Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  “What happened, Venerable?”

  “I’m sorry . . .” The abbot recollects his thoughts. “Yes. Well, the child’s mother was a dancer—a classical ballet dancer trained at the School of Fine Arts—but, like so many artists, could not find work and had to settle for performing at a hotel. It seems there she caught the eye of a VIP guest—a captain in the National Police Bodyguard Unit—and became his mistress. The wife of the police captain found out, and rather than confront him, she hired a gunman to kill the young woman.”

  A beautiful young woman is forced by a powerful man who desires her, or by her own dire needs, into becoming his lover. Whether she’s a bar girl or a ballet dancer, her beauty is both an asset and a curse, drawing jealousy and danger. The city is full of accounts like these, of lives as brief and extinguishable as incense flames. But there is more to this story, and the Old Musician is beginning to discern the heart of it. “Is the little girl his?” he asks.

  “Yes, the little girl is the daughter of the slain dancer and the police captain.”

  “How old is the child, Venerable?”

  “She is three.”

  The Old Musician’s pulse quickens. Sita . . . He tries to keep his voice even. “She is too young to be among us. We’re mostly men and boys here . . .” The one thing he’d done right was to give his daughter Om Paan in place of her mother. “Perhaps we can help in other ways—give food and clothes, collect donations . . . It’s better for the child to remain where she is, with a woman, a mother figure. She needs a strong maternal presence—”

  “The caretaker fears the wife of the police captain will come after the little girl as well.”

  For some seconds the Old Musician can’t speak, thinking he must’ve misunderstood the implication. Finally he manages, “And the police captain? Does he not care that this is his own daughter? Does he not want her? Or, at least, feel some sense of responsibility? Even an animal feels protective toward its young, Venerable.” He stops, quieting his heart.

  The abbot shakes his head in shared dismay. “From what I can surmise, having spoken with the caretaker at length, the man cannot and will not care. His wife is from a very powerful family, you see. The wife may accept that her husband cheats, may even tolerate a string of mistresses, but she expects him to know his allegiance. He can stray, but he’s not permitted to leave any ‘embarrassing physical traces’ that can make the family lose face, threaten their position. Put plainly, the police captain will endanger his own life if he lets out word that the ballet dancer’s daughter is his. At the moment, it seems the wife has no clue about the little girl, but, later, if she finds out and confronts her husband, he’ll most likely deny his daughter’s existence. Perhaps he’ll go as far as to say the child belongs to another man, someone prior to him. We’ve seen how scenarios like this play out.” The old monk rubs his chest with his fist, as if pained at having to speak aloud a reality they know all too well. “You see my quandary? It is greater than the question of whether or not I, a monk, should harbor something as dangerous as a gun, when my teaching forbids me to hold even money. Greater than the question of whether or not to give shelter to a girl in a place that tradition reserves for boys.” The head monk pauses to catch his breath. “It is the fundamental yet most difficult question of how to protect a human life. A tiny fragile life now haunted by immense loss. A life that may be hunted.”

  The Old Musician feels himself unable to breathe. “Have you spoken with anyone else about this?” he asks, groping through a blur of emotions, his surging bewilderment.

  “You’re the first person I’ve come to with this. I must admit I’m still in a bit of shock . . . How are we to care for a little girl? As you say, we’re a community of men and boys. Yes, we have some nuns at the temple, but they come and go, spending some days here and other days back home with their families, when needed. And, besides, I can’t ask them to take on the risks . . .”

  “Then, we must do what we can, Venerable.” The Old Musician is aware that his abrupt change of tone must sound rather peculiar to the abbot. “Given the danger she faces, we have no choice but to take the girl in, until this blows over.”

  “I was hoping you’d say this. I feel the same way.” The abbot looks once again at the revolver, as if probing it for answers, a more definitive solution. To the Old Musician, the gun appears suddenly benign, innocuous, compared to the dangers outside the temple walls. “Aside from us,” the monk continues, “and some close friends of the victim, no one knows the cause of her death. No newspaper will dare publish her story, let alone link her murder to a prominent family. The truth is once again promptly silenced.”

  “Perhaps, Venerable, if the story is forgotten, and lost among myriad others like it, the child will have a chance, her life overlooked, out of harm’s way.”

  “Yes, each day we must live with the lesser tragedy,” the abbot gives in, sounding defeated. “Foreigners have often said ours is a ‘culture of impunity.’ An English phrase, as you know. A critique, a condemnation. But the reproof barely registers, let alone dents our conscience deep enough to force us to account for our wrong. What does it really mean? Impunity. Are we truly exempted from punishment for our crimes, when our culture, our core belief, tells us knowledge of the atrocity we commit is itself a punishment? Because who in his right mind would engage in villainy? We inflict suffering because we are afflicted. Round and round it goes. How then do we get out of this wheel, this spinning in circles, and find justice?”

  “Perhaps it lies in this, Venerable. In the probing itself. We’ve become adept not so much at escaping punishment but at escaping reflection. We fear to plumb the dark and see ourselves in it, the role we played in its creation, because if we go to that depth again we may not be able to resurface, to return to light.” The Old Musician keeps his gaze down, struggling to articulate each thought, fighting the despair that threatens to smother him, send him back into his habitual silence. “As for justice, I’ve tried to comfort myself with the thought that perhaps it is like love—it transcends generations. If we fail to realize it in our own lifetime, perhaps those who come after us will know it.”

  Finally, he looks up, needing to face the abbot now. “When I think of the unfathomable suffering, the countless lives lost and broken, I’m left with this profound hope that someday there will exist a world where justice is not simply the exchange of a life for a life, an ideal of retribution to right a wrong, but a path one walks and lives, a way of being.”

  The abbot stares at him, and for a moment the two old men seem a reflection of each other, a shared stillness. Taking a deep breath, the abbot says, “Until then, until that world arrives, we are forced to shelter both weapons and victims as best we can, away from harm’s reach.” Taking a handkerchief from the folds of his saffron robe, he wraps the revolver, shaking his head in disbelief. “You know, I never thought that one day I’d be a keeper of guns.”

  The two men rise, and as they turn to go their separate ways, the Old Musician says, “Perhaps, Venerable, you ought to speak with Dr. Narunn. I believe he knows of a charity that can transform such things into art.”

  At the main entrance of the open-air pavilion along the promenade in front of the Royal Palace, a little boy in a Spider-Man outfit cups in his hands a bamboo netting with a sparrow inside. He looks about five or six, but his wispy hair and wispier silhouette make him appear younger, fragile. His mother has bought the captured bird for him from one of the vendors. They climb the short stairway into the pavilion, the boy pressing the tiny captive to his chest, his mother a step or two behind, her palms splayed to catch him should he fall. The boy hesitates, gasping, when he spots Teera standing in one corner, her back lit by the late-afternoon sun so that she must appear to him as only a dark outline, a malignant spirit perhaps waiting to claim him.

  Teera moves out of the corner to where he can see her clearly. It’s obvious the little boy is sick, has been sick for some time, his eyes sunken, his entire complexion anemic, ghos
tly, reminding Teera of her aunt, the way Amara looked those last couple of months before her death, as if the most vital part of her had already left and what remained was just a translucent shell. The irony of his superhero ensemble, the mask off and strapped around his neck like a ruined second face, does not escape Teera. The masquerade is over, it seems to say.

  The boy’s mother, a delicate beauty with long black hair and porcelain-white skin, bears all the accoutrements of the country’s new elite—expensive clothes and shoes, a Louis Vuitton satchel with gold trimmings, a great deal of jewelry on her slight frame, and most notably, armed bodyguards, one waiting outside the pavilion, another guarding the shiny silver Mercedes SUV parked on the street, with the engine running.

  As they walk past, others move out of the way and keep a deferential distance, noting the wealth, the pistols glinting from the bodyguards’ midriffs, their impassive faces behind the dark sunglasses. The young mother asks her son if he’s ready, the little boy nods, and she carefully unties a knot on the bamboo netting still pressed to his chest. Then, like a magician opening his palms, the boy releases the sparrow into the air. The tiny bird flits up and down and circles for some seconds, confused by all the open space, its regained freedom, before it darts straight ahead and disappears into the glimmering expanse of the Tonle Sap River.

  “Did you pray to the spirits and guardians?” the mother asks, her attention fully on her son as if she notices no one else, cares for nothing else.

  The little boy nods.

  “And what did you say?”

  “I . . . asked . . . them . . . to take . . . my sickness away.” Each word seems a monumental effort for the boy, a journey of labored breaths. “So that . . . Father said . . . you will laugh again.”

  The young mother looks at her son, her face quivering, and she appears to Teera at once vulnerable and steeled. “No,” she says to him after a moment, the pools in her eyes receding, returning to the source of grief inside her, “so that you will laugh again. Like this!”

  She makes as if to tickle him but stops midgesture when he begins to heave, his chest rising and falling, flimsy as a balloon with insufficient air.

  The bodyguard waiting outside the pavilion hurries in, lifts the boy into his arms, gently but firmly, and carries him toward the Mercedes, as the other bodyguard rushes into the driver’s seat. The mother trails a few steps behind, looking straight ahead, refusing to meet anyone’s gaze, to see her son reflected in another’s eyes.

  Once she’s inside, the doors shut and locked, the driver revs up the engine and forces the Mercedes through the throngs of pedestrians and vehicles that have amassed to enjoy the cool hours of late afternoon along Sisowath Quay. In no time at all they are gone, their car having turned the corner at the end of the block.

  But the sound of the boy’s breath stays with Teera, circling her eardrums, like the exhalation inside the spiraled chambers of a seashell, muffled but persistent, as if part of some greater susurrus. Again, Teera remembers her aunt, the last evening of Amara’s life, the breath that grew more faint with each passing hour, as if inside the still, almost lifeless body under the white sheets, Amara was taking an unhurried stroll, saying her silent farewells to Teera, to the doctors and nurses, to the walls and windows, the hospital bed, the morphine drip, thanking everyone, always grateful and ever gracious.

  A month or so before her death, when she was still fully coherent, not wanting the memories of her death to overwhelm their home, the life they’d shared, Amara had made Teera promise to let her die at the hospital, where she knew many staff members from having taken her clients—refugees and immigrants who did not speak enough English—for various medical visits over the years. She’d firmly refused even the offer of a hospice close to home, where it would be quieter, more peaceful. There’s nothing quieter or more peaceful than death, she’d said good-naturedly, and I’ll go there soon enough. The evening that was to be her last, Amara summoned enough strength through her haze of pain to utter these simple words—Hospital. Take me.

  Teera quietly left Amara’s bedside and walked to the living room, a fist in her mouth to block the howl threatening to escape her throat. She recollected herself, sucking back the tears that’d come through her nostrils, and called for an ambulance. She’d been expecting this moment, and yet when it came, it rattled her and she pushed against it, anguishing. No, not now, not tonight . . .

  By the time they reached Hennepin County Medical Center, Amara had already lost consciousness. The doctor explained Teera’s choices. While she knew Amara would’ve wanted the least struggle, Teera chose life support, to which the doctor said calmly, You understand that this will only prolong her death. She shook her head, unable to explain that long ago, as a child, she had learned death was inevitable—sooner or later everyone was going to die—but if she could live just a bit longer, then it was worth all the fight.

  She didn’t have the peace of mind to explain this to the doctor, so she kept shaking her head, until he complied with her wish. Less than an hour after they’d hooked her up, Amara took her last breath, so long and slow it sounded like a sigh, a yawn before falling into the dark void of sleep, into that silent, unobserved journey.

  Death, Teera realizes now, was only a second’s moment, its certainty registered on the machine with a bleep. Life is the prolonged voyage, the unhurried return to the beginning.

  It is evening, and the Old Musician returns alone to the naga steps. He scans the shoreline, noting the debris—plastic bags, water bottles, old nylon nets, a rusted bicycle wheel—partially hidden in the mud and grass near him. He is suspicious of everything he sees, fearing a discovery much worse than a gun. In the river, where a few days earlier the little girl stood on her water buffalo, he discerns a woman standing on the stern of her boat, a metal bowl in her hand, and for a split second he is confused—How much time has passed? Has the girl aged into a woman?—only to realize they are not the same person. The distance between him and the woman is not much, certainly near enough for him to be privy to the choreography of her ritual, but the sense of privacy she embodies allows them each their separate solitude.

  It appears she has just finished washing her face and arms, and now with her wet hand is smoothing back her hair. Then, from the waist of her sarong, she extracts a pinkish scarf and begins to cover her head in the way a Cham woman covers herself, tucking in the edges so that when she’s done only the oval of her face is showing. In her colorful batik sarong and embroidered white shirt, she appears ageless, serene as a minaret at midnight. He knows her, or more accurately, she is a familiar figure, her home the brightly painted wooden sampan she shares with her husband and three small grandchildren. Despite their frequent encounters, she’s never once spoken with the Old Musician, and he never dares engage her, conscious of her faith and the restrictions she must observe. But on many occasions he has spoken with the husband, who often brings their boat to moor and seek refuge along the shore during a particularly scorching afternoon, or when there is a violent rainstorm. Abdul Razak. A name that would have gotten a man killed during Pol Pot’s regime. A birth name that he has reclaimed since he survived the decimation of his people, and therefore, as he calls it, niam chivit. “My life name, through which I honor Allah for every breath I take.”

  The Cham fisherman is as light-footed as he is soft-spoken, and the Old Musician sees him emerging now with a broom from under the woven rattan roof that arches over the middle section of the vessel. Abdul Razak gathers his nets and fishing tools into one corner by the entrance and begins sweeping the floorboard.

  When he’s finished sweeping, the Cham fisherman puts away his broom, rinses himself with water from a bucket, and goes back inside. A few minutes later he reemerges onto the bow, donning an embroidered skullcap, a loose white shirt, and a checkered sarong. His three grandchildren trail him, two boys and a girl, between the ages of four and eight. The little ones’ parents have gone to other provinces in search of more stable work.

>   At the sound of a distant call to prayer, the wife enters the roofed enclosure. In that constricted space, she will address her God, seek His boundless refuge. Near the prow, Abdul Razak kneels down and rolls out his small square of mat, his grandchildren emulating his every move, like little shadows of himself. He recites verses from the Quran, in a language he does not speak, his face to the distant Mecca. A spiritual origin. A home that a man like Abdul Razak will never see, can never reach, but a home nevertheless, for in believing he belongs somewhere, even in a far-flung and unknowable geography, he has found his reason for being.

  Perhaps home then, in the simplest and profoundest sense, is the center of one’s faith, the belief that shelters and moors a soul tossed to drift in the open sea. The Old Musician longs for such certainty of conviction.

  The call to prayer grows more sonorous. The human voice and its ancient, mysterious music. It unfurls across the Mekong where the river narrows so that the Old Musician is able to hear it, catch its refrain and loop, even as the words are indecipherable to him. It must be coming from somewhere in Arei Ksatre, where, Abdul Razak told him, a small community of Muslim nomads living on the edge of the Mekong has erected a makeshift mosque of tarp and bamboo so that those like themselves without land or permanent homes can come to worship. While most humbly constructed, the mosque boasts a pair of loudspeakers, a small wooden board listing the precise times for the five daily prayers, and a bronze carving of the crescent moon and star, which the imam carries with him everywhere, Abdul Razak said, the only permanent feature of their “wandering mosque.”

  The singing deepens in resonance. Judging from the light, it is the call that precedes the setting sun. The Old Musician has returned to the river, hoping to catch a glimpse of the little girl and her water buffalo, that faint reverberation of his daughter, and hold it still. But this mournful echo of the soul resonating across water and sky, stretching as if toward its source, its longed-for infinity, seems providential. Then again, the mind perceives what it desires, a pattern or importance where perhaps there is none. For the moment, he feels everything—the appearance of the Razaks and their boat, the wind sending a continuous ripple in the direction of the peninsula, the porousness of the evening that makes time seem mutable—conspires to draw him back to that night, which for so long has existed only as an outline in his memory, like the missing note on the sralai, its tone and timbre muted, until now.