“Ma-orm,” Teera says, smelling it. She doesn’t need to write this one down. She remembers it, the earthy fragrance that recalls for her the smell of the first rain when it hits the earth and assumes its dry, sultry breath. There’s a word for it in English. “Petrichor!” she exclaims, and then repeats it more slowly for Yaya.
Yaya smacks her lips, tries to articulate it, twirling her tongue round and round like a child licking ice cream, and finally gives up in a fit of giggles.
Narunn emerges from the tussle, dirt smeared across his forehead and nose, and the words of the victor chiding him—“Hah, who’s eating mud now!” Narunn fires back, “I’ll get you next time, brother!” And to Teera and Yaya, “What’s so funny?”
Again, Yaya bubbles with laughter, leaning as if about to tip over with too much happiness. “You!” Teera tells him.
Narunn sulks off, shoulders slumped in a pretense of hurt, heading for the clay cistern by the back stairway. When he’s finished cleaning himself up, he returns to the wooden platform, mopping up the excess water on his face with his shirtsleeves. The cell phone in his pants pocket begins to ring. He answers, sitting down next to Teera, and after a few seconds silently mouths to her, “Wat Nagara,” before turning to give the caller his full attention.
Teera’s heart lurches. The Old Musician. She hasn’t been back to see him since their first confrontation. She pauses at the thought. Was it a confrontation? She didn’t think of it that way at the time, but in retrospect it was like walking into a minefield, where a single wrong step could detonate some buried secret, destroy the fragile existence they each had built for themselves. The careful choreography of her words around his had exhausted her, and afterward she knew she would have to collect herself, summon her strength anew before another encounter. But the longer she stays away, the more she feels unkind. For all his restraint during that first meeting, she sensed his attachment to her, and for her part, she hasn’t been able since to separate him from her thoughts of her father. Perhaps this is the reason she’s stayed away. Melancholy fills her, pushing out the earlier gaiety.
“Yes, Venerable,” Narunn says, and Teera realizes he’s talking to a monk. “I’m sure it can be arranged. And yes, I’ll speak with Miss Suteera . . .” At the mention of her name, Narunn turns to Teera and smiles. But she’s not convinced, his solemn tone worrying her. “Tvay bangkum, Venerable.” With this formal salutation, Narunn disconnects and slips the phone back into his pocket. “That was the Venerable Kong Oul.”
“Is everything all right?” Teera asks, stopping short of blurting out, Has something happened to the Old Musician?
“There’s a child at the temple, a new orphan, in need of a little escape from her ordeal—she has recently lost her mother—and the abbot is wondering if we could find a day to take her somewhere outside the city, somewhere fun for a three-year-old.”
Three. Teera remembers that she was twelve when her mother died. “Oh, the poor thing must be so scared, so sad.”
“Yes, which is why the abbot thought it might be good if I ask you to come along, to have a woman’s presence. He tried to call you but there was no answer.”
Teera reaches into her bag for her cell phone but then realizes she left it on the desk in her hotel room. “What happened to the child’s mother?” she asks, turning back to Narunn.
He tells them what the abbot told him about the shooting that ended in the young mother’s death, and the delicacy of the situation, the little girl whose life may still be in danger. Teera listens, silently horrified.
“Do you mind making an excursion to the countryside?—I know how you feel about going too far out of the city . . .”
Teera shakes her head. “Never mind. Anything I can do to help.”
Narunn squeezes her hand. “Thank you.”
“The little one might like Phnom Tamao,” Yaya says, as she works through the tray of spices, plucking out what can be saved for another meal. “The sun bears are precious. And the gibbons . . . they make me laugh!” It’s the most the elder has said all evening.
“Ah, yes, good idea!” Narunn kisses Yaya on the cheek, and to Teera explains, “There’s a wildlife sanctuary in Phnom Tamao.”
Just then, Ravi, presiding over the cluster of pots, announces that the dinner is ready. A bustle of movement follows, as everyone gathers on the straw mats laid out on the cleanly swept ground around the wooden platform. Excitement accompanies the parade of dishes—lemongrass snail, whole fish baked in a blanket of sea salt over charcoal, prahoc with kaffir lime grilled in banana leaf, the famous coconut amok, a variety of curries and soups.
Teera takes a deep breath, letting the aromas fill her lungs, assuage and renew her for another day. Perhaps this is all she can ever hope for—a momentary restoration to gather her strength and move forward. To live as courageously and willfully as she can in the company of those who’ve also suffered, and triumphed.
He keeps returning to the river. The Mekong rolls languidly, serenely, belying the dangerous undercurrents far below the surface. Even with his deteriorating sight, the Old Musician can still make out the opposite shore, where water ends and land begins, where the blue-black clumps of distant forest meet the gray patches of clouds. A landscape in silhouettes. Light contours the dark, and the dark seeps into everything.
For decades now, he has traversed the murky, treacherous terrain of his conscience, tracing and retracing countless times the routes he had taken. There had to have been such a divide—much like the mighty river before him—a chasm he crossed separating one existence from another, the known from the unknown, right from wrong.
At what point in his journey did he make the crossing to that other side from where there could be no return? The question plagues him. He is convinced it was at the encampment that morning of his arrival. That was the moment when everything changed. What human being commits a murder and afterward remains unaltered, whole? It was his first execution, the first life he’d extinguished. It does not matter that another soldier had pulled the trigger. There, on the teak crossing, his own fingers gripped the gun as surely as those of the young commander, and he felt the pulse of the metal, heard the unmistakable click, absorbed the smooth reverberation of the bullet through the compact steel chamber, as if the weapon were part of his body, as if it drew energy from him alone.
Could he have said, No, I won’t do this? Could he have tried to reason with the young commander? Could he have fought back, wrestled free from the grip, angled the gun in a different direction? Could he have nudged or kicked the kneeling captive into the stream and let him try to escape? Even with his hands bound, the prisoner could have run. His legs were not tied. Or were they? . . . Still. He—Tun—could’ve done something. Anything. But instead he froze, allowing the will of another to overtake him completely. And, in his numb silence, in his inaction, he became an abettor. A murderer.
That moment then, that brief instant in which he could have acted but did nothing, was the chasm, the moral void where he slipped and fell, plunging into a vicious depth, only to emerge on the opposite shore, unable to return to who he had been, the self that believed he’d left his daughter to fight for something good.
What happened next hardly mattered to him at the time. He remembers vaguely being led off the teak crossing, a shove on his shoulder, the tip of a gun nudging him—left, right, straight head, right again . . . Move faster! Whose gun it was, he didn’t know. He dared not look back. He heard the voice of the commander from far behind him, ordering the soldiers to remove the “body of the traitor” from the stream so that it would not poison the water. Throw it in the forest with the other one! A shuffle of feet, the sound of water lapping, the collective heave of effort pulling the corpse ashore, hauling it away through leaves and branches.
How was it possible that he was able to keep walking, to take one step after another? He arrived at a hut cordoned off from the rest of the camp by a fence made of roughly hewn bamboo stakes and barbed wire. A prison,
he thought. But it had an almost lived-in feel to it. Within the barbed fence, in one corner a scraggly vegetable patch persisted, with tiny nascent leaves among old ones, resuscitated by the onset of rains, it seemed. He noted some pumpkin vines, tomato and chili shrubs, a clump of lemongrass, and random sprouts of ma-orm. A domestic plot. A home, amidst the untamed, untamable jungle. How was this possible? He could not think straight. Were his eyes deceiving him? What day was this? Where was he? Was it only this morning that he’d arrived? It seemed a lifetime had passed. No, he reminded himself, a life had passed. A man had lived and died, and time did not hasten or slow; it moved with the same steady gait. His mind whirled.
In another corner sat a pair of plastic gasoline containers with their mouths sawed off and a bamboo yoke fastened to the handles. Buckets to draw water from the stream. Blood filled his vision. He saw again the body falling, breaking the mirrorlike surface, the water lily radiant in its singular, ostentatious beauty.
Inside the hut, a horrible stench hit him, and in the semidark he thought he must’ve walked into an outhouse. They’d brought him here to let him defecate before shooting him. But why? So he wouldn’t soil his clothes? Clothes they would salvage after he was dead. His eyes adjusted to the dark and he saw that the hut was completely bare except for a plank of wood covering a hole in one corner of the dirt floor. Flies buzzed around it, and an incessant hum rose from beneath. He held his breath, quelling the urge to retch.
“This is where you’ll start,” a voice said from behind him. Tun turned around and saw a young soldier, older than the one who’d led him into the camp, a face he recognized from among the crowd eating the burnt tuber earlier. “You can’t leave the hut for any reason,” the soldier muttered. “You’ll do all your business there.” He nodded to the wood plank. A brief pause, and then he added, in a tone that sounded almost conciliatory, “You’ll stay put until your time is up, and this will depend on how well you’re taking it.”
Until my time is up? The question formed in his head but he could not summon the voice to express it. His throat felt tight, blocked, and he knew if he opened his mouth only a prolonged scream would emerge. But when had he last screamed aloud? Long ago he’d learned from his father to bear the anguish, to prove his strength against the pain. If he screamed now, it would reach all the way to that time, when he was a boy crouching under his father’s whip.
The soldier walked to the doorway, pistol hanging at his side. A handgun similar to the commander’s. “Lutdom kluan,” he said, using the revolutionary lingo, then switching to the gentler everyday language. “Ot thmut.” With this, the youth left, barring the door shut from the outside.
Discipline yourself. Endure. Tun puzzled over the ambiguity—the duplicity of words. Was the soldier trying to help him? Was this advice, cloaked in the tone of a command?—Do what it takes, and you will survive. Or was it merely an order?—Endure. Live.
Tun continued to stand there, rooted to the spot where he’d been left. If he moved, he would buckle. He must first find something to hang on to. A thought. A melody. Even a single note would do. Dtum. Dtum. Dtum. He tries mimicking the beats of a drum, a large bass drum that leads a funerary procession. A man had died—not someone he had known, not a friend but a comrade in the movement nevertheless—and if there was to be no funeral, then at the very least a note to signal his departure, to acknowledge the silent space left by a breath. But nothing emerged from Tun’s throat. He tried again. Still nothing. He had the odd sensation he was caught in a sleep paralysis. Yet, there was no doubt in his mind he was awake, and though he was standing upright, he saw himself recumbent, felt something pressing down on his chest. A presence, a weight. A sadness. But whose? His own? Was he dead? If it was his own lifeless body he was seeing, then he could not be grieving, mourning his own death. When his friend Prama died, he remembered, he’d tried to explain death to his daughter, at the funeral they’d attended together. He didn’t have the heart to tell her what he believed, what he knew to be true—that the moment we are born, each step we take is toward death. Instead, he resorted to telling her about the songs and melodies performed at different stages of a funeral. There’s music, you see, to awake the soul of the deceased, music to comfort it when it becomes aware that it’s no longer part of the human world, music to lead it into the otherworld . . . He knew he was veering from the truth, making it sound as if death too was a journey, much gentler and more poetic than life itself, and in some way preferable. He told her about the instruments in a “music of the ghosts” ensemble—the small oboe whose airy exhalation mimics the wind, the eternal breath; the crescent-shaped nine-gong gamelan whose rippling notes, when struck in continuous succession, echo the circling of time; the drum that marks the ending of one journey and the beginning of another, hastening the footsteps of the deceased toward the spirit realm. Once he’d finished, his daughter declared, “When I die, I want you to play all the instruments of the world one by one! I want you to sing me every song you know! Do you promise me, Papa, do you?” He nodded, and she said quietly, “Good, because I don’t ever want to leave you.” He’d wanted to abandon the funeral then, to spirit her as far from the presence of death as possible.
Tun realized now the weight on his chest was his longing for her. Again, he heard his daughter’s voice, as if she were inside the hut with him. His pulse quickened—What are you doing here? Go back home. But then it felt like they were already home, that he’d arrived back somehow, because there she was inside his room, surrounded by musical instruments, blowing this, tapping that, plucking a random string, curious about the new ones he’d brought to add to the collection. What’s this one, Papa? she inquired, her voice and words so gentle he dared believe he was forgiven for having left in the first place, for abandoning her in the middle of the night. It’s a leaf from a teak sapling. Sapling?—Is it a baby tree? Yes, a baby teak, one as tall as you. What’s it for, Papa? She held the leaf by its tiny stem between her thumb and forefinger, twirling it. For music. Music!—But how? He took the leaf from her and placed it between his lips, as one would a reed in the mouthpiece of a woodwind, his body the instrument. He blew on it, weaving a simple tune with his breath. The leaf vibrated, buzzing like a cicada. It’s alive, Papa, it’s alive! She clapped, enchanted. Yes, he agreed. Give anything the soul of music and it will sing. She turned to a drum and tapped on it. DTUM! Just once but loud enough.
Tun woke from his trance. He felt released, no longer paralyzed, although alone in the hut once more. Of course, he kept thinking, of course . . . He should’ve realized it. It was the wrong note, the wrong pitch, the wrong instrument altogether. He voiced the rhythm aloud—dtum dtak da-rum dtum dtak da-rum dtum dtak dtak dtum—invoking the double-headed sampho, a sacred drum regarded as the instrument of the Teacher, the Master. Once when he explained to her that the larger head was called the “teacher” and the smaller head the “child,” his daughter had laughed and thought the sampho was created specifically for the two of them, that it was their instrument.
He’d found what he was looking for. A reason to endure. He kept to one thought and one thought only—Sita, Sita, Sita. He had to stay alive. This was the only way to get back to her. No matter what it would take. He had to stay alive.
It’s Saturday morning and the otherwise tranquil atmosphere of Hotel Le Royal is abuzz, as if the hotel existed at a portal between past and present, most days retreating nearly a century back in time, ensconced in French Indochina semblance, and then on the weekends reemerging into the hectic modern world, with cell phones ringing in every corner, computers clacking away. A few seconds’ stroll through the lobby exposes Teera to a diversity of languages and nationalities, and the possible journeys that might have brought these sojourners to her homeland. On one sofa, a blond-haired, blue-eyed child sporting a UNESCO T-shirt speaks Khmer to her Cambodian nanny as fluently as she does some Scandinavian language to her siblings. A few seats away, an impeccably dressed designer of African descent, with a slight Brit
ish accent and a profile as regal as that of any Angkorian king depicted on the ancient temples, looks over samples of Cambodian silk with his clients, a group of well-heeled Spanish-speaking women. In a discreet corner, a young interracial gay couple leans into each other, shoulders touching, as one peruses his laptop and the other the Wall Street Journal, an array of emptied espresso cups scattered on the coffee table before them.
Knowing that Café Monivong, where she usually takes her breakfast, will be crowded, Teera heads in the opposite direction for the bookshop café overlooking the pool garden. In the cool, echoing hallway, she passes the prominent glass display of the champagne cocktail stemware specially made to welcome the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy decades earlier, in November 1967. The visit, Life magazine claimed in its glossy spread that Teera came across long ago at Cornell, was the realization of Mrs. Kennedy’s “lifelong dream” to see the ancient, ruined monuments of Angkor. But for all its glamorous facade, history tells us the journey had a serious political intent—to repair the fractured relations that resulted when Sihanouk, enraged by the war spilling over from Vietnam, had severed diplomatic ties with the United States in 1965.
Camelot in the Kingdom of Wonder, Teera thinks every time she happens by the display. What politics shatter, myth can mend and recast anew. Not only did these glasses survive war and revolution, they were exhumed from the abandoned cellars en masse with barely a scratch. Among them one in particular supposedly even bears the lipstick of the former first lady, preserved somehow all too clearly.
Teera turns into a narrow room with books lining one wall and souvenirs the other. Easily overlooked among the hotel’s glitzier shops, it appears more like a secret nook than a café, which, when she first discovered it, appealed to her solitary nature, her desire for quiet and privacy. Morning light streams through the tall windows behind the counter and bounces off the glass display offering an array of sandwiches, baked goods, and sweets so decadent that Teera’s teeth throb at the mere sight. A young waitress greets her, a face she has not seen before, obviously someone new to the staff. The young woman seems shy, even more reticent than Teera. Relieved at not being drawn into extended pleasantries, Teera makes a quick order and then walks past the dark wood counter out onto the small balcony. She settles into a corner seat, pleased to be the only guest here. Her mind returns to the cocktail glasses and she wonders vaguely if her grandfather was among the dignitaries gathered that evening to listen to Sihanouk’s original jazz renditions in honor of Mrs. Kennedy. It’s easy to imagine he might have been, given the important advisory role he’d held in the Cambodian Embassy in DC. The thought that one of those glasses—these very grounds—could bear some imprint of her grandfather sends a shiver down her spine.
Music of the Ghosts Page 22
