Dogs at the Perimeter (6 page)

Hiroji nodded. “Maybe James would have said the same.”

The mountain fell into dusk. We let the subject go. For the rest of the evening, we talked about our various projects. He directed me to studies I had not yet come across, he promised to put me in touch with researchers he had met in Germany.

Weeks passed.

I invited him to dinner at a restaurant in our neighbourhood. Before leaving home, I slipped the file into my bag, promising myself that I would return it to him.

Over the course of two hours we spoke in a careful way about work and the weather, about the headlines and the wars. It was a frosty November evening. I had never seen him look so energized, so strangely bright. But his hands were nervous.

“Are you sleeping well?” I asked.

“It’s funny,” he said. “Sleep feels like the last thing that I need.”

Throughout the meal, I wanted to bring up James, the file, but I didn’t know how. Eventually we bogged down in silence.

“Nuong called,” he said, catching me by surprise. “He’s living in Phnom Penh now.”

He saw my confusion.

“The boy I took care of in Aranyaprathet, in the refugee camp. Do you remember? Nuong. He’s around your age. He was adopted by a family in Massachusetts, back in 1981. Anyway, he’s moved back to Phnom Penh. I
was thinking that I could put you in touch with him. He can help us find James.”

Hiroji kept speaking but the words didn’t register. I took a sip of water, a bite of food, and then I put down my fork.

“Morrin says you’ve been in the clinic constantly this month. He says you’re working all the time.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not sleeping. You haven’t even touched your food.”

The restaurant was full now and the noise pressed in on us.

“Would you come with me?” he asked. “If I went to see Nuong. Could you come with me?”

November. It was the beginning of the dry season in Cambodia. Drenched fields, a slow, thirsting heat. I saw it all with a clarity that shook me. Hiroji’s eyes seemed lighter, joyful. I looked away, ignoring his question. I couldn’t hear my own thoughts. I leaned down, picked my bag up from off the floor, and withdrew the file.

He leaned forward.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I tried, but I couldn’t get anywhere with it. There’s no information to find. There’s nothing.” The words came out wrong. They came out thinly, dismissively.

He took the file, holding it in his hands for a moment as if he did not fully recognize it.

“I can’t abandon him again.”

“There isn’t any other choice,” I said. “We have to let them go.”

His bag, a leather satchel, hung on the back of his chair. He opened it and put the file clumsily in. A waiter, hurrying by, bumped Hiroji’s elbow and the bag fell. Some pages scattered on the floor. He leaned down, reaching toward them, the waiter kneeling to help him.

When he had gathered everything, Hiroji took out his wallet. He pressed a hundred-dollar bill into my hand. “Take this and buy a birthday present for Kiri.”

Kiri’s birthday was still a month away. I shook my head, upset.

“Take it,” he insisted. “I had an antique microscope for him, but I couldn’t get it repaired in time.”

“He’s only six. How could it matter if it’s late?”

“It matters,” he said. He signalled for the bill.

I asked him to come for coffee, to see me tomorrow or the day after. He said he was busy. “I’m behind,” he told me. “I’ve let things get away from me.” He signed the bill and turned it over so that it was face down. Some feeling between us had been extinguished but it would not last, I thought. I would repair it, I would make him understand. “Janie,” he said when we parted. “Don’t judge me too harshly.” The words were pleading. “I have many regrets.”

A week later, when I couldn’t reach him on the phone, I went to his apartment. Inside, everything was neat and orderly. The cat had food and water to last for another
week but, still, she ran to me crying. On the kitchen table, I found the file. He had left it behind, along with his driver’s licence, his bank cards, and the hundred-dollar bill he had tried to give me for Kiri’s birthday. I put all of these things into my bag, I packed up Taka the Old and took her home with me. From there, I called the police.

Mei

T
he next morning, before dawn comes, I walk out onto the wide boulevard of Côte-des-Neiges where the queue for the downtown bus winds along the sidewalk, serpentine, a half-dozen men and women lost inside their winter coats, a light snow falling on us, as fine as sand. I ask someone what day it is, and he says, “Tuesday. One more Tuesday.” He smiles and points out something on the horizon. The bus arrives and, gratefully, the people climb inside.

I begin walking, unsure where to go. I smell coffee from a nearby bakery, I see my little brother and myself, and the smell of bread permeates the air. We are caught outside when the air raid sirens begin. I try to pull him away. It is last night’s memory, when mortar fire started and the rockets began to fall, the middle of the hot season, the beginning of the last Khmer Rouge offensive. There is a shelter nearby, a dry, shallow well in which we sometimes hide, but in my panic I can’t find it. Instead, Sopham and I crouch against the wall of a building. He is carrying his drawing pencils in a blue cloth bag. The air turns to gas and the sidewalk heaves,
splitting apart. I hold on to my brother, gripping him as if he is the world itself and an explosion will claim us together or not at all. His screaming becomes a wide emptiness, a pressure in the air blinding me, and in the darkness I hear a strange, familiar ticking – insects, the typewriter, a clock counting time, the melody of a piece of music – and then my brother repeating my name. He wipes my face with the sleeve of his shirt. The air explodes me from its grip and suddenly I see blood everywhere.
Run
, I hear him saying.
Sister, sister. Come with me
. Words begin to pour from him. He says there is another song he has learned but he cannot remember it, cannot remember. “My pencils,” he says, “look at my pencils.” But when I look all I see is the river, brown and churning, and a yellow boat idling, impossibly, on the surface. “Are you hungry?” he says. He asks me to find bitter
sdao
shoots for him to eat. I reach for the little purse in which I keep American coins but when I reach inside, the coins burn my fingertips. My brother takes the purse, turns it over, scatters the coins on the ground, and when I look down it seems as if they are writhing, they are melting on the road. We leave the money where it is and walk and walk, and my brother comes across a book of Buddhist prayers. We start laughing when we see it, the book seems like a trick of our father’s who often recited verses when he was drunk, when he had gambled our money away, as if beautiful lines would save him in the eyes of our mother. Still, he would come armed with
verses, unfurling them like peacock feathers, dazzling the eyes so we would be blind to the fear and anxiety below. My brother carries the book and we walk on, calling for our father and then, out of the smoke, he appears and runs to us. It is unbelievable, it seems a miracle that he could appear just because we say his name. He raises my brother high, sets him on his shoulders, then he picks me up and begins to run.

“The bombs are coming,” I tell him. “They are coming, they are coming.”

I feel my legs floating, as if I am flying through the streets.

I’m standing at the intersection of Côte-des-Neiges and Queen Mary, snow settling on us, and a woman tells her child,
We are safe as houses
. The saying falls straight through me. The light turns green, nothing approaches, I begin to walk, and the low buildings seem to bend over me. I see my father in the shape of another person, walking up ahead. I see the suit of clothes he used to wear, the haircut he had, his briefcase and his scuffed, worn-down shoes. I run up to the man who is not my father, grab his elbow, and spin him around to face me. A stranger swears and flings me away.

I am home again, inside the safety of our apartment, my father is standing behind me, dictating the words I have to transcribe. When I type, I feel the machine as an extension of my hands, my father’s voice is rainfall, and I am a weed lifting up too fast, gangly and hungry and
gaping in every direction. That typewriter, that gift, is my first real possession. Sometimes when I type, I pay attention to the words themselves, what they say and mean, but other times they are only strings of letters, arranged like beads, joined together by the metronome of the Olivetti. The words materializing on the page, this alphabet so different from the shivering, dancing Khmer script, seemed to me like crevices I could peer through, portholes into lives different, more gracious, than my own.

Someone says my Canadian name.
Janie
. Another woman turns and waves. I am standing in Montreal, on a white winter day, beneath unfamiliar buildings. I look everywhere for Janie. There are no trees, no forest anywhere, nothing to keep the light from falling through.

My father is a storyteller. He smiles and whispers at us to follow him, behind the curtain, into this starlit box. Hanuman, my favourite hero, wraps his giant hands around my little fingers. Tonight, he says, we will travel the world with Jambavan, the king of bears. My father can recite all the shiny strands of the Ramayana, he cajoles my brother and I with brave musketeers, with Tum and Teav and Molière. He gives us any story we ask for, especially tonight, because on this night, he says, the war is ending. Rocket fire burns the skies but
tomorrow everything will change. Even as the shells fall down, our neighbours are dancing and welcoming the Khmer new year.

On the balcony, I sat down, leaning against my father’s body. I was afraid and I didn’t want to be apart from him. Fighting chipped away at the edges of the city, and Sopham pointed out the smoke advancing from the north, south, and west, like a necklace tightening. Tracer fire threw long lines into the darkness.

My father cradled his whiskey and called for the Communists to hurry up, to end the war once and for all. “Once the guns go quiet,” my father said, “the Khmer Rouge will put everything right. Then you, my dancing, kralan-eating children, will go back to school. No more running wild. No more fighting in the streets.” Our prime minister, otherwise known to us as Magic Sands, had fled the country.
Monsieur le sableur des feés
, our father called him, who defended our city with holy grains, who armed our soldiers with Buddhist scarves. Magic Sands had already been evacuated.

“Remember this night,” he said. “Mark it in your memories because tomorrow everything changes.” He smiled and shook his head and swirled the liquid in his glass. “Tomorrow, when your mother puts on her New Year’s finery, she’ll be the most beautiful woman in the city. The war is finished, little ones. We’ll gather all the sadness into a pot, pour it down the drains, and hear it rush into the sea. The king will wake up in the Royal
Palace, and everything will be just as it was. As wonderful and as corrupt as it ever was.” He lay down, staring up at the sky. Beads of sweat trickled down his face, into his hair.

“I should have gone to France,” my father told us. “I should have carried your mother to Paris and we would have been poor together. You two, you and Sopham, you would have been born in the West, like champions!”

“Champions of what?” I asked.

“Champions of champions,” my brother said.

“We would have flown Air France,” my father said. “Just like that, on top of the world, sipping champagne. We would have set Europe on fire: your mother and your father, the beauty and the poet.”

“And me, Pak?”

“You, Sopham? The singer, of course.” My brother, frowning, did the twist for us.

“And me?”

What did he say? I try to remember.

Side by side, we stared up at the darkness, at the beckoning stars, doorways to other worlds and other galaxies. My father turned toward me, as if trying to read the future from my expression. He had curving, lifting, furrowing eyebrows. “You’ll be like the great Hanuman, leaping across oceans. Between you and the heavens, my sweet, nothing will hold you back.”

—

We heard someone running up the stairs. My mother was in the kitchen, making lunch, when the door behind her gave way. I saw a yellow knot in my brother’s fist, round as the sun, and then, behind it, a black shape against the wall. The shining darkness of a rifle, an
AK
, the barrel finding its way across the room. It buried itself in my father’s stomach.

“Wait,” my father said softly. “Wait.”

The boy stepped back. He swung the gun up and took aim at my father’s chest. More Khmer Rouge came in, they were faceless to me, black pants, black shirts, muddy feet, too big to fit inside the room. First they were in the kitchen, then beside me, then at the window.

Outside, a woman started screaming. “He’s not a soldier! It had nothing to do with him. Stop, please stop!” Gunfire then, drowning everything out.

“What is it?” my father said. I saw his mouth moving but his voice seemed to come from somewhere else. The soldiers pushed nearer. They were children, maybe teenagers, with small, lean bodies. “What work do you do?” the boy asked him.