“Here in Phnom Penh, in Sisophon,” Nuong says, “people went on. The mulatan are still there. Some are farmers, some are soldiers. Nobody had anyplace to go. And all the new people, the April 17 people who couldn’t leave, they’ve gone back to the cities where they began.” He says that hardly anyone outside the country remembers this war. Only us, only here.

I tell Nuong that I don’t think I can ever return.

He understands. “Hiroji is in Laos,” he says. “I can tell you where he’s staying.”

That night, I dream of Navin. I dream and when I wake, the curtains are open, the blanket is twisted around me, and the air smells of rumdul flowers and smoke and the river. I get up and go to the door and open it but no one is there, no cars, only the faint glow of the streetlamps. I stand for a moment and let the cold sharpen my senses, invade my dreams. When I first arrived in Montreal, this city had seemed so alien to me, so self-contained and mysterious. How many winters have I passed here? Nearly a decade’s worth, the cold months accumulating, white and silent, the years opening toward another existence. I remember the warmth of Navin’s apartment when I first met him. We were like two coins left in the bottom of the jar: here by circumstance and luck, here together. It was dawn the first time we made our way to the bedroom, dawn when the building began to wake, when his neighbours prepared breakfast, gathered their children, packed their bags and briefcases, jingled their keys. I smelled coffee through the walls but I was holding Navin. Doors slamming upstairs, downstairs, and Navin watching as I touched my lips to him, as I knelt on the blanket. His lean body, surprisingly strong, dark in the unlit room. The building emptying, the air disappearing. I pushed the windows open, back then I craved the shock of air on my skin. In the beginning, we never talked about Cambodia or Malaysia. Our countries remained behind us, two lamps dimming. Like his father, who died young, Navin was an engineer. When I met him, he had just come back from Kuala Lumpur and its towering, silvery skyscrapers. He took me to hear ice melting on the St. Lawrence River, a steady crackling and firing. In the kitchen, there was a picture of his father. They had the same narrow face and dark eyes, the same solemn beauty. I had no photographs from my childhood. “Describe your father to me,” Navin had said. He was making lunch for us, a thin, savoury roti canai. His cooking filled with air with heat, with a floury residue.

“Tell me what he was like.”

I told Navin how easy it had been to make my father laugh, how his hands had danced when he spoke, clipping and prodding the air. I remembered how my father’s entire body had always seemed to lean forwards, propelled into the future, how my brother and I had to run just to keep up with him. I remember how, at weddings and celebrations, he was always the first to start dancing the ramvong, how he never slept well, how he stood on the balcony singing to himself. “What songs?” Navin asked. I remembered. My father had told me they were the songs of my grandmother.

On the residential streets outside Navin’s apartment, brick duplexes had stood, shoulder to shoulder, exhaling chimney smoke, all along the boulevard. Growing up, I remember arak singers trying to tempt wandering souls, the pralung, back into their bodies. I remember celebrations, ceremonies, the words Meng had spoken before I flew away to Canada. Your daughter is crossing the ocean. You, too, must go on. You, too, must walk to your own destiny.

In the sky on the way to Saigon, the hours pass slowly. The plane sails on, food arrives and disappears, trays fold up, windows darken. The man seated beside me watches one movie after another, he laughs big belly laughs and then falls asleep, his headphones askew, his blanket slipping across his shoulders.

I had gone to see my family last night. Navin told me Kiri had started a new set of drawings. Aplysia, waving like a flower. One cell, two cells, or Aplysia its entirety, a wide creature billowing through the ocean. At the kitchen table, Kiri sat across from me and asked me where I was going. “To Laos,” I said. “To see Hiroji.” Morrin had given me two weeks of leave. In my son’s bedroom, I put my fingers to the globe, turned the Earth on its pedestal, and showed him the place. The names inscribed were in French. Cambodge, he read. Viêt Nam. Laos.

Kiri gave me a drawing to bring with me.

I touched the blue, waxy openness. “The sky,” I said. “Or maybe the ocean?”

He nodded. “It goes off the edge of the page.” At school, he said, they had been looking at images from the Hubble telescope. “See? Like a galaxy, and you can go forever but the universe, it just never ends.”

He looked at Taka the Old, who would be staying with them while I was away. When they left for Vancouver, Navin’s sister would come to house-sit. “This cat has a big nose,” he said, suddenly interested. “Like a rabbit.”

“You’re part of us,” Navin told me when I left. “We’re your family. We have to find a way.”

Now, the flight attendant hands out ice cream that we eat with spoons shaped like tiny wooden paddles. I pace up and down in the aisles, between one set of dark blue curtains and another. Nearly everyone is sleeping, heads turned to the side. Hours later, as we are lowering toward Vietnam, I can see the Mekong River, I see temples like patches of gold, the delicate crowns of trees, dry fields ready for the next season. I breathe it in, this landscape so like Cambodia’s, like a painting I memorized long ago, shade by shade, curve after curve. Gamboge, the colour, was named by Flemish painters some three hundred years ago, after my country, Kampuchea. Cambodia. Deep yellow, burned orange, saffron, the colour of the monk’s robes, of tigers and the petalled eaves of the Khmer temples. I can’t stop looking. I am trying to follow this path to its end, I am trying to continue by buying a ticket, pushing my bag through the X-ray scanner, folding myself into the impossible drawer of seat 23D, flying away from Montreal, through the rough turbulence that joins these continents. In Saigon, when we exited the airplane, heat came suddenly, thick and heavy. In the airport, I drank tea. I bought postcards of the south coast. Women in ao dai and women in slacks, men my father’s age, businessmen in polyester suits, the ones who had survived the long wars and now crossed and recrossed the sky, hurried past me. A juddering, unhappy plane carried me north to Vientiane, Laos, and from there I took a bus twelve hours over the mountains. A wet humidity enveloped us. I could not understand the language. Some Lao words drew images in my thoughts but most were puzzles to me. This country was so mesmerizing, the bus climbed up into the mountains, slowing in the high altitudes, descending through limestone valleys and supine clouds. There was a woman on the road with her worried chickens. Little children torpedoed baguette sandwiches through the windows of the bus in return for a few thousand kip. I imagined Kiri here. Where are you going? a woman asked me. I don’t know, I said. She smiled and smiled. I cried and no one noticed. I wanted to go home but this was as close as I could bring myself, floating by sea, floating in air.

The bus carried me to the ancient city of Luang Prabang, where I stayed for two nights, waiting, thinking. In my bare hotel room, I spoke to Navin. We talked about our son. Navin told me about the years in Malaysia, after his father had passed away, and he and his sister were left to raise themselves. He told me details that we had never shared before, afraid of pity or misunderstanding, unwilling to give meaning to the past. I fell asleep thinking of telescopes, microscopes. Galileo and his polished mirrors, how they carried, magically, more visible light to the eye, making the tiny things large, and the distant stars near. How they collapsed space and time. The next morning, I arranged a ride to the village that Nuong had described to me, a dirt road with fifteen or twenty wooden houses and two small restaurants. By then it was late February, almost three months since Hiroji had disappeared. I was let off beside the village temple and the truck driver, a boy in his late teens, smiled at me wistfully. It was Monday, late afternoon. When the truck heaved away, the rising dust hung before me. A tired light veiled the temple, which was painted red and gold, lush as a woman’s fancy dress, like a tirade against the brown landscape. I waited. This village was so small, news would spread within a few minutes that a stranger was here. I stood beneath a blossoming tree and children came out of nowhere to peek at me, and I wondered if I had been like this, Sopham and I, fascinated by the strangers on the riverfront, with all our lives ahead of us. My mother once told me that we are born, into the world, whole. Year by year, our heads grow crowded with too many voices, too many lives. We begin to splinter apart. We take in too much, too many people and places, we try to keep them inside us where the world won’t alter them.