Night after night Mau drove me. We crossed the river to restaurants packed with beer girls and men reaching for them and I said, He would not be here. Mau shrugged as if to say, All things are possible. It was April, almost New Year’s, the hottest time of the year, and the clubs and bars were full every night. I thought, What if he does not go out to listen to music anymore? What if I never go to the same place at the same time? What if the gods are deaf and mute and play tricks on me forever?
In the mornings I walked on Sisowath Quay, watched the traffic, an oxcart piled with wood and big bunches of bananas tied to the outside rail, a bicycle with a slaughtered hog, eyes open, tongue out, lashed on crosswise, small cars and motorcycles making Phnom Penh merges, cutting diagonally across oncoming traffic. On the wide sidewalks people carried large flat baskets filled with fruit and greens on their heads, carried little stools to sit on. Every morning a man without legs drove a bicycle with hand-pedals along the river path eastward. I found Sopheap’s noodle cart. She carried a baby tied to her back and a toddler played near her feet. I watched her face through the steam of her boiling pot and I liked the graceful way she stirred the noodles and her gentleness with the child and I approached her and said in Khmer, A bowl of noodles please with sait moan.
She said, You speak good Khmer.
No, just a little.
She lifted hot noodles from the pot into a chipped bowl, spooned out some meat and handed it to me.
Men in long-sleeved white shirts strolled on the quay in the brief cool of dawn, buying and selling. People jostled at a cart across the street selling pomelos. Whoever had money could eat hot rice and noodles, sugarcane, squid, boiled eggs, lotus root from the carts. Baskets of fried grasshoppers, later trays of ice cream. Hungry children reached out thin hands on the sidewalks. Food. Cigarettes. Petrol. Boys. Girls. Tourists. Traffic police waved people over for license checks. Demanded bribes. Drivers made U-turns as soon as they saw the police. People without arms and legs moved in the shadows of doorways, begging, sleeves turned up and neatly pinned over stumps of arms, harder to beg without arms, a few lucky ones on metal legs, or maybe a heaven-sent three-wheeled bicycle.
I handed Sopheap my empty bowl, said, Juab kh’nia th’ngay krao-y.
She smiled, Have you been here long?
A few days.
How did you learn to speak Khmer?
I studied at home. It is the language of my ...
I searched for a word. I knew how to say brother, father, husband, but I had never learned a word for lover.
It is the language of the man I love, I said. I am looking for him.
It was ordinary that people were missing in this place. As ordinary as missing an arm or a leg.
Sopheap smiled her radiant smile and said, I hope you find him. Tell me what he looks like and I will watch for him. I see many people every day.
After that I went each morning for breakfast at Sopheap’s cart. She told me she was young during Pol Pot and her mother had managed to keep her but that her older brothers died and her father died. She met her husband in a refugee camp on the Thai border. Her mother had wanted to take her abroad but they were not accepted. And so they came back.
In the afternoons I went to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. I liked the Parisian yellow bricks, the thwuck thwuck of the ceiling fans, the clean tablecloths, the stools at an open bar looking over the river and boulevard, colonial decadence. A Westerner arrives with a few dollars and lives like royalty and this unheard-of wealth is the first thing I shared with the foreigners at the FCC. Here I did not have to be lonely. Here someone was always telling stories. Here was rest from struggle on the streets. Among journalists and foreign aid workers and UN workers and backpackers, among the deliberate wanderers of the earth, there was no need to explain looking for a lost lover. Backpackers talked about bars and dope in Thailand, beaches in India, cathedrals in Europe, their mothers. They drifted through Phnom Penh, explored sex and skulls and temples, talked about going to the beaches in the south for New Year’s. Down on the street, children tossed chestnuts in a game called angkunh, and people decorated their tables and stores for the holidays with lotus flowers. From the rooftop of the FCC I looked in one direction over the palace and imagined what it must have been like to live in royal opulence, to attend orange and gold Buddhist processions, to celebrate the plowing on the full moon, and in the other direction I watched ordinary people on their terraces, a woman slaughtering a chicken for dinner, a teenager nursing her baby in a hammock.
17
On New Year’s Day the FCC was quiet. Most people had been invited somewhere or visited the temples to thank the old year’s angels, to welcome new angels. A man I had often seen came through the door. He was very tall with wide shoulders and a bit of a belly, strong forearms, sun-darkened skin. His brown eyes took detail in, and I had noticed him watching me. He bought a beer, came over and slid onto a stool beside me at the empty bar looking over the street. He said, Can I join you? It’s crowded in here.
From the beginning Will Maracle made me laugh.
I’m Will.
I’m Anne Greves.
He said, I see you here every afternoon.
I know.
Happy New Year.
And to you.
He set his glass down where it sweated a ring of water and said, What are you doing here?
I am looking for my lover.
Are you American?
I’m from Montreal.
Me too, near Montreal. Funny New Year’s without snow.
Funny New Year’s in April.
He flickered with a sweet light. There was a rhythm in his English I could not place. I asked, Where near Montreal?
Kahnawake.
That’s Montreal.
No it ain’t. It’s on the other side of the river.
He laughed his easy laugh and said, Why on god’s green earth are you looking for your lover here? And why would he lose someone as pretty as you?
I took a drink and said, What are you doing so far from home?
Forensics.
I looked at him.
Counting.
Counting?
They are trying to figure out how many.
Will Maracle opened massacre sites, released the bones. We talked all afternoon. I asked him what Maracle meant and he didn’t know. He asked me what Greves meant and I told him it was a whaler’s word, the refuse of tallow. I told him about looking for you in all the bars of the city. We talked about French and English and how he got started digging Indian burial grounds, trained with a man named Clyde Snow in Argentina and ended here. I asked him how he could bear his work and he said, Truth is as old as God. He shrugged and said, Someone else said that, not me.
I answered, And will endure as long as He, A Co-Eternity.
Will laughed.
It must be hard work, I said.
It is not shards of pottery. I like the intuition it takes to get bones together, to make sense of the scene. It is human work. Anyway, I’m used to it.
His eyes drifted away and he said, Sometimes I have this dream about severed legs in bed with me. Then he looked back and said, You are a good listener.
Sometimes. Where are you working now?
I’m fucking the dog. Things stop and start. There’s no political will. The leaders don’t want to know. But I like it here.
An elephant swayed up the street. Thin holiday traffic separated around it. I told him I got up at dawn to watch a Mountain and Sand ceremony, five piles of sand in the temple courtyard, the five footsteps of the Buddha, and the monks planted rice sticks decorated with colored paper in the piles and lit incense sticks and sprinkled the sand mountains with scented water.
Will said, I have heard you speaking Khmer. You are lucky. You know what is going on.
We fell silent, listened to each other’s breath.
Will said, Want to go see the Buddha get bathed?
What’s that?
He took my hand and
pulled me off the bar stool, said, Too depressing sitting here alone on New Year’s. Let’s go. I’m meeting some people.
We walked to a small neighborhood temple near a massage room called Seeing Hands, a workplace for landmine victims. An old woman who had lost a leg at the knee waited on a wooden chair beside a young woman with a face that shocked me. She had no eyes and no nose. The center of her face was a rectangle of shiny skin graft. The skin on her forehead, above the graft, was moist and young. A hole near the center of the graft had been constructed as a nostril. Below the graft her lips were sensual and full and she had a delicate chin and a beautiful neck.
Will touched her hand, said, Sineth, I brought along a friend, Anne Greves. She speaks Khmer.
She smiled with those full round lips and reached her hand gracefully toward me. In English she said, Hello. This my friend Bopha. We go now?
She stood and took Will’s arm and walked beside him down the three steps. In the courtyard of the temple a few monks and some elders and a scatter of people. People sprinkled consecrated water on the elders and monks. Sineth explained they were asking forgiveness for any mistakes they had made and promising to make the elders happy in the coming year. I translated for Will, then Bopha said where she came from in the north at New Year’s there was a coconut dance for the young people. Suddenly a middle-aged man poured a jug of water on a man beside him and everyone laughed and splashed water at each other and the monks withdrew. Sineth smiled at the sounds and whispered, When I was young, this ceremony was much bigger, everyone got wet. I used to go with my sister and mother and father and brothers.
Later, walking on the quay, I asked Will, What happened to Sineth?
He said, A pan of acid. Jealous boyfriend. Crazy fuck. In another world I would ask a girl with lips like that to dance with me.
I said, Why not? Why not fall in love with her lips?
I wish it were so simple.
We watched fireworks on the quay and walked past carts selling sweets and cigarettes and fruit and noodles. Will stared at the river, said, I’ll make a New Year’s wish for you. I hope you find who you are looking for. And I’ll make a wish for me. I hope they start work again, so I can stay.
How long have you been here?
Long enough to fall in love with it.
His face was calm in the reflection of firelight off the water. I said, I hope your wish comes true. I cannot imagine what it is like to open a grave.
Will said, These are old graves. It is easier than fresh ones.
Two small boys ran past and tossed firecrackers at our feet. We jumped aside laughing, turned up a dark street. I asked, Once we know, what do we do?
Fireworks made with gold and silver paint exploded, drifted like milkweed seeds across the black sky. Will said, Maybe the only hope is that our humanity might kick into a higher gear, that the more we admit to seeing, the more we will believe we are not that different from each other.
18
Imagine a street; imagine waking up one morning and teenaged voices outside shouting, Comrades, it is Year Zero.
Country kids who cannot drive lurch down the street in tanks and trucks. They have been hiding out in the jungle. They screech brakes, pop clutches. They scream through megaphones. They fire guns and kill anyone who talks back or asks questions or, god forbid, refuses to move. They do not have good judgment. But they can choose anyone to die. Most neither read nor write. Imagine going out into the street and watching a man ask why he must leave his home and a teenager lifting his gun and shooting him.
Think of the old mother who cannot walk. Her children cannot get to her. These hard-eyed boy-soldiers dressed in loose black pants and shirts tramp through the hospital and shoot anyone who cannot get up. Think of people trying to push hospital beds along the road.
Imagine the walk out of the city. People do not know where they will sleep. There is no clean water. Nowhere to shit. No one knows what to bring. Does anyone have matches? A cooking pot? A cup? Old people die on the roadside and people walk past them because soldiers are waving guns. A woman gives birth in a ditch. City people become thirsty, crouching creatures. Hunger makes their heads throb. Mothers snap at their children. People steal bowls from corpses. What else can they do? What is a person capable of?
Year Zero. The country has a new name. Everyone works on farms. Seed. Plant. Harvest with knives. Pound. Winnow. Bag for the soldiers.
Music is forbidden. Talk is forbidden.
The soldiers make bonfires of libraries and paper money. Everyone is hungry.
Banks. Gone.
Mail. Gone.
Telephones. Gone.
Radio. Gone.
Teenagers serve Angka, the Organization. The leader is Brother Number One. No one knows yet his name is Pol Pot. No one knows he used to be a schoolteacher called Saloth Sar. How did this happen? People fell asleep and when they woke up nothing was the same. Would a person risk helping a neighbor if a nervous, shouting teenager were pointing a gun?
In Year Zero there is no past.
19
I walked into the Globe on Sihanouk Boulevard and I saw you standing at the bar. Your dark hair was still long, tied back, and you wore a white T-shirt. You leaned on the bar and you were alone and absorbed in the music. You. In Phnom Penh. Where you go, I will go. And your eyes. Gold flecked. Mud dark. Blood gathered behind my eyes and the room went black and I blinked and breathed and saw you again.
The DJ put on an old Oscar Peterson recording. I listened to that caressing, flirting, demanding touch on a piano playing “L’impossible.” Now that I had found you I had to get used to you again. When the song was finished you shifted on your feet and looked around, and your eyes passed over me and then I watched them flicker back startled and rest on me. Where you lodge, I will lodge. And then you were walking away from the bar, your arms lifting and you were taller than I remembered, still wiry and slender, the skin of your face not so translucent, and I loved all over again that chipped-tooth smile. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. Your fingers touched my shoulders and light shone like stars at the center of your eyes and I said to you in Khmer, I found you. I felt your arms hard around me and I smelled the smell of you, as if we were animals. I was sixteen years old standing in the bite of cold air under the light of a cross on a snowy mountain and I was an old woman who remembers the night I found you in the beer and cigarette smell of Phnom Penh. You were the one I fell in love with and you were someone who lost everyone in this place where ghosts haunt the grieving and the corrupt and I felt something catch in you, a sob or a startle, and light drenched the dark room.
I was not afraid anymore and I would not have to search through dark bars alone anymore and I ran out to tell Mau and I was laughing the way I used to before my laughter hid things, before I lost love.
Sometimes with an old lover there is a fleeting sensation of the disappointment of flesh. But I felt none. I felt the infinite attentiveness that is love.
Do you know me?
I know your eyes.
You reached out and touched my hair, said, How did you find me?
I don’t know.
How long have you been here?
I am not sure.
Where are you staying?
With you.
And then you smiled again. You said, Now I know it is you, Anne Greves. Suddenly you stopped and said, You are speaking Khmer. And your people shall be my people and your God, my God.
20
Mau told me months later, Borng srei, after we found him and I saw him go away with you on his own moto with the sidecar, I went home. I did not want to drive foreigners anymore that night. I wanted to go home and sleep until morning beside Ary because I had not done this with her for a long time.
21
Phnom Penh. The leisurely put-put sway to the traffic, rickshaws drawn by skinny barefoot men who run or pedal bicycles, four-wheeled remorques drawn by motorcycles, white UN vans, Red Cross trucks, military jeeps and buses, a
n elephant carrying lumber, the streets wrinkling up from the waterfront, Street 51 hits a dead end at Street 392 and intersects 254, everything patched together without logic, like family love. And signs along the street for all kinds of English, Practical English, Office English, Business English, Streamline English. White-shirted students walk in small groups, and whole families move home for the night on a motorbike, always the man driving and the wife holding a baby and a grandmother holding a toddler, and once in a blue moon a woman damaged by beating or acid running naked and crazed into the streets.
And so, in Phnom Penh among the beggars and amputees and prostitutes and street children, in the midst of all that relentless struggle, we were together again. Truly the darkness is sweet in Cambodia.
Your stark room. The street noise, the night pressing against wide shutters. I touched your tidy table. I sat on the edge of the bed. It would take only a few minutes to pack up and disappear. For years you had lived in barren order. The picture of your family was tacked up near the table. The two photo booth pictures of us were tacked near the bed. A large fan thwucked on the ceiling. You still used the same cassette player and you had fixed two shelves above your table, one with a few books in Khmer and one lined with little cassette boxes of pirated music. Your old chapei was wrapped in a bit of cloth in the corner. My presence took up so much space. What did I expect? A sprawling tropical home, family, girlfriend, rhythmic ceiling fans over teak tables and built-in library with books in many languages?
I asked, Your family?
You said, Why did you never answer my letters?
What letters?
You said, There is too much. Later. We will talk more later.
The body remembers. I opened myself to you as if I could be unzippered front and back. In the first moments you touched me as an unknown territory, slowly, remembering a softness I think you had forgotten. Your arms, the taste of your skin, your eyes. I could hardly breathe. I received your touch, you received my relief as if we were giving agonized birth to each other. But I could not stay shy, I wanted you, I had wanted you for eleven years and we became cannibals swallowing flesh and breathing prayers. I was not shy, and even if I could have you only this one night I did not care.
Kim Echlin Page 5