Paradise Tales (36 page)

“We have nothing in our records about that.”

“Ah! You see? You don’t have everything in your records.”

We had to talk to the daughter again. I wasn’t there, but the questions would have been: Who else was raped? Was anyone else in your family raped?

Vesna came out and said nothing, just stood there, only the tips of her fingers shivering. Her wedding ring was still. I sent the mother and daughter back. Vesna sat down on one of the visitors chairs. She looked at her nails and told me, “I had to ask the direct question. Was Skender raped too? Then she said yes.”

The direct question invalidated the evidence.

“Do you have any doubt they were raped?” Vesna asked me.

“Let it go,” I said. “Just say … Just say the stories matched.”

Next day we called in the son.

He was a little thing for fifteen, skinny, black eyes like a squirrel. Half his hair had been dyed blond. He didn’t sit down. He said he didn’t like to sit. Something I learned for next time.

So he stood and we asked questions. Did the men do anything? How many? What did they do? What did they do next? How many? Who was first? How did they hold your sister down? Who was next? How many? You have to keep asking the same question over and over.

The boy kept shifting one foot to the other. “Please sit down,” Vesna said.

He said, “It hurts too much.”

Then he told us. All fifteen.

Were they possessed by devils? What does a man who goes home to his family, to his wife, a man who procreates, what does he think when he remembers he penetrated a young boy after ten other men? Is it comradeship, like a football team? Is that military life suppresses them? Or all that killing stimulates them? Where do they recruit, gay discos?

The poor little fellow wet himself. A stain across the trousers, across the floor, but he wouldn’t let us clean him up. He just suddenly started to talk. He talked and talked, strands of spittle between lips, and we had to sit there taking notes so neatly. Vesna’s face swelled up; pushing down tears. I felt sorry for her, but you have to stay detached. You do want to comfort them, give them a hug, but it’s not professional.

He remembered every last detail. One of the men was still chewing rotten salami. One of them had beautifully clean, polished boots.

Then he took a deep breath and said something I couldn’t understand. Vesna dropped the pen, and pushed her forehead down onto her hands. “He’s just told us the father was raped as well.”

We would have to interview them all, all over again. The wife refused. She sat there popping pieces of apple into her mouth, shaking her head. Vesna begged her. “Look! It is in your interests if all the evidence works together.”

“The boy tells stories. He’s too ashamed. He wants everyone to be ashamed. Nothing else happened. Isn’t what happened bad enough for you?” She had very few, very yellow teeth. “I shall take him and I shall beat him.”

“Don’t do that,” Vesna asked her.

“What else am I to do?” the mother answered.

I was the senior officer, so I said, “Vesna, we’ll just talk only to the father. Corroborate as much as we can.”

He came in with his accordion. We could hear him outside the front door playing it. He brought it into the interview room with him, and smiled, as if we were all inside a bar. He kept it on his lap, ready to play. He was smiling with one silver outlined tooth, and unlike his wife looked young for his age.

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?

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.

1. Never think about the past or politics.
   
2. Ignore ghosts. They cannot hurt you.
   
3. Do not go to school. Hire tutors. Don’t do homework. It is disturbing.
   
4. Always be driven everywhere in either the Mercedes or the BMW.
   
5. 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.
   
6. Avoid all men with potbellies. They eat too well and therefore must be corrupt.
   
7. Avoid anyone who drives a Toyota Viva or Honda Dream motorcycle.
   
8. Don’t answer letters or phone calls.
   
9. 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.