easy. We watch him. We get him at night, on the road.”
“You kill him?”
“Do you really want to know? We don’t kill him. We beat him with a bat until all of his bones are broken. That way, he suffers more.” He put the kickstand down on his moto and walked close to Ryna. “Don’t you want revenge?” he said in a gentle voice.
“Yes. But the bat . . .”
“These killers have to pay. And you owe it to the memory of your father. Can you tell me his name? Can you show me where he is?”
“I’ll let you know,” said Ryna. She felt nauseated again, like the first morning she’d seen Touch Pheng. “Not now. I’ll let you know.”
“Don’t wait too long,” said Sayon. He patted her shoulder and drove away.
That afternoon, Ryna prepared dinner for her family earlier than usual. Makara had given her a chicken. It fluttered and squawked when Ryna held her knife against its neck. As she slit its throat, she noticed how easily the blade cut through the muscles and flesh. Almost in a trance, she watched the blood drip drop by drop to the ground.
Ryna didn’t see Touch Pheng again until the middle of July. He was sitting in a plastic chair underneath the awning of the shop that sold sleuk bas and cabbage, and he appeared to be dozing. Without speaking, she walked close to him and just stood staring. She realized that she didn’t know what she would do from one moment to the next. She was trying to make his face change into the face of the arrogant young Khmer Rouge officer. She remembered that other face well, but this was the face of an old man. Yet it was also the same.
“My name is Ryna,” she said finally. She was surprised at the sound of her own voice. He opened his eyes and nodded. “Are you here by yourself?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, and reached for his stick. It was the first time he had spoken to her. In her mind, she saw him lying on a dark road, broken and bleeding to death.
She hesitated. “Do you have a family?”
He leaned forward on his stick and squinted with milky eyes at the crowd of people moving among the covered food stalls. His forehead glistened with sweat. “My wife died ten years ago,” he said. “My children live in Vietnam.” He stopped and began coughing. “I don’t want to live in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are cheaters and liars.”
“May I ask Ta what brings him to Praek Banan?”
“I am visiting the daughter of a cousin,” said the old man. “For a few months. Then I’ll go.” He sat back in the chair. “And you? Neang must live here?”
“Yes, I have lived in this village for thirty years,” said Ryna.
“Are you married?”
“I have a husband and four children.”
“You have good luck,” said the old man.
In the many scenarios that Ryna had rehearsed in her mind over the last couple of months, she had not imagined such a conversation.
Ryna began taking the photograph of her father with her every time she went to the market. She did not show the picture to Touch Pheng again, or even take it out of her pocket, but she wanted it with her when she saw him. Once a week, she and Touch Pheng would have bits of conversation. A few sentences. He never said much. And she, even less. One morning outside of a new stall that sold used tires hanging from the roof like giant black fruit, Touch Pheng confided that his favorite son had mechanical skill and had secured a job repairing motos. “But he married badly,” said the old man, shaking his head, “and is always arguing with his wife. What can I do?” He told Ryna that he had seven grandchildren. On another occasion, as he leaned on his stick and picked at the mole over his eye, he mentioned that for many years now he had been moving from one province to another every few months, living with cousins. “I come and I go, I come and I go. What is an old man to do? I’m lucky to be alive.”
Yes, he’s lucky to be alive, Ryna thought to herself. Especially when so many had died at his orders. Her father. Her father. What Ryna wanted was for the old man to revert to his younger self, the swaggering killer she remembered, and stop pretending to be someone else. Then, she would know what to do. Over and over, she went through the scenes she remembered. She hated talking to this ancient version of that killer. Yet she found herself doing so. One day, she told him that Kamal was beginning to look for a wife. They were sitting next to a stall that sold chickens. She told him that her daughter Nita was pregnant and might be coming home to live with her and Pich, arriving soon, in early September, in time for the Pchum Ben holidays.
That afternoon, as she was washing the family’s clothes in the river, Ryna realized that she had confided far too much in Touch Pheng. How could she have revealed such personal things about herself and her family to that killer? He might not look like the man she remembered, but he was that man. She felt disgusted with herself and scraped a shirt against the cleaning rock harder and harder until it was ripped to shreds and her fingers were bleeding.
She remembered more things of her father, small things. She remembered that his hands were soft and delicate, unlike the hands of Pich.
As she remembered, everyday life was developing a strangeness she’d not experienced before. One morning on her way to the market, she stopped at the little compound next to the pagoda, where the monks slept on straw mats, and listened to their chanting. For ten minutes, she stared at the red-toothed old women chewing on betel leaves under the shade of an acacia tree. For a week, she sat with a friend’s fifteen-year-old son who was dying of tuberculosis, watched as he gasped for air and clawed at the pus-filled lesions on his back. At his cremation ceremony, she suddenly began weeping and couldn’t stop until evening.
Late one night at the end of July, Makara called from the bottom of the ladder, seeking asylum from her husband. Sayon had beaten her before, but that night Makara seemed particularly terrified, and she had dark blue bruises on her face and a bleeding mouth. After Makara had come up into the house, Ryna leaned down to Pich, half asleep, and said, “If Ouv Wea ever hits me like that, I’ll be gone in the morning, and he is never going to find me.” “Watch your tongue,” said Pich, roused from his sleep. “You are the one who needs to watch out,” screamed Ryna, surprised at her anger, and suddenly she had a memory of her sister Lina in the camp, beaten so badly she couldn’t walk. Ryna took Makara behind the curtain into her daughters’ tiny space, and the four of them slept on the mats side by side. The next morning, Makara rose at dawn without speaking and went home to her husband.
At the beginning of August, they started the harvest of the beans and the cucumbers. Ryna would sometimes go to the farm with Pich and Kamal at dawn to pick the cucumbers when they were most cool. In the early mornings, a mist often hung over the land, and the rows of green looked like soft folds of cloth, and each cupful of air shone with its own source of pink light. When Ryna returned to the market, she always looked for Touch Pheng.
She lied to Makara and Sayon. She told them that the Khmer Rouge officer had left the village. But she could see in their eyes that they didn’t believe her. “Please take this,” said Sayon, and he handed Ryna the bat. It was heavy, painted half black and half red, and it had Thai writing on it. “Your husband will know what to do with this.” Without replying, Ryna nodded and put the bat in the trunk that contained her clothes and her hairbrush and a few letters. She, not Sayon, would choose the time and the place of avenging her father’s death.
That
