Free The Disappeared by Kim Echlin Page A

he too was on their lists.

 
     
     
     
24
     
    You wrote to me. One blue aerogram once a week. When you told me, I thought over and over and over and over, How could Papa have done this to me?
    I said, How long did you keep writing?
    I sent you a letter last week. The letters never came back. They were going somewhere. I thought that one might get through. Sometimes I thought nothing. I just wrote.
    Why didn’t you phone?
    Oan samlanh, I did, once. Your father answered and said, Do not call again. She has someone else.
    Betrayed. In the name of love my father kept you from me and still I found you. I did not read your words that told, now that you were gone, your undying love.
    People keep secrets from each other all the time. People hide lovers. Women hide babies. Parents hide their weakness from their children. Children hide who they are from their parents. Who do we degrade with our secrets?
    Why do we long for love in abandon? Love that cannot endure. The world is outside the garden. We cover our bodies and keep living and hope until the end for love in abandon. One more time.

 
     
     
     
25
     
    After a few days your telephone rang in the morning.
    You answered, Hallo? ... Baat ... baat ... Baan ... Okay, bye.
    When you hung up you said, I should go back to work.
    And so our days settled into an easy rhythm. Early each morning you went out to work and returned in the mid afternoon. I wandered through the city, the markets, the small alleys, the temples. I visited Chan in your old neighborhood. I talked with Sopheap. I found the taxi stand where Mau started each day before dawn. When it was very hot I went to the pool at the Cambodiana hotel and swam and watched the foreigners. You said you were a translator and I believed you. You would not speak of your family. I trusted you. I reasoned, There has been great pain. When the telephone rang, the only intrusion in our room, you said you were making work appointments and of course I believed you.
    You would hang up and say, I will be back early today, about two o’clock, oan samlanh. Tonight we should go to the Globe. Listen to music. See you later.
    Domestic talk. More exotic than lovers’ talk, I had lived so long alone. I loved your casual pledge each time you left, See you later. I did not ask for more. I did not ask where you workedor who you worked for. I thought, We have forever. I have waited this long. In the cool late afternoons we made love and in the evenings we roamed the city on foot or on your motorbike with the sidecar. You were often silent. But you still liked to play music and you learned again to joke with me. We ate at carts and sat on benches looking over the river and I told you about our old friends in Montreal, how Charlotte married and had three children, how No Exit found another lead, then drifted away from music to offices and marriages and babies; you told me about traveling north to your grandparents’ village and finding a friend.
    One morning I said, I want to go to Choeung Ek. Will you drive me this afternoon? I want to see the killing fields.
    You said, Why go to Choeung Ek? You already know what happened.
    I want to see for myself. Come with me. I want to know what you know.
    Your face closed and you said, No need to see. You already know.
    But I want to see.
    No need, little tiger.
    After you left I walked across the city to Psar Tuol Tom Pong, the Russian market, and I found Mau and asked him to drive me.
    We discarded the city at the fork in the road that leads to the old longan orchard. The fields were grown over with grass, and a stupa in the killing fields sheltered eight thousand skulls.
    In Choeung Ek memory flips its dark belly to the surface like a water beetle hiding in plain view. Depressions in the earth overgrown with grass. Stupas of skulls and bones. The sky. Ayoung man neatly dressed in a clean shirt and light cotton pants approached Mau and me. His eyes were so flat that I could not bear to look into them and