When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [93]
I would say to Chea, “Chea, chasing birds away from rice is not hard. Even you would like working as a scarecrow. It’s not like building irrigation canals.”
Chea would be delighted with me, I imagine, like a proud mother.
The harvest reaches to full speed. Men from various villages will be here, Comrade Murn tells me, to take processed rice to their respective villages. Perhaps someone from Daakpo can take the rice I’ve saved to my family, she suggests, somehow knowing I’ve been saving the rice for Map and Chea.
A few days later a caravan of oxcarts arrived by the time I’d finished with the day’s work. In the nearby field are skinny cows eating small stacks of hay set in front of them, as if their food is also rationed. Their bodies are covered with sheets of skin, their hip-bones protrude like their eyeballs.
Quietly I pad beside the oxcarts. I prowl, peeking beneath each oxcart, where exhausted men are resting. They are sound asleep, arms bent over their foreheads to shield them from the sun. But at one oxcart an old man stands untying a rope from it. Something about him is familiar.
“Excuse me, are you from Daakpo?” I ask in a soft voice. The man turns, his eyebrows creased as if to say, Who are you?
“That’s right,” he says, pausing from untying the rope.
“Are you Ta Barang?” My memory speaks. “You used to work in a sugar place in Daakpo, didn’t you?”
“How do you know my name?” he asks.
“Do you remember Chea? I’m her younger sister!” I say, surprisingly excited.
A year ago, I tell him, he was kind to Chea and me. At the Daakpo sugar factory where palm sugar is processed for the whole village, he let us scrape white bubbles of sugar formed atop the rim of a huge, heavy pot in which the liquid palm sugar was being reduced to a dark brown, viscous sugar. “Sometimes you gave Chea sugar to bring home. Other times you let her dip yucca roots in the sugar until they were cooked and coated with sugar. Chea said you were the nicest person there.”
Ta Barang glances over his shoulder. “In this era,” he says, “when you are kind to people, you get punished for it. They took me to reform and replaced me with someone else who is good for Angka. Niece, now our country is so different; it’s hard to understand.” Ta Barang sighs, but agrees to take the rice and salted fish to Map and Chea.
A month later, after most of the rice has been harvested, my brigade is sent back to Daakpo. We are told to go back to our families until we are needed again. After a long march, I see a glimpse of my hut. Suddenly two skinny people come running, as if the hut spits them out. It’s Chea and Map! Chea dashes in front, scrawny-looking, with Map behind her, his stomach bulging out, a sign of starvation. Carefully, like frail old people, they walk on sticklike legs. Chea manages a smile that conceals pain. Her arms reach out to embrace me.
“When did you get to the village?” she asks, her voice a mixture of excitement and sorrow, tears in her eyes. Map looks at me eagerly, yet his face is tired.
“I just got here, Chea. Hey, Map,” I say softly, reaching to touch his head. Having spent countless days thinking of them, I’m jubilant, so grateful to see them. But my excitement is short-lived. Chea’s and Map’s depleted faces shock me. I have forgotten that their lives have been so different from mine.
In the alcove of our hut in the cool evening, Chea, Map, and I sit, facing each other. Map sits close to Chea like a child wanting to be cuddled by his mother. Chea’s fervent, sunken face possesses that motherly quality. I ask her questions, eager to find out if the rice rations have been better in Daakpo since the crops turned out well this year.
“Nothing changes,” Chea says dismally. “We’re still eating rice gruel, not even enough, mostly water. Every day all bang wishes is to have solid rice just for one day. Only for one day…. When bang asks the cooperative leader why we don’t get more