C’est aussi simple qu’une phrase musicale. The Old Musician tries sounding out the line of poetry in his head. Une phrase musicale. It no longer has the power it did that first time he heard it. War is anything but simple.
Years later, in Democratic Kampuchea, toward the end of the regime, when it was rumored that Pol Pot, the head of the secret organization, the much feared Angkar, was none other than Saloth Sar, his inspiring and mild-mannered teacher at Chomroeun Vichea, he couldn’t believe it. There must be a mistake, because his teacher had disappeared in 1962 and was since presumed dead. The two couldn’t be the same man. He was convinced the rumor was false.
Only in 1997 when Pol Pot, his once smooth features now aged with liver spots, appeared on television in an interview with an American journalist, did the Old Musician, assured by what he both saw and heard, finally accept that this was indeed the same man who four decades earlier in his recitation of Rimbaud’s “Guerre” had moved the class with the music of his voice.
How long has she been standing in this spot? Teera pulls back and moves away from the fogged glass to the desk beside her bed. Aware of her surroundings again, she hears it. The funeral music. It’s playing somewhere outside the hotel compound, the melody faint, the lyrics indecipherable. Sometimes when broadcast through loudspeakers, you can hear it from miles away. It seems she hears one funeral every day, as if this tiny city is in perpetual mourning, making up for those years it couldn’t grieve for its dead. Teera strains to listen, imagining her father’s words in every tune she hears.
I know not how love chooses who and why—
Why I see infinity in your eyes . . .
It was a strange present to give a child, and an even stranger thing to sing on her birthday. It wasn’t a funerary song, but it was still a smoat, which, he’d explained, was poetry sung in honor of loved ones, living or dead. She wonders now if the dead can serenade the living, seduce us with longings that are not even our own.
There’s more to the song, though she can’t recall beyond those two lines. She feels the rest of the lyrics always at the tip of her tongue, yet whenever she tries to voice them, they refuse formation, and she’s left shaken by the knowledge that her body holds secrets it won’t reveal. In moments like these, she wavers between amnesia and nostalgia, part of her here, part of her there, straddling that undemarcated landless geography of the dispossessed. She wants to forget it all and, at the same time, longs for something she can’t even remember. What is it that she’s reaching for? At times, she feels the journey, this ceaseless search, is her only true country.
As for what she truly knows, much is borrowed knowledge, collective hindsight. If pressed, she fears she won’t be able to separate what she actually recalls from what she’s learned over the years. What’s clear is that memories—the bits and pieces that are hers—fuel the desire to know more, to probe deeper, and the more she knows, the more she’s able to recall. A small, random spark can floret into full luminosity, like a pilot light igniting a halo of flame. And in such bright, short-lived moments, she sees not a portal providing immediate access to the past, a shortcut to truth and certainty, but a road map, an entente cordiale, as if time has called a truce so that she can carefully tread the battlefields of the self to find what may have survived, what may be worth treasuring. Of her father’s disappearance, Amara said that he had joined the insurgent underground movement and that when he reemerged a year later, in March 1975, it was to tell her mother that the civil war would be won by the Revolutionary Army and that he would return then to fetch Teera and her mother to begin their life together in a newly forged Democratic Kampuchea.
For years Teera let this knowledge linger at the periphery of her understanding. Then at Cornell, while she was poring over historical documents, the truth of his affiliation with the Khmer Rouge sank in. But the shock of such a discovery was too much to bear, the weight of admission more devastating than omission. So she shoved history back to where it belonged, on the dusty old shelves of the unread and unexamined. She convinced herself that the past couldn’t be altered. She couldn’t help who her father was, the path he took, who he became, and the nightmare he might’ve taken part in engineering. All the same, she continued to wonder.
Even now the questions persist. Where did he go when he disappeared again? Did he stay close by in the city or go back to the jungle? And always, Why?—Why did he leave? What unhappiness or hope pushed him to make this choice? He gave up everything for nothing, absolutely nothing, as all would be destroyed in the end.
Shortly after his final departure, on that April morning when her grandparents and Amara were rushing to pack and lock up the house, after the Khmer Rouge had ordered them to leave, she asked her mother if they oughtn’t wait for him. Her mother replied in haste, Your father is dead. To me, he is dead, do you understand? Teera didn’t believe it—couldn’t yet accept it. She had no idea whether she would see him again, but she also sensed he was alive somewhere. Somewhere he must be waiting for them. Still, her mother’s words, more than the mayhem around them, shattered her world, ended her childhood, the certainty of it made clear by her father’s total absence in the moment they needed him most.
Had he been captured en route during his clandestine travels back to his hiding place? Was he killed in battle somewhere, or forced by his comrades—by fractious internal politics and ideology—to disassociate himself completely from his family and its privileged background when he reentered the underground movement?
These questions surfaced for Teera years later, in America, when Amara revealed to her what she had learned from Channara—that her father was supposed to come back before the Khmer Rouge takeover. It was just a matter of a few short weeks before they would join him in his new life. But he never returned at the beginning of April as he’d promised. He’d left Channara pregnant with another child, who would be born into hunger and suffering.