The Atlas

BUTTERFLY STORIES (I)

His razor was a Happiness Double Blade, made in China. It lived in a phony gold box whose phony silver lid was spring-loaded like his other wife whom no one dared to say a wrong word to. New and quiet, the razor waited for him. He pushed the stud and the top flew open. The tray where the double blade went had been engraved with a repeating pattern of leaves which dazzled him almost as much as if he were standing at a waterfall's edge peering down into some deep gorge tapestried with the heads of palm trees. The tray could be raised, too, clicking against the lid's underside with a flimsy metal-on-metal sound. The bottom of the tray was a mirror just large enough to reflect either his chin or his upper Up; which should he choose? The secret space beneath, which reminded him of a hiding place in a false-bottomed coffin, held a half-cylindrical recess for the handle, which was grooved with diamonds formed by the intersection of slanting lines; and next to the handle-niche a sunken rectangle waited to reclaim the double blade's shield.

In his underwear, with a towel around him, the journalist looked at his moustache in the mirror for a moment and then closed the empty box. He'd clicked and screwed and twisted the razor's three parts together. The naked blade he'd handled with nervous loathing. It was by no means a safety razor. He remembered a winter day long ago in school when the other children had debated which death would be the worst. One small girl whispered that she was afraid of fire. A boy had seen his sister drown, and thought that was the worst. But the boy who was going to be a journalist had known at once that the most horrible thing would be to have his throat cut, to feel the razor sawing and slicing through the skin and muscle and soft cartilage of his neck. For years it made him go weak just to see barbed wire.

He put the box down on the night stand and rested the razor beside it. Solid and silvery, it caught the sunlight in its many whirling grooves.

Through an interpreter, his wife (whom he'd met a week before) had told him that he looked old with his moustache. He'd told the interpreter that she could shave it off, and she smiled with timid pleasure.

So you're gonna let her shave you, huh? said the photographer, lying bored and sick on the other bed. The shades were down, but through the slits where the fit wasn't perfect the sun still swarmed, turning everything to sweat and corruption. The photographer's whore lay on top of him, giggling and moaning and squirming even as the photographer cursed her, rubbing his stubble with the back of his hand.

You could use a shave yourself, the journalist said. I bought you one of those razors, too.

How much?

Oh, about two bucks. Maybe it was one buck. I don't remember.

The photographer flushed with fever. — Get me the bucket. I'm not sure if I'm gonna puke.

The journalist's wife tapped softly on the door. He leaped up and let her in. He knew that it was embarrassing for her downstairs because everyone looked at her knowing what she was.

Hello, Vanna, he cried happily.

She almost smiled. Then she came with him to the bed. The other whore laughed, and his wife paid no mind. She lay wordlessly down in her black spangly dress with the green ribbons, and he lay beside her. He put his head in her lap. Very softly she began to sing him a sad song which he could not understand. He fell asleep with her hand so light in his hair that the harsh sun-time seemed not to touch him, and he could feel himself grow younger as he slept, more handsome and strong and perfect for his new wife. When he awoke, the light from outside was a screaming orange, but much of the heat had gone out of it. He felt pleasantly damp with sweat. The photographer and the other girl were asleep. His wife (who was amazed by freezers and dental floss) lay against him in her black dress, not sweating, breathing steadily with eyes closed. He raised his hand to caress her and she opened her eyes.

Remembering, he sat up and handed her the new razor. He pointed to his moustache. Her face lit up. Her redwaxed lips curved up lovingly, the lower one widening and shining like her once-scared eyes beneath the dark-peaked brows. A circle of light kissed her nose.

Between her narrow brown fingers (the nails painted the same apple-red as her lips), the handle undid itself, turning until it separated into a hollow silver bone. She lifted the inner plate of the guard off its three screws and set it soundlessly down. Then by the side-edges she took the pure blade whose exposed double meetings of steel and nothingness could so easily have sliced his eyes out or slashed his wrists down lengthwise to burst open the blue arteries of his life. Her smile widened, and he began to sweat.

The photographer had sat up. — Don't tell me you're gonna let her shave you dry with that blade! That's a good way to get cut, man!

I guess I'll make her happy, the journalist replied.

Again he laid down his head in his pretty wife's lap. He made up his mind not to wince away whatever she did. But as he gazed upward at the approaching blade, he decided that it was better to close his eyes.

The first pass of the blade caught the hairs of his moustache painfully, matting them up against the steel edge as they twisted and ripped from the skin. He could almost hear the hairs roaring out. He had not changed his expression; in that respect he lived up to his resolution; but perhaps she saw that she'd hurt him because after that she shaved him in smaller, more nibbling caresses. He could not tell whether she'd cut him yet or not. He was no longer afraid. He lay quite naturally on her lap as she bent over him, uttering her little hisses of concentration and pride. At last she was finished. He opened his eyes. She held the mirror before him triumphantly. He saw his upper lip immaculate and pale, younger than the rest of him (it had not been exposed for years). He got up and looked into his compass mirror so that he could see his whole face. A pretty young boy looked back at him — the true husband of his wife.

The girl from See Sar Ket sat behind the bar with her hands in her lap. There was a long silver cross between her breasts. He bought her a drink, so she came and sat on the stool beside him and pinched his thigh.

I go Kambuja to find my wife, he said. Me no butterfly.* Oh OK, she said. Broken heart.

* Philanderer.

The woman beside him on the plane was going to Battambang, because after twenty yean of paying detectives she'd finally found her sister. Her father had been killed. One of her two children was dead, and the other would be twenty-two now; he was still missing. The woman had pearl earrings and bright red fingernails. She said she prayed every day.

My sister have three children now, she said. She is old. I want to get her out. I can work hard for money to pay her visa. But I have to wait.

He supposed that she if anyone would understand him. On a page of his notebook he wrote: I am searching for the lady in this photograph. Her name is Vanna. Can you help me, please? He asked her to translate this into Khmer for him, so that he could show it to people in Phnom Penh. But she turned away, saying: I prefer not. Because my Cambodian writing is now me embarrass. — For the remainder of the flight she tried to talk with her other seatmate, a German who rudely ignored her.

Phnom Penh was so utterly different that he began to clown around with riels and dollars and taxis so desperately that the Cambodians shook their sides while he almost cried. The bicycles were almost gone. It was all cabs and everything was new and they wanted you to pay in dollars.

In the hotel where his wife had shaved him they had mirrors now and refrigerators and toilets, televisions and bedside phones with music on hold and automatic redial. He couldn't believe it. The price had tripled, but they charged him only half again as much as before, for old times' sake. He asked for the maid he remembered, and she came to him with a cry of joy. He said to her: I came here to find Vanna. Can you come to the disco, please, and help me?

She shook her head so miserably. — I am very sorry, she whispered. I cannot go there. No good. I want to be married, so I cannot. I am so so very sorry.

Never mind, he said. I love you like a sister.

Her salary was thirty dollars a month. He slipped her a twenty. At first she wouldn't take it. She kept saying: Why you pay me?

He said: Because you are my sister.

She rolled the twenty tight in her hand and thanked him in a whisper.

He went into the nearest restaurant, where a girl sat playing some electronic game, and two men were drinking Tiger beer, so he ordered a Tiger beer, trying not to cry, and he arm-wrestled one of them and won, felt dizzy with beer after no breakfast and no lunch, and pulled out Vanna's photograph.

Her name not Vanna, said the old proprietress, whose skin was bleached gold like lemongrass. I know her. Her name Pauline. Wait.

She took the photo from his hand and walked away. He wondered if he'd ever see it again.

After an hour went by without her coming back, he stared at his empty beer and his dead heart exploded with hope because maybe she might actually be doing or finding out something.

The floor pattern was a series of three-dimensional squares which bulged and trapped his drunken eyes.

The proprietress's middle-aged daughter sat nibbling at her fingertips, and the granddaughter read a newspaper with her bare feet up.

The proprietress came in and said: She change house.

No good, eh?

She shook her head.

To restore the past, which cannot be restored, it is most expedient to perform rituals. Belief, while useful, is not indispensable. With his Happiness razor she had once made him young for her. He would youthen himself against all censure, so that by sympathetic magic he could become hers again, hers only. No matter that being hers was as impossible as being young. As he passed a beauty parlor, the women called to him, and he let one lead him into that white bright mirrored place of music; he couldn't get over the newness. The woman who'd hooked him was very beautiful and kept asking if he was married. He allowed that he was. — You no like me? the beautician said, putting his hand on her breast. — I like you very much, but I'm married already, he said. My wife lives here. She's Cambodian. — She didn't understand a word. — He signed to her to cut all his hair off, which would render him monkish, so she washed his hair twice, smeared a beauty mask all over his face, struck his forehead with her clasped wrists in such a way that the bones made a strangely musical clacking sound, shaved his face and neck hair by hair with a straight razor, and then brought a huge dentist's lamp with which to besiege his ear so that she might clean it with no less than twelve instruments: ferruled feathers of various sizes, loops of fine wire to dislodge his lifetime of earwax, and even a fine razor to cut the hairs inside his ears so as to strangely pleasure and tickle him and sometimes spice him with keen short-lived pain. She warmed every implement upon the lamp's lem-ondrop face. The hot feathers anointed him with sleep. Every time he turned his head to look at her or see what time it was she slapped his cheek lightly, saying, Sa-leep! Sa-leep! She spent half an hour on each ear. Then she did his fingernails. After peeling off the facial and purifying his now angelic countenance with a chemical-scented towel she combed his hair and then presented him with the bill: seven thousand riels or three dollars, as he preferred. He paid her ten thousand, and she clasped her hands Ah khun.* In the next chair an UN-TAC✝ soldier from Germany was getting the works, too. Das Leben ist hier so gut! he laughed to the soldier, and the soldier, unsmiling, gave him the victory sign. He turned to the mirror. No matter that she'd never cut his hair. Once again he looked so young and handsome — ready in case he might meet his wife.

* Thank you.

✝ United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia.

The streets were now grayish-brown canals as in Thailand, through which the shiny white UNTAC police cars and the motorcycles and the cyclo drivers ferrying their passengers under sheet plastic all swam, honked and hulked. Sandalled people waded, holding umbrellas.

In the café where he passed that rainy hour (it being too early for the discos to open), old men with puppet-string necks leaned forward so that he could see their ribs change angles under the skin. Dinnertime. The proprietress brought the chicken in a great tub. Her husband, who was an ambulating skeleton, mopped the dead flies from the glass case with a paper towel. He hung the cauliflowers, lemon-grass and eggplants in the upper storey and stuck the chicken pieces on hooks, while the son brought blocks of ice. A man in a dripping black raincoat rushed in, bearing an immense prism of ice that was hollow like a glass brick. Slowly the glass case lost its transparent freedom, becoming instead a cabinet of morbid curiosities silhouetted against the rain. At last it was closed, and the skeleton-man stood beside the man in the black raincoat, looking out at the rain.

As for Vanna's husband, he sat looking across the street-river at the striped awnings of the New Market, knowing that the disco was almost in sight; and his heart suddenly rose.

But he kept believing that this was a spurious double of the city, that the true Phnom Penh, where the disco was in which Vanna had always worked and always would, must be farther east. This was another way of saying that he knew he wouldn't find her.

A cigarette stand girl told him that her business had cost two hundred and fifty dollars to establish. That was how much she made in a month. He had brought five hundred for Vanna; now he was happy; now that sounded like enough.

It began to rain harder. In his camouflage raincoat, he saluted and greeted all as he had done two years before on that armored personnel carrier in Battambang; they smiled as before, but as far as his heart was concerned he might as well have been inside one of those blocks of ice. He was not exactly sad or lonely. He was simply a marionette pulled by strings of resignation.

As he splashed in his sandals through the calf-deep streets into which squatting children pissed, he saw that there were new lights, sometimes even neon, trembling jellies of light that lay on the black night he sank his legs into, that night between steely grayish walls and shut windows, that liquid night of dark crowds walking slowly, some bearing lighted cigarettes like torches, that night of glowing trucks splashing; and he came to a man. He and the man had never seen each other before. He said to the man: Je cherche ma femme.

The man looked at Vanna's photograph. Then he said: Je demanderai si ma femme la connaît.

Non, he said a moment later, with the young wife peeping out through the open door. Pourquoi vous cherchez cette femme?

Parce qu'elle est ma femme.

Je comprends. Mais pourquoi vous la cherchez?

Merci, said Vanna's husband, suddenly exhausted.

He went another block and came to where the disco was, and it was not there.

Maybe I made a mistake, he thought. He went up and down the next two streets on either side, soaked to the knees.

No, he said to himself, it's not there.

Three blocks from where it had been he found an absurd new whorehouse shaped like a wicker beehive. The motorcycle drivers at the entrance stood silently aside. He opened the door and went in.

The ceiling was an immense wheel whose infinitely packed bamboo spokes recalled for him the density theorem of numbers. The circular bar had a circular island with bottles on it and ashtrays crammed with cigarette butts. That was where he sat. UNTAC soldier-boys were playing pool beneath the tigerskin-hung walls. The jukebox sang "You Ain't Nothin' But A Hound Dog." There were tall girls in bathing suits moving about. They did not look Cambodian at all. He said hello in Khmer to the barmaid and she did not understand.

Where are you from? he said.

I am Filipina. Me, her, all from Philippines. Manila.

How long have you been here?

Two weeks. All girls very news. This bar very new.

He pulled out the photograph, which now had a water-spot on the corner. — I'm looking for my wife, he said. Have you seen this person?

She called the other girls, and the soldiers looked at him with the neutrality that comes just before anger, because he had stolen their girls, and the women all inspected the photo and said: No. Never seen that one.

He bought a beer to make the barmaid more helpful. She made him pay in dollars; Cambodian money was no good there. He asked her where he should go next and she told him the Martini. — Many Kampuchean girls there, she said.

If I paid you, would you take me there? he said.

We are not allowed to go out, the girl said carefully. Not ever.

Oh, that's a great job you have, then, he said wearily. He wanted to crush the world under his heel.

Have a good night, Ernie, a soldier said, and he saw another soldier walking beside a girl, going into the back. No, the girl was right. Only the soldiers went in and out. There were no Cambodians in this place at all. He was the only one who wasn't either a soldier or a whore; he was both.

Three dollars for the beer. He left a twenty on the bar and went out. He heard a seashell's silence behind him.

Girl good? Girl number one? laughed the motorcycle drivers in the rain.

He took out Vanna's picture. — This is my wife, he said. Which of you will take me to my wife?

A raindrop fell on Vanna's mouth.

The motorcycle stalled in deep water. He and the driver knee-waded between bamboo fences which leaned in darkness, pushing the motorcycle down a prison-like corridor of bamboo in which giant rats swam. The driver cleared the engine. — Quickly, quickly! he cried. — They yawed back into the night. Occasionally motorcycles of other dreams passed like lonely motorboats. This street was a dark lake whose window-shores very rarely shone.

They came to the Lido now, and at first when he saw the sign he thought: Yes, must be the place because it was about here that that hot low dark disco used to be. But as soon as the motorcycle driver began to slow down he saw a doorway with crimson-carpeted stairs and he knew that it was not the place. He took out the photograph, now somewhat more spotted with rain, and held it out to the woman who stood there, but she brushed it aside impatiently. The next woman took it for a moment and shook her head. — No use, said the driver, who was actually a very good person, but Vanna's husband waited until some more girls came out; they shook their heads and sent him away. It was a mark of their business sense that they did not try to entice him into spending money on a drink or on them, locum tenens; seeing the photograph, they seemed to calculate that he would not be worth their effort to persuade, and they were right. So they sent him on his way. At the Pussy Doll, the Savoy and the Tilden it was the same.

Hee, hee, hee! laughed the cyclo men in raincoats when they heard that he wanted to marry Vanna. One bouncer analyzed his face and pronounced him Japanese. Their opinions of her showed a like sense of the exogamous. They concurred that she was Vietnamese, hence hated, enemy. When he told them that she was Cambodian, they said: Ah, very good! but he could tell they didn't believe him.

Old! Ugly! Vietnamese! the whores laughed over that sad and skinny image of his wife in the straightbacked chair in the hotel that didn't have straightbacked chain anymore. Whaiiiieeeeeee?

Because I love her, he said.

Does you loves her? For all night? Hee, hee, hee!

Seeing the photograph they usually yelled for him to go away. They looked him up and down, peering over each other's shoulders, and laughed, not always derisively. In only one bar did the girls crowd around him, looking into his face with something like hope that if he could fall in love and marry a whore, then maybe somebody might marry them someday, too.

From among the sneering girls came a girl whose name was also Vanna. Snatching up the true Vanna's photograph, she stared at it and then shrieked in disgust.

At the Regent he entered through the gate and then crossed a grand courtyard to the steps which led to this temple of flesh where women stood, and as he ascended in his rolled-up sodden trousers they jeered. The motorcycle driver nudged him; he passed Vanna around. .

Yes, the motorcycle driver said. They have ever seen her. Ever? They have or they haven't? They have all seen her before. When? When?

I don't know. They have never seen her.

At the Martini they all said that they knew her, and two girls in a bar by the Russian market in dresses of netting and sugarcaned starch insisted that she worked at the Lido.

So they went back to the Lido. A woman sat outside looking old. At first he thought her the madam. She was merely another dancer who'd accomplished too many dances. His wife probably looked like that now.

She know her! cried the driver, so happy for him. By the river, in floating restaurant!

You believe her?

She say she know her, said the driver. She have house by the river, but she change her house. Now she work at floating restaurant. Yes. No. She have ever seen her.

It seemed almost a platoon that set out for the nightclub where his wife, who might or might not be dead, might or might not be working. There was the husband, of course, first, last and foremost. He had his driver to speed him there through the rainy streets. At his side rode the dancer with her motorcycle driver. Two other motorcycle drivers followed for a time just to keep company with their own amazement. A dozen barefoot kids in torn gray rags ran behind them laughing; they were, however, soon forsaken. The two supernumerary motorcycle drivers duly recollected their responsibilities to Cambodian commerce; they peeled off. (And speaking of Cambodian commerce, they passed the false Vanna, who was riding on a motorcycle behind a suited man; Vanna's husband nudged his driver and pointed to her but the driver only laughed: You cannot be Kampuchea. Your nose too big!) So there were four who arrived at the market in front of the floating restaurant, and the motorcycle drivers stayed to watch their vehicles while he followed the Lido girl up the gangplank over the water where two women patted the Lido girl down and he offered them his thighs and buttocks to pat down, too, but they only laughed, proving him not consubstantial with the Lido girl, who led him onto the deck around the floating restaurant, led him under weird still lights on the black water, and girls girls girls lined up on the porch as they came in. In that season they seemed to like black skirts with silver belts. They strolled with heads tossed back and pouting lips. They had rounder fleshier faces than the Thai girls. Some had a Chinese look. Every now and then one would go to the railing and smoke a cigarette, staring out into the water and the still Cambodian darkness.

There was a disco ball like a die in the darkness, waiters in white passing on creaky boards over the water. One waiter seated him, so he ordered Tiger beers and a plate of nuts for the Lido girl. The Lido girl said something and nodded at him. To the waiter he showed Vanna's photo, his logotype.

Just wait and they will inform you, said the waiter.

He sat outside with devitrifying eyes, unmoved by the dancing or the dark-clothed figures at white-covered tables. He and the Lido girl had nothing to say to each other. He watched as an UNTAC guy from Holland with a nice ID got pulled inside by his Khmer girlfriend.

You must come back tomorrow, the waiter said. (They all spoke some English now, it seemed.) She did not come because of the rain. Tomorrow, ninety-nine percent, one hundred percent, she will come. Come to this table at seven or eight-o'-clock.

The woman from the Lido took his hand, pointed to herself, and said: Dancing?

He patted her shoulder. — Me-you brother-sister. I dance only with Vanna.

She nodded sadly.

What is this one's name? he asked the Cambodian at the next table. The Cambodian had been an interpreter until his identity card expired.

Dounia, he said.

Oh, that's her name with the foreigners. What's her Khmer name?

She shook her head and refused to answer.

Well, then I won't give her my real name, either. Tell her my name is Sihanouk.

At this everyone choked with laughter.

I'll see you tomorrow, he said to the former interpreter.

To the former interpreter this was an even funnier joke than the last. — You see, he chortled, tomorrow I will be—absent!

You must go for Dounia at the Lido tomorrow at seven-o'-clock, the waiter interposed. She will bring you here.

She'll bring me to my wife?

Your wife — ha, ha, ha, ha! Yes, yes — to your wife!

That night he slept less than well, poundinghearted as he was by the probable insaturation of his wife (no matter that she was dead). Actually he had terrible dreams. In the morning he was exhausted. He could not add up his stacks of riels when he paid for anything. He forgot his hat in a restaurant and the waiter had to run after him for a block calling out. He thought about the coming and final night and hoped without believing.

In the hotel lobby, men in immaculate white shirts and black loafers rested Rolexed arms on the knees of their creased trousers. The billboards showed telephones and overflowing steins of beer.

There were still the narrow alleys paved with black mud where men repaired motorcycles, ladies carried pots of steaming soup, and barefoot kids rode plastic cars, but now the alleys pulsed with generators and the formerly empty shopcaves were selling pigeons and refrigerators. At the hairdresser's where two yean before the woman had laughingly cut his hair and made gestures of marriage, this same woman now looked at him and said: No.

The hotel maid was very busy. He gave her a hundred dollars. The lobby swarmed with UNTAC men from Malaysia. They were taking more than forty rooms, the maid said. He went outside and watched small fishes drying on a wooden trencher on the sidewalk.

A block or two from the hotel a Japanese girl in a kimono was weeping before a stern man in a golden robe; this occurred on a color television in a black-on-white room of shut gratings and dirty chessboard tiles in which people barefoot and in sandals sat in rows of lawn chairs, some couples close together, a girl in a striped shirt in the back row with her chin in her hand, smiling in amazement. He sat in the row of skinny men who smoked cigarettes and drank Cokes. Every time someone opened a can it sounded like a pistol-shot.

The maid's family had invited him to lunch. They wanted to see the photograph. He showed them, and they burst out laughing, and the brother-in-law said: But she is old!

As he came into his room the other maid said: Sir, I am very poor. Buy me gold rings, buy me gold bracelets!

Oh, he said. Boys do that for their girlfriends. Are you telling me you want to be my girlfriend?

Yes, she said.

Well, come in then, he said, crooking a finger. All he would have done was give her five hundred riels and shake her hand, because he was married to Vanna. But she didn't know that; she shook her head and ran away.

On his bed was his laundry, which still another maid had left with this note:

Dear frined

See you a soon.

Love and all good wises of you.

your frined,

Love

Well, he thought, someone loves me anyway. — This encouraged him, so he went out and showed four motorcycle drivers Vanna's photo, but they said: No good! Maybe more than thirty years old!

He went to another hairdresser's shop, and even though a man did most of the work, even though the people weren't friendly and the water they used to shampoo his hair smelled like stale meat, still the woman scratched and scraped the lather into his head with her fingernails most pleasantly; for a few moments he felt as he had when Vanna shaved him.

He passed one of those tapering glass cabinets of cigarette vendeuses with red stacks of riels in the topmost shelf, and reminded himself: Two hundred and fifty dollars. I can easily do that for her.

It began to rain, so he returned to the room and slept for an hour. At six-o'-clock he went down without hope or enthusiasm. He flip-flopped his rubber-sandalled way through the hot ankle-deep street-ponds, looking for a place to eat. He wasn't hungry and hadn't been for days. He saw a sign that said CAFE and went inside but it was only a bar with a brand-new bank of slot machines. Crossing the street, he encountered a restaurant whose long tables were covered by stained white cloths. New money proudly illuminated glass cabinets of beer and soda. Outside the double glass doors, motorcycles rolled in magical silence across the silvery black wetness, and neon string wriggled. For a moment those activities seemed almost meaningful and he remembered some place of lights and hot exciting rain where he had been alive; at the same moment he experienced a passionate flush of hope and belief and then that died.

Two young waitresses stood behind him, watching. At last he pulled out Vanna's photograph. There she was in the hotel that didn't exist anymore, sitting in that teakwood chair in her starchy gauzy disco dress of rainbow colors. He loved her sadly but without shame.

Madame? said one.

He nodded.

Madame you? said the other incredulously.

Sure. Why not?

They looked at the picture, then at him, then burst out giggling.

The restaurant was replete with music and empty chairs. The songs were sung by a Cambodian woman with a shrill yet very beautiful voice whose turned vowels reminded him of a harpsichord's metallic loneliness. The chairs were all pulled back a little as if skinny ghosts were sitting in them. He felt a longing for death which passed as quickly as the earlier gush of joy. Outside, a white UNTAC pickup went by, possibly to a nightclub. A very dark truck passed in the opposite direction, heaped with hideous earth like the cargo of another mass grave.

The lady behind the bar wore a night-blue dress and a long golden necklace. She was older than Vanna, but no one laughed at her. She opened a plastic bag of cashews and poured it out onto two saucers for the waiter to take away. When he had gone, she slipped a single nut happily between her teeth.

The singer sang: Ah, la, la, la.

It would be seven soon. He felt very nervous.

The Lido was completely empty and dark. He went upstairs. Dounia was not there. The second floor was half as huge as a city block. Its windows looked out on the street. Mirrors, neon-strings, glowing beer signs, mirror-pillars, loud music and the whirling disco ball — these things just made him more alone, because no one was there. He swam the expanse of dark tables, avoiding the light which whirled meaninglessly on the dark and empty dance floor. It was almost terrifying. So empty and huge! After awhile he saw a man sitting alone in a corner. The man looked at him, got up, and left.

Nobody, nobody. Nothing but heat and darkness with a dead voice singing. He rose and redescended those red-carpeted stairs to wade again in the streetpools that little boys pissed in, and he stood in the rain waiting for Dounia among the motorcycle drivers and their neutral headlights. She did not come. It was half-past seven, and he was desperately afraid that his wife might come to the table of rendezvous at the floating restaurant, find him not there, and go with another man. He would not wait anymore.

A cyclo driver took him down that quietly puddled street, past the silhouette of a woman walking and the pale form of two strolling men. They made a left down a wide boulevard of fences, walls and monolithic buildings with black windows. He thought that maybe the Ministry of Foreign Affairs used to be here. Trees overhung a ragged black river in each gutter; over a driveway one incandescent bulb blinked crazily. Mosquitoes bit his feet. They passed a glowing sign that said NO PROBLEM; ahead, a faded banner in Khmer overryjng the street. Trees squiggled down like multivulvaed mushroom caps. The night was cool.

The cyclo driver had lost his way. He pedaled him into new darkness lit in lightning-flashes by the occasional barfront. They paralleled a long wall with high dim ornaments, and he remembered that this was the Palace. At each corner a sentry stood in the dark with a rifle over his shoulder. They passed a park of many frogs and then joined a lighted road with two-storey villas glowing and billboards and almost shut gratings and people leaning from balconies as he remembered. Now in the night many changes had come undone, so he began to hope again that he'd find his wife and that she'd be as she'd been. The light and music did not bother him anymore. Behind a hill of garbage a beggar-woman was squatting. Darkness hissed and sparkled from between her thighs. Reddish cans of motor oil gleamed almost comfortingly in a window. Then they made the last turn, and he saw the long low spiral of lights at the river's edge. Dounia waited there.

She sat beside him among the other jades and sylphids, saying: friend; not smiling in her spiral-frosted dress and gleaming gold necklace and watch. The narrow eyebrows he remembered from Cambodia, these dense inverted U's. High heels clicked on the squeaking boards. White teeth cracked nuts. Earrings and hair darknesses and tight bras lived around him; wide belts shone with silver. Girls wearing butterfly barrettes sat at the white-clothed tables, waiting.

Then a woman came whom he was sure he'd never seen before. Young, beautiful, full-figured, she hopped on his lap with a cry of joy. Later he'd think that now he knew how the prince in a fairytale felt when his enchanted wife became someone else. He simply could not believe that it was she. She was talking to him with hisses and ahs and ais, laughing with sparkling eyes to find him come back to her, and he could not believe in her. She was getting humiliated now; she thought he didn't love her. She went and sat quietly on the other seat, not looking at him anymore. He gazed out at the bonnets and polka-dotted butterfly-shaped ribbons and the girls in quilcy dresses walking with their hands on their hips.

Vanna? he said to her.

She nodded.

The other woman took the photograph out of his hands, pointed to it, to her, nodded.

OK, he said, defeated. You can be her.

He got two motorcycles and took Dounia and this new, false Vanna to the hotel. He hired one of the clerks to come upstairs and interpret for him. He asked her some questions that only Vanna could know the answers to, and she knew all the answers. The clerk said: She want to tell you, sir, before, when you with her, she very sick, very skinny! Now in health again!

He believed.

He thanked the clerk and Dounia and paid them both off. Then he sat alone with his wife and he put his arm around her, but she sat unmoving and he wondered how much his unbelief had hurt her.

Vanna's nipples were long and thin as he remembered; they were the beautiful rusty bloody color that he remembered (Cambodian rubies tend to the brownish). Her urine was a robust color because she was menstruating. He could smell it on her breath and in her sweat. Her skin was neither warm nor cold. She lay so still, barely breathing, the sheet rising and falling over her breasts, her dark hair on the pillow. She had the same slender fingers he remembered.

She kept tweaking his nose, gently pinching him as he made love to her.

He gazed into that oval deeply beautiful face with the arched eyebrows and red red lips, and he knew it at last. He believed, he believed!

She was very anxious and resdess all night. Later he found out from the hotel maid that she'd been expecting him to take her away with him on the airplane in the morning. He would have if he could; but she'd never written to him; she'd told the maid she'd lost his address… So he had no ticket. Maybe she didn't love him. How could he have known he'd find her?

In the morning she was standing in front of the mirror, slowly combing her hair by the light of the open door because there was no electricity. Her forehead was hot. She'd put his hand on it and made signs of fever.

He said again: I love you.

She gazed at him but did not reply. Probably she'd forgotten what that meant.

You are very lucky, the hotel maid said to him.

The hotel maid had watched the Khmer Rouge kill everyone in her family. Now she was poor and unmarried.

He told her not to come to the airport with him this time because the soldiers might cause trouble for her, and he said goodbye to her in the lobby where the maid had been interpreting; once more he told her that he loved her very much, nose-kissing her hand with that intake of hissing breath her countrymen favored. Everyone in the lobby cheered. She came outside with him. He said goodbye to her again, more quickly and casually because all the cyclo drivers, taxi drivers, doormen and motorcycle drivers were grinning and one man yelled: You go sleep her now hotel? so he did not want to bring any more shame to her who was too pure to be shamed as she had shown at the restaurant which before had been decrepit but which now was tiled and air conditioned; as before the waiter set a menu only in front of him, and he passed it to her. Then he remembered that this wife of his could not read. He said to the waiter: Ask her what she wants. — She take rice soup, said the waiter. — Now he remembered that she had always ordered rice soup before, too. Probably she was too shy to ask what they had, and so she chose the one dish that she could be sure of. — The rice soup had fish in it. Every now and then, with perfect naturalness, she tossed her beautiful head and spat fish bones onto the marble floor. The business suited ones regarded her sneeringly, and she was not shamed. So now most likely she would not be shamed if he'd taken her in his arms again, and it was even possible that by not taking her in his arms he was shaming her; and yet he remembered how in the wedding studio she'd posed beside him with such inwardness, maybe aloofness or reluctance even, never reaching for his hand; that was why he thought he was being good in merely waving, not looking back. He did not want to look back anyway; he was afraid of his own grief. Now a dozen beggar-children came running. He gave each of them five hundred riels; he'd already given her five hundred dollars. Their dirty hands closed enraptured, and other dirty hands came whirling around him like September's leaves in his own country of four seasons; and by the time he'd finished filling them, his vision had been choked by hands — not hers, not her incredibly brown slender fingers… so he got into the taxi and then as he raised his palm-edge to his forehead to salute them he saw her standing among them, and he waved and she waved and the taxi began to pull away and he saw her trying to smile and she stood there among the beggars, wringing her hands.

One dry season he came back. Cambodia was a kingdom again that year; the slogan was NATION — RELIGION — ROI. Do you know the floating restaurant? he asked the taxi driver.

But now no, the driver explained. Government everybody go away. But now everybody stop the work, because government no have.

So where do those girls go now?

I don't know.

When he got back to the Hotel Papillon, the desk ladies said: All your friends have been dreaming about you! and they gave him a ten percent discount. He went upstairs and took a bath in yellow water that smelled like sewage. The walls were starting to get dirty again.

The cyclo drivers said they remembered him, which might or might not have been true. Kien, the short one, the dirty one with the slight stubble, the wide eyes, and the hat with horizontal stripes, said he remembered Vanna and could find her. The husband told him to please do it.

He went out to talk with the cigarette vendors and he ran into the friend of the English teacher who couldn't speak English. The friend didn't remember him. — You want to sleep with Vietnamese girl? said the friend.

He didn't. He'd had enough girls. — And you? he said.

The friend giggled. — No, he laughed. I don't like.

In the restaurant they brought him a menu with a living cockroach on it.

The next morning the phone rang three times. Every time he lifted the receiver and said hello he was cut off. When he went downstairs they said to him: Your wife was here.

He felt a sickening dread in his heart.

Your wife, she come here every two weeks. Just waiting and waiting for you. Why you don't bring her home your country?

He looked at them and could not answer.

At eight-o'-clock the next morning the phone rang in his room and when he picked it up there was nothing but the noise of somebody dialing, and he hung up. He went downstairs, and the reception ladies said: Your wife was here. . and his heart turned over in terror — not the tiniest gladness, only fear and lonely dread. The ladies said: She come back in ten minute. — He sat down to wait. After two hours she hadn't come, and all the fear had become grief that she'd somehow found him out and had run away from his wicked emptiness; he felt so ashamed and hated himself so much and he longed for her. An hour later she came; and this time the joy flowered and exploded like fireworks in his soul and she drew away from him in shyness but then reached out her hand and then her arms were around his neck and she was giggling with tenderness. He knew that she was the one. He believed in her and knew that she was for him.

The last time he'd seen her she'd been at the peak of her beauty; now she was a woman, not a girl.

They went to a restaurant and she spoon-fed him and he was embarrassed. He tried to spoon-feed her too, but she said she wasn't hungry. She said that she was very sick. She had been sick for months. She touched her forehead and made signs for fever. He supposed that she had AIDS.

The taxi driver took them to a place that said BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS and led them in, beaming. She sat in a dirty room that smelled sweet like old mouthwash. A weary lady with a headlamp that took up half her face inspected her and said that she had rhinid allergy aigue. Vanna leaned toward her so attentively from the rusty steel chair with her feet canted beneath in a ladylike way. The lady with the headlamp had a kind frown; she was oldish and patient. She put on her glasses, which were very thick and dark on top like eyebrows, sniffed, and leaned down to write something very slowly which he could not see from behind the wooden stand with its four dropper bottles like relishes. Everything happened so slowly, as if in time with the shuffling footsteps outside.

He'd given Vanna fifty dollars, and she pulled the money out from between her breasts and gave it all to the lady with the headlamp as a tip. Then they went out to the pharmacy to fill her prescription. She swallowed a little of the first medicine, made a face, and never touched it again.

She said she want to cut out her eye, sir, because last time you leave, she take some medicine to kill herself, and it make that blind place in her eye.

He looked at her. Her face was merciless.

She say she have heavy headache for six months now. She want to kill herself if illness is incurable. Maybe she is joking. She say she don't want to be cured. She just want you to buy her a motorbike before she dies, because she is maybe joking again.

That night she took him by motorcycle to the Ambassador Hotel, where he'd never been before (nor had he wanted to go); maybe it was where she worked now; and the lobby was massive, empty, gleaming and dark like the crypt of some inhuman giant not yet dead; and in the corner lay a subcrypt on either side of whose stairs a security guard stood, one man and one woman, and the woman patted his wife's body down coldly and degradingly and the man gazed upon him in silence; then he and Vanna went downstairs to that basement disco of almost total darkness where the music was loud and a woman was singing a song of terrifying shrillness. They sat down and Vanna ordered some food. The vast walls sucked up all light to such an extent that he could not even see what he was eating. After awhile the disco ball came on. Vanna gestured impatiently. She wanted him to go up and dance with her. He went. They were the only couple on the dance floor. Gazing around him into the bloodvessels of darkness corpuscled by people, he occasionally made out the flash of spectacles or a watch or a gold necklace, but mainly he knew the presence of others by their cruel and scornful laughter. The lights were dazzling and the song went on and on. He felt extremely naked and ashamed. At last the song ended, and at once a double line of dancing girls came to join them. The girls faced one another, trudging toward each other and away in a weary factory step to conserve themselves for the long night ahead, while Vanna danced on, never looking at him, and the girls giggled sneering over their shoulders and already he was getting tired. The song was a love-song with English words. It had already gone on for ten minutes (he looked over every time that Vanna checked her watch) and he was bursting out with sweat because he kept trying to ape the steps his wife made so that he wouldn't disgrace her any further; and finally the song was over and they went to sit down. A man in a necktie and a sickeningly pale shirt approached their table and said: I want to dance with her. — He looked at the man, looked back at his wife who sat apprais-ingly, and he said nothing. — The man shook him by the shoulder. — I want to take her my house and bed her now, you Mister understand? — He looked again at Vanna, then said to the man as calmly as he could: She's with me. If she wants to go with you, that's up to her. Vanna, do you want to go with him?

He made a gesture of her going with the man, and she nodded, started to get up, put her hand on the man's arm, and he looked away from them, choking with shame and bitterness and sadness; and then his wife had evidently taken pity upon him because the man was going away (and later he wondered: Had she begun to go with him because she'd wanted to or because she'd believed he was commanding her to?); but his wife was now dragging him nervously back to the dance floor; and suddenly he understood the rule, which was as brutal as life: As long as he could keep dancing with her (and paying to dance), she'd still be his. As soon as he became too tired to go on, she'd be compelled to dance with someone else. — This next dance, by the way, was a very strange and crowded one of men and women in nested circles moving very slowly around the floor, groping their arms and fingers like swimmers in a nightmare of cobwebbed jelly; and he was able to regain his strength. — The following dance was a fast one. He had to keep wiping his forehead as he danced. No other man was dancing all the dances; only Vanna and her troupe, those girls who continued to move so dreamily; Vanna, it seemed, was enjoying herself, because unlike the other women she danced with superb energy, practically leaping while they shuffled (but on the other hand she never looked anywhere but at her watch). An hour later he was gasping for breath, but he said to himself: If those girls can do this then so can I; and he watched carefully through his fog of sweat to learn how they shuffled and glided in such wise as to expend as little energy as possible; he began to copy them; but his wife continued as fresh as ever.

He hung on. At the end of the third hour it was over. He paid and paid and then they went back to the hotel. Even through an interpreter she refused to speak to him, and he never found out what he had done wrong.

In the morning she had to go to work. She and her friend were selling wine. She said that she would be back at two in the afternoon (so the ladies at the desk interpreted). Of course she was sometimes late. She hadn't come back after two days.

He was very hungry and thirsty because he had waited to eat i with her. He walked and walked all day, half crazed. Every now and then some policeman with a Kalashnikov would stop him and practice English upon him and then he'd have to buy the policeman a beer. Or a man would say: Excuse me, sir, what is your nationality? and then: Where are you from? and then: Where are you going? and then: When you arrive our country? (they all seemed to have studied from the same phrasebook) and then: How long you stay? He always answered patiently; he had no right not to. He passed the site of the floating restaurant (nothing there now), and he turned up a dirt road where girls were unloading huge sacks of rice. The Tonlé Sap was aswarni that afternoon with drifting boats like up-curved dark leaves or maybe seedpods because the seeds were souls, three or four of them, well spaced, in each craft; some of them were standing and lethargically poling; and there were also people bathing and washing in that greenish-gray water where the concrete sloped steeply down from the pavilion in whose shade some beer- and toilet-paper-vendeuses squatted or sat upon their sandals listening to xylophone music there just opposite the weird red and yellow roof-scarps of Sihanouk's palace which rose so impossibly steep and tapered like a lock of his wife's hair after she'd shampooed it and he'd pulled it up from her head in a fairytale horn.

He went to the market which so long ago he had passed through but never been a part of; she'd brought him to that district when he'd bought her the first gold bracelet; and the swarming crowds no longer affected him. Maybe nothing did. He said to himself: These people are here to enrich or glorify themselves, or maybe to pass the time. Any of those choices wearied him so much now. He felt very tired. He realized that he was getting sick.

After a long time he neared the hotel, which he was beginning to loathe. He passed by that restaurant where he'd eaten just before beginning his search for her the previous year. The chickens and vegetables still hung upside down inside the glass case, but the streets were dry and the skeleton-man had grown fat. Then suddenly he saw the place where he'd gotten his hair dressed that last time.

A different girl got him. His girl saw him halfway through and cried: Hello, hello! — The entire time that the new girl was doing him, even when she struck the back of his neck with skillful wooden-sounding clackings of her knuckles and wrist, he remembered that first time now years ago when Vanna had shaved him; and at her brother's flat she'd giggled at him and said something in Khmer; when he asked the brother what she'd said, the man hung his head and replied: She say, who shaved for you? Not so good! — Not surprisingly, her brother was an ambiguous soul. At first he hadn't known that he was her brother; he'd assumed that he was the doctor because he'd made an appointment with an English-speaking specialist about her fevers and headaches and they'd set out on a motorcycle to go there, but, perhaps because she'd never had any headaches or perhaps for some other reason, she'd led him around an almost bright sky-blue cyclo with yellow struts whose skinny-legged old driver had been in an accident and held half a lemon around his bleeding finger, and into a hot doorway and up these four flights of dark and urine-smelling stairs to what he'd supposed was the doctor's house; and sat for awhile with the old lady who he did not yet know was her mother.

The man came in quietly. — Hello, sir, he said.

Very pleased to meet you, Doctor, he said.

No problem, replied the man after awhile. I am her brother.

He wasn't her brother, of course. Pol Pot had killed all her brothers and sisters, along with her parents. But he was himself an orphan and he had also been raised by this weary old woman.

At any rate, what she'd said about his shaving made him smile. Later he realized that maybe this was her way of offering to shave him once more. He no longer possessed the Happiness double-bladed razor because one day when he was travelling his suitcase had burst open and the metal box flew out, opened, and scattered parts far under the conveyor belt of his life's airport. Certainly she spoonfed him with rice with her own hands at her stepmother's house that day. It was all so confusing. So why hadn't she come?

He went into the hotel finally and the maid who now was always busy said: I'm sorry I forgot to tell you your wife came yesterday afternoon and waited for you a very long time, maybe more than one hour.

What did she say?

She was afraid maybe you were angry with her.

No, I'm not angry. What did she say?

She said maybe at night very very busy in restaurant.

You think she meant the good busy or the bad busy? he said.

I don't know. I'm very sorry, she replied, her face filled with pity.

He said nothing.

Have you been to the restaurant? she said.

No, he said. I don't want to see.

The next morning the phone had not rung, and so he went out to get fried rice and two orange juices for his breakfast. The swarm of cyclo and motorcycle drivers that always rushed to meet him shouted: Does you forget her?

Never, he said.

Among them was one who closely observed him and his, affairs; this man slept in his cyclo facing the hotel, opening his eyes whenever anyone passed in or out. On that third morning without Vanna the cyclo driver smiled evilly and said: And last night you sleep your wife?

The other thrill-chasers drew in breath and listened.

It gave him particular pleasure to look the man in the face and reply: Of course. My wife is with me every night. She always has been and always will be. She's my wife.

Later she came back to him, that day or another day; he didn't remember anymore, and why should it matter? When he came into the lobby and saw her sitting tensely with another girl awaiting him he knew that none of it had been her fault, that the misunderstandings would never stop, that he would never ever stay with her, that he loved her violently (he was very ill now with the same headaches and fevers that she had), and he took her so gently upstairs and kissed her. There was another night when he had to bring the desk clerk up to interpret again and the man said:

Please, sir, she say to you: She afraid for old age have no house. She say please buy for her a nice house. She afraid now go your country, better she stay here.

How much would that be?

Forty pieces of gold.

And how much is forty pieces of gold in dollars these days?

Seventeen dollar, sir. No. Forty-two. No. One thousand fifteen dollar. No. One eight seven hundred.

Oh. I knew that all along.

He was extremely sick now and could barely stand. The only other thing that he later remembered was that the next time his wife disappeared he'd gone to a house of Vietnamese prostitutes to get shaved, wanting to imagine that she was shaving him like that first time, so of course he did not even get a woman but instead was presented to a very stern man who wielded an immense straight razor and suddenly he knew that the man was going to cut him. The man was almost finished now. The razor had rasped over his lip and across his naked sweating throat. The man was shaving his cheek now and he gazed into the man's face and the man smiled unpleasantly and by reflex he began to smile back and at once the razor sank deeply into his cheek.