Kim Echlin

by The Disappeared (v5)

  He looked at me, said, Imagine the first real laughter again. Imagine the first time the eyes smile again.

  We watched two Australians come through the door with backpacks, drop them on the floor beside the bar and order two beers. I said, I don’t understand why you are counting now.

  Will said, At first no one really knew what they were doing. Body counters opened a massacre site, measured its perimeter and depth, calculated how many average sized bodies would fit and made their guesses. They did not know about swelling and collapsing and escaping gases. How long the bodies had been there was a crude guess. There were so many massacre sites, Kampong Speu, Prey Veng, Kampong Cham. Now there are better counts: three hundred and nine mass graves, seven sites with thirty to seventy thousand bodies each, twenty-seven sites with ten thousand bodies or more, one hundred and twenty-five sites with a thousand bodies or more. They are in temples and school yards and the jungle. I ask myself, What is the meaning of these numbers?

  He studied my face.

  I did not know. I imagined the school yard near my father’s house. I tried to imagine a thousand bodies there, or seventy thousand. I tried to imagine being left for dead in a mass grave under my father’s body, or Berthe’s.

  Will straightened, said, By the time I got here the graves were disturbed. Pigs, dogs, wild animals, looting, flooding. Peasants went looking for the gold they thought city people took to their graves. People scattered the bones. Or collected them and put them in stupas, or covered them up again. It is hard to get good information. My team went to Laa village and there was this peasant woman who was good at healing. She said she never saw any killing. But one day during Pol Pot time she snuck back to check on her house and her well was full of dead bodies. She covered it with dirt and when the killing was over she moved home and planted a coconut tree on the well but it fell over because the earth was heaving. Too many bodies below. She kept filling the well with dirt and garbage until finally the gases were gone and the worms had done their work and the earth settled. Then she planted a papaya. She said she had bad dreams if she forgot to honor the dead. Her husband said that she had been rewarded for her devotion because she had twice dreamed the numbers of winning lottery tickets. I asked if our team could count the bodies in the well, but she said, Let me think this over.

  Old secrets get people in trouble. She did not tell us that her husband had already been down there looking for gold and he only got a few gold teeth. The translator told us the husband said there were twenty-seven skulls in there. When we came back the next morning the old woman burned sticks of incense on the well and she told us that the victims had appeared in her dreams and approved the digging.

  She said, Please give me money to hire monks to say prayers over the well.

  Our team leader said, We will pay the monks ourselves.

  Then Will leaned back, Fuck. They had to fill up the wells and plant again or they would starve. Everything eats everything else. In Kampong Cham people eat intestines and frogs and spiders and fish paste as they have for generations. Here the foreigners go to the Deauville restaurant and eat pâté de foie gras as they have for generations.

  He smiled and raised his hands, No one thinks about how all this food is at the top of a food chain fertilized with human flesh. But we gotta eat.

  I tossed a balled-up napkin at him and said, I still want to know what Serey is doing when he says he’s going to work. And he has never told me what happened to his family.

  Will sat forward, crossed his arms on the table, said softly, To know him you need to understand this place.

  32

  The torturers of Tuol Sleng complained of working long hours, of fatigue. They confessed that it was difficult to prevent themselves from killing in a temper. But they did not complain of the violence. They said, If we did not kill, we would be killed.

  You did not want to come with me to Tuol Sleng, Street 103, the hill of the poison tree.

  I said, If you do not come I am going anyway. But I want you to come with me.

  You said, No use.

  Borng samlanh, come. I want to know what you know.

  I put my arms around you and you let me and you said, You smell so good.

  Tuol Sleng is raw.

  It is easy to imagine this place transformed from museum back to extermination center in an hour. Everything left as it was. Burned walls. Bloodstained floors. Metal bed frames and shackles and electrical wires. A barrel of water to submerge a head. People walk over the courtyard graves before they know what they are walking on. There are hand-drawn signs, concrete block rooms, walls of photographs and glass cases of skulls. Paintings of the tortures, fingernails pulled out, men lying in rows on the classroom floors, shackled at the ankles, prisoners beaten and left in tiny cells. The eyes of those whose names disappeared stare from the walls. Their spirits are unprayed for because any family that might have prayed for them is dead. Five thousand photographs of the dead of Tuol Sleng. Each picture refuses anonymity. Boy number 17. He has no shirt and they have safety-pinned his number into his skin. A small woman with the number 17-5-78 pinned on her black shirt stares into the camera and at the bottom of the photo a child’s small hand clings to her right sleeve.

  Grief changes shape but it does not end.

  It was a hot day and your forehead was damp. You said, When I first got back I came here to see if I could find pictures of anyone I knew. Tien’s whole family disappeared. I never found anyone who knows what happened to them. In the first months people wrote the names of those they recognized on the pictures. I found no picture to write on.

  In Tuol Sleng a person is asked to stare. A person is asked to imagine clubbing someone to death, imagine attaching wires to genitalia, pulling a baby by the ankles away from its screaming mother and smashing its head against a tree.

  I was numbed by this vision of a human being. I stood beside you and you were so far away that I could not touch you. In Tuol Sleng a person can be torturer or tortured, a person can imagine a Pure system.

  The Khmer Rouge said, Better to kill the innocent than to leave one traitor alive. This is the heart of Purity.

  When I was writing this, I dreamed an old woman came to me and said, Help me to see into the darkness. In the dream I protested, How?

  See the child.

  She has a strong jaw, but her eyes are a child’s eyes. Look into the pupils of her eyes. This is a body made vulnerable. This girl is available to wound. She does not even wear a number. She was not even worth a number. This is war. This is the darkness. This child too was murdered in Tuol Sleng.

  33

  Only seven prisoners came out alive.

  We sat in the sun in the courtyard to rest, trying to feel this day again. I touched your hand and you let me.

  It was such a pretty day. Bicycle peddlers sold nuts and ice cream outside the walls. Bells rang for a Buddhist wedding. Two taxi drivers were play-wrestling by the gates; the others stood around them, joking and laughing. One lifted the other upside down and he split his pants wide open. They all turned to see if anyone was watching and when I covered my smile with my hand, they ran away. We listened to them collapsing with laughter behind the walls.

  Vann Nath was one of the seven who survived. He was selected to paint pictures and shape busts of Pol Pot. If a bust broke and he had to start again, he buried the pieces of the broken one carefully, to show no disrespect. When he painted Pol Pot’s skin, he dabbed the brush delicately, to show no disrespect. After it was over he began to paint the tortures, the pictures of Tuol Sleng.

  I think of Tuol Sleng and I hear Bach’s passion and I hear the thumping rhythms of Todesfuge and the chanting of a horrified chorus in Antigone. I hear a voice cry out in anguish, If this is a man? Human cruelty turned into a note of music, the rhythm of a sentence. Men have invented a word for this. They call it sublime.

  Do not hate me for saying such a thing, borng samlanh. Do not think me perverse. I watched your frantic eyes under your eyelids wh
en you slept, watched the rage and resignation at war under your skin. Borng samlanh, let me look in your place for a while. Do not hate me for naming the Sublime at Tuol Sleng. Do not hate me for wanting to chisel your name, Serey, into the rhythm of my words.

  Beside you on the bench in the sunshine that day at Tuol Sleng I said, We must speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

  You said, I feel nothing.

  34

  Our baby was growing and I found fabric at the Russian market and a teapot, blue colored plates and new chopsticks and a basket for a bassinet.

  In the mornings you brought me coffee from the Vietnamese bakery and you ate rice porridge with me but we no longer made love one more time before you left. I loved your dark eyes in the morning.

  People live omissions their whole lives. And silence turns into lies.

  Here, now, listen to my whisper of shame. As our baby grew, I grew tired of your nightmares. I wish now I had admitted this to you, borng samlanh. I wandered through your city, practicing your language, talking with Sopheap and Chan and Mau, dreaming of teaching again, dreaming of a future. One day I put Chan’s hand on my stomach to feel our baby kicking. She grew very still, listening with her experienced old fingers.

  She said, A woman needs another woman to lean on so she can find her strength. I will make you a new tea. Your time is getting closer.

  Chan’s hands had hauled dead bodies. Stripped their flesh. But I wanted their comfort. Dust is dust is dust. Bones work their way to the earth’s surface each rainy season. I wanted to feed on joy like the radiant gods.

  Against your closed doors I did not want to admit that your pain and silence would be part of our child. I tried to pretend we could make something new. The morning of Pchum Ben I said, Let’s go to the temple and make an offering for my mother, for your mother and father and brother. In the shuttered coolness I placed your hand on my stomach and for the first time you felt our baby moving inside me. I watched your wonder and your hair was loose and your eyes were bright. You were so beautiful. When the baby stopped kicking you lay back and said, Samlanh, I will go to the temple with you to make the offerings for our parents but we cannot make an offering for my brother. He survived.

  35

  You found him by your old front door. You were not sure.

  Sokha, is it you? Are you still alive?

  You were a stranger to him.

  Sokha, it is me, your brother. Sokha, Mak? Pa?

  When you said Mak he recognized you. Still he could not speak and you already had your arms around him and you whispered, Our grandmother? Our grandparents in Sras Srang?

  You felt his thin fingers on your back and his head shaking no against your neck. You said, I have never felt another body like this on mine. He was bones and skin, but his heart was beating like a rock against mine. And I never wanted to let him go.

  Sokha walked from Battambang, passed piles of bodies along the way. He listened to the incessant buzzing of flies crawling over bodies grotesquely swollen. He no longer saw the blue sky or the struggling blossom, only mats of maggots heaving over human flesh. Each time he saw a new pile of bodies he ran away, but the rotting stench of the dead stained the insides of his nostrils. He startled at smells.

  All over Cambodia people startle at cigarette smoke and rotting garbage and gasoline, surrogate odors of torture and dead bodies and bombs. A bad smell makes them jump, as people in other places startle at sudden noises. They call this rumseew, making the brain spin. People suffer stiffness in their necks from jerking in the direction of smells. They suffer from dizziness and nausea and call their discomfort a weak heart.

  You said, My brother could not bear the smell of meat cooking.

  But the city was trying to pick itself up again. Near the palace and the river, food vendors began to push broken carts along the sidewalks and cyclopousse drivers wired old bikes together. People discovered again the passion of speech. They began to shed the disguises they had used to survive. There were those who could not reveal themselves, the torturers, the prison guards, the soldiers. For them there was no exhilaration in language. Virtue is terror, terror virtue. Without slogans, they found themselves speechless.

  36

  In the yellow bedroom looking over Bleury Street long ago I had listened eagerly to the cheerful stories of your childhood.

  Each New Year your family traveled from Phnom Penh up the river to the temples to visit your father’s parents in Sras Srang. You flew homemade kites with Leap and the village children along the shore of the lake. You scratched messages into the rocks. Monkeys chitta-chitted from the temples and you said that spirits, neak ta, sramay, were everywhere. There was the story of the outdoor cinema. But I think it was your grandparents who went to it, not you. The traveling cinema came to the village with movies from China and Russia, hung a sheet up near the wat, and families brought their own mats.

  Your grandfather fought for Lon Nol and he had an ivory Buddha sewed under the skin on his ankle. He let you and Sokha touch the hard bump through the folds of his old skin. He told you about a short film they always played at the beginning of the cinema. It showed a blindfolded rebel just before sunrise. Twelve Sihanouk soldiers raised their guns and shot at him. One soldier had a blank so no one could know the murderer. Every year this short film played before the movie. The blindfolded rebel died over and over, year after year, his head jerked, the ground splashed with blood, his knees folded beneath him.

  You sat up naked in bed to tell this part. You lifted your arms as if you were firing a gun. You put your arms behind your back as if you were the rebel. You fell over dead and I jumped on you and brought you back to life again. Before me, your brother played this game.

  You were always first. First to fly a kite, go to school, play an instrument, go abroad. Sokha studied hard in school and your mother praised him. But your father said to him, Are you first like your brother?

  Your life and Sokha’s was a single stream that divided around a rock, one part falling into thin air over a precipice and the other meandering along the earth in a different direction.

  As war came closer, your mother begged to send Sokha to Montreal but your father said, No! How can Serey keep studying and take care of his younger brother?

  Sokha said to you, I pretended I could not read. Our leaders said, Reading and writing are unnecessary for the proper cultivation of the earth. Angka is correct, bright and wonderful. I was put in a kang chhlop band to spy. We hid under the floors of stilt houses and listened and reported. I was glad I had no parents to report on. Angka said, Your brigade is the hope of the nation. We repeated, We are the hope of the nation. We sang: We the children have the good fortune to live the rest of our time in precious harmony under the affectionate care of the Kampuchean revolution, immense, most clear and shining.

  Their words were burned into him. Sokha repeated phrases you had never heard: Live or die for the greatness of the revolution. Expel all enemies.

  Who were enemies?

  Those who spoke a foreign language. Those who played music. Those who read and studied. City people. Monks.

  Sokha told you he took a message from his unit into the wat behind his camp. In the yard a woman was tied, naked from the waist up, just out of reach of her baby who cried for her breast. The child was not strong enough to sit up, and she could not bend close enough to let him suckle. The woman whispered to Sokha, Help my baby.

  A soldier shouted, Move on! Do not worry about her. She will soon be summoned to the mountain.

  The revolutionary initiative is self mastery.

  There was no radio, no news from outside the forest. The soldiers’ way was the only way.

  You said to me, While these things were happening to Sokha, I was playing in a band and making love with a sixteen-year-old girl.

  Angka never makes a mistake.

  It had been a long time since Sokha slept in a room with a door and a roof. You gave him a toothbrush and he had to learn again how to use it
. He had to learn again to smile, with his lips, with his eyes. He was tempted by forgotten smells, clean rain, clean skin. But inside his nostrils the air stank of corpses and burning hair and diarrhea. Iron in his soul.

  Better to kill an innocent person than to leave an enemy alive.

  37

  I see your long silence as I see war, an urge to conquer. You used silence to guard your territory and told yourself you were protecting me. I was outside the wall, an intoxicating foreign land to occupy. I wondered what other secrets you guarded. Our disappeared were everywhere, irresistible, in waking, in sleeping, a reason for violence, a reason for forgiveness, destroying the peace we tried to possess, creeping between us as we dreamed, leaving us haunted by the knowledge that history is not redeemed by either peace or war but only fingered to shreds and left to our children. But I could not leave you, and I could not forget, and I did not know what to do, and always I loved you beyond love.

  38

  The first day of the evacuation of Phnom Penh your family moved only a half kilometer from home, the crowds were so big. Sokha could still see your front door when night fell and he begged your father to let him run back to sleep in his bed. Your father covered his mouth. He said, We will go to Sras Srang and you will sleep in your grandparents’ house. Sokha slept in the backseat of the car beside your grandmother. At dawn the soldiers demanded the car and everyone got out except your grandmother. A soldier yelled at your father to give him the keys and he said, Bawng, let us keep it to push my wife’s mother in. She is old.

  The soldier looked in, said, She is Vietnamese, and he shot her. Your mother screamed and reached for her and the soldier shot her too. Your father grabbed Sokha and whispered, Do not stand up even if they call you, and he threw him into a ditch of tall grasses. The soldiers yelled at your father, Where is the boy? and your father pointed to the opposite side of the road. Then the soldiers shot your father and ran in the direction he pointed. Sokha lay all day in the grass and listened to the sound of people’s feet shuffling along the road and soldiers shouting and at night he crawled out of the ditch. He was ten years old. The whole city was walking away and for a while he walked behind another family pretending he was with them.