Free The Disappeared by Kim Echlin Page B

he said, I will tell you what happened.
    We sat with him and he said, I saw with my own eyes how they killed. In my work brigade they called a big meeting. They dragged out a young couple and blindfolded them and tied them to a tree. They ordered my brigade to come and see people who fall in love without permission from Angka.
    What should we do? the leaders yelled.
    My brigade yelled back, Kill! Kill!
    I yelled this thing too. The boy beside me stepped forward with a bamboo stick and hit the man across his head. Blood came out of his nose and his ears and his eyes. They took the blindfold off the woman and she went pale and she closed her eyes and they beat her too. After many blows they finished her off. I did this thing too. I hit a still living human being hard on the head and the neck and stomach.
    Why did you shout, Kill, kill?
    He moved his hands in circles in front of his chest and he said, I did not feel anything at that time. Words came out with all the other voices.
    The Khmer Rouge used words to kill the people. Touk min chom nenh dork chenh kor min kat. Sam at kmang. They said these things over and over, To keep you is no benefit, to lose you is no loss. Cleanse the enemy.
    These were phrases I had never studied.
    The young man raised his hands into an open funnel in front of his face and he looked through them. He said, I am a living dead. I have my body, I can move, I can speak, I can eat, but I am nothing.
    Then he fell silent and Mau said, Little brother, what we think, we become.
    We watched two small boys catching frogs in the gullies of the fields, running past paddy and sugar palm and cloth and bone. The grass had done its work.
    We walked back to the remorque and I said to Mau, How did you survive?
    He ran the key to his motorcycle over the palm of his hand. He said, Borng srei, I do not like to talk about that time. I was a fisherman’s son. I pretended I could not read and I was taken to build a dam. When it was over, it was the Buddhist New Year. I joined a circle of bodies that danced and clapped around a fire under the moonlight. I myself felt finally free. Across the circle I saw the others were corpses dancing, and I looked down at my own body and it too was only skin stretched over bone. But I kept dancing. We were so happy. When we got to Phnom Penh, Ary managed to lease some land to grow mushrooms and with the profits I bought my motorcycle to make a good living. That is what happened to me.
    Quietly Mau turned away. Come, borng srei, he said, you have seen enough.
    When I came back, you were sitting cross legged on the bed playing your guitar and I sat near you and put my arms around you and said, Borng samlanh, today I visited Choeung Ek.
    You would not speak and you did not put the guitar aside. I watched you slide your callused fingers up the neck and play a few more notes. I put my hand over your right hand so you could not play and said, I cannot live with your silence.
    You still would not speak and that was the first time since we were together again that I spoke chill, impatient words I canhardly bear to remember. You are like a spirit I once knew, I said. Speak to me. Tell me what happened.
    Dread stillness. After a long time you lifted your hand to touch my hair with your fingers and you reached across the guitar and pulled me to you and pressed your cheek against my head and said, You always smell so good.
    Then you dropped your hands back on your guitar and smiled lightly and said, I wonder if you remember this one. You sang,
I can’t get enough of your sweetness
, and I saw you on stage a long time ago, when you were still a math student from far away who could charm a crowd, but I did not sing with you.
    I said, Sometimes the things that draw people together are the same things that rip them apart.
    You said, Do you want to go up the river to visit the temples near where my grandparents used to live? I will show you where I come from.

 
     
     
     
26
     
    Before the monsoons