He said, You look good. You never change. Want a drink?
Will always made me laugh. My hair is thin. The veins on the backs of my hands are knotted. Will had found a man who would unpack his plastic bags filled with death-stinking work clothes, who would live with the severed limbs in his nightmares. We spoke of work and failed marriages, my children, his lover. He drank his first beer quickly and poured another, said, Why wouldn’t you see me?
I looked down the street. Are you happy?
Will laughed, Happiness is not that important.
I remembered how much I had once liked him.
We sat in silence, remembering, and he said, You still love him, don’t you?
I looked into his eyes and had to look away. After a moment I said, Last week my father died while he walked to work. An aneurysm in the brain.
Will put his stained hand over mine.
At the hospital, I asked for a pan of warm water and soap and clean towels and I washed my father’s body. There was a bruise on his cheek from his fall. I had never seen his genitals. The thin graying hair. I had never touched his feet. He was a modest man. I had not stroked his face since I was a small child. I had loved his eyes, his hands, the brown spots of aging. I washed the muscles of his forearms. He died going to the hospital to work on a leg to help a small boy run. While I washed him I wanted to say to someone, Look. Look, his hands were skilled. I covered him with a clean sheet and I went to his apartment, found his best clothes, went to the funeral home to dress him. His body was so cold. It takes strength to move the heavy limbs of the dead. The mortician said, You do not have to do this.
I sat with his body all through the night. The funeral director said, You do not have to stay.
I accompanied his body to the crematorium and I saw the heavy doors open and I watched him disappear this last time without his usual shy smile. It made a crater in me, hollow, echoing, numb, arid, void. I signed papers and I received his ashes and I buried them. It took three days.
Will said, Do you know that when an infection gets bad enough even bone starts to disintegrate. The skin swells and the bone goes soft and breaks down into mush.
He picked up his glass, took another sip and said, For love’s sake, tell before there is nothing left.
75
I remember you bent over the two strings of your chapei playing for a girl with long kinked hair. I have the two little pictures of you and me taken in the picture booth in the train station near the church. Cassette recordings of your voice. Nothing else.
I have lived in intimacy with the violence of the untold life.
Not long ago I sat for ten hours, watching a screen. I did not doze. Each person who was photographed and died in Tuol Sleng prison is posted, five thousand pictures, each lasts five seconds before dissolving to black. When I closed my eyes that night I had after-images of eyes and the strange twist of the shoulders and neck when the arms are tied behind the back. And I heard your voice.
My colleagues gossip together, Has she not had a marvelous life? Those early years of travel, where was it? Viet Nam? Thailand? Somewhere over there. And two sons and her gift for teaching languages and her writing cabin by the river in the Gatineau. She says she writes but she never publishes anything.
Light laughter.
Her marriage did not survive, but whose does anymore? More light laughter.
She never seems to lack for friends.
Did you hear? Her father just died.
He must have been quite old.
N’importe! At any age it is affecting.
Still.
76
Only I can see you now. Candles on the river. I waited for you, and for a while this was enough. But you did not come back to me. When it was time, I knew the way to you, and I knew where you would be. You gave me flower buds wrapped in a leaf and we listened to music and when we walked on the river it turned around and flowed back to where it began.
77
I do not listen to the old music, the almost forgotten sound of those young Khmer musicians recording as fast as they could write, getting it all down live. None of your musician friends survived, all were left on the streets for dogs, dumped in mass graves. I once wondered when I saw the skulls at Choeung Ek if I was looking at any bone from which that hope-filled music came.
Now, borng samlanh, I see in the mirror a woman of a certain age. I have filled in time since the day I lost you. A lifetime of silent pretending.
If we live long enough, we have to tell, or turn to stone inside. I try to release you from a pit in my heart but unburied and unblessed you imprison me.
I long for the brush of your fingers on my skin. I long for the light of your eyes. If I pray, I pray to a wounded god. In the end it is only the wounded who endure. In Cambodia they say, Loss will be god’s, victory will be the devil’s.
78
You keep coming back to me in little bits of moving images, light on a winter wall. Come to the door, spirit I know, and I will stand and hold you. Come alive just one more time, let me feel your breath, Serey, let me hear your voice in song, let me wash away the pain. Come, and I will whisper your name to you one more time.
HISTORICAL NOTE
This novel takes place during the Cambodian genocide (1975–79), in which two million people died, through the Vietnamese occupation (1979–89) and into the United Nations Transitional Authority, which was to supervise the administration of Cambodia and to attempt to create conditions for the first democratic election in 1993. Those who oppose the government continue to be killed.
Historical timelines have been compressed for this fictional story.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My reading about Cambodia’s and other countries’ genocides and truth commissions, and survivors’ and perpetrators’ reflections, is woven through the fabric of this story. The responsibility for this story, however, is mine, and all allusions to other writers’ reflections and witness accounts have been transmuted here into the kind of truth that fiction tells.
I would like to acknowledge the support of a McGeachy Scholarship from the United Church of Canada.
I am especially grateful for the work of Youk Chaang at the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam); Brad Adams and Human Rights Watch; Mark Gergis and his music collection; Rich Garella and Eric Pape’s article “A Tragedy of No Importance”; Kathy Gruspier for conversation and field notes from the Ontario coroner’s team; Kim Kieran for her diaries (unpublished); for photographs and the most generous consulting, Sonia Tahieri, Ton Paeng and Robert Fiala; Craig Etcheson; research from DC-Cam and the report “Documentation Center of Cambodia Forensic Project” and Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Data Bases.
Of many books about Cambodia, I wish to acknowledge especially Vann Nath’s A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge’s S-21, his art and remarkable spirit; Dith Pran’s Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields; David Chandler’s Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison; Craig Etcheson’s After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide; Human Rights Watch/Asia’s Cambodia at War and François Ponchaud’s Cambodia: Year Zero. I would like to acknowledge Sophearith Chuong’s “Grandmother of ‘Fertilizer’” (DC-Cam) as a source for Chan’s fictional story on page 102, and Ralph Lemkin, who invented the word genocide, as the source of the quotation on page 172 (“If women, children and old people were being murdered a hundred miles from here ...”). I would like to acknowledge the work of Vann Nath with director Rithy Pan in the film The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine as the source for dialogue with former prison guards in Tuol Sleng on pages 131–132.
Readers who love Buddy Guy, Etta James and Sophocles’ Antigone may hear echoes of their song and poetry. “Truth is as old as God ... / And will endure as long as He, A Co-Eternity” (page 65) is by Emily Dickinson. I have alluded to the thought of Jean Améry in At the Mind’s Limits. I believe it was Hannah Arendt who first said, “The authority of any government stops at its ci
tizens’ skin” (page 220), and Simone Weil who wrote about The Iliad, “Force turns the one subjected to it into a thing” (page 32). Tzvetan Todorov wrote in Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, “There is, however, no necessary correlation between how we tell of the past and how we use it; that it is our moral obligation to reconstruct the past does not mean that all the uses we make of it are equally legitimate.”
Others I would like to thank are Lin Chear, Debby deGroot, Shaun Oakey, David Ross, Elizabeth Schmitz, Sally Reardon, Cheryl Carter, Paulette Blanchette, Anne Simpson, Alex Levin, Barbara Jackman, Janice Blackburn, Peter Jacobsen, Rory Cummings, The Very Reverend Bruce McLeod, the late Dr. and Mrs. N.K. Campbell, Ian Small, Michelle Oser, Linda Gaboriau and the Banff Centre for the Arts, Monica Pereschi, Josephine Rijnaarts, Manfred Allie, the Khmer Buddhist Centre of Ontario, Leslie and Alan Nickell, Adam and Ann Winterton, Madeleine Echlin, Paul Echlin, Randy and Ann Echlin, Mark and Joanne Echlin.
To Ross Upshur, true gratitude for your insights and discussion, for sharing with me the dailiness of writing. To Olivia and Sara Upshur, thank you for daily joy.
A special thank you to Sandra Campbell for invaluable criticism and inspiration over many years. You have seen this story in a thousand lights.
To David Davidar and Nicole Winstanley, thank you for your talent, editorial imagination and risk-taking. You are true well-jumpers.
And thank you to a woman whose name I never learned. In a Phnom Penh market you broke silence and asked me to remember with you.
I imagine us in a place that could forgive us all.
Kim Echlin Page 15