The Disappeared (6 page)

My longing did not seem a lover’s insanity in this city of the bereaved. Every person in that crowd was grieving. Nothing seemed crazy in the paralyzed longing of that crowd.

Blood pooled behind my eyes in the moment of blindness I always suffered when I looked at your photo. I was sure I had seen you alive and moving in the crowd and I could no longer
pretend. I turned off the television. I packed things. I put away the picture of my mother. I gave notice at Bleury Street and the university and I went to the passport office. I got a visa. On Sunday night I told Papa I was leaving in two days and he shook his head. He said, You have not heard from him in a decade. You
think
you saw him on television. You are quitting your job before the term is finished? What the hell. Why can’t you wait?

We sat in silence. The food tasted like dust. He set down his fork and said, You are ruining your life.

I said, I did not want to leave without saying good-bye.

He stared at the table in silence. After a long time he looked at me as if I were a ghost, It is your life. Your mother was like this too. She too gave up everything.

He reached out to touch my cheek, said as if to himself, If you find him I may never see you again.

I laughed, cleared the table and said, Papa, do not be so dramatic.

But he insisted, There are things you do not know.

I took my money from the bank and bought an airline ticket. To Paris. To Phnom Penh. We arrived after dawn and I hired a taxi to take me from Pochentong Airport down the highway toward the city. I remember the heat. The roofs, blues and greens and corrugated tin and thick plastic and red tiles. Golden spires from the palace by the river and the graceful curves of the wat on the Phnom Penh hill above the clutter of markets and apartments and huts and animals. Along the roadside, people set up stalls under umbrellas and awnings, cooked food in steaming pots, sold sweet drinks from orange and white coolers. Women without shoes carried their babies in cloth pouches tied front and back, watched toddlers with bare bottoms and staring eyes and fingers in their mouths. The taxi turned deeper into the narrowing streets, drove toward the river into city blocks with rounded buildings that looked like Paris, past the downtown street markets and into a neighborhood of apartments with airy wide terraces on upper floors. The driver stopped in front of your family’s house, Phlauv 350, and I got out and paid him too many American dollars and stood on the street feeling the heat and my heart beating. I wondered if you would answer the door.

I knocked. A young woman holding a baby cracked it open and I was breaking. She said firmly, No. No he does not live here. That family has never lived here. Then she looked at my face and said kindly, Maybe they lived here before. I think I have heard their name.

She closed the door and, exhausted from the long flight, from the heat of Phnom Penh, I thought, What have I done?

An old woman squatted on the sidewalk next door watching me. I approached her and asked, The family that lived there before, did you know them?

She said, You speak good Khmer.

Not so good, I said, but I had a good teacher. Do you know the family who used to live there?

The skin around the corner of her left eye tightened and the eye twitched. She said, There were two brothers; they played with my children. Gone, they are all gone.

I squatted beside her in the doorway. I called her Yay, the word for grandmother.

I am looking for the older brother. Did you ever see him? I think he must have come here.

She studied my eyes and said, He used to come here but I have not seen him for many years. No one else came back.

She looked down the street of ghosts and said, I lost my whole family during Pol Pot.

I did not know what to say. A baby cried inside, behind the shutters. I asked, What can I do?

She answered, I only want you to know.

I will come back and see you, Yay. When I find him I will tell him I met you.

Her neck twitched. Yes, tell him you saw Chan. I will be here.

This was my first day in Phnom Penh, the day I met Mau.

When Mau stepped forward the other drivers fell back. He listened, assessing and calculating, when I told him that I wanted to look for you in all the nightclubs of Phnom Penh. He showed me his remorque with a yellow fringe in the busy market. He was a small man with a scar on his left cheek. He wore a Chicago Cubs baseball cap. His eyes softened fleetingly when he looked at me and he said, Maybe it will take time, maybe it is like looking for a single grain of rice.

I was not sure how I would find you and I was not sure you wanted me to. The smell of the River Bassac, meltwaters from distant mountains tangled into humid air and garlic and night jasmine and cooking oil and male sweat and female wetness. Corruption loves the darkness. In Montreal I knew which doors, which alleys, which snowbanks hid bags of drugs and young girls with red lips and skinny boys with narrow hips, the things men think they want. But here I did not know where anything was and I was afraid to go out alone to look for you.

Mau pulled into traffic, and I was relieved to be out of the crowds of the market. Everyone trying to make a few riel. Mau stopped in front of Lucky No. 1 Restaurant on Monivong Boulevard and called to a waiter to give me a table on the
sidewalk. I asked Mau to eat soup with me but he waved his hand in front of his face. He said, I must watch my moto. I will wait.

Families sat in doorways trying to escape the heat. Men on the street took note of me with casual, calculating eyes: a white woman alone with dollars somewhere on her. A bicycle rolled in front of my table and the front wheel crushed the back of a rat. It writhed in ragged circles. Two waiters tried to nudge it away from my table with the tips of their rubber flip-flops but they were afraid. Finally they got a broom and swept the dying rat into a bucket and threw it still alive and twisting into a bin in the alley.

The Heart was packed and you were not there. I did not expect to find you in the first place I looked. But I hoped. I looked into the shine of eyes that did not recognize me and stepped back out the door. Mau pulled up and said, I know another place. He drove around Independence Monument to a small club called Nexus. A DJ sat behind a rickety table playing a collection of jazz records on a turntable and Khmer music on a cassette player. This was a place you might be. Very pre-genocide. But you were not here. I came out and said to Mau, What if he has a girlfriend?

Night after night Mau drove me. We crossed the river to restaurants packed with beer girls and men reaching for them and I said, He would not be here. Mau shrugged as if to say, All things are possible. It was April, almost New Year’s, the hottest time of the year, and the clubs and bars were full every night. I thought, What if he does not go out to listen to music anymore? What if I never go to the same place at the same time? What if the gods are deaf and mute and play tricks on me forever?

In the mornings I walked on Sisowath Quay, watched the traffic, an oxcart piled with wood and big bunches of bananas tied to the outside rail, a bicycle with a slaughtered hog, eyes open, tongue out, lashed on crosswise, small cars and motorcycles making Phnom Penh merges, cutting diagonally across oncoming traffic. On the wide sidewalks people carried large flat baskets filled with fruit and greens on their heads, carried little stools to sit on. Every morning a man without legs drove a bicycle with hand-pedals along the river path eastward. I found Sopheap’s noodle cart. She carried a baby tied to her back and a toddler played near her feet. I watched her face through the steam of her boiling pot and I liked the graceful way she stirred the noodles and her gentleness with the child and I approached her and said in Khmer, A bowl of noodles please with sait moan.

She said, You speak good Khmer.

No, just a little.

She lifted hot noodles from the pot into a chipped bowl, spooned out some meat and handed it to me.

Men in long-sleeved white shirts strolled on the quay in the brief cool of dawn, buying and selling. People jostled at a cart across the street selling pomelos. Whoever had money could eat hot rice and noodles, sugarcane, squid, boiled eggs, lotus root from the carts. Baskets of fried grasshoppers, later trays of ice cream. Hungry children reached out thin hands on the sidewalks. Food. Cigarettes. Petrol. Boys. Girls. Tourists. Traffic police waved people over for license checks. Demanded bribes. Drivers made U-turns as soon as they saw the police. People without arms and legs moved in the shadows of doorways, begging, sleeves turned up and neatly pinned over stumps of
arms, harder to beg without arms, a few lucky ones on metal legs, or maybe a heaven-sent three-wheeled bicycle.

I handed Sopheap my empty bowl, said, Juab kh’nia th’ngay krao-y.

She smiled, Have you been here long?

A few days.

How did you learn to speak Khmer?

I studied at home. It is the language of my ...

I searched for a word. I knew how to say brother, father, husband, but I had never learned a word for lover.

It is the language of the man I love, I said. I am looking for him.

It was ordinary that people were missing in this place. As ordinary as missing an arm or a leg.

Sopheap smiled her radiant smile and said, I hope you find him. Tell me what he looks like and I will watch for him. I see many people every day.

After that I went each morning for breakfast at Sopheap’s cart. She told me she was young during Pol Pot and her mother had managed to keep her but that her older brothers died and her father died. She met her husband in a refugee camp on the Thai border. Her mother had wanted to take her abroad but they were not accepted. And so they came back.

In the afternoons I went to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. I liked the Parisian yellow bricks, the thwuck thwuck of the ceiling fans, the clean tablecloths, the stools at an open bar looking over the river and boulevard, colonial decadence. A Westerner arrives with a few dollars and lives like royalty and this unheard-of wealth is the first thing I shared with the foreigners at the FCC. Here I did not have to be lonely. Here
someone was always telling stories. Here was rest from struggle on the streets. Among journalists and foreign aid workers and UN workers and backpackers, among the deliberate wanderers of the earth, there was no need to explain looking for a lost lover. Backpackers talked about bars and dope in Thailand, beaches in India, cathedrals in Europe, their mothers. They drifted through Phnom Penh, explored sex and skulls and temples, talked about going to the beaches in the south for New Year’s. Down on the street, children tossed chestnuts in a game called angkunh, and people decorated their tables and stores for the holidays with lotus flowers. From the rooftop of the FCC I looked in one direction over the palace and imagined what it must have been like to live in royal opulence, to attend orange and gold Buddhist processions, to celebrate the plowing on the full moon, and in the other direction I watched ordinary people on their terraces, a woman slaughtering a chicken for dinner, a teenager nursing her baby in a hammock.

On New Year’s Day the FCC was quiet. Most people had been invited somewhere or visited the temples to thank the old year’s angels, to welcome new angels. A man I had often seen came through the door. He was very tall with wide shoulders and a bit of a belly, strong forearms, sun-darkened skin. His brown eyes took detail in, and I had noticed him watching me. He bought a beer, came over and slid onto a stool beside me at the empty bar looking over the street. He said, Can I join you? It’s crowded in here.

From the beginning Will Maracle made me laugh.

I’m Will.

I’m Anne Greves.

He said, I see you here every afternoon.

I know.

Happy New Year.

And to you.

He set his glass down where it sweated a ring of water and said, What are you doing here?

I am looking for my lover.

Are you American?

I’m from Montreal.

Me too, near Montreal. Funny New Year’s without snow.

Funny New Year’s in April.

He flickered with a sweet light. There was a rhythm in his English I could not place. I asked, Where near Montreal?

Kahnawake.

That’s Montreal.

No it ain’t. It’s on the other side of the river.

He laughed his easy laugh and said, Why on god’s green earth are you looking for your lover here? And why would he lose someone as pretty as you?

I took a drink and said, What are you doing so far from home?

Forensics.

I looked at him.

Counting.

Counting?

They are trying to figure out how many.

Will Maracle opened massacre sites, released the bones. We talked all afternoon. I asked him what Maracle meant and he didn’t know. He asked me what Greves meant and I told him it was a whaler’s word, the refuse of tallow. I told him about looking for you in all the bars of the city. We talked about French and English and how he got started digging Indian burial grounds, trained with a man named Clyde Snow in Argentina and ended here. I asked him how he could bear his work and he said, Truth is as old as God. He shrugged and said, Someone else said that, not me.