“About what?”
“Captivity and escape, how they intertwine.” Her eyes catch sight of a flock of birds moving south, past the confluence of the three rivers, and she knows that if they keep going, tracing the curvature of the Mekong, they will reach Neak Leung. “A government that ensnared us into its grand war has given so many of our people their freedom.”
“The Americans did not create the Khmer Rouge,” Narunn says. “We can’t escape responsibility for that violence, that madness which is our own.”
“I know that. Yes, as a people, perhaps we would’ve suffered anyway, sooner or later.”
“But you’re saying the American bombing brought it sooner.”
She nods, and then shakes her head, entangled by all she can’t express. “I look at my life and feel unlucky to have been born into that time, that suffering. I want to lay blame but I don’t know where, on what or whom. Then I think I was so lucky to survive it, and escape. There are moments I’m convinced that my escape would not have happened if not for the American role in the war. It feels both consoling and wrong to think this way. Yet, it’s what I cling to when nothing can pull me out of despair. I know it doesn’t make sense. But anger . . . sinks me even deeper. So I feel grateful because sometimes it’s the only lifeline, the only way to live.”
They sit in silence for a long while, her head on his shoulder, his face buried in her hair. She feels him softly kissing her—inhaling her scent, her entire self, through the strands.
“One day we will try the dinner cruise,” he whispers, “but now I want to take you somewhere more special.”
After a seemingly endless journey by both water and land, Tun arrived at his base, a partially cleared area under the cover of a dense teak forest. It seemed like an ancient world, a landscape of centuries before, and he had to remind himself it was still 1973. August 1973. It was a brilliant morning, with sunlight bouncing off the foliage bejeweled in raindrops left from the early dawn. Campfires dotted the ground, with tendrils of smoke rising in the heat and humidity. Hammocks clustered beneath large swaths of army tarps tenting from branches like the wings of giant bats at rest. On his left, a stream ran parallel to the encampment, the water clear as glass so that he could see through to the rocks and pebbles lining the streambed, an undulation of blues and grays. A young soldier clad in black perched on the edge, drinking from his cupped hand, his gun cradled in the crook between his abdomen and thighs. Another knelt on a crossing made of felled young teaks, head bowed, contemplating his reflection amidst the lily pads. A lone dark pink blossom appeared almost red against the black of his uniform and the surrounding forest.
Tun walked past a group gathered around a fire, sharing a large cooked tuber they’d just extracted from the embers, the brown, bark-like skin partly burned and dusted with ashes. Each broke off a piece, hot with steam, and passed it to the next. He nodded at them; one or two returned his greeting, while the rest just stared. How young they were, many barely into their teens, a few appearing no more than nine or ten, including the soldier leading him now through the encampment. There was a hardness to these boys; they seemed interchangeable, disconnected from one another, without perceivable rearing or roots. Tun imagined they had been hewn from the dark gray rocks jutting out of the earth like half-buried giant tortoiseshells from a prehistoric time.
Despite the soldiers everywhere, a sense of stillness and silence pervaded, as if the immensity of the forest muted all human endeavor and expression. Likewise, Tun felt minuscule, a speck in the formidable verdure, where young teak leaves unfurled three times bigger than his hands. To his right, beyond the clearing, he discerned some huts, barely visible through the screen of trees, and he guessed that they housed more senior soldiers, commanders, and cadres. Weapons and ammunition were gathered in small mounds, scattered across the encampment, some covered with tarps, some with twigs and leaves, others left exposed to the elements so that the words painted on the wooden crates had begun to bleed or fade away.
He followed the boy soldier past a storage depot, a rectangular roof of woven teak leaves anchored by four posts. Underneath were large plastic bags of rice and stashes of bo?tes de conserve, as his friends in the military would refer to the canned goods, which they secretly sold by the truckload to the insurgent forces. He couldn’t be certain whether this stockpile had been captured from defeated government troops, but judging by the condition, he guessed it had arrived through an exchange between supposed “enemies.” Tun remembered one particular night many months earlier when he and another comrade—assigned as escorts by the leader of their underground cell—had ridden in a jeep with a colonel in the Lon Nol army, guiding a camion full of supplies with “US” markings on the canvas bags and tin boxes to a secret drop-off site atop a hill along the national road to Kampot Province. At the appointed hour, the government soldiers had emptied the truckload carefully at the edge of the ravine, where a group of revolutionary fighters waited to receive the cadeau. There was no shortage of corrupt high-ranking army officers ready to sell whatever stashes they could get their hands on, but there were also those, like the colonel, who were sympathetic to the cause and, with insurgent forces now controlling most of the country’s territory, had put their stake with the inevitable victors.