The King's Last Song

by Geoff Ryman

  The Vietnamese drove the Khmers Rouges out of Cambodia into Thailand. Map's only brother died and Map was truly alone. How could he look for his parents, trapped in border refugee camps or hiding out in enemy territory?

  Map deserted the Khmers Rouges in 1983.

  His gun came with him. The Vietnamese-backed government trusted defectors more if they bore weapons away from the Khmers Rouges.

  The government classified Map as a Misled Person. It was not his fault that he was a mass murderer. The government needed Cambodians to fight alongside the Vietnamese. Map found himself an ally of the hated yuon, whom he had once pledged to drive from his country.

  Map changed uniforms and went back to a soldier's life, trooping along roadways or through minefields. He lived on one bowl of rice a day. Or less.

  By then the Khmers Rouges had renamed themselves in English, the NADK. They renounced Communism, denounced the Vietnamese, and were supported by China and America against Russia and Vietnam. War by proxy. Map fought it.

  1985 was the worst year of his life. The Vietnamese had decided to build a wall around Cambodia. They set up labour camps deep in the forests and sent Map to guard the Cambodian conscripts. Map had not found his family, and he was now as far from being able to search as he had ever been.

  He met and befriended another guard in the camp. His name was Nim Veasna and, like Map, he was an NADK defector. Like Map, he too was looking for his family.

  He and Map deserted again. In the prevailing disorder, no one noticed. Veasna and Map joined another government regiment in Siem Reap. They began to help each other find their families.

  They had to go AWOL to do it. They took turns pedalling a push bike from village to village. Sometimes they walked, or hitched a lift with an army vehicle.

  They had fun.

  Twenty years later, Map still tells stories about Nim Veasna. He gets them wrong. He says that because of thieves and guerillas, he and Nim rode a motorcycle at night without lights. Veasna drove without stopping across bridges that were only a plank of wood.

  Nobody in Cambodia had motorcyles in 1985. But that's what Map remembers now.

  Muddling his stories softens them.

  They'd cling to the sides of a five-wheel truck, and the wind would wuther past the upright barrels of their guns. The sun would come up; it would be cool and clear; and Map or Veasna might let off a round in sheer high spirits.

  From around a reservoir, a flock of egrets might take off all in unison. The trees in dry season were leafless blackened stumps as if there had been a fire.

  "Nobody stops us, man!” Veasna yelled. Veasna looked like a movie star. He had oiled, carefully combed hair and shades he had taken from a dead yuon soldier. He hated the Vietnamese, even if they were allies, and he kept making fun of them. He had a character he called Ying Ying who was an effeminate screeching yuon who was always trying to steal everything. Oh, you have cigarette? I Vietnamese, now you don't. Hey, you want to fuck my sister? Oh! You have a hundred dollar, oh, you fuck me instead! Veasna would wail Vietnamese songs in the same way he shot his gun, out of fun and hatred.

  They asked the same set of questions of everyone they met. Cambodian names are so flexible they would start with a place instead. Veasna would ask, “I'm looking for some people from near Battambang, in Banian District? Commune Chheuteal, deDon village? The family might be called Nim? The wife would be called Mrs. Hing?"

  Everybody was trying to find someone, and people asked similar questions back: Do you know anybody taking care of a little boy from Wat Bo? Maybe called Dara? Maybe he is still with his brother Chann?

  Map would think back over all the families he knew—soldiers in his regiment, girls in roadside stalls, or friends of friends. Whenever he met someone new, he would ask them where they were from and what their family members were called. He would try to bolt down in his memory the names of as many people as possible. How else was the country to fix itself?

  They had false alarms. A woman sitting on a roadside platform who sold potatoes said, “I did meet a family from Banian when I was in Preah Vihear. A widow woman. Might she have been called Heng instead? No? Oh, I am sorry for you."

  Once a soldier back from leave to Sihanoukville ran up to them to say, “Hey Map, any chance people might pronounce your family name Tang? I found this guy called Tang Heng, maybe he's your brother?"

  "My brother's dead,” Map said quietly.

  Then one day in April 1988, they were lounging around Siem Reap, and they talked to a stall owner who had once been a schoolteacher from Battambang. He'd dug dikes for years and now he was selling combs and lighters on the street. He looked up at Veasna and said, “Yeah, I know a Mrs. Hing in Battambang. She moved in from deDon village with her cousin, a woman called Ary."

  Veasna went very still. Did he know this woman Ary's family name?

  "Khim,” the vendor said. “I think she was from Chheuteal commune."

  A silent chuckle seemed to shake Veasna and he ran a hand over his forehead.

  "Any chance?” the schoolteacher asked, looking hopeful.

  Veasna started to smile. “I think so, yes."

  The schoolteacher was overjoyed for him. “Oh, I hope it is your mother. Oh, I hope it is true!"

  Veasna suddenly laughed aloud. He even bought one of the guy's lighters.

  Map shook his head and said, “All we need now is cigarettes."

  Over the next few months, Battambang became their destination.

  Whenever they could escape their army duties, they would find someone taking a boat across the Great Lake and up the river.

  Each time, the boat would edge its way into one of scores of channels through the reeds. The fisherman or trader would get frightened and turn off his engine and Map and Veasna would jump into the cool water. They would pull the boat in silence for hours.

  Those were the happiest times Map could remember. They were screened by overgrowth with only their heads and arms above water, so they were hard to spot. The poor old boatman would be shaking with fear but Map and Veasna felt somehow immune.

  They saw purple herons, cormorants, jacuna, and even kingfishers darting among the plants. Watersnakes churned the water to get away from them. They'd spear striped catfish for lunch. Overhead, fish-eagles would turn in the wind. Sure there were leeches, but they'd found a good use for that cigarette lighter—singeing them off.

  Map felt peaceful.

  They'd climb back into the boat and putter into Battambang. The town was flat, colonial, crumbling and stark, stripped of the palm trees that used to crowd around it. It was such a sleepy place that they would sometimes shoot their guns into the air just to see the confusion. Once they squelched in boots that were still wet out to the Central Market, and, for no reason at all, they strafed the vaulted ceiling. The stall owners screamed and ran.

  Map laughed and slapped Veasna with his hat. “That was dumb! We could have asked them about your mother!"

  "Oh! This is a country full of ducks!” said Veasna. “Quack, quack, quack!"

  A bureau had been set up in Battambang, registering families who were looking for relatives. Not many people had applied. Saying who you really were had caused people trouble in the past.

  But on the day they shot up the market, the bureau said that they had found Mrs. Hing. They had an address, meaning a quarter of the city. Veasna's map was his mouth; they asked all day where the house could be found.

  A woman scolded them. “You are the pirates who shot up the market, so I should not tell you, but I know Mrs. Hing. She is a decent woman and maybe she can make a decent son of you."

  Mrs. Hing lived behind a laundry near the art-deco bus station. Veasna saw a skinny kid emptying grey water out of a tub. “Yeha?” he asked. It was his little brother. Yeha hardly recognized him. He led Veasna around grey peeling walls to a courtyard that smelled of drains. A woman looked up from a water trough. She was as scrawny and tough as an old scrub tree growing out of a termite's nest.


  Big, slick, mean Veasna collapsed against his mother, heaving with sobs. She had a man's face, hard and folded in on itself. She did not cry. Veasna asked her, “How are you? How are you, Mama?"

  "I work. I eat.” Her teeth and fingernails were black. She glared at Map. “Who is that?"

  Veasna looked around at Map and said, “This is my best friend, Map."

  Mrs. Hing stood with her arms folded, her eyes narrow. “You have enough brothers to support. Do you have any money? Do you know where Thom is? Tula?"

  Whenever Mrs. Hing spoke to Veasna, her voice came in sharp slivers like flint. If anyone else showed up other than her son, she used a different sweet little voice, which was as horrible as rancid oil. Her son saw her dark face. Veasna kept landing his boat on the rocky island shore that was his mother. That island never grew flowers.

  "You fight with the yuon,” she said. “You are all traitors."

  She said, “You look for this Map's family, why don't you make more efforts to find your own?"

  She said, “I don't want hugs, I want cash."

  Going to Battambang was not fun. Veasna and Map went back to looking for the Tan family. They had to keep going to Kompong Thom province, as dangerous as it was. Map's family had lived there when all this had started, back in 1970. Map could not remember where the house was.

  He did remember that it had a wooden roof with a tiny Kompong Thom spire on the roof beam, and there was a causeway across a reservoir to it, so it must have been a grand house. Map liked to think maybe they had been rich. They had an ox for the cart, he remembered. He remembered washing it in the big reservoir. He remembered carrying water. He remembered his older brother cuffing his ears. A palm-lined track went down a hill into the cluster of fruit trees that shaded the village. He remembered sitting in the oxcart coming home from the town. That hill, that group of trees, always signalled they had come home.

  One day, Map and Veasna got a lift with a five-wheeler going all the way to the town. The driver was smuggling rice, so they left in the dark. He drove so fast that the truck bounded up and down and finally ruined its suspension.

  The driver tried to rig up something with his belt. Map and Veasna stood watch, safety catches off. It was later than they wanted to be on this stretch of road. Everything was blue-grey, enough light to be seen by guerrillas or dacoits.

  Map was staring down a track that ran along a flat plain through a few trees. Very suddenly the track came into focus. He felt his breath catch and a fist seize his heart. Was that it? Was this little slope his big hill?

  "I'm going down there,” he said.

  Their sergeant would have said this was a dumb thing to do. Since the Vietnamese had bombed all their border camps, the guerrillas had moved into the interior.

  Map and Veasna walked along the track. They saw fire through the trees as if there was a sunrise in the wrong place. What looked like ground mist clung to the lower valley. They smelled smoke. The people were burning straw or scrub.

  The village was less than a hamlet and had fallen in on itself like an old person's cheeks. Some of the huts lay flat on the ground.

  Map saw his spire, tipped sideways, grey. The straw roof had been gnawed thin, and the causeway over the reservoir was no more than a plank two metres long across a stinking black ditch.

  An old woman crouched in the raised doorway. For just one stabbing instant, Map thought it might be his mother. She had always squatted in that doorway to signal that she wanted company.

  An old man with a round face like a mango rolled his way down the ladder. He wore a skullcap. These were Chams, the Muslim minority.

  Out of another house crept a young mother with a babe, a white scarf wrapped around her head and pinned under her chin.

  Under that house, he and his older brother Heng had played with the dogs and the roosters, and swung together in one hammock. There had been a huge carved table on which the family and guests had sat to share rice and fish paste and sometimes vegetables. All gone.

  Map made sure they saw his gun. He waited for them to sompiah an army man, but they were all older than he was. The family looked in complete unison at the guns. Veasna jerked his up and down to cock it.

  Angka had killed Muslims, unless they renounced their religion, any religion. The Organization said they did the same to Buddhists, except everyone knew that Angka disliked anything that was not Cambodian.

  Map asked his question. Had a woman from this village called Koy Da come asking after her husband, Tan Phirum? A slim, older woman? A round-faced man, about forty-five?

  No, no, the Cham families chorused, nobody called Tan. Isn't that so? They looked to each other and called each other by both names, Haji Brahim or Toun Abdul. These people were not related. They had simply formed a new kind of family. Ash from the fires flecked their wary faces.

  Map asked, “A girl, she would be about twenty-two now, she would be called Tan Mliss? Did she come?"

  Awkward silence. “No, no,” said one old man burned the color of soil by the sun, except for a hat-shadow on his forehead. “Nobody came, I told you."

  "Husband!” said his wife, who was squatting down, her arms sticking out from her knees. She waved both of her hands. “There was a girl, remember? I don't know her name, but she came asking for the family that lived here. She asked for her brother."

  Map heard the crackling of the field fire. “Did she say where she was living now?"

  Oh, the woman waved to indicate far, far away, oh so far that the girl had no interest in coming back and claiming land. “Phnom Penh. She said she was going to Phnom Penh to make money."

  "Phnom Penh,” said Veasna. “Cool."

  There were now two trains a day to Phnom Penh Central from Battambang. So it was back to the beautiful boats, and then on to the train station, which looked bombed and abandoned. The train left at 5:00 a.m. in complete darkness and there was no light to see inside the carriages. You could hear people grunt as they stepped or sat on each other. Cows grazed the grass between the tracks.

  Map and Veasna had no money so they rode trains for free. They sat among the spare wheels and track carried by the flat cars ahead of the engine. They would restack the iron to give them some shelter from snipers. If the train went over a mine, they would be the first to know.

  Sometimes their extra guns were welcome and their brothers-in-arms let them ride the armoured cars along with the civilians, the chickens, and the piles of vegetables. They were only shot at once, not seriously, though just a few months before Khmers Rouges guerrillas had killed forty people on that same train.

  Cambodia was at war and not at war. Every day five or six things happened: a city would be shelled, land mines would explode, or someone would be kidnapped. Prince Sihanouk's rebel force, the ANS, had an agreement with the government's army not to shoot each other. But the Sihanoukists still fought the Vietnamese. On April 13, perhaps to celebrate the start of New Year, the ANS had blown up the Vietnamese gas depot in Samrong.

  Phnom Penh town was in worse shape than anyone had told them. Many buildings still had no roofs. The roads were lined with rusty hulks, cars that had been abandoned thirteen years before. There were no streetlights. At night it was pitch black and dangerous. You'd hear people peeing, crying, fighting, shouting abuse, and see nothing. It smelled of rotting leaves, rotting fruit, excrement. The children's clothing hung in strips. Hungry eyes followed them, and even Map and Veasna walked closer together, guns at the ready.

  You could buy a Vietnamese whore for fifty cents and fuck yourself stupid and still have money to get drunk. Shanties lined up along suburban roads and the women would stand outside them demanding payment first. In the center of town, they'd stand outside the blackened hulks of apartment houses and you'd have to step over and around families squatting on staircases.

  "Make sure their name isn't Mliss,” Map said once. He was joking, he meant it to be funny, but Veasna, who was always palm-wine drunk in Phnom Penh, went suddenly solemn.

&nbs
p; "Don't look so sad, Brother,” Map chuckled. But he was secretly glad that Veasna had been so serious.

  "Just watch your money around these thieving Vietnamese tarts,” said Veasna.

  They took pot shots at their Vietnamese allies. Hun Sen and Vietnamese troops wore almost identical uniforms, except for the insignia on their caps. Map had grown the eyes of an eagle spotting the little red star that meant the soldiers were Vietnamese.

  The Vietnamese lived in hotels or crammed together in villas outside the center, but sometimes you'd run across a big shot who thought he was a playboy. Usually they were from the south, not as disciplined or as honest as the northerners. They took bribes, got drunk, boasted and smiled a lot. “More like us!” Veasna would joke.

  There were still almost no restaurants, except for those in colleges. The Liberty and the Peace restaurants had just opened on what was now called Achar Mean Boulevard. Only everybody still called it Monivong.

  One night a yuon playboy came staggering out of the Peace. They must have thrown him out. Two Vietnamese whores came trotting out after him; the guy was so drunk that he'd stumbled out without his bodyguards.

  Veasna was drunk as well. He took one look and fired a bullet just past the guy's ear. Then he shot the asphalt at the man's feet. The man froze, and then sompiahed with respect. Map saw wisdom in his round, watchful face.

  "I always greet politely man with gun,” the man said in something like Khmer.

  Veasna's eyes bulged to hear Khmer from a foreigner's mouth. The shock of it and the aptness of what the man had said struck Veasna as funny. One of the whores slinked her way up to him. “I know good place,” she cooed, looking like a housecat gone feral.

  The yuon called out, still in Khmer, “You two have one good time. I would like go home."

  Veasna thought that was even funnier. “Go home. Hah hah hah, he's right, it is time to go home!"

  The girl cooed. “Oh. Don't disappoint me. Big handsome man.” She stroked his cheek. He shoved her away.

  "It's good you yuon whores are here. Cambodian girls don't suck dicks."