When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [12]
Pa gives Tha some medicine, but nothing changes. Tha can’t move or pee and just lies in bed, breathing slowly. He sleeps a lot and his face has turned white. When Mak and Pa try to talk to him, he squeezes his eyes open, eyelids fluttering, but he can’t talk.
Mak is desperate. At one point she seeks a spiritual adviser. The answer is simple: at some point, Tha has peed on someone’s grave. That is why he cannot pee or speak. The angry spirit steals his spirit as retribution. Without an apology, Tha surely will die. My mother racks her brain trying to think of where the offended grave might have been—perhaps in Phnom Penh, during our brief stay there. By now she grasps at any explanation, any thin hope.
With the city abandoned, there is no medical help available. Pa has to get a doctor from far away to help Tha. The doctor gives Tha shots and removes a catheter and hose from his medical bag. Pa motions with his hand, telling me to stand away from Tha’s bed while the doctor tries to get his pee out. Tha groans. Pa and Mak are twin mirrors of distress.
After the doctor finishes, he and Pa go outside and I walk over to Mak, who sits by the bed. Mak feels Tha’s stomach and gazes into his eyes. Mak strokes his hair. I want to touch his hand to comfort him. Then I hear a click sound, and suddenly Tha’s lips slowly widen into a smile. “Mak, Tha is smiling!” Than exclaims happily, standing at the foot of Tha’s bed. We all smile.
Mak says gently, “Than, koon, let your older brother hold your toy gun for a second,” and he does.
Tha does not recover, however. He shuts down, taking nothing in, giving nothing out. He only breathes. Mak and Pa are always by his side.
My parents haven’t prepared us for the idea of death. It is never discussed. When Tha dies, our mother cries very hard. Her ragged sobs scare me and yet pull me to her. Pa’s eyes are red, wet with tears. He covers his face and leaves the house. I am saddened by the death of my older brother, who once let me hold a baby crow, warm and wriggling, with its tiny feet scratching for a perch in the palm of my hand. But in a way, my parents’ distress and helplessness bother me even more.
Increasingly, our lives are spinning out of control.
We have been squatters in the house of Kong Horne, Mak’s uncle, for a month when he returns with his wife and children. The house is filling up. People gradually return to Takeo, and life slowly begins to seep back into the vacant streets.
With a growing household, our family moves into the second floor of the home—a place with an eerie history. Years before I was born, a Vietnamese woman broke into my uncle’s home intent on stealing jewelry, gold, and silver ingots that were hidden in a stack of firewood—a crude but practical safe-deposit box for many Cambodians fearful of inflation and the shifting value of paper money. The intruder somehow lured my seven-year-old aunt upstairs. No one knows what happened. Perhaps she was trying to scare her into revealing where the gold and jewelry was. Maybe she was silencing a witness. In the end, the woman hanged my aunt by her neck, suspending her small body by a rope from a ceiling beam. The murderer was later found hiding under a bed upstairs not far from the body. She never did find the gold.
For years the entire second story of the house was closed off. Cords of wood and thick wooden poles were stacked against it to counterbalance the evil. Whenever we get scared, my great-grandmother rattles off her spiritual defense, a rapid string of Pali words that come out as a chant, asking Buddha to ward off the bad spirits, to set up an invisible boundary so that ghosts can’t enter. In Cambodian culture you can also ward off ghosts in a single gesture: a defiantly uplifted middle finger.
At night my mother swears she can hear someone pouring tea. Some nights when she rises to get water, she spies a dark shadow sitting on the hammock. One night I call out to my father. Someone is running