by Ellen Datlow
“It’s all like that,” said the driver. “I unplugged the set, but it kept playing on every channel.” He sompiahed but looked miserable. “My wife wants to leave.”
Sith felt shame. It was miserable and dirty, being infested with ghosts. Of course they would want to go.
“It’s okay. I can take taxis,” she said.
The driver nodded, and went into the next room and whispered to his wife. With little scurrying sounds, they gathered up their things. They sompiahed, and apologized.
The door clicked almost silently behind them.
It will always be like this, thought Sith. Wherever I go. It would be like this with Dara.
The hotel telephone started to ring. Sith left it ringing. She covered the TV with a blanket, but the terrible, tinny old music kept wheedling and rattling its way out at her, and she sat on the edge of her bed, staring into space.
I’ll have to leave Cambodia.
At the market, Dara looked even more cheerful than usual. The fortunetellers had pronounced the marriage as very favorable. His mother had invited Sith home for the Pchum Ben festival.
“We can take the bus tomorrow,” he said.
“Does it smell? All those people in one place?”
“It smells of air freshener. Then we take a taxi, and then you will have to walk up the track.” Dara suddenly doubled up in laughter. “Oh, it will be good for you.”
“Will there be dirt?”
“Everywhere! Oh, your dirty Nikes will earn you much merit!”
But at least, thought Sith, there will be no TV or phones.
Two days later, Sith was walking down a dirt track, ducking tree branches. Dust billowed all over her shoes. Dara walked behind her, chuckling, which meant she thought he was scared too.
She heard a strange rattling sound. “What’s that noise?”
“It’s a goat,” he said. “My mother bought it for me in April as a present.”
A goat. How could they be any more rural? Sith had never seen a goat. She never even imagined that she would.
Dara explained. “I sell them to the Muslims. It is Agricultural Diversification.”
There were trees everywhere, shadows crawling across the ground like snakes. Sith felt sick. One mosquito, she promised herself, just one and I will squeal and run away.
The house was tiny, on thin twisting stilts. She had pictured a big fine country house standing high over the ground on concrete pillars with a sunburst carving in the gable. The kitchen was a hut that sat directly on the ground, no stilts, and it was made of palm-leaf panels and there was no electricity. The strip light in the ceiling was attached to a car battery and they kept a live fire on top of the concrete table to cook. Everything smelled of burnt fish.
Sith loved it.
Inside the hut, the smoke from the fires kept the mosquitoes away. Dara’s mother, Mrs. Non Kunthea, greeted her with a smile. That triggered a respectful sompiah from Sith, the prayer-like gesture leaping out of her unbidden. On the platform table was a plastic sack full of dried prawns.
Without thinking, Sith sat on the table and began to pull the salty prawns out of their shells.
Why am I doing this!
Because it’s what I did at home.
Sith suddenly remembered the enclosure in the forest, a circular fenced area. Daddy had slept in one house, and the women in another. Sith would talk to the cooks. For something to do, she would chop vegetables or shell prawns. Then Daddy would come to eat and he’d sit on the platform table and she, little Sith, would sit between his knees.
Dara’s older brother Yuth came back for lunch. He was pot-bellied and drove a taxi for a living, and he moved in hard jabs like an angry old man. He reached too far for the rice and Sith could smell his armpits.
“You see how we live,” Yuth said to Sith. “This is what we get for having the wrong patron. Sihanouk thought we were anti-monarchist. To Hun Sen, we were the enemy. Remember the Work for Money program?”
No.
“They didn’t give any of those jobs to us. We might as well have been the Khmer Rouge!”
The past, thought Sith, why don’t they just let it go? Why do they keep boasting about their old wars?
Mrs. Non Kunthea chuckled with affection. “My eldest son was born angry,” she said. “His slogan is ‘ten years is not too late for revenge.’ ”
Yuth started up again. “They treat that old monster Pol Pot better than they treat us. But then, he was an important person. If you go to his stupa in Anlong Veng, you will see that people leave offerings! They ask him for lottery numbers!”
He crumpled his green, soft, old-fashioned hat back onto his head and said, “Nice to meet you, Sith. Dara, she’s too high class for the likes of you.” But he grinned as he said it. He left, swirling disruption in his wake.
The dishes were gathered. Again without thinking, Sith swept up the plastic tub and carried it to the blackened branches. They rested over puddles where the washing-up water drained.
“You shouldn’t work,” said Dara’s mother. “You are a guest.”
“I grew up in a refugee camp,” said Sith. After all, it was true.
Dara looked at her with a mix of love, pride, and gratitude for the good fortune of a rich wife who works.
And that was the best Sith could hope for. This family would be fine for her.
In the late afternoon, all four brothers came with their wives for the end of Pchum Ben, when the ghosts of the dead can wander the Earth. People scatter rice on the temple floors to feed their families. Some ghosts have small mouths so special rice is used.
Sith never took part in Pchum Ben. How could she go to the temple and scatter rice for Pol Pot?
The family settled in the kitchen chatting and joking, and it all passed in a blur for Sith. Everyone else had family they could honor. To Sith’s surprise one of the uncles suggested that people should write names of the deceased and burn them, to transfer merit. It was nothing to do with Pchum Ben, but a lovely idea, so all the family wrote down names.
Sith sat with her hands jammed under her arms.
Dara’s mother asked, “Isn’t there a name you want to write, Sith?”
“No,” said Sith in a tiny voice. How could she write the name Pol Pot? He was surely roaming the world let loose from hell. “There is no one.”
Dara rubbed her hand. “Yes, there is, Sith. A very special name.”
“No, there’s not.”
Dara thought she didn’t want them to know her father was Kol Vireakboth. He leant forward and whispered. “I promise. No one will see it.”
Sith’s breath shook. She took the paper and started to cry.
“Oh,” said Dara’s mother, stricken with sympathy. “Everyone in this country has a tragedy.”
Sith wrote the name Kol Vireakboth.
Dara kept the paper folded and caught Sith’s eyes. You see? he seemed to say. I have kept your secret safe. The paper burned.
Thunder slapped a clear sky about the face. It had been sunny, but now as suddenly as a curtain dropped down over a doorway, rain fell. A wind came from nowhere, tearing away a flap of palm-leaf wall, as if forcing entrance in a fury.
The family whooped and laughed and let the rain drench their shoulders as they stood up to push the wall back down, to keep out the rain.
But Sith knew. Her father’s enemy was in the kitchen.
The rain passed; the sun came out. The family chuckled and sat back down around or on the table. They lowered dishes of food and ate, making parcels of rice and fish with their fingers. Sith sat rigidly erect, waiting for misfortune.
What would the spirit of Kol Vireakboth do to Pol Pot’s daughter? Would he overturn the table, soiling her with food? Would he send mosquitoes to bite and make her sick? Would he suck away all her good fortune, leaving the marriage blighted, her new family estranged?
Or would a kindly spirit simply wish that the children of all Cambodians could escape, escape the past?
Suddenly, Si
th felt at peace. The sunlight and shadows looked new to her and her senses started to work in magic ways.
She smelled a perfume of emotion, sweet and bracing at the same time. The music from a neighbor’s cassette player touched her arm gently. Words took the form of sunlight on her skin.
No one is evil, the sunlight said. But they can be false.
False, how? Sith asked without speaking, genuinely baffled.
The sunlight smiled with an old man’s stained teeth. You know very well how.
All the air swelled with the scent of the food, savoring it. The trees sighed with satisfaction.
Life is true. Sith saw steam from the rice curl up into the branches. Death is false.
The sunlight stood up to go. It whispered. Tell him.
The world faded back to its old self.
That night in a hammock in a room with the other women, Sith suddenly sat bolt upright. Clarity would not let her sleep. She saw that there was no way ahead. She couldn’t marry Dara. How could she ask him to marry someone who was harassed by one million dead? How could she explain I am haunted because I am Pol Pot’s daughter and I have lied about everything?
The dead would not let her marry; the dead would not let her have joy. So who could Pol Pot’s daughter pray to? Where could she go for wisdom?
Loak kru Kol Vireakboth, she said under her breath. Please show me a way ahead.
The darkness was sterner than the sunlight.
To be as false as you are, it said, you first have to lie to yourself.
What lies had Sith told? She knew the facts. Her father had been the head of a government that tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of people and starved the nation through mismanagement. I know the truth.
I just never think about it.
I’ve never faced it.
Well, the truth is as dark as I am, and you live in me, the darkness.
She had read books—well, the first chapter of books—and then dropped them as if her fingers were scalded. There was no truth for her in books. The truth ahead of her would be loneliness, dreary adulthood, and penance.
Grow up.
The palm-leaf panels stirred like waiting ghosts.
All through the long bus ride back, she said nothing. Dara went silent too, and hung his head.
In the huge and empty hotel suite, darkness awaited her. She’d had the phone and the TV removed; her footsteps sounded hollow. Jorani and the driver had been her only friends.
The next day she did not go to Soriya Market. She went instead to the torture museum of Tuol Sleng.
A cadre of young motoboys waited outside the hotel in baseball caps and bling. Instead, Sith hailed a sweet-faced older motoboy with a battered, rusty bike.
As they drove she asked him about his family. He lived alone and had no one except for his mother in Kompong Thom.
Outside the gates of Tuol Sleng he said, “This was my old school.”
In one wing there were rows of rooms with one iron bed in each with handcuffs and stains on the floor. Photos on the wall showed twisted bodies chained to those same beds as they were found on the day of liberation. In one photograph, a chair was overturned as if in a hurry.
Sith stepped outside and looked instead at a beautiful house over the wall across the street. It was a high white house like her own, with pillars and a roof terrace and bougainvillaea, a modern daughter’s house. What do they think when they look out from that roof terrace? How can they live here?
The grass was tended and full of hopping birds. People were painting the shutters of the prison a fresh blue-gray.
In the middle wing, the rooms were galleries of photographed faces. They stared out at her like the faces from her printer. Were some of them the same?
“Who are they?” she found herself asking a Cambodian visitor.
“Their own,” the woman replied. “This is where they sent Khmer Rouge cadres who had fallen out of favor. They would not waste such torture on ordinary Cambodians.”
Some of the faces were young and beautiful men. Some were children or dignified old women.
The Cambodian lady kept pace with her. Company? Did she guess who Sith was? “They couldn’t simply beat party cadres to death. They sent them and their entire families here. The children too, the grandmothers. They had different days of the week for killing children and wives.”
An innocent-looking man smiled out at the camera as sweetly as her aged motoboy, directly into the camera of his torturers. He seemed to expect kindness from them, and decency. Comrades, he seemed to say.
The face in the photograph moved. It smiled more broadly and was about to speak.
Sith’s eyes darted away. The next face sucked all her breath away.
It was not a stranger. It was Dara, her Dara, in black shirt and black cap. She gasped and looked back at the lady. Her pinched and solemn face nodded up and down. Was she a ghost too?
Sith reeled outside and hid her face and didn’t know if she could go on standing. Tears slid down her face and she wanted to be sick and she turned her back so no one could see.
Then she walked to the motoboy, sitting in a shelter. In complete silence, she got on his bike feeling angry at the place, angry at the government for preserving it, angry at the foreigners who visited it like a tourist attraction, angry at everything.
That is not who we are! That is not what I am!
The motoboy slipped onto his bike, and Sith asked him: What happened to your family? It was a cruel question. He had to smile and look cheerful. His father had run a small shop; they went out into the country and never came back. He lived with his brother in a jeum-room, a refugee camp in Thailand. They came back to fight the Vietnamese and his brother was killed.
She was going to tell the motoboy, drive me back to the Hilton, but she felt ashamed. Of what? Just how far was she going to run?
She asked him to take her to the old house on Monivong Boulevard.
As the motorcycle wove through back streets, dodging red-earth ruts and pedestrians, she felt rage at her father. How dare he involve her in something like that! Sith had lived a small life and had no measure of things so she thought: it’s as if someone tinted my hair and it all fell out. It’s as if someone pierced my ears and they got infected and my whole ear rotted away.
She remembered that she had never felt any compassion for her father. She had been twelve years old when he stood trial, old and sick and making such a show of leaning on his stick. Everything he did was a show. She remembered rolling her eyes in constant embarrassment. Oh, he was fine in front of rooms full of adoring students. He could play the bong thom with them. They thought he was enlightened. He sounded good, using his false, soft and kindly little voice, as if he was dubbed. He had made Sith recite Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Rilke. He killed thousands for having foreign influences.
I don’t know what I did in a previous life to deserve you for a father. But you were not my father in a previous life and you won’t be my father in the next. I reject you utterly. I will never burn your name. You can wander hungry out of hell every year for all eternity. I will pray to keep you in hell.
I am not your daughter!
If you were false, I have to be true.
Her old house looked abandoned in the stark afternoon light, closed and innocent. At the doorstep she turned and thrust a fistful of dollars into the motoboy’s hand. She couldn’t think straight; she couldn’t even see straight, her vision blurred.
Back inside, she calmly put down her teddy-bear rucksack and walked upstairs to her office. Aido the robot dog whirred his way toward her. She had broken his back leg kicking him downstairs. He limped, whimpering like a dog, and lowered his head to have it stroked.
To her relief, there was only one picture waiting for her in the tray of the printer.
Kol Vireakboth looked out at her, middle-aged, handsome, worn, wise. Pity and kindness glowed in his eyes.
The land line began to ring.
“Youl prom,” she told the g
hosts. Agreed.
She picked up the receiver and waited.
A man spoke. “My name was Yin Bora.” His voice bubbled up brokenly as if from underwater.
A light blinked in the printer. A photograph slid out quickly. A young student stared out at her looking happy at a family feast. He had a Beatle haircut and a striped shirt.
“That’s me,” said the voice on the phone. “I played football.”
Sith coughed. “What do you want me to do?”
