When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [62]
To avoid my being spotted by the chhlops, Mak warns me not to leave the hut while she’s at work with Avy and Map. I’m to stay in the hut at all times. She leaves me boiled leaves so I don’t have to go outside to cook. Even so, the chhlops can check the hut whenever they want to. Knowing this, I brace myself when I hear footsteps, flattening myself against the palm-thatch wall, afraid even to breathe for fear that my slightest movement will rustle the dry palm leaves. Only when the footsteps subside do I relax, lying down again, cherishing every moment of my rest time. In the evening, as the sun drags into twilight, I look forward to Mak’s return.
In my self-imposed isolation, news travels slowly. Though I don’t dare ask around—I’m too caught up in my need to stay hidden—I assume that Cheng must surely be finding the rest and comforts that I am. But I am wrong. Within weeks I learn through her younger sister that Cheng has died from edema. How? The strong girl who pulled me through grass and woods, who helped me escape? How could she go so fast? Was it the amoebic dysentery that had so scared her back in the camp? My heart cries out to her as grief rises in me. Pictures of how she took care of me return in my mind, of the days when I was groaning and delirious with fever and Cheng had lain beside me, patting my arm. She saved me from the death camp.
There is no modern medicine, but Mak tries to cure me with folk remedies. She boils guava bark to extract a bitter juice for me to drink, to help stop the diarrhea. I am the good patient, diligently drinking the concentrated fluid, so strong that my brain seizes up. Gradually, Mak nurses me back to health. Soon a chhlop discovers me. His young, splotchy face peeks into our hut, spotting me. Mysteriously, I’m neither tortured nor sent back to Oh Runtabage. Instead, they send me to work in a rice field close to the village. Perhaps the Khmer Rouge’s disregard for the individual works in my favor—they have simply forgotten who I am and where I’m supposed to be.
8
When the Owl Cries
I’m more than willing to plant rice. When the chhlop leader, Srouch, orders me to work with Mak and other women from Daakpo, I’m deeply relieved. Every morning I rise early with Mak to report to the rice field while Avy stays home with Map. I’ve learned to accept what cannot be changed. Living on scanty rice rations in the village—less than at the labor camp—is still better than the alternative. I trade food and cruelty for some sense of family.
With Mak, I head to the dark, flooded rice fields each morning. There are no rest days, no holidays, no breaks, unless we are forced to attend a required meeting. I comply, even when my body is weak. Thoughts of food push me, and I pin my hopes on the promise of shade and a scanty lunch of leaves and rice. In the fields, I go hunting. Tiny field crabs, a slender snake, a crawling snail—any living tidbit can make me scramble after it.
Like the older women, I step into the muddy field, heading for the tender green rice seedlings, spears poking out of the water like young grass. By now I know the routine, unlike my first time planting rice in Year Piar. I help with work that doesn’t need to be explained—scattering rice seedlings, transplanting them alongside Mak and the rest of the women until we’re finished. Then the next field, drenched with black, muddy water mixed with cow dung. I walk along the elevated pathway between rice paddies. My mind is elsewhere, dreaming about food, but my feet carry me to the next field. One foot sinks into the soft mud and onto a sharp point. Pain slices across the top of my left foot.
I know I’m in trouble—a cut in contaminated field