Sokha, Mak? Pa?
When you said Mak he recognized you. Still he could not speak and you already had your arms around him and you whispered, Our grandmother? Our grandparents in Sras Srang?
You felt his thin fingers on your back and his head shaking no against your neck. You said, I have never felt another body like this on mine. He was bones and skin, but his heart was beating like a rock against mine. And I never wanted to let him go.
Sokha walked from Battambang, passed piles of bodies along the way. He listened to the incessant buzzing of flies crawling over bodies grotesquely swollen. He no longer saw the blue sky or the struggling blossom, only mats of maggots heaving over human flesh. Each time he saw a new pile of bodies he ran away, but the rotting stench of the dead stained the insides of his nostrils. He startled at smells.
All over Cambodia people startle at cigarette smoke and rotting garbage and gasoline, surrogate odors of torture anddead bodies and bombs. A bad smell makes them jump, as people in other places startle at sudden noises. They call this rumseew, making the brain spin. People suffer stiffness in their necks from jerking in the direction of smells. They suffer from dizziness and nausea and call their discomfort a weak heart.
You said, My brother could not bear the smell of meat cooking.
But the city was trying to pick itself up again. Near the palace and the river, food vendors began to push broken carts along the sidewalks and cyclopousse drivers wired old bikes together. People discovered again the passion of speech. They began to shed the disguises they had used to survive. There were those who could not reveal themselves, the torturers, the prison guards, the soldiers. For them there was no exhilaration in language. Virtue is terror, terror virtue. Without slogans, they found themselves speechless.
36
In the yellow bedroom looking over Bleury Street long ago I had listened eagerly to the cheerful stories of your childhood.
Each New Year your family traveled from Phnom Penh up the river to the temples to visit your father’s parents in Sras Srang. You flew homemade kites with Leap and the village children along the shore of the lake. You scratched messages into the rocks. Monkeys chitta-chitted from the temples and you said that spirits, neak ta, sramay, were everywhere. There was the story of the outdoor cinema. But I think it was your grandparents who went to it, not you. The traveling cinema came to the village with movies from China and Russia, hung a sheet up near the wat, and families brought their own mats.
Your grandfather fought for Lon Nol and he had an ivory Buddha sewed under the skin on his ankle. He let you and Sokha touch the hard bump through the folds of his old skin. He told you about a short film they always played at the beginning of the cinema. It showed a blindfolded rebel just before sunrise. Twelve Sihanouk soldiers raised their guns and shot at him. One soldier had a blank so no one could know the murderer. Every year this short film played before the movie. The blindfolded rebel died over and over, year after year, hishead jerked, the ground splashed with blood, his knees folded beneath him.
You sat up naked in bed to tell this part. You lifted your arms as if you were firing a gun. You put your arms behind your back as if you were the rebel. You fell over dead and I jumped on you and brought you back to life again. Before me, your brother played this game.
You were always first. First to fly a kite, go to school, play an instrument, go abroad. Sokha studied hard in school and your mother praised him. But your father said to him, Are you first like your brother?
Your life and Sokha’s was a single stream that divided around a rock, one part falling into thin air over a precipice and the other meandering along the earth in a different direction.
As war came closer, your mother begged to send Sokha to Montreal but your father said, No!
When you said Mak he recognized you. Still he could not speak and you already had your arms around him and you whispered, Our grandmother? Our grandparents in Sras Srang?
You felt his thin fingers on your back and his head shaking no against your neck. You said, I have never felt another body like this on mine. He was bones and skin, but his heart was beating like a rock against mine. And I never wanted to let him go.
Sokha walked from Battambang, passed piles of bodies along the way. He listened to the incessant buzzing of flies crawling over bodies grotesquely swollen. He no longer saw the blue sky or the struggling blossom, only mats of maggots heaving over human flesh. Each time he saw a new pile of bodies he ran away, but the rotting stench of the dead stained the insides of his nostrils. He startled at smells.
All over Cambodia people startle at cigarette smoke and rotting garbage and gasoline, surrogate odors of torture anddead bodies and bombs. A bad smell makes them jump, as people in other places startle at sudden noises. They call this rumseew, making the brain spin. People suffer stiffness in their necks from jerking in the direction of smells. They suffer from dizziness and nausea and call their discomfort a weak heart.
You said, My brother could not bear the smell of meat cooking.
But the city was trying to pick itself up again. Near the palace and the river, food vendors began to push broken carts along the sidewalks and cyclopousse drivers wired old bikes together. People discovered again the passion of speech. They began to shed the disguises they had used to survive. There were those who could not reveal themselves, the torturers, the prison guards, the soldiers. For them there was no exhilaration in language. Virtue is terror, terror virtue. Without slogans, they found themselves speechless.
36
In the yellow bedroom looking over Bleury Street long ago I had listened eagerly to the cheerful stories of your childhood.
Each New Year your family traveled from Phnom Penh up the river to the temples to visit your father’s parents in Sras Srang. You flew homemade kites with Leap and the village children along the shore of the lake. You scratched messages into the rocks. Monkeys chitta-chitted from the temples and you said that spirits, neak ta, sramay, were everywhere. There was the story of the outdoor cinema. But I think it was your grandparents who went to it, not you. The traveling cinema came to the village with movies from China and Russia, hung a sheet up near the wat, and families brought their own mats.
Your grandfather fought for Lon Nol and he had an ivory Buddha sewed under the skin on his ankle. He let you and Sokha touch the hard bump through the folds of his old skin. He told you about a short film they always played at the beginning of the cinema. It showed a blindfolded rebel just before sunrise. Twelve Sihanouk soldiers raised their guns and shot at him. One soldier had a blank so no one could know the murderer. Every year this short film played before the movie. The blindfolded rebel died over and over, year after year, hishead jerked, the ground splashed with blood, his knees folded beneath him.
You sat up naked in bed to tell this part. You lifted your arms as if you were firing a gun. You put your arms behind your back as if you were the rebel. You fell over dead and I jumped on you and brought you back to life again. Before me, your brother played this game.
You were always first. First to fly a kite, go to school, play an instrument, go abroad. Sokha studied hard in school and your mother praised him. But your father said to him, Are you first like your brother?
Your life and Sokha’s was a single stream that divided around a rock, one part falling into thin air over a precipice and the other meandering along the earth in a different direction.
As war came closer, your mother begged to send Sokha to Montreal but your father said, No!
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