The Disappeared (14 page)

I said, Which home?

My aching breasts. The hot wind in the sidecar. You stopped by the shrine under the tree near Independence Monument, put some fruit there and said without looking at me, I have been working for the opposition, samlanh. I am sorry you found out this way. I wanted to tell you.

When our eyes met I saw in yours a light that did not seek me. You had a driven look I recognized, a look that still desires to be loved, that tolerates no obstacle, that bargains. You said, This is a disheveled country. I want to go away with you but I cannot bring myself to leave. What have I done?

I pushed your hand away and said, You know what you are doing. Do not pretend you are sorry.

We will try again. I will be all right. Don’t worry.

I did not want to leave without you. I did not want to stay. You wrapped your arms around me and I let you, and you
whisper-sang and I was melting all over again, listening to the voice I loved in front of a shrine I did not believe in, our Eros tangled into loss and grief. And I wondered who you were and we were fallen, fallen.

Mau came to our room with Ary. She wore a plain wrapped skirt and white cotton blouse and she entered without making a sound on the floor, not looking at anything but me. Mau hung back in the door frame and I pulled myself up in bed. I asked, How are Nuon, Voy?

Ary was already at my bedside and gently she said, Very naughty. We brought you special tea, very good for you.

Mau gave her sharp directions in a muttered, rapid Khmer I could not understand. She poured the tea from a thermos and placed it on a small table beside the bed and then Mau spoke and she picked it up and held it to my lips. Her hands were cool. I took the cup and held it myself and she swept the room and straightened the sheets. She kept her back to her husband and sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed my hair and wiped my face with a cool cloth and took my hands in hers. Her eyes held mine and she said softly in Khmer, Soon you will feel better. You crossed the river too soon but you will try again. A woman is strong.

Her eyes held my grief, and her body gathered in my pain and knit it into herself as if she were an old marsh creature weaving baskets from rushes.

Our dead daughter’s tiny face. Your mouth. Your eyes. I have lost some of memory’s shards but not this one.

The Phnom Penh where you disappeared was corrupt as hell. Anyone could buy a pillowcase of dope for twenty dollars, or a girl or a boy for the price of a meal. Judges made judgments after they received an envelope. Police gave tickets after the bribe.

Easter, March 31. Elections coming. Truckloads of armed soldiers roared through the streets. Foreigners retreated into their apartments and to the airports. Some leaders were talking this thing, democracy, and expatriates with their pasty skin and their money and their partial understandings were again chirping unfamiliar words, free-and-fair, in different languages. They talked about observing elections but no one saw the village meetings after dark when people were told how to vote and people who asked questions were beaten, killed. Foreigners said, Keep the eyes of the world here, but the people knew that borders and banks close and foreigners leave and wires are cut and bodies disappear and the thirst for power spreads like the odor of rotting, terrifying everyone into obedience. A man with a gun can force a child to kill. No one can force compassion. But it can be extinguished.

Easter Sunday. A speech at the National Assembly.

Ordinary people came to hear the opposition. People showed peculiar courage, by gathering, by listening, seduced by the possibility of a different life. They walked in front of guns. They stood out in the open. Prime Minister Hun Sen, peering from his one good eye, was irked. It was time to shave a few strokes off the golf score.

You should have known. I loved your eyes in the mornings. When you left me that morning you said, See you later. Why were you there? The place was surrounded by B40 rocket launchers. It backed onto Hun Sen’s house.

Sopheap pushed her noodle stand to the edge of the gathering. Her baby slept in a sling on her back and she held her toddler’s hand. People in crowds were always hungry after speeches. She could make good money here. Sam Rainsy stood on a wooden chair and talked about the future. He wore a suit and a yellow tie and a man behind his chair started applause after each important phrase. The bodyguard stood at his right shoulder and his followers clustered in front of him waving light and dark blue flags.

Oppose corruption, said Sam Rainsy. Stop bribes. Stop beatings. Create a better country for your children.

Sopheap gave her little girl a piece of sugarcane to chew so she could listen to the leader. Peaceful. Then: pop. The center of the crowd fell flat to the ground but those who did not recognize the sound of the pin pulled from a grenade did not drop fast enough. Their bodies took the ragged metal disks. Shrapnel cut off feet, sliced through calves, cracked knees.

Before the second grenade, a bodyguard knocked Sam Rainsy off his chair and covered him up and died from the
explosion. Pop. People crumpled like marionettes with cut strings.

Pop. Factory workers on the west side of the crowd got it.

Pop. Sopheap and her baby and her toddler chewing sugarcane and the other street vendors with their noodles and cigarettes and buns at the back of the crowd were tossed up into the air beside their splintering carts. Sopheap’s baby was blown out of her hands and her toddler was flung backward and shrapnel sliced into Sopheap’s chest. Her noodle stand exploded into handfuls of toothpicks and everything fell in slow motion back to the earth.

The injured lay with the dead, and after the first shocked silence, low moaning. Then tiny movements, an arm, a finger. Voices pled for help and soldiers with guns ordered the weeping onlookers not to touch anyone. The police roped off the area and pulled down the loudspeakers. The dying groaned, Please, please.

A few ambulances came after a long, long time.

The hospital floors were slippery with blood. Workers hosed down halls. People lay on worn mats. I listened to their whispers. We were only listening to a speech, they said. Their bodies were pitted with other people’s skin. Their faces cut. I did not find you. I found Sopheap. Dead. I did not find her baby or her little girl. On the second day in the early morning, I went again. Nothing. On the third day the floors were scrubbed clean and everyone who was at the Easter rally was either dead or silent. I wanted to rub ashes on my face. I saw a young man who looked like you on the street but he was wearing army clothes and carried an AK-47 under his arm. I did not know where to look. I went everywhere: police stations
and political offices and the United Nations and embassies and consulates and army offices. Someone knew. Someone had to tell. I dreamed of blood and boars in forests.

I have money. Where is he?

I fell in love with you, and my whole self became yours— without my wanting or not wanting it. I loved being alone in the dark with you, walking on dark streets heading always to some kind of makeshift bed behind a door that closes. Always we met at the end of the day. Since the first time I made love with you I have never once come to the end of the day and not waited for you to be there. Waiting for me. Standing at my door. On the street. Inside my room. At the station. This feeling all through the days that we were together and the years that we have been apart. Each day I imagined you because if I did not, joy would vanish. You cannot disappear. Please do not disappear. No one can mend my sorrow. I love what I lost.

I went to look for you at the city wats where they dumped bodies. I saw other bodies. Never yours. Will walked with me on the riverbank, down below the palace where other bodies showed up. We found a young man, in his twenties, jeans stolen, shot through the chest. There was bloating and Will said, Don’t look, you don’t need to see this.

Why don’t I need to see, Will? I see dead bodies on the front pages of newspapers every day. Television is full of dead bodies. But I am not supposed to look at one man lying in front of me, left because the ones who love him are afraid to claim him, because they do not know where he is. Because the government leaves bodies like little notes written in red. Tell me, Will, why should I not look?

Will said, All right. I just thought.

We left the riverbank and went to report the body at the police station. The officer said, He must have suffered an accident.

I said, I am looking for someone else who disappeared from the rally.

He gazed at me and said, This is not possible.

To live I was condemned to hope.

I leaned in close to his ear, said,
I have money
. He was at the grenade attack at the palace. What happened to him?

There was no sign of you at all from the churning sea of blood.

Everyone had interests. To keep the lid on violence. To keep power. To get power. No point to stir up the past, they said. What if leaders want to take revenge? If leaders do not get a correct result from this voting, we will return to Pol Pot times. They said this. People in the opposition began to hide or flee. All nineteen of the opposition newspapers closed. This strange new food called democracy did not taste as the people imagined. How to make democracy from centuries of kings, occupation, war, genocide? Why is this new fresh rice filled with pebbles?

I was on the other side of history. Do not let an angry man wash dishes; do not let a hungry man guard rice.

My only worth was my desire. To find you.

Men called me foolish, stubborn, worthless, naive, foreign, selfish, stupid, a woman. I wanted what I wanted; I claimed my own lucidity.

I have money. What happened to him?

I have remained silent in the chasm between knowledge and silence, between the law and love. It was so easy for the state to silence me, to say, You have no right. Thirty years and I still want to scream in disbelief. No right?

I have money. Where is he?

I slept with the lights on. I slept for an hour and woke and was sleepless again. I lived in the exhaustion of grief.

Rotting fruit at a shrine under a tree. The glint of sunlight on the river. A child holding a baby on her hip in a doorway. I walked and did not know where I had been or how long I had been gone.

I have money. Where is he?

On Bonn Pchum Ben, a day to honor the ancestors, people dress in clean clothes and go to the temples to bring food to the dead. The souls of the dead return each year for food and my little daughter had never tasted food at all. I bought the best bay ben, rice balls filled with coconut and beans and sesame seeds, so that her first taste of food would be delicious, and I went to the temple where she was cremated and slipped off my shoes at the door. I burned a stick of sandalwood incense for her and made my food offering to the monks and then I knelt and said prayers for my daughter in the darkened, sweet smelling gloom, under the gaze of an orange-robed Buddha. Hundreds of candles flickered in the darkness. I did not believe and yet I knelt with all the others and watched the smoke of the incense twist toward the roof. I did not want to leave. I had nowhere to go. I wanted comfort. The end of the rains. I did not believe and yet I was there. I closed my eyes and stayed and prayed in English, the words of my childhood, because that god too was a compassionate god, and I prayed for my mother and I prayed to see you again. And when I opened my eyes and lifted my head I noticed a young monk watching me curiously and I thought, What am I going to do?

In bed that night I woke from another restless sleep, my clitoris erect, my labia filled and swollen. It felt like rain. In the desolate darkness my animal nature begged and I thought, So part of me is still alive but I cannot be alive if you are dead. I lay alone and let my body have its way. And then I fell asleep so deeply that when I woke the sun was halfway toward noon and my body was refreshed. I stretched in the thick heat knowing that my grief was changing shape and I did not feel relief or joy but the emptiness of one who lives on.

Will met me at the FCC most nights for something to eat and he said, You better stop asking around. They told me to warn you. Don’t draw attention to yourself. I am leaving. I am just waiting for my ticket. Come with me. Things cook up out of mild beginnings.

I ran my fingers through my hair and a clump came out in my hands.

Everyone was trying to bury a bit of rice, to hide a little money. Everyone was buying and selling. The streets grew silent and empty and no one knew if the country was collapsing, if everyone would starve again. People hurried to work with their heads down and hastened through the markets. Soon the river would change direction and in great turbulence turn around and flow north. And the long grasses and reeds on the riverbanks hid bodies and there seemed to be no fresh water capable of turning the violence around.

A young soldier slipped into the shadow of a side street beside me and whispered in my ear, I know where he is. Do you have money?

I said, Half now, half after you tell. I unfolded an American
twenty inside my pocket, pulled it out and put it on his palm. He eyed the bill and slipped it into his pocket. He said, They took him to Ang Tasom.

Is he alive?

This is all I know. They took him to Ang Tasom.

Are you telling the truth?

He held his open hand out between us again. His eyes were thin black knives and I could not tell if their glint shone with malice or fear.

I said, That is not much. But I handed him the bill he believed he was owed and he disappeared back into the shadows.