Love and Other Ways of Dying (47 page)

And he continues to apologize. Discussing the fact that he tortured two prisoners himself but asked his minions “to smash” many others, killing them by cutting their throats, he has said, “The burden is still on me—it’s my responsibility. I would like to apologize to the souls of those who died.”

Meanwhile, Roux and Kar Savuth continue to insist that Duch is being scapegoated, that he should be released from prison, that it’s really Nuon Chea—Brother Number Two, the one from whom Duch ultimately took orders—who bears full responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents. They claim their client faced execution if he didn’t follow instructions. They seem to ask the same question Duch asked Kar Savuth when they first met:
What would you have done?

And yet if this is the beginning of Comrade Duch’s redemption, as Roux so insists, one wonders if he, the steely commandant of S-21, will finally have the stomach for it. Or if the ruination he sees in the mirror will finally crush him, too.

A Final Syllogism:

In Veasna’s living room, Chum Mey needed money to get home. He said he’d moved six times since the start of the pretrial hearings and now lived quite far away. He put on his white watch cap. His once-broken hand was crooked. His eyesight was going. Veasna offered him a ride, but when he refused, she gave him a few small bills.

Earlier I’d had a meeting with a top-level diplomat who’d said that the best Cambodians might hope for now was that this generation, both the perpetrators and the ones who had been so traumatized by the Khmer Rouge, might die off, and with them gone the country might start over again, afresh.

And here was one of the last of that generation, fading before me. The man who’d lost his wife and children,
Pa
to his family, the one who’d gone house to house in the ghost town of Phnom Penh collecting sewing machines to fix, the one who’d lost virtually everything and now moved again from house to house in utter fear and paranoia to keep ahead of his supposed enemies—how could one ever reach this man?

Veasna had something upstairs that she needed to retrieve before we left, too. So I went to the door and waited for Chum Mey to catch up. I was thinking about all the buried pain, everything I would never understand. Cambodia kept passing in windows. Yes, George Clooney was more than an actor. And here, halfway around the world, the room was blinding white, and since I couldn’t speak Khmer, since I had no words, I didn’t know what to do but keep smiling as Chum Mey approached. And
he
kept smiling, shuffling toward me, until I realized he had no intention of stopping.

Did he see me at all?

The old man kept walking, slowly, subtracting the space between us, until all of a sudden he came walking into me, our bodies pressed against each other, a trace of hyacinth and smoke in the city air, and he wrapped his arms around and rested his head on my chest.

Enough.

L
ATER
,
LOST FAR AT SEA
,
WHEN
you’re trying to forget all you’ve left behind, the memory will bubble up unbidden: a village that once lay by the ocean.

Here are the neatly packed homes with gray-tiled roofs over which the mountains rise in rounded beneficence, towering over lush rice fields that feed a nation. Here are the boats that fish the sea, in all its blue serenity, and the grass in all its green. There is such peace in this picture of abundance: lumber from the mountain, rice from the field, fish from the deep ocean. People want for nothing here.

This village woven together by contentment is yours, Hiromitsu, and it is here, in the memory of it whole, that you know yourself best, the fourth-generation son of rice farmers. Here among a hundred wooden houses is the concrete one your family built. The house is made with metal pilings, which by your calculations will stand any high tide or errant wave. On your verdant plot a mile from the sea, a garden bursts with peonies, outbuildings
sag, a koi pond teems. Here you live with your wife, Yuko, to whom you daily profess your love, and your parents, whom you still honor with the obedience of a child. In the barn are the pigeons you adore, for there’s no more beautiful sight in the world than a flock mystically circling deep in the sky, then suddenly one breaking for home, wings aflutter, straining, as if to say,
I’m here.

In this cage lie the chuckling pigeons, and in this barn of theirs, your happiness. Against the wall are full bags of rice seed—and from outside you can hear your wife’s voice calling your name.
Hiromitsu.
Night falls—and in the bedroom you lie beside her. You will remember this later when trying to keep yourself alive: falling asleep one last time by the body of your wife in your house, beneath its roof of white tin, in the shadow of the sea.

Rise now, Hiromitsu, man of men, and accept your fate this day in mid-March 2011, a hint of sulfur in the salt air. Five-thirty
A
.
M
. and frigid, the first priority is, of course, the pigeons in the barn. Fresh water, their corn-wheat-and-barley mix bought from the shop. The wire cage holds all thirty iridescent heads bobbing as they hungrily peck. Out in that barn that holds your happiness, you often speak to them (
How did you sleep?
), call them by name, promise them their daily exercise (
We’ll fly this afternoon
). When you were a child, they called you the Father of Pigeons as an insult, as if you would have no heir but these pea-brained winged things.

Down the driveway—past the koi pond and garden with the now-bare apricot tree and dormant peonies, past the greenhouse in which the rice seedlings grow—you turn up the road, past your tightly packed neighbors, past the nearby shrine, an ancient wooden building, then along Route 6, the sea to your
right, all the way to your job in the lumberyard, your small white compact zipping between the lines—and twenty minutes later you’re through the gates.

After hellos, you take your place in the first shed, running tree trunks through the table saw to make rough boards, the fanged blade in ceaseless rotation, throwing sawdust and the good, clean scent of cedar. Not an hour into the shift and your calloused hands are chapped red. But even this is familiar, an unspoken lesson taught decades before by your father in the rice fields: Work without complaint. Apply one’s mind to the task at hand until everything else has been obliterated.

By noon, the sky has opened a little; a thin sun shines; clouds skim. And yet the cold gathers around you in the shaded shed, running the blade with stiff fingers.
One o’clock, two o’clock.
You watch the hours. Three is break time, in the wood-paneled room with the warm woodstove. Hot tea, rice crackers, and candy suckers.
Two-fifteen, two-thirty.

At two forty-six, something rumbles from deep in the earth, a sickening sort of grinding, and then everything lurches wildly, whips back, lurches more wildly still. The cut boards stacked along the wall clatter down, and your first move is to flee the shed, to dive twenty feet free onto open ground and clutch it, as if riding the back of a large animal. Time elongates. Three minutes becomes a lifetime.

When the jolting ends, stupefaction is followed by dismay—and then a bleary accounting. Already phones are useless. The boss, Mr. Mori, urges you to rush home to check on your wife and parents, but fearing a tsunami, fearing a drive down into the lowlands by the sea, and trusting the strength of your concrete house to protect your wife and parents, you at first refuse. There are ancient stone markers on this coast, etched warnings from the ancestors, aggrieved survivors of past tsunamis—1896,
1933—beseeching those who live by the water to build on the inland side of their hubris or suffer the consequences.

The road is unbroken at first, until the third mile, where a depression has swallowed a rectangle of asphalt. There are downed lines and fallen trees—and yet the rice fields, fallow and unfazed, look exactly as they did this morning. The closer you come to home, the more alarming the damage grows: houses crumpled, windows shattered, sinkholes gaping.

Down near the shore, you pass a car heading inland, an old couple who appear to be
your parents
, whom you spy but do not exactly register in the fog of urgency, as you accelerate past the wooden shrine, through the dense neighborhood of houses, and turn finally into your drive. Immediately you observe that the storehouse wall has come down, and so have the tiles from the roof. Beams are cracked. The fertilizer barrel lies on its side. The walkway to the barn, however, has been meticulously swept.

Bounding up the stairs, you throw the door open to find the drawers have slid from the bureaus and the floor is snowed over with documents, receipts, and invoices. Your daughter, the one who lives in Tokyo now, in a mosaicked picture frame, your favorite heirloom, lies among shattered pieces. The Buddhist altar has been upended, the statue evicted. Everything once on the table litters the floor, including a bottle of wine. Out of all this mess, out of all the meaningful fragments in disarray, you can only think to bend down and pick up that meaningless bottle, replace it gingerly on the table. Your wife—where is she? Now your parents return, your father with that grim expression that belies his fear, beseeching you to follow them to your uncle’s house on higher ground, just as Yuko’s car glides down the driveway. She’s been working out, of all things, at the gym. Her face is rosy. She says
she only felt the quake as a tremor, had no idea of the damage until she got this far. She carries her worry well hidden. In the back of her car are the four twelve-pound bags of rice seedlings that need to be moved to the barn, and though you know the risks of dallying, rice is your history, your patrimony. You send your parents on their way with a promise that you will follow close behind. And some bifurcation of mind allows you to see a neighborhood
—your
neighborhood—damaged but still standing, on a quiet, mendable afternoon like any other.

So, let it be just another afternoon. Your parents leave. Yuko begins moving the bags from the car to the barn while you, Hiromitsu, take three cans of energy drink from the refrigerator and a box of caramels, go upstairs to assess the damage, then step out on the second-floor terrace. You don’t look out to sea, not once; you stand staring at the mountain, Kunimi, in the distance. And now you can hear her downstairs, inside again, and now comes the creak of the bathroom door. Comes the sound of running water. Comes this vision of the mountain, placid, immovable—and then, to your right, to the north, within twenty feet, drifts the whole house of your neighbor. The house is moving past as if borne by ghosts. When you turn left, to the south and the garden, everything is as it’s always been, dry and in place. When you turn back the other way, you can see only this coursing field of ocean.

And that’s when you know you’ve been caught out, that you’ve squandered what time you had, that you must trust this house of concrete you’ve built to stand up to the sea. Your wife joins you on the second-floor terrace, reporting that she, too, saw the neighbor’s house wash away. “We should run,” she says, but you say, “It’s too late.” And then: “We’ll be fine.” Her arms circle your waist and lock there, while you stand stock-straight, gazing at the mountain, without daring to look back at the sea.
These will be your last words to her—
We’ll be fine.
And you’ve already departed your body when everything seems to break beneath your feet and a roaring force crashes over you.

This force is greater than the force of memory, or regret, or fear. It’s the force of an impersonal death, delivered by thousands of pounds of freezing water that slam you into a dark underworld, the one in which you now find yourself hooded, beaten, pinned deeper. The sensation is one of having been lowered into a spinning, womblike grave. If you could see anything in the grip of this monster, fifteen feet down, you’d see your neighbors tumbling by, as if part of the same circus. You’d see huge pieces of house—chimneys and doors, stairs and walls—crashing into each other, fusing, becoming part of one solid, deadly wave. You’d see shards of glass and splintered swords of wood. Or a car moving like a submarine. You’d see your thirty pigeons revolving in their cage. Or your wife within an arm’s reach, then vacuumed away like a small fish. You frantically flail.
Is this up or down?
Something is burning inside now, not desperation but blood depleted of oxygen. What you illogically desire more than anything is to open your mouth wide and gulp. You scissor your legs. In some eternity, the water turns from black to gray, and gray to dirty green, as you reach up over your head one last time and whip your arms down, shooting for the light.

What you see when you explode into the air is a world swarming with burbling black water where one hundred homes once stood, pushing you inland on an oily swell. The mountains keep racing nearer. You’re submerged up to your neck and carried with the current, flying by treetops, electrified by the cold water. It takes a moment to locate yourself here, to confirm that for the moment you’re still living in this thin line between water
and sky. In the frigid flow is half a roof, which just so happens to be yours. Frogging forward, you close the gap, try to lift yourself aboard, but your heavy clothes drag you down. You try a second time. And a third, arms wobbling until you fall back, exhausted. On the fourth attempt, you propel enough of your body out of the water to beach on the roof, then wriggle the rest of yourself to momentary safety. This is when you’re overcome by two feelings: relief (
I’m alive!
) and disbelief (
Where has the whole world gone?
). The wave now surfs you deeper inland, over the homes of Mr. Yoshimura and Mr. Takahashi, Mr. Banba and Mr. Yamamoto (though the water is impenetrably black, you know this village by heart), and just when your forward progress slows (over the roof of the old-age home and the place where the hospital once stood) and is about to reverse direction, you think to jump, understanding that this may be your best opportunity to survive before the wave rushes back or another one speeds forward. The arm of a crane lies just ahead, at the water’s edge, and yet you hesitate a second too long. The reversal of water begins as a sucking sound that gains intensity, amplifying, and then you’re flying, faster and faster, backward over the village on a carpet of black water, to a line of froth where land and ocean formerly met, the mountains receding in a shot, and with them, everything you once thought immovable and holy. Where are you being taken? And what awaits you there?