Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  “Oh!” exclaimed Channara.

  Failing to find the proper greeting, he stammered breathlessly, stupidly, the wind knocked out of him, “It’s you.”

  “Yes.”

  Eternity stood between them, and neither knew what else to say. Then finally, Channara spoke again. “This is Suteera, our”—she faltered, then, steadying herself, proceeded—“my daughter. Suteera, darling, say hello to Uncle Tun. Il est un vieux ami de Maman.”

  The little one did not speak but, palms together and bowing slightly, offered him an elegant sampeah. He didn’t expect such grace from someone so small. She’s much too young to be mine—the thought insinuated itself. He chased it away. Our, Channara had started to say. She must’ve not wanted to bring her husband into the conversation. He was touched by this attempt to protect him from her life, from the happiness he could not share. Had Suteera been his child, she would’ve been eight or nine now. Still, in this little girl, he glimpsed what might have been.

  “Suteera is three,” Channara said, and, smiling at her daughter, teased, “and terribly shy.”

  “Three!” Tun exclaimed, feigning lightness. The girl was born in 1966, he quickly calculated, four years after Channara married, a long time for a married Khmer woman to be without child. He could well imagine the pressure she must’ve endured from her family, particularly her imperious father, Le Conseiller. But knowing Channara’s character, her fierce desire for independence, he guessed she didn’t want to be tied down right away.

  The last he’d seen her was on her wedding day in December 1962, a year after his return from America. He’d come to her family estate as part of the plengkar ensemble hired to play at the wedding. Somehow he’d found the courage to step into her bedroom, the sanctity of her solitude, the final moments of her singlehood before she would share her bed with a man other than himself. You broke my heart, she’d said. And you my soul, he replied, standing at arm’s length, unable to move closer, to embrace her as he would’ve liked, paralyzed by his own anguish. So we’re even now, she murmured. Never, he shot back. It was their last exchange, and he regretted each syllable as he spoke it, as it emerged forcefully of its own will from his lips. He hadn’t been able to forgive himself since.

  As he stood facing her again on the sidewalk in front of Chaktomuk, he thought perhaps this unexpected collision was an opportunity to rectify their terse parting. He had to find his way into her graces again, if not her heart. Perhaps he could win her daughter’s affection. “My, you’re so tall for your age!” He winced at the falsetto of his flattery but couldn’t stop himself. “Such a young lady already!”

  Suteera stared at him, unblinking. He shifted uncomfortably.

  Everything about the child was a replica of the mother, only in much tinier utterances. The long, slender limbs that seemed to accentuate an inborn aloofness, already so apparent even at this tender age. Eyes veiled in an abundance of lashes that gave the impression of bottomless pools rimmed with ferns. Hair that borrowed the intonation of the sea, rising and falling in continuous waves. He could not believe what he was seeing. A double epiphany. The way they stood there holding hands, while he hovered just outside their sphere of intimacy, pierced him with such magnificent agony he believed he would never heal from it. Pain, he would come to learn, has its own afterlife.

  He suffers it even now.

  * * *

  Tun looks down at the music sheet before him, its muted glow under the lantern. Besides the date, he has not been able to write another word. Again, he turns up the wick for more light.

  “Sita, pralung pa . . .” he murmurs aloud, tearing himself from the memory of Channara’s daughter and turning his mind instead to his own child.

  Sita, my soul, my breath . . . He invokes again the atmosphere of their chance meeting, which felt somehow predestined. He remembers thinking he was witnessing a birth, a life coming into being, though she was already a little girl, independently whole and self-aware, when he spotted her that afternoon in the hospital corridor. There was something prescient in the way she focused her gaze on him, as if she intuited the path he couldn’t yet see.

  Beside him, Prama was whispering to another volunteer, something about how this was the perfect opportunity to recruit more villagers into the underground movement. But Tun was no longer listening. He felt every step he took was meant for her and her alone.

  She rose to meet him. “You are my papa?” she asked in a small voice.

  He floundered, confused. It wasn’t really a question. He recalled the term he’d learned from the music dictionary he’d purchased while studying in America years before. Messa di voce. That was the quality of her voice. Loss and reclamation sustained in a single pure note.

  Next to the child, a man with a slight wound on his left shoulder let out a dry, derisive chuckle. Tun suddenly felt Prama leaning into him. “Her mother died in the blast,” his friend whispered. “A village outcast.” Tun gave his friend a quizzical look, to which Prama responded, “The story is that she had the child out of marriage. It seems the girl never knew her father but was constantly told he’d come should she ever need him. They said the mother was not quite right in the head. Her mind, I suspect, was worn down by the persistent ridicule. Both mother and daughter were severely ostracized. No one will ever claim this child.”

  It always amazed Tun, Prama’s exceptional ability to inspire instant trust in people, who would tell him things they might not share with their own family. He attributed this to his friend’s boyish charm, a sincerity of spirit. Prama genuinely loved people, and they responded likewise, a quality—mien prayauy—that made him extremely useful in the revolutionary movement.

  “How old is the child?” Tun asked.

  “She can’t be more than four,” Prama said, shrugging, as if to remind him it didn’t matter, as birthdates are rarely recorded in villages. “I don’t know. Maybe younger?—Three?”

  But her eyes, Tun thought, belonged to someone much older. They intimated a loss that made his own seem trite in comparison. Looking into them, he had the unerring sense he was staring at his future, his entire life. Or rather, the life that would fill the chasm in his own.

  “Papa has come to get Sita,” she said, referring to herself by name, as small children are taught to speak, a way of endearing themselves. Certainly this worked on him as never before.

  Sita. Suteera. The closeness of the two names, not to mention the nearness in age of the two girls, renewed that sense of loss he’d felt upon seeing Channara with her daughter, a child he could never share. He did not believe in fate, and yet, for the first time, he thought it might be this: the unspoken longing in one’s heart reciprocated in the longing of another. You are my papa. He felt certain now it wasn’t a question but a declaration of heightened conviction.

  Her next gesture sealed their fates together. She stepped forward and, her arms lifted toward him, fell into his awaiting embrace.

  “Can we go home now?—I want to go home, Papa.”

  What could he say? She’d already known unimaginable loss for a child her age; how could such a lie add to her misery? He held her against his chest, the crescent of her neck fitting perfectly into his, her pulse in rhythm with his own. As she tightened her arms around him, he noticed that, despite her weight and solidity, her breaths were shallow, wispy as a newborn’s. He felt somehow responsible for the very air she inhaled and exhaled, as if he himself had given birth to her, had selfishly brought her into this precarious world by his very wish for her, for a family to call his own, for a life lived in parallel to Channara’s.

  It was all so new to him, this feeling of knowing that he would lay down his life in an instant for another, for this child. His child. She could be my daughter. The words encircled him, again and again. My daughter. He could hardly believe it.

  “Yes.” His heart tightened, opened, and filled, all in the same moment. “I’ve come to take you home.”

  * * *

  Sita. Tun can barely say her
name now without choking, let alone write it down. He claws at the music sheet, his fingertips leaving elliptical sweat marks like notes on a scale chart. Sorrow and regret lead the way before he even begins the journey. But words, whose attendance he most needs, desert him. He mustn’t fool himself. No matter the noble intention, there is no gentle way for a father to tell a child he is abandoning her.

  “I’m an impostor.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not who you think I am.”

  Teera feels her heart constricting. Not again. Not another loss. Not before he even belongs to her, before she even grasps what it is they share, what they are to each other. She proceeds cautiously: “Who are you then?”

  Narunn sighs. “I’m not really a doctor . . .”

  Teera keeps silent, suddenly unable to breathe, the air utterly still around her.

  “At least, not as good as I’d like to be. Of course I went to medical school, did my training”—he deepens his voice in a mock serious tone—“at the Faculty of Medicine, at the Royal University of Phnom Penh. Sounds rather fancy. But in those early days after the Khmer Rouge, it wasn’t much of a school, let alone for medicine—”

  “You!” She cuts him off, letting out a breath. Relieved, she makes as if to whack the side of his head, but instead pulls the tuft rounding the curve of his ear. “I thought you were serious!”

  “I am serious. Seeing the kind of training medical students get today, I often feel inadequate.”

  “Never mind,” she says, smoothing back the ruffled strands. His hair, now fully regrown since he’d resumed life outside the temple, still surprises her, its sprinkle of gray incongruous with his youth. Yet, it’s the part of him she finds most endearing, for it testifies to the possibility of old age, his pact with time—their conspired assertion against the stranglehold of history. Teera curbs the urge to grab his entire face and kiss him in the way that Cambodians kiss, which is not a kiss at all but a kind of inhalation—if you love someone you breathe into your body his smell and atmosphere, his joy and sorrow, his pride and poverty.

  She looks around Narunn’s one-bedroom apartment, which is both his home and his clinic, where he serves some of the poorest in the city. Most, like him, reside here in the White Building, the gargantuan ghostly structure that haunts the sight of passersby, as the Royal Palace or the National Museum just a few blocks away might dazzle.

  Constructed in six four-story blocks, connected by open staircases, with more than 460 apartments, the complex was initially conceived in the early 1960s as housing for the rapidly emerging lower middle class. In the years following its completion, as the urban population swelled even further, with the influx of families fleeing their provincial homes to escape the bombing and war in the countryside, it quickly became overcrowded. Not long after, when the Khmer Rouge took over and the city was emptied, the White Building was abandoned, its residents banished to the countryside.

  Now, decades later, within its crumbling, mold-infested walls, amidst ruined plumbing and dangerously exposed electrical wires, it shelters nearly three thousand disparate souls—multiple-generation families and single mothers, students and teachers, struggling artists and surviving music masters, civil servants and street vendors, professionals and prostitutes, addicts and drug dealers—each impoverished in some way. Narunn makes his home in this notorious slum not because he lacks the means to get out but, as he told Teera simply, My work keeps me here. His work anchors him. It is his pride and conviction, his chosen poverty.

  Still, every time she visits he apologizes for the things he lacks to make her comfortable. If only he knew the wealth he embodies, the richness he harbors in his heart. She’s never loved anyone quite like she loves him.

  Love. Teera catches herself. Does she love him then? How can it be this easy, this fast and certain? Yet, love no longer scares her, bewilders her as it once did, makes her want to retreat and seal herself from what she’s come to believe is its natural, inescapable conclusion—loss. Yes, she loves him. And yes, it is this easy to love and be certain of it, even at the risk of heartbreak and inevitable separation. It’s been a month since that day they left the temple after her visit with the Old Musician, and this entire time she and Narunn have been together, seeing each other almost every day, alternating between his place and her hotel.

  “Is something wrong?” Narunn asks.

  “N-no. Why?”

  He laughs. “Because you haven’t heard a word I said.”

  “Sorry. Tell me again. Please?”

  “Forensics.”

  She blinks in confusion.

  He laughs louder. “I was saying if I could do it all over again, if I were young enough to go back to medical school, I’d study forensics.”

  “Oh, really?—Forensics? Why?”

  “Well, I was reading an article in a medical journal the other day, about forensics and genocide, and what it would mean for Cambodia if a tribunal is established. But what fascinates me is the idea that the medical narratives of the dead can be used to help the living. Utterly amazing. It seems such a powerful and necessary tool. If the deceased could speak, what stories would they tell, what evidence would they reveal to help prevent another death? Astounding!” His enthusiasm is untainted, infectious. “Think about it, medicine as a kind of nonviolent dialogue between the dead and the living!”

  “Wow.” She laughs, running her fingers through his hair, so perfectly trimmed by a roadside barber whose shop is a rickety bamboo stool under a tree, with a mirror nailed to its trunk. “Here I thought you were going to tell me you’re a drug smuggler, or a hired assassin for one of those Excellencies.”

  “Now you’re not being serious.” He kisses her, his nose to the curve of her neck, a deep inhalation.

  She is suddenly aware of his hair prickling the hollow of her palm. Aroused, she promptly jerks her hand away. Again, she remembers the cultural landscape she’s in, the self she must inhabit, the traditions and beliefs imprinted on her like birthmarks. The head is a temple, she hears Amara admonishing. She has yet to lose the habit of commiserating with her aunt about everything. I know. I’m sorry, but. She abruptly ends the conversation, and for the first time banishes Amara’s ghost from her mind, from the room. Her aunt cannot see her like this, wrapped in a stranger’s kroma, in his arms, yielding to his bed, his desires, her own.

  In the refugee camps, Teera remembers, she was astounded to learn that in their culture it was better to have strangers assume Amara was widowed, that she had lost a husband to starvation or execution, like countless other women, than to have them know the reality of their situation—that here was a young unmarried woman with a niece to look after on her own. It wasn’t proper, Amara explained, as if forgetting they’d just emerged from a hell where they hardly owned enough clothes to cover their skin and bones, let alone the strength or dignity to shoulder the mantle of a culture in ruins. People will assume you’re my daughter, and if they’re going to think that, it’s better for them to believe you’re a child conceived in marriage rather than outside. Teera thought angrily, Who cares! They had no country, no home, no family to speak of; anyone important to them was dead and gone. Who cared what these people, every bit as broken and rootless as they were, thought about them, about anything? It never occurred to either to just speak the truth—that out of their whole family only the two of them, girls at that, made it out of the country alive—because by then the truth no longer mattered.

  “Allô allô . . .” Narunn croons, tapping the tip of her nose with his forefinger. “Leu bong niyeay te oun?”—Do you hear me calling, darling?

  Teera recognizes the popular song of Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea, which, according to Amara, made wooing on the telephone de rigueur among young lovers during her aunt’s teenage years. “You reversed it,” she tells Narunn. “The girl is calling him, not the other way around. The telephone rings three times in the middle of the night, he picks up, and she’s the first to speak, Allô bong . . .” Teer
a hums the melody, hearing the electric guitar, the keyboard.

  “Impressive!—You certainly know the song.”

  “Of course,” she can’t help but boast. “I know every word of it by heart.”

  For the longest time, Teera remembers, music had been her only doorway back to Cambodia. During her high school years, these Khmer rock ballads from the decades before the war resonated with her more viscerally than the American pop her classmates and peers were listening to.

  Teera closes her eyes, and suddenly a scene flashes in her mind—her mother at the river’s edge releasing a caged sparrow from a bamboo netting, while her father stands holding what looked like a banana-leaf cone. She shuts her eyes tighter, willing them to turn so she might see more than just their silhouettes. But, hard as she tries, they remain as they are, side by side, so close to each other that she’s almost certain they’re touching. She wonders, Where was I at that moment? She must have been there with her parents for her to recall the scene. She imagines they were in an exalted state, their moods lifted with the flight of the tiny bird released.

  Teera stills the image in her mind and, for the time being, pushes it to where it will be safe. She supposes it’s only natural that the longer she stays, the more she will experience these flashes from the past. She must learn to take each as it comes, to save it for when she has the solitude to examine it, to expand it, to nudge the boundaries of her own memory.

  She opens her eyes, turning her attention back to Narunn, to the lightness of their conversation. “You know, because of this one song,” she says, recalling what Amara once told her, “because of this innocent exchange of ‘Hello hello’ across the night, my grandfather wanted to ban all of Sinn Sisamouth’s songs from the house.”

  “But why?—Everyone loved Sinn Sisamouth!”

  “Well, the girl starting the call caused quite a stir, especially among the older generations, traditionalists like my grandfather. Srey kromum telephoning a man in the dark of the night, from her bed no less. Simply scandalous!”