Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  “Your wife is lovely,” Vichet murmurs, stealing a glance at Teera.

  “You flirt!” Narunn slaps him on the shoulder, and to her says, “I’d better take you away before this boy breaks your heart, and mine.” Behind them the other vendors laugh, echoing Vichet’s sentiments—“Lovely indeed! No wonder you’ve kept her hidden from us! Bring her back soon, Doctor.”

  “Not a chance!” Narunn waves. “Good-bye, everyone!” He guides Teera across the traffic, one hand holding the coconut, the other protectively on the small of her back. They trace a straight line along the pedestrian crossing—which no one respects—giving way to cars and trucks, letting the motorbikes and tuk-tuks and other smaller vehicles weave around them. “You know everybody!” Teera exclaims through the din, the grasshopper bobbing on its stick above her coconut, as if attempting to drink from it.

  “That’s what happens when you’ve lived in one place for as long as I have. You could say I was among the original inhabitants, when Phnom Penh was still a ghost city. Everyone knew me as the orphaned bachelor—komlos komprea—and now I’m gray-haired, still living alone, unmarried. Forever an orphan in their eyes. Naturally, they’re all worried, and more than a bit curious.”

  They reach the other side of the road. “But you told them you are. Married, I mean.” Teera tries not to show her bafflement, but her voice betrays her. “It seems . . . unnecessary, not to mention untruthful.” The grasshopper nods, agreeing.

  “Oun, I’m sorry.” Narunn turns to face her, palm grazing her forearm. “I got carried by the moment. I really am sorry. But I didn’t want to ruin their happiness.” He looks down at his feet. “Nor mine, I suppose.”

  Teera doesn’t know what to say to this, so she takes another sip of the coconut juice.

  “I know you’ll leave,” he continues after a moment, his voice even quieter now. “Return to America. Your life is not here. I know this. When that time comes, if needed I’ll find a way to explain your absence. But they won’t ask, beyond, How is your wife? Why are there no babies?—In a teasing way, of course! We—the Cambodians here—have learned to live with a permanent sense of impermanency. Any one of us could lose our life—or, like Vichet, the one thing that matters most to us—just crossing this traffic. So we’ve become a bit greedy: we seize whatever happiness we can, in the moment.” He looks at her, eyes pleading. “Forgive me?”

  Teera nods but does not tell him she has no plan to return to America just yet, that this morning she went to a travel agency a few blocks from here to change her return ticket to an open date, that she’s not offended, just cautious, for she too knows what it’s like to live with an abiding sense of loss. She takes his hand, and they walk along the promenade, sipping their coconut juice, at times loudly, like children. She knows also that his letting everyone believe they are husband and wife is a way of respecting her, giving her a place in his life. In their language, songsa—“lover”—is a word that prefigures heartbreak, separation.

  “What happened to Vichet?” she asks after a while.

  Narunn heaves, shaking his head. “A long story. A sad one. But, to put it simply, he was a runner, out running in a city with hardly any sidewalks, and where there are, they’re overtaken by cars and trucks. The bigger the vehicle the more rights you claim and, as you’ve witnessed, those on their feet have no rights whatsoever. But here’s the crazy thing—Vichet was on a sidewalk when he ran that morning. A Hummer thundered down the street in the wrong direction, and a Land Cruiser, trying to get out of the way, veered onto the sidewalk, lost control, crushed his legs. It happened near the White Building. A boy from my same block rushed in to alert me. When I arrived at the scene of the accident, I saw there was little I could do, except to bind and bandage the legs to minimize the bleeding as much as possible, and give him local anesthesia for the pain. He needed to be taken to a hospital to be operated on, by proper surgeons.”

  “How awful!”

  “The one miracle is that he came out alive, if not altogether intact, physically or emotionally. But gone are his hopes of ever competing internationally in a race.”

  “When Amara was sick but still working, I had to fill in for her one time and took her client—a Cambodian man affected by childhood polio—to have him fitted for one of these new graphite leg braces. It was amazing to see how well he walked in it. It could still be possible for Vichet to run, to compete again.”

  “Yes, perhaps in America anything is possible. But here . . .”

  Here, it’s a different reality. How could she forget? She feels astoundingly American, ridiculous in her obstinate hope. It was the one thing that Amara, in her role as a surrogate parent, had cultivated in her while she was growing up. Good grades aren’t enough. In her junior year of high school, bending over college applications, she related to Amara what her high school guidance counselor had told her. If I wanted to go to an Ivy League school, we’d have to have a lot of money saved up in a trust fund. Teera didn’t even know what a trust fund was. You will go, Amara replied simply, never pausing in her task as she stood washing rice at the kitchen sink before setting it to cook. You just have to get in. Quiet, stubborn hope, even in the face of seemingly irreversible defeat, is Teera’s inexhaustible inheritance.

  “He can’t reclaim what he lost, but the NGO he’s with now is his best chance for recovery. They’re teaching him, and others like him, to live with the loss, to discover a hidden talent and nurture it. Funny, with his legs gone, Vichet has learned he’s quite skilled with his hands. You know he built that wheelchair himself.”

  “He does seem remarkably skilled.” After a moment’s thought, she asks, “What happened to the drivers?”

  “The Hummer never stopped, never even slowed down to see what had taken place in the wake of its reckless power. The owner of the Land Cruiser was utterly distraught, scared out of his wits. He could barely drive when he took us—Vichet and myself—to Calmette Hospital. He was the one who paid for everything.”

  Teera shakes her head, confounded. “There’s so much cruelty, so much generosity. I don’t think I will ever understand our country, our people.”

  “Neither will I,” Narunn echoes. “Yet, to hear you say this gives me a strange serenity . . . you know, like I’m not alone . . . you see what I see.” He draws her attention toward a bird vendor with a collection of bamboo cages around her, and a little girl standing nearby contently blowing bubbles. “You see them? They are mother and daughter, a team. The little one catches the birds, and the mother brings them to sell, to be released by those seeking to make merits, answers to their prayers. At times, I feel we—all of us—are like those sparrows, our imprisonment and our freedom intimately linked, willed by the same hands, the same forces.”

  They come to one of the concrete benches spaced at long intervals along the promenade, remnants of the old days. They toss the empty coconuts into the garbage can nearby and sit down on the bench. High above them, the flags of various nations hemming the length of the promenade flap in the steady breeze, the sound reminiscent of distant helicopters, the pulse of war. Now that others might be assuming them husband and wife, Teera feels brave enough to rest her head on Narunn’s shoulder. She looks up, tapping the grasshopper against her leg, and searches among the fluttering colors. She spots France, Japan, China, Vietnam, Russia, the United Nations, a chronicle of power imposed and contested on this land. The US flag flies several poles down to their right. Operation Menu, the initial phase of intense bombing was called. US forces had been bombing Cambodian territory for four years already when, in March 1969, Operation Menu took this to a new level with carpet bombing by heavily loaded B-52s, first in the border region, targeting Vietcong supply routes. Richard Nixon had ordered a lavish banquet for Cambodia, one incendiary feast after another. The first was code-named Breakfast, followed by Lunch, then Supper, Dinner, Dessert, and Snack. These only served to whet the appetite for destruction, and the bombing intensified further over the following years, extending deep i
nto the country, including the tragically mistaken target of Neak Leung.

  “You are right,” Teera tells him, her gaze on the river again, following the dinner-cruise boat gliding downstream.

  “About what?”

  “Captivity and escape, how they intertwine.” Her eyes catch sight of a flock of birds moving south, past the confluence of the three rivers, and she knows that if they keep going, tracing the curvature of the Mekong, they will reach Neak Leung. “A government that ensnared us into its grand war has given so many of our people their freedom.”

  “The Americans did not create the Khmer Rouge,” Narunn says. “We can’t escape responsibility for that violence, that madness which is our own.”

  “I know that. Yes, as a people, perhaps we would’ve suffered anyway, sooner or later.”

  “But you’re saying the American bombing brought it sooner.”

  She nods, and then shakes her head, entangled by all she can’t express. “I look at my life and feel unlucky to have been born into that time, that suffering. I want to lay blame but I don’t know where, on what or whom. Then I think I was so lucky to survive it, and escape. There are moments I’m convinced that my escape would not have happened if not for the American role in the war. It feels both consoling and wrong to think this way. Yet, it’s what I cling to when nothing can pull me out of despair. I know it doesn’t make sense. But anger . . . sinks me even deeper. So I feel grateful because sometimes it’s the only lifeline, the only way to live.”

  They sit in silence for a long while, her head on his shoulder, his face buried in her hair. She feels him softly kissing her—inhaling her scent, her entire self, through the strands.

  “One day we will try the dinner cruise,” he whispers, “but now I want to take you somewhere more special.”

  After a seemingly endless journey by both water and land, Tun arrived at his base, a partially cleared area under the cover of a dense teak forest. It seemed like an ancient world, a landscape of centuries before, and he had to remind himself it was still 1973. August 1973. It was a brilliant morning, with sunlight bouncing off the foliage bejeweled in raindrops left from the early dawn. Campfires dotted the ground, with tendrils of smoke rising in the heat and humidity. Hammocks clustered beneath large swaths of army tarps tenting from branches like the wings of giant bats at rest. On his left, a stream ran parallel to the encampment, the water clear as glass so that he could see through to the rocks and pebbles lining the streambed, an undulation of blues and grays. A young soldier clad in black perched on the edge, drinking from his cupped hand, his gun cradled in the crook between his abdomen and thighs. Another knelt on a crossing made of felled young teaks, head bowed, contemplating his reflection amidst the lily pads. A lone dark pink blossom appeared almost red against the black of his uniform and the surrounding forest.

  Tun walked past a group gathered around a fire, sharing a large cooked tuber they’d just extracted from the embers, the brown, bark-like skin partly burned and dusted with ashes. Each broke off a piece, hot with steam, and passed it to the next. He nodded at them; one or two returned his greeting, while the rest just stared. How young they were, many barely into their teens, a few appearing no more than nine or ten, including the soldier leading him now through the encampment. There was a hardness to these boys; they seemed interchangeable, disconnected from one another, without perceivable rearing or roots. Tun imagined they had been hewn from the dark gray rocks jutting out of the earth like half-buried giant tortoiseshells from a prehistoric time.

  Despite the soldiers everywhere, a sense of stillness and silence pervaded, as if the immensity of the forest muted all human endeavor and expression. Likewise, Tun felt minuscule, a speck in the formidable verdure, where young teak leaves unfurled three times bigger than his hands. To his right, beyond the clearing, he discerned some huts, barely visible through the screen of trees, and he guessed that they housed more senior soldiers, commanders, and cadres. Weapons and ammunition were gathered in small mounds, scattered across the encampment, some covered with tarps, some with twigs and leaves, others left exposed to the elements so that the words painted on the wooden crates had begun to bleed or fade away.

  He followed the boy soldier past a storage depot, a rectangular roof of woven teak leaves anchored by four posts. Underneath were large plastic bags of rice and stashes of boîtes de conserve, as his friends in the military would refer to the canned goods, which they secretly sold by the truckload to the insurgent forces. He couldn’t be certain whether this stockpile had been captured from defeated government troops, but judging by the condition, he guessed it had arrived through an exchange between supposed “enemies.” Tun remembered one particular night many months earlier when he and another comrade—assigned as escorts by the leader of their underground cell—had ridden in a jeep with a colonel in the Lon Nol army, guiding a camion full of supplies with “US” markings on the canvas bags and tin boxes to a secret drop-off site atop a hill along the national road to Kampot Province. At the appointed hour, the government soldiers had emptied the truckload carefully at the edge of the ravine, where a group of revolutionary fighters waited to receive the cadeau. There was no shortage of corrupt high-ranking army officers ready to sell whatever stashes they could get their hands on, but there were also those, like the colonel, who were sympathetic to the cause and, with insurgent forces now controlling most of the country’s territory, had put their stake with the inevitable victors.

  Tun’s gaze flitted again to the soldier kneeling on the crossing over the stream. There was something devotional to his posture, his arms together in front of him, as if in prayer, hands tucked between his knees. No one paid attention to the figure, and for a moment Tun wondered if he was looking at a mirage. He blinked, but the soldier remained where he was, head bowed, his entire being expectant, waiting. Despite the temporary stillness, Tun suspected at any moment they would all pick up and leave, taking whatever supplies they could carry, leaving the rest to be swallowed by the seething, tangled mass of vines and undergrowth. And for the first time he was grateful that his daughter was not with him. Once or twice during his travels he wondered if it had been a fatal mistake not to bring her along. He knew of others who had gone underground with their family members in tow. Had he demanded it of Om Paan, she would’ve packed up Sita and come with him. But after all they’d been through, he could not uproot them again, take away the home and stability they both so cherished. Besides, if all proceeded as planned, he would go back to Phnom Penh to fetch them in a year’s time, and by then he would’ve seen for himself what he was asking them to abandon their life for. Presently, there was only this forest and the battle-gutted landscape he’d traversed to arrive.

  In Kompong Cham, in a district known as “Jewels of the Bees,” where he’d parted ways with Comrade Nuon and the two others, Tun had walked through a village like the surface of the moon. Huge bomb craters transformed by the rains into ponds where children swam and hunted for frogs among colossal chunks of shrapnel. Hillocks sliced by rocket-propelled grenades, their tips half plunged into the earth like banana flower heads pitched from a great height by some immortal strength. Inundated rice paddies harboring overturned tanks and armored personnel carriers that resembled the carapaces of gargantuan crabs. In another district, he’d charged through a burning village caught in the crossfire. A mother, running from the village, pausing to collect pieces of meat from the carcass of a water buffalo blown up by a hand grenade, salvaging what food she could to later feed her children. A father screaming for someone to shoot him, cursing soldiers on all sides, his dead boy in his outstretched arms. Why don’t you kill me too?—Kill me, you cowards!

  After what he’d seen, Tun felt the encampment was a kind of sanctuary, however imposing the forest might appear. He wondered where the others had ended up, if they’d arrived at places as untamable, as concealed. They were separated so no permanent bond would form among the four of them, as tended to happen with traveling companions. Fr
om the start, they had all understood that there was to be no friendship, only camaraderie; no loyalty, except to the Organization. Loyalty was absolute, secrecy paramount. These were the most palpable fortifications—aside from the jungle itself—surrounding the encampment. He’d been shocked to observe that the soldiers, most of them rangy and underfed, would confine themselves to sharing a single burnt wild root, or even forgo food altogether, while the supplies of rice and canned goods gathered layers of twigs and leaves and dirt. What he’d understood as ideological rhetoric—We do not take from the communal pile; we eat when our brothers eat—appeared to command inviolable allegiance, restraining them from siphoning a can here, a can there. On top of this, Tun did not know where he was, and he imagined the same was true of the others.

  In the final leg of his journey, under the dawn’s drizzle, he’d been driven blindfolded in a partially covered oxcart, and when he alighted a short while later, landing unsteadily on soft earth cushioned with tiny scaly leaves, the black cloth removed from his eyes by fingers as weightless as feathers, he found himself kneeling under a thick dome of overgrown bamboo, the rain replaced by bright morning light filtering through the sieve-like canopy, the oxcart disappearing through a narrow opening in the forest, the squeaks and moans of its wheels growing more distant with each rotation. Tun had blinked in confusion, thinking himself inside an enormous cage, an aviary one might encounter in a myth or dream, as sparrows hopped from branch to branch all around him. Had he been captured? Was his enemy a giant?