Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

“Where did you come from, Father?”

“Prek Phnou, outside Phnom Penh. I am a teacher.”

“That’s far away on foot.”

“I walk week. More. I don’t know. Lose track of everything. I hide in the day in forest, but Khmer Rouge leave me alone. They think I will die on my own.”

“We are going to Phnom Penh,” Tanner said, crouching down and snapping pictures of the man as he drank.

“Te!” No! he shouted. “Te Kampuchea! Te Phnom Penh!”

“It’s okay, Father.”

“They empty the city. The hospitals. Terrible. I see things I did not wish to live to see.”

“Are you a person of Vietnam?” Helen asked.

He bowed his head and nodded. “I go back after many years.”

She knew better than to ask about his family. She went to the front of the car and got another canteen and handed it to him. “Take this. Do you have food?”

He shook his head, and she grabbed sandwiches, cookies, and C-rations.

“Here. And some bandages and ointment for your feet. The border is here,” she said, waving her hand at land without demarcation, except for the guard house in the distance. “The next village not far.” What was far to an old man on the verge of collapse?

“Don’t forget an opener,” Matt said, coming around the side of the car, for all the world like a polite schoolboy.

The old man kept sitting. “Aw kohn, aw kohn.” Thank you, he said.

Tanner came back. “Let’s hit the road.”

Helen nodded. “I’m sorry, Father. Can I take your picture?”

He stared up at her with a blank look. “Daughter, there is no one left who will care.” He stood uncertainly, looking down the road. Something passed across his face as she focused her camera, a shudder, and after the picture was taken she felt embarrassed at the intrusion. The image she wanted was her first sight of him-a small, anonymous figure in the distance with the two suitcases. She couldn’t stage it. He felt around in his pockets and pulled out a sandstone medallion no larger than a small coin with a Buddha carved in relief. He handed it to her.

“I can’t accept-” she said.

“I have one, too. It has given me hope.” He pulled out another one from his shirt pocket. “Put in your mouth, like this.” He opened his mouth, revealing a few lone teeth, and placed it on his tongue, then closed his lips. He spit it back out. “It protects you from harm. That is why I escaped, why they didn’t kill me like they killed the others.” He made a chopping motion with his hand. “Vay choul.” With the back of a hoe.

Helen took the small Buddha, hand trembling, and bowed to the old man. “I hope it protects us as it has you.” As they drove away, she watched him pick up his suitcases and limp down the road. She leaned out the window and took the picture she had wanted from the back.

“I wouldn’t put that in my mouth, birdie,” Tanner said. “No telling where that little medallion’s been.”

Like a pair of hyenas, Tanner and Matt laughed as she watched the old man grow smaller and smaller in the side-view mirror until he was only a shadow that disappeared on the horizon.

They had been driving long hours, a tortured skirting of crater-size potholes made by B-52s years before, riding through dry stretches of rice paddy that were smoother than the road, making slow progress, when they came upon a roadblock.

From a distance, it seemed just clutter, but up close its message was stark-a skull, a helmet, a gun, a shoe. They had entered a land before language. A clear meaning that beyond lay only danger. Beyond be dragons. The scorching air now seemed suddenly to crackle, dry and treacherous, incendiary. Helen stuck her head out the window and looked back the way they had come. Had the old man made it to shelter? When Matt and Tanner were preoccupied with the map, she slipped the medallion in her mouth, the texture gritty like pumice, tasting of salt and dirt and iron.

“Looks like we’ve caught up with our quarry,” Matt said.

Helen turned back to the parched landscape ahead, the ground and sky a series of harsh reds and yellows, the trees stunted and full of prickling spines, the place like tinder, waiting for conflagration.

The first shape seemed to be only a pile of rags at the side of the road, but when the station wagon slowed down it turned out to be the corpse of a small boy, curled on his side as if in sleep, a tiny hand covering the gap where an ear was missing. Helen felt the courage pouring out of her, despair and fear taking its place. A quarter of a mile farther on, more bodies: a woman in her twenties with her hands spread out at her sides as if in surprise; a man with his arms folded behind him as if he were relaxing. Then the bodies began to crowd the road-families, groups of men, old people, women-struck down in rows like scythed sheaves of rice, so that Tanner had to slow the car and swerve back and forth along the road, until finally the bodies became so numerous and thick he had to stop to avoid running over them. Tanner and Matt got out while Helen sat loading film in her camera. When she was ready, a Tiger Balm-smeared handkerchief over her nose, they moved forward, cameras clicking. Tanner motioned to her, and she walked to the edge of the road and saw the sunken field piled with hundreds of bodies, many decapitated and bludgeoned, so that they knew the stories of vay choul were true, killing with hoes to save bullets.

“We are the only ones who have this on film,” Matt whispered, his jaw tight and quivering, and then he turned away and vomited.

Helen put her hand on his back. “It’s okay. It happens. Get some water.”

“Not to me.” Matt shrugged her hand off and wiped his face.

She bit her lip, annoyed at his petulance. “It’s the first time I started to like you,” Helen said.

“Then you’ve got some weird criteria,” he said.

“We have enough,” Tanner said. “Let’s go.”

The two men ran back to the car. Without thinking, Helen edged down the embankment and took more pictures of the piled bodies, framing the picture from a lower vantage point, with sky behind them, so the massiveness of the piles could be felt. If the picture was no good, it meant that you weren’t close enough. She did a close-up of a young girl’s face that was as peaceful as if she were asleep, a single flower tangled in her hair. Five minutes later, Helen climbed back up and ran to the car. Inside, she pushed down the lock on the door, then laughed at her own foolishness. “I’m going crazy. Get out a bottle of something.”

“Whiskey time,” Matt said, and burrowed in the bags again.

Tanner put the car in drive. “Forward?”

Helen took a long drink, wiped her mouth, then took another. The scale of this depravity like something out of World War II. She shook her head. This was clearly beyond them. “We’ll never make it to Phnom Penh. And if we do, what then? They’ll confiscate the film.” Helen studied the map. “Let’s go back a few miles and take this secondary road. It’s probably a cow trail, but it’ll hook up with Route 6. Route 6 goes to Thailand.”

Tanner let out a yell and banged his hand on the dashboard. “Do you two have any arguments to sharing the Pulitzer three ways?” He laughed. “We have it. How lucky can you get?”

Helen tried to hold the whiskey bottle, but her hand couldn’t grip, the shaking was so bad. She stuck it between her knees so the two men wouldn’t notice. The irony was that she could have no better company for this trip; they were insulated from the horror by their own ambitions. She didn’t have the strength at that moment to question her own motivations. Why, indeed, was she there? She could only pray their ignorance would carry the three of them to the border.

“They thought they would get away with it. Pol Pot denying the whole thing. No pictures, no proof. Won’t make us too popular around here, huh?” Helen said.