We walked from the kite crowds to Wat Phnom where you had fed the monkeys with your grandmother, through food stalls and an open market selling pirated cassette music and videos and carvings and cloth, past the elephant ride at the bottom of the hill and up the steps to the first terrace of the temple. A pair of young orange-robed monks stood on the steps smoking. We set down our bag with water and bread and chocolate and leaned on the wall to rest. A group of students offering prayers for their exams laughed and called to us, Your bag! Your bag! Two monkeys were stealing our picnic. You jumped sideways and clapped your hands and shooed the bold animals back into the shadows of the woods. A man with stumps for
legs and one arm and a child also missing an arm appeared noiselessly at my feet. I looked down surprised and handed them some riel from my pocket, asked them their names but they only smiled and said, Security police, as they darted back into the shadows.
On the last small terrace before the temple sat a bird-woman with her bamboo cages of small buntings and swallows and an unfortunate weaver bird. She said in English, You buy? We walked past, but a child with teasing eyes sang out, You no buy, I cry. You no buy, I cry. So I squatted near the little girl and said in English, What are the birds for? She smiled and she was beautiful and in a year or two she would not be safe anymore. She said, For prayers.
I gave her some riel, said, Help me choose one, but the little girl would not so I pointed to a large bunting in front. Her grandmother released the bird and we watched it hesitate before flying up over the top of the temple and away into the trees. I had no wish or prayer. The child would eat that night. The prayer bird would return to the old woman. You held my hand. Our baby turned inside.
If we had looked around we might have seen the footprint of the Buddha on the shadowed paths.
Walking home after dark, you stopped to listen to an eerie wail coming out of the sky and you pointed up, said, Listen. It sounds like the blues.
Above us and over the river flew a small cluster of lantern kites, haunting lights flickering, eks moaning and singing in the darkness. I sensed a thing for which I had no word. Now, still faltering, I might call it prayer.
Sokha ran away. He was found by two soldiers in the jungle and he told them he wanted to be a soldier. They laughed and dragged him back to a camp in a small clearing with a few rough sleeping platforms, a cooking fire and provisions shelter. The unit leader looked the boy over and told the soldiers to tie him up. His foot was too small for their leg shackles so they tied a rope around his neck. They left him in the hot sun all day, and at nightfall two new soldiers, one carrying a small ax, the other carrying nothing, untied him and led him into thicker jungle. Sokha thought they were going to kill him when they came to a small clearing in which a man knelt, hands tied behind his back, staked to the ground. As soon as he saw the soldiers he began to beg, Don’t kill me, don’t kill me. Without a word one of the soldiers lifted the small ax and buried its sharp edge into the man’s chest. The man groaned and sank sideways to the ground. The two soldiers looked at Sokha and laughed. They stank of rice whiskey.
Sokha was only trying to survive, you said. Your eyes were dark and dry.
They opened up the man’s chest and the older man plunged his hands in, said, One man’s liver is another’s food.
They placed it on an old stump, and squatted to build a small fire. They drank more and then, poking the liver with a bamboo stick, they sliced and fried it. The blood from the corpse smelled so strong that Sokha threw up and he was afraid that they would kill him for this but they said they were testing his loyalty to Angka and ate the liver and gave some to him to eat too. After that he was taken to be a soldier.
Shame seared me from your burning eyes. I caressed my rounding stomach and tried to protect our baby.
Three years. Eight months. Twenty-one days. The Vietnamese invaded and Pol Pot fled north to a jungle camp on the Thai border. Famine. People walking. People trying to find anyone left alive. People trying to go home.
Some soldiers fled to the jungle, to Pailin and the borders. Some leaders began to rebuild to continue skirmishing for another twenty years, trading carvings from the temples, gems and lumber for arms, eating food stolen from refugees. Some soldiers buried their uniforms and returned to their villages. Some hid with missionaries, became Christians. Some tried to hide among half the country’s survivors in border camps. Leaders threatened a return to the chaos of Pol Pot and secession of eastern provinces. Jungle camps were alive with young men who knew no way of life but war, restless and waiting.
The night Sokha left, you had not seen him for three days. He came in red-eyed and stinking of rice wine.
I am going back to the army in Pailin.
Do not go yet. Not so soon. Stay a little longer.
Sokha held out the wine bottle and after you sipped he swallowed the rest. He said, You did not help us.
The smell of sulfur and rotting wrapped him in a hidden skin. You handed him the photograph of your family and he rubbed the bottom edge with his thumb. You said, Younger brother, what could I do?
Sokha dropped the picture to the floor, said, If I did not obey I would die.
What about the people who did die?
They were secondary victims. If I did not kill, I would be killed. I am like someone who suffered an accident.
Sokha stood without moving and you said, How could you get used to such suffering? Do not go back to them.
Without expression Sokha said, The party called us the heart of the nation. The party said when they arrested someone they never made a mistake.
Even the children? You did not think for yourself at all?
Sokha said, The party told us to repeat, This is the enemy, and I repeated, This is the enemy.
You said, Stay with me. You were just a boy. You do not have to fight anymore.
I have nothing to do here. I like the soldiers.
Live with me. Go to school.
All the teachers are dead. You don’t know anything. You were not here.
Then he dropped his bottle on the floor and covered his eyes.
You said to me, He could not recover from what happened. He hated me.
Where is he?
He went north.
We should find him.
Oan samlanh, I have had no word from him for years. I saw him once. He was on the street with government soldiers. He was taller, his face older, like my mother’s. I called to him and he looked over and turned away. Can you imagine what it was like? When I first came back, I lost you, and then I found Sokha and lost him too.
Why do you think he hates you?
You looked away and said, I did not see our parents die. I spoke English. I made him do my chores. I was eldest. I never killed anyone. Our father did not send him away too. Maybe he always hated me.
You thought Sokha hated you, but I think you were wrong. The peculiar hatred between brothers is a net warped with doubt
and jealousy and buried love. You did not know but Sokha watched you. He knew who you saw, and he gave Will a letter written in red ink warning you to be careful, to go away.
Your name was on their lists.
You were taking pictures of dead bodies and organizing for the opposition, trying to get information out to an indifferent West. I did not know but Will did and the government did.
I was thinking about our baby. I ate what I wanted. I slept when I was tired. My joints were loose. If my body desired, I gave. That pregnancy was so simple. I reached out to you, said, I want you, and you trusted my body too.
I dreamed the smell of warm cotton. I imagined that my mother would have pressed her hand on my stomach to feel my baby. She would have rubbed my skin with scented creams. I imagined what it might have been to ask her to tell me how she felt when I was inside her, to sit with her while I nursed.
Every evening you read the editorials warning people not to oppose the government, threatening violence. People covered things up. Two UN workers who tried to pick up a body on the riverbank were expelled. You threw the newspaper down in disgust.
I asked, Do you think if there was a trial, a truth commission, the country could move on?
You said with irritation, If the leaders have not changed, it is our duty to judge them, not to forgive them. We cannot build on lies and violence. Would you have accepted this in Montreal?
The elections were heating up. We all saw the truckloads of young soldiers riding through Phnom Penh with their AK-47s. We all knew about the bandits on the roads out of town at night, the impoverished soldiers who ran roadblocks and
stopped foreigners from getting into the villages. Will knew they were targeting people like you who worked for the opposition. Later, when I accused him of silence, he said with a shrug, I never interfere with lovers.
I can still see a particle of dust hanging in a sunbeam near your cheek as you slept.
On Christmas Day we drove to the temple in Udong along the road to Tonle Bati. I thought of Christmases with Papa and how we always put my mother’s star on the top of the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve and always walked up the mountain and slid on Beaver Lake on Christmas morning and always went to Berthe’s for an old-fashioned goose in the late afternoon. Papa always bought pebber nodders, cinnamon and cardamom shortbreads and krasekagers for dessert on Christmas night and Berthe served them with her bûche de Noël and tartelettes au sucre. I mailed Papa a letter without a return address wishing him a merry Christmas and telling him about the baby. I thought I might call him that day but I did not. I could not bear to hear his voice.
When your mother was expecting Sokha, your parents took you to Udong. Outside the temple a pinpeat band, each man blinded or missing a limb. Simple rhythms of the samphor played by a young man with open, unseeing eyes, small finger cymbals played by a legless man with angry lines between his eyebrows, two bamboo roneat played by older men who swayed over their long xylophones. The sound of this music natural as wind in the trees. You took coins from your pocket and threw
them on a bit of cloth in front of the orchestra. These were lives cut in two, the time before they stepped on the landmine and the time after. We went into the temple and you led me to a carved relief of a husband and wife bowing before a midwife.
Why is she wearing a box on her head?
That box holds the afterbirth, you said. She has to wear it on her head because she did not pay the midwife enough respect.
Thank god I have no midwife, I said.
I know. You are not from here.
Did your mother have a midwife?
No. They were modern. My father wanted her to go to a hospital.
Then if we do not have a midwife, we follow your family tradition.
You put your arm around my waist and spoke in your soft, warm voice, Tradition does not matter now. We can do things our own way because they are all dead.
You risked your life, and mine and our baby’s, but you did not tell me what you were doing and you could not stop yourself.
And I am past care.
I like the comfortable melancholy of pregnancy, waiting, both fierce and vulnerable. I often walked in the market and when Mau was there, I would bring him a sweet drink and sit with him under the yellow fringe of his remorque. One day we watched a young boy trying to sell postcards to a European tourist wearing leather shoes. The boy followed the big man and thrust the cards in front of him. The man took a card and looked at it and handed it back shaking his head. The boy kept following him. Three times the man turned away and finally he reached in his pocket and handed him some crumpled riel to get rid of him. The boy angrily threw it on the ground and said in English, I am not begging. I am selling. I want to go to school.
I glanced at Mau but he pretended he had seen nothing.
Mau, do you have children?
Two sons, borng srei.
How old are they?
The eldest is nine and the younger five. My wife takes them to school every day. We must protect them from being taken.
Taken?
For ransom, he said. But there was pride because he had money.
Why did you come to Phnom Penh?
I am from Kep, and my wife’s family is from Ang Tasom. After the war we came here to find work.
His face closed. No more questions.
I shifted to ease my back and watched people eating their noon meals from tin boxes or folded papers. I said, Will you come with your family to see a Yike show tonight?
Mau was pleased, said, Borng srei, I have work to do now. I will come and pick you up later.
He arrived in the early evening, his sons dressed in clean white shirts. His wife, Ary, smiled at me and said, I no English, and nudged her eldest son, Nuon, forward and the boy said in English, I am pleased to meet you, and without being pushed his little brother, Voy, stepped forward and said in English, I am your friend.
Mau said, Maybe you will teach them more English when they are older.
You climbed lightly into the remorque with the boys and pulled a string from your pocket to play your old string game. Ary sat on the opposite bench with me. We drove past the palace and turned down the long shaded avenue through the gates of the Royal University. The walls were pocked with bullet holes. Mau paid a driver he knew to watch his remorque. You led us along a broken pathway, not to a theater but to a large studio where dancers were practicing. We stood at the edge of open doors to watch an old woman coaching a group of young girls in traditional court dances. On powerful thighs young barefoot dancers dipped and rose, training their arms and hands and heads and eyes to centuries-old movements that had almost been lost. The old woman slipped among them, touching a
hand to bend it back at the wrist, shaping the fingers, gently correcting, demanding uncompromised perfection. She was small and wore a simple blouse and a plain sampot wrapped around her old woman’s waist and she moved with quick, energetic steps, dipping at the knees, arms rippling and hands opening and closing like roses. You said, Em Theay lived in the palace as a child and was a favorite of the queen. She teaches hours every day, trying to save the dances.