Dogs at the Perimeter (10 page)

The noonday sun scorched the grass. “Fine,” Teacher said at last, when all her questions were done. “You can stay.”

Prasith left to return to Kosal’s cooperative. Before they separated, he told my brother to be careful, that the spies were everywhere, Angkars climbing over Angkars. He said that, in our old cooperative, everyone, including our mother, was safer alone.

“She was relieved that you were leaving, wasn’t she?” Prasith said. “Just like when your sister went away. Mei’s school is just like this one.”

He climbed onto his bicycle and pedalled slowly into the sky’s orange haze.

Each morning, Teacher rounded them up to practise military drills: running, digging, hiding, loading their weapons, aiming, and firing. There was no ammunition, and sometimes the guns themselves were made of soft wood, newly carved and still smelling of the forest. The boys threw rocks at targets and screamed belligerently, cursing spies and agents and counter-revolutionaries. The Americans and the Vietnamese were pressing at the borders, Teacher said, and every child, every Cambodian, must defend their country. We are pure, she said, we are free within ourselves.

“Children become Masters,” Teacher said. “The bread outgrows the basket.”

They sang everyday. Later on, they sang when they carried out the punishments. Sopham had always had a beautiful voice. Before, our mother used to say that he sounded like In Yeng, and it had been In Yeng records that had crowded my brother’s bedside in Phnom Penh. He used to approach the record player with a kind of earnest pleasure, resting his forehead against the wooden case when the music started. He didn’t play kick sandal or
tot sai
with the gang of kids on our street. Those records had been like water to him. He drank and he drank, he was never satisfied.

They had songs to sing even if the words were foolish. Let us destroy the white and glorify the black! Let us dignify the unlettered and eradicate the learned! The judgments were foolish too, but the boys followed orders anyway, there was nothing to be gained in arguing. For them, plastic bags were weapons. Farm tools were weapons. He tried not to dirty his bare hands. Even up to the last moment, he told the guilty not to be afraid. My brother would walk back at night, across the fields, invisible even to himself. When morning came, the sky seemed a little less vivid, a shade lighter, but the shapes around him were clear, pristine.

He slept in a house with a dozen other boys and they ate rice everyday, there was meat sometimes and always vegetables. In the fields, they saw battalions of workers
and they marvelled at the clumsiness of the city people who fell in the mud and broke the implements and injured the animals with their stupidity. Until now, he’d had no idea how vast these rice fields were, how much effort and waste and life were needed to feed a country as small and weak as his. There was too much water and there was too much sun. There were broken dams and flooded crops, there were crabs in the mud and shoddy seedlings. There were closed doors all over this country so farmers died without anyone noticing, they had died generation after generation, from starvation and swindling and finally bombs, until Angkar came and turned the world upside down.

“Your parents deceived you,” Teacher said, “They told you to eat and drink, but how could you when your brother had nothing? When your sister was dying of thirst?”

No city, he thought, could ever be as beautiful as here. The tall stalks of swaying rice, golden brown. Families of sugar palms and coconut trees diminishing into the horizon.

Days passed when he endeavoured to be strong, un-corrupted. He was afraid to think too hard about the Centre, which people said existed in Phnom Penh, in the abandoned buildings beside the river. Angkar was all powerful. Angkar never slept because the Centre consisted of every one of them, watching and listening, reporting and punishing. Everywhere you are, there is the Centre.

Occasionally Prasith came on his bicycle and they walked together in the fields, using long sticks to prod the softest mangoes from the trees. The fruit always helped. He craved sugar and sweetness but against his will these things jogged old memories, dormant images like furniture in a pitch-black room. When Sopham asked about our mother, Prasith said she was the same, the very same. My brother asked if he could see her, but Prasith replied that it was impossible.

“The spies are watching your mother,” he said. There was a new edge in Prasith’s voice, the boy seemed older and more wary. “The new Angkar suspects everyone. Even Kosal has been arrested.”

Sopham saw the bruises of a thousand eyes upon them.

“One day, you’ll go east and defend the country,” Prasith said, trying to reassure him. “We’ll both go east. I would be proud to be a soldier.”

My brother hoped that this was true. To fight an enemy, a real enemy, would be a relief. He took a breath and said the words he had prepared. “My mother used to tell us that you looked familiar to her.”

Prasith’s face was empty of expression. “My father and your father knew each other. I lived there, in Phnom Penh, but not for long.” When he looked at Sopham, his eyes were calm, untroubled. “But they’re ghosts now, aren’t they?”

On the day Teacher told him that he had been chosen, my brother was happy but he didn’t reveal it. What is
Sopham? he asked himself. He is a seed in the dirt, belonging to no one. Rithy will survive for a little while, and then he, too, will disintegrate. If only he could have counselled our father, my brother thought. Maybe this knowledge would have protected him; our father had not known how to cleave his soul.

Teacher told him that he had been selected to work in a security office. The office consisted of a small prison, run by a Khmer Rouge named Ta Chea, and it was housed in a concrete building that used to be a school. First, my brother was a guard and then, later, he was brought into the little rooms where the enemies were questioned. He was the youngest of all the interrogators and Chea told my brother that he should be proud. There are many prisons like ours, Chea said, all over the new country. The interrogators were pulling truth from the bleakest corners, they were the hands and the eyes of Angkar, they were the ones, the only ones, who refused deception. “Don’t be afraid,” Chea told him. “You have a strong character and an upright mind. They can’t harm you.” He said it was my brother’s goodness that cut the prisoners, it was his honesty that sought the truth.

The prisoners arrived blindfolded and tied with rope. My brother studied them as each session began, chilled and fascinated. One night, Prasith arrived. My brother saw his friend helped down, gently, from a truck. His interrogator asked Prasith to give a biography and to name all the remaining members of his family. Then he had to
repeat his life story, over and over. Kosal had betrayed Prasith before he died. The teenager was corrupt, Kosal had said, his only aim to sabotage the revolution. He had gone to school in Phnom Penh, his father had worked as a driver for the French Embassy. All this time, Prasith had kept this information hidden. During the bombings, the B-52s had spared almost no one in his village yet Prasith had somehow managed to survive. He was a traitor of the worst kind, an insect to be purged, a boy who had always put his own survival first. My brother knew this was true. Somehow, Prasith had never completely believed. Maybe Angkar was right, maybe the country had always been most vulnerable from within.

The dying always beg for water. In the prison, the interrogator’s job is to trace all lines to the enemy, to lay bare the networks of connection, and then to follow this taint to every corner of the country. My brother was taught to do this methodically, calmly, without losing control. Chea kept track of the names that surfaced during each prisoner’s interrogation. He noted them in a ledger, then he sent messages to the cooperative leaders: a sheet of white paper, folded four times, containing only names, a date, and the place of the summons.

Chea rotated the interrogators regularly. By the time my brother saw him, Prasith was already dying, his mind had come apart. He didn’t recognize Sopham.

“You must do whatever is necessary,” Chea said, turning the pages of Prasith’s file. “You must make Prasith
uncertain about the question of life and death, you must let him hope that he may survive.”

Our mother had always spoken of the
pralung
, which is something like the idea of the soul. Sometimes, Sopham told me, the people who survived the longest in prison were the ones who had too great a
pralung
, too many souls, for it took so long to remove them. A body did not have to die, he learned, for the
pralung
to be damaged, to grow crooked, become wasted, to finally disappear. He saw people who never cried and people who wept continuously from the moment they entered the prison.

“Most beloved and respected Angkar,” Prasith had said. “Most beloved. Most respected.” His words were disjointed. “I swear to you on all that I love, I have never betrayed you. Please don’t abandon me here. I swear to you, the enemies surround us.”

My brother became familiar with the workings of the human body, with the tissue and the blood and the organs and the delicate, fragile forces that held a boy together. Cut this knot here, and the hand or the leg or the heart becomes useless. It was both mysterious and simple. Every day, my brother fought to banish all the unnecessary raging inside himself, to become as devoted and steadfast as Chea.

Before he died, Prasith told detailed, fantastic tales, he admitted freely to being a spy, he described America as a place where citizens lived on airplanes or underground, leaving the surface of the country empty as a sheet. The
CIA
had recruited him at a young age, he said. They had sent him messages hidden inside pieces of clothing. They had signalled to him from the cockpits of their planes. The truest believers, he said, describing the agents he worked for, were the most indifferent monsters.

My brother became obsessed with water. His throat felt parched and rough, he hallucinated about water, he hoarded it in plastic bags and left these in the fields. Sometimes he stood and gazed at the shackled enemies and drank water in front of them as if to prove it was still there, it still existed within their reach. When it rained, he sat and watched the water moving over the ledges of the concrete building, seeping into the ground, falling and falling from the nothingness above. He watched it gathering in the clay jugs behind the building where the enemy was sometimes brought to be forced down under the clear, clean water. A blessing turned into a torture.

“I just went on with all the same things,” he told me. “What did it matter if I believed or not? Ta Chea told me to think of him as my father. He said he would protect me as a father would.”

In the prison, he let music run in his head. He thought about his hero, In Yeng, the singer, and wondered what had happened to those recording studios in Phnom Penh, to the television screens and singers, to the machines and microphones and boxes of records. Music, he knew, was recorded on to strips of brown tape, tape that spun around and around a metal reel. You could
store music in canisters, you could lift it in stacks. If tomorrow the Khmer Rouge disappeared and he could return home, would he go? His collection of records might still be there but he knew that when he put his fingertips to the wooden case, when he set the needle against the grooves, the record might spin and spin and leave him wanting. Now the singer would be an executed man. Now all the reels of tape would have burned away and what joy was there to be had in such a return? My brother was nine years old. He had committed murders, he told me. He had tried to save himself and he had seen things that even our father, until the end of his life, could never have imagined.

A woman named Chanya came into the prison. They kept her for three weeks and, every night, she was interrogated. Her confession was nearly complete when Chea sent my brother to her. The woman was dying, on the table where she had been shackled, her arms and legs were impossibly thin. Her voice was so weak, he had to lean over her to catch the words.

“I’m hungry,” she whispered.

“I have rice for you.”

“Please. Just a spoonful. Please.”

He gave her the rice, and then a sip of water.

“Thank you, my son. You are kind.”

The next morning, before dawn, he found himself
seated beside her again. The gaps between her sentences had grown longer. He did not light the candle.

“You must tell him,” she said. Her eyes stared up at the stained, dingy ceiling.

“Tell who?”

“Your father. Your brothers.”

He hesitated, thinking. And then he said, “If only I could find them.”

“They’re in the caves.”

“Which caves?”

“You know. The place your father hid when he fought the Americans. The men are waiting for you.”

“No, I can’t find the way by myself.”

“But the map, my son. He drew it so carefully.”

“They took it from me.”

She breathed heavily. “What is that sound?”

It was the splashing of water in the buckets outside. “The children are washing in the river.” A sad smile touched her lips. He was an instrument, he told himself, only an instrument. “After school today,” he continued, “I stopped at the market. I bought you
kralan
from the lady with the curly hair and the gold tooth.” He kept talking. The words seemed to soothe her. After a long time, she turned her head. “It’s sweet,” she said. “This
kralan
, still warm.”

That evening, he was sent to her again. Her eyes were closed. He thought she was unconscious and he repeated her name. “Give me your hand,” she said. He
reached out and held her. Weakly, she ran her thumb over his fingers. “You’ve been chewing your fingernails again. Down to the quick. My poor Tooch. Always so nervous.”

Between their hands, there were two small pieces of paper. They were rolled up, small as a stem, tucked into a gold ring that was so narrow, it could only have belonged to a child. He slid them free and opened them. On the first scrap, a map had been drawn. The paper had been folded so many times that the ink lines of mountains and jungle paths bled into the creases. “Poor little Tooch,” she said, letting him go, turning her face away. “My poor boy.”