The Disappeared (19 page)

My hands were bound, my body ached. On the road out of Ang Tasom, I saw Mau, waiting, half hidden behind a market stall on the roadside, and he raised his eyes to me. In the car with closed windows we crashed through rough potholes, scattered birds. My shoulders bumped against my tormentors and I tried to shrink into a body that could not be touched. I no longer smelled the sugar palm or rice paddies of Cambodia, only the stale breath of those whose duty it was to silence me.

Do you remember the girl in the yellow room on Bleury Street? Thick snow softly falling on Sunday morning sidewalks. I reached for you, expanded into your embrace. Once there were many places, but now there was only you. I loved the way you watched me in the yellow room.

I could not see our driver’s eyes on the road to Phnom Penh. He wore dark glasses and his hands clenched the wheel as he bumped against rocks. Mau had driven with delicacy around the great holes and boulders of the dancing road, stopping to give alms, lifting his moto over a broken bridge, glancing over his shoulder at us, reaching back to share a cigarette.

I will never see the Elephant Mountains again but I can still see Chan’s stiff hands and her twitching face. In the concrete
room I learned with dread certainty: They could do with me what they wanted. They took you from me, and they diminished me to flesh, made me foreign in the world.

At the airport two hard-faced soldiers flanked me and a small woman with harsh hands untied my wrists and gave me a washed T-shirt and cotton pants that were too big. She watched me undress and took my filthy clothes with disgust and put them in an old bag. I was to leave with nothing. They escorted me through customs and gave me my passport and told me to write my name on a document but I would sign no expulsion order. The eyes of the official flickered not brown but slate and my bowels dissolved. These were eyes that could harm me. Four men forced me onto the plane and people stared and soldiers stood at the exits until the plane took off.

Leaving felt like falling into a clean bed. Grief. Exhaustion. Footsteps outside a locked door. I no longer recognized myself. I ate everything on the tray and when they offered me a second I took that too. I slept fitfully. In the plane. In my father’s house. I ate at my father’s table. I remember his eyes on me.

Daughter, he said, you are so thin.

I did not know the time or season, the air was cold and smelled of winter, or perhaps it was only a winter-seeming night.

I told Papa you were dead, that I found your skull. He held up his hand, said, Rest now. You can tell me everything later. When you are rested.

What he meant was, Do not tell me more.

I watched the shadows stretch over the walls of my childhood bedroom and wondered how I had come to this.

Berthe came, sat on the edge of my narrow bed, opened her arms to me and I cried. She smelled of pine-tar soap. She said, Mon p’tit chou, what have they done to you?

My father invited visitors. He was afraid of my foreignness. I sat wrapped in a frayed eiderdown on the old chair beside the
lamp with the chipped shade. Charlotte came with her three children, hesitated as if she did not know me. Her children stared with wide eyes, squabbled over this color or that, broke and cried over a red crayon, filled in lines. Charlotte labored to fill my silence, and I could not tolerate her talking. When she asked, What are you going to do now? I sent them all away.

After I lost you, a thought formed clearly beneath the flat thunder in my head: No one can help me. Despair is an unwitnessed life. The ones who murdered you came and went, going about their business. And my trust in the world was destroyed.

No one will ever see you, still sleeping beside me, needing nothing.

I visited offices, clean ones, well lit ones, where men in suits came and went, opened briefcases, told me their names, consulted papers, repeated in different ways, We do not intervene against the laws of another country, there is always a chain of custody for a corpse, what makes you think a foreign national could just go anywhere and claim an unidentified skull?

The lawyer answered the telephone during our interview and spoke French and Polish as well as he spoke English. He gestured to a pile of files on his disordered desk. He said, I have clients in prisons for years without a trial. He punched a closed fist against an open palm, stood, walked to the corner of his office, looked over the river, said, You are lucky they kicked you out. You could have been stuck in prison.

I said, I committed no crime. They held me without charging me. They leave bodies unburied. People are going missing. Can you help me get back there to get his skull?

You have a dogged quality, he said.

I said, The worst humiliation is that they kicked me out. They think, Let her go, no one will care once she is out.

People like you cause trouble when you are in prison, he said. I care, but I do not know what more I can do for you.

The authority of any government stops at its citizens’ skin. People everywhere look for their missing. We see the women of the plazas. We see women standing on the edges of graves. We hear the dignified plea, Can no one find me even a bone to bury?

It has become so easy to see. Images in the air we breathe. People know what is going on.

The question that skitters over me like rats in a prison cell at night is this: Once we know, what do we do?

This is what I know: You keep coming back to me.

For thirty years, silence has strangled me from the inside and I peck at the shell trying to break it, trying to be born without drowning. Silence. A crime. I have done exactly as they wanted, moved on as if nothing happened. But, borng samlanh, you too did exactly as they wanted; you made yourself vulnerable enough to die. For so long I have felt shame. I have watched myself living as if from outside my body, pretending to be alive. I tried to live, worked, married, gave birth to two sons. My husband left, said it was a mistake, said I was remote. I raised my sons, cooked Sunday dinners for my father. I never told what happened to me over there, not all of it. Papa loved me the best way he could. He took my sons fishing in the Gatineau. I used to stand at the door and watch them climb into his car, all three of them wearing their fishing hats. Now I know the anguish of watching a child go. All my bone wanted to leave home when I was sixteen, and when my sons wanted to leave, all my bone wanted them to stay. This is the genius of:
For he so loved the world he gave his only begotten child
. My father watched who he thought I was disappear in front of his eyes. He could never bring himself to ask who I became. And I did not tell him.

I refused, for years, to see Will when he traveled through Montreal, but I met him by chance one day on St. Laurent. I recognized him when I saw him shift a small backpack from one shoulder to the other. The crevices on his cheeks had deepened. The heels of his hands were red. The clean light in his eyes shone past a life of too much alcohol and nicotine and jet lag and the labor of releasing the missing from their graves.

He said, You look good. You never change. Want a drink?

Will always made me laugh. My hair is thin. The veins on the backs of my hands are knotted. Will had found a man who would unpack his plastic bags filled with death-stinking work clothes, who would live with the severed limbs in his nightmares. We spoke of work and failed marriages, my children, his lover. He drank his first beer quickly and poured another, said, Why wouldn’t you see me?

I looked down the street. Are you happy?

Will laughed, Happiness is not that important.

I remembered how much I had once liked him.

We sat in silence, remembering, and he said, You still love him, don’t you?

I looked into his eyes and had to look away. After a moment
I said, Last week my father died while he walked to work. An aneurysm in the brain.

Will put his stained hand over mine.

At the hospital, I asked for a pan of warm water and soap and clean towels and I washed my father’s body. There was a bruise on his cheek from his fall. I had never seen his genitals. The thin graying hair. I had never touched his feet. He was a modest man. I had not stroked his face since I was a small child. I had loved his eyes, his hands, the brown spots of aging. I washed the muscles of his forearms. He died going to the hospital to work on a leg to help a small boy run. While I washed him I wanted to say to someone, Look. Look, his hands were skilled. I covered him with a clean sheet and I went to his apartment, found his best clothes, went to the funeral home to dress him. His body was so cold. It takes strength to move the heavy limbs of the dead. The mortician said, You do not have to do this.

I sat with his body all through the night. The funeral director said, You do not have to stay.

I accompanied his body to the crematorium and I saw the heavy doors open and I watched him disappear this last time without his usual shy smile. It made a crater in me, hollow, echoing, numb, arid, void. I signed papers and I received his ashes and I buried them. It took three days.

Will said, Do you know that when an infection gets bad enough even bone starts to disintegrate. The skin swells and the bone goes soft and breaks down into mush.

He picked up his glass, took another sip and said, For love’s sake, tell before there is nothing left.

I remember you bent over the two strings of your chapei playing for a girl with long kinked hair. I have the two little pictures of you and me taken in the picture booth in the train station near the church. Cassette recordings of your voice. Nothing else.

I have lived in intimacy with the violence of the untold life.

Not long ago I sat for ten hours, watching a screen. I did not doze. Each person who was photographed and died in Tuol Sleng prison is posted, five thousand pictures, each lasts five seconds before dissolving to black. When I closed my eyes that night I had after-images of eyes and the strange twist of the shoulders and neck when the arms are tied behind the back. And I heard your voice.

My colleagues gossip together, Has she not had a marvelous life? Those early years of travel, where was it? Viet Nam? Thailand? Somewhere over there. And two sons and her gift for teaching languages and her writing cabin by the river in the Gatineau. She says she writes but she never publishes anything.

Light laughter.

Her marriage did not survive, but whose does anymore? More light laughter.

She never seems to lack for friends.

Did you hear? Her father just died.

He must have been quite old.

N’importe! At any age it is affecting.

Still.

Only I can see you now. Candles on the river. I waited for you, and for a while this was enough. But you did not come back to me. When it was time, I knew the way to you, and I knew where you would be. You gave me flower buds wrapped in a leaf and we listened to music and when we walked on the river it turned around and flowed back to where it began.

I do not listen to the old music, the almost forgotten sound of those young Khmer musicians recording as fast as they could write, getting it all down live. None of your musician friends survived, all were left on the streets for dogs, dumped in mass graves. I once wondered when I saw the skulls at Choeung Ek if I was looking at any bone from which that hope-filled music came.

Now, borng samlanh, I see in the mirror a woman of a certain age. I have filled in time since the day I lost you. A lifetime of silent pretending.

If we live long enough, we have to tell, or turn to stone inside. I try to release you from a pit in my heart but unburied and unblessed you imprison me.

I long for the brush of your fingers on my skin. I long for the light of your eyes. If I pray, I pray to a wounded god. In the end it is only the wounded who endure. In Cambodia they say, Loss will be god’s, victory will be the devil’s.

You keep coming back to me in little bits of moving images, light on a winter wall. Come to the door, spirit I know, and I will stand and hold you. Come alive just one more time, let me feel your breath, Serey, let me hear your voice in song, let me wash away the pain. Come, and I will whisper your name to you one more time.