Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  “Mostly blank,” the man continues monotonously. “You’ve left most of these pages blank. You haven’t told us the truth we already know.”

  There is something strange about the phrasing. Every word sounds like a trap. If you already know, why ask? He dares not voice his rebellion. Instead, he focuses on a black revolutionary cap hanging from a loose nail in the wall above the man’s head. A still object. Weightless, benign. It exerts no harm, even if hurled with force. To the far right, in the periphery of his vision, hover familiar objects. A cow’s rope, frayed from overuse. Steel cables of varied length and diameter. Electric cords with exposed copper wires, metal clamps. A clear plastic bag, soiled with condensation and spit. A pair of pliers. All in a tidy row, each tool on its own hook, secure in its purpose. Beneath, a phrase drawn in charcoal. Even without turning his head, Tun knows what it says—You must not scream under any circumstance. The rule is scrawled across the wall of every such room. Beaten into him.

  “Is there nothing more you can write, Comrade? Nothing more you want to tell us?”

  My hands . . . Just as he thinks this, Tun feels the metal band coming off one wrist; his arms swiftly pulled back behind the chair, manacles clanging, banging against wood; then his hands bound once more. They are quick, unlocking and locking him in mere seconds, the two guard dogs. No, guards. Boys. They are boys. Humans like him. He has to believe this. They’re capable of reason. If not that, then at least pity. Some part of them must pity him. One bends down now and straps his already shackled legs to the chair. Fear makes Tun delirious. So he hopes, as he always does, that this time will be different. Hope is his body’s last defense before the inevitable final defeat, which will come at the hour they alone decide. Along with the written rules are the unwritten ones—You must not die under torture. You will suffer as long as we deem necessary. If you die, then another will suffer on your behalf.

  “Let us be like brothers,” his host susurrates. “With no secrets between us. You confess, and I write it down. Will this be easier, less painful?”

  His host. This too, Tun must believe. That the man facing him is capable of human decency. A person who invites you into his space and offers you tea cannot be completely dispossessed of kindness. Tun’s mind splits in two, one half arguing with the other. There must be a sliver of humanity one can appeal to. Let us be like brothers . . . Yes, brothers. Tun tries to nod but pain shoots from the base of his neck to the top of his skull. He remembers the club that caused it. He desperately wants to please his host—to cooperate, as they say. But silence fills his throat. Fear mocks him, laughing. You think you can overcome me?

  Suddenly a current of air rises, and with it the man in front of him, palms slamming the desk, tea tray rattling—“Talk!” The black cap drops to the floor behind him, the nail clattering briefly across the tile floor, revealing a fractured hole in the plaster of the wall. Tun feels like that hole, barely visible yet thoroughly worn. His body an orifice of pain.

  When all is still again, the chief interrogator says, returning to his practiced monotony, “Let’s begin with a simple question.” He takes another sip of tea, swooshing it in his mouth as if ridding his tongue of some bad taste before swallowing. “What is today’s date, Comrade?”

  He cannot remember. The year, yes—1978, as the chief interrogator announced earlier—but today’s date he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. Another tide of panic seizes him, and he can only recall that he was in a similar room earlier—this morning, yesterday, the day before, the whole of this week? Round it goes, the same questioning, the same illogic. You’re here because you’re guilty, you’re guilty because you’re here. He feels a sudden tightening around his ankles and recognizes it now. Not ants. Wires attached to him. Somewhere in the room, he knows, is a car battery. His torso jerks involuntarily. The residual shudder of electricity from an earlier session. The body remembers, even as the mind makes no sense. What is today’s date, Comrade? Time ceases in hell. Only the cycle of torture. His nerves brace, his throat clamps shut. You must not scream under any circumstance. A jolt of electricity rattles his core, splitting him in half. Fire surges through his blood and all he wants is water. Water, please. Water. Just a drop on his tongue. Yes, the tea, the tea. Just a sip. A brief clarity—they put the tea in his direct vision yet out of his reach, knowing this is what he will want after the jolt. The liquid is meant to torment him. Everything can be a tool. Confess your crimes, and you can go back to your cell! CONFESS! Tun’s head explodes. He cannot separate thoughts from speech, his own howling from the scream of his tormentors, from the roar of flames scourging his insides. Words escape his throat, burning as they go, splintering into myriad bright points, needles and spears. Lightning rods. Another jolt. Then another. His world blackens.

  * * *

  Back in his cell, Tun remembers the date. It was something he ought to have easily recalled. They’d told him earlier, at the predawn interrogation, during which he’d signed and dated his confession. Did he not remember? No. He couldn’t utter even this single response, let alone offer more. Panic took precedence, and pain became his sole consciousness. So they accused him once again of deliberately withholding information. Undoubtedly then, he would conceal more sensitive matters, such as plots to overthrow the Organization and countless other treasons. You’ve betrayed the party. If you deny it, then you’re claiming the party is wrong, and this in itself is treason. No matter what you say, you are guilty, you stinking corpse! There’s no escaping it!

  The last bit is the only truth they speak. He cannot escape. The certainty of it hit him again when he woke and realized he did not die as he’d hoped. Death is the only way out of Slak Daek, the only mercy granted, if any, and the party alone decides when it will come. They will keep him alive for as long as they need him to confirm their suspicions, give proof to their fears, feed their paranoia. There’s always another name, another traitor he can point them to. Another life he can exchange for one more gulp of air. But he does not want to live. There is no reason to. She is gone. His anchor and compass. His life’s purpose.

  Perhaps this is the “truth” they say they already know and he need only admit—that it was never the Organization he’d fought for and loved. To that, he must confess. He’s been a traitor all along.

  The date, he now recalls, is September 5, 1978—that is if it’s still the same day. He’s not certain how long he blacked out. It doesn’t matter. Time serves no purpose, brings no splinter of light into his interminable nights blindfolded in a coffinlike cell, except as reminder of the sustained lie he told himself. He believed he could protect her, despite the grim reality, the total transformation of his land and people, the metamorphosis of idealism into depravity. After all, he’d kept her safe and alive even in those terrible months after Om Paan was killed, even through the countless battles in that last year before the Revolutionary Army won and seized control of the entire country. If she survived the war as it raged around her, escaping explosions and gunfire only meters away, while his soldiers smoldered like termites in a farmer’s field fire, then she would survive anything. It was a matter of luck, reinforced by love, his fierce determination to safeguard her life with his own. On the battleground one learns to believe in such things as luck and destiny, when time and again a skilled commander falls to a single bullet and a clumsy foot soldier survives a blast that has obliterated his entire infantry. It was his daughter’s destiny to live.

  When the Revolutionary Army captured Phnom Penh that April in 1975 and the long, bloody civil war came to a close, Tun thought the most dangerous part of his journey was over. Even amidst the devastation caused by the conflict, the chaos that followed as cities were emptied and people arbitrarily flung to rural areas all over the country, he remained assured that order would be restored, that peace and calm would eventually come. Out of the maelstrom, the country would remake itself, and so would he. Mistakes could not be undone; nonetheless, he resolved to do good, because, having glimpsed barbarity at c
lose range, it was the only way he knew to be human again.

  During the mass evacuation, while patrolling a district some distance from Phnom Penh, he would find ways for families to stay together when they were threatened with separation. He’d send city dwellers toward towns and villages where they had family connections so they’d be welcome. He’d help lost children find their parents or, if they were orphaned, assign them to people who seemed good and kind, and likely to care for them. When transport became available, he’d give a place to the elderly and the disabled first. He tried to set an example for the company under his command. Though he did not always succeed. Once several soldiers marched into a small temple and ordered the monks out at gunpoint. While the battle-crazed adolescents shot at sacred shrines and statues, he herded the monks into a recently evacuated villa outside the temple ground and told them to shed their monastic robes and put on whatever ordinary clothes they could find. It was for their safety, he explained. Another time he had been unable to stop a soldier from shooting a man who’d tried to flee, apparently an officer from the defeated government army. Tun heard shouting behind him, then a shot, and as he spun around, he saw that the officer had already fallen to the ground, his face in the dirt, a bullet through the back of his head.

  In situations like these, he was grateful that his daughter was back at the temporary base, cared for now by female comrades in a platoon assigned to provide backup support to his company during the evacuation period. Weeks after Om Paan’s death on the battleground in Oudong, his daughter tried to ask him why her beloved nanny had died in that horrible manner, why she’d died at all, and he could offer only this feeble explanation: “Because there’s a war.” She nodded, as if agreeing, as if she understood the cold injustice of warfare. Then after a moment she said, “It’s your fault, Papa. It’s your fault.” She never spoke again of Om Paan, or asked him why soldiers as young as herself were killed before her eyes in the subsequent battles she was forced to witness at his side. But she wouldn’t have needed to say another word, for he’d come to accept her judgment as irrevocable truth. When one engages in war, one must take responsibility for every life lost.

  He no longer wanted to be a soldier, revolutionary or otherwise. He wanted only what the Organization promised to every citizen in Democratic Kampuchea: a simple life in the countryside. At the end of ’75, six or seven months into the new regime, the first “purifying” campaign was launched in an effort to cleanse the insidious bourgeois tendencies within the party membership itself. Art was unequivocally bourgeois, so Tun, a former musician and an intellectual, was stripped of his cadre rank, as were countless other party members of similar background. Henceforth, he was told, to sharpen his proletarian consciousness he had to work in the fields as a rice farmer. Yet, because of his valuable contribution during the insurgency against the Lon Nol government, he could transfer to a village of his own choosing.

  Tun could hardly believe his luck, as if the Organization had heard and granted his wish. Many others were not so fortunate. Comrade Im—the commandant of the forest encampment where Tun had received his training—was eliminated; his previous collaborations with Vietnamese comrades marked him ideologically impure.

  Tun took his daughter to Chhlong, his mother’s birthplace in Kratie. They were assigned a traditional wooden house on stilts facing east to the Mekong. The house was small but sturdy, with one big room in front and a long, narrow cooking area in back. His daughter’s favorite spot was at the top of the stairs, where she would sit in the doorway and search the currents for the Irrawaddy dolphins known in that part of the river. Once, shortly after they’d arrived, he took her on a boat at sunrise and they encountered a pod of the dolphins playing with the light bouncing off the water just meters away. The smallest one—a calf not much bigger than a bolster pillow—flipped and swam backward, seeming to wave gleefully to them with its stubby fins. His daughter was utterly delighted, the happiest she’d ever been since they left home. He couldn’t return to her everything she’d lost—their home in Phnom Penh, Om Paan, her childhood—but he could give her this momentary joy. So at sunrise before joining others at the rice fields each morning, they’d slide out in the palm dugout and wait for the dolphins.

  In this way, they became father and daughter again, taking pleasure in the newness of their surroundings, the reassuring pattern of village life, the company of kindhearted villagers who noted his daughter was without a mother and he was without a wife. Some of the village elders remembered Tun’s mother from her youth, before she married and moved away to Neak Leung, and this knowledge was enough for Tun and his daughter to be regarded by the village cadres as peasants rather than former city dwellers, the less desirable class. Residents of Chhlong were charmed to see how this “widower” was so devoted to his only child, and how the motherless girl in turn seemed protective of her father. At work in the fields, they would sometimes spot her hugging him with innocent exuberance, and despite knowing the rules against familial affection, many could not help wishing their children might show them similar tenderness.

  As the revolution intensified, with rumors of extreme hardship and starvation in other parts of the country, Chhlong was buffered from the most radical policies. Comrade So Phim, secretary of the East Zone that included this corner of Kratie, had a reputation for being lenient, seeing no need to enforce communal eating or revolutionary attire, at least not until much later. He was a hugely popular party leader, whom Tun first heard of when fighting in Kompong Cham, in an area east of the Mekong under Comrade So’s military command. It was this tenuous connection with a man he’d never met that would later prove perilous.

  Since the first “purifying” campaign that stripped Tun of his rank, the Party Center had launched successive nationwide purges, each rooting out and eliminating tens of thousands of “traitors.” By April or May of ’77, two years into the regime, rumors of mass killings had become indisputable reality. Whole families disappeared from Chhlong, as others arrived, heaving like colonies of the undead, emaciated and tormented, only to be carted away again. Severe rice shortages plagued the country, most shockingly in the Northwest Zone, once the most fertile land. The Party Center blamed the bad harvests on “certain internal enemies” plotting to overthrow the Organization and undermine the regime. Entire communes came under suspicion, accused of harboring traitors, and villagers were massacred en masse.

  Then, only three or four months ago, Comrade So, rumored to be among the accused, disappeared. Some said he shot and killed himself when the Party Center ordered his arrest. It was impossible for Tun to know with certainty. So much was kept from ordinary people, with impenetrable layers of secrecy woven around the Organization. He didn’t want to ask questions that would draw attention, or do anything that could brand him an enemy of the regime. Like all, he lived in terror from one day to the next.

  One evening at the beginning of August, he was at home with his daughter. Together they had returned from the fields, the sunset magical after the rain, casting a shimmering rainbow over the water, so they thought they’d go down to the river to wash and possibly catch a glimpse of the dolphins. She’d stepped inside to collect a change of clothes for them each, and while waiting he scanned the river for bobbing heads or the flick of a tail. So absorbed was he in his search that he did not notice the three revolutionary guards approaching until they’d already surrounded him.

  “The Organization summons you,” they said. Tun went completely cold. Those four unmistakable words were his death sentence, and to ask what crime might warrant such a punishment would only have provoked his execution on the spot. He recognized them as new guards, recently posted to his village, so he could not rely on familiarity. Instead he tried pleading, but his words came out muddled—“Comrades, my daughter . . . she’s only twelve.” She was still a child, he’d meant to say, and she needed him. Their response was equally obscure: “Yes, we know, and that is exactly your crime. Your own daughter!”

  “Papa.”
He heard her whisper from the top of the stairs. A bourgeois term. She hadn’t called him this in a long time. Since liberation, it’d always been “Father,” and, more recently, “Comrade Father.” He saw the fear in her eyes, heard it in her voice. He summoned what was left of his own courage and responded in kind, abandoning her revolutionary name: “Sita, my love.” If this was to be the last time, he wanted her to know what she’d meant to him. “My life—” His throat swelled. He couldn’t say more.

  They ordered her back inside the house and pulled him away. He made no attempt to resist. By now he’d stopped thinking of his own life. If she was to survive without him, he mustn’t give them any reason to punish her. He kept walking without once turning back. The villagers would care for her. She was deeply loved. She would know who to go to.

  At a crossroad outside the village, an oxcart waited for them. Tun climbed in, and the guards quickly bound his wrists and ankles, blindfolded him. He didn’t understand the need for all this—it would’ve been simpler to end his life with a bullet.

  As the cart trundled along uneven paths, the evening turned to night, the darkness beneath his blindfold deepened, the crickets came out and tuned their ensembles. Several hours must’ve passed before the oxcart finally stopped. Tun felt a pair of hands loosen the rope around his ankles. Another hand urged him off the cart. He stood swaying for a moment before regaining his balance. They took turns shoving him forward and he waddled barefooted, his car-tire sandals abandoned on the oxcart, until they paused at what sounded like a wooden door creaking open. A final shove, and the door banged shut. The rattle of metal chain and lock. He was on a hard cement floor, alone in pitch-blackness, imprisoned within layer upon layer of incomprehensibility.

  The first blow came in the middle of the night. He thought the roof had collapsed. A white brightness flooded the room, blinding him. A flashlight in his eyes, the blindfold having slipped to his nose. Then came the second blow, a rifle butt to the side of his head. Blood seeped through his hair and down his cheekbone. Confess your crime! He tried to tell them he’d committed no crime, but this only earned him a kick in his chest. Still he persisted, and still they were not convinced. More kicks, more blows, until he heaved against the cement with only enough breath to utter, W-w-what crime? The answer was more devastating than the violence they’d rained down on him: You’ve had an immoral relationship with your daughter. We’ve seen you hug. As you said, she is twelve, not a little baby. She doesn’t need to be comforted in such a way. It is immoral. This kind of love—between father and daughter—is impure. She’s also arrested, and if you don’t want her to suffer like you, then you must confess your crime—all your crimes, including your traitorous connections, everyone in your ksae kbot, your string of traitors and betrayals . . .