Dogs at the Perimeter

by Madeleine Thien

  Teacher told him that he had been selected to work in a security office. The office consisted of a small prison, run by a Khmer Rouge named Ta Chea, and it was housed in a concrete building that used to be a school. First, my brother was a guard and then, later, he was brought into the little rooms where the enemies were questioned. He was the youngest of all the interrogators and Chea told my brother that he should be proud. There are many prisons like ours, Chea said, all over the new country. The interrogators were pulling truth from the bleakest corners, they were the hands and the eyes of Angkar, they were the ones, the only ones, who refused deception. “Don’t be afraid,” Chea told him. “You have a strong character and an upright mind. They can’t harm you.” He said it was my brother’s goodness that cut the prisoners, it was his honesty that sought the truth.

  The prisoners arrived blindfolded and tied with rope. My brother studied them as each session began, chilled and fascinated. One night, Prasith arrived. My brother saw his friend helped down, gently, from a truck. His interrogator asked Prasith to give a biography and to name all the remaining members of his family. Then he had to repeat his life story, over and over. Kosal had betrayed Prasith before he died. The teenager was corrupt, Kosal had said, his only aim to sabotage the revolution. He had gone to school in Phnom Penh, his father had worked as a driver for the French Embassy. All this time, Prasith had kept this information hidden. During the bombings, the B-52s had spared almost no one in his village yet Prasith had somehow managed to survive. He was a traitor of the worst kind, an insect to be purged, a boy who had always put his own survival first. My brother knew this was true. Somehow, Prasith had never completely believed. Maybe Angkar was right, maybe the country had always been most vulnerable from within.

  The dying always beg for water. In the prison, the interrogator’s job is to trace all lines to the enemy, to lay bare the networks of connection, and then to follow this taint to every corner of the country. My brother was taught to do this methodically, calmly, without losing control. Chea kept track of the names that surfaced during each prisoner’s interrogation. He noted them in a ledger, then he sent messages to the cooperative leaders: a sheet of white paper, folded four times, containing only names, a date, and the place of the summons.

  Chea rotated the interrogators regularly. By the time my brother saw him, Prasith was already dying, his mind had come apart. He didn’t recognize Sopham.

  “You must do whatever is necessary,” Chea said, turning the pages of Prasith’s file. “You must make Prasith uncertain about the question of life and death, you must let him hope that he may survive.”

  Our mother had always spoken of the pralung, which is something like the idea of the soul. Sometimes, Sopham told me, the people who survived the longest in prison were the ones who had too great a pralung, too many souls, for it took so long to remove them. A body did not have to die, he learned, for the pralung to be damaged, to grow crooked, become wasted, to finally disappear. He saw people who never cried and people who wept continuously from the moment they entered the prison.

  “Most beloved and respected Angkar,” Prasith had said. “Most beloved. Most respected.” His words were disjointed. “I swear to you on all that I love, I have never betrayed you. Please don’t abandon me here. I swear to you, the enemies surround us.”

  My brother became familiar with the workings of the human body, with the tissue and the blood and the organs and the delicate, fragile forces that held a boy together. Cut this knot here, and the hand or the leg or the heart becomes useless. It was both mysterious and simple. Every day, my brother fought to banish all the unnecessary raging inside himself, to become as devoted and steadfast as Chea.

  Before he died, Prasith told detailed, fantastic tales, he admitted freely to being a spy, he described America as a place where citizens lived on airplanes or underground, leaving the surface of the country empty as a sheet. The CIA had recruited him at a young age, he said. They had sent him messages hidden inside pieces of clothing. They had signalled to him from the cockpits of their planes. The truest believers, he said, describing the agents he worked for, were the most indifferent monsters.

  My brother became obsessed with water. His throat felt parched and rough, he hallucinated about water, he hoarded it in plastic bags and left these in the fields. Sometimes he stood and gazed at the shackled enemies and drank water in front of them as if to prove it was still there, it still existed within their reach. When it rained, he sat and watched the water moving over the ledges of the concrete building, seeping into the ground, falling and falling from the nothingness above. He watched it gathering in the clay jugs behind the building where the enemy was sometimes brought to be forced down under the clear, clean water. A blessing turned into a torture.

  “I just went on with all the same things,” he told me. “What did it matter if I believed or not? Ta Chea told me to think of him as my father. He said he would protect me as a father would.”

  In the prison, he let music run in his head. He thought about his hero, In Yeng, the singer, and wondered what had happened to those recording studios in Phnom Penh, to the television screens and singers, to the machines and microphones and boxes of records. Music, he knew, was recorded on to strips of brown tape, tape that spun around and around a metal reel. You could store music in canisters, you could lift it in stacks. If tomorrow the Khmer Rouge disappeared and he could return home, would he go? His collection of records might still be there but he knew that when he put his fingertips to the wooden case, when he set the needle against the grooves, the record might spin and spin and leave him wanting. Now the singer would be an executed man. Now all the reels of tape would have burned away and what joy was there to be had in such a return? My brother was nine years old. He had committed murders, he told me. He had tried to save himself and he had seen things that even our father, until the end of his life, could never have imagined.

  A woman named Chanya came into the prison. They kept her for three weeks and, every night, she was interrogated. Her confession was nearly complete when Chea sent my brother to her. The woman was dying, on the table where she had been shackled, her arms and legs were impossibly thin. Her voice was so weak, he had to lean over her to catch the words.

  “I’m hungry,” she whispered.

  “I have rice for you.”

  “Please. Just a spoonful. Please.”

  He gave her the rice, and then a sip of water.

  “Thank you, my son. You are kind.”

  The next morning, before dawn, he found himself seated beside her again. The gaps between her sentences had grown longer. He did not light the candle.

  “You must tell him,” she said. Her eyes stared up at the stained, dingy ceiling.

  “Tell who?”

  “Your father. Your brothers.”

  He hesitated, thinking. And then he said, “If only I could find them.”

  “They’re in the caves.”

  “Which caves?”

  “You know. The place your father hid when he fought the Americans. The men are waiting for you.”

  “No, I can’t find the way by myself.”

  “But the map, my son. He drew it so carefully.”

  “They took it from me.”

  She breathed heavily. “What is that sound?”

  It was the splashing of water in the buckets outside. “The children are washing in the river.” A sad smile touched her lips. He was an instrument, he told himself, only an instrument. “After school today,” he continued, “I stopped at the market. I bought you kralan from the lady with the curly hair and the gold tooth.” He kept talking. The words seemed to soothe her. After a long time, she turned her head. “It’s sweet,” she said. “This kralan, still warm.”

  That evening, he was sent to her again. Her eyes were closed. He thought she was unconscious and he repeated her name. “Give me your hand,” she said. He reached out and held her. Weakly, she ran her thumb over his fingers. “You’ve been chewing your fi
ngernails again. Down to the quick. My poor Tooch. Always so nervous.”

  Between their hands, there were two small pieces of paper. They were rolled up, small as a stem, tucked into a gold ring that was so narrow, it could only have belonged to a child. He slid them free and opened them. On the first scrap, a map had been drawn. The paper had been folded so many times that the ink lines of mountains and jungle paths bled into the creases. “Poor little Tooch,” she said, letting him go, turning her face away. “My poor boy.”

  She was taken from the prison that night and killed. Sopham locked himself in a storage room and used a candle to study the map. He could still hear the woman’s breathing, the shallow exhalations. When he was small and learning to tie his first knot, our mother had told him that a rope almost never breaks within the knot itself. Instead a rope is weakest just outside the entrance to a knot, where the load is greatest. The map showed a way to the heavily guarded Vietnamese border, into the caves and out again. The second scrap of paper held a single phrase, written so lightly he almost didn’t see it.

  The river has flooded this year.

  A smuggling ring, he thought. A code.

  He returned to the map. If disciplined, perhaps he could travel there in a single day. My brother knew that Angkar would seek his family out, uncles and aunts, cousins, friends. They would be identified and arrested. He no longer believed that our mother was alive. Who was left? Only his sister. Only me.

  When he could see the map in his mind’s eye, my brother burned the papers. He placed the ashes on his tongue where they turned to paste and little by little dissolved.

  He waited for the hot season to end. In the forest beyond the prison he hid lighters, clothing, uncooked rice, paper, pencils, candles, a good knife. Rithy existed and survived. He waited and kept his hands and his face impeccably clean but inside, there was someone else, a boy who watched, who had no need for language, who saw everything but never spoke, a boy who waited in the dirt for the end of one season and the start of another.

  When news arrived at the prison that a girl at the reservoir was searching for Prasith, my brother, ever reliable, asked permission to bring her to the security office. He had done this before for other enemies. Chea, suspicious of everyone but my brother, agreed. Sopham hid his supplies on his body. He set off on an old bicycle, carrying the travel pass that Chea had given him.

  Every day, hauling mud in the bottom of a vast, dry reservoir, I followed Bopha’s tracks. Our work unit, made up of three dozen girls, moved from project to project. Sometimes we hauled mud or shit, or we dug with our bare hands, or we gathered wood. Sometimes we just marched from one destination to another, guided by a brutal but confused cadre. Bopha, Chan, Thida, Srei, Vanna, so many more, these are the children I remember. Oun, the dentist’s son, arrived here, too, part of a children’s mobile unit.

  At night, I slept beside Bopha. We were the same age, we had the same blunt haircut, the same hollow bellies, but her eyes were bright and questioning and alive. Somehow, months of working in our brigade had not dulled them. When she laughed, she covered her eyes with her hands. All I would see was her upturned mouth, pale lips, a flash of teeth, stained fingers.

  Every few weeks, Bopha would leave the reservoir at night. She would walk into the fields, through the blackness, until she reached the cooperative where her older sister lived. These nights were always the worst for me. My terror grew and grew, choking my breath. I wanted every noise, every approach, to be hers. Somehow, Bopha always succeeded in avoiding the patrols. When she returned before dawn, I held her more tightly, I watched her constantly, I did not want to let her disappear.

  I recognized my mother everywhere, in the groups of women whose arms and legs were thin as blades, who dug endlessly at the ground. I tried to climb away into my mind, there were tunnels there, lakes, shelters within shelters. Memories came to me like objects sliding off a shelf. Week after week, I tried to convince myself to go back, just as Bopha did, but I kept putting it off. The darkness held a terror for me. Many times, I dreamed that I went home but my mother was already gone. No trace of her, no record, remained. Everything I knew had gone away. All around me, hour after hour, I heard the steady crack of shovels against earth.

  At the height of the dry season, Oun beckoned to me across the reservoir. Briefly, a line connected us, taut for a moment, before he dropped his eyes. Slowly, cautiously, we drew nearer to each other, until we were side by side. Oun set his basket down, pretending to be occupied with it. “I went back,” he said. “I saw my mother.” I tried to shield my eyes from the glare of the sun. He hesitated, picking some rocks out of the basket. “Sopham was gone, sent away like us.” One by one, the rocks came out. “I heard your mother was ill and that Angkar sent her to the infirmary.” “Oun,” I said. I saw the basket lifting, and then his bare feet, dark against the soil. The sun was nearly in the centre of the sky. It had taken him this long to reach me. “Do you know the place?” he asked me. His words came quickly now, rushing out. “It’s where my father died. You must know it. In this sub-district, there’s only the one infirmary.”

  I glimpsed a cadre walking toward us.

  “I know it,” I whispered.

  Desperately, I pushed my hands into the warm mud, digging, busying myself. Time slowed. The morning light had solidified around us, holding each object, making every outline, all the shapes and all the people, precise unto themselves. I looked up. The cadre was watching us from a distance.

  “Go,” Oun said, moving away. “Don’t wait.”

  I remember very little of the journey. Bopha gave me her sandals, which were newer than mine and in better condition, and then we went, moving through the impossible blackness, quickly, carefully. We had learned to be wary of injury. Wounds didn’t heal anymore. In the heat and humidity, the smallest wounds could become infected. In the reservoir, people died from negligible things, a cut, a piece of rotten food, a single mistake made in a moment of exhaustion. As we ran, I saw Oun and the other children, I saw the cadre, Vuthy, who took care of us and who tried to be kind, but of Sopham or of my mother, my thoughts were bare. Not even their faces came to me. It was as if I could not lift them out from the darkness. We walked on and on, the night stretching around us.

  At the edge of a road, Bopha took my hand. She was continuing on to see her sister, and we had agreed to meet back at the reservoir by morning. “Don’t stay away too long,” Bopha said before letting go. Within seconds, the shape of her had vanished into the emptiness.

  People slept on straw mats or on the filthy tiled floor, with nothing to cover them or to keep the rats away. A girl wearing a long apron gave me a candle so that I could search for my mother. Slowly, I moved between the bodies, circling once, and then again, and again. I glimpsed a woman’s loose clothing, her dark hair, and finally her face, childlike now, young again. My mother was so very thin, I had not recognized her.

  There was no food in the infirmary. People lay covered in flies, too weak to climb out to use the latrine, unable to scavenge and feed themselves. They groaned and cried for water. My mother’s hands were so tiny, they could fit inside my own. I stroked her hair and whispered her name. I said that her girl had come back, I had come to take her home. The wind blew inside and cooled us. A memory came to me of the sugar water she had drunk, perhaps a year ago now. It seemed like it must be a different girl, a different mother. She opened her eyes and looked at me as if from a great distance.

  “Are we going home now?” she asked finally. Yes, I said. The lie felt bitter on my lips. “He’s there,” she said. “Father.”

  A boy came and said he was a doctor and he gave me a white paste to rub on my mother’s chest. The paste was chalky and strange, it smelled of the earth and some herb I couldn’t identify. She asked me where my brother was.

  When I told her I didn’t know she said, “He went away with that boy. They went away and then the boy came back alone.”

  Gently, I rubbed the paste onto her skin and as I d
id so, tears began to run from her eyes. I could not bear it. I blew the candle out.

  The night passed slowly. The infirmary was never still. People called to ghosts who were not there, living ones or lost ones, names that no one answered to. The words filled the space like an incantation. Unable to sleep, I got up and went outside. First light came, I thought of Bopha waiting for me, and the mud of the reservoir seemed to grow brighter in my imagination, all the black-clothed workers, war slaves, the cadres sometimes called us, though the war had ended long ago. Here, in the infirmary, there were mothers and fathers and children, but hardly any who belonged to each other. Infrequently, the nurses came through. They were hardened now, more unforgiving than they had been before. I saw a woman being sent back to her work unit. Stone-faced, unable to weep, she left a bundle of food beside her son. Rice, fruit. By evening, the food had disappeared but the boy had not moved. I had hideous, nightmare dreams about my brother. On the third morning that I was there, I saw the nurses lift the boy’s body and carry it away. All day, my mother did not open her eyes.

  I scavenged, going farther and farther afield because the land near to the infirmary had been picked clean. In my mother’s pocket, I had found her travel pass and I carried it everywhere with me. The pass was signed not by Kosal, but by a name I didn’t recognize. I searched desperately for frogs, lizards, crickets, but my movements and my thoughts were slow. I, too, was starving. I returned with herbs and wild grasses and made a thin soup for us both. “The food is ready,” my mother said. “Call your brother to the table. Give him a little rice.” All too clearly, I could see the images in her mind, our white kitchen, her silvery pots, her family. I lay beside her and tried to disappear into my mother’s world, to become her, to keep her near and lose myself instead. I begged her to be strong, to come back. I could not bear to survive alone.