Narunn lets go of Lah’s hand and pulls Teera to him. They lie in each other’s arms, her head on his chest, and he says softly, exhaling sleep from his body, “I was just now dreaming of home . . . You remember, I told you it’s on the Tonle Sap Lake, not far from Siem Reap. A fishing village.” Teera nods. “The two of you were there with me. You met my mother, my whole family. They’d been waiting for us. They were still alive . . . It was all so real.”
They are both still, and even without looking, Teera knows his eyes are closed as he tries to imagine them again, tries to bring back the dream. She listens to his heart, its music. Now and then the sampho answers, setting the rhythm, leading the way.
He has remained, unable to move, shackled to his corner by remembering. On several occasions during the day, strangers kindly stopped to ask if he was lost and needed help to find his way home, or if he had a home at all. When the Old Musician assured them he was all right, thanking them for their concern, some tried to offer money, which he humbly refused. But when a little girl from a noodle shop across the street came in the heat of the day with a packet of fried noodles and a bottle of water, he accepted this timely generosity, nodding in muted gratitude toward her parents, the proprietors of the shop. It is now evening, and in the gathering dusk the White Building appears less imposing, as if it might vanish completely when night arrives. But he knows it will survive the dark, as it has for decades.
In recent years, the aging structure has provoked an ever-intensifying debate among disparate groups—activists fighting to preserve it for the historic value, developers maneuvering to demolish it and erect something new on one of the city’s most valuable plots of land, residents still living inside because it is the only home they’ve ever known. Several months back Dr. Narunn read to him a magazine feature on the White Building’s architect, Lu Ban Hap, who—second only to the renowned Vann Molyvann—was a driving force behind the New Khmer Architecture movement of the post-independence period.
In 1949, the feature said, Lu Ban Hap traveled with other students on a steam ocean liner from Saigon to Marseilles. In Paris, many of his fellow Cambodian students became enthralled with Marxism. Yet Lu Ban Hap—encouraged by Vann Molyvann, who had arrived a few years earlier—pursued a different sort of revolutionary education at the école nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where he became a disciple of Le Corbusier, the famed leader of modernist architecture. Whereas Marx advocated political mobilization as the path to social transformation, Le Corbusier’s modernism espoused a reimagining of the physical environments that structure social interaction, eschewing ornamentation in favor of mathematical order and harmony. The article went on to translate into Khmer a quote from Le Corbusier’s manifesto Vers une architecture—“At the root of today’s social unrest is a question of building: architecture or revolution.”
Absorbing every word read to him, the Old Musician had the odd sensation that this line was a reprise from a forgotten conversation. Days later, it came to him. Music . . . or revolution. Before us lay these two paths, my friend . . . We made a terrible mistake. But choice was always there. It’s available to us even now, even here . . .
Here in Slak Daek. This was what Sokhon meant. When Tun first learned that they had ended up in adjoining cells, he could hardly believe it. Yet, he had only to remind himself that those with a shared history were often brought to the same prison, even from different provinces. According to the brutal logic of the Organization, witnessing the torture of a friend or loved one would make a victim more likely to confess to any crime. Why then should Tun be surprised that their separate paths had suddenly converged? After all, on the list of people he’d implicated, he’d declared Sokhon a “friend of a friend.”
Once in Slak Daek—in those last months of 1978—he and Sokhon did indeed become friends. That too was a choice. For in that hellhole where they festered as condemned enemies of the state, friendship was an act of rebellion, their joint sabotage, the only possible shadow of escape. They stole every chance they could to talk, to mourn, to remember. Though they couldn’t see through the wall of wood planks separating their two cells, they heard each other’s moans and cries, half-choked breaths, silent entreaties for death to come. A strange intimacy grew between them, as if pain—the agony of the body—exposes the heart as only love should. In this way, each man knew as much as he could bear to know about the other.
In March 1974, the night of his daughter’s eighth birthday, Sokhon had gone underground, leaving his family behind. For months, he and Channara had talked it through, deciding that the birthday celebration would provide the perfect cover and, most important, prove his commitment to the cause. Why else would he abandon his daughter on such a special day? Given the family background—their privilege and status, their time in America—it was crucial for Sokhon to demonstrate his revolutionary zeal, Channara advised, if he was to come back for her and Suteera without eliciting suspicion. Sokhon’s entry into the movement was facilitated by a prominent party intellectual and commander of the North Zone, Comrade Kuon, who, shunning the austerity of the typical Communist military commander, enveloped himself with an atmosphere of art and festivity. It was this love of art—in particular music—that had connected the two men. Sokhon would spend the next year in various forest encampments in the liberated North Zone, crafting revolutionary songs with words to incite the masses, molding his own artistic sensibilities to party doctrine. Art is not born of inspiration, he learned, but of blood and sweat, the proletariat aspiration. An artist is merely another weapon of the revolution.