Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  Again Tun hesitates, fighting the overwhelming urge to turn around and walk back to the only life that holds any meaning for him. His daughter is all that matters, she gives value and purpose to everything he does, and, paradoxically, the very thought of her at this instant reminds him why he must proceed. In war one must choose sides, he feels. If caught in the middle, one risks being massacred by fire from all directions.

  Still, greater than his fear is the belief that a more just world—if not a gentler one—awaits to be built. Here then lies his ineradicable faith in the future, even as the present crumbles around him, even as one regime fails and another emerges only to prove more corrupt, more vicious, than the previous. He could blame America for the current maelstrom, but the truth is, since his student days, those brief months in that great nation’s capital, where he glimpsed at close range a government and its Constitution in practice, he hasn’t been able to let go of his hope for what Cambodia could become. Surely if a nation as enormous and disparate as the United States can hold itself together around a single ideal without falling into fiefdoms, a small, relatively homogenous country like his has as much chance, if not more.

  Democracy. There is no more viable system to govern a society. He fervently believes this even now, even when his own government has made a shambles of it. The Republic is a joke, doomed to fail, but propped with America’s might, it has become a sustained hypocrisy. What choice does he have except to pin his hope on a yet unseen future? So he joins those who are battling for that future, even as he questions the blunt specificities of Communist ideology, its literalness, its lack of metaphor and music.

  Stop. He mustn’t reason too much, or everything will fall apart, as it inevitably does when one philosophizes. He must do what needs to be done. Simple as that.

  He sees a cyclo and beckons it toward him. “Chruay Chongvar Bridge,” he tells the peddler, a sinewy adolescent who looks as wiry as his vehicle.

  “Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” the boy enthuses, lacking the ease and confidence of a seasoned peddler. He doesn’t seem to belong in this urban landscape.

  It’s obvious to Tun the boy is too soft-spoken, too polite to be a peddler of any sort. Here in the city, boys of this age are being recruited into the militia in a patriotic call to Bamreur Jiat—“Serve the Nation”—enticed with a choice of an M1 rifle, an M16, or an AK47. One sees these youngsters everywhere, at any hour, balancing their weapons next to their schoolbooks on the handlebars of their bicycles, as they rush from school or from home in a round-the-clock duty of patrolling the city for possible “leftist activities.” Perhaps it’s not wise for Tun to converse with this strange boy, but for some reason he desires a connection, however tenuous. Once they’re well on their way, and sensing the boy is harmless, he asks, “Where are you from?”

  “Banaam, sir.”

  He turns to have a better look. “Banaam is near Neak Leung.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When did you come to Phnom Penh?”

  “The day after Neak Leung was hit. My mother forced me to leave. She was afraid we’d be next. Though, she herself is still there . . .”

  Tun is silent. Another life displaced, another family torn.

  “Were you a cyclo driver in Banaam?”

  “No, sir. My mother took her entire savings to buy me this so that I could have some means to support myself in the city. Once I’ve saved enough, then I can bring her.” His voice grows soft, resigned. “But everything here costs money, even chilies and lemongrass. In the countryside, we simply trade herbs and vegetables and fruits with our neighbors. Here I live on rice and salt. On a good day I allow myself a bit of prahoc.”

  At the corner on Sisowath Quay, just before the bridge, Tun gets out, empties his pockets of the few bills he’s brought with him, having left his savings behind with Om Paan. He offers the bills to the cyclo driver, who hesitates, seeming nonplussed by the generosity, this gesture of extravagance at a time of extreme scarcity. Tun thrusts the money into the boy’s hands. “Thank you, sir,” the youth mutters. “Thank you.”

  Tun takes in the scene. There are even more people here, even at this late hour of the night, and the din resonates more thickly, one sound hardly distinguishable from another. A few paces away to the right, the Tonle Sap laps languidly against the shore, lulling those who are still awake into a kind of lassitude, inattentiveness. High above him the massive concrete remains of Chruay Chongvar Bridge extend out into the night. The previous year, insurgents succeeded in planting bombs that destroyed three spans of the bridge, which jut from the water still in jagged disarray. The ferry has become, once again, the only means across.

  Tun and his comrades couldn’t ask for a more ideal place to slip out unnoticed. Straight ahead across the road, a pair of headlights from a station wagon parked in the shadow of a cassia tree flashes three times in rapid succession. He recognizes the signal and the vehicle—a rented dark green Peugeot 404, a popular and reliable family car, ubiquitous and therefore unlikely to draw attention. Inside await his comrades, two men and a woman. They will cross the river in the station wagon by ferry, and if stopped by a guard patrolling the dock area, they are to let their female comrade speak, use her charm. Some things never change, Comrade Nuon had grumbled at their exit plan when it was discussed at the meeting earlier that night. I suppose equality for women will have to come later. This comment drew a severe critique from a high-ranking cadre in attendance. It showed a lack of faith not only in the revolutionary movement but in the party. The Organization, he told her, never errs.

  Looking around, Tun is not overly worried about the crossing. The government is much more vigilant of movements into the city, so it’s easier to leave than to enter. Besides, the men relegated to these nonfighting roles are often young, barely out of their teens, undisciplined and minimally trained. They are easily bribed, and nothing charms a young boy with a gun more than another treasure of shiny steel. The watch on Tun’s wrist should come in handy in such a situation. It’s a good thing he didn’t give the watch away to the cyclo driver, he thinks. Had he remembered it in that moment, Tun might’ve felt compelled to relinquish this last sompirak sivilai, this frivolous “object of civilization,” which will have no value in the jungle, as time there will cease to exist. In some way, it already has for him.

  But he must hurry. His comrades are signaling him again. This is it, he thinks. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Lokta, Lokta! a child calls from somewhere behind him as he’s about to cross the road.

  His eyes flutter open.

  Narunn tells Teera he was sixteen when the Khmer Rouge fell, and his extended family—more than twenty members, including his father, grandparents, five siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces—were all wiped out. His mother was the last to go. She died trying to give birth to a life conceived by force. The man who’d raped her, a stranger housed in a neighboring village, was dragged to the fields and executed, one bullet in his head, another in his crotch for good measure. Such crimes were not tolerated by the Organization.

  After admitting her own fault in a public self-criticism session—failing to look modest enough, revolutionary enough, and therefore inviting unwanted male attention—Narunn’s mother had been allowed to live. A different kind of punishment. She’d hoped against hope that the absence of menstruation for the next several months was a sign she was menopausal. She was after all nearing fifty. But her belly grew and grew even as the rest of her became more emaciated. Then the ninth month arrived, she went into labor, and after a night of sweat, blood, and blinding pain, the life inside her gave up trying to find its way out, as if sensing it stood no chance outside her womb. Even so Nim had no strength to grieve, to feel anger or regret, to fear. She too would die, and she was ready. She curled up on the wood floor, holding her stomach, the lifelessness within. A body inside a body, the mother a coffin for her child. She took comfort in this, in the knowledge that out of all her dead children at least this one ha
d her protection, her permanent embrace. She calmed her heart, slowing her breaths, saving them for Narunn, the only one of her five children—six counting this one in her womb—and the only member of her family still alive.

  At dawn’s first light when he returned as usual with his work unit from quarrying stones at a mountain in the neighboring district, she gathered her remaining strength to give voice to the thoughts that had kept her alive the past hour as she waited for him. “I’ve made peace with death,” she murmured, her voice faint but tranquil, her eyes traveling the silent, parallel rivers down the sides of his nose. “I’d like you, in my place, to reconcile with life. Take it beyond what I can give you. Go forward, my son. I will see you on the other side.”

  But grief made going forward impossible, even long after the regime had collapsed. There remained the danger of unexploded mines, the risk of being kidnapped and brutally killed by Khmer Rouge bandits, the utter lack of resources, and most important, the feeling that if he left, he would be relinquishing his duty as the family’s sole survivor—to be the signpost to their unmarked graves. This kept Narunn bound to his village at the water’s edge for a while longer, during which he made every effort to teach himself, to make up for the lost years in his education.

  As there were no books for him to learn from, he sought the monks, the artists and musicians, the village elders for whatever knowledge they could impart, whatever wisdom had survived with them. Through the recitation of the Buddhist dharma in Pali and Sanskrit, he plumbed the depths of language, ascertained the roots of words and their relations, their inevitable rotation and return—anatta, anantakol, avasana, anicca. Selflessness. Eternity. Termination. Impermanence. Nothing is static. Even death is a kind of continuity. There is no end, no beginning. Only analay—homelessness—this continual search for a self that belongs.

  From neak smoat, these soulful singers of poetry, he discovered that music can heal, that a human’s voice is a most potent medicine: it can stir even the dead. And from a medicine man, he learned that healing is a dialogue, a peace talk of give-and-take, an age-old negotiation between life and death. At a birthing ceremony, he watched a midwife reverse a baby in breech position, turning the infant’s head toward the birth canal, with movements of her hands that mimicked the improvised gestures of the accompanying spiritual medium, as she danced to the music of khmer leu, the mountain nomads of Ratanakiri who passed through his village, their ensemble of instruments ranging from a single leaf to the amvaet, a wind instrument with sweeps and curves as ostentatious as a peacock’s. He thought of the ordeal his mother had endured in labor while he was absent. Had there been a doctor, a hospital or clinic, perhaps her death might have been prevented. Had there been medicine, even the most basic analgesic, her pain and suffering could’ve been palliated.

  In countless conversations with an old pharmacist who’d been dislocated from his home in Phnom Penh to the countryside during the mass exodus and who’d kept his identity hidden to survive the Khmer Rouge regime, Narunn often wondered if healing is as much a leap of faith as it is a science, a paradox that embodies the inescapable knowledge of ourselves—death’s inevitability—and the desire to be tethered to this world, to be in the selfless service of others, to prolong what is essentially short-lived. You’d make an excellent doctor, the pharmacist said, encouraging Narunn to go to the capital, where such pursuit might be possible now that the country’s reconstruction had begun. If his own health hadn’t been irretrievably broken by the years of hard labor and starvation, the elder would certainly return to the city himself. While it was too late for him, he urged Narunn not to confine himself to this small village. He must continue learning—strive to expand his mind beyond the limit of his geography and birth. Ignorance, the old man told him, is its own kind of hell.

  Thus, at the urgent behest of this mentor, Narunn set out for Phnom Penh, first by boat, then walking from one village to the next, hitching rides in oxcarts whenever possible, crossing rivers and streams in fishermen’s canoes, and once, to his amazement and delight, accompanying a mahout high up on the back of an elephant. Along railroad tracks overgrown with grass and saplings, he caught up with the slow-moving carcass of what remained of a train, and because he had no gold or anything of value to trade for a seat inside one of the cars, he was told he could climb atop the engine, where there was still space near the radiator vent at the front. It’s free, said the conductor, nodding at the flock of men perched there. You should know, though, that those who take the risk might never make it to their destination. This front of the train will be the first to explode if it runs over mines laid by Khmer Rouge bandits, or if we hit an ambush. Narunn surveyed the hardened expressions of his would-be traveling companions, then climbed on. He had to make a leap into the unknown. There could be no destination without first a journey. His mother’s words came back to him. I will see you on the other side. At the time, he’d thought she meant she would see him in death, the inescapable end to all existence, but gradually he came to believe “the other side” of the nightmare they’d endured was life. Go forward, my son. She would live through him.

  Once in the city, Narunn searched for the apartment building that the pharmacist had told him about. Based on the elder’s descriptions, he imagined something grand and modern, indestructible. He asked everyone he encountered, reciting by rote the part of its name his mind was able to retain, but no one had any clue of a place called the White Building. Narunn would soon come to learn that most of the city dwellers were villagers themselves who had come to the city because it was one of the few places in the country safe from the Khmer Rouge. Most were just as lost as he. As for the original residents of Phnom Penh, a great number had perished during those four years in rural exile, and those who’d survived and returned to the city were too afraid to speak, to give out any information, so they lived in feigned ignorance.

  Narunn didn’t know all this, however, on that first day. He continued searching in vain, and by late afternoon, exhausted and hungry, he was ready to give up when a deranged beggar, who had been shadowing him for some time, beckoned him to follow. Speaking an unintelligible mix of Khmer and what sounded like French, the beggar led Narunn to a mammoth, crumbling structure along the riverfront. Boeding sar, the beggar whispered, as if the place might be haunted, as if this “white building” was itself a ghost.

  Inside, Narunn found indeed it was. A ghost of a building with its ghost inhabitants. I am afraid . . . So quiet here . . . Messages in charcoal crawled across the walls and floors. Only the soldiers are left . . . I am afraid. I am afraid. Some words had faded, leaving only faint outlines; others were black and sharp, with a feathery layer of charcoal dust, as if written only days before. Where are you?—Where am I? What is this place? The living speaking to the dead, and the dead searching for echoes of themselves, for shadows and silhouettes resembling their own, for signs they had once existed.

  Names, dates, numbers. Slashes and marks in patterns decipherable only to those who had drawn them. Stick figures of a family, with every member crossed off except the last in the row. Wiggly circles on stems, like lollipops or flowers. Other scribbles made by children’s hands or minds gone mad. These renderings accompanied Narunn as he walked the ground level from one apartment block to the next, until he reached the block he was looking for. Dirt-encrusted footprints wove their way up the open staircase.

  Narunn followed the footprints, only to find them vanish at the first landing without a trace. He continued the journey up, in place of whoever had left those footprints below. When he reached the intended floor, he counted the apartments from left to right, and again from right to left. Feeling certain he’d identified the correct one, he approached it. It was occupied. His heart leapt with hope. He told the people living there about the old pharmacist who had sent him to see whether his family had returned, as this had been their home before the Khmer Rouge chased them out. The middle-aged mother, with her three teenaged children gathered warily around her,
said she had never heard of this pharmacist. Her own husband had died under Pol Pot’s regime, at the very end during the big purge, she explained as if to make certain there was no mistaking her and her children for the pharmacist’s family. She didn’t think the apartment belonged to anyone now. She had found it empty, without a single possession. She sounded suddenly guarded, afraid. Was Narunn certain this was the right unit? Yes. Perhaps other occupants would know then, she suggested, clearly wanting him to leave. It was a big place, with several linked blocks, and some units empty still. The new government allowed people to claim whatever home they found unoccupied, she told him. Perhaps the pharmacist’s family had found a bigger home, a fancy villa that had belonged to some rich people. Narunn nodded, sensing his search was over.

  Dispirited, he thanked the woman and again headed for the open stairs. It had been several years now since the fall of the regime, and if any members of the pharmacist’s family were still alive, they would’ve already returned, as they’d promised one another when the Khmer Rouge separated them and flung them to different parts of the country. If you find them, tell them that you’re like a son to me, his mentor had said. If you don’t, there’s no need for words. I’ll understand your silence.

  Yes, silence, Narunn thought, as he meandered up the concrete staircase. It was best to leave the dead undisturbed, let them rest, wherever they may be.

  He wondered how much of Phnom Penh he could see the higher up he went. At the top, looking west into the city, the tiered steeple of the Independence Monument rose above the tree line, the golden roof of Wat Langka flickered as the sun passed behind it, the National Sports Complex appeared like a luminous assemblage of ivory in the evening light. Narunn did not know what he was seeing but would gradually come to learn the names of these edifices and their histories—the monument designed by the renowned modernist architect Vann Molyvann, the temple converted to a storehouse during the Khmer Rouge, the sports stadium where many executions had taken place. On the east side, in the immediate surroundings, a wide tract of unkempt ground, bearing faint traces of landscaped gardens in neat long rows, stretched the full length of the apartment complex. Narunn sensed that in the distance beyond lay the river, but he could not see past the buildings and trees. Leaning over the railing, he let his gaze wander north, where he could make out the edges of the mythical skyline. He remembered from the day’s earlier wandering the shimmering domes and spires of the Royal Palace, the old National Assembly, and the ornate temple, Wat Botum Vaddey. A lovely city, Narunn thought as he stood admiring it now, despite the darkness encroaching.