First They Killed My Father (25 page)

In my dreamlike state I hear Ma’s voice calling to me. “Loung! Where are you going? Come to us!” I wake up, gulping air. Am I
hearing voices? Am I going crazy? “Ma?” I whisper. My heart dances with hope, but I suppress it. “Ma?” I cry in anguish. “Over here!” I hear the voices of Chou, Geak, and Kim! I force my eyes to open wider against the heavy pull of my swollen lids, searching among the people for their voices.

Far in the corner of the room, I see hands waving excitedly in the air. I stare at the faces of Ma, Geak, and Meng. Chou and Kim run toward me, smiling broadly. Everyone in our family but Khouy is here! I cannot believe my eyes. I look into their beaming faces: Chou is barely able to suppress a laugh, Geak looks at me in confusion, and Ma is crying.

“Silly girl,” Ma hollers at me. “You almost walked past us.”

“I’m so glad you are here! I was afraid to be here alone!”

“This is the only infirmary in the area!” Ma replies. She pats the ground next to her, gesturing for me to sit. My knees go weak and I fall into Ma’s arms. My eyes wide open, I clutch her sleeves while the rest of my siblings look on awkwardly. “We’re all together now. We’re all together,” her voice is muffled through my hair. Looking into the faces of my siblings, I no longer fear I will die alone.

As Ma releases me from her grasp, Geak crawls over and seats herself between us. Ma tells me that she and Geak came here five days ago with stomach pains. Like me, all the siblings traveled separately and were lucky to find each other here. Ma says that Chou was the second to arrive, followed by Kim and Meng, who just arrived yesterday. Everyone is here but Khouy!

We spend our days in the infirmary lazily talking to one another about many things but never about Keav or Pa. No one in the family has ever explicitly stated that we are not to bring them up in our conversations. Yet we all know not to speak about them. Each of us keeps our memories of them private and safely locked in the boxes of our own heart. Instead, we spend the time telling Ma about our lives. Chou tells us she enjoys being one of the only two cooks at her camp. She says the other girl is nice. Being in charge of the food supply, she is able to steal a little of everything to bring to Ma. When the girls make her mad, she takes revenge by spitting in the food. At his boys’ camp, Kim works day and night in the fields planting and harvesting
rice. The setup of Kim’s camp is identical to that of Chou’s and mine, where all the children sleep together in a large hut. Every night he also has to attend the same propaganda meetings that Chou and I do. Meng tells us that before he fell sick, he and Khouy were still loading bags of rice onto trucks that are rumored to be delivered to China. He reports that he still lives with Khouy and Khouy’s wife, Laine. Despite our curiosity, Chou and I never ask Meng about her. Three years living under the Khmer Rouge regime has taught us that some things are better left unsaid.

Though we do not have to work, we are given a ration of rice and salt and sometimes fish. The amount of food is comparable to what I was given while I worked. Though from our shiny faces and swollen bodies, we realize that we are all suffering from similar symptoms: stomachache, extreme exhaustion, diarrhea, and aching joints. After much discussion, we conclude that we are not so much sick as weak from starvation. First thing in the morning and after dinner, the nurses walk over and pour water into a smooth, polished coconut shell bowl, then they put a small cube of white granulated material on my palm, telling me to eat it. I put the cube on my tongue and feel it dissolve. A smile spreads across my face when I realize it is sugar! Sugar for medicine. I plan to stay in the infirmary for as long as I can.

Even with the daily ration of “medicine” I am always hungry. It is hard for me to walk, but I must scavenge for food. I search the bushes for frogs, crickets, grasshoppers, or anything else that can be eaten. But I am a clumsy predator, moving slowly in my sickness. On my way back to the infirmary one afternoon, I see a rice ball left unguarded beside an old woman. My hand quickly grabs it and puts it in my pocket. My heart pounds rapidly, and I walk away as fast I can before anyone notices.

Once alone outside the compound, I am wracked with guilt for what I have done. The fist-sized rice ball rests weightily in my pocket as the face of the old woman comes back to me. Her gray oily hair clings to her skull and her chest contracts and expands in shallow breaths beneath her black clothes. Her lids are half closed, exposing the whites of her eyes. Her helpers will return to find the rice missing and they will have nothing more to give to her. Knowing she will die anyway,
they may forget about her. By taking her food I have helped kill her. But I cannot return the rice. I lift it to my lips as salty tears drip into my throat. The hard rice scrapes down in a dry lump, thus I put a marker on the old woman’s grave.

With heavy feet, I make my way back to my family. They are sitting quietly, happy to be together. Somberly, I sit next to Ma and scratch my head with both hands. My hair is in greasy knots and my head itches. Our clothes are tattered and have not been washed in weeks. The well water is reserved for the nurses’ use and the stream where we bathe is far away.

“Come.” Ma’s hand reaches for my head and parts my hair. “We will fix that.” She reaches, into her bag and takes out her special lice comb. She sits across from me and spreads her red-and-white scarf on the ground. She gently pushes my head down so that I am looking at the scarf and drags the brown plastic comb with its micro teeth through my hair. My scalp hurts from the pull, but it is worth it as I see the six-legged bugs fall from my hair onto the scarf. They scurry all over the scarf, trying to escape but are met with our thumbnails crushing them to bits. Blood squirts from their bodies and they make small popping sounds. Chou and Geak laugh and join in the killing. One by one, Ma combs our hair and rids us of the lice. We spend our days this way, sitting around, talking, laughing, and loving each other again.

One night I dream about Keav. She is beautiful, young, and exuberant. My dream starts peacefully. I am somewhere alone with her. We are talking, walking. I reach out to her but stop because her appearance is changing. In front of my eyes as she continues to talk, she grows thinner and thinner. Her skin becomes yellowish, aged, and hangs loose from her bones. Then the skin on her face begins to melt, becoming transparent, exposing the outlines of her large eye sockets and the skeletal bones behind them. I want to run away but I also want to stay. Her lips are still moving and she says, “I’m all right, I am not as you see me.” I love her and want so much to be with her, to find out where she is now so that I can meet her. I do not understand what she is saying and I scream myself awake. Determined to live, the next morning I force myself to walk the hospital grounds looking for food to steal to fill my stomach.

I stay in the infirmary for as long as I can, and with the sugar cubes and food and rest from work, my body gradually grows stronger. After one week, the infirmary becomes overcrowded and the nurses force us to leave. First they kick out Meng, then Kim, then me. I cry, whine, and he, but in the end I am forced to leave. Walking away, I break my farewell rule and look back to see Ma, Chou, and Geak crying and standing in the doorway. It was a mistake to turn around, my body aches to run back to them, to hold on to them. Expanding my lungs with air, I straighten my shoulders and march away firmly, wondering when I will see them again.

Another six months has passed since our family reunion at the infirmary. Back at the camp, my life continues as before and with another increase in food rations, I become still stronger. We no longer work in the fields but spend the hours learning to fight in combat as rumors spread that Youns have invaded our borders. During the day, we train with the few sickles, hoes, knives, stakes, and guns that are available in the camp. Most of the training is repetitive, but Met Bong insists that only when the movements become automatic will we be able to fight well. In the evening, after our meal, we gather brush and sticks to build a fence around our camp.

Early one morning, I wake up with dread and panic. My stomach knots and I am drenched with sweat. I tell myself it is nothing, just nerves; I convince myself that I get nervous easily. After washing my face, I join the other kids in training. Met Bong takes her old clothes and stuffs them with leaves and straw to make dummies. For the heads, she stuffs her red checkered scarf with straw. She calls them her Youn dummies and hangs them on trees in the field. After another long report about the evil of the Youns, she lines us up single file across from the dummies.

With a six-inch knife in my hand, I stand at attention in front of the line. Panting like an animal, with my legs shaking and my hand gripping the knife, I attack at Met Bong’s cue, charging at my dummy, I yell, “Die! Die!” Though I focus on its head, I am only tall enough to thrust my knife into its stomach.

The next morning, I wake up in great agony. My head throbs, my stomach hurts, and my chest constricts as if someone is sitting on it. I wrap my arms around my stomach, wanting to scream to the world. Something hurts inside me. Rage erupts in my body, making me jump and run out of the hut. I don’t understand the electricity in my body, this panic, this sadness, hatred, emotions that manifest into physical pains.

I have to see Ma. It is dangerous to travel without permission, but I do not care. I have to go to her. I know I cannot leave through the front gate; if the girls see me, they will tell on me. I walk around the hut and search for a part of the fence where I can make my escape. I see a loosely built part where the stakes are far apart and the bushes sparse. Making sure no one can see me, I drop to my knees. Quickly, I part the prickly brushes, get on all fours, and crawl through.

I walk in the hot sun without food or water. Though my throat begs for water and my feet crave to stop, I push on. My heart races as images of Ma and Geak flash before me. Their faces are long, their mouths turned down, their eyes glisten with tears. They sit at the hut in Ro Leap, calling out to me, as if they are trying to tell me something. I know why they are calling out to me. But I cannot accept it. I know.

My thought turns to Pa, and I remember how he told me I had extrasensory perception. Even as young as I am, I have always felt as if I live 80 percent of my life in déjà vu. In Phnom Penh, many times I knew who was on the other line even before Pa picked up the phone. Walking in the streets with Pa or eating noodles with Ma at the shops, I would sense that we’d run into a certain person and we would. In Ro Leap, I had a dream that a certain house would catch on fire, and it did. Pa said it is a power and though I did not fear it then, I fear it now.

The minutes turn into hours until I reach Ro Leap. It is midmorning. The village is quiet. When I enter the village, I run to Ma’s
hut. “Ma,” I call out frantically. “Ma! Geak!” No one replies. “Ma!” I run as fast as I can into the garden. Ma and Geak are not there. Tears blur my vision as I run back to her hut. Everything is still there. Their wooden rice bowls and spoons. The small pile of clothes. “Ma!” I scream, my voice hoarse.

“They are not here,” a voice answers. A young woman stands in the doorway of the next hut. She is new; I do not recognize her. “They left yesterday. My baby is sick so I did not go to work. I saw them leave.”

“Where did they go?”

“I don’t know. They went with soldiers,” the woman says quietly and looks away. She stares into the distance, refusing to look back at me.

We both know what it means when the soldiers come to the village and take someone with them. Part of me cannot believe what the woman says, but the other knows it is true. Yesterday I could not explain the mental anxiety and physical pains I woke up with. Now I know it was Ma and Geak telling me about the soldiers.

“Ma, where are you? Ma, you can’t do this to me!” I scream into the empty hut. They cannot have survived three years of starvation and the loss of Keav and Pa only to be taken now! The last time I saw her she was doing okay without Pa. I believed she was going to make it. She fought so hard to live! She cannot be gone. Poor little Geak, she never got anything good out of life.

At the sound of her baby’s cries, the woman goes into her hut. Inside, the woman hums her baby back to sleep. A memory of Ma singing me to sleep in Phnom Penh flashes before me. I cannot be strong anymore. My wall crumbles and collapses on top of me. Tears run uncontrollably down my face. My chest compresses, my insides gnaw at me, eating away at my sanity. I have to run away, I have to leave. Somehow my legs take over and carry me away from the village. “Ma! Geak!” I whisper to them. Their faces flood my consciousness. My mind races, remembering the time I stole rice from the container, out of their mouths. She never knew how it felt not to be hungry. My mind will not leave me alone. My body goes weak when I wonder which one the soldiers killed first. My mind projects pictures of the two of them together.

I see them marched slowly in a long line of twenty people collected from other villages in the province. A group of five or six Khmer Rouge soldiers walk
on either side of the villagers. The soldiers’ rifles point at the prisoners. The rain three days before has left the field wet and slippery with mud, making it difficult for the villagers to keep their balance. Besides the grunts, moans, and whimpers of the villagers, all is quiet. Both the soldiers and the villagers have on black pajama clothes and red-and-white checkered scarves with mud stains on their bottoms and knees. The men walk with their fingers locked behind their head. Sweat drips from their forehead and stings their eyes. But they dare not unlock their hands to wipe them. The women, children, and old villagers are allowed to use their arms to balance while they work their way on the uneven ground. Whatever their history, whatever their past, they are marching now because the Angkar branded them traitors to the government.

Trailing along at the end of the line, Ma carries Geak on her back. Ma cries softly, her body tense with fear and her hands holding on to Geak. She feels Geak bounce slightly on her back as she catches her balance and prevents herself from a fall in the mud. Biting her lips, she thinks of Pa and wonders if he was this afraid when they took him away. She shakes her head, not allowing herself to think of him as being dead. Parts of her will always believe he is alive somewhere. It has been almost two years and still she misses him every minute of the waking hour. In her dreams, he is so real that she wakes up hurting more than the day before. Sometimes, while she pulled weeds from the vegetable gardens, her mind wandered to their first meeting by the river, when she first caught his eye. She thought he was so handsome but knew her parents would not approve of him. She loved him and despite her parents’ objections, she ran away and they eloped. She just wanted to be with him. Maybe she would be with him again soon.