Now, making his way through the encampment, he wondered where their leader was, who among these half-starved, inured fighters was the commanding cadre. Could it be the soldier on the teak crossing? For the third time, his gaze strayed toward the figure bowing over the water: he certainly had the adult patience to hold himself in such prolonged stillness. As they got closer Tun realized the soldier did indeed seem older than he had earlier appeared at a distance, perhaps in his twenties or possibly thirties, with a physique more sculpted, more muscled than the flat geometry of a young adolescent. He wished the soldier would look up, and just as he thought this, a shot reverberated in the forest across the stream. Perhaps an engine had misfired, but there was no car or truck anywhere, no road in that impenetrable wilderness. For some seconds it became even more silent and still, the forest seeming to hold its breath.
Even more curious, the boy leading him paused in his steps and turned opposite from where the shot had echoed. Tun could not catch his gaze, and when he looked around at the others he noted that they were doing the same, turning away from the origin of the firing sound, as if denying the sound. Before he could make sense of it, a soldier emerged from the forest across the stream, a pistol in his hand, and strode angrily toward the crossing. One of the camp leaders, Tun thought. A battalion commander. Everything about him spoke of war; he was all combat and rage. “Your turn!” he shouted, but the soldier on the crossing did not flinch and kept his head bowed. His uniform—the loose-fitting black pajamas of the revolution—told Tun he was not a captured enemy from the government side, a prisoner of war, but one of their own. But what was his crime? What had he stolen? A can of sardines or condensed milk, a Zippo lighter from one of the boxes strewn on the ground among the supplies? And what did it mean, “your turn”? Was there another offender, another captive? The commander stood over the bowed man, the gun now pointing at his head. “Get up!” Still, the offender remained, immovable as the gray boulder a few feet behind him in the middle of the stream. Tun looked around, stunned that not a single person acknowledged what was happening. The commander caught Tun’s gaze, their eyes locked, then all of sudden he lifted his pistol, arm outstretched and straight as an arrow, and pointed the gun at Tun—“You, over here!” Tun froze. The commander eyed the boy soldier, a flicker of exchange passed between them, and the boy scrambled over to Tun, nudging him forward with the barrel of his AK47.
“Shoot him,” the commander ordered, thrusting his pistol into Tun’s hands, and it was then, standing on the crossing, that Tun saw the wrists of the man kneeling before them were bound tightly with rope. “I said shoot the traitor!”
Tun felt his limbs go numb, heavy as lead, his entire body inert with fear. This cannot be happening. And yet, he knew it was happening: this was not some nightmare he could wake up from but madness in the making. The commander grabbed his hands, imprisoned them inside his own, and, lacing their fingers around the pistol, shot the kneeling offender in the side of his head. The man fell on his side, a chunk of his skull gone, blood splattering, seeping into the tight crevices between the felled teaks. “Anyone else want to defect?” the commander thundered, eyes sweeping all gathered, his pistol back in his hand. Silence. Every face was a blank. “I didn’t think so,” he murmured, and then to Tun—“Never point your weapon at anyone you’re not ready to kill. Let this be your first lesson.” He looked at the lifeless body at their feet and kicked it into the water. The lily pads sank beneath it, lost in the ballooning of black clothes, and then, as if by some madness or miracle, the lone dark pink blossom broke through the surface again, wrestling to recover the rays of the sun.
Narunn has brought Teera to a house on the southern shore of Chruay Chongvar, one of the few traditional teak homes still standing, and beautifully preserved, amidst throngs of new construction. It belongs, he told her, to a magnificent woman who has taken him in as one of her own. Yaya, everyone calls her, short for Lokyay Tuat—“Great-Grandmother.” When they are introduced, Teera is surprised to find that the tiny soul hunching before her, with back curved like a sickle and head shaved bald in keeping with Buddhist tradition for the elderly, is the same formidable woman she pictured through Narunn’s description. It is only when Yaya embraces her that Teera feels the elder’s strength, her ageless fortitude. Even more astonishing, as she holds Teera’s face between her thin, fanlike hands, Yaya sticks out her tongue, revealing a hairline scar across its midsection. This wordless greeting moves Teera deeply.
Despite the long-ago injury, the elder can still speak but chooses not to say much. Instead, she smiles endlessly, lips permanently puckered between two caved cheeks as if always ready to kiss and be kissed. As she sits on the carved wooden platform under the raised teak house, the younger generations—from a middle-aged grandson who can scale the tallest palm tree on their property in mere seconds to a little baby, a great-granddaughter, just learning to walk—whirl around the diminutive matriarch like tributaries of a Great Lake, meandering in numerous directions yet always returning to their source, bringing to her the earth’s treasures: berries to freshen her palate, a coronet of wild jasmines sprinkled with water to cool her exposed head, unknown bugs and beetles for her to identify, roots to add to her lacquered box of traditional cures. Yaya repays these gestures by taking her loved ones into her arms and pressing their faces into hers, inhaling their scents, as if doing so guards their lives, or some essential part of them, with her own breath.
In no time at all, Teera learns from the loquacious clan that Yaya had thirteen children, none of whom survived the Khmer Rouge. Yet, some of her grandchildren did, and they have multiplied, through marriages and births and other tenuous connections. As for Narunn, he came one day to Chruay Chongvar looking for a distant relative of his mother’s who might’ve had a home around here, at the southern tip of the peninsula. When Yaya encountered him on the dirt road in front of their property she invited him in to meet her family, a brood of grandchildren, who explained that they were new to the land and did not know which house had belonged to whom before the war, who among their neighbors were original residents, and who were refugees like themselves. At the fall of the regime, fearing kidnappings by the remnant Khmer Rouge rebels, they had fled their village in a remote area east of the Mekong and come near the city, where it would be safer. They found the rustic setting of the peninsula preferable to the city itself, and, to their good fortune, discovered this house among overgrown trees and bushes, with a few shutters missing but otherwise in remarkable condition. They couldn’t tell Narunn for certain whether the house had belonged to his kinsmen, as no one had ever come to claim it. In any case, he was welcome to stay with them, be part of their family.