The tremor resumes, more like scraping now—like the rasp of metal against rock, nothing at all like music. She hears whistling and knows right away it’s the young soldier. Comrade Chea, she used to call him. Now it’s just Chea. He’s the only one of the band of Khmer Rouge to survive, while his leaders, those who had gone ahead, died in the blasts. He’d been relegated to the back to guard over the slow movers like Suteera and her aunt. He was the youngest of the seven and seemed the least like a soldier, might even have been a new recruit, plucked from the fields a few months before when fighting started with the Vietnamese. She gets up and walks toward him through the tall grass.
Chea stops whistling when he sees her. She squats down, chin on her knees, watching him sharpen his knife against a rock half buried in the earth. When the mines exploded, he’d picked her up as if she were a toddler and run for cover behind the trunk of a palm they’d passed, her aunt and the others scrambling to follow, keeping to the course they’d already trod. Then, when all was silent again, the earth resettled, and the dead stayed dead, Chea tossed aside his gun. It was useless, he said, depleted of ammunition since their last battle with the Vietnamese. He’d had enough of this, he went on, without passion or emphasis, in the same tone he’d used when guiding Suteera’s steps among the bodies. He’d yet to kill another human being outside the battlefield, but he’d seen enough of death. He wanted no more of this place. Chea knew the way to Thailand. Before the war, he’d traversed the jungle many times, guiding young water buffaloes and ponies to the border to trade. It was the most he’d said. He started walking, retracing his steps out of the rice fields and back to the narrow dirt path where they’d started. He waited. Who wanted to come? They all did. Who else could they have followed? The dead stay dead. Days ago he was their captor and now he is their protector and guide, his knife the only weapon against possible bandits, wild animals, imagined sounds.
“I thought I heard music,” Suteera tells him.
They have formed a kind of bond. He looks to be about her aunt’s age—no, several years younger, maybe only seventeen or eighteen, and Suteera is thirteen, if what people are saying is true: that it’s 1979, and they’ve endured this hell for four years. She’s certain a lifetime has passed. But it hardly matters how old she is or how old she was before all this, before she lived alongside corpses, borrowing from their expired breath, stealing from them to feed herself. She knows she may not live tomorrow.
“Out here,” Chea says, his voice gentle, as if not to frighten her, “there’s only music of the ghosts.”
First Movement
He feels his way in the confined space of the wooden cottage, hands groping in the dark, searching among the shadows through the blurred vision of his one good eye for the sadiev. The lute has called out to him in his dream, plucking its way persistently into his consciousness, until he’s awake, aware of its presence beside him. His fingers find the instrument. It lies aslant on the bamboo bed, deeply reposed in its dreamlessness. His fingers inadvertently brush against the single copper string, coaxing a soft ktock, similar to the click of a baby’s tongue. The Old Musician is almost blind, his left eye damaged long ago by a bludgeon and his right by age. He relies much on his senses to see, and now he sees her, feels her presence, not as a ghostly apparition overwhelming the tiny space of his cottage, nor as a thought occupying his mind, but as a longing on the verge of utterance, incarnation. He feels her move toward him. She who will inherit the sadiev, this ancient instrument used to invoke the spirits of the dead, as if in that solitary note, he has called her to him.
He lifts the lute to his chest, rousing it from its muted sleep, holding it as he often held his small daughter a lifetime ago, her heart against his heart, her tiny head resting on his shoulder. Of all that he’s tried to forget, he allows himself, without reservation, without guilt, the reprieve of this one memory. The curve of her neck against his, paired in the concave and convex of tenderness, as if they were two organs of a single anatomy.
Why are you so soft? he’d ask, and always she’d exclaim, Because I have spinning moonlets! He’d laugh then at the sagacity with which she articulated her illogic, as if it were some scientific truth or ancient wisdom whose profound meaning eluded him. Later, at an age when she could’ve explained the mystery of her pronouncement, he reminded her of those words, but she’d forgotten she’d even uttered them. Oh, Papa, I’m not a baby anymore. She spoke with a maturity that pierced him to the core. She might as well have said, Oh, Papa, I don’t need you anymore. Her eyes, he remembers, took on the detachment of one who’d learned to live with her abandonment, and he grieved her lost innocence, yearned for his baby girl, for the complete trust with which she’d once regarded him.
Something fluid and irrepressible rushes from deep within him and pools behind his eyes. He tries pushing it back. He can’t allow himself the consolation of such emotion. Sorrow is the entitlement of the inculpable. He has no claim on it, no right to grief. After all, what has he lost? Nothing. Nothing he wasn’t willing to give up then. Still, he can’t help but feel it, whatever it may be, sorrow or repentance. It flows out of him, like the season’s accumulated rain, meandering through the gorges and gullies of his disfigured face, cutting deeper into the geography of his guilt.
He runs his fingertips along the thin ridge, where the lesion has long healed. The scar, a shade lighter than the rest of his brown skin, extends crosswise from the bridge of his nose to his lower left cheek, giving the impression of two conjoined countenances, the left half dominated by his cataract eye, the right by smaller grooves and slash marks.
If his daughter saw him now, would she compare the jaggedness of his face to the surface of the moon? How would she describe the crudeness of his appearance? Would she see poetry in it? Find some consolably mysterious expression for its irreparable ruin? He never did make the connection between the softness of her skin and her imaginary moonlets. Now he is left to guess she probably associated the distant velvety appearance of the full moon with the caress of sleep, the lure of dreams that causes one’s body to relax and soften. But even this is too rational a deduction, for he cannot trust his memories of the full moon to make such a leap. The last moon he saw clearly was more than two decades ago, the evening Sokhon died in Slak Daek, one among many of Pol Pot’s secret security prisons across the country, each known only by their coded euphemism as sala. School. That evening, at Sala Slak Daek, the moon was bathed not in gentle porous light but in the glaring hue of Sokhon’s blood. Blood that now tinges his one-eyed vision and sometimes alters the tone and texture of his memories, the truth.