He waited, like a condemned prisoner given time to take stock of his life and ready himself for execution. He wanted to plan it right, to imagine his final moment of reckoning, to anticipate, as he’d often done in Slak Daek, the full extent of agony and pain so that he wouldn’t lose the courage to bear it.
After all, he reminded himself, he’d willed this. Days after Visakha Bochea, he went to the abbot and told him the truth, the bits he could bear to tell—that he’d once known Suteera’s father, that he’d chosen Wat Nagara knowing that if any family member survived, they would someday come here. In case there was any doubt about his intentions, he made clear he was not seeking to benefit from the connection in any way; he desired neither pity nor recompense of any sort, least of all from the young woman. He repeated that he wished only to return the instruments—the remains of the father she’d lost. Perhaps she would want them kept in the communal stupa once it was built. In any case, they were hers to do with as she saw fit.
The abbot, moved by the story of this broken man who all these years had held on to the only possessions of a dead friend in hopes of returning them to his family, gave him the address in America and said he could write Miss Suteera Aung himself. Then the abbot told him something he hadn’t expected to hear: the gift of funds for the construction of the communal stupa came from Miss Suteera’s aunt, a longtime patron of the temple until her untimely passing a few months prior, at the beginning of the year. We knew the aunt was sick, the abbot said, but we didn’t expect her to go so soon. Her death is a blow to us. The old monk then added, It may be that Miss Suteera doesn’t want to hear from the ghost of her father at this time. It’s hard enough to bury one family member, you see, without exhuming the memory of another. You will understand, of course, if she doesn’t wish to reply.
The Old Musician could only nod. She had not been alone! He did not know if Suteera and her aunt were the only two members of the family to have survived the regime. He assumed this was the case since the abbot mentioned no one else—not her mother, Channara. He dared not ask. His heart quaked at the name alone.
Again, the bell rings, as his recollections swell. It was the end of June when he’d finally decided to write. It is now September, and he has received no word from her. Still, he convinces himself it is only a matter of time before he faces her and confesses, before he looks into her eyes. And only then, only when he sees himself through her, will he know pain worse than any he experienced in Slak Daek. She will be his scourge, her loathing his final and lasting suffering.
The Old Musician turns his face from the dark corners of his cottage toward a patch of gray light filtering through the burlap curtaining his doorway. Even with his eyes closed, he can always feel light, its source and temperament. Its design on his skin, if it intends to soothe or hurt, warm or scorch.
In Slak Daek, blindfolded with a black cloth, he was often taken from his cell in the middle of the night and shoved across the grassless quadrangle to the interrogation room. Though he couldn’t see, he would always know the moment he stepped from the natural light of the night cast by the stars or the moon into the fluorescent glare of his torturers’ chamber.
The bell issues its final call. The monks have begun their morning chant. In their plaintive incantation on the meaning of existence, the Old Musician hears again and again the allusion to misery and pain. This cycle to which we are bound . . . spinning in perpetual ignorance and strife . . . In a little while, alms bowls in hands, they will leave the temple and walk the streets barefoot, pausing in front of a house or shop to receive a family’s first proffering of cooked rice and vegetables, food they will bring back to share with him and those who have sought refuge here. We, who cling and desire . . . their voices thick, viscous like balm . . . we, who attach ourselves to this earthly realm, with all its ills and illusions, we cannot escape the wheel of samsara, the ceaseless rotation . . . Yet, he finds life unbearably kind to him. After all that he destroyed and violated, the sun still rises and offers him its light and colors, the rain still falls and refills his clay cistern, and these monks who intone life to be an inescapable circle of sorrow still see fit to give him food and shelter to ease his suffering. How is it that he, who had such low regard for the sanctity of human life, has lived this long, the charity of old age doled out to him?
He stands up from his bamboo bed and, with one arm stretched out before him, lifts the burlap partition. He steps out into the morning, his eyes open now, and though he can barely make out the rows of monks chanting in the prayer hall, their saffron robes made more brilliant by the sunrise, he knows that their harmonized chanting will give his day solace.
Above him, the wind sweeps through the trees, shaking loose the night’s residual rain, and he hears the drops hitting the bamboo trough attached to his cottage in an almost pentatonic succession. Or has she—his daughter, the lute in whose voice she now speaks—called out to him?
What can the author of the letter tell her that he couldn’t or wouldn’t say from a distance? There has to be more to his shared history with her father than those instruments. He didn’t reveal his name, only the curious signature, Lokta Pleng at Wat Nagara—“the Old Musician at Nagara Temple”—at the bottom of the page, in a shaky, barely legible scrawl that contrasted with the neat, careful handwriting of the body of the letter, as if he’d grown old and tired in the course of composing it.
“Yes, we’re going home,” the old couple in the seats next to her echo back and forth, squeezing each other’s hand.
Home. They use the word so easily, savoring its single syllable like the taste of palm sugar remembered from long ago.
Amara, in her final days, wasn’t so clear about where she wanted to be. I’d like to reincarnate here, she’d said in a moment of clarity between the morphine injections given to alleviate her pain. Here, in Minnesota, where snow covers and erases everything. Where the seasons forgive all our wrongs. Then later, in another moment, she cried out in anguish, Take me back, Teera. I want to be with the others. Let me die in Srok Khmer. This, of course, wasn’t possible. A mere three months after she’d been diagnosed with the cancer, Amara took her last breath. There was barely time to find a funeral home, let alone make arrangements to return to their homeland.