Teera lowers her head, burying her face in his neck, sobbing into that hollow note, and the boat-shaped reservoir of his clavicle. It’s the first time she’s mourned Amara in the presence of another this way, with the ungraceful, abandoned refrain of hiccups and hypoxia.
Narunn lowers them both back onto the pillow. “My training was rather scant and rushed,” he murmurs, returning to the subject of medicine, as if sensing that his voice is the only thing that will soothe her. “Right after Pol Pot, everything was destroyed. There was no real health system to speak of—no functioning modern clinics, no hospitals. For our training, we scavenged, gathering whatever textbooks and equipment could be found amidst the shattered remnants of the university classrooms. Out of hundreds of doctors, forty-five survived—forty-five—and half of them fled the country as soon as they could. The few remaining doctors pooled their efforts for the near impossible task of rebuilding a health system from scratch, appealing for assistance from the Red Cross, enlisting the help of Vietnamese experts still present in the country. Young Cambodians who had begun medical training before the war were recruited as ‘teachers,’ others finished a course one semester and turned around to teach it the next. We shared a hodgepodge of Russian, French, and Vietnamese language texts, which you were lucky if even the teacher could decipher. So literally we had to pick up from the dust and bones. We had to find our way back to some semblance of a society, to some means of healing, by retracing those disappearing footprints with our own.”
Teera listens, his chest like a seashell against her ear, a chamber of echoes and currents, ancient rivers and tears, timeless sorrow.
“Let me tell you about them, these footprints, and their haunted path . . .”
Tun has finished packing. A bundle that he will carry on his shoulder. No valise, nothing unnecessary, not even his name. When he walks out his door, he will no longer be Tun. He’ll assume an alias, a new identity unknown to people he loves, fellow musicians in the various ensembles to which he belongs, the friends and neighbors who share the Municipal Apartments complex, or the White Building, as some have taken to calling it. He hears movement coming into the living room. The night accentuates every sound and brings it closer, makes even an insubstantial echo seem embraceable, somatic. The whoosh of an object, the sense of something suspended, oscillating in midair. His daughter swinging a toy in her hand? A wooden yo-yo perhaps? Or maybe one of his instruments? No, she’d be humming or singing to herself, as is her habit when she wakes. This is how one should always reenter the world from whatever sojourn, he thinks. With music.
He listens more carefully, recognizing now the nanny’s footsteps coming toward his room. He feels her calm the moment she appears at his door, a lotus-leaf packet swinging on a string from her hand. Earlier in his daughter’s room, he wondered where Om Paan was, noting the empty straw mat on the floor across the room. All the while she’s been in the kitchen, packing food for him to take, abetting his escape. She’s known for some time now he’s leaving. He told her only the fact of his inevitable departure, nothing else. Not why, not when. But it’s clear she intuits the choreography of his every step, its direction and intention. Sometimes he feels she can hear his heartbeats from a distance.
“Are you ready, sir?” she inquires.
“Will I ever be?” he replies, trying to be light.
She gives him a solemn smile. “No, sir.”
He nods. She is a tiny woman, standing no taller than his chest. A child’s height. But she possesses the solidity of a rock, the stability of a mountain. He met her on the street a year or so after he’d brought Sita home from the hospital. Her infant, an eight-month-old boy, had just died from dysentery he caught as they made their escape from Chantrea, a village in southern Cambodia near the Vietnamese border, heavily bombed by the Americans on suspicion that it was an enclave for Vietcong and other Communists. Her husband had been killed some months earlier by an unexploded ordnance he’d stepped on while plowing their fields. When he encountered her on the street in her solitude, she appeared to Tun a mound of grief and bones. Beside him, Sita tugged at his shirtsleeve, insisting they bring her home. When he suggested that perhaps they could just buy her food and clothes, his daughter said, “But, Papa, she’s an orphan like me.” Tun realized then that his daughter knew her mother had died, and how. So they brought Om Paan home. Her stay was supposed to be temporary, until she was strong enough to be on her feet again. It’s turned out he and Sita aren’t strong enough to be without her.
He often wonders what he would do without Om Paan’s steady presence these past years, what he would do without her now. Certainly he would never think of leaving if she weren’t here to look after Sita. It seems she sees herself here for the singular purpose of caring for his daughter. She passes no judgment on his politics, and interferes in no other aspect of his life. Only once she treaded the periphery of his heart, light-footed as a skimmer, and discerned its fragmentation. You’ve been hurt by love. That was all she said. She’s never ventured further. And he does not tell her that one afternoon this love—who had so thoroughly wounded him—occupied the very spot where she now stands.
That day after he’d bumped into Channara in front of Chaktomuk Hall, after they’d taken their cones of sugarcane juice and strolled along the promenade and spoken at length, with little Suteera contentedly following close behind, Channara suddenly asked if they could see where he lived, and, not wanting the moment to end, he was more than happy to oblige. But he regretted it the moment they stepped inside, when Suteera, honest in the innocent yet brutal way that children often are, murmured, “It’s . . . it’s so small.” Channara did not hear her daughter, her eyes taking in his sparse solitary existence, her mind lost to thoughts he could not ascertain. Tun knew then he could never hope to give this woman he loved the life she was accustomed to, deserved.
“Om . . .” he starts to say, his voice trailing. Elder aunt. He addresses her as his daughter does, though she’s only in her early forties. She could be his older sister, and he treats her as such, with respect and gratitude and love.
“It’s nothing special, just rice and fish,” she says, lifting the stringed packet toward him. A brief silence, as they try to avoid each other’s eyes. “Please be careful,” she says after a moment, sparse with her advice, which only increases his apprehension.
He thanks her, slipping the packet into his bundle. His gaze momentarily flits to Sita’s room, and panic seizes him again. Catching this, Om Paan says, “You know I’ve loved her as my own.”