When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [77]
The day Mak goes to Peth Preahneth Preah, my mind is crowded with thoughts and fears. As I work in the woods, my hands slowly clearing away plants and grass, my mind is absorbed only with Mak. The family separation is now reversed. Instead of my brothers, sisters, and I being separated from her, she’s the one who’s taken from us. I dread going back to the hut, picturing Map waiting in the hut by himself.
Without Mak, Chea becomes his surrogate mother. At night he cuddles next to her, his arms thrown wide embracing her or hers embracing him. In these moments I see a child’s desperate need for comfort, and a sister who dispenses all the love that she has. Since our mother’s departure, we’ve drawn close to each other, hearts and minds bound by an invisible thread. When we come together from work, we read one another’s eyes, as if checking to see if the other misses Mak or is sad about her. We serve our evening meal of rice and weeds on plates like small adults, passing food to the others, polite, respectful. We keep our thoughts to ourselves, swallowing words. To speak of our fears only reinforces them, opening up a dark path of possibilities.
In the hospital, patients must struggle to find the self-reliance to survive. Those who succeed learn the tricks. Their competitors in the game of survival are mice and rats, the hospital’s residents who remain hidden during daylight. They range in size, as little as a toe and as large as a papaya. At night the games begin. From somewhere beneath the hospital, they emerge, the sound of their soft moving feet magnified in the silent night. They crawl, then pause. Mak, like many starving patients, mirrors their behavior—pause, be still. With a cloth draped over her head and body, a few grains of rice scattered beneath as bait, she waits, her hungry hands prepare to pounce. The rats smell the bait. Hunger draws them to their death as Mak’s hands grab them. Quickly she kills them, snapping their necks until they’re motionless. It is a strange cycle—the rodents come to gnaw on the weak and dead, the dying wait to trap those who would feed upon them. They will be her next day’s meal only if other patients sharing the crowded floor space don’t steal them.
Ry tells me about Mak, her tricks to survive in the hospital. But I already know. This is what I’ve been doing in our own hut—covering myself at night with a blanket and baiting a small tin can with a few grains of unhusked rice, waiting for mice. Lately I’ve traded my sleep for food, dozing lightly until I felt movement or heard their feet on the can. Sometimes I get two or more, even four on one occasion. In the morning I skin them, taking the guts out and tying their small bodies to a stick. Each mouse is a small, savory bite, and I try to eat the bones and all. In the evening, at the commune, I roast them on the fire. There, some boys steal envious glances, whispering among themselves. They wonder how I catch mice at this time of year.
At first there are many. Then my supply becomes scarce. I no longer have them to supplement my ration like Mak at Peth Preahneth Preah. A few weeks after arriving there, her edema worsens. Her stomach grows larger, swelling like that of a pregnant woman. Ry describes it to me, her eyes reddened.
Another week passes. Ry comes back with more news. A hospital worker has suggested that she take Mak to a hospital in a village called Choup. Unlike Peth Preahneth Preah, it has modern medicine, the worker promises Ry. We’ve never heard of it. Even though it’s painful to imagine our mother being at an unknown place, the prospect of Mak being treated with modern medicine eases that pain. It gives Ry hope, and she wants to persuade us. She waits for family consent.
The day before Mak leaves for Choup, Ry takes