What Tun had witnessed on the teak crossing, Comrade Im said, would happen to anyone suspected of collaborating with the enemy. Yet—Comrade Im pointed out—the execution had been a kind one, compassionate even, given the battalion commander’s predilection for cruelty. It was immediate and without torture, because the offender was a high-ranking cadre, one of the encampment leaders, respected and loved by many. Other traitors were disemboweled or had their throats sliced, writhing slowly toward death.
“Now do you see that your trial was not at all a punishment?” Comrade Im said, smiling charitably. Tun nodded but kept silent, forging his resolve to stay alive, which, during his isolation, had solidified into a trait all its own. For him, there could be no loyalty without love. It had always been this way. With his music. With Channara. With Sita. In the absence of love, loyalty was merely obedience, what one owed one’s captor. He’d known obedience with his father. He could summon it again.
In the meantime, if becoming a soldier was the only way back to his daughter, he would learn to fight, he would cross one battlefield after another until he reached her again.
So he became a soldier. To his great relief, there was a new battalion commander. The old one, he was told, had been called to the “Special Zone,” the area around Phnom Penh, closer to the enemy. Under the new commander—who worked jointly with a Khmer-speaking Vietnamese combat specialist—Tun learned to handle weapons, to aim and shoot at targets called out to him impromptu; to sense danger by the slightest sounds and stirrings in the forest; to crawl in the grass, under barbed wires, in torrential downpours; to dig trenches and build barricades; to sit still as throngs of red ants bit into his flesh; and, most important, to feel nothing in these moments and to remember only that bloodshed was a cause for exaltation, the closest feeling to joy one would experience in the presence of the Organization.
After a few short months, Tun was told these military exercises were adequate, considering that most soldiers received none at all and learned to fight during actual combat. He had received as much because he was deemed capable of being a leader—he understood maps, could make sense of diagrams and charts, knew how to use a compass, could read and write. And thus, at the end of his training, Tun was put in charge of about thirty soldiers. His own ragtag platoon of half-starved illiterates. Many of the new recruits were terrified by their first battles, but they remained with him, loyal to the insurgency, because the fear of being killed in the line of fire was secondary to the fear of being tortured and brutally murdered by their own. They had seen it happen to their own friends caught trying to defect. In short, they had been unequivocally forewarned.
For Tun, it was neither fear nor blind allegiance that kept him moving. He dodged countless bullets, narrowly escaped explosions, and several times even broke through enemy lines, only to be baffled by how he’d managed to do so, how he had survived, with the occasional slight wound. He had only one goal—with each victory to get closer to his daughter. In that sense, perhaps love had been at the forefront of all his battles. But he had not dared express such sentiment, or even think it, until now. Until this very moment when he sat looking down at her sleeping face, when he felt her in his arms and, unlike those tormented nights when he’d only dreamt of her, knew that she was real.
Tun turned to Om Paan in the other cyclo moving in tandem with his. She smiled at him, nodding silently, as if to say there would be time later for words. They’d reached the edge of the city. They thanked Roeun and the other cyclo driver, said a solemn good-bye, and quickly transferred to a prearranged oxcart loaded with hay and clay pots. They continued like this the rest of the way, furtively hopping out of one ride into another, following a route mapped out in advance, avoiding government checkpoints through the help of various guides and “eyes.” They raced against time, aiming to reach Oudong, about forty kilometers north of the city, before battles resumed at dawn.
*
That night they reached Oudong as planned, but not all of them made it out. A few days later, after the government troops had virtually reclaimed the former royal capital, Om Paan was killed in crossfire during the final battle. As Tun’s unit retreated with the rest of the insurgent forces, she crouched beside him, shielding Sita while he fought, and when the bullet came she took it—a single definitive shot in the side of her neck. Tun had no time to think, feel, or even react, except to seize Sita from Om Paan’s lifeless clutch. Only later when they were safe in a forest did he note the silent scream trapped in his daughter’s eyes. It was a look that would never quite leave her. Again and again, he would be privy to it. Her horror. A hint of which he glimpsed decades later in Suteera’s eyes when they met.
He is not ready to see it again. Not yet. She is probably on the way to the temple this very moment with Dr. Narunn, to pick up little Lah for their outing. He knows now why he has come to the city, why he wandered this far, along these particular streets, arriving as if by accident at his former home. If he were to recount his life to Suteera, he could do so up to this point, the final year before the country fell, knowing that someone of her compassion would be sympathetic to his mistakes, all the possible wrong turns he had made, the many moral lapses he’d fallen into. Shocked as she might be, she could probably bear to hear of his love for her mother, Channara, and forgive him for it. Or, if not that, at least pity him. And he . . . he could probably go on to tell her about the next several years, knowing that everything he did, vile or forgivable, was to keep his daughter alive. But how can he tell her the one truth she seeks and still bear the horror in her eyes? What do you know of my father? he can almost hear her asking. What happened to him? Who are you?
The answer is simple, and yet how can he tell her?
I am your father’s executioner.
Third Movement