Teera recounts their pilgrimage to the Tonle Sap Lake, whose ebb and flow sets the pulse of the country, tracing the air with her fingers, invoking the anatomy of an organ, with its veins and valves, chambers, reservoirs and atria, which Narunn sketched in a page of her journal. “Our homeland, in his rendering, looks like the human heart.” And the heart, she now realizes, having seen how life stubbornly thrives and reasserts itself wherever she travels, will continue to beat.
Watching her, he’s conscious that she’s surpassed her own mother’s age. He feels suddenly grateful to have a glimpse of the woman he loved in this burgeoning beauty. Suteera . . . Sita . . . If his daughter had survived, if she lived to this day, he imagines, perhaps this is how she’d look, how she’d sound. He remembers Suteera’s birthday. March, Sokhon told him. Soon she will be thirty-eight, not so young. Yet her life, he senses, is just beginning. Love is the only rebirth.
Teera pauses, and without looking up takes a sip of water from her glass before continuing. She tells him about Narunn’s childhood friend and his wife, their lovely home on the water, the floating world of Elephant Tusk Landing. A place steeped in legends, memories, and love. She is hoarse from talking. Her voice fades, drawing to a close. “I wish you could’ve been there with us.”
A flutter in his chest. She didn’t have to say this. He wants to repay her tenderness with his own—You are never far from my thoughts. But he needs all the self-composure he can muster. It is now his turn. “I’ve wanted to speak with you,” he says before he loses courage.
She lifts her face to meet his gaze—the one sorrowed eye, the unknowable one beneath the black cotton patch. “I’m listening.”
“But, before I begin, you must promise me that you will stay, that no matter how difficult it gets, you will remain to the end.”
She nods.
“You can judge me as you see fit. In return, I only ask that you witness the full extent of my crime.”
And so it came to this . . .
“Choice . . .” your father said, straining with every breath, as he cowered in a corner of our communal cell, now overcrowded with new arrivals. “Remember . . . our talk?”
Our inviolable promise to each other. To choose when to die, and by whose hands. I nodded, unable to look at him, even as I crouched only inches away, my back against the wall, he on my right. Just as you sit now. Only hours earlier, your father had returned from yet another interrogation. The method of communication, it seemed, was air. Or, more precisely, its deprivation. All it took was a plastic bag to draw blood. His earlobes were coated with it, I’d noted through the corner of my eye, a dry streak running down each side of his face.
“Look . . . at . . . me,” he said, summoning his strength.
In my desolation, I finally understood why the boys in my father’s music troupe—close friends of mine whom I slept and ate and practiced with—would avoid me after I’d endured a beating from my father, our music master. I had believed then that they were ashamed of me, ashamed of whatever weakness of character always provoked my father’s wrath. Why couldn’t he just be a better student—a better son? I’d often imagined them grumbling to one another. If only he was less stubborn, quicker to submit . . . Now, in this prison chamber, witnessing without pause the suffering of a friend, I felt profoundly ashamed of myself, my incapacity, my uselessness. What good was compassion if it could not prevent, or even dampen, the violence inflicted on those around me?
“Look at me,” your father commanded quietly but as forcefully as he could. The place was loud with the moaning and motion of other prisoners. I drew myself closer, looked at him, and he continued, “Soon . . . My time . . . will come soon.”
What good was my existence if it only entrapped another in a lie?
“There’s . . . nothing left,” your father persisted, inhaling, reaching deeper for strength. “Even they’ve run out of the lies they want me to repeat. There’s nothing left. Nothing more I can give them. Except my blood.” He paused, steadying his voice. “I’m marked for execution, you see. A slow, drawn-out execution. Their so-called doctor will come. There is a war, I’m told. They say they need my blood to treat the wounded.”
He was hallucinating, I thought. There was no war, of course. The endless reverberation of gunshots we knew to be prisoners being executed in continuous waves. Even in moments of clarity, I could hardly distinguish gunfire from the rattle of chains echoing through the cells. The other things he was saying I couldn’t comprehend. I didn’t want to understand, to imagine.
“How kind of them to explain it all to me. Perhaps this is their one act of courtesy.”
I wanted him to stop talking, to preserve what little strength remained. But I understood all too well the mind emerging from torture, the muddle of pain. Words, even senseless words, were necessary, the struggled grasps reaching back toward sanity, toward life. Even as life had become nothing but misapprehension, an extended overture to total and permanent obliteration. I let him talk, torn by the desire for my own life to end and my desire to see him live.
“Every time—just before the first blow, the first shock, the first cut of air from my lungs—I hum. It confuses them. Makes them hesitate for a split second. They can’t be sure if I’m submitting or rebelling. They think they have a monopoly on truth. But the truth will echo through, even under the weight of a mountain of forced confessions. I know that now.”
He moaned, his shackled hand reaching for mine resting limply at my side, equally hindered. He tapped his fingers on my knuckles, a rhythm of sorts, and I realized he wasn’t moaning but was attempting to chant—to sing. In that place, at such a moment, your father was trying to sing. He licked his lips, swallowed, and once more gathered his strength. “The spirit of this land . . . lives in its fields of rice . . .” His voice was barely audible, but I recognized the cadence of a smoat as I leaned in to listen. He sang the same short lyric, the single stanza, over and over, his words as labored as his breaths. When he’d finished, I repeated the refrain, giving it the melody he intended.
We were quiet for a moment, and then your father spoke again. “I wrote it . . . when I was making the sampho. It’s part of the drum, written into its skin. A hidden invocation. A sealed truth. It’s just as well . . . that I never had the chance to bury it. These fields are stained with the blood of so many . . . Yet, the music will endure, without me. I realize now I’m merely one in this ensemble. I’ve served my purpose, played my part—”
“No, listen to me,” I said, cutting him off. “My daughter is gone, but your daughter, your wife and family, may still be alive. You must fight to your last breath.”
“But when I can no longer fight, when they’ve siphoned my blood, and all I am is this vessel of pain. You promised me, Tun.”
I lowered my head. I could not bear what he was asking me.
“Should you come out the lone victor in this battle, then find my daughter, find my wife . . . take my place.”