And that was the best Sith could hope for. This family would be fine for her.
In the late afternoon, all four brothers came with their wives for the end of Pchum Ben, when the ghosts of the dead can wander the Earth. People scatter rice on the temple floors to feed their families. Some ghosts have small mouths so special rice is used.
Sith never took part in Pchum Ben. How could she go the temple and scatter rice for Pol Pot?
The family settled in the kitchen chatting and joking, and it all passed in a blur for Sith. Everyone else had family they could honor. To Sith's surprise one of the uncles suggested that people should write names of the deceased and burn them, to transfer merit. It was nothing to do with Pchum Ben, but a lovely idea, so all the family wrote down names.
Sith sat with her hands jammed under her arms.
Dara's mother asked, “Isn't there a name you want to write, Sith?"
"No,” said Sith in a tiny voice. How could she write the name Pol Pot? He was surely roaming the world let loose from hell. “There is no one."
Dara rubbed her hand. “Yes there is, Sith. A very special name."
"No, there's not."
Dara thought she didn't want them to know her father was Kol Vireakboth. He leant forward and whispered. “I promise. No one will see it."
Sith's breath shook. She took the paper and started to cry.
"Oh,” said Dara's mother, stricken with sympathy. “Everyone in this country has a tragedy."
Sith wrote the name Kol Vireakboth.
Dara kept the paper folded and caught Sith's eyes. You see? he seemed to say. I have kept your secret safe. The paper burned.
Thunder slapped a clear sky about the face. It had been sunny, but now as suddenly as a curtain dropped down over a doorway, rain fell. A wind came from nowhere, tearing away a flap of palm-leaf wall, as if forcing entrance in a fury.
The family whooped and laughed and let the rain drench their shoulders as they stood up to push the wall back down, to keep out the rain.
But Sith knew. Her father's enemy was in the kitchen.
The rain passed; the sun came out. The family chuckled and sat back down around or on the table. They lowered dishes of food and ate, making parcels of rice and fish with their fingers. Sith sat rigidly erect, waiting for misfortune.
What would the spirit of Kol Vireakboth do to Pol Pot's daughter? Would he overturn the table, soiling her with food? Would he send mosquitoes to bite and make her sick? Would he suck away all her good fortune, leaving the marriage blighted, her new family estranged?
Or would a kindly spirit simply wish that the children of all Cambodians could escape, escape the past?
Suddenly, Sith felt at peace. The sunlight and shadows looked new to her and her senses started to work in magic ways.
She smelled a perfume of emotion, sweet and bracing at the same time. The music from a neighbor's cassette player touched her arm gently. Words took the form of sunlight on her skin.
No one is evil, the sunlight said. But they can be false.
False, how? Sith asked without speaking, genuinely baffled.
The sunlight smiled with an old man's stained teeth. You know very well how.
All the air swelled with the scent of the food, savoring it. The trees sighed with satisfaction.
Life is true. Sith saw steam from the rice curl up into the branches. Death is false.
The sunlight stood up to go. It whispered. Tell him.
The world faded back to its old self.
That night in a hammock in a room with the other women, Sith suddenly sat bolt upright. Clarity would not let her sleep. She saw that there was no way ahead. She couldn't marry Dara. How could she ask him to marry someone who was harassed by one million dead? How could she explain I am haunted because I am Pol Pot's daughter and I have lied about everything?
The dead would not let her marry; the dead would not let her have joy. So who could Pol Pot's daughter pray to? Where could she go for wisdom?
Loak kru Kol Vireakboth, she said under her breath. Please show me a way ahead.
The darkness was sterner than the sunlight.
To be as false as you are, it said, you first have to lie to yourself.
What lies had Sith told? She knew the facts. Her father had been the head of a government that tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of people and starved the nation through mismanagement. I know the truth.
I just never think about it.
I've never faced it.
Well, the truth is as dark as I am, and you live in me, the darkness.
She had read books-well, the first chapter of books-and then dropped them as if her fingers were scalded. There was no truth for her in books. The truth ahead of her would be loneliness, dreary adulthood, and penance.
Grow up.
The palm-leaf panels stirred like waiting ghosts.
All through the long bus ride back, she said nothing. Dara went silent too, and hung his head.
In the huge and empty hotel suite, darkness awaited her. She'd had the phone and the TV removed; her footsteps sounded hollow. Jorani and the driver had been her only friends.
The next day she did not go to Soriya Market. She went instead to the torture museum of Tuol Sleng.
A cadre of young motoboys waited outside the hotel in baseball caps and bling. Instead, Sith hailed a sweet-faced older motoboy with a battered, rusty bike.
As they drove she asked him about his family. He lived alone and had no one except for his mother in Kompong Thom.
Outside the gates of Tuol Sleng he said, “This was my old school."
In one wing there were rows of rooms with one iron bed in each with handcuffs and stains on the floor. Photos on the wall showed twisted bodies chained to those same beds as they were found on the day of liberation. In one photograph, a chair was overturned as if in a hurry.
Sith stepped outside and looked instead at a beautiful house over the wall across the street. It was a high white house like her own, with pillars and a roof terrace and bougainvillaea, a modern daughter's house. What do they think when they look out from that roof terrace? How can they live here?