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.
After, combing your fingers through my hair, you said, I am happy for the first time since I left you. This is the truth. And then with your charming smile, Anne Greves, I am starving.
I said, I know.
The print of each other’s hands and mouths still on our skin, we went to a restaurant to eat phnom pleung, turning bits of fish over the small barbecue on the table, famished, and we ate green morning glory stems with rice. We could not stop looking, touching each other now with our eyes. A child came by with an armful of pkaa malis and you bought all her strings of flowers and gave them to me, and the child ran smiling back to a man slouching on the corner. I lifted the jasmine to my nose and you said, It is a full moon day. Do not smell them yet, bad luck. Bring them home to offer to the house spirits.
Under the table our feet touched. A waiter checked the flame and you spoke to him so rapidly I could not understand and the waiter went away.
You said, I see snow on your eyelashes. And I hear French and English. I am listening to Buddy Guy. But I am no longer with a girl. You are different now, stronger.
I said, People do not really change; we are only undefeated because we have gone on trying.
You smiled, said, Maybe they do change, little tiger.
I did not know yet how you had changed. I asked, What do you do?
Translation.
I said, Your studies abroad were useful.
You took my hand on the table, said, More useful than for languages, oan samlanh.
And I knew I would stay with you forever.
We ate slowly and the waiter returned with a little leaf parcel secured with a piece of toothpick. You put it in my hand, This is pkaa champa, for you.
A scent like magnolia from three delicate buds wrapped in a leaf. I resisted putting them to my nose.
The old poets rarely describe requited love. How can they resist?
Did you have lovers? You were first to ask.
I have only ever loved you.
Already we were wandering hand in hand to leave the garden. I said, And you? You must have had many lovers.
None.
We told each other these falsehoods of love and fetched my bag from my empty guest room and brought it back to your room, which smelled now of jasmine and magnolia, and after we made love you slept and dreamed, frantic eyes darting back and forth under closed lids, and when you opened your eyes again, I said, Tell me.
I do not want you to have to know. In my dreams Sokha accuses me. My parents are behind him staring at me from big silent eyes. But my younger brother stands in front of me and says over and over, Why did you do nothing?
22
You were shocked, at first, by what you saw, a skeleton-people struggling numbly back into the silent city. A family had already taken over your old family home. Numb, you found this room on Sisowath Quay. The first silence of the city was broken by foreign aid trucks rumbling back and forth and the shouts of Vietnamese soldiers. At odd moments on the street two people would suddenly recognize each other and burst into little islands of talk, sifting through memories of who they had last seen where, who had died when. They stood in the street, sometimes holding each other, then weeping and talking, relief at finding anyone alive, telling how they survived, each tear like a small match thrown into a barrel of gasoline. The first year there was little planting as people struggled slowly home all
After, combing your fingers through my hair, you said, I am happy for the first time since I left you. This is the truth. And then with your charming smile, Anne Greves, I am starving.
I said, I know.
The print of each other’s hands and mouths still on our skin, we went to a restaurant to eat phnom pleung, turning bits of fish over the small barbecue on the table, famished, and we ate green morning glory stems with rice. We could not stop looking, touching each other now with our eyes. A child came by with an armful of pkaa malis and you bought all her strings of flowers and gave them to me, and the child ran smiling back to a man slouching on the corner. I lifted the jasmine to my nose and you said, It is a full moon day. Do not smell them yet, bad luck. Bring them home to offer to the house spirits.
Under the table our feet touched. A waiter checked the flame and you spoke to him so rapidly I could not understand and the waiter went away.
You said, I see snow on your eyelashes. And I hear French and English. I am listening to Buddy Guy. But I am no longer with a girl. You are different now, stronger.
I said, People do not really change; we are only undefeated because we have gone on trying.
You smiled, said, Maybe they do change, little tiger.
I did not know yet how you had changed. I asked, What do you do?
Translation.
I said, Your studies abroad were useful.
You took my hand on the table, said, More useful than for languages, oan samlanh.
And I knew I would stay with you forever.
We ate slowly and the waiter returned with a little leaf parcel secured with a piece of toothpick. You put it in my hand, This is pkaa champa, for you.
A scent like magnolia from three delicate buds wrapped in a leaf. I resisted putting them to my nose.
The old poets rarely describe requited love. How can they resist?
Did you have lovers? You were first to ask.
I have only ever loved you.
Already we were wandering hand in hand to leave the garden. I said, And you? You must have had many lovers.
None.
We told each other these falsehoods of love and fetched my bag from my empty guest room and brought it back to your room, which smelled now of jasmine and magnolia, and after we made love you slept and dreamed, frantic eyes darting back and forth under closed lids, and when you opened your eyes again, I said, Tell me.
I do not want you to have to know. In my dreams Sokha accuses me. My parents are behind him staring at me from big silent eyes. But my younger brother stands in front of me and says over and over, Why did you do nothing?
22
You were shocked, at first, by what you saw, a skeleton-people struggling numbly back into the silent city. A family had already taken over your old family home. Numb, you found this room on Sisowath Quay. The first silence of the city was broken by foreign aid trucks rumbling back and forth and the shouts of Vietnamese soldiers. At odd moments on the street two people would suddenly recognize each other and burst into little islands of talk, sifting through memories of who they had last seen where, who had died when. They stood in the street, sometimes holding each other, then weeping and talking, relief at finding anyone alive, telling how they survived, each tear like a small match thrown into a barrel of gasoline. The first year there was little planting as people struggled slowly home all
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