The Disappeared (4 page)

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.

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 sometimes they write thousands. Don’t they know? How can they sleep at night pretending to write facts when they don’t know?

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.

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.

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.

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?