The old driver understands the importance of this visit. It’s not every day, he told Teera in the car, that you cross paths with someone who might be able to shed light on what happened to your loved ones, who may have witnessed their last days, their final breaths. To know for certain they died, even without the proof of bones and ashes, is its own kind of peace, for it allows us to separate the missed from the missing. He himself would walk to the ends of the earth to meet another who could tell him what became of his wife and children, his first family, whose silhouettes he still searches for in crowds, whose voices he imagines hearing through the market din. The strange thing is I wouldn’t know if I bumped into them right now. Afterward, he seemed surprised that he’d shared so much with her.
Likewise, Teera is astonished by how much she’s come to rely on him, to trust him. Once he was a Khmer Rouge soldier whose shadow she would’ve feared. Now it’s clear to her they are on the same journey, her search becomes his, and he is utterly invested in the mundane task of ferrying her around, always ready for their next quest.
As Teera makes her way down the steps, she realizes there remains very little of the temple she remembers from her childhood. All the structures seem to have been built only recently, and the grounds are smaller than she recalls, perhaps because of the brick walls, the fresh clay texture not yet sullied by the blackish-green algae veining other surfaces. There are some ancient-looking trees, at least old enough to have preceded the Khmer Rouge, but no structure stands out or strikes her memory with ringing clarity. Yet, the resonances of what once existed are all around her, and she feels in her steps the imprints of her childhood strolls upon these grounds; she senses walking beside her the pralung of her young self, that little girl she once was, at times running ahead, leading the way. She remembers that then, as now, it was lush and harboring, and that during festivals vibrant colors glittered across the seemingly infinite expanse—before there were walls—where land reshaped itself into water and water into forests and forests into clouds.
Fiery specks flood her vision. Orange, cinnamon, and deep earthy red of the monastic cloths flutter among leaves and branches, calling to mind the brilliant swaths of autumn when she left Minneapolis several weeks ago, and Teera remembers in turn how struck she was by the fall season, its tropical tinges, when she and Amara arrived in America that October in 1980. The hues of one love simmer in another, she thinks.
She realizes with a pang of guilt that before she was even aware she loved her father, her mother, loved another human being, she had loved a place—this land, which, in her innocence, she didn’t understand as defined by borders and geography, its relationship to other countries, only in the intimate sense of family, safety, and home. The world then contracted and expanded, nimble and borderless as her imagination. As she grew older, she learned of territories with clearly marked perimeters, often drawn and redrawn by wars and revolutions, by blood. Yet, as Teera takes these steps, she knows she has never stopped loving this place. Its people, its landscape. She has never let it go. She’s learned to embrace another as her home only because once she knew how it felt to be embraced by a land, to be rooted and safe.
She heads toward the cluster of wooden dwellings, the monks’ private quarters, where, she was told, young women are not normally permitted to enter unless they are nhome—family of the ordained. In your case, though, it’s perfectly all right, the Venerable Kong Oul said when they spoke on the phone early this morning. Your reunion is long awaited. Teera found it curious that the abbot used the word “reunion” rather than “visit.” Did he know she’d come before? The two of you will have much to talk about, he told her, and then prophetically added, And you’ll know then what course you must take.
What has the Old Musician revealed to the abbot? Did he speak of her father, their imprisonment in Slak Daek, how they had suffered together, what might have been their crimes? Or is she hoping for too much? Perhaps the Old Musician has nothing to offer her beyond the cryptic fragments he’s already shared in the letter, and those tired old instruments.
But something nudges her. A thought, a feeling. No, even less than that. Some vague yearning she can’t begin to articulate.
Teera spots the “cottage” the abbot has described for her, perplexed that he used so grand a name for this weather-beaten hovel squatting in the dirt, with its walls of thin wood planks crudely tacked together, leaving huge gaps in between. She looks from it to the pristine white stupa bearing her father’s name in gold lettering at the far end of the compound, then back at the cottage. Her heart flutters. She tells herself he’s waiting for her now inside that cramped, dank space. How can this be his home? How can it be anyone’s? Yet, in these past weeks she’s come to see all too clearly that to have any shelter at all separates you from the countless whose only claim to home is a corner of sidewalk or a small patch of public ground.
Now, looking around the temple grounds, Teera questions the value of building stupas, or any such dwellings constructed for the dead, when the living lack the dignity of shelter, the privacy afforded by simple walls and a roof. She thinks of the street corner near her hotel where a family has set up shelter. Every time she goes out for her evening walk she encounters them—a young couple and their school-aged daughter. Last night the father had parked his cyclo against a lamppost so that his small daughter could do her schoolwork under the light. As it started to drizzle, the little girl pulled the clear plastic hood of the cyclo forward and clasped it in place with a clothespin, leaving open the pair of rectangular air holes cut in the sides like tiny windows. There, the girl cocooned herself inside the bubble-like sphere, poring over her schoolbook, arms around her backpack—a Clifford the Big Red Dog bag, the kind of item sold at the open-air market among piles of donated used clothes that have made their way from America. Teera has learned this is where cast-off belongings end up, unacceptable even to charity organizations like the Salvation Army and Goodwill. Leftover hand-me-downs for leftover lives.
But the way the little girl wore the backpack on her chest, hugging it, made clear how much she cherished it. The bag doubled as her doll, and as she rocked back and forth, memorizing her lesson, Clifford bobbed up and down, ears flopping, nodding agreeably with the recited lesson, his once bright synthetic fur dulled by poverty but softened by ceaseless love.
The child kept reading, even as the light from the lamppost grew dimmer in the gathering mists. Outside, her parents moved around the cyclo and fastened a blue tarp around its metal frame to create a space for themselves underneath. As Teera approached them, she stepped off the sidewalk, not wanting to trespass upon their private space, the sanctity of home however vagrant and lacking, and continued the rest of her evening stroll on the street.