I knew one thing my mother would have wanted for me, her own desire—to live. The photograph beside my bed was changing; the twenty-two-year-old woman, her eyes locked into her baby’s, seemed no longer tender but trapped. I wanted to give her the years she missed. I knew the one who took the picture; he left her long days alone, he sat reading long evenings through half-glasses and did not lift his eyes. I felt her ghost urging me, live, live for me, go, live, it ends at any instant, live, be free.
Maman, I did live. My only daughter was stillborn. (It has taken me thirty years to possess these eight syllables.) I tried. Even after Cambodia. Maman, I tried to live.
6
Papa sat at the kitchen table but did not get up when you came in. You stood waiting to be asked to sit down.
Papa said, What are you studying?
Mathematics. I tutor. I want to teach.
Do you like it here?
I have no choice. My country is closed.
You put your arm around my waist.
I slipped away from you, went to the counter, plugged in the kettle and brought three cups to the table.
Papa nodded to a chair, Go ahead. Sit.
You said to Papa, Anne told me you design prosthetics.
I teach in the faculty of engineering. We are working on a new leg right now, with spring, so a young amputee could learn to run on it.
You should have asked him to tell you more. Listened to him. Admired him. He would have talked and been happy and forgiven you your age and your race and your poverty. But you said, In my country we need legs that people can just walk on. In my country people fasten on wooden pegs.
Papa said, When will you go back?
You said with impatience, Our borders are closed. Nothing in. Nothing out. No one knows when things will open.
Papa looked gravely at you, Yes, I read about that. My father was an immigrant. He was a fisherman who came with nothing in his pocket.
Papa was ignoring me and you were sullen, and fleetingly I loathed both of you.
You said, I am not an immigrant. I am in exile. I do not choose to stay here. But I have no other place to go. My country is my skin.
Papa pushed back from the table and said, A person needs to be grateful to live somewhere.
He stood and said to me with raised eyebrows, I have some work to finish off.
And to you a brief nod, Pleasure.
Our cups sat empty and the water had not yet boiled.
Papa said, Do not throw it away like this. He will never be accepted here. Since your mother died, I have done everything for you. You must listen to me.
Papa had not heard you sing. He had not felt your touch. He did not know your tenderness.
I said, Papa, he already teaches at the university.
My father said, A tutor! He will leave you and go home. No good can come of a man who refuses to be grateful for shelter. He is too old for you. And anyway, no matter who he is, you are not yourself since you met that boy.
I would never be that self again. I was drowning in you. I would keep going back to you. Impossible not to.
7
After the first time, there is no rest. Every day we invented ways to be alone behind the closed door of Bleury Street. You picked me up at school and we went straight to your yellow room. You played tapes of Ros Sereysothea and Pan Ron and I listened to a chapei singer called Kong Nai. I heard Khmer rockabilly and surf and soul and two-stringed and four-stringed guitars and Farfisa electric organs and rock drumming and lyrics I did not understand. I did my homework at your kitchen table, humming Cambodian tunes under the photo of your family tacked on the wall and ate rice with you. I stayed overnight. I came and went as I pleased and I wore my father down. He swore at me and threatened to lock me in my room. But it was too late for that and when he had exhausted himself he said, You are stubborn. Even as a child I could not do a thing about it. You are a fool to ruin your life.
But a girl understands with her first lover that there is no daughter who does not betray the father, there are only great crashing waves of the woman to come, gathering and building and breaking and thrashing the shore. I watched my body’s swelling and aching and flowing and shrinking as a sailor watches the changing surface of the waves. I let you do anything. I did anything I wanted and the dirty sheets of Bleury Street became my world.
The Saturday I am remembering, a snow faintly falling outside the window in a dusk half light, we were on your bed. We liked to smoke in silence, passing it back and forth, looking into each other’s eyes, exploring our slight knowledge of ourselves. You delicately pinched the remnant heat into gray ashes between your thumb and long index finger and dropped it in a cup. Then you stretched your legs on top of the patterned yellow and purple Indian cotton bedspread and lifted your arm for me to lean against you. Together we watched the snow fall now brighter and slower against the deepening sky and I said, I think I can smell my mother, and you said softly, My mother used to make sticky rice wrapped in leaves for me and my brother to take frog hunting. We hunted them on the shore of the lake near the temple at Sras Srang. My grandfather showed me how to make offerings of leaves when the river changed direction.
I laughed, Changed direction?
The Tonle Sap flows south, then turns around and flows north when the snows melt in the Himalayas. That is when we celebrate the river festival, when it changes direction. We make boat races and have fireworks.
And send candles out on the river?
And kids throw firecrackers at people.
You smiled looking into that dark funnel of memory and said, My brother, Sokha, and I used to throw lit ones at lovers from the trees.
There was no one to ask how the borders of a country could close. You showed me the letters you wrote alone in your yellow room. You sent them to the Red Cross in the refugee camps along the Thai border and to the UN High Commission. We read Year Zero by a French priest called Ponchaud. He described people pushing hospital beds, women giving birth in ditches, a cripple with neither hands nor feet writhing along the ground like a severed worm to get out of Phnom Penh. You threw up in the toilet and then you opened the book at the beginning again and read all night, looking for clues about your family. In the morning you said, What if my family is dead? What if I can never go back? When we walked on St. Catherine you waved your hand in the air and said, Would Montrealers believe that soldiers could arrest anyone?
I told you about bombs that tore up the stock exchange and bombs in mailboxes and the mayor’s house and men kidnapped and a politician left strangled in the trunk of a car for seven days. I told you how the police arrested Papa without charging him, only because he taught at the university. Criminal terror. Police terror. The front de libération du Québec. My father raged, Do they not see where force leads? He lectured to his classes, Force turns the one subjected to it into a thing. My teacher at school said, So what do we do, let the terrorists take over?
Even here, you said.
Why would here be different?
We watched a passing calèche, the horse’s heavy breath a white cloud in the cold air. You asked, Why did they arrest your father?
They accused him of knowing how to build bombs. He told the police, I make legs and arms for people who lose them to bombs. He did not even speak French. Berthe stayed with me and I was terrified I would never see him again but they let him go after two days. I remember the paleness of his face the night he came home. He was not angry anymore. He held me and whispered, I was so afraid.
We bought a Sunday New York Times and the Nouvel Observateur. We took the papers to Schwartz’s and outside the deli door a blind man with misshapen legs sat like a frog, feet splayed backward on a piece of cardboard. When he heard us walking nearby he said, I’m gonna take you to Hollywood, and you dropped a coin in his plastic dish. Inside we ate cheesecake and drank coffee. The papers reported mass slaughter in your country. You traced your finger over the newsprint and said, Sometimes they write millions dead and sometim
es they write thousands. Don’t they know? How can they sleep at night pretending to write facts when they don’t know?
8
In the small black and white photograph of your family taped over the kitchen table you were sixteen and your brother, Sokha, was eight. You were taller than your father, who wore old-fashioned spectacles. I examined his hard jaw and saw the seed of your pride. One of your hands was behind your mother’s back but everyone else’s hands hung at their sides, formally. Your mother’s clear face had the solitary look of a mother of sons. Your Vietnamese grandmother sat in the middle on a straight-backed chair, feet flat on the floor, everything at right angles like an Egyptian painting.
You said, Mak was fourteen when she was betrothed and married and she ran away from Pa’s mother. But Pa was really in love so the second time she left he followed her and they ran away together from both families and promised each other they would work and find a way to buy their own house or they would drown themselves in the Tonle Sap.
Why does your little brother look so serious?
You laughed and said, He was angry at me that day. He asked me to let him play in my band but I told him he was too young, told him to clean our room and then I’d let him join. I was supposed to get my hair cut because they say there that long hair means a man is hiding something. So I got one of the guys in the band to cut it for me and I was running to the photographer’s house late. I tripped and fell and cut my hand on the edge of a naga snake sculpture at the photographer’s gate. It bled a lot and I covered it with a handkerchief and walked into the studio. My mother screamed when she saw the blood.
They wrapped it up in a bandage and the photographer told me to hide it behind my mother’s back.
You rubbed your finger along a soiled edge of the picture. You said, Sokha will be almost fourteen now. Old enough to start his own band. Then you said, My mother tucked this into my pocket at the airport when I left and I laughed at her. It is the only picture I have.
Five people stare in a formal way into the camera. No one smiles. The tall boy has your eyes. The small boy has a shadow of a crease between his eyebrows and his eyes are stormy. The adults are composed. You looked from the photo to me and in your eyes’ black pupils I saw already a survivor’s pinprick of despair.
Then you stood abruptly and said, Let’s go take our own picture.
We rode your bike to the train station and we went into the photo booth, pulled the black curtain behind us, smiled into the black glass and waited for the flash. We kissed and waited for the flash. We stood back to back with stern faces and waited for the flash. Then you put your hands into my hair and said, This one is mine. The machine sent out four photographs and you ripped the strip in half and you kept the last two and I kept the first two. You taped yours on the wall beside your bed and you got your guitar and sang “Hummingbird” to me. Then you said, I learned a new one, and you sang “Chelsea Hotel” in a talking voice. I laughed because certain music sounded so odd coming from you.
I said, I never ever thought of myself as little.
You said, annoyed, I never thought of myself not able to sing whatever I want.
I took your hands in mine and made you look at me and after a long time you said, Except for your hair you look a bit Asian. I like how you speak your mind and do not try to please me. Your mind is not Asian at all.
9
Bombs were dropping the length of the Thai border as you grew up. Tons and tons of bombs.
But in Phnom Penh, you said, we tried to go on as if there were no war. My father hired a chapei teacher, Acha Trei, for me. He took me once to hear the great chapei player Kong Nai, who was blinded from smallpox when he was a child. He was competing against the one-eyed chapei master, Phirom Chea. They sang rhymes and riddles to each other. Phirom Chea sang: Two animals of the same name have three heads and nine legs. Kong Nai sang back: An elephant has four legs and a water elephant has four legs and a mango named Elephant Head lies in a dish.
I said, But that is still only eight legs, and what is a water elephant?
The water elephant is a hippopotamus and the dish has a pedestal.
You sang it in Khmer, imitating two voices. I pretended to understand but I was on the untranslatable edge. You lay down your chapei and said, When I was thirteen I began to go around the city on my own and that’s when I joined my first band. My best friend, Tien, was in the band. He played electric organ. We listened to everything the American soldiers were bringing to Viet Nam. I have not heard from Tien for a long time.
I took your chapei on my lap and plucked at the strings. I imagined you in Phnom Penh listening to Western rock and roll, absorbing the sounds and words brought by soldiers not much older than you were. I said, Isn’t it strange how people go to war and still play each other’s music?
You said, My grandmother used to take me to a temple to pray for peace. I was afraid of the monkeys there. They snuck up beside us and grabbed at the scraps my grandmother carried wrapped in a cloth. She’d clap at them and then squeeze my hand and say, If the enemy comes in front of you, make it pass over. If it comes behind, make it disappear.
You reached across, took back your chapei, played a few notes and hummed. You said, But after I started playing the enemy’s music I thought, I don’t want to make the enemy disappear, I want to learn his music. And you joked, singing, The enemy is in me, and I am in him.
10
We could survive a whole weekend on five dollars. There was always a bag of rice and we brought home fresh fish from Chinatown and fifty cents’ worth of greens and a couple of oranges. We knew a café on Crescent Street where we could sit the whole afternoon with one coffee and we got into L’air du temps through the back entrance. Sometimes we walked up the mountain and threw snowballs over Beaver Lake and when our fingertips began to freeze we went into the churches. I liked St. Joseph’s oratory best, its gloom and incense and hidden stairways.
You marveled at the high dark wall of abandoned canes and crutches, said, The Buddha believed only in the miracle of instruction.
We lit candles, not because we believed, but because we liked the flickering lights in tiers under crosses and icons, and we liked being together.
We wandered outside the oratory to the little house where the healer Brother André once slept on a hard, narrow bed. Through the glass panes we studied his brown robe hanging on a hook. You said, At home during Kathen festival, the people give new robes to the monks at the end of the rainy season. They stay three months in retreat, fasting and meditating. They make offerings to the ancestors until the people come and give them food and new robes. The monks live almost on air.
Like us, I said.
11
Montreal’s dark winter afternoons lengthened into the translucent light of a northern spring and the snow melted and ran in long streams down the streets toward the river. From the top of the mountain the melt in the city looked like a great chandelier with strings of prisms. The first hepatica popped out of the ground and the first white-throated sparrow trilled oo ee ee ee eeee. You oiled up your bike and we drove through the chill air into the Gatineau, through Precambrian rock and thin pine into the endless idea of north.
We had so much time. I would soon finish at Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s and go to university and I said, Maybe I will live with you, and you said, Yes.
The last Sunday in March, after driving along the river to L’Assomption and back because a tank of gas for your Harley was cheaper than anything else we wanted to do, I sat at your kitchen table reading The Golden Notebook. From the stove, the warm nutty smell of rice cooking and you were gutting a fish. Rinsing the blood from your long fingers you said, Do you think my family is still alive?
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.
Kim Echlin Page 3