Cambodia: As Good as Dead (cont.)

Corinne began asked the twenty-one-year-old some basic questions: name, age, etc. As Rouen translated, the man’s blood-shot eyes began to gleam eerily, a tinge of the insane or the guilty. He gave his name, Phan, and reiterated the story, darting glances at his family as if to challenge them. More questions followed. “What do you remember happening right after you heard the shots?” “Why did you run straight to the backyard?” “Did you know someone was back there?” “Did you see the man’s face?” After a moment of silence, he began to speak, slowly at first but gradually picking up speed. He answered none of the questions. He made accusations, asserted that his father had never been a sorcerer, and bemoaned his family’s situation. Corinne asked Rouen to repeat the questions, but Rouen shook his head, no.

As we’d been talking to the family, news had spread and neighbors were now entering the yard. As if cued, the mother began wailing and moaning. She got up, pulled a scarf over her bare head, and spoke rapidly, facing no one. Phan yelled something at her, and her voice dropped to a mumble, though her tone remained accusatory. Rouen: “She doesn’t want us to speak of it anymore. Bad luck.” The woman mounted another smaller pallet and lay down, and the other women flocked to her, clucking like the scraggly hens pecking around in the dusty yard. Phan looked at Corinne, hard-eyed, and began speaking emphatically. Rouen translated: he wanted the world to know. He wanted the authorities to know that his father and brothers had been murdered unjustly. He wanted an article written so that the police would help his family, give them some compensation… blood money.

Corinne asked whether we could see the backyard. For a moment Phan looked around at his family, as if seeking permission, but everyone was silent. He nodded assent and awkwardly got up off the pallet. His right leg, hidden from view up until now, looked devoid of musculature, a bone just barely covered by skin. He limped towards the backyard, and we followed. In the back three small wood fires smoked ominously; a little further on was a wooden table at which a young woman (the eldest brother’s widow) was mincing a tiny amount of pork with a large dull knife. A young girl was splitting a block of wood with a hatchet, lodging the metal into the wood and banging it into the ground until it split, raising clouds of dust.

The fence had a gate in the back, which lead us to a small patch of land, furrowed but desiccated. Shrubs lined the field, but at the far end was a gap in the foliage, and Phan, without looking back, limped up to it and called us over with a wave of his hand. A dirt path led down a slope, at the bottom of which a thin watercourse trailed a lazy brown line off to the left and right. The path widened a bit and Phan stopped, pointing at the ground. A dark stain could be seen in the dirt, and a few feet away there was a broken analog watch. The watch read two thirty.

Corinne got out a digital camera and Rouen asked some questions. Phan explained what had happened when he had wrestled the gunner, reenacting the scene, teetering slightly when he put too much weight on his lame leg. After his demonstration, we all fell silent. A large black caterpillar crawled near my foot. A red anthill sat not more than a foot away from the broken watch. Corinne broke the silence with a question about Phan’s leg. Rouen translated: a childhood malady, no one knew what it had been. “Polio,” Corinne whispered, half a question. Rouen asked another question and told us that with the brothers gone, there would be no men to tend the field when the time came; the women would have to take care of it. A wind started up, filling the silence with the hollow creaking echoes of a copse of dying bamboo trees.

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