The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (31 page)

At these cheerful tidings the photographer brightened markedly. He came out from under the sheet, killed two mosquitoes, played with his flash, and initiated a fabulous conversation. For hours
the two of them discussed the differences between Thai and Cambodian women and how many times the photographer or the journalist had been so low, cowardly, perverted, and immoral as to use a
rubber. So they whiled away the suffocating hours until it was time to pick up the chief of protocol and head for the Blue River restaurant . . .

Ask this sixteen-year-old if she wants to marry me, said the photographer with a mirthful glance at the journalist.

She says she will bear your children, cook for you, do dishes, but she cannot marry you because she is too far beneath you.

The photographer shrugged. Tell her she is prettier than a flower.

She says a flower that is smelled too many times begins to wilt.

Interesting that the photographer, who wanted to break as many hearts as possible, and the journalist, who wanted to make as many happy as possible, accomplished the same results! Does that
prove that the journalist was lying to himself?

Please believe me when I say that he did not want to be unfaithful to Vanna. It’s just that when anyone asked him for something, he hated to cause disappointment. I
honestly think that the journalist was fundamentally good. I believe that the photographer was fundamentally good. No matter how naive it sounds, I suspect even Pol Pot must have meant well.

He went to the disco. The photographer did not come because he did not want his girl to know that he was around. The photographer had told him: You know what the difference
between us is? There’s no difference. We’re both assholes. The journalist knew that he was starting trouble for the photographer by going in there but he missed Vanna too much; maybe he
loved her; maybe he really did. As always in that hot darkness, he felt that he was doing something stupid and dangerous by being there. He could see nothing. The air was brownish-black like the
tree they’d shown him at Choeung Ek, the tree whose bark was ingrown with hardened blood where the Khmer Rouge used to smash babies’ skulls. He fumbled his way to a table sticky with
spilled beer.

Is Vanna here?

You want one beer?

Vanna. Girl. I want Vanna. Tall girl.

No no you miss
mistake
, my friend.

Vanna.

My friend . . .

I want to take home Vanna. Only Vanna. Vanna and me like this.

No no no!

I want to marry Vanna. I buy her gold ring.

No no no, my friend, no no!

Gripping the journalist’s upper arm firmly enough to bruise, the pimp or waiter or bouncer or whatever he was led the journalist outside. He looked back at all the faces watching him in
darkness, the fat yellow cat faces.

Well, said the photographer, why
should
she come to work? You already got her a gold
bracelet
, for Chrissakes. She probably sold it ten minutes after she got rid
of you.
That
money should probably last her a few weeks.

I used to not have enough money to spend on whores, the photographer said. Now I don’t know what else I would ever spend my money on.

No, sir, the boy said (he was yet another of their impromptu interpreters), I’m sorry; she’s not here today.

Then she came like a ghost in the darkness, smelling like her sickly-sweet face powder, giving him for a while her triangular face, and he had to concentrate too hard on everything to be happy
but he knew that later on when he had time to remember he’d be happy, and she sat beside him and he slipped her ten thousand riels under the table, a middling stack of money that she made
vanish.

Can I buy you a beer before I go? said the journalist to the new interpreter.

But, sir, I have not had any supper! the boy whined.

The journalist started to despise the boy then. He’d showed up uninvited at lunchtime; the photographer had yelled:
Fuck off! Screw!
but the journalist had said: All right, if you
want to come to lunch you can come to lunch, but you have to pay for yourself. And then the photographer said: Aw, you can’t make him pay for his own meal; the kid’s probably got no
money . . . and so they’d taken him out, handing the waiter rubber-banded blocks of hundred-riel notes that smelled like mildew; it was after lunch that the journalist had gotten him to write
a love letter, a commission he’d fulfilled in beautiful script, even folding the sheet of paper as delicately as if he’d studied origami, so the journalist had been grateful, but this
request to be bought dinner at a rip-off place was too much, especially with Vanna waiting to be taken home; he told the boy he’d buy him a beer and a dance but that was that. Then he was on
his feet, following Vanna off to the hotel.

As soon as he’d closed the door of the room behind them he gave her the love letter, and she sat down to read it. (I have one sure rule for you, one of his friends said to him much later,
when he told the friend about her. The rule is this: Whatever you think she’s thinking, you’re going to be wrong.) It took her half an hour to read the letter. He saw her lips moving
three times or more over each word. Then he saw that instead of explaining himself to her and making the situation any easier, he’d only set her another ordeal. But he had to know. He had to
know! He gave her pen and paper and waited. She smiled anxiously. She strained over her writing, sounding out every letter in her whisper-sweet, passionless voice. Then she crossed out what
she’d written – only a single word – and turned the page. She tried again and again. Finally she had three or four lines for him. It had taken her twenty minutes. The next day he
got his government interpreter to translate, and the man laughed and said: But it is all together like nothing, all these words! She does not know how to write! I cannot, I . . . uh, she say, uh,
that she watch you very carefully the first time, and she is very happy with your letter, her happiness, uh, beyond compare.

He had lain beside her thinking she was already asleep and touched her hand, but at once her fingers closed around his very tightly. He began to play with her but she was
still, she kept her legs closed. So he patted her and rolled over to sleep. Suddenly she was smiling and slapping his butt. Pretty soon he was pointing to his crotch and hers and she was nodding
and he got out the K-Y jelly . . .

Back at the disco the journalist drank a Tiger beer; then he bought the English teacher who didn’t speak English a Tiger beer as well . . .

She came again like an apparition, looking at him.

She say she’s busy with another guest, the English teacher said. Do you want her to come to your bedroom, sir?

Oh, I dunno, said the journalist despondently. Let me think about it.

Tell her it’s OK, the journalist said. Tell her she doesn’t have to come. Tell her I’ll say goodbye.

Eyes bulging, the English teacher repeated this information in a voice of machine-gun command. Or maybe he said something entirely different. That was the beauty of it.

She said something to the English teacher, who said: She is very happy to have meeting you.

Well
, the journalist thought, or tried to think, that’s it.
Really, it’s just as well
. . .

Then Vanna came to him and gave him something wrapped up neatly in a square of paper, and again he had a sinking feeling, believing that she was returning his letter, and it seemed right and
fair but also very sad, and then because she was still standing there he opened it to learn that it was something very different – lines of Khmer written very neatly (possibly professionally)
with loops, wide hooks, spirals, heart-shaped squiggles, everything rounded and complicated, flowing on indecipherably.

The English teacher said: She go to get free from customer.

OK, he said.

He was happy and amazed. He sat there and the English teacher sat with him.

She came back and said something to the English teacher, who said: She will go home now to dress. Please wait for her. She return in twenty minutes. She come for you.

He took the English teacher outside and sat him down in the light outside an apartment building. He asked him to translate. The English teacher looked at the letter for a long time. Then he
said: I will tell you only the highlights . . .

Please tell me everything. Can you write for me everything? Then I go to the hotel to wait for her.

The English teacher wrote:

Why can you write so much better than you can speak?

Yes, the English teacher said.

She wouldn’t ride in front of him on the motorbike any more. She made them ride separately and pay both drivers. Had people been torturing her too much, or was she just
lazy? His driver paralleled hers, so that all the way back to the hotel he could watch her sit sidesaddle on the bike, gripping some handle between her legs, her clown-pale face almost a toy,
smiling like a happy mask.

He was desperate to know what her letter said. It was so hard not to be able to talk with her. He wondered if she’d had to pay someone to write the letter for her or whether they’d
done it for nothing.

He held her, and when the photographer came in and turned on the light, he saw that she’d fallen asleep smiling at him.

The letter said:

He sat rereading the letter under the rainy awning where the cyclo drivers sat drinking their tea from brown ceramic teapots with bird shapes on them; they recounted their
skinny stacks of riels as lovingly as he retold her words to himself; they rubbed their veined skinny brown legs; and he thought:
Am I so far beyond them in soul and fortune that I can spend my
time worrying about love, or am I just so far gone?

After a quarter hour the rain stopped, and the cyclo drivers took the sheets of plastic off their cabs and dumped masses of water out of them. The proprietor of the café brought them
their bills. The Khmer Rouge had put his family to work near Battambang. They’d beaten his wife and three children to death with steel bars because they couldn’t work quickly enough. He
had seen and heard their skulls crunch. They did it to them one by one, to make the terror and agony stretch out a little longer. They’d smashed in the baby’s head first; then they
deflowered his four-year-old daughter; then it was his seven-year-old son’s turn to scream and smash like a pumpkin and spatter his parents with blood and bone. They saved the mother for last
so that she could see her children die. The proprietor was a good worker; they had nothing against him. He knew that if he wept, though, they’d consider him a traitor. He had never wept after
that. His owl eyes were wide and crazy as he fluttered around the café exchanging bread and tea for money. He was like a mayfly in November. And the journalist thought:
Given that any
suffering I might have experienced is as nothing compared to his, does that mean I’m nothing compared to him? Is he greater than I in some very important way? Yes. So is there anything I can
do for him or give him to demonstrate my recognition of the terrible greatness he’s earned?

But the only thing that he could think of to help the man or make him happy was death, and the man had refused that.

Then he thought about giving the man money, and then he thought:
Yes, but Vanna is as important as he is. And because she loves me and I love her, she is more important.

As for tragedies (which were a riel a dozen in Cambodia), what about the circular white scars on her brown back, put there forever by the Khmer Rouge when as a child she couldn’t carry
earth to the ricefield dykes fast enough? If he could have gotten into his hands the people who’d done that to her, he would have killed them.

Her face lit up, amazed at the ice-cube tray in the freezer; he knocked a cube out for her and she crunched it happily between her teeth. She was finally laughing and smiling
and going
psssst!
. . . She finally trusted him; yes, she loves you, the English teacher who couldn’t speak English had said at the disco; she trusts you; you can see it in her eyes .
. . Now she lay in bed with him singing Khmer songs in a soft voice until the photographer, who was very ill, sat up in bed and started mimicking her in the ugliest way that he possibly could, and
Vanna became silent.

The photographer had made a mess of things. His girl lay next to him weeping because the photographer did not care whether she stayed or went – preferring, in fact, that
she go, because the photographer knew it was only a matter of time before he had to puke, and anyway Cambodia wasn’t exactly his country the way Thailand was; the girls here didn’t
attract him as much, and everyone seemed so docile and lazy to him, whereas he only respected people like his next-door neighbor in San Francisco whom he’d caught pissing in the hall and the
photographer started yelling at him but the neighbor only swung round his bleary terrible face and shouted: Next time I’ll shit on your head! and then the photographer had to forgive and
admire him; his girl in Cambodia didn’t do that, not quite; and when the time came to send her away forever because they were leaving for Thailand early next morning, the girl began to weep
and grovel again, soaking his knees with tears, clinging to him; it was horrible to see her; as affectionately as he could, the journalist kissed her hand goodbye . . .