Three Flames Read online

  ALSO BY ALAN LIGHTMAN

  FICTION

  Mr g

  Ghost

  Reunion

  The Diagnosis

  Good Benito

  Einstein’s Dreams

  NONFICTION

  Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

  In Praise of Wasting Time

  Screening Room

  The Accidental Universe

  A Sense of the Mysterious

  Dance for Two

  The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th Century Science

  Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists

  Time for the Stars

  Ancient Light: Our Changing View of the Universe

  POETRY

  Song of Two Worlds

  THREE FLAMES

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 by Alan Lightman

  First hardcover edition: 2019

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  An earlier version of the chapter “Ryna” first appeared in Daily Lit magazine under the title “Reprisals.” An earlier version of the chapter “Pich” first appeared in Consequence magazine.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lightman, Alan P., 1948– author.

  Title: Three flames : a novel / Alan Lightman.

  Description: First hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018057994 | ISBN 9781640092280

  Subjects: LCSH: Cambodia—History—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3562.I45397 T47 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057994

  Jacket design by Jaya Miceli

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to the strong and courageous young women of the Harpswell Foundation.

  CONTENTS

  Ryna (2012)

  Nita (2009)

  Kamal (2013)

  Thida (2008)

  Pich (1973)

  Sreypov (2015)

  Notes and Acknowledgments

  RYNA

  (2012)

  Ryna had just finished putting a quarter kilo of pork and a half dozen rambutan into her burlap shopping bag, wondering if her husband would scold her for spending too much, when she saw the man who had murdered her father. At first she wasn’t sure. She hadn’t seen the man for thirty-three years, since she was twelve years old, and he was now whitened and bent over and barely able to support his skinny body with a walking stick. But he had the same crooked mouth and angular cheeks that she remembered, the same mole above his left eye, and as she studied him from three stalls away, she became more and more certain. Many times over the years since the war, she had imagined what she would do if she ever saw him again. What she had most wished for was some catastrophe to permanently separate him from his family, as had happened to her family, or for him to be stricken with cancer and die a slow and painful death.

  That evening, after her husband had finished eating his dinner, Ryna said to him, “I think I saw Touch Pheng in the market this morning.” The smell of the pork blended with the odor of mildew, always present during the rainy season, when nothing could be kept dry.

  “Who?” said Pich, wiping his mouth.

  “The commander of the camp at Sopheak Mongkol.”

  She looked over at Pich through the dim yellow light and tried to read his expression. The one room of the house was lit only by a single bulb, which dangled from wires that ran along the tin roof, down a wall made of packed palm leaves, around the two storage bags of corn and rice, and finally to a car battery in the corner.

  “Why are you talking about that?” said Pich, annoyed. “And anyway, how do you know it was him? It’s been so many years.”

  “Do you remember when I saw Cousin Mala after forty years? You didn’t believe me then either.”

  Pich didn’t bother replying. He was sharpening the blade of his plow, which he would need to finish preparing his fields for planting. Sharpening blades was their son Kamal’s job, but Kamal was out as usual, drinking cheap wine in the rain with his friends.

  Pich stood and began putting his tools away. He was not much taller than his wife and almost as thin, with fleshy lips, perpetually bloodshot eyes, and a scar on his cheek where he’d been gored by a neighbor’s ox. Now the rain was pinging like gunshots on the tin roof, causing the two oxen under the house to shuffle nervously. Ryna could look down between the bamboo poles of the floor and see their shadowy forms fidgeting below.

  “What should we do?” said Ryna.

  “What’s there to do? Why do you want to think about such a useless thing? It’s a waste of time. And tomorrow don’t buy any rambutan.” Pich was always especially unpleasant the day after he’d spent the night with Lakhena.

  “I am doing, I don’t yet know what.”

  “What is silly Mae Wea going to do?”

  “Something.” Unsettled, Ryna sat down next to Thida, her eldest daughter, who began brushing her mother’s hair. At age sixteen, Thida had gone to Phnom Penh to work off a family debt. She’d been back home for a year, eating regularly, but her wrists were still smaller than the thickness of a cucumber, and she sometimes began screaming in the middle of the night. Their middle daughter, Nita, Pich had married off at age sixteen to a traveling rubber merchant, who promptly deposited his new wife for safekeeping with his aunt on the far side of Battambang Province. But at least Ryna still had her youngest daughter, Sreypov, her mi-oun, still in school at Ryna’s fierce insistence. She would give her life to protect Sreypov. Ryna looked over at her youngest daughter, in the corner, reading one of her schoolbooks. Sreypov, although only fourteen, had her own mind and wrote poetry. She was the fire in the family.

  Ryna closed her eyes, hoping the long brushstrokes would calm her. Her jet-black hair fell to the middle of her back. Despite her age, she was still an attractive woman, with a slender body and a sympathetic mouth, but her skin had become worn with the heat and the life on the farm, and deep grooves spread out from the corners of her eyes. One could see the Chinese blood on her father’s side, as her nose was more narrow and her skin lighter than pure Khmer.

  “I’ve had enough of silly talk for the day,” said Pich. “I’m getting old. And tomorrow is almost here.” Without bothering to take off his sweaty shirt, he lay down on his sleeping mat. Almost immediately, Sreypov and Thida disappeared behind the dangling sheet that partitioned off the tiny area where they undressed and slept.

  Once the house had grown silent, Ryna began brooding again about Touch Pheng, and her hands started to shake. She would do something horrible to him. She walked to the corner of the room where the family said prayers for their ancestors. On a table were candles, bits of colored string, photographs of Pich’s parents and grandparents and of Ryna’s mother and two grandmothers. Ryna possessed only a single picture of her father, which she kept safe in a small metal box. Now she lit a candle and took out the photograph, stained and curled around the edges. Here her father was a young man, perhaps twenty-five years old, handsome and sweet. In he
r mind, she could see the moonless night he was killed, she could see the red glow of the hand-rolled cigarettes of the Khmer Rouge soldiers as they sat under a tree, she could hear their voices as they came to her father’s bunkhouse and called him out along with two other men who had all tried to escape to find missing members of their families. “We are moving you to another camp,” said Touch Pheng, a phrase whose meaning all understood. She could hear the commander’s raspy and arrogant voice. She had seen him order the executions of people before, as easily as if he were swatting mosquitoes. The cadres carried shovels and ropes. Ryna looked at the photograph and said a prayer for her father. Inexplicably, she began thinking of the time they had gone together to Phnom Penh when she was a little girl and sat on the grass below the great monument celebrating the departure of the French. Ryna had never seen a city. Amid the noisy crush of buildings and people flying by on their cycles and motos, her father sat quietly humming a song to her. Somewhere, in the distance, she heard Pich snoring. Ryna put a cupful of sticky rice sweetened with palm sugar on the sleeping mats of each of her children, as she had done for years, and lay down.

  After a night of tossing and turning, Ryna rose before dawn, climbed barefoot down the rickety wooden ladder to the ground, and began preparing breakfast and lunch in the little shed that served as the kitchen, ten meters from the house. Thida had gotten up even earlier to start the wood fire. Until harvest, their food was limited, but Ryna could still season it with garlic and ginger. A little later, Ryna roused Pich and Kamal, who ate their rice and bits of dried fish in the dark without speaking. Afterward, the men loaded up the oxcart with sacks of rice seed and tools and left for the farm.

  When she and Thida had finished cleaning the dishes, Ryna swept the floor and dusted the tables and the sleeping mats and the walls. It was 8 a.m., time for the market. She gathered up food scraps for the oxen and went down the ladder again to the ground. Passing the kitchen shed, she caught sight of the pork knife and put it in her shopping bag.

  The market was always a barrage of color and sound, offering a thousand distractions, but this morning Ryna walked purposefully past the oranges and the red rambutan, the lavender and magenta fabrics, the screaming half-naked children and the chickens darting down the muddy path between the stalls, until she spotted the man standing near the covered stall that sold mangoes. She approached him as closely as she dared and got a good look, much better than the day before. She even heard him speak, asking how much he owed for a half dozen mangoes. Was it the voice she remembered? It was the tired voice of an old man. After a minute, he seemed to feel her eyes and returned her gaze. They stared at each other for a few uncomfortable moments. She gripped the handle of the knife in her bag. Then the man looked away and hobbled to the next stall. She would not approach him now, not today.

  It was still early in the morning and already so hot that the sweat had soaked through Ryna’s shirt. She nodded to several people she knew and bowed to a procession of monks in saffron robes, walking through the muddy ruts left by the oxcarts. When she passed the house of her best friend, Makara, she waited a few moments at the wire fence. But Makara wasn’t there.

  Although Ryna had lived in this village for nearly thirty years, only in the last few had she felt that she might begin to belong. This was her husband’s provincial home, not hers. Her birth village was in Pursat. She hadn’t returned there since that frightening morning a lifetime ago when the young soldiers appeared and dragged everyone off to the camps. Only two years after the Khmer Rouge regime ended, when Ryna was fourteen, her mother had died from gangrene, later her sister. Without any parents, Ryna was taken into the household of her uncle, who arranged for her to marry Pich. She knew nothing of Pich or his village. At first, she had thoughts about going to school, but Pich put her to work on the family farm, and then the children began. After the birth of Thida, when Ryna had been ill with pneumonia, Pich sat by her side day and night putting wet rags on her cheeks and massaging her back. He did the same when she was sick with dengue fever. Over the years, she and Pich had grown accustomed to living with each other. Slowly, she’d made friends in the village, at the funerals and the weddings.

  Thirty years. All of Ryna’s uncles and aunts had passed away and now seemed like the shadows of vanishing dreams. The only remaining link to her village in Pursat was her childhood friend Makara, who, upon marriage, had refused to share a sleeping mat with her husband until he agreed to live in the same village as Ryna. Every Sunday for the last twenty-five years, she and Makara walked arm in arm by the river, escaping for a few precious hours their household obligations and their husbands. Makara was her lifeline. Makara was her soul mate. She laughed with Makara.

  It was Makara who had first discovered that Ryna’s husband was sleeping with Lakhena. Half the married men in the village had girlfriends, but few of them lived nearby. “I’m so sorry, dear sister,” she told Ryna, and hugged her. When Ryna confronted Pich about the affair, he said only: “It’s none of your business.” Since then, a year ago, Pich had been spending one night a week with Lakhena. Every month, Lakhena sent little gifts to Ryna’s children, pieces of fruit and bits of colored fabric, delivered by a toothless former monk. Ryna would always throw the gifts into the river. Pich called Lakhena his bropun jong, his second wife, but Ryna and her friends called her a srey somphoeung, a slut.

  That night, after the second time she had seen Touch Pheng in the market, Ryna could hardly close her eyes. It was hot, without any breezes, and she was thinking about the man. She saw him covered with blood, swaggering about their village. Then she was a child, back in the camp, eating grasshoppers and crickets and anything she could find, digging canals in the mud with her fingers, hungry, always hungry, trying to catch sight of her father and little brother and sister.

  The following morning, the whitened old man with the crooked mouth was not at the market. Nor the morning after that. A week later, Ryna spotted him again, standing in front of some children playing in the mud near several crates of oranges. This time, she walked straight up to him. “Are you Touch Pheng?” she asked. He seemed to lean more heavily on his stick. “Do you know who I am?” said Ryna, her voice not as confident as before. He shook his head no. He smelled of tobacco. “Were you in Sopheak Mongkol during the Pol Pot time?” whispered Ryna. The man said nothing, but she could see something cross his face. Slowly, he turned around on his cane, putting his stooped back toward her.

  On her way home, Ryna stopped at Makara’s house. Today, Makara was home. “The man who killed my father,” said Ryna. “He’s alive. I saw him here, in the village.”

  Makara stopped feeding her chickens and looked up. Over the years, she had lost a couple of teeth and gained weight, but she still had her broad and welcoming face. “When?”

  “Ten days ago.”

  “Really! Why didn’t you tell me? What are you going to do? The police won’t do anything.”

  “I know. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do.”

  “But you are doing something,” said Makara. “Those killers should be brought to justice. They should suffer. You owe it to your father.” She put her arm around Ryna. “I’ll tell Sayon. He knows about these things. He’ll tell you what you can do. Where’s this man living? Can you show him to me?”

  “I don’t . . .” Ryna found herself suddenly frightened. She needed time to think. “I’m not sure where he lives.”

  “Sister, this is your chance to have courage. If I could get the soldiers who murdered my uncle and sister . . .” Makara gently patted Ryna’s back. “Just tell Sayon when you’re ready.”

  In the following weeks, Ryna saw Touch Pheng several more times at the market. They would stare at each other from a distance, then go about their business. She noticed that the old man was always alone. And as he limped from one stall to the next on his stick, he seemed half in the grave.

  The new rice shoots were coming up now, several centimeters tall, close packed and velvety and intensely yellow
-green in color. Every afternoon, Ryna spent hours on the farm picking out the invading snails, one by one, and dropping them in a bucket. Soon it would be time for transplanting. Pich went out to drink several nights a week, sneaking five-hundred-riel notes from the envelope under his sleeping mat. In the wee hours of the morning he would call up to Ryna, too drunk to climb the ladder without her help.

  After a stifling night in mid-June, Ryna took the photograph of her father from its safe place in the metal box and, for the first time in years, carried it out of the house. When she saw Touch Pheng at the market that morning, she gingerly pulled the picture from her pocket and held it in front of his face. “This was my father,” she said. He looked at the photo without speaking. Then he took some sugarcane and rambutan from his basket and held it out to her. “No,” she said. But as she turned to go home, he slipped the food into her shopping bag and hobbled away. She threw his food to the ground.

  Now Ryna was certain that the old man was Touch Pheng. That evening, while she and Pich were listening to their radio, she wanted to tell her husband about her meetings with Touch Pheng. She wanted Pich to hold her and talk sweetly to her, as he had done when they first married. But she could not make the words come out of her mouth. For years, her husband had acted as if the Pol Pot time had never occurred, although he himself had lost an uncle and two aunts. There were other things he would not discuss as well. Something terrible had happened to his brother, before the Pol Pot time. When they first married, Ryna told Pich all the horrors she had witnessed in her camp—seeing an old man hung upside down from his ankles because he had complained about his thin soup; her little brother dying of starvation; her pretty sixteen-year-old sister Lina snatched up by one of the Khmer Rouge officers and used every night in his hut; the pile of fresh bodies with slit throats that she stumbled upon in the bushes one day. And the murder of her father. Pich had listened and nodded and said, “We will not speak of this again.”