Collected Prose

of food…. The hundreds of children were all marasmic—much skin disease, baldness, discolored hair and great fear in the whole population.” Or later, describing what he saw on a visit to the 7th of January Hospital in Phnom Penh: “… terrible conditions—children in bed in filthy rags dying with starvation–no drugs—no food…. The TB allied to starvation gives the people a Belsen-like appearance. In one ward a boy of thirteen tied down to the bed because he was going insane—many children now orphans—or can’t find families—and a lot of nervous twitches and spasms to be seen among the people. The face of one small boy of eighteen months was in a state of destruction by what appeared to be infected skin and flesh which had broken down under severe kwashiorkor—his eyes full of pus, held in the arms of his five-year-old sister … I find this sort of thing very tough to take—and this situation must be applicable to hundreds of thousands of Kampuchean people today.”
    Two weeks before reading these words, A. went out to dinner with a friend of his, P., a writer and editor for a large weekly news magazine. It so happens that she was handling the “Cambodia story” for her publication. Nearly everything written in the American and foreign press about the conditions there had passed before her eyes, and she told A. about a story written for a North Carolina newspaper—by a volunteer American doctor in one of the refugee camps across the Thai border. It concerned the visit of the American President’s wife, Rosalynn Carter, to those camps. A. could remember the photographs that had been published in the newspapers and magazines (the First Lady embracing a Cambodian child, the First Lady talking to doctors), and in spite of everything he knew about America’s responsibility for creating the conditions Mrs. Carter had come to protest, he had been moved by those pictures. It turned out that Mrs. Carter visited the camp where the American doctor was working. The camp hospital was a make-shift affair: a thatched roof, a few support beams, the patients lying on mats on the ground. The President’s wife arrived, followed by a swarm of officials, reporters, and cameramen. There were too many of them, and as they trooped through the hospital, patients’ hands were stepped on by heavy Western shoes, I.V. lines were disconnected by passing legs, bodies were inadvertently kicked. Perhaps this confusion was avoidable, perhaps not. In any case, after the visitors had completed their inspection, the American doctor made an appeal. Please, he said, would some of you spare a bit of your time to donate blood to the hospital; even the blood of the healthiest Cambodian is too thin to be of use; our supply has run out. But the First Lady’s tour was behind schedule. There were other places to go that day, other suffering people to see. There was just no time, they said. Sorry. So very sorry. And then, as abruptly as they had come, the visitors left.
    *

    In that the world is monstrous. In that the world can lead a man to nothing but despair, and a despair so complete, so resolute, that nothing can open the door of this prison, which is hopelessness, A. peers through the bars of his cell and finds only one thought that brings him any consolation: the image of his son. And not just his son, but any son, any daughter, any child of any man or woman.
    In that the world is monstrous. In that it seems to offer no hope of a future, A. looks at his son and realizes that he must not allow himself to despair. There is this responsibility for a young life, and in that he has brought this life into being, he must not despair. Minute by minute, hour by hour, as he remains in the presence of his son, attending to his needs, giving himself up to this young life, which is a continual injunction to remain in the present, he feels his despair evaporate. And even though he continues to despair, he does not allow himself to despair.
    The thought of a child’s suffering, therefore, is monstrous to him. It is even more monstrous than the monstrosity of the world itself. For it robs the world of its one consolation, and in that a world can be imagined without consolation, it is monstrous.
    He can go no farther than this.
    *

    This is where it begins. He stands alone in an empty room and begins to cry. “It is too much for me, I cannot face it” (Mallarmé). “A Belsen-like appearance,” as the engineer in Cambodia noted. And yes,