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, an 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 thebed. 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
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, an 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 thebed. 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
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