The following March, on the week of Suteera’s ninth birthday, he returned to Phnom Penh as planned. The war had reached its climax, with insurgent forces closing in on the capital, poised for victory. The American and other foreign embassies were preparing to evacuate. It was only a matter of weeks, possibly days, before the old regime would collapse and a new, brighter Cambodia rise in its place. In the meantime, Sokhon told Channara, he could not risk capture by staying in the city longer than he already had. Although a revolutionary, he was only a civil cadre, and had to rely on the help of soldier comrades to scurry safely through combat zones. He would return once the city had been fully liberated, and Channara should be prepared then to leave with him and journey to an area of Kompong Cham in the North Zone where their new home would be. They would take Suteera but must cut ties with the rest of the family. Would Channara be able to make this ultimate sacrifice? Yes, came her firm reply. Amidst a relentless siege, Sokhon slipped back out of the city, abandoning them as he’d done before.
Liberation came a few short weeks later, but, to his bewilderment, Sokhon could not return to the city, having been ordered to stay put. He was given no explanation, only this firm warning: A great deal is uncertain, alliances are shifting, and many are scrutinized. If you make the wrong move, we cannot guarantee your safety, let alone that of your family or anyone connected to you. Sokhon waited, clutching to the wan hope that Channara had remembered and would try to make her way to him with Suteera somehow. One month passed, then another, then many more . . . Finally, 1975 was coming to a close, and the only news he received concerned his own fate—he would be posted to a remote labor camp in the upper reach of Kompong Thom, his membership in the party revoked. He was advised by a sympathetic comrade not to seek help from any high-ranking cadres he knew, as they may already be implicated in some web of accusation. Instead, he should use this opportunity to disappear, go to Kompong Thom as ordered, and wait it out, until the party had purged itself of traitors. So Sokhon went, he disappeared, motivated by the fear that if he stayed in Kompong Cham, he might very well encounter his family and jeopardize their lives, now that he himself was somehow marked. Surely the party would right itself and everything would calm down soon.
The purge continued, seemingly without pause. One campaign hardly ended before another was launched, the supposed enemies multiplying like lice, connected in an indecipherable tangle of strands. Comrade Kuon seemed to have vanished, his zone divided and passed on to others. The rhetoric following his disappearance suggested that he had come under suspicion of the party leadership.
In Kompong Thom, Sokhon was no longer a musician and composer but was assigned to be an instrument maker, a man with far humbler skills, more like a carpenter, which put him in the laboring class, kept him safe. When not digging irrigation ditches or clearing bamboo forests for rice fields, he would make instruments for the village’s revolutionary musical troupe. This earned him a favorable nod now and then from the local cadres, the kinder of whom would furtively reward him with an extra ration of rice, a wedge of palm sugar, an ear of corn. Like most, he was starving, but the flimsiest stories suggesting the possibility that his family might still be alive would renew his reach for life. Even dreams fueled his hope, giving him energy to endure. He had only to close his eyes and they would appear before him—Channara, Suteera, his parents-in-law, Amara—all so real. His only family. He’d never known another.
Orphaned since boyhood and brought up by the monks at Wat Nagara, Sokhon had come under the guardianship of the temple’s most illustrious devotee. Le Conseiller first took note of Sokhon through the mournful lyricism of his sung poetry, and later, as the boy matured into adolescence, through his thoughtful commentary on the dharma with respect to equality and social justice. At the behest of the temple’s abbot, Le Conseiller assumed the full responsibility of Sokhon’s education, paving the way for the young man’s schooling in Cambodia and abroad. While Sokhon’s intellectual acuity earned him respect among his peers, it was Le Conseiller’s powerful influence that procured him the royal government scholarship to study in America. Sokhon owed his every achievement to Le Conseiller, and when the formidable diplomat conceded to his request to marry Channara, he felt his existence couldn’t have been more fortunately endowed. Though intimate friends of the family had long foreseen the union—as it was common for a wealthy patriarch to take in a promising young boy and groom him for his daughter—Sokhon viewed it as nothing less than a miracle.
He had loved Channara for most of his life, starting with his first glimpse of her when the family visited Wat Nagara during their annual return from America, where, he’d later learn, her father was an official in the Cambodian Embassy. She was five, a celestial creature with hair almost to her knees, and he was nine, a newly ordained novice with no hair at all. Orphaned and poor, he could only dream from a distance . . .
And through the years he dreamt of her, feeling she was with him all the while, even when far away in another land. Every year he would wait for her return, thrilled about her month-long stay. Every year he would grow to love her more—silently, secretly. For all Sokhon dared to dream, he never presumed, never overstepped the boundary of generosity. Even the confidence he embodied was a bestowal of sorts from Le Conseiller, who, with a keen sense for self-invention, maintained an appearance of distance and impartiality so that Sokhon could make his own mark, earn the respect necessary to move in their milieu.
In his early twenties, while taking a respite from his studies in America, Sokhon married Channara. During the first few months of marriage, he would often wake in the middle of the night, slightly shaken, unsure if it was his heartbeat or hers that had stirred him to wakefulness. Staring at Channara, he could hardly believe she was his wife. She had not only accepted him but, by her own admission, loved him. He felt it. In some mysterious way, she loved him. Sokhon would fall back to sleep, thinking perhaps he was still dreaming. Later he would tell himself that certain dreams acquire the pulse of reality. His had throbbed into existence when he was that nine-year-old novice reciting the sutras, forgetting his line, falling out of rhythm with the other monks, as he caught sight of her hopping about the temple grounds, each leap pounding his heart. Several years into their marriage, when their daughter Suteera was born, he felt that his dream was complete, fully realized, becoming the life he lived and breathed.