by Geoff Ryman
You get used to him going in the morning.
You cease to be flustered when his grand wife talks to you kindly. You cease to be bewildered by the generosity and the good behaviour, and the balancing act that goes on behind her eyes. You grow used to wanting to respond in kind with similar acts, only to find it is never appropriate. Nothing you have can be given to a queen. You accept that she has everything over you. She and your husband spend hours discussing the Gods, as if they shared rice with them. Together they analyse the teachings of the Buddha as if they could penetrate his mind or his previous lives just by thinking, by talking.
You grow used to the ache in your heart because you can never give him that. Your mind, like your fingers, is blunted with work. You will go thick-waisted and stolid from all the sitting and all the feeding, for you cannot stop your peasant hands and mouth flying to food, stuffing it in just in case you do not eat tomorrow.
You accept that though you yearn to be friends with the servant girls, it can never really be. The ones who are friendly are simply being smart, currying favour. The ones who are friendliest are the very ones you trust the least, the ones who have the brightest, hardest eyes.
So your choice is stark. You can melt into the shadows and start to die. Or you can pray, pull in strength, and say: I am a good and chaste woman who deserves respect.
You go to the Queen and say, “Queen Victory, I have a suggestion."
Jayarajadevi puts down her palm-leaf book and looks smoothly pleased. “Yes, Cat."
"You and the Princess Indradevi work so hard at the school, at the hospital, with the medicines. It seems to me that I should help in some way."
The Queen smiles approval. This strange, wise, virtuous, woman who is made of smoke says, “Yes, Cat.” Again.
"I could take responsibility for the kitchens and the household."
A pause.
"That is rather a large task."
"It is a task which the Queen will understand is very familiar to me."
She drinks you in. She always leans back and takes you in, like you are a perfume. She does it to remind herself of who you are, why she likes you, how she can bear you.
"I must ask my sister the Princess Indradevi Kansru. I cannot simply make a decision that involves her. It is good that you wish to do this."
Education and grace and training and a fine mind and a good heart. And one whole eldest son, to your incomplete one. She has the ability, just by sitting there and shining, to make you lower your eyes with shame.
Lady, I would ask you to teach me how to read, if I could bear to have you do something else for me, to climb down so far. I would ask you about the Gods, but you would never finish explaining, and I would never finish misunderstanding.
You work so hard and so sincerely to make me part of the family. You do this for our husband's sake, for the sake of the Way, for the sake of virtue and your own salvation. You just cannot quite do it for your sake or for mine.
"I....I could mention the idea to Princess Indradevi for you."
And yes, that is a challenge, a hesitant foot forward.
"Oh, the Princess and I are sisters, it will be better and easier if I do it."
As simple as that. She's bested you by speaking from the heart.
So it is the way of acceptance. She will always be Queen. You never will.
It is not even clear that you want to be, Cat.
This dreamlike life will go on, cut off from all things that make any sense. You will learn, Cat, but slowly.
Your task, Cat, will be to make a place of simplicity the King can return to, a place removed from palaces or temples or power or prayer.
You are dismissed by your pleased and grateful Queen, and you think.
You want a New Way, Lady? You shall have one.
* * * *
Fishing Cat moved into a hut.
She cast aside her fine robes. She dug a trench for a fire and made a clay oven to roast and bake, and she strung hammocks. The only concession to her status was a hanging golden curtain that could be lowered, for privacy, when the King visited her.
"Fishing Cat, what is this I hear about a hut?” asked the Queen.
"Oh. I am happier there,” said Cat.
The Queen looked stricken. “Have we been unkind in any way or made you unwelcome?"
Cat felt bigger, happier, and the Queen looked more frail. “No, no, not at all. But I am not comfortable in a palace, with all its finery. I am happy with my palm-frond roof, and fine handsome shed."
"But I feel terrible, as if we had said or done something!"
Quite sincerely, Cat took the Queen's delicate hand in her own. “No, not at all. You have been an inspired vision of the virtues. But I'm sure the Queen can see. The girls come to talk to me. We sit and do our chores and joke. They come and rind the fruit, and so do I. Really. I am happy."
And so, my Queen, is the King when he comes to stay here.
He remembers the oyster sky, and the green grass. For he has another home, in another land. And I have something that you cannot have and over which you have no power.
Part of your husband will always be a slave now. He is that with me.
So let him have his other life, Queen, a life in a shed, with a fattening category woman and the deformed child of a slave, in the open air with the smell of cooking charcoal instead of incense.
You are graceful and wise and beautiful; and you will not only reflect his greatness, you will help build it.
So, go back to the palace, Lady. I will always be grateful and respectful, though I cannot in all honesty say that I love you.
You try to look reassured, and you cannot think why you have such misgivings. You have already understood that if I am happier here, it makes no difference what people make of it. How virtuous you look—or perhaps don't look—is of no significance even for you.
Walk away, Lady, so graceful, thin, and reed-like. Of course we are not equals.
We are different.
And this, this, will be my home. I am content.
* * * *
So people spoke.
They spoke in the royal household. They began to speak in the villages that owed rice and fealty to the City of the Eastern Buddha.
The King of the Eastern Buddha rested part of the week with his slave woman in a slave hut. He allowed himself to be called by his old palace name, the name of Nia, Slave.
If anyone asked, foolishly presuming the King could be teased or made to look weak, he responded, “Slaves own kings."
And he would explain how God was present in all things, even the smallest. How kings were a tiny pinpoint of creation, so tiny compared to the mass of the trees, the grass, and the slaves who tilled the ground. You traced power high enough, and it circled back and came to earth.
It circled back, to a charcoal stove, a worn hammock. Power settled like a bird back onto a crippled son playing in the dust. Power pressed between its fingers unseasoned rice in a reed bowl.
The King called Slave delivered his thoughts to a circle of young acolytes, while his concubine worked over an earthen stove, humming peasant songs.
The beautiful Queen did the noblest works.
Her talented sister composed poetry in Sanskrit so fine that Brahmins came from India to study her technique.
The King sometimes shouldered a leather bag and walked out to the fields of his tiny kingdom. He staggered down into the moats and reservoirs to help the serfs drag out the choking plants, and dredge black soil up onto the banks. He skittered down into the rice fields, bending over to help his people replant the nursery rice. In the lumber yards, he would laugh aloud and spring forward to help the sinewy, black, sweaty men who sawed timber.
On these sudden, joyous, bounding voyages into the life of his people, his companion was the slave woman, who helped catch fish and crickets.
As intended, the only possible response from the people was love.
The soldiers noted that the King's first task was to buil
d a wall all around his city. That one knows the value of defence as well as prayer, the soldiers said, and tapped the sides of their noses.
With the walls, and the great new gates, there was carving to be done. Craftsmen, yearning for both work and a gentler atmosphere, crowded into the City of the Eastern Buddha.
A stonemason, burning with love, sat and looked at the King's meditating face as he rested.
Alive with the flame of heaven, the stonemason suddenly thought: I can remake that face in stone.
He went to work with a chisel, and then with a wire brush and then with sand in the palm of his hand. He stroked the stone to life. The living stone showed a plump, kind, beautiful, strong, and peaceful spirit. The white stone face seemed to glow with a holy light.
There had been no other image made like it in all of Kambujadesa. It was not the face of a king who was a god. It was the face of a beautiful man, smiling with content, yet stressed with compassion.
Something new. This was a kingdom of new flowers, all about to bloom.
"If only words could do that,” said the King, over the stonemason's shoulder.
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April 15, 2004, part two
On the road to Leung Dai, Map hangs onto the motorcycle, slow and heavy with fury.
It's you, isn't it, Saom Pich? You've done this.
You'll have some shiny intellectual reason for it, but it won't do the rest of us any good and it will lose us the treasure. The army have already clumped all over your house and found nothing. Well, I don't want you to think you've fooled us. I want you to know that you're under suspicion, that your life will be hell, that we'll never let you get away with this. I'll burn your farm for you.
Map is tired.
He has now gone for two nights without sleep. But it's more than just physical fatigue. The whole effort of being Tan Map—of boasting, of being merry, of ignoring the throbbing ache in his fingers, of being fearless, of not letting a word of bullshit come out of his mouth—just suddenly today it's all got too much.
And now I have Ly William to drive me.
Pich will know who I am, his whole family will. Maybe they'll recognize William and ask him: what are you doing with this murderer?
This is the guy who killed your parents.
Well, I'm just too tired to care today. William's the one who wanted to drive me. He can just find out. I shot his mother and father. And maybe then he won't be so happy about his seven dollars a day. Or so peaceful.
"Who are we going to see?” William asks, turning around on the bike.
"Your worst nightmare,” says Map.
The bike bounces down an incline into a village with hedges tight up against the road. They pass a fenced, boarded-up building. In 1979, that was the Angka regional hospital. They made pills of paste and traditional herbs, only the little girls they called nurses didn't know one herb from another.
They come to the corner where the road dead-ends with only a dike beyond it. They pull into a yard surrounded by kapok trees. A corral pens in an ox, away from the fruit. The house is solid, made of matching wood with a roof of wooden tiles. The stilts are square like beams, not round, and they sit on top of smoothly formed concrete posts to keep away the termites. From within comes the sound of a TV.
"Sok subbay!" calls Map. Two small boys in blue shorts, with paper animal masks—a monkey and a tiger—come out giggling, squealing and twisting each other's arms, overexcited by some afternoon TV show. This would be a second crop of kids, from some new young wife.
Map feels something like despair. Even this murdering old pirate has settled down; all of Cambodia has gone home, it seems. Except for Map.
He asks the boys if their father is home. He isn't, but their mother and their great-aunty are. The boys point to the fields behind the house. Map walks around the house; the boys clamber boisterously back to their TV. Next to the house is a tall haystack. A large palm leaf with its stalk is folded down over it, to help keep it in place.
Map remembers haystacks like this, smelling of sun and dust. He thinks he smells a warm and human smell. He lifts up a lid of hay, and there is a child's nest, with a round colored ball inside it.
Oh, big brother, you and I would sleep like this, giggling long into the night, making wicked plans.
Gently, as if hiding it from foes, Map scatters the hay back down over it.
Next to the haystack is a well, with a wooden lid and a bucket on a rope and a neat smooth concrete wall around it. No UN markings. Old Ta Pich made this himself then. Dug it, poured the concrete. An accident did not cripple him. The well walls did not fall in on him, nor did the rope break as he climbed out. So where is karma?
"Made it himself. Nice job.” Map talks before remembering that he has a policy of saying nothing to William.
"Sergeant,” says William in a low, anxious voice but with merry, encouraging eyes. “You think maybe the farmer took the Book?"
Map only shrugs and walks on. He can't be bothered to answer. I thought you were smart this morning, but you've gone back to being soft and stupid. We're trying to get Luc back, and for that we need brains.
Ahead of them there's an earthen oven with a grill over it. Women in faded sampots are weaving palm fronds. Map remembers the hours he spent as a soldier over ovens, melting plastic sheets to make oil for lamps. The sheets were blue, and as they melted, they smelled of fire and rotten fish. The smell would combine with the hollow in his belly to make him feel sick.
A different world, now.
"This is a nice farm,” says William. He looks nervous; he's only just realizing how nasty this could get. If Saom Pich is here, he may start shooting.
It will feel good to shoot him, even if he hasn't taken the Kraing Meas.
Why isn't the house filled with spirits every night, demanding food and justice? How can Saom Pich sleep? How does he go unpunished? Or am I punishing myself? I sleep out on the ground. I have no home, no family. This old man led all the murders around here; he was the number three man; he did all that but he is the one with the handsome house and the healthy sons.
As Map draws closer he adds still one more blessing: the beautiful young wife.
She is folded as neatly as a pocket handkerchief next to the stove, a young woman with a new baby and a sweet, calm expression. A Khmer beauty.
She escaped it; she escaped the whole thing, the wars, and the jeum-room camps on the border, all of it. What is a leathery old murderer doing with a wife like that? A home like this? Hens, fruit, a tethered ox, children warm in hay?
As they get closer, Map smells pondwater, stale and slimy. Wet palm leaves are piled high next to bamboo rods. Away from the house because of the smell, the women are making old-fashioned roofing—soaked strips of palm leaves doubled over bamboo poles. Not for this house—oh no, this house has tiles. They're to sell to poor people, to make Pich even richer.
Map remembers as a child looking up from his hammock in the rainy season and seeing the overlapping rows of palm-frond ceiling. He loved the neat way each rod did two jobs, supporting one layer of leaves like a curtain rail while propping up the higher layer from underneath.
Next to the palm panels, lengths of thick, hollow bamboo are roasting on the fire. They will be full of sticky rice and red beans. He remembers breaking open bamboo to eat as dessert at New Year.
Home.
Next to the wife, an old, black-toothed crone pokes the embers under the fire and feeds in scrub. She looks up with eyes as mean and narrow as Map's own. You old stick. We are just the beaten husks, you and I. All the juice and sugar has been pounded out of us.
"Yiey, Grandmother,” Map says to the old lady, then to the wife, “Loak sray." They blink at his old shorts and farmer's gloves. The young wife recalls her manners, gives Map an unclouded smile and, as he is an older man, sompiahs.
"Your husband must have much merit. He has such a beautiful farm."
The wife goes back to folding the leaves around the rods. “Than
k you. We like it. It is pleasant enough."
"You have a TV."
"But no electricity. Maybe that is best. I like natural light.” She smiles again. The presence of William reassures her. William, who looks so harmless, so friendly, so polite. William bows and smiles and strains forward like a friendly dog.
Motoboy, I know you. You can't wait to start chatting her up, to find out who she knows and how you can help each other.
"A good life,” Map nods. “Everything on this farm is well done. The house, the fields, the well—they are all solid."
The little, beautiful girl still doesn't get it. She looks pleased. “My husband does things well."
The old woman knows what Map's about. She stands up and keeps a fistful of scrub between them. “He had it bad during the war."
"No, he didn't,” replies Map. “He was district representative. An old-fashioned maquis. They did things well, the old ones, the old-time Communists. They'd been to school and the Party gave them books, taught them all kinds of things. They were educated. In a way."
The old woman grunts. “The army have already been here. They turned the whole house over. There are no guns, nothing. You can go home."
The wife's face falls, and her eyes close. Map is sorry to see her beauty hidden away. He's sorry to make her unhappy and also glad to trouble her. She has had it too easy; she knows nothing.
Map lets the wife have it. “We were both communists. I worked for him for a while, before and after the yuon came. Were you with him in the jeum-room in Thailand?"
Of course she wasn't. You don't stay sweet and kind in a refugee camp.
The wife gives her head a mournful little shake. “That was before my time,” she murmurs, her voice a pleading whisper that means: I am innocent, keep me out of this.
How he must love you, Map thinks. You are the comfort of his old days, young and beautiful, giving him baby sons. And you look happy, so maybe he is good to you. Tigers are tender with their cubs.
Suddenly Map finds that he does not have the heart to involve her.
