Dogs at the Perimeter

by Madeleine Thien

  One night, my mother set empty plates on the dinner table and looked searchingly at us, at him.

  He ran his index finger across a plate, as if to check for dust.

  “Would you like to go out?” he asked, flustered. His long body stooped toward her, like a fishing rod. I yearned to go to him, to pull him back. Our mother was not like other mothers, she had never been shy or decorous or restrained.

  “Into the city?” my mother said, dropping her voice. “So we can dine with all these military men waiting for what, the end of the world? And the cost of rice, don’t you realize?, it’s up again and your wallet’s empty. There’s nothing here and tomorrow will be the same.”

  My brother watched, bright with embarrassment.

  “Shhh,” my father said, smiling weakly, eyes drifting to the window where voices rose like applause and touched the curtains, then dissipated back into the street below.

  “Promise me, my love. We must get out. The war is ending but what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll get us out.”

  “At least Sopham,” my mother said.

  “I promise.”

  Downstairs, I saw people lying in streams of water, their mouths open, the rain leaking in. The floor was littered with bodies, and I couldn’t differentiate the dying from the dead. There was no help for them. I hid upstairs, beside Sopham, unable to speak. Between us, the quiet had become habitual, we were wary of the spies and the chhlop, of saying the wrong thing. In Kosal’s cooperative, a teenager named Milia had been caught keeping a diary. When the spies found it, Milia had disappeared. She never came back and I lay awake at night, staring at the place she used to sleep. It was occupied by another girl, as if Milia had never been. The diary, too, with all its thoughts and secrets, had been swallowed up. I dreamed they were under the huts, Milia, the banker, reaching their arms up, trying to help us.

  The torrential rains stopped. One of the nurses saw that my mother was stronger, and we were discharged.

  Walking home, my brother and I took turns pushing the empty cart, our mother beside us, her steps tentative and weary. The sky was translucent, a watery gold that settled like steam over the distant fields. “Everything ends,” my mother said. “But we’re here. We’re together, even if all else must fade away.”

  Prasith came to us. In our small patch of vegetables, he said, “Who owns all this?”

  “Come and see,” he said, calling the other children. “Whose food is this?”

  I told him that this garden was ours.

  Prasith got down on his hands and knees and began digging at the dirt. He snuck his fingers deep into a hole and extracted the tiny, misshapen root, a sweet potato, the earth still clinging to its wrinkled skin. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Not yet. But you will: we no longer steal from the people.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “Steal,” he whispered.

  He put the tiny root in my hand.

  Devotion softened his face. He said that people had suffered, they had given their lives to end this injustice. “That’s why we fought this war,” he said, “so that all of us might be free.” He picked up a shovel that was lying nearby and began to dig, bringing up the roots and all the food. “I caught a boy stealing,” Prasith said. “He took a watermelon but I punished him. Would you like to know how?”

  The dry grass bit my feet. His voice suffocated me but I tried to close my ears, to cloak myself. Prasith stepped nearer, the words flowing out of him as if they were music.

  “How brave you are,” Sopham said, cutting him off. “You must be fearless to do a thing like that.”

  Prasith turned.

  My brother stood beside me.

  The boy’s tone was mocking. “Are you?”

  Sopham clasped his hands together. I willed him not to speak, not to show himself. “Yes,” he said evenly. “I’m not afraid of my brothers.”

  Prasith stared, and then laughed. He held the shovel out. “Do your brother a favour,” he said, “and finish our work.”

  Calmly, Sopham took the shovel and walked to the centre of our garden. I watched all the roots, all the seeds, come loose.

  Prasith began trailing us across the fields. He would ramble excitedly. One moment sincere, the next, sly.

  “If you want to be strong,” he said one day, “you have to become someone else. You have to take a new name.

  “For instance,” he said, nodding at me, “you should take the name Mei.”

  I stared, bewildered. We had been up since dark, digging canals to irrigate the fields. In a little while, we would be called back to work. Six more hours of digging and shifting soil.

  “Mei, Mei,” he sang. The name, a common one, meant “lovely, beautiful.” His eyes were half-closed, heavy-lidded. “See this?” He lifted his shirt to reveal an un-healed scar. “This is shrapnel.”

  My brother made a noise of disgust.

  I averted my eyes.

  “Shrapnel,” Prasith repeated, watching me, letting his shirt fall.

  My brother had glimpsed a frog and now he dropped to his hands and knees. The tall grass shifted around him.

  “B-52s,” Prasith said. “Whomp-whomp-whomp, like that, everywhere.” He tilted his head back and stared at the sky as if it might fall down on us. “The light, it breaks. It breaks people open as if they’re dogs or dirt. I looked up and there were no houses, no people. Just this hole.”

  Shyly, he bowed his head. “I’m important here. But, really, not even Kosal has any power. Me or him, it’s like using an egg to break a stone.”

  I couldn’t understand. “But who decides?”

  Prasith smiled.

  I persisted. “Who’s the stone?”

  “Too slow, too fast, here’s the stone now.” He swung a bit of rope in the air, laughing at me. “Here it comes. What can you do to stop it?”

  My brother stood up. He held the frog by its dark, crooked legs and then swung it, hard, against a rock. “Too late,” my brother said. “Too slow.”

  The animal in Sopham’s hand convulsed.

  I looked at it, sickened, starving. We could almost see through the frog’s skin, to its lungs and guts. Slowly, pitifully, its feet beat against nothing. I turned away. To hide the trembling in my hands, I kept walking, kept moving. When I turned back to look for my brother, I saw Prasith’s cooking fire, their two heads bowed together and white smoke that coursed into the sky.

  I stood watching until they stood up, until they kicked the fire out.

  That night, my brother showed me the treasure Prasith had given him. Two eggs, impossible things. We shared the first and gave the second to our mother. She ate it slowly, gratefully, her eyes closed, chewing the egg and then the shell itself. She told us that she had dreamed about our father. Pa had come with a knife, she said. He had cut us free.

  Before we slept, my brother tied our wrists together, the way Prasith had taught him, so that if one of us were taken, the other would wake.

  When Prasith restrained the boy, he didn’t resist. This is the way my brother described it to me. The boy, Tao, the eldest son of the machinist, had stood there, motionless. My brother stared at the ground. Prasith had given him new sandals to wear, and they felt heavy and unfamiliar to him, the rubber hot from the sun.

  Calmly, Prasith took his own krama and tied it tightly around the boy’s face. It choked Tao’s breath and he stumbled and fell forward. Against his skin, the fabric of the krama grew dark with sweat or tears.

  “Do you feel pity, Sopham?”

  The air had become cold, Sopham told me. The sky, the colours, the feel of the air, the breath in his lungs, even the passing seconds were cold. My brother could feel the older boy watching him.

  When Tao’s mutilated body lay between them, Prasith cleaned his knife carefully in the grass.

  “I used to think it was strange,” Prasith said, “even terrible, but now I understand how it is.” There was a shivering in his voice. “We have to let the sand
wash away so that everything that remains will be clearer, stronger.

  “No one will ever invade our country again. No more fighting, no more wars. Do you see? We’re nothing but waterways. Nothing but drops of water.” He was staring at Sopham so intensely, my brother had the sensation that the edges of his body were being sheared away.

  “Your father was a translator, wasn’t he?” Prasith said. “I think you went to Chatamukh School. Maybe there’s some part of you that remembers me.”

  My brother studied the body, the soft creases of Tao’s clothing. He said, “It’s as if that time never was.”

  Prasith began undoing the rope that bound Tao’s arms. They walked away, leaving the body where it was, folded over in the grass. “Look, this is what happens when people disappear,” Prasith said. “Bat kluon. What will we do? All the bodies are fading away.”

  The seasons were changing, and all around me the harvest shone, brushed gold. I saw my brother and Prasith approaching from a distance. They walked confidently, arms relaxed, the rifle on Prasith’s back angled to the sky. I was watching them when Kosal came and told me, proudly, that my name was on a list. I looked up at him, uncomprehending. “Come,” he said, and I followed him behind the huts to where a line of girls was waiting.

  He told me to stand with them.

  I went to the end of the line.

  Through the gap between the huts, I saw the pristine fields, strangely bright. My brother running toward me.

  Kosal was speaking, addressing us. He said we had been chosen to join a children’s brigade, we would travel south, we would serve Angkar. Around us, the cooperative seemed unnaturally loud.

  “For how long?” I asked.

  He looked at me, a pleasant expression on his face. “Oh, not long.”

  There were people now, shapes approaching. I looked up and saw Sopham. My entire body began to shake. I began walking away, in the direction of the huts, looking for my mother. Prasith was there, I had not seem him arrive, he took my hand and led me back. “Mei,” he said. “Where are you going?”

  He returned me to the end of the line. “Everyone has a place,” he told me. “Everyone has a function.”

  Sopham and my mother were together now. She was there, she was holding me. “They want to take me away,” I said. My mother’s eyes were swollen, gleaming.

  “Hush, my sweet,” she said, caressing my face.

  “Please, Ma.”

  “Hush, my girl,” she said, her voice fading. “We have no choice.” In her hands were the tin plate and spoon that she used. She folded them into my hands. “You’ll come home soon. You must be brave.”

  “Ma,” I begged. “Help me.”

  Gently, so gently I do not know if I imagined it, she pushed me away.

  A lone cadre escorted us, single file, along the narrow ridges of the rice fields. We were a dozen hungry children, slipping in the mud, running to keep up. I saw tanks and rusted farm machines lying abandoned in the open. Grass slid through them, sticking up like hair, and I told myself that I would see these same objects when I came back again, in a few days, in a week or two. We walked until the sun was high, and we kept walking past crops that were a verdant green, their stalks blurring in the heat. I couldn’t breathe, I felt my mother’s fingers pushing against me. Red clay coated my feet and clothes. You have no possessions, no history, no parents, the cadre said. Your families have abandoned you. The sleeve of her shirt fell back, exposing her slender arms, the colour of wet wood. I thought of my mother gazing at Sopham, going from soldier to soldier, pleading for my father. Open your hands, the cadre said. Let go. If you are pure of heart, you have nothing to be afraid of. This is the revolution that is coming, that is here.

  Rithy

  In the middle of a harvested field, he and Prasith had come to a sala, a meeting place, where a group of boys sat singing, a teenaged girl watching over them. When the song ended, Teacher called my brother forward. She asked his name.

  “Rithy,” he said.

  “Can you add these numbers together, Rithy?”

  “No.”

  “Can you read?”

  “Some.”

  “What work did your father do?”

  “He had a stand in the market. He sold palm sugar.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nine.”

  The questions kept coming but he answered them all, concealing himself like a stem overlaid with branches. His new name, Rithy, meant “strength.” In Phnom Penh, in the temple schools, a new name had been a rite of passage, a bridge from one shore of life to the next, the symbol of a transformed existence. While Sopham answered questions, Prasith stood beside him, listening carefully, nodding as my brother spoke.

  The noonday sun scorched the grass. “Fine,” Teacher said at last, when all her questions were done. “You can stay.”

  Prasith left to return to Kosal’s cooperative. Before they separated, he told my brother to be careful, that the spies were everywhere, Angkars climbing over Angkars. He said that, in our old cooperative, everyone, including our mother, was safer alone.

  “She was relieved that you were leaving, wasn’t she?” Prasith said. “Just like when your sister went away. Mei’s school is just like this one.”

  He climbed onto his bicycle and pedalled slowly into the sky’s orange haze.

  Each morning, Teacher rounded them up to practise military drills: running, digging, hiding, loading their weapons, aiming, and firing. There was no ammunition, and sometimes the guns themselves were made of soft wood, newly carved and still smelling of the forest. The boys threw rocks at targets and screamed belligerently, cursing spies and agents and counter-revolutionaries. The Americans and the Vietnamese were pressing at the borders, Teacher said, and every child, every Cambodian, must defend their country. We are pure, she said, we are free within ourselves.

  “Children become Masters,” Teacher said. “The bread outgrows the basket.”

  They sang everyday. Later on, they sang when they carried out the punishments. Sopham had always had a beautiful voice. Before, our mother used to say that he sounded like In Yeng, and it had been In Yeng records that had crowded my brother’s bedside in Phnom Penh. He used to approach the record player with a kind of earnest pleasure, resting his forehead against the wooden case when the music started. He didn’t play kick sandal or tot sai with the gang of kids on our street. Those records had been like water to him. He drank and he drank, he was never satisfied.

  They had songs to sing even if the words were foolish. Let us destroy the white and glorify the black! Let us dignify the unlettered and eradicate the learned! The judgments were foolish too, but the boys followed orders anyway, there was nothing to be gained in arguing. For them, plastic bags were weapons. Farm tools were weapons. He tried not to dirty his bare hands. Even up to the last moment, he told the guilty not to be afraid. My brother would walk back at night, across the fields, invisible even to himself. When morning came, the sky seemed a little less vivid, a shade lighter, but the shapes around him were clear, pristine.

  He slept in a house with a dozen other boys and they ate rice everyday, there was meat sometimes and always vegetables. In the fields, they saw battalions of workers and they marvelled at the clumsiness of the city people who fell in the mud and broke the implements and injured the animals with their stupidity. Until now, he’d had no idea how vast these rice fields were, how much effort and waste and life were needed to feed a country as small and weak as his. There was too much water and there was too much sun. There were broken dams and flooded crops, there were crabs in the mud and shoddy seedlings. There were closed doors all over this country so farmers died without anyone noticing, they had died generation after generation, from starvation and swindling and finally bombs, until Angkar came and turned the world upside down.

  “Your parents deceived you,” Teacher said, “They told you to eat and drink, but how could you when your brother had nothing? When your sister was dying of thirst?”
r />   No city, he thought, could ever be as beautiful as here. The tall stalks of swaying rice, golden brown. Families of sugar palms and coconut trees diminishing into the horizon.

  Days passed when he endeavoured to be strong, un-corrupted. He was afraid to think too hard about the Centre, which people said existed in Phnom Penh, in the abandoned buildings beside the river. Angkar was all powerful. Angkar never slept because the Centre consisted of every one of them, watching and listening, reporting and punishing. Everywhere you are, there is the Centre.

  Occasionally Prasith came on his bicycle and they walked together in the fields, using long sticks to prod the softest mangoes from the trees. The fruit always helped. He craved sugar and sweetness but against his will these things jogged old memories, dormant images like furniture in a pitch-black room. When Sopham asked about our mother, Prasith said she was the same, the very same. My brother asked if he could see her, but Prasith replied that it was impossible.

  “The spies are watching your mother,” he said. There was a new edge in Prasith’s voice, the boy seemed older and more wary. “The new Angkar suspects everyone. Even Kosal has been arrested.”

  Sopham saw the bruises of a thousand eyes upon them.

  “One day, you’ll go east and defend the country,” Prasith said, trying to reassure him. “We’ll both go east. I would be proud to be a soldier.”

  My brother hoped that this was true. To fight an enemy, a real enemy, would be a relief. He took a breath and said the words he had prepared. “My mother used to tell us that you looked familiar to her.”

  Prasith’s face was empty of expression. “My father and your father knew each other. I lived there, in Phnom Penh, but not for long.” When he looked at Sopham, his eyes were calm, untroubled. “But they’re ghosts now, aren’t they?”

  On the day Teacher told him that he had been chosen, my brother was happy but he didn’t reveal it. What is Sopham? he asked himself. He is a seed in the dirt, belonging to no one. Rithy will survive for a little while, and then he, too, will disintegrate. If only he could have counselled our father, my brother thought. Maybe this knowledge would have protected him; our father had not known how to cleave his soul.