Her Father's Daughter

by Alice Pung

  All the women on the team were unattached because the Black Bandits had severed their attachments at the roots. They had dragged Champey’s husband away one night because he had worked for the former army, and she never saw him again. Champey had been a teacher. She could sing all sorts of songs, even English and French ones. She would sing a song by the Carpenters, with all the sha la la las. The fertiliser team worked outside the village, in the open space. So they used to work and she used to sing, and when there was enough food, sometimes Kuan could forget where he was for a heartbeat. These women, they suspended him in weightless grace for a moment, in a certain unbearable lightness of floating even knowing the fall to come.

  Champey had three living sacks of skin and bone she called her children, who were cast away from her during the day to work in the children’s collective. Champey said that she could just bear it that her kids were thin, but she couldn’t die herself – because if she died, all her children would be dead too. Her priority was to keep herself alive, and she made no apology for it.

  When they were taken from the city and all the artifice was wiped away, women, he found, were much like men. Most of them worked in the fields just as hard. Eventually malnutrition worked its wonders until both genders started to merge into one type of body, one which seemed designed solely to show off the mechanical marvels of the human skeleton. Their kneecaps became wider than their thighs. Most of the men lost their sex drive, the women stopped getting their periods.

  What made a woman a woman? What had made men want to continue the species before the invention of lipstick? Their snug eggshell curves, and the way they could dedicate their bodies to elegant movement even at the worst of times. When he stirred a pot of soup, it was just dumb sinew and muscle making motion. When a young woman stirred a pot of soup, it was a regal arch of the neck, a Khmer royal ballet with the wrists. These women in the fertiliser team were still women.

  He knew that the Black Bandits trusted him to be a decent man. He knew that they would not have sent just any young man out to work alongside such gems. For this he felt proud: as if, although starved and a slave, people still knew he was the type of man whose eyes would never stare, whose hands would never stray.

  ‘Do you know this one? This one we used to sing at school,’ Champey would ask, and begin the first lines of Sur la Mer. The leader of the fertiliser team would try covertly to give her fish that he had caught, but everyone knew what he was doing. Champey wasn’t particularly attracted to yellow-eyed, thick-fingered country men, but she had kids and if his love was getting them fish, who was she to turn him away? Yet the fertiliser team leader was also very proper with Champey. He knew that the penalty for love was death, and he already had a wife.

  It was like that ridiculous Zen story of the man suspended on a cliff, hanging on to a tiny branch with a gaping-jawed tiger beneath, finding a strawberry and savouring its syrup. That was what lust was like in the camp. The Base Men kept falling in love with the girls from the city. There was a Base Man who had a massive stomach. People quietly joked that he was pregnant with a demon. The city girl he fell in love with was all by herself, twenty-five and without a family. He kept helping her and giving her things. Carrying her buckets of water when they threatened to spill. In the end, he told the authorities they wanted to get married, and when the authorities allowed it, it was just as simple as saying that they were married. Afterwards, the older women asked her, ‘How do you have sex with that guy? His stomach is so big it’s like he’s seven months into your pregnancy.’

  But Kuan had also heard about the young Khmer Rouge Base Girl who had fallen in love with a city man. Forgetting that Angkar had as many eyes as a pineapple and could see everything, they had consummated their relationship. One night they were both taken away and smashed.

  *

  The loveliest woman in the collective, Maly, worked on the fertiliser team with him. She had dimples and eyelashes like fans. Each hut on the collective housed four or five families, but her hut was reserved for her and her four-year-old daughter. In front of it was the village chairman’s hut. Her daughter was treated like the child of royalty. Her husband had worked for the former government, so one day he was called away and never returned.

  Maly swapped gold with the Black Bandit hotshots. She would collect gold from the city people and help them trade it for rice and other food. In return for her bartering services, they gave her a small share. The Black Bandits, too, gave her rice and sugar on the sly. She knew that her looks were also a form of currency. Maly was well connected. She knew a bigger hotshot Black Bandit in another village. She visited him a couple of times, and a couple of times Kuan went with her.

  ‘Our family used to own a factory,’ Kuan told her one day as they were both working. He wanted her to find him remarkable. He watched this woman pouring a bucket of shit into a hole to make the wet fertiliser, and she reminded him of a lotus with its roots all clogged with mud, but its head lushly clean.

  Once she asked him to come to her hut during a break. She wanted him to blow a bamboo reed and make music for her. Another time when he came over, she wore a shirt with yellow flowers all over it that was almost see-through. Where on earth she had managed to get a piece of clothing that was not black was beyond him. This woman was searching for calamity. He had to be careful and leave immediately, or who knew what could happen?

  The Economic Distributor was in love with Maly too. Everyone was. The Economic Distributor was the primitive equivalent of a middle manager, responsible for doling out the produce of their commune. He liked music, particularly that of the yangquing, which looked like a harp laid flat and was tapped with wooden mallets. One evening the village chairman asked Kuan to come to his hut and the three of them made music – the Economic Distributor, the chairman and he. They gave a concert for Maly and her little girl.

  There was a bowl in the middle of the hut filled with pieces of sugar-palm rock, which Kuan kept looking at. At that time, at that moment, he coveted the sugar-palm rock more than he desired any woman in the world, but he was too embarrassed to ask for a few pieces. Because his family did not go begging for food, the Black Bandits treated them with a little more respect.

  One day, Maly kept muttering that if anyone made her angry, she would spill their secrets. She screamed that she could reveal who was trading on the black market with her. She would tell each and every one of their names and they would be dead, and she didn’t care.

  Kuan’s heart deadened for a few seconds. Then it started up again, like a dreadful but steady drum crescendo. He had told her that his family had once owned a factory. Would she now go and tell on him?

  But she was not angry with him. She was angry with the Black Bandits. Did they deny her something? Did they ask something of her that she would not do? She thrashed and raged and stormed through that day, until the Black Bandits were aflame too. They thought that she would give them away to their superiors, disclose their illicit trading with the New People.

  The next day, she did not turn up to make fertiliser.

  To the Black Bandits, perhaps it was like killing a dog that had gone feral. When you are about to kill a person, they are no longer themselves. Their face contorts with low animal feelings like stretched-mouth fear and runny-nosed supplication, and that gives you reason enough to kill them. The Bandits probably didn’t see the girl who liked music in her hut or the one they had gazed at with tenderness, but the crazy apoplectic creature that seemed to take her place, and this was reason enough to do whatever they wanted with her.

  To kill you is no loss, to keep you is no gain, the Black Bandits had told them again and again. How reckless of Maly to believe that she was the exception to this rule. How foolish of her to believe she had any sort of power.

  Afterwards, her daughter pattered around the collective like a stunned, homeless creature. During this time there was food in the commune kitchen, and s
he brought a bowl along to collect her share of rice. Before, everyone had doted on this little girl, but now people pretended not to see her. They didn’t want to be associated with the living remains of Maly, or what she had come to represent.

  ALL YOU CAN EAT

  He was caught stealing rice when he and two other men were assigned to work in the cooking shed. In four years, this only happened once. Wordlessly, they knew what to do. When they had served everyone, they scraped the burnt rice-crust from the bottom of the black cooking urn and shoved it inside their clothes. When they returned to their hut, they left the rice on the straw of the roof to dry out so that they could store it.

  A Black Bandit boy walked by and found out. He must have been monitoring them all along, knowing they would pilfer.

  ‘Why is this on the roof?’ A sweeping motion of his hand knocked the rice crusts to the ground.

  ‘We were hungry.’

  ‘You were hungry, eh? You didn’t get enough to eat?’

  ‘We did. We did,’ they protested. Once before, Kuan remembered, when they were eating in the communal food hut, the man next to him had muttered that his rice porridge was not cooked properly.

  ‘Half-raw, eh?’ asked a Black Bandit who caught his words. He motioned to two other soldiers who set upon the man and led him away. He was never seen again. You had to be careful about food. Even talking about it could kill you.

  ‘We might get hungry later,’ the man to his left now stammered to the boy soldier.

  ‘Hungry, eh? Then come here.’ The Black Bandit led them back to the kitchen. He filled a vat with scoopfuls of rice. He stacked it on. The three of them watched the white mound grow and grow. ‘Eat this.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘No, when you reach Nirvana. Yes, now! You said you were hungry! Eat this up, all three of you. When I come back and find that you haven’t filled up, you will all be dead.’ They sat down on the floor and began to fill their mouths.

  Holes holes holes – a human being was all about satiating holes, he thought. Holes for the filling with food, holes for the smelling of danger, holes for the seeing of which parts of your body might drop off from infection, holes to release excrement and holes for the expulsion of sex secretions, not that such a thing existed anymore in this world. Finally, holes for the hearing of Angkar dogma, because if you didn’t listen, they might make you dig your own grave. This was the ideology that reduced a whole human soul to a single man’s digestive tract. All that mattered in the revolution and all he wanted to do was to gorge, and now that the soldier had given him permission to do it – in fact, forced him to – he was scared of dying. A human stomach that has been starved for so long will not stretch so far.

  The two other men knew it too.

  ‘You haven’t eaten enough!’ the man to his left accused him. ‘You’re going too slow! Stop thinking about taking a shit and keep eating!’

  Who knew that eating used up so many muscles in the jaw and in the face? In the throat too. Masticating could be as exhausting as working.

  ‘What about you? The spoon has been far from your mouth for too long. I saw you taking it easy, taking a rest.’

  Even having too much food could cause malice.

  The Black Bandit had left, but they were watched by an old villager who was a constant in the kitchen, one of the Base People. It was impossible to hide any of this rice on their bodies. They would just have to eat and die, which to Kuan seemed better than being bludgeoned on the head with the back of an axe.

  There was the unmistakable smell of something frying. They all sensed it, he and the two other men. The smell made them take in two more handfuls of rice. They could pretend that the oily scent and the rice were one, something new. Even when granted a reprieve in the middle of hunger, with more rice to eat than was humanly possible, after only twenty minutes all of them had begun craving something else. Were humans the only creatures whose desires could never be fully sated? The buffaloes in the field weren’t craving chrysanthemums.

  The old man in the kitchen walked over and put a small fried dried fish down in front of them without saying a word. Then he left. He had watched them squish the grains into the smallest possible balls and scoff them down until their eyeballs bulged, and he knew they could not keep going without a second wind. That fish was their second wind. They mashed it into tiny crumbs and flakes. That feisty fish fought a battle with the army of bland grains. It conquered with every successful swallow until the war was over, the bowl was empty and they had won.

  THE BELT

  Once he boiled and ate his leather belt.

  Kuan felt as though he was on his last legs: they were wobbly and prone to bending at unexpected times. Then he remembered his belt. He had buried it in a secret spot behind his hut. Those Chinese communists on their Long March ate the leather of their boots. He had read about it while in high school. Charlie Chaplin ate his bootlaces, too, in the first silent black-and-white movie he had seen with his mother. How strange, at a time like this, to be inspired by the antics of a white man who looked like a pretty girl with a moustache.

  Why not a belt?

  When the sky was dark, he dug it up. He cut the belt into thin strips and boiled it for hours and hours. His sister and his mother kept a lookout for him. When it was ready, they took pieces hot out of the pot and chewed. And chewed and chewed and chewed.

  They kept the buckle.

  The year Kuan ate the belt, Chicken Daddy’s whole clan had been cut from him – his wife and his three children. His whole paltry family. Soon after his daughter was buried, Chicken Daddy started to feel a strange itchiness all over his body. Flakes of skin peeled from him, falling like scales from a snake. Kuan’s mother swapped a condensed-milk tin of rice for diesel fuel and rubbed the fuel over his body, hoping it would heal him. Instead he jumped up and down in his hut, screaming, ‘I’m burning! I’m burning!’ before running to leap into the river. The water washed the oil from his skin, but did not cure him of the rash or the hunger. And nothing could cure him of the loss of his own flesh and blood, as close to him as his limbs. Now he felt like an amputee, and he took to lying on the floor of his hut, not wanting to move. Moving was hard work. He looked up at the slits of light on the thatched roof. Looking was hard work, too. He closed his eyes. And finally, breathing. Breathing was the hardest task of all. He decided that he just wasn’t up to it anymore.

  CATS AND DOGS

  It seemed one evening that the Black Bandits had stolen away into the night. That was the evening when, all night long, they heard the bom bom bom sounds of distant manmade thunder that meant no good. Perhaps the bombs were going to rain down on them now, curtains on a final closing act of a dark and meaningless show that no one was watching.

  The next morning when Kuan awoke, the Base People said that they had seen the Black Bandits running away through the village. The city people slowly started to wander, testing the perimeters of the sudden silence, marking its borders.

  The village chairman and his family had also disappeared. The only sign that anyone had been living there was the meowing beneath his hut. The chairman had kept a cat as a pet. How could they keep such things alive when people could not even find food for their children? Of course, the first thing his brother Kiv did when he found out the Black Bandits had gone was find that cat and kill and eat it.

  Nearby a group of men had teamed up to chase down a cow in the fields. The cow seemed to sense that something was wrong, that this was not the usual herding. No, this was predatory. There must have been at least a dozen people with sticks. When they finally caught the cow, they whacked it over the head, knocking it to the ground until it was lying on its side. Dozens more looked on, yelling out useless advice. He tried to beg for some meat but they paid him no heed.

  It was a lie when Buddhism declared that all animals were created equal. All animals were not created
equal; the only thing universal about the different species was their suffering. In the wild a lion doesn’t spare a deer, and the cat does not seek karmic bliss with the mouse. Hunger has priorities.

  That night, people were talking, saying that the Black Bandits really had disappeared. The Vietnamese soldiers, who had burrowed in underground tunnels like hungry moles, had emerged and driven away their enslavers.

  ‘Let’s go back then,’ his mother decided. They did not want to be in this place for a moment more. They wanted to find their house in Phnom Penh, even though the keys had been lost long ago. They would return missing half their number and all their things. Now it was just his mother, his sister Kieu, his brother Kiv, Suhong and their three children.

  They packed their luggage – their grass mats, some rice, their few remaining clothes. The following day, they started walking in the afternoon, and by night they reached another village. All the houses had been ransacked, and people were crammed into any hut they could find. They spent the night on the floor of an abandoned shop, and the next morning they kept walking.

  On the road they met a local villager, a teenage boy who had a puppy curled in his arm. His brother swapped something for the puppy. They led the puppy along with them by a piece of string. Soon they came to a river, where there was a Vietnamese soldier. The soldier took a liking to the puppy and played with it. They waited patiently until the soldier had left.

  His brother could kill the cat, but could not bear to kill the puppy, so he asked Kuan. But Kuan couldn’t kill the puppy either. He couldn’t bear to smash something into that happy-yappy face, or to puncture its neck with a knife. In the end he put it in a sack so that he didn’t have to see. Tying the sack with the piece of string that had been the leash, he drowned the puppy in the river. They cut it up, cooked it and ate it. His brother, who was the one who couldn’t bear to kill it, ate the most.