Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  “But are we sure she’s a virginal maiden?” Narunn bats his brows with mischief.

  “Stop it, I’m trying to educate you!”

  “How do you know so much about this?”

  “If you haven’t noticed, Doctor, I’m Khmer.”

  “Khmer?—Are you really?”

  Teera turns somber. That question, the very notion of Khmer or not Khmer, led to countless deaths and disappearances in her village during the last year or so of the Khmer Rouge rule. Communism unites us all!—But not if you’re Vietnamese! Filth, rags—those yuon! So those with any perceived connection to Vietnam were purged.

  Narunn pinches her nose. “You’re an impostor like me.”

  She smiles sadly.

  “Hey, I’m only kidding!”

  “But you’re right. I am an impostor of sorts. An itinerant outsider. Never the person I’m supposed to be.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “I suppose . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, in America, I feel most Cambodian, and here, I feel more American than I remember ever feeling in all the years I’ve lived in the States.” Teera’s gaze darkens, receding into itself, and she sees a child, a little girl, walking in a long, narrow corridor much like the one outside Narunn’s apartment. Ever since she first set foot in this place, she’s had the unsettling feeling that she’d walked this space before, or somewhere like it. “There’s this Welsh word,” she continues after a moment, “I learned years ago in a poetry class at Cornell. Hiraeth. It has no exact equivalent in English. Or Khmer, I think.”

  “But it’s something translatable,” Narunn offers tentatively, “to every heart that’s ever known loss, desired the impossible.” He grins. “Am I right?”

  Teera gives him a strange look. “You could say that. It’s this deep longing for a home that never was. An ailment that brings both a sense of estrangement and a haunting familiarity.”

  “Ah, I know this ailment. I’ve seen it in countless patients. Indeed, I have it myself—as a matter of fact, our entire people suffer from it. A disease of incompleteness, disconnection.”

  “Yes!” She feels a sudden rush of love for this man who understands her so effortlessly.

  “You’re wrong, though. There is a name for it in our language.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Memory sickness, which, as you know, the Khmer Rouge deeply feared, so much that they attacked it like an epidemic.”

  Teera nods, remembering. She wonders if there’s such a word or phrase for the self. Can you grieve for the person you’ve never been? A wholeness, a singularity, you’ve never known? Is pralung, or any such concept of the soul, its antidote? Her thoughts drift. Where is Amara’s pralung now? Where is mine? Whose ghost or spirit is calling to me this very moment?

  “Allô allô . . .” Narunn cuts in, laughing. “Calling you back to me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Are you always like this, lost to your reverie? It’s impossible to compete with a dream, you know.”

  Teera props herself up on one elbow, her curls brushing his shoulder and chin, her chest pressing against his upper arm. They are skin to skin, stretching in nearly equal lengths, the kroma now twisted in the crevice between them. When they make love, she notices, he breaks out in goose bumps, his body a canvas of impressionism, all ripples and resonances, pleasures bestrewn in dots, the shifting luster of passion evoked. Culminated. She lets her forefinger ghost his collarbone, moving from left to right, lingering, pirouetting in the ellipse beneath his Adam’s apple. An unborn melody . . . every person carries the seed of this melody inside himself. She recalls the tracery of the air hole on the oboe and wonders if love has its own note, its inexpressible truth.

  “I can’t see you behind all these waves and lashes,” Narunn teases, blowing the curls from her face, looking deep into her eyes. “And who can you possibly be daydreaming about when I’m right here?”

  Teera stares at his moving lips, not quite hearing him, this beautiful lighthearted man beside her. Narunn Nim. Nim was my mother’s first name, but since she didn’t make it, I took it as my surname. A way to carry her forward, he told her. How easy to be with him, Teera thinks. He embraces the living and the departed with such serenity, as if his entire being, not just his head, were a temple, an altar where both burial and rebirth are possible.

  “Anyone I know?” he asks again when she remains silent, preoccupied. “Someone very special?”

  She nods.

  “Your aunt.”

  Tears flood her eyes, and before she knows what to do, a drop rolls out. Narunn promptly rises up on both elbows, collarbones protruding in the effort, and stops the drop midtrack, lips pressed to the side of her nose. He holds himself there, a floodgate, braced to inhale the torrent.

  Teera lowers her head, burying her face in his neck, sobbing into that hollow note, and the boat-shaped reservoir of his clavicle. It’s the first time she’s mourned Amara in the presence of another this way, with the ungraceful, abandoned refrain of hiccups and hypoxia.

  Narunn lowers them both back onto the pillow. “My training was rather scant and rushed,” he murmurs, returning to the subject of medicine, as if sensing that his voice is the only thing that will soothe her. “Right after Pol Pot, everything was destroyed. There was no real health system to speak of—no functioning modern clinics, no hospitals. For our training, we scavenged, gathering whatever textbooks and equipment could be found amidst the shattered remnants of the university classrooms. Out of hundreds of doctors, forty-five survived—forty-five—and half of them fled the country as soon as they could. The few remaining doctors pooled their efforts for the near impossible task of rebuilding a health system from scratch, appealing for assistance from the Red Cross, enlisting the help of Vietnamese experts still present in the country. Young Cambodians who had begun medical training before the war were recruited as ‘teachers,’ others finished a course one semester and turned around to teach it the next. We shared a hodgepodge of Russian, French, and Vietnamese language texts, which you were lucky if even the teacher could decipher. So literally we had to pick up from the dust and bones. We had to find our way back to some semblance of a society, to some means of healing, by retracing those disappearing footprints with our own.”

  Teera listens, his chest like a seashell against her ear, a chamber of echoes and currents, ancient rivers and tears, timeless sorrow.

  “Let me tell you about them, these footprints, and their haunted path . . .”

  Tun has finished packing. A bundle that he will carry on his shoulder. No valise, nothing unnecessary, not even his name. When he walks out his door, he will no longer be Tun. He’ll assume an alias, a new identity unknown to people he loves, fellow musicians in the various ensembles to which he belongs, the friends and neighbors who share the Municipal Apartments complex, or the White Building, as some have taken to calling it. He hears movement coming into the living room. The night accentuates every sound and brings it closer, makes even an insubstantial echo seem embraceable, somatic. The whoosh of an object, the sense of something suspended, oscillating in midair. His daughter swinging a toy in her hand? A wooden yo-yo perhaps? Or maybe one of his instruments? No, she’d be humming or singing to herself, as is her habit when she wakes. This is how one should always reenter the world from whatever sojourn, he thinks. With music.

  He listens more carefully, recognizing now the nanny’s footsteps coming toward his room. He feels her calm the moment she appears at his door, a lotus-leaf packet swinging on a string from her hand. Earlier in his daughter’s room, he wondered where Om Paan was, noting the empty straw mat on the floor across the room. All the while she’s been in the kitchen, packing food for him to take, abetting his escape. She’s known for some time now he’s leaving. He told her only the fact of his inevitable departure, nothing else. Not why, not when. But it’s clear she intuits the choreography of his every step, its direction and intention. Sometimes he feels she can hea
r his heartbeats from a distance.

  “Are you ready, sir?” she inquires.

  “Will I ever be?” he replies, trying to be light.

  She gives him a solemn smile. “No, sir.”

  He nods. She is a tiny woman, standing no taller than his chest. A child’s height. But she possesses the solidity of a rock, the stability of a mountain. He met her on the street a year or so after he’d brought Sita home from the hospital. Her infant, an eight-month-old boy, had just died from dysentery he caught as they made their escape from Chantrea, a village in southern Cambodia near the Vietnamese border, heavily bombed by the Americans on suspicion that it was an enclave for Vietcong and other Communists. Her husband had been killed some months earlier by an unexploded ordnance he’d stepped on while plowing their fields. When he encountered her on the street in her solitude, she appeared to Tun a mound of grief and bones. Beside him, Sita tugged at his shirtsleeve, insisting they bring her home. When he suggested that perhaps they could just buy her food and clothes, his daughter said, “But, Papa, she’s an orphan like me.” Tun realized then that his daughter knew her mother had died, and how. So they brought Om Paan home. Her stay was supposed to be temporary, until she was strong enough to be on her feet again. It’s turned out he and Sita aren’t strong enough to be without her.

  He often wonders what he would do without Om Paan’s steady presence these past years, what he would do without her now. Certainly he would never think of leaving if she weren’t here to look after Sita. It seems she sees herself here for the singular purpose of caring for his daughter. She passes no judgment on his politics, and interferes in no other aspect of his life. Only once she treaded the periphery of his heart, light-footed as a skimmer, and discerned its fragmentation. You’ve been hurt by love. That was all she said. She’s never ventured further. And he does not tell her that one afternoon this love—who had so thoroughly wounded him—occupied the very spot where she now stands.

  That day after he’d bumped into Channara in front of Chaktomuk Hall, after they’d taken their cones of sugarcane juice and strolled along the promenade and spoken at length, with little Suteera contentedly following close behind, Channara suddenly asked if they could see where he lived, and, not wanting the moment to end, he was more than happy to oblige. But he regretted it the moment they stepped inside, when Suteera, honest in the innocent yet brutal way that children often are, murmured, “It’s . . . it’s so small.” Channara did not hear her daughter, her eyes taking in his sparse solitary existence, her mind lost to thoughts he could not ascertain. Tun knew then he could never hope to give this woman he loved the life she was accustomed to, deserved.

  “Om . . .” he starts to say, his voice trailing. Elder aunt. He addresses her as his daughter does, though she’s only in her early forties. She could be his older sister, and he treats her as such, with respect and gratitude and love.

  “It’s nothing special, just rice and fish,” she says, lifting the stringed packet toward him. A brief silence, as they try to avoid each other’s eyes. “Please be careful,” she says after a moment, sparse with her advice, which only increases his apprehension.

  He thanks her, slipping the packet into his bundle. His gaze momentarily flits to Sita’s room, and panic seizes him again. Catching this, Om Paan says, “You know I’ve loved her as my own.”

  “I’ve never doubted this. It’s just that I . . . I can’t . . .” He fumbles. Takes a deep breath. Then starts over: “I’ve tried to write a letter explaining my leaving. I want to make it simple. Something she can understand. But—”

  He stops, conscious of the rising agitation in his voice, afraid of waking his daughter in her room just a few feet away.

  “I will do my best to comfort her,” Om Paan offers quietly. “Until you return.”

  He takes the nanny’s hand and squeezes it. He doesn’t trust himself to say more, least of all make a promise. He might not be able to return. He might well be captured by the government tonight and shot on the spot. The execution of Preap In, a decade ago in ’63, is still fresh in his mind. The young insurgent belonged to a group called Khmer Serei, a nationalist movement in opposition to both the Communists and the monarchy. Preap In was arrested en route from South Vietnam to Cambodia to negotiate his group’s participation in the government, after having been guaranteed safe passage on the authority of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, head of state at the time. The prince, determined to make an example of the young insurgent in order to sow fear in the rising opposition, ordered the execution filmed and then broadcast for a month in every cinema, seen by adults and children alike. Lasting fifteen minutes, the film showed Preap In shackled and caged like an animal, assaulted with imprecation and refuse of every kind, then shot by a firing squad. A spectacle of cruelty from beginning to end, it impressed upon Tun as nothing before the savagery his countrymen are capable of inflicting on one another. This was what frightened him most—the game, the shameless parade we make of our inhumanity.

  The government has since changed hands. Prince Sihanouk is in exile, shuttling between Beijing and Paris, deposed three years earlier, in 1970, in the military coup led by his first cousin Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, and his former commander in chief and defense minister, Lon Nol, now president of the fledgling republic. While espousing liberal democracy, Lon Nol jails and tortures his enemies in growing numbers. Despite American military aid to bolster the government, the opposition forces continue to strengthen, feeding off the sharpening climate of repression. Violence has become the primary means of political expression. Tun fears this is only the surface of what’s to come.

  In the dark, narrow corridor outside his apartment door, he stills his heart and gathers his final resolve. He can almost hear Om Paan breathing on the other side. She lingers at the door, listening, grieving. A moment passes, and he hears her walking away toward his daughter’s room. But he knows, like him, she will not sleep tonight.

  He walks to the end of the corridor and descends the wide, open stairwell, weaving back and forth in a continuous zigzag pattern. He pauses now and then on a landing to remember conversations he has had over the years with his neighbors, the civil servants and professionals who made living in an apartment setting—so different from that of the traditional Khmer home or Chinese shop house—seem modern. He remembers the time his daughter cut her foot on a piece of broken glass and the entire floor came to her rescue. She is without a mother, but she does not lack for maternal care and affection. This comforts him, eases his steps forward. Perhaps she won’t miss him all that much, he tells himself.

  On the ground, he hears a bamboo flute playing faintly from the landscaped gardens on the east side paralleling the Bassac River six or seven hundred meters away, recalling for him the innumerable hours he spent composing music outside when it was too hot inside his apartment, or when electricity failed and the only source of light was the sky above. Tonight electricity is out again in this part of the city—a constant during wartime—but the stairwell from top to bottom is awash with moonlight. Looking at the latticework of masonry covering the walls, he once again marvels at the way the design plays with angles and silhouettes, how it makes use of sramaol—shadows and shades—to frame natural light, harnessing it into focus, illuminating an enclosed space while keeping it ventilated and cool. There’s lightness to the modernist architecture that has begun to reshape Phnom Penh in the years since independence. The White Building is no exception, and tonight, with the full moon shining, it appears ethereal as an apparition, mournful and chalky as its name.

  This is his daughter’s home, he tells himself. She’s survived the bombing of her village. She is meant to live. Their home will endure. It has to, or his leaving will have been for nothing. He will do whatever it takes to return to this spot again, if not to hold his daughter, then to see, to know for himself, that she is safe inside.

  He crosses the triangular stretch of ground behind the apartment complex to a corner of the street where he’s most likely
to find a ride late in the night. Even at this hour, even without electricity, people are up and about, moving with subdued gaits and gestures, their silhouettes like shadow puppets outlined against the pearly night. Most are refugees from the countryside who have made the streets and sidewalks their homes. Lon Nol and his government are incapable of curbing the havoc they’ve created, so these families make do, pitching their tarps and spreading their straw mats wherever they can, surrounding themselves with sandbags—if they’re lucky enough to have even that much—for when the sirens sound, signaling another air raid.

  Food stalls offering different varieties of porridge and soup scent the air, making the open space feel somehow less exposed, less dangerous, and, in some corners, as familiar as one’s own outdoor kitchen. A Chinese boy beats his chopsticks together in rapid succession, like a pair of drumsticks rattling out pek-pok pek-pok, the rhythm that’s earned the nighttime snack its name, “Pekpok Noodles.” The boy walks ahead of his father, who wheels their wooden cart, heavy with ceramic bowls and spoons, noodles and vegetables, and a large tin pot of steaming broth. At the end of a short block, they stop to fill the orders that have already come in, the father preparing the soup, and the son carrying one bowl after another to the customers waiting in their homes or shelters.

  Tun takes it all in—the night scene, the mingled smells, the quiet music of life being lived and enjoyed despite the threat of death, the possibility of an airstrike always looming. Normality. As strained as it may be under the circumstances, he will sorely miss it. There will be none of this where he’s going. No food stalls to satisfy his late-night cravings. No markets. No restaurants. No home, no family. Only the jungle.

  He doesn’t even know where he and his comrades are going, only that there should be a guide at each of the handoff points, the first of which will be in Chruay Chongvar once they’ve crossed the Tonle Sap River. The precise location of any encampment or base must be kept secret throughout the journey, in case they are captured.