Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  Teera contemplates now the topography before her—the man and his landscape. Narunn moves with the oars, his narrow back rippling with its own runnels and rivers, a force of strength at once quiet and resolute. In his company, she’s learned to let words and perceptions slide, as easily as water slides off the skin. Here, in the eyes of the villagers, she is his “wife,” and Lah their “daughter.” In her heart, there is no name, no spoken language, for the love she feels, the immediate and profound connection she shares with these two, each a life as adrift as hers, and yet together—the sight of them together—a kind of harbor all its own. Teera dares not cling or hope for more, dares not peer too far into the future, the vast unknown.

  They glide past other boats, and houses on stilts, most painted blue or green, deepening the hues of the water. Past a vendor with her boatload of fresh fruits and flowers and vegetables for the morning market. Past a “minimart” afloat under the shade of a giant umbrella offering individual packets of Nescafé and instant noodles, tin pots and pans and plastic dishes, hats and sunglasses, prepaid phone cards and, incredibly, international call services. Past a little boy rowing his even littler sisters in an oversize aluminum bowl—the kind used for laundering clothes—all three dressed in crisply ironed uniforms, heading toward a school buoyant on pontoons of rusted oil drums. The boy winks at Narunn, as one man would to another, acknowledging the concentrated effort required to ferry one’s family safely across the water.

  On they go, exchanging silent greetings with those they meet. A nod, a smile, a gesture of recognition. A deep bow to a row of monks receiving alms on a phoenix-shaped vessel near the steps of a temple of white-and-gold pillars. The monks do not stir from their contemplation, do not look up, do not chant or speak to the villagers giving alms from their boats. Speech is an incursion. Only the oars are loquacious, their rhythmic whisper and whoosh permissible, a welcome sutra in this birthing light.

  It is their last morning here, and Narunn is determined to take them all the way to the end of the mile-long stretch through the flooded forest, where the Tonle Sap Lake awaits. His previous attempts had been unsuccessful, their trip prolonged by countless things to see, drawn-out greetings, more old friends to reacquaint with. But starting out early like this, they should be able to make it there without too much disruption and turn back before the sun gets too hot. Lah scoots from the seat to the bottom of the dugout, where she can safely delight in the water. She drapes her arm over the hull and lets her fingers skim the surface, creating rills and rifts that mimic the patterns of the oars. Narunn whistles toward a group of fishermen with their nets and traps extending into the inundated mangroves. Recognizing the birdlike call, they whistle back, a tune all the more haunting amidst the drowning trees.

  A narrow winding path weaves ahead through an archipelago of water hyacinth. To the left, a thatched hut rocks gently in the breeze, surrounded by rafts of spices drying in the sun, and amidst the bold profusion of colors, three naked siblings stand in a line from tallest to shortest, a live fat snake wound around their shoulders like a ropy scarf, a shared comfort blanket, all twisted and tensile. Nearby on a raft with buckets and bowls and scattered bars of soap, their mother is washing their baby brother, dunking him right into the river, while the three children await their turns, faces still full of sleep. They exchange long, silent stares with Lah. To the right in a clearing, a man balances on a bamboo coracle, jabbing the water with his spear.

  As they glide farther now, without others in sight, Teera follows the rhythm of the oars breaking the water, and her thoughts turn to the quiet of another narrow winding path they traveled just a few days before . . . a footpath under giant strangling fig trees, leading from an ancient ruin, the last of the Angkor temples they’d seen that day. They were tired and wanted to find a quiet place to rest before catching their tuk-tuk back to the hotel. Halfway along the footpath, Teera heard the sound of a wind instrument emerging faintly from the surrounding woods. She stopped in her tracks, looked around, and, aside from Narunn and Lah walking a few steps ahead, saw no other souls. She listened for it again but heard only the rustling of leaves. She must’ve imagined it. She hadn’t slept well the night before, waking in the dark to the sound of a child’s crying, only to realize it wasn’t Lah’s but her own. She’d then lain awake, silencing herself against the pillow, until the pitch-blackness lightened to dawn.

  Her tiredness was making her hallucinate, she thought, standing stock-still on the path.

  “Something the matter?” Narunn asked, walking back to her, Lah high on his shoulders.

  “I thought I heard music . . .” A chill ran through her as soon as she said it, and then came the reply, echoing across ancient forests, across time—Out here, there’s only music of the ghosts.

  Teera felt weak. She needed to sit down. Narunn lifted Lah off his shoulders, unwound the kroma from his neck, and spread it for them under the canopy of the giant strangling figs.

  The instrument resurfaced, louder now, the unmistakable lament of a coconut tro. Other instruments emerged, joining in one by one—a bamboo flute or an oboe, a drum, a zither, a xylophone, cymbals and bells—until a whole ensemble resounded through the forest. The three listened, Teera and Narunn leaning into each other, heads and shoulders touching; Lah sprawled in front of them, her tiny head in Narunn’s lap. The melody shimmered, bloomed, and cascaded. Then, gradually, it evaporated. Only the echoes of the drum remained, like the footfalls of some unseen guardian enjoying a late-afternoon stroll, taking pleasure in the sunlight coruscating from the leaves.

  The three listeners rose and headed toward the source of the music. Something magical and divine. Teera let her imagination indulge. An ensemble of forest sprites, or apsaras and devatas, those deities depicted on the bas-relief of the temple they’d just seen. What inspired beings had rendered such a beguiling, ethereal tune?

  A small thatched roof came into view, and in its shelter, on a raised bamboo platform, a group of musicians were retuning their instruments. One of them looked up and slowly turned toward the crackle of feet on pebbles and leaves. He was blind, the lids of his eyes sealed shut into two ridged lines. Sensing approaching listeners, he lifted the bow of his three-stringed tro, which, in fact, had only one working string. He tuned his entire body to listen again, and then, as if sensing something else—the quiver of another’s heart, the current of sorrow from a long-forgotten time—placed the bow back down on his lap.

  Narunn offered greetings to the men, whose clothes were so threadbare they assumed the color of earth and straw. He introduced himself by way of his village—“a child of Elephant Tusk Landing”—and Teera and Lah as his “family.” He conversed with them as though they were brothers and uncles, smiled and laughed in response to their questions, and asked what Teera was too overcome to ask. How long have you been playing together as a group? Were you musicians before your injuries? How were you injured? The last question, Teera was certain, Narunn knew the answer to, just by looking at the scars, the patterns of healing, but he asked anyway for her sake, sensing her wonder. An amputee, who handled his worn prosthetic as though it were a priceless musical instrument, said he had been a rice farmer; another a fisherman who’d explored every tributary of the Tonle Sap; one a soldier in the government army after the Khmer Rouge; another a soldier during the Khmer Rouge, forced to fight as the regime was falling. The tro player had been a teacher, until he couldn’t see, couldn’t read and write, not even for himself, let alone teach another to do so. Land mines were their common enemy. Their scars, their wounds, their missing limbs, and these partially broken instruments salvaged from the city’s refuse—all brought them together. Teera listened mutely, moved beyond words by this ensemble of disfigurement, dearth, and undiminished dignity.

  They wanted to play another piece for the three visitors. As the tro player swept the bow across the only remaining string of his upright fiddle, Teera suddenly realized why the night before she’d woken up crying in the dark: she was
bringing to completion something she’d started decades earlier, something interrupted at the borderland by the fear of death around her. A lamentation for the homeland she was about to abandon.

  As they walked slowly back to the entrance where their ride awaited, meandering the long way around, Teera told Narunn about her desperate flight a lifetime ago from Kompong Cham to the jungle of Siem Reap, the ghostly tremor that’d stirred her to waking, the quiver of her own heart she’d mistaken for phantom music. About a boy named Chea, a soldier who, at the fall of the Khmer Rouge, had scurried her and Amara across the rice fields and forests not so far from where they were now, guiding their steps through the interstices of land mines, and delivered them to safety at the refugee camp in Thailand, only to turn around again to help others. Chea was from Siem Reap, a native of Phum Kruos. For years, once the country had become stable again, her aunt had sent letter after letter from America to government offices here, inquiring about him. She’d pursued every possible contact, paid people to search for him, but all led to nothing. When Teera herself had first arrived in Cambodia, she too had contacted the census office in Siem Reap to see whether they had any records of anyone with that name and history. And she’d been forced to accept anew that there were those whose fates she would never know. Now, having heard the musicians and their stories, she feared Chea, who’d carried her as explosives detonated all around, and had probably helped many others escape in the same way, might’ve lost his own life to those remnants of abandoned battlefields. The injustice of it was more than Teera could bear.

  Narunn took her hand and squeezed it. “But perhaps like them, like these musicians, your friend could’ve survived an explosion. If he’s still alive, if he’s somewhere in the country—or in this world—it’s not impossible to cross paths with him again.”

  Teera stared at him, astounded by the steadiness with which he clung to every possibility of life, seen and unseen, despite all he’d lost, or perhaps because of it. An emotion overwhelmed her. She felt profoundly indebted to the forces that had kept him alive, that had willed his path toward hers.

  “In the meantime, we keep searching . . .”

  * * *

  The river widens, spreading open like a fan. Suddenly they emerge into the oceanic vastness of the Tonle Sap Lake. There is no discernible shoreline in front of them, only the boundless undulation of blue and green, interspersed with reflections of the clouds, birds in flight. Here and there outlines of something solid materialize—shoals, sandbars?—only to dissolve completely when a flock of cranes or ibis break the surface of the water. Narunn stops rowing, letting the tips of the oars drop like anchors. He turns to face Teera, and a look passes between them. Tuk tov . . . kompong nov.

  The boat departs . . . but the harbor remains.

  As always, there were two guards, one keeping watch at the closed door, and the other doing the interrogator’s bidding. A moment earlier, with his blindfold removed, Tun had noticed that the small square window lined with iron bars was now boarded up. Aside from a muted sliver of sunlight piercing through a gap between the boards, he could no longer see the expansive tree trunk whose rooted presence he’d often fixed his gaze on as violence rained down upon him. He noticed always with renewed horror the wall of instruments, their ready compliance, the singular inviolable code of conduct. You must not scream under any circumstance. The words mocked him. His eyes frantically searched for something to focus on—some sign that there existed a world beyond this absolute hell. He found nothing, save for the sliver of light. He heard their question but couldn’t bring himself to open his mouth to speak.

  They were asking whether or not he wanted to eat. Cee reu min cee? His first impulse was to shield his face, clamp his hands over his lips, shut them tight. But his wrists, like his ankles, were bound behind him, as he was made to kneel on the tile floor. He shook his head vehemently, idiotically, anticipating the excrement they would feed him, as they had the last few sessions. Yet, he didn’t remember seeing the bucket in the room, couldn’t detect any fresh stench besides his own fear. Still, they could beat him until he defecated and make him eat his own shit. “Arh’aing cee reu min cee?” the guard standing next to him demanded, echoing the chief interrogator. They no longer addressed him as “comrade.” Arh’aing was what you’d call a leech, a worm, anything other than a human. The guard grabbed his hair and pulled his head back so that his mouth was agape to receive whatever they would force down his throat. Tun wanted to plead, but he could barely swallow, his windpipe suddenly hardened as if coated with cement. Again, the chief interrogator murmured, with violent calm, “Cee reu min cee? It’s a simple question. And really, there’s only one answer. Just say it, and it’ll be over.”

  Suddenly the end of a bludgeon smashed his left eye, like the force of a steel ball. “CEE!” he screamed in agony, falling to the floor, the side of his face smacking the hard tiles, his protruding cheekbone shattering as if bones were made of powder. “CEE!” Yes, he’d devour his own excrement like the cur he was! He’d eat anything! His own rotting flesh if he must! Whatever they said, he’d obey.

  He whimpered, disgusted by his weakness, yet unable to rise from the floor, from his debasement. He wanted only to press his smashed eye to the guard’s bare foot and still the pain against the warmth of another’s flesh. He was certain his eyeball had detached and embedded itself in the back of his skull. The freshness of pain, its rawness and intensity, shocked him as much as it hurt. He’d expected that by now he’d be used to it, his nerves numbed by the repetition of abuse, the severity of impact. He’d thought that at some point pain would reach a level the body could no longer translate into words or awareness. That he would no longer be able to identify it, just lose himself in a paroxysm, like a splinter in an immense explosion.

  The guard kicked him, shaking his foot loose of the despicable heap he’d become. “Now you’ve admitted the truth,” the chief interrogator said from his perch on the edge of his desk, one leg swinging nonchalantly, “what exactly did you do for the CIA?”

  Tun reeled. He’d misunderstood. A trick of the tongue. A foreign intrusion into his own language, a language, though innate as breathing itself, that had become alien to him. C, not cee. Even a single letter could be a trap, ensnaring a victim into self-condemnation.

  “Everything,” Tun lied through his shattered skull, his battered eye, already swollen shut. “Everything the CIA wanted me to do. I was their lackey, their spying dog . . .”

  Satisfied, the interrogator got up and left the room. The two guards remained. Then the one at the door said to the one who had beat him, “Is he dead, Comrade?”

  “If only he were that lucky.” The older guard spat, disgusted, the bludgeon still in his hand. “We can’t take him back to the cell now, short of carrying him.”

  The younger one moved from the door, stood over Tun, and, with the butt of his rifle, pushed him on the shoulder so that Tun fell flat on his back. “I’ll stay with him. Until he can move again,” the boy offered. The older guard hesitated, then reluctantly nodded. “Make sure you call me when he’s ready.”

  Once they were alone, the younger guard lowered himself onto his haunches, his AK47 in the crook between his abdomen and thighs. Tun recalled this was how the boy had held his gun when he’d first laid eyes on him that long-ago morning by the stream at the forest encampment. How the boy would always hold his gun when not fighting, as if cradling it. “Why won’t you die?” his former trainee growled, leaning low into Tun’s face. “Why are you so pigheaded? Why do you still hang on?”

  Tun struggled to express himself. “You . . .” I know you. You were once under my command, my care . . . It was obvious from the look in his eyes that the guard remembered. Tun said the only thing that mattered— “Why . . . don’t you . . . help me then? To die.”

  Back in the chamber with the other prisoners, Tun slowly came to his senses, and he began to regret his words. He imagined what would happen if they reached the chief interrogato
r’s ears. Who do you think you are? Only the party will decide how and when you die! It would be one thing if they killed him for having spoken so boldly, but he knew they could make him suffer far more terribly than he already had. Each time he thought he’d endured the worst, they shoved him deeper into the abyss, reminding him there was no limit to their evil. Tun told no one, not even Sohkon, whom he trusted with his life—whom he’d entrusted with ending it, should such a moment present itself.

  Weeks passed, his injured eye began to heal, the swelling reduced bit by bit, though it still throbbed painfully, and he could no longer see clearly with it. His right cheekbone did not shatter, as he’d believed, but was badly bruised. His body vigorously healed itself. While others around him died, Tun, to his utter dismay, continued to live. He kept waiting for something to happen, and yet he knew not what . . . Lightning to strike this whole place down? A miracle, a greater force than this evil to wipe them all out? At times he wondered if he’d imagined the whole exchange with the boy.

  Then the day arrived when it was his turn again in the interrogation room. Like countless times before, they brought him in blindfolded, but before they even had a chance to position him as they wanted, commotion broke out in another part of the prison. At first all he heard was the sound of gunshots, then running footsteps, and the breathless voice of a guard at the door, addressing the chief interrogator: “Elder Brother!—A prisoner’s stabbed his own throat!”