Paradise Tales (37 page)

One day, Dara chuckled and said, “As a friend I advise you, you don’t need another mobile phone.”

Sith wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like this one any more. It’s blue. I want something more feminine. But not frilly. And it should have better sound quality.”

“Okay, but you could save your money and buy some more nice clothes.”

Pol Pot’s beautiful daughter lowered her chin, which she knew made her neck look long and graceful. “Do you like my clothes?”

“Why ask me?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s good to check out your look.”

Dara nodded. “You look cool. What does your sister say?”

Sith let him know she had no family. “Ah,” he said and quickly changed the subject. That was terrific. Secrecy and sympathy in one easy movement.

Sith came back the next day and said that she’d decided that the rose-colored phone was too feminine. Dara laughed aloud and his eyes sparkled. Sith had come late in the morning just so that he could ask this question. “Are you hungry? Do you want to meet for lunch?”

Would he think she was cheap if she said yes? Would he say she was snobby if she said no?

“Just so long as we eat in Soriya Market,” she said.

She was torn between BBWorld Burgers and Lucky7. BBWorld was big, round, and just two floors down from the dome. Lucky7 Burgers was part of the Lucky Supermarket, such a good store that a tiny jar of Maxwell House cost US$2.40.

They decided on BBWorld. It was full of light, and they could see the town spread out through the wide clean windows. Sith sat in silence.

Pol Pot’s daughter had nothing to say unless she was buying something.

Or rather she had only one thing to say, but she must never say it.

Dara did all the talking. He talked about how the guys on the third floor could get him a deal on original copies of
Grand Theft Auto
. He hinted that he could get Sith discounts from Bsfashion, the spotlit modern shop one floor down.

Suddenly he stopped. “You don’t need to be afraid of me, you know.” He said it in a kindly, grownup voice. “I can see you’re a properly brought-up girl. I like that. It’s nice.”

Sith still couldn’t find anything to say. She could only nod. She wanted to run away.

“Would you like to go to K-Four?”

K-Four, the big electronics shop, stocked all the reliable brand names: Hitachi, Sony, Panasonic, Philips, or Denon. It was so expensive that almost nobody shopped there, which is why Sith liked it. A crowd of people stood outside and stared through the window at a huge home-entertainment center showing a DVD of
Ice Age
. On the screen, a little animal was being chased by a glacier. It was so beautiful!

Sith finally found something to say. “If I had one of those, I would never need to leave the house.”

Dara looked at her sideways and decided to laugh.

The next day Sith told him that all the phones she had were too big. Did he have one that she could wear around her neck like jewelry?

This time they went to Lucky7 Burgers and sat across from the Revlon counter. They watched boys having their hair layered by Revlon’s natural-beauty specialists.

Dara told her more about himself. His father had died in the wars. His family now lived in the country. Sith’s Coca-Cola suddenly tasted of antimalarial drugs.

“But … you don’t want to
live
in the country,” she said.

“No. I have to live in Phnom Penh to make money. But my folks are good country people. Modest.” He smiled, embarrassed.

They’ll have hens and a cousin who shimmies up coconut trees. There will be trees all around but no shops anywhere. The earth will smell.

Sith couldn’t finish her drink. She sighed and smiled and said abruptly, “I’m sorry. It’s been cool. But I have to go.” She slunk sideways out of her seat as slowly as molasses.

Walking back into the jewelry rotunda with nothing to do, she realized that Dara would think she didn’t like him.

And that made the lower part of her eyes sting.

She went back the next day and didn’t even pretend to buy a mobile phone. She told Dara that she’d left so suddenly the day before because she’d remembered a hair appointment.

He said that he could see she took a lot of trouble with her hair. Then he asked her out for a movie that night.

Sith spent all day shopping in K-Four.

They met at six. Dara was so considerate that he didn’t even suggest the horror movie. He said he wanted to see
Buffalo Girl Hiding
, a movie about a country girl who lives on a farm. Sith said with great feeling that she would prefer the horror movie.

The cinema on the top floor opened out directly onto the roof of Soriya. Graffiti had been scratched into the green railings. Why would people want to ruin something new and beautiful? Sith put her arm through Dara’s and knew that they were now boyfriend and girlfriend.

“Finally,” he said.

“Finally what?”

“You’ve done something.”

They leaned on the railings and looked out over other people’s apartments. West toward the river was a building with one huge roof terrace. Women met there to gossip. Children were playing toss-the-sandal. From this distance, Sith was enchanted.

“I just love watching the children.”

The movie, from Thailand, was about a woman whose face turns blue and spotty and who eats men. The blue woman was yucky, but not as scary as all the badly dubbed voices. The characters sounded possessed. It was though Thai people had been taken over by the spirits of dead Cambodians.

Whenever Sith got scared, she chuckled.

So she sat chuckling with terror. Dara thought she was laughing at a dumb movie and found such intelligence charming. He started to chuckle too. Sith thought he was as frightened as she was. Together in the dark, they took each other’s hands.

Outside afterward, the air hung hot even in the dark and 142nd Street smelled of drains. Sith stood on tiptoe to avoid the oily deposits and castoff fishbones.

Dara said, “I will drive you home.”

“My driver can take us,” said Sith, flipping open her Kermit-the-Frog mobile.

Her black Mercedes-Benz edged to a halt, crunching old plastic bottles in the gutter. The seats were upholstered with tan leather and the driver was armed.

Dara’s jaw dropped. “Who …
who
is your father?”

“He’s dead.”

Dara shook his head. “Who was he?”

Normally Sith used her mother’s family name, but that would not answer this question. Flustered, she tried to think of someone who could be her father. She knew of nobody the right age. She remembered something about a politician who had died. His name came to her and she said it in panic. “My father was Kol Vireakboth.” Had she got the name right? “Please don’t tell anyone.”

Dara covered his eyes. “We—my family, my father—we fought for the KPLA.”

Sith had to stop herself asking what the KPLA was.

Kol Vireakboth had led a faction in the civil wars. It fought against the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese, the King, and corruption. It wanted a new way for Cambodia. Kol Vireakboth was a Cambodian leader who had never told a lie and or accepted a bribe.

Remember that this is an untrue story.

Dara started to back away from the car. “I don’t think we should be doing this. I’m just a villager, really.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

His eyes closed. “I would expect nothing less from the daughter of Kol Vireakboth.”

Oh for gosh sake, she just picked the man’s name out of the air, she didn’t need more problems. “Please!” she said.

Dara sighed. “Okay. I said I would see you home safely. I will.” Inside the Mercedes, he stroked the tan leather.

When they arrived, he craned his neck to look up at the building. “Which floor are you on?”

“All of them.”

Color drained from his face.

“My driver will take you back,” she said to Dara. As the car pulled away, she stood outside the closed garage shutters, waving forlornly.

Then Sith panicked. Who was Kol Vireakboth? She went online and Googled. She had to read about the wars. Her skin started to creep. All those different factions swam in her head: ANS, NADK, KPR,and KPNLF. The very names seemed to come at her spoken by forgotten voices.

Soon she had all she could stand. She printed out Vireakboth’s picture and decided to have it framed. In case Dara visited.

Kol Vireakboth had a round face and a fatherly smile. His eyes seemed to slant upward toward his nose, looking full of kindly insight. He’d been killed by a car bomb.

All that night, Sith heard whispering.

In the morning, there was another picture of someone else in the tray of her printer.

A long-faced, buck-toothed woman stared out at her in black and white. Sith noted the victim’s fashion lapses. The woman’s hair was a mess, all frizzy. She should have had it straightened and put in some nice highlights. The woman’s eyes drilled into her.

“Can’t touch me,” said Sith. She left the photo in the tray. She went to see Dara, right away, no breakfast.

His eyes were circled with dark flesh, and his blue Hello trousers and shirt were not properly ironed.

“Buy the whole shop,” Dara said, looking deranged. “The guys in K-Four just told me some girl in blue jeans walked in yesterday and bought two home theatres. One for the salon, she said, and one for the roof terrace. She paid for both of them in full and had them delivered to the far end of Monivong.”

Sith sighed. “I’m sending one back.” She hoped that sounded abstemious. “It looked too metallic against my curtains.”

Pause.

“She also bought an Aido robot dog for fifteen hundred dollars.”

Sith would have preferred that Dara did not know about the dog. It was just a silly toy; it hadn’t occured to her that it might cost that much until she saw the bill. “They should not tell everyone about their customers’ business or soon they will have no customers.” Dara was looking at her as if thinking:
This is not just a nice sweet girl.

“I had fun last night,” Sith said in a voice as thin as high clouds.

“So did I.”

“We don’t have to tell anyone about my family. Do we?” Sith was seriously scared of losing him.

“No. But Sith, it’s stupid. Your family, my family, we are not equals.”

“It doesn’t make any difference.”

“You lied to me. Your family is not dead. You have famous uncles.”

She did indeed—Uncle Ieng Sary, Uncle Khieu Samphan, Uncle Ta Mok. All the Pol Pot clique had been called her uncles.

“I didn’t know them that well,” she said. That was true, too.

What would she do if she couldn’t shop in Soriya Market any more? What would she do without Dara?

She begged. “I am not a strong person. Sometimes I think I am not a person at all. I’m just a space.”

Dara looked suddenly mean. “You’re just a credit card.” Then his face fell. “I’m sorry. That was an unkind thing to say. You are very young for your age, and I’m older than you and I should have treated you with more care.”

Sith was desperate. “All my money would be very nice.”

“I’m not for sale.”

He worked in a shop and would be sending money home to a fatherless family; of course he was for sale!

Sith had a small heart, but a big head for thinking. She knew that she had to do this delicately, like picking a flower, or she would spoil the bloom. “Let’s … let’s just go see a movie?”

After all, she was beautiful and well brought up and she knew her eyes were big and round. Her tiny heart was aching.

This time they saw
Tum Teav
, a remake of an old movie from the 1960s. If movies were not nightmares about ghosts, then they tried to preserve the past. When, thought Sith, will they make a movie about Cambodia’s future?
Tum Teav
was based on a classic tale of a young monk who falls in love with a properly brought-up girl, but her mother opposes the match. They commit suicide at the end, bringing a curse on their village. Sith sat through it stony-faced. I am not going to be a dead heroine in a romance.

Dara offered to drive her home again, and that’s when Sith found out that he drove a Honda Dream. He proudly presented to her the gleaming motorcycle of fast young men. Sith felt backed into a corner. She’d already offered to buy him. Showing off her car again might humiliate him.

So she broke rule number seven.

Dara hid her bag in the back and they went soaring down Monivong Boulevard at night, past homeless people, prostitutes, and chefs staggering home after work. It was late in the year, but it started to rain.

Sith loved it, the cool air brushing against her face, the cooler rain clinging to her eyelashes.

She remembered being five years old in the forest and dancing in the monsoon. She encircled Dara’s waist to stay on the bike and suddenly found her cheek was pressed up against his back. She giggled in fear, not of the rain, but of what she felt.

He dropped her off at home. Inside, everything was dark except for the flickering green light on her printer. In the tray were two new photographs. One was of a child, a little boy, holding up a school prize certificate. The other was a tough, wise-looking old man, with a string of muscle down either side of his ironic, bitter smile. They looked directly at her.

They know who I am.

As she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, she heard someone sobbing, far away, as if the sound came from next door. She touched the walls of the staircase. They shivered slightly, constricting in time to the cries.

In her bedroom she extracted one of her many iPods from the tangle of wires and listened to System of a Down, as loud as she could. It helped her sleep. The sound of nu-metal guitars seemed to come roaring out of her own heart.

She was woken up in the sun-drenched morning by the sound of her doorbell many floors down. She heard the housekeeper Jorani call and the door open. Sith hesitated over choice of jeans and top. By the time she got downstairs, she found the driver and the housemaid joking with Dara, giving him tea.

Like the sunshine, Dara seemed to disperse ghosts.

“Hi,” he said. “It’s my day off. I thought we could go on a motorcycle ride to the country.”

But not to the country. Couldn’t they just spend the day in Soriya? No, said Dara, there’s lots of other places to see in Phnom Penh.

He drove her, twisting through back streets. How did the city get so poor? How did it get so dirty?