Three Flames

by Alan Lightman

  The girls constantly gossiped about who would be allowed into Auntie’s room, who would become her next pet. The pets got better food and sometimes their choice of the customers. When Thida first arrived at the brothel, the girls began whispering about her light skin. Everyone was saying that Thida would become one of Auntie’s pets. But Thida kept her distance. Auntie had a rough laugh, and she slapped. In those first months, Thida was completely silent, living in the land of the dead. The other girls, Auntie, the cook, Auntie’s business partner Samphors, who carried a gun in her purse, the fat men and the skinny men—all were nearly invisible to her, pieces of flesh that made noise.

  One night in September, when the rain was coming down hard and business was slow and the girls sat in the bar reading magazines, Auntie asked for a Coca-Cola from her table in the corner. Thida brought it to her. Just that small thing. Auntie reached up and gently touched Thida’s cheek. Thida’s breathing stopped. The music stopped. The laughing at the bar. The air. Thida had never felt a touch like that. This wasn’t the hand that slapped. She floated. She covered Auntie’s hand with her own. Her body dissolved into that loving hand on her cheek. “Honey, you’re crying,” said Auntie.

  After that night, Thida began doing small errands for Auntie, bringing her drinks, following her around in the lounge and in the cooking area behind the brothel and in the cleaning room where they washed sheets. One night, she gave Auntie a bath in the kitchen, something she’d never done with her own mother, sponging Auntie’s back with hot water while Auntie moaned with pleasure. Auntie’s flesh turned pink and softened to Thida’s touch. It softened and spread and warmed until Thida felt that she was part of Auntie’s body. “My father sold me,” Thida said quietly. “Men are shit,” said Auntie. “I treat you nice, don’t I? I treat you nice.”

  A week later, Thida waited in the hallway at night in the dark until Auntie came out of the bathroom in her robe. There was a chance Auntie might talk to her there in the hallway, say something sweet, just the two of them. That was the first night Thida slept in Auntie’s room. When she entered, two other girls were asleep on the floor. She lay down in Auntie’s bed. But on the side nearest the door, in case Auntie turned mean.

  Ryna was on the phone, crying and talking crazy. “Mi-oun, you have to leave that bad place. Come home right away.” After a year of getting Thida’s cloth packages of money from a third party, Davuth had grown suspicious and discovered where she was actually working.

  “Are you getting the money?” said Thida.

  “You have to come home.”

  “I can’t. Madam Chheng paid seventeen hundred dollars for me.”

  “What! Who did she pay?”

  “Cousin Boran.”

  “Boran!”

  “Father owed him money.”

  Thida heard screaming and her mother and father shouting at each other. Then her mother got back on the phone. “I’ll come get you,” she said. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “No,” said Thida. “Don’t. Don’t. If I try to leave, they’ll hurt me. They might hurt you, too.” She ended the call.

  Thida felt herself shaking and couldn’t stop shaking. Sister Sreyrath wrapped her arm around her. “What was that?” said Sreyrath, who had just put on her lipstick for the night.

  “Nobody,” said Thida. She took a long draw on the pipe.

  “Was it your mother?” said Sreyrath.

  “I didn’t want her to know,” said Thida, rocking back and forth. “I didn’t want her to know. I didn’t want her to know.”

  “The world is full of shit,” said Sreyrath. “But we’re beautiful, aren’t we.” She held a mirror to her face, and then to Thida’s face. Thida looked in the mirror. The skin was thin and stretched tight, the eyes sunk in their sockets, the pupils huge.

  “My mother won’t love me now,” said Thida. She put the pipe aside and lay down on the sofa.

  “I don’t have a mother,” said Sreyrath. She kissed Thida on the lips. “We’re all right here. We’re beautiful.”

  “We’re nothing,” said Thida.

  The third time that Thida’s hymen was resewn to make her like a virgin again, she came down with a fever. It was her second year at Madam Chheng’s. For three days, she lay burning on her bed, unable to get up. Several of the girls brought her cold soft drinks and noodles. Thida half opened her eyes and stared at the red fabric draped across the ceiling. Someone was holding her hand. “Sister.” “Sister.” In the distance, the sound of karaoke. Was it daytime or night? The room had no windows. It smelled of perfume, but underneath was the stink of the men. Someone grasped her hand. She was on fire. “Water.” She opened her eyes. Auntie, on the edge of her bed, held ice to her cheek and stroked her forehead. Thida closed her eyes again. She was standing beside the river in Praek Banan with her little sister Sreypov and the river was orange, and then they were slowly paddling a fishing boat through the tall grasses. It started to rain. The rain soaked their clothes and felt cool and wet. Thida opened her eyes. Auntie was still there on the edge of her bed, holding ice to her cheek and softly singing:

  Sleep, my darling, sleep.

  Don’t cry, my baby.

  Your rice with honey

  Is now prepared.

  It must have been very early in the morning, because Thida couldn’t hear any sounds except the call of the dawn noodle seller out on the street. Thida held Auntie’s hand.

  The girls brought her pills. When she got over the fever, she kept taking the pills. They helped her sleep. She would drift off, then wake up dreaming that a man was on top of her, even feel the weight and the sticky slime of him. In that twilight of sleeplessness and exhaustion, the room dimly lit by the bulb down the hall, she began to fully fathom what had happened to her. She’d been sold by her father. She’d been turned into filth. She’d look at the bottle of pills by her bed and think that maybe she should just swallow them all and be finished, like Soren had done. What did it matter? Wasn’t she already dead? Worse than dead. In the dim light, she lay sleepless and stared at the pills.

  The next night as she lay in her bed unable to sleep, the ghost of her grandfather softly entered her room. Ryna’s father. Thida had seen the one photo of Ta that her mother kept in the small metal box. Grandfather appeared much older than in the photo, with little hair on his head and a limp, but he was easily recognizable from the missing front tooth and the narrow nose like her mother’s. He carefully closed the door, so as not to make the slightest sound, and sat on the edge of the bed. Like all ghosts, he was translucent, so that Thida could partly see through him to the other side of the room.

  “Granddaughter,” he said. “You look like your mother.” He patted her on the shoulder, and his eyes moved around the room. “Granddaughter, dear Granddaughter. I hate to see you in this bad place. Also, I hate to see you thinking bad thoughts. I’ve walked a thousand kilometers ten times to see this bad thing.” “I’m sorry, Ta,” said Thida. She thought to herself that she would tell her mother about this visit with Ta. But then she remembered that she would never see her mother again. “Don’t do it,” said Ta. “You’ll get out of this bad place.” “No,” said Thida. Ta lived in the world of the spirits. He didn’t know about brothels, the buying and selling of people, the debts, the filth. She looked at him again—an old man who didn’t know much. “Listen to my words, chao srey,” he said. “You’ll get out of this place for sure.” “I won’t in this life,” said Thida. “Just be ready to run,” said Ta.

  She put her head down and dreamed that she sat in the lounge with the girls, and it was so smoky from cigarettes that she couldn’t see across the room. Everyone was coughing. When she opened her eyes in the dark, she too was coughing. And she smelled burning. For a while, she lay in her bed wondering if she was still dreaming. The house was silent. She must still be asleep. Then she heard a scream. “Fire.” Suddenly, people were running down the hall. Someone flung open the door to her room. Smoke poured in. Thida rushed into the hallway, coughing. Al
l the doors were open and the floor was wet. Should she go right or go left? At the end of the hall on the right was a narrow stairway barely wide enough for one person. Through the smoke, she could see several girls standing there with bags and photos ripped off their walls. Why were they waiting? On the left was a metal door leading to steep metal stairs winding down to the street two floors below. Someone wailed. “Get out! Get out!” Two girls came down the wood stairs from a higher floor dragging a third girl. Now Thida could see flames in one of the rooms and flames leaping down from the hall ceiling. She could feel the heat on her face. It was so hot. It burned. “Go down,” someone screamed.

  Thida ran toward the stairway, tripped over some bedding in the hallway, got up, and started down the stairs. Several girls rushed ahead of her. Her lungs burned, burned. She could barely see through the smoke. Auntie. “Where’s Auntie?” she shouted. She saw Sreyrath at the end of the hallway. “Where’s Auntie?”

  “I think she’s already out,” said Sreyrath, running for the stairway. “Don’t worry about her.”

  On the first floor, Thida ran down the hallway to Auntie’s room. It was filled with smoke, and one of the walls was on fire. Auntie lay on her sofa coughing. When she saw Thida, she propped herself up on one arm and said, “Help me, honey.”

  In the next instant, Thida imagined that she was lifting Auntie off the sofa, pulling her out of the room and down the hallway, then out of the building to the street, out to the good air where the girls stood crying and safe under the blinking neon sign. “Help me,” Auntie said again, pleading this time. For a moment, Thida stood there at the door, looking at Auntie coughing on the sofa. Then she turned and ran.

  People in Praek Banan say that in the early mornings, you can see spirits floating in the mist over the river or hovering in the fields where the land meets the sky. Sometimes at dawn, the procession of monks going down to the river pauses for a few moments. “Listen,” whisper the monks. “Can you hear them singing? We are blessed.” Babies born during these spirit visitations are said to bring good luck from previous lives.

  Every morning at dawn, just after the monks’ procession, Pich and Kamal set out for their fields to tend to their rice and cucumbers and beans. They are still poor, but their debts have been paid, and Pich has begun speaking less roughly than in the past. But his daughter Thida will not look at him.

  For anyone who asks, Pich and Ryna say that Thida spent three years working in the garment factories like a good daughter and now has come home. Over those three years, many of Thida’s friends married. Soma But wedded Chanty Lov’s son, and the couple built a house with a new tin roof near the monks’ quarters in back of the pagoda. Kanha married a cousin in Takeo and moved to his family’s sugarcane farm there. Kimsrung married a boy in the Phal family, who owns the spice shop next to the market. Already, Kimsrung has two children. A year ago, Thida’s own sister Nita was married off to a rubber merchant and now lives in Battambang, far from home. Thida herself can never marry.

  When Thida’s friends invite her to come to their houses or to stroll with their babies, she declines. She is needed to help her mother, she says. When she sees friends at the market, she pauses to say a few words, but she never says much. Since coming home, she has been mostly silent.

  At night, she sleeps with her mother. For some time now, Ryna has stopped lying next to Pich. Each evening before bed, Thida brushes her mother’s long silky hair, the strokes downward and downward and soft like a breeze moving over the river. But some nights, she drops the brush and begins screaming. And even though she throws her arms around her mother’s neck and locks their bodies tightly together, she sees Auntie staring at her from the sofa. The eyes slice through her like knives. And next to Auntie on the sofa is her father. He looks at her without expression, his hand cupping one of Auntie’s bare breasts. At the same time, he is here, here, just on the other side of the hanging sheet. It is her terrible secret, the secret within the secret. It is the death without chance of rebirth. She sees the draperies on fire, the bureau on fire, the porcelain vase on the table.

  PICH

  (1973)

  For a year, Pich had a job selling sugarcane after school. It was a stupid job to pass the time and give him a little cash to buy palm wine and occasionally take a bus to Praek Khmau. One morning he woke up and realized that it was mostly women and girls who sold sugarcane. His mother sold sugarcane. His cousin Riya sold sugarcane. Pich decided that his days selling sugarcane were over. But he needed a little income. His half-blind brother Chann worked on the family farm with their father, but that was hard labor. Around that time, his one and only friend, Leap, just before he left for Malaysia, told Pich that the easy money was in stealing bicycles. So Pich began stealing bikes and selling them in nearby towns.

  At first, Pich was just another teenage boy who would sneak into some village in the middle of the night and try to wheel away somebody’s bike from under their house—often stirring up the chickens and waking the family. But then he met a gang of young bicycle thieves. He didn’t have any money, so he paid them two stolen chickens to let him join the group. Anybody can steal chickens, they said.

  Pich needed practice if he was going to work with the gang. At night, he tried folding up the kickstand of his own bike a few dozen times, very quietly, then wheeling it out to the road. In the afternoons, he began studying old man Chea, who could walk around as silent as a light breeze.

  After a month, Pich had some techniques figured out. The gang met every Tuesday evening next to the pagoda. They sat in rickety plastic chairs they took from Phirum’s filthy restaurant. For an hour or two, they played cards and drank, and then they set out for the night’s work.

  It was a thrill, stealing bicycles in the moonlight. The boys dressed in dark clothes and signaled one another with their own invented sign language. They got to know all the sleeping villages along the Bassac. They’d ride past kilometers of dark rice fields, tangles of low scrub brush and palms, their bikes kicking up clouds of dust, and then they’d see a cow or two wandering on the dirt road, and the dim lights of a village ahead. If there weren’t any soldiers on the road, the gang feared nobody. They could do anything they wanted. Sometimes, the boys snatched a sickle or a bag of rice just to show they could. But it was the bicycles they were after.

  Occasionally, Pich would think about the victims sleeping up in the houses while the boys stole their bikes in the darkness below. If it looked to be an especially poor family, he’d pass that house and go to the next. After all, he told himself, he could steal only one bike on an outing. Most of the time, he didn’t give a second thought to the owners of the bicycles. They had their business, and this was his business.

  Pich didn’t consider himself the brightest of the gang members, but he was good at pinching bikes. Some of the boys had a knack for theft, and some were skilled at sweet-talking dumb farmers into paying a thousand riels for a used bike. Pich was good at both. Within a couple of months, the other boys were following him around, studying his technique. Pich loved all of that. He was one of them now. For the first time in his life, he was a member of a group. He had friends.

  A few of the boys had no talent at all. They couldn’t keep from farting even right under somebody’s house in the middle of the night. Or they would forget to bring along a tire pump. How could you steal a bike fifteen kilometers from home and not bring along a tire pump? Those boys were kicked out of the gang. They were endangering the operation. Go sell sugarcane, the gang’s boss, Vann, told them. Yeah, go sell sugarcane, Pich repeated. The wannabe thieves threatened to tell their parents, and then Vann made his own threats. As far as Pich knew, nobody told their parents about the bike business. His own parents didn’t care a cow’s shit what he did. They never asked when he was coming home or where he’d been or where he’d gotten the money to buy a nice radio and a new bike. With Chann, they’d ask how many times he took a piss that day.

  The most clever members of the gang were Vann and Dara.
Vann didn’t have a father. Eighteen years old, two years older than Pich, Vann was extremely handsome and always boasting that he had two girlfriends. He was planning to get rich and take the ladies to Phnom Penh and buy a big house for all three of them to live in like one happy family. Dara had a father, but his mother had died of tuberculosis, and he was passed around from aunt to aunt a few months at a time. One night, he told Pich that he’d never had a friend like him before. Me neither, said Pich. Leap was gone, but now he had Dara. They were lying on their backs under the tamarind tree near Pich’s house, drinking palm wine and looking up at the stars. At that hour, most of the villagers had snuffed out their candles and lamps, and only one tiny light in the salt seller’s house spoiled the perfect black of the sky. Somebody like you, said Dara, you must have lots of friends. Not really, said Pich. Then Dara said that he thought Pich was more than a friend, and he gently eased his hand onto Pich’s thigh. Pich sat up and removed Dara’s hand. Sorry, said Dara. I’m just drunk. Don’t fucking do that again, said Pich, drunk or not.