Three Flames

by Alan Lightman

  When people in the village looked out their windows at night and saw the dim form of Sreypov walking back from the fields, she could feel their disapproval. They thought she was haunted and bringing bad luck to the village. Some told their children to stay away from Pich and Ryna’s “strange daughter.” You are you and I am me, Sreypov thought to herself.

  To be sure, there was plenty of bad luck in the village. But Mr. Noeum couldn’t blame her for the tree that fell on his tin roof. That tree had been sitting in a dangerous position for years, the trunk halfway sawed through by Mr. Noeum’s crazy son, and everyone had been telling him forever to take it down. Or Mrs. Nol’s husband, who disappeared one day during the Khmer New Year festivities wearing his new silk jacket and sandals from Praek Khmau and smoking an expensive cigarette. For the next week, Mrs. Nol gave Sreypov the hard suspicious stare in the vegetable stall. “Don’t come near me,” said Mrs. Nol, who wore wool sweaters even when it was ninety degrees. “You little srey arak, you little devil girl.” “You don’t know anything about me,” said Sreypov. Husbands were disappearing all the time for one reason or another, she wanted to say, but she held back. She didn’t want to make Mrs. Nol even more angry and upset. And what about the drunk lady named Grandma Lo-la, who cast spells on all the houses as the boys rolled her down the road in a wheelbarrow. Why not blame her for bad luck?

  And what about the bad luck of Sreypov’s own family? By far the worst bad luck was what happened to her poor sister Nita. Dearest sweet Nita. On 15 September 2014, she skidded into a tree on her moto, broke her neck, and was killed instantly, leaving her one-year-old daughter, Theary, to be raised by the family. Some of the villagers blamed Sreypov and her nightly wanderings even for that.

  Sreypov tried to ignore all the mumblings and just go about her day. In the early mornings, she played with her little niece, already beginning to look like Nita. When her mother and sister went off to the market, she met her friends at the pagoda and walked to class in the four-room schoolhouse with the crumbling walls. After school, in the warm afternoons, she studied her history and biology and Khmer lessons, helped prepare dinner for the family. In the evenings, she went out to the fields and wrote in her journal. Many of the villagers couldn’t write at all. Most hadn’t finished eighth grade. Most hadn’t journeyed a hundred kilometers from Praek Banan, or even as far as Praek Khmau, where Sreypov sometimes went with Kamal to the Internet cafés. There, she’d read about Aung San Suu Kyi and Hillary Clinton and seen a video clip of a soccer game in Brazil. Praek Banan was just a speck in the world. A thousand villagers in all, counting men, women, and children. They formed their opinions listening to the radio at night. In the day, those opinions were stretched and spun sideways and refashioned by gossip, mostly by the women walking in pairs to the river to do a wash or sitting in the shade under their houses while their husbands were off in the fields. They talked about how they were managing their husbands (“my husband won’t eat anything but meat,” “my husband hates me to fall asleep before him”); marrying off their daughters (“tell your daughter to wear a red wristband on her wedding night, and she’ll get pregnant right away”); shopping (“Chinese people are owning everything these days”). Sreypov heard all the talk, but she kept it to herself. Except in her journal, where she wrote everything down and formed her own ideas. You are you and I am me, she thought to herself. Gossip and do what you want. Believe what you want. I’m a poet. I’m going to university. And after that, who knows what.

  II.

  As day moves to night,

  Light fades and dims,

  Death one day nearer.

  I reach out my limbs

  To the undying stars.

  When Sreypov turned seventeen, Pich began planning for her to wed Mr. Ly’s son, Kosal. Pich didn’t say anything to Sreypov, but she heard him whispering to Ryna. “Mr. Noth never coughed up anything for us,” Pich said to his wife late one night as they lay side by side under their mosquito net. “All that money, and nothing for us.” “Poor Nita,” whispered Ryna. “It was a tragedy,” said Pich. “She was a good daughter. But we wasted the chance. Battambang is too far away. We shouldn’t have let Daughter Nita go to Battambang. We have to marry Sreypov to someone closer, so we can keep control.” “Daughter Sreypov isn’t ready to get married,” whispered Ryna. “She has one year left of school, and that’s what she’s going to do.” “Listen to me,” Pich said. “Sreypov is already seventeen. Ly is rich. And he’s right here under our noses. We can keep an eye on him and his son. Sreypov is friendly with his wife.” “Sreypov will not agree to it,” said Ryna. “She’ll do what I tell her,” said Pich. “If you think so,” said Ryna, “then you don’t know your daughter.” From her sleeping mat behind the dangling sheet, Sreypov smiled.

  There was a page in Sreypov’s journal, dated 3 October 2015, with some words scratched through, written again below, scratched through a second time, then finally written again. The words were: “I hate Father.”

  When Sreypov wrote those words, lying under the stars one night, she felt as if one of the planets in her abdominal solar system had suddenly exploded, spewing dirt and rock into space. Surely, she had just cursed her karma for the rest of eternity for even thinking such a thing. In her next life she’d probably come back as a bug, or a snake. But she’d thought it, and she’d written it, and she couldn’t bring herself to scratch it out again. A kind of freedom swept through her, mixed with a dread. And a power. She felt powerful in the sacrilege and the clarity of the statement.

  In Mekh, time didn’t flow uniformly. Whole months went unrecorded. By contrast, some hours were split into second-by-second observations: tiny brown insects moving from one blade of grass to the next. Some entries skipped ahead, sprinkled with poems. Present and past sometimes merged, sometimes crossed, sometimes dissolved into the future. That was the way of memories and premonitions. “I hate Father,” she wrote on 3 October 2015, when she felt that she’d started some big thing in motion.

  But the thing had already started the previous night. She’d been on her way back to her family house after lying in the fields when she spotted the silhouette of her father out on the road. Immediately, she felt the dark churn in her stomach. But she followed him. He was walking in the direction of Khean’s fields, a vast expanse at the edge of the village once owned by old man Khean but never farmed. After the Pol Pot time, newcomers to the village had begun building their houses on Khean’s fields without asking anyone for permission, but no one objected. Sreypov knew her father’s gait well—when he was setting out for his farm at dawn, when he was coming home tired at the end of the day, when he was drunk. But this night his shadow, framed by the light of the moon, moved in a way that she’d never seen before. He walked briskly, and there was something else unfamiliar and strange in his gait. Sreypov kept a distance back as she followed. He walked past the Cheam house, the Soy house, the Kim house, and the Yarn house, a group of families who had moved together to Praek Banan from Takeo. Their houses glowed in the night. Even though it was well past the evening meal, the smells of garlic and ginger and lemongrass hovered in the warm air. Just beyond those houses, Sreypov passed a broken moto on the side of the road. In a dark stretch, Pich stopped suddenly. Sreypov ducked behind a tree. Then he veered off the main road and walked on a narrow dirt path past another cluster of houses, approaching an isolated house beneath some tamarind trees. He climbed the ladder of that house, removed his sandals, and went in.

  Standing in the moon shadows, Sreypov could see her father through the window. There was a woman. They embraced and kissed. It was a long embrace, more tender than any she’d seen with her mother. When the couple separated, Sreypov recognized the woman. It was Lakhena, her father’s girlfriend of several years. Lakhena was well known to the family. Ryna had occasionally pointed her out to the children, referring to her as a dirty woman, but Sreypov had never before seen Lakhena’s house. Somehow, she’d always imagined that Lakhena was part of a story that may or may no
t be true, perhaps just an acquaintance of her father—in any case a situation well beyond her understanding. But that kiss now, she had seen. Why didn’t her father kiss her mother like that? For a few minutes, Sreypov walked about in the shadows below the house, unsure what she should do. Then she climbed the ladder and stood in the open door frame.

  The room was lit by two kerosene lamps. On a table near the door, a bottle of palm wine and two glasses. Several meters away stood Lakhena and her father. He looked thinner than usual. For a few moments, no one spoke. So this is the place, Sreypov thought to herself, the place where Father goes one night a week, coming back to their house at dawn, disheveled and moody. This was the place. The room had his smell. Was this like a second home to him? Did he feel at home here? This man was her father, and at the same time he wasn’t her father.

  “Would you like to come in?” said Lakhena. She seemed to know Sreypov. She’d seen Pich together with his children at various events.

  Pich’s body stiffened. He looked at his daughter as if she belonged to someone else. “This is none of your business,” he said. “Go home. Go back to your mother.”

  “You’re my father,” said Sreypov.

  “Let your daughter come in,” said Lakhena, as if they were all part of one big family.

  “I don’t want her to come in,” said Pich.

  “I’d like her to come in,” said Lakhena. “This is my house.” She took a step toward Sreypov.

  “You have no business being here, Daughter,” said Pich. “Never follow me here again. Now go home.”

  Sreypov walked into Lakhena’s house. It looked much like her own house, except everything was extremely neat and in place. Perhaps Lakhena had just straightened the house especially for her father’s visit, or perhaps it was always orderly. She saw two bowls of rice and vegetables on the counter, some mangoes, a woman’s dress neatly folded over a chair, a shirt she recognized as her father’s, a belt. For the first time, she became aware of the music, coming from a radio. The music added to the injury. Nearby, she saw the sleeping mats. For a moment, she imagined her father and Lakhena lying there together. Now her father was holding Lakhena’s hand. She’d never seen her father holding any woman’s hand.

  “Father,” she screamed. She looked at him straight in his eyes and kept staring.

  “Lakhena takes care of me,” said Pich. “Better than your mother does.”

  “Your father and I are good together,” said Lakhena.

  “You act sweet,” said Sreypov, “but you’re a bad woman.”

  Pich slapped her. Then he poured himself a cup of palm wine. He sat down in a chair and crossed his legs in an easy manner. “I work hard,” he said to his daughter. “I sweat. I put food on the table. I take care of my family. I can do what I want. You’re a child. You don’t understand anything. Go home.”

  Later that night, Sreypov couldn’t remember anything that had been said. She was shocked—by the slap, of course, which still burned, but much more by the realization that her father was capable of sweetness and love. Was it ever there with her mother? She strained to remember. She began thinking of other husbands and wives that she knew in the village. Some showed mutual affection, many did not. Why did people get married at all? Sister Nita hadn’t loved her husband, she knew that for sure. Makara’s husband beat her. Maybe she herself would never get married. Marriage was a trick. It wasn’t what people said. She could never tell her mother about what she had seen. Maybe her mother already knew all of it, the sweetness and the dirtiness of it. As Sreypov lay on her mat, unable to sleep, a sadness went through her, and a fear. The world had grown unsteady and mean under her feet. She felt adrift. For some years, she’d imagined a life beyond Praek Banan, but she wasn’t sure such a life really existed, or whether she deserved it even if it did. She was the blood of her parents, no changing that. She was a part of the lie. And she felt more suffering and darkness to come. Something.

  III.

  Sister flying through the night,

  Her lovely life a thread so slight,

  While blacker night stands still and waits

  To crush a thousand lovely fates.

  “I’m not going to marry Kosal,” Sreypov said a few nights later. She didn’t say it to her father. She didn’t want to talk to him anymore. She just said it.

  “Kosal!” said Thida. She stopped brushing her mother’s hair. “He does nothing except play cards.” Thida covered her mouth as soon as she realized she had stumbled into a family dispute she knew nothing about.

  “How do you know about this?” said Pich. “Never mind. It will be a good wedding. Mr. Ly will probably bring musicians from Phnom Penh.”

  Without speaking more words, Sreypov left the house and started walking toward Mr. Hang’s fields. Ryna followed her. “Don’t try to make me marry Kosal,” Sreypov said to her mother as they walked side by side. On the other side of the road, Mr. Ly’s generator groaned and chugged, partly drowning out the drops of music that dribbled out of the houses.

  “I won’t,” said Ryna. “You should do what you want. I can’t speak for your father. He’s . . . You know how he is.”

  “Why do you stay with him?” said Sreypov.

  Ryna hesitated. “He’s my husband.”

  “Is that the only reason?” Sreypov turned and looked directly at her mother. Ryna looked away.

  “I’m not going to marry Kosal, no matter what,” said Sreypov.

  Ryna nodded and firmly clasped her daughter’s hand. “I know,” she said. “Please go talk to your brother about what you should do.”

  “I know what I’m going to do.”

  “I mean about your father.”

  Kamal now lived in his own house. A year earlier, shortly after Nita’s cremation, he had married a village girl, Han Somrith, and the village men had built the new couple a house near the market. Each morning before dawn, Kamal walked back to the family house, had breakfast with Pich in the dark, yoked the ox under the house, and followed his father to the farm—as he had done since he was fifteen years old.

  Sreypov waited for Kamal. When he arrived, trailing a cloud of red dust, he smelled of manure. He invited her into his house, where his wife was chopping vegetables, but Sreypov shook her head no, so they sat on the ground next to the water pump.

  “Bong. Father wants me to get married,” said Sreypov. She noticed that her brother had gained weight since moving into his own house. His cheeks were fuller, and she could see his belly flesh bulging out over his pants. He was taller and bigger than Pich.

  “Married to who?”

  “Ly Kosal.”

  “A rich family,” said Kamal.

  “I’m not doing it,” said Sreypov.

  Kamal nodded. “Have you talked to Mother?”

  “She said talk to you.”

  Kamal stood up and began walking around the water pump. He was eleven years older than Sreypov, now the man of his own house. As he paced, a wandering chicken hurried to get out of his way and began squawking. “Here’s my best advice, Sister,” he said. “I think you should ask Father to postpone the marriage for a year. Other things being the same. Then you’ll be able to finish school.”

  “After I finish high school, I’m going to university,” said Sreypov. “I’m going to be a poet.” Sreypov was no longer certain of these things, but she said them anyway. “Will you speak to Father?”

  Kamal looked at his sister in surprise mixed with admiration mixed with fear. “What would I say?” said Kamal.

  “You’d say that I should be able to do what I want. You’d say you agree with me. Mother agrees with me.”

  Kamal’s face had turned to stone.

  “Father has ruined our family,” said Sreypov, loudly enough for Somrith to hear up in the house. She wanted Somrith to hear. “Do you see that, Brother?” Kamal didn’t say anything. “You know what he’s done. Look how he treats Mother. What he did to Thida. And you. He treats you like cow shit. You wanted to leave Praek Banan. I reme
mber. Why didn’t you?”

  “Sreypov . . . you’re talking about things you don’t know.”

  “I know that you wanted to leave Praek Banan,” said Sreypov. “I’m not blaming you for that. You should have left. You should have married that girl. What was her name?”

  “Sophea.”

  “Why didn’t you marry her?”

  Kamal didn’t say anything. Finally: “I don’t think she wanted to marry me. I wasn’t . . .”

  “You should have left anyway,” said Sreypov. “Father has wrecked our family,” she shouted. “I hate him. I hate him.”

  “Don’t say that, Sreypov.” Kamal glanced quickly up at his house to see if Somrith had heard anything. In fact, Somrith was standing at the door, worry on her face.

  “Yes, I’m saying it. I’m saying it. I hate him. Don’t you hate him?”

  Kamal put his hand to his brow and began rubbing his forehead back and forth.

  “Mother hates him,” said Sreypov. “I know she does. She just won’t say it. Thida hates him. She won’t even look at him. We have to do something.”

  “What can we do?” said Kamal.

  “I don’t know,” said Sreypov. “You’re afraid of him, aren’t you.”

  “I’m not afraid of him.”

  Sreypov knew he was lying. They were all afraid of Father. “Will you talk to him?”

  Kamal sighed. “I’m not sure. You’re going so fast with this, Sister. I need to think.”

  “You know I’m telling the truth.”

  Kamal stared at the fields across the road. “All right. I’ll talk to him.”

  “When?”

  “Sometime in the next couple of weeks. I need to think about what to say. I need to think.” Kamal sighed again. He gently touched Sreypov on her shoulder and went up the ladder into his house.

  Two new pages in her journal had to be ripped out because they got waterlogged in the fields. On the next page: “12 October 2015: A talk with Brother Kamal last night. He said he would speak to Father and do something. Maybe Father will listen to the other male in the family. But I’m not sure Kamal will do what he said. He doesn’t have any spine. Kosal came up to me today at the market and started talking. He’s lazy but not stupid. He started telling me all this stuff about his father’s moto business and that he was going to inherit the business. He said that once a month he goes with his father to Saigon to work on motos. They own a shop there that fixes the cracked cylinder heads so they can resell the motos. Cracked cylinder heads! Why is he telling me about cracked cylinder heads? Does he think he’s getting me to fall in love with him? Does he think cracked cylinder heads are going to make me marry him? I told him that I might write a poem about cracked cylinder heads. He’s a nice boy. I hope he finds a wife. Mother is sticking up for me. She should stick up for herself.”