I do not want you to have to know. In my dreams Sokha accuses me. My parents are behind him staring at me from big silent eyes. But my younger brother stands in front of me and says over and over, Why did you do nothing?
You were shocked, at first, by what you saw, a skeleton-people struggling numbly back into the silent city. A family had already taken over your old family home. Numb, you found this room on Sisowath Quay. The first silence of the city was broken by foreign aid trucks rumbling back and forth and the shouts of Vietnamese soldiers. At odd moments on the street two people would suddenly recognize each other and burst into little islands of talk, sifting through memories of who they had last seen where, who had died when. They stood in the street, sometimes holding each other, then weeping and talking, relief at finding anyone alive, telling how they survived, each tear like a small match thrown into a barrel of gasoline. The first year there was little planting as people struggled slowly home all across the country. Then followed two years of famine. When the foreign relief workers arrived and no one knew Khmer you had endless work translating.
You said, All through Pol Pot time people could not speak freely. Neighbor against neighbor. Children trained to report on their families. People tried to hide inside the same skin. People pretended not to be city people, pretended not to understand foreign languages, tried to disguise soft hands, tried to pass as farmers, taxi drivers, street vendors.
Who did you find? Did you find Tien?
Musicians were the enemy. Students were the enemy. City people and educated people. Everything I had been was the enemy.
A soul protects itself from what it cannot bear. You would not speak of your family. You said, But I found a new chapei teacher. Some people survived.
You got up then and took your chapei from the corner of the room and unwrapped it. You sat on the bed cross legged and you lay the instrument across your lap and plucked the two strings. You sang an old folk song about yearning for the time of the monsoon winds, oan samlanh, yearning to go to the festival with your love, wearing a new phamuong, oh dear one, going together to the festival with your love.
You looked at me to see if I still liked your singing.
When you first got back you walked across the city to your old street, past your old front door looking for your family. Nothing. You went to the Red Cross center with their lists of names. Nothing.
I met Chan, I said.
You went to my home?
Yes. It was the first place I looked.
You said, The country was like a shattered slate. Before they could think of drawing lines on it, they had to find the pieces and fit them together again.
You pulled open a drawer and took out a school notebook and flipped through it to show me pages of lyrics written in your precise Khmer script.
I have been learning the old songs, you said. I know many more than when I knew you. I have broken with tradition by writing them down.
Then you closed the book and put it back in the drawer and you took me in your arms and said, It seems like a dream, you here.
Dawn light soon filled the lines between the shutters and I did not want daylight and heat. We lay in bed touching, whispering.
What did you do?
I did not tell you the pain of receiving no word. I did not tell you how I wondered if a human being can invent love. I did not tell you how I began to notice that people marry every day not for love but because they are well matched, or lonely.
I said, At first I tried to telephone you but it was impossible. I sent letters to Phlauv 350. I studied and later I taught.
Your eyes were so alive. I laughed and said, I rented your old apartment. I painted the bedroom yellow again. For years I tried to tell myself that it was over. But a few weeks ago, I saw you on television. It was a ceremony for the dead at a school here. I thought I saw you in the crowd.
You said, I never go to those ceremonies.
I laughed, Then there was no reason to come at all.
I pretended to get up to leave but you pulled me back and I was happy that you could still play.
I said, The night after I thought I saw you, there was a late spring snowstorm. I walked from Bleury Street up past the Yellow Door and past La Bodega, where I tasted my first sangria with you and near the pub where you sang. I climbed past the university to the top of the mountain, where we argued about you leaving, and then I walked toward St. Joseph’s. Do you remember how we watched the people climbing the steps on their knees? I did not want to go home and I walked all the way
to the train station past Marie-Reine-du-Monde. I was tired but I kept walking, to old Montreal, past L’air du temps and I remembered Sonny and Brownie. Finally I went home. The whole city and every step reminded me of you.
A single tear slipped along the side of your nose and you brushed it away. You said, Let’s go out for a walk.
I said, No, wait. Tell me what happened to your family.
What I know belongs to another person, you said. Better to shut it away in a closed box. Let’s go out.
I followed you. Of course. We crossed the street to the wide promenade by the river. I saw Sopheap’s noodle cart and we stopped for noodles and when she saw you her eyes sparkled and she asked, Is it him?
I nodded and she laughed and handed us two bowls of noodles, said, No money today. Today is a celebration.
After we finished eating we walked along the river in the gathering heat of morning and you said, Who else do you already know here? I forgot how free you are.
We walked in front of the Royal Palace and you said, Have you visited yet? We passed through the Chan Chaya Pavilion where the dancers once performed, up the marble staircase and over the silver tiles of the Pagoda of the Emerald Buddha. We looked at the Emerald Buddha made of Baccarat crystal and the gold Buddha encrusted with diamonds and a small silver and gold stupa that contained a relic of the Buddha from Sri Lanka. I liked best the standing Burmese Buddha made of marble, and you showed me the library of sacred texts inscribed on palm leaves. We watched two children playing a game like tic-tac-toe in the sand and looked at the golden roofs of the palace with their flame-shaped peaks and naga snakes and bright blue
mosaics and we watched geckos darting under enormous urns planted with palms. You said, Remember how we visited all the churches of Montreal? We walked back to a sidewalk café below the FCC and drank strong Italian coffee and we talked about eleven years of days, and restless, you said, Let’s go listen to music.
I thought we were going to a café but instead I followed you to a squatter camp called Dey Krohom. You bought a sack of rice in one of the markets. Rows of huts of corrugated metal and plastic sheeting and woven rattan. Broken coconut husks on the ground. The smell of charcoal and wood fire. You led me through the narrow paths to a house where a man with pocked skin lay dozing on a kgrair behind a pair of black sunglasses. You called softly, Uncle, it is me, and you placed the rice under his wooden slatted bed.
His face was instantly cut in two by a wide smile and as he sat up, you leaned into my hair and joked in English, Meet Ray Charles, but to him you said in respectful Khmer, Teacher Kong Nai, I have brought a friend who likes your music. You put my hand in his. Nai smiled at me and squeezed my hand in his warm palm. You said, Would you play? and he called back into the house to a young woman who brought out his old instrument. He tucked his legs sideways under him and played and sang stories of giants and harvest and he sang his own name. Two little girls appeared from the outside edge of his home and danced, wrists bent back, graceful fingers spread, and adults slipped away from their cooking fires to listen. Kong Nai felt
his wife approach and turned toward her with that luminous smile. He played the music that I had heard on your cassette tapes in the room on Bleury Street, the bluesy moan of strings and human voice. You glanced at me and studied the master’s fingers and looked at the small crowd of people listening.
Most of the musicians were dead and most of the dancers were dead and most of the painters were dead. Some who lived hid themselves away and drank. Some had pretended to be mad to survive and could not fully shed their pretended madness. Some said, Better artists than I were killed, but they found the strength to keep working. When Nai finished, he said to me, Come any time. I like to play.
We walked out through the narrow pathways and you said, Nai is the one I wanted to bring to L’air du temps.
Salt sweat and wood smoke and the river. The light of little fires, the smell of cooking rice and frying fish. The darkness of a city still unlit.
How did he survive?
He harvested corn and beans. He made palm rope. He sang revolutionary songs. By the end, he too was on their lists.
You wrote to me. One blue aerogram once a week. When you told me, I thought over and over and over and over, How could Papa have done this to me?
I said, How long did you keep writing?
I sent you a letter last week. The letters never came back. They were going somewhere. I thought that one might get through. Sometimes I thought nothing. I just wrote.
Why didn’t you phone?
Oan samlanh, I did, once. Your father answered and said, Do not call again. She has someone else.
Betrayed. In the name of love my father kept you from me and still I found you. I did not read your words that told, now that you were gone, your undying love.
People keep secrets from each other all the time. People hide lovers. Women hide babies. Parents hide their weakness from their children. Children hide who they are from their parents. Who do we degrade with our secrets?
Why do we long for love in abandon? Love that cannot endure. The world is outside the garden. We cover our bodies and keep living and hope until the end for love in abandon. One more time.
After a few days your telephone rang in the morning.
You answered, Hallo? ... Baat ... baat ... Baan ... Okay, bye.
When you hung up you said, I should go back to work.
And so our days settled into an easy rhythm. Early each morning you went out to work and returned in the mid afternoon. I wandered through the city, the markets, the small alleys, the temples. I visited Chan in your old neighborhood. I talked with Sopheap. I found the taxi stand where Mau started each day before dawn. When it was very hot I went to the pool at the Cambodiana hotel and swam and watched the foreigners. You said you were a translator and I believed you. You would not speak of your family. I trusted you. I reasoned, There has been great pain. When the telephone rang, the only intrusion in our room, you said you were making work appointments and of course I believed you.
You would hang up and say, I will be back early today, about two o’clock, oan samlanh. Tonight we should go to the Globe. Listen to music. See you later.
Domestic talk. More exotic than lovers’ talk, I had lived so long alone. I loved your casual pledge each time you left, See you later. I did not ask for more. I did not ask where you worked
or who you worked for. I thought, We have forever. I have waited this long. In the cool late afternoons we made love and in the evenings we roamed the city on foot or on your motorbike with the sidecar. You were often silent. But you still liked to play music and you learned again to joke with me. We ate at carts and sat on benches looking over the river and I told you about our old friends in Montreal, how Charlotte married and had three children, how No Exit found another lead, then drifted away from music to offices and marriages and babies; you told me about traveling north to your grandparents’ village and finding a friend.
One morning I said, I want to go to Choeung Ek. Will you drive me this afternoon? I want to see the killing fields.
You said, Why go to Choeung Ek? You already know what happened.
I want to see for myself. Come with me. I want to know what you know.
Your face closed and you said, No need to see. You already know.
But I want to see.
No need, little tiger.
After you left I walked across the city to Psar Tuol Tom Pong, the Russian market, and I found Mau and asked him to drive me.
We discarded the city at the fork in the road that leads to the old longan orchard. The fields were grown over with grass, and a stupa in the killing fields sheltered eight thousand skulls.
In Choeung Ek memory flips its dark belly to the surface like a water beetle hiding in plain view. Depressions in the earth overgrown with grass. Stupas of skulls and bones. The sky. A
young man neatly dressed in a clean shirt and light cotton pants approached Mau and me. His eyes were so flat that I could not bear to look into them and he said, I will tell you what happened.
We sat with him and he said, I saw with my own eyes how they killed. In my work brigade they called a big meeting. They dragged out a young couple and blindfolded them and tied them to a tree. They ordered my brigade to come and see people who fall in love without permission from Angka.
What should we do? the leaders yelled.
My brigade yelled back, Kill! Kill!
I yelled this thing too. The boy beside me stepped forward with a bamboo stick and hit the man across his head. Blood came out of his nose and his ears and his eyes. They took the blindfold off the woman and she went pale and she closed her eyes and they beat her too. After many blows they finished her off. I did this thing too. I hit a still living human being hard on the head and the neck and stomach.
Why did you shout, Kill, kill?
He moved his hands in circles in front of his chest and he said, I did not feel anything at that time. Words came out with all the other voices.
The Khmer Rouge used words to kill the people. Touk min chom nenh dork chenh kor min kat. Sam at kmang. They said these things over and over, To keep you is no benefit, to lose you is no loss. Cleanse the enemy.