Kim Echlin

by The Disappeared (v5)

  The echoes of drums and cymbals fell silent in the deep darkness before dawn. I left the room and went back to the canal. To bury the dead is right. I did not care what they did to me. I had no thought but one: If I could not bury you, grief would break me. I smelled the red village dust. But before I could slip down the bank and into the water, three young men closed in around me. My arms were wrenched behind my back and I smelled garlic and cheap soap and I heard a hissing voice say, Stop kicking. I kicked. I felt the first blow on my head and no one in Ang Tasom saw anything, heard anything.

  They locked me in a cement block room and I sank to the floor. I was nothing. I was so thirsty. And I was so tired. I fell into a deep sleep and was instantly woken by the call of a honey buzzard outside, pee lu pee lu, and there were no windows but I felt in the warming air the first gray of dawn. All the living were locked in cement rooms and all the lost were drowned in canals.

  Now I belonged to the wild world of the dead.

  How did I offend? I only wanted to knit you back into the earth. How could it be right for pigs and dogs to tear at the skin of your face but not right for me to bury you? They said to me, Woman, you are worthless. You understand nothing. You are nothing. Your desire is nothing.

  Fool. Madwoman. Victim.

  67

  There was a time when I could still touch your skin. Impossible to leave. Impossible to stay.

  People say, It is their country, let them tell it.

  You are my country.

  Two guards came and went from the cement block room. They were young, thin, obedient, with stupid, aggressive eyes. They’d been trained to look for screws and rivets a prisoner might use to choke himself, for pens that open veins. They took my Buddha necklace. A pail stank in the corner. Filthy bowls of coarse rice hid pebbles that cracked the teeth. Carefully I sucked the rice and spit out the bits of stone. There was a shallow basin of water I feared to drink and drank anyway. I would have fought for those drops of water. When I cried of thirst an older guard said, Be quiet or I’ll come back and beat you. When I turned my back on him he said, Turn so I see you or I’ll beat you. He asked, Are you hungry? I said, No. Then he said, You’re lying. Tell the truth or I’ll beat you.

  His body was possessed of an exact memory of how he kept men from killing themselves before they were tortured to death.

  Someone once asked Martha Graham how she remembered her dances. She answered, The body remembers.

  After I made love for the first time I understood this.

  The guards searched me and I was condemned to remember.

  I was a woman reduced to a T-shirt and bra, underwear and cotton pants and pain and thirst. I shivered at night and curled up in a ball wrapping my arms over my face against the rats. My leg swelled red and my head throbbed. The first night I thought, Will knows I am here. Mau knows I am here. They will come soon. On the third night I thought, Maybe no one knows I am here. They kept me awake all night, sitting up in a corner. When I dozed they woke me with water or a kick. At dawn the guard tied my hands behind my back and took me again to the office of Ma Rith.

  He dismissed my guard with a sharp, Baat, tien! and gestured to the chair opposite him. His desk was empty except for his package of Marlboros, a cheap yellow Angkor lighter, his folded sunglasses and a mug of water. I wanted my tormentor’s water.

  He said, Why did you go back to the canal? I told you there is nothing to find.

  Aching. Thirsty. Sleepless. My hands tied. Now I was a body made vulnerable. Now I was available to wound.

  I said, I found him.

  Ma Rith answered, You found nothing.

  I shifted in the chair. I was free to say anything; I did not care if I died.

  The government does not admit that any wrongdoing happens. How can people move on without knowing what happens to their families? How can they move on without truth?

  The damp hot air was still between us.

  Ma Rith’s eyebrows lifted and then his face smoothed again. He said, Our leaders say we should dig a hole and bury the past and look ahead to the new century with a clean slate. All of us have family members, friends and relatives killed and left uncremated by the genocidal regime.

  Outside, far away, the call of a vulture.

  I said, What we think, we become. If the truth is not told, the spirits of the dead will never rest.

  Ma Rith’s voice sharpened like a string tightened across worn frets, You are not from here. Why do you come and interfere? We must accept the reality of our history. Our dead are silent and lost. Our country has suffered decades of war. We must turn from this terrible history now and build a future.

  I said, People want the truth. But they are afraid. Your citizens too wish to speak for those made silent. Someone must act in the name of the lost. Why are you willing to bury the past, but not to bury those who lived in it? What law is transgressed by burying the dead? What law of nature? Of the gods? I found his skull. I recognized his tooth.

  You did not find him. Whatever you found, it was not him. There are many skulls in this country. It is easy to confuse them.

  He lit a cigarette and took a deep draw. He leaned back on his chair, more relaxed than the last time, provoked and bullying. I was dirty, thirsty. Outside I heard the squawks of starlings and the chirrups of tree sparrows.

  I said, I only want to perform rites for him, cremate him, ask the monks to say prayers for him. It is normal to bury the dead.

  A strange stillness held me, and I watched Ma Rith’s shoulders tighten. I feared I had fallen asleep when I noticed him take a last draw on the stub of his cigarette and crush it with cold calm. I did not want to show weakness. I had become an animal who might die. I had become capable of anything, of sleeping while I spoke, of stealing water, of unspeakable atrocity, of acting without feeling. I had to control myself, to find a way. Please, loak borng, I said, allow me to bury his skull.

  Ma Rith said, This task does not belong to you. You are a foreigner. The body belongs to his relatives in Cambodia. Why do you defy our law?

  I said, He has no relatives. I claim the right to give my husband a proper burial. The law is only a man’s thought. Surely you would not allow anyone to take away a family member’s body and say nothing.

  The air changed. I had crossed a line, passed through a door into a different room.

  He smiled derisively. He shifted a pair of sunglasses on the desk and said with mocking, There is a younger brother. We know him. And we know also that he was not your husband.

  I tried to push down the clench of nausea and heat and chill sweat. I glanced around the room, saw no bucket. I said in a voice no longer strong, He is my husband. Together we conceived a child.

  What child? You have no child.

  He did not wish to talk about babies and marriage and grew cruel, as if it were a family argument, intimacy waiting to explode into rupture, violence, silence. I paused to still my shaking voice, said, I had breakbone fever and I crossed the river too soon and my baby died. It was a girl.

  He said mockingly, Do you think we do not know who you are? We know everything. We know when you came. We know what he was doing. You are not married. You are like any beer girl.

  The words cut like an oxcart axle across the head.

  My shoulders ached and I could not wipe my wet forehead.

  I have committed no crime. My husband disappeared from a political rally in Phnom Penh. I found his skull. I want to cremate it and pray.

  How far his eyes might pierce I could not tell. He had been ordered to make me comply. Suddenly he slammed his open hand on the desk and I jumped and he said in a raised voice, At oy té. You have committed a crime. You are not permitted to claim anything.

  Humanity dictates burial of the dead, I answered.

  Ma Rith said, Humanity does not dictate respect for the disloyal. This man was betraying his government. He deserves no loyalty.

  A chill wind entered my body, through my groin, one that has never fully gone away.
>
  I said, What is loyalty after death?

  When I die, said Ma Rith without temper, I will still know my enemies.

  False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand. Is man no more than this?

  I straightened on the hard chair, said, When I die, I will still know my loved ones. I will die before I leave Ang Tasom without him. I know he is here.

  Ma Rith stood then, walked behind me, leaned over me. He said, No woman will tell me how to enforce the law of my own country.

  My insides were liquid. The room was thick with ragged spirits. How much cruelty does it take to put out our human light? How far would this go? On the gateway over the entrance of the cemetery at Errancis is the single word, DORMIR.

  I spoke to his empty chair, There is a law older than the laws of man. Divine law says: Every stranger is holy. What divine law have I broken?

  He sat down again, wrote on paper thin as the eyelids of a corpse. He said, You are a victim. It is as if an accident happened to you. You say there is no one to claim him but you are wrong. His brother is alive.

  The burn on my leg throbbed. But it felt like someone else’s body. I was interested in the pain but it was no longer mine.

  I said, Loak bou, I have only one desire: to love my dead. How can this be wrong? Your citizens would say this too, but terror makes them close their mouths. His brother does not care.

  Ma Rith lit another cigarette, impatient now. This was dull theater. There were other things to do. His job was to get rid of me and still we were talking. If he could not persuade me he would force me. He closed the file and spoke once again in that soft, cajoling voice used for ritual phrases, What purpose to revisit the past?

  I said, To claim the present.

  He opened up his dark glasses and put them on. He said, Burn the old grass to let the new grass grow.

  The earth will be burnt up, will perish and be no more.

  We had pared the argument from both sides and left nothing in the middle.

  You will be sent back, he said. You will be taken to the airport and put on a plane to your country and you are forbidden to return to Cambodia.

  I was taken back to the cement block room. I examined the cracks in the walls. I did not look at my own body. I observed the throb of hunger and the dizziness of thirst. I crashed into sleep. If you are there in the wild place I will walk straight to you and rest in you. Have you found your dead, your mother, your father, your grandmother, Tien, and do you sit with them? Is there music where you are? Is there rock and roll? Is my mother there? I thrashed at the rats and listened to a voice crying out in little sharp cuts from half-sleep and realized it was my own. At dawn the next day I heard a car arrive, men’s feet and voices outside. Now I would be torn from you forever. I was so thirsty.

  Montreal

  68

  My hands were bound, my body ached. On the road out of Ang Tasom, I saw Mau, waiting, half hidden behind a market stall on the roadside, and he raised his eyes to me. In the car with closed windows we crashed through rough potholes, scattered birds. My shoulders bumped against my tormentors and I tried to shrink into a body that could not be touched. I no longer smelled the sugar palm or rice paddies of Cambodia, only the stale breath of those whose duty it was to silence me.

  Do you remember the girl in the yellow room on Bleury Street? Thick snow softly falling on Sunday morning sidewalks. I reached for you, expanded into your embrace. Once there were many places, but now there was only you. I loved the way you watched me in the yellow room.

  I could not see our driver’s eyes on the road to Phnom Penh. He wore dark glasses and his hands clenched the wheel as he bumped against rocks. Mau had driven with delicacy around the great holes and boulders of the dancing road, stopping to give alms, lifting his moto over a broken bridge, glancing over his shoulder at us, reaching back to share a cigarette.

  I will never see the Elephant Mountains again but I can still see Chan’s stiff hands and her twitching face. In the concrete room I learned with dread certainty: They could do with me what they wanted. They took you from me, and they diminished me to flesh, made me foreign in the world.

  69

  At the airport two hard-faced soldiers flanked me and a small woman with harsh hands untied my wrists and gave me a washed T-shirt and cotton pants that were too big. She watched me undress and took my filthy clothes with disgust and put them in an old bag. I was to leave with nothing. They escorted me through customs and gave me my passport and told me to write my name on a document but I would sign no expulsion order. The eyes of the official flickered not brown but slate and my bowels dissolved. These were eyes that could harm me. Four men forced me onto the plane and people stared and soldiers stood at the exits until the plane took off.

  70

  Leaving felt like falling into a clean bed. Grief. Exhaustion. Footsteps outside a locked door. I no longer recognized myself. I ate everything on the tray and when they offered me a second I took that too. I slept fitfully. In the plane. In my father’s house. I ate at my father’s table. I remember his eyes on me.

  Daughter, he said, you are so thin.

  I did not know the time or season, the air was cold and smelled of winter, or perhaps it was only a winter-seeming night.

  I told Papa you were dead, that I found your skull. He held up his hand, said, Rest now. You can tell me everything later. When you are rested.

  What he meant was, Do not tell me more.

  I watched the shadows stretch over the walls of my childhood bedroom and wondered how I had come to this.

  Berthe came, sat on the edge of my narrow bed, opened her arms to me and I cried. She smelled of pine-tar soap. She said, Mon p’tit chou, what have they done to you?

  My father invited visitors. He was afraid of my foreignness. I sat wrapped in a frayed eiderdown on the old chair beside the lamp with the chipped shade. Charlotte came with her three children, hesitated as if she did not know me. Her children stared with wide eyes, squabbled over this color or that, broke and cried over a red crayon, filled in lines. Charlotte labored to fill my silence, and I could not tolerate her talking. When she asked, What are you going to do now? I sent them all away.

  71

  After I lost you, a thought formed clearly beneath the flat thunder in my head: No one can help me. Despair is an unwitnessed life. The ones who murdered you came and went, going about their business. And my trust in the world was destroyed.

  No one will ever see you, still sleeping beside me, needing nothing.

  72

  I visited offices, clean ones, well lit ones, where men in suits came and went, opened briefcases, told me their names, consulted papers, repeated in different ways, We do not intervene against the laws of another country, there is always a chain of custody for a corpse, what makes you think a foreign national could just go anywhere and claim an unidentified skull?

  The lawyer answered the telephone during our interview and spoke French and Polish as well as he spoke English. He gestured to a pile of files on his disordered desk. He said, I have clients in prisons for years without a trial. He punched a closed fist against an open palm, stood, walked to the corner of his office, looked over the river, said, You are lucky they kicked you out. You could have been stuck in prison.

  I said, I committed no crime. They held me without charging me. They leave bodies unburied. People are going missing. Can you help me get back there to get his skull?

  You have a dogged quality, he said.

  I said, The worst humiliation is that they kicked me out. They think, Let her go, no one will care once she is out.

  People like you cause trouble when you are in prison, he said. I care, but I do not know what more I can do for you.

  The authority of any government stops at its citizens’ skin. People everywhere look for their missing. We see the women of the plazas. We see women standing on the edges of graves. We hear the dignified plea, Can no one find me even a bone to bury?

  It has become so easy to see.
Images in the air we breathe. People know what is going on.

  The question that skitters over me like rats in a prison cell at night is this: Once we know, what do we do?

  This is what I know: You keep coming back to me.

  73

  For thirty years, silence has strangled me from the inside and I peck at the shell trying to break it, trying to be born without drowning. Silence. A crime. I have done exactly as they wanted, moved on as if nothing happened. But, borng samlanh, you too did exactly as they wanted; you made yourself vulnerable enough to die. For so long I have felt shame. I have watched myself living as if from outside my body, pretending to be alive. I tried to live, worked, married, gave birth to two sons. My husband left, said it was a mistake, said I was remote. I raised my sons, cooked Sunday dinners for my father. I never told what happened to me over there, not all of it. Papa loved me the best way he could. He took my sons fishing in the Gatineau. I used to stand at the door and watch them climb into his car, all three of them wearing their fishing hats. Now I know the anguish of watching a child go. All my bone wanted to leave home when I was sixteen, and when my sons wanted to leave, all my bone wanted them to stay. This is the genius of: For he so loved the world he gave his only begotten child. My father watched who he thought I was disappear in front of his eyes. He could never bring himself to ask who I became. And I did not tell him.

  74

  I refused, for years, to see Will when he traveled through Montreal, but I met him by chance one day on St. Laurent. I recognized him when I saw him shift a small backpack from one shoulder to the other. The crevices on his cheeks had deepened. The heels of his hands were red. The clean light in his eyes shone past a life of too much alcohol and nicotine and jet lag and the labor of releasing the missing from their graves.