by Paul Yoon
They were already approaching the far bank when one of the shell casings loosened and the raft tipped, deep enough so that one end dipped into the water, and she watched as Touby, who was closest to the edge, began to lose his balance and fall. She stepped down into the river, holding her breath, but just then the father reached for Touby’s rucksack and held him.
The raft tilted back up, and then they were across.
“Forty seconds,” the woman behind Auntie said.
Together they watched as everyone scrambled to collect the branches on the other side and hide the boat and themselves. Then, on this side of the bank, the woman and Auntie did the same, lowering themselves onto the ground. The cool earth on her chest.
They heard the patrol rounding the bend. The light panning over them. She waited for the engine noise to fade and then, slowly, carefully, they began to remove the branches that were covering them.
She turned to the woman and said, “Set up a meeting.”
She meant with the others who were scattered across these mountains, hiding.
The woman wondered if it was too dangerous, but Auntie pretended not to hear.
“Is this about the doctor?” the woman said.
It was always about the doctor, she almost said, and was briefly convinced that she had in fact said this, though she wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t something she believed—had ever thought about until now—and yet the words skipped across inside her like a flat stone over the river.
The sun was starting to crest the high opposite ridge, clarifying their surroundings. The woman told her they should go, that the others had already gone. All they could hear was the rush of the current now.
Three minutes.
Auntie glanced across and then wiped the dirt from her trousers, noticing for the first time the pinprick of dried blood near her pocket from yesterday.
PRANY (1977)
They were released.
For the first time in seven years, they stood outside in the courtyard of the reeducation center. They looked across at the gate. They remembered none of this. The flagpole and the towers. The cameras. Prany counted the sentries in the towers. Six. He heard the rattle of keys as the guard behind him, wearing a green uniform, undid his handcuffs. Then the guard undid Vang’s. They rubbed their free wrists. Vang made fists with his hands.
Prany dug the soles of his new shoes into the dirt. He watched Vang’s hands and then he turned to see the building from where they had exited. It was an old factory. The same color stone as the walls. The flag flapped in the wind. The sun on him. All that blue sky. His neck was stiff. He knew that if they were forced to run right now, his legs might buckle. Not because he was weak, but because in this moment, in the new environment, out in the open, his entire body felt uncertain.
It was early. A different guard wearing a short-brimmed hat stepped out from the balcony above them and lit a cigarette. A rifle was slung behind him. His figure tall against the sky. He tapped his cigarette and the ash fell, already cold by the time it hit Prany’s shoulders. The guard tried again, aiming at Prany’s face.
Prany pretended not to notice. He couldn’t stop looking at the sky. From inside came the faint noise of an announcement on the loudspeakers. Then he caught the sounds that had kept them company through the years: the hum of the electrical wires outside the cells, the footsteps in the small rear yard where they were able to play a bit of soccer, and during the monsoons feel the rain on them.
The birds. He remembered the shock of hearing one, unable to recall the last time he had. It was almost enough to get him through the week. He had once stopped in the field where he had been forced to work, listening to it, not caring that in ten seconds he would be punished for stopping. Then the desire to see the bird had driven him insane.
Someone was playing soccer now. He caught the sound of a ball bouncing, waited for another. An hour ago, they had signed documents pledging loyalty to this country. They had been brought to a concrete room where there was a long, wooden desk and two chairs across from each other. A portrait of the prime minister was hanging on the wall. Then a man they had never seen before, wearing an ill-fitting suit, came in, sat on the chair below the portrait, and gestured for Prany to take the other.
Prany was unused to the grip of a pen. He wrote slowly, watching the ink appear and bleed, forming his name. A part of him was stunned he still knew how to write it. He had never learned how to read or to write, had hardly ever considered language as something visible, but from Vang they had learned how to write their names one night at the farmhouse, all of them unable to sleep. Vang by a desk with three legs, the other built of books, and the three of them taking turns writing on a damp page in his notebook, in candlelight, the ink smearing as they ignored the sound of the distant bombers.
Years after that night, in their cell one day, he wondered out loud where the notebook was, and Vang, pausing, replied, “I never had a notebook.”
That was the first time Prany began to doubt his memories.
In the room, Prany asked the official in the suit across from him what day it was. The official seemed surprised.
They knew months and years. They didn’t trust days.
The officer said, “Today is Wednesday, the second of February, 1977.”
It suddenly occurred to Prany he couldn’t recall how his sister wrote her name, would not have been able to identify her handwriting among a thousand others.
“When did I come in?” Prany said.
The guard behind him reached for Prany’s neck and slammed him down against the desk. Prany clutched the pen. Immediately, his nose began to bleed. His nose often bled. He snorted it up as hard as he could and swallowed his blood and wiped his lips with his tongue. The official was looking at him as though Prany had asked him whether he owned sheep.
“You came in on the tenth of January, 1970. Both of you did. You were at one of those decrepit mountain camps. All of you, how many were there? One hundred? Hiding like mice in your huts with your ten bullets and rusty rainwater. You couldn’t even farm. So malnourished you were probably dying and didn’t know it. All that, because of what? You lost. We are not animals. We would have taken care of you. We did take care of you.”
Behind him, Vang, silent, was leaning against the wall beside the guard.
“We’re approaching the next decade,” Prany said.
“Yes. Quite.”
“How’s it going so far?”
From behind, he heard the guard step toward him again, but the official waved him away. The man took off his glasses and cleaned them slowly, looking across at Vang, whose own glasses were covered in so many scratches he could hardly see through them.
“A new decade for you, too,” the man said. “Your age.”
“That’s right. A new decade for me.”
“That’s lovely,” the man said. “A fresh start.”
“Yes,” Prany said. “A fresh start.”
“How many men are given that in life? It is a gift. To start again. To have that chance. You are now a member of this society, men of this society, both of you, and you get to contribute to its success. What a gift.”
Only then did the man reach across and take back the pen. It was as though he were waiting to see what Prany would do with it. Prany had done nothing. He watched the man tap it on the edge of the desk and consider Prany. Tap, tap, tap.
He then took out a file and confirmed their relocation and new postings at a village in Luang Prabang. From a sheet he read to them that they would report to the administrative office tonight. There was a temporary room in a house that they could stay in for the week. It had all been arranged. This was also a great gift for them: to be together, given that they were not related. Others were not so lucky, he said.
“As you have learned, our country is rich in natural resources and we should develop them. Under the old regime we were not working hard enough, yes? How could we under such oppression and disorder? So dysfunctional were we over the years
, corrupted by and reliant on the Japanese, the French, the Americans. All these people always crossing our borders, claiming to want to help us. Liberate us. But now, here, all of us, look at us now. We broke that cycle. We freed you. We taught you how to be self-sufficient. We taught you how to grow food if you didn’t know how. We taught you how to build fish ponds. To raise pigs and chickens. You worked this land. Every day, you worked this land. This center, as far back as it goes, was your land. You helped us, and you helped yourselves. It is all wonderful. Now you will be self-sufficient. You will use all this knowledge to help your village. And then your village will help others. You will, together, collectively, be hardworking and clean and pure. You will prosper from your education these past years, and you will think on this day as the first in your new life and be grateful to us.”
“You’re very generous today,” Prany said, and this time the man leaned across and gripped Prany’s left hand, crushing the fingers hard, pulling him across the desk. Prany stifled a scream.
“The party and government’s intelligence is clear and bright,” the official said. “All praise, all praise, all praise.”
Vang quickly repeated the words and then, after a pause, Prany, breathing between his teeth, said them, too: “The party and government’s intelligence is clear and bright: all praise, all praise, all praise.”
The official let go. For the first time, he addressed Vang: “I am actually feeling quite generous today. But you’ll have to keep an eye on this one. In fact, if he gets into any trouble, it’s you we’ll come for, yes? Do you understand? He’s your responsibility now.”
The official looked down at the file.
“Doctor,” he said. “Yes. Quite. Sorry, no doctor postings available.”
He chuckled and gave them their new papers. He also slid over a set of clothes for them that smelled harshly of chemicals. Then the official stood, congratulating them on their reeducation, and wished the two of them good health, good work, and long, peaceful lives.
Now, in the courtyard, a van pulled up. The guard on the balcony went inside. Prany held on to a head cushion and climbed up after Vang did. The windows had been blacked out. The divide between their seats and the front had been walled up as well, so that they were blind as they drove across the courtyard, the van bouncing slightly as they left through the gate.
Without turning, Vang spoke to Prany softly, the way they were used to doing. He was whispering in French. On the second day, using a hammer, they had broken the bones of the doctor’s fingers first, wanting names of CIA officers. Wanting the location of Hmong fighters. And a woman they called “Auntie.” Then they broke Prany’s fingers.
Vang’s recovered. Prany lost the use of his left hand.
“The dates,” Vang said. “In that room. Why did you want to know the dates?”
The van bounced again as they turned onto a smoother road. The driver sped. In the dark, Prany could hear only the air. He watched the quick shadows in the thin space along the bottom of the side door. He had forgotten about speed. The speed of a vehicle. He grew light-headed again. He fought it by breathing deeply.
In the prison, after the first three years, they had mostly left Prany alone, but they had kept returning to Vang. They called him the pretty doctor. The men would lift him by his arms and drag him down the hall, barefoot, to where the interrogator was waiting for him, and he would be gone for an hour. Prany couldn’t hear him. He couldn’t hear anything. He counted the seconds to distract himself and to time how long he was alone. In that hour, it was the complete silence that terrified them.
Vang asked him again. “Why did you want to know the dates?”
Prany said that he wanted to hear someone other than themselves say it out loud. The months, the years. He asked if Vang understood. This doctor, whom he had now known for a decade and who had kept practicing French with him in the cell as a thread of sanity.
Vang, whom he would never see again after today.
“Stay focused,” Vang said. “We’re out.”
The doctor mimed punching the ceiling a few times, his arms like pistons, restless as they sped across the smoothness of a paved highway. The wind grew louder. The engine.
Seven years. Prany was twenty-five. Vang was almost forty.
They had no idea where they were.
* * *
They were dropped off at a bus station near Vang Vieng. It didn’t matter anymore, but he had timed how long they had been in the van and wondered if they had been kept somewhere in the north, near the Chinese border.
There was a time when Prany used to spend all day attempting to orient himself by the shape of a far slope, the temperature during the colder months. The wind and the weather, or the flight path of a bird—a bird! This need for a compass. The delirium of it. He would have offered his other hand to simply know.
When the van door opened, unaccustomed to the daylight, Prany was still unsure of where he was, whether he was in fact still in Laos. He almost wept. It wasn’t because he recognized the bus station. He had never seen it before. It was simply because they hadn’t been taken back, that the building was different from the buildings of the prison.
And because they were still in Laos.
“Take the first bus,” the guard in the passenger seat said. “Wait at the bench. Good health.” And then the van drove away, leaving the two of them in front of the station, which appeared empty.
Vang knelt to retie his shoes. They had been given matching clothes—white shirts, gray trousers, and black shoes—and they were getting used to them, the feel of them, that smell, the shapes. Whose clothes were they wearing? In first imagining and then planning this day, they had been uncertain about the clothes. To them it was a miracle that they had been given anything at all.
They were about two hundred kilometers southwest of Phonsavan. Closer to Vientiane. They lifted their hands for shade, squinting against the brightness as they walked around to the back of the station. In a dirt yard was the shell of what had been a school bus, rusted, propped up on bricks. Behind it, two small billboards that had probably been intended for the roadside were stacked against the wall: the first was an illustration of an elephant carrying felled logs through a forest; the other depicted a woman repairing a chair.
No one came. But Vang kept a lookout as Prany opened the lid of a trash container. He didn’t spot the box at first. He saw only the garbage and some rotten fruit and rice and his heart began to beat quickly as he wondered if something had happened. If something had gone wrong.
But it was there, farther below: the black shoe box, like they were promised.
He flipped it open. Inside, there was a thick envelope of money and a small hunting knife, the blade folded into the metal handle. A stray dog appeared, sniffing their shoes, his nose following the scent of the garbage. Prany reached into the garbage container again and tossed the dog a handful of the fruit and rice. Then he passed the money and the knife to Vang and together they returned to the front of the station and waited.
They waited standing in the quiet, with a mountain range in the east and a village to the north, a small collection of rooftops by the river. They were distracted by the vast emptiness. There were no buses, no one on the road. There was only the mountain. The distance.
Then, from the road, an old man appeared, crossing the lot and sitting on the bench near the front entrance of the station. He was wearing similar clothes as them, and they waited to see if he would try to speak to them, but he didn’t. He lifted up his sleeve as though he had a watch and scratched a knuckle in a way that made Prany suddenly remember a girl he had met in a southern town. He had convinced her to ride a rickshaw he had stolen for an hour to try to make some money. This was during a lull in the fighting during a heavy, rainy season. Her profile in the rearview and the scent of her in the back as she kept reaching over his shoulder, her money grazing his ear as she told him to keep going.
Where did they go? Prany tried to remember. He and Vang hadn’t m
oved from the station entrance. He was tired. They were both so tired. Shy of the new landscape. This new world. Still afraid. The way the feeling was there like a contrail as they kept gazing out at the horizontal distance. How nothing came up from behind the ridgeline, how in five minutes nothing in the landscape had altered. How there was no sound other than the wind. The gait of the dog and the dust.
“Shall we walk?” Prany said.
They could. In their plan, they had talked about saving their energy, but it wasn’t far. Prany suddenly wanted to walk forever. He thought he could. He paced a little. He could feel his heart. Together, they tracked a bird in the air. How many birds did they end up watching? He had witnessed the doctor grow older. Gray was starting in his hair. In his memory of the man, there was only this face now, not the one that would lean so close to the keyboard of the piano that they thought he was going to disappear into it.
Prany remembered now. Eventually, he took the girl to a ceremony a relative of hers was hosting. She got out without looking at him and then, to his surprise, took his wrist and made him follow her up a hill. They entered a landscape he had never seen: a high field, unbroken by the war, domed in suspended candlelit lanterns hanging from poles. It was as though he had stumbled upon that other world the shamans claimed they had access to. There was a small crowd and the shaman was standing at the center. The girl he had driven took the string the crowd gave her and bound her wrist and then bound the rest of the string to Prany’s. They were all bound, the entire crowd. And then they approached the shaman, who flung the smoke of incense over them.
He came back never knowing what they were celebrating or wishing for, just that they had been bound, him with those strangers and the girl, and that they had been blessed. Still in the echo of it as Alisak and Noi slept by a river. He had stopped on the way and bought as many pears from a peddler as he could carry, the fruit spilling from his arms. They never noticed he was gone. Only the new scent on him, the incense and the girl’s perfume of herbs and flowers.
