Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  Teera is silent.

  “Sometimes, walking past his cottage,” Dr. Narunn continues, “I hear him speak, very tenderly, to the instruments, as if they were people, his children. He’s very attached to them.”

  In the cottage, Teera also sensed this—the Old Musician’s love for the instruments, his almost parental protectiveness toward these inanimate objects. If it’s all right with you, she’d said before leaving, I’d like to keep them in your care awhile longer. He nodded. It seemed to her he could only nod.

  Tentatively, Dr. Narunn says, “There’s only one person I’m aware of who might have some connection to his past. And even this I only guessed while helping him with a task.” Again, the doctor hesitates before continuing. “You see, several months back, he asked for my help in writing you.”

  Teera is startled, more than she lets on. How many lives are connected to our own in these small ways without us knowing?

  “You are destined to meet, then!” Mr. Chum exclaims.

  Dr. Narunn flushes and, clearing his throat, says, “I’ve wanted to mention it since we got in the car.” He gives Teera an apologetic glance.

  “So it was you who wrote the letter,” she murmurs, understanding now why it looked to her as if it had been written by one person and signed by another.

  “No, I was the scribe—I merely took down his words. He was very exact in what he wanted to convey.”

  “Are you close to him?” Teera asks.

  “As close as one can be, I suppose, to someone extremely private, essentially unknowable.”

  It suddenly occurs to Teera whom Dr. Narunn reminds her of. Chea, the young soldier who scurried them across the border to Thailand, quietly comforting her as he guided her steps. Dr. Narunn has that same soothing way of speaking. Though she barely recalls Chea’s face, she knows the doctor—who seems her age, thirty-seven, or maybe a bit older—is too young to be the soldier. She steals a quick glance at his profile anyway. The thing about loss, Amara once said to her, is that it rims the silhouette of every face you encounter. In a way they’d lost Chea too. After he’d guided them safely to the refugee camp in Thailand, he immediately turned around with the intention of helping others out of Cambodia. That was the last time she and her aunt saw the young soldier. Later they left for the refugee camp in the Philippines, their orientation site before immigrating to the United States. Once in the States, Amara made countless inquiries among friends who’d arrived after they did, as well as those who remained in the refugee camps. But no one had news of him. Stories abounded, and the most pervasive belief was that Chea never made it out of Cambodia again.

  “How do you go about looking for lost ones?” she asks, fingering the gold necklace she’s worn for so long that most of the time she doesn’t feel it there.

  “It depends.” Dr. Narunn turns to face Teera, eyes probing hers for a second or two before facing front again. “If you think they’re still alive, you can make an appeal for information in the newspaper, on the radio or TV, and so forth . . .”

  In the refugee camps, they never had to barter the necklace for food, and after arriving in America, once it became clear that they would never go hungry again, Amara fastened it on Teera’s neck, with the solemnity of passing down a family heirloom, explaining she’d had it “blessed.” When Teera wanted to know how, as there was neither a Buddhist monk nor temple in Minnesota at the time, her aunt said that she’d gone to the copper-domed Cathedral in St. Paul on Summit Avenue, surreptitiously lit a candle for it, and prayed to the statue of Christ on the cross. We make do, she’d told Teera. And so must the gods.

  “You can also go to their home village or town, their birthplace, if you know where. Most survivors tried to get back home as the regime fell, believing their loved ones—if they also survived—would do the same. They’re likely to still be there.”

  Since then Teera has considered the necklace a kind of talisman, her protection against forgetfulness, a reminder always of how close she was to death, how close she still is to the dead. Could the soldier have made it all the way back to his home village? Phum Kruos, she remembers Amara telling her. In Siem Reap. Dead or alive, she feels him with her now.

  “There’s also Tuol Sleng,” Mr. Chum says, so quietly Teera almost misses it.

  Tuol Sleng, Pol Pot’s most ruthless secret security prison and torture center. During the regime, it was known to the top echelon of the party leadership and those who worked there by the cryptic code S-21. Out of more than fourteen thousand men, women, and children sent there, only a handful of adults survived, none of the children. It’s been turned into a museum, with thousands of photos of victims on display.

  “It’s not a place we can step into lightly,” Dr. Narunn says, “and when we do, it stays with us, lives inside us forever. Most Cambodians, I believe, have not seen it still, and those of us who have, it is for one reason only—to look for our lost.”

  Teera asks no more. They continue the rest of the drive in silence. She feels they’ve arrived at the end of a long, shadowy corridor, only to find impenetrable darkness. She fears a bottomless drop on the other side.

  August 1973 . . .

  He steps into her room and, lifting the edge of her mosquito net, bends down to kiss her, to smell her hair. Breathe in the scent of innocence against the stink of underground politics, dark and addictive as nicotine, clinging to his clothes and skin. She must have inhaled a whiff of it, the poisonous odor he’s dragged in, or at least must have sensed his movement, for she stirs and murmurs in her half-conscious state, “I waited for you, Papa. You didn’t come. You broke my feelings.”

  She turns on her stomach, relinquishing him like a dream. At times Tun feels she owns and disowns him as only a child can, without malice or marking, without the complication of adult feelings. To her, love must not be any trickier than a blanket: she can wrap it around herself, or shed it for the time being—kick it off when it becomes too weighty—and it will always be just within reach, warm and versatile, when she needs it. In the morning when she wakes, she’ll love him as before, as she always has, with all her feelings intact, her heart whole.

  In the dark living room, the illuminated hands of the clock on the console table by the entrance say it’s almost ten. He has plenty of time to pack and get to the appointed place by the ferry dock near Chruay Chongvar Bridge. He feels like an intruder these past few months, an interloper in his own existence, stealing into one shadow and sliding out another, his steps caught in the choreography of secrecy, the slow yet sure dance of disappearance. Leak kluan. Lup kluan. Kasang pravatarup thmei. Hide yourself. Erase yourself. Construct a new autobiography.

  He lights the kerosene lantern beside the clock and brings it with him. Shadows loom, turning as he turns, clamoring along the walls and ceiling like phantom dissonances.

  In his room, he lowers himself onto the cushion in front of the teak coffee table that served as his writing desk. On the floor beside it, his straw mat and pillow and stack of books beckon him, and he longs to lie down, to lose himself in some history or story, then slip unconsciously from the worded pages into the uncharted landscape of reverie. But neither sleep nor rest will be his tonight. He turns up the wick, fighting the exhaustion that threatens to incapacitate him, and sets the lantern down on the table, his body mirroring the trembling blue flame inside the glass. He grabs a blank music sheet from the untidy pile in front of him.

  August 6, 1973, Tun writes at the top, only to realize it is the wrong date. More than a week has passed since, but this date will forever be burnt into his memory. He takes another sheet and attempts to restart the letter afresh, his vision seared with images of death and destruction. He can’t begin to comprehend the devastation that has descended upon their world, let alone explain it to his small daughter.

  A third of Neak Leung—his hometown—razed by a B-52 bomber when it unleashed its twenty tons of metal and fire. A mistaken target, the papers said. But this brings him no comfort. Such a blunder only a
ugments the horror. It all comes down to this simple truth: no matter the intended target, lives would be lost, homes obliterated. Two of his childhood buddies, soldiers, with their wives and small children. An elderly bedridden couple, bosom friends of his mother, people who’d loved him as their own. The woman he had been engaged to, whose heart he broke when shortly after his own mother’s death four years earlier he rescinded his promise to marry. Other friends and neighbors he’d visited every time he returned to his hometown. All dead, pulverized, their bones and flesh mixed into the pummeled earth.

  Over thirty craters, one after another stretching from north to south, have sundered the center of town, as if some monster had prowled through unseen in the hours before dawn, leaving tracks more than two kilometers long. He will never forget it, the devastation he witnessed in the aftermath. Every death, every life scathed by it, left behind to endure this scorch, to bury its own dead. A mother bent over the edge of a crater, her entire being quaking at the scattered remains of her children—a wooden rattle here; an overturned bassinet there; a chubby, silver-bangled wrist beneath a layer of broken dirt, fist clutching at the air, at the breath that had already slipped away. The young mother clawed at her throat, gasping, grasping, when a group of townsmen began the work of covering up the pit. “Noooo!” She let out a long wail. “Leave it! I want them to see! I want them to see from their planes what they’ve done! I want them to see! Make them see!”

  She lost everything, her entire family and home, Tun later learned as he made his way through the wreckage, the absolute stillness that had enshrouded the town. Anger, bewilderment, despair. How could they have done this? They said they were here as our friends—to defend us. Then they arrive to kill us in the middle of the night? They’ve succeeded in their mission. They’ve murdered our children in their sleep!

  As of today—August 15, Tun remembers now—the Americans have officially ended their airstrikes in Cambodia. Other nations quickly condemned this denouement as irresponsible, leaving in its wake a massive refugee crisis and a government military, a supposed US ally, now far outmatched by the insurgent army. A clear indication of how the United States will treat the rest of its Asian allies, and perhaps the rest of the world. When the going gets tough, one diplomat decried, the tough abscond.

  Morally vacuous, Tun thinks, swallowing the bitterness coating his throat. Unforgivable. You wreak havoc on a place, leaving it strewn with limbs and body parts, devastated buildings and debris and denuded trees, then you abandon it for those you’ve wounded and maimed to clean up. You cover your tracks, your mistakes and disorder, with the disarray of a mother’s grief. You try to seal her mouth, silence her rage, with your American dollar bills. A few hundred for a family dead, a bit less for a limb lost, and even less for a home destroyed. How much then would you pay for my shattered faith! I once believed in you Americans! Was filled with admiration for your land and your race, the wisdom of your democracy, the power of your technology. Your progress was the justice I dreamt for my country. The right that would’ve eradicated the wrongs of my history . . .

  A melody emerges, and Tun forcefully stills it, the heel of his palm pressed against his chest, muting his heartstrings—the sudden tides of sharp pain—as one might mute the string of a guitar. Now . . . Now all he feels is disgust. Utter revulsion for a people whose conscience is as misdirected as their weapons.

  What other sentiments could he summon to dampen the ill—this hate inflaming him? The word gives him pause. Hate. It’s not an emotion he assumes lightly. It’s not one that offers him light. To be inflamed is incorrect then. He feels absorbed by it. Hate would be his endless night, his covered grave. He’s not ready to die yet. He must hold on to some shred of hope. There is decency still in this world. He has to believe this, for his daughter’s sake.

  Once again, he is aware of her presence on the other side of the thin wall, senses her breathing like a vibrato originating somewhere deep in his being, his consciousness—the silence that precedes voice. He often feels she is the current, that inaudible music just beyond hearing, slipping through this world, and he’s merely one of those things, like a leaf or a laundered sheet, that take on movement, flutter to life, when she brushes past. Yet, here he is, the sojourner tonight, ready to leave her and sneak away into another existence.

  Survival by separation, he reasons. He’s doing this for her. What parent does not want a better place for his child? It’s been two years since Prama’s death, and he fears if he makes no sacrifices, if he does not take sides, more lives will be lost, and his country will be obliterated in the firestorm of another’s making.

  The irony does not escape him that the tragedy forcing him out of his daughter’s life now is the same that brought her into his. Four years ago—1969—her home was also bombed, the entire commune of a dozen villages or so, including hers, completely decimated, along with the only school and what little there was of a clinic. She survived only by hiding in the hollow of an ancient rain tree, around which she’d been playing, while her mother was cooking outside their hut, keeping an occasional eye on the girl, who appeared in the distance no bigger than a starling flitting about in the open fields. Perhaps, Tun pauses to think for a moment, it should’ve been the other way around. The child should’ve kept her eyes on the mother. But then what? She would’ve only been witness to the blast that destroyed her mother and home, her entire world.

  When the child heard the awful drone of the Stratofortress, she’d looked up and glimpsed the sleek silhouette of a winged minnow slipping in and out of the clouds. This troubled her, for she’d only begun to learn that while some creatures are aerial, others are bound to land and water. You’re not a bird, her mother would always warn. Don’t jump from that tree. Fish, the child thought, don’t belong in the sky. Or do they? But before she could rearrange the image in her head, there were other minnows—itsy-bitsy baby ones—dropping suddenly from the belly of the larger fish in neat little rows. The air vibrated with their descent. The coppery, translucent downy hairs on her arms and neck bristled. She began to run, paused to pick up a ripened kapok pod that had fallen to the ground, by some instinct broke it in half and sealed her ears with the white fibers inside, and kept running. She found cover, crawling into the womb of the giant rain tree, with her legs pulled up to her chest, arms around her knees, curled like a fetus, as the world erupted around her.

  Tun would come to learn these details bit by bit, from the child herself and others like her who had barely escaped the bombing and were brought to the hospital in Phnom Penh. She was so small he’d missed her entirely when he’d first walked into Calmette, where she was lost in the gauzes of misery that had unraveled from the waiting room into the anemically lit corridor.

  The hospital was short of staff; thus Tun and Prama—his friend was still alive then in ’69—and others from their political group had come to volunteer. With no medical knowledge or skills to offer, their task was mainly to escort the wounded—those who could still walk—to the correct treatment room. They were told from the start that some of the smaller children did not understand they’d lost their homes and families, and therefore great care should be taken when communicating with these little ones. Arrangements were being made for temporary shelters in the city where the children would remain until permanent guardians could be found. Perhaps distant relatives somewhere would eventually emerge to claim the orphans. In the meantime, boys would be placed in a temple, but girls would have to be relegated to an orphanage. Ignored and forgotten by all, a life there, everyone knew, would be a life in perpetual limbo, with no possibility of a future.

  As Tun came into the corridor to help the next patient to treatment, he spotted her among the wounded and shell-shocked. A face so small and perfectly round, the first thought that popped to mind was “pea pod.” Indeed, she appeared to him like a tiny seed, a life whole and self-contained, needing only love and care to bud. And yet here she was, lost in this cramped tunnel of blood-soaked bandages and last
breaths.

  Feeling his gaze, she looked up, her eyes lit with such fierce hope it was akin to recognition, like the mirror reflection of an encounter the previous month that had arrested him as profoundly.

  * * *

  Their reunion took place on the street in front of La Salle de Conférence Chaktomuk, the new performance hall from which he’d emerged after a long morning of grueling rehearsal in preparation for that evening’s opening-night performance of Tum Tiev. He was among the lead musicians, and the main lyricist, for a stage adaptation of the revered classic of thwarted young love. Tun stepped into the afternoon glare, his vision assaulted by the sudden brightness, his temples still throbbing from the thick clouds of incense and candles burning with the baisei tvay kru—offerings made to the guardians of Music and Art—that accompanied every rehearsal. He needed fresh air. Behind the conference hall, the river water susurrated, wooing him, and he wished for nothing more than to plunge into its depths and be borne away by its liquid melody.

  On the sidewalk in front of him, vendors paraded hand-painted kites, sparrows chirping in tiny bamboo cages, snacks wrapped in banana leaves. A crowd had gathered around a cart selling fresh sugarcane juice, like bees inebriated by the mist sugaring the air. Two cones for us, please! one called out above the collective drone, and another, Three over here! The vendor acknowledged the orders as he fed two or three cut stalks at a time into the hand-cranked extractor, each stalk wrapped with a twirl of citrus rind—the famed virescent Pusat orange. Tun’s nostrils smarted at the thick, sweet scent. He was suddenly aware of his parched throat. So instead of veering right toward the river, he swung left into the crowd, much too forcefully, nearly knocking a little girl, who looked up startled, the banana-leaf cone full of juice wobbling in her hand. Before he could apologize, the girl’s mother turned, and his heart stopped.