The old woman turned away frightened. No one used the word
coup
. People called grenades
events
. She said, I do not know anything.
All through the market I asked the same questions and eyes darted and glanced away looking for who might hear, who might see. No one said anything. Everyone turned from me. I bought a salve of aloe, went back to my airless room and waited.
Just before dusk, two police officers came to the hotel. One was a young man with a clear complexion and wary eyes. The other was a short middle-aged man with hard eyes and a thick scar on his right hand. He said roughly, The chief of police wishes to speak with you.
Will came into the hall, said, What’s going on? He put himself between me and the men and said in a whisper, What the hell did you do?
I stepped away from Will, said in English, So they don’t have to blame Mau, so they can blame me.
In Khmer I said to the hard-eyed man, If I do not come back my friend will come looking for me. If I do not come back everyone in my country will know.
He spat to one side and the young soldier looked away embarrassed. They walked, one on each side of me, down the main street where the stalls were still open for the celebrations and people were relaxing on cool rooftops. The two men led me down a side path to the police station and escorted me into a cement block room where a man wearing a clean and pressed light blue shirt sat on a wooden chair. A single lightbulb burned overhead in the center of the room. He was heavyset with deep creases between his eyes. He did not stand up but motioned me to sit on the chair on the other side of
his desk. He dismissed the two soldiers and said, What is your name?
Anne Greves.
He lit a cigarette, did not offer me one, looked across the desk at me, said, What are you doing here?
I am looking for someone who went missing.
This is not permitted.
His Khmer was formal, educated.
I understand. But I am doing it anyway. I would like to know your name.
I no longer pretended deference. I no longer pretended anything.
His gaze deepened, the only movement in his still face. He leaned forward, rested his forearms on the desk, said, My name is Ma Rith. I am the district chief of police. What makes you think you can do this?
I said, It is normal to look for someone who is missing. I know he was brought here.
How do you know?
A soldier told me.
What is his name?
He did not tell me.
Ma Rith opened an old file on his desk and wrote. He looked up again, said, Where?
He approached me in a doorway, but I do not remember exactly where. Somewhere off Sisowath Quay in Phnom Penh.
He wrote and looked up again, said in a reasonable, persuading voice, You must understand that you cannot come to Ang Tasom and ask people to talk about things of which they know nothing. It makes unrest. Our country has suffered a lot.
Our leaders must have the loyalty of the people. There can never be order without this. We are rebuilding our country and creating democracy.
The government used these ritual phrases in all their speeches. On radio broadcasts. In the papers. But they also said, If there is opposition, there will be a return to Pol Pot.
I said, In the new democracy of Kampuchea, you will want the truth to be told and justice to be done. You will understand that people cannot just disappear.
Ma Rith continued as if I had not spoken, You have been in this country for only a short time. You must go back to Phnom Penh. You cannot create trouble here.
I said, I do not want to make trouble. I only want to find out what happened.
He raised his eyebrows and his tone hardened, You must understand that the hope of finding lost family members never comes for most of our citizens. The sad perseverance of searching and not finding is something our citizens continue to suffer.
He leaned back and shifted to a softer tone, I always feel pain when I see people seeking family members separated during the wartime. I pray to the sacred objects to allow those people to meet their family members again. Some of my family members and friends have forever left me, and I still do not know exactly their fates. We have to move on.
Ritual phrases.
I saw in his eyes no pain at all, but the impatience of a man who has a job to do. When a river changes direction anything can happen. The well-ordered turns on itself. Bodies float face down in gentle eddies.
I looked into his eyes and said, I am not looking for someone lost during the Pol Pot time. I am looking for someone who disappeared from a political rally six months ago.
He dropped his cigarette on the floor, stepped on it, answered, Let us say there was an accident and the one you are looking for is dead. Since there would be nothing you could do, it would be better to go back to Phnom Penh. Our leaders and your Western leaders do not want trouble.
My bowels loosened and a crown of beads formed over my temples. I wanted to scream but there was no breath. I wanted to say, There is already trouble. People shot in the streets. Bodies left on the riverbanks. Leaders fleeing across borders.
I said, I want his remains.
I forced out the words, not believing them yet. I said, If someone dies, surely people collect their bodies. In Phnom Penh people went to the temples to claim their dead. I saw it.
He tapped his pen on the file, said, Of course there are procedures. But a person must be able to identify their dead. And if it happened that someone wished to claim disputed remains, this person would have to make a tribunal with the Ja Vei Srok in Ang Tasom.
He was trying to show there were laws, new ways that depended on neither tradition nor violence. But his words were like seeds without soil. He had to satisfy his leaders. He had to make problems disappear. He sensed my disdain, said with reined anger, In your case a tribunal will not be permitted because there is nothing to find. Now you will go back to your room and in the morning return to Phnom Penh. Your driver has been told.
He tapped his pen, bullying and harsh. The interview was over.
But I said, I wish to request your help to locate his remains.
We both watched him lay his pen deliberately on the desk. He stood and lifted his right arm above his head and brought it down with a pointing finger toward my face, slicing the air three times as he spoke.
You do not listen. There is nothing to find. You will return to Phnom Penh.
Jab. Jab. Jab.
The naked lightbulb over our heads flickered, dimmed and came back on. He did not glance at the faulty light and I closed my eyes and saw a fleeting image of a young woman looking into the eyes of her baby. I warned myself to concentrate, to get myself released. He lit another cigarette, blew smoke into my face.
He said, You will be taken back to your room. At dawn you go back to Phnom Penh. We do not want trouble.
I do not understand the unfathomable love I feel for you. But I am in a place the old Gnostics call emptiness. If your face appeared around the doorway where I sit at this small desk, I would turn to you and say, Now I am awake.
The strangeness of my love for you is that it has made me dead in life and you alive in death. I am afraid you will disappear and no one will remember your name.
After dark I heard a light scratch on my unlocked door. Mau slipped in, closed the door behind him. There was a bruise on the scar over his cheekbone. He said, I am sorry, borng srei.
It was a warning bruise, a red lettered note.
He stood inside the door and whispered, They throw bodies in the canal beside the bamboo seller’s house. At the end of the road going out of town. After the grenade rally they brought two bodies. They shot him because he took pictures of the grenade throwers. They knew he had connections in the West. They did not want his body found. That is why they brought him here.
Mau’s liquid eyes held mine and he lifted his hands as if to touch me then let them drop again. He said in a whisper, At least you know. Many people never find out. As soon as there is light, I must take you back. Everything is ready. You must come with me at dawn. Do not make trouble. You do not know what these men will do. I will sleep at my wife’s cousin’s. I must go now, they are watching me.
I slipped from the back door of the hotel and into the Kathen procession on the main street. The people’s faces were
illuminated by flickering candles. Drums and gongs and chhing finger cymbals grew louder, celebrating the divine. I was not part of the crowd because people shifted away from me though I walked in the middle of them. When the people turned down the path toward the temple I stepped into the shadows of the unlit road, continued to the end of town and saw the bridge over the canal. I saw cut bamboo leaning against the bamboo seller’s house. Next door to the bamboo seller was a Buddhist monument maker and I saw his yard of stone carvings like a garden of spirits squatting and sitting and standing under the clouded full moon night. I slipped along the side of the little house past the old retaining wall and found an animal path down a small hill to the edge of the canal. Then I waded into the canal, afraid of what might be there.
Waist deep in the unlit night, in a world of smell. At first I did not feel the wet chill. A storm in the mind removes all feeling from the senses. I heard Mau whisper from the bridge, Stop, sister. Come back.
Someone was slipping down the bank after me and then I heard Will’s voice, Get the hell out of there.
Mau pointed from the bridge down into the center of the canal. They dropped the body from a truck here, he said. Come, sister. Nothing left. Come. I am afraid of sramay.
There are no ghosts. Only you.
I waded deeper until I stood under Mau and then I looked into the blackness, Here?
He leaned over, Come out. There will be nothing. Everything washes away. Come, there are neak ta.
Spirits. And village leaders.
Mau slipped off the bridge and slid down the bank too. He
squatted on the edge, said, The leaders do not want you here. Look, someone gave me something so you would know, so you can leave.
I reached to his outstretched hand and Mau grasped my wrist and pulled me into the grasses. He pressed my old St. Christopher medal into my open palm and released my arm.
He said, The bamboo seller took it from his body. You have this proof. This is enough.
It is not enough. See what breeds around the heart.
Wings and webbed feet on the surface of the water. Forest ducks have laid their eggs in skulls in all the canals of Cambodia. Starving dogs scrounge. Rats nest.
A flock of cranes rippled through the sky.
I felt the cold of the tiny medal on my wet skin. As I turned from Mau, I tripped and the water splashed in the grasses and disturbed the hidden waterfowl whose wings beat hard against the canal. Air heavy enough to scoop with a cup. Blood pulsing behind my eyes. The burn on my leg under the water stinging. What lies beneath? I am in your grave and I am haunting you.
I turned to where Mau had crouched but there was only darkness. Will waded toward the center of the canal and he studied the water and the riverbank, said, If they dropped him from there.
Then he looked into the muck, said, Can’t you ever the hell not stir things up? He glanced up at the bridge again, calculating, whispered, If they dropped him from there, he would have fallen around here. But animals move things. And there is weather.
Behind us the canal widened and Will said, Anne, there’s probably nothing left but I will have a look. Keep quiet.
The place swayed with dark blowing. He walked in small circles. He knew his work. Bodies are eaten by pigs, bones scatter, sink into the silt. The trees have eyes. I listened to Will’s slow concentrated breath and watched him search deliberately in the chill dark. Over and over, he squatted, neck deep in the water, dipping one shoulder down below the surface, turning his face to the side to breathe, arm tugging, back covered with water hyacinths and slime. Be quick. He pulled things up, now a stick, now a rock, once a small bone. He examined them on the surface, tossed them to shore, said, Not human. He took up his circles again. He disappeared below the surface as he worked at releasing what he found by touch in the stinking water. I waited. In the distance I heard men beating chhai-yam drums. Three things cannot be hidden, the sun, the moon and the truth. At the temple there would be theater with puppets and the lighting of candles and incense. A light breeze in the canal grasses.
After a long, long time, slowly Will lifted something. I saw him bend over it, tenderly smoothing off silt, and then he raised it above the water and I watched drops falling in silvery streams as it broke the surface. The clouds blew away, uncurtained the full moon. The end of the monsoons. Tomorrow the monks would have new robes. Pinpeat music far away.
In that wet dark place we were two creatures divided at the waist by water and I took the skull he offered me and I felt his shoulder against mine as we examined it together in the blackness. I was afraid of what I touched. I did not know the dead. How could this small piece of bone harm the world? Surely it was not you. This tiny skull could not be you, somewhere you were still alive. Then I saw a half-moon chip on a front tooth loose in the upper jaw.
Here hung those lips that sang. We will no more meet, no more see each other. I pulled you to me, hugged you against my breasts.
On the filthy bank of the canal in the dark-eyed night I sat in the mud to cradle your skull forever. Will squatted beside me and his finger traced the curve of the skull and pointed to a small ragged opening. He said, That is the entry hole of a bullet. Where a bullet entered the right temple.
Expertly he turned the skull while still I held it, said, There is no exit wound. If it did not lodge inside, it could have gone through the orbit of an eye. If it was lodged inside, it would fall and sink.