At Wat Minnesotaram, where Teera has left the rest of Amara’s ashes in an urn, her aunt can slip back and forth between one existence and another. She imagines Amara’s ghost sitting in the prayer hall now, calm and collected in death as she’d been in life, neither accepting nor denying her passing but observing with her keen eye the irony of geography—that borrowed landscape of snowy winters and cornfields in which their tropical dream rose from a modest farmhouse into a glittering reality, a sanctuary of gold spires and ornately carved columns, safe from the threats of war and revolution.
Teera leans her head back and closes her eyes. She should’ve never set foot on the plane. Now there’s no changing her mind.
Slak Daek, the Old Musician had written in his letter. How long were he and her father in that chamber of torture together? What were their crimes? What had they done—been accused of? She’s read enough to know that out of the thousands of mass grave sites discovered across Cambodia, most were located at or close to the Khmer Rouge security prisons. In Kompong Thom Province alone, which the Old Musician mentioned in his letter as the location of Slak Daek, nearly twenty mass grave sites have been surveyed and are believed to contain the remains of more than 120,000 victims. In Kompong Cham, where Teera and the rest of her family finally ended up after their expulsion from Phnom Penh, sixty-one mass grave sites have been found, with close to 180,000 victims.
In her obsession, her search to understand, Teera will read everything she can get her hands on, the latest findings, and when she comes across a photograph of the remains of the dead, always she wonders if some piece of her family is among the skulls and bones captured in the image. Often she’ll gaze at a fractured cranium, look into the hollows of eye sockets, with the unease that it’s not the living, the survivors, but the dead who bear witness, their vision unabated, reaching across time, seeing the violence committed, now and again, their warning unheard. Unheeded.
Tightness fills the small space between her brows. Teera pinches her skin to release it. When she opens her eyes again, the low ceiling of the aircraft cabin tilts left and right, and she feels herself whirling in confusion. How much did her father suffer? How did he die? Did they shoot him from behind? Was he allowed to run? Or did they tie his hands and ankles? There were other ways to destroy a person, she remembers. Other methods more effective, more efficient. In his final moments, did her father think of the family? Of her? Or was his killer’s face the last he remembered?
She doesn’t know why she bothers with such useless queries. They’re like holes in a moth-eaten mat, and when she peers into them, they lead only to greater voids.
Teera feels a hand on her arm. She looks up and sees the flight attendant smiling at her. The young woman reminds her to bring her seat to an upright position. The plane has begun its descent into Phnom Penh International Airport. Around her, the Cambodians chatter away in anticipation of the landing. She is suddenly aware that sweat is trickling down the sides of her face. She wipes it away with the base of her palm. She turns toward the window.
A terrain of slender sugar palms and straw huts comes into view, desolate and scarred, the earth a deep saffron color. For some reason, maybe because of the Angkor advertisement she came across earlier, Teera expects to see more green, to be greeted by a lush tropical landscape of coconuts and teaks, emerald rice paddies, lakes and ponds filled with lotus and water lily, rivers embroidered with winged sampans and palm canoes with prows like beaks of birds. Instead, what lies below resembles a battleground, pockmarked by dark-water holes and bomb-crater-like gashes. A fractured geography.
What can it tell her? What lies beneath those patches of gray and brown? What secrets does this wounded earth hold for her that she doesn’t already know? Does it conceal in its crevices her father’s dying scream, his shattered ideals and dreams, evidence of his alleged crime, the possibility of his redemption, as well as her own?
The plane dips left, dropping in altitude. The city comes into sharper focus. “That’s Phnom Penh?” someone says, evidently disappointed. “It looks like . . . like nothing.”
The city slips in and out of vision in the framed perspective of the small window. It’s nothing like what Teera has come to expect of a city. Even from this bird’s-eye view, it looks more like a rural town than the capital of a country. Her eyes scan the city’s topography, looking for the golden temples and red-tile roofs from the 1960s National Geographic features she pored over time and again as a university student, scouring for evidence of her history, the fragments of her home and family. All she discerns now is architectural incongruity, the remnants of prewar edifices patched together with newer, grayer blocks.
The plane tilts right, and Teera catches the glints of a gold-painted rooftop in the distance along a river. Could it be the Royal Palace? And the river—is it the Tonle Sap?
Images of the old Phnom Penh suddenly flood her mind—the layered steeple of the Independence Monument rising out of its circular foundation like the mauve flame of an immense candle; Wat Phnom shimmering in the afternoon sun; the palace grounds dotted with glittering halls and carved pavilions, resembling, she always thought when she was little, a celestial city; the Tonle Sap River brimming with monsoon rains.
The plane swoops down, then touches ground with a light bump. Teera’s heart skips a beat. Next to her, the old woman weeps. “We’re home,” she tells her husband, taking his hand, and he, in return, cups his over hers, fighting back the tears rimming his eyes, his chin trembling.
Teera presses her forehead hard against the window, feeling helpless in the presence of such exposed sentiments. Over the years, she’s learned to blanket her feelings in the rhythm of another’s language. Even her name has taken on a more pronounceable disguise. Teera instead of Suteera. She’s an American. This is no longer her home.
As the plane makes its way smoothly along the runway, her heart lurches, banging against her chest. Again, she clutches her oversize shoulder bag to still herself. Inside are the valuables—her passport, some cash and a couple of credit cards, the small wooden box of Amara’s ashes, and the Old Musician’s letter.
My dear young lady, I don’t know how to properly begin this letter. She’s read it so many times she can recall it word for word. There is so much to say . . . It isn’t a long letter, but the empty spaces between the lines resonate with inexpressible sadness, their parallel sorrows. I knew your father. She imagines his pen poised at an angle as he paused in search of the next word, the next sentence, while his mind leapt over countless things he wanted to tell her. He and I were . . . The words were crossed out, a single straight line running through them, as if the mistake was immutable, impossible to obliterate or retract by a new beginning. Teera was touched by its honesty, its self-revelation when she first read it. We were in Kompong Thom together during the last year of Pol Pot’s regime, in Sala Slak Daek. A prison. How I survived such a place, I do not know. Why I survived at all is a question that has plagued me until now . . .