The night before he leaves Australia for Cambodia, Vichet lays his hands on Anna’s belly and puts his ear to her skin. Then he whispers in Khmer–in that smooth Phnom Penh accent he uses whenever he doesn’t want her to understand.
“What are you saying?” she asks.
His hands are warm, cupped as if to contain the whole of their child. She sees the paleness of her skin like water slipping through the spaces between his fingers. Behind him hangs the crazy jumble of his sister Neary’s pictures. Anna tries to ignore them and concentrates instead on Vichet–the heat of his palms, the resonance of his voice, the pronounced curve of his cheekbones. Half-smiling, he resembles the king whose face is carved into the Cambodian temples.
“What are you saying?” she asks again, this time in the awkward Khmer she learned while working in the refugee camp.
“Never mind.” He says something else to the baby, then smiles fully so his lips part, revealing the tooth he chipped as a boy. He blows lightly across her belly. His breath on her skin makes her shiver, almost involuntarily, with pleasure. For a moment it seems that everything will be all right, that he is not really leaving. He rests his head on the dome of her stomach, carefully, so as not to apply too much pressure, and watches her.
“I’ll be back soon,” he finally says. “In a month. Well before the baby is born.”
She thinks of his niece, 9 years old, dying of septicemia in a dirty hospital in Phnom Penh. She remembers the children in the camp who had stepped on land mines, having slipped outside the fence to collect firewood. She thinks of their own unborn child, safe, here. Still she says, “Don’t go.”
“I should have been dead 10 times already. Don’t worry.” This does not comfort her. “Don’t worry,” he whispers again in Khmer, koum phei, two soft syllables. He reaches over, winds the long strands of her hair around his hand and pulls it taut so she feels a tug of roots. She still wants to talk about his leaving, but he kisses the space between her breasts, trails his tongue around her nipples, moving toward her mouth, his hand still wrapped in her hair, pulling her toward him. She closes her eyes and begins to forget her jealousy over his secret words, her fears that he is speaking so earnestly to their child because he thinks he isn’t coming back.
Two months later, Anna reaches for him under the sheets, then opens her eyes. Neary’s picture of Angkor Wat hangs at the foot of the bed, stuck to the brick wall with pieces of duct tape. The top left corner detached during the night, so the cloth picture drapes like an unfurled flag. Through its folds she can see the temple’s three main towers.
Anna shuts her eyes and tries to forget where she is: a converted garage in Yarraville, a shabby town at the foot of the Westgate Bridge, across the bay from Melbourne. The constant bridge traffic rattles the house. She tries to pretend it’s the sound of rain, which does not explain the slight vibration to the floor, even the bed as she lies there now–a shallow tremor, like the unsettled feeling that precedes an earthquake.
It is July–summer in her native California; winter here in Australia, where she is marooned with Vichet’s sisters, Neary and Lieng, waiting out her pregnancy; monsoon season in Cambodia, where Vichet has gone to help his niece. He flew to Thailand then illegally crossed the border into Cambodia with Khmer soldiers, carrying money for bribes to get the girl proper medical care. He made it there, she knows from his letters, but the baby is due in four weeks and he still isn’t back.
Outside the single barred window, the sky hangs in a monotonous sheet of gray. Anna had thought Australia would be warm, southern. She hadn’t realized how far south it lay, how close to Antarctic currents. She’s not used to the cold that snakes into her bones, any more than she is accustomed to her swollen body or Vichet’s absence.
This was not the life she’d expected when they married one year ago on the Thai-Cambodian border. They’d met two years before that, working in the Cambodian refugee camps just inside Thailand. She left the States at 19, after seeing the movie “The Killing Fields.” Her parents objected, wanting her to finish college first. She went anyway–armed with a press pass from the university weekly, the address of a friend working in the camps and a backpack full of bulk-loaded film and BullFrog mosquito repellent–promising to return for the fall semester. But she never did go back, never wanted to. When her press pass ran out, she got a job teaching English in order to stay.
Vichet worked at the Center for the War Wounded then. He’d been a refugee in the camps and then was resettled in Australia. As soon as he got citizenship and passport, he returned to the border to help those still stuck in the camps. A French priest explained all this to Anna before Vichet himself did. “Vichet is–how do you say in English–an idealist,” he told her with clear admiration. He later insisted on blessing the two of them in town after their Buddhist wedding in the camp.
None of their family attended the ceremony. Vichet’s sisters didn’t have the means. Anna’s parents disapproved and flat out refused to travel from California for the wedding. “What the hell are you doing marrying a refugee?” her father had yelled over the phone. Anna pulled the receiver away from her ear and stared at the wood plank wall. She had waited in line for half an hour for this phone booth, at a shop on the edge of town, in order to tell her parents the news. It was the only overseas line and costing her $4 a minute. Her mother said, speaking more softly, “You’re welcome to come home when it doesn’t work out,” then added that a ceremony in a refugee camp probably wasn’t even legal anyway.
They did get married in the camp, rather than the Thai town where they lived, so that Anna’s students and Vichet’s staff could attend. The wedding was held in a Buddhist temple in Site Two, presided over by a Cambodian monk, with huge pots of Khmer curry afterward. No one had seen a foreigner married in the camp. Anna’s students giggled to see their teacher in a rented golden brocade kben, wrists and ankles looped in jangling bracelets that would later take her forever to slip back off her hands and feet. She didn’t recognize half the faces at the wedding, but she felt such a sea of warmth, laughter and subtle teasing that she didn’t care. She was making a new life for herself and never intended to return to America except to visit.
She thought they’d work on the border until Cambodia opened up. Then they would travel to see the Angkor temples in the jungle, wrapped in vines and the sinuous roots of banyan trees, the same jungle he had described to her in his stories of Cambodia. She imagined listening to the cries of forest creatures she had never seen, which he would name for her. She thought they’d eventually settle down in Phnom Penh, perhaps work for the UN, live in a house on a boulevard overlooking the Mekong and have drinks at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club.
Anna looks at the clock on the nightstand, next to a cheap brass Indian vase with fake flowers that Neary placed there. Dust coats the yellow silk roses. Ten o’clock. If she doesn’t get up soon, Neary will knock at the door, asking if she’s hungry. Since Vichet left, Neary rarely leaves her alone; she’ll barge in without even waiting for an answer. The older sister, Lieng, on the other hand, speaks to her less and less. Anna doesn’t know where she stands, somewhere between an honored guest and intruder.
She enters the house to use the bathroom in the back, next to the industrial sewing machines. Lieng leases the machines to sew outwork for the Angkor Factory, which Vichet’s friend runs in nearby Sunshine. Unfinished blue and pink baby suits lie heaped on the floor. Black designer shirts with wide, double-stitched collars drape over a plastic folding chair. Lieng isn’t hunched at the machines, but in the eerie quiet Anna pictures her there, ghostlike: short legs dancing on the pedals, hands streaming fabric. Usually, on top of the clatter of the bridge and the sewing, Neary plays the same tape of Khmer love songs over and over, or else watches Aussie MTV, singing tunelessly to the English words she doesn’t understand.
Neary is in the kitchen, silent, chopping up a chicken. She squats on the linoleum floor at a thick round cutting board, a sarong with bright orange flowers wrapped tightly around her hips. She’s almost 30 but looks barely 16. Her name means “young woman,” and she wears a lacy yellow blouse that’s a bit too small, as if she’s just outgrown it and is waiting for someone to buy her the next size.
“Little sister, are you hungry?” Neary asks in Khmer. She doesn’t know English so they always speak in Khmer.
Anna stares at the dismembered chicken, the pale pimply skin and blood oozing on the wooden board, and thinks she might get sick.
“No, I’m not hungry,” she answers. “Where’s Lieng?”
“Vic Market. It’s Saturday.”
Anna feels a little irritated no one woke her up. She likes going to Victoria Market with its outdoor stalls and hawkers calling you to buy their cheap T-shirts or koala hand puppets or taste their Asian pears just arrived from Queensland. She pictures the mounds of papayas and mangoes and custard apples. Since she’s been pregnant, she’s craved fruit.
“Why didn’t you go to the market?”
“I’m tired.” Neary’s eyebrows scrunch together and her lower lip pushes out into a pout. “I want to stay home with little sister.”
Neary talks to her in clear, simple Khmer–like the slow, stilted English that Anna used with her students in the refugee camp. Anna knows it’s more polite to use familial relationships instead of names, but still she wonders if Neary is slyly mocking her, implying that she really doesn’t belong in this family. Since she arrived here five months ago, already pregnant, Neary has done everything to attend to her. The way Neary tags along reminds her of the kids in the camp, who followed her everywhere, tugging on her elbows and grabbing hold of her fingers, chanting, “Please give me one baht. Please give me candy.” She wanted to hand out sweets, like the French priest who carried hard candy bright as marbles in his pants pockets. But Vichet told her the priest’s candy only created jealousy and that she shouldn’t encourage it. With over 100,000 people in the camp, there could never be enough for everyone. Desire, he said, was the cause of suffering.
Maybe he was right. But what was wrong with wanting your husband in your bed, your child to have a father?
“What are you making?” she asks Neary.
“Khmer curry. Little sister’s favorite. Wedding curry.” Neary giggles.
Neary’s moods had a way of changing suddenly, without warning, the way the Melbourne sky shifts from merciless sunshine one moment to raining hailstones the next. Vichet explained to Anna, after they arrived, that Neary was–he paused before saying, in Khmer–“lngeu.” The word sounded malevolent, with so many consonants piled together, almost rhyming with English “glue.” Anna thought it meant something like silly or irrational, but the way Vichet said it made her think of crazy. He said it was his responsibility to take care of his sister. She was all right as long as she took her medicine, but sometimes she forgot or refused, or wouldn’t tell him when the prescription ran out.
“Wedding curry,” Anna repeats. She doesn’t want to tell Neary about the smell or upset her. She doesn’t want to think about her wedding, with Vichet gone. So instead she jokes, “Single woman’s curry.” Curry kromoam. Virgin curry. Old maid’s curry. Kromoam: an unmarried woman–a woman who hasn’t had sex.
Neary laughs. Curry kromoam, she repeats, slicing the blade through a thigh joint. Curry kromoam.
Anna walks past her to sit on the couch in the living room. She’d tried once to help with the cooking, but Neary shooed her out of the kitchen, saying not to worry about it–whether in deference to her pregnancy or her general culinary incompetence, Anna wasn’t sure. She’d also tried half-heartedly to help Lieng with the sewing, which was how the sisters supported themselves, along with public assistance and the money Vichet sent. But she just wasn’t fast enough at the piecework–at just $2 to $4 a garment–to make it worthwhile. She wanted to get a photography job and had thought about teaching ESL, but her visa status didn’t allow her to work legally.
So she has nothing to do, nowhere to go. She hasn’t left the house since last week when, while on a short walk, she saw a woman, a tiny body falling from the Westgate Bridge, like a rag doll, into someone’s backyard. Vichet had warned her most of the suicides don’t go far enough out on the bridge to land in the water. Anna had twice before skirted crowds of gawkers and police cars clustered around a house, but seeing the figure falling, suspended in those last moments, had disturbed her even more.
Before she met Vichet, she had never even considered Australia as a place to live. The continent had existed in her mind as a vague impression of kangaroos and convicts, a remote island where they once sent prisoners and the insane. Or was it prisoners who became insane?
The thunk, thunk of Neary’s knife is the only sound in the house.
Anna adjusts pillows around her stomach, trying to get comfortable, and opens Vichet’s last aerogramme, which arrived two weeks ago. The thin paper feels fragile in her hands, weightless, the opposite of her body. She’s read the letter so many times she has long since memorized it. His niece is still in the hospital, recovering from septicemia.
She stares at the black ink on the pale blue paper, like a scrawl of birds passing across the sky. She imagines the words transfiguring into real birds, rising gracefully off the page and fluttering around the room before smacking themselves against the window glass and falling lifeless to the ugly yellow carpet. No matter how long she stares at the letter, it says the same thing. Vichet still doesn’t know when he is coming back. “Soon,” he writes in English letters that curl and loop like Khmer characters. “Very soon.” At the very bottom, he adds in Khmer, “I miss you.” Actually, he writes nuk nah–“miss very.” The “I” and “you” are only implied.
She sets the aerogramme on the couch arm and stares at the T-shirt pulled tight across her stomach. She still hopes he will show up at any moment, unannounced. He had a way of disappearing and reappearing when they worked in the camps. Someone always needed him, and she dreaded those absences. He left for various reasons: arranging to smuggle supplies over the border, meeting with resistance leaders, trips to Australia to help his sisters. She would never know when she’d find him waiting for her on their porch stairs, having returned early to surprise her. He often brought gifts: a small ruby from Pailin, a silk shirt from Bangkok, and once, the gold wedding ring he’d had made by an amputee silversmith in the camp.
She keeps looking now toward the front door and the living room window, half-expecting to see him waiting on the stairs in the shade of a mango tree, with his lopsided smile. But there is no porch here, no stairs, and no trees except for a half-dead eucalyptus near the sidewalk.
She had wanted to stay on the border, pregnant or not. But Vichet worried, among other things, that she’d catch dengue fever again. She lacked the immunity most Cambodians acquire in childhood, if they survive it. There is no cure. She used to think it had such a silly name, dingy fever. She assumed it was a nickname, having to do with delirium, something vaguely ridiculous, tongue-in-cheek. Not a real disease at all, certainly not one that increases in intensity each time you catch it. Her second time, it almost killed her. Breakbone fever, some call it, because of the pain in your bones. She wonders if her child will be born with the memories of the heat that bloomed on her skin in burst capillaries, the ache of marrow filled with broken glass.
Vichet was also afraid their child would inherit his sadness like the malaria in his veins. He caught it working in the Khmer Rouge labor camps almost 10 years ago, and it still recurs. A month before he left, she found him lying in their bed in the converted garage, lights turned off, shuddering. She sat next to him and cooled him with a wet cloth, starting with his forehead and moving down his shoulders, stomach, thighs, the entire length of his skin, luminescent with fever. He was naked except for a cotton krama wrapped around his waist, and she ached to make love, straddling him as her hair fell on his chest. She felt guilty for desiring him at that moment when he was suffering. She inhaled the sour smell of the sweat-stained sheets, so different from a bed damp with sex. When he finally pulled her wordlessly to him, it seemed his skin would leave burn marks wherever it touched hers.
‘Little sister,” says Neary. She shuffles from the kitchen to where Anna sits on the couch. “Are you hungry? Have some tea.”
Neary’s hands are slick with chicken fat. Anna takes the cup and hopes she’ll return to the kitchen and leave her alone. Instead she settles next to Anna, careful her feet don’t touch the piles of fabric scraps on the floor. She’s sorted them into three distinct mounds according to her own inscrutable system.
“Don’t worry,” Neary says, as if picking up in the middle of a conversation. “Vichet will come back. Before you cross the river.”
Before I give birth, Anna mentally translates. The way Neary says it frightens her. Neary has explained that Cambodians use this phrase, chhlong tonle, because it’s a difficult journey. Not everyone makes it to the other side. Her own mother died giving birth to her, the ninth child. Her father died later, in the Pol Pot time, along with all of her brothers except for Vichet. The word she uses for river, tonle, does not mean the small streams like those in the California foothills where Anna was born. It means wide, deep water, like the Mekong or the Mississippi.
“Are you scared?” Neary asks, as she has nearly every day since Vichet was supposed to have returned. She watches Anna solicitously, her eyes slightly crossed, which gives the impression that she is looking not at Anna but rather into herself.
“No,” Anna answers. The hot tea scalds her tongue. She blows across the top of the cup. “I’ve crossed the water already with this child, from Thailand to Australia. This baby will be fine.”
Neary picks up one of her fabric pictures from the top of a pile of material and smoothes it on her lap. “You must remember to look at beautiful things.”
“Yes.” Anna sees in her mind the body falling from the bridge and wishes she could remove it from her memory.
“So that the baby will be beautiful.”
“Yes,” Anna says again.
Neary was thrilled to learn Anna was pregnant. She talked about the baby constantly and put her hands on the curve of Anna’s stomach with a familiarity and possessiveness that startled her, as if the baby were actually Neary’s child. Then Neary began to cut out magazine photos of Cambodian and Thai movie stars and tape them to Anna and Vichet’s garage bedroom walls. When Scotch tape wouldn’t hold and nails wouldn’t sink into the mortar lines, she used duct tape instead. When Anna protested to Vichet, he just laughed and said not to worry. “She’s lngeu,” he said. “This keeps her busy. And besides, you should look at beautiful things.”
Neary selected pictures of actresses who looked half-foreign, with light skin. She snipped out advertisements with waterfalls, mountain vistas, beaches with palm trees. “Look, how beautiful,” she said, “like Cambodia.” She added a poster of the Sydney opera house. “Like lotus,” she explained. Then she moved the cheap Indian vase with fake flowers from the top of the television to Anna’s nightstand, placed it on a pink crocheted doily she took from the arm of the couch.
The fabric pictures started soon after that. Neary began the first one with a background of red, using remnants from an order of rayon shirts Lieng sewed as outwork for the Angkor Factory. Neary added other strips of color: orange taffeta, purple flannel, gold chiffon, spreading the scraps across the living room carpet. Anna had no idea what she was doing. She took pieces of a stone-colored linen, scissored them into squares and triangles and sewed them on top. It looked like a mess. But when it was all done, there it was: three linen towers of Angkor Wat against a sunset of rayon and flannel.
That day Lieng stood over Neary in the living room and screamed at her, “If you can do this, why can’t you work? Look at this! Look at what you can do!” She accused Neary of making mistakes to get out of doing the paid outwork. Neary could have been helping her with that last jacket order, very difficult with all those panels, but it had paid better than usual, four-fifty a garment. Instead, Neary was always jamming the overlocker, stitching the wrong pieces together, or putting the back side of the fabric up. Because of this everyone, even Vichet, would end up seam-ripping garments into the middle of the night and then Lieng would have to resew everything. She had reason to be angry. The two argued for days. Finally, Neary hung the picture at the foot of Anna’s bed. She said it was so that the baby would be beautiful and remember Cambodia. Anna suspected it was more to keep it out of Lieng’s sight.
Three of the walls in the garage bedroom are completely covered now. Neary is working on the fourth, and then only the ceiling will be left. Anna can’t imagine what the baby will look like. Maybe it’s true her child will resemble these walls, all mixed up. It’s a girl, she knows from the ultra-sound. Anna wonders if their baby will grow up speaking in a twangy, nasal Aussie accent, so different from her own or Vichet’s. She imagines their child will never see the places they came from, except maybe as a tourist to Disneyland or Angkor Wat.
In the picture that lies on Neary’s lap now, a woman walks alone along a paddy ridge with a dangrek, shoulder pole. For the pole Neary has sewn on a stick taken from a straggly eucalyptus tree in front of the house. Two buckets dangle from the pole, one on each end. The buckets are cut from gray polyester and only pinned on.
Neary licks the end of a thread several times before aiming it carefully through the eye of the needle.
“What will you name the baby?” she asks, as if this were the first and not the 10th time she’s asked this in the last month.
“I don’t know.” Anna sips the tea, lukewarm now, and gives her usual reply. “I want to decide with Vichet. When he comes back.” The truth is, she asked Vichet this same question before he left, pestering him then as Neary is bothering her now. He said to be patient. Frustrated, Anna has been secretly thinking of names in his absence: Kaliyan, Sovanna, and most recently Solekena, the name of a beautiful teacher they knew in the camp. Vichet told her Cambodians usually wait until a month or two before the birth, so they’d choose a name when he returned; he also explained that sometimes the grandparents, or even an uncle or an aunt, help name the child. So maybe Neary thinks this is her duty, her right, with Vichet being gone, her mother and father dead, and Anna’s own parents absent.
Neary removes a pin and tucks under the edge of one of the cloth buckets and begins sewing. Anna doesn’t know why, maybe it’s the pins or the odd angle of the stick, but it seems that the buckets are about to slip off the pole and that the ridge is too narrow for the woman’s feet. What surprises her, though, is the green of the rice fields, a color so brilliant it seemed fluorescent. The fabric came from skirts Lieng sewed for the Angkor Factory last month. The skirts were garish, but the color perfectly suits the rice fields–vibrant, beautiful, unreal.
“You should name her Sita,” Neary says. When Anna doesn’t reply, she adds, “Sita, the wife of Rama, from ‘The Ramayana.’ It’s the great love story of Cambodia.”
“I know.” Anna has heard the story many times: how Sita and Rama were married, how the demon Ravana abducted Sita to his island, how the lovers were finally reunited. She often watched “The Ramayana” danced in the camp, although never the whole thing, only fragments out of order. She also knows a Cambodian mother would never name a child Sita; it’s crazy for Neary to suggest it. She’s heard of only one woman who deliberately took that name, signing the forbidden letters she wrote to her husband during the Khmer Rouge time with the name “Sita,” in grief of her separation from him.
“Sita had to wait for Rama–oh, for a long time.” Neary sweeps her hand with the needle broadly through the air for emphasis. The picture in her lap lifts briefly, yanked up by the thread. “But finally he came back.”
Is she saying this to comfort Anna? Vichet’s aerogramme still lies on the arm of the couch, balanced so precariously the least movement of air could send it falling to the floor. Anna thinks of how the woman, Sita, and her husband were arrested for their love letters, and how they died in Toul Sleng prison, in separate cells, never seeing each other again. She thinks of Sita from the legend, all the years she waited for her husband as her abductor tried to seduce her with sweet words, gifts, even lies that Rama had died. How did she know what to believe? Why didn’t she give up? Anna’s heard different versions of how Rama finally crossed the sea to reach his wife. In one, Hanuman’s monkey army builds a causeway of stones. In another, they make a bridge of their own bodies, sacrificing themselves. In yet another, Rama doesn’t need their help at all but shoots an arrow that magically parts the sea.
She imagines Vichet in Cambodia trying to find his way back to her, seeking out the monkey king in the jungle, raising armies, building bridges of stone, tree limbs, drowned bodies. She imagines the feel of damp monkey fur and brittle spines under his bare feet as he steps across submerged backs.
“Do you miss your first country?”
Neary’s question startles Anna. She wonders if Neary has been talking to her all along and she just hasn’t heard. She is still thinking of Sita and Rama, and how their reunion is not the end of the story. Afterwards, he accuses her of unfaithfulness during their years of separation. He asks her to walk through fire to prove her purity. Sita passes the test, but even so he exiles her to the forest, where she gives birth alone.
“Little sister, do you miss your first country?” Neary asks again, slipping the needle expertly in and out of the fabric.
“I don’t know,” Anna finally says. She doesn’t miss America, not in the way Neary and Vichet long for Cambodia. Especially not now that her parents have virtually disowned her. What she does miss, though, is her life with Vichet, the time they spent together on the border. She even misses the camps. For refugees, the first country is your homeland. The second is the place where you flee. The third is where you are resettled. In the camps, this last place was not Australia or America but simply prateh ti bei–third country. The Cambodians talked about it with desire and reverence.
Anna twists the teacup around in her hands, staring into it. A hairline crack runs across the bottom and up the side, dark against the porcelain. She wonders, what will this country be for her baby? The first or the third?
“I miss older brother,” says Neary.
“I miss him too.”
“No, not little sister’s husband. Oldest brother.”
Neary’s never told her what happened to their oldest brother, although once Anna asked without realizing it. It was about a month after Anna arrived, while they were combing each other’s hair in front of the mirror in Neary and Lieng’s bedroom. Neary giggled like a schoolgirl and ran her hands slowly through Anna’s long hair, saying it felt like silk, like a Khmer woman’s, only blond. When they switched places, Anna felt a lump on Neary’s scalp. “What happened?” she asked, rubbing her index finger over the hard ridge of skin. Neary flinched. “Don’t ask that,” she said. “Don’t ask.” Then she grabbed the comb out of Anna’s hand and never said anything more about it. Vichet told her later that Neary was the only one with their oldest brother when he was killed. Just a few days before the Vietnamese invaded, the Khmer Rouge forced the people to dig a long trench, then bludgeoned them with the backs of hoes. Neary was struck in the head but survived by pretending to be dead.
Anna imagines her lying in the ditch under the press of bodies, afraid to breathe. Maybe her brother was nearby, still alive, but she couldn’t reach him. Maybe his body shielded hers. There was something that kept her from dying as she lay there, waiting for the soldiers to leave. Anna wants to ask her what it was: How did you survive?
‘I have a headache,” Neary says now, biting off the end of the thread. She slides the needle back into the fabric, then walks in little steps around the cloth piles back to the kitchen. Anna readjusts the pillow next to her stomach and folds her legs to the side, like a Khmer woman. She watches Neary through the doorway as she chops potatoes and onions. Neary squats on her heels with her back to Anna. Her long hair falls past her waist, the ends brushing the floor. From here she looks almost beautiful.
Anna knows she should offer to help cook, but she feels too tired. She is ashamed of her weakness, but not enough to try to overcome it. Instead she stares at Neary’s latest completed picture, hanging on the living room wall across from her. It’s Neary’s most complex project so far–a view of a refugee camp, like the one where Anna met Vichet. The thatch huts are sewn of brown corduroy, all lined up and crammed together. Here and there tinier buildings made of burlap represent the latrines that were full of maggots. In the dirt paths between the huts, men with missing legs lean on matchstick crutches. In the background behind the camp rises the dark velour bulk of the Dangrek Mountains, the Shoulder Pole Mountains, which divide Thailand from Cambodia. In the camp, Anna had often stared up at those mountains, imagining the country that lay on the other side.
The picture looks quite realistic, down to the red satin trucks that carry water into the camps and the Thai soldiers with their black uniforms and machine guns slung over their shoulders. It’s all there, stitched into cloth, except that the guns are made of bobby pins and Neary has added a river. It starts small at the top of the mountains, a trickle sewn from a few pieces of thread, but as it tumbles down it gains substance, turning into a cascade of various shades and textures of blue. By the time it reaches the camp, it is as wide as Anna imagines the Mekong to be, although she’s never seen it. Fish leap from its waves. A crocodile watches from the shallows, eyes and snout just above the surface, while women bathe at the bank and children splash in the water. In the real camp, there was no river, no fruit, and the forest had been chopped down for space and firewood. But in Neary’s picture, huge mango trees grow alongside the water, bright orange ovals sewn into the branches. There are sugar palms with skinny trunks and banana trees with yellow crescents of ripe fruit.
A half hour later, Neary starts the curry simmering in a big pot on the stove. She adds cans of coconut milk, then returns to chopping more potatoes. Anna sits nearby at the kitchen table, thinking these are the edges of her world: the garage with Neary’s pictures, the living room with Neary’s pictures, the kitchen with Neary.
Anna opens the book on the kitchen table: “Functional Khmer Literacy Book One.” Its pale yellow cover was hand-printed in the camp. The uneven ink bleeds through the transparent pages. She wants to learn to read and write to improve her pronunciation, because Khmer has so many sounds that don’t exist in English, nearly impossible to transcribe. She reads silently, mouthing the words.
The first page shows the consonant ko and a woman at a loom, the same kind the widows used in the camp. She extends the lines of each thread to the very edge of the paper, imagining them continuing on like railroad tracks, off into infinity, somewhere beyond this kitchen. She can’t concentrate on the language at all. The characters aren’t placed next to each other in linear order like in English. Forms change. Consonants have abbreviated variations, “feet” that can be tucked under other letters. Vowels can wrap themselves entirely around the consonants, above and below, before and after.
“Ko!”
Anna nearly jumps out of her seat. It’s Neary, yelling in her ear. She stands above Anna with the knife in her hand. Loose strands of hair fall around Neary’s eyes. She brushes them back with the hand holding the knife, and the blade cuts through the air. Then she leans the knife hand on the table and presses her finger on the page, as if squashing a bug.
“Ko,” she insists, naming the consonant again.
“Ko,” Anna repeats after her.
Neary points to the loom, speaking in the slow, exaggerated language Anna once used as a teacher, “Ko kee.”
“Ko kee,” says Anna.
Neary turns the page to a picture of a blacksmith hammering. He stands bare-chested with wide, strong shoulders. Anna thinks of the blacksmiths in the camps, amputee ex-soldiers at the Center for the War Wounded, where Vichet worked. She remembers the first time she saw a thigh stump–smooth except for the scar at the end, sealed like a closed, crooked mouth.
The man in the illustration is intact, unscarred, but he wears an expression of distilled sadness, as if he thinking of the past or perhaps the future. Neary points at the words above him, covering his face with her thumb.
“Hammer,” she says in Khmer. “Rope.”
Her fingers leave a dark wet stain. Then, as suddenly as she appeared, Neary returns to chopping vegetables at the cutting board on the floor. Anna turns the page. A farmer walks on a plank over a river, carrying a log on his shoulder. In the margin she translates the short Khmer words into long English phrases: To carry on the shoulder. To walk on a narrow place.
The fierce beat of Neary’s knife punctuates the silence. Anna drums her fingertips on her stomach in an opposing rhythm–faster, less regular. She imagines the meaningless pulse passing through the fabric and her stretched skin, thrumming a garbled message through the water that surrounds her baby. She wonders if her child can feel her impatience, her fear, or worse yet, hear her thoughts–not with her nascent ears but with what links them, their shared blood. Anna rests her hands flat and still on her belly and tries to breathe slowly. She pictures the child curled between her hip bones and rib cage, floating in liquid space. She imagines the tiny interlocking pieces of her spine, like a mast stripped of sails.
How do women wait through wars?
In the camp the women would sit for hours in the sun, thin kramas wrapped around their faces, waiting for ration cards, rice distribution, the arrival of water trucks, news of absent husbands. They shifted only to adjust the scarves around their faces as the sun changed position in the sky. Such stillness. As if all their energy were concentrated in the waiting. Sometimes they joked with Anna as she photographed them. Why so many pictures? What do you see? There is nothing interesting here. You think she is beautiful–what about me? Am I too old? I know why you speak Khmer now–I hear you have a Cambodian husband.
She should have thought to ask them then: How do you do it?
And Lieng, what about her? The Khmer Rouge killed her husband. Sometimes Anna suspects Lieng blames her somehow, because she’s American and the U.S. bombing helped the Khmer Rouge gain the support they needed to win the war–but this is a crazy thought. No one has ever blamed her. She’s probably just imagining Lieng’s strident tone. Lieng never talks with Anna about her husband or anything else. It was Vichet who told her how the Khmer Rouge didn’t kill Lieng’s husband right away like other soldiers. Instead they put him in a prison camp. Lieng had only been married a couple of years. She was allowed to visit him twice before he died. The last time he was so emaciated she couldn’t believe it was her husband, except for the wedding ring, which must have fallen off his bony finger because he wore it tied by a string around his neck. That day he looked at her as if he didn’t know her and begged for food, pleaded for rice, like the ghosts from children’s stories. That’s what Vichet said. Lieng refused to remarry.
Anna wonders what it would be like to look at your husband as if he were a ghost, knowing it would be the last time. She remembers photographing a woman watching exhausted Khmer soldiers trudge single file through the camp. They had just returned from the mountains, fighting the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. The woman was not beautiful; her eyes were too close together, and a deep scar cut into her cheek. She wore a blue shirt, the same color as the bright blue UN plastic that patched her hut. The repeating pattern of color caught Anna’s eye. But it was the intensity of the woman’s expression–a brief raw moment of emotion revealed in the hardening of her eyes, the un-conscious parting of her lips, a yearning–that made Anna snap the picture before turning her camera to the men. She watched a pair of soldiers carry a third man concealed in a hammock, slung from a bamboo shoulder pole between them. The weight of the hidden man made the hammock swing awkwardly, nearly throwing the two who carried him off balance. Anna thought the woman must have been hoping the body in the hammock was not her husband, feverish with malaria or incoherent from loss of blood, the shock of missing limbs–or maybe she was hoping that it was him, injured but alive.
Even then, the war didn’t seem quite real to her. She lived in a Thai town outside the camp, because relief workers were not allowed to remain in the camp after dark. It was strangely exciting to be so close to danger and yet safe. At night she would lie in Vichet’s arms, his legs wrapped around her as they listened to the muffled booms of artillery, like a giant striking the side of a faraway mountain. He’d whisper the name of each type of shell, its length in millimeters, its distance in kilometers, like the soft words of a lullaby. She’d fall asleep to this litany of distances–how far from the border, how far from the camp, how far from the town where she lay enclosed in his limbs.
Lying there, she never imagined she would end up here. Waiting, because of a distant war. Because of a cheap mine planted at the edge of a schoolyard who knows how many years ago or by whom or what country manufactured it, or why it lay dormant all that time through the passing of so many footsteps, waiting for just that exact moment–the slight but precise pressure of the tiny heel of Vichet’s 9-year-old niece–before it finally had to explode.
The smell of curry fills the room. Anna closes the book, wondering how long she’s been staring at the same page without really seeing it. Pushing herself up from the chair, she walks the few steps to the stove, where Neary stirs the pot with a wooden spoon. She feels dizzy from standing up too quickly and leans against the counter, trying to regain her equilibrium. Steam rises around Neary’s face, blurring it and condensing on her skin. Her face is narrower than Vichet’s, her lips thinner, but their eyes are the same–heavy-lidded, sensual.
Neary ladles curry into a small bowl. Although Anna thought she wouldn’t be hungry for it, now her mouth waters. She reaches for the bowl, thinking Neary means to hand it to her. But instead Neary walks past her and around the counter toward the family altar in the kitchen corner–a collection of photographs of relatives who had died, white candles, red incense sticks stuck in a glass filled with sand.
The largest picture is of Vichet’s parents: his mother sits in a rattan chair while his father stands behind her, solemn and watchful. Their dead sons gaze out from smaller frames: one wears a soldier’s uniform, another poses beside a cascade of bougainvillea, a third, the oldest, stares out from an enlarged passport photo. Lieng’s husband, their son-in-law, is the only one smiling. He stands on a causeway in front of Angkor Wat; behind him loom the temple’s three distinct towers, just like in Neary’s picture that made Lieng so angry.
Anna stares at the pictures, her vision slipping out of focus as she sees a photo of Vichet in the space between the incense sticks and Lieng’s husband. She closes her eyes. When she opens them again, the image is gone. Neary’s at the altar, cupping the bowl in both hands, looking at a point beyond the wall.
“You hear?” Neary whispers.
“What?”
“You hear?”
“What is it?” Anna turns down the flame on the stove.
“Listen.”
As Anna strains to hear some sound, she realizes how quiet the house is. It’s so still they seem to be suspended in one of Neary’s pictures, fixed by tiny pieces of thread. There is no sound of a knife, no MTV, no arguing, no sewing machines. The frantic bubbling of the curry has died down. Steam rises in soundless clouds. There’s nothing but the distant humming of the bridge and the hiss of the stove flame, turned so low it flickers blue under the pot, threatening to go out.
“I can’t hear anything.”
Neary opens her hands wide, raising her palms, and the bowl falls to the floor. It clatters and breaks, splattering yellow curry across the linoleum. Neary jumps back and heads toward the front door. Anna follows after her, awkwardly looking down around her stomach to avoid stepping on the shards of the broken bowl. Like a sleepwalker, Neary glides past the kitchen table, through the living room strewn with cloth, the small hallway cluttered with shoes and sandals. She flings open the front door and stops. Her bare toes rest on the metal tack strip at the threshold. Cold air rushes in. She grips the doorknob, her head cocked to the side like a bird’s.
“You hear?” she asks.
Anna listens to her heart pounding, her own ragged breathing, the storm rattle of traffic on the Westgate Bridge.
“It’s just the cars.” Anna reaches out to touch her arm, but Neary elbows her away. She doesn’t know what has triggered Neary’s distress–the pictures on the altar, the breaking of the bowl, her own sullen presence? Has Neary quit taking the medicine Vichet mentioned? Anna’s never seen her like this before.
“You hear them?”
“It’s just the cars on the bridge.”
Anna doesn’t know what Neary’s listening to. She hears the muffled pounding of a stereo. A police siren wails. Neary tenses, her body rigid as she grasps the doorknob tighter. Anna hopes no one has jumped from the bridge. She wants to get Neary away from the door and close it.
“You hear?” Neary’s voice rises higher, shrill and edgy. “They’re coming!”
“It’s the cars,” Anna says again, helpless. Where would Neary’s medicine be–bathroom cabinet, bedroom drawer? How quickly did it work? She can’t leave Neary to look for it. Maybe the medicine has run out, and that’s why she’s flipping out. Lieng must know. When will Lieng come back from the market? Soon. It has to be soon. She just needs to hang on until then. Maybe Lieng is around the corner right now, just out of her sight. Where is she? Where is Vichet?
“They’re coming!”
“No one’s coming.” The siren screams closer. Why didn’t Vichet warn her–how could he leave her–why isn’t he back? The questions fire through Anna’s mind, rapid, senseless.
“They kill everyone.”
Anna doesn’t know if Neary is saying “they will kill everyone” or “they have killed everyone.” She wants to run out the door and down the street, past the rusted iron fence, the half-dead trees, the locked-up houses, past the huge cement base of the bridge and the shrieking siren. She imagines her bare feet slapping the cold sidewalk, icy air stinging her lungs as she leaves behind Neary, this house, this country. But she can’t move, her body too heavy. She’s stuck like Neary, just inside the door. Where would she go?
Then Neary says, “Vichet is dead.”
The baby shifts position, moving up and pushing into Anna’s ribcage.
He is not dead.
Anna doesn’t know if she says this out loud or not. The baby feels like it is bracing against her bones, pressing against her lungs. She can’t breathe. She leans against the door frame to keep from passing out. The police siren has stopped. Neary is shaking, like Vichet does when his malaria recurs, her entire body shuddering as she talks so fast Anna gives up altogether trying to follow what she’s saying.
“Don’t worry,” Anna says in English. “Don’t worry.”
Neary keeps talking in a rush, pausing only to take deep sobbing breaths. Anna puts her arms around her, switching to Khmer, “Koum phei, koum phei.” This is all she can say, all she can remember: Don’t worry. She no longer knows if she’s talking to Neary or to herself. Her arms feel brittle, ready to snap at the elbows, but Neary doesn’t push her away this time.
Carefully, she closes and locks the door with one hand, her other arm still around her. Neary leans against her. She guides her slowly back through the hallway to the living room. Then, as if they were one person, their knees buckle and they sink into the piles of fabric scraps on the floor.
Anna is still holding Neary when she feels the baby kick.
She wonders if the child has used her heels or fists. She imagines her eyes clenched shut in determination as she strikes out at whatever she can, her anger as the walls yield and then spring back to enclose her. The baby kicks once more, and then Anna feels her shift position, settling back down into her pelvis so that she can breathe again.
“Older sister,” Anna says. She takes Neary’s hands and places them on the dome of her belly, lifting her shirt enough so that she can touch her bare skin. Neary’s palms feel cold and Anna shivers, watching her fingers spread over her skin, the perfect crescent moons of her nails. Behind her she sees the picture of the camp, imaginary water spilling down the mountain. She doesn’t know how long they will stay like that, Neary’s hands resting on the island of her stomach. Waiting. The two of them and the child.
———-
Sharon May worked in Cambodian refugee camps in the 1980s and later returned to Cambodia to edit the anthology “In the Shadow of Angkor: Contemporary Writing From Cambodia” (University of Hawaii Press). Her stories have appeared in Tin House, StoryQuarterly, MANOA, Alaska Quarterly Review, Other Voices and Crab Orchard Review. She recently received the Robie Macauley Award for Fiction from StoryQuarterly. She holds a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, where she is finishing a collection of linked stories about Cambodia.
