the infirmary had been picked clean. In my mother’s pocket, I had found her travel pass and I carried it everywhere with me. The pass was signed not by Kosal, but by a name I didn’t recognize. I searched desperately for frogs, lizards, crickets, but my movements and my thoughts were slow. I, too, was starving. I returned with herbs and wild grasses and made a thin soup for us both. “The food is ready,” my mother said. “Call your brother to the table. Give him a little rice.” All too clearly, I could see the images in her mind, our white kitchen, her silvery pots, her family. I lay beside her and tried to disappear into my mother’s world, to become her, to keep her near and lose myself instead. I begged her to be strong, to come back. I could not bear to survive alone.

On the third day, the boy, the doctor, came and told me that I had to leave. I asked who would take care of my mother and he said that he would. “Who will bring her food?” I asked. He said that Angkar would provide. I said that I would not leave, and he looked at me, surprised. He asked my name and my work unit. When I didn’t answer, he asked to see my travel pass. I showed him the one I had taken from my mother. He stared at it for a long time, and then he flung it back. He could not read, I realized. The child doctors of the Khmer Rouge could not even read. He told me to leave immediately, that she was no longer my responsibility. I knelt on the ground, weeping, trying to wipe the dirt from the scrap of paper.

My mother’s chest rose and fell, struggling on and on. A nurse came and told me, urgently, that I must leave, all the relatives had to go, the doctor had sent word to Angkar. And then what? I wanted to ask her. What more could Angkar do to us? But the nurse had already hurried off. The world had grown too large for me, it was asking too much, too much. I held my mother’s hand, I kissed her fingers. “The rice,” she said. “Please, my darling. Bring me a little rice.” The things I had scavenged lay around us. Fruit, herbs, water. I searched my mind for what I should do, where I could find food, how I could help her, but my thoughts felt like grains of sand, scratching, tumbling. My father’s stories came back to me, all the heroes that persisted in Khmer poems and myths, so many stories that promised us we were braver than we were. I wanted to shake him, I wanted to tell him that the things we try so hard to keep, the beloved, most precious things, keep slipping through. We had always been powerless to keep them safe. I got to my feet, I went outside for air, and then I kept walking, kept going. At the junction where Bopha had parted from me, I stood, weeping, trying to will myself to return. Go back, I told myself. She needs you. She’ll die without you.

I kept going, as if we were again leaving the city, this exodus that had begun and had never ended. I walked and saw the crowd beside me. People had carried the things they treasured, a machinist carried his tools, a grocer pushed a cart of groceries, my father carried books. In my mother’s bag were photo albums, our clothes, our toys. Later on, all these things had been abandoned, bit by bit, on the side of the road. A space grew around me, it rose from the soil, a space in which there were no doors, no light or darkness, no landmarks. No future, no past. The things I had kept hidden from Angkar had not been buried deep enough. From far away, I saw myself as I had been many years ago, carried by my father. He swung me down and laid me in my mother’s arms. I carried this image with me as I walked away, pushing it down, clothing it in darkness. Turning so completely away from it, the image slowly disappeared.

When I reached the reservoir, it was dawn. Bopha was awake, waiting for me. My thoughts, my memories, my body, were separating but she held me tightly, she tried to keep me from coming apart. She told me to go to Vuthy right away, to tell him I had been sick and I had gone into the forest to find medicine. That I had been feverish and had gotten lost but, this morning, I had found my way free again. I did everything just as she told me. In his hut, Vuthy watched me intently. When I had finished explaining, he told me to sit down. He gave me a plate of food with rice and fish, and when I was done eating he told me not to tell anyone about the food, to go back to my work unit, and to continue on.

The hot season ended. I lived and worked and dreamed beside Bopha. At night, while I listened, she spun stories for me. She told me about a boy named Chantou who had run away into the forest. “He lived up in the trees,” Bopha said, “safe from the wild animals.” She said that, in the north, the Tonle Sap floods everything, the lake rises so high it covers not only the buildings but the highest branches of the forest. In the trees, the boy Chantou had gathered up the dead bodies of sodden birds. He had found fish in the branches, stranded there when the water subsided.

“Fish in the trees,” I said.

Bopha looked up at the starlight. “More and more the farther he climbed.”

We imagined the boy Chantou. He lay beside us, telling his stories. Our own lives were littered with traps, unanswerable questions, and it was Bopha who first taught me how to escape from myself in this way, disappearing into the souls of other people, both the real and the imaginary.

Early mornings, in the forest beyond the reservoir, we tried to find food. We stripped bark from the trees, and then we put these curling strips into the puddles of water that had gathered in the indentations of rocks, and we drank the liquid up. Small birds came and hung upside down, warming themselves in the patches of light. When I stretched out my hands to capture them, they blurred away. We ate leaves, husks, stems, and wild grasses, but our stomachs couldn’t digest them and it took too much energy to grind the food into pulp. I imagined climbing up into the highest branches and glimpsing the airplanes that had once paraded across the sky. Thida disappeared, then Chan, then Srei. Other children arrived to replace them. Su, Leakhena, Dara, every one of us like water spilling into the ground. My body was wearing out. I was so thirsty I wanted to pour the blue sky into the palm of my hands, swallow it in great gulps. One night, I remember, Bopha killed a snake and we charred it on the fire. The meat was leathery, rich, and tough. Bopha’s face, her enormous eyes, lit up with pleasure.

My friend was wasting away. In my arms, Bopha seemed as insubstantial as the dry grass, as if the sea inside her had evaporated. “There’s an answer to everything,” she said one night when she was ill. “My grandmother told me, it’s all written in a big book. I used to think that, one day, I would read it. I would walk into a temple, it would be as vast and rich as a palace, I would turn all the pages, I would see everything that had ever happened, everything that was coming.”

She looked at me as if she could see straight into my heart, into the centre of who I was. “But I know now,” she said softly. “I’ve looked and I’ve looked, but there’s no answer for me.”

I wanted to hear her laugh. I mimicked the pouting mouth of Vuthy, the way he bit his lip, the way every time he said the word Angkar he sniffed as if he had a cold. I held her hand and kissed her repeatedly, fearfully.

She told me that after they had been evacuated from Phnom Penh, a foreboding had come to her mother. Bopha’s father had already been taken away, and her mother knew that Angkar had marked them. She believed that, unless her children rid themselves of their history, they would never be safe. One night, she packed their things and she sent both her daughters, Bopha and Rajana, away, one to the north and the other to the south. When you reach a camp, she said, tell them you’re an orphan. Tell them your parents have died and you have no place to go. A few weeks later, Bopha said, her mother had been taken away and killed.

I remember birds sliding upwards into the ruby night. Once, while gathering kindling in the forest, I saw a tiger stalking a deer. I stood very still, thinking of my mother, believing that she had come now, she had forgiven me. Instead, the tiger vanished and the deer with him. They were the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen in the world. For Bopha, I gathered lime-green berries in a jacket of dew. But nothing I did could save her. Bopha died. Vuthy came, he helped me bury her at the edge of the reservoir, in a place where still leaves would shade her from the heat. Against her chest, in the pocket of her clothes, lay a picture of her sister, Rajana. Afterwards, fearful that Angkar would see my pain, I hid inside the forest. I asked myself how I had disappeared and why I could not remember the moment, the act. Was this the emptiness at the centre of creation, the nothingness to which I aspired? Was this the highest truth of all? I saw that I had not understood before, how deep, how wide, loneliness could be.

Hunger was erasing my being. Soon, I, too, would find my way into the trees. I went to Vuthy again. I told him I wished to find my brother, and I asked him to send a message to Prasith, a Khmer Rouge cadre. I gave him the name of our old cooperative. Vuthy looked at me, there was pity in his eyes. He said that he would do his best. I wanted to ask Vuthy what he had been before, what lives he had lived, I wanted to know how it was possible to be something more than what I was.

I continued to work in the reservoir. Chantou kept me company, returning to me night after night. My hands, my body, remained in the world, but slowly I released myself into the quiet grief of my thoughts.

Who lied to us? Chantou asked me. I tried to answer him, I tried to know. Maybe it was the ones who said we were living in a new age, a year zero, who said we must be strong, that purity was strength. I wanted to ask Angkar, How can we save ourselves and still begin again, how can we keep one piece and abandon all the rest? The devastation always moves inward, even to the last and highest rooms.

In the reservoir, the rains kept on. I thought another birthday must have passed and I was now eleven years old. No existence is permanent, I told myself. I held fast to the belief that all times, all wars, must come to an end.

Everything passes, my mother whispered.

Even love. Even grief.

Near the end of the rainy season, my brother arrived at the reservoir. I had been summoned to Vuthy’s hut. My brother looked at me, held my eyes, then turned away.

“I need your signature, mit,” my brother said to Vuthy. The cadre lifted the page. He studied it for a long time, then he turned to me, as if he had a question only I could answer. At last, Vuthy picked up a pen and signed the page. My brother unloaded a sack of rice from the bicycle and laid it on a nearby table. The cadre examined it, surprised.

The tires needed air and when I climbed on, we subsided even farther. As Vuthy watched Sopham began to pedal, navigating us down the muddy road, away from the reservoir. I sat on the seat and my brother stood and pedalled, the cotton of his shirt blowing out behind him, touching my face, my neck and shoulders. The coarseness of his shirt rubbed against me. I had dreamed of seeing him too many times, wished for it, imagined it. In the same moment, I believed and disbelieved.

When the cooperative was far behind us, he manoeuvred the bicycle to the side of a fast-moving stream. He took my hand and helped me into the water and he used my filthy clothes to scrub the mud and dried, old blood from my skin. I could not remember where the blood had come from. He rubbed hard and the clothes, so old and thin, began to disintegrate. The water was sun-drenched, it smelled of black dirt. “Are you all right?” he asked me.

I said that I was cold, only cold.

My brother nodded. “Look,” he said. “I brought new clothes for you.”

Nothing was what it seemed. Somehow he had grown taller than me, heavier. I put the clothes on. Emotion flickered behind his eyes, never quite coming to the surface.

“How did you find me?” I asked him.

“You sent word. Through Prasith. Do you remember?”

I nodded. He turned away from me and climbed back onto the bicycle, waiting. “And Ma,” I said, trying to begin, but the words only slid away from us, unfinished.

“She’s gone,” he said simply.

In his voice, all the feeling had hardened and closed off.

It started to rain. The landscape turned murky, the road began to wash away from under us, but we continued on, hurrying west then south then west again, mostly pushing or carrying the bike over the dislodged road. Shadowy forms moved against the twilight, human beings freezing into trees, trees elbowing into human shapes. We stopped to rest and I opened my mouth and drank the rain.

When it grew too dark to see, we hid in a grove of trees and took turns sleeping. I woke to the sound of my brother reloading the AK, cleaning the barrel and the grip. He had a killed a creature while I slept, skinned it, and hung the flesh from a branch. The mosquitoes and flies surrounded it, ecstatic, and he took the meat down and wrapped it in leaves. We kept going.

Eventually, my brother turned onto a narrow track. We abandoned the bicycle in the mud. Slowly the ground gave way to jungle. I saw thick vines choking the gnarled trees, I saw frantic ground squirrels, enormous, furry insects with wavering antennae and burning eyes. We ascended and the mist rose with us, and then past us. On and on we went, climbing higher and higher. Daybreak came. We stopped only twice, sharing the rice Sopham had brought. Afternoon and then evening fell. The last light pebbled over the jungle floor, my brother moved faster and faster. I struggled to keep up. And then, in the gloom, we saw it at the same time, a crevice cut into the rocks.

Sopham held his AK in both hands. He went in first and then, when he had disappeared, I followed.

Nothing was visible. The cave smelled like a world condensed, all the earth and trees and rocks crushed to a handful of minerals. Sopham rustled in his clothing. Light flickered between us. I saw a match in his hands, and then a candle, thick and honey-coloured, the kind used for temple offerings. For a moment, Sopham looked at me, his eyes pale in the sudden light, and tried to smile. I saw my father’s face, his disbelief, his masked sadness.

Deeper inside the cave, we rested. In a sort of grotto in the wall were the ends of other candles, a disintegrating scarf, burned-down sticks of incense, dulled bullet casings. My brother told me about the prisons, about Prasith, about the woman named Chanya. His voice was flat. “The good and the pure break,” he said. “They always break.” I remember water dripping endlessly down the cave walls. My brother went away somewhere, he started a fire, cooked the meat, and brought it back to me. He showed me the treasure he had kept all this time, the key to our apartment on Norodom Boulevard, in Phnom Penh. He asked me to take care of it, to keep it safe. We could not bring ourselves to speak about our mother. For a long time, while Sopham slept, I ran my fingers over the key, listening to my brother’s breathing, his exhaled words. I told myself that I could protect him. The love I felt for him was like air, everywhere inside me, pushing me on.

Turn by turn, we passed through the long waist of the mountains, not knowing if we were deep inside the caves or almost through, not knowing if the border to Vietnam was near or distant. The groundwater rose to our hips and then subsided, draining away.

Sometimes the ceiling dropped low and we had to crawl forward, holding our mouths above the water, the ak lifted up. The farther we went, the slower our movements seemed, the slower my blood pulsed. At the end of a long passage, the cave flowered open into a grandiose space, hourglass columns, glimmering pools, still reflections. Light rained in through pinches and seams. My brother said that this was the place, Chanya’s map would not lead us any farther. We sat against a wall, listening to the bats and the falling water. It felt like days passed, but perhaps it was only hours. I no longer know. We slept and woke, slept again.

I heard the crank of an ak. My eyes flicked open.

A man stood in front of us, a tall, thin shadow, appearing as if he had melted from the walls. There were noises behind him, a woman’s nervous warning, and then footsteps, quickly retreating. Beside me, my brother woke. He lifted his hands, the palms facing out.

“Mit,” Sopham said. The word echoed off the walls.

The man cut him off. “What district?”

“Peam Ro district, Prey Veng province.”

The rifle edged nearer.

My brother’s voice was trembling. “The river has flooded this year,” he said.

Surprise showed in the man’s eyes, and then it was gone. “Has it, child?”

“Yes, mit. The river has flooded this year.”

“At oy té,” he said softly, ambiguously. “Let it flood.”

He crouched down in front of us, the gun supported on his hip, and studied our faces. His skin was faded, tinged grey. “Let’s have the truth. Who are you, really?”

When neither of us answered, the man pushed the tip of the rifle against my brother’s heart. “Hurry up,” the man said. “Time is running down.”

“Our friend showed us the way,” Sopham said finally.

“He had a map.”

“I see. Where is this friend?”

“He was ill, mit. He died on the road. I’m sorry, he didn’t —” my brother tried to say more but the words stuck in his throat.

The man lifted the barrel of his gun, rapping it twice against Sopham’s AK. It was still strapped to my brother’s body but now, carefully, he slid it free. The man took it. “Stand up,” he said. He searched my brother and then me, his hands moving roughly down my arms, my jutting ribs. “Please,” I said. “We have nothing.”

He paused and stepped back. “If you have nothing, what should I do with you? What good are you to me?”

“All we want is to leave.”

“Do you think it’s so simple?”

I looked into his eyes, unable to answer.

A long time passed and Sopham and I lay together on the ground. The man watched us intently. Later on, people came. I saw a teenager wearing a belt of ammunition and, behind him, a woman carrying a baby. Her breathing was shallow, as if they had climbed far to reach this place. They sat down opposite us. Once, the baby came loose from her mother’s arms. She crawled to me, pulled my hair, touched my face with her warm, birdlike hands. “No, baby,” the woman said. Her baby made a happy sound, like a cat licking milk, and the woman looked at me with sadness and wonder.

The teenaged boy went away and then returned; I heard the scratch of his footsteps.

It was no longer possible to track the sun, to identify the hours, the nights.

My brother woke in a panic. “Feel my hands,” he mumbled. “See how thin they are?” I held them. “No,” I said, easing him back to sleep. “No.” The baby in the woman’s arm was snoring lightly. I fought to stay awake. “You have to deal with them,” someone said. “Yes. The risk is too great.” “They’re harmless,” the woman said. Someone grunted in dismissal. “But the others —” “The others are not coming.” “We can’t wait. They’ll have to go separately.” The name Chanya touched the air, but maybe it was only my brother’s dreams seeping into me. I heard the dull clicking of bats, small pips, the beat of tiny wings.

“Please, luk,” I said. The term of respect came back without my realizing. He looked up, startled.

“At oy té.”

“Don’t leave us behind.”

“No one will get left behind.”

“You’re frightening me,” I whispered.

Ignoring me, he opened his krama and removed some crabs and a handful of rice. He offered this food to the woman and the teenager. They began to eat. The woman took a portion from what she had and brought it to us. In my mouth, the little crabs had serrated edges, it hurt to chew, but I could feel the blood flowing in me again, a quickened pulsing.

When the food was gone, they rose to their feet.

“Come,” the man said, turning to us, his expression lost in the shadows. “It’s time to leave.”

We stood. My brother began washing his face in the water that slid along the walls, and then I, too, did the same. In his eyes I saw my own fear, my own acceptance.

The man walked first, and then the woman, myself, Sopham, and the teenaged boy. Every moment, I expected to hear voices, the release of the safety, the word Angkar. Instead, I smelled the sweetness of leaves, of roots, of the wet earth. The man disappeared through a narrow mouth of the cave walls. On the other side, I saw a soldier in army fatigues holding a green helmet in his hands. Without speaking, the soldier hid us in a nearby truck, underneath sacks of rice. The teenaged boy didn’t come with us, he faded back into the opening of the cave. The truck shuddered into life, time seemed to contract and expand. I pulled one of the bags open, fed the grains into my mouth, held them there until they disintegrated. I willed myself to feel nothing, neither fear nor hope, only the jolting road beneath us, the weight of the burlap sacks. Twice, the vehicle was stopped. Both times, I heard men speaking Vietnamese, low voices followed by gaps of silence. Nobody searched the truck. We continued on.

Finally, the sacks were removed and what I saw seemed impossible, the night sky and a thousand stars burning. The woman and the child were bundled away down another road. “Are you ready?” the man asked us. We didn’t know what to say, who to believe. “It’s time for us to leave,” he said. The soldier gave us biscuits, noodles, dried fish, a few cans of milk, and water, and then we climbed into a small wooden boat. It ferried us to another boat that waited, anchored in the sea. Inside was a shallow cargo hold filled with many people, many families, who watched us descend, their faces etched with fear. The man spoke to them in Vietnamese. He told us that these people had been waiting several days; already, they were running out of water.

We took turns lying down, first my brother and I, then the man, who told us to call him Meng. Above us, slats of wood had been removed and we could see up into the sky.

My last image of Cambodia was of darkness, it was the sound of nearly forty mute wanderers, of silent prayers. I closed my eyes. My father told me how Hanuman had crossed the ocean, how he had gone into another life. Look back, my mother said, one last time. I followed her through our twilit apartment, walked in the shade of my father, past bare walls and open windows, the noise of the street pouring in. Between us, she said, I had known love, I had lived a childhood that might sustain me. I remembered beauty. Long ago, it had not seemed necessary to note its presence, to memorize it, to set the dogs out at the perimeter. I felt her in the persistent drumming of water against the boat’s hull. Guard the ones you love, she told me. Carry us with you into the next life.

Exhausted, holding tight to my brother, we set out across the sea.

Our time in the boat was infinite. One long night that battered on and on until the food was gone and the water drained away. Meng, ever watchful, would take my hands. Gently, he would massage my fingers and my cupped palms, telling me that soon, any day now, we would arrive.

He showed us a photo of a smiling man in an oversized floral shirt and dark slacks. This was his younger brother, Sann. They had hidden in the caves together and then his brother had gone ahead with his wife and sons, using the same smugglers, arriving finally off the coast of Malaysia. The smugglers had given Meng this photograph. “To reassure me,” Meng said, “and to raise the price.”

“Do you come from the city?” I asked him, trying to see Phnom Penh, to hold it once more in my mind’s eye.

“I was born there,” he said. “But I lived many lives. Teacher, farmer, soldier.”

“Khmer Rouge?”

He nodded. After a moment, he said, “Your father, what work did he do?”

“He was a translator. Angkar took him away.” I didn’t know how to continue. Hearing the words, I felt defenceless, ashamed. Meng lowered his eyes. Even here, in the crowded boat, he tried to shelter us, to give us space to breathe.

I curled on my side and watched my brother sleep. All the time he asked for water. “There is the tap,” he said, half-dreaming. “But look, nothing comes out. I twisted it all the way around but there’s no water, no water anywhere.”

That morning, Meng paid the fishermen and they let us up into the open air. Sopham and I climbed out of the hold, clinging to the sides of the boat. We were impossibly small. The waves crowded against our ears, muting our thoughts. All was blue, all was noise.

“I saw so many things,” Sopham told me. “One day, I promise, I’ll find a way to tell you everything.”

On the sea, we moved through a turbulent world, forever adrift. Three or four nights passed, but each day, no land appeared on the horizon. On and on we went until the night when the men came. The collision hit like an explosion. Once, these men had been fishermen, but now they were something else, some instinct that has no pity, no name. They robbed us, and then they forced the girls up out of the cargo hold. I remember the sound of crying, a noise like a serrated edge. Minutes passed, hours. I remember crawling between the bodies to the edge of the deck, away from the smell of fuel, but still the men were there. Pulling us back, taunting us. Time stopped. I have no words for what was done. Sopham appeared and we fell into the sea. I fell, I kept falling, and then my body rose to the surface. Still they were behind me, holding me, crossing oceans and continents. Coming into every room, every place, preceding me into my life. I no longer wanted to breathe the air. My brother kept repeating my name. He used his krama to tie my wrist to a piece of floating wood, checking and rechecking the knot. Don’t leave me, I said. The boat withered and dark shapes bent across the water. I tasted salt, dreamed salt. Morning came and it seemed that we were caught on broken glass, countless fragments that turned the light aside. My brother said the guard had gone to sleep, he could go past, he could leave without her waking. I told him that our wandering was over, we had nothing more to be afraid of. The key was gone. I said that I could not bear to be alone. My brother wept. I was not strong enough to hold him. He opened his hands and I watched as the ocean breathed him in.

I saw my wrist and my hand bound to the wood but I no longer recognized it as my own. The knot my brother had tied would not come loose. Inside me, all the feeling went away.

I can taste the faint, distilled light, it rests on my tongue like a coin. I am nearly at the edge of the city. The road gives way to open space, untrodden snow. The northern reach of Boulevard St-Laurent comes to an end and I stand at last at the river. Behind me, trees tower up into the pale sky.

On a park bench, a woman wearing ski gloves is carving letters into the wood. I can hear the hard edges of her blade, like an animal burrowing into the frozen ground. I remember how, in the ocean, the water had become a shining mirror, how the sun had touched everything and left no shade, no chasms. The fishermen who drew me from the water hurried across the sea until, finally, their boat reached land. I remember the sudden, incomprehensible, stillness. One of the men lifted me from the boat and I looked up and saw the high palms, the amber sky. The man who carried me began speaking, words that rustled together, and then I was passed into another person’s arms. They brought me into a house where I was laid down and washed and covered.

Something has turned over in me, broken and come undone. I take my phone and begin dialling Meng’s number. He picks up on the first ring. When he hears my voice, he shouts in joyful surprise. “It’s Mei,” he says to someone, to us both. “It’s Mei!”

Voices rattle behind him. Grandchildren, he tells me, laughing proudly when I ask. “Mes petits canards,” he calls them. One by one, they come to the phone and greet me in high-pitched voices, then my friend returns.

“Meng,” I say finally. “On the boat that night, did you hear them coming?”

In all these years we’ve stayed in touch, I’ve never been able to talk about what happened. He, too, had been pulled from the water and saved. He asks me where I am. I tell him I am at the river, I have walked as far as I can away from the city, I cannot find a way to go any farther.

“No,” he says. His voice is quiet. “I didn’t hear them. Until the very last moment. I never heard them.”

I want to tell Meng that I know too much, I have too many selves and they no longer fit together. I need to know how it is possible to be strong enough. How can a person ever learn to be brave?

“Janie,” he says. “My child.” He says that my parents, my brother, lived their lives. “They wouldn’t want you to fight on and on. To fight even when it’s done.” Long ago, Meng and I had stood together at the water’s edge. “Your daughter is leaving now,” he had said, addressing my ghosts. “Your sister has found a new home. You, too, must walk to your own destiny.” The incense in my hands had left its smoke in the air. The next day I would depart for Canada.

“We have to try again,” he says. “Not just once but many times, throughout our lives.”

I feel as if I am swaying over the river, but that this river, finally, is blind to me. I can see it now for what it is, only a membrane, a way down. Leave me, I think. Let me go.