Tun was only half listening. He’d recognized one of the new guards—a former trainee of his from those early days in the insurgency. The boy had grown into a man, but his face was unmistakable. Tun couldn’t be certain if the boy had recognized him in his horribly altered state. Still, hope knocked against his breastbone, in silent delirium.
Sokhon lifted his manacled wrists and crossed them in front of his chest, staring down at the loop of metal chain. “Should I get to that point, where it’s neither life nor death, I am asking . . .” He paused, swallowing. “I am asking you to have mercy. To do for me what I wouldn’t have the strength to do myself.”
Tun regained his attention and stared at Sokhon. What are you saying?
“I still want to live. In spite of everything, I want to live. Yet there comes a point—”
“But . . . how?” Tun cut him off.
Sokhon, nodding at Tun’s wrists, said, “With that . . . the chain of your manacles. Wrap it around my throat, release me from the suffering.” He spoke so evenly that it terrified Tun all the more. “I would do the same for you . . . I want us to decide while we still have our wits, while we can still think at all. Whoever should reach that point first, the other will execute this last wish. Can you promise me this?”
Tun could not bring himself to open his mouth.
“You know, several months ago when one of the village cadres—a man in charge of the musical troupe—warned me of my possible arrest, I started to put together an ensemble of instruments I would bury, as one buries the cherished possessions of the dead to accompany them on their journey. Except in my case it would be the instruments first, a kind of pre-burial. Some part of me still believed it a mistake. But if it turned out not to be, I thought, then I’d have the instruments ready for my passage into the otherworld. I already had the sadiev, an antique one given to me by a village elder in Kompong Cham. I’d made several kinds of oboes for the musical troupe, and kept a favorite, the sralai, for myself. I would use the rest of the time to make other instruments, bringing together those for the dead and those for the living, fusing two disparate ensembles to create a unique one for myself. Yes, sacrilegious, I know. But then again, I had yet to die. There was still hope. I’d barely finished a sampho when they came for me.”
In spite of his confusion, Tun found a strange comfort in Sokhon’s words, as if they echoed some covert longing of his own. His curiosity surprised him. “Did you bury them?”
Sokhon shook his head. “There was no time.” He receded into thought for a moment. “Music . . . or revolution. Before us lay these two paths, my friend. We chose wrong. We made a terrible mistake. But choice was always there. It’s available to us even now, even here . . .”
Tun faced Sokhon for the first time. “But what about the one of us left behind? If you reached that point first, I would fulfill your request . . . But who would bestow upon me the same mercy? Who would put me out of my misery?”
“I’ve no answer to that . . . Yet, if it were the other way around, I who had to take your life, only to then be tortured to the point where the only part of me still alive was pain, then I’d hope my last thought to be that once in my life I’d made the right choice—to cut short the terrible suffering of a friend. It would be small comfort, but in this place, I can’t ask for more.”
Tun nodded, then, after a brief silence, said, “I understand.”
*
Night arrives, shadowy and fluttering like a moth. The Old Musician rises from his corner, barely able to discern the shapes about him. He searches for a motodup to take him back to Wat Nagara, where he will seek refuge in the dark of his cottage. His memories trail him.
Narunn heaves himself from the river onto the ironwood dugout, a blue checkered kroma tightly wound around his hips, the rest of him coppery brown and glistening in the first morning light. Teera pauses in her writing and watches from the veranda of the raised wooden house where they’ve been staying, its stilts and stairway almost completely submerged in the high water. She closes her journal, needing no paper and pen; she could sketch him with her breath alone.
Rivulets flow down the length of his body, and he seems a being molded from the elements—wind, water, earth, sun. The long, narrow dugout rocks under his movements, prompting Lah to grab her seat with both hands. Narunn shifts his legs, straddling the vessel, like some ancient warrior taming the mythical naga serpent with the grip of his bare feet. When all is still again, he kneels down in front of the little girl, a baby turtle in his open palm—“Someone wants to meet you.” Lah looks skeptically at the inert brown shell no bigger than her own palm. “He’s in there,” Narunn whispers. “He’s just shy.” Tentatively, Lah runs the tip of her forefinger across the hatchling’s back, tracing the barely visible ridges, the minute squared pattern like stitching on a quilt. “Where’s his mama?” she asks after a moment. Narunn nods toward a clump of bright green water hyacinth bobbing nearby. “In there. Waiting for him. With his brothers and sisters.”
Teera’s heart tugs. She senses the sorrow beneath the child’s question, the loss too big to comprehend. You met my mother, my whole family. They’d been waiting for us. They were still alive, Narunn said when waking from the dream that brought them here to his native village on a tributary of the Tonle Sap Lake. It was all so real. As she surveys the flooded geography, with the sky reflected in the water so that trees and houses and all earthbound things appear afloat on clouds, Teera thinks perhaps this is all a beautiful dream.