Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  A young boy had stepped from behind him and stood off to one side, waiting and watching, the black cloth that had been Tun’s blindfold now dangling in his small hand, an AK47 cradled across his stomach in that intimate way a peasant boy might hold a newborn calf. Tun recalled the lightness of the boy’s fingers when he’d untied the blindfold, and now it was obvious to him that these fingers, long and agile, were more suited to a musical instrument and its intricate choreography of notes than the monotonous dissonance of the battlefield. He suddenly regretted not having brought with him at least a simple bamboo flute. Yet, he couldn’t imagine playing any of those instruments from home without the presence of his daughter, for she’d made them her own, addressing each like a beloved sibling. To the sralai, the tiny ivory oboe he’d brought her from Ratanakiri, he’d once heard her ask: “Sralai srey oun somlanh—you little one I love—what song will you sing me today?” This memory alone nearly knocked him off balance again.

  The boy nodded for Tun to get up and follow. Without further exchange, they pushed deeper into the canopy, tracing its curve and narrowing cavity, until the bamboo gave way to hardwood trees, a forest dominated by ancient teaks, and, in the midst of it, the encampment.

  Finally, Tun felt safe to ask where he was, and in reply the soldier mumbled some letters and numbers designating the region and zone, but nothing more. Silence appeared to be the boy’s native tongue. Tun had decided then it was best to observe, take in as much as he could. Things would become clear soon enough. So he’d hoped.

  Now, making his way through the encampment, he wondered where their leader was, who among these half-starved, inured fighters was the commanding cadre. Could it be the soldier on the teak crossing? For the third time, his gaze strayed toward the figure bowing over the water: he certainly had the adult patience to hold himself in such prolonged stillness. As they got closer Tun realized the soldier did indeed seem older than he had earlier appeared at a distance, perhaps in his twenties or possibly thirties, with a physique more sculpted, more muscled than the flat geometry of a young adolescent. He wished the soldier would look up, and just as he thought this, a shot reverberated in the forest across the stream. Perhaps an engine had misfired, but there was no car or truck anywhere, no road in that impenetrable wilderness. For some seconds it became even more silent and still, the forest seeming to hold its breath.

  Even more curious, the boy leading him paused in his steps and turned opposite from where the shot had echoed. Tun could not catch his gaze, and when he looked around at the others he noted that they were doing the same, turning away from the origin of the firing sound, as if denying the sound. Before he could make sense of it, a soldier emerged from the forest across the stream, a pistol in his hand, and strode angrily toward the crossing. One of the camp leaders, Tun thought. A battalion commander. Everything about him spoke of war; he was all combat and rage. “Your turn!” he shouted, but the soldier on the crossing did not flinch and kept his head bowed. His uniform—the loose-fitting black pajamas of the revolution—told Tun he was not a captured enemy from the government side, a prisoner of war, but one of their own. But what was his crime? What had he stolen? A can of sardines or condensed milk, a Zippo lighter from one of the boxes strewn on the ground among the supplies? And what did it mean, “your turn”? Was there another offender, another captive? The commander stood over the bowed man, the gun now pointing at his head. “Get up!” Still, the offender remained, immovable as the gray boulder a few feet behind him in the middle of the stream. Tun looked around, stunned that not a single person acknowledged what was happening. The commander caught Tun’s gaze, their eyes locked, then all of sudden he lifted his pistol, arm outstretched and straight as an arrow, and pointed the gun at Tun—“You, over here!” Tun froze. The commander eyed the boy soldier, a flicker of exchange passed between them, and the boy scrambled over to Tun, nudging him forward with the barrel of his AK47.

  “Shoot him,” the commander ordered, thrusting his pistol into Tun’s hands, and it was then, standing on the crossing, that Tun saw the wrists of the man kneeling before them were bound tightly with rope. “I said shoot the traitor!”

  Tun felt his limbs go numb, heavy as lead, his entire body inert with fear. This cannot be happening. And yet, he knew it was happening: this was not some nightmare he could wake up from but madness in the making. The commander grabbed his hands, imprisoned them inside his own, and, lacing their fingers around the pistol, shot the kneeling offender in the side of his head. The man fell on his side, a chunk of his skull gone, blood splattering, seeping into the tight crevices between the felled teaks. “Anyone else want to defect?” the commander thundered, eyes sweeping all gathered, his pistol back in his hand. Silence. Every face was a blank. “I didn’t think so,” he murmured, and then to Tun—“Never point your weapon at anyone you’re not ready to kill. Let this be your first lesson.” He looked at the lifeless body at their feet and kicked it into the water. The lily pads sank beneath it, lost in the ballooning of black clothes, and then, as if by some madness or miracle, the lone dark pink blossom broke through the surface again, wrestling to recover the rays of the sun.

  Narunn has brought Teera to a house on the southern shore of Chruay Chongvar, one of the few traditional teak homes still standing, and beautifully preserved, amidst throngs of new construction. It belongs, he told her, to a magnificent woman who has taken him in as one of her own. Yaya, everyone calls her, short for Lokyay Tuat—“Great-Grandmother.” When they are introduced, Teera is surprised to find that the tiny soul hunching before her, with back curved like a sickle and head shaved bald in keeping with Buddhist tradition for the elderly, is the same formidable woman she pictured through Narunn’s description. It is only when Yaya embraces her that Teera feels the elder’s strength, her ageless fortitude. Even more astonishing, as she holds Teera’s face between her thin, fanlike hands, Yaya sticks out her tongue, revealing a hairline scar across its midsection. This wordless greeting moves Teera deeply.

  Despite the long-ago injury, the elder can still speak but chooses not to say much. Instead, she smiles endlessly, lips permanently puckered between two caved cheeks as if always ready to kiss and be kissed. As she sits on the carved wooden platform under the raised teak house, the younger generations—from a middle-aged grandson who can scale the tallest palm tree on their property in mere seconds to a little baby, a great-granddaughter, just learning to walk—whirl around the diminutive matriarch like tributaries of a Great Lake, meandering in numerous directions yet always returning to their source, bringing to her the earth’s treasures: berries to freshen her palate, a coronet of wild jasmines sprinkled with water to cool her exposed head, unknown bugs and beetles for her to identify, roots to add to her lacquered box of traditional cures. Yaya repays these gestures by taking her loved ones into her arms and pressing their faces into hers, inhaling their scents, as if doing so guards their lives, or some essential part of them, with her own breath.

  In no time at all, Teera learns from the loquacious clan that Yaya had thirteen children, none of whom survived the Khmer Rouge. Yet, some of her grandchildren did, and they have multiplied, through marriages and births and other tenuous connections. As for Narunn, he came one day to Chruay Chongvar looking for a distant relative of his mother’s who might’ve had a home around here, at the southern tip of the peninsula. When Yaya encountered him on the dirt road in front of their property she invited him in to meet her family, a brood of grandchildren, who explained that they were new to the land and did not know which house had belonged to whom before the war, who among their neighbors were original residents, and who were refugees like themselves. At the fall of the regime, fearing kidnappings by the remnant Khmer Rouge rebels, they had fled their village in a remote area east of the Mekong and come near the city, where it would be safer. They found the rustic setting of the peninsula preferable to the city itself, and, to their good fortune, discovered this house among overgrown trees and bushes, with a few shutters mi
ssing but otherwise in remarkable condition. They couldn’t tell Narunn for certain whether the house had belonged to his kinsmen, as no one had ever come to claim it. In any case, he was welcome to stay with them, be part of their family.

  “Now we welcome you also!” they declare, pulling Teera into their midst. “You’re one of us!—Our foreign sister.” Through their eyes, Teera begins to glimpse the melding of her divided self, the stranger to this land and the child who never left.

  True to their words, they treat her like family, like she’d always been part of their clan, drawing her into competing conversations, as they dash about orchestrating a traditional country feast—food of the peasants, they say—to welcome her back to her Khmer roots. M’rum! M’reah! M’ras! They take turns holding up to Teera the edible leaves, flowers, and buds sprouting wildly on their land, singing the names for her benefit in case she’s forgotten, before tossing them into the various pots simmering over the clay braziers in the outdoor cooking area off the side of the house. Teera takes out the journal she carries with her everywhere in her shoulder bag, asks whether it’s all right for her to jot these names down, and, when they chorus their consent, begins to scribble, feeling strangely at home with her thoughts, as if it’s a natural thing, writing in such company. Romdaeng . . . romduol . . . kjol rodek . . .

  There is music to their words, a rhythm connecting a familiar spice to a rare mountain flower and the flower to the harvest wind, whose name bears the resonance of a child’s laugh. One day, she tells herself, she wants a family as large and boisterous as this, a home open to all who pass. She notes the rows of solid round teak columns holding up the house so that it appears an abode rising from the earth, an indestructible entity, protected through the years of war and abandonment by the surrounding trees, by the spirits and ghosts that took up residence. “You’ve dug a pond since I was last here!” she hears Narunn exclaim, and, turning, sees him pointing to a field of lotuses blooming in one corner of the property. Ravi, the eldest of Yaya’s granddaughters, explains, “Yes, to give our land a breath of water”—dangherm tik.

  Teera echoes the words in her mind, writing them down lest they escape her completely. And as she does so, one explains to the others that this scribbling of hers is the way of the sas sar, something she must’ve developed living among the “white race.” Another agrees, “Yes, they read and write all the time. They record everything, not like us; we don’t know our own history.” Ravi’s husband, the palm climber, retorts, “Oh, we know, but we’d rather not! We choose to forget.” His cousin interjects, “Min bomphlich kae bomphlanh,” harking back to the adage of the Khmer Rouge years. “What we can’t forget they will destroy. It’s self-preservation, pure and simple. We’re like prahoc, rotten to the bone but prepared to last.” Laughter erupts, and the rowdiest of the bunch offers Teera a jar of the pungent pickled fish—the quintessential condiment in Khmer cuisine—and, gesturing to Narunn, advises, “Make sure the doctor has the courage to stomach this thing raw before you trust him with your heart.” Narunn grabs him, and they tussle like boys—“You water buffalo, I’m going to make you eat mud!”

  Amidst the continuing jest, Yaya beckons Teera to her. On the way here, Narunn told her that during the Khmer Rouge, Yaya, by virtue of her peasant background, was ordered to identify who among the city people exiled to her village were enemies of the Organization. She refused, instead offering her tongue to be cut off. Better, she told the soldier, than telling a lie.

  Beholding this whisper of a woman on the wooden platform, Teera is amazed that Yaya not only survived that ordeal but that she has lived to such an age, her skin so deeply grooved and veined that she seems inseparable from the land. What’s even more amazing is that the elder has long outlasted the soldier who grazed her tongue with his razor-sharp knife that day, who was later purged, a victim of the revolutionary cleansing he had instigated in the village.

  Teera takes a seat on the wooden platform facing Yaya, her legs folded to one side, feet tucked beneath her, a gesture of propriety and respect toward the elder. Between them sits a bamboo tray of fresh spices—a profusion of scents, textures, and colors. Yaya looks past it to the journal, nodding for Teera to read. Teera is unsure if she’s understood correctly. Narunn catches her eye and winks.

  “It’s mostly in English,” she tells Yaya. “Except for a few Khmer words here and there.”

  Yaya smiles. It doesn’t matter the language. The creases in her forehead, the delight in her eyes, the crosshatched lines around her mouth, the stillness of her hands—Teera has never met anyone who speaks with every part of her body, who conveys so much with silence.

  She opens the journal to where she’s tucked her pen, clears her throat, and reads—“ ‘A breath of water’ . . . So many expressions I’ve forgotten. I am like this land, each word recalled, excavated, lends me its breath, its life, and I hear a voice echoing the story I want to tell . . .”

  Words, Teera loves them. If pressed, she will probably admit that her longest love affair has been with language. Even as a child—a quiet one at that—she was besotted by words, the way they looked and sounded, the way they caressed her ears. Eavesdropping on adult conversations, she’d snatch phrases she didn’t understand, words too big for her, exceeding her emotion and years. She’d store them in her memory and, when opportunities arose, toss them like pebbles to see where they landed. Later, a refugee in America reaching to grasp the nuances and subtleties of another’s tongue, she wanted not just to survive in this borrowed voice but to thrive. She studied hard, read ferociously, made daily lists of vocabulary to conquer, signed up for Speech and Debate even though she was terrified of public speaking and couldn’t begin to formulate her thoughts, least of all in proper English. You’re like a sponge—you soak up everything. Your language is remarkable. And your mind . . . your mind is a steel trap, her drama coach had said. A steel trap, Teera would later note in the spiral journal she kept for English class, her repository of unfamiliar phrases.

  In a volunteer internship at the county courthouse, bending over the Xerox machine, leafing through applications, affidavits, and dossiers, Teera was introduced to the specificity of the legal vernacular, its exactitude and restriction. It spoke to her desire for clarity. Later, at Cornell, she entertained the possibility of studying toward a law degree. Poring over casebooks and law manuals, she’d ponder the frailty of “deposition,” its merit and value relative to “interrogatories,” or the providential definitiveness of “judgment.” She’d fall in love too with a phrase like “description of notes,” twirling it around her tongue, around the silhouette of a poem emerging in her mind, as she absentmindedly twirled a lock of hair around her pen, dreaming, composing . . . It was as if, without knowing its shape or direction, she sensed she had a story to tell, and she was keen to equip herself with the elements of exposition. As she studied history, however, submerging herself in that era whose very name was a matter of debate—the Vietnam War, the American War, the “conflict” in Southeast Asia—she learned that the things she wanted most to write about lacked fixed definition, defied simple clarity. They were only hinted at in the books she was reading, if not ignored altogether. These, she felt, are the things that gain brilliance only in darkness, acquire solidity and wholeness only when your world is destroyed, when all you have left are fragments of the life you once knew.

  Love . . . hope . . . humanity. Intangible, yes, but also the building blocks of self-preservation, renewal. These are the most durable possessions I have . . .

  Teera glances up, confused as to what she’s read aloud, what she’s recalled silently in her mind. Beside her, Yaya nods and, seeing Teera’s hesitation, says, “Taw tiat, chao”—continue, grandchild. Teera’s eyes smart at the last word. Fighting back the tears, she returns her gaze to the pages of her journal. I walk into a family scene, and find the scent of home cradled in a tray of spices. A cut of fresh galangal releases a bouquet of memories. The air is filled with the aromas of my childhood
, fragrances that envelop and linger, haunt my senses like ghosts . . .

  How strange, she thinks, to give voice to these words and to hear something unlike her own voice, something that has acquired a timbre of its own, as if the sentiment belongs to all who listen, not just she who’s written. I take a deep breath, inhaling the pralung of a lemongrass, and I feel nourished, healed, even if only in this moment.

  Teera looks up and sees that Yaya has had her eyes closed. When she opens them again, she cups Teera’s face in her hands, peers deep into her eyes for what feels like an eternity, and then, as when they first greeted, sticks out her tongue, head bobbing from side to side, in the same flow and inflection as Teera’s reading. It suddenly occurs to her that perhaps Yaya isn’t simply showing her the scar, that perhaps this is the elder’s way of taking in all the words she can’t form, the truth she can’t articulate. Teera is reminded of how when learning English she’d stretch and flex her tongue, preparing to sound out a new word, shaping the space for what was to come, even if in that moment she couldn’t voice it.

  Perhaps, Teera thinks, silence is its own voice.

  Yaya lets out a laugh, a bubbling brook gushing upward from her belly, sending her sunken cheeks puffing with transient youth. From the tray of spices, she plucks out a green sprig similar to lavender, with tiny purple flowers, and gives it to Teera.