Little Brother Read online

But Mang was dead.

  Vithy slouched to the edge of a black pool and moved a long stick outlined by olive green algae in the pool. Maybe you could catch a fish. Maybe the pond wasn’t big enough. Mang would know, but Mang was dead …

  Was he?

  Vithy blinked at the stick as if it had become a loaf of bread. He tasted the new thought carefully.

  Was he?

  Vithy picked up the stick and waved it at the ragged piece of sky over his head, his mouth open, his eyes alive.

  No, he was not!

  Some of the algae fell across his face and he sucked it from his lips.

  They would never catch Mang. He was faster, smarter, stronger than they were, even now, even after a year in their paddy. It was only a single shot; that’s all. They couldn’t touch him with three shots across a clearing, how could they touch him in the middle of a forest? How could they keep up with him after half an hour? They couldn’t; that’s all.

  Vithy tried to look into the pool, then probed it for depth with the stick.

  And now he’s gone back to the tree to find you!

  Vithy dropped the stick.

  Of course he has. Didn’t he tell you not to move? He’s there now, looking for you. Vithy turned as if to see the tree and Mang behind him. He took half a step from the pond and realised he could not find the tree again. Mang might stay by the tree for three weeks but he did not know in what direction nor how far away it was. He’d lost Mang as surely as if the soldiers had caught him.

  Vithy turned back to the pond and picked up the stick to throw it as far as he could. Then he stopped, the green algae hanging from the black wood like jelly.

  Mang had said something about a ‘border’, hadn’t he?

  Something like ‘follow the lines out of the war’ to go to the border. What lines? Lines on a map? Telegraph lines? And what border?

  Vithy’s head was hurting, but that was all right. He was thinking again, and that felt good. He drew a big square in the mud round the pond with the stick. That was here, Kampuchea, full of Khmer Rouge soldiers trying to catch Mang. To the south there was the Gulf of Siam and the Pacific Ocean, and that surely didn’t count as a border.

  Vithy swept some algae from his hand and licked his fingers.

  Now to the east there was the border with Vietnam and to the north was the border of Laos and they had wars about the same time as Kampuchea. To the west there is Thailand, which has not had a war with anyone …

  Vithy leant thoughtfully, reached out for the algae, shook off some of the slime and opened his hand to look at the oily green mass. All he had to do was to find out where he was in that square, and which border Mang had meant, and go there to find him.

  Vithy slapped the algae into his mouth, shuddered, and began to swallow.

  Vithy found the forest a vast and lonely place in the next few days. In the beginning he tiptoed from tree to tree, listening for any sound that might be a warning and diving under a rock at a distant crash. But the only sign that people had been among the trees was an occasional partly overgrown path, and there was no sound beyond the chattering of monkeys, the gargling of a bird and the slow dripping of water.

  There are no soldiers here, he told himself. And after a while he began to believe it. This forest was not all that different from the rolling country round his home at Sambor.

  He woke on the third day in the forest to watch a small deer nibbling at a bush. He thought of trying to catch the deer, but a treeful of monkeys warned the deer and chattered at him until he walked away.

  There are no soldiers here, he thought. There is no Big Paddy and maybe there hasn’t been a war. Perhaps it’s all been a bad dream, and Mang is behind the next tree.

  He called for Mang a few times but there might be soldiers in the forest after all, so he stopped.

  He ate a small piece of orange fungus on the fourth day and was wondering how to catch a monkey or a bird when he found a house. The house was built of timber and thatch, raised on thick stilts to three metres from the forest floor. It had shared a hollow with another house but the other house had been destroyed by fire a long time ago. Vithy stayed in the trees and watched the remaining house for an hour. When he was certain there was no one in the house he slid nervously out of hiding.

  A loom and an unfinished piece of material collapsed like a tired dragon under the house. Parts of a badly rusted motor bike sprawled near the steps. And there was a vegetable garden at the back.

  There wasn’t much left. There had been a low mesh fence erected around the garden but animals had broken in and the forest had followed. Vithy found the stalks of a Chinese lettuce, three shoots of spring onion and a yam, which he ate as he found them, squatting on the earth and wiping them on his shirt. For the first time in a long while he wasn’t feeling hungry.

  He climbed the steps to the house. The front door sagged off its hinges; the house had been ransacked from the skeleton of its stove to its sleeping space and possession of the building was being fought out between spiders, birds and a tribe of monkeys. Vithy chased the outraged monkeys into the trees, cleared a wormed and cracked mat and slept under the soothing patter of rain on the roof.

  Next morning he lay on his back and didn’t want to go anywhere. The house was as comfortable and familiar to him as the palm of his hand and he didn’t want to lose that feeling. He thought he might dig up the garden, see what he could find and plant some seeds and catch birds or something while they grew …

  He got up and looked out at the quietly ticking forest as if he owned it. He picked a fragment of an old photo from the floor, a family around that motor bike when it was new.

  That was it, of course, that was why the house had felt familiar. It reminded him of home, when Kampuchea was Cambodia and they were all Khmers and the Khmer Rouge were some bandits in the mountains and the war hadn’t started. There was Dad’s pet vegetable garden, his retreat when he wasn’t working as a doctor; there was Mum’s kitchen, but it had been white and shining with pots and pans; there was Sorei’s corner of the kitchen, where she had talked with Mum for hours about cooking, Judge Rabbit, and how mean Vithy was to her; and there was even the motor bike down in Mang’s ‘Fix-it Shop’ below, taken apart by Mang and Vithy time and again, and one day they’d get it to go …

  Vithy carefully placed the torn photo on what there was of the stove, looked around at the battered old house, and left. The memories hurt too much.

  THE ROAD

  Vithy walked no more than a hundred metres along a muddy path before he reached a bitumen road. The road – any road – was menacing because it meant trucks full of soldiers at any minute and Vithy wanted to turn back to his safe forest. But he had to find Mang and he had to start by finding out where he, Vithy, was.

  He stayed behind a tree and tried to work out where the road went. It was a year ago, but he could remember the Khmer Rouge making him, Mum, Sorei, Mang and eighty neighbours march south from Sambor for thirteen days. And the soldiers had then taken Mum, Sorei, him and forty-eight other people across the River Mekong, leaving Mang and the others on the other side …

  For a moment Vithy’s face loosened. Then he pressed his lips together and shook his head, as if to dislodge a thought.

  ‘Okay,’ he told the tree.

  Okay so they took Mum, Sorei and him to the Big Paddy. Forget about what happened there. Doesn’t matter now. But he didn’t know where the Big Paddy was for a start. Mang had joined him months ago, but yesterday soldiers marched them and some others into the forest for many hours – maybe to kill them because there wasn’t enough rice – until someone started shelling the forest. They had run blindly from the soldiers in the confusion and he did not know how long they had run, nor in what direction. So he knew only that he was a long way south of Sambor, somewhere in the middle of Kampuchea. And west of the Mekong.

  ‘What can you do with that?’ he asked the tree.

  He punched the tree, thought a bit and punched the tree again.


  ‘Nothing,’ he said finally and started following the road to his right.

  At first Vithy walked through the trees beside the road, but there seemed to be nothing on the road at all. It is slow, hard work to push through undergrowth with an open road beside you. And the road had been torn apart by craters and trenches, as if armies had fought with field guns for this strip of old bitumen. This must be why nobody was using the road: no truck could drive on it.

  Vithy left the trees for the grass verge, and after less than an hour he was striding down the centre of the road with the confidence of a band on parade.

  So he hopped and jumped down a chain of craters on a bend, and nearly stumbled into a truck.

  The truck was painted khaki and heavily loaded. It was stationary. Four men, stripped to the waist, were working with picks and shovels to fill in a crater. A fully uniformed soldier was leaning against the truck, watching.

  The officer looked up and saw Vithy. ‘Heya,’ he called.

  Vithy ran very fast, very low into the forest. He tore into shrubs, weaved between trees, jumped a fallen log and hunched for the sound of shots.

  But there were no shots at all.

  Vithy’s jagged race became a jog, then a panting rest. He trembled, swallowed and listened, but nobody was following him. He waited for an hour, and thought about what he had seen.

  They wore uniforms.

  Not black pyjamas, or pieces of uniforms like the Khmer Rouge he had known, but full brown uniforms from the caps to the boots. They were different. Go back and look.

  Vithy closed his eyes and shook his head.

  They’re just stupid mountain men. That’s what Mang said.

  No!

  In the end he crept slowly back to the road, his heart drumming in his ears. He had to know what they were.

  The soldiers were levelling another crater as if nobody had ever seen him. They put their shirts on and the officer drove the truck off slowly. Too late Vithy smelt the bagged rice. He squinted after the truck and slowly worked things out. ‘Not the same soldiers,’ he said aloud, and walked onto the road to hunt for spilled rice.

  A long while ago the Khmer Rouge had come down from the mountains of Cambodia, conquered the country and called it Kampuchea. Now, was it possible that some other army was conquering them? Did these soldiers fire the shells that gave Mang and him the chance to escape?

  Vithy found five grains, put them in his mouth and sucked them as he walked on. By mid afternoon the forest had peeled away from the road and was replaced by huge rice paddies with no rice and no people. He heard engines revving on the road ahead and slid quietly through the paddies until the sound was far behind him. Then he returned to the road.

  As the sun set he was beginning to pass houses, first singly, then groups and streets. A sign told him he was in the outskirts of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, but he could not believe it. He had known the river edge of Phnom Penh in festivals and a family holiday, and it had been a swirl of colour and noise, honking cars and revving motor bikes pushing against a river of people. But in this city everything was deserted.

  Vithy walked on as the silence slid coldly up his spine. The buildings grew taller and crowded together as he moved into a darkening stone desert. The only sound he could hear was the nervous slap of his bare feet on the bitumen and the soft whispering of the wind in the streets. He thought of shouting at the city but he decided against it. What if some thing howled back?

  Vithy stopped at a broad intersection and bit his lip. Now he knew exactly where he was and he wished he didn’t. He had come here before the war with Dad, Mum and thousands of people for the music, lights and gaiety. Now there were only empty bandstands and stages in the long park to his right. To his left there were trains, long rows of slowly rusting metal, and beyond that there should have been a cathedral with an elephant grazing by its front door. Now, no elephant, no cathedral, nothing at all.

  He walked slowly towards the centre of the city, feeling colder with each step. He passed many cars left by the side of the road, smashed, dented, sometimes burnt. A touch of wind whirled paper out of the gutter. Vithy was watching more paper money than he’d ever seen in his life littering the street. Awnings sagged from buildings with shattered windows and stained walls. Shops were bare and open.

  Vithy reached the city’s central market, a huge empty concrete dome, and looked for a place to sleep among the looted jewellers, tailors, radio shops. He entered a jeweller’s shop through a kicked-in door and used a torn piece of curtain to sweep enough dust off the floor to sleep. He sprawled in the shadows and began to drift away from this city of ghosts …

  ‘Eh! Come on. I can see you!’

  KING OF THE CITY

  Vithy jerked to his elbows as a shadow in the street rattled the screen over the window. He pushed himself desperately away from the shadow until he backed into a wall and was showered in glass. A piece of thin metal jabbed his finger and he grabbed it between his thumb and forefinger to defend himself. It was no bigger than a bottle top.

  They had caught him. He knew they would.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ the shadow said, waving something long and straight. Probably a gun.

  Vithy thought wildly of throwing the piece of metal at the shadow and then running through the door. But it wouldn’t work, and it would get them angry. He didn’t want to get them angry.

  ‘I don’t know why I try. You’re so dumb.’

  And for the first time Vithy heard the voice, not just the words. It was just a boy. No more than a kid. Vithy moved from the wall a little, but then he remembered all the small boys with high voices and guns he had met since the Khmer Rouge had marched down from the mountains. He pushed back to the wall again and bit his knuckles.

  The boy sighed. ‘Look, you can stay there all the time. I don’t care. Stay hungry.’ He turned from the window and walked away.

  Vithy took his fist from his mouth and stared at the empty window in blank astonishment. This sort of thing just never happened. A Khmer Rouge soldier who offered food and walked away from someone he had trapped? It was not possible.

  ‘Wait …’ Vithy stumbled to his feet, hurried to the door, tripped over a broken bar and fell into the street, holding his piece of metal as if it was a bayonet.

  The boy turned and nodded at Vithy as if it was normal for him to be greeted that way. He walked back and plucked the metal from Vithy’s hand. ‘Evenin’,’ he said. He did not look like a soldier.

  ‘Hello,’ said Vithy cautiously, pushing himself to his feet. ‘I’m Vithy. You said something about food.’

  The boy moved into the moonlight to examine Vithy’s piece of metal, and his bright gold and red shirt shimmered. He rubbed the metal against a sarong glinting with silver thread. ‘Where did you find this?’

  Vithy was staring at the heavy gold chains round the boy’s neck and wrists. ‘In there,’ he said lamely.

  The boy raised the walking stick he had been carrying and pointed the handle at Vithy. ‘It’s a little leaf from a brooch. Made of gold. Because you found it here, it’s mine. All right?’

  Vithy was looking at a savage elephant’s head, carved in teak. But he managed to croak: ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m the King of the City and you stink.’

  Vithy shrugged. He supposed he did, but there were so many other things to worry about.

  ‘All right then? The gold?’

  ‘Okay.’ It was a small price for a meal. But Vithy decided he was not going to be frightened any more by this kid. He relaxed.

  The King of the City nodded and pulled at his lip. ‘Well, I suppose you want to eat first?’

  Suddenly Vithy’s mouth was in flood. The kid could call himself Emperor of the Universe for all he cared, just so long as he was the king of a bowl of rice. ‘You have something?’

  The King laughed. ‘Come to my palace,’ he said.

  Vithy followed the King past the concrete mountain of the central market, and began to expect a banquet. A
fter all, a kid who wore enough gold to set up a treasury must have something. But it was a long walk, down silent alleys and streets to where French words began to appear on walls. They passed rotting green awnings where a fruit market had been and entered a building that had almost been destroyed by fire.

  ‘This is your palace?’ Vithy panted as he clambered over charred beams and broken bricks. Those dreams of fish and roast duck were steaming away.

  The King winked. ‘It’s secret.’ He groped for something in the floor, then swung up a small trapdoor. He led Vithy down a steep metal staircase into utter darkness that smelled of fish oil and kerosene. He stopped ahead of Vithy and fumbled while he muttered. A match flared and he persuaded an old lamp to light, throwing shadows into corners.

  Vithy stared. And stared again.

  ‘My treasure house,’ said the King.

  The dusty cellar was jammed from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall with incredible riches. The King’s swaying light washed over stacks of tins with labels curling brownly from the bright metal; tall jars of mysterious black fruit; crates of soft drinks and a careful stack of empty bottles; a long rack of shirts, belts and trousers, a TV set with a shirt drying on the indoor antenna; silver plates heaped in a corner; barrels, large cans of kerosene and vegetable oil, Indian rugs, a mahogany Buddha, a rattan ball, even a brand new bicycle.

  ‘Where’d you get all this?’ Vithy waved his arms about.

  ‘From my City,’ said the King, dusting an Indian rug with his hand. He motioned Vithy to sit. ‘What would you like to eat?’

  Vithy was getting annoyed with the boy and his queer game, but then he looked at the stacked tins of pears, baked beans, lychees, beef stew. ‘Ah, anything,’ he said, touching his lips with the tip of his tongue.

  ‘Caviar, eh? Maybe venison soup. No, at the start.’ He opened a tin of potato salad and poured it onto a silver plate. ‘I’d turn the TV on and give us a bit of entertainment, but we don’t have any electricity.’

  Vithy took a spoon from the King and placed his little piece of metal on the rug. He began to shovel the salad into his mouth.