When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [47]
“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.
She can’t even walk less than a mile to see to her dying mother, Yiey Srem, who has also been brought to our village. As fate would have it, all of Mak’s side of the family also end up in Daakpo. But there is little joy in this fact. We hardly see each other. Starvation has given Yiey Srem a swollen body much like her daughter’s. My grandmother’s sagging, wrinkled skin is inflated. Oddly, there is a cruel family resemblance in the edema—we are all becoming a tribe of puffy people, all the “new people” in the village. It is a hideous badge, a way to identify us. We become preoccupied with the lack of food. The memory of it is a