Her Father's Daughter (15 page)

The problem with suffering, Kuan realised, was that there were too many senses. In the evenings when they lay down from their days of walking in limbo, towards a place that might not exist on any map anymore, his mind was free to think. But all his thinking had come to a halt and he couldn’t drag his thoughts very far. So instead, when he couldn’t sleep, he liked to imagine that he were five different men, each only having to deal with one sense at a time.

He came from the city, so the rustle of leaves sounded like the rustle of distant plastic bags. And the quiet of the night – it was like the sky was yawning and sucking in all the mosquitos. He knew that hearing was the last sense to go, so it was a terrible thing what Chinese families did about grief. Wailing and carrying on like that at a person’s deathbed, when they should be listening to the breath of the loved one with every hair in their inner ear a-quiver. You would never hear such breath again.

There was the quiet slipping from words into a sigh of silence.

Then came that hour, the hour when the dead slept without a noise. It was that hour when they called for him.

‘Come.’

‘This way.’

‘Over here.’

The sound of their rubber-tyre sandals through the dirt and the leaves and cow pats. His bare feet.

The sound of their in-out, in-out breath.

He would never hear breath again, he thought, the breath of these soldiers would be the last he would hear. He wondered if the animals in the forest were listening too, the birds and spiders and monkeys. Maybe, he thought, the first laws came about because man needed to sleep and so needed to be protected from his companions who might remember past grievances. But now he was being led somewhere and he didn’t even know who had a grievance against him.

They took him into the hut of the village chairman who was having stomach pains. The squelching of his stomach could be heard like a throbbing planet-sac filled with disgusting dead ocean juices. It was as if all the fish and algae and molluscs in the world were sloshing around in the black sea and this was its yowl, this was its noise, the noise of one man’s stomach.

There are sounds the throat makes thinking that noise will block off pain. Arrrgh. Oooeeegg. Waaahhh. But nothing was as great a din as that infernal ocean.

He took out his needles, and the ring of the copper wire was like a singing bee-sting.

There was a ten-year-old girl who was punished by having both her hands bound behind her back for so long that when she was untied, they flopped uselessly by her sides. He took out his copper wires and gave her acupuncture. Otherwise, she would be sent to the hospital. Skinny people seemed to have nerve endings closer to the surface of the skin, so they felt more pain, but this girl didn’t feel a thing.

The man who punished her was the leader of the children’s army. He had a simian face, and he regarded the children as worker ants, or lice that lived in his hair and sucked out his energy.

Yet one time when there was enough rice, he taught the children to sing revolutionary songs and even started a school in one of the huts. In the morning the rows of children would trudge off to work and in the afternoon they would sit on a dirt floor and learn about Angkar’s visions. For these children, Angkar must have been the God of the Underworld, a nameless faceless force of reckoning with a thousand bloodshot eyes and a thousand axe-wielding arms. Angkar spoke indirectly through the adults in charge, and you felt Angkar in the back of your neck whenever you felt that you did something wrong, but you could not see Angkar; you could not touch Angkar.

At night before he drifted off, he often imagined a life only of smells. The hollows of their nostrils would seek one another out in the darkness. He thought of the way white people were the warm stink of cooked lamb, how south-east Asians were fish-sauce sharp, or how the French smelt like the salty insides of oysters. Perhaps that’s what they meant by animal magnetism – you were drawn to the scent of the human who most resembled the animal that made up your diet. In the end, everything came down to food.

His mother used to smell each one of her children. That was how they kissed in a culture that did not have a physical-touch greeting. Cheeks were not made for blushing but for smelling. But the Black Bandit boys looked at the adults as if they were smelling them with their eyes and didn’t like the odour.

He had once seen a parasite that ate out another fish’s tongue and then lived in its mouth – two unblinking black eyes staring out of the host’s open mouth. But the more he thought about it, the more he realised that the human tongue was like a primeval animal, an underwater sea-dweller. The teeth, two rows of stalactites and stalagmites forming a barrier in the cave where the tongue lived, letting it out to roam only when its curiosity could not be contained.

Only once in those four years were they given a taste of sweetness from their former world. One day a Black Bandit brought in a tin of unopened Nestlé Sweetened Condensed Milk. He asked the workers in the kitchen to fill the enormous communal vat, which held hundreds of litres, with water and bring it to the boil. Then, in an act of unexpected generosity, he opened the can with a knife and poured the contents into the vat. ‘Milk!’ he declared. ‘Tonight Angkar provides you with milk!’ Each worker got a scoopful, and when it reached their bowls it was almost clear in colour, but they were so grateful they could have wept.

Later, when he had escaped to Vietnam and all his senses were awake again, he wondered what glass would taste like. Painted wall? Wooden drawer? A piece of red cedar, a lump of yellow silk. A black key from an accordion. A used bar of soap, still warm from the shower.

But under the Year Zero regime, with nothing to swallow during the years of the Black Bandits, the tongue was used to move air around. One day he and another man were caught speaking their native Teochew Chinese.

‘What were you saying?’

‘Nothing.’

‘We were not saying anything, comrade.’

‘You were speaking in another language.’

‘No.’

‘You were speaking in Vietnamese!’

‘No! No!’

He remembered what had happened to the mother who had a slight Vietnamese accent in her Khmer.

‘Kneel down. Stick out your tongue.’

The Black Bandit boy unsheathed a combat knife from his waistband.

‘No, comrade brother, we beg you. We’re not Vietnamese.’

They begged and begged, because that was all they could do. At that moment he did not think of living without a tongue, but only of the possible pain of the wound and that detached mouth muscle squirming on the ground. It was the vision he most dreaded.

‘Don’t let me catch you speaking any other language again!’ the boy yelled.

‘Thank you thank you thank you comrade.’

Spared! He and the man looked at each other. They were allowed to keep one of their senses. They would never speak a word to each other again.

He used to think that blindness was the worst affliction a person could possibly have, until he imagined the opposite. Imagine if they had lost all their senses but sight. He imagined a life without eyelids. Eyeballs that would not be shielded from anything in the world.

The rest of the body would be peeled away from the eye, as if the eye were a grape and the body were the skin. And then the eye could look at what it had shed, because the human body had every colour under the sky. Red blood. Black pupils. Yellow intestines. Blue fingers. Inside the face the colour of curry over cooked shellfish.

But this was only five. There was a final sense, of course, the one that kept all the others at work.

She had made it out alive too, he realised when they saw each other in Siem Reap. Her family tree had been burned down to a stump – all that remained was herself and a ten-year-old niece. When Kuan saw his fiancée Sokim again, he didn’t make love to her. They sat up all night making melancholy. He couldn’t even look at her face, so he spent the night staring at her left temple, staring at the blue-vein tree there.

Out of the wet clay of their recent memories, they moulded people back to life – her mother, his father, her siblings, his niece and nephews, Chicken Daddy. Chicken Daddy had no pockmarks, he found his wife again, she became sane and spoke sense, and they loved each other before they were separated.

Chicken Sister’s skin filled up like sugar palm, her real palms opened and closed, she used her elbows to get herself up off the mat. The flies disappeared. ‘Uncle, uncle, we need to look for rice.’ No, that was still too tinged with what was to come, which was Chicken Sister squatting on the ground pressing her forefinger to the dust. No, she was back in Phnom Penh, in the pocket of her dress were a polyester ribbon and the rubber bands from her hair, and she was smiling her slice-of-watermelon smile.

The two nephews would dig themselves out of the dirt, their already-opened eyes would blink again, and they would think about catching the yellow dog with the swollen teats to follow her home to her pups.

It seemed like a ten-year night, and when it was over he asked Sokim to go away with him. Yes or no? Questions now were ultimatums. There were no decisions that you could answer with maybes. No, she replied. She wanted to see her home. She wanted to find out who had survived and who had died.

He sighed. The decision was hers. If he had been more in love with her, he would have pleaded. He liked Sokim, she was kind and pretty even after starvation, but he didn’t care for her enough to push harder.

So they parted. That was the way it was with women. You didn’t make love to them until they were yours. Yet he didn’t know whether he could make like, let alone love, to anyone again for a very long time.

When they first entered Phnom Penh, the Vietnamese found a series of shop-houses containing strange items. One shop was filled entirely with left shoes. Another one contained thousands of right shoes, stacked to the ceiling. A store crammed with refrigerators. Another of half-smashed televisions. A building filled with chairs, a building of tables. There was a house of cooking pots. Year Zero museums of archaic modern technology. The only ambassadors of the modern world allowed entry into Pol Pot’s Cambodia were the Kalashnikov and the electric wire around the fence of Tuol Sleng prison.

The air exhaled silence.

‘There is nothing for us here,’ his mother sighed.

They had found their old house, but they noticed a pair of blue shorts and a frayed shirt hanging over the balcony to dry. Some other family had already settled in their factory.

So they returned to Siem Reap, living in a communal house with many other families.

In the town, his brother’s little girl Hue, who was now three, stood gaping at an ice seller. With his bare hands the street vendor pressed ice shavings tightly into a sphere around a centre of sweet red beans. He handed the cold ball to Kiv, who crouched down and placed it at his daughter’s lips, to give her a suck. They all watched the face of this child, born during the days of slavery. Less than a year ago she was crouching on the ground digging up small spring onions and popping them in her mouth. A baby eating raw spring onions. They all waited to see the first signs of recognition of this small joy that they had lost for four years, and which they had thought was lost to them forever.

But the first thing she said was, ‘Wah! It’s so hot!’

He couldn’t stop laughing.

The coldest thing in their world would be scorching to someone who did not know what it was like to taste cool. The sunrise they expected to see on her face was actually a fire-burn.

In Siem Reap, Kiv, who was always the innovator of the family, started up a gold-smithing trade. With nothing but a small mallet he made rings. Whenever they obtained a bit of gold, they melted it into tiny pellets. Kiv would flatten these pellets and make a hole in the centre, like a donut. Then he would use his little hammer to tap out a ring. It was slow work, shaping an amorphous gold donut into a wedding band. Every day he and his brother hawked around this jewellery in exchange for rice. A ring would be exchanged for five or six tins of rice. The more rice they earned, the more they could exchange for more gold. There were no scales, so Kiv made a set, with weighing plates made of condensed-milk-tin lids. The Vietnamese soldiers watched their burgeoning trade with quiet amusement. Sometimes they even came to exchange something, but they never came to snatch anything away.

*

After two months, Kiv made a decision. ‘We have to go to Vietnam,’ he said. ‘We can’t do this forever.’ He said that he would go with his wife and daughters, and if things went well, they would send someone to bring over the rest of the family. He would leave his son Wei in the care of his mother, brother and sister. Kiv swapped some gold for a bike, and hid the remaining gold in its hollowed-out handlebars. There was no time for teary goodbyes. Kiv and his family set out when it became dark, he wheeling his bike with one hand and carrying Hue with the other, while Suhong carried their remaining bags and held the hand of Huong, their older daughter.

Kuan remembered the time Kiv came crying to him because they had caught Suhong bartering rice and locked her up in a hut by herself, to be executed. That evening, his brother had wrapped his ration of rice in banana leaves and stood beneath the thatched hut, the house of straw with pitch-patch light entering through its seams during the day. He poked the package through the floor, until he felt his wife’s tug. Her last supper.

Kuan had watched his older brother and learnt about keeping a family alive, about how to condense your world to the smallest possible unit so that you could keep it safe. In the end Kiv’s wife was spared. There was no reason why. A woman’s life was subject to the whim of sixteen-year-old boys. There was a nine-year-old girl they tethered to a tree. They told her that they were going to kill her the next day. She had to pass the night with that certainty like a rusted spoon scraping at the inside of her stomach. They killed her the next day.

He thought about the scraps of his family. Him with his bad eye. His sister Kieu, whom they called Blackie because she was so dark from the sun. And his mother, keeping her adult children alive. He remembered the afternoon of his mother’s birthday in the killing fields, when he had felt the whoosh of wings above him. He watched a bird fly past and dunk itself into the rice paddy like a falling sickle. It emerged with something in its mouth, which it dropped a few seconds later while soaring away. He walked over to the paddy and saw the splashing. A fish! He pulled it out and smacked it against the ground and hid it in his shirt, close to his chest. They would be able to celebrate his mother’s birthday.

At the end of his twenties, his world, once so peopled with attachments, was down to this ragged walking cluster, a cluster he vowed to love and protect till the end of his days. And yet he wanted something more. He knew, without a doubt, that he wanted a family of his own.

Soon, true to his word, Kiv’s guides arrived for them. He had sent two Chinese men who had lived in Vietnam, Dang Hai and Guang Hwei. When his mother heard the names, she declared it a blessing from Buddha. Back in Cambodia before Year Zero, she had once gone to a Buddhist shrine to get her fortune told and was given a small rhyming-couplet poem of four lines, with those very same characters.

Dang Hai gave Kuan a cigarette to smoke, ‘like a Vietnamese, so no one will be suspicious of you’. When they left, he was standing in the back of an old Chinese military truck with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, looking backwards at a country he knew he never wanted to see again.