Her Father's Daughter (14 page)

Once she asked him to come to her hut during a break. She wanted him to blow a bamboo reed and make music for her. Another time when he came over, she wore a shirt with yellow flowers all over it that was almost see-through. Where on earth she had managed to get a piece of clothing that was not black was beyond him. This woman was searching for calamity. He had to be careful and leave immediately, or who knew what could happen?

The Economic Distributor was in love with Maly too. Everyone was. The Economic Distributor was the primitive equivalent of a middle manager, responsible for doling out the produce of their commune. He liked music, particularly that of the yangquing, which looked like a harp laid flat and was tapped with wooden mallets. One evening the village chairman asked Kuan to come to his hut and the three of them made music – the Economic Distributor, the chairman and he. They gave a concert for Maly and her little girl.

There was a bowl in the middle of the hut filled with pieces of sugar-palm rock, which Kuan kept looking at. At that time, at that moment, he coveted the sugar-palm rock more than he desired any woman in the world, but he was too embarrassed to ask for a few pieces. Because his family did not go begging for food, the Black Bandits treated them with a little more respect.

One day, Maly kept muttering that if anyone made her angry, she would spill their secrets. She screamed that she could reveal who was trading on the black market with her. She would tell each and every one of their names and they would be dead, and she didn’t care.

Kuan’s heart deadened for a few seconds. Then it started up again, like a dreadful but steady drum crescendo. He had told her that his family had once owned a factory. Would she now go and tell on him?

But she was not angry with him. She was angry with the Black Bandits. Did they deny her something? Did they ask something of her that she would not do? She thrashed and raged and stormed through that day, until the Black Bandits were aflame too. They thought that she would give them away to their superiors, disclose their illicit trading with the New People.

The next day, she did not turn up to make fertiliser.

To the Black Bandits, perhaps it was like killing a dog that had gone feral. When you are about to kill a person, they are no longer themselves. Their face contorts with low animal feelings like stretched-mouth fear and runny-nosed supplication, and that gives you reason enough to kill them. The Bandits probably didn’t see the girl who liked music in her hut or the one they had gazed at with tenderness, but the crazy apoplectic creature that seemed to take her place, and this was reason enough to do whatever they wanted with her.

To kill you is no loss, to keep you is no gain, the Black Bandits had told them again and again. How reckless of Maly to believe that she was the exception to this rule. How foolish of her to believe she had any sort of power.

Afterwards, her daughter pattered around the collective like a stunned, homeless creature. During this time there was food in the commune kitchen, and she brought a bowl along to collect her share of rice. Before, everyone had doted on this little girl, but now people pretended not to see her. They didn’t want to be associated with the living remains of Maly, or what she had come to represent.

He was caught stealing rice when he and two other men were assigned to work in the cooking shed. In four years, this only happened once. Wordlessly, they knew what to do. When they had served everyone, they scraped the burnt rice-crust from the bottom of the black cooking urn and shoved it inside their clothes. When they returned to their hut, they left the rice on the straw of the roof to dry out so that they could store it.

A Black Bandit boy walked by and found out. He must have been monitoring them all along, knowing they would pilfer.

‘Why is this on the roof?’ A sweeping motion of his hand knocked the rice crusts to the ground.

‘We were hungry.’

‘You were hungry, eh? You didn’t get enough to eat?’

‘We did. We did,’ they protested. Once before, Kuan remembered, when they were eating in the communal food hut, the man next to him had muttered that his rice porridge was not cooked properly.

‘Half-raw, eh?’ asked a Black Bandit who caught his words. He motioned to two other soldiers who set upon the man and led him away. He was never seen again. You had to be careful about food. Even talking about it could kill you.

‘We might get hungry later,’ the man to his left now stammered to the boy soldier.

‘Hungry, eh? Then come here.’ The Black Bandit led them back to the kitchen. He filled a vat with scoopfuls of rice. He stacked it on. The three of them watched the white mound grow and grow. ‘Eat this.’

‘Now?’

‘No, when you reach Nirvana. Yes, now! You said you were hungry! Eat this up, all three of you. When I come back and find that you haven’t filled up, you will all be dead.’ They sat down on the floor and began to fill their mouths.

Holes holes holes – a human being was all about satiating holes, he thought. Holes for the filling with food, holes for the smelling of danger, holes for the seeing of which parts of your body might drop off from infection, holes to release excrement and holes for the expulsion of sex secretions, not that such a thing existed anymore in this world. Finally, holes for the hearing of Angkar dogma, because if you didn’t listen, they might make you dig your own grave. This was the ideology that reduced a whole human soul to a single man’s digestive tract. All that mattered in the revolution and all he wanted to do was to gorge, and now that the soldier had given him permission to do it – in fact, forced him to – he was scared of dying. A human stomach that has been starved for so long will not stretch so far.

The two other men knew it too.

‘You haven’t eaten enough!’ the man to his left accused him. ‘You’re going too slow! Stop thinking about taking a shit and keep eating!’

Who knew that eating used up so many muscles in the jaw and in the face? In the throat too. Masticating could be as exhausting as working.

‘What about you? The spoon has been far from your mouth for too long. I saw you taking it easy, taking a rest.’

Even having too much food could cause malice.

The Black Bandit had left, but they were watched by an old villager who was a constant in the kitchen, one of the Base People. It was impossible to hide any of this rice on their bodies. They would just have to eat and die, which to Kuan seemed better than being bludgeoned on the head with the back of an axe.

There was the unmistakable smell of something frying. They all sensed it, he and the two other men. The smell made them take in two more handfuls of rice. They could pretend that the oily scent and the rice were one, something new. Even when granted a reprieve in the middle of hunger, with more rice to eat than was humanly possible, after only twenty minutes all of them had begun craving something else. Were humans the only creatures whose desires could never be fully sated? The buffaloes in the field weren’t craving chrysanthemums.

The old man in the kitchen walked over and put a small fried dried fish down in front of them without saying a word. Then he left. He had watched them squish the grains into the smallest possible balls and scoff them down until their eyeballs bulged, and he knew they could not keep going without a second wind. That fish was their second wind. They mashed it into tiny crumbs and flakes. That feisty fish fought a battle with the army of bland grains. It conquered with every successful swallow until the war was over, the bowl was empty and they had won.

Once he boiled and ate his leather belt.

Kuan felt as though he was on his last legs: they were wobbly and prone to bending at unexpected times. Then he remembered his belt. He had buried it in a secret spot behind his hut. Those Chinese communists on their Long March ate the leather of their boots. He had read about it while in high school. Charlie Chaplin ate his bootlaces, too, in the first silent black-and-white movie he had seen with his mother. How strange, at a time like this, to be inspired by the antics of a white man who looked like a pretty girl with a moustache.

Why not a belt?

When the sky was dark, he dug it up. He cut the belt into thin strips and boiled it for hours and hours. His sister and his mother kept a lookout for him. When it was ready, they took pieces hot out of the pot and chewed. And chewed and chewed and chewed.

They kept the buckle.

The year Kuan ate the belt, Chicken Daddy’s whole clan had been cut from him – his wife and his three children. His whole paltry family. Soon after his daughter was buried, Chicken Daddy started to feel a strange itchiness all over his body. Flakes of skin peeled from him, falling like scales from a snake. Kuan’s mother swapped a condensed-milk tin of rice for diesel fuel and rubbed the fuel over his body, hoping it would heal him. Instead he jumped up and down in his hut, screaming, ‘I’m burning! I’m burning!’ before running to leap into the river. The water washed the oil from his skin, but did not cure him of the rash or the hunger. And nothing could cure him of the loss of his own flesh and blood, as close to him as his limbs. Now he felt like an amputee, and he took to lying on the floor of his hut, not wanting to move. Moving was hard work. He looked up at the slits of light on the thatched roof. Looking was hard work, too. He closed his eyes. And finally, breathing. Breathing was the hardest task of all. He decided that he just wasn’t up to it anymore.

It seemed one evening that the Black Bandits had stolen away into the night. That was the evening when, all night long, they heard the
bom bom bom
sounds of distant manmade thunder that meant no good. Perhaps the bombs were going to rain down on them now, curtains on a final closing act of a dark and meaningless show that no one was watching.

The next morning when Kuan awoke, the Base People said that they had seen the Black Bandits running away through the village. The city people slowly started to wander, testing the perimeters of the sudden silence, marking its borders.

The village chairman and his family had also disappeared. The only sign that anyone had been living there was the meowing beneath his hut. The chairman had kept a cat as a pet. How could they keep such things alive when people could not even find food for their children? Of course, the first thing his brother Kiv did when he found out the Black Bandits had gone was find that cat and kill and eat it.

Nearby a group of men had teamed up to chase down a cow in the fields. The cow seemed to sense that something was wrong, that this was not the usual herding. No, this was predatory. There must have been at least a dozen people with sticks. When they finally caught the cow, they whacked it over the head, knocking it to the ground until it was lying on its side. Dozens more looked on, yelling out useless advice. He tried to beg for some meat but they paid him no heed.

It was a lie when Buddhism declared that all animals were created equal. All animals were not created equal; the only thing universal about the different species was their suffering. In the wild a lion doesn’t spare a deer, and the cat does not seek karmic bliss with the mouse. Hunger has priorities.

That night, people were talking, saying that the Black Bandits really had disappeared. The Vietnamese soldiers, who had burrowed in underground tunnels like hungry moles, had emerged and driven away their enslavers.

‘Let’s go back then,’ his mother decided. They did not want to be in this place for a moment more. They wanted to find their house in Phnom Penh, even though the keys had been lost long ago. They would return missing half their number and all their things. Now it was just his mother, his sister Kieu, his brother Kiv, Suhong and their three children.

They packed their luggage – their grass mats, some rice, their few remaining clothes. The following day, they started walking in the afternoon, and by night they reached another village. All the houses had been ransacked, and people were crammed into any hut they could find. They spent the night on the floor of an abandoned shop, and the next morning they kept walking.

On the road they met a local villager, a teenage boy who had a puppy curled in his arm. His brother swapped something for the puppy. They led the puppy along with them by a piece of string. Soon they came to a river, where there was a Vietnamese soldier. The soldier took a liking to the puppy and played with it. They waited patiently until the soldier had left.

His brother could kill the cat, but could not bear to kill the puppy, so he asked Kuan. But Kuan couldn’t kill the puppy either. He couldn’t bear to smash something into that happy-yappy face, or to puncture its neck with a knife. In the end he put it in a sack so that he didn’t have to see. Tying the sack with the piece of string that had been the leash, he drowned the puppy in the river. They cut it up, cooked it and ate it. His brother, who was the one who couldn’t bear to kill it, ate the most.

*

Now that the Black Bandits were gone, the Vietcong soldiers were in charge of herding everyone back to their hometowns. Kuan remembered the discipline of these young soldiers. ‘Everyone back to their bases!’ was the command of their leaders before the sun set every evening and all the Vietcong would finish their conversations with the Cambodians and retire. There was absolutely no fraternising after dark.

Walking back to Phnom Penh, they were told that those who arrived first would lay claim to the houses. It didn’t matter that you had once lived there; it was now finders keepers.

On the road they swapped stories with others in steady deadened voices: ‘I saw babies thrown in the air and caught on the ends of bayonets.’

‘They thought my sister stole rice, and they sliced open her stomach to search for the proof.’

‘I watched my father die. They tied his hands behind his back and sealed a plastic bag over his head.’

Others were stone silent, since it took about seventy muscles in the face to mutter a single word, and they were exhausted.

Some men begged for a spare set of clothes to ‘walk the road’. This meant that they wanted to exchange their black rags for proper clothes before quietly finding a place to die. Others lost their minds and did not bother to retrieve them. He met a man who had feigned madness when he was about to be executed, so that the Black Bandits would not kill him.

‘Kuan, the night they were going to execute me, I pretended I was crazy. The Black Bandits had to test out whether it was for real or not, so they mashed up a bowl of hot chillies and fed it to me spoonful by spoonful. I had to laugh like a fool being tickled or else. The children used to hit me and I couldn’t even swat them off. I didn’t mind because I could wander away from the collective and no one really pried into what I was doing. I found more food.’

Madness, Kuan thought, seemed the appropriate response to the regime. To play the innocuous fool gave a man a better shot at life.