“I’ve decided on something short and simple. A smoat. Your father’s last composition. I hope you would agree that the words are most fitting for the occasion. When we occupy a place, we give thanks to the spirits that remain as well as the spirits that move on.”
Teera nods, recalling the verse he’d shared with her. They walk together in companionable silence, Lah skipping ahead, her pigtails bouncing. They arrive just as the ceremony comes to a close, with the gathered throng bowing one last time to the monks, who remain seated. Teera looks across the land and sees a procession of food coming. Narunn helps the Old Musician onto the raised platform, where he sits at one corner so that he can see both the monks and the audience. The Venerable Kong Oul lowers his head and closes his eyes to listen, one of many unconventional gestures of respect the abbot has shown to this man others might easily mistake for a beggar.
Teera takes a seat next to Narunn on the straw mat, where his knee presses against hers as if to offer support, and prepares herself for another heartbreak and, by the same token, another healing, knowing that in the words to come, she will hear her father’s voice, his song.
The spirit of this land lives in its fields of rice,
Its forest pathways, its flooded rivers,
And in the rhythms that echo
For the sojourners, already on our way . . .
Author’s Note
While the principal characters in this novel are fictional, the story is set amidst historical events in Cambodia before, during, and after the Khmer Rouge regime. These include the US bombing campaign; the Khmer Rouge victory and mass evacuation of the urban population in 1975; targeted killings of the educated elite, former soldiers, scholars, monks, and artists; and the eventual waves of purges that saw hundreds of thousands imprisoned and executed. Slak Daek is a fictional prison, but the methods of torture described there are those employed by the Khmer Rouge in a network of nearly two hundred “security centers” established across the country, including at Tuol Sleng, the most thoroughly documented of these.
A Khmer Rouge survivor myself, I escaped as a child across the border to Thailand after the fall of the regime with only my mother left from among the vast extended family who’d made up my world before the war. My father was taken away in the early days of the revolution, and his disappearance, his uncertain death, has haunted me ever since. Even as a child, I was struck by the contradiction that, like many other Khmer intellectuals of that era, my father was sympathetic to the ideals of democracy that the revolutionary movement espoused, and yet became an early victim.
Today it is common to find perpetrators and victims living side by side, and even for those of us who lived through the atrocity, it is often difficult to discern a dividing line between the two. While some joined the revolutionary movement by idealistic inclination, many more were coerced or forced to take on roles as soldiers, guards, informants, and spies. Few can look back honestly without confronting questions of conscience as to what they might have done differently.
If my first novel, In the Shadow of the Banyan, is a story of survival, Music of the Ghosts is a story of survivors. The novel opens in the period before the convening of the Khmer Rouge tribunal, a long-overdue but highly restricted undertaking focused on just a handful of surviving former leaders. My motivation in writing is to explore the questions of responsibility, atonement, forgiveness, and justice in the more everyday settings in which survivors find themselves—in the chambers of the heart, and in the intimate encounters where perpetrator and victim sit face-to-face.
V.R.
Historical Chronology
1953
Cambodia wins independence from French rule. Saloth Sar (later Pol Pot) and colleagues return from studies in France.
1954
Geneva Conference delivers political and military settlement, leading to withdrawal of French and Vietnamese troops.
1963
Preap In, an insurgent in the Khmer Serei nationalist movement, is executed. Pol Pot is named party secretary and leader of the underground Communist Party.
1967
Jacqueline Kennedy visits Phnom Penh.
1968
Khmer Rouge launch armed insurgency.
1969
After four years of bombing raids on Cambodian territory, US forces launch the intensified secret bombing campaign known as Operation Menu, which continues until 1973.
1970
Prince Sihanouk is deposed in a military coup led by his first cousin Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak and his former commander in chief and defense minister, Lon Nol.
1973
Khmer Rouge advance in civil war against US-backed Lon Nol government, gaining control over most of the country’s territory. US forces bomb Neak Leung.
1975
Khmer Rouge seize Phnom Penh and take power, launching a mass evacuation of the city. In the subsequent years, hundreds of thousands are tortured and executed, many in a network of secret security prisons. An estimated 1.7 million perish from violence, disease, starvation, and forced labor.
1978
Vietnamese forces invade in December.
1979
Vietnamese forces take control of Phnom Penh in January, sending remnant Khmer Rouge forces into retreat.
1989
Vietnamese forces withdraw from Cambodia.
1991
Paris peace accords are signed, setting the stage for a United Nations–led transitional authority and elections in 1993.
1997
UN Commission on Human Rights adopts a resolution asking the Secretary General to examine requests for assistance in assessing past violations of Cambodian and international law.
1998
Pol Pot dies in his jungle hideout. Senior Khmer Rouge leaders defect. Civil war gradually ends, with remaining leaders surrendering the following year.
2001
Cambodian law is passed seeking establishment of a tribunal to bring genocide charges against Khmer Rouge leaders.
2005
Khmer Rouge tribunal is approved by the United Nations after years of debate over funding.
2007
The tribunal is operational and begins questioning surviving senior Khmer Rouge leaders.
2010
Top former Khmer Rouge leaders Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith, and Khieu Samphan are indicted for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Acknowledgments
Since early childhood I have been drawn to the plaintive sounds of the traditional Khmer ensemble, and it would be impossible to thank individually the scores of unrecognized musicians who have shared with me not only their music but also their stories. Each is a story of suffering and sacrifice. These nameless musicians I encounter on street corners and forest trails, so often overlooked, continue to move me. I feel their music in my heart, and wish to honor their efforts to sustain their art and, in so doing, to sustain us all.