Three Flames

by Alan Lightman

  “Out,” said Mr. Noth. He grasped her by the arm and led her out of the room and into the spare bedroom across the hall and closed the door. What was this? Was she awake or asleep? She heard the sound of the front door opening again, and someone came in. There were other noises. “Nice.” It was the voice of a girl, the voice she’d heard outside. Nita backed away from the closed door and sat down on the bed. Could her husband possibly be bringing a girlfriend into their house? What should she do? She couldn’t do nothing. This was her house. This was her husband. She went back to the closed door and listened. “Oun,” her husband said sweetly to the girl. Honey. The girl made some kind of sound, and then they went into the bedroom where she’d been sleeping moments ago, the room that she shared with her husband, her bedroom. They were laughing. There were other sounds. Rustling. Then the girl began moaning, and she heard her husband moan too. “Oun,” he said. Darling. The girl was saying some words too, but Nita couldn’t hear what they were. Her heart was pounding. She thought to herself: Go in there right now and confront them, both of them. She couldn’t let this go on, right in her own house, thrown out of her room. She imagined herself walking into the room and facing them, her cheating husband and his cheap girlfriend lying on her bed. They were both groaning now. Didn’t Auntie hear all of this? Why wasn’t Auntie out of her room, protesting this outrage? Nita stood at the closed door, her hands shaking. She looked out a window and saw that the moon had come out. Mr. Noth’s car gleamed in the moonlight. He hadn’t bothered to put it in the garage. The shadow of a mango tree draped across the hood of the car. Then she fell back on the bed and put the pillow over her head.

  Sometime later in the night, she couldn’t tell when, she awoke again. Screams came from the other room. Her husband was shouting, and the girl was crying. It sounded like furniture was being thrown about. The girl was screaming and screaming. Then it became quiet. Nita drifted back to sleep.

  At dawn, she awoke sweating, thinking that she’d had some terrible nightmare. In her nightgown, she walked out into the hallway. The door to her bedroom was closed. The house was completely silent, except for the sound of a tree lightly brushing against the side of the house. She went to the front window, looked out, and in the dim light saw something on the gravel path in front of Mr. Noth’s car. It appeared to be a body. “Oh,” she shouted. She ran outside. It was a girl about twenty years old, lying in the gravel path, naked from the waist down, her buttocks and thighs bruised and scarred. The girl didn’t move. Nita screamed. She ran into the house and threw open the door to her bedroom, where her husband was stretched across the bed. “A girl’s on the ground outside the house,” Nita shouted. “I think she’s dead.”

  Mr. Noth sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes. “What?” he said.

  “You’ve got to go see,” shouted Nita.

  Mr. Noth sleepily put on his trousers. Auntie came out of her room in her nightgown and stood in the hallway looking annoyed. Mr. Noth followed Nita out to the gravel path, where the girl was lying.

  “She’s dead, she’s dead,” wailed Nita, cupping her face in her hands and covering her eyes.

  “She’s not dead,” said Mr. Noth. He touched the girl on her back. She didn’t move.

  “She’s dead,” screamed Nita.

  Mr. Noth nudged the girl. Still she didn’t move. Her eyes were closed and Nita could see that her hair was matted with blood. Mr. Noth shook the girl by the shoulder. In a few moments, she let out a moan and half opened her eyes.

  “Get up,” Mr. Noth said to her. Slowly, the girl lifted herself up on all fours, then to a sitting position.

  “We have to take her to a doctor,” said Nita. “We have to help her.”

  “She’ll be all right,” said Mr. Noth. He went into the house and came out with some clothes and put them on the ground beside the girl. He nudged the girl again. She stood up, staggered, sat down, then stood up again. Mr. Noth helped her get dressed. “Now you go home,” he said to her. “I’ve put bus money in your pocket.” The girl swayed on her feet, then slowly walked away on the gravel path out to the main road and disappeared.

  That morning, Nita stood in the shower for a full half hour. She kept scraping her skin with the body brush over and over. She stayed in the shower until she heard Mr. Noth drive away in his silver car.

  Mr. Noth never mentioned the incident with the girl. Neither did Auntie. A couple of times, Nita started to speak about it to Auntie, but found that she couldn’t. There were no words. So all of them said nothing. And as each day passed without mention of it, the incident seemed less and less real, until it melted away like a morning mist, and Nita began wondering if it actually happened. But she moved into the spare bedroom. That small thing she did.

  The next morning as Nita was serving Auntie her breakfast, Auntie grabbed her wrist. “Why aren’t you sleeping in your bedroom?” Nita didn’t answer. “That’s your room with Nephew. You’re a silly girl. When Nephew comes home next month, I want you back in that room with him. Do you understand?”

  “I’m not going back,” said Nita.

  “Yes, you are,” shouted Auntie, and she gave Nita’s wrist a rough twist.

  “I’m not,” said Nita. She pulled herself away from Auntie’s grip.

  A week after she’d moved into the spare bedroom, Nita missed her period. She missed again the next month. She felt nauseated.

  “You’re pregnant,” said Auntie, and she hugged Nita. “Am I pregnant?” Nita asked, disbelieving. “I’m sure of it,” said Auntie. She gently placed her hand on Nita’s stomach. “You’re pregnant, my dear.” Nita looked at herself in the mirror. “You’re pregnant,” Auntie said again and laughed. “After all of this time. I’ve been saying prayers for Nephew. You took a long time.”

  When Mr. Noth came home a few weeks later, he put his hand on Nita’s stomach and smiled. “Our son,” he said. After a day’s visit, he drove back to Battambang City.

  “His business with the rubber,” said Auntie.

  “He can stay away as long as he wants,” said Nita. Just the day before, she’d finished moving the rest of her clothes into the spare bedroom.

  “You’ll have a clever baby boy,” said Auntie. “Maybe we should name him Chamness.”

  Nita thought to herself that she could possibly have a son. Her husband and aunt wanted a son, but Nita decided that she was going to have a daughter. In fact, a daughter would be better. She began to be more careful about what she ate. In the mornings, she walked to the market and picked out the fruits and the vegetables. Pork, which had always been a favorite, she stopped eating because she heard that the local pigs had been contaminated with dirty water. She began taking naps in the afternoon. She took up sewing, to make clothes for the baby. On one of her trips into Battambang City, she got a sewing book and needles and yarn with a tiny bit of money Auntie had given her, and she taught herself to sew. Some mornings, she sat in a rocking chair in her new bedroom near the open window and began sewing a tiny shirt for her daughter. With the light streaming in, it was quiet, and peaceful. It was a small room, but it had everything she needed. As she sat sewing, Nita began concentrating on small things. She looked carefully at the way tiny specks of dust in the air danced in the sunlight and the way that the feathery boundary between shadow and light slowly moved across the floor as the hours passed. She studied her own hands, hands that would hold her daughter, and noticed how the lines on her palms crisscrossed in mysterious patterns and how the blue veins just beneath the skin of her wrists slightly bulged. In the early mornings, she inhaled the scents of mangoes and newly lit fires and damp earth that wandered through the house. She listened to the sounds of the farmers yoking their oxen and chickens pecking and women gathering wood.

  Auntie had stopped mentioning Nita’s move into the spare bedroom. There were other things to complain about. In fact, Auntie hadn’t been feeling well lately. She seemed tired and began going to bed right after supper. A few days later, she complained about dizziness and headach
es. But Auntie had always complained about something. Then she began retching. This went on for a week, until she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. “Call my nephew,” she moaned from her bed. When Mr. Noth arrived two days later, he picked Auntie up in his arms and drove her to a hospital in Battambang City.

  Auntie was given various medicines and sent home. But the nausea and fatigue persisted. Mr. Noth came back and sent her to different specialists. Each diagnosed an illness in his specialty and prescribed more medicines, but Auntie didn’t get any better. Mr. Noth wanted to take her to Thailand or Vietnam for another diagnosis, but Auntie refused. So she remained in a weakened state, barely able to get out of bed, nauseated and dizzy. Nita knew what was wrong with Auntie. Nita was putting a small amount of pesticide in her food every day. She’d read a book about agriculture in the Very Extraordinary Australian University of English, and she had computed exactly what dose to use, making Auntie sick but not ill enough to die. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner, she brought the food into Auntie’s room. At other times of the day, when Nita heard Auntie calling out for water or for help going to the toilet, she sometimes didn’t answer the call. Nita was in control now. In another few months, she would leave Battambang altogether, she’d decided. She would take the bus while her husband was away, using money she’d taken from Auntie’s drawer. She would go back to her village in Kandal and give birth to her daughter surrounded by her family. And there she would stay. It had all been temporary—the work on the farm, the marriage, the move to Battambang.

  At night, as she lay on her bed, Nita imagined that she could see her daughter curled up inside her. Her daughter was a perfect being. She’d made the little thing herself from her own body. A feeling like warm water moved through her insides where her daughter slept. She would be a good mother, she was certain, like Mae. She would nurse her daughter and bathe her and watch her grow. Her daughter would be clever, and she would go to university. And Nita would always be her mother. Thinking these nice things, she slipped into sleep. She dreamed that she was a queen standing in a great house, grander than Mr. Noth’s house in Battambang City. When she looked out, the glassy stone floors went on and on until they joined with a garden. Beautiful spirits hovered in the air all around her, blessing her and her daughter. And there was beautiful music from invisible instruments. Mae was there, and Father was there. Sreypov and Kamal were there. And dear Thida, smiling at her. And Lina. Everyone was so kind. And milk poured from her body, white and perfect and good.

  KAMAL

  (2013)

  Old Hok died in his little room next to the pagoda. The day after the cremation, at dawn, Kamal went to gather up the monk’s few things. Months before, the old man had willed him his sparse property.

  In the early morning, the village was quiet, except at the hour when the monks walked in procession to the river to bathe. An oxcart stood near the pagoda, shadowy in the dim light. As Kamal ambled down the dirt road, thinking of old Hok, his feet made little clouds of red dust. It was the dry season. When the rains came, the road filled with puddles and mud.

  Old Hok had been sick for two years, during which he hardly rose from his sleeping mat, and the air in his room was hot and stale and smelled like an old man. Kamal had never before been in Hok’s room. On the one shelf, Kamal found musty copies of The Unfaithful Woman and King Mongkut, an ink-stained envelope of photos, and a pair of spectacles with glass as thick as the bottom of a beer bottle. He paused a moment to flip through the photos: one showed Hok as a young man, standing in front of a grand palace somewhere. Another showed the monk on a beach with mountains rising in the distance. Another, a crowded city. Closing the envelope, Kamal felt a stab of bitterness that his work on the farm had never allowed him to see the world. He gingerly put the shelf’s items in his burlap bag, as well as the small statue of the Buddha and the photograph of the Venerable Thy Hut. There were no clothes aside from the monk’s sandals and saffron robes. Behind the room, amid the wilted garden, Hok’s broken bicycle leaned against an acacia tree. Kamal had known the old man for most of his life. It was believed that Hok might be a third or fourth cousin. However, Kamal’s parents never spoke about Hok. Years ago, there had been some argument, which no one could remember now, and Pich had forbidden any mention of the monk thereafter. Kamal couldn’t imagine old Hok ever arguing with anyone.

  Since the last harvest, Kamal and Pich had been spending their days threshing the rice sheaves against a wooden board in back of their house, catching the grains of rice in a large yellow sheet and then shoveling the rice into burlap bags. It was a mind-numbing task, but easier than tending the fields, and Kamal liked to listen to his mother singing her songs as she sewed. The men started threshing at dawn and worked until dusk, when the houses began to glow softly with their kerosene lamps, and the smells of cooked chicken and ginger wafted through the village.

  After Kamal finished eating dinner with his parents and sisters, he and his friends usually met in the rutted main road, then walked past the vegetable gardens and nervous cows until they reached the dry goods store opposite the market. There, the young men reclined in the white plastic chairs and drank palm wine until the surrounding fields disappeared into the night. Many of Kamal’s childhood friends had moved away from Praek Banan to get work. Of those remaining, many were married, and some even had children, but they’d been meeting together for years, and domestic affairs could always be forgotten for a few hours.

  “Any of you guys want old Hok’s bicycle?” Kamal said, and he took a deep swig of palm wine from a recycled laundry detergent container.

  “Why would anyone want that piece of shit,” said Narin, a tall boy who was trying to grow a beard.

  “It can be fixed,” said Kamal. He waited to see if there was any interest. Most of the young men owned motos and disdained bicycles. “I’ll keep it if nobody wants it.” The boys grunted and continued playing cards without comment. Hok and his bicycle meant nothing to them, thought Kamal. He’d keep the bicycle himself, but he’d have to hide it from his father.

  Across the road, a kerosene lamp came to life in Bormey’s house. Chivon dropped his cards and stared intently across at the house. Many times, Chivon had wanted to walk alone with Bormey by the river, but custom and her parents forbade it, unless they became engaged. Nevertheless, he and Bormey were in love, or so they told people. Kamal had never been in love, although he had kissed Narin’s sister a few times.

  “Old Hok was bad luck,” said Narin. “One of our chickens dropped dead every time he came to visit.”

  “You can’t blame that on old Hok,” said Kamal. “Your scrawny-ass chickens were dying because you didn’t feed them.” Kamal was drunk. He was thinking about what an adventurous life Hok had led, despite being a monk, and how everyone in the village thought he was just a tiresome old man who didn’t know anything. Kamal had shared many meals with Hok when the old monk was up on his feet. Many stories he’d heard from old Hok about his travels in Laos and Thailand and Australia, the foods people ate, the ships in the harbors, the buckets of money just lying in the road. According to Hok, in Australia he’d met a woman who wanted to marry him, and he’d come a whisker’s breadth from renouncing the monkhood and running off with her. With a laugh, he’d given Kamal a crumpled map of Australia and a knife with a beautiful carving of a dog on its handle. Now Hok was gone. Nobody knew of his exciting life except for Kamal and Hok’s other friend, crazy man Sok Rith. Kamal held one of his cards in the candle and watched it catch fire and shrivel into a black crisp.

  The week after Hok’s passing, the village began preparing for the Khmer New Year, and Chhay’s cousin Sophea arrived for her annual visit.

  She stayed with her uncle and aunt. Kamal followed a distance behind her as she walked to the market in her high heels. He waited in the stall that sold mangoes and rambutan, then followed her back to her uncle’s house. Her long silky hair swayed as she moved. Even under the shade of the covered stalls, her skin was so light she could p
ass for a barang. Her stylish and low-cut blouses, most likely bought in the shops of Phnom Penh, revealed the curves of her breasts. Some of the merchants would shoo her away as she approached their stalls. But Chhay, who sold fried crickets and grasshoppers, always welcomed her into his stall and offered her a warm can of Coca-Cola. Sometimes, Sophea met her childhood girlfriends at the market, and they locked arms like schoolgirls and spent a half hour chatting under the awning of the fabric shop.

  Following the evening hours with his friends, Kamal walked by her uncle’s house, hoping to get a glimpse of her through the open window. When he couldn’t see her inside, he sat in the dark next to the chicken coop and found himself mumbling Buddhist prayers, something he never did even at the pagoda. He saw her smooth skin when he went to sleep that night and, the next day, heard her voice in the sounds of the boys’ kites, whose arched bamboo struts and wrapping paper hummed in the wind.

  After a game of Chol Chhoung one evening in mid-week, Kamal overheard two men talking, both drunk and smoking cigarettes.

  “The little whore is back,” said one of the men.

  “A pricey whore.”

  “Did you see how she was looking at Tararith today at the market?”

  “How was that, brother?”

  “Straight in the eye. And long. Rith’s wife chased her away.”

  “She’s a slut, all right. She’s looked at me just like that.”

  “You couldn’t afford her.”

  The men began laughing, showing their tobacco-stained teeth in the light of their lantern. Kamal should have walloped them, he later told himself. He was twenty-seven years old and far stronger, but instead he only slammed his fists together and walked home on the dirt road.

  That night, lying on his mat next to the oxen, Kamal couldn’t sleep. His father was snoring beside him, and above, in the house, he could hear his sister Nita singing to her baby. It was a happy song. Nita had settled quickly back into the family after leaving her husband. Only a month earlier, Mr. Noth had arrived at their house in his big silver car, having driven all the way from Battambang, and demanded that Nita and her baby be returned to him. However, as soon as he saw that the child was a little girl, he departed empty-handed.