Dogs at the Perimeter

by Madeleine Thien

  “The bombs are coming,” I tell him. “They are coming, they are coming.”

  I feel my legs floating, as if I am flying through the streets.

  I’m standing at the intersection of Côte-des-Neiges and Queen Mary, snow settling on us, and a woman tells her child, We are safe as houses. The saying falls straight through me. The light turns green, nothing approaches, I begin to walk, and the low buildings seem to bend over me. I see my father in the shape of another person, walking up ahead. I see the suit of clothes he used to wear, the haircut he had, his briefcase and his scuffed, worn-down shoes. I run up to the man who is not my father, grab his elbow, and spin him around to face me. A stranger swears and flings me away.

  I am home again, inside the safety of our apartment, my father is standing behind me, dictating the words I have to transcribe. When I type, I feel the machine as an extension of my hands, my father’s voice is rainfall, and I am a weed lifting up too fast, gangly and hungry and gaping in every direction. That typewriter, that gift, is my first real possession. Sometimes when I type, I pay attention to the words themselves, what they say and mean, but other times they are only strings of letters, arranged like beads, joined together by the metronome of the Olivetti. The words materializing on the page, this alphabet so different from the shivering, dancing Khmer script, seemed to me like crevices I could peer through, portholes into lives different, more gracious, than my own.

  Someone says my Canadian name. Janie. Another woman turns and waves. I am standing in Montreal, on a white winter day, beneath unfamiliar buildings. I look everywhere for Janie. There are no trees, no forest anywhere, nothing to keep the light from falling through.

  My father is a storyteller. He smiles and whispers at us to follow him, behind the curtain, into this starlit box. Hanuman, my favourite hero, wraps his giant hands around my little fingers. Tonight, he says, we will travel the world with Jambavan, the king of bears. My father can recite all the shiny strands of the Ramayana, he cajoles my brother and I with brave musketeers, with Tum and Teav and Molière. He gives us any story we ask for, especially tonight, because on this night, he says, the war is ending. Rocket fire burns the skies but tomorrow everything will change. Even as the shells fall down, our neighbours are dancing and welcoming the Khmer new year.

  On the balcony, I sat down, leaning against my father’s body. I was afraid and I didn’t want to be apart from him. Fighting chipped away at the edges of the city, and Sopham pointed out the smoke advancing from the north, south, and west, like a necklace tightening. Tracer fire threw long lines into the darkness.

  My father cradled his whiskey and called for the Communists to hurry up, to end the war once and for all. “Once the guns go quiet,” my father said, “the Khmer Rouge will put everything right. Then you, my dancing, kralan-eating children, will go back to school. No more running wild. No more fighting in the streets.” Our prime minister, otherwise known to us as Magic Sands, had fled the country. Monsieur le sableur des feés, our father called him, who defended our city with holy grains, who armed our soldiers with Buddhist scarves. Magic Sands had already been evacuated.

  “Remember this night,” he said. “Mark it in your memories because tomorrow everything changes.” He smiled and shook his head and swirled the liquid in his glass. “Tomorrow, when your mother puts on her New Year’s finery, she’ll be the most beautiful woman in the city. The war is finished, little ones. We’ll gather all the sadness into a pot, pour it down the drains, and hear it rush into the sea. The king will wake up in the Royal Palace, and everything will be just as it was. As wonderful and as corrupt as it ever was.” He lay down, staring up at the sky. Beads of sweat trickled down his face, into his hair.

  “I should have gone to France,” my father told us. “I should have carried your mother to Paris and we would have been poor together. You two, you and Sopham, you would have been born in the West, like champions!”

  “Champions of what?” I asked.

  “Champions of champions,” my brother said.

  “We would have flown Air France,” my father said. “Just like that, on top of the world, sipping champagne. We would have set Europe on fire: your mother and your father, the beauty and the poet.”

  “And me, Pak?”

  “You, Sopham? The singer, of course.” My brother, frowning, did the twist for us.

  “And me?”

  What did he say? I try to remember.

  Side by side, we stared up at the darkness, at the beckoning stars, doorways to other worlds and other galaxies. My father turned toward me, as if trying to read the future from my expression. He had curving, lifting, furrowing eyebrows. “You’ll be like the great Hanuman, leaping across oceans. Between you and the heavens, my sweet, nothing will hold you back.”

  —

  We heard someone running up the stairs. My mother was in the kitchen, making lunch, when the door behind her gave way. I saw a yellow knot in my brother’s fist, round as the sun, and then, behind it, a black shape against the wall. The shining darkness of a rifle, an AK, the barrel finding its way across the room. It buried itself in my father’s stomach.

  “Wait,” my father said softly. “Wait.”

  The boy stepped back. He swung the gun up and took aim at my father’s chest. More Khmer Rouge came in, they were faceless to me, black pants, black shirts, muddy feet, too big to fit inside the room. First they were in the kitchen, then beside me, then at the window.

  Outside, a woman started screaming. “He’s not a soldier! It had nothing to do with him. Stop, please stop!” Gunfire then, drowning everything out.

  “What is it?” my father said. I saw his mouth moving but his voice seemed to come from somewhere else. The soldiers pushed nearer. They were children, maybe teenagers, with small, lean bodies. “What work do you do?” the boy asked him.

  “I’m a translator.”

  “For the government?”

  “No. Books, textbooks.”

  The boy’s eyes drifted over my mother, over us.

  “You have to evacuate the city,” he said. “All of you. Don’t take your things. You won’t be gone long. Three or four days at the most. The Americans are going to bomb us.”

  “But why?” my father said, confused. “The war is over. They’ve already pulled out.”

  The boy nudged his rifle up, pushing it against my father’s neck. “Take only the things you need,” he said, “nothing more. Don’t waste any time.”

  When they left, the door, broken off its hinges, swung wide. My father’s hands travelled over his face, down his shirt. No bullet hole, no blood. He looked at his hands in disbelief. My mother told us to sit down at the table, to eat our food now, quickly, to come away from the windows, to come now, to hurry.

  I followed my parents into the street. I thought the buildings, the hospitals, the banks and restaurants, the temples and market had all been tipped sideways, spilling everyone and everything into the road. There was no space to go back, to change direction, there was no room to breathe. I saw defeated soldiers wearing pristine uniforms, thin monks, lost children, rich men and poor men, I saw bodies curled on the sidewalk. Towers of rifles, strung with ammunition, lay jumbled on the street corners.

  Our neighbour, Uncle Samnang, sat on the ground with a woman in his arms, weeping. “What happened to Uncle Samnang?” I asked.

  My mother tilted my chin up, averting my eyes.

  Money floated along the street, it flew up in bundles, dry and perfect, swirling above us. Sopham and I waved our hands to gather the bills. Everyone was talking but I didn’t understand, I heard names that I didn’t recognize, I looked up and saw the frangipani, pink as my mother’s silk shoes. In the midday heat, their heads drooped low, their fragile necks were bent. “I’m thirsty,” my brother said. We both carried small overnight bags. The straps rubbed against my shoulders. All I could smell was the sweetness of the flowers. My parents whispered to each other, back and forth, back and forth. We plodded on, stopping all the
time because the crowd kept thickening, more and more people herded into the street. At the turnoff to Tuol Kok, my parents led us down an alleyway, into a courtyard. My grandfather’s house slouched down, all the shutters closed. My mother went inside. White sheets, white flags, hung from all the balconies, motionless in the hot air.

  A woman stood in the shade, her blouse dark with sweat. She told us that all the hospitals had been emptied, the injured and dying had been thrown into the street wearing their hospital gowns, holding their own iv bags. Government soldiers had been shot on the road, students and teachers were being trucked away.

  “They told us not to pack very much,” my father said sternly. “We’ll come home in a day or two.”

  The woman’s long hair had fallen loose and it clung to her neck. “They told me, ‘Go back to your home village.’ Well, mine is up past Battambang, that’s three hundred kilometres away, and I haven’t been there since I was a girl. Getting there will take more than a few days, won’t it? And then what?”

  My mother was standing in the doorway now. “He’s gone,” she said. “The doors are all broken. He’s already gone.”

  We stood together, waiting in front of the house. A group of Khmer Rouge came and told us to get out of here, to move on.

  The woman wandered off, scratching madly at her arms. “Watch your step,” she said. “Don’t fall into the holes.”

  Back on the main road, the crowd trudged slowly, as if through mud. A voice, amplified by loudspeakers, prodded us north, then west.

  Beside me, a man with no legs crawled forward on his elbows. My mother was crying noiselessly. I stared at the ground and then up at the sky, where the elegant buildings seemed to wilt in the heat. I saw white shutters, cars turned on their sides, crates of chickens, howling dogs, and, in every direction, a shifting wall of people. On my left, two Khmer Rouge were guarding an intersection. I wanted to see them, I tried to get nearer.

  A woman was arguing with them. She wanted to take another road but they were refusing to let her pass. She persisted. “My husband and children were sent down Route 2,” she said. “If I hurry, I’ll be able to join them.” She put her hands together, bowed her head, touched her fingertips to her forehead in a sign of respect. Casually, one of the boys lifted his rifle and shot her. She was thrown backwards, her skull cracking against the pavement. Blood poured from her heart as if it would never stop. Within seconds, the boys had unclasped her watch, taken her necklace and her ring, and then rolled the body to the edge of the road. The woman’s hands still moved, her lips were speaking. One of the boys met my stare. “What are you looking at?” he said. He prodded the woman with his foot. “Does this belong to you?”

  My father spoke my name, he pulled me away into the thicket of bodies.

  My father disappeared. But still, even now, I imagine seeing him again. In my dreams, he tells me that time ran away from him. Time, only time. One day he blinked his eyes and thirty years had come and gone. Just last night, my father had knocked at my door, surprised and embarrassed, asking me where everyone had disappeared to, demanding to know why we hadn’t waited and why, all these years, we had never answered his calling.

  “You didn’t have time to speak,” I said.

  “Didn’t I?”

  “On that day, it happened so quickly.”

  “I had a list of things to tell you,” he said. There was snow in his hair, crystals on his eyelashes. “I had a list of things to tell little Sopham. Where is my boy? Where is Mother?” He stared at me, as if seeing me for the first time. “Why are you all alone here?”

  Three days after we had begun walking, we reached a checkpoint. The men were separated and questioned one by one. Afterwards, my father was guided, alongside dozens of others, into a waiting truck, the soldiers pushing him into the vehicle as if he were a child. We lost sight of him but I heard him saying our names, my father’s thin voice rising out of the press of bodies.

  “Are you afraid of us?” one soldier asked, circling the truck. “Why in the world are you afraid, my brothers? When did we ever betray you?”

  “Let me down,” an old man said. “Please. I can’t breathe. There’s no air in here.”

  A boy aimed his AK at the truck and told the man to be still. He called him mit, my friend, comrade, he said that the men in the truck were the lucky ones. They were going into the forest to study, they were educated men who would one day serve the country and Angkar.

  “But what is Angkar?” the old man asked.

  The boy looked at him, incredulous. “Angkar fought this war and won your freedom. Don’t you know?” He kept talking about Angkar, which meant the “organization,” and Angkar Leu, the “Greater Organization.” I understood the boy’s words but I couldn’t follow their meaning, it was as if another vocabulary, another history, had distorted the language I knew.

  My mother went from one soldier to another, pleading with them to release my father. “Please,” she said desperately. “Let him stay with us.” Her hands were clasped together.

  A soldier pushed her hands down. “Don’t beg,” he said. “Don’t demean yourself. Everyone is equal now.”

  Sweat ran down my neck, down my back, it shone on the faces of the men as they bowed their heads against the sun. I heard my name spoken again and again, my father’s voice calling as if he wanted me to join him, or flee, or hold on. The Khmer Rouge watched us with such derision, such contempt, I couldn’t move, my limbs were frozen but things around me seemed to move faster, to grow tumultuous. Our religion was Buddhism and it taught us that life was suffering and that the cycle was eternal and would continue no matter our individual destinies. For the first time in my life, I saw the cycle, I saw its end, a lake, a nothingness on which we hovered.

  The engine started and the truck pulled away. The soldiers watched until the men had disappeared, and then they lowered their guns.

  My mother held us. She spoke into my brother’s hair, “It’s the dust, it’s the dust, my darling. Who will help us? All I can see is dust.”

  The soldiers sent us south then east, then north again. Every night, we slept in the open, surrounded by hundreds of people until, bit by bit, the city people were gradually dispersed. There was a mountain, I remember, Phnom Chisor, that we skirted and climbed and descended, it was always there, growing larger or receding behind us. The farther we walked, the more silent the world became, stripped of traffic, blaring radios, air raid sirens, voices. Each morning, I woke believing my father had returned, but it was always my brother, prodding me awake, his eyes wide and alarmed. I saw purple skies, Martian seas against the saffron temples. I saw my mother trying to make a meal from the things we had scavenged. After weeks of walking, we were ordered to turn around, we were sent east across the river, into Prey Veng province.

  My brother asked me if this wandering would last forever. Maybe the cities are truly gone, I said, and they have no place to send us. Gone how? he asked. Bombs, I said, but we had seen no airplanes, no fighters in the sky. He knew it, too, but didn’t say so.

  The rainy season began. Somewhere near to Wat Chroy, a man met us on the road. By then, we were a group of sixty or seventy people. The man, who said his name was Kosal, had eyes that seemed to droop at the edges, as if his face could be nothing but sad. He said he was the Angkar here and that this cooperative was our destination. We looked around: we were standing in a fallow field, at the edge of a tattered village.

  “What do you mean?” someone asked. “Our homes are in Phnom Penh.”

  “Your homes are here,” Kosal said, smiling kindly. “Angkar wants you to remain with us.”

  “But our belongings –”

  Kosal nodded. “Tomorrow we’ll think about the rest. At oy té. You have nothing to fear.”

  Staying near to one another, we made our camp for the night.

  A teenaged boy was sent to guard us. He was tall, no more than fourteen years old, with an angular, mischievous face and a rifle slung across his back. He tapped the
gun nervously, unable to keep his hands still.

  The night sky came nearer, it was a cloth tightening around us, erasing the world. In my dreams, I saw bodies everywhere, infants and grown men, a wide-eyed girl, my brother, men built like steamships and others like sticks. I saw them all, as if we were on a road together, one body growing from the next, soaking into the ground. Above us, sugar palms stretched thinly up in the sky, into streaks of blue and golden light. I saw village houses, seated in a row. Here at our destination, I was the only one alive. I couldn’t move or speak, fear was a shunt in my chest, I wanted to cry out but I couldn’t even breathe.

  I woke. I saw the tall boy with the gun, asleep against a tree, his mouth open, round like a baby’s.

  “That boy,” my mother said, her voice low. “There’s something familiar about that boy.”

  Our first day here began. We built three bare structures to shelter our group, and we covered each with a roof made of thatched palm leaves. They were dry and tough, my hands bled from weaving them together, everybody’s hands bled because we were city people used to paper, pens, and smooth typewriters. There were teachers, students, a dentist, a banker, drivers, machinists, a hotel manager, there were families like ours where the father had been sent away, there were dozens of children. Villagers came and went, watching us. Cautiously, my brother approached them. He asked them to advise us on the proper knitting of the leaves, and a boy his age stopped to help us. Sopham, my small, earnest brother, worked hard, harder than all the rest.