When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [108]
Ra looks at her load, pulls out a pot, a cutting block, and a bag of salt, then she cries. “Thy, I can’t throw these away. We need—”
Boom! An artillery shell lands nearby. We jump into the ditch, then Ra sticks her head out. “Ming, over here!”
When the firing subsides, we climb out of the ditch. To avoid any attack by the Khmer Rouge from the Kandal village, we move to a grove of trees away from it. Here, resting on the ground among the trees, we are by ourselves. Two families. The woman, her daughters, Ra, Map, and me. Now that I’ve caught my breath, I can feel my body aching. My mind slips, giving in to exhaustion. My head nods, I’m dozing off. I try to open my eyes, and try to listen to Ra and the woman as they talk about their fears.
Soon, though, someone emerges from the trees. We stand up, ready to run.
“It’s Meng…only Ameng.” Ra runs to her, and I follow.
“Ara, Ara—my siblings, oh, my aunt, my aunt,” bang Meng stammers incoherently. “Ara, they’re all dead. Dead. The Khmer Rouge killed my family.”
Bang Meng pants. Her body trembles, wobbling. Her hands grip the carrying stick that balances two big trunks on her shoulder. Ra grabs the carrying stick from her.
Free from the load, bang Meng cries in a long, shrieking voice and stammers about the death of her family. Suddenly her legs sag, then she pulls herself back up. At that second a wave of flies recoils, bouncing off her blood-soaked blouse, then is drawn back to her.
When she calms down, she tells us what happened, tears spilling out of her eyes. “We were tired and afraid of getting hit by bullets and bombs, so we stopped. We hid in a paddy with four other families behind this path. Suddenly a man wearing black, a Khmer Rouge, approached. He walked up to a boy, a sick, swollen boy, hiding near the road. Oh, Ara, ming, it’s awful….” Bang Meng breaks down, shaking.
“He begged, raised his hands to his forehead. He said, ‘Poo, don’t kill me, please don’t kill me—’
“That Khmer Rouge said to the boy, ‘I won’t kill you,’ but as he said that, he pulled a pistol and shot the boy in the head, right in the head. When I saw that, I knew we were next,” bang Meng continues. “As he strode toward us, my brother, sisters, aunt, the girls from this family, everyone, and this old grandma, all sampeahed* him. They implored him, saying, ‘Poo, khmuy,† chow,‡ don’t kill me, don’t kill us.’ When he was close, I shut my eyes. I covered my face with a scarf and hat. I lay down on the ground near the feet of my aunt, sisters, and brother. Suddenly I heard shots, loud shots. Oh God, everyone fell on me. Warm blood seeped onto me, my clothes. Then I felt a foot on my chest, then I thought he’d shot me….”
Later, bang Meng heard footsteps coming. She feared that the same Khmer Rouge had returned to kill her. As she cried, trembling in horror, the footsteps stopped near her. Then the hat covering her head blew away. She shivered, wailing, her hands over her face. “Don’t be afraid of me,” a man’s voice said. “I’m not going to harm you. I’m a good soldier, a PARA¶ soldier.”
He said that when he noticed bang Meng’s body was still breathing, he felt compelled to save her. Having explained himself, he advised bang Meng to leave Chhnoel, and so here she is with us, alone without her family.
Having heard bang Meng’s story, we all decide to move farther away from Chhnoel and Kandal. We join a group of people in an area with hay-colored grass. A few older men and women talk, the rest stare at the grass or into space. We camp there overnight.
The next morning bang Meng ventures to Chhnoel with other people who lost their families. Tears well in her eyes as she describes the stench and the heap of corpses removed to a field to be burned. “Ara, my baby brother is gone,” she sobs. “He’s pale, bloodless. Lifeless.…” She asks Ra to go with her to see her family’s corpses before they are burned. In this time of loss, Ra can’t refuse a friend. Struggling to decide what is the right thing to do, Ra takes Map and me along for fear of separation if the Khmer Rouge