Yes, the dirt. As if it were the only thing. Teera signs the bill and hands it back to Samnang. The two bow and leave, and as the heavy wooden door softly closes, she hears rapid whispering back and forth: If she were plumper, she’d be very beautiful. It’s the style over there. What—looking bony and sad? Oh, you boys don’t understand trends!—I think big sister’s beautiful as she is. I think you’re beautiful, Devi. A sudden hush.
Teera imagines Devi blushing. Big sister, they all call her. Even in the States, Cambodians address each other by familial terms. There she thought nothing of it, but here it stabs her every time, this default claim of kinship, this illusion of continuity and wholeness. Maybe Devi knows what she’s talking about after all. The dirt here clings to you, crimson and sorrow-tainted, no matter how long you stand under the shower.
Teera walks over to the writing desk near the head of the bed and confronts her reflection in the mirror on the wall. She runs her fingers through her damp hair, regretting all over again that in a moment of rashness, a week or so before making the journey here, she’d taken a pair of scissors and, in the Buddhist act of letting go, chopped off the long strands. It looks better now, thanks to her hairdresser, who, upon seeing her handiwork, lamented, Oh, your beautiful curls, I just want to faint! She wonders, though, whether the shoulder-length crop makes her look even thinner, more long-limbed and willowy than she already is. She hasn’t been eating or sleeping well for months.
She puffs her cheeks out, imagining a fuller face, a self less spare, less spectral. Maybe you’d gain some weight with less hair to lug around, Amara would always tease, hand smoothing Teera’s massive waves. But I can’t imagine you looking any other way. You’re the spitting image of your mother. Whenever her aunt said this, Teera felt an echo of another self, as if her body was not hers alone.
She returns to the sofa, drops a bag of Earl Grey into the teapot, and, letting it steep, begins to take slow sips of the rice porridge, her comfort food. When she was a child, starving, even a few spoonfuls of the plain, watery gruel would calm her stomach, lessen the horrible pang. How long ago that was. And yet, no matter how far she has traveled, something as tactile as a knot in her stomach can collapse time and space and plunge her back to the moment when hunger was all she knew.
She pours herself some tea and reaches into her shoulder bag on the floor, pulling out the two books she bought early this morning at the hotel bookshop, the Lonely Planet guide and a collection of essays. Her fingers flip through the guide, stopping at a map of Phnom Penh. She notes that many of the street names are still preceded by the French rue, as painted on the road signs. She reads them aloud in succession like the headings of a history lesson that stretches from Cambodia’s mythical past to its multifarious present. She locates Duan Penh, where her hotel stands, the avenue named in honor of the legendary widow Lady Penh, whose divine vision supposedly led her to erect a temple on the hill, two blocks east of here, around which grew the eponymous city, Phnom Penh, the “Hill of Lady Penh.”
Main roads with names like Confédération de la Russie and Dimitrov jostle those named for royal personae—Sisowath and Norodom and Sihanouk—like revolts against feudalism itself. Phnom Penh is probably the only city in the world where one would find Charles de Gaulle, Josip Broz Tito, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mao Tse-tung, and Abdul Carime all in the same tight geography. This map, she thinks, is a study in the accumulated layers of geopolitics that intertwine here, none completely erasing that which came before.
Teera sets down the guidebook and picks up the volume of essays, letting her index finger trace the letters on the front cover. Understanding the Cambodian Genocide. From among the bookshop’s offerings, she was attracted by this title, its bold and capitalized confidence, its promise of an explanation. She turns the pages and tentatively begins reading, curling up in the sofa as she did years ago in the armchairs of Cornell’s Kroch Library, home to the Asia collections. For hours at a time, she’d pore over old journals and manuscripts from Cambodia, deepening her knowledge of her native tongue, reawakening her childhood love of reading, searching for clues. Despite her aunt’s gentle warning, she was drawn to history, captivated by its fluidity and ease with the language of loss. That was then, this is now, Amara would remind her. It’s all in the past. We’ve left that land behind.
Cambodia. Kampuchea. Srok Khmer. No matter how she says it, Teera knows it will never leave her tongue. It will never leave her, even as she tries to peel it from the memory of her skin. It has stained her. Marked her with the lives lost, those whose faces she’s forgotten but whose voices, whose screams and pleas, weave the tenuous boundary between dreams and nightmares. She recalls once again that particular evening, its twilight glow, in which corpses sprawled across rice paddies looked at first glance like families sleeping. Even now, a lifetime later, the dead stalk her, and she, who wishes only for their burial, a restful end to their journey, hears their cries as her own.
She gets up from the sofa and, pulling the double glass doors open, steps onto the balcony. She needs fresh air, the voices and presence of living people. She inhales deeply, her attention immediately drawn to the sounds of paddling and splashing a few yards away in the children’s pool. A roly-poly toddler in a sagging two-piece wades sneakily to the far corner of the pool, climbs the edge, tummy pressing against the tiles, leaps to her feet, and bounds off. Water drips from her drenched bikini bottom, leaving a wet trail on the pebbled mosaic floor, like an umbilical cord connecting her to an aqueous origin. A woman, as pale as the toddler is brown, turns from her conversation with a friend and says suddenly, “Luna?” In a split second, she runs after the toddler, whose cherubic form rounds the pillars of the roofed walkway separating the shallow children’s pool from the deep pool at the opposite side of the courtyard. “Luna! Luna, if you jump again, Mommy’s going to—” Splash!
Teera goes back inside and shuts the balcony doors, fogging the glass panes with the humidity she’s let into the air-conditioned room. She breathes on the glass directly in front of her face, thickening the vapor. Then, with the tip of her forefinger, she draws a straight line, a band of opening, and peers through it, back into the verdant, tangled underbrush of the past.