Three Flames

by Alan Lightman

  “It’s easy,” said Ryna, “I’ll show you.” She got her scissors, which she had been using the night before, and a piece of cloth and cut out a square fifty centimeters on a side. Then she took out her needle and thread and began stitching around the perimeter to keep the edges from unraveling.

  Touch Pheng shook his head, as if incredulous that she would ask him to do such a thing.

  “It’s easy,” said Ryna. “We are making diapers for my first grandchild, Nita’s child.”

  “I could never do a thing like that,” said Touch Pheng.

  “Of course Ta can. Let me just find another pair of scissors. I have plenty of cloth and thread.” Ryna began looking around the room. There were not many places to look. She went through the three drawers of the table. She looked on the floor next to the car battery, where they kept a box of odds and ends. She rummaged through her trunk. Underneath her clothes, her hands felt the heavy bat that Sayon had given her, and she paused for a moment. She gripped the bat. Then she let it go. At the bottom of the trunk she found the second pair of scissors. “Here,” she said, handing the old man the scissors. “Just do what I do.”

  “My hands,” said Touch Pheng, “I have the pain in my fingers.” Ryna showed him how to hold the scissors. “I cannot do this,” said the old man.

  “Yes, you can. Do what I do.”

  Touch Pheng began cutting a square out of the cloth.

  “You never thought you would be making diapers, did you?”

  “I have never done anything like this before,” said Touch Pheng. “I have no ability at this.” But he kept cutting the fabric. He was sitting forward in his chair now, concentrating. Somewhere, in the distance, the radio was still playing Sinn Sisamouth.

  “Do you need any help?” asked Ryna. She pulled her chair a little closer to his.

  “No, I can see what you are doing.”

  Even though Pchum Ben had been over for weeks, Ryna felt her father in the room. Here, now.

  “Ta is doing a good job,” said Ryna, “making diapers for my grandchild. Is it hurting your hands?”

  “No, it’s not hurting at all.” He continued cutting. “Look, I have finished one.” He held up the diaper, amazed.

  They heard some rustling behind the sheet, and Nita appeared, her belly as large as a goat. “What are you doing, Mae?”

  “Touch Pheng is making diapers for your child,” said Ryna, “for my grandchild.”

  “That is wonderful,” said Nita, smiling.

  “I made a diaper,” said Touch Pheng.

  “Yes, you did,” said Ryna, and she looked out the window just in time to see a white-breasted plover flying straight for the river.

  NITA

  (2009)

  Limheang. Channsophea. Savada. These are the names she’s considering for her daughter, still only a small bump in her belly. In another month, it will be time to announce the news. Neighbors will ride their bicycles and motos up the gravel road to the house to congratulate her and perhaps bring some cloth diapers. They’ll use the visit as an excuse to inspect the rooms and the beds, to surreptitiously gawk at the refrigerator, and to see if the rumored silk curtains from Phnom Penh are really made out of silk. It’s a village of farmers who can’t read and dingy shop owners. It’s a gossipy village. It’s a village where people make sly jokes and innuendos about who is in debt and who is cheating on their spouse and who might be sneaking over the Thai border to buy and sell cocaine. Despite that small trade, the village is dirt poor, like her own village, more than three hundred kilometers away. This is her husband’s family home. In her two years here, she’s never been welcome. The villagers treat her politely, in deference to her rich husband.

  Her face is round, with high cheeks, a strong chin, and eyebrows too inky and thick for a girl. Her teeth are good, and she has a silver star implanted on one of them, a beauty touch requested by her husband. Most of her hair has been cut short by her husband’s aunt. Too short. The remaining long strands she’s wrapped around her face in an imitation of the film stars she admires. Although she’s only eighteen, her skin is already worn, with creases beginning to form on her forehead. But on the whole she is an attractive young woman, not what anyone would call beautiful, but pleasant-looking. Her figure is slender, like her mother’s. And she has light in her eyes, an intelligence that some find appealing, and others just the opposite. At the moment, she’s taking a rest and sits in the kitchen holding an ice chunk against her face to fight off the sweltering heat. She can hear her auntie retching in the next room. She misses her mother and brother and sisters. She even misses her father, who forced her to come to this place. In her mind, she composes a letter to her mother: Dear Mae, I’m finally pregnant. I can hardly believe it. I’d given up. Nearly three months now. Next week, I’ll take the bus to Battambang City to look for baby clothes. I’ve learned to sew and am making something myself. A little girl is what I want. I’ve been a good wife, Mae. I have. I’ve kept the three flames.

  She has told her mother the truth, but not all of the truth. For a moment, a slight breeze wafts through the open window, a tiny relief. She touches her tummy and thinks of the future—not her future, but the future of the little one inside her.

  It was just before planting season when Pich decided that his daughter should drop out of school. They’d finished dinner, and Ryna was putting away the uneaten rice for breakfast the next morning. Nita was looking out the window; somebody’s cow had gotten loose and was wandering between the houses, and the rice fields beyond the village were turning purple in the dusk. Suddenly, Pich stood up from where he’d been sitting on the floor, with no shirt on, and said, “Kon, I want you in the fields with me tomorrow.”

  “Nita has school tomorrow, and Father knows it,” said Ryna.

  “Other girls help their fathers in the fields,” said Pich. “Sreynich, Dina, Veasna. Look at them.”

  “Our Nita is different,” said Ryna. “She’s very clever. All her teachers say so.”

  “Enough school,” said Pich. “Thida is gone. Sreypov is too little. Kamal and I need help.” He began waving his arms like he did when he was angry. Pich always looked bigger when he waved his arms. “Daughter Nita has no need of school,” he said. “In a year, she’s being married.” Ryna let her face go slack, as she always did when she had to be a good wife and do what Pich wanted.

  Nita thought to herself that she was not getting married anytime soon. Maybe when she was twenty-five. Kamal had told her that some women in Phnom Penh didn’t get married until they were twenty-five or thirty and earned four hundred dollars a month all by themselves. Nita ran behind the dangling sheet where she and her little sister slept, and she put her schoolbooks inside her mother’s old trunk where nobody would find them.

  Early the next morning, before her father and brother got up to load the oxcart, Nita crept down the ladder and went to hide at Lina’s house. It was still dark outside, so she took a kerosene lamp, but she knew the way. Lina and Nita had made many trips on the rutted road between their two houses, chatting and pretending not to notice the boys lolling under the acacia trees, doing nothing except sucking palm sugar juice out of plastic bags. “What’s up, little srey chhlat,” the boys would say to Nita. Smart cookie. Which was sweet, but maybe it wasn’t really so sweet. Nita figured they just wanted her to do their math homework for them. The boys paid the teacher to get the answers to the tests, but Nita got the answers on her own. Lina, they called sa’at. Beautiful. They never called Nita that. Lina could have had her pick of any boy in the village, but her parents wanted her to marry her cousin Hin Nhean, so that’s what she did. Then her husband left to get seasonal work in Malaysia, and the boys began looking at her again. Sometimes she looked back.

  Afternoons, after their household chores, Lina and Nita walked along the river to watch the wooden fishing boats dragging their white nets behind them. Lina usually wore her knockoff Diesel T-shirt and matching flip-flops. She once offered Nita her tight-fitting Diesel�
�one of the boys had given it to her, and she could get many more, she said—but Nita thought it provocative. Lina had plenty of friends, but she said she liked Nita the most because Nita didn’t judge her and didn’t jabber all the time.

  That morning, Nita hid in Lina’s storage shed. She had to share the space with Lina’s two cats, both strays that Lina had taken in. Nita’s family had owned a cat when she was a little girl, but she had beaten it badly with a broom after she saw her father beat her mother with the broom, and the cat ran away and never came back.

  All day Nita squatted in the shed, sweating in the heat. Lina brought Nita some rice and dried fish. To pass the time, they put pink polish on each other’s fingernails. “I thought you’d stay in that dumb school for the rest of your life,” whispered Lina. “I wish I could,” Nita said. “What are your plans, sister?” said Lina. She held Nita’s hand. “Why don’t you live in my house with me. It’s lonely when my parents go to Praek Khmau.”

  Live in her house with her? Lina always said a lot of silly things. She said that she’d been born to marry a rich man because she’d done a lot of good deeds in her previous life, but some crazy cosmic accident had occurred and she got stuck with her cousin Nhean. She also said that her father had seventeen girlfriends. Nita calculated that if Lina’s father spent only fifty dollars on each one, it would cost more than he made in a whole year in his fish stall at the market.

  Nita stayed in Lina’s shed until dark, then went back to her house. Pich had been outside drinking palm wine and could barely stand up. As soon as he staggered into the house, he picked up the broom as if he was about to beat his daughter. This time he changed his mind. He just touched Nita on the shoulder and said “Daughter” and lay down on his sleeping mat. It wasn’t late, but Ryna turned off the bulb dangling from the tin roof, and the house went dark.

  For a long time, Nita couldn’t sleep. She was thinking about how much she would miss school and learning things, especially math, and how she would never go to university now, which had been her dream, and then she began wondering about her older sister, Thida, and if she would ever see her again, and then she was thinking about the boys who looked at Lina and wondered whether they would ever look at her that way.

  The next afternoon, two teachers from Nita’s school came to her house, Krou Phally and Krou Sophal. Krou Sophal was her math teacher. She had hair on her chin, like a man. Krou Phally and Krou Sophal told Nita’s parents that there were only four girls left in the class, against seventeen boys, and that Nita was the best student in the entire class. In fact, the best in five years. None of the other students paid attention for one entire minute during the day. Then the teachers began complaining about how they got paid only forty dollars a month, and there was no toilet in the school. Their only satisfaction was a good student like Nita, every five years. At the least, she should be allowed to finish high school, they said. Navin “the little scientist” had finished high school three years ago and was working as a tour guide in Siem Reap and sending her parents thirty dollars a month. Two girls from the nearby town of Praek Khmau had even gone to university. Nita could be the first girl from their village to go to university. Times were changing, they said.

  As the teachers were talking, Krou Sophal put her arm around Nita’s shoulder—as if bonding them in a shared vision of great things for the future. A future in which Nita would graduate from high school and then go on to university like the girls of Praek Khmau and bring honor and glory to Praek Banan, and perhaps even a toilet for the school and increased salaries for its teachers. Actually, Nita had not been aware that she was the best student in five years. That knowledge solidified her ambitions. The future was beckoning.

  Pich didn’t say a word. He just sat picking at the dirt under his fingernails.

  Nita hated working on the farm. She hated tossing the smelly cow dung and beating the rice seeds into the mud and sifting out the snails. It was stupid work. Did the other farmers think she was stupid, like them? Using her math brain to sift snails? This was temporary work, she told herself. Sometimes, she brought along a bag of salt and sprinkled it on the snails, a little at a time, and watched them slowly dissolve and turn into mush. Let them suffer a little, she thought. Suffering was part of life. At night, after she and Sreypov went behind the dangling sheet and undressed, she studied her schoolbooks with a kerosene lamp. When she was studying, she forgot who she was and where she was, and she just floated in the Land of Learning. But she knew that she would probably never be in school again.

  It was a few months later that Nita’s father began dropping hints about this man he knew in Battambang. Noth Bun was his name. Actually, Pich had never met this man, but his cousin in Battambang knew him. “Cousin Narith knows a rich bachelor,” Pich said one night. One minute before, he’d been talking about how many kilos of rice he’d reap in the next harvest, and suddenly he was talking about Mr. Noth. A week later Pich said to Ryna, as if he was talking only to her, but loudly, “I heard that Mr. Noth is very handsome.” That’s all he said. Who was this Mr. Noth? Nita wondered. But she never interrupted when her parents were talking.

  One afternoon, Pich said, “Mr. Noth is pretty young for somebody so rich.” “How old is he?” asked Ryna. “Cousin Narith says he’s thirty-eight,” said Pich. “That’s a good age.” “How did he become rich?” asked Nita’s brother, Kamal, who was allowed to interrupt. “I heard he sells rubber from the rubber trees,” said Pich. “He’s a businessman.”

  After a few weeks of this kind of talk, it was like Noth Bun was a member of the household. Nita had never heard his name before a month ago, and now he was practically eating at their table. Of course, she knew what her father was doing. But she didn’t want any of it. Look at Lina. What good did a husband do her? Nita had another friend, Chenda, who worked day and night making food for her husband and his friends and washing his clothes and his uncle’s clothes and taking care of their two babies. Chenda used to be so pretty. By the time she was eighteen, her face looked like a stone. Nita’s friend Sreyden had been married only six months when her husband walked out on her, leaving her with five hundred dollars of debt.

  Long ago, when Nita was still a little girl, her mother had told her while they were washing clothes in the river that she didn’t have to get married if she didn’t want to.

  Pich kept talking about this Noth Bun, and one day he announced that the man was coming all the way from Battambang to meet the family. “You should be nice to him, kon srey,” said Pich. “It’s a long trip.”

  “Why is he coming?” Nita asked, knowing perfectly well why he was coming.

  “He wants to meet you,” said Pich. “He’s rich. He could take good care of you.” He paused. “And maybe send a little bit to us.”

  “There must be other girls, in Battambang,” Nita said. She understood that she shouldn’t say something with a knife blade in it to her father, but the words just came out of her mouth. Ryna looked over at Pich and waited for him to talk.

  “Mr. Noth has heard that you are clever,” said Pich. “And he and Cousin Narith are good friends.”

  “Just let him meet you,” said Ryna. “You don’t need to say anything to him.”

  Pich frowned at his wife. “Daughter should certainly talk to him,” he said.

  The next Sunday, in mid-afternoon, a big silver car drove up the rutted road to Nita’s house. It couldn’t get all the way, because of the mud, so it stopped about a hundred meters from the gate, and Mr. Noth began walking. It had to be Mr. Noth, thought Nita. She’d never seen a car like that in her village. She hurried down the ladder and ran to Lina’s house and hid in her storage shed.

  An hour later, Nita heard her mother’s voice from outside the shed. “Dearest daughter, mi-oun, please come out now.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  For a while, Ryna didn’t say anything. “I know how you feel,” she said.

  “So don’t make me come out,” Nita said.

  “Dear daughte
r . . . I love you so much. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You remind me of myself when I was your age. You’re prettier and smarter than I was. I was so confused. I didn’t know anything about anything. I didn’t really know your father. But look at us. We’ve made a life together. It’s been twenty-five years now.”

  “I’m not you,” said Nita.

  “Your father wants you to meet Mr. Noth,” said Ryna.

  “What do you want?” said Nita.

  “My dearest daughter,” Ryna said in a low voice, almost whispering. She hesitated. “I want you to stay in school. But . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence.

  Nita sat down on an old bucket in the shed. She tossed off her flip-flops and pressed her foot hard against a rock until she could feel the pain. Nita loved her mother. She thought about how her mother was just doing what she had to do, so she came out of the shed, but she slammed the door so hard that the wood splintered, and she didn’t say a word to her mother as they walked back to their house.

  Mr. Noth sat in one of the two chairs of the house, Pich in the other. Pich was wearing his nice silk shirt, which he usually wore only during the Khmer New Year. Mr. Noth was dressed in a jacket and lace-up shoes. He had bushy eyebrows that met in the middle, and the hair on his head was starting to fall out, and when he stood up he leaned to one side, as if one leg were shorter than the other. Maybe it was.

  Nita stood against the wall, keeping a distance. Mr. Noth knew that she’d been hiding somewhere. “I like a girl with spirit,” he said, and grinned. Nita noticed that he had all of his teeth. At least he had that. Mr. Noth began asking her questions about various things, like what kinds of jobs people did in her village and the cost of tires at the market. At first, Nita didn’t want to talk to him. But she knew all the answers. And she did have her dignity.

  “She’s a pretty girl, isn’t she,” said Ryna.

  “Not so pretty,” said Mr. Noth, “but she’s clever.”