Vothy
Not four seasons but two. Dry. Wet.
The house where I stayed on my last trip sat on a vast expanse of thirsty soil; now it is hemmed in by water in the middle of a wide pool. The rains have painted the dying landscape of withered palms and parched rice paddies with the impossible greens of a watercolor. The river carrying me south-wasn't it a stony dirt road just a few months ago? You travel to a country during the dry season, and when you return during the monsoon, you no longer recognize it. It is transformed. The magic of the seasons is repeated every year east of the Suez, where the days break first and the Sky God decides which dreams will come true this season.
And which will have to wait until the next.
The monsoon is everything in Asia. People wait for it with impatience, with longing-and with dread. It gives life and takes it away. It can arrive early enough to halt a military offensive in the jungles of Burma, or bring famine to millions of Indian peasants if it's late. Sometimes it floods everything in its path, erasing borders that haven't always existed. This complicates things for the soldiers charged with defending the nation, since they can't tell where their territory begins or ends. The line that separates them from the others lies underwater, and they may confuse a boat full of soldiers from a neighboring country struggling to stay afloat with an enemy incursion. Are they on their side of the line or on ours? Do we help them, or shoot them?
The magic of the seasons pulls off its most amazing trick in the Mekong. The "river of evil memory" is born in Tibet, where the shepherds believe a mighty dragon guards its source to make sure it will never stop flowing, as its waters are considered the blood that runs through the veins of the people who live on its banks. Without it, life would not be possible. After leaving China, the river grows murky as it passes through the heart of Southeast Asia, becoming for much of its length an endless fount the color of milky coffee, perhaps to hide old betrayals, the colonial atrocities and devastating wars that have done so much harm to its peoples. Winding through jungles and valleys, the Mekong traces the border between Burma and Thailand, passes through Laos and Cambodia, and finally dies, full of life, in Vietnam.
The Tonlé Sap, one of the river's tributaries, flows southwest through Cambodia when there are no rains, but during the monsoon its waters abruptly rise and reverse course, flowing northward into Lake Tonlé. Only when the rains come to an end does it take up once more its usual course toward the South China Sea. The miracle of the Mekong's reversal is celebrated throughout the country with a large festival and fireworks. It is the beginning of the wedding season.
With people's hearts in tumult, matchmakers go from town to town acting as go-betweens and arranging marriages for a small commission, based on the terms negotiated between the families and the number of sacks of rice a suitor can offer. The elder members of the community say that it's always been this way and that traditions should be respected. But the only tradition that never dies in the villages of the Cambodian countryside is poverty, which makes love a prized asset, the only asset. Only a fool would just give it away.
Kong Thai and Touh Sokgan broke the rules and gave theirs away. He was a scrawny man, teeth rotting and tobacco-stained, hair grimy, with a wife and four children from an earlier, unsuccessful life. His best years had been left behind in the rice paddies, and they weren't coming back. She'd been the most sought-after young woman in the village, her skin browned by the tropical sun, with high cheekbones, soft lips, and ebony hair. She was supposed to marry someone who owned at least one plot of land and half a dozen animals, but ignored her family's objections to a man they said would bring nothing but trouble. Sokgan and Thai decided to abandon the life of the monsoon, tired of waiting for the rains in the years it arrived late, and tired of wishing it had never come in those years when it unleashed its fury upon the village. They came together, in defiance of everything and everybody, in their tiny village in Svay Rieng province near the Vietnamese border, and left to live out their improbable dream in the capital city.
In Phnom Penh they found the same lodging that all newcomers do: a room, a rickety bed, a fan, a window, and plenty of rats, all for a dollar a day. Sokgan took care of the house during the day, while Thai took a job as a rickshaw driver. At the time, you could accurately assess how the country was doing by the number of rickshaws in the city. The more rickshaws there were, the more destitute trying to make ends meet. When Kong Thai started his new job at the beginning of the '90s, there were thousands of trishaws in Phnom Penh, driven to and fro by peasants newly arrived from the countryside, war veterans who still had both their legs, lunatics, and unfortunates of all stripes. Cambodia had been shattered by decades of invasions, bombings, civil war, and Pol Pot's genocide. Its people didn't know it yet, but just as they were starting to recover from those old wounds, a new, silent tragedy had begun to strike at the heart of Cambodian society. AIDS had slipped silently into the lives of those charged with the task of pulling the nation out of its deep well of misery.
Sokgan has never understood how that scrawny, feeble man who promised her a new life in the city could have the strength after an arduous workday to pedal another eleven kilometers to the brothels of Svay Pak, on the outskirts of the city, to spend his day's earnings there. But it's too late now for regrets. She is lying naked, too weak to feign modesty about the body she no longer recognizes as her own, in a room on the third floor of the Russian hospital in Phnom Penh. The young woman has watched her own beauty gradually decay, washed away like a watercolor in the rain. Her breasts have shrunk and disappeared, her face has flattened, her thighs have grown thin and her voice weak; she spends the nights howling. She can't remember the last time she looked in a mirror. When I see her huddled there on the rickety bed, motionless, I hesitate in the doorway. Is she alive? Is she dead? Only her bones remain and, folded over them, piles of extra skin, languid, unfixed, looking at any moment as if they might slide off her body and leave her skeleton bare.
Thai must have brought AIDS into the house almost immediately, because Vothy, their daughter, was also born with HIV. There's an old suitcase under the bed that mother and daughter share in the Russian hospital, the kind of old perfume salesman would carry, rectangular, made of brown artificial leather with metal corners, battered and slightly pompous. Everything they own is in that suitcase. Vothy's pink dress, her mother's blue dress; Vothy's pair of patent-leather shoes, her mother's sandals; Vothy's earrings, her mother's earrings; a small brush for Vothy, a big one for her mother.
Sokgan had refused to go to the hospital, figuring that if she was going to die, it made no difference where she did it. In any case, every day she had less strength for the trip and so always put it off till tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow . . . Only when she found the first lesions on her daughter's skin, lesions like the ones that for her had signaled the beginning of the end, did she muster what was left of her strength, stare her husband down with the full force of her pent-up rage, and demand that he take the two of them to the hospital. You and I might die tomorrow, and it might even have been better if we'd died already, but how is it Vothy's fault that you spent your rickshaw money in the Svay Pak brothels? And don't bother lying to me anymore. The doctor said AIDS can't be transmitted through food or water, only through weakness, which you've always had in spades.
So Kong Thai pedaled the fifteen kilometers between the family's room-the rickety old bed with its fan, window, and rats, all for a dollar-and the hospital, his daughter and wife clutching their suitcase in the rear of the rickshaw, sobbing. The sick were lined up at the hospital entrance, lying on the ground, too weak to stand, waiting for today's dead to make room for the dead of tomorrow. They waited there for hours until, as night fell, a nurse called them and began the admissions process. At the top of the form she wrote the date:
AUGUST 22, 2000.
Name: TOUH SOKGAN.
Age: 27 YEARS.
Symptoms: SKIN LESIONS, NAUSEA, VOMITING, WEIGHT LOSS, COUGH, ULCERS.
Weight: 28 KG.
Condition: TERMINAL AIDS.
Name: KONG VOTHY.
Age: 5 YEARS.
Symptoms: SKIN LESIONS, NAUSEA, HAIR LOSS.
Weight: 17 KG.
Condition: (Probably) AIDS.
Sokgan was embarrassed by the questions about her sexual history, offended that she'd been taken for a prostitute. She said her only sexual partner had been a rickshaw driver. Even though at the time many housewives were contracting the disease from their husbands, doctors identified any woman they diagnosed with AIDS as a prostitute. AIDS was a whores' disease, not a disease of the johns who visited them.
Finally, the nurse asked the two new patients if they had any family. This was important, she said, because if the parents died before their daughter and left her an orphan-a likely scenario-the hospital would take her to the village of her extended family, as the staff had found that a grandparent, uncle, or cousin was always willing to take in a...
