First They Killed My Father (15 page)

She wraps her red scarf around her head and walks toward the rice fields. Every day she works in the rice fields, planting and harvesting rice. Everyday, it is backbreaking work. It is only five A.M., but today she could see that the sky is hazy and cloudless. The air is already hot and humid. In an hour, the haze dissipates to expose a white sky. Her black pajama pants and shirt absorb the sun’s rays and sweat drips out of all her pores. With the sun beating down on the top of her head, the heat and humidity make it difficult for her to breathe.

An hour passes and her stomach continues to growl, making loud, angry noises. She ignores it, hoping it will eventually settle itself. Talking and singing isn’t allowed during work. Planting rice now has become an automatic, physical action, requiring no concentration. Thus, she has lot of time to spend with herself in her head, too much time even. Her mind grows lazy and wanders around too many topics
—
her schoolwork, a cute boy she met in Phnom Penh, movies she saw
—
but always it comes back to our family. She misses us so much.

Another hour passes, and her stomach is now in great pain, causing her to double over. She wraps her arms around her stomach, runs to the bushes, pulls her pants to her ankles, and lets the poison run out of her. She pulls her pants up and walks back to the fields but soon has to rush to a bush again. After several visits to the bushes, she finally walks over to the supervisor.

“Please, I am very ill. It is my stomach. May I take the rest of the day off and visit the infirmary?” She pleads with the supervisor. The supervisor looks at her with disgust and contempt.

“No. I do not believe you are sick. We all have hunger pains. You are just a lazy, worthless city girl. Go back to work.” Keav’s heart shatters at being so denigrated.

Another hour passes, but her stomach refuses to settle down. In that hour, she spent ten minutes in the rice field and the rest of the time in the bushes. She is then so sick and weak that she has to drag her body to the supervisor.

“Please, I am very sick. I cannot stand up anymore.” As sick as she is, Keav’s face burns with embarrassment as she follows the supervisor’s gaze to her leg. On her last trip, Keav soiled her pants.

“You smell terrible. All right, you have permission to go to the hospital.” Finally, with permission slip in hand, Keav staggers back to her camp and collapses.

An hour after she leaves the field, Keav finally arrives at the makeshift hospital where there are many patients waiting to see the nurses. The hospital is a decrepit old building with many cots lined up on the ground. When Keav approaches a nurse and reports her illness, the nurse takes her arm and leads her to a cot to lie down. Without taking her pulse or touching her, the nurse asks Keav a few brief questions about her symptoms and hurries away, saying she will return later to check on her and bring some medicine. Keav knows this is a lie. There is no medicine. There are no real doctors or nurses, only ordinary people ordered to pretend to be medical experts. All the real doctors and nurses were killed by the Angkar long ago. Still Keav is glad to be out of the sun.

At Ro Leap, when the sun hovers directly over my head, the lunch bell rings at one
P.M.
Rushing out of our hut, Chou, Geak, and I meet Pa and Kim at the communal kitchen to receive our ration. Sitting in the shade, we eat our meal of thin rice soup and salted fish in silence. Chou feeds Geak from her own bowl, being careful Geak doesn’t spill or drop anything. Her round stomach, small head, sticklike arms and legs look disproportional to the rest of her body. All around us, groups of five to ten people sit together and quietly consume just enough food to live for another day.

I look up and see Ma’s figure returning. Her face is red and puffy from crying. We know something is seriously wrong, yet none of us are
ready for the shock of the news. “She’s not going to live, she’s not going to make it,” Ma weeps as she whispers the words. “Keav is not going to survive the night. She is very sick and has a bad case of dysentery. They believe she ate poisonous food. She is so very thin and sick just from one morning of diarrhea.” Ma drags her palms from her eyes down to her cheeks as she describes Keav to us. She tells us there is no flesh left on Keav’s body. Keav’s eyes are sunken deep into their sockets, and she can hardly open them to look at her. When she first saw Ma, she did not recognize her. Keav wheezed and gasped for air just from trying to talk to her. Ma breaks down and weeps loudly.

When she finally did speak, she kept asking for Pa. “Ma, where’s Pa? Ma, go get Pa. I know I am going to die and I want to see him one last time. I want him to bring me home to be near the family,” Ma tells us. “That is her last wish, to see her family and be near them even after she’s gone. She said she is tired and wants to sleep but will wait for Pa to get there. She is so weak she cannot raise her hand to wave the flies away from her face. She is so dirty. They didn’t even clean her mess up until I got there. They just let her lie there in her sickness and dirty sheets. No one is taking care of my daughter.”

After Ma and Pa receive permission from the chief to go get Keav, they hurriedly leave together. I sit on the steps of our hut with Kim, Chou, and Geak, watching our parents disappear to bring my oldest sister home to us. Kim and Chou sit quietly, lost in their own thoughts. Geak crawls over to me and asks where Ma went. Receiving no answers from us, she climbs down the steps to sit on the ground. Picking up a branch, she draws circles, squares, and crude pictures of our hut in the dirt. As we wait, the minutes turn into hours, the hours into eternity, and the sun refuses to lower in the sky to make time pass faster.

I follow them in my mind as they travel to the hospital to find my sister. I imagine Keav there, waiting for our parents.

Keav remembers the feel of Ma’s hand softly touching her forehead. It is the best thing in the world to have someone love you. Though she can not feel her body much, it is nice to have Ma’s hands on her, cleaning, wiping, smoothing her hair. She misses them so much! She misses Ma so much now! The memory brings a small smile to her lips. She smiles again thinking of Ma, but soon the smile turns to tears. She cries silently, finally letting go of her emotions. She
wishes Ma didn’t have to see her like this, worrying about how she appears to Ma during her last visit. Ma is so shocked and sad to see Keav in this condition. Ma cries a great deal and tells her profusely how much she is loved. Ma gently holds her hands and kisses her forehead. She wants to sit up for Ma, but her body is so weak that the slightest movement is painful. There is so much she wants to say to Ma but talking is difficult.

She is frustrated at being trapped in a body that refuses to move. When Ma leaves, Keav can only turn her head to watch her disappear. “Come back quickly, Ma,” she whispers. She knows Ma does not want to leave her, but Keav wants to see Pa one last time. She misses him and the rest of her family so much. A wave of sadness washes over her and seeps into every inch of her body, taking her breath away. A sadness so enormous and overwhelming she does not know what to do with it. A black fly buzzes over and lands on her hand. She is too weak to swat it off. A strange chill runs up her spine. She knows it to be pure fear. Her heart weighs so heavy, and it is getting more and more difficult to breathe. “Pa, I’m so afraid,” she cries into the thin air. “Please come see me soon.”

When, at last, I see their distant figures return, my siblings and I rush toward them. My heart breaks when I see my parents return without my sister. Their faces are drawn and long. I run to them for news of my sister’s condition, though in my heart I know she is already dead. Ma, having lost her oldest daughter, runs to her youngest daughter, four-year-old Geak, and clasps her tightly.

“Keav was already dead by the time we got there,” Pa speaks wearily. She died shortly before we arrived. The nurse said she kept asking if we had arrived yet, saying how she wanted to be home and nowhere else. We got there too late. I asked the nurse if I could take her body home, but they no longer knew where she was. They had thrown her body out because they needed her bed for the next patient. We tried to look for her among the dead on the floor but could not find her.” The nurse went on to tell Pa that more than a dozen girls died that day from food poisoning. She said it is lucky they were notified at all. Most of the time, they don’t know where to contact the parents. Those they have no contacts for, they bury right away. Keav’s body must have gotten mixed up with them. “They acted as if we should be thankful we were told. Now she’s dead, and we cannot find her.” Pa
tries to control his anger but his face contorts. His shoulders shaking, Pa hides his tears from us and covers his face with his hands.

“I asked them if I could have Keav’s belongings,” Ma whispers hoarsely. “The nurse went to look for them but came back with nothing. When I saw her, Keav still had the gold watch, a gift from us that she kept hidden. When she knew she was dying she took it out and wore it for the first time. The nurse said she does not remember seeing a watch on her wrist and does not know where it is.” Most likely, someone had stolen it off her wrist.

I cannot listen anymore. I run and run, finding myself heading for the woods. There, beneath a large tree, next to a thick bush, I hide from the rest of the world. Hugging my knees tightly to my chest, I rest my head on my forearms. I cup my hands over my mouth and scream out in pain over the cruel death of my sister. The sound burns in my throat, fighting to be released, but I hold it in as tears stream out of my eyes.

People have always said that Keav and I were similar in many ways. We looked almost identical to each other and were also alike in personality. We were both headstrong and always ready to fight. Keav’s last wish was not granted; she did not get to see Pa before she died. I wrap my arms around my stomach and double over in pain, falling to the ground. In the thick grass, my tears pour out for my sister and seep into the earth.

That night, lying on my back, my hands crossed over my chest, I ask Chou what happens to people when they die.

“No one knows for sure, but it is believed that at first they sleep peacefully, not knowing they are dead. They sleep for three days, and on the third day they wake up and try to return home. That’s when they realize they are dead. They are sad but have to make peace with themselves. Then they walk to a river, wash the dirt off their bodies, and start their journey to heaven to wait for their next reincarnated life.”

“When will they be reincarnated?”

“I don’t know,” Chou replies.

“I hope she won’t be reincarnated here,” I say quietly. Chou reaches out for my hand and holds it gently as she wipes her eyes with her sleeve. I think about what Chou has just told me. I imagine Keav sleeping peacefully somewhere. On the third night she wakes up
only to realize that she is dead. It saddens me to think of her pain upon finding out she cannot return home. I imagine Keav in heaven, watching over us, finally happy again. I picture her the way she looked before the war, and wearing a white gown and washing in the river. I see her the way she looked in Phnom Penh, not the way Ma described her.

The reality of Keav’s death is too sad so I create a fantasy world to live in. In my mind, she is granted her last wish. Pa gets there in time to hear Keav tell him how much she loves him and he gives her our messages of love. He holds her in his arms as she dies peacefully feeling love, not fear. Pa then brings Keav’s body home to be buried, to be forever with us, instead of being lost.

I wake up the next morning feeling guilty because I did not dream about Keav at all. Pa is already off to work. Ma’s face is red and swollen, and, as always, she is holding Geak. Ma and Keav never got along well. Keav was wild and temperamental. Ma wanted her to change, to be more ladylike, more subdued. I wonder about the regrets Ma must have over their relationship, regrets about all those times they fought in Phnom Penh over what music Keav listened to or the clothes she wore.

Ma turns and looks at me, her eyes cloud over. For a brief moment I want to reach out to her and give her some comfort, but I cannot and turn away from her staring eyes. Our lives will never be the same again after Keav’s death. Hunger and death have numbed our spirits. It is as if we have lost all our energy for life.

“We all have to forget her death and continue.” Pa tries hard to encourage us. “We have to go about our ways as if nothing has happened. We don’t want the chief to think that we can no longer contribute to their society. We have to save our strength to go on. Keav would want us to go on; it is the only way we will survive.”

Time passes by slowly. We are in the middle of our summer because the air is hotter and drier now. It seems to be about four months since Keav died. Though the family does not talk about her, my heart still weeps when I remember that she is no longer with us.

The government continues to reduce our food rations. I am always hungry and all I think about is how to feed myself. Each night, my stomach growls and aches as I try to sleep. Our family remains dependent on Khouy and Meng to bring us food whenever they can steal away from their camp to visit us. However, the Angkar keeps them so busy that they are unable to visit us as often as before.

We live under the constant fear of being discovered as supporters of the former government. Every time I see soldiers walking in our village, my heart leaps and I fear they are coming for Pa. They don’t know that Pa is not a poor farmer, but how long will it be before they realize we are all living a lie? Everywhere I go I am obsessed with the thought that people are staring at me, watching me with suspicious eyes, waiting for me to mess up, and give away our family secret. Can they tell by the way I talk, or walk, or look?

“They know,” I overhear Pa whisper to Ma late one night. Lying on my back next to Chou and Kim, I pretend to be asleep. “The soldiers have taken away many of our neighbors. Nobody ever talks of the disappearances. We have to make preparations for the worst. We have to send the kids away, to live somewhere else, and make them change their names. We must make them leave and go to live in orphanage camps. They must lie and tell everyone that they are orphans and don’t know who their parents are. This way, maybe, we can keep them safe from the soldiers and from exposing one another.”