by Mary Gordon
Day after day, Maria looks at photographs; she reads reports of terrible atrocities. She hears of the worst things human beings can do to one another. She wants to travel with Clelia and see for herself, but Clelia always needs her at home to run the office. One day, Clelia says. I promise. But it never happens.
On July 6, 1977, Maria meets Ya-Katey, who has come from Cambodia to the United States to get help for his people, trying to make the full horror of his country known.
Do we remember Cambodia, its names and places, or have they blurred for us in the fog of atrocities, other sites of mass murder, other killing fields: Bosnia, Rwanda, Kurdistan? We search our memory; we call up names: Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge. The people’s army of Kampuchea. Do we remember 1975, when Pol Pot took over the city of Phnom Penh? Do we remember what Pol Pot stood for, what his ideas were? A Marxist-agrarian idealist, violently nationalist, violently antitechnology and anti-intellectual, he murdered one in four of his people. In the years 1975 to 1979 the odds against any Cambodian dying a natural death were two to one.
Maria learns all this in 1977 from Ya-Katey, as she takes him to churches and to the homes of the wealthy to raise money for medical supplies. This is his focus; he has trained as a doctor in Paris. One statistic he presents is this: as a result of Pol Pot’s executions the number of doctors in Cambodia has fallen in two years from 270 to 40. Ya-Katey was imprisoned in a special jail set up for doctors, a former hospital. Each morning, one doctor was shot in front of the others. Each morning, they were told there was no more need for doctors. On one of the mornings, the soldier holding the rifle made an imaginary cutting motion with an imaginary knife across his stomach. “If someone needs to have their intestines removed, I will do it.”
Forty doctors for a country of eight million people. Imagine, he says, having only forty doctors in the city of New York.
He tries to make these wealthy well-meaning Americans understand Phnom Penh in 1975, when Pol Pot took over. “Imagine your city, New York, evacuated in one day like Phnom Penh was because the Khmer didn’t believe in cities; cities were dangerous. Imagine someone saying that all pure Americans were country people: that city people were a dangerous pustule on the healthy body of the nation.” He reminds them that Pol Pot wants a pure Cambodia, a peasant ideal he believes he experienced when he was in hiding in the north of his country. Try to imagine, he says, everyone you know being marched at gunpoint to the countryside to work as slaves—that is, those who are allowed to survive. You must remember, he says, that people are killed for anything, for almost nothing: for having an education or technical skills, for knowing French, even for wearing glasses. “Our school is the farm, the land is our paper, we will write by plowing,” Ya-Katey heard a soldier say before he shot a group of teachers.
There is no possible private life: children are buried alive for refusing to report on their parents, people are beheaded and their heads put on pikes for mourning the dead too publicly or too long.
You must try to imagine the madness of a country in the grip
of a murderous madman, he tells the safe Americans. To illustrate his point, in every speech he describes an orphanage he passed by as he was being led out of the city at gunpoint. The workers had been ordered to leave by soldiers who had convinced themselves that babies in cradles were enemies, counterrevolutionaries, didn’t deserve care. Some of the workers at the orphanage had refused to leave and were shot. “I heard the babies crying and I broke away. The soldiers followed me. I saw the bodies of the dead workers on the floor. Their bodies were rotting, and some babies were crawling around beside them. There were forty-eight cradles; forty-eight babies trapped in their cradles with literally no one looking after them. Some of them of course were already dead. There were twins in one cradle; one was alive, the other dead. Some babies tried to cry, but only a horrible sound came from their throats as they gasped for breath. Some people had sneaked in during the night and left cans of water and rice on banana leaves for the children on the floor. One of the children who had managed to crawl out of his crib was sitting on the floor, eating. His stomach was bloated and he looked dazed, but he couldn’t stop eating. A dead baby lay nearby.”
Ya-Katey told the soldiers he wouldn’t leave the children in this condition. He was hit in the head with a rifle butt and beaten to insensibility.
When he woke up, he was in prison in the countryside. Then the camp was attacked by the North Vietnamese. In the chaos, he escaped: over the Thai border and finally here, to America.
Every evening Maria drives him to the places he will speak; she introduces him in the name of Clelia’s organization. Clelia is very taken by him and tells Maria to show him around New York. In the mornings, in the afternoons, he wants to see things; he wants to eat well, particularly French food. He says he wants to store up images, images of beauty and of things beautifully done, so they will be a bank of hope for him to draw on in hopeless times. That is how he can order escargots, agneau sanglante, haricots verts, tarte aux pommes; return an unsatisfactory wine; accept, graciously, the apologies of the sommelier. How he can lose himself in the watery landscape of the Corot at the Frick, delight in the daub of red that is the boatman’s hat. “Pol Pot would have me killed for desiring angneau sanglante, and Corot,” he said, “because he says it is part of the corruption of Cambodian purity, an imperialist corruption. I fear purity; I fear it very much; it is a dangerous idea. I am a scientist, and I know that nothing alive is pure. To be pure is to be impervious to change, to mixture. Change and mixture is our lot, our lot as living things.”
And one night, delighting in her body, he says, “If we should have a child it would be very very impure: Jewish, Russian, Cambodian, Catholic, Buddhist. A real mess. I am in love with the idea of mess. The mess is our only hope against the tyranny of the pure.”
When he speaks about purity, he is thinking of murder. When she thinks of it, she thinks of surveillance. The kind of purity he fears is revolutionary purity. The kind she fears, the kind her experience has provided, is sexual. The purity that flew under the banner of virginity. The purity of the untouched body. The purity of the child. In her childhood, impurity meant only one thing: sexual defilement. Even to touch your body was a sin of impurity. She refuses a definition of virtue that insists she be either untouched or a child. But she feels that her ideas of purity are childish compared to his, and she is embarrassed to speak of them. When she asks him once why the idea of purity—of which there is no model, as he had often said, in nature—seems to have such a hold on the human imagination, he says, “It seems greatly desirable to be only one thing. To be, to do one thing fully, with no contradictions. To be a closed circle, impenetrable, impermeable. This, I believe, makes people feel safe.”
When he says a closed circle, impenetrable, impermeable, she thinks of the White Circle of the Host and of her First Communion when she was six. She does not want to admit to him that it was a wonderful feeling, a day when she had felt entirely pure. Her father had told her once that Napoleon had said his First Communion was the happiest day of his life. She didn’t know how her father knew this, but it was the kind of thing her father knew.
At twenty-nine, the age she is when she is with Ya-Katey, Maria hopes there will be happier days in her future. She would never have admitted, feeling as she does about her father and what her father stood for, that her First Communion was the happiest day of her life. If the thought entered her mind, she would banish it, annihilate it: a dangerous insurgent that must be blasted upon sight. As she has banished, every time it came to her, the thought that it was a wonderful feeling, the feeling of purity, of being whole, of being entirely one thing, and that thing only.
She wants to tell Ya-Katey about her First Communion, but it embarrasses her to be thinking of it, to be granting it any importance, when he is thinking about the horrors he has seen and the horrors that are going on in his homeland while he is here. Compared to that, her First Communion is ridiculous; she tells herself it w
ould be blasphemous, even, to mention it to him. But the memory is vivid, and when he speaks of the dangers of purity, against her will the image of herself in her white dress enters her mind.
She remembers waking up on the day of her First Communion. Even the light coming in her window seemed sanctified; not drinking water that morning (although water was allowed), bathing herself in silence, dressing herself in silence, everything touching her body pure white, the living perfection of the form. A spotless girl child in white, with a bride’s white veil. If you died on the way home from your First Communion, one of the nuns had told them, it would be a perfect death. Were you supposed to pray for the grace of this perfect death, to pray for the favor of being run down by a car on the street at age six?
Inside her body: the Host, an illuminated circle; her ribs incandescent; the bones of the crucified Jesus visible to her through the stretched skin of his torso, ribs like her own incandescent ribs, illumined by the Host. She was glorified, transfigured, shining like the whitest snow. In her heart, an oval flamed, like the light of a lamp in a dark room, and she knew of course she would be one of the children willing to die in the name of this, this thing that was only one thing, the body of Christ, the thing she too had become: illumined, without blemish, without contradictions. Of course it would be easy to die. Only she could not pray for it. She did not want to die. Knowing she didn’t want to die, she feared herself imperfect, impure. But she very much wanted the perfection of the form, her sense of her life as shining and complete.
Maria is afraid of the connection between her childhood vision of beauty and the murder from which Ya-Katey has fled, perhaps only temporarily. She feels she has no right to speak. So she doesn’t tell him much about her life; she considers it far less important than his; she wants to give him pleasure and refreshment before he has to go back to horror, to what will probably be death.
“Must you go back?” she asks him once, and he says, “Yes, I can’t be safe here in this dream while my people are living a nightmare.”
So she creates a dream for him: a dream of pleasure. They laugh together; he teases her, calling her his luxury: “Ma Luxe, pas calme, mais voluptueuse.” He calls her his Jewish princess, and she tries to explain what that means in New York. He quotes the Song of Solomon: Thy breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies. And his body, slight to her, and light, almost as if a girl were above her, a girl with a man’s force but without the crushing mountainous feel that a heavy man’s body would provide.
Is it that they are exotics to each other? Certainly they are that. Is that why their bodies please each other so? Does it matter? They desire each other, they admire each other. They both know it won’t be for long. They don’t say much about what they feel, only that they enjoy each other. And for both of them, that seems enough; it seems a very good thing.
Almost by accident, they discover they aren’t entirely foreign to each other. She is driving down Fifth Avenue in front of St. Patrick’s, and there is a terrible traffic jam. “What the hell is this?” she says. “It’s the middle of the week, the middle of summer, August fifteenth, for God’s sake.” And then both of them say, at the same second, “August fifteenth: Assumption Day!” The Feast of the Assumption.
They laugh very hard. They have both been to Catholic school. He has been educated by the Jesuits, sent to their school in Paris. His father had been Buddhist but, enamored of French civilization, had converted. They are astonished to find in each other bits of a history that intersects. One night, a little drunk, they sing Salve Regina to each other. Then Pange Lingua: Sing, my tongue. They are a little obscene about that one. You can imagine. He hadn’t liked Catholicism; he felt he’d been robbed of his heritage. He is a stranger to Buddhism. When he saw the desecration of the temples by the Khmer Rouge, he grieved for what he had not been allowed to know. He asks Maria if she’s felt robbed of her heritage. “I don’t think about it much,” she says. And even Ya-Katey knows there is no sense in saying more. I’m not sure what he thinks, because he leaves soon afterward. He plans to sneak back into the country as he’d left: through the Thai jungle. He knows he probably will not survive.
Maria never hears from him. The organization cannot track him down. And then she discovers she is pregnant with his child. She didn’t mean for it to happen; her diaphragm failed. She had known him little more than a month. And so she had, as her model of what a man to whom she could attach herself should be, a ghost: someone against whom all other men she met would be found wanting. It is possible to say that this suited her very well. She never said to herself that even with this man, this model for her of what attachment had once been and would never be again, she had not felt free to say what she was thinking. She felt under surveillance; that she herself was in charge of the operation did not change the essential shape. She doesn’t admit to herself that she has always divided the men she has known into the ones who made her feel, if not unworthy or insignificant, at least not up to scratch, and the others, for whom she felt, if not contempt, a bored impatience, a desire to flee. She tells herself only that she is better off alone. But not alone: she has her child.
Why did she decide to have the child when she discovered she was pregnant? She believed in abortion, she had marched for it; most of her friends had had at least one. She had not thought before of having a child; when Ya-Katey spoke of the child that would be theirs, “a real mess,” she had laughed with him; it was only a joke. But when she found out she was pregnant, she had no hesitation. Having a child seemed simple; not having the child of a hero seemed strange; refusing to have a child in the name of hope seemed wrong. The noise that had filled her ears, the sound of the world since 1965, the sound of death and lies and wicked incomprehension, the crackle, the buzz, the wires’ hum, was covered over, muffled, for the first time.
It has occurred to me that sometimes a story is more a tone than a tale. This is true of the story of Maria’s motherhood. She decided she would have the child, and in this way Ya-Katey would not be silenced forever. She would have this child, Ya-Katey’s child, in the name of hope. She would live her life hopefully now. And with that decision, the tone of the world changes. The light that had begun to darken with the death of John Kennedy and turned murderous in the murderous days of Vietnam and the horrors of race war and the burning of the cities, the light that had fallen on her and her father, that had distorted his face till it became the nightmare face she had run from, the siren tone of danger and distress: all this is gone. She and her child will begin a new history, a history where good will not be defined by impossible heroics and enforced by impossible surveillance, impossible purity, the amputation of everything human. She has learned from Ya-Katey the horrors of the impulse to purification. She and her child will simply live: alone, together, in the larger world.
The greatest passion of her life seizes her when she first holds her baby. It is not gentle, not at all; it is a violent, predatory bird with a strong sharp beak that lifts her, exhilarated, over treetops, swirls her dangerously, dangles her, turns her over and over, sometimes allowing her to soar in the plain ecstasy of sheer flight. The predator bird: mother love. She cannot explain it to anyone, this power and danger, the danger of being taken up entirely, whirled who knows where, then dropped, just anywhere at all.
Why, she wonders, do people think that mother love is peaceful? The soaring and the drowning, the terror, the exaltation, the sharp bites of the beak in the soft skin at the back of the neck: it has not claimed its proper language. The mystic, her skin melted by the touch of God, the lover set aflame at the sight of the beloved—these are nothing compared to her flight in the beak of this predatory bird. My own, my own: you had to say it, you could not keep from saying it. And yet children are not your own. For a while you think they are, as you clasp them safe. And then—how does it happen?—they have somehow wriggled free and they are riding on the bird’s back now, and the direction of the flight is in their hands. They ride, u
nreachable by you, heads in the clouds, while you are dangled, while the beak bites harder now into your neck. You can’t get me! they shout, intoxicated by the height, their hair windblown, their cheeks burnished, unaware of the danger you can see from your lower position, closer to the ground. “I am not yours,” they say, and then the beak shakes you, turns you over, shows you how far, how devastatingly it would be possible to fall.
Nothing has ever been more powerful, nothing has ever been more dangerous. And it takes her entirely by surprise. She hadn’t been one of those girls who played with dolls, who dreamed of hordes of children. She hadn’t even meant to get pregnant. But she is never happier in her life than when Pearl is a baby, a small child: the exhaustion, the boredom, the cub’s lapses—these are nothing compared to the drowning joy.
The baby’s mother comes behind Maria, taps her on the shoulder.
“I can’t thank you enough,” she says.
Maria hands over the sleeping infant. The front of her body feels cold now; without the weight of the child she feels insubstantial and quite lonely.
She wants to weep or cry out, to bellow like a cow who calls for a missing or endangered calf. What has happened to my child? she wants to scream. She tries to imagine what Pearl looks like now. Always the sight of Pearl has been the sight she has most longed for. Now she fears it.
“You’re a lifesaver,” the baby’s mother says.