Madeleine Thien - Dogs at the Perimeter

My friend was wasting away. In my arms, Bopha seemed as insubstantial as the dry grass, as if the sea inside her had evaporated. “There’s an answer to everything,” she said one night when she was ill. “My grandmother told me, it’s all written in a big book. I used to think that, one day, I would read it. I would walk into a temple, it would be as vast and rich as a palace, I would turn all the pages, I would see everything that had ever happened, everything that was coming.”

She looked at me as if she could see straight into my heart, into the centre of who I was. “But I know now,” she said softly. “I’ve looked and I’ve looked, but there’s no answer for me.”

I wanted to hear her laugh. I mimicked the pouting mouth of Vuthy, the way he bit his lip, the way every time he said the word Angkar he sniffed as if he had a cold. I held her hand and kissed her repeatedly, fearfully.

She told me that after they had been evacuated from Phnom Penh, a foreboding had come to her mother. Bopha’s father had already been taken away, and her mother knew that Angkar had marked them. She believed that, unless her children rid themselves of their history, they would never be safe. One night, she packed their things and she sent both her daughters, Bopha and Rajana, away, one to the north and the other to the south. When you reach a camp, she said, tell them you’re an orphan. Tell them your parents have died and you have no place to go. A few weeks later, Bopha said, her mother had been taken away and killed.

I remember birds sliding upwards into the ruby night. Once, while gathering kindling in the forest, I saw a tiger stalking a deer. I stood very still, thinking of my mother, believing that she had come now, she had forgiven me. Instead, the tiger vanished and the deer with him. They were the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen in the world. For Bopha, I gathered lime-green berries in a jacket of dew. But nothing I did could save her. Bopha died. Vuthy came, he helped me bury her at the edge of the reservoir, in a place where still leaves would shade her from the heat. Against her chest, in the pocket of her clothes, lay a picture of her sister, Rajana. Afterwards, fearful that Angkar would see my pain, I hid inside the forest. I asked myself how I had disappeared and why I could not remember the moment, the act. Was this the emptiness at the centre of creation, the nothingness to which I aspired? Was this the highest truth of all? I saw that I had not understood before, how deep, how wide, loneliness could be.

Hunger was erasing my being. Soon, I, too, would find my way into the trees. I went to Vuthy again. I told him I wished to find my brother, and I asked him to send a message to Prasith, a Khmer Rouge cadre. I gave him the name of our old cooperative. Vuthy looked at me, there was pity in his eyes. He said that he would do his best. I wanted to ask Vuthy what he had been before, what lives he had lived, I wanted to know how it was possible to be something more than what I was.

I continued to work in the reservoir. Chantou kept me company, returning to me night after night. My hands, my body, remained in the world, but slowly I released myself into the quiet grief of my thoughts.

Who lied to us? Chantou asked me. I tried to answer him, I tried to know. Maybe it was the ones who said we were living in a new age, a year zero, who said we must be strong, that purity was strength. I wanted to ask Angkar, How can we save ourselves and still begin again, how can we keep one piece and abandon all the rest? The devastation always moves inward, even to the last and highest rooms.

In the reservoir, the rains kept on. I thought another birthday must have passed and I was now eleven years old. No existence is permanent, I told myself. I held fast to the belief that all times, all wars, must come to an end.

Everything passes, my mother whispered.

Even love. Even grief.

Near the end of the rainy season, my brother arrived at the reservoir. I had been summoned to Vuthy’s hut. My brother looked at me, held my eyes, then turned away.

“I need your signature, mit ,” my brother said to Vuthy. The cadre lifted the page. He studied it for a long time, then he turned to me, as if he had a question only I could answer. At last, Vuthy picked up a pen and signed the page. My brother unloaded a sack of rice from the bicycle and laid it on a nearby table. The cadre examined it, surprised.

The tires needed air and when I climbed on, we subsided even farther. As Vuthy watched Sopham began to pedal, navigating us down the muddy road, away from the reservoir. I sat on the seat and my brother stood and pedalled, the cotton of his shirt blowing out behind him, touching my face, my neck and shoulders. The coarseness of his shirt rubbed against me. I had dreamed of seeing him too many times, wished for it, imagined it. In the same moment, I believed and disbelieved.

When the cooperative was far behind us, he manoeuvred the bicycle to the side of a fast-moving stream. He took my hand and helped me into the water and he used my filthy clothes to scrub the mud and dried, old blood from my skin. I could not remember where the blood had come from. He rubbed hard and the clothes, so old and thin, began to disintegrate. The water was sun-drenched, it smelled of black dirt. “Are you all right?” he asked me.

I said that I was cold, only cold.

My brother nodded. “Look,” he said. “I brought new clothes for you.”

Nothing was what it seemed. Somehow he had grown taller than me, heavier. I put the clothes on. Emotion flickered behind his eyes, never quite coming to the surface.

“How did you find me?” I asked him.

“You sent word. Through Prasith. Do you remember?”

I nodded. He turned away from me and climbed back onto the bicycle, waiting. “And Ma,” I said, trying to begin, but the words only slid away from us, unfinished.

“She’s gone,” he said simply.

In his voice, all the feeling had hardened and closed off.

It started to rain. The landscape turned murky, the road began to wash away from under us, but we continued on, hurrying west then south then west again, mostly pushing or carrying the bike over the dislodged road. Shadowy forms moved against the twilight, human beings freezing into trees, trees elbowing into human shapes. We stopped to rest and I opened my mouth and drank the rain.

When it grew too dark to see, we hid in a grove of trees and took turns sleeping. I woke to the sound of my brother reloading the AK, cleaning the barrel and the grip. He had a killed a creature while I slept, skinned it, and hung the flesh from a branch. The mosquitoes and flies surrounded it, ecstatic, and he took the meat down and wrapped it in leaves. We kept going.

Eventually, my brother turned onto a narrow track. We abandoned the bicycle in the mud. Slowly the ground gave way to jungle. I saw thick vines choking the gnarled trees, I saw frantic ground squirrels, enormous, furry insects with wavering antennae and burning eyes. We ascended and the mist rose with us, and then past us. On and on we went, climbing higher and higher. Daybreak came. We stopped only twice, sharing the rice Sopham had brought. Afternoon and then evening fell. The last light pebbled over the jungle floor, my brother moved faster and faster. I struggled to keep up. And then, in the gloom, we saw it at the same time, a crevice cut into the rocks.

Sopham held his AK in both hands. He went in first and then, when he had disappeared, I followed.

Nothing was visible. The cave smelled like a world condensed, all the earth and trees and rocks crushed to a handful of minerals. Sopham rustled in his clothing. Light flickered between us. I saw a match in his hands, and then a candle, thick and honey-coloured, the kind used for temple offerings. For a moment, Sopham looked at me, his eyes pale in the sudden light, and tried to smile. I saw my father’s face, his disbelief, his masked sadness.