Music of the Ghosts

by Vaddey Ratner

  For some weeks—maybe a whole month, maybe less—he had not been allowed outside that hut. From one day to the next he would sleep, wake, eat, shit, breathe his own foulness and ruin, all within the dark confines of the mosquito-infested thatch. Food and water were slid under a gap beneath the door. There was no discernible schedule. A day or two could go by during which he would receive neither, and he would have to rely on the grasshoppers or crickets that found their way into the hut, the raindrops he’d managed to collect in a cut section of bamboo. He had no means to wash, except during a storm when rivulets of water pierced the roof. Most days he festered in the heat. On nights when it rained without pause, he shivered. He was given no blanket, no mat or mosquito net, no hammock, nothing, not even a kroma. The only essentials at his disposal were those he’d brought with him from home. To his surprise, they did not confiscate these belongings. He resisted the urge to ask for anything, fearing they would take what little he had away or, worse, end it all for him. In any case, there was no one to ask. He would hear voices, laughter, and shouts floating from the middle of the encampment. Methodical plinks and echoes of target practice. Sometimes even singing, an out-of-tune but boisterous chorus of young male voices. But the area surrounding his hut was always silent save for the din of the jungle.

  A soldier would come and go, mutely delivering the scant meal, walking around the hut checking to see that nothing was amiss, and Tun would detect only a partial silhouette or bare feet circling the ground, the sleek outline of an AK47 or a pistol pointed downward nonchalantly from a hand. The closest he received to an explanation was when a voice once said, “This is not a punishment. The Organization needs proof, you see.” He thought it might be the battalion commander, but it sounded like someone older, more solemn and somehow cultivated. In any case, Tun silenced his rage, quelled the urge to claw his way out like an animal. At times, his hunger for human contact was so great he wished that it were punishment, that a soldier would just come and beat him, shout threats and abuses. A punishment would’ve been simple and clear, and Tun would’ve known for certain that he was still alive.

  One day the door finally swung open. It had been unbarred from outside, by whom or when, Tun had no idea. He suspected it was a test. So he remained inside, glued to his corner, bracing for death, his impending execution. But no one came. Two days later a figure walked in, the intense sunlight from behind making the silhouette appear porous, spectral. A hallucination, Tun thought. Then the figure said, “Comrade, your trial is over.” It was the same voice that had spoken to him days earlier. “The isolation was necessary. You’ve proven your loyalty. You will now join the rest of us.” The figure stepped forward to reveal a man who looked to be in his late forties, with, as Tun had surmised, an educated manner to match his speech.

  Comrade Im was the leader of the encampment, a high-ranking cadre with access to the Central Committee, the core leadership of the Communist Party, or, as it was now more commonly referred to, the Organization. These extreme measures had to be taken, he later told Tun once it was clear that Tun could be trusted, his inviolable allegiance to the Organization demonstrated. The revolution, Comrade Im went on to explain, was entering a period of intense radicalization. Those joining the movement must be made to understand that they were soldiers, and soldiers must embrace suffering and hardship on every front. It was easy to teach new recruits to handle guns, pull the pins of grenades, launch rockets, but far more challenging to teach them discipline and loyalty. Often it proved impossible. In the case of loyalty, it was not a trainable skill at all but a character trait that had to be coaxed out of people by putting them in a trial such as the isolation Tun had endured, with no explanation given whatsoever, except the vague knowledge that this was the Organization’s design. Initially, it had not been so strict. Newcomers were allowed outside the hut, so long as they stayed within the marked perimeter. Some even took to planting vegetables and herbs while being “broken in.” Now, with the war intensifying, there was no room for question, for doubt, for sentiment. Only absolute devotion. Those who tried to defect were invariably executed.

  What Tun had witnessed on the teak crossing, Comrade Im said, would happen to anyone suspected of collaborating with the enemy. Yet—Comrade Im pointed out—the execution had been a kind one, compassionate even, given the battalion commander’s predilection for cruelty. It was immediate and without torture, because the offender was a high-ranking cadre, one of the encampment leaders, respected and loved by many. Other traitors were disemboweled or had their throats sliced, writhing slowly toward death.

  “Now do you see that your trial was not at all a punishment?” Comrade Im said, smiling charitably. Tun nodded but kept silent, forging his resolve to stay alive, which, during his isolation, had solidified into a trait all its own. For him, there could be no loyalty without love. It had always been this way. With his music. With Channara. With Sita. In the absence of love, loyalty was merely obedience, what one owed one’s captor. He’d known obedience with his father. He could summon it again.

  In the meantime, if becoming a soldier was the only way back to his daughter, he would learn to fight, he would cross one battlefield after another until he reached her again.

  So he became a soldier. To his great relief, there was a new battalion commander. The old one, he was told, had been called to the “Special Zone,” the area around Phnom Penh, closer to the enemy. Under the new commander—who worked jointly with a Khmer-speaking Vietnamese combat specialist—Tun learned to handle weapons, to aim and shoot at targets called out to him impromptu; to sense danger by the slightest sounds and stirrings in the forest; to crawl in the grass, under barbed wires, in torrential downpours; to dig trenches and build barricades; to sit still as throngs of red ants bit into his flesh; and, most important, to feel nothing in these moments and to remember only that bloodshed was a cause for exaltation, the closest feeling to joy one would experience in the presence of the Organization.

  After a few short months, Tun was told these military exercises were adequate, considering that most soldiers received none at all and learned to fight during actual combat. He had received as much because he was deemed capable of being a leader—he understood maps, could make sense of diagrams and charts, knew how to use a compass, could read and write. And thus, at the end of his training, Tun was put in charge of about thirty soldiers. His own ragtag platoon of half-starved illiterates. Many of the new recruits were terrified by their first battles, but they remained with him, loyal to the insurgency, because the fear of being killed in the line of fire was secondary to the fear of being tortured and brutally murdered by their own. They had seen it happen to their own friends caught trying to defect. In short, they had been unequivocally forewarned.

  For Tun, it was neither fear nor blind allegiance that kept him moving. He dodged countless bullets, narrowly escaped explosions, and several times even broke through enemy lines, only to be baffled by how he’d managed to do so, how he had survived, with the occasional slight wound. He had only one goal—with each victory to get closer to his daughter. In that sense, perhaps love had been at the forefront of all his battles. But he had not dared express such sentiment, or even think it, until now. Until this very moment when he sat looking down at her sleeping face, when he felt her in his arms and, unlike those tormented nights when he’d only dreamt of her, knew that she was real.

  Tun turned to Om Paan in the other cyclo moving in tandem with his. She smiled at him, nodding silently, as if to say there would be time later for words. They’d reached the edge of the city. They thanked Roeun and the other cyclo driver, said a solemn good-bye, and quickly transferred to a prearranged oxcart loaded with hay and clay pots. They continued like this the rest of the way, furtively hopping out of one ride into another, following a route mapped out in advance, avoiding government checkpoints through the help of various guides and “eyes.” They raced against time, aiming to reach Oudong, about forty kilometers north of the city, before battles r
esumed at dawn.

  * * *

  That night they reached Oudong as planned, but not all of them made it out. A few days later, after the government troops had virtually reclaimed the former royal capital, Om Paan was killed in crossfire during the final battle. As Tun’s unit retreated with the rest of the insurgent forces, she crouched beside him, shielding Sita while he fought, and when the bullet came she took it—a single definitive shot in the side of her neck. Tun had no time to think, feel, or even react, except to seize Sita from Om Paan’s lifeless clutch. Only later when they were safe in a forest did he note the silent scream trapped in his daughter’s eyes. It was a look that would never quite leave her. Again and again, he would be privy to it. Her horror. A hint of which he glimpsed decades later in Suteera’s eyes when they met.

  He is not ready to see it again. Not yet. She is probably on the way to the temple this very moment with Dr. Narunn, to pick up little Lah for their outing. He knows now why he has come to the city, why he wandered this far, along these particular streets, arriving as if by accident at his former home. If he were to recount his life to Suteera, he could do so up to this point, the final year before the country fell, knowing that someone of her compassion would be sympathetic to his mistakes, all the possible wrong turns he had made, the many moral lapses he’d fallen into. Shocked as she might be, she could probably bear to hear of his love for her mother, Channara, and forgive him for it. Or, if not that, at least pity him. And he . . . he could probably go on to tell her about the next several years, knowing that everything he did, vile or forgivable, was to keep his daughter alive. But how can he tell her the one truth she seeks and still bear the horror in her eyes? What do you know of my father? he can almost hear her asking. What happened to him? Who are you?

  The answer is simple, and yet how can he tell her?

  I am your father’s executioner.

  Third Movement

  Lah. There is a cheerful ring to the child’s name, and as though she were a musical note, the little one hums continuously. In the driver’s seat, Mr. Chum taps his fingers on the steering wheel, and beside him, Narunn shakes his head gently from side to side as he whistles along. They’ve been driving for some time now, withstanding breath-halting lurches and bumps, the calamitous swerves of vehicles overburdened with passengers and belongings, the continuous edging of oxcarts and tractors onto the already crowded narrow lanes. Lah seems unperturbed by it all, perfectly content in the backseat as she snuggles into Teera’s shoulder, her tiny arm around Teera’s waist. When she catches a glimpse or a sound of something interesting, the girl will poke her head up and take in the full scene—a chhayam drum carnival with giant dancing puppets at the entrance to a temple, a stream of schoolgirls in blue-and-white uniforms pedaling their bicycles along the dikes of dry paddy fields, a wedding party buzzing with bamboo flutes and coconut tros. When it’s just flat country scenery, the child dips down again, curling her body like a snail into its shell, attaching herself to comfort and safety, the shelter of another’s body. The apprehension Teera felt back at the hotel has long vanished, and in its place something stronger, more certain, is taking root, though she does not yet know what it is.

  Earlier this morning at the temple, when they were introduced, the first words to emerge from the little one’s lips were: “I’m four today!” The girl counted aloud to herself and then, with one hand pinning down the thumb of the other, uncurled the correct number of chubby fingers for them all to see. Teera had expected someone willowy and broken, but the face gazing up at hers beamed with a curiosity that eclipsed loss. “Are you the auntie from America?” Lah scrutinized, her dark round eyes rimmed with lashes as jet-black and silken as the hair framing her tiny-moon face. The Venerable Kong Oul standing nearby gave a hopeful smile, and Teera, lowering herself to the child’s level, said, “Yes . . . and I’ve come to take you for your birthday outing. Would you like to see some gibbons and sun bears?” Lah nodded vigorously, and then broke into a giggle when Narunn stepped aside and started making muted hoots and scratching himself like an ape. “Are you from America too, uncle?” Lah asked, hands cupping her mouth to suppress her amusement.

  Narunn grumbled with indignation, “Oh no, somewhere much more glamorous!”

  “Where?”

  “The jungle, of course!”

  Lah narrowed her eyes for a moment before appearing to reach the same conclusion. Narunn and Mr. Chum each took her by the arm and swung her toward the car. The Venerable Kong Oul and Teera followed a few steps behind. “I told her you were an auntie from America,” the abbot said. “It’s kind of you to play along. I wanted to give her something exciting to look forward to, a day with someone who has no connection whatsoever to her ordeal.”

  “She seems all right,” Teera told him. “Surprisingly joyful.”

  “A child this young is resilient, and she is remarkably so. She bounces around like a bubble, and the little novices trail her everywhere, as you can see.” The abbot nodded to the clusters of monks gathering here and there to watch, curious, vigilant. “They feel protective of her but maintain an appropriate distance, in accordance with the monastic rule. I’m the only transgressor here.” He chuckled. “I’ve made a small place for her in my room. It’s far from ideal, but it’ll have to do for now.”

  “Have you told her what happened?”

  The old monk nodded. “Yes, simply that her mother has passed, not the details of how and why. And, as with most children her age, she takes it to mean her mother is ‘gone,’ at least physically. How she makes sense of this is hard to know . . . Every now and then she’ll ask when her mother is coming back, and I tell her more or less that her mother is on a long journey to find a better life, and that for the time being she is to remain at the temple with us. It’s clear she senses something is wrong but does not ask to know more. Such is the wisdom of innocence—it does not seek the answer it cannot accept.”

  They walked in silence for a while, and, as they neared the car, the abbot said, “Also, I’d asked you to come along because I felt the Old Musician would want to see you. He knew you were coming today but must have forgotten, because he’s gone into the city with the monks on their alms rounds. Perhaps you’ll see him later today when you return from Phnom Tamao.” The monk stood still for a moment, hands clasped behind his back in a contemplative bow. “He’s the only one who seems shattered by the little one’s presence. He tries to stay out of her path as much as possible, though it was he who insisted we bring her here.”

  Teera gave him a surprised look. “Shattered?”

  The abbot shook his head. “I don’t know . . . Perhaps ‘shattered’ is the wrong word. He’s deeply affected by her loss. Anyway, I thought seeing you again might be a good thing.”

  Though they’d only met recently, Teera felt she knew the Venerable Kong Oul in some deep way, having read his extended correspondence with her aunt. When misfortune befalls us, he’d written in one of the last letters to Amara, whether a collective one like war, or a personal one like illness, it is tempting to see religion as the answer. In all my years as a monk, I’ve come to believe that religion is only another way of asking the question, why? Why is there suffering? Why are we here? In Teera’s own interaction with him, the abbot had always been able to fathom the unspoken, and she thought this the mark of his spirituality—the ability to reach deep into another’s soul without seeming to trespass. She could see why Amara had sought his counsel from afar over the years. Teera felt at ease with him, in a way she’d never been able to feel in the presence of other monks. “I’m sorry, I’ve been meaning to plan another visit,” she said after a moment, “but the time never seems right.”

  “I understand.” The abbot held her gaze. “Until then, off you go now, nhome atmah. Be mindful on the road.”

  * * *

  Teera hears a deep sigh from the passenger’s seat and then a softer one against her chest. Both Narunn and Lah have fallen asleep, their breaths weaving a hypnotic rhythm aroun
d her heart. She lowers the little one’s head onto her lap, letting her stretch out. Lah stirs, unconsciously humming some residual notes. In these brief hours together, it’s become painfully clear to Teera that this is a child who has learned to sing herself to sleep, who knows loneliness and solitude, who senses the permanency of her mother’s absence even without knowing the meaning of death.

  The car bounces over a large pothole in the road. Lah turns on her side so that her face is lost in the folds of Teera’s shirt. Teera caresses her until she is tranquil again. Nhome atmah, the abbot called them. Certainly, these three odd people in the car are the closest thing to a family she’s recovered since her return to Cambodia.

  They’ve turned off the main route onto a dirt road lined with leafless brown saplings. Plumes of red dust rise up and surround the car, making it hard to see out. Mr. Chum proceeds cautiously, even though no other vehicle is in sight on this stretch of the road. Glancing at Teera through the rearview mirror, the old driver says in a low voice so as not to wake Narunn and Lah, “It gets like this during the dry season. Nothing but dirt. Like Pol Pot’s time.”

  Teera nods, glimpsing the starved, skeletal landscape through the billowing sieves. Dust rises and falls, rains have washed away the blood, the seasons spin into decades, and yet, the past is but half a breath away. She has only to exhale, and that long-ago desolation, such as she’d never known before that day, unfurls into a vast, unconquerable terrain.

  They were on a similar dirt road, her oxcart moving in one direction and her mother’s in another, each receding into the dust. Channara’s supine form was covered with a kroma, and her bare feet sticking out the back of the cart were the last things Suteera saw.