I will stay . . . For how long, she can’t say. The dissolution of home requires only walking away, a single flight across the borders, but finding it again takes a lifetime of returning. For now, I will stay . . . because part of my home is you, this budding existence we share with Lah, the whole we are trying to patch together from the fragments. She wishes Narunn to know this.
As for the tremor, this fluttering he detected, it’s not fear of entrapment but the release of what has been imprisoned inside of her. She’s not sure what to call it now. It ceases to be what it was—anguish, grief, despair. It surrounds her—like a florescence of dust motes in the sunlight—and yet, it no longer possesses the weight and solidity to drag her to the bottom, to the darkness within, as it did those days right after she and the Old Musician spoke. Instead, it moves with her, rising when she rises, sitting when she sits. The sorrow of knowing. It’s clear that she can put the dead to rest, bury the ghosts, but not the knowledge. What she knows now will become part of her, an abiding consciousness.
Perhaps, Teera thinks, this is what we all live with as a people, the painful awareness that this history—war, atrocity, genocide, whatever its name—surrounds us persistently, at times binding like a metal chain, other times incorporeal as dust. Even so, we can still move forward, with the small choices we make each day. To love, to harbor and protect, to rebuild.
She hears playful shouting and looks up from her writing to see the men of Yaya’s household carting materials—poles, ropes, stakes, tarps—to construct a canopy for the ceremony later this morning. Narunn strolls over to meet them, Lah bouncing on his shoulders, the wind chime still jangling from her hand, their endeavor to hang it postponed momentarily. After a boisterous exchange of greetings, Narunn gestures to the middle of the plot, where the future house will stand. This is where the men will raise the canopy, with a platform underneath for the monks and straw mats all around for guests. In a few short hours, the Venerable Kong Oul, along with some novices, will arrive to bless the land. There will be chanting, and afterward the Old Musician will offer an invocation to the spirits, asking for their protection and benevolence, their forgiveness for any trespassing.
Teera thinks back to her meeting with the Old Musician only a few days ago, six weeks after the long, heartbreaking revelation they’d shared in the ceremony hall. He seemed taken aback to see her return to the temple, to hear that she’d come specifically to visit him. For a long time they sat facing each other in mutual silence. Then, he said, “What I did . . . those many years ago . . . cannot be forgiven. Still, I am profoundly sorry.”
They plunged into another silence. Finally, she said, “When my mother took her own life, I blamed myself. Rin, my baby brother, had just died, you see, and she was grieving. I should’ve found some way to pull her out of that awful despair, I thought. I was angry at myself, and, unable to bear this anger, I lashed out at the world.” The words flowed out of Teera, filling the gulf between them. “I’ve since learned something about anger and despair. You can always direct your anger at something—someone. And when you do, there’s almost certainly a response, and thus you have company, you’re not alone in anger. Eventually it grows and intensifies, depleting you of energy, but before that it can offer a certain seductive comfort.” She paused, swallowing, moistening her throat. “But with despair, you are alone. You grieve in solitude. You sink deeper and deeper into it, to where no one can reach you, and you have to gather all your strength to fight your way back to the surface. So, slowly, I’ve had to learn to let go of anger—to feel it but not to cling to it, as Amara taught me by her example—because whatever strength I have I must reserve for the fight against that solitary descent into grief.” Teera looked up and saw tears pooling in his good eye, a faint stream seeping from underneath the patch covering the injured one. “I am here because I’ve fought my way to the surface again.”
They held each other’s gaze for a moment, a confluence of the inexpressible between them. A sudden intake of breath that sounded like a sob. From whom, neither could be sure. He nodded, and for a moment, Teera glimpsed her mother beside him—his younger self, Tun—both looking as they had that day when the two of them stood side by side at the riverfront releasing a sparrow, while she, little Suteera, sipped sugarcane juice on a bench behind them. In her remembering, Teera had mistaken him for her father. The heart, she realized as she stared at him, holds its own trial. It bears witness to what the mind easily forgets, and yet it forgives every act of love.
She flips to the back pocket of her journal and pulls out the black-and-white photograph of her parents, turning it over to look at the tentative designation in Amara’s handwriting—1962? The year her parents married, this she’s always known, from her aunt’s recounting of the wedding festivities. She wonders now whether the picture was taken before or after. Could it be that the captured festive scene was a party during the weeklong celebration? If so, the Old Musician was part of the scene, somewhere in the uncaptured periphery, playing music with the ensemble sent, according to Amara, by the Ministry of Culture. A gesture honoring her grandfather, Le Conseiller, a dedicated patron of the arts, on the joyous occasion of his daughter’s marriage. They were all there, Teera realizes in astonishment.
Then, as if acting of its own free will, the tip of her pen begins to blot out the year. It’s not important when the image was taken. She’d like to believe that somewhere in the uncharted periphery of time and memory they still are there, all together.