Three Flames. Alan Lightman
whispered Ryna. The man said nothing, but she could see something cross his face. Slowly, he turned around on his cane, putting his stooped back toward her.
On her way home, Ryna stopped at Makara’s house. Today, Makara was home. “The man who killed my father,” said Ryna. “He’s alive. I saw him here, in the village.”
Makara stopped feeding her chickens and looked up. Over the years, she had lost a couple of teeth and gained weight, but she still had her broad and welcoming face. “When?”
“Ten days ago.”
“Really! Why didn’t you tell me? What are you going to do? The police won’t do anything.”
“I know. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do.”
“But you are doing something,” said Makara. “Those killers should be brought to justice. They should suffer. You owe it to your father.” She put her arm around Ryna. “I’ll tell Sayon. He knows about these things. He’ll tell you what you can do. Where’s this man living? Can you show him to me?”
“I don’t . . .” Ryna found herself suddenly frightened. She needed time to think. “I’m not sure where he lives.”
“Sister, this is your chance to have courage. If I could get the soldiers who murdered my uncle and sister . . .” Makara gently patted Ryna’s back. “Just tell Sayon when you’re ready.”
In the following weeks, Ryna saw Touch Pheng several more times at the market. They would stare at each other from a distance, then go about their business. She noticed that the old man was always alone. And as he limped from one stall to the next on his stick, he seemed half in the grave.
The new rice shoots were coming up now, several centimeters tall, close packed and velvety and intensely yellow-green in color. Every afternoon, Ryna spent hours on the farm picking out the invading snails, one by one, and dropping them in a bucket. Soon it would be time for transplanting. Pich went out to drink several nights a week, sneaking five-hundred-riel notes from the envelope under his sleeping mat. In the wee hours of the morning he would call up to Ryna, too drunk to climb the ladder without her help.
After a stifling night in mid-June, Ryna took the photograph of her father from its safe place in the metal box and, for the first time in years, carried it out of the house. When she saw Touch Pheng at the market that morning, she gingerly pulled the picture from her pocket and held it in front of his face. “This was my father,” she said. He looked at the photo without speaking. Then he took some sugarcane and rambutan from his basket and held it out to her. “No,” she said. But as she turned to go home, he slipped the food into her shopping bag and hobbled away. She threw his food to the ground.
Now Ryna was certain that the old man was Touch Pheng. That evening, while she and Pich were listening to their radio, she wanted to tell her husband about her meetings with Touch Pheng. She wanted Pich to hold her and talk sweetly to her, as he had done when they first married. But she could not make the words come out of her mouth. For years, her husband had acted as if the Pol Pot time had never occurred, although he himself had lost an uncle and two aunts. There were other things he would not discuss as well. Something terrible had happened to his brother, before the Pol Pot time. When they first married, Ryna told Pich all the horrors she had witnessed in her camp—seeing an old man hung upside down from his ankles because he had complained about his thin soup; her little brother dying of starvation; her pretty sixteen-year-old sister Lina snatched up by one of the Khmer Rouge officers and used every night in his hut; the pile of fresh bodies with slit throats that she stumbled upon in the bushes one day. And the murder of her father. Pich had listened and nodded and said, “We will not speak of this again.”
In the fields, in the afternoons, Ryna found herself remembering things about her father that she thought had been lost to the years and the hardships of life. She remembered that she would sit on his lap while he told her the story “Grandma and Rabbit,” in which the mischievous rabbit ate all of Grandma’s bananas. When she got older, he told her stories from other parts of the world, stories she told to her own children years later. She remembered that when he would come home after being gone for weeks with some Chinese businessmen, he would bring a maroon woven bag from which he would happily pull beautiful carved hairbrushes and strange-tasting spices and fabrics. He once gave her a turquoise silk scarf decorated with apsara dancers, and she now remembered the precise moment, his hands touching her shoulders, the view of pink bougainvillea outside the half-open window. She remembered that he would give her a foot massage before bed. Ryna thought of these things as she worked her trowel into the mud and scooped up the young rice plants to be replanted in the adjacent fields. Each fist-size chunk of mud and rice shoots, a miniature island of dense yellow-green trees, she painstakingly carried to the new field and buried in the mud under the water. She remembered his laugh. She remembered that she was his favorite child. She remembered that he called her his svay pa-em, his sweet mango.
In the evenings, as they unrolled the mosquito nets, she told her daughters these fragments of memories. She told them of the places her father had traveled, and they played games, guessing the clothing and foods of faraway peoples and lands. “Grandfather seems so different from Father,” said Sreypov. “You must have loved him very much.” “Yes,” said Ryna. “I wish I could see him,” said Sreypov. “I wish he was here. I hope he is not sad in his new life with the spirits.” “I hope so too,” said Ryna. “Put your hand on my shoulder, Mae,” said Sreypov. “Why?” “I will imagine it is Grandfather’s hand.”
One morning as Ryna was leaving her house to take rice to the monks, Makara’s husband rode up on his moto. Sayon was a tall man whose hands were always clean despite his work in the fields. “I am offering my help with this killer,” he said. “What have you decided to do?”
“I’m not sure,” said Ryna.
“You shouldn’t wait,” said Sayon. “These KR killers don’t stay in one place long. There are thousands of them among us. They think they’re invisible, like fleas on an ox’s back.”
“I’m planning something,” said Ryna.
“I can do it for you,” said Sayon. “Or have a friend do it.”
“What would you do?”
“It’s easy. We watch him. We get him at night, on the road.”
“You kill him?”
“Do you really want to know? We don’t kill him. We beat him with a bat until all of his bones are broken. That way, he suffers more.” He put the kickstand down on his moto and walked close to Ryna. “Don’t you want revenge?” he said in a gentle voice.
“Yes. But the bat . . .”
“These killers have to pay. And you owe it to the memory of your father. Can you tell me his name? Can you show me where he is?”
“I’ll let you know,” said Ryna. She felt nauseated again, like the first morning she’d seen Touch Pheng. “Not now. I’ll let you know.”
“Don’t wait too long,” said Sayon. He patted her shoulder and drove away.
That afternoon, Ryna prepared dinner for her family earlier than usual. Makara had given her a chicken. It fluttered and squawked when Ryna held her knife against its neck. As she slit its throat, she noticed how easily the blade cut through the muscles and flesh. Almost in a trance, she watched the blood drip drop by drop to the ground.
Ryna didn’t see Touch Pheng again until the middle of July. He was sitting in a plastic chair underneath the awning of the shop that sold sleuk bas and cabbage, and he appeared to be dozing. Without speaking, she walked close to him and just stood staring. She realized that she didn’t know what she would do from one moment to the next. She was trying to make his face change into the face of the arrogant young Khmer Rouge officer. She remembered that other face well, but this was the face of an old man. Yet it was also the same.
“My name is Ryna,” she said finally. She was surprised at the sound of her own voice. He opened his eyes