The Disappeared (3 page)

On stage you unwrapped a long-necked two-stringed Khmer guitar from a piece of brightly dyed fabric. You sat cross legged on a bench and lay the round body of the instrument on your lap. You looked into the crowd and joked, I am one of about seventeen Khmer in Montreal. People chuckled at your wry smile. You pulled the microphone down in front of the strings,
said, But you’re stuck with me. This is called a chapei, and we’re going to play a song by Sin Sisamouth called “Don’t Let My Girlfriend Tickle Me.” You played a short, sweet melody, the hard calluses on each finger of your left hand pressing and releasing and sliding on strings over bone frets, your right hand loose, stretching out to pluck the notes. The band hit twenty funky electronic beats of guitar and chapei and organ and you sang campy rock and roll from the dance crazes and psych rock you had left behind in Phnom Penh. Your face smoothed around the Khmer words, and your voice slipped into a five-tone scale as you beat out a simple rock rhythm with your body and hammed it up.

You were a novelty, a charismatic Asian guy with a young white girlfriend and you sang from the open throated cool of the stranger. Young women were drawn to the gloom and glory of your exile, and Charlotte whispered to me, See that guy over there? He’s a draft dodger. He’s rattled by your new friend. Every eye in the room was on you. I wanted an exotic past too. You played your own version of “Black Magic Woman,” half English, half Khmer, and then you put down your chapei and stood and lifted your hands and clapped to get the crowd moving and you said, This is “Lady Named No,” and you sang in Khmer both a man’s part and a woman’s part in a thin falsetto, and no one knew what the words meant but we could all hear in your teasing voice a parody of asking and refusal. People were dancing and swaying and loving you. At the end of the set you said, This is a blues song I wrote in Khmer called “Sugarcane Baby.” The words go something like: I can’t get enough of your sweetness, baby, I’m just a boy peelin and suckin on white sugarcane.

People laughed and you knew you sounded charming speaking Khmer and French accented blues English and you looked down into the crowd at me and said, Je le joue pour Visna who is here tonight.

You picked up your chapei and you stopped camping it up and sang a sweet ballad in a voice that cracked and it was a song of love and it was the first time I heard the words oan samlanh. At the end Charlotte said, I have to fly. I think he likes you.

This was new, a man wrapping his feelings for me in a song.

People disappeared into the city night, left empty chairs twisted at odd angles from tables that smelled of beer. I waited for you in the doorway and breathed in the chill clean air. A few girls waited while the band packed their instruments, wound up wires, disconnected speakers. I put myself where I knew the light from a street lamp shone through my hair and when you came to me carrying your chapei and your guitar you were still excited from being on stage. You set down the guitar but holding the chapei you wrapped your arms around me from behind and said, Did you like your song?

I said, Who is Visna?

Visna means my destiny. The tune is a lullaby my mother used to sing to me, but I made up new words for you.

I never felt any forbiddenness of race or language or law. Everything was animal sensation and music. You were my crucifixion, my torture and rebirth. I loved your eyes, the tender querying of your voice in song.

After you left me under the stairs that night I ran up and through the front door and I did not want to break the spell of you but Papa called from his bed, You are spending too
much time with him. Bring him to meet me Sunday afternoon.

I did not answer. People do not like to think of love as a crucifixion but I know now, thirty years later, that if a person is tough enough for love nothing less than rebirth will be required.

We walked past the front door to the musicians’ entrance on rue St. François Xavier and the manager laughed when he saw us together and said, Hey, you found each other. He offered us a joint and we stood together looking out to the sidewalk. I can still see the manager’s face, pock-marked and pale, and his nicotine-stained fingernails. He said to you, I listened to that chapei music you gave me. It’s blues, man. Bring one of those guys here and I’ll give him a show.

Inside, two old men sat in the hall, and we squeezed past them and found a table close to the stage. Thin university girls without bras blew smoke into the stale beer air and the place filled up. People were excited that night, waiting. The house lights dimmed and two spotlights made a thin halo over two wooden chairs. An old man walked from the back through a scatter of tables toward the stage. Another old man held the tail of his shirt and shuffled in behind. You said with reverence, There they are.

The two old men at the door.

One was near blind, the other lame. I watched them settle, adjust silver mikes, grumble at each other; one picked up a guitar, the other a harmonica, and with the thump thump thump of a hard shoe on the plank floor, air through metal and wood, fingers on tuned strings and a voice shout-singing, Whoo ee, whoo ee, the two stiff old men turned into the nimble,
golden-tongued blues gods they were, playing for their worshippers, embracing and breaking the hearts in that room, and I could see how the world goes with no eyes.

My shoulder touched yours, transformed by what I heard that night, syncopations, sound unbound and riffing, chat and jokes and insults between left hand and right, between strings and harp, slapping laughs and love moans and I heard things I did not yet know but would, stories of humiliation and brawls and seductions and nights gone bad and women weeping for men and men lost and alone, music epic-great, born of sex and police beatings and the stale beer stink of dark bars far away from the churches of the towns.

We left the club in the first hour of morning and Sonny and Brownie’s affectionate squabbling on stage had sown in me an idea about what happens when people last together a lifetime, companionable grumpiness, separate cars, separate beds in separate rooms, but out on stage chat-singing, their feet pounding the same boards and their ears hearing the same rhythms.

You said, I don’t want to go home yet.

We rode your bike to the great river. Stars and water and night. Down the riverbank, wrapped in darkness. You led me along a dock where boats were moored in narrow slips and we jumped onto the deck of a sloop called Rosalind. You took a small key from your jeans pocket and unlocked the cabin door. I followed you down three steep steps into a tiny galley and you opened a cupboard door and took out a box of floating candles. You said, At home it is Sampeas Preah Khe, the night we pray to the moon. My grandmother always lit a hundred candles and sent them out on the black river.

Why?

To honor the river and the Buddha.

You handed me a book of matches and I lit them with you, one by one. We sent out the ninety-ninth and hundredth out together and watched the trail of small flames drifting away. You said, My grandmother told me in the old days young people did this and prayed for love.

Inside the sailboat through the uncurtained window, I watched clouds moving across a sinking moon. Then I turned to you. You crossed your arms and pulled your white T-shirt over your head. I remember the muscled lines of your torso. Outside, wings and webbed feet on the surface of the water and the autumn wind rising and water lapping against the hull. Anyone walking along the river would have seen a hundred floating lights but they would not have seen any light at all from inside the Rosalind. I remember caught breath and a feeling no woman had ever admitted to me and the sound of a man’s groan. I remember your eyes never leaving mine. I remember the roughness of the calluses on your left fingers on my skin and I remember how slow you were. It was early November on a night you called Bon Om Touk. I had not known there would be blood.

After, we slipped up to the deck naked. We jumped into the freezing water with small screams and came up laughing and trying to find our breath. Then we wrapped an old blanket around us and when I shivered you handed me my clothes and slipped back into yours and we rubbed our hair dry and you said, Look.

Our candles were still burning and drifting on the slow current, disappearing into the darkness where the river meets the sea.

My body pressed against your back, my arms around your chest, one of your hands on mine driving home that night, my cheek resting on your leather jacket. I did not go to my own bed in my father’s house; I went to your apartment on Bleury Street with you. Through the hours before morning I loved you again in your warm yellow room, melting into you, standing up and lying down, heart to heart, our bodies golden heat and melting snow. Our fingers like small wings traced over each other’s whispers all through that first night, the first night of life.

What is this scar on your temple? I asked, tracing its curve with my lips.

I fell on a rock at Sras Srang when I was teaching my brother how to catch frogs near the lake. That’s how I chipped my tooth. I love how you talk. Tell me your name again.

The one who loves me called me Visna, I said. Do you like the name my lover gave me?

I love you with or without a name, Anne Greves.

I traced the shape of the half-moon chip on your tooth and whispered, I like Serey.

It means freedom, you said and pulled me to you again. It means power and beauty and charm. Do you like the name my parents chose for me?

I liked the hardness of your arms but I pushed you away, play-wrestling, and asked, All that? Does it mean good lover too?

You looked surprised, then said with your charming smile, Perfect lover.

You used to say that before me no woman ever teased you.

You were beloved and firstborn and I loved even your arrogance because now I knew you naked and vulnerable. I
loved you on stage and I loved you walking beside me. But you were most truthful in bed. At dawn I dreamed of a lover whose body knows things she does not. I had lost my voice and we were in a restaurant called the Courthouse and I was calling for you but you could not hear. My father’s presence was somewhere on the edges of the dream. You woke me and smoothed my hair and said, You are calling my name. Do not worry, oan samlanh, I will always be here.

The ocean has one taste and it is salt. I believed your body but I knew the words were untrue.

What do you have to say for yourself?

Nothing.

Nothing?

Papa set down his book and looked at me. Then he said softly, Your mother liked to wear my clothes when we first met.

A girl wears her lover’s clothes because she likes his smell and she wears his clothes because she is trying to understand why she feels both freed and broken. Why does she feel whole when she has given away her body, her mind and her heart? Why is she not tempted to escape? She wants to smell her lover on her skin, and she cannot understand this feeling that imprisons, frees her. She does not guess that she will remember wearing her lover’s clothes when she is old. She tells herself that what she feels is forever. But she has already observed in the world that it is not.

I turned away from Papa to go to my room, to be alone to smell your shirt, and then he said oddly, Do you still love me?

Of course I do, you’re my father.

Then listen to me. He is not right for you.

Papa took off his reading glasses and wiped them on his sleeve and said, Your mother did not run around. Make a
spectacle. Our neighbors talk. Your mother found invisible ways to get what she wanted.

I answered with intimate cruelty, Like the day she got pregnant with her professor and quit school. Like the day she left her baby and drove away in a snowstorm and never came back.

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.

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.