Kim Echlin

by The Disappeared (v5)

  Her gray hair was pulled back simply under a cloth headband and when she showed a movement, her heart-shaped face lifted toward the sky, the deep creases in her old face smoothed, arms lifted lightly from dropped shoulders, fingers stretched backward, thumbs in the opposite direction, hands turning on her wrists like petals on a stem.

  We left the dancers and walked across the campus to the stage where the Yike performers sat in a half circle already singing together the song of Toeup Sodachan. Ary settled her sons, telling them soon the devada was coming. Together we watched the old play once performed near wats and rice fields, the story of a devada goddess forced to come to earth in human form. She was condemned to serve a slave from whom she had stolen a flower. The devada-girl helped the slave gain his freedom and we watched with caught breath the moment they first expressed their love, the birth of their child, and then we watched with outrage and sorrow when the devada was told that she must leave her earth family because her banishment from heaven was over. You took my hand and stroked it as the grieving couple separated, their child in the husband’s arms. The man opened his throat and sang, asking heaven what divine justice would separate a mother from her child. You whispered to me, I once heard Sin Sisamouth sing this part.

  Borng samlanh, our baby was rolling inside me as I watched the performer standing alone singing his anguish to the sky, and these memories are threaded through with the eyes of Tuol Sleng, with images of babies torn from their mothers by soldiers, of babies tossed and shot in the air. I wondered what had become of me that I could not stop seeing such things. I looked around the audience and saw people wiping their eyes and little Voy had fallen asleep and Mau picked him up and we walked back to the remorque. Ary followed, holding Nuon’s hand in the unlit night. Mau drove us home through the dark streets, past the palace where the bats had already flown out in black clouds for their night feeding. When I said good-bye, he said quietly, Borng srei, my wife will help you when your baby comes.

  As we climbed the stairs to our room you said, I have never been back to the theater in all the years. I always used to go with my family.

  I said, After the baby, let’s find Sokha.

  I do not think he wants to be found. He is not like a brother anymore.

  I said, Borng samlanh, families forgive and go on and come in all shapes. He is all you have.

  But you joked it away with your charming smile, Yes, samlanh, and you are my family now and you are big as an elephant. Maybe there are two in there.

  49

  The hot dry season was on us and weekends we drove out of the city down the narrowing road to Kien Svay. Food stands selling fresh pomelos and jackfruit. Ice cream sellers held up lotus-shaped treats on bamboo sticks. The vendors laughed and raised their eyebrows and looked at each other when they heard me speak Khmer. A country girl asked, What province are you from?

  An old woman yelled at a young man who rode his motorcycle too close to her stall. Past the sign to Koki we saw woven huts on stilts rising out of the water where city people picnicked in the cool breezes. I did not want to go that day, I felt too warm and a little ill. But you said, Come, the coolness on the river will be good for you. We bought cooked river lobster and fruit and tied them in a cloth. We rented a river hut and hired a boatman to take us out. People sat on rented river platforms eating and playing cards and talking. We tore the shells off the lobster and threw them in the water. You always ate slowly, as if there were too much food. I peeled some fruit with my pocketknife and laid it on a bit of paper. I shifted on the mat and finally lay on my side looking at the sky. I was growing warmer and my body ached and I said, Maybe we should go back.

  You looked across the water as if you had not heard, said, When I first met you, I had no burden of family. I dressed and ate and slept how I wanted. I played the music I wanted. I dreamed of going back home. But I no longer followed the way of my ancestors. I was becoming someone new. I thought, By surrendering all that one thinks of as self, self is found. But that changed when I got back here. I cannot stop thinking of what I lost. You caressed the round hardness of my stomach, said, My grandmother told me, Do not pursue the past. Do not lose yourself in the future.

  I pressed your hand over our baby moving and said, We do not stop missing the ones we lose.

  You looked across the river, said, A person can get used to anything. I love you, Anne.

  That night, I knelt face down on the bed, knees spread, and I gave myself to your love. My body was yours. I trusted you. When we lay apart, side by side, I could still feel the print of your hands on my breasts, the thickness of you trying to make yourself reborn between my legs. I dozed and stirred awake and I felt the baby turn inside clear as a word. I was still unwell and beginning to sweat.

  You were lying awake and when I took your hand you said, They say that the souls of the dead wander if the monks don’t pray over the bodies. But I think the souls of the living wander when their dead are lost.

  A deep ache moved through my joints. I squeezed your arm, said, Could you bring me some water? I am burning up.

  50

  There are terrible fevers and a sick lassitude unique to the tropics, a torpor that sent me into dreams of drowning in crystal waters, clean, cold northern lakes bubbling over my head and I lay on the bottom looking up to the surface but I could not move. I knew that if I did not get up I would drown but in the dreams it did not bother me. The worst pain was behind my eyes and my nose. My gums bled and my knees and shoulders ached and I shivered in the heat as if I were freezing to death. On the third day little islands of rash appeared all over my body and you wrapped me in blankets and held spoonfuls of water to my lips. Finally on the fifth day you said, I must find a doctor. There were so few doctors. You drove me in the sidecar to Calmette Hospital. We passed soldiers riding in open trucks and you turned your face from them. The doctor examined me and frowned. This is dengue, he said, breakbone fever, infection. They put me in a long ward because I was pregnant, and I lost consciousness as if I were in shock, and when I finally woke two days later you were sitting beside me and the doctor was listening with a stethoscope to my stomach. That evening the fevers finally broke and you fed me a clear soup and the doctor returned. He spoke in the neutral tone of one charged with bad news. I wanted to thrash him with a bamboo stick. I wanted to make him tremble and grovel, make him beg for his own life. I wanted to scream no no no, make time turn back. You hung my sweat-soaked sheets to dry. You moistened my lips with a cloth and combed my hair. You put your hand on my stomach and I slowly admitted an unfamiliar stillness inside. How many days had our baby not moved while I lay in the fever? I tried to make myself believe that the doctor was mistaken. I wished if our baby were dead that I might die with it and when the doctor told me they would induce it in the morning, that I would deliver it dead, I pretended it was not happening, that they were wrong. I wanted my baby alive, I wanted you to be far away with me, I wanted, I wanted. You brought me soup and said, I will go find something to eat and come back soon.

  Will took you to one of the beer gardens on the east bank of the river. I never went to those places where girls dressed in the colored uniforms of Stella Artois and Becks and Carlsberg, where drunken men sat under strings of colored lights and girls slipped away from the casual pats and squeezes of men’s hands saying, Please uncle, try my beer, and bent their ears to men’s lips to make special arrangements. You were coming back to me when you heard a gunshot on the side of the road.

  People stared as the man crumpled to the ground. A motorbike was slowly pulling away, the man on the back riding pillion, holding a rifle. A hundred meters down the road, the bike turned and doubled back. People began to scatter but Will stayed and knelt by the man in a wreath of blood without looking at the bike. The killers made no effort to hide their faces with sunglasses or helmets. They rode back and slowed and they looked to be sure they had hit their mark. With dread certainty you knew then and you said to Will, The driver.

  Will ignore
d you, said, I think he’s still alive.

  He cradled the back of the man’s head, laid his other hand over the wound, murmured to him. Someone yelled at Will in Khmer, Don’t touch him.

  You stepped toward Will, said in English, Get away from him.

  Will bent lower and slid his palm to the man’s face, said without looking away from his eyes, The guy’s dying.

  You watched the motorbike circle back a third time and now the side of the road was deserted and the voices in the beer garden fell silent. Thai pop music from tinny speakers. Strings of red and blue and green lights over deserted tables. When the motorbike stopped and idled beside the dying man, Will looked up and said over the engine noise, You fucks. The driver yelled, Chohp! and you said to him in Khmer, He does not understand you. Please, Sokha.

  Sokha finally saw you and his startled eyes locked with yours. You bent slowly toward Will and said in Khmer to the men on the motorbike, Muy soam, leave the foreigner out of it, he doesn’t understand what you say. I’ll take him away. Without any sudden movement you reached down to Will’s shoulder, grasped his shirt.

  Will was already releasing the man’s head gently to the road and he stood stiffly and wiped his bloody hands on his pants. He said to no one, He’s dead.

  The man on the back of the bike still had his gun raised and Sokha shifted into gear, revved and pulled away.

  You said, Let’s go.

  Together you came back to the hospital. You smelled of outside air. I saw the stains on Will’s pants, pulled myself up, looked at your pale face. Will said, They’re shooting people on the street.

  I looked at his dirty fingernails, asked, You saw?

  A journalist, you said.

  Will sat on the edge of my cot and you smoothed the sheet near my hand, pulled the crumpled blanket flat over my swollen breasts, said, It was my brother driving the gunman.

  Sokha?

  He was going to fucking kill me, said Will.

  The skin around your eyes was taut.

  No, he wasn’t, you said. They got who they wanted. And you straightened the corners of the bottom sheet into neat, tight folds.

  Will shifted and jostled me on the cot, Get him the hell out. His own brother.

  I smelled their sweat. I loathed the excitement I felt in their fear. Their squabbling. I thought, I have this dead baby. Why do they come to me with this?

  Will took my hand and squeezed it and saw me for the first time. He said, You should be resting. What are we doing?

  You had turned your back to us and stood looking down the ward and Will said, We should go.

  But you shook your head, I’ll stay here tonight.

  You handed Will your keys and walked down the ward with him and when you came back you sat beside me on the bed and you took my hand and talked softly for a long time. Spoke of Sokha, his startled eyes that went hard as old coins, said, I was so afraid. Then you told me about the dying man on the street. Your eyes were dark ringed. You whispered in English so no one on the ward would understand, whispered his name, that he had written against the government, said you had worked with him. I watched the shadows across your weary face and you said, I have not told you things, Anne. I should have.

  What haven’t you told me?

  Your hands were cold on mine and you said, I need to think.

  Think?

  Please, oan samlanh. Tomorrow we can talk, after it is over.

  Serey, I said. Why are you doing this? Tonight?

  But you only shrugged, and turned from me. Methodically you found a frayed mat, settled on your side on the floor beside my bed and slept the deep sleep of a guilty man when a decision has been made.

  51

  It was a savage old-fashioned procedure with a metal curette and soon my body was nothing but wave after wave of roiling pain. Deliver this dead fetus. Deliver my first baby. The doctor worked and worked, massaged me, as if he were tearing me apart, and I pushed and he guided my baby’s head and I pushed. You tried to hold my hands but my fists were clenched around balls of rough cotton sheet. There was only pain. Me alive, my dead baby out. To this end the doctor used his skills. Your eyes held mine and I saw in their reflection a desperate animal trying to survive. I pushed and pushed again and I was lost in pain and trying to escape drowning in your eyes and after they cut the cord I had to push again to get rid of the afterbirth but this word is wrong because it was after death. They wiped her off and gave her to you to hold. She was a perfect little girl with your mouth, I saw her in your arms, our dead daughter, and you brought her close to me to see and I cupped her cheek with my hand and it was still warm and then with grace beyond measure I saw you hand her to the nurse and turn back to the mess on the delivery bed, blood, shit, amniotic fluid, me.

  My milk came in and I wept with the startling prickling pain of my breasts swelling and a nurse showed me how to express the milk into a metal pan. Gently she asked, Could I use it for another baby? There is need. Crying, I nodded, thought, how long will I feed another baby? How does the milk stop? My tears hardened molten. When I think now about that time I am astonished at how my body regathered, moved on, left my soul behind.

  They bound my breasts and got me up because they needed my bed. You signed papers and we were allowed to take our dead daughter to be cremated at the temple near the Globe and in the sidecar I held that cold small body wrapped in a square of white cotton and we paid four monks for prayers and as I stood with them thinking about my baby, my bindings and blouse became soaked with milk and when the ceremonies were over you said, Let’s go home.

  I said, Which home?

  My aching breasts. The hot wind in the sidecar. You stopped by the shrine under the tree near Independence Monument, put some fruit there and said without looking at me, I have been working for the opposition, samlanh. I am sorry you found out this way. I wanted to tell you.

  When our eyes met I saw in yours a light that did not seek me. You had a driven look I recognized, a look that still desires to be loved, that tolerates no obstacle, that bargains. You said, This is a disheveled country. I want to go away with you but I cannot bring myself to leave. What have I done?

  I pushed your hand away and said, You know what you are doing. Do not pretend you are sorry.

  We will try again. I will be all right. Don’t worry.

  I did not want to leave without you. I did not want to stay. You wrapped your arms around me and I let you, and you whisper-sang and I was melting all over again, listening to the voice I loved in front of a shrine I did not believe in, our Eros tangled into loss and grief. And I wondered who you were and we were fallen, fallen.

  52

  Mau came to our room with Ary. She wore a plain wrapped skirt and white cotton blouse and she entered without making a sound on the floor, not looking at anything but me. Mau hung back in the door frame and I pulled myself up in bed. I asked, How are Nuon, Voy?

  Ary was already at my bedside and gently she said, Very naughty. We brought you special tea, very good for you.

  Mau gave her sharp directions in a muttered, rapid Khmer I could not understand. She poured the tea from a thermos and placed it on a small table beside the bed and then Mau spoke and she picked it up and held it to my lips. Her hands were cool. I took the cup and held it myself and she swept the room and straightened the sheets. She kept her back to her husband and sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed my hair and wiped my face with a cool cloth and took my hands in hers. Her eyes held mine and she said softly in Khmer, Soon you will feel better. You crossed the river too soon but you will try again. A woman is strong.

  Her eyes held my grief, and her body gathered in my pain and knit it into herself as if she were an old marsh creature weaving baskets from rushes.

  Our dead daughter’s tiny face. Your mouth. Your eyes. I have lost some of memory’s shards but not this one.

  53

  The Phnom Penh where you disappeared was corrupt as hell. Anyone could buy a pillowcase of dope for twenty dollars, or a g
irl or a boy for the price of a meal. Judges made judgments after they received an envelope. Police gave tickets after the bribe.

  Easter, March 31. Elections coming. Truckloads of armed soldiers roared through the streets. Foreigners retreated into their apartments and to the airports. Some leaders were talking this thing, democracy, and expatriates with their pasty skin and their money and their partial understandings were again chirping unfamiliar words, free-and-fair, in different languages. They talked about observing elections but no one saw the village meetings after dark when people were told how to vote and people who asked questions were beaten, killed. Foreigners said, Keep the eyes of the world here, but the people knew that borders and banks close and foreigners leave and wires are cut and bodies disappear and the thirst for power spreads like the odor of rotting, terrifying everyone into obedience. A man with a gun can force a child to kill. No one can force compassion. But it can be extinguished.

  Easter Sunday. A speech at the National Assembly.

  Ordinary people came to hear the opposition. People showed peculiar courage, by gathering, by listening, seduced by the possibility of a different life. They walked in front of guns. They stood out in the open. Prime Minister Hun Sen, peering from his one good eye, was irked. It was time to shave a few strokes off the golf score.

  You should have known. I loved your eyes in the mornings. When you left me that morning you said, See you later. Why were you there? The place was surrounded by B40 rocket launchers. It backed onto Hun Sen’s house.