We hit a big rock and bounced and we both laughed. The dope made the wind slow down.
I had opened my whole body to you. I heard no groan of work above me, only pleasure and relief. You said once that my love released you from wishing you were dead and I believed you.
Mau stopped for a group of villagers crossing the road, pushing a house on stilts. They rolled it on four-wheeled platforms. Men pulled and pushed, ropes over bare shoulders, children ran barefoot alongside carrying sticks. In the sway of a stilt house people learn to move lightly. A woman rolling over in her sleep can sway a stilt house. A boy climbing up the steps with a heavy load can sway a stilt house. Even the wind sways a stilt house. Now the house swayed across the road, pushed and pulled by the villagers, like a traveling carnival with clowns and trained animals and acrobats and brightly robed women and barefoot men.
Will?
Yeah?
Do you think he is alive?
Do you want the truth?
Not right now.
I leaned back and felt the heat in my hair.
Another thirty kilometers down the road, a pair of three-meter-tall Kathen puppets with papier-mâché heads and pursed lip smiles and round eyes blocked the way. Enormous papiermâché hands sliced through the air on long sticks under orange and green shirts, collecting alms for the monks. Long dresses covered the puppet bodies down to their ankles, and wide feet in sandals poked out below. The puppets swayed and reached out their hands in the middle of the road. A scatter of people ran alongside the puppets like chickens, laughing and touching the puppet dresses. Mau wanted to drive around them but they blocked the road and forced us to stop.
The male puppet stepped forward and received the money I handed to him. Everyone laughed. The female puppet walked beside the remorque reaching her hand in for more. Will jumped up and shouted in a terrible accent, Bawng! Bawng srei! and the crowd grew excited. He took the puppet hand and vaulted out onto the road, reached up and took the other hand and started to dance. Children laughed and Will called out in English to me, Look! I’m dancing for merit in the next life.
Then he dropped the puppet hand and fell back clutching his face and yelled, Aowww. My tooth! My tooth!
He twisted his head from one side to another and moaned. He fell on his knees in front of the male puppet and begged in English, Help me! Help me! I’ve got a horrible toothache.
The toes under the puppet spread in his sandals. The puppet knew a clown when he saw one and he reached out his hand for more alms and everyone laughed. The female puppet knelt down, swaying at the waist, reaching out both hands to hold Will’s head. The crowd sighed. And the male puppet chanted a nonsense riddle:
When no judge stretches out his hand to take a coin
When every case in law is righted
When no child is found alone in an alley
When no monk takes alms from a politician
When a woman lives outside the home
And no spirit roams unburied
Then shall the world
Come to great confusion.
Then comes the time we see not yet
Of future prophecy, we live before this time.
A child ran up to the remorque and put a sweet smelling white-yellow romdoul flower in my hand. Mau called Will, Come. We must arrive before dark. As we drove away, I watched the people grow smaller in the red dust. I will never see them again, I thought. I will forget these people and they will forget me, just more barang passing through their festival. When I was young I thought I would remember everything, and now I know that people lose things in the sand and that how we tell the past and how we use the past are unconnected.
You loved the Kathen puppets. You might have explained their strange song. You knew me when my laughter hid nothing. Things do not suddenly happen to us. Things happen step by step.
I studied the red earth. I counted trees to keep awake, umbrella trees and mango trees and peacock trees. Then the road disappeared.
Memory is a bit of light on a winter wall. Yesterday while I was writing I met a distant cousin I had not seen since childhood. She had my father’s mouth. Our daughter had your mouth. The travel that single day was so slow, bumping along kilometer by kilometer. And then we came to the gulley where the road disappeared and I got out of the remorque and stumbled and dropped the flower I had crushed in my palm.
The bridge broke under a truck loaded with concrete. At the bottom of the gulley, a stream ran through the cab. Bags of concrete mix were scattered down the riverbank and men were tossing what was still dry away from the water.
Will stretched stiffly, looked at the broken bridge, said, I am asking myself why the hell I came on this trip.
The truck driver’s head was wrapped in bloody cotton strips. People stared. He walked in circles. Someone handed him water to drink but he shook his head and said, My truck.
I said to Will, Here is safe if you don’t count landmines or holes in the road the size of moon craters or bridges that collapse or people who disappear.
Men with strong arms and backs were dragging two long tree trunks to the river. They edged them to the site of the old bridge, lifted them up and let them fall to the other side. People dragged planks up from the old bridge to begin laying them across.
I said to Mau, Let’s walk across.
Mau said, The bridge is not ready yet. First they nail it.
Where are the nails? Before the nails get here we could die. It is going to get dark.
I took the handlebars of Mau’s Honda 90 and pushed the moto toward the riverbank.
Mau took the handles from me and said, Yes, stop, borng srei. I will take it apart. We’ll do it in two, first the wagon, then the moto. Wait, sister.
Nothing is still. Everything is moving. My mind burns with an injury that neither heals nor scars. The yellow fringe is swinging around like crazy. Everyone gathers on the riverbank to see the impatient barang. When kids run to help, Mau yells at them to get off. He and Will heave on the trailer and they do not pause and they do not rush and I watch and listen to the crack and creak of the makeshift bridge under the wheels of the small wagon. Will’s shirt is wet. Mau’s head is turned slightly back, the pinprick of light in his eye widened and concentrated like a horse on the bit for the first time, watching his trailer, his daily rice, his children’s future. Nothing must happen to his remorque. As his foot hits the opposite shore, the front left wheel hits a knot in the wood and jams and Mau heaves the wheels of the wagon to land. A board twists up and falls in slow motion down into the gulley and Will jumps over the open spot and does a little dance. I already have Mau’s motorbike on the loose planks and Mau is yelling in Khmer, Wait, sister. The boards are sliding and Will shouts, Can’t you ever the hell wait? They stand on the edge watching, leaning into the air over the makeshift bridge. I move forward step by step. I am used to pushing a motorcycle with a sidecar but Mau’s bike leans. I straighten the handlebars and move toward the gap near the end. I can see the road to Ang Tasom like an arthritic finger bent away from the gulley. The back wheel hits the gap and twists. It catches and tips the bike frame sideways and the hot exhaust pipe sears my leg and I am afraid of the depth below me and the rough lines of the riverbank and I remember too having the idea that I should be down there because the dead are down there and I remember shaking myself alert and thinking I will not fall into a black hole on the road to Ang Tasom before I find you. Mau and Will are leaning out like one body and Mau grabs the front wheel and hangs on and Will grasps my wrist and hauls me to the bank. Then they both turn around to watch another board fall in a vertical slice into the cement at the bottom.
I lie sprawled on the ground and laugh. Will leans over the burn on my leg.
Now we are on the far side. Where we want to be.
58
In rice fields there are no deep currents, only what can be seen. I dab at the burn on my leg. Will rolls another joint and lights it and passes it to me. He says, For the pain.
I
no longer feel pain.
A man flicks the back of his water buffalo.
I have never felt as alive as I did on the road to Ang Tasom. The yellow fringe is covered with red dust. Pretty.
If I were sitting on the roof of the FCC with you, I would order a cold beer. Later I would order a baguette sandwich and an espresso. I would touch your arm and watch men wearing leather shoes from faraway cities with those beautiful young girls who wear lipstick and heels. I would listen to the absurd things people say, watching all that human traffic. Once I saw a man pass money to another man and receive a young girl in exchange. A journalist behind me said, The wife is for children but every now and then a man needs a thirteen-year-old.
Will?
What?
If he is dead, what would be left?
Will raised his eyebrows, said slowly, It depends where the body was left. Sometimes the fat changes into grave wax, but we are almost past the rainy season, everything disappears in damp.
I think I can smell you.
59
Once a woman came to the Buddha carrying her dead son in her arms. She asked him to have mercy on her, to give her back her son. The Buddha said that he could help her. First, he said, bring me a mustard seed from a family that has never experienced death. The woman searched from home to home. People wanted to help but everyone she met had experienced death—a brother, sister, parent, husband, child. After searching for a long time the woman returned to the Buddha.
He said, Where is your son?
The woman replied, I buried him.
60
The road grew rougher. We jostled forward and I watched a young mother squatting beside the road, eating her evening meal, holding her baby. I had no baby to hold. What would she do if soldiers came up to her and grabbed her baby? The Buddha said, Hatreds do not ever cease in this world by hating, but by love. Overcome anger by love, overcome evil by good. Overcome the miser by giving, overcome the liar by truth.
Does a mother have the right to forgive the man who rips her child from her arms? Does the orphan have the right to forgive his parents’ murderers? They know not what they do. Who has the right to forgive such things? Can I forgive them for taking you from me? Forgiveness is a radical act. Humans like revenge stories, even those who claim the New Testament’s epic of love.
Get past the golden rule. Make the enemy inhuman. Call the enemy dog, snake, kraut, gook, kike, cockroach, slut, all that ugly talk. Tear the child from his mother and kill him or make him a soldier. Rape the woman and plant superior seed in her less than human cunt.
Mau stopped at a roadside stand to fill up his moto from one of the Fanta bottles and to buy another from narrow shelves neatly stacked with Mild Sevens and Camels and Marlboros. Will paced, restless. He picked up a stick and batted a ball of old paper around like a golf ball. In seconds a group of kids was copying him, playing golf with sticks. A girl with a limp had a nice swing.
Will called over to Mau and me resting with a cool drink by the side of the road, Meet the Takeo province junior golf team. Isn’t this little girl a hummer? If I had a camera I’d take pictures and send them to Hun Sen. Do you know his favorite putter is a Kevin Burns?
Mau watched the children and spoke into the air ahead without turning to look at me. He said, You asked what happened to me. When I was a boy I spent a lot of time at the temple. I learned to read. I liked being a monk. But my family was poor and they needed me. When the killing began near us I was still fishing with my father. I was sent away from Kep because I was strong. I was sent to work carrying rocks for dams. Thousands of us carried baskets of rocks.
He pointed to the scar on his cheek. He said, I got this one day when I dropped my basket. That night I decided better to die escaping than starve here. I snuck into the women’s camp and I managed to get Ary and we ran away and hid and crossed the Thai border. We spent a long time in the Sa Kaeo camp. Until the end. My wife was pregnant. Everywhere in the holding centers women were pregnant. But the Thais did not want us to have babies. The Thai camp workers started to give women a drug, Depo-Provera, and the American workers said, Do not take it, it is illegal in America.
When the Thai military came to give Ary the injection there were problems in the camp. Khmer Rouge soldiers were trying to steal food for the army. That day they forced a man to climb barefoot into an empty water tank. They closed the lid and locked it, lit a fire around it and pounded on the top with a hammer. The man screamed from inside and everyone pretended not to hear until finally one French man came and argued with the soldiers and threatened them until they opened the tank. The man was burned, half dead. I was looking for Ary and in the middle of the shouting and screaming I saw a soldier go to give her the injection. He slapped her but she did not beg. She said, Get away from me. I am sterile. I was raped so many times I am sterile.
The soldier felt such shame that he turned and walked away. This is how she tried to save our baby. By the time anyone knew, it was too late.
Mau paused, took a small sip of his drink and watched Will playing with the children. He said, I did not want my child to grow up in a refugee camp. The Thais did not want us and I had no chance to go abroad. The Khmer Rouge threatened us. They sang:
Those who go back first will sleep on cots.
Those who go back second will sleep on mats.
Those who go back third will sleep in the mud.
And those who go back last will sleep under the ground.
After the baby was born we decided we would not to stay in the camps and we walked back to Phnom Penh and I do not know why we survived. We walked close to the dead bodies and slept close to dead bodies because there the mines were already exploded. On the far side of the minefields, children sat with their skin stretched over twig ribs, waiting for parents who did not survive. We were so hungry. Our baby died on the way to Phnom Penh.
We sat side by side in the shade looking at nothing. The perfume of the romdoul flower on my palm. As if there was no trip ahead. As if we had already arrived. The end of a thing is better than the beginning. I did not know what to say. A pulse, not mine, beat through me.
Mau said, Those children, what do they know of Angka? The rice fields remind me of Angka. I drive on this long red road and I hear their songs and shouting and the sounds are burned into me. I must always be careful. I must not betray myself. You too must be careful, sister. The leaders do not want trouble.
I scratched at the earth with a little stick.
Mau stood and said, Someday even the stones will speak.
Will called, Time to go?
Mau said quietly to me, I still think of those twig children. Borng srei, I just want you to know.
61
When we were young in Montreal, after we had used up our last money at the train station taking pictures of ourselves in the photo booth, we walked across the street and went into Marie-Reine-du-Monde because the wind was so bitter off the river. We wandered under the high roof through the smoke of incense and candles. We held hands and a priest approached us and asked us not to touch in this sacred place. We looked at the murals of Catholic priests and nuns being burned alive and the shine of fire on the skin of the Indians and we studied the faces of attacked and attackers twisted in rage and agony, eyes turned up, limbs straining. We stood in the nave under a tall sculpture of a man hanging, tortured on a cross. I longed for an image of compassion in this place of worship. I stood beside you, forbidden to touch you, and sudden tears filled my eyes and you said, Do not be ashamed. When I take you to Angkor Wat you will see carvings on the walls of people suffering and falling into hell, Yama sending people to their fate. These things are everywhere.
I close my eyes even now and I can feel the heat of your palm on mine and I can smell the incense and you.
62
Mau turned and slowed down, Last wat before Ang Tasom.
I dropped some riel from the side of the remorque at the temple gate but the paper notes missed the table and fluttered in th
e breeze. Children playing on the roadside scooped them up, placed them on the table, turned to wave. Big smiles. Festival time. Your smile.
Drumming from Ang Tasom and the bright blur of festival crowds in the streets. Mid afternoon of the last days of Kathen and drummers dressed in yellow shirts and red ties with red sashes around their heads beat long drums decorated with red, green and gold ruffles. Old women wearing red sampot skirts and men wearing clean sarongs followed, swaying to the rhythms, under enormous lace-trimmed yellow umbrellas, carried baskets of food offerings on their heads. At the front of the Kathen procession three people wearing yellow shirts and red scarves and sashes carried stacks of folded clean saffron robes. Following behind were women and men wearing tall orange and gold and red headpieces shaped like temples. Barefoot children ran along the sides and clapped and kicked pebbles and hoped for something sweet to eat.
As the procession moved farther down the road toward the temple we edged through the market on the main street, a row of food stalls and tables sheltered by tin roofing, covered with white and red checkered plastic, steam rising from pots of boiling water, ditches of dirty water on the roadsides. Two young mothers with their babies peeked around the pole of a stall. I watched with a dull ache the casual way they shifted their babies on their hips. Mau slowed and stopped at Thmor Sor guesthouse with its open air restaurant in front and simple outdoor toilets round back. We climbed down from the remorque and stretched and Mau said quietly, I will go now and see what I can find out and I will stay with my wife’s cousin and come in the morning to find you. Wait for me here.
Kim Echlin Page 12