Dogs at the Perimeter (9 page)

For as long as I could remember, my father treated his sadness with Valium, pills he had begun taking when he was a student in Phnom Penh. I used to buy his medicine for him, by the cupful, in the Chinese market. But later, as the war dragged on, when the Khmer Rouge controlled the Mekong River and everyday the airport came under worse bombardment, the market ran out of pills. My father stopped sleeping, ate little, and worried constantly. The rockets and mortar fire cracked his nerves and sometimes his eyes seemed strange and elongated to me, bloodshot, red-rimmed, and lost. He wrote lists of names, people he could appeal to for money or support, people who could transport us to the border. He tucked the lists into my clothes for safekeeping.

One night, my mother set empty plates on the dinner table and looked searchingly at us, at him.

He ran his index finger across a plate, as if to check for dust.

“Would you like to go out?” he asked, flustered. His long body stooped toward her, like a fishing rod. I yearned to go to him, to pull him back. Our mother was not like other mothers, she had never been shy or decorous or restrained.

“Into the city?” my mother said, dropping her voice. “So we can dine with all these military men waiting for what, the end of the world? And the cost of rice, don’t you realize?, it’s up again and your wallet’s empty. There’s nothing here and tomorrow will be the same.”

My brother watched, bright with embarrassment.

“Shhh,” my father said, smiling weakly, eyes drifting to the window where voices rose like applause and touched the curtains, then dissipated back into the street below.

“Promise me, my love. We must get out. The war is ending but what does it mean?”

“I don’t know. I’ll get us out.”

“At least Sopham,” my mother said.

“I promise.”

Downstairs, I saw people lying in streams of water, their mouths open, the rain leaking in. The floor was littered with bodies, and I couldn’t differentiate the dying from the dead. There was no help for them. I hid upstairs, beside Sopham, unable to speak. Between us, the quiet had become habitual, we were wary of the spies and the
chhlop
, of saying the wrong thing. In Kosal’s cooperative, a teenager named Milia had been caught keeping a diary. When the spies found it, Milia had disappeared. She never came back and I lay awake at night, staring at the place she used to sleep. It was occupied by another girl, as if Milia had never been. The diary, too, with all its thoughts and secrets, had been swallowed up. I dreamed they were under the huts, Milia, the banker, reaching their arms up, trying to help us.

The torrential rains stopped. One of the nurses saw that my mother was stronger, and we were discharged.

Walking home, my brother and I took turns pushing
the empty cart, our mother beside us, her steps tentative and weary. The sky was translucent, a watery gold that settled like steam over the distant fields. “Everything ends,” my mother said. “But we’re here. We’re together, even if all else must fade away.”

Prasith came to us. In our small patch of vegetables, he said, “Who owns all this?”

“Come and see,” he said, calling the other children. “Whose food is this?”

I told him that this garden was ours.

Prasith got down on his hands and knees and began digging at the dirt. He snuck his fingers deep into a hole and extracted the tiny, misshapen root, a sweet potato, the earth still clinging to its wrinkled skin. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Not yet. But you will: we no longer steal from the people.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“Steal,” he whispered.

He put the tiny root in my hand.

Devotion softened his face. He said that people had suffered, they had given their lives to end this injustice. “That’s why we fought this war,” he said, “so that all of us might be free.” He picked up a shovel that was lying nearby and began to dig, bringing up the roots and all the food. “I caught a boy stealing,” Prasith said. “He took a watermelon but I punished him. Would you like to know how?”

The dry grass bit my feet. His voice suffocated me but I tried to close my ears, to cloak myself. Prasith stepped nearer, the words flowing out of him as if they were music.

“How brave you are,” Sopham said, cutting him off. “You must be fearless to do a thing like that.”

Prasith turned.

My brother stood beside me.

The boy’s tone was mocking. “Are you?”

Sopham clasped his hands together. I willed him not to speak, not to show himself. “Yes,” he said evenly. “I’m not afraid of my brothers.”

Prasith stared, and then laughed. He held the shovel out. “Do your brother a favour,” he said, “and finish our work.”

Calmly, Sopham took the shovel and walked to the centre of our garden. I watched all the roots, all the seeds, come loose.

Prasith began trailing us across the fields. He would ramble excitedly. One moment sincere, the next, sly.

“If you want to be strong,” he said one day, “you have to become someone else. You have to take a new name.

“For instance,” he said, nodding at me, “you should take the name Mei.”

I stared, bewildered. We had been up since dark, digging canals to irrigate the fields. In a little while, we
would be called back to work. Six more hours of digging and shifting soil.

“Mei, Mei,”
he sang. The name, a common one, meant “lovely, beautiful.” His eyes were half-closed, heavy-lidded. “See this?” He lifted his shirt to reveal an un-healed scar. “This is shrapnel.”

My brother made a noise of disgust.

I averted my eyes.

“Shrapnel,” Prasith repeated, watching me, letting his shirt fall.

My brother had glimpsed a frog and now he dropped to his hands and knees. The tall grass shifted around him.

“B-52s,” Prasith said.
“Whomp-whomp-whomp
, like that, everywhere.” He tilted his head back and stared at the sky as if it might fall down on us. “The light, it breaks. It breaks people open as if they’re dogs or dirt. I looked up and there were no houses, no people. Just this hole.”

Shyly, he bowed his head. “I’m important here. But, really, not even Kosal has any power. Me or him, it’s like using an egg to break a stone.”

I couldn’t understand. “But who decides?”

Prasith smiled.

I persisted. “Who’s the stone?”

“Too slow, too fast, here’s the stone now.” He swung a bit of rope in the air, laughing at me. “Here it comes. What can you do to stop it?”

My brother stood up. He held the frog by its dark, crooked legs and then swung it, hard, against a rock. “Too late,” my brother said. “Too slow.”

The animal in Sopham’s hand convulsed.

I looked at it, sickened, starving. We could almost see through the frog’s skin, to its lungs and guts. Slowly, pitifully, its feet beat against nothing. I turned away. To hide the trembling in my hands, I kept walking, kept moving. When I turned back to look for my brother, I saw Prasith’s cooking fire, their two heads bowed together and white smoke that coursed into the sky.

I stood watching until they stood up, until they kicked the fire out.

That night, my brother showed me the treasure Prasith had given him. Two eggs, impossible things. We shared the first and gave the second to our mother. She ate it slowly, gratefully, her eyes closed, chewing the egg and then the shell itself. She told us that she had dreamed about our father. Pa had come with a knife, she said. He had cut us free.

Before we slept, my brother tied our wrists together, the way Prasith had taught him, so that if one of us were taken, the other would wake.

When Prasith restrained the boy, he didn’t resist. This is the way my brother described it to me. The boy, Tao, the eldest son of the machinist, had stood there, motionless.
My brother stared at the ground. Prasith had given him new sandals to wear, and they felt heavy and unfamiliar to him, the rubber hot from the sun.

Calmly, Prasith took his own krama and tied it tightly around the boy’s face. It choked Tao’s breath and he stumbled and fell forward. Against his skin, the fabric of the krama grew dark with sweat or tears.

“Do you feel pity, Sopham?”

The air had become cold, Sopham told me. The sky, the colours, the feel of the air, the breath in his lungs, even the passing seconds were cold. My brother could feel the older boy watching him.

When Tao’s mutilated body lay between them, Prasith cleaned his knife carefully in the grass.

“I used to think it was strange,” Prasith said, “even terrible, but now I understand how it is.” There was a shivering in his voice. “We have to let the sand wash away so that everything that remains will be clearer, stronger.

“No one will ever invade our country again. No more fighting, no more wars. Do you see? We’re nothing but waterways. Nothing but drops of water.” He was staring at Sopham so intensely, my brother had the sensation that the edges of his body were being sheared away.

“Your father was a translator, wasn’t he?” Prasith said. “I think you went to Chatamukh School. Maybe there’s some part of you that remembers me.”

My brother studied the body, the soft creases of Tao’s clothing. He said, “It’s as if that time never was.”

Prasith began undoing the rope that bound Tao’s arms. They walked away, leaving the body where it was, folded over in the grass. “Look, this is what happens when people disappear,” Prasith said.
“Bat kluon
. What will we do? All the bodies are fading away.”

The seasons were changing, and all around me the harvest shone, brushed gold. I saw my brother and Prasith approaching from a distance. They walked confidently, arms relaxed, the rifle on Prasith’s back angled to the sky. I was watching them when Kosal came and told me, proudly, that my name was on a list. I looked up at him, uncomprehending. “Come,” he said, and I followed him behind the huts to where a line of girls was waiting.

He told me to stand with them.

I went to the end of the line.

Through the gap between the huts, I saw the pristine fields, strangely bright. My brother running toward me.

Kosal was speaking, addressing us. He said we had been chosen to join a children’s brigade, we would travel south, we would serve Angkar. Around us, the cooperative seemed unnaturally loud.

“For how long?” I asked.

He looked at me, a pleasant expression on his face. “Oh, not long.”

There were people now, shapes approaching. I looked up and saw Sopham. My entire body began to shake. I
began walking away, in the direction of the huts, looking for my mother. Prasith was there, I had not seem him arrive, he took my hand and led me back. “Mei,” he said. “Where are you going?”

He returned me to the end of the line. “Everyone has a place,” he told me. “Everyone has a function.”

Sopham and my mother were together now. She was there, she was holding me. “They want to take me away,” I said. My mother’s eyes were swollen, gleaming.

“Hush, my sweet,” she said, caressing my face.

“Please, Ma.”

“Hush, my girl,” she said, her voice fading. “We have no choice.” In her hands were the tin plate and spoon that she used. She folded them into my hands. “You’ll come home soon. You must be brave.”

“Ma,” I begged. “Help me.”

Gently, so gently I do not know if I imagined it, she pushed me away.

A lone cadre escorted us, single file, along the narrow ridges of the rice fields. We were a dozen hungry children, slipping in the mud, running to keep up. I saw tanks and rusted farm machines lying abandoned in the open. Grass slid through them, sticking up like hair, and I told myself that I would see these same objects when I came back again, in a few days, in a week or two. We walked until the sun was high, and we kept walking past crops that were a verdant green, their stalks blurring in the heat. I couldn’t breathe, I felt my mother’s
fingers pushing against me. Red clay coated my feet and clothes. You have no possessions, no history, no parents, the cadre said. Your families have abandoned you. The sleeve of her shirt fell back, exposing her slender arms, the colour of wet wood. I thought of my mother gazing at Sopham, going from soldier to soldier, pleading for my father. Open your hands, the cadre said. Let go. If you are pure of heart, you have nothing to be afraid of. This is the revolution that is coming, that is here.

Rithy

I
n the middle of a harvested field, he and Prasith had come to a
sala
, a meeting place, where a group of boys sat singing, a teenaged girl watching over them. When the song ended, Teacher called my brother forward. She asked his name.

“Rithy,” he said.

“Can you add these numbers together, Rithy?”

“No.”

“Can you read?”

“Some.”

“What work did your father do?”

“He had a stand in the market. He sold palm sugar.”

“How old are you?”

“Nine.”

The questions kept coming but he answered them all, concealing himself like a stem overlaid with branches. His new name, Rithy, meant “strength.” In Phnom Penh, in the temple schools, a new name had been a rite of
passage, a bridge from one shore of life to the next, the symbol of a transformed existence. While Sopham answered questions, Prasith stood beside him, listening carefully, nodding as my brother spoke.