Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  By then, his heart had stopped.

  * * *

  What is today’s date, Comrade? Now that the answer has come to him, he wishes he could laugh. Memory is the enemy, the serial traitor. It betrays him again and again. Yet, he never learns. He forgets. He forgets that no one is safe—no man, woman, or child. He forgets that anything you do, or do not do, can be seen as a crime. He forgets that once accused, you are guilty, and everyone you know is culpable by association. He forgets, he forgot. He told them what they wanted to know—how he came to be linked to the traitor So Phim, where he’d first heard of the man, why he’d chosen to settle in Chhlong . . . He told them the truths and the lies, all they wanted him to admit. Isn’t it true that you’d been under that traitor’s command from the beginning? Wasn’t this the reason you chose Chhlong, a district in his zone, so that you could continue to plot against the Organization with him and others in his network? Who else do you know? Give us names—everyone you once knew, everyone you know now, all the people you’ve ever known. If you don’t give us enough names to add to your ksae . . . Let’s put it this way—do you want your daughter to die? It is as simple as that, you see.

  Again, memory deserted him, and he forgot all over again the evil they could do. So he told them, writing confession after confession, list after list. Countless names. Some real, others invented. But it made no difference. All the truths he’d purged, the lies he’d conjured. They murdered her anyway and threw her in the Mekong. Now she could swim with the dolphins, they told him, laughing. They’d defiled her, he learned in another round of beating. In this way, they made truth of their lies. The party is that powerful. He ought to remember.

  Tun turns in his cell, bumping into a wall either way. It’s not the same cell they threw him into that night after his arrest. This is Sala Slak Daek. They’ve brought him from Kratie to Kompong Thom, to a proper santebal—a security center. Chhlong is far away, and he would like to forget it, forget his entire life. But he cannot. Memory is deceitful.

  He hears a moan in the adjacent cell and, against his will, remembers it is Sokhon. Aung Sokhon. One of the many names his memory betrayed. A life he exchanged in the desperate hope to save his daughter’s. He loved her. Purely, profoundly. Innocently.

  But love is no excuse.

  Asingle throb in her heart, like a drumbeat. She wakes. Where am I? . . . It takes Teera some seconds to be fully conscious of her surroundings. Beside her, Lah is facedown under the cover, one arm around the purple silk elephant they bought at the hotel gift shop, the other hanging off the side of the bed. Seeing the child in her bed, Teera wonders, how can so small a life exert such hold, such sense of anchoring, upon her own?

  She leans over the child to look, and sure enough, Narunn has been edged off and is napping on the floor, elbow draped over his forehead, hand tentatively clasping Lah’s. Again, Teera’s heart throbs, the cartography of love, its ever-expanding frontiers.

  A drum echoes, the same sound that woke her, that she’d mistaken for her own heartbeat. Quietly, she rises and steps through the glass door onto the balcony, following the sound. On the grassy lawn adjacent to the children’s pool, a group of adolescents are arranging musical instruments on a raised platform for a performance later this evening, it seems. The large placard on an easel to the side says it is an ensemble of “former street children” trained by a local NGO specializing in traditional music. In the middle of the arrangement, the oldest-looking of the children—a boy about fourteen—hits a painted sampho, first with his left hand, then his right, alternately testing each head of the barrel drum. It’s twice as big as the one in the Old Musician’s care.

  The Old Musician. He lingers always at the periphery of consciousness, more persistent than the ghosts. Teera sighs . . . She hasn’t been able to stop thinking of him since their return several hours ago from Phnom Tamao.

  Leaving the wildlife sanctuary, they’d intended to drop Lah back at the temple as planned, but when they telephoned the Venerable Kong Oul to say they were on their way, he informed them that the Old Musician hadn’t yet come back from the city, which meant Teera wouldn’t be able to see him. Just as well, she thought. She was tired, they all were, so she asked the abbot if it would be all right to take Lah to the hotel and keep her for the night. The abbot couldn’t have been more delighted. It is now dusk, and Teera wonders if the Old Musician has returned to the temple. She’d been dreaming of him when she suddenly woke to the sound of the drum. She can’t recall a single detail of the dream. Surely the abbot would call if anything happened.

  She goes back inside and checks her cell phone. There’s no missed call. She unmutes it, just in case. Then she walks to where Narunn lies on the floor and, brushing her lips against his, whispers, “Hey, sleepy head.”

  He stirs, opens one eye, then the other. “Hey, sleepy heart . . .”

  She laughs. He gives a quick glance at the child, whose hand is still in his, and to Teera says, his voice unusually clear for someone just waking, “Let’s go to Siem Reap. Let’s take her with us.”

  “What?”

  Narunn lets go of Lah’s hand and pulls Teera to him. They lie in each other’s arms, her head on his chest, and he says softly, exhaling sleep from his body, “I was just now dreaming of home . . . You remember, I told you it’s on the Tonle Sap Lake, not far from Siem Reap. A fishing village.” Teera nods. “The two of you were there with me. You met my mother, my whole family. They’d been waiting for us. They were still alive . . . It was all so real.”

  They are both still, and even without looking, Teera knows his eyes are closed as he tries to imagine them again, tries to bring back the dream. She listens to his heart, its music. Now and then the sampho answers, setting the rhythm, leading the way.

  He has remained, unable to move, shackled to his corner by remembering. On several occasions during the day, strangers kindly stopped to ask if he was lost and needed help to find his way home, or if he had a home at all. When the Old Musician assured them he was all right, thanking them for their concern, some tried to offer money, which he humbly refused. But when a little girl from a noodle shop across the street came in the heat of the day with a packet of fried noodles and a bottle of water, he accepted this timely generosity, nodding in muted gratitude toward her parents, the proprietors of the shop. It is now evening, and in the gathering dusk the White Building appears less imposing, as if it might vanish completely when night arrives. But he knows it will survive the dark, as it has for decades.

  In recent years, the aging structure has provoked an ever-intensifying debate among disparate groups—activists fighting to preserve it for the historic value, developers maneuvering to demolish it and erect something new on one of the city’s most valuable plots of land, residents still living inside because it is the only home they’ve ever known. Several months back Dr. Narunn read to him a magazine feature on the White Building’s architect, Lu Ban Hap, who—second only to the renowned Vann Molyvann—was a driving force behind the New Khmer Architecture movement of the post-independence period.

  In 1949, the feature said, Lu Ban Hap traveled with other students on a steam ocean liner from Saigon to Marseilles. In Paris, many of his fellow Cambodian students became enthralled with Marxism. Yet Lu Ban Hap—encouraged by Vann Molyvann, who had arrived a few years earlier—pursued a different sort of revolutionary education at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where he became a disciple of Le Corbusier, the famed leader of modernist architecture. Whereas Marx advocated political mobilization as the path to social transformation, Le Corbusier’s modernism espoused a reimagining of the physical environments that structure social interaction, eschewing ornamentation in favor of mathematical order and harmony. The article went on to translate into Khmer a quote from Le Corbusier’s manifesto Vers une architecture—“At the root of today’s social unrest is a question of building: architecture or revolution.”

  Absorbing every word read to him, the Old Musician had the odd sen
sation that this line was a reprise from a forgotten conversation. Days later, it came to him. Music . . . or revolution. Before us lay these two paths, my friend . . . We made a terrible mistake. But choice was always there. It’s available to us even now, even here . . .

  Here in Slak Daek. This was what Sokhon meant. When Tun first learned that they had ended up in adjoining cells, he could hardly believe it. Yet, he had only to remind himself that those with a shared history were often brought to the same prison, even from different provinces. According to the brutal logic of the Organization, witnessing the torture of a friend or loved one would make a victim more likely to confess to any crime. Why then should Tun be surprised that their separate paths had suddenly converged? After all, on the list of people he’d implicated, he’d declared Sokhon a “friend of a friend.”

  Once in Slak Daek—in those last months of 1978—he and Sokhon did indeed become friends. That too was a choice. For in that hellhole where they festered as condemned enemies of the state, friendship was an act of rebellion, their joint sabotage, the only possible shadow of escape. They stole every chance they could to talk, to mourn, to remember. Though they couldn’t see through the wall of wood planks separating their two cells, they heard each other’s moans and cries, half-choked breaths, silent entreaties for death to come. A strange intimacy grew between them, as if pain—the agony of the body—exposes the heart as only love should. In this way, each man knew as much as he could bear to know about the other.

  In March 1974, the night of his daughter’s eighth birthday, Sokhon had gone underground, leaving his family behind. For months, he and Channara had talked it through, deciding that the birthday celebration would provide the perfect cover and, most important, prove his commitment to the cause. Why else would he abandon his daughter on such a special day? Given the family background—their privilege and status, their time in America—it was crucial for Sokhon to demonstrate his revolutionary zeal, Channara advised, if he was to come back for her and Suteera without eliciting suspicion. Sokhon’s entry into the movement was facilitated by a prominent party intellectual and commander of the North Zone, Comrade Kuon, who, shunning the austerity of the typical Communist military commander, enveloped himself with an atmosphere of art and festivity. It was this love of art—in particular music—that had connected the two men. Sokhon would spend the next year in various forest encampments in the liberated North Zone, crafting revolutionary songs with words to incite the masses, molding his own artistic sensibilities to party doctrine. Art is not born of inspiration, he learned, but of blood and sweat, the proletariat aspiration. An artist is merely another weapon of the revolution.

  The following March, on the week of Suteera’s ninth birthday, he returned to Phnom Penh as planned. The war had reached its climax, with insurgent forces closing in on the capital, poised for victory. The American and other foreign embassies were preparing to evacuate. It was only a matter of weeks, possibly days, before the old regime would collapse and a new, brighter Cambodia rise in its place. In the meantime, Sokhon told Channara, he could not risk capture by staying in the city longer than he already had. Although a revolutionary, he was only a civil cadre, and had to rely on the help of soldier comrades to scurry safely through combat zones. He would return once the city had been fully liberated, and Channara should be prepared then to leave with him and journey to an area of Kompong Cham in the North Zone where their new home would be. They would take Suteera but must cut ties with the rest of the family. Would Channara be able to make this ultimate sacrifice? Yes, came her firm reply. Amidst a relentless siege, Sokhon slipped back out of the city, abandoning them as he’d done before.

  Liberation came a few short weeks later, but, to his bewilderment, Sokhon could not return to the city, having been ordered to stay put. He was given no explanation, only this firm warning: A great deal is uncertain, alliances are shifting, and many are scrutinized. If you make the wrong move, we cannot guarantee your safety, let alone that of your family or anyone connected to you. Sokhon waited, clutching to the wan hope that Channara had remembered and would try to make her way to him with Suteera somehow. One month passed, then another, then many more . . . Finally, 1975 was coming to a close, and the only news he received concerned his own fate—he would be posted to a remote labor camp in the upper reach of Kompong Thom, his membership in the party revoked. He was advised by a sympathetic comrade not to seek help from any high-ranking cadres he knew, as they may already be implicated in some web of accusation. Instead, he should use this opportunity to disappear, go to Kompong Thom as ordered, and wait it out, until the party had purged itself of traitors. So Sokhon went, he disappeared, motivated by the fear that if he stayed in Kompong Cham, he might very well encounter his family and jeopardize their lives, now that he himself was somehow marked. Surely the party would right itself and everything would calm down soon.

  The purge continued, seemingly without pause. One campaign hardly ended before another was launched, the supposed enemies multiplying like lice, connected in an indecipherable tangle of strands. Comrade Kuon seemed to have vanished, his zone divided and passed on to others. The rhetoric following his disappearance suggested that he had come under suspicion of the party leadership.

  In Kompong Thom, Sokhon was no longer a musician and composer but was assigned to be an instrument maker, a man with far humbler skills, more like a carpenter, which put him in the laboring class, kept him safe. When not digging irrigation ditches or clearing bamboo forests for rice fields, he would make instruments for the village’s revolutionary musical troupe. This earned him a favorable nod now and then from the local cadres, the kinder of whom would furtively reward him with an extra ration of rice, a wedge of palm sugar, an ear of corn. Like most, he was starving, but the flimsiest stories suggesting the possibility that his family might still be alive would renew his reach for life. Even dreams fueled his hope, giving him energy to endure. He had only to close his eyes and they would appear before him—Channara, Suteera, his parents-in-law, Amara—all so real. His only family. He’d never known another.

  Orphaned since boyhood and brought up by the monks at Wat Nagara, Sokhon had come under the guardianship of the temple’s most illustrious devotee. Le Conseiller first took note of Sokhon through the mournful lyricism of his sung poetry, and later, as the boy matured into adolescence, through his thoughtful commentary on the dharma with respect to equality and social justice. At the behest of the temple’s abbot, Le Conseiller assumed the full responsibility of Sokhon’s education, paving the way for the young man’s schooling in Cambodia and abroad. While Sokhon’s intellectual acuity earned him respect among his peers, it was Le Conseiller’s powerful influence that procured him the royal government scholarship to study in America. Sokhon owed his every achievement to Le Conseiller, and when the formidable diplomat conceded to his request to marry Channara, he felt his existence couldn’t have been more fortunately endowed. Though intimate friends of the family had long foreseen the union—as it was common for a wealthy patriarch to take in a promising young boy and groom him for his daughter—Sokhon viewed it as nothing less than a miracle.

  He had loved Channara for most of his life, starting with his first glimpse of her when the family visited Wat Nagara during their annual return from America, where, he’d later learn, her father was an official in the Cambodian Embassy. She was five, a celestial creature with hair almost to her knees, and he was nine, a newly ordained novice with no hair at all. Orphaned and poor, he could only dream from a distance . . .

  And through the years he dreamt of her, feeling she was with him all the while, even when far away in another land. Every year he would wait for her return, thrilled about her month-long stay. Every year he would grow to love her more—silently, secretly. For all Sokhon dared to dream, he never presumed, never overstepped the boundary of generosity. Even the confidence he embodied was a bestowal of sorts from Le Conseiller, who, with a keen sense for self-invention, maintained an appearance of distan
ce and impartiality so that Sokhon could make his own mark, earn the respect necessary to move in their milieu.

  In his early twenties, while taking a respite from his studies in America, Sokhon married Channara. During the first few months of marriage, he would often wake in the middle of the night, slightly shaken, unsure if it was his heartbeat or hers that had stirred him to wakefulness. Staring at Channara, he could hardly believe she was his wife. She had not only accepted him but, by her own admission, loved him. He felt it. In some mysterious way, she loved him. Sokhon would fall back to sleep, thinking perhaps he was still dreaming. Later he would tell himself that certain dreams acquire the pulse of reality. His had throbbed into existence when he was that nine-year-old novice reciting the sutras, forgetting his line, falling out of rhythm with the other monks, as he caught sight of her hopping about the temple grounds, each leap pounding his heart. Several years into their marriage, when their daughter Suteera was born, he felt that his dream was complete, fully realized, becoming the life he lived and breathed.