Dogs at the Perimeter (22 page)

By early 1979, the border area is a dead-eyed, stinking hell. He signs on as an aid worker with the Red Cross and they give him a stipend and a room. In January, the Vietnamese Communists crossed the Cambodian border, swept the Khmer Rouge aside, and took Phnom Penh in less than two weeks. The refugees wash up in their black clothes, so debilitated and disturbed that Hiroji thinks he is walking through an exhumed cemetery, they are more soil and sickness than human beings. Orphaned children piled together in a cloud of flies, little girls who are a jigsaw of bones, numb parents. He volunteers with the Red Cross but the supplies are so limited he works in a state of heartless efficiency. It’s the only way that he can cope. Film crews record a girl, the same age as Nuong, suffering from starvation. On camera, she dies. Rows of cork boards overflow with letters, queries, and pictures of the missing. He adds James’s photograph but, within a day, it’s covered over by other missing people. He falls asleep tasting flies in his mouth, he hallucinates dead women stuck to his shoes. Vancouver and the University might as well be drawn on paper, he begins to forget that other people don’t live this way.
Bye-bye
, the children say, when they glimpse him
arriving, walking, working, leaving.
Bye-bye!
He keeps James’s photo in his pocket all the time but the shame he feels searching for his brother, this foreigner, one person out of two million, distresses him.

Nuong is sponsored, all of a sudden, by a family in the United States. The adoption, arranged by an American Christian relief agency, happens so fast Hiroji is caught off guard. He has to hide his unhappiness in a bloom of smiles. In a few weeks, Nuong will board a plane from Bangkok to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Lowell, Massachusetts. His new family sends him a greeting card with a snapshot of balloons. Nuong wants to know if he will be given food on the crossing, if Hiroji will visit him, if it is advisable to take everything with him, his books, pencils, and quietly accumulated stash of Nescafé, and not glance back over his shoulder, the way the Christian missionaries taught them, to prevent the salt from flowing back up through his mouth, out his nostrils. Hiroji doesn’t know what to say, he doesn’t understand this boy.

“Why are you so sad all the time?” Nuong asks him in his now-melodic English. “Is it so very bad where you come from?”

Hiroji has to laugh.

Nuong doesn’t smile. He says, “Thank you heaven I am not going to Canada.”

More refugees arrive every month, wasting, mangled bodies.

Hiroji makes a gift to Nuong of all his remaining money, which isn’t a great deal, and the shining bodhisattva. He accompanies him as far as Bangkok and he tells Nuong to be strong, not to look back, to be brave.

The boy looks so small with his suitcase and his blunt haircut, wearing a knit sweater for the first time. He does what Hiroji says and he doesn’t look back, he launches himself courageously up into the sky.

A few weeks later, Hiroji sits with his mother in the apartment he grew up in on the east side of Vancouver. Her hair has gone wiry and white, and the tea is pale because she has been re-using the same leaves too many times. They go through all the details ten times, a hundred times. She, too, makes lists. She smiles her old smile at him and asks when he will go back to Aranyaprathet.

“Soon,” he says.

“Next month?”

“Soon.”

After a week of this they both fall silent. He spends too many hours in the second bedroom, which is overflowing with their adolescent junk: deflated soccer balls, bottle collections, homework assignments, and the assorted dregs of childhood. In a biscuit tin, he finds James’s birth certificate and an expired driver’s licence, both with his brother’s birth name, Junichiro Matsui. In each photo, James is grinning. He looks young, he looks careless, as if the days have
no weight on him, as if he is higher up or better than all the rest. Hiroji shoves the
ID
into his backpack.

It is surprisingly easy to impersonate his brother and, each time he passes for James, he feels more in control, more at peace with himself. He gets a new driver’s licence, opens a bank account, and deposits a small sum of money. The truth is, they don’t really look alike, but Hiroji has a trustworthy disposition, people look at him and see an honest face. They seem glad to help. A month later, while attending a conference in Rome, Hiroji gets a fresh haircut and presents himself at the Canadian Embassy. Calmly, believing his own illusions, he tells the wary man behind the glass that his passport has been stolen and could he apply for a new one? He has a police report showing that he, Junichiro Matsui, had his briefcase stolen while visiting the Trevi Fountain. The hard-nosed man barely looks at him: he takes Hiroji’s falsified
ID
, photocopies it, and hands it back. Two weeks later, Hiroji signs for the passport of Junichiro Matsui. He buries it in his suitcase and tells himself that he is only preparing to meet James again, that these are necessary preparations for his brother’s repatriation. On paper, his brother still exists, he still belongs to a country, a home.

Finally, he is able to enter Cambodia, flying in on a Red Cross plane with two French doctors who murmur the rosary.

It is mid-1979, months after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. All over the city, people are rebuilding their lives in the street. He sees old men cooking meals in front of the Royal Palace where gold shingles sparkle like the crests of the ocean, he sees girls who sleep in the rusted carcasses of tanks, in straw huts, in silken hammocks. Farther along, on Monivong Boulevard, a wide road shaded by blossoms, smashed cars are piled four, five high, in a kind of monumental fuck you to Mercedes. Heaps of refrigerators and sofas are degrading in the humidity, bourgeois comforts evicted from their homes and left to rough it out. A boy waits with a car jack slung across his chest, cradling it like a mini AK-47. Alert with insomnia, Hiroji wanders the city that hardly seems a city at all. The citizens are all sleeping outdoors, where they can see and hear in every direction. He passes Vietnamese patrols, women ringed by children, people on mats and sheets all along the pavement, no electricity but dozens of candles shivering in glass jars. People follow him, they ask him if he knows the man from
UNHCR
who promised to bring charcoal last week, or the technician from the factory who was supposed to repair the sewing machines, or the doctor who ran out of bandages but said he would be back. Hiroji cannot bring himself to say that these experts have already flown out. All the Western aid is at the border, in Thailand, not here, in Phnom Penh. They ask him to please pass on their requests, to impress upon someone that there are things they need,
now, right away. Persistently, they crowd in on him, but it is as if they are restrained, their limbs move slowly, or is it his eyes that are deceiving him because all he sees are wraiths, bodies out of proportion who, in the morning when he emerges from his cotton sheets, might very well be dead. An old man who speaks English and claims to be the former Minister of Public Works asks him to come back tomorrow and take a letter to his sister, now living in California. He wants to tell her that her children are dead but her husband concealed his identity and lived. The volume of his voice flickers along with the lights in the jars. Hiroji shows the man a photograph of James. The former Minister of Public Works studies his brother’s face and then directs him down along the road, to Tun or Old Mak, maybe one of them will know.

“What cooperative?” Tun asks, holding the photo close to his eyes.

Hiroji shakes his head.

“Do you know what district, what sector?”

“He lived in Phnom Penh,” Hiroji says.

“Non, non,”
a woman interjects.
“Personne a habité ici.”

Two men nearby are screaming at each other. Their fists are out, faces venomous, but people watch languidly. It is simultaneously loud and still and bright and fast. One man picks up a brick, wraps it in his scarf, and begins to swing the weapon, like a cowboy, over his head. Beside Hiroji, the woman says,
“Vas-y
. Get away from here.” She is talking to herself, but the French and
Khmer words lodge in his mind. Forcefully, she pushes him back.

He passes through the crowd, disoriented. He is holding James’s photograph and an old man selling individual slices of grapefruit runs after him and takes the photo from him.

He tells Hiroji, in graceful English, “I know this man. This is the friend of Dararith. The doctor.”

“Yes,” Hiroji says, stunned. “The doctor.” The crowd is grumbling now, in counterpoint to the yelling. “James Matsui. Sometimes he went by Ichiro or Junichiro.”

“But he died,” the old man says. “He died and left his wife behind, long before April 17.”

“No, that isn’t the same person.”

“Of course it is,” the old man says calmly. “I went to the wedding. Yes, the sister of Dararith.”

“Where is Dararith now?”

“Dead.”

“And his sister?”

“Oh, certainly dead.” The man hands the photograph back to Hiroji, his expression unreadable in the twilight. “She taught my son. She was a good girl, a good teacher.”

“It must be a different man.”

“On my soul,” the old man says, his voice barely audible above the commotion behind them. “Yes. On my soul. Sorya and Dararith lived on Monivong. If you want, I will show you the place.”

They walk to Monivong, up and down the wide street, past people so pitiful Hiroji looks past them to the darkened buildings, the smashed windows, and broken-down doors. Campfires burn haltingly. There is rubbish everywhere. The old man moves very slowly, he gets confused and turns around, squints up at the French façades, wonders aloud if the shutters were blue or green. He sighs and says, “My eyesight is very poor now. I believe it was this building but … third floor or fifth floor? An odd number. I’m very sorry. It’s difficult at night. I can see it in my mind but I don’t see it here.”

They stand for a few moments gazing up at the shadowed buildings.

“If you remember,” Hiroji says at last, “will you come and find me?”

“Of course, of course. I would be happy to.”

In neat block letters, Hiroji writes the name of the hotel and then the address of the Red Cross office.

“I’ll come speak to you again,” he tells the man.

“Of course.”

Hiroji buys two whole grapefruit and carries on. More people mumble over the photograph, they ask themselves is this so-and-so, is this the son of our friend Tan? He hears a dozen leads and possibilities, he writes each one down in a black notebook, each one as likely and unlikely as the next.

Night after night, he wanders through Phnom Penh and the wary Vietnamese soldiers leave him alone, the
rats scurry from underfoot, children watch him pass as if he were an apparition.

“You’re stubborn,” his brother says.

“I’m tired, James.”

“Do you remember Dad?”

“I’m so tired now.”

“It’s okay. He didn’t want to be remembered. It was war, he said. ‘It was just another war.’ That’s why he did the things he did.”

“What kinds of things?”

His brother shakes his head impatiently.

A girl on the street asks him, “Mister, where are you from?”

“Canada.”

She looks at him, puzzled. A deep frown spreads across her forehead. “Czechoslovakia,” she says suddenly, victoriously.

“Canada,” he says.

She smiles and she keeps smiling, her eyes are half-mad and he has to look away.

“Mister,” she says slowly. “Do you want to help me?”

He covers his face with his hands.

The thing is, a part of him wants to remain in Phnom Penh. The jungle eats the buildings up, and the people come and push it back, and violence isn’t hidden anywhere, it just is what it is, it dogs you like the river, it arrives and returns, it arrives and remains.

He tells James, “I won’t abandon you.”

“You’ll never be ready,” his brother says impatiently. “You never had it in you.”

The rains start. He’s ashamed to witness such hardship. People cling to nothing, they stare out with empty expressions, a blankness that seems like a screwed-on lid, slowly cracking under the pressure. Meanwhile, he goes back, every night, to the Hotel Samaki, where a three-course dinner is served on fragile painted plates. The food in the hotel is fresh and bountiful, the Red Cross has its own private stock of food. He’s never eaten so well in his life. The sound of the metal forks raking against the plates disturbs him. He wants to pray or meditate or walk on water. Stories pile up in his black notebook: the Japanese cameraman who was captured in 1973 and killed. The Canadian sailor who washed up on the south coast in 1977, he was imprisoned and finally executed. All the children who, orphaned or separated, flew away to the other side of the world.

At the hotel, he stands, drenched, under the once-sublime balustrade. The water carries lost objects, a rubber sandal, a baby’s tub. A boy races to retrieve usable items, the water rising as high as his waist. Thirty years later, Hiroji thinks he sees him again, the very same child, except that this one is shouting, pursued by another boy, and the street is a current of reflected colours, headlights, and neon signs rubbing the darkness. Phnom Penh is under water again, but this time it is strange and out of season. Nuong snaps and unsnaps his cell phone,
extends an umbrella, and guides Hiroji through the rivered streets to Nuong’s own guesthouse, the Lowell Hotel. A young helper lifts Hiroji’s suitcase, frowns, tells Nuong that this Korean tourist has come empty-handed. Hiroji stands like a potted plant, gazing at Nuong’s wife, she is fine-boned and lovely, her flower-patterned dress quivering in the fan’s current. “A twenty-hour flight!” Nuong is saying. “Just one more set of stairs.” They go up and up. Behind them, the helper, Tarek, balances the suitcase on his shoulder. “The best room,” he hears, “you can stay as long as you want,” and it
is
comfortable, cool and sun-dappled. Nuong aims a remote at the ceiling and the air conditioning clanks into life. “Relax for an hour or so, then we’ll go to dinner. The rains will stop. There’s a great place …” and Hiroji sits on the bed. There is the bodhisattva just as it was, one hand pointing to heaven, the other caressing the earth. “It’s yours,” Nuong is saying. “Do you remember? You gave it to me at the airport, before I boarded the plane. I’ve always kept it.” When the door closes, Hiroji stands for a long time at the window, trying to understand the choice he’s made, the things he’s done. There’s no going home now. Some part of him is still in the airplane, still looking down, unable to see.