Dogs at the Perimeter (15 page)

“Listen,” she says. I hear movement, papers sorted through. Tavy begins to read,
“My darling James, today is the first day of the New Year. Heng came today and returned your camera
 …” She keeps going.

The water spreads in a puddle, touching my bare feet.

“She was his wife,” Tavy says. “Maybe Sorya is not her only name, probably she had an alias, many aliases. Nearly everyone did. I should look …”

“James wasn’t married. Or Hiroji never mentioned it.”

“But according to what she wrote …” Voices in the background, rising and falling. “She thought her letters were being smuggled to James,” Tavy says. Her voice is low, it mirrors my own surprise. “She took a risk and gave these letters to someone she trusted. Whoever it was, they told her that James Matsui was in hiding in the northeast, in the caves by the Cambodia–Laos border. Who knows if it was true? But in late 1975, she was arrested. I found her prison dossier – the usual, her biography, confessions, and also her photograph. There is nothing after 1976. But, also, there is no date of death.

“I’ll keep looking,” she says after a moment. “The letters are scanned so I can send them by email. I’m sorry I woke you … Usually when we find this kind of information, people like to know right away. One last thing, when James Matsui donated the letters, he left a phone number. I tried calling it but the number is out of service.”

“Thank you, Tavy,” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “I’ll keep looking.”

The dial tone hums in my ear. I hang up, step across the puddle of water, kneel down, and begin to wipe it with a T-shirt. The starlight is dim, a fine wash against the window. The water seems to keep on spreading. I give up on the puddle. On it goes, touching the feet of the couch, swelling against the carpet.

Unable to sleep, I go to Hiroji’s office and open the file.

Wednesday, February 22

[fragment]

This is the way Hiroji once described it to me. In 1976, Nuong arrived, alone, at the Aranyaprathet camp in Thailand. He had been ten years old when he and his brothers escaped from their cooperative, a mountain camp outside of Sisophon. The six boys had walked into the jungle and they had survived, on roots and stolen watermelons, for more than a month, finding their way west, toward Thailand. They scaled the Dangrek Mountains and descended into a dry, open forest. But then the mines separating Cambodia from Thailand, mines planted by the Khmer Rouge, began. The detonators were the size of melon seeds and the colour of rust, with trip wires, luminous nylon thread, that curled through the grass. The brothers walked single file, the
eldest first, and Nuong last. Nuong saw only the black shirts of his brothers ahead of him. They whispered to him not to panic, not to be afraid. But leaving Cambodia was like trying to walk through a forest of glass. They set off a series of mines. Within seconds, all of his brothers were dead.

For a long time, he stood where he was. Bits of earth were everywhere around him, they fell in clumps from the trees, triggering yet more explosions. A deer leapt toward him, the ground burst. He stood with his hands pressed to his ears believing that he, too, had come apart. He saw his brothers again. They were impatient and they yelled at him to hurry, so Nuong closed his eyes and did as he was told. He began to crawl. Flies covered him. He was less than twenty metres from the border, he crossed without knowing it, and kept going until a Thai farmer saw him, reached down, and carried him away.

In 1980, Nuong was sponsored by a family in Lowell, Massachusetts, and he lifted off for America. For nearly two years, his letters arrived at Hiroji’s apartment every month, the upright alphabet giving way to cursive, to scribbled notes, and then to postcards. By the time Nuong was a teenager, even those no longer came. The boy had passed through a curtain, he belonged to a new family.

And then, last summer, Hiroji had answered the telephone and a voice he didn’t recognize, with an unfamiliar accent, said, “It’s me, Nick.”

“Nick?” Hiroji said. “I’m sorry. Who is this?”

“Nuong,” the voice said after a moment. “Nuong. From Aran camp.”

Hiroji was overjoyed. He asked a handful of questions but Nuong managed to evade them all. After a few minutes of dodging and deflecting, he told Hiroji that he was in trouble.

“What’s happened? Let me help you.”

But by then it was too late to intervene. Nuong had made too many mistakes, starting with the wrong friends, a quick temper, drinking, drugs, and finally a vicious fight that ended up blinding a man. Nuong and his adoptive family had not realized that, despite Nuong’s papers – his refugee status in the United States, his high school diploma, his green card – he was not an American citizen. He had neglected to apply. Instead, he was a refugee who had committed a felony and, now, under the law, he was subject to deportation. He was being sent back, forcibly, to Phnom Penh.

“We’ll get a lawyer,” Hiroji said.

“But I have one already.”

“I have a friend in Boston, don’t worry about money –”

“No,” Nuong said. “I just wanted to tell you. I wanted you to know that I was going back. That it was all for nothing.”

Hiroji was stunned silent.

“I don’t even speak Khmer anymore, I barely remember the language,” Nuong said. He laughed hurriedly,
and then the discomfort came back. Hiroji saw the sullen Thai soldiers and the Khmer Rouge who had come like spiders across the border, taking truckloads of refugees. He saw the small boy who would sleep at the foot of his bed, motionless, unblinking.

“Nuong,” Hiroji began.

“I don’t even know if that’s my name. It’s what my brothers called me. It’s just the name I remember.”

In November, a few weeks before Hiroji disappeared, he had received a letter from Nuong. Hiroji told me that the boy’s American family had gone to visit him in Phnom Penh. They had decided to invest in a small hotel that Nuong was now managing.
The Lowell Hotel
, Nuong wrote.
Their idea
. Here was his telephone number, here was his address.
Send me a photograph of James
, Nuong wrote.
Don’t forget. I want to keep looking
.

Hiroji told me that he remembered following Nuong to the border. The boy stood there, in the dry, sunlit field, holding a stone in his hands, staring across the bridge. The Khmer Rouge guard taunted Nuong to step forward, to throw the stone, to cross the bridge back into Cambodia, to come home, but the boy just stood there staring like a sick dog, a dying child. Come home. If you come home, Angkar will give you everything you want. “Nuong,” Hiroji had called. But he already knew what would happen. This was a country, he had learned, in which no one responded to their names. Names were empty syllables, signifying nothing, lost
as easily as a suit of clothes, a brother or a sister, an entire world.

[end]

Unable to settle, I put the espresso maker on the stove. While the coffee warbles up through its pipes, I free a chocolate bar from its wrapper, set it near the element so that it melts a little in the heat, and then I carry it to Hiroji’s desk, eating it slowly.

Tavy’s email has arrived, along with the scans of Sorya’s file.
My darling James
, Sorya’s letters begin. There are six of them, dating from April 1975 to the end of that year.

I read them through once, and then again. The screen glows whitely in the dark room and outside all is hushed. From the pocket of my coat, I retrieve the yellow notebook and open it to the back cover where Nuong’s number is written. The cat comes in and begins to clean herself as I dial. The line rings several times and then a man answers.

In English, I ask for Ly Nuong.

“Yes. Speaking. Who is this?”

I tell him my name and say that I am a friend of Hiroji Matsui. That I am looking for him. Brusquely, the man says that I have the wrong number, that I am misinformed. In Khmer, I ask Nuong not to hang up, I have
found something that might lead to Hiroji’s brother, James. I tell him about the letters, written by Sorya, about Tavy at the Documentation Centre, and the file Hiroji gave me last year. I ask for his help and then, abruptly, the words stop. I say my name again.

“He’s already gone.”

The words don’t register.

Nuong says. “Hiroji is in Laos.”

I ask him a string of questions.
When, how, where
.

“Wait,” Nuong says. “Slow down. I won’t hang up. I’m listening.”

We talk for a long time. Near the end of our conversation he tells me that, when he first arrived in America, at the age of eleven, it wasn’t the war he had left behind – the refugee camps, the Khmer Rouge – that had struck him as incomprehensible. Rather, he was confounded by the vastness of this new country. America’s bright smiles and proud efficiency, its endlessly flowing water, cinemas, fairgrounds, and easy optimism, shamed him. He felt out of place, unknowable.

“Here in Phnom Penh, in Sisophon,” Nuong says, “people went on. The
mulatan
are still there. Some are farmers, some are soldiers. Nobody had anyplace to go. And all the new people, the April 17 people who couldn’t leave, they’ve gone back to the cities where they began.” He says that hardly anyone outside the country remembers this war. Only us, only here.

I tell Nuong that I don’t think I can ever return.

He understands. “Hiroji is in Laos,” he says. “I can tell you where he’s staying.”

That night, I dream of Navin. I dream and when I wake, the curtains are open, the blanket is twisted around me, and the air smells of rumdul flowers and smoke and the river. I get up and go to the door and open it but no one is there, no cars, only the faint glow of the streetlamps. I stand for a moment and let the cold sharpen my senses, invade my dreams. When I first arrived in Montreal, this city had seemed so alien to me, so self-contained and mysterious. How many winters have I passed here? Nearly a decade’s worth, the cold months accumulating, white and silent, the years opening toward another existence. I remember the warmth of Navin’s apartment when I first met him. We were like two coins left in the bottom of the jar: here by circumstance and luck, here together. It was dawn the first time we made our way to the bedroom, dawn when the building began to wake, when his neighbours prepared breakfast, gathered their children, packed their bags and briefcases, jingled their keys. I smelled coffee through the walls but I was holding Navin. Doors slamming upstairs, downstairs, and Navin watching as I touched my lips to him, as I knelt on the blanket. His lean body, surprisingly strong, dark in the unlit room. The building emptying, the air disappearing. I pushed the windows open, back then I craved
the shock of air on my skin. In the beginning, we never talked about Cambodia or Malaysia. Our countries remained behind us, two lamps dimming. Like his father, who died young, Navin was an engineer. When I met him, he had just come back from Kuala Lumpur and its towering, silvery skyscrapers. He took me to hear ice melting on the St. Lawrence River, a steady crackling and firing. In the kitchen, there was a picture of his father. They had the same narrow face and dark eyes, the same solemn beauty. I had no photographs from my childhood. “Describe your father to me,” Navin had said. He was making lunch for us, a thin, savoury roti canai. His cooking filled with air with heat, with a floury residue.

“Tell me what he was like.”

I told Navin how easy it had been to make my father laugh, how his hands had danced when he spoke, clipping and prodding the air. I remembered how my father’s entire body had always seemed to lean forwards, propelled into the future, how my brother and I had to run just to keep up with him. I remember how, at weddings and celebrations, he was always the first to start dancing the
ramvong
, how he never slept well, how he stood on the balcony singing to himself. “What songs?” Navin asked. I remembered. My father had told me they were the songs of my grandmother.

On the residential streets outside Navin’s apartment, brick duplexes had stood, shoulder to shoulder, exhaling chimney smoke, all along the boulevard. Growing
up, I remember arak singers trying to tempt wandering souls, the
pralung
, back into their bodies. I remember celebrations, ceremonies, the words Meng had spoken before I flew away to Canada. Your daughter is crossing the ocean. You, too, must go on. You, too, must walk to your own destiny.

In the sky on the way to Saigon, the hours pass slowly. The plane sails on, food arrives and disappears, trays fold up, windows darken. The man seated beside me watches one movie after another, he laughs big belly laughs and then falls asleep, his headphones askew, his blanket slipping across his shoulders.

I had gone to see my family last night. Navin told me Kiri had started a new set of drawings. Aplysia, waving like a flower. One cell, two cells, or Aplysia its entirety, a wide creature billowing through the ocean. At the kitchen table, Kiri sat across from me and asked me where I was going. “To Laos,” I said. “To see Hiroji.” Morrin had given me two weeks of leave. In my son’s bedroom, I put my fingers to the globe, turned the Earth on its pedestal, and showed him the place. The names inscribed were in French.
Cambodge
, he read.
Viêt Nam. Laos
.