Houses and houses and houses

I have to move by the middle of July. This is my own fault. I have a flat and a kind flatmate, but I promised another friend that we would find a place together. This is proving difficult, but I have already given my notice. So I must move. I hate moving house. I hate it more than anything else that I can think of, and yet I do it, over and over.

One dark day in Cambodia a couple of years ago, the day when I came closer to despair than I have ever come, I found myself crying, I want to go home over and over again. Drying my tears, I pondered this rather absurd statement. What was it that I wanted? Where was my home? Was I just reverting back to the early misery of boarding school? Did I mean that cold stone mansion in Limuru with its kingly garden and endless fields of brilliant green tea, our first home in Kenya, the one I left for the dormitory with its linoleum floor and antiseptic bathrooms? Was Sudan home? If it ever was, it certainly isn't now.

The fact of the matter is that I don't think I have ever had a home. I've just had houses. Places I've lived with people I've loved. Houses and houses and houses. I'll revisit this, but for today I wanted to post a piece I wrote about two houses in Cambodia--well, ostensibly it's about houses. It's truly about looking for home.

...I lived for a time in a tiny walled villa with a fairytale garden: pots of floating lotus flowers lined the courtyard, a pomello tree hung her heavy thick-skinned green fruit over the verandah, bamboo rustled along the walls. I lived for a time with an Englishwoman in that precious villa, but I could not stay there. I could not breathe in the miniature rooms of the house; I could not bear our gated and guarded street where I knew none of our neighbors except for our shrewd landlady and her fragile spinster sister who worked as our maid. Sokhay came with the house. She worked for both houses; we paid her a salary, her sister’s contribution was room and board and a life of indentured service. Sokhay’s voice was always apologetic. She stroked our arms like someone petting a cat, desperate to please, and cringed each time she erred as if we might cuff her on the side of the head. One day she announced her engagement to a naturalized French Khmer machinist looking for a wife. She had never met this man, who remained in France, sending a family member to arrange the match instead. She was forty years of age and I had assumed that her relatives had resigned themselves to her unmarried state. I asked why she had agreed to the proposal and she told me that she would rather take the chance of life at this stranger's side than continue to live in her sister's home. She spoke French, after all.

Her niece had been married three months earlier in a stunningly expensive wedding in a great hall. Thousands of dollars had been spent and the bride had appeared in two guises: first as a princess of Angkor, draped with gilt and gold, and secondly as a Western bride in a floor-length white satin gown, a filmy veil, small white flowers woven in her long dark hair. But for the girl’s aunt no such effort was made. She was a traveling bride, leaving the nation and continent of her birth for a marriage and life to a stranger in a far off land. Her dowry consisted of two suitcases and a great package of dried fish made by her sister. I sat under their porch and watched the landlady scale, debone and slice a basket of fish that were transformed into fans of peach-colored flesh still joined at the tail, to be marinated and dried. My flatmate was indignant about the whole affair; I more resigned. Did she want to go? I inquired. Oh yes, she said. Maybe it will be better. She did not speak a word of French, and I squeezed her arm in concern and we gave her an envelope full of money and then she was gone.

I left soon after Sokhay did. I wanted to live alone near my office in the city. I moved to a cement and tile apartment, a single long suffocating rectangle on the second floor. My new landlords were dentists. A placard of an enormous set of hand-painted gums hung outside our gate to advertise their services; a small crowd usually waited on stone benches inside our compound. Their office stood across the cement compound from the apartments; the surgery had an uncurtained window facing the stairs. My landlady did most of the surgery. When I crossed the courtyard she was often bent over a patient seated in a black reclining chair. She would stop probing in the patient’s wide open mouth and wave a bloody gloved hand. I would wave back.

My apartment had a set of inner stairs to the roof of the building. I thought I would have this roof to myself, but the landlord’s Chinese parents had a longstanding claim. They had a key to the padlock on the back door. Each evening they slowly ascended the outside stairs to my home, passed through my spare kitchen, and climbed the inner steps to the roof. On the roof they had strung mosquito nets and hammocks, rigged up a fluorescent light with a long extension cord, and arranged a series of cots and wooden krays. Each morning they descended, their flip-flops slapping against the tiled floor, swept the stairs with a straw broom and left the door unlocked. I begged and pleaded to no avail. They were not accustomed to locking doors. They trusted in the barred gate and three German Shepherds who tore about the compound barking every night and slammed their huge furry bodies against the constraining bars of their cage in a frenzy whenever I passed by.

The apartment had white walls and a high ceiling, but all its windows faced west. The house was a furnace. I gave up entirely on sleeping in its stifling confines and moved up to the roof with the Chinese grandparents and whichever members of the extended family were visiting. I slept in my sarong beneath a single cotton sheet and a synthetic plaid blanket on a spare kray. They listened to their radio and rocked the grandchildren in hammocks; I read novels; we all relished the wind blowing across the roofs of the city. I lay awake longer than my Cambodian companions did at night and rose an hour later at six o’clock in the morning. After half a year I awoke one morning and found myself again. Who were these strangers lying under the thin veil of a mosquito net not two feet away from my own supine body? Why was I living in a furnace with a perpetual stream of unknown relatives tromping through my house, some of whom persisted in using my tiny bathroom? Why was I living in a compound with three dogs I despised, whose barking interrupted all my dreaming? I had never hung a single painting on the wall nor bothered to change the ugly curtains. I had lived there in a dream and when I awoke I swung open the doors and left.