CALLING VICHET by Sharon May Brown
He is alive, she has heard – a rumor. He’s somewhere in the mountains, married now. Sometimes, he comes to the city. This number, scribbled on the back of an envelope, tucked under a polished serpentine paperweight beside the phone, was acquired through the efforts of friends on two continents. She does not know whose number it is, only that she might reach him there. Maybe it’s the number of a hotel, a friend’s apartment, or a gambling house.
She has tried other numbers before. Most never made it through the maze of connections, cables, and satellite links, ending in doomed tones or a clipped automated voice. A few reached strangers who struggled to understand her broken Khmer. She imagined that after she hung up in frustration, they puzzled for a few moments over the fragmented message left by the barang woman from America, then shrugged their shoulders and moved on.
She presses the phone against her ear, leans into the silence. She listens now to a double beep, pause, double beep – like Morse code, an SOS. Maybe it’s a busy signal, or the call being routed to a recording. She has learned the various tones of international calls, like dialects. But this one is foreign, unrecognizable to her. She hears the odd sequence three times before realizing it could be the sound of a phone ringing.
Click. She catches her breath. Hears the hiss and crackle of empty static.
“Hello?” she asks.
As she speaks a voice reaches her, the words, delayed, crossing over the lines so she can’t understand them. She’s not even sure whether they were spoken in English or Khmer.
“Hello?” she asks again.
She holds the phone to her ear like a sea shell. Through the faraway roar of static she hears a faint return “hello” – distant, muffled. A man’s voice, or just the ghostly phone echo of her own?
Hello, hello! Can you hear me, sweet? She wants to call out these words to a Cambodian love song he used to sing to her. Hello, hello, in English, the rest in Khmer. This line is all she can remember of the song.
Instead, she asks, “Is Vichet there?”
This time, she waits for a response. She tries to recall the phrases for Please speak slowly and I speak only a little Khmer. She wonders if she should switch languages, Chang chuep bong Vichet? And she worries, can she use this word, bong, which means older brother, but also sweet, addressed to a man – or should she use the more distant phu, uncle?
“This is Vichet.”
She recognizes the texture of his voice before the words themselves register. For a moment she says nothing, unable to speak.
“Vichet,” she finally says, the ch pronounced like a j. Her tongue feels as if it is lagging behind thought, the way sound follows after light. She remembers how once he told her that when you are in the jungle – the prey, literally, the wilds – you must be careful what you say. If you speak of a tiger, it will appear. If you call a cobra by its name, it will strike. To name a creature is to summon it, call forth its true nature, drawing it to you. So now she murmurs this word, his name, like an incantation.
“This is Tamara.”
“Tamara,” he repeats, rolling the r. He, too, lingers on the name, which lies round and resonant in his mouth. “Where are you?”
“California.”
“I thought – maybe you are in Phnom Penh.”
“No.”
But for a moment, she feels she is there. It is no longer evening on the West Coast, where she sits at her desk at home, wrapped in a sweater, while a cold rain batters the roof and wind hisses through tall pines.
No.
She is on the other side. It is morning in Phnom Penh in April, the hottest month. The fleeting coolness of dawn has long since passed, and the sky is clear, merciless, holding no promise of a breeze. Under the fierce sun, morning traffic rumbles in the street – multi-tiered buses, cars, cyclos, mopeds stacked with baskets of chickens, squirming fish, or fresh baguettes. Amidst the bellow of engines and the staccato of horns and bicycle bells, street vendors holler at passers-by. Beggars with no legs, their limbs lost to landmines, sit on the filthy sidewalk and cry out in the din. There is the stench of diesel fumes and packed sweaty bodies, rotting garbage, and maybe too the sweetness of mangoes that ripen at this time.
“You hear it? It is the traffic, terrible.” Over the phone, Tamara listens to the rise of noise, motors, squeals, voices merging with the phone static into a single wave of sound. “Phnom Penh is not like before,” he says, almost having to shout. “It’s like Bangkok now.”
Bangkok.
She remembers walking through the streets of Bangkok, holding hands as they crossed Sukhumvit Road, wide as a river, awash with sound so loud it overpowered any words. They wove their way through the current of cars and tuk-tuks, scurrying a few feet, then stopping, still holding hands as traffic flowed around them, swirling in engine noise and exhaust. This, the only time they ever touched in public, more intimate than a kiss, riskier than other acts of love – the smoothness of palm touching palm, fingers interlaced in the moist heat. Even married couples didn’t touch in public. Only here, while crossing the street, would he take her hand. In the last lane, buses ran in the opposite direction against all the rest of the traffic, and she’d always forget to watch for them. He’d have to pull her back, gently, until it was safe to cross. As their feet stepped onto the far curb, their hands parted.
“I thought it was you, many times,” he says. “Whenever a European calls who sounds like you, I ask, Tamara? Tamara? But I am always wrong. Today I am surprised. I can’t believe.”
He falls silent. Through the cacophony of the street, she recognizes another sound, this one closer, more distinct – a child crying.
“My son,” he says. “Can you hear him?”
“Yes, I hear him.” She can’t tell whether the boy is crying in distress or delight. She imagines him beating the bare floor with the palms of his hands, shouting to his own music, exultant in his emerging powers of limb and voice. “How old is he?”
“A year and a half.”
“What’s his name?”
Vichet must repeat it three times before she can catch the quick flow of Khmer vowels and consonants she has not heard in so long.
“Sacheak Noreak. Do you understand?”
“No,” she says. He asks in English, and she wonders, which understand does he mean? In Khmer there is one word for understand in your mind and heart, another for hearing the words. “I have forgotten a lot. I have no one to speak to now.”
“Sacheak,” he says, “means truth. And noreak, man. My son’s name is Man with the Truth.”
Tamara can tell he is pleased with this name. And he is pleased with his son. He used to tell her he did not want children; he was afraid his sadness would pass on to them, like a disease in the blood. She had felt helpless in the presence of this sorrow, angry that she could do nothing to alter his belief that whatever he loved he would lose.
Once he made her promise that if he were to die, she would bring his body back to his homeland. If necessary, he insisted, she must cut off his limbs, chop his body into pieces so that it would fit into a suitcase, then pray that no one would notice as she passed through airport customs. If he died in Thailand, she could just drive to the Cambodian border, and toss his body over onto the other side. Not to worry about burying it, he said with a wry smile, but his eyes remained serious. Then he added, no, it would be easier to have him cremated, then she could carry his ashes back, along with the small bits of charred bone. You must promise. My biggest fear is that I will die here.
“How long,” she asks, “have you been back?”
“Seven years.”
She thinks, I am absolved of this promise now. Out loud she asks, “Are you happy?” It is a stupid question, a question she knows he cannot answer, but she asks it anyway. He doesn’t reply and she wonders if he has heard.
“I feel like an old man,” he finally says, “like I am sixty or seventy already. The situation here is difficult. I have been traveling around Cambodia for many years.” This she had imagined. When the border finally opened after being closed for so long, she knew he would go back. “But it seems, all my work, I get nowhere. It was so hard on my family. Now, I give that up. I settle down to take care my wife, my son.”
“Where are you now?”
“Home.”
“In Phnom Penh?”
“Yes. Can you believe, I live in an apartment, third floor.”
Tamara can’t see him there. She has always pictured him on the rice farm he longed for, in a graceful wooden house on stilts, like the house he grew up in, or the Thai house she rented on the border, which backed rice fields and faced a brothel. A tall fence shielded the brothel from the street, but from her house on stilts Tamara could see over the fence. When Vichet was gone – as he often was, arranging to smuggle medicine or money over the border, or away helping family overseas – she would make a game of counting the cars she recognized across the street. On slow nights the women would gather on the porch decorated year-round with Christmas lights, and Tamara would sit alone on her balcony and listen to the sing-song murmur of their voices, unable to understand. She imagined they watched her back, although she knew they couldn’t see her through the darkness.
“And you,” Vichet asks, “do you have children?”
“No.” Tamara sees in her mind the child she didn’t have, the one they lost. She imagines it was a girl, although they lost it too soon to know. Every day for a week, Vichet washed the sheets in a blue plastic tub on the kitchen floor, scrubbing them even after the water ran clear and hanging them to dry on the back porch. He said it was his fault, his sorrow that made her lose this baby – their koun kat, cut child. Such a harsh phrase, it seemed to Tamara, so frightening to be chopped in half, divided, always reaching to be whole. Yet in Cambodia these children are not shunned; they are treasured, considered more beautiful, smarter than either race alone. Tamara still wonders what this child would have looked like, whose eyes she would have had, whose lips, whose skin.
“I dreamed of you,” Tamara says. “So many times. I was searching for you in the Cambodian countryside, trying to remember the Khmer words to ask for you. Once, I found you.” She stops. “You had a wife.”
“I’ve been married three years now,” Vichet says slowly, and Tamara counts back the years, trying to remember where she was then, and when it was she had this dream. “She is a countryside girl.” He pauses. “Uneducated. Innocent.”
Innocent. Tamara knows this means many things to him, that it is a powerful word meaning full of goodness and life. He used the same word to describe her when they first met in the refugee camps, fifteen years ago. Over the phone, Tamara hears a young woman’s voice in the background, comforting the child. She imagines this wife of his is beautiful, like the Cambodian women she photographed in the camps, stunning women who would pull their brilliantly woven kramas around their faces and smile shyly. When they laughed, they would politely cover their mouths with long-fingered hands, belying the sorrows of the past – the children, husbands, parents lost to starvation, execution, the Khmer Rouge. His wife would be one of these women from the countryside, with penetrating eyes and arched eyebrows, wide cheekbones and smooth coppery skin, like watery silk under your fingers – skin like his.
Tamara thinks this wife does not speak English and won’t understand his words. She will understand Vichet, though – the curve of his back that is turned away from her perhaps, the way his hands cradle the phone, the tenderness that slips into the spaces between words. She will know her husband in ways Tamara never did, subtle signs she couldn’t decipher correctly, misinterpreting or failing to see them at all, despite years of wrapping her tongue around foreign syllables, and shuttling back and forth until the pages of her passport were full.
As they speak now, skirting cautiously around the past, Tamara wonders where his eyes rest – on a bowl of mangoes sitting on a small table, or on his son, or on the brilliant square of light that pours in through the open window? She remembers how, in the hot season, he used to bring her mangoes. Sweet April mangoes that he would not eat in his exile, would not himself taste. Carefully, he would slice away the skin. As amber liquid slid over his hands, he offered the fruit to her, piece by piece, watching her eat.
She did not understand then, why, when she murmured with pleasure over the fragrant flesh, he would suddenly look away. Or why he would complain that these Thai mangoes were stringy and tasteless, and then describe to her the mangoes of Cambodia – their various shapes, hues, perfumes – naming each of them in Khmer until they became more real than the fruit he held in his hands.
“Tamara,” he says, “you should have children.”
She doesn’t reply, she cannot. She waits for him to pick up the thread of words and pull it through the silence. This is how it always was between them, things strangely reversed – she, unusually quiet, mute even, and he, the reticent one, talking softly to her for hours, weaving his stories in the humid darkness.
“It is important. I like to think of you with a family, happy.”
Again she says nothing. She waits, and when he begins to speak, it is of his hopes for his son, his fears for his country. She listens as she once listened to his stories of Cambodia, captured by the familiar cadence of his voice, following it like a faint trail that winds through mountains, disappears at streams, picks up on the other side. It crosses oceans, deserts, and she must stay close behind, before the thin line of his words vanishes and she is lost, searching for other paths.
Tamara hears Vichet’s voice pulling her back, gently now, like he’d pull her out of the way of the buses on Sukhumvit Road. “It’s been a long time,” he says. “This is very expensive. You should go.”
No, not yet. She’s not sure whether she says this aloud or not.
“Tamara, I know.” He draws out the final syllable like he is speaking Khmer, not English, and she recalls this word, nouw, but not what it means. His voice is a thin thread, barely audible over the street noise. “For all my life it is like this.”
She hears him take a deep breath, and then she remembers the meaning of nouw, to be placed, like dialog from a phrasebook:
Bong nouw e na? Where are you?
Oun nouw tinih. I am here.
“You should go now,” he says. “This is too expensive.”
“At ai te.” It doesn’t matter. But she knows that she cannot keep him much longer.
“Chumreap lea,” he says, softly. Good-bye. Literally, it is unwrapped. It is opened, uncovered. On the other end of the line, the street noise rises, and she hears the clamor of motors and the keening of beggars mixed with the crying of his son.
Sharon May Brown’s stories have appeared in Manoa, Seeking Shelter: Cambodians in Thailand and International Quarterly. Her work has been cited in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and the Pushcart Prize anthologies.