Dogs at the Perimeter

by Madeleine Thien

  On the third day, the boy, the doctor, came and told me that I had to leave. I asked who would take care of my mother and he said that he would. “Who will bring her food?” I asked. He said that Angkar would provide. I said that I would not leave, and he looked at me, surprised. He asked my name and my work unit. When I didn’t answer, he asked to see my travel pass. I showed him the one I had taken from my mother. He stared at it for a long time, and then he flung it back. He could not read, I realized. The child doctors of the Khmer Rouge could not even read. He told me to leave immediately, that she was no longer my responsibility. I knelt on the ground, weeping, trying to wipe the dirt from the scrap of paper.

  My mother’s chest rose and fell, struggling on and on. A nurse came and told me, urgently, that I must leave, all the relatives had to go, the doctor had sent word to Angkar. And then what? I wanted to ask her. What more could Angkar do to us? But the nurse had already hurried off. The world had grown too large for me, it was asking too much, too much. I held my mother’s hand, I kissed her fingers. “The rice,” she said. “Please, my darling. Bring me a little rice.” The things I had scavenged lay around us. Fruit, herbs, water. I searched my mind for what I should do, where I could find food, how I could help her, but my thoughts felt like grains of sand, scratching, tumbling. My father’s stories came back to me, all the heroes that persisted in Khmer poems and myths, so many stories that promised us we were braver than we were. I wanted to shake him, I wanted to tell him that the things we try so hard to keep, the beloved, most precious things, keep slipping through. We had always been powerless to keep them safe. I got to my feet, I went outside for air, and then I kept walking, kept going. At the junction where Bopha had parted from me, I stood, weeping, trying to will myself to return. Go back, I told myself. She needs you. She’ll die without you.

  I kept going, as if we were again leaving the city, this exodus that had begun and had never ended. I walked and saw the crowd beside me. People had carried the things they treasured, a machinist carried his tools, a grocer pushed a cart of groceries, my father carried books. In my mother’s bag were photo albums, our clothes, our toys. Later on, all these things had been abandoned, bit by bit, on the side of the road. A space grew around me, it rose from the soil, a space in which there were no doors, no light or darkness, no landmarks. No future, no past. The things I had kept hidden from Angkar had not been buried deep enough. From far away, I saw myself as I had been many years ago, carried by my father. He swung me down and laid me in my mother’s arms. I carried this image with me as I walked away, pushing it down, clothing it in darkness. Turning so completely away from it, the image slowly disappeared.

  When I reached the reservoir, it was dawn. Bopha was awake, waiting for me. My thoughts, my memories, my body, were separating but she held me tightly, she tried to keep me from coming apart. She told me to go to Vuthy right away, to tell him I had been sick and I had gone into the forest to find medicine. That I had been feverish and had gotten lost but, this morning, I had found my way free again. I did everything just as she told me. In his hut, Vuthy watched me intently. When I had finished explaining, he told me to sit down. He gave me a plate of food with rice and fish, and when I was done eating he told me not to tell anyone about the food, to go back to my work unit, and to continue on.

  The hot season ended. I lived and worked and dreamed beside Bopha. At night, while I listened, she spun stories for me. She told me about a boy named Chantou who had run away into the forest. “He lived up in the trees,” Bopha said, “safe from the wild animals.” She said that, in the north, the Tonle Sap floods everything, the lake rises so high it covers not only the buildings but the highest branches of the forest. In the trees, the boy Chantou had gathered up the dead bodies of sodden birds. He had found fish in the branches, stranded there when the water subsided.

  “Fish in the trees,” I said.

  Bopha looked up at the starlight. “More and more the farther he climbed.”

  We imagined the boy Chantou. He lay beside us, telling his stories. Our own lives were littered with traps, unanswerable questions, and it was Bopha who first taught me how to escape from myself in this way, disappearing into the souls of other people, both the real and the imaginary.

  Early mornings, in the forest beyond the reservoir, we tried to find food. We stripped bark from the trees, and then we put these curling strips into the puddles of water that had gathered in the indentations of rocks, and we drank the liquid up. Small birds came and hung upside down, warming themselves in the patches of light. When I stretched out my hands to capture them, they blurred away. We ate leaves, husks, stems, and wild grasses, but our stomachs couldn’t digest them and it took too much energy to grind the food into pulp. I imagined climbing up into the highest branches and glimpsing the airplanes that had once paraded across the sky. Thida disappeared, then Chan, then Srei. Other children arrived to replace them. Su, Leakhena, Dara, every one of us like water spilling into the ground. My body was wearing out. I was so thirsty I wanted to pour the blue sky into the palm of my hands, swallow it in great gulps. One night, I remember, Bopha killed a snake and we charred it on the fire. The meat was leathery, rich, and tough. Bopha’s face, her enormous eyes, lit up with pleasure.

  My friend was wasting away. In my arms, Bopha seemed as insubstantial as the dry grass, as if the sea inside her had evaporated. “There’s an answer to everything,” she said one night when she was ill. “My grandmother told me, it’s all written in a big book. I used to think that, one day, I would read it. I would walk into a temple, it would be as vast and rich as a palace, I would turn all the pages, I would see everything that had ever happened, everything that was coming.”

  She looked at me as if she could see straight into my heart, into the centre of who I was. “But I know now,” she said softly. “I’ve looked and I’ve looked, but there’s no answer for me.”

  I wanted to hear her laugh. I mimicked the pouting mouth of Vuthy, the way he bit his lip, the way every time he said the word Angkar he sniffed as if he had a cold. I held her hand and kissed her repeatedly, fearfully.

  She told me that after they had been evacuated from Phnom Penh, a foreboding had come to her mother. Bopha’s father had already been taken away, and her mother knew that Angkar had marked them. She believed that, unless her children rid themselves of their history, they would never be safe. One night, she packed their things and she sent both her daughters, Bopha and Rajana, away, one to the north and the other to the south. When you reach a camp, she said, tell them you’re an orphan. Tell them your parents have died and you have no place to go. A few weeks later, Bopha said, her mother had been taken away and killed.

  I remember birds sliding upwards into the ruby night. Once, while gathering kindling in the forest, I saw a tiger stalking a deer. I stood very still, thinking of my mother, believing that she had come now, she had forgiven me. Instead, the tiger vanished and the deer with him. They were the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen in the world. For Bopha, I gathered lime-green berries in a jacket of dew. But nothing I did could save her. Bopha died. Vuthy came, he helped me bury her at the edge of the reservoir, in a place where still leaves would shade her from the heat. Against her chest, in the pocket of her clothes, lay a picture of her sister, Rajana. Afterwards, fearful that Angkar would see my pain, I hid inside the forest. I asked myself how I had disappeared and why I could not remember the moment, the act. Was this the emptiness at the centre of creation, the nothingness to which I aspired? Was this the highest truth of all? I saw that I had not understood before, how deep, how wide, loneliness could be.

  Hunger was erasing my being. Soon, I, too, would find my way into the trees. I went to Vuthy again. I told him I wished to find my brother, and I asked him to send a message to Prasith, a Khmer Rouge cadre. I gave him the name of our old cooperative. Vuthy looked at me, there was pity in his eyes. He said that he would do his best. I wanted to ask Vuthy what he had been before, what lives he had lived, I w
anted to know how it was possible to be something more than what I was.

  I continued to work in the reservoir. Chantou kept me company, returning to me night after night. My hands, my body, remained in the world, but slowly I released myself into the quiet grief of my thoughts.

  Who lied to us? Chantou asked me. I tried to answer him, I tried to know. Maybe it was the ones who said we were living in a new age, a year zero, who said we must be strong, that purity was strength. I wanted to ask Angkar, How can we save ourselves and still begin again, how can we keep one piece and abandon all the rest? The devastation always moves inward, even to the last and highest rooms.

  In the reservoir, the rains kept on. I thought another birthday must have passed and I was now eleven years old. No existence is permanent, I told myself. I held fast to the belief that all times, all wars, must come to an end.

  Everything passes, my mother whispered.

  Even love. Even grief.

  Near the end of the rainy season, my brother arrived at the reservoir. I had been summoned to Vuthy’s hut. My brother looked at me, held my eyes, then turned away.

  “I need your signature, mit,” my brother said to Vuthy. The cadre lifted the page. He studied it for a long time, then he turned to me, as if he had a question only I could answer. At last, Vuthy picked up a pen and signed the page. My brother unloaded a sack of rice from the bicycle and laid it on a nearby table. The cadre examined it, surprised.

  The tires needed air and when I climbed on, we subsided even farther. As Vuthy watched Sopham began to pedal, navigating us down the muddy road, away from the reservoir. I sat on the seat and my brother stood and pedalled, the cotton of his shirt blowing out behind him, touching my face, my neck and shoulders. The coarseness of his shirt rubbed against me. I had dreamed of seeing him too many times, wished for it, imagined it. In the same moment, I believed and disbelieved.

  When the cooperative was far behind us, he manoeuvred the bicycle to the side of a fast-moving stream. He took my hand and helped me into the water and he used my filthy clothes to scrub the mud and dried, old blood from my skin. I could not remember where the blood had come from. He rubbed hard and the clothes, so old and thin, began to disintegrate. The water was sun-drenched, it smelled of black dirt. “Are you all right?” he asked me.

  I said that I was cold, only cold.

  My brother nodded. “Look,” he said. “I brought new clothes for you.”

  Nothing was what it seemed. Somehow he had grown taller than me, heavier. I put the clothes on. Emotion flickered behind his eyes, never quite coming to the surface.

  “How did you find me?” I asked him.

  “You sent word. Through Prasith. Do you remember?”

  I nodded. He turned away from me and climbed back onto the bicycle, waiting. “And Ma,” I said, trying to begin, but the words only slid away from us, unfinished.

  “She’s gone,” he said simply.

  In his voice, all the feeling had hardened and closed off.

  It started to rain. The landscape turned murky, the road began to wash away from under us, but we continued on, hurrying west then south then west again, mostly pushing or carrying the bike over the dislodged road. Shadowy forms moved against the twilight, human beings freezing into trees, trees elbowing into human shapes. We stopped to rest and I opened my mouth and drank the rain.

  When it grew too dark to see, we hid in a grove of trees and took turns sleeping. I woke to the sound of my brother reloading the AK, cleaning the barrel and the grip. He had a killed a creature while I slept, skinned it, and hung the flesh from a branch. The mosquitoes and flies surrounded it, ecstatic, and he took the meat down and wrapped it in leaves. We kept going.

  Eventually, my brother turned onto a narrow track. We abandoned the bicycle in the mud. Slowly the ground gave way to jungle. I saw thick vines choking the gnarled trees, I saw frantic ground squirrels, enormous, furry insects with wavering antennae and burning eyes. We ascended and the mist rose with us, and then past us. On and on we went, climbing higher and higher. Daybreak came. We stopped only twice, sharing the rice Sopham had brought. Afternoon and then evening fell. The last light pebbled over the jungle floor, my brother moved faster and faster. I struggled to keep up. And then, in the gloom, we saw it at the same time, a crevice cut into the rocks.

  Sopham held his AK in both hands. He went in first and then, when he had disappeared, I followed.

  Nothing was visible. The cave smelled like a world condensed, all the earth and trees and rocks crushed to a handful of minerals. Sopham rustled in his clothing. Light flickered between us. I saw a match in his hands, and then a candle, thick and honey-coloured, the kind used for temple offerings. For a moment, Sopham looked at me, his eyes pale in the sudden light, and tried to smile. I saw my father’s face, his disbelief, his masked sadness.

  Deeper inside the cave, we rested. In a sort of grotto in the wall were the ends of other candles, a disintegrating scarf, burned-down sticks of incense, dulled bullet casings. My brother told me about the prisons, about Prasith, about the woman named Chanya. His voice was flat. “The good and the pure break,” he said. “They always break.” I remember water dripping endlessly down the cave walls. My brother went away somewhere, he started a fire, cooked the meat, and brought it back to me. He showed me the treasure he had kept all this time, the key to our apartment on Norodom Boulevard, in Phnom Penh. He asked me to take care of it, to keep it safe. We could not bring ourselves to speak about our mother. For a long time, while Sopham slept, I ran my fingers over the key, listening to my brother’s breathing, his exhaled words. I told myself that I could protect him. The love I felt for him was like air, everywhere inside me, pushing me on.

  Turn by turn, we passed through the long waist of the mountains, not knowing if we were deep inside the caves or almost through, not knowing if the border to Vietnam was near or distant. The groundwater rose to our hips and then subsided, draining away.

  Sometimes the ceiling dropped low and we had to crawl forward, holding our mouths above the water, the AK lifted up. The farther we went, the slower our movements seemed, the slower my blood pulsed. At the end of a long passage, the cave flowered open into a grandiose space, hourglass columns, glimmering pools, still reflections. Light rained in through pinches and seams. My brother said that this was the place, Chanya’s map would not lead us any farther. We sat against a wall, listening to the bats and the falling water. It felt like days passed, but perhaps it was only hours. I no longer know. We slept and woke, slept again.

  I heard the crank of an AK. My eyes flicked open.

  A man stood in front of us, a tall, thin shadow, appearing as if he had melted from the walls. There were noises behind him, a woman’s nervous warning, and then footsteps, quickly retreating. Beside me, my brother woke. He lifted his hands, the palms facing out.

  “Mit,” Sopham said. The word echoed off the walls.

  The man cut him off. “What district?”

  “Peam Ro district, Prey Veng province.”

  The rifle edged nearer.

  My brother’s voice was trembling. “The river has flooded this year,” he said.

  Surprise showed in the man’s eyes, and then it was gone. “Has it, child?”

  “Yes, mit. The river has flooded this year.”

  “At oy té,” he said softly, ambiguously. “Let it flood.”

  He crouched down in front of us, the gun supported on his hip, and studied our faces. His skin was faded, tinged grey. “Let’s have the truth. Who are you, really?”

  When neither of us answered, the man pushed the tip of the rifle against my brother’s heart. “Hurry up,” the man said. “Time is running down.”

  “Our friend showed us the way,” Sopham said finally. “He had a map.”

  “I see. Where is this friend?”

  “He was ill, mit. He died on the road. I’m sorry, he didn’t –” my brother tried to say more but the words stuck in his throat.

  The man lifted
the barrel of his gun, rapping it twice against Sopham’s AK. It was still strapped to my brother’s body but now, carefully, he slid it free. The man took it. “Stand up,” he said. He searched my brother and then me, his hands moving roughly down my arms, my jutting ribs. “Please,” I said. “We have nothing.”

  He paused and stepped back. “If you have nothing, what should I do with you? What good are you to me?”

  “All we want is to leave.”

  “Do you think it’s so simple?”

  I looked into his eyes, unable to answer.

  A long time passed and Sopham and I lay together on the ground. The man watched us intently. Later on, people came. I saw a teenager wearing a belt of ammunition and, behind him, a woman carrying a baby. Her breathing was shallow, as if they had climbed far to reach this place. They sat down opposite us. Once, the baby came loose from her mother’s arms. She crawled to me, pulled my hair, touched my face with her warm, birdlike hands. “No, baby,” the woman said. Her baby made a happy sound, like a cat licking milk, and the woman looked at me with sadness and wonder.

  The teenaged boy went away and then returned; I heard the scratch of his footsteps.

  It was no longer possible to track the sun, to identify the hours, the nights.

  My brother woke in a panic. “Feel my hands,” he mumbled. “See how thin they are?” I held them. “No,” I said, easing him back to sleep. “No.” The baby in the woman’s arm was snoring lightly. I fought to stay awake. “You have to deal with them,” someone said. “Yes. The risk is too great.” “They’re harmless,” the woman said. Someone grunted in dismissal. “But the others –” “The others are not coming.” “We can’t wait. They’ll have to go separately.” The name Chanya touched the air, but maybe it was only my brother’s dreams seeping into me. I heard the dull clicking of bats, small pips, the beat of tiny wings.