The Rent Collector (28 page)

I breathe in the smoke of despair, sickened by my selfish, filthy smell.

I plead heavenward, begging for solace, send a miracle to heal my fallen heart.

No heavenly hand carries my pain.

No light disperses my sorrow.

No voice offers answers.

Only a peasant girl interrupts and asks that I teach her how to read.

The ancestors have a very funny sense of humor.

*****

Though the stories are tragic, moving, and enlightening, none appears to tell me the whereabouts of my teacher. Then my cousin Narin drops by just as the sun sets. She has heard at the shelters that friends have gathered to help us get settled and she wants to see how she can help. When I see her, my tired mind makes the connection.

“Of course!” I say aloud, remembering her friend Makara, whose sister works at the hospital treating Sopeap. “If Sopeap is sick, surely that’s where she would be.”

If we leave now, there will still be time. Ki nods his blessing, then counts out enough money to pay for a moto. I leave with Narin, hoping that we’ll find Sopeap alive and ornery, complaining about the nurses.

It is not the hospital where I took Nisay, but the place is just as crowded and hurried. The waiting room is filled with different faces, but the worry, pain, and frustration are the same. The woman at the desk pages Makara’s sister, and within a few minutes, she rushes through the door. Though she appears happy to see Narin, it’s also clear that she can’t talk long. After polite introductions, I get right to my question. “Have you seen Sopeap Sin, the woman you were treating from the dump?”

“Sopeap? I haven’t seen her for several weeks.”

“Wasn’t she coming here for her treatments?”

“She was, yes, but she quit—it was quite a while ago.”

“Quit?” I am confused. “Why would she quit?”

“She said the drugs made her too weak, caused her to be ornery, clouded her thinking. She said they interrupted
things
that she needed to do. We can’t force someone to go through treatment.”

“No, I understand,” I say, as my brain tries to assemble pieces that don’t fit. “One last question,” I plead, though its answer is for me and not in hopes of finding Sopeap. “Had she continued, would the treatments have made a difference?”

The woman pauses to think, then offers her best medical opinion. “In Cambodia—no. Had she decided to go to Thailand, then perhaps yes.”

“Thailand?” I ask.

“Yes, didn’t she tell you? There is a foreign hospital there offering study treatments that are experimental but promising. She turned them down—for the very same reasons.”

*****

The eastern sky is just beginning to glow across the horizon, waiting for a sun that is building enough courage to peek out and start another day at Stung Meanchey. Halfway to Sopeap’s home, I jerk to a stop. “Wait, I forgot my bag,” I say, “to carry back the books.”

“What books?”

“In her note—didn’t I tell you? She left some books for me.”

Ki shrugs a no. “If there are too many to carry, we can come back later.”

As we arrive, Ki assures me that she is definitely not inside.

“How do you know?”

“Look at her lock. It’s been secured from the outside.”

I tap on the door anyway and listen. There is no response.

Technically, Sopeap doesn’t live in Stung Meanchey, at least not in the homes that dot its perimeter. Hers is located on a skinny western street that skirts out of Stung Meanchey at a diagonal. I don’t recall how I learned which home was hers, since she’s never actually invited me over. From the outside, however, it appears to be two rooms, solid walls, and a pitched roof. The openings are shuttered tight. What I most envy, however, is her front door that locks. Still, in a world where everything means something, I’m also reminded that, like her home, Sopeap allowed very few people inside.

I bang harder, loud enough that a neighbor comes out from next door, looking irritated. “She’s not home,” he says, stating the obvious.

“Do you know where she went or if she’ll be back?” I ask.

“No.” And with a turn of his head, he disappears.

I hurry around to the side and kneel to reach behind her water jar. My fingers clutch a rusty metal ring that holds a single key. I turn to see the neighbor peek out from behind a window opening and then turn away. I pay him no mind but hurry to the front and shove the key into the lock. It clicks open.

“Are you ready?” I ask Ki. He deflects my question with a shrug.

I push open the front door and let the light that is now bathing the dump wash inside and illuminate the room.

“Sopeap?” I call out, knowing I will hear no answer.

As I glance around, my mouth drops open and my heart races. I reach out to confirm with my touch what my eyes try to register. Every wall in the room is stacked with books—hundreds of books.

There is a single sleeping mat against one wall. On the other side of the room is a cooking stove, black and dull, yet the modern kind with a chimney that bends on top to vent to the outside. Beside it is a tattered cabinet with a door swung half open. Inside, I see rice, a plate with aging vegetables, a container of cooking oil, and assorted cooking utensils. Opposite, on the other side of the stove, sits a small desk with a chair pushed beneath.

No matter where I stand in the room, I am close enough to reach books. I lean over to scan the closest titles. Though some are in English, most are translations into Khmer. I pull one at random from the stack and open its pages. It is
Vorvong and Saurivong,
a popular Cambodian legend. This version was written by Auguste Pavie.

I move to the next. It’s written in English, but between each line, Sopeap has penned in Khmer words. I let the cover flip closed, but the title is so worn, I can’t read it.

“What’s it about?” Ki asks.

“I have no idea.”

I pick up yet another. This one is printed in Khmer, with the name of the translator in type larger than the name of the author—an American named Steinbeck.

I keep reading titles and find there are Cambodian stories, Russian stories, Chinese stories, African stories, and stories from countries that I’ve never heard of.

“It doesn’t look as though you gave up on literature at all,” I declare.

“If these are the books she’s giving to you,” Ki says, “you’ll not only need a bigger bag, we’re going to need a bigger house.”

I shift my attention from the books to anything else in the room that may offer a clue as to where Sopeap has gone. I take a step closer to the small desk that holds an open ream of paper, a cup filled with pens and pencils, and a scribbled list with the names of twelve families—and it includes ours.

“What does it say?” Ki asks.

“It’s a list of those from whom she collected rent. Our name is at the bottom.”

That’s when it dawns on Ki for the first time. “If she’s gone, who is going to collect our rent?”

“Who, indeed?”

We scour the place a bit longer before Ki gives up and asks, “Now what?”

“Let’s start with the neighbors,” I say, “and then everyone on Sopeap’s list.” I realize the man I’ve already encountered next door won’t be much help, so I try the neighbor on the opposite side. After I call out, a middle-aged woman comes out to greet us.

“Good morning,” she says, as if we were good friends.

“Good morning,” I reply. “I am looking for Sopeap Sin, from next door. Have you seen her?”

She shakes her head sadly. “She is sick. She has not felt well. I think she left to get help.”

“When? When did she leave?”

“A few days ago.”

“Do you know where she was going?”

“No . . . no, she didn’t talk much.” Then the woman’s eyes brighten, as though she has just solved the secret to the universe. “Lately she has been friendlier,” she adds.

Though I appreciate her enthusiasm, I was hoping for something more. We try other nearby homes and fail on all fronts. With no visible clues as to where Sopeap may be or even if she is still alive, we decide to head back home so I can read through more of her essays. We are halfway there when Ki asks a curious question.

“If she goes away and we never see her again—”

“Ki, don’t say that!”

“No, hear me out. If she goes away, won’t the landowners send a new person to collect the rent?”

His question perturbs me, and I ask, “Do we have to worry about that now?”

“You’re not understanding,” he adds. “One way to find Sopeap might be to track down the landowners.”

I don’t mean to squeal, sounding like the pigs that neighbors raise at the dump, but I do. “You may be right. Where would we find them?” And then before he can respond, I answer my own question. “Teva will know. Hurry, let’s go.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Ministry of Land and Records is located on Norodom Boulevard, near the Singapore Embassy, exactly where Teva described. It’s a modern, three-story structure with a red tile roof and a contrasting whitewashed exterior. Trees partially mask the building from the street, but as we come near, I can see it’s quite inviting—except for one problem. There is a gate and a uniformed guard through which everyone who wishes to enter must pass.

I tell Ki to announce our business, hoping it will sound more official.

“Can I help you?” the guard asks.

“We are here to research the ownership of several pieces of property,” Ki says with such authority that I want to run over and give him a hug—but I don’t. We must have passed the test because the guard waves us toward the building entrance.

The interior marbled floors are clean and swept. As I look down at our dirty and worn clothes, the contrast ensures I am instantly self-conscious. A second sentinel waits, this time behind an information desk, to further screen would-be intruders.

“May I help you?”

“We are looking for the Department of Records,” Ki says, but as he pronounces the title, I realize he’s said it incorrectly. It should be the Department of
Land and
Records. Either way, the uniformed guard nods once. Unfortunately, it’s not a
Please-let-me-be-of-assistance
nod, but rather an
I’m-about-to-shoo-you-peasants-out
nod, and then I notice the sign behind him. It distinctly reads
Land and Records
and it directs visitors to the far stairs.

“Never mind,” I say, pointing to the sign. “I can see that it’s up on the second floor.”

He stops nodding and also gestures toward the stairs.

We locate the office, which I hope will prove to be friendlier territory. Within the room stands a lone man behind a long counter. He wears no uniform. Once inside, Ki lets me do the talking.

“We are here to research the names of landowners,” I tell him, “not only for the home where we live, but also for a few of our neighbors.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place,” he says with a comforting wave of his hand.

I breathe a sigh of relief. “Wonderful.”

“Tell me where you live,” he asks.

In outlying parts of Cambodia, and also within the dump, there are few formal addresses. While there may be official coordinates recorded somewhere, most homes would be known and described by either their occupants’ names or by a physical description of the land and building itself.

“We live in the dump at Stung Meanchey,” I say, to begin.

“The dump?” he says, shooting back a look that’s hard to read. “Is there a sale going on there?”

I have no clue what he means so I ignore his comment and move forward. “We live on the northeast side, where the ground is higher, above where the water puddles into the marsh on the south, several hundred yards from where the water pipe enters beside the building with the bright blue roof.”

I then pass him the list of renters we found in Sopeap’s home. “These are the renters. I can describe each dwelling.”

He studies the paper before taking a sudden interest in who might be asking. He scans me up and down first, and then Ki Lim.

“Wait here, please,” he says sternly, as though we have done something wrong, before he steps away into another office. We hear voices, two people talking, and I lock my eyes on Ki, wondering if we should bolt this instant—though I have absolutely no idea why. Ki returns a shrug.

When the man steps back to the counter, he holds a second paper that he places on the hard surface next to mine. They are identical, his also in Sopeap’s distinctive handwriting. “She brought this in nearly a month ago, and then she’s returned twice since with additional information that was required,” he says. “I remember her well. She was the sick woman—I have her name right here . . .”

“Sick?” I say.

“Yes, not doing well at all.”