The Invention of Solitude

as he means to say I. For the story of mem ory is the story of seeing. And even if the things to be seen are no longer there, it is a story of seeing. The voice, therefore, goes on. And even as the boy closes his eyes and goes to sleep, his father ’ s voice goes on speaking in the dark.
     

The Book of Memory. Book Twelve.
    He can go no farther than this. Children have suffered at the hands of adults, for no reason whatsoever. Children have been abandoned, have been left to sta rve, have been murdered, for no reason whatsoever. It is not possible, he realizes, to go any farther than this.
    “ But then there are the children, ” says Ivan Karamazov, “ and what am I to do with them? ” And again: “ I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don ’ t want any more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to make up the sum of sufferings which is necessary for the purchase of truth, then I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price. ”
    Every day, without the least effort, he finds it staring him in the face. These are the days of Cambodia ’ s collapse, and everyday it is there, looking out at him from the newspaper, with the inevitable photographs of death: the emaciated children, the grownups with nothing left in their eyes. Jim Harrison, for example, an Oxfam engineer, noting in his diary: “ Visited small clinic at kilometer 7. Absolutely no drugs or medicines—serious cases of starvation—clearly just dying for lack 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. ab out 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 Cambo dian child, the First Lady talking to doctors), and in spite of everything he knew about America ’ s responsibility for creating the con ditions 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 pa tients 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 doc tor 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