by Tim Butcher
Right now, the old policeman was trying to finish his shift without incident, though a small riot was stirring up in the food market; a mango seller was fighting with a motorcycle-taxi man. The latter had blindly ridden into the seller’s papayas and mangos, which were laid on a piece of flat cloth on the dirt road, and now the fruits were crushed into a mess. The old policeman heard the seller asking for 5,000 riel in compensation, but the taxi man only cursed her. When he was tired of cursing, he pulled his motorcycle away. Dara knew the man well – he had arrested him twice for heroin trafficking some years ago. But with the intense noon sun heating up the day, the old policeman had no desire to help with anything or arrest anyone. He walked between the customers and their sellers, ignoring their loose talk and crude banter, and stepped on to the dusty white road.
When Dara arrived home, his wife Chinda was frying fish in a wok, yesterday’s catfish leftovers with some steamed rice. Without a word to his wife, the old policeman sat on a bench in the backyard under a banyan, swallowing the mashed fish bones and rice. His two dogs came out, staring at his food and waiting, but eventually even they got bored and started to chase each other in the yard. The sun was burning hot above Dara’s head and flies whirled around his sweaty skin.
He had bought some gasoline from a roadside store, and filled the oil tank of his old Yamaha. For some days now, the engine of his disintegrating steel horse wouldn’t start, and the sparks weren’t jumping. Dara had been riding his Yamaha for nearly ten years, but now he had to fix the rotten thing twice a week. With the dogs fighting for their lunch nearby, he pulled the spark plug out and moistened the hole with a bit of gasoline, then he screwed in the spark plug and kicked at the bike to start it. Immediately, a puff of black smoke rose up and nearly set the motorbike on fire. The engine was working, and now the only parts that still needed to be fixed were the brakes, but Dara didn’t care much. Who needed brakes? Brakes wouldn’t get him to a village fifteen miles away in one short afternoon. All he needed was speed. Dara cooled down his face with a splash of water and jumped on his motorbike.
As the traffic gradually subsided, the old policeman’s motorbike flew faster and faster along road to the jungle village of Khna. He descended south towards Lacustrine Plain, and his wheels gradually sank into water. The monsoon rain had been falling for weeks now, and the forest had become soaked in the afternoon’s downpour. Now, with the sun setting fire to his skin, thoughts of his lost daughter filled his mind. Normally Dara didn’t think much; he only lived. But when he occasionally thought of his little daughter Bopah, big oily tears would roll quietly down his dark cheeks.
Dara was an orphan, and since he was a child there had been no one to count on or to care for. He had been wandering around the world like a weightless leaf. The day his wife bore him a daughter, he felt that he had finally become a true man and he wanted to love the little child for his next three lives. But then, Buddha and Angkor together had played their joke on his life. One day, when his daughter Bopah was four years old, she had been walking behind him on the way back home. As they passed a rice field, Bopah played with a white buffalo while Dara had a short chat with the rice farmer. At one point Dara realised he couldn’t hear his daughter’s laughter anymore. He turned around: the white buffalo was still there but Bopah was no longer playing on the grass. He searched around all the fields until the sky grew dark and the hairs on his skin stood straight. He walked to the nearby villages but again found nothing. He hoped that the girl had managed to get back home by herself, or that someone had helped her. He returned home, only to find his wife alone. Chinda began to cry bitterly. At night, the couple lay and waited on their bed, which was little more than a floorboard. Then his wife got up and lit a candle to pray to the Buddha all night. When the rooster sang at the break of dawn, Dara left the house and went back to the area around the rice fields. He searched the nearby jungle for days, but found no trace of his daughter.
Fifteen years passed, and the old policeman’s wife had another two pregnancies but both of the babies died at birth. The midwife from the village said that Chinda had a very small womb; that it suffocated the child inside. The doctor from Siem Reap warned that if Dara’s wife had another pregnancy, she would die. But the worst remark came from a witch in a nearby village. The witch told Dara that he had caught an evil spirit in his early life and that the bad spirit was resting in their house. She said that it would always accompany the policeman wherever he went. An evil spirit from his early life? The old policeman didn’t ask what it was and neither did his wife. But after the witch had gone, his wife said, ‘Perhaps that woman meant those people you killed years ago.’
When he heard this, the old policeman’s head began to ache. He knew what the witch had been talking about, even if the witch herself did not. He was eighteen when the Khmer Rouge killings took place. He had been one of those ‘New People’, a young soldier of Pol Pot in the 70s. As an orphan he’d had neither education nor a home but in the army he found himself some rice to eat and a place to sleep. When the civil war broke out he was serving as a guard in a labour camp in the north. He had never met Brother Number 1 but nonetheless he was loyal to the leader’s words. He had beaten many enemies and killed many people. He had dug big pits with other soldiers in order to bury the corpses. After the war, he had wandered through remote areas. For a few months, he went to Thailand to start a small business selling gasoline, but trade faltered. So he switched to recycling plastic bottles, refilling them with tap water to sell at the market. Back in the country, he spent his days riding a cyclo for the visitors touring the ancient Angkor temples. Life was about earning every day’s rice – it had never let him look back. Eventually, since he was very good with guns and could shoot a target precisely, he got a job in the local police office. After living alone and being lonely for thirty years, Dara felt like settling down. He found himself a wife who came from a village near Tonlé Sap lake. Chinda was a simple woman who had never left her village before. But their happy life was finished even before it started. Their missing daughter became a sorrowful presence in their house, and when she learned she could no longer have babies, Chinda fell into a silent depression.
Months and years went by, and no one asked the policeman anything about his past. Perhaps once or twice his wife stared at him and wanted to know of the things that had happened thirty years ago, but even she gave up in the end. What would be the use? Everyone had suffered the civil war; every heart was dead many times over. His past was like a long night with a string of senseless nightmares. There was no energy left to talk about those bitter years. To survive was the only meaningful thing to do.
Then only yesterday, in the police office, Dara heard that an old woman had found a jungle girl in the forest. He learned that the jungle girl couldn’t speak any human words and that she behaved wildly, like a feral beast. The villagers guessed that the girl had lived in the jungle for most of her life and therefore couldn’t understand humans. But the second Dara heard that the jungle girl had a big purple scar on her left arm, he knew it was his daughter Bopah. Thoughts crowded the policeman’s mind; thoughts that constantly tortured him and wouldn’t leave him in peace. Dara convinced himself that his missing daughter was found. He didn’t want to tell his wife yet.
After an hour with the wind cutting under a poisonous sun, thinking over the past and of his lost little daughter, Dara’s cheeks were wet from his thick tears. Life was like a well dug long ago – you hoped the water supply would last the rest of your life but as the days went by, the well got drier and drier. Eventually, it became a deep and hollow dark hole. There were a very few things one could keep in this life, Dara thought. If an old man could manage to get something back from his past, then his future would still be worth living. Murmuring to himself, the old policeman drove over miles and miles of bumpy red dirt road alongside the banana trees.
Upon arriving in the village of Khna, Dara tried to find the family who had found the jungle girl. He got the name
and a rough address from his office, and had bought a map as well. The area was poor, like the village where the old policeman had grown up. It had only a few mango and palm trees, and several buffalo. The locals made their living producing palm tree sugar – they would chop the tree trunk and heat the inside, letting the palm tree juice flow out, then they would dry the juice to make sugar. But Dara knew that palm tree sugar earned them very little money and that these people had to kneel by the fire all day long, under a hot sun, heating those tree trunks. There were no rice fields nearby and the land was occupied by shapeless bushes, grown after all the mahogany trees had been felled for furniture. The monsoon season had begun to show its power and most of the land was swallowed by a muddy, yellow water.
After a while, Dara found the grandmother who had discovered the jungle girl. The yard was full of barking dogs, chickens, cats and pigs, rats and lizards, and naked children. At first, the grandmother didn’t want to show the jungle girl to the policeman, talking instead for about an hour. Holding her two grandchildren in both arms, she told Dara that for days, the food in her house had gone missing. Normally she would pack the food into two lunch boxes for her son and grandson, who worked as guards in the nearby temple. Since the food kept going missing, she decided to look around and find the thief. So she went into the jungle, which was further than the villagers would usually go. That was when she saw a naked girl with mud all over her skin, her long hair covering her body. The little beast was discovered kneeling down in the dirt, grabbing at rice and pork spread out on a huge banana leaf. The grandmother recognised the food and ran fast to catch the jungle thief. But to her surprise, the jungle girl didn’t walk like a human. Instead, she ran on four limbs like a monkey. Yet even the grandmother was faster than the hunched monkey girl, and eventually she caught her and brought her back to the village.
When the old policeman saw the feral girl in the grandmother’s backyard, his cheeks began to ache and his heart shrank. The jungle girl was lying under a dead banana tree, her body wrapped in a piece of cloth and her hands and feet tied by ropes to the tree. Her long hair covered her entire body like a black robe. Her eyes were the most frightened eyes Dara had ever seen, full of a certain hatred he couldn’t understand. She didn’t seem to care when flies and insects stuck to her skin. Dara looked carefully at the girl’s left arm. Yes, some purple marks, just like he remembered on his little daughter.
When Dara moved closer to her, the jungle girl started to scream like an owl. He called his daughter’s name, ‘Bopah, Bopah!’ but she trembled like a monkey caught in a forest fire. When Dara tried to untie her, the jungle girl became like a wild bull, biting into the rope around her shoulder. The grandmother said that the feral girl had been making just this kind of noise all night, barking at anyone who passed in front of her. The old policeman paid some riels as compensation for the old woman’s food, and half an hour later, the village kids watched as the policeman tried to fix the girl on to his motorbike; it seemed to take all the old man’s energy to manage this at last.
Back home in Siem Reap, the old policeman’s wife burst into tears when she saw the jungle girl. She immediately prayed to the Buddah and then she seemed suddenly to become a woman of strength. Together, with great effort, the couple tried to give Bopah a bath, though the effort it required exhausted them. After washing her, Dara’s wife attempted to dress the girl in a shirt, but as soon as the clothes were on, the feral child would violently tear them off again. Outside, the moon was already high in the sky; the night seemed to have arrived faster than any other night. Dara made some lentils but the food was left untouched – instead the wild one ate a cluster of bananas. They organised a small room and bed for her, then they left her alone. Dara made sure the door and windows of her room were always closed in case the girl ran away.
No one really knew what was going on inside Dara’s house. The neighbours knew only that on the second day after the jungle girl’s arrival, she tried to run away, but the neighbours caught her and brought her back. Another time, two journalists came to visit and took some photos of her. Then a week later, the neighbours discovered their chickens were going missing. They traced the blood all the way to Dara’s house, and through the window they saw the girl sitting on her bed, blood and feathers around her mouth and in her hair. The neighbours ran back to their yard scared, without a word.
As the days went by, the old policeman was barely seen on the streets of Siem Reap. The couple were busy in their house, trying to teach their daughter to walk on her feet, and to speak, and cooking for her. The girl preferred to huddle in the corner, staring at everything with her big, secret eyes. Her teeth were so tightly clenched that Dara could hear them grating. She had hidden herself, rolled up, like a big silent cat, creating a suspended tension which left the couple sleepless. Worst of all, she couldn’t get used to the habit of peeing or shitting in the toilet, she would relieve herself anywhere on the floor, or outside in the yard.
For weeks, the jungle girl’s words were incomprehensible. But once, when Dara was alone with her in the house, she said ‘papa’ and looked into his face. Dara’s throat tightened suddenly as he felt tears come into his eyes. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when the mosquitoes were calming down, Dara’s heart squeezed as he contemplated his daughter sleeping on the bed, like a dog would sleep – four limbs laid out vulnerably, head down inside her long thick hair. He wondered if there was any kind of memory stored in this wild girl’s mind, the memory of what had happened to her in the jungle before she got to their house. Dara knew one could forget anything; he had forgotten most things from the days when he was a soldier in the Khmer Rouge camp. He didn’t want to remember. He could almost see the fragments of his memory like a handful of dust thrown into the night sky, falling into a ruined forest where the world didn’t offer any hope of forgiveness or redemption.
One day, two strangers arrived in Dara’s front yard. One was an American, who wore a pair of elegant glasses and carried a silver suitcase; and the other was his assistant and translator, a Khmer living in Phnom Penh. The American said he was a psychologist and that he had read a newspaper article about Dara’s jungle girl. This was why he had travelled all the way from the capital in a bus with his translator.
‘What do you want?’ Dara stared at the two men.
But it seemed that seven hours on the bumpy road had made the two civilised men unusually grumpy. The assistant asked for water and something to eat, while the American went straight to the jungle girl’s room. Dara’s wife cooked some noodles and made icy lime-juice for them. Standing as close to his daughter as possible, Dara observed the foreigner touching the girl’s hands and moving her arms, whilst at the same time speaking to her in English. It was bizarre for the old policeman to see – his own daughter couldn’t even understand him and Chinda, so how would she understand a foreigner? But the American seemed to be very patient; he made crazy hand signs to the girl and took detailed notes in his notebook. All through this the poor little thing just stared at the foreigner with deep hatred in her eyes.
Eventually the American left her alone and tried to instruct Dara instead. The foreigner claimed that at the moment, the girl’s intelligence was that of a four-year-old child and that because she had not been living with humans for so long, she would have to be systematically retrained from scratch. The psychologist explained that the girl needed to be treated in a special hospital in Phnom Penh, otherwise she wouldn’t be able to live like a normal human. A special hospital in Phnom Penh. When the old policeman heard this, his face darkened. He could not imagine the girl being sent somewhere even further away than where he had at last found her.
As the American left the old policeman’s house, he said to Dara, ‘I also think it is necessary to do a DNA test on you and your … what’s her name … Bopah.’ It sounded like the psychologist didn’t want to refer to the girl as Dara’s daughter. But a DNA test? Dara knew what that was; he had worked as a policeman and he knew what it meant.
Without saying anything, Dara smiled and sent the men to the front yard, then watched them disappear at the end of the road. Back inside, Dara locked the wooden barrier around his house, shutting himself, his wife and his daughter inside.
Dara was on his old Yamaha again. He had just left his district after completing a shift with another policeman and was now on his way to a temple in the outskirts of the city. He had heard that there was a spirit healer living in the temple who could help to exorcise the ‘jungle spirits’ from his daughter. He spent a good while there, negotiating the price with a monk. At last, they came to agree that Dara would pay thirty-five US dollars – the spiritual healer didn’t want useless Cambodian currency. Dara’s monthly salary was only thirty US dollars, but he was willing to pay anything to cure his daughter. Anyway, the monk explained, he would find out where the jungle spirits hid within the girl, and he would organise a ritual to get rid of them. Leaving the temple, Dara was full of hope and he rode his Yamaha back home as fast as he could.
The spirit healing was supposed to take place in the monk’s temple, but Dara and his wife could not get their daughter out of the house – she refused to put on her clothes and she wouldn’t walk on her feet. The next day, Dara had to pay another ten US dollars to invite the healing master to visit them instead.