Narunn tells Teera he was sixteen when the Khmer Rouge fell, and his extended family—more than twenty members, including his father, grandparents, five siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces—were all wiped out. His mother was the last to go. She died trying to give birth to a life conceived by force. The man who’d raped her, a stranger housed in a neighboring village, was dragged to the fields and executed, one bullet in his head, another in his crotch for good measure. Such crimes were not tolerated by the Organization.
After admitting her own fault in a public self-criticism session—failing to look modest enough, revolutionary enough, and therefore inviting unwanted male attention—Narunn’s mother had been allowed to live. A different kind of punishment. She’d hoped against hope that the absence of menstruation for the next several months was a sign she was menopausal. She was after all nearing fifty. But her belly grew and grew even as the rest of her became more emaciated. Then the ninth month arrived, she went into labor, and after a night of sweat, blood, and blinding pain, the life inside her gave up trying to find its way out, as if sensing it stood no chance outside her womb. Even so Nim had no strength to grieve, to feel anger or regret, to fear. She too would die, and she was ready. She curled up on the wood floor, holding her stomach, the lifelessness within. A body inside a body, the mother a coffin for her child. She took comfort in this, in the knowledge that out of all her dead children at least this one had her protection, her permanent embrace. She calmed her heart, slowing her breaths, saving them for Narunn, the only one of her five children—six counting this one in her womb—and the only member of her family still alive.
At dawn’s first light when he returned as usual with his work unit from quarrying stones at a mountain in the neighboring district, she gathered her remaining strength to give voice to the thoughts that had kept her alive the past hour as she waited for him. “I’ve made peace with death,” she murmured, her voice faint but tranquil, her eyes traveling the silent, parallel rivers down the sides of his nose. “I’d like you, in my place, to reconcile with life. Take it beyond what I can give you. Go forward, my son. I will see you on the other side.”
But grief made going forward impossible, even long after the regime had collapsed. There remained the danger of unexploded mines, the risk of being kidnapped and brutally killed by Khmer Rouge bandits, the utter lack of resources, and most important, the feeling that if he left, he would be relinquishing his duty as the family’s sole survivor—to be the signpost to their unmarked graves. This kept Narunn bound to his village at the water’s edge for a while longer, during which he made every effort to teach himself, to make up for the lost years in his education.
As there were no books for him to learn from, he sought the monks, the artists and musicians, the village elders for whatever knowledge they could impart, whatever wisdom had survived with them. Through the recitation of the Buddhist dharma in Pali and Sanskrit, he plumbed the depths of language, ascertained the roots of words and their relations, their inevitable rotation and return—anatta, anantakol, avasana, anicca. Selflessness. Eternity. Termination. Impermanence. Nothing is static. Even death is a kind of continuity. There is no end, no beginning. Only analay—homelessness—this continual search for a self that belongs.
From neak smoat, these soulful singers of poetry, he discovered that music can heal, that a human’s voice is a most potent medicine: it can stir even the dead. And from a medicine man, he learned that healing is a dialogue, a peace talk of give-and-take, an age-old negotiation between life and death. At a birthing ceremony, he watched a midwife reverse a baby in breech position, turning the infant’s head toward the birth canal, with movements of her hands that mimicked the improvised gestures of the accompanying spiritual medium, as she danced to the music of khmer leu, the mountain nomads of Ratanakiri who passed through his village, their ensemble of instruments ranging from a single leaf to the amvaet, a wind instrument with sweeps and curves as ostentatious as a peacock’s. He thought of the ordeal his mother had endured in labor while he was absent. Had there been a doctor, a hospital or clinic, perhaps her death might have been prevented. Had there been medicine, even the most basic analgesic, her pain and suffering could’ve been palliated.