Teera hears a deep sigh from the passenger’s seat and then a softer one against her chest. Both Narunn and Lah have fallen asleep, their breaths weaving a hypnotic rhythm around her heart. She lowers the little one’s head onto her lap, letting her stretch out. Lah stirs, unconsciously humming some residual notes. In these brief hours together, it’s become painfully clear to Teera that this is a child who has learned to sing herself to sleep, who knows loneliness and solitude, who senses the permanency of her mother’s absence even without knowing the meaning of death.
The car bounces over a large pothole in the road. Lah turns on her side so that her face is lost in the folds of Teera’s shirt. Teera caresses her until she is tranquil again. Nhome atmah, the abbot called them. Certainly, these three odd people in the car are the closest thing to a family she’s recovered since her return to Cambodia.
They’ve turned off the main route onto a dirt road lined with leafless brown saplings. Plumes of red dust rise up and surround the car, making it hard to see out. Mr. Chum proceeds cautiously, even though no other vehicle is in sight on this stretch of the road. Glancing at Teera through the rearview mirror, the old driver says in a low voice so as not to wake Narunn and Lah, “It gets like this during the dry season. Nothing but dirt. Like Pol Pot’s time.”
Teera nods, glimpsing the starved, skeletal landscape through the billowing sieves. Dust rises and falls, rains have washed away the blood, the seasons spin into decades, and yet, the past is but half a breath away. She has only to exhale, and that long-ago desolation, such as she’d never known before that day, unfurls into a vast, unconquerable terrain.
They were on a similar dirt road, her oxcart moving in one direction and her mother’s in another, each receding into the dust. Channara’s supine form was covered with a kroma, and her bare feet sticking out the back of the cart were the last things Suteera saw.
It had been a quiet, wordless death. Channara died from consuming the same small green fruits that weeks earlier had poisoned Rin, Suteera’s little brother, who’d probably mistaken the fruits for baby mangoes. Her brother was hungry—starving like the rest of them—and, being only two or three, had no way of knowing what was edible, what was not. They found him on the riverbank behind their hut one evening after returning from the fields. He was lying under a row of trees that one of the village elders identified as dao krapoeu—“crocodile’s sword”—with long green lance-like leaves. Her brother was only partially breathing by then, and when Channara picked him up, asking, “Why, why, why?” as she pried from his mouth the remaining bits of what he’d already swallowed, her little brother murmured, “Rice. Mama . . . rice.” Channara lost any semblance of composure then—she screamed, “It’s not rice, baby, it’s not rice!—It’s not even food.” Hours later, Rin stopped breathing altogether, his mouth agape, as if still awaiting the rice that never came.
After his death, Channara disappeared into herself, in the same way she’d done back home whenever she wrote. Except now, Suteera was certain, her mother would never reemerge, because there was no story to share, no words that could bring her brother back. So, day after day, the silence thickened, and Channara sank deeper into it. Then one day, Suteera found her mother with a bowl of the same green fruits and a dipping mixture of crushed fresh chilies and salt. The desolation in Channara’s eyes as she looked up from her eating told Suteera that it was too late. Grief was its own poison, and Channara’s body was flooded with it.
Suteera sat down opposite her mother, rocking gently back and forth. Silent rivers cut their faces, plunging into the gulf between them. They did not speak. What could they have said? The same two words knocked at Suteera’s heart—Don’t die. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what was going through her mother’s mind. Until that moment Suteera had not seen Channara’s vulnerability, a parent’s childlike fragility. Don’t die. Aside from her own impossible wish, she wanted only to comfort her mother in these last hours.
Sometime in the night Channara died, and Suteera let out a single audible sob when she woke to find her mother breathless beside her on the straw mat.
When the village cadres learned of the death, they assigned a soldier to take Channara’s corpse away to fertilize the fields, in keeping with revolutionary practice. Suteera, they said, could now go live with her grandparents and aunt in the village where they’d been sent. It would only take a morning to get there by oxcart, but because of what happened, Suteera would be allowed the whole day off from working. She ought to use this time, they told her, to examine her mother’s choice, as she may be called upon to give a critique at the next commune-wide political meeting. Choice? There’s no choice. Death is all there is. Suteera raged against the emptiness, the hateful landscape. The dust rose and silenced her. The only sounds came from the oxcart wheels grinding the bones of the earth.
*
Teera hears beeping, only to realize it’s from their car. Mr. Chum keeps pressing the horn as they trundle ever cautiously along, passing the flimsy skeleton of a thatched hut on the right and a desiccated palm on the left. The dust has thinned, but it’s still a challenge to see far ahead, and Teera thinks he must be alerting an unsuspecting cow or water buffalo wandering too close to graze on the sporadic clumps of brown grass. Or perhaps there are wild animals on the loose in the vicinity of the sanctuary. Troops of macaques waiting to ambush them. Khmer Rouge soldiers, with AK47s and rocket launchers, belts of bullets draped from their bodies—
Teera blinks away her fear.
Mr. Chum’s honking grows insistent. Narunn murmurs something, rising from his slouch, his voice husky with sleep. Lah follows suit, sitting upright in the backseat, rubbing her eyes. “There they are,” Mr. Chum says, sounding suddenly relieved. “Didn’t want to bump into them by mistake in these dirt clouds.”
The dust slowly begins to settle, and it’s clear why the old driver has been so vigilant. Straight ahead, in a row on either side of the road, dusty gaunt figures crouch with buckets and bowls in hand, tossing water in repeated arcs that wet the ground, their gestures ceremonial—funereal. Teera’s breath catches, and for some seconds she is unsure whether they are phantoms from the past—mere mirage—or actual ghosts rising from the splintered earth. What time period has memory dragged her into now? What unfinished graves have they disturbed? As their car moves nearer, she sees that the figures are mostly elders and children, but their haggardness, their destitution, makes them at first glance indistinguishable one from another.
“What are they doing?” Teera asks, when at last she finds her voice.
There is silence in the car, as if such things are inexplicable, defy expression. Teera asks again. Finally Narunn says, “They’re watering the road to keep the dust down. So we can see.” He pauses, clearing his throat. “In return, they hope we’ll give them food, some small change, whatever we can spare.”
“I don’t understand. How can this be? How can they live . . .” Teera hears the despair in her own voice, something breaking inside herself.