The Apartment on 6th Avenue
The shadows thrown by the setting sun passed across the building, consuming the warmth of its ocher bricks. Pigeons flew in from overhead, roosting in the soffits of the structure, evidence of their occupation splattered on the pavement below. Traffic lights shimmered red and green like baubles on holiday trees. Suon approached the building and entered the lobby, taking the old elevator up to apartment #817. She carried a tub of bai cha and a plastic bag containing laundry detergent and ibuprofen.
They met at Ros Kunthea’s apartment on Tuesdays and Sundays in the late afternoon, each bringing a little something for the teacher’s meals. Sometimes only three students showed up, sometimes as many as seven. The master teacher also saw girls earlier in the day for private sessions if she could arrange it, but that was difficult. There were always enthusiasts at first, longing for their homeland, free from parental disapproval, free of the need for permission. A good number peeled away, though, discouraged by the discipline, frustrated by the rigidity of expression.
Suon greeted everyone and turned over her contribution to Ros Kunthea’s living wages, donation for the knowledge passed on. The group stretched before they began, the teacher bending back a hand, pulling back a shoulder, straightening the spine. Then they danced.
When she danced, Suon thought of Charya. The rest of the day her mind was occupied with practical matters or taken up with romantic notions or ambitious thoughts for herself. But dancing always brought her back to Charya. Best friends, almost sisters, separated that hot April day years ago, never to see each other again. Sometimes as she danced, sometimes when she satisfied Ros Kunthea with a particular gesture, the correct bend of the elbow, Suon would feel the connection with Charya click complete.
There were many such thoughts circulating in that room, one could say; hovering in the ether over the dancers. ‘We are assembled here to reclaim what is lost. This is a remembrance ceremony; a retrieval system; a fight for an existence far removed from home. We are not home, and the gulf between there and here endures, even though a package has just arrived from Phnom Penh with costumes—some of the first sent abroad. Wearing the newly sewn cloth, up here in this sky apartment, sliding the copper patrum and beaded kong ngor bangles over our wrists, the rift still holds, a shoe separated from its sole, a tree uprooted from the soil. The gap aches like a cavity in a tooth. We dance and each movement is a transmittal sent from the foreign land I occupy back to myself. I am neither one or the other; not either/or.’
* * *
As Suon’s teacher got ready for bed that night, she thought particularly of one of her dancers, the one who danced with an unusual presence for one so young. Her aura did not distract from her precision of movement; her presence arose from within that precision. Suon reminded her of her younger self, except she herself had not been weighed down in the ingenue phase of her life. The grief had arrived later. When Ros Kunthea lay down, and the movie reel of never completely past horror started flickering against her closed eyelids, she slowly, steadily stanched it; remembering a section of a ballet from beginning to end; finding safety, solace in the repertoire; slowly, elegantly stretching and bending her hands in the dark, just as she did at night back in the labor camp, when the Party believed her ruse of being a witless peasant, with no comprehension of who or what she really was.
Finally, after more than two years, Ros Kunthea had her nine dancers, and a troupe was formed—a diaspora troupe, not a home-grown one, but still, a link between heaven and earth.
Image: Dancing in the dark. Source: Photograph by George Groslier, founding director of the National Museum of Cambodia, 1927; edited by J. Weigley. See: http://www.devata.org/royal-cambodian-dancers-of-sisowath-in-1927-photos-by-george-groslier/#.WnEF7pM-eT9 for full details about Groslier's photographic archive of classical Cambodian dance movements and poses.