Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  “Thank you,” she says finally, in English no less, her voice guileless, thinking nothing of his momentary confusion with time and space. “But I don’t need anything.” Returning her gaze to him, she switches back to Khmer. “I—I’ve come to see you.” She smiles, the sun hat still pressed against her chest, as if hiding something fragile.

  His heart tears, bleeding inside. Has he misheard the emphasis, the empathy in her voice? He mustn’t allow himself to believe she regards him any way other than with suspicion.

  “May I sit?” She gestures to the foot of the bamboo bed.

  He stands shaken for a second, then mumbles apologetically, “Yes, of course,” and makes as if to clear away the instruments he’s neatly arranged to await her arrival.

  “It’s all right, there’s room.”

  He doesn’t know what wounds him more—the girl, the voice, or the tenderness these simple words evoke. His mind rushes back to that singular moment when the young Channara, his secret love—his only love—appeared in his cramped apartment in Washington, DC, speaking almost these same words. May I sit?—Right here on your bed? They had planned this moment, desired it for so long. Still, how nervous they both were, like children. He was terrified that she’d taken such risk to come to him, to be with him at all. Yet, in his heart, love beat infinitely stronger than fear. He sensed the same was true in her heart when he knelt in front of her, pressing his head to her chest, letting her legs and arms enfold him. They remained like this, on the edge of the bed, until they were both calm. It was a lifetime ago, but the moment still pulses inside of him.

  Now the daughter stands before him, an echo of her mother, sunglasses atop her head, her shoulder-length hair gathered in a loose braid to one side, the strayed wisps coiling around her ears, sticking to her damp skin. So tenuous her presence, she seems barely a brushstroke. A calligrapher’s exhalation, the sweep of hand across parchment. He fears she will fade away, as magically as she arrived.

  She perches tentatively on the edge, her long legs extended, toes pivoting, as if ready to leap and flee. How many times has he rehearsed this moment, the things he wanted to say, the truths he must purge? Now she’s here and he cannot think where to begin.

  He senses she understands his helplessness, his disbelief and shame—the indignity of his impoverished surroundings—for she drops her gaze and turns instead to the instruments beside her. The sun hat, now placed on her thighs, continues its nervous jiggle, and he can’t tell what part of her is shaking—her legs, her hands hidden underneath it, her abdomen. His own stomach hollows and heaves, a capacious cave swarmed with bats suddenly awakened and beating their wings. “Was your drive here agreeable?” he finally manages stiltedly.

  “It was lovely, thank you. My driver took me on a small road near Chrung Pich.” A pause, as if she expects him to say something, and when he doesn’t, she continues, “Then we drove the rest of the way along the river. It’s especially beautiful today.” Another pause. “The water calm and glittering.”

  He nods vigorously, pleased by the lightness of her voice. He considers asking her when she arrived, how long she’s been in Cambodia, and how much of Phnom Penh she’s seen. He swallows and the words, the simplest expressions, plunge to irretrievable depth. She’s been here for some time, he’s almost certain, long enough that it would only grieve him to know she’s been so close yet unreachable. She seems like one who has landed and found a footing on familiar ground, a migrating bird, one of those long-legged white egrets rediscovering its abandoned nest among the rice fields. The important thing, he tells himself, is that she’s here now. She’s here. Speak with her, you mute!

  “And how do you find the climate?” He winces at the banality of his effort. “The heat can be draining when one’s not used to it.” He remembers he found the air suffocating after his return from abroad.

  “I forgot how hot and humid it could be. I’m grateful when it rains.”

  Yes, rain, that elixir of renewal. He longs for it now to close the wounds her appearance has reopened, cut anew into his heart. “Perhaps it’ll rain while you’re here,” he offers, noticing the beads of sweat forming on the tip of her nose. Her mother’s exquisite nose. The narrow rise of its bridge made him think of ascension. Yes, once he thought this, once when he was that young student in America, when he dared to reach so high for love, when he thought of love not as something you fall into but something you rise toward—the sky and its limitless mystery.

  “Perhaps it’ll rain,” he murmurs, not sure whether he has already said it. Did he just now hear thunder? Perhaps he’s imagined it in thinking about the sky, the vast geography of longing.

  “I hope so,” she says, looking perplexed.

  They are both silent. He sees that this trite conversation pains her as much as it does him. Yet, he does not know where to go from here. He keeps still and mute.

  She reaches for the instruments. “We who are left behind . . .” Her hand flutters for a second above the lute before alighting on the slender oboe. “You know, when I was very small,” she commences again, the tremor barely perceptible now in her voice, “I used to think the sralai was female.”

  He wonders whether “you know” is something she inveterately uses, a phrase of habit, or whether she is testing him to see if he does know, if he does remember, if he is who he claims to be. He braces himself.

  She rests the oboe on the sun hat. “It was the only instrument I thought of that way, as having a specific gender. Srey Lai, I called it. Lady Lai,” she adds in English, half whispering, as if the translation is for her own benefit; then back to Khmer again: “So lovely and feminine, don’t you think?”

  He doesn’t know how to respond.

  “Yes, I thought it a woman.” She grows more composed, and he has the curious sensation that they’ve talked for hours already, that somehow they’ve always been in each other’s life and this is another of their frequent ruminations. “A mother with child.” She taps her forefinger on the rise where, counting from the top, the fourth air hole is bored. “Because of this bulge here, you see. I imagined she’d given birth first to these four notes, one immediately after another, and then sometime later two more, each note a gift to the world. That’s how music must have originated, I thought. At least the kind of music we’re able to hear, the kind we can share with one another. A universal melody, in other words.”

  Is this something he ought to have remembered? Frantically, he searches his memories. Nothing. Was it never told to him?

  “But there’s another kind of music, you see.” Her finger moves to the solid space below the fourth air hole, outlined as if meant for another note. “An unborn melody, I think.”

  He swallows and waits for her to continue.

  “Like the sralai, I’ve come to believe, every person carries the seed of this melody inside himself. A truth he alone knows.”

  He feels himself unraveling.

  She returns the oboe to its place between the lute and the drum. Then, looking up, she says, “My father is gone.” Her voice catches. “But I have come hoping the truth did not die with him.”

  Crossing Monivong Bridge over the Bassac River, they head back to the city, and in the far distance to the east, the Mekong shimmers in the sunlight like one long, exquisite poem.

  Before leaving the temple, as she was thanking the Venerable Kong Oul for arranging the meeting with the Old Musician, the abbot asked whether she might do a favor by letting her driver give the departing monk—now ex-monk—a ride home with his few belongings. Dr. Narunn, Mr. Chum calls him, his tone emphatic with respect and admiration, using, as is customary, the first name even in formal salutation. It’s clear to Teera now that no one here is ever just one thing, what appears on first encounter. She supposes this is true to some extent of any place, and anyone, but feels it especially so in this landscape of evolving pralung. Aurora borealis. She recalls the Northern Lights she once saw from a friend’s lakeshore cabin in the depths of the woods near Ely, Mi
nnesota. Here, among paddies and palms, where the dead walk and sit beside you, their heaves and sighs mingling with your breaths, you witness a similar phenomenon. Aurora spiritus.

  “I hope it’s all right with you . . .”

  It takes a second or two before Teera realizes the doctor is speaking to her from the passenger’s seat. “I’m sorry . . . my mind was elsewhere,” she admits ruefully.

  “I should be the one apologizing.” He turns to look at her, then just as quickly faces front again, embarrassed by their proximity, the mirroring of their expressions. “I should’ve just flagged down a motodup instead of troubling you.”

  “No trouble at all.” In truth, she would prefer to be alone with Mr. Chum, who by now is used to her long stretches of silence, her way of receding deep into her thoughts. But when a whole family often squeezes onto the narrow seat of a moped, Teera can’t bring herself to tell Mr. Chum she’d like the car to herself, at least not in the presence of a holy man who needs a ride. With his hair shorn and the smell of incense permeating his clothes, not to mention a palpable aura of tranquillity about him, she finds it difficult not to think of him as a monk. Any other time, under different circumstances, she would wholeheartedly welcome the doctor’s company, even desire it. His closeness only augments the sense of familiarity, the feeling that she’s met him in another time, another life.

  “See, nothing to worry about!” Mr. Chum asserts jovially. He explains to Teera that it’s not far out of the way to Dr. Narunn’s home, someplace called the “White Building.”

  “Well, thank you again,” Dr. Narunn says, hand sweeping the top of his head, brushing back the hair that’s not there, as if for the first time feeling self-conscious of his looks, the strangeness of his appearance, a bald man in everyday clothes. “You’re both very kind.”

  Teera manages only a halfhearted smile in response, still trying to make sense of what transpired moments earlier. Until reaching the front of the cottage, she hadn’t been conscious of it, and only as she faced the Old Musician—the forgotten lyrics of her birthday smoat coming back to her—did the irrational question flash in her mind, unexpected. Could he be my father? For one brief moment as their gazes met, as they stood considering each other, the impossibility ripped through her. She knew it couldn’t be, and yet the long-buried accusation flared in her mind. The last time you held me, Papa, you left me shattering in the wake of your footfalls . . . She could barely imagine the words without trembling.

  Following him into the cottage, Teera could hardly stand, shaken by her childish longing. She asked if she could sit, and having found a steady perch on the edge of his bamboo bed, she studied him: the patch on his left eye, the permanent squint in his right one, the scar bisecting his face, the evidence of cruelty branding his skin. At one point, exchanging pleasantries, she mentioned their home, the name of their family estate, and waited for that flicker of sorrow for its loss in his face. It never surfaced. It was foolish for her to hope, even for one brief moment.

  They continued their polite, strained conversation, and she noted his movements, his profile as he turned, his frame and height. He’s not a towering figure by any measure, she thought, but neither is he small for a Cambodian man. She couldn’t understand why he appeared reduced, compromised in some profound way. Age and suffering diminish a person’s stature, or perhaps it was that low, dark space of the cottage. She’d imagined him tall, the way she had once thought her father towering, able to reach beyond the soaring palms to catch for her a bird flying in the sky. She was certain she had never met him before, yet he seemed familiar somehow.

  Who then is this broken old man, this ragged and tormented being she’s just met? What depth or darkness has he risen from? What message from the dead does he carry for her? Where is her father? Does he lie beneath the soil like the rest of her family? Or is he among the living somewhere, existing as the palimpsest of his long-ago self, altered beyond recognition? What memory, what history does this old musician carry in the depths of his occluded vision? What new sorrows will he bring to her?

  “Is it too much air-conditioning?” Mr. Chum cuts into her thoughts, looking at her through the rearview mirror. “You’re shaking.”

  Teera stares, confused, unsure whether the chill surrounds her or rises from within. All the same, her cotton white dress, with its billowing half sleeves, which she thought was ideal for a temple because it’s both comfortable and modest, feels somehow inadequate now. She rubs her forearms and hugs herself tighter. “Yes, a little.”

  Mr. Chum promptly turns off the AC. Dr. Narunn unwinds the kroma from his neck and offers it to her. “Please,” he says and, seeing her hesitate, jokes, “It’s only a little dirty, I promise.”

  She thanks him, embarrassed she can’t engage more fully, can’t reciprocate his lightheartedness, and wraps the blue-and-white checkered scarf around her shoulders. It smells of candle and incense, incantation whispered into its folds, the musky warmth of another’s skin. She has the urge to gather it and press it to her nose.

  They’ve reached an intersection. There are neither traffic lights nor stop signs. But like all the cars around them, they slow to a crawl. Looking past the couple of cars ahead of them, Teera expects to see a motorcade escorting a convoy of armored Ford Rangers favored by high-ranking officials and oligarchs, or worse, a Hummer barreling down at sixty, eighty kilometers an hour in a zone marked twenty. No such vehicle emerges. Instead she notices an old man, tall and stately but otherwise dressed in the patch-filled clothes of a mendicant, a bamboo cane in one hand and a cotton satchel on his shoulder. He takes a cautious step from the sidewalk into the humming traffic, then pauses, tapping the bamboo cane on the asphalt, swinging it from right to left, his head cocked to one side, listening, observing with all his senses. Then he lifts his free hand straight past his head and proceeds forward, weaving across the intersection.

  He’s blind, Teera realizes in astonishment. Though he can’t see, he raises his arm in the air so others can see him. Everything stills inside her. In this chaotic little city where traffic stops for no one, except out of fear for those with power, and fatal accidents occur daily, so it can seem human lives are as dispensable as those of chickens and pigs on their way to slaughter, this mute gesture feels like a revelation of sorts.

  I have come hoping the truth did not die with him. What truth is that? What is she seeking? She’s no longer sure what she meant. Though she knows in this very instant that if all she has to take with her when she leaves this land is the image of the raised hand, she’ll have gained more than what she came with. She may never fully grasp the source of inhumanity, what drives a people to massacre one another, the potential for hate that lurks in every heart, or at what point ideals turn rancid with venom so that they poison and corrupt, murder the very beauty they aspire to create. What is clear before her is the simple fact that it takes conviction to do what this blind man does. In the absence of sight, when all is dark around you, it takes a deep-seated belief that others will answer your appeal, that their humanity will rise to meet your lifted hand, your raised hope, and in that brief moment, you cross the otherwise arbitrary divide between death and life.

  On the other side, a middle-aged woman, cradling a basket of steamed peanuts she’s selling, takes a firm hold of the old man’s wrist and helps him onto the sidewalk, just as traffic weaves again around him. Teera’s eyes follow him, until their own car makes a turn and he disappears from her field of vision.

  If her father lived to old age, would this be his life? Would a stranger look kindly upon him? Do others see what she sees—these small, unheralded testimonies to the ineradicable bonds holding together a society, affixing its shattered pieces despite the persistent aftershocks that add to its myriad strains and cracks?

  “How old is he?” she asks, her thoughts leaping again, from one person to another.

  “Hmm, I’m not sure.” Dr. Narunn seems to be thinking it over. “Maybe in his late seventies? For someone who can’t
see, he crossed that road with such sense of direction and purpose. What do you think, uncle?” The physician turns to Mr. Chum.

  “He could be much younger,” Mr. Chum says, hands on the steering wheel, mindful of the vehicles around them. “It’s hard to tell how old anyone is these days. Khmer yeung chap chas. Poverty and suffering age us. We all look older than we really are. Take me, for example!”

  Dr. Narunn, not missing a beat—“Forgive me, uncle, how old are you? Twenty-nine?”

  Mr. Chum laughs, head bobbing appreciatively.

  “I meant the Old Musician,” Teera says.

  A brief silence. The two men exchange surprised glances. Teera expects this. Until now she hasn’t said a word about her meeting.

  “We don’t know really,” Dr. Narunn says after a moment. “We don’t even know his name. At the temple, we all call him Lokta Pleng—‘the Old Musician’—and he’s never objected to it, never once corrected us.”

  “He spoke English to me.” In the cottage, she dismissed the Old Musician’s slip of the tongue as the result of thinking her an American, the way people here randomly blurt out English greetings—Hello! How are you?—when they sense she might be a foreigner, eager to test what they know, perhaps to demonstrate that Cambodians are catching up with the rest of the world. “I mean, he’s not just some homeless old musician, is he? He was once somebody, a learned man.”

  Again, Dr. Narunn and Mr. Chum seem taken aback. After another awkward silence, the doctor says, “Well, yes, and he must’ve suffered horribly for who he was. Sometimes, I can’t help but think that his anonymity—this absence of name and history, or as we Buddhists say, this self-less existence—is the only way he’s able to continue.”

  “Does he not have any family at all?”

  “I’m afraid not. He’s never spoken of a single relative, friend, or anyone outside the temple community. Certainly not to me. He doesn’t speak at all of his life before he came to Wat Nagara. I believe he lost everyone to Pol Pot.”