Текст книги "Dogs at the Perimeter"

Автор книги: Madeleine Thien

Соавторы: Madeleine Thien
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 11 страниц)

My friend was wasting away. In my arms, Bopha seemed as insubstantial as the dry grass, as if the sea inside her had evaporated. “There’s an answer to everything,” she said one night when she was ill. “My grandmother told me, it’s all written in a big book. I used to think that, one day, I would read it. I would walk into a temple, it would be as vast and rich as a palace, I would turn all the pages, I would see everything that had ever happened, everything that was coming.”

She looked at me as if she could see straight into my heart, into the centre of who I was. “But I know now,” she said softly. “I’ve looked and I’ve looked, but there’s no answer for me.”

I wanted to hear her laugh. I mimicked the pouting mouth of Vuthy, the way he bit his lip, the way every time he said the word Angkar he sniffed as if he had a cold. I held her hand and kissed her repeatedly, fearfully.

She told me that after they had been evacuated from Phnom Penh, a foreboding had come to her mother. Bopha’s father had already been taken away, and her mother knew that Angkar had marked them. She believed that, unless her children rid themselves of their history, they would never be safe. One night, she packed their things and she sent both her daughters, Bopha and Rajana, away, one to the north and the other to the south. When you reach a camp, she said, tell them you’re an orphan. Tell them your parents have died and you have no place to go. A few weeks later, Bopha said, her mother had been taken away and killed.

I remember birds sliding upwards into the ruby night. Once, while gathering kindling in the forest, I saw a tiger stalking a deer. I stood very still, thinking of my mother, believing that she had come now, she had forgiven me. Instead, the tiger vanished and the deer with him. They were the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen in the world. For Bopha, I gathered lime-green berries in a jacket of dew. But nothing I did could save her. Bopha died. Vuthy came, he helped me bury her at the edge of the reservoir, in a place where still leaves would shade her from the heat. Against her chest, in the pocket of her clothes, lay a picture of her sister, Rajana. Afterwards, fearful that Angkar would see my pain, I hid inside the forest. I asked myself how I had disappeared and why I could not remember the moment, the act. Was this the emptiness at the centre of creation, the nothingness to which I aspired? Was this the highest truth of all? I saw that I had not understood before, how deep, how wide, loneliness could be.

Hunger was erasing my being. Soon, I, too, would find my way into the trees. I went to Vuthy again. I told him I wished to find my brother, and I asked him to send a message to Prasith, a Khmer Rouge cadre. I gave him the name of our old cooperative. Vuthy looked at me, there was pity in his eyes. He said that he would do his best. I wanted to ask Vuthy what he had been before, what lives he had lived, I wanted to know how it was possible to be something more than what I was.

I continued to work in the reservoir. Chantou kept me company, returning to me night after night. My hands, my body, remained in the world, but slowly I released myself into the quiet grief of my thoughts.

Who lied to us? Chantou asked me. I tried to answer him, I tried to know. Maybe it was the ones who said we were living in a new age, a year zero, who said we must be strong, that purity was strength. I wanted to ask Angkar, How can we save ourselves and still begin again, how can we keep one piece and abandon all the rest? The devastation always moves inward, even to the last and highest rooms.

In the reservoir, the rains kept on. I thought another birthday must have passed and I was now eleven years old. No existence is permanent, I told myself. I held fast to the belief that all times, all wars, must come to an end.

Everything passes, my mother whispered.

Even love. Even grief.

Near the end of the rainy season, my brother arrived at the reservoir. I had been summoned to Vuthy’s hut. My brother looked at me, held my eyes, then turned away.

“I need your signature, mit,” my brother said to Vuthy. The cadre lifted the page. He studied it for a long time, then he turned to me, as if he had a question only I could answer. At last, Vuthy picked up a pen and signed the page. My brother unloaded a sack of rice from the bicycle and laid it on a nearby table. The cadre examined it, surprised.

The tires needed air and when I climbed on, we subsided even farther. As Vuthy watched Sopham began to pedal, navigating us down the muddy road, away from the reservoir. I sat on the seat and my brother stood and pedalled, the cotton of his shirt blowing out behind him, touching my face, my neck and shoulders. The coarseness of his shirt rubbed against me. I had dreamed of seeing him too many times, wished for it, imagined it. In the same moment, I believed and disbelieved.

When the cooperative was far behind us, he manoeuvred the bicycle to the side of a fast-moving stream. He took my hand and helped me into the water and he used my filthy clothes to scrub the mud and dried, old blood from my skin. I could not remember where the blood had come from. He rubbed hard and the clothes, so old and thin, began to disintegrate. The water was sun-drenched, it smelled of black dirt. “Are you all right?” he asked me.

I said that I was cold, only cold.

My brother nodded. “Look,” he said. “I brought new clothes for you.”

Nothing was what it seemed. Somehow he had grown taller than me, heavier. I put the clothes on. Emotion flickered behind his eyes, never quite coming to the surface.

“How did you find me?” I asked him.

“You sent word. Through Prasith. Do you remember?”

I nodded. He turned away from me and climbed back onto the bicycle, waiting. “And Ma,” I said, trying to begin, but the words only slid away from us, unfinished.

“She’s gone,” he said simply.

In his voice, all the feeling had hardened and closed off.

It started to rain. The landscape turned murky, the road began to wash away from under us, but we continued on, hurrying west then south then west again, mostly pushing or carrying the bike over the dislodged road. Shadowy forms moved against the twilight, human beings freezing into trees, trees elbowing into human shapes. We stopped to rest and I opened my mouth and drank the rain.

When it grew too dark to see, we hid in a grove of trees and took turns sleeping. I woke to the sound of my brother reloading the AK, cleaning the barrel and the grip. He had a killed a creature while I slept, skinned it, and hung the flesh from a branch. The mosquitoes and flies surrounded it, ecstatic, and he took the meat down and wrapped it in leaves. We kept going.

Eventually, my brother turned onto a narrow track. We abandoned the bicycle in the mud. Slowly the ground gave way to jungle. I saw thick vines choking the gnarled trees, I saw frantic ground squirrels, enormous, furry insects with wavering antennae and burning eyes. We ascended and the mist rose with us, and then past us. On and on we went, climbing higher and higher. Daybreak came. We stopped only twice, sharing the rice Sopham had brought. Afternoon and then evening fell. The last light pebbled over the jungle floor, my brother moved faster and faster. I struggled to keep up. And then, in the gloom, we saw it at the same time, a crevice cut into the rocks.

Sopham held his AK in both hands. He went in first and then, when he had disappeared, I followed.

Nothing was visible. The cave smelled like a world condensed, all the earth and trees and rocks crushed to a handful of minerals. Sopham rustled in his clothing. Light flickered between us. I saw a match in his hands, and then a candle, thick and honey-coloured, the kind used for temple offerings. For a moment, Sopham looked at me, his eyes pale in the sudden light, and tried to smile. I saw my father’s face, his disbelief, his masked sadness.

Deeper inside the cave, we rested. In a sort of grotto in the wall were the ends of other candles, a disintegrating scarf, burned-down sticks of incense, dulled bullet casings. My brother told me about the prisons, about Prasith, about the woman named Chanya. His voice was flat. “The good and the pure break,” he said. “They always break.” I remember water dripping endlessly down the cave walls. My brother went away somewhere, he started a fire, cooked the meat, and brought it back to me. He showed me the treasure he had kept all this time, the key to our apartment on Norodom Boulevard, in Phnom Penh. He asked me to take care of it, to keep it safe. We could not bring ourselves to speak about our mother. For a long time, while Sopham slept, I ran my fingers over the key, listening to my brother’s breathing, his exhaled words. I told myself that I could protect him. The love I felt for him was like air, everywhere inside me, pushing me on.

Turn by turn, we passed through the long waist of the mountains, not knowing if we were deep inside the caves or almost through, not knowing if the border to Vietnam was near or distant. The groundwater rose to our hips and then subsided, draining away.

Sometimes the ceiling dropped low and we had to crawl forward, holding our mouths above the water, the ak lifted up. The farther we went, the slower our movements seemed, the slower my blood pulsed. At the end of a long passage, the cave flowered open into a grandiose space, hourglass columns, glimmering pools, still reflections. Light rained in through pinches and seams. My brother said that this was the place, Chanya’s map would not lead us any farther. We sat against a wall, listening to the bats and the falling water. It felt like days passed, but perhaps it was only hours. I no longer know. We slept and woke, slept again.

I heard the crank of an ak. My eyes flicked open.

A man stood in front of us, a tall, thin shadow, appearing as if he had melted from the walls. There were noises behind him, a woman’s nervous warning, and then footsteps, quickly retreating. Beside me, my brother woke. He lifted his hands, the palms facing out.

“Mit,” Sopham said. The word echoed off the walls.

The man cut him off. “What district?”

“Peam Ro district, Prey Veng province.”

The rifle edged nearer.

My brother’s voice was trembling. “The river has flooded this year,” he said.

Surprise showed in the man’s eyes, and then it was gone. “Has it, child?”

“Yes, mit. The river has flooded this year.”

“At oy té,” he said softly, ambiguously. “Let it flood.”

He crouched down in front of us, the gun supported on his hip, and studied our faces. His skin was faded, tinged grey. “Let’s have the truth. Who are you, really?”

When neither of us answered, the man pushed the tip of the rifle against my brother’s heart. “Hurry up,” the man said. “Time is running down.”

“Our friend showed us the way,” Sopham said finally.

“He had a map.”

“I see. Where is this friend?”

“He was ill, mit. He died on the road. I’m sorry, he didn’t —” my brother tried to say more but the words stuck in his throat.

The man lifted the barrel of his gun, rapping it twice against Sopham’s AK. It was still strapped to my brother’s body but now, carefully, he slid it free. The man took it. “Stand up,” he said. He searched my brother and then me, his hands moving roughly down my arms, my jutting ribs. “Please,” I said. “We have nothing.”

He paused and stepped back. “If you have nothing, what should I do with you? What good are you to me?”

“All we want is to leave.”

“Do you think it’s so simple?”

I looked into his eyes, unable to answer.

A long time passed and Sopham and I lay together on the ground. The man watched us intently. Later on, people came. I saw a teenager wearing a belt of ammunition and, behind him, a woman carrying a baby. Her breathing was shallow, as if they had climbed far to reach this place. They sat down opposite us. Once, the baby came loose from her mother’s arms. She crawled to me, pulled my hair, touched my face with her warm, birdlike hands. “No, baby,” the woman said. Her baby made a happy sound, like a cat licking milk, and the woman looked at me with sadness and wonder.

The teenaged boy went away and then returned; I heard the scratch of his footsteps.

It was no longer possible to track the sun, to identify the hours, the nights.

My brother woke in a panic. “Feel my hands,” he mumbled. “See how thin they are?” I held them. “No,” I said, easing him back to sleep. “No.” The baby in the woman’s arm was snoring lightly. I fought to stay awake. “You have to deal with them,” someone said. “Yes. The risk is too great.” “They’re harmless,” the woman said. Someone grunted in dismissal. “But the others —” “The others are not coming.” “We can’t wait. They’ll have to go separately.” The name Chanya touched the air, but maybe it was only my brother’s dreams seeping into me. I heard the dull clicking of bats, small pips, the beat of tiny wings.

“Please, luk,” I said. The term of respect came back without my realizing. He looked up, startled.

“At oy té.”

“Don’t leave us behind.”

“No one will get left behind.”

“You’re frightening me,” I whispered.

Ignoring me, he opened his krama and removed some crabs and a handful of rice. He offered this food to the woman and the teenager. They began to eat. The woman took a portion from what she had and brought it to us. In my mouth, the little crabs had serrated edges, it hurt to chew, but I could feel the blood flowing in me again, a quickened pulsing.

When the food was gone, they rose to their feet.

“Come,” the man said, turning to us, his expression lost in the shadows. “It’s time to leave.”

We stood. My brother began washing his face in the water that slid along the walls, and then I, too, did the same. In his eyes I saw my own fear, my own acceptance.

The man walked first, and then the woman, myself, Sopham, and the teenaged boy. Every moment, I expected to hear voices, the release of the safety, the word Angkar. Instead, I smelled the sweetness of leaves, of roots, of the wet earth. The man disappeared through a narrow mouth of the cave walls. On the other side, I saw a soldier in army fatigues holding a green helmet in his hands. Without speaking, the soldier hid us in a nearby truck, underneath sacks of rice. The teenaged boy didn’t come with us, he faded back into the opening of the cave. The truck shuddered into life, time seemed to contract and expand. I pulled one of the bags open, fed the grains into my mouth, held them there until they disintegrated. I willed myself to feel nothing, neither fear nor hope, only the jolting road beneath us, the weight of the burlap sacks. Twice, the vehicle was stopped. Both times, I heard men speaking Vietnamese, low voices followed by gaps of silence. Nobody searched the truck. We continued on.

Finally, the sacks were removed and what I saw seemed impossible, the night sky and a thousand stars burning. The woman and the child were bundled away down another road. “Are you ready?” the man asked us. We didn’t know what to say, who to believe. “It’s time for us to leave,” he said. The soldier gave us biscuits, noodles, dried fish, a few cans of milk, and water, and then we climbed into a small wooden boat. It ferried us to another boat that waited, anchored in the sea. Inside was a shallow cargo hold filled with many people, many families, who watched us descend, their faces etched with fear. The man spoke to them in Vietnamese. He told us that these people had been waiting several days; already, they were running out of water.

We took turns lying down, first my brother and I, then the man, who told us to call him Meng. Above us, slats of wood had been removed and we could see up into the sky.

My last image of Cambodia was of darkness, it was the sound of nearly forty mute wanderers, of silent prayers. I closed my eyes. My father told me how Hanuman had crossed the ocean, how he had gone into another life. Look back, my mother said, one last time. I followed her through our twilit apartment, walked in the shade of my father, past bare walls and open windows, the noise of the street pouring in. Between us, she said, I had known love, I had lived a childhood that might sustain me. I remembered beauty. Long ago, it had not seemed necessary to note its presence, to memorize it, to set the dogs out at the perimeter. I felt her in the persistent drumming of water against the boat’s hull. Guard the ones you love, she told me. Carry us with you into the next life.

Exhausted, holding tight to my brother, we set out across the sea.

Our time in the boat was infinite. One long night that battered on and on until the food was gone and the water drained away. Meng, ever watchful, would take my hands. Gently, he would massage my fingers and my cupped palms, telling me that soon, any day now, we would arrive.

He showed us a photo of a smiling man in an oversized floral shirt and dark slacks. This was his younger brother, Sann. They had hidden in the caves together and then his brother had gone ahead with his wife and sons, using the same smugglers, arriving finally off the coast of Malaysia. The smugglers had given Meng this photograph. “To reassure me,” Meng said, “and to raise the price.”

“Do you come from the city?” I asked him, trying to see Phnom Penh, to hold it once more in my mind’s eye.

“I was born there,” he said. “But I lived many lives. Teacher, farmer, soldier.”

“Khmer Rouge?”

He nodded. After a moment, he said, “Your father, what work did he do?”

“He was a translator. Angkar took him away.” I didn’t know how to continue. Hearing the words, I felt defenceless, ashamed. Meng lowered his eyes. Even here, in the crowded boat, he tried to shelter us, to give us space to breathe.

I curled on my side and watched my brother sleep. All the time he asked for water. “There is the tap,” he said, half-dreaming. “But look, nothing comes out. I twisted it all the way around but there’s no water, no water anywhere.”

That morning, Meng paid the fishermen and they let us up into the open air. Sopham and I climbed out of the hold, clinging to the sides of the boat. We were impossibly small. The waves crowded against our ears, muting our thoughts. All was blue, all was noise.

“I saw so many things,” Sopham told me. “One day, I promise, I’ll find a way to tell you everything.”

On the sea, we moved through a turbulent world, forever adrift. Three or four nights passed, but each day, no land appeared on the horizon. On and on we went until the night when the men came. The collision hit like an explosion. Once, these men had been fishermen, but now they were something else, some instinct that has no pity, no name. They robbed us, and then they forced the girls up out of the cargo hold. I remember the sound of crying, a noise like a serrated edge. Minutes passed, hours. I remember crawling between the bodies to the edge of the deck, away from the smell of fuel, but still the men were there. Pulling us back, taunting us. Time stopped. I have no words for what was done. Sopham appeared and we fell into the sea. I fell, I kept falling, and then my body rose to the surface. Still they were behind me, holding me, crossing oceans and continents. Coming into every room, every place, preceding me into my life. I no longer wanted to breathe the air. My brother kept repeating my name. He used his krama to tie my wrist to a piece of floating wood, checking and rechecking the knot. Don’t leave me, I said. The boat withered and dark shapes bent across the water. I tasted salt, dreamed salt. Morning came and it seemed that we were caught on broken glass, countless fragments that turned the light aside. My brother said the guard had gone to sleep, he could go past, he could leave without her waking. I told him that our wandering was over, we had nothing more to be afraid of. The key was gone. I said that I could not bear to be alone. My brother wept. I was not strong enough to hold him. He opened his hands and I watched as the ocean breathed him in.

I saw my wrist and my hand bound to the wood but I no longer recognized it as my own. The knot my brother had tied would not come loose. Inside me, all the feeling went away.

I can taste the faint, distilled light, it rests on my tongue like a coin. I am nearly at the edge of the city. The road gives way to open space, untrodden snow. The northern reach of Boulevard St-Laurent comes to an end and I stand at last at the river. Behind me, trees tower up into the pale sky.

On a park bench, a woman wearing ski gloves is carving letters into the wood. I can hear the hard edges of her blade, like an animal burrowing into the frozen ground. I remember how, in the ocean, the water had become a shining mirror, how the sun had touched everything and left no shade, no chasms. The fishermen who drew me from the water hurried across the sea until, finally, their boat reached land. I remember the sudden, incomprehensible, stillness. One of the men lifted me from the boat and I looked up and saw the high palms, the amber sky. The man who carried me began speaking, words that rustled together, and then I was passed into another person’s arms. They brought me into a house where I was laid down and washed and covered.

Something has turned over in me, broken and come undone. I take my phone and begin dialling Meng’s number. He picks up on the first ring. When he hears my voice, he shouts in joyful surprise. “It’s Mei,” he says to someone, to us both. “It’s Mei!”

Voices rattle behind him. Grandchildren, he tells me, laughing proudly when I ask. “Mes petits canards,” he calls them. One by one, they come to the phone and greet me in high-pitched voices, then my friend returns.

“Meng,” I say finally. “On the boat that night, did you hear them coming?”

In all these years we’ve stayed in touch, I’ve never been able to talk about what happened. He, too, had been pulled from the water and saved. He asks me where I am. I tell him I am at the river, I have walked as far as I can away from the city, I cannot find a way to go any farther.

“No,” he says. His voice is quiet. “I didn’t hear them. Until the very last moment. I never heard them.”

I want to tell Meng that I know too much, I have too many selves and they no longer fit together. I need to know how it is possible to be strong enough. How can a person ever learn to be brave?

“Janie,” he says. “My child.” He says that my parents, my brother, lived their lives. “They wouldn’t want you to fight on and on. To fight even when it’s done.” Long ago, Meng and I had stood together at the water’s edge. “Your daughter is leaving now,” he had said, addressing my ghosts. “Your sister has found a new home. You, too, must walk to your own destiny.” The incense in my hands had left its smoke in the air. The next day I would depart for Canada.

“We have to try again,” he says. “Not just once but many times, throughout our lives.”

I feel as if I am swaying over the river, but that this river, finally, is blind to me. I can see it now for what it is, only a membrane, a way down. Leave me, I think. Let me go.