These were phrases I had never studied.
The young man raised his hands into an open funnel in front of his face and he looked through them. He said, I am a living dead. I have my body, I can move, I can speak, I can eat, but I am nothing.
Then he fell silent and Mau said, Little brother, what we think, we become.
We watched two small boys catching frogs in the gullies of the fields, running past paddy and sugar palm and cloth and bone. The grass had done its work.
We walked back to the remorque and I said to Mau, How did you survive?
He ran the key to his motorcycle over the palm of his hand. He said, Borng srei, I do not like to talk about that time. I was a fisherman’s son. I pretended I could not read and I was taken to build a dam. When it was over, it was the Buddhist New Year. I joined a circle of bodies that danced and clapped around a fire under the moonlight. I myself felt finally free. Across the circle I saw the others were corpses dancing, and I looked down at my own body and it too was only skin stretched over bone. But I kept dancing. We were so happy. When we got to Phnom Penh, Ary managed to lease some land to grow mushrooms and with the profits I bought my motorcycle to make a good living. That is what happened to me.
Quietly Mau turned away. Come, borng srei, he said, you have seen enough.
When I came back, you were sitting cross legged on the bed playing your guitar and I sat near you and put my arms around you and said, Borng samlanh, today I visited Choeung Ek.
You would not speak and you did not put the guitar aside. I watched you slide your callused fingers up the neck and play a few more notes. I put my hand over your right hand so you could not play and said, I cannot live with your silence.
You still would not speak and that was the first time since we were together again that I spoke chill, impatient words I can
hardly bear to remember. You are like a spirit I once knew, I said. Speak to me. Tell me what happened.
Dread stillness. After a long time you lifted your hand to touch my hair with your fingers and you reached across the guitar and pulled me to you and pressed your cheek against my head and said, You always smell so good.
Then you dropped your hands back on your guitar and smiled lightly and said, I wonder if you remember this one. You sang,
I can’t get enough of your sweetness
, and I saw you on stage a long time ago, when you were still a math student from far away who could charm a crowd, but I did not sing with you.
I said, Sometimes the things that draw people together are the same things that rip them apart.
You said, Do you want to go up the river to visit the temples near where my grandparents used to live? I will show you where I come from.
Before the monsoons the waters were low, but still we set out in the pill-shaped Royal Express, the four-hour boat from Sisowath Quay. A television blasted Thai soap operas and music videos from Hong Kong. As soon as we were away from the docks, we climbed out the door and edged along the narrow gunwale to find a place on the roof of the boat. We tied kramas over our heads and watched villages on stilts at the river’s edge. We sat shoulder against shoulder, the wind in our ears, at ease together, as if we were riding your motorcycle along the shore of the St. Lawrence. You said, You will remember this river all your life.
The Royal Express broke down and we waited on the shore for another, smaller boat, watching the children, and you talked about your grandparents’ home at the phum near Angkor Wat, gibbons squabbling at dawn, chapei singers at dusk, gongs echoing through the village. You told me in a voice soft with affection that a man you played with as a boy would meet us. I looked into the gold-flecked water and I saw your eyes in the ripples.
Flocks of egrets skimmed the great lake and tall trees rose from the low water. When the prop of the small boat stuttered
against the mud, we stopped again and the driver lowered himself overboard with a wrench. We moved inside to escape the blistering sun and soon the engine caught again and we pushed on through the shallow marshes as the river spread into the lake and we motored past trees growing out of the water to a floating jetty where pirogues waited and men called out prices for a poled ride to the bouncing narrow walkway on stilts above mudflats.
You called out and waved, excited, Aa-Leap! to a man in a crescent moon-shaped boat with a long rudder half eaten by the water.
We jumped into his boat and he steered us into the waterways of the floating village, rows of floating houses strapped onto oil-drum pontoons, floating shops with cigarettes and soda bottles of outboard engine oil, a floating purple clapboard school and a floating hospital clinic. It might have been a charming drawing in a child’s book but for the poverty and struggle. The people of the floating village worked in bamboo-walled fish corrals, and a gray police boat with a machine gun mounted on its side was moored near a floating office marked
BUREAU DE LA POLICE FLUVIALE
. A small, naked boy with a wide smile spun in a floating bucket.
We glided past blue shuttered floating houses with floating porches and hanging flower pots. Leap moved us with his single rudder to a little house looking over the lake and fishing scows anchored nearby. I watched the late afternoon sun light Leap’s tranquil face copper and purple.
You said to me in English, Leap’s grandfather knew mine. We played together when we were children. When I first got back he saw me in my grandparents’ village and said, Is it you? and I said, Are you alive?
Leap left us at a floating house as the sun disappeared and we sat on bamboo mats on the porch looking across the lake. Soon his wife appeared through a tear in the darkness squatting in the bow of his boat. She handed us hot rice wrapped in leaves and a fish steeped in coconut milk, baked in a banana leaf. We spoke about the fishing and the coming monsoons and I said, Come join us.
But she nodded to the bamboo walls and answered in a soft voice, Ears everywhere. Eyes as many as the eyes of a pineapple.
Then she disappeared again into the watery alleys of the village.
Why is she afraid to sit with us? I asked.
You joked, Maybe it’s your accent.
I did not understand then that everywhere people watched each other. And sometimes they told and sometimes they did not in this place that was not free.
We ate and stowed away big bottles of water. We listened to fishing families at the end of the day, dishes and pots, card games, a baby crying, the low murmur of evening gossip. The lake was wide and very white and the people who slept with darkness and awoke before dawn fell instantly silent. All day they watched the sky and the water, read the signs of changing hours and seasons, honored the gods as naturally as they breathed, waited for the oil drums to rise again and the village to float out into the lake. Stars turned across the sky. Everything drifts and returns.
You took a tiny pink coral Buddha on a fine silver chain out of your pocket and you fastened it around my neck. I had nothing to give you but my old St. Christopher medal, which my father had given my mother and then gave me, and I undid it and put it around your neck.
We pledged ourselves to each other with our bodies. In the darkness alone together, we said that we would care for each other until death. There was no one to witness to us and so we were witnessed only by the nameless missing and by the generations to come. And this was the night our baby was conceived, a soul leaving the dry sky of the ancestors to live anew in bones and flesh.
I am getting closer to you.
I am exhausted. The pain of this telling is so great that I forget to breathe. I long for your tenderness. For thirty years I have clung to words that might lend me a measure of comfort.
I have longer to please the dead than to please the living. This from Sophocles. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. This from St. Paul. What we think we become. This from the Buddha.
We were sitting in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club at the bar looking over the street and Will came up behind me.
He said, Anne Greves, where have you been? You found him?
I laughed and said, Meet Will Maracle. From Montreal.
Will studied you, said, I remember you. I saw you in a band in Montreal.
You said, That was a long time ago.
Will shrugged, said, I’ve just come from Siem Riep. There’s a scene there. Have you ever been ecstatic in a temple? Know what I think? People have a top brain and a bottom brain. The bottom brain is for survival and seduction. I like the bottom brain. Anyone want a drink?
It felt like home. Meeting old friends. Picking up threads. Jokes. Talk. What life could be like.
Will said, Temple art, bodies falling into hell, shafts of light over the churning sea of milk. Worshiping Shiva in the king. The old guys were very tuned into bottom brain life. Have you seen the carvings? If you could meet any artist, who would you like to meet?
You said, Alive or dead?
Either.
Charlie Mingus.
Will looked at me.
Buddy Guy, no, Will Kemp.
Who? Never mind. I’d like to meet a temple carver. I’d like to know what he thought about when he worked, what he thought when he carved an elephant tossing someone into the air, or Kama dying in his lover’s arms. Maybe he was just a laborer with a special skill like me. Maybe he got up in the morning and chipped away all day until he was bone-tired and didn’t think about much except where his palm wine was coming from. I want to know how it felt to carve all those apsara breasts. I want to know if he zoned like I do when I work. Time disappears. Those carvers couldn’t make a mistake. Imagine a wall carved with a Vishnu lit by solstice light, or a tower of hundreds of apsaras and you’re chipping away and you had a bad night and you’re not too steady and you chip the wrong way and wreck one of the apsara’s Mona Lisa smiles. You’d be fucked.
We laughed.
Acres of carvings, he said, no mistakes, every carving different. Each breast a little different. The carvers must have thought about this. When I stare at the stone faces of the kings I feel their eyes moving, feel them breathing. They look in four directions, waiting until darkness to grab one of those temple dancers, waiting till morning to lose their temper and condemn some poor sod peasant to death. Those haughty eyes, halfway to god, held down by stone necks. I like the bottom brain side of things.
I said, You must have been a carver in another life.
Will said, I only believe in this life. And lots of times I have trouble believing in that.
Will always made me laugh.
You said, We never know which life we are in.
Abroad, everyone was talking democracy in Cambodia. They did not talk about fighting and hidden jungle camps, smuggling arms and people, or a minefield called the K5 that stretched from the Gulf of Thailand to the Lao border.
People said, The United Nations will supervise the first elections. Said, Aid organizations must help rebuild. Said, The people are tired of war. Said, The leaders have agreed in Paris to a peaceful transition.
The jungles are so far away from the Champs-Élysée. Each leader hid his own troops: Funcinpec, Son Sann, the Khmer Rouge, the People’s Revolutionary Armed Forces. People were refugees inside their own country, starving, killed by bullets, tossed up like little matchsticks along the K5.
You lay on the bed reading a newspaper and I sat at your table studying Khmer. I traced my finger under the curling script and read:
If the tiger lies down, don’t say, The tiger is showing respect. If you suspect your wife of being unfaithful, don’t let her walk behind you
. I asked, Why are there so many chbaps about suspicion? And you laughed, Because no one can trust anyone.
I picked up your paper and deciphered the headline about more observers coming in for elections. I said, Maybe I could
get some translation work with them. Or the UN. I need to work too.
You said, They are useless.
You swung off the bed, pushing the newspaper to the floor, said, The dog barks and the oxcart plods along.
What does that mean?
It means the foreigners come and bark but everything just keeps going the same way.
But someone has to see.
Anne, you do not understand. They try to go into the villages with their white trucks and blue berets and soldiers stop them with guns. At night people in the countryside are made to swallow bullets and the soldiers tell them, If you do not vote as we say, these bullets will explode inside you. They force people to swear before the Buddha how they will vote. They beat people to remind them how to vote. They throw grenades into village leaders’ houses. The foreigners go to their comfortable hotels and see nothing. Here’s another chbap: The mango and the orange are the same, both sour.
I remembered your fear standing in the kitchen on Bleury Street, holding the last telegram from your father.
I thought we were just two plain people loving each other as best we could. I did not know that you were working for the opposition, taking pictures, writing speeches, translating stories for the West. I had not grasped what was in front of my eyes, that anyone against the government could be murdered for anything. Did you think about why you hid things from me? Was it your habit of long solitude? Was it some antique romance of warriors who return to women after war? Was it my foreignness?
I said, It takes centuries to shape the discipline of freedom. It did in the West, and it takes forever to guard it.
You lifted your hand and waved me away.
Your eyes avoided mine. How could you degrade me with your secret life? I felt your distraction when I touched you. I missed how you used to delight in me. I said, Tell me what you do every morning. I want to see where you work.