Holiday in Cambodia (11 page)

Someone finds me later and whispers, ‘Is it you?’

‘No, no,’ I say and we go back to what we’re doing: shovelling dirt into wicker baskets and pulling it uphill.

‘I know it’s you,’ the voice whispers, ‘you sang at weddings, before.’ I think it’s a ghost – no one speaks about before. All around us are skulls. Moving skulls on bodies like sticks staggering through the mud. ‘I recognise you, anyway,’ it says – a man. ‘You sang.’ I bend my head away towards the stinking water and he’s insulted. ‘Why don’t you sing for me?’ he cries and I wish him dead and then he is. Or, a cadre in a red scarf hauls him away and I can’t see him anymore.

The parents choose the husband-to-be. I saw mine once across a sports field – my brother pointed him out and then he was gone but I felt a happy gnawing, as though a mouse inside me was getting a handful of seed. Next to me, Maly crouches and scoops. She wears the same filthy black skirt and shirt and threadbare blue scarf that we all do. Above us on the ridge, the cadre called Keng watches her, his hand hung like a hook from his red scarf. Maly’s mother would never marry her to him. But our mothers aren’t here. The old women in the camp tell us instead, whispering without moving their split lips: You want to muddy your skin, flatten your vowels, move dirt in the day and not die of hunger at night. That’s what a girl wants to do, they say.

Maly and I watch the ground for lizards, ants and grass shoots. We stumble along the barren road towards camp with fifty or so other women. Corn grows on either side and we can see three egrets ahead. As the birds fly off, every neck turns to watch. Maly stumbles and grabs a handful of dirt to smear on her face. She hisses over her shoulder, ‘Wedding.’ She has been whispering with the old women. There are months in which you can get married and they are the months with thirty-one days in them. From the heat it must be April. You can’t get married in April.

‘When?’ I ask, but cadre Keng comes to walk beside me. He stares at Maly’s still-beautiful hair and hums a regime song. I dig what’s left of my thumbnail into the bloated flesh of my index finger to remind myself not to sing along.

The puddles have dried. Ants escape into the powdery cracks. At night we can hear people starving through the thin walls, voices hushing, Be quiet. But it’s too late. Angkar has heard. Before the meal I hack at Maly’s hair with a sharp bit of rock. There are two songs for ceremonial hair cutting, both about the bride. One is about beauty and the other about bathing in the village lake. Maly has her head bent towards the rotting bamboo floor, like a bride receiving a monk’s blessing. We used to see the disrobed monks in the men’s camp but their hair has grown back now. Maly’s shoulders shake. I stop and get her to stand. She smells like diarrhoea, like death.

‘It’s not going to make any difference,’ she whispers with her teeth against my collarbone. ‘He’ll know me.’ I start to sing one of the brides’ songs in her ear but she steps away and glances at the floor. Dried palm fronds crack under the house. The person crouches very still. We wait for a long time until we hear them move on to the next hut.

‘Maybe you could hack out my throat when we’ve finished with your hair,’ I whisper and hand her the rock. She puts a hand over her face but she’s so hungry that her laughter comes as a groan.

The cowbell rings. Gongs are hit as the bride arrives. We clutch the ladder to the hut so that our legs don’t give out. Children with red scarves and sticks come to hit you if you fall. We shuffle across the trampled yard to the open shed for the meal. Red curry noodles, beef ceviche, coconut chicken curry, cardamom snake and quail. Maly and I sit with the other women on stiff sacks at a low table made from planks. We can barely lift our heads to suck in the grey soup. It isn’t hot but it burns and my stomach cramps. I retch, taste blood and swallow. I press the few grains of rice between my palate and tongue and rub them there so that they last. Across from me, one of the old women hunches over her metal bowl, drinking her soup methodically without taste or pause. In the Honouring the Parents ceremony, the bride and groom would hold umbrellas over the old woman’s head while she ate lollies. Her grandchildren observe her from a distance through narrowed eyes. Angkar is their parent.

‘Wedding?’ I whisper at her. There’s a deep cut on the woman’s forehead and her hair sticks to it.

‘Tomorrow,’ she barely says.

‘Who?’ But she looks over my head as though she has seen Angkar itself. Keng is behind me.

‘You’re Ravi? I’d like to invite you to go for a walk,’ he says. Beside me Maly cries out and he kicks her in the back. She spills the last of her soup over the wooden board and it drips through the cracks and onto the dirt.

Keng walks ahead of me, away from the shed. He turns towards the houses. I pause at the fork in the path. In the other direction is the dark cornfield where he will crack my skull. He snorts.

‘
To keep you is no gain, to destroy you is no loss
,’ he says – Angkar’s words, ‘but you’re lucky tonight.’ He leads me to a large hut with a garden and a door that closes. Animals scramble beneath the house. A woman with a nice face opens the door and glares at me.

‘I just swept,’ she tells Keng, ‘I don’t want the parasite in here.’ She rests a hand on her pregnant stomach. A man’s voice calls from inside and the woman smiles without her eyes and moves aside. The lanterns burn my eyeballs. Inside, a family are cleaning up scraps of rice and chicken after dinner. My knees buckle and I catch myself. The children and a teenage girl scowl at me like they’ve been taught. Keng wraps his rough hand around my wrist and tugs me into another room, where the camp official sits. I’ve seen him before, his face like a professor teaching all the children about Angkar.

‘I understand that you can sing,’ he tells me. He doesn’t try to hide his Phnom Penh accent. ‘Let me rephrase: I
know
you can sing.’

I breathe and my vocal cords vibrate to make a sound. ‘I have never,’ I tell the Official, ‘never.’ I am lying to Angkar. Keng flexes his hand and glances at the Official, who shakes his head.

‘One of your comrades told me that you sang in Phnom Penh, for weddings and once for the King,’ says the Official. ‘That right?’ He watches me with bright, well-fed eyes. ‘Go on then.’ I don’t understand. I wait for Keng’s hand. ‘Sing.’

‘I’ve forgotten.’

Keng’s fingers are solid over the back of my head. I stumble and the ground rises and falls like a horizon.

‘Sing.’

I tuck my chin into my chest and mumble the camp song. Just before the end of the last verse, one note betrays me. It rings out and I hold it as though it’s glass.

‘I thought so. Now sing a wedding song,’ says the Official with a smile.

I shake my head. Tears burn my lips. ‘Which one, Camp Official?’

He laughs. ‘My wedding was a long time ago. Now my wife and I are married to the revolution, to Democratic Kampuchea, you understand?’ I nod and stare at the floor laid with new bamboo. ‘Sing the one they used to sing at the end of the wedding. The one about grass seeds. I liked that one.’

I sing it.

‘I think she’ll do,’ the Official says when I’ve finished. Beside me Keng agrees and I can hear in his voice that he’s terrified. ‘You’ll lead the camp song tomorrow at the wedding.’ He flicks his hand at me. ‘Go.’

Keng pauses at the door. ‘And will I also be married tomorrow, comrade?’ he asks.

‘No,’ says the Official. He scratches his chin and glances at Keng. ‘You’ll marry my daughter when she’s fifteen.’

My hut is dark and Keng hesitates while I climb up the ladder and go through the open doorway. I can see his face outside, broad and hungry in the half moon.

‘Shhh,’ I say to Maly before she can speak and we wait in the darkness until we hear him snort and say, ‘I’ll have you anyway,’ and crunch away down the path.

‘They’re not going to marry you to him,’ I whisper.

She doesn’t speak for a long time. ‘Who then?’

‘Farmers,’ I say, ‘whose relations wore giant water jars instead of clothes not so long ago.’

Maly sniffs. ‘Jars? Why would they wear jars?’

‘The farmers were so poor during the Japanese occupation, there was only one set of clothes for a whole family. The rest had to go naked. Jump into jars if visitors came.’ Maly sniggers. ‘My husband will be a pig raiser,’ I say after a while.

‘And mine?’

‘A shit shoveller.’ I feel her laugh.

‘Ravi?’ she asks the darkness. ‘Have you ever kissed before?’ She feels me shake my head. The husband and wife don’t kiss during the ceremony, only in private. ‘Will you kiss me while I have the choice?’ she asks.

On our wedding day we go to the work site and move earth. Maly and I keep falling over. While we’re on the ground we smear our faces with dirt so they won’t marry us to cadres. Maly falls one time too many and Keng runs down the hill to where we’re shovelling and kicks her viciously in the hip.

‘A limp will help,’ she gasps from the ground as he walks away. She stretches her hand to me but I’m too frightened to help her.

When the sun is so high that there are no shadows under the palm trees, one of the cadres shouts into a megaphone that Angkar has given all the unmarried women and men the afternoon off. I see a mother sobbing silently as she watches her daughter climb the muddy embankment. We’ll sing ‘
Phat Cheay
’ and follow her to our wedding. We’ll sing ‘
Kang Saeuy
’
and offer presents to our ancestors. On the long walk back to camp I glance around for the cadres and push my hand into the dirt to give some to Maly, who can’t bend anymore.

We line up inside. The wooden floor creaks with our feet. The hall was made before the regime and isn’t used to having so many people in it. The air closes in. It stinks of the cadre’s cigarette smoke and the terrified sweat of women. Married couples – family and friends of the happy bride and groom – circle seven times with candles so the smoke will protect them from evil. A line of boys and men are led in to stand across from us and there is a new smell: of urine and dirt. A different fear.

‘Whoever we stand across from will be ours,’ Maly whispers. I roll my eyes to the side. Her lips aren’t moving and I wonder if she has spoken at all. ‘There’s your husband,’ she says so quietly that even Keng, who is watching her like a carrion bird, can’t have known. The wedding guests shout and throw white palm seeds, which coat the floor like hail. I trace a direct line across the wooden boards, pale with decades of dust, to find my husband. I see one filthy foot, one brown ankle soft with bruises, a stick. I see a stump of flesh below faded black pants, a black shirt, a tattered red scarf. One of his arms is slung over a crutch fashioned from a forked branch. His chin and cheeks are gaunt, one eye is gouged, the other stares at me like from a new corpse.

The Official tells us that we are marrying for the revolution, that we have to breed tonight for the revolution, or we will die for the revolution. ‘You’re married,’ he says.

I flick my eyes to Maly’s husband: just a boy – a teenage Khmer Rouge.

The Official calls, ‘Comrade Ravi,’ and my eyes jump. I step forward. I feel a shiver through the fifty betrothed couples as I let the first notes of the camp song ring out. Then they all open their mournful mouths to sing.

‘We tie, we tie three strings to the wrists of these children to wish you happiness and success. Remember your parents, remember your traditions. You will always stick together, like grass seeds made wet by the rain.’

They could hear the mobile phone ringing inside. Nary stopped beating the mats and glared as though the phone was someone else’s. Mai gazed imploringly at her old aunt until, on the fifth ring, Nary waddled to the sideboard, poked at a button and brought it to her face.

‘Hello?’ she asked suspiciously. The high-pitched voice of Chantrea Keng came through the earpiece. Nary rested an elbow on the sideboard and shifted into a tone of maternal condescension. ‘No, Mrs Keng, the visitor hasn’t come back. He told your husband he’d come back again when the water turned and the water hasn’t turned. I don’t know what
I’m
supposed to do when it does.’

‘I could just tell the visitor we’re not home,’ Mai called out, standing on the tiptoe of her good foot and straining her neck. The effort made her taller but more crooked and she brought her heel down again.

‘I tell you I didn’t
talk
to the visitor, Mrs Keng, your husband did,’ Nary said to the voice in her ear. ‘If you ask
my
opinion, that visitor will want this house back. What if he does and I’m here with nothing but little Mai to … I’m just saying … well, if Mr Keng knows the law then Mr Keng knows. Alright. Wear a hat. Bye bye bye.’ Nary’s chin doubled as she squinted down at the phone, pressed another button and put it to her ear again. ‘Hello?’ Satisfied that no one was there, she dropped it on the sideboard and stared at the water through the windows. The monsoon season had ended. People were pouring into Phnom Penh from the provinces to watch the water turn around, flow from the draining Tonle Sap lake to the Mekong River and pour out to sea. But it hadn’t turned yet: it was still flowing northwest, up the centre of the country. ‘It’s not right,’ she said, taking up a broom to sweep furiously at a square of gleaming tile. ‘I said that to
her
,’ she nodded at the phone, ‘when they first moved in. They’ll be back, I said. Clothes still laid out for Khmer New Year. The newspaper –
Nokor Thom
for goodness sakes – on the table, dated April ’75. Spoons next to soup bowls, right here.’ She gestured with one short arm to the space between the couch and the sliding door, where a table might once have been. ‘And did they have monks come, or anyone? No, they just painted everything over. I don’t know how whatshisname, that visitor, I don’t know how he found it again. It was so long ago.’

‘If he comes back, I could just tell him we’re not –’

‘But
you’d
be home, child!’

‘Oh.’

‘And what am
I
supposed to do if he comes again, that’s what I’d like to know. What am
I
supposed to say?’ Nary picked up the phone and waddled with it into the kitchen.

‘Well, how many should I make?’ The sun was going down and Nary turned on the kitchen light. ‘Twenty? It’s hardly worth it. We’ll make fifty and freeze. No, he hasn’t come. I’ll call you as soon … as soon as he comes. Alright? Bye bye bye. Why she’s … hello?’ Nary listened a moment longer, then put the phone on the bench. ‘Why she’s so excited about the visitor, I don’t know. I’m the one who has to defend the house.’

‘Maybe she thinks he’s coming because there’s gold in the walls?’ Mai said. She flattened a ball of ground rice dough with the heel of her hand and passed it to her aunt who dumped pork and mung bean paste in its centre. ‘When I went to burn the rubbish I saw Jorani and she said when people evacuated they put gold and jewels and things in the walls so that no one would take them,’ Mai continued. ‘She said now there’s gold all over the city from people who, you know, never came back.’

‘Which Jorani said that?’ asked Nary. She stuck her tongue out to wrap one of the rice cakes in a banana leaf and set it on a pile.

‘The old one, with the funny –’

‘What would
she
know? What else did she say?’

‘She said that if she were expecting a visitor –’

‘No one would visit her.’

‘Yes, but if she was, she’d let him in and get him to tell her where the gold was. Get a share of it.’

‘What would
she
buy? I know I’d buy some very good shoes.’

‘With all that gold you could probably buy a lot of shoes, Aunt, I bet.’

‘Yes, I’d buy two pairs of very good shoes and I’d get a nice chair. There are ones that turn into a bed, I saw them with Mrs Keng, they have a lever like this,’ – she made a fist of her paste-covered hand and pulled it back beside her – ‘and your legs go out and you’re sitting like the rich with a nice cup of coffee. Not that I’d get any of the gold with Mr and Mrs Keng around.’

‘Maybe they’d give you some because of what happened during the regime? With Uncle Kosal. You said he worked himself to death but I know …’

Nary straightened.

‘What do you know about it, child?’

‘Nothing –’

Nary slapped the bench. ‘What?’

‘Mum just said once. Just that Mr Keng and the others took Uncle Kosal for a walk but after the war Mr Keng gave you a job here and ev–’

‘My husband was never an Agent of American Imperialism.’ Nary’s fingers crept up and pinched the skin at the edges of her mouth, distorting her face. ‘We didn’t know what that was,’ she whispered.

‘I didn’t –’

‘What do you want to know about it for?’ Nary pinched harder. Her voice was a cobweb now. ‘Have you been talking to Mr Keng? To the visitor? Telling them things?’

‘I didn’t see the visitor, Aunt.’

Nary released her lips and reached for the dough but it wouldn’t flatten. She pressed her shaking palms against the bench top.

Mai announced that the beef was good and that she’d marinated it in fermented fish for a salad.

‘Then you’ve done everything you can do, child,’ said Nary, who was staring out at the rivers and the moving lights of pleasure boats.

‘What should we do now?’ Mai waited for a reply. ‘I mean, what should we do now, do you think –?’

‘Shh,’ said Nary. She tilted her head and listened. The knock came again. ‘It’s the visitor.’

‘Should I ask him about the gold?’

‘I’ll go.’ Nary stayed where she was.

‘I could tell him to come back in a week … because we’ve got malaria,’ Mai suggested. There was no answer from her aunt so she went to the door and opened it a crack. ‘Hello?’ she called. The landing was empty, the dark concrete stairwell fading into black. She flung open the door to show Nary. ‘It’s rats in the wall,’ she advised, then closed and locked it again. Nary went back to staring at the water. The phone began to ring and Mai brought it to her.

‘Are you going to answer it, Aunt?’

Nary stared at it. ‘Go to the kitchen and make some coffee, child,’ she said finally, then, ‘Hello? Oh it’s you. It’s just Mrs Keng!’ she called to Mai. ‘I thought you might be the visitor …’ She followed Mai into the kitchen with the phone. ‘It’s
my
opinion that he won’t come back even when the water
does
… Because he would have come by now if he was going to. Don’t worry about it Mrs Keng, Mai and I have it … We’ve got it all under control … Okay, bye bye bye.’

‘Maybe she heard about the gold,’ said Mai.

‘How would she hear? Did you tell her?’ Nary glared at Mai, who shook her head so violently that her hair fell around her face. ‘Well then she doesn’t know anything. She’s just bored up there in Battambong and needs the gossip.’ Nary gave the cracked wall a few experimental taps with her fist.

‘Aunt, what if the phone rings while you’re in your new chair?’

Nary grinned toothily and squatted again.

‘If the phone rings you just go like this.’ She pushed her fist forward. ‘And your legs come down. Easy.’ She eased herself to standing. ‘It’s not like being in a bed. It’s better. That’s what I’d do with the gold.’

‘I’d go to Australia. On a holiday.’

‘Ho! “Australia on a holiday.”’ Nary held her stomach and laughed. ‘Where are you going to get a passport from, child?’

‘I’m going to get one with the gold.’

Nary snorted. ‘Pour the coffee. There’s no one who’s going to give
you
a passport, even for all the gold in all the walls of Phnom Penh.’

Mai looked down at her feet and gave the crooked one an experimental stretch. It bounced back again, like a diverted river finding its course.

Nary watched her and picked at a crack in the paintwork. A chip came away in her hand. ‘If that visitor
does
come and if
there
is
gold in these walls we’ll talk to a friend of mine at the market about a passport,’ she told Mai.

‘Couldn’t we ask Mr and Mrs Keng for help?’

Nary peered at the chip of paint. ‘The Kengs? Oh, no. They’re so busy. Best … best not bother them about this, child.’

Out in the night the water coming into the country met the greater force of the water going out.