“Never mind,” she says, smoothing back the ruffled strands. His hair, now fully regrown since he’d resumed life outside the temple, still surprises her, its sprinkle of gray incongruous with his youth. Yet, it’s the part of him she finds most endearing, for it testifies to the possibility of old age, his pact with time—their conspired assertion against the stranglehold of history. Teera curbs the urge to grab his entire face and kiss him in the way that Cambodians kiss, which is not a kiss at all but a kind of inhalation—if you love someone you breathe into your body his smell and atmosphere, his joy and sorrow, his pride and poverty.
She looks around Narunn’s one-bedroom apartment, which is both his home and his clinic, where he serves some of the poorest in the city. Most, like him, reside here in the White Building, the gargantuan ghostly structure that haunts the sight of passersby, as the Royal Palace or the National Museum just a few blocks away might dazzle.
Constructed in six four-story blocks, connected by open staircases, with more than 460 apartments, the complex was initially conceived in the early 1960s as housing for the rapidly emerging lower middle class. In the years following its completion, as the urban population swelled even further, with the influx of families fleeing their provincial homes to escape the bombing and war in the countryside, it quickly became overcrowded. Not long after, when the Khmer Rouge took over and the city was emptied, the White Building was abandoned, its residents banished to the countryside.
Now, decades later, within its crumbling, mold-infested walls, amidst ruined plumbing and dangerously exposed electrical wires, it shelters nearly three thousand disparate souls—multiple-generation families and single mothers, students and teachers, struggling artists and surviving music masters, civil servants and street vendors, professionals and prostitutes, addicts and drug dealers—each impoverished in some way. Narunn makes his home in this notorious slum not because he lacks the means to get out but, as he told Teera simply, My work keeps me here. His work anchors him. It is his pride and conviction, his chosen poverty.
Still, every time she visits he apologizes for the things he lacks to make her comfortable. If only he knew the wealth he embodies, the richness he harbors in his heart. She’s never loved anyone quite like she loves him.
Love. Teera catches herself. Does she love him then? How can it be this easy, this fast and certain? Yet, love no longer scares her, bewilders her as it once did, makes her want to retreat and seal herself from what she’s come to believe is its natural, inescapable conclusion—loss. Yes, she loves him. And yes, it is this easy to love and be certain of it, even at the risk of heartbreak and inevitable separation. It’s been a month since that day they left the temple after her visit with the Old Musician, and this entire time she and Narunn have been together, seeing each other almost every day, alternating between his place and her hotel.
“Is something wrong?” Narunn asks.
“N-no. Why?”
He laughs. “Because you haven’t heard a word I said.”
“Sorry. Tell me again. Please?”
“Forensics.”
She blinks in confusion.
He laughs louder. “I was saying if I could do it all over again, if I were young enough to go back to medical school, I’d study forensics.”
“Oh, really?—Forensics? Why?”
“Well, I was reading an article in a medical journal the other day, about forensics and genocide, and what it would mean for Cambodia if a tribunal is established. But what fascinates me is the idea that the medical narratives of the dead can be used to help the living. Utterly amazing. It seems such a powerful and necessary tool. If the deceased could speak, what stories would they tell, what evidence would they reveal to help prevent another death? Astounding!” His enthusiasm is untainted, infectious. “Think about it, medicine as a kind of nonviolent dialogue between the dead and the living!”
“Wow.” She laughs, running her fingers through his hair, so perfectly trimmed by a roadside barber whose shop is a rickety bamboo stool under a tree, with a mirror nailed to its trunk. “Here I thought you were going to tell me you’re a drug smuggler, or a hired assassin for one of those Excellencies.”
“Now you’re not being serious.” He kisses her, his nose to the curve of her neck, a deep inhalation.
She is suddenly aware of his hair prickling the hollow of her palm. Aroused, she promptly jerks her hand away. Again, she remembers the cultural landscape she’s in, the self she must inhabit, the traditions and beliefs imprinted on her like birthmarks. The head is a temple, she hears Amara admonishing. She has yet to lose the habit of commiserating with her aunt about everything. I know. I’m sorry, but. She abruptly ends the conversation, and for the first time banishes Amara’s ghost from her mind, from the room. Her aunt cannot see her like this, wrapped in a stranger’s kroma, in his arms, yielding to his bed, his desires, her own.
In the refugee camps, Teera remembers, she was astounded to learn that in their culture it was better to have strangers assume Amara was widowed, that she had lost a husband to starvation or execution, like countless other women, than to have them know the reality of their situation—that here was a young unmarried woman with a niece to look after on her own. It wasn’t proper, Amara explained, as if forgetting they’d just emerged from a hell where they hardly owned enough clothes to cover their skin and bones, let alone the strength or dignity to shoulder the mantle of a culture in ruins. People will assume you’re my daughter, and if they’re going to think that, it’s better for them to believe you’re a child conceived in marriage rather than outside. Teera thought angrily, Who cares! They had no country, no home, no family to speak of; anyone important to them was dead and gone. Who cared what these people, every bit as broken and rootless as they were, thought about them, about anything? It never occurred to either to just speak the truth—that out of their whole family only the two of them, girls at that, made it out of the country alive—because by then the truth no longer mattered.
“All? all? . . .” Narunn croons, tapping the tip of her nose with his forefinger. “Leu bong niyeay te oun?”—Do you hear me calling, darling?
Teera recognizes the popular song of Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea, which, according to Amara, made wooing on the telephone de rigueur among young lovers during her aunt’s teenage years. “You reversed it,” she tells Narunn. “The girl is calling him, not the other way around. The telephone rings three times in the middle of the night, he picks up, and she’s the first to speak, All? bong . . .” Teera hums the melody, hearing the electric guitar, the keyboard.
“Impressive!—You certainly know the song.”
“Of course,” she can’t help but boast. “I know every word of it by heart.”