30 December

Three years ago yesterday I attended Khmer Heritage Night in Portland, Oregon, USA. I was feeling blue and I didn’t really want to go, but I had a story to write, so I picked myself up by my bootstraps. I was, and I am, ever so glad I did. The people at my table on that chilly, rainy night – so different from Cambodia’s delicious December weather – taught me my first word of their language, and I ended the article I wrote about the event with that word – ah goon - which means “Thank you.”

“I think Cambodia is one of my twenty countries now,” I wrote in my journal. “For all they’ve been through, the Khmer are just about the nicest people in the world. I’ve never felt so welcomed.”

I followed through on that intention three years ago. I’ve been living in Cambodia and studying the Khmer language for three months now, and my impression that the people of Cambodia are the nicest in the world has only deepened.

Yesterday evening I recited a rhyme in Khmer for my students. I’m nearing the end of my first-grade reader, and this rhyme was my first group of lofty, not to mention cohesive, thoughts, after pages and pages of letters, then words, then simple yet excruciating sentences. I have always loved learning to read, and here again it is one of my life’s joys to tentatively sound out squiggles and realize I already know their sounds and their meanings. (The first word I discovered this way was the Khmer word for “language.”)

My students are generally as polite and attentive as can be expected of twenty teenage girls at the end of their school day, but when I read that rhyme to them, they were rapt. Afterward, they burst into the kind of applause usually reserved for rock stars. They insisted on two encores. “Can I read it tomorrow?” I asked, intending to convey by implication instead of again today. “You can read it every day!” one student squealed.

Among the privileges of my nomadic life is the opportunity to observe people’s ferocious and tender love, all over the world, for their first languages. Far from inciting xenophobia, this love seems to me to predispose people to love second languages, and third, and on and on.

Khmer is my fifth language. With the exceptions of long-distance running and stone carving – neither of which I have any natural talent for – it is the most challenging project I have ever undertaken. It has 33 consonants, 32 of which have separate subscript forms, 25 dependent vowels, 15 independent vowels, and at least three diacritical marks. The majority of these neither look nor sound like anything remotely familiar to me, and many of them look and/or sound a great deal like each other. The consonants change their appearance and the vowels change their sounds depending upon their attachments to each other. Vowel sounds also change based upon a number of other conditions that I, at this point, can only take on faith and repeat as corrected.

I am unlikely to achieve anything commonly thought of as fluency, especially as I plan to be here only two more months. Khmer is not a widely spoken language. Why, I ask myself when my head swims, am I doing this? It’s not a rhetorical question. I am doing this because I can’t think of anything else I have ever done that has made so many people so happy.

Here is my translation of the rhyme, which, as they left the classroom, a number of my students were reciting:

We are children; we go to school to learn.

We learn to see, we learn to read, we learn to draw and write.

We are good at it, but not really good. We can practice sport.

Well-being.

28 December

NUCLEAR RUINS

WORMWOOD

December 28, 2008

Chernobyl is the strangest, the most recent and most clearly preventable of all my ruins, the one with the farthest-reaching and longest-lasting implications, the one which will not simply and slowly sink into the earth which accepts all gifts. Yet Chernobyl is a ruin. I hadn’t quite seen it that way at first, since most of my ruins are peaceful, benign. Chernobyl, after more than two decades, is tending toward tranquility, the reminder that time really does heal all wounds, but it hasn’t reached it yet. Chernobyl still feels haunted, perhaps by so many heroes who lost their lives there, and saved the world.

A Ferris wheel out back of the Palace of Culture and Sport in Pripyat has never been in use, scheduled as it was to open on the First of May, 1986. The earth is taking back a hotel and a swimming pool, as it has perhaps already taken a church I read about but never saw. A school was by far the saddest of these remains, with bookshelves tilting crazily and books piled in heaps. I was momentarily seized with an urge to take a souvenir – there were no signs forbidding it – but I didn’t act on this brief lunacy. The photographs I took are suffused enough with the magnitude of this catastrophe.

Leaving the site of what may be the worst thing my species has ever done, I had to walk through a radiation detector. It was only an instant of terror. The rest of the world that waited for me on the other side was, and still is, a miracle.

HALF-LIVES

August 6, 2001

The wind called Termination blasts and scours

the shell of a ghost-town schoolhouse where children

of farmers and ranchers learned their ABCs before

the government gave these residents of Hanford

thirty days to pack their things and go.

I listen for the padded footfalls of bobcats

stalking sparrows and voles in the cool

shadows of abandoned reactors

that punctuate the bluffs above this surreal stretch

of the Columbia River that plutonium saved.

In the slow but unrelenting current, two mule deer swim

toward the riverbank where a bright red sign

warning Construction Site: No Trespassing

guards the future tombs of nuclear tailings.

A third of the river’s salmon start and finish

their unlikely lives on the gravelly bottom

of these fifty miles of the Hanford Reach,

but the seep of irrigation from the cropland shore

is threatening to erode the stone above their spawning beds.

I linger in plutonium’s slow legacy, half-grateful, half-afraid.

16 December

Everybody gets a second chance, nobody gets a third.

15 December

Teacher Josephine is laughing.

It’s late at night. Teacher Josephine is looking at her watch. Her neighbors are making noise, and Teacher Josephine is laughing.

Her neighbors downstairs are watching a program on television: the people are yelling and the music is loud. Her baby neighbor across the courtyard is crying and screaming. The dogs outside are howling.

Why is Teacher Josephine laughing?

Yesterday, Teacher Josephine taught her English students a story about Arthur and his noisy neighbors. Arthur’s neighbors were dancing, vacuuming, playing the drums, listening to loud music, barking, and having a big argument. Arthur was very angry.

Teacher Josephine is laughing because Arthur has six noisy neighbors and she has only three. Arthur was angry, but Teacher Josephine is laughing. She can’t wait to tell her students this story.

13 December

Temporary Cats

I couldn’t forget the day I found Oodacha: her name means “Lucky” in Russian because she arrived in the hall outside my second apartment in Blagoveshchensk, the Russian Far East on December 13, 2002. It was a Friday. I wrote:

Someone knocked on the door but didn’t answer when I asked “Kto tam?” There, miserable and scared, in the far corner of the hall, was a small tiger cat. While I watched, she pushed the door to the elevator room open, then huddled in the tiny corner by the elevator.

She and Skaska, “Fairy Tale,” a polite Siamese abandoned the previous winter with her sister at the school where I taught, became friends, though, like a number of my friends and me, they had little in common but proximity.

What I had forgotten was that, a decade earlier to the day, a feral tailless tuxedo kitten I named Pica Milagrita, “Little Miraculous Magpie,” began keeping company with someone I was also keeping company with. I wrote:

So we have a kitty for a little while. His kitty, in that he has the last word, and so far, pays the bills. But we’re acting like giddy adoptive parents, perfect timing for this latest cycle of mourning for a child I’m trudging through. It helps. I’ve never been all that particular about species. Here we have the best of all possible worlds, a tiny being who won’t turn our lives upside down, but will keep us company, entertain us, give us focus for our nonspecific tenderness.

Three years and a winter later, he said he wanted to be friends. I figured that included giving me a picture of Pica, the only thing I asked for. It didn’t. Eighteen years later, I’m still trying to give up hope.

As for Skaska and Oodacha, when I returned late to Russia, other people I knew nothing about were living in my apartment. They thought my cats were a nuisance, and when I got there, they were both gone. At least I’d taken photos of them.

People laugh at the idea of temporary cats, but it seems to me it’s all temporary, every single thing.

4 December

No one has ever been able to force me to do anything, including give up on them.

2004