So in Kompong Thom, separated from his family, Sokhon dreamt again, fiercely, feverishly. In his mind’s eye, he saw that they were still alive. He had to believe this because a reality without them was not one he could accept. He pictured countless moments of reunion, imagined all the possible ways in which they could survive, promised himself that once they were together again he would beg Le Conseiller for forgiveness . . . He rehearsed the words he’d say to the man who’d been like a father to him, who’d given him everything—We were all caught up in the war, you see. The American bombing shook the very foundation of our existence. Cracks and fissures appeared everywhere, and as you said, our hopes and dreams tilted on the precipice. Yet, had I heeded your counsel and paid close attention, I would’ve seen what you saw—that the politics of anger and hate only hastened the rupture, consuming the last remnants of stability we had. I’ve betrayed my education, my talent. I betrayed our family. I betrayed you who loved and nurtured me as if I were your own son. How can I begin to express . . .
Sokhon dreamt. Even as the nightmare around him spun out of control. He hoped. He yearned for his wife and daughter. Then, one day he was awakened to reality, finding himself shackled to names and lives he barely knew, while the fate of his own family remained unknown.
“You say I am in here because of you,” he told Tun in one of their earliest whispered conversations through the wall. “You named me. But others did as well. I appear in multiple dossiers, the chief interrogator assured me, and therefore I could only be guilty . . . Do you know he studied law and literature, our inquisitive comrade? A former classmate of mine. Wrote a brilliant essay on the literature of justice, examining the feudal system of crime and punishment through the lens of classics like Tum Teav and Thmenh Chey. And now, years later, here we are, on the other side of that brilliance. You and I held captive to his blinding logic.”
Even if Sokhon absolved him of blame, Tun remained certain of his culpability. He recalled now that, while feverishly scribbling down names of people he’d known, he had thought of Channara, had been on the verge of declaring her name out of longing, but something had stopped him, as if even in pain his heart had known to keep her secret, to protect her. Instead, he’d written down her husband’s name. How many times had he wished Sokhon dead, wished the man had never lived at all? There was no doubt in his mind. His confession alone would’ve led to Sokhon’s arrest, concluded his fate.
At the start of November, a couple of months into their incarceration at Slak Daek, the two men were hauled from solitary confinement and shoved into a chamber with a dozen or so other prisoners. No longer blindfolded and shackled in place—but with their legs and arms still bound in chains—they could see and drag themselves about. Faint traces of words in Pali and Sanskrit floated across the plastered walls, like half-uttered prayers. Someone said they were inside the compound of a temple, and this had once been a classroom where little monks learned to read and write, memorized the sutras. Amidst the stench of shit and urine, blood and sweat, intractable excretions of pain and fear, it was impossible to believe the room had been anything other than the bowel of hell. “A temple?” Sokhon scoffed in hushed indignation, he who’d been a monk in his early youth. “What kind of name is Slak Daek for a place of worship?” Tun made no reply, having learned that like any alias it hid a dreadful truth.
“Choke on metal” was not only the meaning of Slak Daek but in the prison it was their daily staple. Confess, or do you want to choke on metal, you rotting maggot! Slak Daek was filling up, they overheard the guards saying, and the single cells were needed for those yet to endure their first sessions with the chief interrogator. They couldn’t see beyond the room, with the windows boarded up, the double wooden doors locked and always guarded, as evident from the echo of footfalls pacing the pathway outside.
Tun didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know. As it was, the sight of the other victims filled him with renewed horror. Every prisoner was bruised, bloody and broken, festered by wounds decaying to the whiteness of bone. Flies alighted on their open sores, intoxicated by the freshness of flesh. One prisoner could hardly breathe, his back against the stained floor, mouth agape and eyes glued to the ceiling, pupils permanently dilated. Two of the prisoners—one looking no more than sixteen, another perhaps in his early twenties—had no nails on their fingers and toes, their hands and feet splayed with abscesses. Former guards of the prison, Tun recognized. It could mean only one thing—they had failed to follow orders. A middle-aged man heaved in one corner like a chained beast, his residual heft suggesting he’d been eating well until only recently, until he was caught and starved like the rest of them. Tun felt certain the man had been a cadre of some rank. Occasionally, the prisoner would lift his head, turning it slowly in that exaggerated gesture of the blind, his eyes so swollen that he seemed to have no eyes at all beneath a giant throbbing forehead. A sightless monster. They were all becoming monsters through the monstrosity they endured.
As for Sokhon, Tun could barely look at him. Both men became suddenly hesitant toward each other, as if the wall between their former cells—the physical barrier—had precipitated their profound intimacy, and now without it, they were doubly vulnerable, doubly at risk, each suffering not only his own torment but the other’s. It took a long moment to finally look each other in the eye. And, despite the violence done to them, it was painfully clear that each was a life—heart, breath, and soul—still pulsing beneath the landscape of injuries. Tears welled up in Tun’s eyes and a second later spilled forth from Sokhon’s. They were connected in ways they couldn’t begin to describe, individually shattered but together somehow whole.
The cycle continued, unremitting. Every day someone was towed out for interrogation and, hours later, brought back more devastated than before. A victim was left alone only long enough to recover the energy to withstand further interrogation. If suspected of faking weakness, he would be deprived the daily cup of watery gruel. On a night that might’ve been Tun’s or Sokhon’s turn, a pair of guards burst into the chamber, as another pair stood with flashlights guarding the double wooden doors. They began kicking the immobile prisoner sprawled on the floor. “Time for another talk, you useless cur. Get up! What?—We can’t hear you. Oh, His Highness wants us to carry him on a dais!” The prisoner, his eyes still glued to the ceiling and unblinking, began to convulse, chest contracting, the valley beneath his protruding bones dipping and rising, until his breaths turned to hiccups. One of the guards kicked him again and marched out of the room, followed by his partner. They couldn’t risk being blamed if the prisoner were to die in their presence. For the rest of the night, Tun and Sokhon and the other inmates listened to the man’s hiccups, the soft rasping more horrifying than anything they’d heard inside the prison. In the morning, he finally died. Two days passed before guards removed the swollen corpse. They were not the same guards.
Afterward, Tun sought a quiet corner by himself, trying to calm his heart—a sudden, unreasonable convulsion of hope. As if sensing something out of the ordinary, Sokhon shuffled beside him, chains clanging. They crouched in silence for a moment, then Sokhon said, barely a whisper, “I don’t want to end that way.”
Tun was only half listening. He’d recognized one of the new guards—a former trainee of his from those early days in the insurgency. The boy had grown into a man, but his face was unmistakable. Tun couldn’t be certain if the boy had recognized him in his horribly altered state. Still, hope knocked against his breastbone, in silent delirium.
Sokhon lifted his manacled wrists and crossed them in front of his chest, staring down at the loop of metal chain. “Should I get to that point, where it’s neither life nor death, I am asking . . .” He paused, swallowing. “I am asking you to have mercy. To do for me what I wouldn’t have the strength to do myself.”
Tun regained his attention and stared at Sokhon. What are you saying?
“I still want to live. In spite of everything, I want to live. Yet there comes a point�
�”
“But . . . how?” Tun cut him off.
Sokhon, nodding at Tun’s wrists, said, “With that . . . the chain of your manacles. Wrap it around my throat, release me from the suffering.” He spoke so evenly that it terrified Tun all the more. “I would do the same for you . . . I want us to decide while we still have our wits, while we can still think at all. Whoever should reach that point first, the other will execute this last wish. Can you promise me this?”
Tun could not bring himself to open his mouth.
“You know, several months ago when one of the village cadres—a man in charge of the musical troupe—warned me of my possible arrest, I started to put together an ensemble of instruments I would bury, as one buries the cherished possessions of the dead to accompany them on their journey. Except in my case it would be the instruments first, a kind of pre-burial. Some part of me still believed it a mistake. But if it turned out not to be, I thought, then I’d have the instruments ready for my passage into the otherworld. I already had the sadiev, an antique one given to me by a village elder in Kompong Cham. I’d made several kinds of oboes for the musical troupe, and kept a favorite, the sralai, for myself. I would use the rest of the time to make other instruments, bringing together those for the dead and those for the living, fusing two disparate ensembles to create a unique one for myself. Yes, sacrilegious, I know. But then again, I had yet to die. There was still hope. I’d barely finished a sampho when they came for me.”
In spite of his confusion, Tun found a strange comfort in Sokhon’s words, as if they echoed some covert longing of his own. His curiosity surprised him. “Did you bury them?”
Sokhon shook his head. “There was no time.” He receded into thought for a moment. “Music . . . or revolution. Before us lay these two paths, my friend. We chose wrong. We made a terrible mistake. But choice was always there. It’s available to us even now, even here . . .”
Tun faced Sokhon for the first time. “But what about the one of us left behind? If you reached that point first, I would fulfill your request . . . But who would bestow upon me the same mercy? Who would put me out of my misery?”
“I’ve no answer to that . . . Yet, if it were the other way around, I who had to take your life, only to then be tortured to the point where the only part of me still alive was pain, then I’d hope my last thought to be that once in my life I’d made the right choice—to cut short the terrible suffering of a friend. It would be small comfort, but in this place, I can’t ask for more.”
Tun nodded, then, after a brief silence, said, “I understand.”
* * *
Night arrives, shadowy and fluttering like a moth. The Old Musician rises from his corner, barely able to discern the shapes about him. He searches for a motodup to take him back to Wat Nagara, where he will seek refuge in the dark of his cottage. His memories trail him.
Narunn heaves himself from the river onto the ironwood dugout, a blue checkered kroma tightly wound around his hips, the rest of him coppery brown and glistening in the first morning light. Teera pauses in her writing and watches from the veranda of the raised wooden house where they’ve been staying, its stilts and stairway almost completely submerged in the high water. She closes her journal, needing no paper and pen; she could sketch him with her breath alone.
Rivulets flow down the length of his body, and he seems a being molded from the elements—wind, water, earth, sun. The long, narrow dugout rocks under his movements, prompting Lah to grab her seat with both hands. Narunn shifts his legs, straddling the vessel, like some ancient warrior taming the mythical naga serpent with the grip of his bare feet. When all is still again, he kneels down in front of the little girl, a baby turtle in his open palm—“Someone wants to meet you.” Lah looks skeptically at the inert brown shell no bigger than her own palm. “He’s in there,” Narunn whispers. “He’s just shy.” Tentatively, Lah runs the tip of her forefinger across the hatchling’s back, tracing the barely visible ridges, the minute squared pattern like stitching on a quilt. “Where’s his mama?” she asks after a moment. Narunn nods toward a clump of bright green water hyacinth bobbing nearby. “In there. Waiting for him. With his brothers and sisters.”
Teera’s heart tugs. She senses the sorrow beneath the child’s question, the loss too big to comprehend. You met my mother, my whole family. They’d been waiting for us. They were still alive, Narunn said when waking from the dream that brought them here to his native village on a tributary of the Tonle Sap Lake. It was all so real. As she surveys the flooded geography, with the sky reflected in the water so that trees and houses and all earthbound things appear afloat on clouds, Teera thinks perhaps this is all a beautiful dream.
“Elephant Tusk Landing.” The village took its name from a legend that recounts an epic war between two mighty elephant kingdoms. As the mammoth armies marched into battle, they created a furrowed path that would become a river, and along the river rose a strip of land shaped like an elephant’s tusk, a sign that buried deep in an unreachable layer of the earth lay the petrified remnant of the elephant king who’d died in battle, his troops defeated and subsumed into the victorious parade. As a little boy, Narunn would plumb the depths of the river and lake with his gangly band of naked pals, overturn anthills and termite mounds in the hope of finding the fabled relic, the possession of which—even a tiny shard—was thought to bring great luck not just to the finder but to the whole village. It’d never occurred to the stripling Narunn that one day he, a grown man, would scour the same earth and water for the remains of his family. Aside from his mother, who took her last breaths in his arms, his other family members had died without him as witness, and he could only guess where they might’ve been taken and killed. After the Khmer Rouge, whatever skull or bone he chanced upon, he would take to the village temple so that the monks could accord them the proper ceremony. As for the rest—his loved ones and the countless lost—he allowed himself the consolation that they’d become inseparable from the terrain, woven into the story of this place.
“Let’s return him to his family,” he says, placing the turtle in Lah’s palm so she can lower the creature back into the water. Again, Narunn rises, unfurling in one sinewy movement, one arm extended to Teera. She slips the journal safely into the hammock behind her, descends the few planks of the stairway unclaimed by the water, and steps into the dugout, steadying herself against his weight. Cautiously, she proceeds to the middle and lowers herself next to Lah on the seat. He smiles, one brow raised in question—Ready? The two nod vigorously, eager to begin their voyage.
Narunn walks to the bow, where he takes command of the crisscrossed oars pivoted on a pole near the prow, and begins to row. Beneath them the river rolls like a mirrored walkway, opening ever wider in the distance ahead. He is tuned to the rhythm of boat and water, the physical memory that flows through him, his body recalling each stroke forward and back. Tuk tov . . . kompong nov, they’ve all said, those who remember him from his childhood when he first learned to navigate this flooded terrain. Teera understands it now, sees it so clearly. In just a few short days, he has completely shed his urban, educated sheen, stripping down to the bare-bone tautness of one in constant movement with the water. Even his speech is reduced to mostly susurrus and smile, as if all words lead back to the same basic truths. If she came upon him now as a stranger, she wouldn’t be able to tell him apart from the other fishermen. He appears not just part of the landscape but deeply steeped in it.
They arrived in Siem Reap more than a week ago and spent the first few days at a hotel in town, taking time to see some of the ancient ruins of Angkor, until Narunn finally located a childhood buddy of his from the village, one of the boys he used to roam the terrain with. They visited him and his wife—a childless couple—as they were about to set out on their sampan to cast their nets in the vast expanse of the Tonle Sap Lake. Given the itinerant nature of their livelihood, the couple would be gone for some time, but, as they’d already conveyed to Narunn on the phone, they wished
the three visitors would enjoy their home on the water. “I’m afraid it’s just this one room,” the wife apologized, gesturing to the modest but neatly kept space. “And the area in the back, for cooking and washing. And of course, the veranda—our bit of luxury!” It was lovely, Teera told her, thanking them both for their generosity. Again, the couple expressed their regret, wishing they’d known sooner Narunn was coming, but at this point it was too late for them to reverse course: they had to check on traps set days earlier. If they didn’t, they could lose the bulk of their catch, the main source of their income for the year.
The Great Lake is at its most bountiful, most generous, the husband explained. Now, at the beginning of the dry season, with the rains having only just disappeared, the water remains high but not churning with silt and sediment, as in those turbulent months of the monsoon. Some parts are so tranquil they reflect the forest and sky in astonishing detail. “Quite majestic, in fact,” their host concluded. “You must see it for yourself.”
Teera needed no further convincing, and by then, hardly an hour into the visit, Narunn had already changed into a kroma, ready to take his first plunge. He saw his friends off, swimming alongside their sampan, slaking his body’s long-forgotten thirst.
News of his return traveled fast, and soon a cluster of boats gathered around the house, carrying old friends and neighbors eager to be reacquainted. Some had brought along food, explaining the strict instructions from the fisher couple to feed their guests well, to look after them during their sojourn. The stream of visitors continued into the evening, and throughout the next day, and the next, bearing a continuous variety of dishes just prepared—local specialties Teera and Lah might enjoy, Narunn might have long craved. Even strangers came, and though they’d never met Narunn until that moment, they felt they knew him in some way, knew of his great loss—his large family—and his brave continuation in the face of that loss. It was as if he’d never left, nearly two decades of absence barely a ripple in this estuary of timelessness. He was remembered, he was deeply missed, and, as far as they were concerned, he was family, as if the borders of their hearts were as fluid as the terrain shaping them.
Music of the Ghosts Page 28