When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge Paperback (12 page)

Others don’t seem to rebound from the parasites that plague us. For more than a week, my three-year-old brother Vin has suffered from dysenteric diarrhea. Every day he soils his few pairs of worn pants and the other clothes that
Mak
uses to cover him. On the wooden floor of our hut, his little body lies still, disturbed only by the slow, rhythmic motions of his breathing. He lies sideways, wearing only a shirt. He is naked from the waist down—it’s pointless to try to keep clean pants on him, and his tiny bottom is perpetually swamped by flies. We have a new job. Someone must sit near him, fanning the flies away. Thinking back, I remember
Pa
curing one of my cousins of diarrhea. He would have known what to do. Water and salt, to help with the dehydration. But nothing is available to us. Fanning flies away is the only care we can give him. The only thing we know to do to protect him. Helplessness haunts us.

“
Mak
…
Mak
, please let me sleep by you. I’m cold,” Vin beseeches, his voice small, soft, and sad. “I’m cold,
Mak
. Let me sleep with you for one more night.”

“
Koon proh Mak
,
*
Mak
doesn’t want you to make your brothers and sisters sick. Please sleep over there, my son,”
Mak
begs.

“
Mak
, let me sleep with you one more night. Only one more night,
Mak
. Tomorrow I’ll go to the hospital and then I’ll feel better. Please let me,
Mak
, I’m cold,” Vin cries out once again.

“
Mak
is sorry,
koon
.” Never before has
Mak
been so helpless. So apologetic.

This child whom she brought into the world cannot be satisfied. And this raw fact is slowly killing her.

For the rest of us, it is like listening to the soundtrack of a sad movie that has no end. Lying cuddled beside
Mak
—my brothers and sisters sharing blankets and our warmth when the cool night wind blows, wriggling through the cracks into our hut—I weep for Vin. Our sniffles become a melody in the night as each of us suffers with him. He is only three, but the revolution ages us all. Already Vin can articulate his need, his desperate need to survive.

Long into the night, Vin cries as the chilly December wind blows. It beats the leaves of the tall trees behind our hut, creating a chorus of noise akin to Vin’s shuddering. Even beneath a blanket, I’m touched by this invisible wind.

When the morning comes, Ry gets Vin ready for a trip to the Khmer Rouge hospital, called Peth Preahneth Preah, a name left over from an earlier time, which means “Hospital of the Sight of God.” It is probably three miles from where we live.

Vin’s pale, shrinking body lies still as Ry wraps him in
Mak
’s sarong. Sadly he gazes at our mother. Vin’s bloodless lips slowly part. “
Mak
, I go to the hospital. Soon I’ll feel better, then I’ll come back home. I’ll come soon,
Mak
.”

His words and sad eyes suggest a pensive parting. As small as he is, Vin seems to understand, absolving her, comforting her. His empathy in the midst of his own suffering strikes me to the core. Vin is little, yet so curiously wise. Perhaps it is a wisdom born of a young life that has straddled so much—our life before the revolution, the retreat from Phnom Penh, the life of forced labor. Too much living to cram into too few years. A three-year-old in a boxcar. A three-year-old scavenging for food. He has known so much pain that I can’t bear it. I want to drop to the dirt, fall to my knees to beg Buddha to stop his suffering.

I want so much.

“Yes,
koon proh Mak
, go to the hospital and you will get better soon. Then
koon
comes back to
Mak
.”
Mak
chokes up, speaking the ragged words she knows will not come true.

“‘
Koon
comes back to
Mak
,’” Vin says, repeating
Mak
’s phrase as if it comforts him.

Weeks go by, and Vin is still in the hospital. His condition worsens, Ry reports to us. She is stationed at the hospital taking care of Vin, a role that would otherwise have fallen to Chea and Ra, who are older than her. But they are gone, having already been taken off to a forced youth labor camp. They left a day after an informant leader, Srouch, came by, ordering them to a meeting. They obeyed immediately, like soldiers called up for combat. Their responsibility to our family is no longer relevant. Through no fault of her own,
Mak
has lost custody of her children—
Angka Leu
has appointed itself sole parent. With their departure, Ry steps in, taking upon herself a motherly role.

Back in Phnom Penh, at age thirteen, she was slim but strong. Her black silky hair fell below her shoulders, cut evenly. She looked cute, I thought, in her blue miniskirt with her white and blue blouse. When she biked to school, her legs pumped her bike pedals like an athlete’s.

Even then Ry was nursing us, taking care of Chea when she came down with typhoid and a blood condition. Ry was a natural nurse, staying with Chea so
Mak
could take care of us at home and
Pa
could work. Though Ra was older, she feared the dead spirits in hospitals. Unlike Ra, Ry wasn’t scared of sickness. Ra was better off staying at home, helping
Mak
with cleaning, cooking, and grocery shopping.

At fifteen, mature for her age, Ry takes on the caregiving task again. Just as she used to care for Chea, she now stays days and nights with Vin. She works in the hospital, a hall that used to be part of a temple. The floor is dirt, patients lie on slim metal cots. Others are scattered on blankets or plastic sheeting on the floor. It has the atmosphere of a field hospital, scarcely an aisle to walk through. Vin is luckier—because of the crowding, he has been moved to an annex, a nearby building with a wooden floor. He is allotted a narrow space a few scant feet from the nearest patients. Medical scrubs are replaced by the eternal Khmer Rouge uniform—black shirt and pants, a simple scarf. If these hospital “authorities” have a medical education, it isn’t apparent. The only treatment readily dispensed is “rabbit dung,” the term adopted for crude “pills” made from bark and honey. Sometimes people request the “rabbit dung” just for the honey alone, something to fill their empty stomachs. It seems that food, simple nutrition, would cure much suffering here.

Like a mother, Ry feeds Vin his meager food ration. Since there is no one else to administer care, she bathes him, dresses him. She gives him comfort and warmth, cuddling close to him at night. But as hard as she works, he is empty. Every day he cries for
Mak
, begging Ry to ask
Mak
to come and see him. Ry passes along the plea, imploring
Mak
until
Mak
cries, “Don’t torture,
Mak
,
koon
. I can’t walk to the hospital.
Mak
would if
Mak
could.”

She speaks the painful truth.
Mak
’s face and entire body have swollen up, inflated by the fluid building up inside her. Her face is an ugly mask of what it once was, as pale as pigskin with puffy jowls. Her eyes squint out from this fleshy landscape, cloudy and dull. No one knows why this is, what is making our limbs so heavy. My mother has a theory. “We don’t have salt,” she says, shrugging. Before long, she has company. In time, we all get it—the new people. At first it seems like bad fortune, a curse on the most recent arrivals. It takes a while for us to associate this condition with our own starvation. The word is
hamm
, swollen (edematous). I too am swollen. My legs. My arms. My face. Suddenly, a simple task like walking feels like slogging through mud. Like
Mak
and me, Avy and Map also swell up like inflatable dolls, their faces tight and stretched, their legs fat beyond their years. The skin between Avy’s toes scares me—so taut and transparent, it looks as if it will surely burst. Still, she is stronger than me, able to walk to retrieve water. I feel helpless, ashamed, weak by comparison. My strong little sister surprises me.

Around us we watch the drama unfold. Sickness touches so many huts. Even the ill-tempered “Grandma Two Kilo” is humbled, her tongue temporarily silenced by the sickness, which robs her of the last delicacy of her fading beauty.

One day Ry returns from the hospital to report that Vin is dying. As soon as she spits out the words, she convulses, doubled over with grief.

“
Mak
, Vin begs for you to see him. He wants to see you one more time.”

“
Mak
can’t go,
koon
.
Mak
can hardly walk to get water to drink and cook.
Mak
cannot walk that far.” Her words are slow, without hope or animation. She is beaten down by her own body.

“But Vin is dying,
Mak
! He asks for you, he misses you.…” Ry breaks down.

“
Koon
, did you hear what
Mak
said?
Mak
wants to go see your brother, but
Mak
just can’t walk that far.” She is too weak to argue. Ry must understand this. And yet the roles are oddly reversed. Ry is like the mother, ordering her child to obey.
Mak
must be there. Doesn’t she understand? Her voice rises again, desperate.

“What should I tell him when he asks for you again? What do I do,
Mak
?”

“Tell your baby brother that
Mak
cannot walk that far yet. When
Mak
can walk,
Mak
will see him.” Her answer is a long sigh.

“But he’s dying…” Ry wails.

“
Mak
knows,
koon
. Tell your brother what
Mak
said.” Her words are slow and steady. Despite what she feels in her heart, her voice never reflects the hysteria of this moment. She is simply too sick to care. Sitting on the floor, her hands clutching a knee,
Mak
begins shuddering.

“
Mak
.” Map reaches out as
Mak
releases her grief. It is as if she has swallowed her tears and her screams, letting only thin threads of it bubble up. Her cries are like jagged glass, and we look on in silence. Suddenly Map wails—his cries breaking her own internal spell of sadness. She looks up as if doused with a pan of cold water. Awakened.

“Don’t cry,
koon proh Mak
.
Mak
stop crying, stop crying.”
Mak
comforts Map, holding him in her arms.

Avy’s tears rush out to join them, streaming down her pale, puffy cheeks. With the swelling, she looks like a crying statue. The tears are there, but the swelling has masked her expression. Her ragged sobs join the chorus, adding to Map’s,
Mak
’s, and mine. It is too much for Ry to take. She walks away. Her weeping trails down the alley between the huts until it is a faint echo in the distance. She returns to Vin at the hospital, bringing with her a sad message. I imagine him lying on the floor of the hospital. A three-year-old’s heartbroken cries when Ry tells him
Mak
can’t come. In my mind, I cry out to Buddha to help Vin:
Preah
,
please help my baby brother. Please don’t let him die—he’s only a baby. Please let him live so he can see Mak one more time. Only one more time, Preah
.…

I recall Vin’s expression of hope and the words he and
Mak
exchanged before Ry took him to the hospital: “
Mak
, I go to the hospital. Soon I’ll feel better. I’ll come back home. I’ll come soon,
Mak
.…” “Yes,
koon proh Mak
, go to the hospital and you’ll get better soon. Then
koon
comes back to
Mak
.”

“‘
Koon
comes back to
Mak
.’” A hollow game of make-believe. A gentle parting. A promise that cannot be kept.

Vin dies in the hospital from an illness that is curable. But the world is brutal, indifferent. Drawn and dehydrated, his lifeless body lies naked on the wooden hospital floor—a skeleton of a little boy. When Ry wakes next to him, she leans over and shakes him, begging for a weak answer. There is none. Soon after his death, Ry removes his red knit shirt. Even in her grief, she must think about survival, saving the shirt for Map. It is necessary, a desperate act. His last rite. Her final image of him is of a small, still body wrapped in a burlap bag, carried away by two hospital workers. They never speak to her, these custodians of death.

Vin is buried at the edge of a hill called Phnom Preahneth Preah, the Sight of God. It is an impersonal burial in an unmarked grave. None of us are there to mourn. No relatives gather, no monks pray. When Ry brings home this news, no one cries. Not even
Mak
. To weep is to acknowledge what we can’t accept. Our minds are already saturated with sorrow. Our silence is our last defense.

Mak
is numb. Like the sun surrendering to an eternal eclipse, she simply shuts off. I study my mother now, and it is hard to imagine the happy bride, the rebellious student, the determined mother full of gentle smiles and silent sacrifice. There are no rewards in our life. To be alive and walking every day, to live through another day, is its own reward in this horrible world. Already
Mak
looks old beyond her years. Numbed by suffering, deadened by the death all around us. Too feeble to care.