Dogs at the Perimeter

by Madeleine Thien

  At mid-day, the banker came and sat beside us. He had joined our group only a few days before, but we had never seen him sober. Along the way, he had traded all his extra clothes for rice wine. “Slow down, child,” he said to my brother. “You must try not to draw attention to yourself.”

  Sopham looked up. After a moment he said, “I don’t want to sleep in the open tonight. Smell the air, Uncle. It’s going to rain.”

  “Which one of these men is your father?” the banker asked.

  “They sent him to study.”

  “To study,” the banker said. “Sent with his hands tied behind his back. Sent to the forest where there is no electricity, no school, no teachers, no books. Is that how an educated man studies? What theories will he memorize there?” He smiled at us because he was unhappy. “My eldest boy is one of them,” he said. “He went to fight with these jungle Communists but I always warned him, the Khmer Rouge are less than human, they have no soul, no pralung. They’ll cut your throat before they introduce themselves –”

  “How dare you,” my mother said.

  He looked up, startled.

  “Get away from my children.”

  “But, madam,” the banker said. “Have I said something untrue?”

  Other voices hurried forward. Lower your voices. Those are rumours, only rumours. Can’t you see he’s drunk? They drew protectively around us, shutting him out.

  “I’ve drunk nothing!” the banker said, shouting now. “Go on then, keep playing. Make your little houses! You have my pity.” He stood up, smoothed his clothes, and walked unsteadily away. My mother stared after him.

  I saw the teenager with the gun watching us, an amused smile on his lips.

  That night, we huddled together inside the makeshift hut. The shelter had no walls or floors. A chill crept in, eating its way under my clothes, around my feet, into my bones. Rain splashed against my face. I had never truly known the cold before, all my nerve endings felt seared awake, dipped in ice. The smell of food drifted over us, sweet and fragrant. My mother got up and walked to the village houses. When she returned, triumphant, she held an egg in her hands. “All they asked for was a ballpoint pen,” she said. Salt, pepper, and herbs had been pushed in through a tiny opening in the shell, before the egg was boiled. It was the best thing I had ever tasted, the salt made my mouth water with pleasure. My mother didn’t eat. She took a fragment of shell and traced a line against her wrist, over and over, until the shell disintegrated in her fingers. “Your father is in Phnom Penh,” she said wistfully. “He’ll be here soon. It isn’t far. Along Route 1, it’s just a hundred kilometres.” I breathed in the scent of the wet ground, all the bodies around us, a rotting smell that expanded like moisture in my lungs. The stars crept near, too close, too cold. My brother held my hand. There was a low moaning of children, complaining, asking for food, that never seemed to cease.

  I begged my father, Come and find us before we disappear.

  One or two at a time, in the night, people went away.

  Don’t ask. Don’t look into the holes.

  Here is the answer: Do you want to see?

  Every day, the quiet expanded. There were gangs of boys who came and went, who boasted of the cleansing they had done. They were sly and unpredictable, at sudden moments they smiled at us and the smiles were as sharp as tiny cuts. Angkar had divided us into the pure and the impure. On one side were the peasants, the mulatan, the true Khmer. On the other were the April 17 people, the population that had been expelled from the cities.

  “The wheel of history is turning,” Kosal said, lecturing us, his drooping eyes impervious to our hunger, to fear, to rage. “If you use your hands to try to stop the wheel, they will be caught in the spokes. If you use your feet to try to stop it, you will lose them too. There is no turning back.”

  He called us the new people, he said we must abandon our diseased selves, we had to cut loose our dreams, our impurities, our worldly attachments. To pray, to grieve the missing, to long for the old life, all these were forms of betrayal. Memory sickness, Kosal called it. An illness of the mind.

  In the hut that night, the banker sighed for everyone to hear, “If I lose my mind, forget everything, became ignorant, will I be cured, Monsieur Angkar?” He stayed alone in a corner and nobody answered him. “You imagine,” he whispered, looking at us, “that it will end. Don’t you?”

  Every day, we woke on a knife edge and we ran along it. We crushed makloeu berries and used the dark juice to dye our clothes. We cut our hair. When the sky was still black, the adults were summoned to their work brigades. From four in the morning until nightfall, they ploughed the soil, dug canals, planted seedlings, then transplanted these seedlings to the fields. Twice each day, Angkar rationed us a bowl of water with two or three spoonfuls of rice. My mother would eat quickly and then sit very still, holding her shivering body. “I’m tired, my darling,” she told me. “I’ve never known such tiredness.”

  At first, we children were left behind. We scavenged the nearby forest and collected firewood, roots, fruit, and tree bark. My brother, who had never fit in with boys his own age, who preferred to sit at home with his records, had an instinct for the wild. With the dentist’s son Oun, and a few of the village boys, he choked rabbits, twisted their necks, pulled them inside out. When we had meat, if for a moment I felt full, daylight seemed to expand again, colours returned and melted the tightness in my chest.

  One of the mulatan, an old woman, tried to keep us occupied. She gave us seeds and spoke kindly about soil and water. She said the war had left Cambodia in disrepair. The Americans had bombed our schools, our roads and reservoirs. To survive, we had to feed our country. Food was our first defence, our most powerful weapon.

  The seeds were like letters in my hands. Day after day, I knelt in the dirt, dragging weeds from the ground, imagining the beans, peppers, and cucumbers that would tangle around us.

  “Feel my hands,” my brother said one morning, nearly crying. “See how they’re breaking.” We were working together in the garden.

  His hands were scratched and rough.

  “You’re imagining things,” I told him. “They’re just the same as always.”

  “If we had a gun,” my brother said, “we could have all the food we wanted. If I had a rope …”

  “Then what?”

  Sopham wiped the sweat and tears from his face. After a moment, he said, “If Kosal could give you anything, what would you ask for?”

  The sun was crawling up. In the fullness of a banana tree, I saw a figure reaching up into the leaves, trying to grasp the fruit, mistaking it for the sun. The picture, hallucinatory, swam in the air.

  “Ask for something you can use,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s no good asking for the impossible.”

  But we had a home, I thought, a life. Why should we be ashamed? Kosal’s world was the dream, I knew. Soon we would open our eyes and all of this would cease to be. I saw my father laughing, his stories like a page turning. I closed my eyes and willed him to keep walking, to come nearer.

  I heard my brother’s voice. “Ask to be a mulatan, and not one of us. The mulatan always have enough. They have food they can’t even finish.”

  In small groups, the older children were sent away. The driver and his wife, the machinist and two of his boys, became sick and died. The students, the teachers, the banker, they vanished. If a family asked for a missing person, Kosal answered them by saying, “I don’t know who you mean. I don’t know this person.” He had a cunning, dry expression in his eyes. He spoke slowly as if his words held threads of gold, he spoke softly and we had to lean in close to hear. “Why do you worry?” he would ask, a smile shading his face. “At oy té.”

  One night, we were called to a meeting. Kosal stood before us. An old man, the hotel manager, knelt on the ground.

  “Tell us,” Kosal said.

  I saw sweat gleaming on the man’s face. He said, “What would you have me say, Teacher?”

  “Tell us
about your life.”

  The old man stared up, uncomprehending.

  Beside them, the teenager, Prasith, carried a length of rope hung diagonally across his chest, worn like an ammunition belt. He handled the rope in his hands obsessively, fitfully, winding the end around one wrist, letting it fall slack, then taking it up again. The old man begged forgiveness. “You were happy then, weren’t you?” Kosal said, interrupting him. “In the old society.” There was a tokoe, a gecko on the wall clicking and clicking. “You think you’re suffering now,” Kosal said. He spoke as if he were feverish and light and faultless. “You think you understand, but what do you know about pain? I had to add everything together. There was a cost to your happiness.” My mother tried to turn our faces away but Kosal rebuked her in his smooth, begging voice. He told us to pay attention, to learn from this man’s example. He said that we must make ourselves strong and self-sufficient, we must never rely on anyone else, we must be clean inside because purity was strength. He said, “If your life brings us nothing, why should we not obliterate you?”

  In front of us, the old man tried to crawl free. He swung his head away to shield himself, from Prasith and from all the watching eyes.

  I wanted to block out the sound that his throat made, the panic in his hands. “Don’t be afraid, mit,” the teenager said, touching the old man’s head, his face. “The earth is quiet. It will bring you quiet. Everything is only beginning again.”

  My mother came back with her eyes alight and her hands shaking. She had a plan, she told us. The time had come to run away. We were to be reunited with our father. “Phnom Penh,” she said. “Norodom Boulevard. Of course he’s there.”

  The world was upside down. I wanted to tell her there was no Phnom Penh, no Norodom, but it was like speaking to my father on those days when he couldn’t hear us, his drinking had turned the volume down low. We were the sun going down, we were nothing but projections of light on the wall.

  “Escape to where?” my brother said gently. “Escape to what?”

  Feverish, my mother held her hands over her ears. Her body was both skeletal and swollen.

  “He’s been asking for you,” she said. “Father has the plane tickets already. The flight. We’ll go through Bangkok. See the water, see how it’s receding?” She turned to me. “Terrible girl. Why do you blame your father? They sent him to study. They know his worth.”

  All night, my mother cried and twisted on the ground. Her legs were tender, bloated with water, she needed food, she needed vitamins, but all those things had vanished as if they’d never been. Kosal gave us medicine but the strange black pills dissolved on her tongue like charcoal.

  “Ma,” I whispered. “They’re listening.”

  My brother stroked her hands. “She doesn’t know us.”

  She lay between us, feverish, laughing.

  The stars were everywhere. My father came and knocked at the door, repeating my name like an incantation. From room to room, I ran, turning my back on him. I walked through the hallways, I found the staircase that led to the rooftop. My father was there waiting for me. He held my hand and pulled me through a window and into a hidden space. He was covered in dust, it slid into the air, it coated everything. I lay my father down. There were pills everywhere, in his hands, tumbling out of his pockets, cascading down and skittering along the floor, a thousand riels for a cupful, I remember, a thousand riels, sometimes less. The boys playing kick sandal by the riverside, the cyclo drivers asleep in their vehicles. Endless colour and movement, a wonder before my eyes. “Are we going home now, Pak? I’m hungry and the moon is already out.” His eyes were open. I filled this room with the names of books I remembered, I saw them on the thin, hard spines, floating on typeset pages, the texts of the Tipitaka, the Buddhist cannon, books by Alexandre Dumas, novels of Hak Chhay Hok and Khun Srun, I read their titles on clean sheets of paper that were rolled into the little typewriter my father had given me. My friends laughing when I had told them, puffed up like a tiger, that my father had given me this clattering machine, this grown-up beauty, something of my own.

  “If I leave you,” I asked him, “where will I go?”

  “My sweet, you can never travel far enough.”

  Along the pitted road a truck came, churning up the ground with its thick tires. A beam of light advanced across the huts but I lay close to the earth, inside the darkness. Beside me, our friend, Oun, the dentist’s son, was reciting verses in Pali, I could hear the running of sound: There are trees bearing perpetual fruit, on these trees there are multitudes of birds. There also is heard the cry of peacocks and herons, and the melodious song of kokilas. There near the lake, the cry of birds who call, Live ye, Live ye. The birds roam the woods … Passages he had memorized in school, just as we had done. Words pushed out of his mind, they floated down on us like air.

  “My son, my son,” his father said.

  Oun’s voice fell silent, he moaned as if trying to reel the sentences back in again.

  His father said, “Angkar is listening.”

  There were spies, chhlop, everywhere. They came and waited in the darkness.

  I fell asleep and became a small child again. I saw Wat Langka, its tiled rooftops, its rising eaves, stupas in the courtyard, the stone undulations of the Naga at the foot of the stairs. These were the forms that had coloured my earliest dreams. When my grandmother died, the monks had written her name on a slip of paper. They had set the words alight, watching the paper coil and burn, becoming ash inside a golden bowl. In the bright heat of morning, the monks’ voices had risen through the air, arcing up against the temple walls.

  All mortal things are impermanent, their nature is to arise and decay, having arisen they cease, in their stilling is happiness.

  I opened the door to our apartment but nothing was visible. All the walls had been folded away.

  “Tell me a story,” my father said, his voice disembodied and sad. “My thoughts are dissolving. Don’t turn away,” he begged. “I was walking, the sky goes forever. Why is it changing to dust?”

  —

  I caressed his hands, I forced the pills between his lips. The next morning, our mother could not stand. When Prasith came, we tried to tell him that she was ill and couldn’t work, but the teenager just watched us with a faint smile on his lips. Kosal, he said importantly, had granted us permission to take our mother to an infirmary.

  Prasith raised our mother up from the floor and carried her out of the hut. Her eyes flickered open and she tried to nudge him away. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Your children are here.” Carefully, almost tenderly, he lay her inside a wooden cart. My brother and I took hold of opposite handles and began to push. Prasith led us away from the cooperative, his face tilted toward the clouds, as if luxuriating in the rising warmth. When our path joined another road, he gave us further directions and turned back.

  “That boy,” my mother mumbled, barely conscious. “I know that boy.”

  Nothing seemed real. The road we walked on was desolate and cratered and the sun never seemed to move, only to come steadily nearer, expanding into a dense fog. Twice, Khmer Rouge soldiers stopped us. They examined the permission slips Prasith had given us and then they waved us on, past workers who dissolved into the mist, past grey animals. Hours later, we arrived at the infirmary, a ruined concrete building where the nurses were only children and the sick lay everywhere on cots on the ground.

  Upstairs, we found a place for our mother. There was no medical equipment but nurses came around with medicine, small white cubes that they stirred into bowls of water. Our mother was more alert now. She drank the medicine, her hands shaking, the water spilling. When the bowl was empty, she smiled weakly at us.

  “Sugar,” she said. “It’s sugar.”

  Heavy rains began, lightning bursts, flooding. Hurriedly, we unrolled the bamboo blinds that clung to the ceiling. They were tattered and the wind swung them back and forth. We sat close to our mother, trying to keep her warm. I watched as she stared fever
ishly into my brother’s face, looking for something, a detail beloved to her, a trace of someone I couldn’t see. Sopham’s eyes were like still ponds. I leaned my head against the wall, unable to rest.

  Often, my father had gone away. He would return home, to Norodom Boulevard, with empty pockets and bloodshot eyes, he would say things like, “I got carried away. I started walking up Monivong and suddenly it was Tuesday but how that happened, I don’t know.”

  “We don’t know,” my brother and I would echo. “We don’t know!”

  “All I remember,” my father said once, his hands drifting limply in the air, “is looking up at the sky and thinking the sky would never go dark, it can’t get dark because a hard blue lid covers everything. ‘Whatever else we were intended to do, we are not intended to succeed,’ who said that? A great man. A great, good man. We are not. We are not …”

  For as long as I could remember, my father treated his sadness with Valium, pills he had begun taking when he was a student in Phnom Penh. I used to buy his medicine for him, by the cupful, in the Chinese market. But later, as the war dragged on, when the Khmer Rouge controlled the Mekong River and everyday the airport came under worse bombardment, the market ran out of pills. My father stopped sleeping, ate little, and worried constantly. The rockets and mortar fire cracked his nerves and sometimes his eyes seemed strange and elongated to me, bloodshot, red-rimmed, and lost. He wrote lists of names, people he could appeal to for money or support, people who could transport us to the border. He tucked the lists into my clothes for safekeeping.