The Rent Collector (17 page)

I’m not certain exactly what point I’ve proven, but it feels as though there must be one in there somewhere. “Yes,” I answer. “I’m sorry.”

Sometimes when I get Sopeap angry, we finish early for the day. I think if I had to put up with me, I’d drink also. But today, she gathers her composure and keeps going.

“There are other vital characters beside the hero. Stories are littered with characters you will recognize from our everyday lives. We should talk about them as well.”

“Like who?”

“Have you ever known someone who pretended to be something they were not? A friend, perhaps, who later crossed you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then you have met a shape-shifter—and yet it’s not always a person. Fate is the most maddening shape-shifter you will ever encounter.”

Perhaps it’s because my face is all scrunched up that she thinks I don’t follow. I do. It is just that she is talking so fast I have to concentrate to not miss something. “Tell me about others.”

“Do you have friends or acquaintances who are always mischievous and making jokes?”

“Everyone does.”

“Not only do these people provide relief with their wit, but their often impish actions point out the absurd, things that need to change.”

“Just like Lucky Fat,” I say.

“Explain what you mean.”

“The other day Lucky joked about how ridiculous it is that the buyer pays less to women and children when they bring in scrap than to a man—and he did it right in front of the buyer’s face. I thought it was funny, but the buyer seemed annoyed. Yet, when he paid me that day, it was as much as if Ki had gone.”

“Then you are already acquainted with the benefits of a trickster.” Sopeap raises her arm to cover the lower part of her face, then crouches at her waist. She glances wildly about the room, and when she speaks, her voice almost sounds sinister. She is actually acting; it’s a side of the woman I have never seen. “And then there’s the mask of the shadow,” she says, “a cunning character indeed.”

“The shadow character must be the evil person, like the gangs,” I say.

“It could be,” she agrees, standing back up straight. “Sometimes, the shadow is the villain, but a shadow may also be someone who simply disagrees with the hero and tries to pull him or her in a different direction. And sometimes the shadow isn’t a character at all.”

“Why not?”

“At times the shadows can be within us—all of our dark secrets that try to tear us apart, secrets that we can’t or don’t admit, even to ourselves.”

“There is something you’ve said that confuses me,” I say.

“Some of the things I say confuse me also. What is it?”

“If the shadow isn’t always evil, if it can also be someone who disagrees, does that mean Ki is a shadow when he tells me I’m wrong?”

“Good question. Remember, from the shadow’s point of view,
we
are the shadow and he is the hero. And here is something else just as confusing: sometimes these characters are all mixed together. We may find that any character in the story can temporarily wear the mask of any or all of these, even the hero.”

“Then how do I keep them straight?”

“Often we don’t. That is why literature—and life—are so exciting. These characters can be right in front of our faces and yet we don’t see them.”

Sopeap hesitates.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Also think about this, and then we will finish for the day. All of these characters we have discussed, and many more that we haven’t—their struggles aren’t always evident. In almost every story, the fiercest battles often take place within.”

Sopeap places her books in her bag, a sign that tells me we are finished for the day. Perhaps it’s the confusion still pinned to my face, or that I’m finally silent and not asking incessant questions, but either way, just before heading out the door, she leaves a thought that I sense will percolate in my head for the rest of the afternoon.

“Just when we think we have our own stories figured out,” she says, “heroes arise in the most unexpected places.”

*****

The
Momordica charantia
is a tropical plant grown in Cambodia that is widely known for its edible fruit. The fruit is a grassy green color and comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, though typically oblong with bluntly tapering ends. In short, it looks like a skinny cucumber with a horrific case of warts. It is also called
bitter melon,
and rightly so. Of all the fruits in Cambodia, there is none more bitter or acrid to the taste.

Teva Mao says the leaves of the bitter melon plant stimulate digestion, reduce fever, and just may help my son. When she returns from a trip into the city, she brings back some leaves that she purchased at the market, and I am most thankful. Nisay is not as excited. I don’t care. He’s been getting worse and I’ll try anything. I boil the plant until the bubbling water has leached color from the leaves, turning the liquid a pale emerald green. It actually looks quite delicious, until I take a sip. My lips tighten and purse and my tongue involuntarily blocks access to my throat. It makes me wonder: If I can hardly stand its taste, how am I going to get Nisay to try it?

Ki thinks it’s funny, so I give him the job of feeding it to the child. He starts with a spoonful, and while Nisay is eager on the first try, he’s not stupid. I question how much of the liquid the boy actually swallows as green splashes trickle down his bare chest. On Ki’s second try, Nisay cries, spits, and jerks his head sideways, and it’s plain to everyone—okay, at least to me—that this is not going to work. Ki, however, can be as stubborn as Nisay. He tells us that he’ll be back, and he soon returns with a small container of juice from a fruit called
Tieb,
also known as
custard apple.
(I have no idea where he got it, and he refuses to tell me.) While the bitter melon is known for being sour, the custard apple is known for being sweet. On the third attempt—Nisay twists away at first—Ki finally forces a spoonful of the sugary liquid against the child’s lips. The fussing stops, Nisay turns to Ki with interest, and his tongue pokes out of his mouth, as if to say, “Hey, something is different here!”

The transformation is so swift we can’t keep from laughing, and Nisay now looks like a baby bird waiting for breakfast. I almost feel sorry for the child, as I can see what’s coming. He gulps; he realizes; he coughs; he cries. Ki then presses another spoonful of the sweet liquid to his lips and the process starts all over again. It is parenting by deception at its finest, and my husband is quite proud of himself—in spite of the fact that our son will have obvious issues with trust well into adulthood.

Still, it’s a happy day and I have hope that the medicine will help. But by the next morning, there is more diarrhea, this time a pasty green color, and my son cries for most of the morning before I hand him to someone else, someone who is not his mother, someone who doesn’t care about him as much as I do, and I trudge back home to learn about literature because it’s supposed to somehow, in my warped mind, help my child.

When Sopeap finally arrives, she asks, “Are you okay, child? You look as though you’ve been crying.”

Chapter Seventeen

Dreams are curious.

Most dreams are nonsensical scenes that cause us to giggle when we recall them in the morning. Others are frightening nightmares during which we are attacked by gangs, chased by garbage trucks, or endlessly falling in menacing darkness. A few rare dreams are so real, so detailed and profound, that they alter the course of our lives. Last night I had such a dream.

It was not of my childhood. I didn’t speak with my grandfather or try to decipher his often puzzling advice. In fact, I didn’t utter a word. Instead, when I awoke in the morning—or thought I had—I opened the flap on the front of our little home at Stung Meanchey to find the entire dump covered in a blanket of white ash. I assumed that the fires must have been especially terrible to create so much ash, but then, as I looked over the horizon, I could see Jorani Kahn. She was waving me to follow, and it was then that I understood Stung Meanchey wasn’t covered in ash at all—it was covered in snow.

I have never seen snow in person, never felt its touch against my skin. I only know about snow through occasional pictures of faraway countries that we find in discarded travel magazines—and from Jorani Kahn’s stories. She once visited a place called
Co-lo-ra-do
in America with her father when she was a child. She told me about molding snow into balls like cotton, but heavy like mud, and throwing them at other people for fun. She said that the piles of snow in the mountains were so tall that they would almost reach the height of the trash at Stung Meanchey.

I didn’t have time to play in the snow. Nisay had been sick again and we had no money for the doctor. I had to work, but when I looked again for Jorani Kahn to tell her, she was gone. Instead, I saw only stillness—no rumbling trucks, no clanking bulldozers, no scavenging workers, no grunting pigs, no clucking chickens, no boisterous children, no buzzing flies. It was completely and utterly silent.

In spite of the unusual scene, I snatched my picker and an empty canvas sack, as if it were just another normal day of work. Yet the fact that it was just an ordinary day is partly what made it so extraordinary. I stepped out into the snow, but as I began to dig down through the sheet of white, I realized the putrid trash was no longer there beneath. Everything dirty at Stung Meanchey was gone—no germs, no stench, no toxic water, no smoke, no fires, no bustle, no gangs, no rotting food. The filthiest place on earth had been made clean.

As I turned about, marveling at what had happened, in the distance I could see my home province of Prey Veng. I understood that this was impossible, since Prey Veng and Stung Meanchey lie far apart, a distance that requires a long trek by bus, much hiking, and lastly a ride by boat—but I could see the province anyway. And in my village home, a man stood waiting with his hands stretched out in my direction, as if he wanted me to hand him something, or perhaps he was beckoning me home. At first I assumed him to be my grandfather, for he often visits me in my dreams. However, this man stood too tall, too straight, too broad to be my grandfather, even in his younger years.

And then he spoke.

“You should have come sooner. Why didn’t you come sooner?”

He repeated the question three times before I responded. But just when I was about to ask his name and what his question meant, I awoke with his voice still ringing in my ears:

“Sang Ly, you should have come sooner.”

*****

“Do you dream?” I ask Sopeap before we end for the day.

“As in goals, such as ‘
reach for your dreams’?
Or do you mean waking up relieved that I wasn’t actually working naked in the dump?”

Until I came to know Sopeap, I didn’t realize how funny she could be.

“I mean seeing people and places in your dreams that are familiar, but then not understanding what they mean—if they mean anything at all.”

“You’re talking about serious dreams?”

“Yes.”

“The only real dreams I have anymore are usually not pleasant.”

“Nightmares?”

She nods. “Perhaps a symptom of old age.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “How do you keep them away?”

“Rice wine. Why all the questions?”

“I had a dream that feels important, but I don’t know for sure.”

“I guess that would depend on whom you believe.”

“How so?”

“William Shakespeare called dreams the ‘children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy.’ ”

“What’s my other choice?”

“Dreams have also been called a sign of ambition. I think the quote was: ‘Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.’ ”

“And who said that?”

“That was also William Shakespeare.”

“He couldn’t make up his mind?”

She shrugs. “I would say if it feels important it probably is. Our subconscious can be downright persistent in prodding us along our path, even if it’s a road we’d rather not travel.”

“Then dreams matter?”

“Absolutely. Some of the world’s most important stories, works of literature that have changed lives, have come through dreams.”

“Seriously?”

“Let’s see. Many sacred writings of Buddha depict specific dream images. Then there is Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland,
a perfect example of a story inspired by dreams. There’s
Kubla Khan,
a poem by Coleridge that’s considered one of his greatest works. It celebrates creativity and our connection to the universe—and it was composed one night after a dream. Robert Louis Stevenson, a Scottish novelist, was a vivid dreamer, as was Bunyan, who wholly attributes his
Pilgrim’s Progress
to dreams. Cambodian writer Nhean Uy composed several of his dreams into stories. Give me time and I can probably list dozens, perhaps even hundreds more. And let’s not forget Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist. He was the grandfather of dream psychology. He believed that literature and dreams weave together in astonishing ways. He documented a connection between the dreams of his patients and figures in mythology—even with people who had never read mythology.”