are you talking about that?” said Pich, annoyed. “And anyway, how do you know it was him? It’s been so many years.”
“Do you remember when I saw Cousin Mala after forty years? You didn’t believe me then either.”
Pich didn’t bother replying. He was sharpening the blade of his plow, which he would need to finish preparing his fields for planting. Sharpening blades was their son Kamal’s job, but Kamal was out as usual, drinking cheap wine in the rain with his friends.
Pich stood and began putting his tools away. He was not much taller than his wife and almost as thin, with fleshy lips, perpetually bloodshot eyes, and a scar on his cheek where he’d been gored by a neighbor’s ox. Now the rain was pinging like gunshots on the tin roof, causing the two oxen under the house to shuffle nervously. Ryna could look down between the bamboo poles of the floor and see their shadowy forms fidgeting below.
“What should we do?” said Ryna.
“What’s there to do? Why do you want to think about such a useless thing? It’s a waste of time. And tomorrow don’t buy any rambutan.” Pich was always especially unpleasant the day after he’d spent the night with Lakhena.
“I am doing, I don’t yet know what.”
“What is silly Mae Wea going to do?”
“Something.” Unsettled, Ryna sat down next to Thida, her eldest daughter, who began brushing her mother’s hair. At age sixteen, Thida had gone to Phnom Penh to work off a family debt. She’d been back home for a year, eating regularly, but her wrists were still smaller than the thickness of a cucumber, and she sometimes began screaming in the middle of the night. Their middle daughter, Nita, Pich had married off at age sixteen to a traveling rubber merchant, who promptly deposited his new wife for safekeeping with his aunt on the far side of Battambang Province. But at least Ryna still had her youngest daughter, Sreypov, her mi-oun, still in school at Ryna’s fierce insistence. She would give her life to protect Sreypov. Ryna looked over at her youngest daughter, in the corner, reading one of her schoolbooks. Sreypov, although only fourteen, had her own mind and wrote poetry. She was the fire in the family.
Ryna closed her eyes, hoping the long brushstrokes would calm her. Her jet-black hair fell to the middle of her back. Despite her age, she was still an attractive woman, with a slender body and a sympathetic mouth, but her skin had become worn with the heat and the life on the farm, and deep grooves spread out from the corners of her eyes. One could see the Chinese blood on her father’s side, as her nose was more narrow and her skin lighter than pure Khmer.
“I’ve had enough of silly talk for the day,” said Pich. “I’m getting old. And tomorrow is almost here.” Without bothering to take off his sweaty shirt, he lay down on his sleeping mat. Almost immediately, Sreypov and Thida disappeared behind the dangling sheet that partitioned off the tiny area where they undressed and slept.
Once the house had grown silent, Ryna began brooding again about Touch Pheng, and her hands started to shake. She would do something horrible to him. She walked to the corner of the room where the family said prayers for their ancestors. On a table were candles, bits of colored string, photographs of Pich’s parents and grandparents and of Ryna’s mother and two grandmothers. Ryna possessed only a single picture of her father, which she kept safe in a small metal box. Now she lit a candle and took out the photograph, stained and curled around the edges. Here her father was a young man, perhaps twenty-five years old, handsome and sweet. In her mind, she could see the moonless night he was killed, she could see the red glow of the hand-rolled cigarettes of the Khmer Rouge soldiers as they sat under a tree, she could hear their voices as they came to her father’s bunkhouse and called him out along with two other men who had all tried to escape to find missing members of their families. “We are moving you to another camp,” said Touch Pheng, a phrase whose meaning all understood. She could hear the commander’s raspy and arrogant voice. She had seen him order the executions of people before, as easily as if he were swatting mosquitoes. The cadres carried shovels and ropes. Ryna looked at the photograph and said a prayer for her father. Inexplicably, she began thinking of the time they had gone together to Phnom Penh when she was a little girl and sat on the grass below the great monument celebrating the departure of the French. Ryna had never seen a city. Amid the noisy crush of buildings and people flying by on their cycles and motos, her father sat quietly humming a song to her. Somewhere, in the distance, she heard Pich snoring. Ryna put a cupful of sticky rice sweetened with palm sugar on the sleeping mats of each of her children, as she had done for years, and lay down.
After a night of tossing and turning, Ryna rose before dawn, climbed barefoot down the rickety wooden ladder to the ground, and began preparing breakfast and lunch in the little shed that served as the kitchen, ten meters from the house. Thida had gotten up even earlier to start the wood fire. Until harvest, their food was limited, but Ryna could still season it with garlic and ginger. A little later, Ryna roused Pich and Kamal, who ate their rice and bits of dried fish in the dark without speaking. Afterward, the men loaded up the oxcart with sacks of rice seed and tools and left for the farm.
When she and Thida had finished cleaning the dishes, Ryna swept the floor and dusted the tables and the sleeping mats and the walls. It was 8 a.m., time for the market. She gathered up food scraps for the oxen and went down the ladder again to the ground. Passing the kitchen shed, she caught sight of the pork knife and put it in her shopping bag.
The market was always a barrage of color and sound, offering a thousand distractions, but this morning Ryna walked purposefully past the oranges and the red rambutan, the lavender and magenta fabrics, the screaming half-naked children and the chickens darting down the muddy path between the stalls, until she spotted the man standing near the covered stall that sold mangoes. She approached him as closely as she dared and got a good look, much better than the day before. She even heard him speak, asking how much he owed for a half dozen mangoes. Was it the voice she remembered? It was the tired voice of an old man. After a minute, he seemed to feel her eyes and returned her gaze. They stared at each other for a few uncomfortable moments. She gripped the handle of the knife in her bag. Then the man looked away and hobbled to the next stall. She would not approach him now, not today.
It was still early in the morning and already so hot that the sweat had soaked through Ryna’s shirt. She nodded to several people she knew and bowed to a procession of monks in saffron robes, walking through the muddy ruts left by the oxcarts. When she passed the house of her best friend, Makara, she waited a few moments at the wire fence. But Makara wasn’t there.
Although Ryna had lived in this village for nearly thirty years, only in the last few had she felt that she might begin to belong. This was her husband’s provincial home, not hers. Her birth village was in Pursat. She hadn’t returned there since that frightening morning a lifetime ago when the young soldiers appeared and dragged everyone off to the camps. Only two years after the Khmer Rouge regime ended, when Ryna was fourteen, her mother had died from gangrene, later her sister. Without any parents, Ryna was taken into the household of her uncle, who arranged for her to marry Pich. She knew nothing of Pich or his village. At first, she had thoughts about going to school, but Pich put her to work on the family farm, and then the children began. After the birth of Thida, when Ryna had been ill with pneumonia, Pich sat by her side day and night putting wet rags on her cheeks and massaging her back. He did the same when she was sick with dengue fever. Over the years, she and Pich had grown accustomed to living with each other. Slowly, she’d made friends in the village, at the funerals and the weddings.
Thirty years. All of Ryna’s uncles and aunts had passed away and now seemed like the shadows of vanishing dreams. The only remaining link to her village in Pursat was her childhood friend Makara, who, upon marriage, had refused to share a sleeping mat with her husband until he agreed to live in the same village as Ryna. Every Sunday for the last twenty-five years, she and Makara walked
