I held the bone and felt its curve under my palms and I looked at the pocked surface. All the joys of life left no mark at all. What is the value of a single human life? I will cremate you. I will say prayers over you.
The sand falls, not much left now, just a few last grains, and as I have watched them falling year after year after year, I do not ever come to the end. I lost you again, a third time, the last time. My sorrow and my failure.
His eyes were two dark moons. Will stared past my shoulder and under the slime and water hyacinth muck on his chest he turned into sweating stone. He whispered hoarsely to a silent shadow behind me, Bawng, muy soam. Without taking his eyes off the gun Will said to me, Get up very slowly and turn around and tell him we’re leaving, we’re going to the hotel and getting out of town, tell him. Tell him we’re getting the hell out. Tell him.
The line between life and death disappeared. I bent over as if to hide something and Will grabbed my arm and dragged me up from the bank shouting at me, Pretend you’re afraid of me, then he threw me down on the bank and turned to the men with guns, his palms pressed together, fingers up, in front of his chest, begging.
Bawng, we’re going, just put your guns down.
They answered in English, You leave Ang Tasom.
One man’s foot was at my head and his hand thrust down and swiped your skull from between my breasts and tossed it far down the canal, back into the water. I looked at my empty hands without believing.
I hear the light splash, like a duck landing in spring, over and over and over and over. For thirty years I have heard that splash.
I fell on the soldier’s arm and Will pulled me off and started dragging me up the bank. The soldier said to me in Khmer, The village leaders say you must leave.
He shoved Will so hard he fell at my feet. The soldier looked me eye to eye and said in Khmer, He will take you back. Go now. No trouble. Or I come back.
I smiled, a lunatic foreigner smiling a lunatic smile, and I said, Tell the village leaders if I die in my bed tonight I will haunt them.
The soldier kicked at Will. But I was no longer wedded to life. Neither was I yet married to death. I was memory and hope calculated to their smallest ratio.
I do not remember walking back to the hotel. I remember only in my room Will sitting by the wall near the door, his long legs drawn up, drinking an Angkor beer and asking, What did you say when they let us go?
I told him ghosts would get him.
Will laughed, a strained and frightened twist of air. He said, I wonder where the hell Mau went? He looked at me and said, You know, humans are made for happiness too. A happy person too can serve the sacred. You didn’t have to do this.
I remember the wet print of Will’s pants on the floor after he
got up and said, We’re leaving. Lock the door. I am going to find Mau. I hope they haven’t beat the shit out of him.
What about his skull?
It is the only time I ever saw Will angry. He said, It is time to stop, Anne. It is finished. We’re getting the christ out. There won’t be any more chances. We’re not waiting for morning.
The echoes of drums and cymbals fell silent in the deep darkness before dawn. I left the room and went back to the canal. To bury the dead is right. I did not care what they did to me. I had no thought but one: If I could not bury you, grief would break me. I smelled the red village dust. But before I could slip down the bank and into the water, three young men closed in around me. My arms were wrenched behind my back and I smelled garlic and cheap soap and I heard a hissing voice say, Stop kicking. I kicked. I felt the first blow on my head and no one in Ang Tasom saw anything, heard anything.
They locked me in a cement block room and I sank to the floor. I was nothing. I was so thirsty. And I was so tired. I fell into a deep sleep and was instantly woken by the call of a honey buzzard outside,
pee lu pee lu
, and there were no windows but I felt in the warming air the first gray of dawn. All the living were locked in cement rooms and all the lost were drowned in canals.
Now I belonged to the wild world of the dead.
How did I offend? I only wanted to knit you back into the earth. How could it be right for pigs and dogs to tear at the skin of your face but not right for me to bury you? They said to me, Woman, you are worthless. You understand nothing. You are nothing. Your desire is nothing.
Fool. Madwoman. Victim.
There was a time when I could still touch your skin. Impossible to leave. Impossible to stay.
People say, It is
their
country, let them tell it.
You are my country.
Two guards came and went from the cement block room. They were young, thin, obedient, with stupid, aggressive eyes. They’d been trained to look for screws and rivets a prisoner might use to choke himself, for pens that open veins. They took my Buddha necklace. A pail stank in the corner. Filthy bowls of coarse rice hid pebbles that cracked the teeth. Carefully I sucked the rice and spit out the bits of stone. There was a shallow basin of water I feared to drink and drank anyway. I would have fought for those drops of water. When I cried of thirst an older guard said, Be quiet or I’ll come back and beat you. When I turned my back on him he said, Turn so I see you or I’ll beat you. He asked, Are you hungry? I said, No. Then he said, You’re lying. Tell the truth or I’ll beat you.
His body was possessed of an exact memory of how he kept men from killing themselves before they were tortured to death.
Someone once asked Martha Graham how she remembered her dances. She answered, The body remembers.
After I made love for the first time I understood this.
The guards searched me and I was condemned to remember.
I was a woman reduced to a T-shirt and bra, underwear and cotton pants and pain and thirst. I shivered at night and curled up in a ball wrapping my arms over my face against the rats. My leg swelled red and my head throbbed. The first night I thought, Will knows I am here. Mau knows I am here. They will come soon. On the third night I thought, Maybe no one knows I am here. They kept me awake all night, sitting up in a corner. When I dozed they woke me with water or a kick. At dawn the guard tied my hands behind my back and took me again to the office of Ma Rith.
He dismissed my guard with a sharp, Baat, tien! and gestured to the chair opposite him. His desk was empty except for his package of Marlboros, a cheap yellow Angkor lighter, his folded sunglasses and a mug of water. I wanted my tormentor’s water.
He said, Why did you go back to the canal? I told you there is nothing to find.
Aching. Thirsty. Sleepless. My hands tied. Now I was a body made vulnerable. Now I was available to wound.
I said, I found him.
Ma Rith answered, You found nothing.
I shifted in the chair. I was free to say anything; I did not care if I died.
The government does not admit that any wrongdoing happens. How can people move on without knowing what
happens to their families? How can they move on without truth?
The damp hot air was still between us.
Ma Rith’s eyebrows lifted and then his face smoothed again. He said, Our leaders say we should dig a hole and bury the past and look ahead to the new century with a clean slate. All of us have family members, friends and relatives killed and left uncremated by the genocidal regime.
Outside, far away, the call of a vulture.
I said, What we think, we become. If the truth is not told, the spirits of the dead will never rest.
Ma Rith’s voice sharpened like a string tightened across worn frets, You are not from here. Why do you come and interfere? We must accept the reality of our history. Our dead are silent and lost. Our country has suffered decades of war. We must turn from this terrible history now and build a future.
I said, People want the truth. But they are afraid. Your citizens too wish to speak for those made silent. Someone must act in the name of the lost. Why are you willing to bury the past, but not to bury those who lived in it? What law is transgressed by burying the dead? What law of nature? Of the gods? I found his skull. I recognized his tooth.
You did not find him. Whatever you found, it was not him. There are many skulls in this country. It is easy to confuse them.
He lit a cigarette and took a deep draw. He leaned back on his chair, more relaxed than the last time, provoked and bullying. I was dirty, thirsty. Outside I heard the squawks of starlings and the chirrups of tree sparrows.
I said, I only want to perform rites for him, cremate him, ask the monks to say prayers for him. It is normal to bury the dead.
A strange stillness held me, and I watched Ma Rith’s shoulders tighten. I feared I had fallen asleep when I noticed him take a last draw on the stub of his cigarette and crush it with cold calm. I did not want to show weakness. I had become an animal who might die. I had become capable of anything, of sleeping while I spoke, of stealing water, of unspeakable atrocity, of acting without feeling. I had to control myself, to find a way. Please, loak borng, I said, allow me to bury his skull.
Ma Rith said, This task does not belong to you. You are a foreigner. The body belongs to his relatives in Cambodia. Why do you defy our law?
I said, He has no relatives. I claim the right to give my husband a proper burial. The law is only a man’s thought. Surely you would not allow anyone to take away a family member’s body and say nothing.
The air changed. I had crossed a line, passed through a door into a different room.
He smiled derisively. He shifted a pair of sunglasses on the desk and said with mocking, There is a younger brother. We know him. And we know also that he was not your husband.
I tried to push down the clench of nausea and heat and chill sweat. I glanced around the room, saw no bucket. I said in a voice no longer strong, He is my husband. Together we conceived a child.
What child? You have no child.
He did not wish to talk about babies and marriage and grew cruel, as if it were a family argument, intimacy waiting to explode into rupture, violence, silence. I paused to still my shaking voice, said, I had breakbone fever and I crossed the river too soon and my baby died. It was a girl.
He said mockingly, Do you think we do not know who you are? We know everything. We know when you came. We know what he was doing. You are not married. You are like any beer girl.
The words cut like an oxcart axle across the head.
My shoulders ached and I could not wipe my wet forehead.
I have committed no crime. My husband disappeared from a political rally in Phnom Penh. I found his skull. I want to cremate it and pray.
How far his eyes might pierce I could not tell. He had been ordered to make me comply. Suddenly he slammed his open hand on the desk and I jumped and he said in a raised voice, At oy té. You have committed a crime. You are not permitted to claim anything.
Humanity dictates burial of the dead, I answered.
Ma Rith said, Humanity does not dictate respect for the disloyal. This man was betraying his government. He deserves no loyalty.
A chill wind entered my body, through my groin, one that has never fully gone away.
I said, What is loyalty after death?
When I die, said Ma Rith without temper, I will still know my enemies.
False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand. Is man no more than this?
I straightened on the hard chair, said, When I die, I will still know my loved ones. I will die before I leave Ang Tasom without him. I know he is here.
Ma Rith stood then, walked behind me, leaned over me. He said, No woman will tell me how to enforce the law of my own country.
My insides were liquid. The room was thick with ragged spirits. How much cruelty does it take to put out our human light? How far would this go? On the gateway over the entrance of the cemetery at Errancis is the single word, DORMIR.
I spoke to his empty chair, There is a law older than the laws of man. Divine law says: Every stranger is holy. What divine law have I broken?
He sat down again, wrote on paper thin as the eyelids of a corpse. He said, You are a victim. It is as if an accident happened to you. You say there is no one to claim him but you are wrong. His brother is alive.
The burn on my leg throbbed. But it felt like someone else’s body. I was interested in the pain but it was no longer mine.
I said, Loak bou, I have only one desire: to love my dead. How can this be wrong? Your citizens would say this too, but terror makes them close their mouths. His brother does not care.
Ma Rith lit another cigarette, impatient now. This was dull theater. There were other things to do. His job was to get rid of me and still we were talking. If he could not persuade me he would force me. He closed the file and spoke once again in that soft, cajoling voice used for ritual phrases, What purpose to revisit the past?
I said, To claim the present.
He opened up his dark glasses and put them on. He said, Burn the old grass to let the new grass grow.
The earth will be burnt up, will perish and be no more.
We had pared the argument from both sides and left nothing in the middle.
You will be sent back, he said. You will be taken to the
airport and put on a plane to your country and you are forbidden to return to Cambodia.
I was taken back to the cement block room. I examined the cracks in the walls. I did not look at my own body. I observed the throb of hunger and the dizziness of thirst. I crashed into sleep. If you are there in the wild place I will walk straight to you and rest in you. Have you found your dead, your mother, your father, your grandmother, Tien, and do you sit with them? Is there music where you are? Is there rock and roll? Is my mother there? I thrashed at the rats and listened to a voice crying out in little sharp cuts from half-sleep and realized it was my own. At dawn the next day I heard a car arrive, men’s feet and voices outside. Now I would be torn from you forever. I was so thirsty.