Madeleine Thien - Dogs at the Perimeter

Sopham had heard singing in the fields. This is the way he described it to me, later on, in the caves.

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?”

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, uncorrupted. 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.

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.