I said without looking up, They must be.
Look at me.
I was startled by a sharp edge in your soft voice.
Do you think of what is happening there?
Of course I do.
I had been thinking about my book and communists and socialists in London who worked together and slept together and had children together.
I don’t think you do.
Then you left the kitchen and walked down the long hall and came back with a yellowed telegram. You unfolded it and read:
ARPIL 16TH, 1975, BORDERS MAY CLOSE. DO NOT COME BACK UNTIL I CALL. FATHER
.
This is their last word, you said. Four years ago. Do you know what I did that day? I tried to telephone and the operator said there were no more lines to Cambodia. I went to the post office to send a wire. No lines. I gave the clerk a letter to mail and she said, I’m sorry. There is no more service. I dropped the letter in a mailbox outside anyway and four days later it came back to me with a stamp: undeliverable. Do you know what it means to send a letter to your family and read that it is undeliverable?
You stood holding the thin paper as if you could be swept away with a broom. I closed my book and put my arms around you and I traced my finger over your chipped tooth and we were two orphans standing in a forest and we left the pot of rice to burn and we tried to make love but we could not. There was never anything weak about you, your fingers were hard, your thighs were hard. Your skin was smooth as beach glass. I tried to soothe you, to rouse you, to make you forget but that day as you touched my hair you said, A person learns to imagine anything, oan samlanh.
Oan samlanh, my dearest darling. You taught me to call you borng samlanh, which is what a woman calls a man. Behind your charming smile, your fear was jammed and rusted. And after you finally fell asleep I crept out of your arms, wrapped up in a blanket, turned on a small light and read some more.
I saw the world more sharply with you, as if I had put on new lenses, the left a little stronger than the right, but worn together they shaped blurred edges into clear lines. There were moments I would have liked not to see so sharply. Borng samlanh, I wanted to know everything about you. I was young and but slenderly knew myself.
In April you said, I do not want to be apart from you ever.
And I knew you were going to leave.
Ares and wild boars and plowing. No one imagined what stench lay below.
I woke late and you were already up. The Sunday morning sidewalk smelled of spring, snowmelt and new green and car exhaust. I stretched my sated body on the sheets into the mild air and you sat on the edge of the bed and said, Oan samlanh, the Vietnamese invaded. The border is opening. I have to go back. I have to find my family.
I’m coming.
I cannot take you with me. You’re too young.
(Why did you not strike me too?)
Too young? I have never been too young for anything you wanted to do. I am coming with you.
Anne, you cannot. There has been war there. I do not know what I will find.
I will find it with you.
You cannot come.
I got out of bed and threw on last night’s clothes and I brushed you off me and ran down the steep stairs onto Bleury
Street and headed up the mountain. I sat by the lake and watched Sunday families, Sunday lovers, Sunday loners, filthy pigeons. I tried to imagine who I was without you. You had so much to do, didn’t you? None of it you could do on a Sunday.
You came looking for me and when I saw you on the mountain I shed my raging body and already I was drinking your skin, combing your long black hair, wrapping myself around your narrow hips. Your eyes were determined but still pleading. I wanted the borders to close again, so I could have you back. I wanted you to die so I would not have to think of you without me. I wanted money. I wanted to be older. I wanted you to find your whole family alive so I could be with you. I wanted you to find your family dead so you would be mine. I wanted everything to change now, and everything to stay the same forever. I wanted to erase all transgression from my fate. You were salt and sweet, my whole body’s desire. Under the unearthly clamor of the pigeons’ insistent cooing all around us, the echo of my father’s words, He will go home. All I wanted was to hear you say, I will wait for you. I will come back for you, but you said, The borders are open. I must go.
War claimed you.
Your ticket read: Paris. Phnom Penh. I wanted a ticket like that.
We made love before sunrise and left the house without speaking. I could not shed my anger at the airport.
Where will you stay?
At my parents’ house, Phlauv 350. I will write.
When you reached for me, I pushed you away. You stepped back and you looked down at your watch, said, I am afraid of what I will find.
Then wait, and I will come with you.
Little tiger, don’t be stubborn. Let’s not leave each other without at least a kiss.
I am not the one leaving.
You were holding your chapei and I stepped into your arms and you buried your face in my hair. But then you walked through thick glass doors and turned once to wave and after a long time your plane slowly backed up and wheeled around and drove down the runway and disappeared into the air. I returned to the empty city and I went to my father’s apartment and I felt blind and deaf and Papa in his reading chair said without looking up, Gone?
I waited for you. The first week I expected something every day, the second week turned into two months, six months, a year. No letter. No word. I sent letters to your parents’ address. I tried to find a telephone number. I had my seventeenth birthday, then another and another and another and another. How could I have lost you? How could we have made love in the first gray light before dawn and then I would never see you again?
Papa said, Perhaps he thinks it is easier this way.
Charlotte said, Things were awful there. Maybe he needs time.
Berthe said, Don’t worry, mon p’tit chou. You will find each other again.
She helped me find a part-time job selling flowers on St. Laurent in a shop called the Parisian. I had my own money. I went to the university and I studied languages. I was seduced by the shapes of words in my mouth and when I wrote them on the page they were raw and muscled and shining like a man who performs on stage. I needed memory and hope and since I could find them nowhere else, I looked for them in the declensions of verbs. Words swallowed me like a deep river. I dreamed false etymologies. I dreamed I discovered the beginning of the world in the sound of the adjective vraiment: vrai for truth and ment-ir for lie. I made new friends at the women’s center, women who talked liberation and peace, women who shared sex toys and contraceptives and I liked these women and I loved walking under the poster above the women’s center door that said:
THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE. BUT FIRST IT WILL PISS YOU OFF
. I told them about you and they said, He never wrote? Forget him, there are plenty of fish in the sea.
But in a secret hour of each day I studied Khmer. The language of love. A curling script with soundless buried r’s, beautifully balanced between consonants and vowels with two sounds each. I wrapped my tongue around the language of your childhood, embraced you with each new word. My teacher had a wooden leg. His name was Vithu and I paid him with my flower money. He had managed to escape across the border early in the war but not before he stepped on a landmine. He had been precocious, a farmer’s son who learned to read and write at the monastery. He taught me words and he taught me how to speak. He tried to teach me modesty. He said, If someone says, You cook well or you speak well, you must say, No I don’t, and lower your eyes. In Cambodia a virtuous woman moves without making a sound on the floor.
I loved the folk wisdom called chbap. Vithu taught me: Don’t let a hungry man guard rice, don’t let an angry man wash dishes. He taught me about khmoc, ghosts, and pret and besach, the demon spirits of people who die violent deaths and about arak, bad female spirits, and neak ta, the spirits in stones and trees. Over the years I became quite good and one day after reading aloud a story about a rabbit and a judge, I looked up to see Vithu’s eyes full of tears. I touched his hand and said, You miss home very much. But he said, It is not that so much, Anne Greves; it is more that the things I have taught you are things that have surely disappeared from my home.
I told him my father could make him a better leg but he stroked his, said, I’m used to this one. One day he asked me to write my favorite Khmer story. I wrote about a king in the time Nokor Pearean Sei whose name was mighty as thunder from eight directions. His grandson wished to surpass his grandfather
and destroyed everything his grandfather achieved, the royal fortresses and temples, monasteries and schools. By the time the grandson was finished, it was as if the great empire of his grandfather had never existed.
When Vithu showed me his corrections, he brushed his hand over my paper as if it too were a vanished monument and he said, In Buddhism we believe we can see ourselves in the other. Do you know the story of the rabbit in the moon? Before the Buddha was the Buddha he was a rabbit. He wanted to be reborn as the Buddha and so he offered to sacrifice his life to anyone in need. One day a tevada-angel turned himself into a starving hunter to test the rabbit. He said, I am so hungry. If I do not eat soon I will die. The rabbit said, I will sacrifice my life to help you. Make a fire and I will jump in and cook myself for you. The hunter agreed and built a blazing fire. The rabbit jumped into the flames but he was unharmed. Then the tevada carried the rabbit to the moon and drew his image there to remind people always of the Buddha’s selfless kindness.
When Vithu finished he said, My sister’s name was Channary, which means a girl with a face like the moon.
Where is your sister now?
Gone, he said.
One day walking down Bleury Street I saw
FOR RENT
written on a piece of cardboard taped to the window of your old apartment. I called the landlord and said, I’ll take it.
There had been years of tenants since you. I ran up the long dark staircase and opened the door and wandered through the large rooms. I sniffed the closets, sat on the balcony, paced the floor in the kitchen, stood in the bedroom where I had listened over and over to “Sugarcane Baby.” Every room had been painted. There were scattered images and ghosts, but not yours. I could smell Gouda cheese, and hear the laughter of six women students planning a party, and I felt the presence of a boy studying weather. I moved my bed into your old room at the front and painted it yellow again.
I was not unaffected by the liberties of the times, music and drugs and separatism. At the wild Laval dances they sometimes still played Patti Labelle singing “Lady Marmalade.” I took lovers. When I visited Berthe she said tenderly, Enjoy this time, life is short, mon chou. I watched the city awkwardly absorbing Algerians and South Africans and Persians and Koreans and Chinese and Senegalese and Haitians. I searched out the places French Canadians and the children of European immigrants
and the old-wealth Anglo Westmounters rarely went. I danced to reggae and disco and Haitian music in a press of warm bodies in le bar Port au Prince. One night I took home a cheerful young man who made me laugh when he said he wanted to call the book he was writing
Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer
. In the kitchen at Bleury Street we danced again. We got up from the linoleum floor ravenous and made thick milkshakes and toast and then we tried the bed. It was Sunday morning and then Sunday afternoon and in the twilight leading toward the third day, he told me he wanted to write about his grandmother in the highlands of Haiti. After he left I never saw him again and I did not mind. Longing for you, I learned, borng samlanh, that once in a lifetime, if we are lucky, we meet the one who teaches us how even fickle Eros can set free abiding love.
Then one night, eleven years after you left, I turned on the television and the light flickered in front of me. I moved my chair very close to the screen. Australian backpackers were taking a train into Phnom Penh to attend a memorial day, the Day to Remain Tied in Anger. The Vietnamese were withdrawing and the United Nations was creating a transitional government. I had watched newsreels of war and landmine victims and the hollow desperation of hunger and piles of skulls but I had never seen pictures of Cambodia trying to recover. I watched a weeping woman dressed in white behind the microphone speaking to a large crowd in the courtyard of a school that had been used as an extermination center. She was thin and she held a wet handkerchief. Her nasal voice flayed the upturned faces of the listening people. She chanted the names of her
parents, her husband, her children, her brothers and sisters, taken from her one by one. Tears streamed down her face, deep lines deepening between her brows. When she paused to breathe past the lumps in her throat, she covered her face with a white handkerchief dripping tears and sweat.
Behold grief.
Words and weeping one sound. She covered her mouth with dread grace, swaying from the waist, her long fingers rippling like stalks of grain. She sang:
What sorrow is there that is not mine?
Country lost and husband and children.
What sorrow is not mine?
Face after face after face turned away, eyes dropping, tears falling. Another young woman took her turn at the microphone and from her throat spilled a song seared with hatred. Her eyes flamed black. She was blood and tissue drained of love. She sang,
Mother, what did they do to you here?
The monks say, Mean ruup mean dtuk. With a body comes suffering.
I saw you.
The camera panned the crowd and I was sure I saw you in the crowd.