'So we were still in Phnom Penh when the bombing started. They blew up the banks, the libraries, the churches, the hospitals, anything with ties to the West. There were going to be no foreign influences in the Year Zero. That's what they called it, the Year Zero, the glorious new beginning.' He stops and opens his eyes. 'Could I have some water?'
Rafferty raises the bottle to Chouk's lips. One swallow, two, and then Chouk lifts his chin: enough. 'Glory,' he says. 'It was about glory. We-Cambodia, I mean-were going to return to our days of glory, the days of Angkor, when Khmer kings ruled most of Southeast Asia.' The sound he makes might be a laugh, or just something caught in his throat. 'Of course, the days of Angkor were a thousand years ago. That was Pol Pot's great leap forward-ten centuries into the past.'
'I wasn't aware there were a lot of violinists at Angkor.'
Chouk's grin is quick and white, with no more humor in it than the laugh had. 'They were such hypocrites. The fat boys-Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, all of them-had been rich kids. They went to school in Paris. The people, the ordinary people, were sealed off from the West-from books and ideas and even medicine. But the fat boys liked music.'
'And that saved you.'
'In a manner of speaking, I suppose it did.' He starts suddenly and looks around the room at the darkness, as though he is just noticing the passage of time. 'Where's the boy?'
'Probably stuck in traffic. It's rush hour.'
'It shouldn't be taking him this long.'
'He'll be here.' Rafferty prompts the man back to his story. 'You met Madame Wing in an interrogation center.'
''Met' is an interesting choice of words. You could say I walked into her, in the sense that people sometimes walk into an airplane propeller. You could say I was thrown into her, like a tree into a chipper. 'Met' is a little on the soft side. But I don't want to talk about her yet. We'll talk about her when the boy gets here.'
'I want a beer,' Rafferty says. In fact, he needs to escape the room: the thick, dark atmosphere and the darkness of Chouk's past. They combine to exert a pressure that makes him feel like he's been buried alive. 'I'd offer you one, but it'd probably knock you out.'
'I don't drink.'
'Hang on.' He goes out into the equally dark living room, snapping on lights as he goes. The illumination does nothing to lift his mood. A detour takes him to Miaow's room, where she is bent over a schoolbook, copying something down. The tip of her tongue is pasted to her upper lip.
'Hello, Miaow.'
'Hello, Poke.' She does not look up from her work. 'Where's Boo?'
The old name seems appropriate for the first time. 'On an errand.'
'Who are you talking to?'
'Someone who doesn't feel well. I'll tell you about it later.'
She squints down at the book. 'What does 'spontaneous' mean?'
He hates this kind of question. 'Um…sort of unplanned. You know, if you were a witch and you decided all of a sudden to turn me into a toadstool, that would be a spontaneous decision.'
'You're too nice to be a toadstool,' she says without looking up.
'Thank you, Miaow.'
'I'd turn you into a mushroom.'
'Great,' Rafferty says. 'I could be your pet mushroom. You could buy me a little hat.'
'Mushrooms already have caps,' Miaow says, dismissing him.
One-upped by an eight-year-old. There is something sane and warm in being one-upped by an eight-year-old. In the kitchen he pops a beer, draws a deep breath for strength, and goes back into the bedroom. On the threshold he hesitates and then decides against turning on the lights. Chouk rolls toward him, his face thrown into relief by the light coming through the door until Rafferty pulls it closed behind him.
'You were in Phnom Penh,' Rafferty says, sitting on the edge of the bed.
'Not for long. A few weeks. Then we were sent to the countryside. We grew rice. We dug ditches. We dug graves.' He pauses and swallows. 'A great many graves. The killing never stopped. And the interrogations went on day and night.
'There were already interrogation centers all over the country, for those who didn't plant rice fast enough, or grumbled about being worked sixteen hours a day, or starved with insufficient enthusiasm. Or people they should have killed the first time around but missed. People like me.'
'How did they find out who you were?'
'Somebody talked.' He takes a breath and holds it, then releases it. 'Somebody always talked.' He turns to Rafferty, and his eyes glint in the darkness. 'It might have been one of my daughters. They indoctrinated the children twenty-four hours a day.'
Rafferty says the only kind thing he can think of. 'But you don't know that.'
'And I don't want to know. I think it would kill me.'
'So you were betrayed. What happened?'
'I was special, because I'd had some status before the revolution, so they sent me to Tuol Sleng. In the middle of Phnom Penh, they took over a high school and turned it into something new: an interrogation and murder facility for Khmer Rouge who had betrayed the revolution. Of course, nobody had betrayed the revolution. It was just craziness, paranoia. They used Tuol Sleng to torture confessions from people Pol Pot was afraid of, or just tired of. The basic idea was simple. Bring people in, torture them until they signed a confession, and kill them. Seventeen thousand people went in. Seven came out.'
The room is almost completely dark. The sound of traffic from the street is like an anchor to the life of Bangkok, going on all around them. 'What were they supposed to confess to?'
'Anything. Collaborating with the CIA. Sympathizing with Vietnam. Listening to Thai pop music. Eating weeds in the forest. One person confessed to not watering his houseplants. Whatever it was, people were tormented until they said what they were told to say, and then they were taken to the killing field at Cheung Ek in trucks and put to death. Beaten with hoes, usually, or chopped with machetes, because the revolution was short of bullets.'
'Did they do that to your hand?'
'This?' Chouk looks at Rafferty as though he hasn't been listening. He lifts the hand as far as the chain will allow. 'This was just a way of saying hello. It's trivial. They wouldn't even have bothered with it if they hadn't known I was a violinist. They did it to hurt me inside and also, I think, because they just hated beauty. Beauty frightened them. They beheaded every Buddha at Angkor. This hand could finger the melodies of Beethoven and Bach, so they destroyed it.'
He gazes at the ruined hand regretfully but remotely, the way someone might look at a house that burned down years ago. 'They did it with a hammer and pliers in one of the interrogation rooms. Classrooms, they had been, with blackboards and windows so the children could see the sky while they learned. They put an iron bed frame in each room and wired it to a hand-cranked generator. In one corner they put the knives and the bolt cutters and the pruning shears and the whips made out of heavy copper electrical wire, and the iron rods they used to break the long bones. They placed these things in the corner opposite the door so they were the first thing the subject saw when he came into the room. To the left of the door was a little table with a chair in front of it for the interrogator to use. The table and the chair were so neat, so clean. In some ways they were the worst things in the room. We were chained to the bed frame, filthy and stinking with our own piss and shit, and the table and chair were so clean. The interrogator sat there and made notes while his assistants did their work. They worked around the clock sometimes, in shifts. You could hear screaming all day and all night. For some reason it was worst at night.'
The door to the bedroom opens, and Superman comes in, framed in light, holding a file folder. His eyes are enormous, stunned, like someone who has just survived a disastrous accident and doesn't know why. He moves quickly to Rafferty and thrusts the folder at him as though it were an animal that bites. Then he turns to the bed and spits on Chouk.
'No,' Rafferty says, rising to take the boy by the shoulder. 'He didn't do anything.'
'You haven't looked,' the boy says. 'Kill him.'
Rafferty is still standing. 'You've got it wrong. Now beat it. Go sit with Miaow. And don't talk about this. I'll
