| rette. The floor was hardwood, the house a solid tenement built for the Irish, but lived in, mostly, by Italians. Savoun, the four-year-old, and six-year-old Chan stared at Theng as he whispered answers to their questions. "I am your father's older brother," he told them. "I lived for five years in Khao I Dang camp. I was born in Battambang, like your father." He talked to the children in matter-of-fact Khmer, but his words flew by them like pelicans lifting off the great lake Tonle Sap. |
| "What is starving?" asked Savoun. "What is escape? Why aren't you married?" |
| "Shut up," said nine-year-old Mok. But he listened like the others when Theng ignored him and explained. |
| And so the names Sisophon, Aranyaprathet, Piopet, and the idea of bachelorhood seeped into the house with the smell of cigarette smoke. Where there had been no photos, no mementos, no heirlooms, no people attached to the words "grandfather," "aunt," ''cousin," now there was Theng. |
| Not that there weren't signals before, omens of memory spelled out in the children's stomach aches at school; in the way Sokunthea, home drunk from the factory in the late afternoons, would curl like a baby on the living room floor; in Luon's sudden pain when, supervising plastic tubing operators and surreptitiously studying for his night class in accounting, he glanced out the dusty windows to see a plane overhead, because he had been about to make fighter pilot, all those years ago. But now there was Theng, come like a premonition into their lives. |
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