Tun and his comrades got out of the Peugeot, locked the doors, and threw the key into the marsh below. Hopefully, by the time someone noticed the ditched vehicle and pried the doors open, they would’ve already been long gone, their path untraceable. They’d chosen a good month to journey, despite the worsening road conditions, the ground muddy and puddled with craters of rain. During monsoon season, particularly in July or August when the rain began to intensify, fighting between revolutionary forces and government troops occurred less frequently, with each side waiting for respite from the deluge to launch their attacks. On a night like this, impregnated with the possibility of a heavy downpour, the only battles were distant ones, episodically flaring the night sky with a muted glow. In the momentary quiet, one could almost believe peace was possible, imminent.
The four comrades walked back in the direction they’d just driven, weaving through the interstices of trees, their silhouettes camouflaged in the surrounding shadows, their path lit by only the moon and stars, which appeared even brighter above the darkness of the peninsula, most of it yet to be electrified. Somewhere in one of the bigger trees an owl hooted, and every time they passed a bamboo thicket, one cicada would chirp and then a whole throng would follow in a deafening symphony, as if colluding to hide the sound of their footsteps, abetting their escape. Fully aware of possible buried mines, they stuck to the routes they had carefully cased out and mapped with the help of their comrades based in clandestine cells on the peninsula. Through the dense woods, away from houses and busy roads, they risked only contact with poisonous plants and wild animals. At one point, Comrade Nuon let out a surprised shriek and promptly silenced herself with a hand over her mouth. “I think a snake just slithered across my feet,” she said, by way of apology, looking embarrassed. Tun felt something bulbous and slimy—a snail most likely—clinging to the strap of his left sandal. He shook it loose.
As they proceeded, he offered his arm to Comrade Nuon, and she took it without hesitation, pressing close to him when something startled her—a branch falling in the stillness around them, a human-shaped shadow that seemed too large to be human, the meow of a kitten in the middle of nowhere. She was a young bride, following her husband, who had gone underground six months earlier, shortly after their marriage. Both had been civil engineering students, drawn to the promise that in the new Cambodia they would be able to use their education to serve the common good, designing dikes and dams that would allow for rice planting all year round.
Tun had never met Comrade Nuon’s husband and yet he felt envious of the man, wondering what it was like to be loved by a woman who, even without full knowledge of where her husband was based, would give up everything to follow him into the forest. Would Channara have made such a sacrifice? Would she have blindly followed him anywhere? Left her privileged diplomatic life in Washington, DC, to join him as a penniless student returning to Cambodia those many years ago? You’ll never know now, will you? he chastised himself. You never gave her the chance to consider such a choice.
He’d left America without so much as a note to her, simply vanishing, as he’d been instructed to do. There is no future for you here, Le Conseiller had said to him over the telephone, speaking in the even tone of those assured in their words, their power. If you wish to have a future at all, you will return home for your father’s funeral, and you will remain, give up your studies in America. I’m giving you a graceful exit from your folly. You will not say a word. You will simply vanish from her life. The senior diplomat had refrained from mentioning Channara’s name in his directive, as if it would defile his daughter by uttering it in the same breath he’d spoken Tun’s name. A year later, on Channara’s wedding day, standing in her room as she accused him of breaking her heart, Tun could not bring himself to tell her the reason for his silence without revealing the mute cowardice with which he had submitted to her father’s demand. Even if she could forgive him for the cowardly way he’d ended their love, by then it was already too late, for she had decided on someone more deserving of her respect, a doctoral student of music at one of the universities in Washington, DC, another Cambodian who had arrived in the American capital in the fall of 1960—a year before Tun—under the auspices of Her Majesty Queen Kossamak, Cambodia’s preeminent patron of the arts. Aung Sokhon, though from a humble background like Tun, possessed the serious courage of a true artist, who dared to push not only the boundary of music but that of love, trespassing class barriers and defying fearsome statesmen, to ask Channara’s father for her hand in marriage.
Tun could only imagine how thoroughly Sokhon must’ve impressed Le Conseiller for such a union to even be considered. A less brave man would have been reduced to nothing, his future ruined before it began. During his brief sojourn in America, Tun had met Sokhon once, and though it was only in passing at an embassy function, it was clear that this reserved, contemplative young scholar, whose musical talents surpassed those of any other Cambodian musician of their generation, possessed an enormous sense of purpose as he cut through a room full of diplomats and dignitaries to greet the Cambodian ambassador and impress upon the attending throng the necessity for those who called themselves “envoys of culture” to respect the culture they purported to represent. Your Excellency must offer a platform where artists could perform with dignity. A venue does not make a stage, Sokhon had said, alluding to the numerous occasions when musicians like himself and Tun had had to play during an embassy dinner, amidst the din of the meal itself, their beautifully crafted melodies lost to the clatters of knives and forks, the cacophony of competing conversations. If we do not stop to listen to our own music, how can we expect the foreigners to? There was a sudden hush among those who had heard Sokhon’s incisive words, and for a moment the Cambodian ambassador looked as if he was considering putting Sokhon in his place, but, to the relief of the crowd, he responded affably, You are right, of course, you are absolutely right.
During the entire exchange, Tun noted, Sokhon’s composure never once flickered, as if the young scholar were standing inside an impermeable bubble. Tun realized in that moment Sokhon would become someone important, for he possessed that unassailable sense of self and vision so necessary in the pursuit of art. To a man like Sokhon, there were no boundaries, except those he drew around himself to protect his dignity and ability to create.
Tun did not have Sokhon’s inviolability or courage. At times he wondered if his decision to leave, to take sides in the war, was a mislaid attempt to rectify his own failure of character. He had been unable to stand up to Le Conseiller, a weakness that had cost him the only woman he had ever loved—would ever love—and now he was taking a stance against all the injustices of his society, against the cruel tyranny of a class to which a man like Le Conseiller belonged.