It suddenly occurs to Teera whom Dr. Narunn reminds her of. Chea, the young soldier who scurried them across the border to Thailand, quietly comforting her as he guided her steps. Dr. Narunn has that same soothing way of speaking. Though she barely recalls Chea’s face, she knows the doctor—who seems her age, thirty-seven, or maybe a bit older—is too young to be the soldier. She steals a quick glance at his profile anyway. The thing about loss, Amara once said to her, is that it rims the silhouette of every face you encounter. In a way they’d lost Chea too. After he’d guided them safely to the refugee camp in Thailand, he immediately turned around with the intention of helping others out of Cambodia. That was the last time she and her aunt saw the young soldier. Later they left for the refugee camp in the Philippines, their orientation site before immigrating to the United States. Once in the States, Amara made countless inquiries among friends who’d arrived after they did, as well as those who remained in the refugee camps. But no one had news of him. Stories abounded, and the most pervasive belief was that Chea never made it out of Cambodia again.
“How do you go about looking for lost ones?” she asks, fingering the gold necklace she’s worn for so long that most of the time she doesn’t feel it there.
“It depends.” Dr. Narunn turns to face Teera, eyes probing hers for a second or two before facing front again. “If you think they’re still alive, you can make an appeal for information in the newspaper, on the radio or TV, and so forth . . .”
In the refugee camps, they never had to barter the necklace for food, and after arriving in America, once it became clear that they would never go hungry again, Amara fastened it on Teera’s neck, with the solemnity of passing down a family heirloom, explaining she’d had it “blessed.” When Teera wanted to know how, as there was neither a Buddhist monk nor temple in Minnesota at the time, her aunt said that she’d gone to the copper-domed Cathedral in St. Paul on Summit Avenue, surreptitiously lit a candle for it, and prayed to the statue of Christ on the cross. We make do, she’d told Teera. And so must the gods.
“You can also go to their home village or town, their birthplace, if you know where. Most survivors tried to get back home as the regime fell, believing their loved ones—if they also survived—would do the same. They’re likely to still be there.”
Since then Teera has considered the necklace a kind of talisman, her protection against forgetfulness, a reminder always of how close she was to death, how close she still is to the dead. Could the soldier have made it all the way back to his home village? Phum Kruos, she remembers Amara telling her. In Siem Reap. Dead or alive, she feels him with her now.
“There’s also Tuol Sleng,” Mr. Chum says, so quietly Teera almost misses it.
Tuol Sleng, Pol Pot’s most ruthless secret security prison and torture center. During the regime, it was known to the top echelon of the party leadership and those who worked there by the cryptic code S-21. Out of more than fourteen thousand men, women, and children sent there, only a handful of adults survived, none of the children. It’s been turned into a museum, with thousands of photos of victims on display.
“It’s not a place we can step into lightly,” Dr. Narunn says, “and when we do, it stays with us, lives inside us forever. Most Cambodians, I believe, have not seen it still, and those of us who have, it is for one reason only—to look for our lost.”
Teera asks no more. They continue the rest of the drive in silence. She feels they’ve arrived at the end of a long, shadowy corridor, only to find impenetrable darkness. She fears a bottomless drop on the other side.
August 1973 . . .
He steps into her room and, lifting the edge of her mosquito net, bends down to kiss her, to smell her hair. Breathe in the scent of innocence against the stink of underground politics, dark and addictive as nicotine, clinging to his clothes and skin. She must have inhaled a whiff of it, the poisonous odor he’s dragged in, or at least must have sensed his movement, for she stirs and murmurs in her half-conscious state, “I waited for you, Papa. You didn’t come. You broke my feelings.”
She turns on her stomach, relinquishing him like a dream. At times Tun feels she owns and disowns him as only a child can, without malice or marking, without the complication of adult feelings. To her, love must not be any trickier than a blanket: she can wrap it around herself, or shed it for the time being—kick it off when it becomes too weighty—and it will always be just within reach, warm and versatile, when she needs it. In the morning when she wakes, she’ll love him as before, as she always has, with all her feelings intact, her heart whole.
In the dark living room, the illuminated hands of the clock on the console table by the entrance say it’s almost ten. He has plenty of time to pack and get to the appointed place by the ferry dock near Chruay Chongvar Bridge. He feels like an intruder these past few months, an interloper in his own existence, stealing into one shadow and sliding out another, his steps caught in the choreography of secrecy, the slow yet sure dance of disappearance. Leak kluan. Lup kluan. Kasang pravatarup thmei. Hide yourself. Erase yourself. Construct a new autobiography.
He lights the kerosene lantern beside the clock and brings it with him. Shadows loom, turning as he turns, clamoring along the walls and ceiling like phantom dissonances.
In his room, he lowers himself onto the cushion in front of the teak coffee table that served as his writing desk. On the floor beside it, his straw mat and pillow and stack of books beckon him, and he longs to lie down, to lose himself in some history or story, then slip unconsciously from the worded pages into the uncharted landscape of reverie. But neither sleep nor rest will be his tonight. He turns up the wick, fighting the exhaustion that threatens to incapacitate him, and sets the lantern down on the table, his body mirroring the trembling blue flame inside the glass. He grabs a blank music sheet from the untidy pile in front of him.
August 6, 1973, Tun writes at the top, only to realize it is the wrong date. More than a week has passed since, but this date will forever be burnt into his memory. He takes another sheet and attempts to restart the letter afresh, his vision seared with images of death and destruction. He can’t begin to comprehend the devastation that has descended upon their world, let alone explain it to his small daughter.