Paradise Tales, page 28
The questions back forth and over again, the same ground. He perched forward, eyebrows arched as if straining to say nothing is wrong; his manner straightforward, as though he understood that we were trying to help. Da, da, firm downward strokes of the head. Yes they held my daughter down, and turned her so that I had to see what they did. Yes, they did that to her as well. Yes, my poor Shemsije, she was next. What do you think they did? Almost a chuckle. The usual thing. Like in barnyard. Son? Yes.
It was like he was discussing sporting results.
Did they assault anyone else?
No.
No one else was assaulted?
No.
Mr Paçaku, it is necessary that all the stories match.
Da, yes, downward stroke.
That went on for about an hour. I nodded to Vesna. Go ahead, ask.
“I’m sorry, Mr Paçaku, but your son says that other people were raped.”
“Yes, poor boy. He is ashamed, it’s his way of spreading it around.”
“It wasn’t anyone in your family’s fault. None of you have done anything to be ashamed of. But we do need the basic facts.”
“Ah! The facts! If you want the facts. We used to help on a farm you know?”
He starts to tell us stories about some lost golden age, when he worked on a farm, and his family didn’t have to beg. Then he tells us about his wedding. It was a real Romany wedding in summer, wildflowers on the bed. The women gave his wife gold, it went on all day, guns shooting into the air. He starts to play the wedding music on his accordion.
We have to stop him. “Mr Paçaku? Please. Mr Paçaku. That’s very nice but we still have to ask you some questions.”
He told us about his cousin’s new car. He told Vesna about how he hid Muslims. He must think she is a Muslim, maybe he knows she lives south of the river. Nobody ever says where they live, their lives depend on it. He tells us about gypsy arts and crafts, how to carve, how to read fortunes, how his aunt predicted her own death. Sometimes in this job you have to let them see you are prepared to wait.
“Mr Paçaku…We need to know who else was raped.”
We really want to help him. I go outside and tell the clerk to send everybody else home, and to get us more water and some food. We give him noodles.
He starts to talk about recipes, about the kindness of the Kosovars before the war. Everybody live in peace, everybody happy. He tells us about his brother’s prowess as a bare-knuckles boxer. He starts to cry, he mops his tears with the bread. He’s smearing butter on his cheeks and he’s crying about lost animals, his father’s animals. They stole my pigs and ducks! He tells us a story about how the pig died of a broken heart because it lost its favorite duck. Suddenly it’s dark outside. Vesna looks beside herself.
“Just ask him directly,” I tell her.
She does. He blows up. “Do you think I would let such a thing happen to me? Do I not look like a man to you? Who has been saying such a thing? Who? The boy? I will beat him, for saying such a thing. I tell you anybody tries to do such a thing to me, he is flat on the ground; he’s on his back; he’s dead.”
It’s worse than the accordion.
We keep pushing. The tears start again. “Why do you say such things to me? My wife, my daughter, is it not enough? Why are you tormenting me? When will it stop?”
Finally I say, “Let’s finish.”
Vesna just nods. I send her home. I said to her, I told her, I said, “We’ll talk tomorrow, OK?”
We didn’t need it in the end, the testimony. Skender was examined and they found damage completely consistent with the story, and that was good enough. The Paçakus got to Norway.
It’s a miracle this café is still here. Wine’s just as terrible. Tastes of blood. I was hoping to see Vesna.
I’m here on my VARI…voluntary relief from isolation. You become so professional. I didn’t know what it was at first, I just felt exhausted. They’re sending me to the Rome office probably until I retire. I been lots of places.
My first was West Africa: Sierra Leone and Liberia. Then Zaire. That might be the worst. North Ossetia, then here. Pakistan, Zambia—lovely country, that was just persuading the Angolanos to go home. Now Chad, Darfur. It’s all the same thing.
How can a pig love a duck?
Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter
In Cambodia people are used to ghosts. Ghosts buy newspapers. They own property.
A few years ago, spirits owned a house in Phnom Penh, at the Tra Bek end of Monivong Boulevard. Khmer Rouge had murdered the whole family and there was no one left alive to inherit it. People cycled past the building, leaving it boarded up. Sounds of weeping came from inside.
Then a professional inheritor arrived from America. She’d done her research and could claim to be the last surviving relative of no fewer than three families. She immediately sold the house to a Chinese businessman, who turned the ground floor into a photocopying shop.
The copiers began to print pictures of the original owners.
At first, single black-and-white photos turned up in the copied dossiers of aid workers or government officials. The father of the murdered family had been a lawyer. He stared fiercely out of the photos as if demanding something. In other photocopies, his beautiful daughters forlornly hugged each other. The background was hazy like fog.
One night the owner heard a noise and trundled downstairs to find all five photocopiers printing one picture after another of faces: young college men, old women, parents with a string of babies, or government soldiers in uniform. He pushed the big green off buttons. Nothing happened.
He pulled out all the plugs, but the machines kept grinding out face after face. Women in beehive hairdos or clever children with glasses looked wistfully out of the photocopies. They seemed to be dreaming of home in the 1960s, when Phnom Penh was the most beautiful city in Southeast Asia.
News spread. People began to visit the shop to identify lost relatives. Women would cry, “That’s my mother! I didn’t have a photograph!” They would weep and press the flimsy A4 sheets to their breasts. The paper went limp from tears and humidity as if it too were crying.
Soon, a throng began to gather outside the shop every morning to view the latest batch of faces. In desperation, the owner announced that each morning’s harvest would be delivered direct to The Truth, a magazine of remembrance.
Then one morning he tried to open the house-door to the shop and found it blocked. He went ’round to the front of the building and rolled open the metal shutters.
The shop was packed from floor to ceiling with photocopies. The ground floor had no windows—the room had been filled from the inside. The owner pulled out a sheet of paper and saw himself on the ground, his head beaten in by a hoe. The same image was on every single page.
He buried the photocopiers and sold the house at once. The new owner liked its haunted reputation; it kept people away. The FOR SALE sign was left hanging from the second floor.
In a sense, the house had been bought by another ghost.
This is a completely untrue story about someone who must exist.
Pol Pot’s only child, a daughter, was born in 1986. Her name was Sith, and in 2004, she was eighteen years old.
Sith liked air-conditioning and luxury automobiles. Her hair was dressed in cornrows, and she had a spiky piercing above one eye. Her jeans were elaborately slashed and embroidered. Her pink T-shirts bore slogans in English: CARE KOOKY. PINK MOLL.
Sith lived like a woman on Thai television, doing as she pleased in lip-gloss and Sunsilked hair. Nine simple rules helped her avoid all unpleasantness.
Never think about the past or politics.
Ignore ghosts. They cannot hurt you.
Do not go to school. Hire tutors. Don’t do homework. It is disturbing.
Always be driven everywhere in either the Mercedes or the BMW.
Avoid all well-dressed Cambodian boys. They are the sons of the estimated 250,000 new generals created by the regime. Their sons can behave with impunity.
Avoid all men with potbellies. They eat too well and therefore must be corrupt.
Avoid anyone who drives a Toyota Viva or Honda Dream motorcycle.
Don’t answer letters or phone calls.
Never make any friends.
There was also a tenth rule, but that went without saying.
Rotten fruit rinds and black mud never stained Sith’s designer sports shoes. Disabled beggars never asked her for alms. Her life began yesterday, which was effectively the same as today.
Every day, her driver took her to the new Soriya Market. It was almost the only place that Sith went. The color of silver, Soriya rose up in many floors to a round glass dome.
Sith preferred the 142nd Street entrance. Its green awning made everyone look as if they were made of jade. The doorway went directly into the ice-cold jewelry rotunda with its floor of polished black and white stone. The individual stalls were hung with glittering necklaces and earrings.
Sith liked tiny shiny things that had no memory. She hated politics. She refused to listen to the news. Pol Pot’s beautiful daughter wished the current leadership would behave decently, like her dad always did. To her.
She remembered the sound of her father’s gentle voice. She remembered sitting on his lap in a forest enclosure, being bitten by mosquitoes. Memories of malaria had sunk into her very bones. She now associated forests with nausea, fevers, and pain. A flicker of tree-shade on her skin made her want to throw up, and the odor of soil or fallen leaves made her gag. She had never been to Angkor Wat. She read nothing.
Sith shopped. Her driver was paid by the government and always carried an AK-47, but his wife, the housekeeper, had no idea who Sith was. The house was full of swept marble, polished teak furniture, iPods, Xboxes, and plasma screens.
Please remember that every word of this story is a lie. Pol Pot was no doubt a dedicated communist who made no money from ruling Cambodia. Nevertheless, a hefty allowance arrived for Sith every month from an account in Switzerland.
Nothing touched Sith, until she fell in love with the salesman at Hello Phones.
Cambodian readers may know that in 2004 there was no mobile phone shop in Soriya Market. However, there was a branch of Hello Phone Cards that had a round blue sales counter with orange trim. This shop looked like that.
Every day Sith bought or exchanged a mobile phone there. She would sit and flick her hair at the salesman.
His name was Dara, which means Star. Dara knew about deals on call prices, sim cards, and the new phones that showed videos. He could get her any call tone she liked.
Talking to Dara broke none of Sith’s rules. He wasn’t fat, nor was he well dressed, and far from being a teenager, he was a comfortably mature twenty-four years old.
One day, Dara chuckled and said, “As a friend I advise you, you don’t need another mobile phone.”
Sith wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like this one any more. It’s blue. I want something more feminine. But not frilly. And it should have better sound quality.”
“Okay, but you could save your money and buy some more nice clothes.”
Pol Pot’s beautiful daughter lowered her chin, which she knew made her neck look long and graceful. “Do you like my clothes?”
“Why ask me?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s good to check out your look.”
Dara nodded. “You look cool. What does your sister say?”
Sith let him know she had no family. “Ah,” he said and quickly changed the subject. That was terrific. Secrecy and sympathy in one easy movement.
Sith came back the next day and said that she’d decided that the rose-colored phone was too feminine. Dara laughed aloud and his eyes sparkled. Sith had come late in the morning just so that he could ask this question. “Are you hungry? Do you want to meet for lunch?”
Would he think she was cheap if she said yes? Would he say she was snobby if she said no?
“Just so long as we eat in Soriya Market,” she said.
She was torn between BBWorld Burgers and Lucky7. BBWorld was big, round, and just two floors down from the dome. Lucky7 Burgers was part of the Lucky Supermarket, such a good store that a tiny jar of Maxwell House cost US$2.40.
They decided on BBWorld. It was full of light, and they could see the town spread out through the wide clean windows. Sith sat in silence.
Pol Pot’s daughter had nothing to say unless she was buying something.
Or rather she had only one thing to say, but she must never say it.
Dara did all the talking. He talked about how the guys on the third floor could get him a deal on original copies of Grand Theft Auto. He hinted that he could get Sith discounts from Bsfashion, the spotlit modern shop one floor down.
Suddenly he stopped. “You don’t need to be afraid of me, you know.” He said it in a kindly, grownup voice. “I can see you’re a properly brought-up girl. I like that. It’s nice.”
Sith still couldn’t find anything to say. She could only nod. She wanted to run away.
“Would you like to go to K-Four?”
K-Four, the big electronics shop, stocked all the reliable brand names: Hitachi, Sony, Panasonic, Philips, or Denon. It was so expensive that almost nobody shopped there, which is why Sith liked it. A crowd of people stood outside and stared through the window at a huge home-entertainment center showing a DVD of Ice Age. On the screen, a little animal was being chased by a glacier. It was so beautiful!
Sith finally found something to say. “If I had one of those, I would never need to leave the house.”
Dara looked at her sideways and decided to laugh.
The next day Sith told him that all the phones she had were too big. Did he have one that she could wear around her neck like jewelry?
This time they went to Lucky7 Burgers and sat across from the Revlon counter. They watched boys having their hair layered by Revlon’s natural-beauty specialists.
Dara told her more about himself. His father had died in the wars. His family now lived in the country. Sith’s Coca-Cola suddenly tasted of antimalarial drugs.
“But…you don’t want to live in the country,” she said.
“No. I have to live in Phnom Penh to make money. But my folks are good country people. Modest.” He smiled, embarrassed.
They’ll have hens and a cousin who shimmies up coconut trees. There will be trees all around but no shops anywhere. The earth will smell.
Sith couldn’t finish her drink. She sighed and smiled and said abruptly, “I’m sorry. It’s been cool. But I have to go.” She slunk sideways out of her seat as slowly as molasses.
Walking back into the jewelry rotunda with nothing to do, she realized that Dara would think she didn’t like him.
And that made the lower part of her eyes sting.
She went back the next day and didn’t even pretend to buy a mobile phone. She told Dara that she’d left so suddenly the day before because she’d remembered a hair appointment.
He said that he could see she took a lot of trouble with her hair. Then he asked her out for a movie that night.
Sith spent all day shopping in K-Four.
They met at six. Dara was so considerate that he didn’t even suggest the horror movie. He said he wanted to see Buffalo Girl Hiding, a movie about a country girl who lives on a farm. Sith said with great feeling that she would prefer the horror movie.
The cinema on the top floor opened out directly onto the roof of Soriya. Graffiti had been scratched into the green railings. Why would people want to ruin something new and beautiful? Sith put her arm through Dara’s and knew that they were now boyfriend and girlfriend.
“Finally,” he said.
“Finally what?”
“You’ve done something.”
They leaned on the railings and looked out over other people’s apartments. West toward the river was a building with one huge roof terrace. Women met there to gossip. Children were playing toss-the-sandal. From this distance, Sith was enchanted.
“I just love watching the children.”
The movie, from Thailand, was about a woman whose face turns blue and spotty and who eats men. The blue woman was yucky, but not as scary as all the badly dubbed voices. The characters sounded possessed. It was though Thai people had been taken over by the spirits of dead Cambodians.
Whenever Sith got scared, she chuckled.
So she sat chuckling with terror. Dara thought she was laughing at a dumb movie and found such intelligence charming. He started to chuckle too. Sith thought he was as frightened as she was. Together in the dark, they took each other’s hands.
Outside afterward, the air hung hot even in the dark and 142nd Street smelled of drains. Sith stood on tiptoe to avoid the oily deposits and castoff fishbones.
Dara said, “I will drive you home.”
“My driver can take us,” said Sith, flipping open her Kermit-the-Frog mobile.
Her black Mercedes-Benz edged to a halt, crunching old plastic bottles in the gutter. The seats were upholstered with tan leather and the driver was armed.
Dara’s jaw dropped. “Who…who is your father?”
“He’s dead.”
Dara shook his head. “Who was he?”
Normally Sith used her mother’s family name, but that would not answer this question. Flustered, she tried to think of someone who could be her father. She knew of nobody the right age. She remembered something about a politician who had died. His name came to her and she said it in panic. “My father was Kol Vireakboth.” Had she got the name right? “Please don’t tell anyone.”
Dara covered his eyes. “We—my family, my father—we fought for the KPLA.”
Sith had to stop herself asking what the KPLA was.
Kol Vireakboth had led a faction in the civil wars. It fought against the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese, the King, and corruption. It wanted a new way for Cambodia. Kol Vireakboth was a Cambodian leader who had never told a lie and or accepted a bribe.
