How can Serey keep studying and take care of his younger brother?
Sokha said to you, I pretended I could not read. Our leaders said, Reading and writing are unnecessary for the proper cultivation of the earth. Angka is correct, bright and wonderful. I was put in a kang chhlop band to spy. We hid under the floors of stilt houses and listened and reported. I was glad I had no parents to report on. Angka said, Your brigade is the hope of the nation. We repeated, We are the hope of the nation. We sang:
We the children have the good fortune to live the rest of our time in precious harmony under the affectionate care of the Kampuchean revolution, immense, most clear and shining
.
Their words were burned into him. Sokha repeated phrasesyou had never heard: Live or die for the greatness of the revolution. Expel all enemies.
Who were enemies?
Those who spoke a foreign language. Those who played music. Those who read and studied. City people. Monks.
Sokha told you he took a message from his unit into the wat behind his camp. In the yard a woman was tied, naked from the waist up, just out of reach of her baby who cried for her breast. The child was not strong enough to sit up, and she could not bend close enough to let him suckle. The woman whispered to Sokha, Help my baby.
A soldier shouted, Move on! Do not worry about her. She will soon be summoned to the mountain.
The revolutionary initiative is self mastery
.
There was no radio, no news from outside the forest. The soldiers’ way was the only way.
You said to me, While these things were happening to Sokha, I was playing in a band and making love with a sixteen-year-old girl.
Angka never makes a mistake
.
It had been a long time since Sokha slept in a room with a door and a roof. You gave him a toothbrush and he had to learn again how to use it. He had to learn again to smile, with his lips, with his eyes. He was tempted by forgotten smells, clean rain, clean skin. But inside his nostrils the air stank of corpses and burning hair and diarrhea. Iron in his soul.
Better to kill an innocent person than to leave an enemy alive
.
37
I see your long silence as I see war, an urge to conquer. You used silence to guard your territory and told yourself you were protecting me. I was outside the wall, an intoxicating foreign land to occupy. I wondered what other secrets you guarded. Our disappeared were everywhere, irresistible, in waking, in sleeping, a reason for violence, a reason for forgiveness, destroying the peace we tried to possess, creeping between us as we dreamed, leaving us haunted by the knowledge that history is not redeemed by either peace or war but only fingered to shreds and left to our children. But I could not leave you, and I could not forget, and I did not know what to do, and always I loved you beyond love.
38
The first day of the evacuation of Phnom Penh your family moved only a half kilometer from home, the crowds were so big. Sokha could still see your front door when night fell and he begged your father to let him run back to sleep in his bed. Your father covered his mouth. He said, We will go to Sras Srang and you will sleep in your grandparents’ house. Sokha slept in the backseat of the car beside your grandmother. At dawn the soldiers demanded the car and everyone got out except your grandmother. A soldier yelled at your father to give him the keys and he said, Bawng, let us keep it to push my wife’s mother in. She is old.
The soldier looked in, said, She is Vietnamese, and he shot her. Your mother screamed and reached for her and the soldier shot her too. Your father grabbed Sokha and whispered, Do not stand up even if they call you, and he threw him into a ditch of tall grasses. The soldiers yelled at your father, Where is the boy? and your father pointed to the opposite side of the road. Then the soldiers shot your father and ran in the direction he pointed. Sokha lay all day in the grass and
Sokha said to you, I pretended I could not read. Our leaders said, Reading and writing are unnecessary for the proper cultivation of the earth. Angka is correct, bright and wonderful. I was put in a kang chhlop band to spy. We hid under the floors of stilt houses and listened and reported. I was glad I had no parents to report on. Angka said, Your brigade is the hope of the nation. We repeated, We are the hope of the nation. We sang:
We the children have the good fortune to live the rest of our time in precious harmony under the affectionate care of the Kampuchean revolution, immense, most clear and shining
.
Their words were burned into him. Sokha repeated phrasesyou had never heard: Live or die for the greatness of the revolution. Expel all enemies.
Who were enemies?
Those who spoke a foreign language. Those who played music. Those who read and studied. City people. Monks.
Sokha told you he took a message from his unit into the wat behind his camp. In the yard a woman was tied, naked from the waist up, just out of reach of her baby who cried for her breast. The child was not strong enough to sit up, and she could not bend close enough to let him suckle. The woman whispered to Sokha, Help my baby.
A soldier shouted, Move on! Do not worry about her. She will soon be summoned to the mountain.
The revolutionary initiative is self mastery
.
There was no radio, no news from outside the forest. The soldiers’ way was the only way.
You said to me, While these things were happening to Sokha, I was playing in a band and making love with a sixteen-year-old girl.
Angka never makes a mistake
.
It had been a long time since Sokha slept in a room with a door and a roof. You gave him a toothbrush and he had to learn again how to use it. He had to learn again to smile, with his lips, with his eyes. He was tempted by forgotten smells, clean rain, clean skin. But inside his nostrils the air stank of corpses and burning hair and diarrhea. Iron in his soul.
Better to kill an innocent person than to leave an enemy alive
.
37
I see your long silence as I see war, an urge to conquer. You used silence to guard your territory and told yourself you were protecting me. I was outside the wall, an intoxicating foreign land to occupy. I wondered what other secrets you guarded. Our disappeared were everywhere, irresistible, in waking, in sleeping, a reason for violence, a reason for forgiveness, destroying the peace we tried to possess, creeping between us as we dreamed, leaving us haunted by the knowledge that history is not redeemed by either peace or war but only fingered to shreds and left to our children. But I could not leave you, and I could not forget, and I did not know what to do, and always I loved you beyond love.
38
The first day of the evacuation of Phnom Penh your family moved only a half kilometer from home, the crowds were so big. Sokha could still see your front door when night fell and he begged your father to let him run back to sleep in his bed. Your father covered his mouth. He said, We will go to Sras Srang and you will sleep in your grandparents’ house. Sokha slept in the backseat of the car beside your grandmother. At dawn the soldiers demanded the car and everyone got out except your grandmother. A soldier yelled at your father to give him the keys and he said, Bawng, let us keep it to push my wife’s mother in. She is old.
The soldier looked in, said, She is Vietnamese, and he shot her. Your mother screamed and reached for her and the soldier shot her too. Your father grabbed Sokha and whispered, Do not stand up even if they call you, and he threw him into a ditch of tall grasses. The soldiers yelled at your father, Where is the boy? and your father pointed to the opposite side of the road. Then the soldiers shot your father and ran in the direction he pointed. Sokha lay all day in the grass and
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