In the fields, in the afternoons, Ryna found herself remembering things about her father that she thought had been lost to the years and the hardships of life. She remembered that she would sit on his lap while he told her the story “Grandma and Rabbit,” in which the mischievous rabbit ate all of Grandma’s bananas. When she got older, he told her stories from other parts of the world, stories she told to her own children years later. She remembered that when he would come home after being gone for weeks with some Chinese businessmen, he would bring a maroon woven bag from which he would happily pull beautiful carved hairbrushes and strange-tasting spices and fabrics. He once gave her a turquoise silk scarf decorated with apsara dancers, and she now remembered the precise moment, his hands touching her shoulders, the view of pink bougainvillea outside the half-open window. She remembered that he would give her a foot massage before bed. Ryna thought of these things as she worked her trowel into the mud and scooped up the young rice plants to be replanted in the adjacent fields. Each fist-size chunk of mud and rice shoots, a miniature island of dense yellow-green trees, she painstakingly carried to the new field and buried in the mud under the water. She remembered his laugh. She remembered that she was his favorite child. She remembered that he called her his svay pa-em, his sweet mango.
In the evenings, as they unrolled the mosquito nets, she told her daughters these fragments of memories. She told them of the places her father had traveled, and they played games, guessing the clothing and foods of faraway peoples and lands. “Grandfather seems so different from Father,” said Sreypov. “You must have loved him very much.” “Yes,” said Ryna. “I wish I could see him,” said Sreypov. “I wish he was here. I hope he is not sad in his new life with the spirits.” “I hope so too,” said Ryna. “Put your hand on my shoulder, Mae,” said Sreypov. “Why?” “I will imagine it is Grandfather’s hand.”
One morning as Ryna was leaving her house to take rice to the monks, Makara’s husband rode up on his moto. Sayon was a tall man whose hands were always clean despite his work in the fields. “I am offering my help with this killer,” he said. “What have you decided to do?”
“I’m not sure,” said Ryna.
“You shouldn’t wait,” said Sayon. “These KR killers don’t stay in one place long. There are thousands of them among us. They think they’re invisible, like fleas on an ox’s back.”
“I’m planning something,” said Ryna.
“I can do it for you,” said Sayon. “Or have a friend do it.”
“What would you do?”
“It’s easy. We watch him. We get him at night, on the road.”
“You kill him?”
“Do you really want to know? We don’t kill him. We beat him with a bat until all of his bones are broken. That way, he suffers more.” He put the kickstand down on his moto and walked close to Ryna. “Don’t you want revenge?” he said in a gentle voice.
“Yes. But the bat . . .”
“These killers have to pay. And you owe it to the memory of your father. Can you tell me his name? Can you show me where he is?”
“I’ll let you know,” said Ryna. She felt nauseated again, like the first morning she’d seen Touch Pheng. “Not now. I’ll let you know.”
“Don’t wait too long,” said Sayon. He patted her shoulder and drove away.
That afternoon, Ryna prepared dinner for her family earlier than usual. Makara had given her a chicken. It fluttered and squawked when Ryna held her knife against its neck. As she slit its throat, she noticed how easily the blade cut through the muscles and flesh. Almost in a trance, she watched the blood drip drop by drop to the ground.
Ryna didn’t see Touch Pheng again until the middle of July. He was sitting in a plastic chair underneath the awning of the shop that sold sleuk bas and cabbage, and he appeared to be dozing. Without speaking, she walked close to him and just stood staring. She realized that she didn’t know what she would do from one moment to the next. She was trying to make his face change into the face of the arrogant young Khmer Rouge officer. She remembered that other face well, but this was the face of an old man. Yet it was also the same.
“My name is Ryna,” she said finally. She was surprised at the sound of her own voice. He opened his eyes and nodded. “Are you here by yourself?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, and reached for his stick. It was the first time he had spoken to her. In her mind, she saw him lying on a dark road, broken and bleeding to death.
She hesitated. “Do you have a family?”
He leaned forward on his stick and squinted with milky eyes at the crowd of people moving among the covered food stalls. His forehead glistened with sweat. “My wife died ten years ago,” he said. “My children live in Vietnam.” He stopped and began coughing. “I don’t want to live in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are cheaters and liars.”
“May I ask Ta what brings him to Praek Banan?”
“I am visiting the daughter of a cousin,” said the old man. “For a few months. Then I’ll go.” He sat back in the chair. “And you? Neang must live here?”
“Yes, I have lived in this village for thirty years,” said Ryna.
“Are you married?”
“I have a husband and four children.”
“You have good luck,” said the old man.
In the many scenarios that Ryna had rehearsed in her mind over the last couple of months, she had not imagined such a conversation.
Ryna began taking the photograph of her father with her every time she went to the market. She did not show the picture to Touch Pheng again, or even take it out of her pocket, but she wanted it with her when she saw him. Once a week, she and Touch Pheng would have bits of conversation. A few sentences. He never said much. And she, even less. One morning outside of a new stall that sold used tires hanging from the roof like giant black fruit, Touch Pheng confided that his favorite son had mechanical skill and had secured a job repairing motos. “But he married badly,” said the old man, shaking his head, “and is always arguing with his wife. What can I do?” He told Ryna that he had seven grandchildren. On another occasion, as he leaned on his stick and picked at the mole over his eye, he mentioned that for many years now he had been moving from one province to another every few months, living with cousins. “I come and I go, I come and I go. What is an old man to do? I’m lucky to be alive.”
Yes, he’s lucky to be alive, Ryna thought to herself. Especially when so many had died at his orders. Her father. Her father. What Ryna wanted was for the old man to revert to his younger self, the swaggering killer she remembered, and stop pretending to be someone else. Then, she would know what to do. Over and over, she went through the scenes she remembered. She hated talking to this ancient version of that killer. Yet she found herself doing so. One day, she told him that Kamal was beginning to look for a wife. They were sitting next to a stall that sold chickens. She told him that her daughter Nita was pregnant and might be coming home to live with her and Pich, arriving soon, in early September, in time for the Pchum Ben holidays.
That afternoon, as she was washing the family’s clothes in the river, Ryna realized that she had confided far too much in Touch Pheng. How could she have revealed such personal things about herself and her family to that killer? He might not look like the man she remembered, but he was that man. She felt disgusted with herself and scraped a shirt against the cleaning rock harder and harder until it was ripped to shreds and her fingers were bleeding.
She remembered more things of her father, small things. She remembered that his hands were soft and delicate, unlike the hands of Pich.
As she remembered, everyday life was developing a strangeness she’d not experienced before. One morning on her way to the market, she stopped at the little compound next to the pagoda, where the monks slept on straw mats, and listened to their chanting. For ten minutes, she stared at the red-toothed old women chewing on betel leaves under the shade of an acacia tree. For a week, she sat with a friend’s fifteen-year-old son who was dyi
ng of tuberculosis, watched as he gasped for air and clawed at the pus-filled lesions on his back. At his cremation ceremony, she suddenly began weeping and couldn’t stop until evening.
Late one night at the end of July, Makara called from the bottom of the ladder, seeking asylum from her husband. Sayon had beaten her before, but that night Makara seemed particularly terrified, and she had dark blue bruises on her face and a bleeding mouth. After Makara had come up into the house, Ryna leaned down to Pich, half asleep, and said, “If Ouv Wea ever hits me like that, I’ll be gone in the morning, and he is never going to find me.” “Watch your tongue,” said Pich, roused from his sleep. “You are the one who needs to watch out,” screamed Ryna, surprised at her anger, and suddenly she had a memory of her sister Lina in the camp, beaten so badly she couldn’t walk. Ryna took Makara behind the curtain into her daughters’ tiny space, and the four of them slept on the mats side by side. The next morning, Makara rose at dawn without speaking and went home to her husband.
At the beginning of August, they started the harvest of the beans and the cucumbers. Ryna would sometimes go to the farm with Pich and Kamal at dawn to pick the cucumbers when they were most cool. In the early mornings, a mist often hung over the land, and the rows of green looked like soft folds of cloth, and each cupful of air shone with its own source of pink light. When Ryna returned to the market, she always looked for Touch Pheng.
She lied to Makara and Sayon. She told them that the Khmer Rouge officer had left the village. But she could see in their eyes that they didn’t believe her. “Please take this,” said Sayon, and he handed Ryna the bat. It was heavy, painted half black and half red, and it had Thai writing on it. “Your husband will know what to do with this.” Without replying, Ryna nodded and put the bat in the trunk that contained her clothes and her hairbrush and a few letters. She, not Sayon, would choose the time and the place of avenging her father’s death.
That night, she had a dream. She and her father were in the camp, just before dawn, sitting on a log together, drinking their thin gruel of water and rice. In the distance, the dim shapes of soldiers moved about. Strangely, her father was wearing the saffron robes of a monk, but with chains cutting into the flesh of his ankles. “My dear father, what should I do?” she asked him. He touched her cheek but did not answer her question. Instead, he whispered, “Bad times.” “For me?” asked Ryna. “When?” Then she was back in the dark house with Pich.
When her daughter Nita arrived at Praek Khmau on the bus, struggling with her two bags of belongings, her stomach bulging beneath her faded sarong, Ryna could hardly stop weeping with joy. “Mi-oun, mi-oun, mi-oun,” was all she could say. “Mae looks tired,” said Nita, who had not seen her mother for over a year. Nita’s breasts, tiny buds when she first married, had grown plump. Her lips were bright red, her fingernails and toenails the same color. “Tonight, I will make amok for you,” said Ryna. “I will make amok and luk lak and bok choy, and I have some nice bananas. But first, you are resting.” Ryna wrapped her arms around her daughter and helped her get into their oxcart. The bus stop was crowded with people and motos and carts, some of the little motos carrying entire families wedged together. One moto had a pig strapped across sideways. “Is your husband angry that you left him?” asked Ryna. “He doesn’t care about me,” said Nita. “I think that he has a girlfriend in Kampot. More than one.” She hugged her mother.
After Nita moved in, the house was so alive and so crowded that Kamal and Pich slept in hammocks under the house, hung between the corner posts, and the oxen were retied to a stake near the kitchen shed. On the first day of Pchum Ben, they all dressed in white clothes and went to the pagoda at dawn. Several hundred villagers were already there, wearing white tops and black pants and skirts, praying and tossing rice on the ground to feed their dead ancestors. Ryna had brought along all the ancestral photographs, including the one of her father. During the Pchum Ben holidays, Ryna always thought of her parents, wondering if she might hear them as they crept about the village. But on this Pchum Ben, with the return of Touch Pheng and the flood of old memories, she was certain that she could feel her father brush past her.
“May your ancestors be released from their misery and reborn in a happy life,” chanted the three monks, who sat cross-legged on white cushions. Behind them, a long table was laden with bowls of rice and fruit, and on the wall was a large photograph of the Venerable Thy Hut, who had worked in the resettlements after the war. As Ryna sat with her eyes closed, feeling her family around her, her three daughters and her son and her husband, the thought came to her that not all of her fortune in this life had been bad. But it had not been good either. A shudder went through her as she remembered what her father had said in the dream. Was it a summary of bad things that had already happened, or a prophecy of bad things to come? Ghosts sometimes mixed future and past. Ryna half opened her eyes and saw among the throngs of people Makara and her husband, kneeling on mats. At the other side of the pagoda, beneath the photograph of the venerable monk, she saw Lakhena, sitting alone and wearing a white lace blouse with a lavender sash draped over her shoulder. Lakhena was looking intently at Ryna and her family. When she noticed Ryna looking back, she dipped her head in a bow. Ryna hesitated and then gave a slight nod in return. Lakhena surely had her own suffering, she thought, like all women. “May your ancestors bless you for what you are doing to release them from their misery and for offering them food,” droned the monks.
A week after the dry season had begun, after the mud turned to dirt and the dirt turned to red dust that hovered like mist in the air, Ryna saw Touch Pheng limping up to her front gate. When she went down to meet him, he told her that he had come to say goodbye. He was leaving Praek Banan. It had been five months since she first saw him in the village.
“You are leaving before the rice harvest?” asked Ryna.
“I have to go,” said Touch Pheng. “An old man has worn out his welcome. Do not feel sorry for me. I am alive. I’m going this afternoon, to a nephew in Banteay Meanchey. My bags are packed.”
“That is a long trip on the bus.”
“No matter.”
The old man leaned against the gate, thin as a reed even in his traveling shirt. He would not live long, she thought to herself. “I would like my daughters to meet you before you go,” said Ryna.
Touch looked at her as if he didn’t understand what she had said.
“Two of my daughters are here. If you are all packed.”
“I am packed,” said Touch Pheng. “I do not have much.” He began coughing and could not stop for a full minute. “All right,” he said, taking large gulps of air. “I will meet your daughters.”
With some effort, Ryna helped Touch Pheng up the ladder into her house. As always, he smelled of tobacco. He looked around without comment. Nita was napping behind the curtain, and Sreypov, just home from school, sat cross-legged in the corner with a book. Ryna introduced her daughter, who greeted the visitor and went back to her studies. The radio was playing some songs of Pen Ron. Letting his stick drop to the floor, the old man sank into one of the two chairs.
“Do you like her singing?” said Ryna.
Touch Pheng nodded. He seemed a bit out of breath and closed his eyes. Ryna was again struck by how thin he was.
“If you don’t like Pen Ron, I can change the dial,” said Ryna.
“Don’t go to any trouble for me. Whatever you want is fine.” Touch Pheng rubbed at the mole over his eye and shifted in his chair. “To be honest, Pen Ron is a little crazy for me.”
“Rock and roll,” said Ryna. “What about Sinn Sisamouth? There’s a channel that plays Sinn Sisamouth all the time.”
“I know,” said Touch Pheng, opening his eyes. “I like Sinn Sisamouth. ‘Violon Sneha’ is my favorite song.” Ryna turned the dial of the old radio until she found the Sinn Sisamouth channel. “Yes, that’s him,” said Touch Pheng. “It’s a song I don’t know, but no one can mistake his voice.” He closed his eyes again.
&nbs
p; “My husband and I listen to him all the time,” said Ryna. She noticed that Touch Pheng sat so that he cocked his left ear toward the radio, as if he might be deaf in his other ear.
“No one sings like Sinn Sisamouth,” said Touch Pheng. “Listen to the words. He knew the pain of romance, didn’t he.”
“He’s my favorite singer,” said Ryna. She closed her eyes, and they both sat with their eyes closed, listening to Sinn Sisamouth on the radio. Some minutes passed, how many Ryna couldn’t tell. It was sweltering in the house, and she could feel the sweat dripping down the small of her back.
“Did you know that he went to medical school?” said Touch Pheng. “At one time, he was going to be a doctor. Think of that.”
They could hear Nita behind the curtain. She drew long breaths as she slept, and she turned over several times.
Ryna looked at Touch Pheng. He appeared to be dozing, his head drooped down to his chest. She stood up. “What?” he said, opening his eyes and looking around as if he did not remember where he was.
“Let me give you something to eat,” said Ryna.
“No need to feed me,” said Touch Pheng.
“You have a long journey,” said Ryna. She went down the ladder and came back with rice and pork. She watched as he ate.
“Neang will not eat?” he asked.
“I ate already.” She served him more rice.
“Thank you,” he said when he finished. “It was kind of you to allow me into your house. I doubt I will ever be back to Praek Banan.” He started to rise from his chair but then sat down again. “May I ask Neang a favor? May I stay a few more minutes more? It is old age. I need to rest a bit after eating.”
“Stay for a few minutes.”
While Touch Pheng was digesting his lunch, a thought came into Ryna’s head. “Why doesn’t Ta help me make diapers for my grandchild, coming in only a few weeks.”
“Diapers? I know nothing about making diapers.”
Three Flames Page 2