Sith went hard. “Not a million,” she said. “Somewhere between two hundred and fifty and five hundred thousand."
"Enough,” smiled the Kru Taey. “My father was one of them.” She smiled for a moment longer. “I will be sure to tell the Prime Minister that you visited me."
Sith snorted as if in scorn. “I will tell him myself."
But she ran back to her car.
That night, Sith looked down on all the lights like diamonds. She settled onto the giant mattress and turned on her iPod.
Someone started to yell at her. She pulled out the earpieces and jumped to the window. It wouldn't open. She shook it and wrenched its frame until it reluctantly slid an inch and she threw the iPod out of the twenty-first-floor window.
She woke up late the next morning, to hear the sound of the TV. She opened up the double doors into the salon and saw Jorani, pressed against the wall.
"The TV…” Jorani said, her eyes wide with terror.
The driver waited by his packed bags. He stood up, looking as mournful as a bloodhound.
On the widescreen TV there was what looked like a pop music karaoke video. Except that the music was very old fashioned. Why would a pop video show a starving man eating raw maize in a field? He glanced over his shoulder in terror as he ate. The glowing singalong words were the song that the dog had sung at the top of the stairs. The starving man looked up at Sith and corn mash rolled out of his mouth.
"It's all like that,” said the driver. “I unplugged the set, but it kept playing on every channel.” He sompiahed but looked miserable. “My wife wants to leave."
Sith felt shame. It was miserable and dirty, being infested with ghosts. Of course they would want to go.
"It's okay. I can take taxis,” she said.
The driver nodded, and went into the next room and whispered to his wife. With little scurrying sounds, they gathered up their things. They sompiahed, and apologized.
The door clicked almost silently behind them.
It will always be like this, thought Sith. Wherever I go. It would be like this with Dara.
The hotel telephone started to ring. Sith left it ringing. She covered the TV with a blanket, but the terrible, tinny old music kept wheedling and rattling its way out at her, and she sat on the edge of her bed, staring into space.
I'll have to leave Cambodia.
At the market, Dara looked even more cheerful than usual. The fortunetellers had pronounced the marriage as very favorable. His mother had invited Sith home for the Pchum Ben festival.
"We can take the bus tomorrow,” he said.
"Does it smell? All those people in one place?"
"It smells of air freshener. Then we take a taxi, and then you will have to walk up the track.” Dara suddenly doubled up in laughter. “Oh, it will be good for you."
"Will there be dirt?"
"Everywhere! Oh, your dirty Nikes will earn you much merit!"
But at least, thought Sith, there will be no TV or phones.
Two days later, Sith was walking down a dirt track, ducking tree branches. Dust billowed all over her shoes. Dara walked behind her, chuckling, which meant she thought he was scared too.
She heard a strange rattling sound. “What's that noise?"
"It's a goat,” he said. “My mother bought it for me in April as a present."
A goat. How could they be any more rural? Sith had never seen a goat. She never even imagined that she would.
Dara explained. “I sell them to the Muslims. It is Agricultural Diversification."
There were trees everywhere, shadows crawling across the ground like snakes. Sith felt sick. One mosquito, she promised herself, just one and I will squeal and run away.
The house was tiny, on thin twisting stilts. She had pictured a big fine country house standing high over the ground on concrete pillars with a sunburst carving in the gable. The kitchen was a hut that sat directly on the ground, no stilts, and it was made of palm-leaf panels and there was no electricity. The strip light in the ceiling was attached to a car battery and they kept a live fire on top of the concrete table to cook. Everything smelled of burnt fish.
Sith loved it.
Inside the hut, the smoke from the fires kept the mosquitoes away. Dara's mother, Mrs. Non Kunthea, greeted her with a smile. That triggered a respectful sompiah from Sith, the prayer-like gesture leaping out of her unbidden. On the platform table was a plastic sack full of dried prawns.
Without thinking, Sith sat on the table and began to pull the salty prawns out of their shells.
Why am I doing this?
Because it's what I did at home.
Sith suddenly remembered the enclosure in the forest, a circular fenced area. Daddy had slept in one house, and the women in another. Sith would talk to the cooks. For something to do, she would chop vegetables or shell prawns. Then Daddy would come to eat and he'd sit on the platform table and she, little Sith, would sit between his knees.
Dara's older brother Yuth came back for lunch. He was pot-bellied and drove a taxi for a living, and he moved in hard jabs like an angry old man. He reached too far for the rice and Sith could smell his armpits.
"You see how we live,” Yuth said to Sith. “This is what we get for having the wrong patron. Sihanouk thought we were anti-monarchist. To Hun Sen, we were the enemy. Remember the Work for Money program?"
No.
"They didn't give any of those jobs to us. We might as well have been the Khmer Rouge!"
The past, thought Sith, why don't they just let it go? Why do they keep boasting about their old wars?
Mrs. Non Kunthea chuckled with affection. “My eldest son was born angry,” she said. “His slogan is ‘ten years is not too late for revenge.’”
Yuth started up again. “They treat that old monster Pol Pot better than they treat us. But then, he was an important person. If you go to his stupa in Anlong Veng, you will see that people leave offerings! They ask him for lottery numbers!"
He crumpled his green, soft, old-fashioned hat back onto his head and said, “Nice to meet you, Sith. Dara, she's too high class for the likes of you.” But he grinned as he said it. He left, swirling disruption in his wake.
The dishes were gathered. Again without thinking, Sith swept up the plastic tub and carried it to the blackened branches. They rested over puddles where the washing-up water drained.
"You shouldn't work,” said Dara's mother. “You are a guest."
"I grew up in a refugee camp,” said Sith. After all, it was true.