FATHER—
When they came to the field where he had buried the dead, the trees seemed to be in the wrong place. He hadn’t realised there would be such heat in the sky and on the ground, such blue and such white. He looked at his daughter revolving slowly, taking all of this in with her 360-degree vision – the sky so wide and the field so empty. He knew she was thinking that this was a sacred place, with spirits floating around, the place where he had buried bodies every single year during the floods.
How could she ever understand the waste of time it was, that loss of four years of his life? She couldn’t imagine. She thought that if you told your story to the world, then things would change. Perhaps the world would stand still and wait, wait for reason to catch up. No, the world still spun, even if people believed it was flat, even if they believed it would heat up, or be blasted into oblivion. No, it didn’t matter what people believed. The world spun on. The only thing that mattered was what people did. And before he came to Australia, he had done a spring-clean of his mind, brought a truck in there to haul out all the debris. It was part of moving home. He wanted to be sure that when he landed in the new continent, he could start anew.
The Australians had a funny expression: ‘I wasn’t born yesterday, mate.’ He liked it a lot. Imagine being born yesterday, but with all your knowledge intact. He would wake up and there would be a new beginning, because all his feelings would be only a day old. He would pick and choose what emotions he wanted to test out. He would choose not to see the baby-blood patches on the trees but the miracles three years later. Like the day they found the stash of colourful clothes near the trunk of a tree. They were walking through the broken country and there they were, carefully folded in a cradle of leaves. If he hadn’t looked closely, he would have missed it. To have been secretly blessed made them walk a little further that day. Who had left the clothes there? Good god, what a miracle that was.
And then, all those years later, his daughter telling him she wanted to know about Pol Pot. As if she could! But he bent to her whim and took her to interview some friends of his in a wooden house in suburban Springvale. The man and his wife had been stuck on top of the Dangrek mountain range along the Thai–Cambodian border. The refugees seeking asylum in Thailand had been driven back in buses and trucks and dumped there by the Thai government. The mountain range was dotted with landmines. This is what the man’s wife told them that afternoon when he and his daughter came to visit:
‘The buses that took us to the top were air-conditioned. We thought we were going up to meet the aeroplanes that would take us to America. We arrived in the middle of the night and slept on top of the rocks. In the morning, Thai soldiers arrived with guns. My husband left first with the rice; the children and I kept the pots and pans. We gave all our money to the soldiers. We thought that would pacify them, but then they started shooting. Thousands of people started running downhill, clinging to the tree vines; our children were clinging to our clothes. I was crying all the way down.’
But she had made it, and at the base of the mountain she helped to deliver the babies of two women who had gone into labour. Her children had made it too. They were forced back to Cambodia, those who were still alive. Later, as they wandered, these same people found a stash of cotton jackets and dresses and pants in some empty houses. They took what they needed and strung the rest from the treetops for other stragglers to find, in case any of their loved ones had survived the massacre.
When he looked back at the trees again, he could almost imagine the arms of a blue shirt waving at him, the bright eye of a button beckoning.