The Disappeared (10 page)

It is nothing. Just translation.

Who for?

Whoever needs it. Lots of people.

Where?

You answered roughly, Do not keep asking. What I do is what I do. You suffocate me.

I picked up my purse as if to leave. Fuck you, I said.

You said in a soft voice, Oan samlanh, come here. I am only trying to move on. Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

You put your arms around me then. Always your body could melt me, and you knew this and you used this against me.

I said, Do you remember how you were when I first met you? Do you remember how you talked about everything?

You said, We did not talk about everything. You were too young.

I am not young now, I said.

And then you pulled me close. Everything I would forgive you to feel the rough calluses of your fingers against my skin. I was an animal. I could pick up my purse but where in the world could I run to? Out of what despair did you keep your secrets? Out of what fear did I let you? Why did I not make you tell?

I often visited old Chan after you left in the morning. She sat in the doorway very, very still but for the tiny jerks of her head, her trauma’s unique fingerprint. I brought her bags of rice and fresh greens and fish. Her eyes brightened when she saw me.

The boy-soldiers called Chan Grandmother Fertilizer. She did everything to keep the soldiers from executing her family but not one person survived. I sat in the doorway and listened to her. She cooked me pregnancy teas and told me to eat boiled eggs for my baby. On the day I brought her fresh bananas, she let herself talk.

At first the smell of the corpses made me throw up, she said. I had to peel the flesh from the bodies. I had to gather the bones, burn them and make fertilizer from the ashes. I dragged out the bodies and I did not try to take the flesh immediately; the smell was too bad. I did whatever the boy-soldiers wanted. Sometimes at night I made old-fashioned coin treatments on them. Some of them missed their mothers. Whatever they asked I did. All my children and nephews and nieces were killed. My brothers and sisters were killed near a big tree in Po Penh.

Chan knew everyone on your street when you were growing up. She said, I cooked their medicines and shared my food. I
used to listen to Serey singing through the windows. Little Sokha was his shadow. He made Sokha do his chores for him and we laughed at how Sokha wanted to please him. His father was ambitious for them.

She said, The morning Serey left for Montreal his mother’s eyes were sun and cloud. She did not want him to go so far.

I asked, Did you ever see Sokha when it was over?

Chan shook her head, All my children are gone. She looked across the broken road and said, Under Sihanouk, people used to greet each other, How many children have you? Under Lon Nol, people said, Are you well? Under the Khmer Rouge, How much food do you get in your cooperative? Now we say, How many of your family are still alive?

I took her hand and I thought of how you once admitted to me in bed that you wished Chan had disappeared instead of your parents.

As if she could overhear my thoughts Chan said, There is nothing for me here. Nothing I can do. The old monks used to say, One day there will be war; the demons come and blood will rise to the elephant’s stomach.

The tortured stay tortured. After the bodies were cleared, imagine what people had to do. Imagine the stench that clings.

Will, I want to know what he does every day. What happened to your hand?

He was lifting a pitcher of iced tea to fill my glass. We sat at a low table under a big fan in the FCC. Will stretched out his swollen fingers and examined the flesh. He said, Got caught in a dog fight.

He set down the pitcher and scooped out two ice cubes with his other hand. He dropped one into my glass and one into his and after thinking for a long time he said, When people keep secrets it is usually because of shame.

I watched the ice melt.

He said, Imagine what it feels like to come from a place where the tourist attractions are cases of skulls. This guy said to me up at Angkor Wat, Would you want your mother’s skull displayed for some stranger to see? What country displays skulls? What use to bring up the past? It will make people want revenge.

I watched the clear morning light on Will’s face and said, But to end impunity is not revenge. It is a call for justice.

Will said, That’s foreign talk.

Is it?

Can you tell me how people feel after, when you first come in and start digging?

Will stared at my face but he was not looking at me. My ice cube disappeared into the tea.

Numb, he said.

Then he shifted in his chair, said, No one speaks of the stench and the rotting and the decay after. Flies spin in green swarms, settle in heaps on broken glass and broken walls, crawl through cracks, buzz horribly at dawn. Maggots are thick as men’s fingers. Rats are bloated with human flesh. The last moving things at night are a handful of stars and the scatter of vermin. People are numb.

But they have to go on. There are convoys of trucks with foreign writing on the sides:
UNICEF, OXFAM, CROIX ROUGE
. They hauled in rice from Kompong Som and Vietnamese soldiers squatted on the roadsides smoking. There are rumors. People said, Pol Pot arrested his own father for eating a piece of sugar palm and forced him to work in a minefield and he was blown up. People said, He might be coming back. He is still alive gathering a new army on the Thai border. The bridges were gone. The roads were bombed. Everywhere people were starving and trying to walk home. The idea was just to get home. Two million people died. Imagine walking down your street at home and every seventh neighbor dead.

He looked at me, said, Imagine the first real laughter again. Imagine the first time the eyes smile again.

We watched two Australians come through the door with backpacks, drop them on the floor beside the bar and order two beers. I said, I don’t understand why you are counting now.

Will said, At first no one really knew what they were doing. Body counters opened a massacre site, measured its perimeter and depth, calculated how many average sized bodies would fit and made their guesses. They did not know about swelling and collapsing and escaping gases. How long the bodies had been there was a crude guess. There were so many massacre sites, Kampong Speu, Prey Veng, Kampong Cham. Now there are better counts: three hundred and nine mass graves, seven sites with thirty to seventy thousand bodies each, twenty-seven sites with ten thousand bodies or more, one hundred and twenty-five sites with a thousand bodies or more. They are in temples and school yards and the jungle. I ask myself, What is the meaning of these numbers?

He studied my face.

I did not know. I imagined the school yard near my father’s house. I tried to imagine a thousand bodies there, or seventy thousand. I tried to imagine being left for dead in a mass grave under my father’s body, or Berthe’s.

Will straightened, said, By the time I got here the graves were disturbed. Pigs, dogs, wild animals, looting, flooding. Peasants went looking for the gold they thought city people took to their graves. People scattered the bones. Or collected them and put them in stupas, or covered them up again. It is hard to get good information. My team went to Laa village and there was this peasant woman who was good at healing. She said she never saw any killing. But one day during Pol Pot time she snuck back to check on her house and her well was full of dead bodies. She covered it with dirt and when the killing was over she moved home and planted a coconut tree on the well but it fell over because the earth was heaving. Too many bodies below. She kept filling the well with dirt and garbage until finally the gases were
gone and the worms had done their work and the earth settled. Then she planted a papaya. She said she had bad dreams if she forgot to honor the dead. Her husband said that she had been rewarded for her devotion because she had twice dreamed the numbers of winning lottery tickets. I asked if our team could count the bodies in the well, but she said, Let me think this over.

Old secrets get people in trouble. She did not tell us that her husband had already been down there looking for gold and he only got a few gold teeth. The translator told us the husband said there were twenty-seven skulls in there. When we came back the next morning the old woman burned sticks of incense on the well and she told us that the victims had appeared in her dreams and approved the digging.

She said, Please give me money to hire monks to say prayers over the well.

Our team leader said, We will pay the monks ourselves.

Then Will leaned back, Fuck. They had to fill up the wells and plant again or they would starve. Everything eats everything else. In Kampong Cham people eat intestines and frogs and spiders and fish paste as they have for generations. Here the foreigners go to the Deauville restaurant and eat pâté de foie gras as they have for generations.

He smiled and raised his hands, No one thinks about how all this food is at the top of a food chain fertilized with human flesh. But we gotta eat.

I tossed a balled-up napkin at him and said, I still want to know what Serey is doing when he says he’s going to work. And he has never told me what happened to his family.

Will sat forward, crossed his arms on the table, said softly, To know him you need to understand this place.

The torturers of Tuol Sleng complained of working long hours, of fatigue. They confessed that it was difficult to prevent themselves from killing in a temper. But they did not complain of the violence. They said, If we did not kill, we would be killed.

You did not want to come with me to Tuol Sleng, Street 103, the hill of the poison tree.

I said, If you do not come I am going anyway. But I want you to come with me.

You said, No use.

Borng samlanh, come. I want to know what you know.

I put my arms around you and you let me and you said, You smell so good.

Tuol Sleng is raw.

It is easy to imagine this place transformed from museum back to extermination center in an hour. Everything left as it was. Burned walls. Bloodstained floors. Metal bed frames and shackles and electrical wires. A barrel of water to submerge a head. People walk over the courtyard graves before they know what they are walking on. There are hand-drawn signs, concrete block rooms, walls of photographs and glass cases of skulls. Paintings of the tortures, fingernails pulled out, men lying in
rows on the classroom floors, shackled at the ankles, prisoners beaten and left in tiny cells. The eyes of those whose names disappeared stare from the walls. Their spirits are unprayed for because any family that might have prayed for them is dead. Five thousand photographs of the dead of Tuol Sleng. Each picture refuses anonymity. Boy number 17. He has no shirt and they have safety-pinned his number into his skin. A small woman with the number 17-5-78 pinned on her black shirt stares into the camera and at the bottom of the photo a child’s small hand clings to her right sleeve.

Grief changes shape but it does not end.

It was a hot day and your forehead was damp. You said, When I first got back I came here to see if I could find pictures of anyone I knew. Tien’s whole family disappeared. I never found anyone who knows what happened to them. In the first months people wrote the names of those they recognized on the pictures. I found no picture to write on.

In Tuol Sleng a person is asked to stare. A person is asked to imagine clubbing someone to death, imagine attaching wires to genitalia, pulling a baby by the ankles away from its screaming mother and smashing its head against a tree.

I was numbed by this vision of a human being. I stood beside you and you were so far away that I could not touch you. In Tuol Sleng a person can be torturer or tortured, a person can imagine a Pure system.

The Khmer Rouge said, Better to kill the innocent than to leave one traitor alive. This is the heart of Purity.

When I was writing this, I dreamed an old woman came to me and said, Help me to see into the darkness. In the dream I protested, How?

See the child.

She has a strong jaw, but her eyes are a child’s eyes. Look into the pupils of her eyes. This is a body made vulnerable. This girl is available to wound. She does not even wear a number. She was not even worth a number. This is war. This is the darkness. This child too was murdered in Tuol Sleng.

Only seven prisoners came out alive.

We sat in the sun in the courtyard to rest, trying to feel this day again. I touched your hand and you let me.

It was such a pretty day. Bicycle peddlers sold nuts and ice cream outside the walls. Bells rang for a Buddhist wedding. Two taxi drivers were play-wrestling by the gates; the others stood around them, joking and laughing. One lifted the other upside down and he split his pants wide open. They all turned to see if anyone was watching and when I covered my smile with my hand, they ran away. We listened to them collapsing with laughter behind the walls.

Vann Nath was one of the seven who survived. He was selected to paint pictures and shape busts of Pol Pot. If a bust broke and he had to start again, he buried the pieces of the broken one carefully, to show no disrespect. When he painted Pol Pot’s skin, he dabbed the brush delicately, to show no disrespect. After it was over he began to paint the tortures, the pictures of Tuol Sleng.

I think of Tuol Sleng and I hear Bach’s passion and I hear the thumping rhythms of
Todesfuge
and the chanting of a horrified chorus in
Antigone
. I hear a voice cry out in anguish, If this
is a man? Human cruelty turned into a note of music, the rhythm of a sentence. Men have invented a word for this. They call it sublime.