Three instruments, the letter said, yet it failed to mention what they were. Teera couldn’t help but think how ironic it was that, while houses and monuments and entire cities had dissolved and vanished, these instruments, trivial and fragile by comparison, had endured. How had the instruments found their way into this man’s care? If indeed they’d once belonged to her father, what would she do with them now? What use could they serve when she could no longer hear her father’s music?
She tried repeatedly to put the letter away, stashing it in various drawers, burying it under piles of mail, or filing it randomly in one of the hanging folders at her writing desk so she’d forget its whereabouts, only to retrieve it again and reread the words, its whispers and intimations. The man knew her father. They were together, it said, during the final year of the Khmer Rouge regime. Imprisoned, her father had survived almost until the end. But how? By what means? Had he made any effort to find them during the prior three years? What was his crime? And, most curiously, why did this man, who claimed to know her father, only now make contact? Who was he? What could he possibly want? Hard as she resisted, Teera couldn’t escape the pull of the past.
Truth, she believed, lies in what is said as much as in what isn’t, in the same way that a melody not only is a sequence of audible notes but encompasses the spaces and pauses in between. When listening to music, you must learn to take in even the atmosphere of an echo.
She wasn’t sure whether she’d first recalled these words on her own, or whether, like so much of what she remembered, they’d emerged from Amara’s recounting and fused with her own recollections of those early childhood years when she’d follow her father to universities and performance halls to hear him lecture. In any case, these words over time came to invoke for her the cave in which her grandparents had been abandoned to die twenty-four years earlier, in 1979. A cave whose yawning silence must’ve augmented the sound of their labored breaths, and elongated the pauses in between.
She wondered if the author of the letter would be able to explain what her father might’ve meant by “atmosphere of an echo.” Is it like the inside of a cave, where a person’s life is slowly absorbed into the stillness, as a flame is extinguished for lack of oxygen? Or is it like the hollow of a mass grave, where even silence has a tenor, carrying with it the rebuke of the dead, their relentless reproach that the living have yet to honor them with a reply, an answer to why they died, why atrocity such as this was allowed to happen, why it happens still?
Teera finally stowed the stranger’s letter in the cedar chest where she kept some of Amara’s cherished belongings. Then, taking everyone by surprise, she resigned from her position at the community arts center. It was clear that her friends and colleagues saw the abrupt departure as a kind of denial, her inability to deal with grief or, as some put it, to properly mourn her aunt’s death. But Teera knew all too well that grief is an unpredictable, untimely visitor. One can never properly prepare for its arrival. If anything, her sudden resignation kept the door open for grieving so that indeed she might move beyond it.
Now here she is, on a plane, plunging she feels not forward with her life but backward. Once again her mind is overtaken by recollections of another headlong flight—that fraught journey across jungles and battlefields when, with each dash forward, she would turn to look behind her, gripped by the uncanny feeling that someone or something was pursuing her, calling out her name. She didn’t—couldn’t—know then that this constant backward glance would come to define her life, her inviolable tie to that land and its ghosts. She will never be free of it. Still, at the time, she tried to outrun it, tried to escape its incessant calling.
Suteera, Suteera . . .
Memories swell, flooding Teera’s mind, her vision. She pulls herself up, breaking the surface, breathless with the knowledge of where she’s heading and why. Certainly she intends to take Amara’s ashes to consecrate the stupa, its construction now completed, as she’s learned from the abbot of Wat Nagara, and to reclaim her father’s instruments. While she won’t admit so aloud, the main reason for her return, and perhaps the only reason, is her father. He is the only one who holds her to the past.
Surely, she’ll finally learn from the writer of the letter what happened to him. In the nearly four years of the Khmer Rouge rule, as one death followed another, her father’s disappearance never attained that searing ache of a definitive loss. She would search for him everywhere. Even now, decades later, his ghost haunts her most persistently.
She can’t help but believe he vanished violently.
He hears her name now in each ring of the meditation bell. The very first time he heard it, the Old Musician thought it a phantom echo, like a soft trill in a musical passage, a familiar reprise of the same few notes in an otherwise erratic melody of his madness.
It was this past May, during Visakha Bochea, a festival celebrating the three most significant events of the Buddha’s life—birth, enlightenment, nirvana—when the abbot announced to the whole sangha that a certain Miss Suteera Aung, a Cambodian living in America, had sent a substantial gift for the construction of a large communal stupa on behalf of her aunt.
Suteera Aung. It took the Old Musician a few seconds to recognize it, as the abbot had said the surname second, the form she must have adopted in the United States. Our benefactor wants the communal stupa to be a place, the abbot went on, where those who cannot afford to build a private family stupa can store the remains of loved ones perished during the Pol Pot years. Remains, as described by Miss Suteera Aung, might be the ashes of exhumed skulls and bones, an old photograph, pieces of old clothes, memories of the deceased, our prayers and wishes for them. Anything really . . .
As the Old Musician listened to the abbot, a wave of calm passed through him. She’s alive. He was caught between disbelief and the inexplicable sense that he’d known all along. How he could be so sure of such a thing, he can’t explain. He only felt he’d been waiting for this moment. What happened next would fall neatly into place, as if the long, twisted course he’d traveled for the past decades suddenly straightened and revealed the only direction left for him to take.