“I’ve never doubted this. It’s just that I . . . I can’t . . .” He fumbles. Takes a deep breath. Then starts over: “I’ve tried to write a letter explaining my leaving. I want to make it simple. Something she can understand. But—”
He stops, conscious of the rising agitation in his voice, afraid of waking his daughter in her room just a few feet away.
“I will do my best to comfort her,” Om Paan offers quietly. “Until you return.”
He takes the nanny’s hand and squeezes it. He doesn’t trust himself to say more, least of all make a promise. He might not be able to return. He might well be captured by the government tonight and shot on the spot. The execution of Preap In, a decade ago in ’63, is still fresh in his mind. The young insurgent belonged to a group called Khmer Serei, a nationalist movement in opposition to both the Communists and the monarchy. Preap In was arrested en route from South Vietnam to Cambodia to negotiate his group’s participation in the government, after having been guaranteed safe passage on the authority of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, head of state at the time. The prince, determined to make an example of the young insurgent in order to sow fear in the rising opposition, ordered the execution filmed and then broadcast for a month in every cinema, seen by adults and children alike. Lasting fifteen minutes, the film showed Preap In shackled and caged like an animal, assaulted with imprecation and refuse of every kind, then shot by a firing squad. A spectacle of cruelty from beginning to end, it impressed upon Tun as nothing before the savagery his countrymen are capable of inflicting on one another. This was what frightened him most—the game, the shameless parade we make of our inhumanity.
The government has since changed hands. Prince Sihanouk is in exile, shuttling between Beijing and Paris, deposed three years earlier, in 1970, in the military coup led by his first cousin Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, and his former commander in chief and defense minister, Lon Nol, now president of the fledgling republic. While espousing liberal democracy, Lon Nol jails and tortures his enemies in growing numbers. Despite American military aid to bolster the government, the opposition forces continue to strengthen, feeding off the sharpening climate of repression. Violence has become the primary means of political expression. Tun fears this is only the surface of what’s to come.
In the dark, narrow corridor outside his apartment door, he stills his heart and gathers his final resolve. He can almost hear Om Paan breathing on the other side. She lingers at the door, listening, grieving. A moment passes, and he hears her walking away toward his daughter’s room. But he knows, like him, she will not sleep tonight.
He walks to the end of the corridor and descends the wide, open stairwell, weaving back and forth in a continuous zigzag pattern. He pauses now and then on a landing to remember conversations he has had over the years with his neighbors, the civil servants and professionals who made living in an apartment setting—so different from that of the traditional Khmer home or Chinese shop house—seem modern. He remembers the time his daughter cut her foot on a piece of broken glass and the entire floor came to her rescue. She is without a mother, but she does not lack for maternal care and affection. This comforts him, eases his steps forward. Perhaps she won’t miss him all that much, he tells himself.
On the ground, he hears a bamboo flute playing faintly from the landscaped gardens on the east side paralleling the Bassac River six or seven hundred meters away, recalling for him the innumerable hours he spent composing music outside when it was too hot inside his apartment, or when electricity failed and the only source of light was the sky above. Tonight electricity is out again in this part of the city—a constant during wartime—but the stairwell from top to bottom is awash with moonlight. Looking at the latticework of masonry covering the walls, he once again marvels at the way the design plays with angles and silhouettes, how it makes use of sramaol—shadows and shades—to frame natural light, harnessing it into focus, illuminating an enclosed space while keeping it ventilated and cool. There’s lightness to the modernist architecture that has begun to reshape Phnom Penh in the years since independence. The White Building is no exception, and tonight, with the full moon shining, it appears ethereal as an apparition, mournful and chalky as its name.
This is his daughter’s home, he tells himself. She’s survived the bombing of her village. She is meant to live. Their home will endure. It has to, or his leaving will have been for nothing. He will do whatever it takes to return to this spot again, if not to hold his daughter, then to see, to know for himself, that she is safe inside.
He crosses the triangular stretch of ground behind the apartment complex to a corner of the street where he’s most likely to find a ride late in the night. Even at this hour, even without electricity, people are up and about, moving with subdued gaits and gestures, their silhouettes like shadow puppets outlined against the pearly night. Most are refugees from the countryside who have made the streets and sidewalks their homes. Lon Nol and his government are incapable of curbing the havoc they’ve created, so these families make do, pitching their tarps and spreading their straw mats wherever they can, surrounding themselves with sandbags—if they’re lucky enough to have even that much—for when the sirens sound, signaling another air raid.
Food stalls offering different varieties of porridge and soup scent the air, making the open space feel somehow less exposed, less dangerous, and, in some corners, as familiar as one’s own outdoor kitchen. A Chinese boy beats his chopsticks together in rapid succession, like a pair of drumsticks rattling out pek-pok pek-pok, the rhythm that’s earned the nighttime snack its name, “Pekpok Noodles.” The boy walks ahead of his father, who wheels their wooden cart, heavy with ceramic bowls and spoons, noodles and vegetables, and a large tin pot of steaming broth. At the end of a short block, they stop to fill the orders that have already come in, the father preparing the soup, and the son carrying one bowl after another to the customers waiting in their homes or shelters.
Tun takes it all in—the night scene, the mingled smells, the quiet music of life being lived and enjoyed despite the threat of death, the possibility of an airstrike always looming. Normality. As strained as it may be under the circumstances, he will sorely miss it. There will be none of this where he’s going. No food stalls to satisfy his late-night cravings. No markets. No restaurants. No home, no family. Only the jungle.