When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [34]
After the sun surrenders to the night, I’m still thinking of Pa. I’m no longer scared of the informant hiding below us. I sit on Pa’s scooter, parked under the house where the informant used to eavesdrop on us. Holding on to the black rubber handles, Pa’s last handprints, I’m connected to the world as it was when Pa was with us. As painful as it is, I journey back in time, revisiting the past as my wet eyes gaze at the tachometer, the red needle aligned at the zero mark.
Zero. Our lives are at zero. Year zero.
I reminisce about better times, when Pa took us out to restaurants and to the palace where the royal family lived. I remember nights in Takeo. Pa would wake everyone up for pâté sandwiches. He’d carry me from my bed to the dining table. He’d feed me until my mind woke up, then my eyes would open to find a platter of meats, cucumbers, and French bread. My memory speaks until it hurts. Until I break down.
“Athy, why are you crying? Are you okay?” Chea comes to rescue me.
“Chea, I miss Pa. I miss Pa very much.”
“Stop crying, p’yoon srey. I miss Pa, too.”
Chea reaches out and pulls me close to her. In her arms, I cry harder, letting out pain that I’ve hidden from my family. Chea hugs me tight. Her hand massages my head, a soothing touch that softens my sorrow. It allows me to sleep, lying in the room beside my sisters, hugging Pa’s shirt. I hug him in my mind as I inhale his odor from his shirt. I inhale it deeply and hungrily. I love Pa—words I’ve never actually uttered. I miss him; the way I would miss a piece of my own body. I am adrift.
One month has gone by. Still Pa hasn’t returned. Now the Khmer Rouge order Mak to a meeting with the other women whose husbands were taken away. At the meeting the Khmer Rouge ask everyone if they want to go to their husbands and work with them in an “office.” All of them say yes. Who wouldn’t want to be with their husbands? Mak wouldn’t. She tells the Khmer Rouge that she would rather stay in the village and work for Angka Leu. Mak would have told them otherwise if it weren’t for Som, whose husband had worked for Kong Houng before the Khmer Rouge “liberated” Year Piar. Som secretly came to Mak the day before the meeting and told her what to say. Even though there was no reason given, Mak obeyed, repeating her lines to Khmer Rouge leaders. Mak’s intuition to trust Som’s words saves my family. In time, those women who volunteered to be with their husbands are taken away.
Walking in the village days later, Mak sees a man wearing Pa’s shirt—a cream-colored short-sleeved dress shirt with one pocket. In this village of poverty, a simple office shirt stands out. Without fear, she follows the man and demands to know where he got it. Baffled by Mak’s abrupt confrontation, he mutters that it has been distributed to him. Mak rages at the idea of someone giving away her husband’s belongings. Biting back her anger, she turns and heads to Som’s hut in search of the truth. Mak figures Som will know since her husband is one of the local people who now works for the Khmer Rouge who took Pa and my uncles to “orientation.”
Som whispers urgently to Mak, asking her to tone down her voice. In her hut, lit only by the rays of sun that sneak in, she confides to Mak, revealing what happened to Pa—a truth that shakes the core of Mak’s already wilted soul.
Pa, Uncle Surg, Uncle Sorn, and the other men were not taken to an orientation. They were taken to a remote field outside Year Piar to be executed. Upon their arrival, they were unloaded off the oxcarts and forced to dig their own graves. After they finished, the Khmer Rouge cadres tied them up, then killed each one with a hoe. The bodies tumbled into the very pits they had readied to catch them.
“Your husband fought back