“It’s all right, there’s room.”
He doesn’t know what wounds him more—the girl, the voice, or the tenderness these simple words evoke. His mind rushes back to that singular moment when the young Channara, his secret love—his only love—appeared in his cramped apartment in Washington, DC, speaking almost these same words. May I sit?—Right here on your bed? They had planned this moment, desired it for so long. Still, how nervous they both were, like children. He was terrified that she’d taken such risk to come to him, to be with him at all. Yet, in his heart, love beat infinitely stronger than fear. He sensed the same was true in her heart when he knelt in front of her, pressing his head to her chest, letting her legs and arms enfold him. They remained like this, on the edge of the bed, until they were both calm. It was a lifetime ago, but the moment still pulses inside of him.
Now the daughter stands before him, an echo of her mother, sunglasses atop her head, her shoulder-length hair gathered in a loose braid to one side, the strayed wisps coiling around her ears, sticking to her damp skin. So tenuous her presence, she seems barely a brushstroke. A calligrapher’s exhalation, the sweep of hand across parchment. He fears she will fade away, as magically as she arrived.
She perches tentatively on the edge, her long legs extended, toes pivoting, as if ready to leap and flee. How many times has he rehearsed this moment, the things he wanted to say, the truths he must purge? Now she’s here and he cannot think where to begin.
He senses she understands his helplessness, his disbelief and shame—the indignity of his impoverished surroundings—for she drops her gaze and turns instead to the instruments beside her. The sun hat, now placed on her thighs, continues its nervous jiggle, and he can’t tell what part of her is shaking—her legs, her hands hidden underneath it, her abdomen. His own stomach hollows and heaves, a capacious cave swarmed with bats suddenly awakened and beating their wings. “Was your drive here agreeable?” he finally manages stiltedly.
“It was lovely, thank you. My driver took me on a small road near Chrung Pich.” A pause, as if she expects him to say something, and when he doesn’t, she continues, “Then we drove the rest of the way along the river. It’s especially beautiful today.” Another pause. “The water calm and glittering.”
He nods vigorously, pleased by the lightness of her voice. He considers asking her when she arrived, how long she’s been in Cambodia, and how much of Phnom Penh she’s seen. He swallows and the words, the simplest expressions, plunge to irretrievable depth. She’s been here for some time, he’s almost certain, long enough that it would only grieve him to know she’s been so close yet unreachable. She seems like one who has landed and found a footing on familiar ground, a migrating bird, one of those long-legged white egrets rediscovering its abandoned nest among the rice fields. The important thing, he tells himself, is that she’s here now. She’s here. Speak with her, you mute!
“And how do you find the climate?” He winces at the banality of his effort. “The heat can be draining when one’s not used to it.” He remembers he found the air suffocating after his return from abroad.
“I forgot how hot and humid it could be. I’m grateful when it rains.”
Yes, rain, that elixir of renewal. He longs for it now to close the wounds her appearance has reopened, cut anew into his heart. “Perhaps it’ll rain while you’re here,” he offers, noticing the beads of sweat forming on the tip of her nose. Her mother’s exquisite nose. The narrow rise of its bridge made him think of ascension. Yes, once he thought this, once when he was that young student in America, when he dared to reach so high for love, when he thought of love not as something you fall into but something you rise toward—the sky and its limitless mystery.
“Perhaps it’ll rain,” he murmurs, not sure whether he has already said it. Did he just now hear thunder? Perhaps he’s imagined it in thinking about the sky, the vast geography of longing.
“I hope so,” she says, looking perplexed.
They are both silent. He sees that this trite conversation pains her as much as it does him. Yet, he does not know where to go from here. He keeps still and mute.
She reaches for the instruments. “We who are left behind . . .” Her hand flutters for a second above the lute before alighting on the slender oboe. “You know, when I was very small,” she commences again, the tremor barely perceptible now in her voice, “I used to think the sralai was female.”
He wonders whether “you know” is something she inveterately uses, a phrase of habit, or whether she is testing him to see if he does know, if he does remember, if he is who he claims to be. He braces himself.
She rests the oboe on the sun hat. “It was the only instrument I thought of that way, as having a specific gender. Srey Lai, I called it. Lady Lai,” she adds in English, half whispering, as if the translation is for her own benefit; then back to Khmer again: “So lovely and feminine, don’t you think?”
He doesn’t know how to respond.
“Yes, I thought it a woman.” She grows more composed, and he has the curious sensation that they’ve talked for hours already, that somehow they’ve always been in each other’s life and this is another of their frequent ruminations. “A mother with child.” She taps her forefinger on the rise where, counting from the top, the fourth air hole is bored. “Because of this bulge here, you see. I imagined she’d given birth first to these four notes, one immediately after another, and then sometime later two more, each note a gift to the world. That’s how music must have originated, I thought. At least the kind of music we’re able to hear, the kind we can share with one another. A universal melody, in other words.”
Is this something he ought to have remembered? Frantically, he searches his memories. Nothing. Was it never told to him?
“But there’s another kind of music, you see.” Her finger moves to the solid space below the fourth air hole, outlined as if meant for another note. “An unborn melody, I think.”
He swallows and waits for her to continue.
“Like the sralai, I’ve come to believe, every person carries the seed of this melody inside himself. A truth he alone knows.”
He feels himself unraveling.
She returns the oboe to its place between the lute and the drum. Then, looking up, she says, “My father is gone.” Her voice catches. “But I have come hoping the truth did not die with him.”