Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  He glides the fingers of his left hand closer to the gourd sound box, producing a periodic overtone, like an echo or a ripple in the pond. I thought I was alone. I walked the universe, looking for your footsteps. I heard my heart echo . . . and felt you knocking on the edge of my dream.

  The quality of each note—its resonance and tone—varies as he slides the half-cut gourd across his chest. He plucks faster and harder, reaching a crescendo. Then, in three distinct notes, he concludes the song.

  Teera studies the clouds caressing the wing of the plane. They seem to be in no hurry, gliding at an imperceptible speed, melting into one another like fragments of a childhood memory. We’re going so fast it seems we’re sitting still, her aunt Amara said on their plane ride together as refugees journeying to America. Teera didn’t understand it then—the idea that speed could be stillness. She thinks now that what her aunt probably meant by “stillness” is suspension of the senses: you’re thrust forward at such incredible speed you’re left paralyzed, unable to feel, to absorb all that’s happening around you.

  It’s been more than half an hour since the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, leaving the colorful landscape of duty-free shops for the blankness of transboundary skies. They’ve reached cruising altitude, the captain announces. Teera feels herself hurtling. Toward what, she doesn’t know. The future and the past lie in borderless proximity.

  She turns her face from the window and, closing her eyes, leans back in her seat. Pressing the oversize shoulder bag against her abdomen, she tries to draw from it some sense of anchor, even as she’s fully aware that its contents are the very reason for this headlong flight. Her mind leaps through the events of the past months—her aunt’s death, the Buddhist cremation ceremony in the depths of Minnesota winter, the unexpected letter from the strange old musician, quitting her job as a grant writer at a community arts center, and now this trip halfway across the world. A year ago Teera couldn’t have imagined a life without Amara or this journey she’s taking alone to a land they’d risked everything to escape.

  Srok Khmer. That’s how Cambodians refer to the country in their own language. Never Cambodia, for Cambodia is synonymous with war and revolution and genocide. But Srok Khmer is a place that exists in the geography of the heart, in the longing for what is lost. For Teera, it is no bigger than her childhood home, and the more time passes the smaller still it becomes, like a star whose light diminishes with increasing distance. The rest—the destruction, the killing, and all that was lost—she does not, will not, associate with her small private Cambodia. That was Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea. Her country disappeared with her family.

  A woman’s voice over the intercom announces that breakfast will now be served. A flurry of activities ensues as passengers let down the tray tables in front of them in anticipation of the meal.

  She’s gathered from the snippets of conversations around her that for many overseas Cambodians this is a pilgrimage they take every year they can since the UN-sponsored election a decade ago in 1993. Amidst flight attendants serving food and refreshment, the Cambodian-Americans freely exchange information about their lives. They seem obsessively curious to know what part of America others are from, as if the name of a city or town would pinpoint the exact cause of their isolation.

  They reminisce about the old days—the years before the war, before “ar-Pot,” always the pejorative prefix denoting their contempt for Pol Pot, which, to all of them, to every Cambodian, including Teera herself, is more than the man or the monster but has become the epithet of an era. Where were you during ar-Pot?

  In her most pessimistic moments, Teera feels this is the triumph of evil—the name that lives on alongside those of heroes and saints, written in history books, casually pronounced on the lips of adults and children alike, gaining magnitude and permanency in our collective awareness, even as our sensibility becomes immune to all the name subsumes.

  “I was in Battambang,” says a man across the aisle to his newfound traveling companion. “Awful, awful place. Many deaths there. How about you?”

  Teera knows they won’t venture beyond the names of provinces, the scant remembrances and quick summaries of their family’s ordeals. The horrors they experienced might be expressed only in the one question that runs common in all the conversations she’s hazarded upon: Do you still have family back there? Often a head shake will say it all. But Teera knows these same people, like the Cambodians in Minnesota, will have ready answers if asked by outsiders. Many times we almost died. But luckily we survived the killing fields.

  Stock phrases, picked up from television and newspaper, recycled words, compressed and distilled of all ambiguities, leaving no doubt as to who was innocent and who was guilty. We are Khmers, but these Khmer Rouge, who knows what they were! Real Cambodians would never have killed other Cambodians!

  As for Terra, she keeps quiet and saves her thoughts for paper and pen, her private journey with words, the music of her distilled emotion pulsing through her. She hears it now in the beating of her heart, the rhythm of her own breath.

  He puts down the sadiev, his gesture tentative, as if lulling a child back to sleep. Behind him in the upper corner of his bamboo bed, among bundles of clothes, crouch the lute’s companions, the sralai, a kind of oboe, and the sampho, a small barrel drum. Made during the revolutionary years, these instruments are younger and newer than the sadiev. He feels profound tenderness toward all three, for even in their inanimate silence they appear sentient, conscious of his existence, his history and transgression, yet forgiving, always answering his invocation, offering him the music he seeks for his own healing. For nearly two and a half decades they’ve been his traveling companions, his only family. Now, he senses, they must part company, he toward his long-overdue demise and they toward love’s reclamation.

  It’s been more than six weeks since he wrote to her about these instruments, and in these shadowy hours, he senses he is about to meet her, and in her face he will recognize the reflection of a dead man.

  He hears the first soft chime of the meditation bell at the temple. He takes a deep breath, freeing his mind momentarily of the noise of his thoughts. Even if it brings him only fleeting peace, the act of inhaling and exhaling makes him aware that perhaps his body, like the bell itself, is just another instrument, hollow and mute on its own, yet capable of producing a whole range of tones and pitches when struck. That the clatter and buzz of his mind are not permanent, as he sometimes believes, but self-induced vibrations, transient and hallucinatory.

  Ours is a false existence, the monks will soon intone, a variation of the same Buddhist chant they recite day and night. Suffering and despair are nothing more than illusions. Let go of desires and attachments, and inner peace shall be attained . . .

  He’d like to take comfort in these words, except that by the same logic, peace, or whatever consolation he allows himself, is also an illusion. He can’t deny the miseries around him. The limbless men begging at the entrance of every market, their legs or arms blown to pieces by explosives buried in a road or rice field. The ragged old widows wandering the city streets, their minds deranged because they’ve lost entire families, might’ve witnessed the executions of their children. The orphans roaming the landfills, scavenging through the refuse for food, for any scraps that will numb their hunger or hide their bone nakedness. They are real, these peripheral, splintered lives, their struggles far from the false manifestations of his tormented conscience. Meditation only makes him see them all the more clearly. The only illusion would be if he allowed himself to believe he’d played no part in the present misery.

  What’s incredible, preposterous, is the fortuity of his situation. How is it that he’s come to be given refuge at a temple, a place whose belief and way of life he once shunned, whose inhabitants the soldiers of his espoused revolution disrobed and annihilated?

  If karma is as he understands—the certainty that he’ll pay for his crimes—then a temple is the last place he’d expect to be of
fered a home. How then has he arrived where he is, given sanctuary by men whose brethren his soldiers murdered? What wrinkles or variances in the laws of karma have delivered him to this enclave of mercy, when his actions should’ve warranted him a punished existence?

  At the fall of the regime in the early days of 1979, upon his release from Slak Daek, he headed for the jungle—to nurse his injuries, to hide his shame. For some months he existed in complete isolation, until he could bear it no longer. If he must live out the remains of his days, then he would do so in the company of humans, not the ghosts that had followed him there, the mutilated faces and mangled screams of those slaughtered in Slak Daek. So he emerged from the forests and returned to the world of the living, what was left of it. He went to a village where he knew no one, where no one would recognize him behind the scars of his shattered self. There he built a quiet life, and for many years earned his keep through music, playing the instruments, mostly at funerals and spirit-invoking ceremonies. It was during one such occasion—the funeral of a village chief—that, in a newspaper used to wrap his payment of fried fish and rice, he came upon an article describing the calls to establish a tribunal to try those responsible for the “crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge regime.”

  Khmer Rouge—he tested the words on his tongue, seeing himself as others would see him if they knew his past. He searched the oil and spice stains saturating the newspaper, turning the once solid-black letters diaphanous, but he did not find his name.

  How was he to consider himself? he wondered, letting the flies feast on the rice and fish fallen to the ground. A victim or a perpetrator? He’d believed in the cause he was fighting for, and then, without warning, was shoved into that hellhole for a crime against the Organization, a crime he wasn’t aware of but was made to confess again and again. He was a traitor, his torturers had wanted him to admit, a viper slithering and scheming in that insidious ksae kbot, that endless “string of betrayals” to which his name was bound along with hundreds—thousands—of others. You can corroborate, the interrogator would inform him coolly. Or you can lie there on the tile floor, chew your own tail, like the snake that you are, until there’s nothing left, except your head—and the traitorous thoughts you hide there! A padded club would land on his temple, his head clanging and buzzing, blood flowing out of his ears, pushing against his eyes. So what will it be? Live or die? Over and over he’d chosen survival, some part of him foolishly believing his life was still worth something, that he still had a life.

  Now, years later confronted with his own culpability, he realized all that had remained then was his conscience, the only possible source of truth worthy of his sacrifice. But he’d betrayed that too.

  He wiped away the grease and food bits from the newspaper, folded it neatly, and slipped it into his pocket. It was clear what he had to do. He left his quiet village and came to Phnom Penh. If there was to be a tribunal, he was prepared to turn himself in, be among the first to come forward and face the condemnation of his people and the world, not because he wished to set a moral example for others, but because he believed the initial wrath would be unsparing, merciless. They would be seen for what they were—monsters. They would be convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, and thrown in jail to rot and die.

  Here he caught himself. Jail? After what he had endured in Slak Daek, jail would be a farce, a travesty not only of justice but of punishment itself. What inhumanity could he be made to suffer that he hadn’t already endured in those macabre cells? He had only to think of it to recall each pain in its intensity and realness, as if somewhere in his skin, amidst the complex, regenerative structures of his cells, hid the contour of his torturer’s sadistic malice, twitching and thrashing like a whip, inflicting new lesions upon the old.

  Imprisonment, lifetime or otherwise, would be all too light a sentence compared to what he had already known in Slak Daek, too small a reprisal for the magnitude of his crimes. What about death then? What was left of his despicable life that could recompense for the lives he’d taken and the countless more he must’ve unwittingly harmed or destroyed? Death would be an even easier escape.

  Besides, the very fact he’d lived through Slak Daek meant death had rejected him. It had spat him out, as if it found no niche or nook in its vast storehouse of offenders for one as vile as he, as if death only obliged with its punctuality those who understood the value of life.

  If there was to be any justice, he was convinced he would have to mete out his own punishment. Just as well, he thought. Since that initial appeal he’d read in the newspaper, there was still no tribunal. In the meantime, one by one, Pol Pot and some of those most responsible had died. Others, like himself, were quickly growing old, and before long would be too feeble to stand trial. When it became obvious the tribunal would not happen for many more years, there was only one place for him to go.

  Finally he faced it, sitting one morning on a street corner outside the wall of Wat Nagara, a temple on the edge of the Mekong. It was at this temple that Sokhon had immersed himself in meditation, the life of a young novice. It had once been his beloved childhood home. A group of novice monks, returning from their alms walk at dawn, encountered the Old Musician playing the sadiev and, out of pity for a disfigured, homeless elder, offered him food from their alms. That evening, having sought the permission of the abbot, the same group of novices invited him to spend the night on the temple grounds, away from the stench and filth and danger of the streets. They offered him the wooden cottage belonging to the temple sweeper who had recently passed. Stay as long as you like, the abbot told him. We could use a musician. So he stayed, fed and clothed by a daily tenet of generosity, protected by a shared belief that a temple is where one quietly seeks ablution and forgiveness, where peace of mind may be found through silent reflection. Who among us, dear old man, has not been touched by tragedy? the abbot asked, sensing the weight of his affliction. Who among us does not bear the burden of survival? The other monks echoed, Whatever your transgression, you’ve paid for it with your injuries.

  If they knew his past, they would see that his injuries—his partial blindness and physical disfigurement—convey not just transgression but a bodily dossier of unconfessed crimes. It’s time you merit a better karma. They encouraged him to join the sangha, their spiritual community of ritual contemplation. Let go of the troubles of the world and you’ll find the peace you seek.

  He declined. He’d come to the temple not to escape retribution but to put himself at the gates of forgiveness, knowing full well that he could never be forgiven, that he did not deserve the charity and kindness he received, that his only salvation was in the realization of his own worthlessness, his evil and monstrosity. This was to be his deserved punishment—to live the rest of his days in self-condemnation, self-loathing.

  Or so he thought.

  A young Malaysian flight attendant in a blue flowered batik dress—a kabeya, Teera remembers from an article in the in-flight magazine—leans forward, pushing the heavy compact metal cart with her slender frame. She asks the elderly couple sitting next to Teera what they’d like. They don’t understand. Teera isn’t at all surprised these two old people can’t speak English, though she noticed earlier that they carry American passports. Like many elderly Cambodians she’s come across, they may have never, aside from this trip, ventured outside their community.

  The flight attendant repeats the meal choices, raising her voice slightly as if the old couple were hard of hearing: “Beef fried rice or mushroom omelet?—Asian breakfast or Western,” she adds for clarification. Still, they don’t understand. Teera tells her, “Fried rice—for both,” knowing, without having to confer with the old couple, they’ll always prefer rice. It’s in their blood. Once they may have even risked their lives to steal a spoonful.

  Rice. Mama, rice. Her brother’s last words. He was born some months after the Khmer Rouge had taken over. When they left home that April morning in 1975, joining the forced mass exodus out of Phnom Penh, Teer
a hadn’t known her mother was pregnant. Rin hungry. Tummy hurts. Hunger was among her baby brother’s first words, his first knowledge, and he died as he was just learning to talk. She blinks away the memories.

  “And you, ma’am?” the flight attendant asks, her gaze on Teera.

  “Coffee, please,” she says.

  In the first years after their arrival in America, she and Amara did try to put it all behind them. When Amara was asked if the Khmer Rouge regime had been as horrible as portrayed, her answer was always simple. Yes. Amara’s silence reinforced her own. It built thicker and higher walls, until it seemed the two of them existed in separate cells, prisoners to all they couldn’t say.

  “What about breakfast?” the flight attendant says.

  Teera shakes her head. She wants to explain she’s not hungry, but the effort of finding words for her thoughts requires more energy than she can muster. Besides, there are crackers in her bag. She’ll nibble on those if needed. She hasn’t felt hunger, felt the desire to eat since boarding the flight in Minneapolis more than twenty hours ago. Since Amara’s death, really.

  “No, just coffee, thanks.”

  Teera sips the lukewarm diluted liquid, letting the mild bitterness glide down her throat. Next to her, the old woman seems overwhelmed by all the little packages on her tray, unsure what to tackle first. Then, following her husband’s lead, she peels the foil cover from the rectangular dish and sniffs the fried rice. The thick smell of reheated grease is overpowering. Again, Teera feels nauseous. She tries holding her breath to block the odor.