Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  There’s more to the song, though she can’t recall beyond those two lines. She feels the rest of the lyrics always at the tip of her tongue, yet whenever she tries to voice them, they refuse formation, and she’s left shaken by the knowledge that her body holds secrets it won’t reveal. In moments like these, she wavers between amnesia and nostalgia, part of her here, part of her there, straddling that undemarcated landless geography of the dispossessed. She wants to forget it all and, at the same time, longs for something she can’t even remember. What is it that she’s reaching for? At times, she feels the journey, this ceaseless search, is her only true country.

  As for what she truly knows, much is borrowed knowledge, collective hindsight. If pressed, she fears she won’t be able to separate what she actually recalls from what she’s learned over the years. What’s clear is that memories—the bits and pieces that are hers—fuel the desire to know more, to probe deeper, and the more she knows, the more she’s able to recall. A small, random spark can floret into full luminosity, like a pilot light igniting a halo of flame. And in such bright, short-lived moments, she sees not a portal providing immediate access to the past, a shortcut to truth and certainty, but a road map, an entente cordiale, as if time has called a truce so that she can carefully tread the battlefields of the self to find what may have survived, what may be worth treasuring. Of her father’s disappearance, Amara said that he had joined the insurgent underground movement and that when he reemerged a year later, in March 1975, it was to tell her mother that the civil war would be won by the Revolutionary Army and that he would return then to fetch Teera and her mother to begin their life together in a newly forged Democratic Kampuchea.

  For years Teera let this knowledge linger at the periphery of her understanding. Then at Cornell, while she was poring over historical documents, the truth of his affiliation with the Khmer Rouge sank in. But the shock of such a discovery was too much to bear, the weight of admission more devastating than omission. So she shoved history back to where it belonged, on the dusty old shelves of the unread and unexamined. She convinced herself that the past couldn’t be altered. She couldn’t help who her father was, the path he took, who he became, and the nightmare he might’ve taken part in engineering. All the same, she continued to wonder.

  Even now the questions persist. Where did he go when he disappeared again? Did he stay close by in the city or go back to the jungle? And always, Why?—Why did he leave? What unhappiness or hope pushed him to make this choice? He gave up everything for nothing, absolutely nothing, as all would be destroyed in the end.

  Shortly after his final departure, on that April morning when her grandparents and Amara were rushing to pack and lock up the house, after the Khmer Rouge had ordered them to leave, she asked her mother if they oughtn’t wait for him. Her mother replied in haste, Your father is dead. To me, he is dead, do you understand? Teera didn’t believe it—couldn’t yet accept it. She had no idea whether she would see him again, but she also sensed he was alive somewhere. Somewhere he must be waiting for them. Still, her mother’s words, more than the mayhem around them, shattered her world, ended her childhood, the certainty of it made clear by her father’s total absence in the moment they needed him most.

  Had he been captured en route during his clandestine travels back to his hiding place? Was he killed in battle somewhere, or forced by his comrades—by fractious internal politics and ideology—to disassociate himself completely from his family and its privileged background when he reentered the underground movement?

  These questions surfaced for Teera years later, in America, when Amara revealed to her what she had learned from Channara—that her father was supposed to come back before the Khmer Rouge takeover. It was just a matter of a few short weeks before they would join him in his new life. But he never returned at the beginning of April as he’d promised. He’d left Channara pregnant with another child, who would be born into hunger and suffering.

  Whether her father remained at large or met his demise, her mother would never forgive him for the death of their second born, a son he didn’t know, would never know he had.

  Again, Teera reaches for her shoulder bag and extracts her journal. Sitting down at the desk, she feels the bone-aching need to write but doesn’t know where to begin. Her mind hums, abuzz with thoughts, afraid of what it will discover in stillness. She flips the journal over, noting the imprint of its flowered logo, with the words “White Hibiscus” etched into the leather cover. From the inner pocket of the back flap, she pulls out the black-and-white photograph she carries from journal to journal, each time giving it a new home between the pages. It’s the only image of her parents Amara managed to smuggle out and retain, and over the years it’s turned jaundiced and papery, its edges frayed, its surface spidery with wrinkles and cracks, all the vulnerabilities of age, while her parents remain forever young.

  They are at a party of some sort—perhaps a soirée, as Amara was fond of saying, a word so out of context in their Section 8 housing when Teera first noted her aunt’s incessant use of it. Oh, I remember the soirées we used to have, Amara would reminisce, pronouncing it with a proper French accent. There was this one soirée where I sipped my first champagne . . . I was twelve, and I didn’t know that champagne was not made from champignons!

  In the captured soirée, her mother is the only one wearing the traditional sampot phamuong—a long embroidered silk sarong—and matching court blouse, with three strands of pearls resting on the square neckline, while everyone else sports Western attire, the women in those black dresses so emblematic of the 1960s and the men in suits and ties. The young Channara—who looks to be in her early twenties, but with a confidence that makes her seem older, worldly wise—embodies what Teera has come to see as the paradox of much of the educated Cambodian elite at the time, ideologically progressive yet morally conservative.

  Teera notes the correct way her mother carries herself, the self-possessed uprightness that calls to mind the arrogant superiority of another educated woman she saw in a newspaper article recently. Ieng Thirith, the former Khmer Rouge minister of social affairs, appeared in a photograph alongside her husband, Ieng Sary, and other surviving regime leaders who would be tried if the proposed tribunal ever takes place. Teera wonders if her mother ever crossed paths with this woman. Did Channara consider herself a Marxist? A Communist? Had Suteera’s father returned in those couple of weeks before the Khmer Rouge takeover, would her mother have gone with him? Teera remembers her mother as steely resolute about everything she believed in. In the black-and-white photograph she’s holding now, the youthful Channara stares at the camera with a sternness and austerity softened only by her extraordinary beauty.

  Teera’s eyes shift to the young man next to her mother in the photograph. Her father, his face turned so that only his profile is captured, smiles adoringly at his beautiful young wife. Her parents, happy and in love—or so Teera imagines—are surrounded by friends and intimates. A man has his arm around her father’s shoulder, pulling him so that he leans slightly to one side. From behind, a woman pitches forward to whisper something in her mother’s ear. And a bit off to the right, a group of festively dressed children gather in a semicircle, with Amara in the middle cupping something in her hand, maybe a butterfly or bug, Teera imagines. Even as a little girl, it seems her aunt could summon a crowd. This makes Teera smile, and she imagines Amara’s gentle but firm voice explaining to the throng of tiny listeners how to handle a delicate creature, a fragile life.

  Ah, Sangkhum. Teera remembers how Amara would sigh with happy nostalgia whenever they looked at the photo together, as if this one word brought to life a time, before war and revolution and genocide, when there was indeed evidence of “Society,” a time when art and culture thrived, when ideas marked your sophistication, allowed you to move with ease from one circle into another. You must study hard and do better than your American classmates, her aunt would then add, as if it was all part of the same conversation. Your mother was rig
ht. Education makes all boundaries porous, crossable.

  In this lush setting, Teera sees it so clearly now, the cultivated sophistication of her parents’ milieu, the vibrant atmosphere of learning that seems to lie just beneath the dull, filmy coat of the monochrome paper. As she continues to stare at the photograph, she half expects the surface fissures and tears to mend themselves and the stilled scene to burst into life, in the full brilliant colors of the tropics.

  They are all outside on the pillared marble veranda Teera recognizes as her childhood home. Mon rêve sur le précipice, her polyglot grandfather would rhapsodize, holding her tiny hand as they walked the grounds, always with a touch of sadness in his tone, as if speaking of something long passed. The sprawling estate stretched across the outermost tip of what her grandfather nicknamed Chrung Pich—“Diamond’s Point”—facing the confluence of the country’s three principal rivers: the Mekong, the Tonle Sap, and the Bassac. 1962? Amara had written on the back of the photo, the question mark in pencil, as if added later, doubting the indelible assertion in ink.

  If it was 1962, that would mean her aunt was seven, thirteen years younger than her mother, and her grandfather had just returned from his post as senior advisor to the ambassador at the Cambodian Embassy in Washington, DC. Le Conseiller, a title he would’ve retained in perpetuity, Amara explained, had it not been for the Khmer Rouge. Amara said she had little recollection of those first seven years of her life in the States, or—when Teera asked—why they suddenly left after such a long sojourn abroad to return home. But Teera knew this couldn’t be true. Amara had to remember, or at least had to have some inkling why the patriarch abruptly gave up his highly prized diplomatic post in the embassy and moved the entire family back to Phnom Penh.

  Whenever Teera and Amara managed to talk about the past, their cautious exchange was riddled with “I don’t remember . . .” which was often code for “I don’t want to talk about it . . . at least not yet.” Teera guesses that for Amara to recall those early years in the States would inevitably lead her aunt to wonder what life might have been like had the family never returned to Cambodia. What if they had all survived?

  The danger, Teera realizes, is not in remembering but in longing for what never was, leaping into vague possibilities that multiply into even more obscure possibilities. In reality, her grandfather, an ardent patriot and staunch monarchist, would never abandon his country for another. If anything, he was the kind who would return in times of upheaval to try to help steer the country back to stability, and, according to Amara, that was exactly what he had done.

  Knowing what she knows now, Teera is convinced that even back then, in the early sixties, with student demonstrations and leftist politics on the rise and the underground movement gaining membership and momentum, her politically astute grandfather must’ve discerned the fault lines, the rifts and ruptures around his tightly cordoned enclave of privilege and power. He must’ve known her mother’s role in augmenting those rifts, her infatuation with the left, and he must’ve used all his weight and influence to try to keep his country from sliding toward the abyss.

  Précipice. Teera loved the sound of it as a child, without knowing what it meant. It wasn’t the kind of word one learned in primary school—even at the elite École Miche—but through her grandfather’s refrain, his lament, it became firmly rooted in her memory. A lifetime later and in an entirely new geography, she encountered its English equivalent in her high school AP Literature class, and only then did she realize her grandfather had been speaking for all of them, for all Cambodia, a nation on the brink of its own destruction, its willful suicide.

  The temple officiant lights the candle on a popil, a carved wooden holder shaped like a banyan leaf, and gestures for the Rattanaks and their boy to scoot forward. A group of elders, representing the eight cardinal directions, encircles Makara. They pass the lit candle around in a clockwise direction, each drawing a half-moon over the flame before offering it to the next person, weaving a symbolic wreath of protection around the boy. Last in the circle, the spiritual medium receives the candle in one hand, opens the lid of the clay vessel with the other, and blows out the flame in one decisive breath, sending the strand of smoke dancing in Makara’s face. When the smoke enters his nostrils, Makara lets out a series of coughs, as if to suggest that indeed his spirit has united with his body. The jolt sends a sprig of cowlick straight up at the back of his head.

  The Old Musician smiles, remembering Prama’s cowlick, the spiky hair his friend was forever trying to tame with coconut oil, the prickly strands that earned him the pet name Kamprama—“Porcupine”—a playful spin-off on his grandiose formal name, Pramaborisoth, one of “True and Pure Knowledge.”

  He last saw his friend alive that misty morning, in 1971, when he—then Tun—waited with his daughter outside their Citroën on Sisowath Quay along the river. By then Prama had joined the Communist Party and was preparing to go into hiding. His friend wanted to meet at the promenade in front of the Royal Palace, an open and public place, which would give the illusion of a serendipitous encounter between two old friends, so as not to stir any suspicion from patrolling police. It was normal for people to park their cars on the streets and then go for a jog or stroll on the promenade along the Tonle Sap River.

  Tun himself had come in running shorts, though it was a nippy morning. To keep himself warm while he waited for this so-called chance meeting with Prama, Tun stretched and sprinted back and forth between a pair of coconut trees. On the curb, his daughter stood with her back to him, drawing pictures on the car window, observing his opaque reflection through the fogged pane. Earlier at home, she had woken to the sound of his footsteps walking past her room and then, trailing him through the hallway, insisted on accompanying him.

  Now, worried she’d get sick from the mist falling on her head and the chilly breeze from the river, Tun suggested she go back inside the Citroën. She refused, telling him that the fine spray was tik phka chouk—the shower falling from the lotus-shaped faucet they had at home, under which she’d lose herself every morning, singing his funerary smoat to herself, happy as a sparrow trilling in its birdbath, oblivious to the mournfulness her invocation inspired.

  The Old Musician swallows, pushing down the grief rising to his throat at this last image—the happy innocence with which she embraced the world—and he wants to weep but cannot.

  The monks have reached the final incantation, pausing to allow the group to repeat each line after them. Dr. Narunn dips the sacred brush made from a bundle of finely pared coconut spines into the bronze bowl and sprinkles water on the throng before him. The drops make the Old Musician think of the tiny beads gathering on his daughter’s long locks that morning, like strands of infinitesimal pearls materializing and melting in rapid succession.

  He closes his eyes, remembering the mossy dampness of her hair when he placed his hand on her head. He’d caught sight of Prama at the far end of the promenade. He ordered her to wait inside the car. She reluctantly obeyed, noting his hardened voice, which he almost never used with her. In subtle protest, she sat in the back instead of reclaiming the passenger seat where she’d always sit with him, as if to say, If you don’t want me near you, then I won’t sit next to you! He gave her a rueful smile. She did not smile back.

  Prama appeared on a rickety old bicycle, less a symbol of his fallen economic status as the disinherited heir of a silk fortune than a statement of his identification with the laboring masses. The two friends mimed surprise at running into each other. Here of all places! How are you doing? Where do you live now? Well, let me give you my address! Prama pulled from his breast pocket a pen and folded paper, pretended to scribble down his address, and handed Tun the paper, which in reality was a letter to his father, from whom he was now estranged. The silk merchant had disowned Prama due to his associations with those “loathed Communists.” But Prama, ever boyishly affable and good-natured in spite of his serious political agenda, never begrudged his father for cutting him o
ff. That morning, preparing to join the insurgency, he told Tun he wanted his father to understand his decision, his chosen path, a course he believed the entire country would one day be forced to take. This was the dawn of a bright new decade, his friend told him, sounding a bit naive, Tun thought. Prama, having taken another nickname, an alias he refused to reveal, parted by saying that he hoped Tun would reconsider following him.

  Several months later Tun did join Prama. At his funeral. Prama was killed during the crossfire between the insurgents and the government army at a jungle-shrouded temple outside of Siem Reap. It was never really clear whether he was killed during battle or captured by the other side and executed. Either way, his body was abandoned in an open field and reclaimed by the government soldiers who identified him as Kim Pramaborisoth, the son of the silk merchant Kim Houng. Neither Prama’s alias nor his role in the revolutionary movement was ever known. It was better this way for all concerned. The body was brought back to Phnom Penh, where Tun had joined the family for the funeral, taking his daughter with him. It was the first funeral she would attend.

  Sorrow floods his chest, and the Old Musician lets it overtake him. Eyes still closed, he shuts out the present completely. His mind swings back to that morning on the promenade when his friend was still alive, when, before jumping back on his bicycle, Prama grabbed him and hugged him hard, his fist affectionately pounding Tun’s back as if to say, Stay strong, pal. Tun, facing the car, looked up from his friend’s shoulder and saw his daughter watching them. He waved to her playfully, mouthing he would soon be done, but she blew on the window, fogging the glass with her breath, shutting him out.

  By March 1974, he was indeed a full-fledged member of the resistance and would soon go underground, leaving his daughter behind. He would come back for her, but during his long absence she’d outgrown a father’s coddling adoration. Oh, Papa, I’m not a baby anymore. Her one reprimand was enough to leave a permanent bruise on his heart.