When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [67]
Another lightning bolt lights the sky. I see a group of four children holding on to each other, with dark clothes covering their heads, walking beside me. I grab a girl’s soaking scarf, draped over her head. Then I switch, grabbing her arm instead, making sure I won’t be lost in this tempest. She turns. Glances at me, startled.
Now the sky is totally dark. The intermittent flashes of lightning stop. The sky roars, thundering. The angry rain still falls, beating, slapping my body. Everyone shudders. My jaws chatter. I’m cold, yet I feel warm with fever. We stumble into a ditch, slamming into baskets and hard pieces of wood. Screams erupt in unison: “Mak, help me. Mak….” My words mingle with the other pleas. In the chaos of mud and baskets and the collision of bodies, I struggle to stand. I reach out in the dark, looking for the kids I’ve been with. I feel a hand, grab it, and say, “Please wait for me.”
The sharp, pinching pain in my foot is immense, but the fear of getting lost, swallowed up in the cold darkness, cannot be measured. I cry the pain away. My own suffering is lost in this madness. Somehow we rise and move on. We must move on.
As suddenly as it started, the rain is over. The darkness lingers, daytime tumbling into night. Some children’s cries pierce the night, other children whimper. I release my long-held fears, calling out to Mak in my mind. A man’s voice from a distance rises over the children’s cries. It sends a wave of hope. The group I’m with steps up the pace, shifting our bodies in the direction of the man’s voice. We cling together, a chain of human links. As we get closer, we can make out the man’s words of warning.
“Don’t cross the water! Stand there! I’ll help you one by one,” the man’s voice commands, loudly but with compassion.
“Ow, help me!” a voice bursts out, choking. “I fell in the water. Help me, Athy. Help me….”
Who is calling out my name? I rack my mind, trying to think. Suddenly it clicks—the voice is Ary’s, a girl I know from Daakpo. I saw her earlier, when we were working.
“Ary! Ary! Where are you?” I yell at the top of my voice. I want to pull her out of the gushing water, but I can’t see anything in the darkness. I can hardly move. My body is as stiff and cold as a corpse. I feel my way with my hands, threading through other children, reaching forward in the dark, trying to get to her.
I shriek, “Where are you, Ary? Where are you?”
“I’m in the water…. Help me, Athy,” she cries, choking and coughing.
“Ary, wait, I’m coming.” My feet slowly sink in the slick, muddy soil. The cold water gives me chills. I stoop, my hands working as eyes. Suddenly the man’s voice shouts, breaking my own fear of getting swept away like Ary. “Don’t get into the water,” he commands. “I’ll get her. Stay there!”
I stop, relieved and grateful. Everyone else, it seems, has abandoned us. He somehow manages to get Ary out of the water.
The man guides us with a flashlight. We squeeze together, shivering. As we walk through the field, I suddenly feel concrete beneath my feet—a distant memory of a more civilized world. I know we’re now in a village, but I can’t see anything before me except the curtain of darkness. A woman’s voice guides us up a wooden stairway to a darkened building. I’m exhausted, yet with every step I take I encounter a rug of children, sprawling and packed closely together.
I resign myself to the darkness and sink down amid some mysterious metal objects, hugging them like a soft pillow.
In the morning I awake, horrified. The sunlight filters through a small, dirty window exposing thick cobwebs intertwined along the ceiling, the walls, and the old bicycle parts that litter the floor where we have slumbered.