For the longest time, Teera remembers, music had been her only doorway back to Cambodia. During her high school years, these Khmer rock ballads from the decades before the war resonated with her more viscerally than the American pop her classmates and peers were listening to.
Teera closes her eyes, and suddenly a scene flashes in her mind—her mother at the river’s edge releasing a caged sparrow from a bamboo netting, while her father stands holding what looked like a banana-leaf cone. She shuts her eyes tighter, willing them to turn so she might see more than just their silhouettes. But, hard as she tries, they remain as they are, side by side, so close to each other that she’s almost certain they’re touching. She wonders, Where was I at that moment? She must have been there with her parents for her to recall the scene. She imagines they were in an exalted state, their moods lifted with the flight of the tiny bird released.
Teera stills the image in her mind and, for the time being, pushes it to where it will be safe. She supposes it’s only natural that the longer she stays, the more she will experience these flashes from the past. She must learn to take each as it comes, to save it for when she has the solitude to examine it, to expand it, to nudge the boundaries of her own memory.
She opens her eyes, turning her attention back to Narunn, to the lightness of their conversation. “You know, because of this one song,” she says, recalling what Amara once told her, “because of this innocent exchange of ‘Hello hello’ across the night, my grandfather wanted to ban all of Sinn Sisamouth’s songs from the house.”
“But why?—Everyone loved Sinn Sisamouth!”
“Well, the girl starting the call caused quite a stir, especially among the older generations, traditionalists like my grandfather. Srey kromum telephoning a man in the dark of the night, from her bed no less. Simply scandalous!”
“But are we sure she’s a virginal maiden?” Narunn bats his brows with mischief.
“Stop it, I’m trying to educate you!”
“How do you know so much about this?”
“If you haven’t noticed, Doctor, I’m Khmer.”
“Khmer?—Are you really?”
Teera turns somber. That question, the very notion of Khmer or not Khmer, led to countless deaths and disappearances in her village during the last year or so of the Khmer Rouge rule. Communism unites us all!—But not if you’re Vietnamese! Filth, rags—those yuon! So those with any perceived connection to Vietnam were purged.
Narunn pinches her nose. “You’re an impostor like me.”
She smiles sadly.
“Hey, I’m only kidding!”
“But you’re right. I am an impostor of sorts. An itinerant outsider. Never the person I’m supposed to be.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“I suppose . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, in America, I feel most Cambodian, and here, I feel more American than I remember ever feeling in all the years I’ve lived in the States.” Teera’s gaze darkens, receding into itself, and she sees a child, a little girl, walking in a long, narrow corridor much like the one outside Narunn’s apartment. Ever since she first set foot in this place, she’s had the unsettling feeling that she’d walked this space before, or somewhere like it. “There’s this Welsh word,” she continues after a moment, “I learned years ago in a poetry class at Cornell. Hiraeth. It has no exact equivalent in English. Or Khmer, I think.”
“But it’s something translatable,” Narunn offers tentatively, “to every heart that’s ever known loss, desired the impossible.” He grins. “Am I right?”
Teera gives him a strange look. “You could say that. It’s this deep longing for a home that never was. An ailment that brings both a sense of estrangement and a haunting familiarity.”
“Ah, I know this ailment. I’ve seen it in countless patients. Indeed, I have it myself—as a matter of fact, our entire people suffer from it. A disease of incompleteness, disconnection.”
“Yes!” She feels a sudden rush of love for this man who understands her so effortlessly.
“You’re wrong, though. There is a name for it in our language.”
“Oh, really?”
“Memory sickness, which, as you know, the Khmer Rouge deeply feared, so much that they attacked it like an epidemic.”
Teera nods, remembering. She wonders if there’s such a word or phrase for the self. Can you grieve for the person you’ve never been? A wholeness, a singularity, you’ve never known? Is pralung, or any such concept of the soul, its antidote? Her thoughts drift. Where is Amara’s pralung now? Where is mine? Whose ghost or spirit is calling to me this very moment?
“All? all? . . .” Narunn cuts in, laughing. “Calling you back to me.”
“Sorry.”
“Are you always like this, lost to your reverie? It’s impossible to compete with a dream, you know.”
Teera props herself up on one elbow, her curls brushing his shoulder and chin, her chest pressing against his upper arm. They are skin to skin, stretching in nearly equal lengths, the kroma now twisted in the crevice between them. When they make love, she notices, he breaks out in goose bumps, his body a canvas of impressionism, all ripples and resonances, pleasures bestrewn in dots, the shifting luster of passion evoked. Culminated. She lets her forefinger ghost his collarbone, moving from left to right, lingering, pirouetting in the ellipse beneath his Adam’s apple. An unborn melody . . . every person carries the seed of this melody inside himself. She recalls the tracery of the air hole on the oboe and wonders if love has its own note, its inexpressible truth.
“I can’t see you behind all these waves and lashes,” Narunn teases, blowing the curls from her face, looking deep into her eyes. “And who can you possibly be daydreaming about when I’m right here?”
Teera stares at his moving lips, not quite hearing him, this beautiful lighthearted man beside her. Narunn Nim. Nim was my mother’s first name, but since she didn’t make it, I took it as my surname. A way to carry her forward, he told her. How easy to be with him, Teera thinks. He embraces the living and the departed with such serenity, as if his entire being, not just his head, were a temple, an altar where both burial and rebirth are possible.
“Anyone I know?” he asks again when she remains silent, preoccupied. “Someone very special?”
She nods.
“Your aunt.”
Tears flood her eyes, and before she knows what to do, a drop rolls out. Narunn promptly rises up on both elbows, collarbones protruding in the effort, and stops the drop midtrack, lips pressed to the side of her nose. He holds himself there, a floodgate, braced to inhale the torrent.