Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  The Old Musician closes his eyes as he works his twig whisk. Life hums and whirs around him. He’s learned to take in his surroundings within the first few moments, as one might learn to discern the form and mood of a song by hearing the first phrase of notes. Considering the blows his head received during those months at Slak Daek, it’s a wonder he can still hear. And at the moment he hears everything. Right beside him, an orchestra of insects buzzes in their chamber beneath the firewood. Some forty meters away, the Mekong rushes in full spate. Hidden in the roof of some nearby structure, a gecko rasps, Tikkaer! Tikkaer!

  A thunderclap rumbles in the north, in the direction of the city. At the far corner of the temple compound the air whistles. A rush of leaves falling from a great height. Something crashes to the ground with a resounding thud, as if following the command of the thunder. A desiccated palm frond, the Old Musician surmises. Not far from him, two adolescent monks on the steps of their kot—the wooden cottage on stilts—recite by rote their English lessons, chanting as they would the Buddhist dharma. My name is Mr. Brown. What is your name? My name is Mr. Smit . . . In their saffron robes, with their arms and shoulders bare, the interplay of cloth and skin, they remind the Old Musician of a pair of orange-spotted geckos he once glimpsed under the front eave of his cottage. He half expects them to chime, Tikkaer! Instead, they reel off back and forth, How do you do? I’m fine, sankyou.

  Sankyou. He can’t help but smile. For most Cambodians, the th is difficult to articulate. Likewise, Smit could well be a Khmer name, easily pronounceable, but not Smith. Most people looking at him—an impoverished old musician, disfigured and half-blind—never guess he once spoke this language with great fluency. He wonders whether the saffron-robed Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown will accept his help if offered. Or will they regard him with skepticism, as the young often regard the old? He doesn’t blame them, youth with their doubt and distrust. They’ve inherited a harsh world, and there is much to question. He for one is suspect.

  Where do you live? My how is near de market. My how is near de river. House, he wants to correct. The market, the river.

  In Democratic Kampuchea, he forced himself to forget most of the English he’d learned in his youth. But now, with it used everywhere, he remembers more and more each day, with a speed and ease he didn’t think possible. Quite often a word or phrase will skim the surface of his mind, like a stone skipping the stillness of a pond, rippling his memory.

  He recalls an English word he learned during his brief sojourn in America in the fall of 1961 when he was a university student. Heartstrings. The woman he loved taught it to him. “It could be the perfect English name for the sadiev,” she said, placing her head on his bare chest as they lay on the narrow bed in his dormitory apartment. “Except the lute has only one string—singular.” She was his English tutor, and in class, he had been eager to demonstrate his ability to hear the s at the end of a word, which the other Cambodian students in his group found difficult to catch. To him, this barely audible sibilance, more like a sigh than a hiss, denoted not only the plural form but also the plurality of thoughts and ideas, the reverberation of the multitudes. Lying in his arms, she told him what the word meant and how it would be used in a sentence. “You are my heartstrings,” he said, pulling her even tighter to him, certain of what love meant.

  They had met only weeks earlier. At a time when women wore their hair in short, stiff bouffants, she had long, soft curls that had unraveled from a loose knot and spilled down the length of her back as she rushed into the classroom. A creature born of the wind, was his first thought. He felt certain if he so much as breathed on those midnight tendrils, she’d upheave and take flight, hair spreading like a cape behind her. She was wildly beautiful.

  “In English, it doesn’t matter if you’re the students and I’m the teacher,” she’d said by way of introduction, “it is you for everyone. There’s no hierarchy, no need to address me as Neak Gru—‘Respected Teacher’—or any other such title we Cambodians are so fond of. We’re all here to learn, to expand our understanding of ourselves through another language, another rhythm of thought and feeling. Call me Channara!”

  More than her beauty, it was her eloquence that had simultaneously stirred and arrested him. Barely eighteen, younger than the group of male students facing her, she possessed a confidence rarely exhibited by a Cambodian woman, let alone one as young as she. On first impression he’d mistaken her self-possession for the arrogance of her social class, but he came to suspect instead that perhaps it was the product of her upbringing abroad.

  The daughter of a career diplomat—who served for many years as the most senior advisor at the Cambodian Embassy in Washington, DC—she practically grew up in the United States, speaking English as fluently as she did Khmer and French. That fall, at the start of her freshman year in college, she’d heard that a group of vocational school graduates from Phnom Penh were looking for additional tutoring to help them more quickly master the English language. She brought it to her father’s attention and, gaining his permission, volunteered to be their tutor. “A language is more than just a tool of communication,” she said to the enthralled group as they advanced in their lessons. “It’s a road map to a country’s future, encompassing the collective aspiration of its people.” She went on to speak of the “language of democracy,” explaining the equality of “you” and “I,” as if fairness and justice began with the parity of pronouns. It was then that he fell in love with her, this tevoda with hair down to the small of her back.

  The Old Musician’s head suddenly spins at this recollection. He tries to regain his balance, returning his attention to the task at hand, loosening the ash in the brazier. Still his memories come unbidden, rushing headlong, blurring like currents of light. Voices mingle, accelerating, and he finds he can’t quite distinguish one from another. Are they real or imagined? Are Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith still reciting their lessons? He hesitates to look, fearing that if he opens his eyes too quickly, the light will assault his vision. Yet, he feels the sensation of his lids fluttering open of their own accord. He forces them closed again. But to his utter confusion, he sees an altered landscape, a dream spreading before him. Rain puddles, each a different shape, glint under the afternoon sun. A splintered lake? Where is he? What time has he fallen into? Whose consciousness has he invaded?

  His temples throb. The soft thuds of quickening footsteps. He recognizes them. He hears her running toward him. “A tevoda threw down her mirror, Papa!” his daughter says, ignoring her nanny’s repeated calls to return to her room for her afternoon nap. She’s inches before him, at once incandescent and corporeal, as if through the trickery of his failing sight, he has transmuted part and parcel of his memory of her into a living whole. “Did you see it, Papa?” It seems they are in the middle of a rainstorm—another bolt of lightning has just cut across the sky. “Oh, the mirror is broken, Papa! Now the tevoda is crying.” She seems particularly distressed, and he guesses this is why she can’t settle down for her nap. He tries to soothe her by explaining electrical discharge in the atmosphere, moisture and condensation, prevailing southwest wind, the habits of monsoons. But this fails to appease her, and, as always, he gives in to her imagination, adopting a playfully exasperated tone, wondering how it is that a tevoda—all wise and knowing—can’t foresee that a mirror flung from a place as high up as the sky will shatter. His daughter cries, “Oh, Papa, you don’t understand! She threw it down so that she could look at it! She wanted to see herself from where we are!”

  He is struck by the turn of her mind, her leap and insight, this ability to communicate beyond her tender years, to perceive beyond her small world of nagging nannies and afternoon naps. She stares at him, waiting for his reply, and he wants only to reach out and grasp hold of her, to confirm her realness and solidity. She looks as she always does, sempiternally young, the rain-soaked sunlight limning her white cotton dress. It suddenly hits him that she is that tevoda they’re speaking of, a spirit in the moment of incarn
ation, staring at the pieces of her shattered mirror, their fragmented world. “Now do you see, Papa?” she pleads, speaking the same exact words she uttered in another life they’d shared together. “Do you see it?”

  He nods. Yes, I see. In blindness, I see . . .

  Heaven, she meant. Do you see heaven, Papa?

  The Old Musician opens his eyes. She vanishes. Just like that, like a tiny point of light, her presence no bigger than the glint of an arrow piercing his sight. Blinding him all over again. Sorrow blooms inside his chest, tentacular and effulgent, reaching deep into him. The temple grounds return around him, the ashes, the brazier, and he tells himself that she did indeed appear, that some part of her is still here, continues to exist alongside him. He has only to look at these tiny reservoirs, these twinkling liquid mirrors dotting the ground, and he will see her again.

  “In blindness,” he murmurs aloud, “I see you in your heaven.”

  Minneapolis, Minnesota. Its foreignness speaks to him of a distance he once traversed. He tries to picture what this place looks like, where it is on the map, how far it might be from Washington, DC. That fall, in 1961, he never had the opportunity to travel and see the rest of America, as he would’ve liked. The first semester ended with the news of his father’s death and his rushed return to Cambodia for the old man’s funeral. Once home, he found that his grieving mother had also fallen ill and, despite her insistence that she would be fine on her own, he couldn’t leave her. He was her only child, and with his father gone, she had no other immediate family member nearby. So, he made the painful decision to give up his studies in America for the time being. Perhaps he could win another scholarship. It was not impossible. After all, he’d won this one without much knowledge of the English language.

  He had been in his fourth year at the School of Arts and Trade, finishing his studies in woodworking—his particular specialty the technique and art of carving traditional Khmer instruments—when he was selected, along with a handful of classmates, for a two-year language immersion course funded by a grant from the United States government. That spring—in ’61—he and his classmates enrolled in an intensive English class taught by an Indian teacher from Burma. By the fall, they’d learned enough of the language to feel some confidence when they boarded a Pan Am flight that took them first to Hong Kong, then Honolulu, and finally to the America he’d dreamed of for so long. A land where the endless expressways alone inspired in him inexhaustible optimism and hope.

  He couldn’t have known then that in a few months’ time he would reverse course, speeding along those same expressways back to the airport on a no-return flight to his homeland, to his dismal prospects in a country he’d come to regard after his brush with modernity as a place stuck in time, folded in on itself. He could not permit himself to think of Channara, their severed love, his shattered heart. He could not face her. A good-bye was impossible. As he resigned himself to the task of caring for his mother, he dared not voice his ambition but vowed that one day he would resume his studies in America. It never happened. The country drew him into politics, and politics drew him underground, into the jungle, and war.

  Minneapolisminnesota. The Old Musician says the two names as one, letting the syllables roll effortlessly off his tongue, noting the way the letters repeat themselves, like the reflections of a reflection inside a hall of mirrors, as if the place felt a need to confirm its existence through persistent alliteration. If he gets up now and looks into one of the rain puddles, he wonders childishly, will he see this Minneapolisminnesota? Will he see a paradise reflected among the cumuli, and in its pure white serenity will he see her, this Suteera, another tevoda reincarnated, grown-up and altogether different from the child she had been, peering down to search for him, for her father?

  He places a handful of kindling in the brazier, lights a dried coconut blade, and sticks it into the cluster. Swirls of smoke rise like recalcitrant sprites slow to awaken. A tiny orange-blue flame leaps forth through the dry leaves and branches, a chameleon born of alchemy. The flame grows and multiplies. He adds bigger pieces of wood to the fire and gives it his breath, once and then again. The flames spring higher, the heat reaching his face, reminiscent of the warmth of his daughter’s tiny hands cupping his cheeks.

  Wake up, Papa, wake up! He recalls those mornings when she would tiptoe into his room and rouse him with a peck on the nose. Time to practice your music! When he groaned, she would kiss him all over his face. You lazy papa! she’d say, her breath redolent of the sugarcane juice she’d drunk for breakfast. If she kissed him now, he thinks, if she were here as the little girl she was, tenderhearted and joyful, showering him with sweet, scented drops, his scars and injuries would vanish, as the fissures and rifts on a drought-inflicted earth would surely disappear under the monsoon rains. He longs to be whole again.

  He gets up and shuffles over to the front of his cottage. He fills his kettle with the rainwater collected in the clay cistern, shuffles back to the brazier, and sets the kettle down over the fire, letting the blackened bottom cover the orange flames like the moon eclipsing the sun.

  Will she appear through the far gate? Or the one nearer to him? Sometimes he sees her so clearly his heart stops. Will she walk? Will she float? However she arrives, he knows she will appear to him like a vision, her beauty as untamable as her mother’s. Even as young as four or five, she’d already become the spitting image of the young Channara, with long, swirling locks tumbling past the small of her back. A little girl, she was more hair than body, more spirit than mass. When she ran she was a blur of moving strands. A current of air. A thought or wish whizzing past. If he’s not vigilant—

  He gasps, shocked by his own perfidy, the tricks his mind will play with hope and memory.

  Suteera, he meant. He is certain of her return.

  The streets teem with pedestrians, vendors, and vehicles of all sorts. Cars big and small, some with steering wheels on the left, others on the right, pack the narrow lanes littered with detritus. Quite often a vehicle will force its way from the opposite direction, facing the oncoming traffic, with no regard for driving rules and regulations, or even common sense. Tuk-tuks sputter next to SUVs emblazoned with giant letters—LEXUS—across the full span of their exteriors, as if making clear their status and origin, should anyone question the satiny frilled synthetic curtains across the tinted windows, and other such oddities, and mistake them for inferior cars. Cyclos, most empty of passengers, roll aimlessly along, a species marching toward its inevitable extinction. Open carriages rigged to motorcycles haul supplies ranging from toilet seats to oversize mattresses to assortments of sharply cut glass and rebar protruding dangerously into the crowds. It’s been more than a week—ten days, to be exact—and Teera still can’t get used to the contradictions and incongruities, the endless acrobatics.

  Mopeds convey cartons of eggs stacked a meter high into the air, plumes of live chickens hanging upside down by their feet, a litter of pigs squirming and squealing in the confines of bamboo netting. Ramshackle trucks crammed with passengers gurgle next to spotless Land Cruisers carrying foreign aid workers, whose affluent appearances and calm demeanors sharply contrast with the bedraggled populace they’ve come to help. On sidewalks, shiny glass carts offering noodles and steamed buns vie for space next to crooked wooden shelves hawking gasoline and antifreeze in reused soda bottles that emit a dirty phosphorescent glow. A rainbow of pollutants, poisons, and pickles. You can’t be sure what is what. All seem flammable, a lineup of Molotov cocktails. Again, Teera is unnerved by how closely it resembles the mass exodus decades ago when Khmer Rouge soldiers forced everyone out of their homes toward the countryside, leaving the entire city in apocalyptic disarray.

  Shantytowns fight for their inch of land against sprawling residential estates and hotel grounds, against sprouting American-style shopping malls and Chinese-style row houses. Open sewage canals—clogged with plastic bottles and bags, the blackened water a hothouse for diseases heaving in the heat and dust—hem t
he streets boasting modern clinics and pharmacies. Casinos and nightclubs, thudding with pop rock and hip-hop music at all hours, cast their neon auras onto crumbling brick walls of adjacent Buddhist temples. The city evinces a makeshift existence, a way of life in constant flux, which at any moment can implode into violence, like the last bloody coup that took place only six years ago, in 1997, when televised images of gunfire and tanks and fallen bodies recalled again and again those frightful days of the Khmer Rouge takeover. Always the potential for another war, another revolution. Teera fears this every time she emerges from the guarded enclosure of Hotel Le Royal. Despite the relative calm and stability, she senses tension everywhere, in the reckoning of these disparate elements forced into proximity.

  “Are you all right?” Mr. Chum asks, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.

  Teera nods. Chaik knea ros, the taxi driver said on their first ride together that day from the airport, as if apologizing for the disorder. She didn’t quite grasp it then, but she’s beginning to see now that this “getting by together,” this attempt at coexistence in the confines of tragedy, is perhaps a kind of redress, a provisional atonement for the survivors, both victims and perpetrators, amidst the wreckage and loss.

  Eyes back on the road, Mr. Chum maneuvers his krabey sang—his “gas-guzzling water buffalo”—around a traffic circle, unperturbed as one motorcycle after another zips past or cuts in front of them. The blue-black 1993 Camry, he proudly told Teera, was “imported” from the United States, from “Cali,” parroting the diminutive for California coined by Cambodian-Americans, as if he himself knew that place well. The car had been totaled in a crash and fated for the junkyard but was instead brought here and, like legions of others, refurbished with a second life. There are countless similarly reincarnated blue-black sedans crowding the narrow lanes around them. Their ubiquitous presence reminds Teera, ironically, of the black-clad soldiers who occupied the same streets decades ago as they declared an end to machinery and forced the populace toward a machine-less existence.