Her Father's Daughter (18 page)

DAUGHTER—

These were some of the sights she and her sister Alison saw in Cambodia: a leper with white on her face like talcum powder. A woman who sold them some books, her face melted by a long-ago acid attack. Landmine amputees. Children who squatted in the streets, brown and grotty. One tiny girl followed them all the way to their car and stood outside, tapping on the window. She had a baby on her hip, held there by a krama scarf. Tap, tap, tap. Little beggar children with no one to pull them away from oncoming traffic. A man who was so crippled he could only crawl on his stomach, lying on a flat board with wheels on the bottom.

Her family in Cambodia tried to shelter them from all this, in the same way Siddhartha was sheltered. ‘You will never see land this green,’ her father told them proudly. ‘This is the tropics.’ They were driven in a Mercedes to the holiday resort Cousin Hue managed in Sihanoukville. They had dinners of fresh seafood by the sea. The chauffeurs remained respectfully silent, and the bodyguards never spoke a word to them. But they were always there. When she swam at Sihanoukville Beach with her sister they watched from the shade of a tree, and when she ate dinner at a restaurant they stood outside. Her uncle kept sending them, three or four at a time. He was afraid his family would be kidnapped and ransomed off. A finger might be cut off, an ear. Acid on the face if there was no payment.

It wasn’t just the money and the hotels. Her relatives called every day, and often accompanied them on their trips. This is what it means to be a Pung, they seemed to be saying. You take care of your family.

She was taken to see the royal palace with its Bodhi tree at the front and its floor of silver tiles, its stupas commemorating the life of kings. She saw the Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, and the floating village on the Tonle Sap Lake. But not the genocide museum with its bloodstained floor and its racks in the corridors, not the killing fields of skulls and broken teeth.

Never get too close to cripples lest their cripple rub off onto you, was the way her parents saw their existence, even in Australia. The sense of helplessness on leaving those behind – those on the stretchers with their IV drips warming like cordial in the sun. Crying crying waiting for them to die, wanting them to shut up.

*

Perhaps this was why her mother and father couldn’t save the cats beneath the house. The mother cat was left on the side of the road, eyeballs out of their sockets, mouth open in one final noiseless roar, for the children to see. Her father didn’t think to shield their eyes from it while he walked them to school. They did nothing – just waited for the council to clear away the death. Months later the bloodstains were still on the side of the road, the claw scratches on the curb.

‘Give this dish of milk to the kittens,’ her mother told her when the mewing became too much. ‘Put it under the house.’ But by the time she stepped out into the drizzle, on the front doorstep, the four older ravenous feral felines were there. There was no way to get beneath the house; the narrow wooden slits at its base would only admit small crawling creatures.

Those kittens mewed for three nights straight. They were beneath her room. She couldn’t sleep. For three days and three nights she was at home in the room she shared with Alexander. There was nowhere else to go during the school holidays. No such thing as taking a walk down the street. For three days and three nights it rained outside and they heard the kittens above the rain.

Human life, like the cats’ lives, was nasty, brutish and short. That was what she had been brought up with. It was not like on a farm, where the trajectory of life and death was laid out in matter-of-fact detail as part of the natural world. Her parents were working to give them better lives, but in those early years of arrival they worked until the curtains fell down, until the grouting on the tiles turned black, until the grass grew tall outside, and yet they could not see these things in their quest for an unblemished future. Work meant existence. In their minds, crippled soldiers: taken away and shot. Sick workers: taken away. Yet they could still work, and if you could work you could strive for something better, something cleaner. You had a future.

But the kittens were dying beneath the floorboards and there was nothing she could do. She could beg and beg and beg for their lives and yet her parents would say nothing could be done. She listened for three nights as the mewing became more faint, till the mews became hoarse. Till it was no longer a collective mew, till they dropped off one by one. She listened until the final whimper, until the end of noise.

Later, other cats came. She fed them scraps from the kitchen, but she would not pat them.

FATHER—

When they came to the field where he had buried the dead, the trees seemed to be in the wrong place. He hadn’t realised there would be such heat in the sky and on the ground, such blue and such white. He looked at his daughter revolving slowly, taking all of this in with her 360-degree vision – the sky so wide and the field so empty. He knew she was thinking that this was a sacred place, with spirits floating around, the place where he had buried bodies every single year during the floods.

How could she ever understand the waste of time it was, that loss of four years of his life? She couldn’t imagine. She thought that if you told your story to the world, then things would change. Perhaps the world would stand still and wait, wait for reason to catch up. No, the world still spun, even if people believed it was flat, even if they believed it would heat up, or be blasted into oblivion. No, it didn’t matter what people believed. The world spun on. The only thing that mattered was what people did. And before he came to Australia, he had done a spring-clean of his mind, brought a truck in there to haul out all the debris. It was part of moving home. He wanted to be sure that when he landed in the new continent, he could start anew.

The Australians had a funny expression: ‘I wasn’t born yesterday, mate.’ He liked it a lot. Imagine being born yesterday, but with all your knowledge intact. He would wake up and there would be a new beginning, because all his feelings would be only a day old. He would pick and choose what emotions he wanted to test out. He would choose not to see the baby-blood patches on the trees but the miracles three years later. Like the day they found the stash of colourful clothes near the trunk of a tree. They were walking through the broken country and there they were, carefully folded in a cradle of leaves. If he hadn’t looked closely, he would have missed it. To have been secretly blessed made them walk a little further that day. Who had left the clothes there? Good god, what a miracle that was.

And then, all those years later, his daughter telling him she wanted to know about Pol Pot. As if she could! But he bent to her whim and took her to interview some friends of his in a wooden house in suburban Springvale. The man and his wife had been stuck on top of the Dangrek mountain range along the Thai–Cambodian border. The refugees seeking asylum in Thailand had been driven back in buses and trucks and dumped there by the Thai government. The mountain range was dotted with landmines. This is what the man’s wife told them that afternoon when he and his daughter came to visit:

‘The buses that took us to the top were air-conditioned. We thought we were going up to meet the aeroplanes that would take us to America. We arrived in the middle of the night and slept on top of the rocks. In the morning, Thai soldiers arrived with guns. My husband left first with the rice; the children and I kept the pots and pans. We gave all our money to the soldiers. We thought that would pacify them, but then they started shooting. Thousands of people started running downhill, clinging to the tree vines; our children were clinging to our clothes. I was crying all the way down.’

But she had made it, and at the base of the mountain she helped to deliver the babies of two women who had gone into labour. Her children had made it too. They were forced back to Cambodia, those who were still alive. Later, as they wandered, these same people found a stash of cotton jackets and dresses and pants in some empty houses. They took what they needed and strung the rest from the treetops for other stragglers to find, in case any of their loved ones had survived the massacre.

When he looked back at the trees again, he could almost imagine the arms of a blue shirt waving at him, the bright eye of a button beckoning.

DAUGHTER—

Her senses became more stretched, as though they were working their hardest to take in the world. At first there was the field. And then there was the heat, when the sky breathed its fever breath over the field. Then back to the field and its unyielding dust. Nothing grew on it. ‘When the floods came,’ her father said, ‘this was raised ground. This was where I buried people.’

How could such a hot land be filled with water? ‘In Cambodia, there are only two seasons,’ her father explained, ‘Wet and Dry.’ Like he was explaining the latest Philishave razor. Wet and Dry. It had meant nothing to her until she stepped onto this soil.

When she imagined people dying like flies, what she saw in her mind was ice and snow and skin-thin sleet deaths. Too many movies about Stalingrad and the Holocaust and the Long March. Silly, she knew, because death here had hot halitosis that withered away the bodies much faster. Its rotting gums melted organs into miasmic matter. ‘The best fertiliser in the world,’ her father told her. ‘Besides shit, of course.’

And that was all her father said about that.

How do you feel about being here?
she had wanted to ask him, but she knew what his answer would be.

Nothing much. It’s just a place.

Yet it wasn’t nothing much. It was nothing at all, and yet suddenly this flat stretch of nothing was everything. All that existed at that moment was this space. And she knew – all her father’s life had been about filling this emptiness. All he probably wanted to do after five minutes in the field was to climb back into the air-conditioned car and talk about Kiv’s buildings that spread across the city and rose into the sky, and the seaside resort that sprawled like a beautiful blinged-up woman across the beach, to lose himself in those generous sandy arms.

But in the middle of the field, with nothing, you had only your own body. And how treacherous your own body can be, she thought. How strange that most people woke up each morning with the certainty that life would go on for them, when it was entirely dependent on the body, a body over which you had absolutely no control, a body that every once in a while would let loose with an awful surprise. You could vomit on a public bus. You could collapse on a dirt road because of a weak ankle. Exhaustion might blur your vision. Tinnitus could put a brake on your sense of balance. A migraine might make you taste tin in your mouth and bleed from the nose.

The field left her exposed, as no other place in the world had, left her standing there with her loved ones, realising how little she knew about anything or anyone, even how very little she knew about herself. It stripped her of all certainty.

Dad buried bodies here, she realised, bodies that needed to be held, that once moved and exhaled and blinked just as she and he were doing. Bodies no one would ever talk about again. She looked around at her family. There were bones beneath their feet, souls between their breaths. The distance between the living and the dead was only a heartbeat’s fade away. She felt a sudden need to grab them, her loved ones; to hold them close, to make sure they were not going to dissolve.

At that moment, her father was seeing something else. He pointed to the trees. There weren’t many and they were skinny coconut or sugar-palms, huddled by the edges of the yellow field, as if afraid to step into the soil of a thousand souls.

She waited for him to tell her about the trees.

‘Look at those bamboo ladders,’ he said. ‘They’re used for climbing to the very top, to collect the juice of sugar-palm plants or coconuts.’

She grabbed onto the ladder and started up.

‘Only the first few rungs,’ he said, ‘or you could fall.’

She let go.

They were surrounded by ex-soldiers who were now her family’s bodyguards. Dressed in a khaki uniform, one of the soldiers carried a hessian bag of bullets across his chest. Another had a hoe and was digging a hole in the ground. This time it was not for burying a body – it was so that they could make a fire and burn their Heaven Banknotes for the memory of Auntie Suhong’s mother, who had been buried in this ground. They had brought along two cartons, and each banknote was painted gold on one side and silver on the other.

‘When I was digging up the ground the year after your auntie’s mother died,’ her father said to her, ‘I unearthed the marker of her burial spot. Your auntie and uncle had written her name on a small piece of wood.’

‘Did you stow it away and keep it?’ she asked.

‘No, of course not.’ If you picked up a handful of dirt from the ground, you were stealing from the revolution.

‘People dug the graves up, over and over again, after the liberation,’ Uncle Kiv told her. They were looking for rings and gems looped around finger bones and wrists.

‘There was nothing,’ her father confirmed. ‘When I buried those bodies, they didn’t even have proper clothes.’

Now there were not even bones left. None of those people seemed to have existed, and yet her auntie was kneeling on the dirt in front of an incense urn, with three sticks of incense clutched in her hand. On the ground a rattan mat was laden with food – platters of roast meats, bowls of fruit and bamboo shells filled with rice and red beans. When Auntie Suhong rose up after her third bow and turned around, her shoulders were shaking with the memory of her mother.

The villagers were watching. They had been steadily growing in number, and some had stood for hours beneath the sugar-palms. A mother with a growth on her neck that gave her chin a thrust of stoic nobility. A cluster of naked children with faces she wanted to kiss. Her auntie and uncle handed out the food to the villagers. More children appeared out of nowhere, running across the field.

There was a man with them. An old man who had once headed the children’s army in their collective. Murderer of children! she thought when her father told her who it was. She could not believe that her father and Uncle Kiv were talking to him so calmly and casually, as if he were some ordinary neighbour with whom they had shared a street. She could not believe how, after their visit to the field, the man invited them back to his house, which was no more than an empty hut raised on stilts. He showed them a photograph of his daughter’s wedding.

‘Look,’ her father said to her, pointing out figures in the photograph. ‘This is his only daughter. That man standing next to her is his son-in-law.’

On the wall of his hut, alongside two family photos, was tacked a peeling picture of some movie stars. On the floor was a small used tube of teenage make-up for face blemishes. How strange to see it there. This man also had children in his life, children he loved. He also had the grace of his community and their goldfish memory spans.

She felt that this country was something precious – as brutal, as split open as a pomegranate, with hot breath and a million red and buried eyes. A country she would never understand, but that had shaped her father and made him who he was. The real miracle in this, she realised as she watched him standing there in the heat holding a straw hat to his head, was not that he had lived. The real miracle was that he could love.