Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  The old woman begins to pick out the greasy, stringy beef with her fork and puts it in her husband’s dish. Turning to Teera, she says in Khmer, “No teeth left.” She smacks her exposed gums together and grins.

  In spite of herself, Teera smiles and reluctantly lets down her guard.

  “Is this your first time going back, chao srey?”

  Teera’s heart skips a beat. It isn’t at all unusual for Cambodians to address one another in familial terms, but she can’t remember when she was last called “granddaughter” with such tenderness. An image of the cave where Teera left her grandparents blooms in her mind, its entrance illuminated by the setting sun, giving the impression that it was lit from within. She swallows, wondering as she has countless times over the years how they perished. Who went first—her gentle, diminutive grandmother, or her stoic, once-imposing grandfather? They’d already been starving, their bodies weakened and damaged beyond saving, when she and Amara were forced to abandon them in the cave in order to keep up with the rest of their group as they navigated the jungle. They probably didn’t last through the night. They had survived through the regime, through four long, miserable years, only to end up betrayed by life, handed over to death in the middle of nowhere.

  Teera takes another sip of the coffee to help ease down the lump in her throat. She gives only a tentative nod to the old woman’s inquiry. Already she regrets allowing herself to be seduced by those toothless grins.

  “It’s our first trip as well,” the old woman says. “Now that we’re getting on in years we haven’t got much time left, as you can see. Soon we’ll be too old and sick to travel.”

  Teera winces, recalling the oncologist’s words not long ago. At this advanced stage, I’m afraid the prognosis is not good. She remembers him looking from her to Amara as he spoke, unsure who was responsible for whom. When she and her aunt first walked into his office, he’d assumed they were sisters, as Amara’s petite frame made her look more like a woman in her late thirties than midforties. I am truly sorry, he concluded decisively after what felt like mere seconds. What could you know! Teera felt the urge to scream at him, at his useless apologies, the absurdity of it all. For them to have endured indescribable inhumanity only to succumb to something as nameable as pancreatic cancer seemed a mockery of their struggle all these years to rebuild their lives. It was their shared belief that after what they had been through they’d overcome anything, that their survival had purpose and meaning—a reason. They were meant to live, damn it, she wanted to tell the smug doctor. Amara was stronger than this. She’d live. Her aunt would fight and live. You’ll see! Instead, in a tone close to threatening, Teera rasped, We’ll seek a second opinion. And to Amara, she added shakily, desperately, A third and fourth, if we need to. Amara looked at her with pity, as if Teera had been the one with cancer. They left the doctor’s office in defeated silence.

  Only later, when they were back home, did Amara speak. If I’d had more time, I might’ve returned to Cambodia. Her aunt had chosen her words carefully, speaking in her precise, practiced English. But all Teera could think of was that the verb tense was all wrong. Did Amara not remember anything about the past subjunctive from all those grammar lessons Teera had helped her with? You’re not dead yet, she wanted to say. There’s still time. You have more time. You do! Instead, she burst into tears, to which Amara responded, Oh, Teera, we’ve been blessed in so many ways. I’ve had a good life. I got to see you grow up, didn’t I? I’ll always be grateful for these extra years, for all we’ve built together here. Her aunt sounded as if she believed she ought to have died with the others. Teera grew more upset.

  In the following days and weeks, Amara, with her characteristic equanimity, proceeded to put her life in order. She resigned from her longtime position as the head of an organization that provided social services to Cambodian immigrants and refugees in Minnesota. She went to a lawyer and made a will to ensure that Teera, her only kin, would receive all her savings and assets, which, including a life insurance policy she’d had the foresight to buy many years earlier, amounted to a small fortune. Certainly enough to allow you to devote time to your own writing, she explained matter-of-factly, while Teera listened in stunned dismay. You must look after yourself, darling. Tend to all that’s alive in you, to what’s living. And let me tend to the dead.

  Besides the inheritance she’d left for Teera, Amara had bequeathed an amount for the construction of a communal stupa at Wat Nagara, their old family temple. She told Teera she’d already written to the abbot of the temple, expressing her intentions that it serve as a kind of memorial to their family, and to those who had perished during the Khmer Rouge years. Weeks passed, then a month, then two. Amara grew visibly sick, her physical deterioration reducing her to a pale copy of herself. Then one day, sitting Teera down and handing her a small wooden box, Amara said, If you should ever return to our country, please take a bit of my ashes in this and leave it in the stupa there. Teera reeled in the midst of her aunt’s calm instructions. But you’re still alive! she wanted to shout, too confused and upset to make sense of her own words, let alone Amara’s. Divide up the ashes? She felt certain this was sacrilegious—a violation of Buddhist custom and belief, even as she was acutely aware that a divided self was something her aunt had to live with daily since their arrival in America, a reality she struggled to accept as she built her life in a country where she felt she never truly belonged.

  If you should ever return . . . Those words angered Teera. They sounded like a betrayal. Why should she? Why would she want to? There would be no one for her to visit or reconnect with. Unless this was Amara’s way of saying she wanted Teera to return, to take her back and reunite her, if only in spirit, with the rest of the family. Teera couldn’t voice her objection. Amara was dying.

  Every time she thinks of her inheritance, Teera can’t escape the feeling that she’s always gotten the better end of life, while her aunt bore the brunt of it, suffered. Died. Is this why she’s going back now? To purge her own guilt by fulfilling Amara’s unspoken longing for home?

  Amara passed at the beginning of the year, three days short of her forty-seventh birthday. Her sudden death sent shock through the Cambodian community, and the tremendous outpouring of grief engendered a kind of collective mourning on a scale befitting a minor celebrity. Teera shouldn’t have been surprised. For many years, Amara was a constant fixture in the lives of so many. There was never a birthday, graduation, wedding, or funeral she failed to attend. If invited, which was almost always, she was there to offer her quiet support. Naturally, when news of her death got out, the whole community came to pay respects, gathering at a funeral home in Minneapolis, where the undertaker, familiar with the rites of a Cambodian funeral, arranged a row of chairs for Buddhist monks on the pulpit facing the mourners. They went on to the crematory a few blocks away, where Amara’s body was incinerated and the ashes collected in an urn with the efficiency, Teera noted with dismay, of a well-run bakery. The next day they gathered once more at Wat Minnesotaram, the temple in rural Hampton where an evening wake was held. The urn was on display atop a small table beside a photograph of Amara, accompanied by funerary chants and music meant to ease her aunt’s spirit on its journey into the otherworld.

  Then, sometime at the end of June, a bit more than half a year after Amara’s death, just when Teera felt that everyone had grown accustomed to her aunt’s absence and she could begin to mourn privately, a letter arrived from Cambodia. The author of the letter offered his condolences. He had heard of Amara’s untimely passing from the abbot of Wat Nagara, the temple where he had sought shelter. To Teera’s astonishment, the stranger went on to explain that while he offered his deepest sympathies for her great loss, he was in fact writing in regard to some musical instruments belonging to her father, which he wished to give her. Teera didn’t know what to make of it, believing for a moment it might’ve been an opportunist’s vague solicitation for money. She ought to trash it. But something about the letter made he
r hesitate. Its tone, perhaps. A tone is the intention of a note, Amara would say in moments of unbidden remembering, quoting her father, repeating things that had struck her as mysterious or prophetic. The tone of the letter made Teera believe that the stranger’s intention was honorable. Sincere.

  Three instruments, the letter said, yet it failed to mention what they were. Teera couldn’t help but think how ironic it was that, while houses and monuments and entire cities had dissolved and vanished, these instruments, trivial and fragile by comparison, had endured. How had the instruments found their way into this man’s care? If indeed they’d once belonged to her father, what would she do with them now? What use could they serve when she could no longer hear her father’s music?

  She tried repeatedly to put the letter away, stashing it in various drawers, burying it under piles of mail, or filing it randomly in one of the hanging folders at her writing desk so she’d forget its whereabouts, only to retrieve it again and reread the words, its whispers and intimations. The man knew her father. They were together, it said, during the final year of the Khmer Rouge regime. Imprisoned, her father had survived almost until the end. But how? By what means? Had he made any effort to find them during the prior three years? What was his crime? And, most curiously, why did this man, who claimed to know her father, only now make contact? Who was he? What could he possibly want? Hard as she resisted, Teera couldn’t escape the pull of the past.

  Truth, she believed, lies in what is said as much as in what isn’t, in the same way that a melody not only is a sequence of audible notes but encompasses the spaces and pauses in between. When listening to music, you must learn to take in even the atmosphere of an echo.

  She wasn’t sure whether she’d first recalled these words on her own, or whether, like so much of what she remembered, they’d emerged from Amara’s recounting and fused with her own recollections of those early childhood years when she’d follow her father to universities and performance halls to hear him lecture. In any case, these words over time came to invoke for her the cave in which her grandparents had been abandoned to die twenty-four years earlier, in 1979. A cave whose yawning silence must’ve augmented the sound of their labored breaths, and elongated the pauses in between.

  She wondered if the author of the letter would be able to explain what her father might’ve meant by “atmosphere of an echo.” Is it like the inside of a cave, where a person’s life is slowly absorbed into the stillness, as a flame is extinguished for lack of oxygen? Or is it like the hollow of a mass grave, where even silence has a tenor, carrying with it the rebuke of the dead, their relentless reproach that the living have yet to honor them with a reply, an answer to why they died, why atrocity such as this was allowed to happen, why it happens still?

  Teera finally stowed the stranger’s letter in the cedar chest where she kept some of Amara’s cherished belongings. Then, taking everyone by surprise, she resigned from her position at the community arts center. It was clear that her friends and colleagues saw the abrupt departure as a kind of denial, her inability to deal with grief or, as some put it, to properly mourn her aunt’s death. But Teera knew all too well that grief is an unpredictable, untimely visitor. One can never properly prepare for its arrival. If anything, her sudden resignation kept the door open for grieving so that indeed she might move beyond it.

  Now here she is, on a plane, plunging she feels not forward with her life but backward. Once again her mind is overtaken by recollections of another headlong flight—that fraught journey across jungles and battlefields when, with each dash forward, she would turn to look behind her, gripped by the uncanny feeling that someone or something was pursuing her, calling out her name. She didn’t—couldn’t—know then that this constant backward glance would come to define her life, her inviolable tie to that land and its ghosts. She will never be free of it. Still, at the time, she tried to outrun it, tried to escape its incessant calling.

  Suteera, Suteera . . .

  Memories swell, flooding Teera’s mind, her vision. She pulls herself up, breaking the surface, breathless with the knowledge of where she’s heading and why. Certainly she intends to take Amara’s ashes to consecrate the stupa, its construction now completed, as she’s learned from the abbot of Wat Nagara, and to reclaim her father’s instruments. While she won’t admit so aloud, the main reason for her return, and perhaps the only reason, is her father. He is the only one who holds her to the past.

  Surely, she’ll finally learn from the writer of the letter what happened to him. In the nearly four years of the Khmer Rouge rule, as one death followed another, her father’s disappearance never attained that searing ache of a definitive loss. She would search for him everywhere. Even now, decades later, his ghost haunts her most persistently.

  She can’t help but believe he vanished violently.

  He hears her name now in each ring of the meditation bell. The very first time he heard it, the Old Musician thought it a phantom echo, like a soft trill in a musical passage, a familiar reprise of the same few notes in an otherwise erratic melody of his madness.

  It was this past May, during Visakha Bochea, a festival celebrating the three most significant events of the Buddha’s life—birth, enlightenment, nirvana—when the abbot announced to the whole sangha that a certain Miss Suteera Aung, a Cambodian living in America, had sent a substantial gift for the construction of a large communal stupa on behalf of her aunt.

  Suteera Aung. It took the Old Musician a few seconds to recognize it, as the abbot had said the surname second, the form she must have adopted in the United States. Our benefactor wants the communal stupa to be a place, the abbot went on, where those who cannot afford to build a private family stupa can store the remains of loved ones perished during the Pol Pot years. Remains, as described by Miss Suteera Aung, might be the ashes of exhumed skulls and bones, an old photograph, pieces of old clothes, memories of the deceased, our prayers and wishes for them. Anything really . . .

  As the Old Musician listened to the abbot, a wave of calm passed through him. She’s alive. He was caught between disbelief and the inexplicable sense that he’d known all along. How he could be so sure of such a thing, he can’t explain. He only felt he’d been waiting for this moment. What happened next would fall neatly into place, as if the long, twisted course he’d traveled for the past decades suddenly straightened and revealed the only direction left for him to take.

  He waited, like a condemned prisoner given time to take stock of his life and ready himself for execution. He wanted to plan it right, to imagine his final moment of reckoning, to anticipate, as he’d often done in Slak Daek, the full extent of agony and pain so that he wouldn’t lose the courage to bear it.

  After all, he reminded himself, he’d willed this. Days after Visakha Bochea, he went to the abbot and told him the truth, the bits he could bear to tell—that he’d once known Suteera’s father, that he’d chosen Wat Nagara knowing that if any family member survived, they would someday come here. In case there was any doubt about his intentions, he made clear he was not seeking to benefit from the connection in any way; he desired neither pity nor recompense of any sort, least of all from the young woman. He repeated that he wished only to return the instruments—the remains of the father she’d lost. Perhaps she would want them kept in the communal stupa once it was built. In any case, they were hers to do with as she saw fit.

  The abbot, moved by the story of this broken man who all these years had held on to the only possessions of a dead friend in hopes of returning them to his family, gave him the address in America and said he could write Miss Suteera Aung himself. Then the abbot told him something he hadn’t expected to hear: the gift of funds for the construction of the communal stupa came from Miss Suteera’s aunt, a longtime patron of the temple until her untimely passing a few months prior, at the beginning of the year. We knew the aunt was sick, the abbot said, but we didn’t expect her to go so soon. Her death is a blow to us. The old monk then added, It may be that Miss Sutee
ra doesn’t want to hear from the ghost of her father at this time. It’s hard enough to bury one family member, you see, without exhuming the memory of another. You will understand, of course, if she doesn’t wish to reply.

  The Old Musician could only nod. She had not been alone! He did not know if Suteera and her aunt were the only two members of the family to have survived the regime. He assumed this was the case since the abbot mentioned no one else—not her mother, Channara. He dared not ask. His heart quaked at the name alone.

  Again, the bell rings, as his recollections swell. It was the end of June when he’d finally decided to write. It is now September, and he has received no word from her. Still, he convinces himself it is only a matter of time before he faces her and confesses, before he looks into her eyes. And only then, only when he sees himself through her, will he know pain worse than any he experienced in Slak Daek. She will be his scourge, her loathing his final and lasting suffering.

  The Old Musician turns his face from the dark corners of his cottage toward a patch of gray light filtering through the burlap curtaining his doorway. Even with his eyes closed, he can always feel light, its source and temperament. Its design on his skin, if it intends to soothe or hurt, warm or scorch.

  In Slak Daek, blindfolded with a black cloth, he was often taken from his cell in the middle of the night and shoved across the grassless quadrangle to the interrogation room. Though he couldn’t see, he would always know the moment he stepped from the natural light of the night cast by the stars or the moon into the fluorescent glare of his torturers’ chamber.

  The bell issues its final call. The monks have begun their morning chant. In their plaintive incantation on the meaning of existence, the Old Musician hears again and again the allusion to misery and pain. This cycle to which we are bound . . . spinning in perpetual ignorance and strife . . . In a little while, alms bowls in hands, they will leave the temple and walk the streets barefoot, pausing in front of a house or shop to receive a family’s first proffering of cooked rice and vegetables, food they will bring back to share with him and those who have sought refuge here. We, who cling and desire . . . their voices thick, viscous like balm . . . we, who attach ourselves to this earthly realm, with all its ills and illusions, we cannot escape the wheel of samsara, the ceaseless rotation . . . Yet, he finds life unbearably kind to him. After all that he destroyed and violated, the sun still rises and offers him its light and colors, the rain still falls and refills his clay cistern, and these monks who intone life to be an inescapable circle of sorrow still see fit to give him food and shelter to ease his suffering. How is it that he, who had such low regard for the sanctity of human life, has lived this long, the charity of old age doled out to him?