More than her beauty, it was her eloquence that had simultaneously stirred and arrested him. Barely eighteen, younger than the group of male students facing her, she possessed a confidence rarely exhibited by a Cambodian woman, let alone one as young as she. On first impression he’d mistaken her self-possession for the arrogance of her social class, but he came to suspect instead that perhaps it was the product of her upbringing abroad.
The daughter of a career diplomat—who served for many years as the most senior advisor at the Cambodian Embassy in Washington, DC—she practically grew up in the United States, speaking English as fluently as she did Khmer and French. That fall, at the start of her freshman year in college, she’d heard that a group of vocational school graduates from Phnom Penh were looking for additional tutoring to help them more quickly master the English language. She brought it to her father’s attention and, gaining his permission, volunteered to be their tutor. “A language is more than just a tool of communication,” she said to the enthralled group as they advanced in their lessons. “It’s a road map to a country’s future, encompassing the collective aspiration of its people.” She went on to speak of the “language of democracy,” explaining the equality of “you” and “I,” as if fairness and justice began with the parity of pronouns. It was then that he fell in love with her, this tevoda with hair down to the small of her back.
The Old Musician’s head suddenly spins at this recollection. He tries to regain his balance, returning his attention to the task at hand, loosening the ash in the brazier. Still his memories come unbidden, rushing headlong, blurring like currents of light. Voices mingle, accelerating, and he finds he can’t quite distinguish one from another. Are they real or imagined? Are Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith still reciting their lessons? He hesitates to look, fearing that if he opens his eyes too quickly, the light will assault his vision. Yet, he feels the sensation of his lids fluttering open of their own accord. He forces them closed again. But to his utter confusion, he sees an altered landscape, a dream spreading before him. Rain puddles, each a different shape, glint under the afternoon sun. A splintered lake? Where is he? What time has he fallen into? Whose consciousness has he invaded?
His temples throb. The soft thuds of quickening footsteps. He recognizes them. He hears her running toward him. “A tevoda threw down her mirror, Papa!” his daughter says, ignoring her nanny’s repeated calls to return to her room for her afternoon nap. She’s inches before him, at once incandescent and corporeal, as if through the trickery of his failing sight, he has transmuted part and parcel of his memory of her into a living whole. “Did you see it, Papa?” It seems they are in the middle of a rainstorm—another bolt of lightning has just cut across the sky. “Oh, the mirror is broken, Papa! Now the tevoda is crying.” She seems particularly distressed, and he guesses this is why she can’t settle down for her nap. He tries to soothe her by explaining electrical discharge in the atmosphere, moisture and condensation, prevailing southwest wind, the habits of monsoons. But this fails to appease her, and, as always, he gives in to her imagination, adopting a playfully exasperated tone, wondering how it is that a tevoda—all wise and knowing—can’t foresee that a mirror flung from a place as high up as the sky will shatter. His daughter cries, “Oh, Papa, you don’t understand! She threw it down so that she could look at it! She wanted to see herself from where we are!”
He is struck by the turn of her mind, her leap and insight, this ability to communicate beyond her tender years, to perceive beyond her small world of nagging nannies and afternoon naps. She stares at him, waiting for his reply, and he wants only to reach out and grasp hold of her, to confirm her realness and solidity. She looks as she always does, sempiternally young, the rain-soaked sunlight limning her white cotton dress. It suddenly hits him that she is that tevoda they’re speaking of, a spirit in the moment of incarnation, staring at the pieces of her shattered mirror, their fragmented world. “Now do you see, Papa?” she pleads, speaking the same exact words she uttered in another life they’d shared together. “Do you see it?”
He nods. Yes, I see. In blindness, I see . . .
Heaven, she meant. Do you see heaven, Papa?
The Old Musician opens his eyes. She vanishes. Just like that, like a tiny point of light, her presence no bigger than the glint of an arrow piercing his sight. Blinding him all over again. Sorrow blooms inside his chest, tentacular and effulgent, reaching deep into him. The temple grounds return around him, the ashes, the brazier, and he tells himself that she did indeed appear, that some part of her is still here, continues to exist alongside him. He has only to look at these tiny reservoirs, these twinkling liquid mirrors dotting the ground, and he will see her again.
“In blindness,” he murmurs aloud, “I see you in your heaven.”
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Its foreignness speaks to him of a distance he once traversed. He tries to picture what this place looks like, where it is on the map, how far it might be from Washington, DC. That fall, in 1961, he never had the opportunity to travel and see the rest of America, as he would’ve liked. The first semester ended with the news of his father’s death and his rushed return to Cambodia for the old man’s funeral. Once home, he found that his grieving mother had also fallen ill and, despite her insistence that she would be fine on her own, he couldn’t leave her. He was her only child, and with his father gone, she had no other immediate family member nearby. So, he made the painful decision to give up his studies in America for the time being. Perhaps he could win another scholarship. It was not impossible. After all, he’d won this one without much knowledge of the English language.