Teera doesn’t know what to say to this, so she takes another sip of the coconut juice.
“I know you’ll leave,” he continues after a moment, his voice even quieter now. “Return to America. Your life is not here. I know this. When that time comes, if needed I’ll find a way to explain your absence. But they won’t ask, beyond, How is your wife? Why are there no babies?—In a teasing way, of course! We—the Cambodians here—have learned to live with a permanent sense of impermanency. Any one of us could lose our life—or, like Vichet, the one thing that matters most to us—just crossing this traffic. So we’ve become a bit greedy: we seize whatever happiness we can, in the moment.” He looks at her, eyes pleading. “Forgive me?”
Teera nods but does not tell him she has no plan to return to America just yet, that this morning she went to a travel agency a few blocks from here to change her return ticket to an open date, that she’s not offended, just cautious, for she too knows what it’s like to live with an abiding sense of loss. She takes his hand, and they walk along the promenade, sipping their coconut juice, at times loudly, like children. She knows also that his letting everyone believe they are husband and wife is a way of respecting her, giving her a place in his life. In their language, songsa—“lover”—is a word that prefigures heartbreak, separation.
“What happened to Vichet?” she asks after a while.
Narunn heaves, shaking his head. “A long story. A sad one. But, to put it simply, he was a runner, out running in a city with hardly any sidewalks, and where there are, they’re overtaken by cars and trucks. The bigger the vehicle the more rights you claim and, as you’ve witnessed, those on their feet have no rights whatsoever. But here’s the crazy thing—Vichet was on a sidewalk when he ran that morning. A Hummer thundered down the street in the wrong direction, and a Land Cruiser, trying to get out of the way, veered onto the sidewalk, lost control, crushed his legs. It happened near the White Building. A boy from my same block rushed in to alert me. When I arrived at the scene of the accident, I saw there was little I could do, except to bind and bandage the legs to minimize the bleeding as much as possible, and give him local anesthesia for the pain. He needed to be taken to a hospital to be operated on, by proper surgeons.”
“How awful!”
“The one miracle is that he came out alive, if not altogether intact, physically or emotionally. But gone are his hopes of ever competing internationally in a race.”
“When Amara was sick but still working, I had to fill in for her one time and took her client—a Cambodian man affected by childhood polio—to have him fitted for one of these new graphite leg braces. It was amazing to see how well he walked in it. It could still be possible for Vichet to run, to compete again.”
“Yes, perhaps in America anything is possible. But here . . .”
Here, it’s a different reality. How could she forget? She feels astoundingly American, ridiculous in her obstinate hope. It was the one thing that Amara, in her role as a surrogate parent, had cultivated in her while she was growing up. Good grades aren’t enough. In her junior year of high school, bending over college applications, she related to Amara what her high school guidance counselor had told her. If I wanted to go to an Ivy League school, we’d have to have a lot of money saved up in a trust fund. Teera didn’t even know what a trust fund was. You will go, Amara replied simply, never pausing in her task as she stood washing rice at the kitchen sink before setting it to cook. You just have to get in. Quiet, stubborn hope, even in the face of seemingly irreversible defeat, is Teera’s inexhaustible inheritance.
“He can’t reclaim what he lost, but the NGO he’s with now is his best chance for recovery. They’re teaching him, and others like him, to live with the loss, to discover a hidden talent and nurture it. Funny, with his legs gone, Vichet has learned he’s quite skilled with his hands. You know he built that wheelchair himself.”
“He does seem remarkably skilled.” After a moment’s thought, she asks, “What happened to the drivers?”
“The Hummer never stopped, never even slowed down to see what had taken place in the wake of its reckless power. The owner of the Land Cruiser was utterly distraught, scared out of his wits. He could barely drive when he took us—Vichet and myself—to Calmette Hospital. He was the one who paid for everything.”
Teera shakes her head, confounded. “There’s so much cruelty, so much generosity. I don’t think I will ever understand our country, our people.”
“Neither will I,” Narunn echoes. “Yet, to hear you say this gives me a strange serenity . . . you know, like I’m not alone . . . you see what I see.” He draws her attention toward a bird vendor with a collection of bamboo cages around her, and a little girl standing nearby contently blowing bubbles. “You see them? They are mother and daughter, a team. The little one catches the birds, and the mother brings them to sell, to be released by those seeking to make merits, answers to their prayers. At times, I feel we—all of us—are like those sparrows, our imprisonment and our freedom intimately linked, willed by the same hands, the same forces.”
They come to one of the concrete benches spaced at long intervals along the promenade, remnants of the old days. They toss the empty coconuts into the garbage can nearby and sit down on the bench. High above them, the flags of various nations hemming the length of the promenade flap in the steady breeze, the sound reminiscent of distant helicopters, the pulse of war. Now that others might be assuming them husband and wife, Teera feels brave enough to rest her head on Narunn’s shoulder. She looks up, tapping the grasshopper against her leg, and searches among the fluttering colors. She spots France, Japan, China, Vietnam, Russia, the United Nations, a chronicle of power imposed and contested on this land. The US flag flies several poles down to their right. Operation Menu, the initial phase of intense bombing was called. US forces had been bombing Cambodian territory for four years already when, in March 1969, Operation Menu took this to a new level with carpet bombing by heavily loaded B-52s, first in the border region, targeting Vietcong supply routes. Richard Nixon had ordered a lavish banquet for Cambodia, one incendiary feast after another. The first was code-named Breakfast, followed by Lunch, then Supper, Dinner, Dessert, and Snack. These only served to whet the appetite for destruction, and the bombing intensified further over the following years, extending deep into the country, including the tragically mistaken target of Neak Leung.
“You are right,” Teera tells him, her gaze on the river again, following the dinner-cruise boat gliding downstream.