“Yes, which is why the abbot thought it might be good if I ask you to come along, to have a woman’s presence. He tried to call you but there was no answer.”
Teera reaches into her bag for her cell phone but then realizes she left it on the desk in her hotel room. “What happened to the child’s mother?” she asks, turning back to Narunn.
He tells them what the abbot told him about the shooting that ended in the young mother’s death, and the delicacy of the situation, the little girl whose life may still be in danger. Teera listens, silently horrified.
“Do you mind making an excursion to the countryside?—I know how you feel about going too far out of the city . . .”
Teera shakes her head. “Never mind. Anything I can do to help.”
Narunn squeezes her hand. “Thank you.”
“The little one might like Phnom Tamao,” Yaya says, as she works through the tray of spices, plucking out what can be saved for another meal. “The sun bears are precious. And the gibbons . . . they make me laugh!” It’s the most the elder has said all evening.
“Ah, yes, good idea!” Narunn kisses Yaya on the cheek, and to Teera explains, “There’s a wildlife sanctuary in Phnom Tamao.”
Just then, Ravi, presiding over the cluster of pots, announces that the dinner is ready. A bustle of movement follows, as everyone gathers on the straw mats laid out on the cleanly swept ground around the wooden platform. Excitement accompanies the parade of dishes—lemongrass snail, whole fish baked in a blanket of sea salt over charcoal, prahoc with kaffir lime grilled in banana leaf, the famous coconut amok, a variety of curries and soups.
Teera takes a deep breath, letting the aromas fill her lungs, assuage and renew her for another day. Perhaps this is all she can ever hope for—a momentary restoration to gather her strength and move forward. To live as courageously and willfully as she can in the company of those who’ve also suffered, and triumphed.
He keeps returning to the river. The Mekong rolls languidly, serenely, belying the dangerous undercurrents far below the surface. Even with his deteriorating sight, the Old Musician can still make out the opposite shore, where water ends and land begins, where the blue-black clumps of distant forest meet the gray patches of clouds. A landscape in silhouettes. Light contours the dark, and the dark seeps into everything.
For decades now, he has traversed the murky, treacherous terrain of his conscience, tracing and retracing countless times the routes he had taken. There had to have been such a divide—much like the mighty river before him—a chasm he crossed separating one existence from another, the known from the unknown, right from wrong.
At what point in his journey did he make the crossing to that other side from where there could be no return? The question plagues him. He is convinced it was at the encampment that morning of his arrival. That was the moment when everything changed. What human being commits a murder and afterward remains unaltered, whole? It was his first execution, the first life he’d extinguished. It does not matter that another soldier had pulled the trigger. There, on the teak crossing, his own fingers gripped the gun as surely as those of the young commander, and he felt the pulse of the metal, heard the unmistakable click, absorbed the smooth reverberation of the bullet through the compact steel chamber, as if the weapon were part of his body, as if it drew energy from him alone.
Could he have said, No, I won’t do this? Could he have tried to reason with the young commander? Could he have fought back, wrestled free from the grip, angled the gun in a different direction? Could he have nudged or kicked the kneeling captive into the stream and let him try to escape? Even with his hands bound, the prisoner could have run. His legs were not tied. Or were they? . . . Still. He—Tun—could’ve done something. Anything. But instead he froze, allowing the will of another to overtake him completely. And, in his numb silence, in his inaction, he became an abettor. A murderer.
That moment then, that brief instant in which he could have acted but did nothing, was the chasm, the moral void where he slipped and fell, plunging into a vicious depth, only to emerge on the opposite shore, unable to return to who he had been, the self that believed he’d left his daughter to fight for something good.
What happened next hardly mattered to him at the time. He remembers vaguely being led off the teak crossing, a shove on his shoulder, the tip of a gun nudging him—left, right, straight head, right again . . . Move faster! Whose gun it was, he didn’t know. He dared not look back. He heard the voice of the commander from far behind him, ordering the soldiers to remove the “body of the traitor” from the stream so that it would not poison the water. Throw it in the forest with the other one! A shuffle of feet, the sound of water lapping, the collective heave of effort pulling the corpse ashore, hauling it away through leaves and branches.
How was it possible that he was able to keep walking, to take one step after another? He arrived at a hut cordoned off from the rest of the camp by a fence made of roughly hewn bamboo stakes and barbed wire. A prison, he thought. But it had an almost lived-in feel to it. Within the barbed fence, in one corner a scraggly vegetable patch persisted, with tiny nascent leaves among old ones, resuscitated by the onset of rains, it seemed. He noted some pumpkin vines, tomato and chili shrubs, a clump of lemongrass, and random sprouts of ma-orm. A domestic plot. A home, amidst the untamed, untamable jungle. How was this possible? He could not think straight. Were his eyes deceiving him? What day was this? Where was he? Was it only this morning that he’d arrived? It seemed a lifetime had passed. No, he reminded himself, a life had passed. A man had lived and died, and time did not hasten or slow; it moved with the same steady gait. His mind whirled.
In another corner sat a pair of plastic gasoline containers with their mouths sawed off and a bamboo yoke fastened to the handles. Buckets to draw water from the stream. Blood filled his vision. He saw again the body falling, breaking the mirrorlike surface, the water lily radiant in its singular, ostentatious beauty.