He was very hungry and thirsty because he had waited to eat i with her. He walked and walked all day, half crazed. Every now and then some policeman with a Kalashnikov would stop him and practice English upon him and then he'd have to buy the policeman a beer. Or a man would say: Excuse me, sir, what is your nationality? and then: Where are you from? and then: Where are you going? and then: When you arrive our country? (they all seemed to have studied from the same phrasebook) and then: How long you stay? He always answered patiently; he had no right not to. He passed the site of the floating restaurant (nothing there now), and he turned up a dirt road where girls were unloading huge sacks of rice. The Tonlé Sap was aswarni that afternoon with drifting boats like up-curved dark leaves or maybe seedpods because the seeds were souls, three or four of them, well spaced, in each craft; some of them were standing and lethargically poling; and there were also people bathing and washing in that greenish-gray water where the concrete sloped steeply down from the pavilion in whose shade some beer- and toilet-paper-vendeuses squatted or sat upon their sandals listening to xylophone music there just opposite the weird red and yellow roof-scarps of Sihanouk's palace which rose so impossibly steep and tapered like a lock of his wife's hair after she'd shampooed it and he'd pulled it up from her head in a fairytale horn.
He went to the market which so long ago he had passed through but never been a part of; she'd brought him to that district when he'd bought her the first gold bracelet; and the swarming crowds no longer affected him. Maybe nothing did. He said to himself: These people are here to enrich or glorify themselves, or maybe to pass the time. Any of those choices wearied him so much now. He felt very tired. He realized that he was getting sick.
After a long time he neared the hotel, which he was beginning to loathe. He passed by that restaurant where he'd eaten just before beginning his search for her the previous year. The chickens and vegetables still hung upside down inside the glass case, but the streets were dry and the skeleton-man had grown fat. Then suddenly he saw the place where he'd gotten his hair dressed that last time.
A different girl got him. His girl saw him halfway through and cried: Hello, hello! — The entire time that the new girl was doing him, even when she struck the back of his neck with skillful wooden-sounding clackings of her knuckles and wrist, he remembered that first time now years ago when Vanna had shaved him; and at her brother's flat she'd giggled at him and said something in Khmer; when he asked the brother what she'd said, the man hung his head and replied: She say, who shaved for you? Not so good! — Not surprisingly, her brother was an ambiguous soul. At first he hadn't known that he was her brother; he'd assumed that he was the doctor because he'd made an appointment with an English-speaking specialist about her fevers and headaches and they'd set out on a motorcycle to go there, but, perhaps because she'd never had any headaches or perhaps for some other reason, she'd led him around an almost bright sky-blue cyclo with yellow struts whose skinny-legged old driver had been in an accident and held half a lemon around his bleeding finger, and into a hot doorway and up these four flights of dark and urine-smelling stairs to what he'd supposed was the doctor's house; and sat for awhile with the old lady who he did not yet know was her mother.
The man came in quietly. — Hello, sir, he said.
Very pleased to meet you, Doctor, he said.
No problem, replied the man after awhile. I am her brother.
He wasn't her brother, of course. Pol Pot had killed all her brothers and sisters, along with her parents. But he was himself an orphan and he had also been raised by this weary old woman.
At any rate, what she'd said about his shaving made him smile. Later he realized that maybe this was her way of offering to shave him once more. He no longer possessed the Happiness double-bladed razor because one day when he was travelling his suitcase had burst open and the metal box flew out, opened, and scattered parts far under the conveyor belt of his life's airport. Certainly she spoonfed him with rice with her own hands at her stepmother's house that day. It was all so confusing. So why hadn't she come?
He went into the hotel finally and the maid who now was always busy said: I'm sorry I forgot to tell you your wife came yesterday afternoon and waited for you a very long time, maybe more than one hour.
What did she say?
She was afraid maybe you were angry with her.
No, I'm not angry. What did she say?
She said maybe at night very very busy in restaurant.
You think she meant the good busy or the bad busy? he said.
I don't know. I'm very sorry, she replied, her face filled with pity.
He said nothing.
Have you been to the restaurant? she said.
No, he said. I don't want to see.
