Music of the Ghosts Read online

  “The problem, Suteera,” her mother explains, sounding angry, “is when men play at being gods, the consequence is war. You cannot decide another’s path without drawing resistance. Sooner or later, there’ll be a clash, a collision so dark and huge it’ll eclipse any battle we’ve seen.” Her mother pauses, looks at her, and frowns, as if suddenly realizing she’s talking to an eight-year-old. “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?” She seems annoyed at the whole world, scornful of its ignorance.

  Suteera nods, though she’s not sure whether what she understands is the same as what her mother intends. A sorcerer of sorts, her mother can weave an entire universe into existence, a world so intriguing you can lose yourself in it for days. But as a child, Suteera still sees her world—the real one she shares with her family—as preferable to any conjured up by words. Suteera understands her mother’s story to mean that, even if it seems there’s someone or something trying to separate them now, in the end her father will return, they will see him again, and, like the sun and moon, her parents will be reunited.

  “Your grandfather may believe himself to be this god-king who decides everyone’s fate. But war has come, whether he likes it or not.”

  Whatever antagonism her mother and grandfather harbor for each other has turned more dangerous in recent months, with Channara abandoning her comic books in favor of writing newspaper articles that criticize the rich and powerful, people like themselves, people Suteera’s grandfather knows intimately. The senior statesman sees this as an outright assault against him and has many times ordered his daughter to stop. But Channara keeps at it, arguing that because she’s publishing under a fake name—various ones, in fact, for different articles—no one will trace these writings back to her. You’re safe, Father, she hissed during one of their more seething arguments. You and your good name.

  “And for all his power and influence, he’s no match for it. We’ll all be scorched. Few will escape its fire. We have to change, or we’ll be torn asunder—”

  “What your mother means,” interrupts Amara, who hasn’t said a word until now, “is that we must look after one another.” She glances at Channara disapprovingly, then back at Suteera with a smile. “We must be attentive amidst all the coming and going.”

  Suteera knows her aunt is attempting to reassure her. Gentle like Suteera’s grandmother, Amara is the peacemaker in the family, and in this explosive environment, she strikes Suteera as the bravest. It takes courage to stay composed amidst angry words flying.

  “And you,” her aunt continues, “mustn’t wander off too far by yourself.”

  At seventeen, her aunt is calmer and wiser than most grown-ups Suteera knows. While Channara is brilliant in many ways, it is Amara who often makes sense when no one else does. Still, Suteera finds it unsettling that neither her mother nor her aunt has spoken yet of her father’s absence, that neither seems to be addressing his abrupt departure in the middle of the night. Do they know where he’s gone and why? Did the two women plan the big party so that he could take advantage of the commotion to slip away unnoticed? No one sees it necessary to explain what has happened, and Suteera is too afraid to ask. She keeps hoping that she’s just imagining things, that in reality her father has gone on a trip to the provinces to talk about music and recruit new talent, and that by nightfall he will return, as he always does.

  “I want us to prepare ourselves for it,” her mother concludes prophetically.

  The spiritual medium leads the group into the ceremony hall and everyone sits down on the straw mats, facing the monks, leaving a respectful aisle in between. Once again the chanting resumes, with Dr. Narunn leading in a baritone, the other monks joining him one by one in succession, their voices merging in layered resonance, like water upon water, a midnight monsoon descending on the Mekong, sonorous and pensive.

  Makara appears soothed by the chanting, eyes closed and head lowered, palms together in front of his chest, body twitching every once in a while as if from the residual effect of the drug.

  The Old Musician remembers himself during those adolescent years when politics was a kind of intoxicant for a generation heady with the country’s newly gained independence. He was only a few years older than Makara is now, but he felt like a man, making his own decisions about the future—where to go to school, what to study, which classmates to fraternize with, which teacher to steer clear of and which to endear himself to. It was 1956, less than three years after Cambodia had won its freedom from France. He was at Chomroeun Vichea, a private school in Phnom Penh, at a time when private schools were a relatively new phenomenon and thus considered inferior to the long-established government public institutions rooted in the French system, where, in order to move up from one level to the next, one must pass the notoriously difficult national examinations. While he had received high marks on all his exams, earning the coveted diplôme, he’d nonetheless failed to secure a place in a public lycée, as there were a great many more qualified applicants than available seats, often given preferentially to those with wealth and family connections. Having neither money nor family influence, he’d entered Chomroeun Vichea with the help of a friend already at the school. Prama . . .

  The Old Musician smiles, remembering his friend’s pet name. Cambodians are fond of nicknames and diminutives, as if every trait or idiosyncrasy deserves its own appellation, a distinct honor and title. Tun, his own nickname, came from his mother telling him as a young child that he was tunphlun—tenderhearted—and thus “tun” was a term of endearment for her son. It seems even back then the students and the teachers all had nicknames, demonstrating, as he would come to realize, a predilection for self-metamorphosis, the ease with which they would later assume one alias after another, to obscure some aspect of their identity as much as to accentuate another.

  His friend was part of that growing circle of youth more interested in politics than academic pursuits. The year before, Prama had arrived at the school after he’d failed the state examinations, having abandoned his studies in favor of political meetings. Hearing of Tun’s travails, Prama was indignant on his behalf and told him there was still space at Chomroeun Vichea. Prama then convinced his father, a well-to-do silk merchant, to help his friend with the private school fees and tuition. Tun was extremely grateful and felt profoundly beholden to the generous but surly patriarch. Prama’s father made clear he expected great things from the studious young lute player, whose talents he’d enjoyed and patronized over the years at various family festivities and religious ceremonies. Tun greatly respected the merchant and feared the debt he would owe this man for the rest of his life. At the same time, he was reassured by the possibility that the patriarch must have truly thought well of him to put forth such investment in his future. A school was only as good as the paths it opened for its students, he reasoned.

  Once at Chomroeun Vichea, to his surprise, he quite liked it, was even impressed by it, despite its reputation as a breeding ground for Communists and radicals. While at the time he was not politically active or even inclined, Tun found the atmosphere of open debate dynamic and refreshing, so unlike any school he had known. Soon he came to believe this private institution was indeed striving toward “progressive learning”—as the name Chomroeun Vichea clearly purported—the kind of education that went beyond memorization of standardized knowledge to incorporate a critique of social conditions and spur civic engagement. That particular year, 1956, his friend Prama, using Tun’s love of songwriting and Khmer poetry as bait, inveigled him into taking a literature class taught by a relatively new teacher who had quickly gained a reputation for being eloquent, insightful, and inspiring, as well as compassionate and fair in his dealings with students. It soon became clear to Tun that the teacher’s reputation was the sole reason Prama had wanted to take the class, given his friend’s absolute lack of interest in literature.

  During class one morning, Prama, fidgeting with a trickster’s restlessness, obviously impatient with the writings of dead Frenchmen,
raised his hand to interrupt the teacher’s reciting of a prose poem by Rimbaud from the collection titled Les Illuminations. “Why is it that we must mimic the tongue that reduced our people to savages?” Prama quipped, as usual teetering between humor and irreverence, pretending he’d completely forgotten this was a course on classic French literature.

  Who else were they supposed to read and mimic? Tun wanted to remind his friend. From the seat behind, he snapped Prama’s shiny cowlick with a flick of his forefinger, hissing under his breath, “You’re going to get yourself expelled.” But others seemed to concur with Prama. Yes, why do we seek to master the language of our former masters?

  Instead of slamming the desk or roaring with anger, the more likely response to such insolence, the teacher quietly closed the book he had been reading, looked up slowly, and smiled. He nodded his head a few times, as if to encourage the students to continue their inquiry and critique. The whole class, abandoning Rimbaud’s poetic reflection on youth and war, suddenly burst into debate. They pondered the pervasive use of French, particularly in academic and official settings, among the Cambodian intelligentsia in general—even in an avant-garde institution like Chomroeun Vichea—and what that said of the Khmer national identity.

  One student asserted that for him it was a matter of pride to speak French, to prove that Cambodians are not the buffoons the colonialists had thought them to be, that the Khmer race, like any human race, was capable of varied linguistic expressions, even the languages of the so-called civilized. No, it was revenge, argued an aspiring writer, a character more irreverent, more dangerously flippant, than his friend Prama. “Because knowing a language well gives you the tools to expose a system of thinking from within!” Then, half jokingly, the would-be novelist explained that while he could never utter expletives in his own “lovely native tongue,” he found it was easy to do so in French. Vulgarity, he rationalized, was not part of Cambodians’ innate speech, and thus, the only undeniable influence of the French and their erstwhile colonial administration on him and those they subjugated was obscenity, which, in his well-read opinion, was the very essence of colonial practice. “Colonialism, both concept and application, is obscene at best and, ironically, barbaric at worst because it reveals the ignorance of those blind to their own savagery!” The whole class stood up and clapped, rowdy as a crowd watching a street performance.

  The teacher said nothing, and it was difficult for the students, even the more astute and perceptive among them, to tell what he thought of their circuitous detour from the subject of French literature. Once the class had settled down again, the instructor, who stood before them with a face as composed and benign as a bodhisattva, returned to Rimbaud’s collection and the last lines of “Guerre,” the prose poem about the potent dream of war:

  Je songe à une Guerre de droit ou de force, de logique bien imprévue.>

  C’est aussi simple qu’une phrase musicale.

  For the first time that morning, Tun felt he understood Rimbaud’s poetry, or at least the metaphor. Certainly the allusion to music was something he could grasp. But perhaps what drew him was the way the poem was read, the melody, the tenderness and poignancy, the irony with which the teacher recited the final line.

  Teera’s father failed to return that night after her birthday, or the next night, or the one after. But true to her words, her mother tried to prepare her for what was to come. Weapons of war, Channara explained when distant howls and roars intermittently broke the almost funereal silence around them. She told Suteera about rockets and bombs and grenades, painting them with her terrible, beautiful words, illustrating them with her graceful hands, her dancelike gestures. Rockets, she said, looked like banana blossoms. They whistled as they flew through the air. Grenades hissed like snakes before exploding. If one rolls through our gate, you must run from it as fast as you can, Suteera. You must not touch it, go near it, or mistake it for a fruit—a custard apple gone gray. And bombs? Suteera wanted to know. Bombs were unpredictable, her mother explained. You’d never know when one would drop from the sky, but if it did, you’d feel it—its awful power. Bombs came in all shapes and sizes, gifts from the Americans, who rained them down on towns and villages, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands. If one lands on our estate, it’d be the end of us.

  In this way the days passed into weeks, the weeks into months, with the screams of war growing louder, at times deafening, until its monstrous presence replaced her father’s ghostly absence. One sees the agony of a people in that woman’s face, her mother wrote in a newspaper about an encounter she’d had with a peasant woman who’d lost half of her face during a rocket attack, and who, with her children, had fled their war-ravaged village to the city, as had the countless refugees living on the streets. Bullets and rockets rain down on us like a new kind of monsoon. Her mother’s words ricocheted through her grandfather’s circles, angering him and others supporting the American intervention.

  Only many years later, as an adult, a student of history, did Teera come to understand what her mother had tried to explain about the war—that their small country was caught in the much larger political mayhem of the American conflict in Vietnam, that in 1969 President Nixon authorized a secret bombing campaign on Cambodia in order to destroy Vietnamese Communist forces hiding there, and that by 1973, when Congress finally knew and put a stop to it, the indiscriminate carpet bombing had left hundreds of thousands of Cambodians dead and millions displaced. The United States bombed Indochina with three times the tonnage of bombs used in all of World War II; Cambodia alone was hit with three times more tonnage than Japan.

  Knowing this, it’s easy for Teera to see now why Cambodians, educated and uneducated alike, were so ready to believe the Khmer Rouge when a mere two years later, on that fateful April morning in 1975, upon seizing the capital, the guerrillas claimed the American warplanes would return to drop more bombs, this time on Phnom Penh itself.

  In hindsight, Teera believes that people like her mother and grandfather, those with a deeper understanding of international politics, may have known it was a straight-out lie. Still, even if they’d known, by that time they had no choice but to leave the capital as ordered, joining the entire urban population, now some two million displaced peasants in addition to the seven hundred thousand original city dwellers—a gargantuan mass for so small a city—all forced at gunpoint in the mass evacuation to the countryside.

  But for the young Suteera, the chaos began weeks before the Khmer Rouge victory. One night in March, a year after her father had disappeared, just as she grew certain she would never see him again, he suddenly returned, cloaked in the din and chaos of mortar explosions rattling the city. “I’ve come back to celebrate your birthday,” he told her happily, as if he’d only been gone a few days, as if a whole year hadn’t passed.

  She had the urge to hurt him, to tell him she wasn’t a child—his child—anymore. She wanted desperately to wound him so he couldn’t escape again. But she had the distinct feeling that words, whatever she said, wouldn’t make a difference. She couldn’t have been more right.

  Her father stayed with them for several more days and, on the night of her ninth birthday, vanished again. This time she had been prepared. She wouldn’t allow herself to be tricked into accepting something she didn’t want. She’d refused a party, a celebration of any sort. In any case, it wouldn’t have been possible to celebrate with the war raging all around them, with the Khmer Rouge closing in on the city. Still, she would not allow him to sing to her, as a gift or otherwise. If she couldn’t make him stay, then she would not be serenaded into accepting his departure.

  C’est aussi simple qu’une phrase musicale. The Old Musician tries sounding out the line of poetry in his head. Une phrase musicale. It no longer has the power it did that first time he heard it. War is anything but simple.

  Years later, in Democratic Kampuchea, toward the end of the regime, when it was rumored that Pol Pot, the head of the secret organization, the much feared Angkar, w
as none other than Saloth Sar, his inspiring and mild-mannered teacher at Chomroeun Vichea, he couldn’t believe it. There must be a mistake, because his teacher had disappeared in 1962 and was since presumed dead. The two couldn’t be the same man. He was convinced the rumor was false.

  Only in 1997 when Pol Pot, his once smooth features now aged with liver spots, appeared on television in an interview with an American journalist, did the Old Musician, assured by what he both saw and heard, finally accept that this was indeed the same man who four decades earlier in his recitation of Rimbaud’s “Guerre” had moved the class with the music of his voice.

  How long has she been standing in this spot? Teera pulls back and moves away from the fogged glass to the desk beside her bed. Aware of her surroundings again, she hears it. The funeral music. It’s playing somewhere outside the hotel compound, the melody faint, the lyrics indecipherable. Sometimes when broadcast through loudspeakers, you can hear it from miles away. It seems she hears one funeral every day, as if this tiny city is in perpetual mourning, making up for those years it couldn’t grieve for its dead. Teera strains to listen, imagining her father’s words in every tune she hears.

  I know not how love chooses who and why—

  Why I see infinity in your eyes . . .

  It was a strange present to give a child, and an even stranger thing to sing on her birthday. It wasn’t a funerary song, but it was still a smoat, which, he’d explained, was poetry sung in honor of loved ones, living or dead. She wonders now if the dead can serenade the living, seduce us with longings that are not even our own.