The Living Fields
After moving to Thailand I said I would never be the same girl again, but it is after visiting Cambodia I know I will never be the same person again.
In Siem Reap I barely noticed I was breathing because I was in awe of walking amongst one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – Angkor Wat and its surrounding temples. In Phnom Penh the only way I could tell what I was seeing was the real world was because I had trouble breathing. The reality of Cambodian life caused an ache in my chest, a sting in my eyes, a tightness in my throat, a curdle in my stomach, a frailty in my knees.
But I do not know hurt. These people breathe hurt. Hurt and ugliness.
***
Shortly before 9 a.m. we got into our driver’s car – a black two decade-old BMW with fake diamonds on the door locks and a hip hop song about having a party coming out of the speakers. We were on our way to the killing fields. If there is a way to prepare for this sight, we surely weren’t. The five-kilometre stretch of red dirt road leading to the land was only a glimpse of the gloom this country bears.
Women walk along the edge with wide baskets of peanuts balanced on their heads while half-clothed toddlers cling to their legs when vehicles like ours pass. Men lift and drape nets into little brown ponds hoping to find a fish or two. Some sit on blue plastic stools behind a row of coke bottles filled with gasoline for sale. Plastic bags, cigarette butts and bugs stick together in piles strewn along the ditches where people walk and children play.
Cambodia is decades behind because of a series of events, I later learned, that started in the ‘70s when the Vietnam War trickled over into Cambodia and a man named Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge party, came into power. In his quest to conquer and control the country, also called Kampuchea, two million people were tortured, many at an old high school, then executed, at this place – the killing fields – both now Phnom Penh’s claim to fame.
****
They use a tall, skinny, white concrete closet to keep the skulls in.
We walked towards it, the mass of bone and brick appearing as one. Through a glass door no wider than me we stood before a dozen shelves, each holding dozens of heads of the dead. They were classed in groups like ‘FEMALE FROM 20 TO 40 YRS. OLD’ and ‘JUVENILE MALE KAMPUCHANI FROM 15 TO 20 YRS. OLD’.
They’re different, incomparable even, to the ones you see on your science teacher’s shelves. Here they are piled on top of one another, some facing visitors, some upside down, some missing half the face, some with rusty looking sides, some with flies flying through the neck and out the nose.
At the very, very bottom of the case is a pile of clothes, mostly faded blue and brown pants, tossed purposely randomly on a wooden plank. The white sign with blue letters beside it says After Excavating The Mass Graves Victims’ Clothes Were Cleaned By Deodorants in 1988.
I, like the others, took pictures of this gruesome display. Close-ups of individual skulls, shots that captured all dozen shelves from the bottom up, shots of the groups of skulls according to age.
I was so close to them I could’ve touched them. I could’ve smelled them, too, but I wasn’t concerned with either of these senses. At the time, I had enough trouble believing my eyes.
I walked away and thought ‘I’m going to throw up’. I did. The yogurt and masticated fruit I had for breakfast shot up my throat and once the acid taste hit my tongue my cheeks expanded, then I coughed once and swallowed it all back down. I didn’t think I had the right to vomit on this soil.
When I lifted my head I saw a gazebo with benches and a poster on the wall. It said:
EVEN IN THIS 20TH CENTURY, ON KAMPUCHEAN SOIL THE CLIQUE OF POL POT CRIMINALS HAD COMMITTED A HEINOUS GENOCIDAL ACT. THEY MASSACRED THE POPULATION WITH ATROCITY IN A LARGE SCALE. IT WAS MORE CRUEL THAN THE GENOCIDAL ACT COMMITTED BY THE HITLER FASCISTS, WHICH THE WORLD HAS NEVER MET.
WITH THE COMMEMORATIVE STUPA IN FRONT OF US, WE IMAGINE THAT WE ARE HEARING THE GRIEVOUS VOICE OF THE VICTIMS WHO WERE BEATEN BY POL POT MEN WITH CANES, BAMBOO STUMPS OR HEADS OF HOES. WHO WERE STABBED WITH KNIVES OR SWORDS WE SEEM TO BE LOOKING AT THE HORRIFYING SCENES AND THE PANIC STRICKEN FACES OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE DYING OF STARVATION, FORCED LABOUR OR TORTURE WITHOUT MERCY UPON THE SKINNY BODY. THEY DIED WITHOUT GIVING THE LAST WORDS TO THEIR KITH AND KIN. HOW HURTFUL THOSE VICTIMS WERE WHEN THEY GOT BEATEN WITH CANES HEADS OF HOES AND STABBED WITH KNIVES OR SWORDS BEFORE THEIR LAST BREATH WENT OUT. HOW BITTER THEY WERE WHEN SEEING THEIR BELOVED CHILDREN, WIVES, HUSBANDS, BROTHERS OR SISTERS WERE SEIZED AND TIGHTLY BOUND BEFORE BEING TAKEN TO THE MASS GRAVE!
WHILE THEY WERE WAITING FOR THEIR TURN TO COME AND SHARE THE SAME TRAGIC LOT.
THE METHOD OF MASSACRE WHICH THE CLIQUE OF POL POT CRIMINALS WAS CARRIED UPON THE INNOCENT PEOPLE OF KAMPUCHEA CANNOT BE DESCRIBED FULLY AND CLEARLY IN WORDS BECAUSE THE INVENTION OF THIS KILLING METHOD WAS STRANGELY CRUEL SO IT IS DIFFICULT FOR US TO DETERMINE WHO THEY ARE FOR. THEY HAVE THE HUMAN FORM BUT THEIR HEARTS ARE DEMON’S HEARTS. THEY HAVE GOT THE KHMER FACE BUT THEIR ACTIVITIES ARE PURELY REACTIONARY. THEY WANTED TO TRANSFORM KAMPUCHEAN PEOPLE INTO A GROUP OF PERSONS WITHOUT REASON A GROUP WHO KNEW AND UNDERSTOOD NOTHING, WHO ALWAYS BENT THEIR HEADS TO CARRY OUT ANKAR’S ORDERS BLINDLY. THEY HAD EDUCATED AND TRANSFORMED YOUNG PEOPLE AND THE ADOLESCENT WHOSE HEARTS ARE PURE, GENTEL AND MODEST INTO ODIOUS EXECUTIONERS WHO DARED TO KILL THE INNOCENT AND EVEN THEIR OWN PARENTS, RELATIVES OR FRIENDS.
THEY HAD BURNT THE MARKET PLACE, ABOLISHED MONETARY SYSTEM, ELIMINATED BOOKS OF RULES AND PRINCIPLES OF NATIONAL CULTURE, DESTROYED SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS, PAGODAS AND BEAUTIFUL MONUMENTS SUCH AS ANGKOR WAT TEMPLE WHICH IS THE SOURCE OF PURE NATIONAL PRIDE AND BEARS THE GENIUS, KNOWLEDGE AND INTELLIGENCE OF OUR NATION.
THEY WERE TRYING HARD TO GET RID OF KHMER CHARACTER AND TRANSFORM THE SOIL AND WATERS OF KAMPUCHEA INTO A SEA OF BLOOD AND TEARS WHICH WAS DEPRIVE OF CULTURAL INFRA-STRUCTURE, CIVILISATION AND NATIONAL CHARACTER, BECAME A DESERT OF GREAT DESTRUCTION THAT OVERTURNED THE KAMPUCHEAN SOCIETY AND DROVE IT BACK ON THE STONE AGE.
With each sentence my sight became more blurry as tears slid out of my eyes but I got mad at myself and told them to stop and soon they were numb.
How dare I cry? What the hell did I know of hurt, much less horror? Fuck all. Now or ever.
I was nauseous and angry and stunned. How did the world I know let this one let this? How come I didn’t know about this? How, how, how?
I got up and walked to look at more of the killing. The first stop is what looks like a dirty dugout, about four feet wide by seven feet long, with sticks all around the sides as a gate. The sign here, on a wooden plaque with white writing says ‘MASS GRAVE OF 166 VICTIMS WITHOUT HEADS’.
Every few feet there was a sunken-in lump of ground covering bodies. The grass on top was sparse and little; a reminder the shovels covered the last of them not that long ago or, I imagined, that life ceased to grow where this kind of death was kept.
In the middle of the field was a tree, once used as another tool for torture. In bold letters, this spot’s sign said ‘KILILNG TREE AGAINST WHICH EXECUTIONERS BEAT CHILDREN’. Deep from where its roots met the ground to far above my head were the thick indents of machetes. Somehow trickles of blood, of child’s blood, dark, almost black blood, remained. A stump beside it has three bones on top, leg bones maybe, that didn’t make it into a grave.
Adjacent to the killing tree was another, this one so round I wouldn’t be able to fit my arms even half way around it. This tree was without the marks of knives but also aided in the killing. It was called the Magic Tree, according to the sign, which said: THE TREE WAS USED AS A TOOL TO HANG A MICROPHONE WHICH MAKE SOUND LOUDER TO AVOID THE MOAN OF VICTIMS WHILE THEY WERE BEING EXECUTED.’
I let my tears fall as we walked away from the field, single file. We opened our own doors to the BMW while little boys rushed up, shirtless and shoeless, holding out their dirty palms. “Please lady. One dollar. Please.”
In every Cambodian face I saw after the fields, I saw the killing, the beating, the bones. Just 30 feet away cows were feeding on weeds, children were running outside a classroom, a man was cutting hair inside a sheet metal hut.
We didn’t say a word to each other on the drive back to the city.
I kept my head cocked towards the window. It strained my neck and I didn’t want to look out anymore but I didn’t want to look inside the car either. I couldn’t look into the eyes of men on bicycles passing or of grandmothers washing babies. Is your sister in that ground, just over there? What did you have to do to keep your skull on? What does it do to you to have to live so close to that horrible, horrible place?
I started thinking maybe I could do something. I wanted to do something, like work in an orphanage, or maybe even adopt a child and take it back to Canada with me. I was picturing it already: me and two little boys, one on each hip, smiling as we stepped off the plane at the Calgary airport. I instantly decided I wanted boys – I never liked girls much – and that I should take two, so they wouldn’t be so alone in a new place together. I was like a little kid letting my adoption fantasy run wild. I couldn’t take them this trip, I thought, but before I left Asia for good I would have two little boys to take home. It would be a nice story, wouldn’t it and I would be little miss Mother fucking Theresa for doing it, but I knew just as quickly as I had day-dreampt it up that it probably wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. I didn’t have a job or a car or even a home to go home to. They’d be better off here.
“Where are we going now?” Amanda asked our driver, breaking nearly 20 minutes of silence.
“S-21,” he said, and kept his eyes on the road, offering no more of an explanation.
None of us knew what S-21 was. We had hardly done our research about this country or this city or its ugly history. Turned out our next stop, S-21, was the genocide museum.
*******
For $2 US you can see where hell had a home on earth. We paid our money to a man in a beige uniform and picked up our free information brochure about the genocide museum, known to Cambodians as Tuol Sleng, the former Khmer Rouge S-21 Prison. For a little over 10 minutes we each read it, word for word, occasionally letting out an “Oh my God” or two, until we were done and understood just where we were.
S-21, once a high school, was set up in 1976 as a secret torture house where KR guards, mostly under the age of 15, kept unruly Cambodians in the cruelest of ways.
We walked into the closest building first. Like the other two, former classrooms had been converted into cells, mass holding rooms and interrogation, or rape, areas. Today the bottom level here holds the start of a photo exhibit meant to preserve this piece of history through ghastly shots of the prisoners alive, barely alive and leaving life.
Each board holds about 30 8 by 10” black and white pictures behind a glass front. Women, men and children are posted in these groups, taken pre-torture. The men look skinny, more so because their arms are tied tightly behind their backs, and this pose makes their head seem bigger and their eyes jut out so that no matter where you try to look on the picture, your own eyes are always drawn to theirs. They look the most afraid, the most aware of their fate. The women don’t look quite as frail but they are broken, like zombies, there is no life in their eyes. I imagine they tried to trick their minds into believing they were already dead so they could get on with dying. But the little boys and girls, well, this is what breaks your heart because they don’t look sad or scared and you wonder if, when the photographer stood before them, they had any idea their next picture would be their last because children, though clever, are hopeful. I hope they weren’t hoping then.
One woman and child were granted a much larger space for their place in the exhibit. In the back corner of the second room, in a glass case, is the most gut-wrenching thing I and other S-21 visitors will see. A mother with a bob and a pale blouse is holding her naked newborn child in her arms with her eyes staring directly forward. Like two dolls, their faces are emotionless and unreal. Behind them is a thick metal contraption set on a hunk of wood. There’s some kind of pulley and gears around the top of the device which smooths into a skinny piece with a corkscrew end. It would dig and twist into the back of her brain until she was dead with the baby below.
‘I’m not going to get sick. I’m not going to get sick. I’m not going to get sick,’ I kept repeating to myself, just like in The Little Engine That Could book. It was working quite well until Amanda and Beth said they felt sick out loud. I just had to ignore them and keep on walking.
I stood outside in the middle of the old high school grounds. Each building was tall with faded white paint and thick barbed wire clung from the ground to the top of the third floor ‘to prevent prisoners from committing suicide’ a sign said.
Building two is where you get to see the individual chambers, rooms perhaps one foot by four feet, where there is still blood on the same red and white checkered tile we were walking on, where foot clamps and chains are still tied to the ground, where scratch marks are defined on the wooden walls.
Again, like the others, I took pictures. I took shots of the chamber rooms, all 12 with the doors open, of the insides and the floor and the blood and the marks. In one brick-walled cell, in the corner, was a wide shadow and even now, looking at the picture, I can see the face of someone, their nose and eyes pointed towards the light.
Up on the second floor the space is open and along the back wall are the shackles that held the feet of 60 men and women who were forced to lie on the ground beside each other, connected by this long line of heavy burgundy metal.
Between building two and three the biggest tool of torture is on display. Three thick pieces of wood 30 feet long are linked to form a square, with brackets on the base, like a soccer net. Beneath it, on the ground, is a life size pot. Guards used this apparatus as an interrogation aid, beating prisoners silly while they were hung upside down from the crown by their feet. When the blows rendered them unconscious, they were dipped down into the water until they woke so the questioning could resume.
The last, third building, is just as brutal as the two before. This is where prisoners endured agony alone. Each room on the ground floor has a picture nearly the size of the entire wall showing how prisoners were tortured in the very same room. A man missing parts of his stomach, just a dark face and upturned feet, is photographed lying on the metal cot I can touch if I want. I can lift the black whip beside the bed, too, or put my hands over his own bloody handprints, still on the wall. His bloody handprints are still on the wall.
******
We couldn’t find Sopan, our driver, when we walked out of the museum and into an alley where he said he’d be. We drifted into a little outdoor shop with Christian crafts like wall hangings that said things such as ‘Lord, Carry Me’. I picked up a basket holding about 50 little hand-carved names and at the top were CHRIS and BRANDON, the names of my two step-brothers, whom I rarely talk to anymore. It was a sign, I felt, that I was just where I was supposed to be. Later, I bought bracelets at the market made from rolled up magazine paper. The proceeds went to a local NGO and the bag they were put in was made from a Cambodian newspaper page. Of the handful of words in English was the name Natalie – another reminder I was on a pre-destined path. I decided not to buy my brothers’ name keychains. But I, like a lot of folks who leave the museum must, felt like I needed a little Jesus in my life so I bought a cross keychain made from a twig.
******
We were 10 minutes early for the bus back to Bangkok on Friday morning. We got out of the BMW and walked past the fruit ladies and the gum ladies and the water ladies. We had 10 minutes. Two cigarettes, I thought. I often timed waiting events according to how many cigarettes I could fit in. Standing outside the door alone I was prey to the walking vendors and the kids with empty eyes and empty hands.
“Lady, you want newspaper?” a teenage boy asked, flipping through his stack to show me headlines of the Cambodia Daily, the Bangkok Post and even TIME.
Then the bread man came up with dozens of loaves of baguettes, buns and croissants in clear plastic bags. “Lady. Hey lady,” he said, shoving the bread against my arms, as if when it touched me I would then want it.
I brushed past him and stepped on the bus to see Amanda and Beth with their hands on their hips, thoroughly dissatisfied with the aqua blue plastic seats with purple and white stars, the barely functioning air conditioning and the non-existent bathroom.
“This is shit,” Beth declared. Beth, so very British, joined Amanda and I two days earlier when we were leaving Siem Reap. At 23, she could have been 17. Her skin was flawless and she was tall and thin and had long, wavy blonde hair. The only thing, I decided, that must have kept her from being on the runway or under a spotlight somewhere was an extremely thin set of lips and an occasional lisp. The three of us got along well and were minding budgets so we shared a room, a driver, drinks and despair over the next few days.
The bread man and the gum lady banged on our windows, waving their wares, as if we hadn’t already seen them, as if seeing the stuff outside the bus would propel us to run off and buy it. Beth closed her curtain. Amanda smiled, teasing them. I said no then looked away.
Then I remembered we still hadn’t given away our bag of Canadian goodies Amanda’s mom sent with my mom who had visited me in Bangkok a month earlier. Inside were two white frisbees with the read maple leaf in the middle, wash-off tattoos of the flag, pencils, a picturesque calendar of Canada in 12 of its glories and a few other things with neon green Liquidation World stickers on the back.
For once there were no needy children around so I waited with the bag until two children, a boy about three and a girl, perhaps five, came and stood before me. I handed them the bag and the bread man turned around. I stepped in front of him so he knew it was for them, not him. I got back on the bus and watched out my window as the children looked inside, with the bread man beside them. They dug through it a little and I don’t think they had a clue what anything was but they were damn excited about it. They ran off, skipping and smiling and without looking back at me.
The bread man, knocking on our windows for the second time, had the two Frisbees under his arm.
“That pisses me off,” I said to Amanda, pointing to the awful man.
“Natalie, maybe it’s their Grandpa, and he’s just holding it for them. Maybe they didn’t know what it was so they bartered with him for bread. Just think of it like that.”
So I tried to think of it like that and I wasn’t quite so pissed off anymore.
It was just past 7:30, our departure time, and the bus still wasn’t full or moving so we started talking about the night before.
“Did the guy at the hotel even say sorry about last night, Beth?” I asked.
“No. He just said ‘OK, $5 off.’ I told him that wasn’t good enough. I don’t think we should have to pay for the room at all. Then he said half price, without even looking at the room.”
She re-told her conversation with the same snotty, not-backing-down British accent and tone she often used and sometimes I was embarrassed because of her rudeness and other times it made me embarrassed of my Canadianness because even though I got smiles, she got things done.
And it was a good thing, because the previous night RiverStar Hotel had shown us a view of Phnom Penh’s water that was not exactly pictured on the brochure.
Shortly after three a.m., I heard rain. It was coming from above and it was tapping on the roof and the windows in a constant way. Good. This rain is good for Cambodia, I thought, smiling as I turned over back to sleep.
When Amanda got up to go to the bathroom at four Beth noticed the edge of her bed, from the top blanket to the mattress, was soaked. From somewhere above, water was leaking down only onto Beth’s bed.
“Jesus Christ. The roof is going to come down soon,” Amanda said, joking and climbing back into her cool dry blankets.
But the rain was beginning to fall faster and harder so Beth got up and walked into the hall to see if it was raining like this anywhere else on the fourth floor. Just a few feet around the corner water was crashing down onto the pale green linoleum from a place in the middle of the roof, which certainly was going to cave any minute.
“Oh my God,” I heard her say, so I sprang from my bed, also in my boy-short underwear and tank top, to see the water. Amanda, in her pink cotton nightie that just barely covered her ass cheeks, was right behind me.
“Holy shit you guys,” she said as she caught up, just as another girl, who had the sense and respect to dress in the middle of the night, opened her door.
“We should really, really go tell someone,” I offered, trying to keep my feet out of the ever-rising puddle.
The other girl, who had blonde hair and an Australian accent, explained her boyfriend was already downstairs doing that very thing. We looked at the roof and floor and each other and then laughed.
The elevator dinged and we all turned around, nearly naked, to see the boyfriend and the poor hotel guy on night shift who would have to figure out how to deal with all of this. He looked scared and stunned and I’m not sure if it was more because of the water or the women. We tip-toed hurriedly back to our room and looked at our own little leak.
Still giggling like girls at a sleepover, Amanda and I laughed louder and longer as Beth proclaimed, “This is shit,” and went back into the hall.
“Excuse me. Excuse me,” she yelled at the hotel guy, who was throwing as many buckets as he could onto the floor.
I felt awful for him. This poor shmuck is alone, dealing with a mere flood, naked laughing girls and now a British one who wouldn’t let up about her wet sheets. So, he abandoned the hall and found a huge metal tub, the kind they use for washing clothes and linens and threw it under our own crumbling roof. Like I said, Beth got things done. We tried to ask how it was happening and, knowing no English, he pointed at the roof. Between looking out the window and seeing no rain and realizing we were on the top floor with leaks in very specific spots, we figured out that a water pipe had burst. He was just about to leave our room when the crack in the roof started widening and water gushed down, smacking the bottom of the bucket. What did we do? Got out our cameras and, still laughing so hard we couldn’t talk, still too naked to be seen in front of strangers, started taking pictures standing on my bed, the furthest from the water.
“This is just too fucking funny,” said Amanda. But two minutes later she decided it wasn’t funny at all. In fact, it was “downright fucking ridiculous” because now she’d lost sleep and on top of that, which is at the top of unforgivable sins to be committed against Amanda, it smelled like a toilet in our room. Toilet and cigarettes. I had taken the opportunity to smoke during the festivities.
If anyone on the bus was able to make out our recounting of the events, they didn’t think it was nearly as funny as we did. Cambodia, we agreed, had been a hell of a journey, and yet we still had 11 hours until we’d be back in Bangkok.
At eight the bus driver started the engine and the tires kicked up red dust as we slowly left the parking lot. Almost every 15 minutes afterwards the driver pumped the wheel, eliciting the horn to honk twice quickly. We weren’t sure if it was to let motorcycle drivers know we were behind them or if it was because people in the passing villages might want to hop on, or both, but at 9:15 Beth announced she was going to “shove the horn right up his rear.”
Just then we stopped and a family climbed on. One boy, two boys, three boys, an old lady and an old man, who all managed to squeeze into the only two free seats – directly behind Amanda and me.
“Natalie, they smell and they’re touching me.”
“I know. I know.” It was awful of us to say but it was true and it was awful. The little boys were on their grandparents’ laps so their little heads and hands were all around us. Instinctively, as those with weak stomachs do, I began breathing through my mouth.
I tried to think of what they smelled like. How am I going to describe this when I write?
“I bet it’s worse than the Bog of Eternal Stench, you know, from the movie Labrynth,” Amanda said, speaking through her red shirt, which she had pulled nearly up to her eyes.
“Yeah,” I said, still thinking of adjectives and metaphors to help someone reading this recognize the smell in their minds. I could feel one of the boys breathing on my shoulder.
I concluded they just smelled like little boys, little boys whose skin or clothes hadn’t seen water in weeks. Little boys who probably played in the dirt a lot and maybe sometimes it stuck to the sweat on their skin and maybe sometimes a little of their supper fell onto their shirts, and maybe when they turned around to go pee a little dribbled on their shorts as they pulled them back up to their bellies. Little boys all around the world can, and often prefer, to smell just like this.
Their grandpa’s face was just inches from Amanda’s. He kept making this sound, like he was sucking on a sucker and then a sound like when you lick your lips and circle your tongue slowly above your teeth. It was gross.
“Natalie, it’s gross,” Amanda said, in her whiny voice.
“What does he have in his mouth?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. I just can’t look. He’s right there.” So I looked and couldn’t find any source for the noise other than his lips, teeth, tongue and saliva. It was unending and unnerving.
We were all very crabby, very fast. We were tired, hungry, hot, uncomfortable and unable to breathe without a screen. Only 10 more hours. Well, the good news is, I told myself, it really can’t get any worse. And for the first time that I’d ever said that, I knew it really actually couldn’t. Not on that day, on that bus, anyway.
Amanda remembered we still had some candy in our little backpack and got it out. One of the boys was now sitting in the aisle, on the floor, while his brothers slept on the old people.
“Amanda,” I whispered. “I think we should share.”
She didn’t like their company and frankly neither did I but she knew she should so she did. We swallowed ours whole and had two more.
A few minutes later I felt the youngest one again, this time his fingers instead of his breath, against my shoulders. I turned back and could only see one eye peeking around the seat and his hands under my nose.
“You’re awake now buddy?” I reached down and grabbed the candy. There was three pieces left. “Have the whole darn thing,” I said, looking at him as his hands and face quickly retreated back to his grandma’s side. She unwrapped a purple piece and I heard him plop it in his mouth.
He moved his face back to the space between the window and my seat and the sucking noise started. I couldn’t see him chewing it, but I could tell when he rocked it from one cheek to the other, plunking it against the bottom of his mouth, out to the middle of his lips, where he sucked on it, and back in again, where he sucked harder. It was the same sound his grandpa was making. I started to cry. It wasn’t gross anymore, it was sad, and sweet. He was sucking like that to find ways to taste as much of the candy as he could, to make it last as long as he could.
With my right hand on the left side of my chest, between my breast and collar bone, I turned my head a little closer to the window and listened and cried.
I both fear and hope that everything I ever do, everything that happens to me, will be compared to Cambodia.
In Siem Reap I barely noticed I was breathing because I was in awe of walking amongst one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – Angkor Wat and its surrounding temples. In Phnom Penh the only way I could tell what I was seeing was the real world was because I had trouble breathing. The reality of Cambodian life caused an ache in my chest, a sting in my eyes, a tightness in my throat, a curdle in my stomach, a frailty in my knees.
But I do not know hurt. These people breathe hurt. Hurt and ugliness.
***
Shortly before 9 a.m. we got into our driver’s car – a black two decade-old BMW with fake diamonds on the door locks and a hip hop song about having a party coming out of the speakers. We were on our way to the killing fields. If there is a way to prepare for this sight, we surely weren’t. The five-kilometre stretch of red dirt road leading to the land was only a glimpse of the gloom this country bears.
Women walk along the edge with wide baskets of peanuts balanced on their heads while half-clothed toddlers cling to their legs when vehicles like ours pass. Men lift and drape nets into little brown ponds hoping to find a fish or two. Some sit on blue plastic stools behind a row of coke bottles filled with gasoline for sale. Plastic bags, cigarette butts and bugs stick together in piles strewn along the ditches where people walk and children play.
Cambodia is decades behind because of a series of events, I later learned, that started in the ‘70s when the Vietnam War trickled over into Cambodia and a man named Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge party, came into power. In his quest to conquer and control the country, also called Kampuchea, two million people were tortured, many at an old high school, then executed, at this place – the killing fields – both now Phnom Penh’s claim to fame.
****
They use a tall, skinny, white concrete closet to keep the skulls in.
We walked towards it, the mass of bone and brick appearing as one. Through a glass door no wider than me we stood before a dozen shelves, each holding dozens of heads of the dead. They were classed in groups like ‘FEMALE FROM 20 TO 40 YRS. OLD’ and ‘JUVENILE MALE KAMPUCHANI FROM 15 TO 20 YRS. OLD’.
They’re different, incomparable even, to the ones you see on your science teacher’s shelves. Here they are piled on top of one another, some facing visitors, some upside down, some missing half the face, some with rusty looking sides, some with flies flying through the neck and out the nose.
At the very, very bottom of the case is a pile of clothes, mostly faded blue and brown pants, tossed purposely randomly on a wooden plank. The white sign with blue letters beside it says After Excavating The Mass Graves Victims’ Clothes Were Cleaned By Deodorants in 1988.
I, like the others, took pictures of this gruesome display. Close-ups of individual skulls, shots that captured all dozen shelves from the bottom up, shots of the groups of skulls according to age.
I was so close to them I could’ve touched them. I could’ve smelled them, too, but I wasn’t concerned with either of these senses. At the time, I had enough trouble believing my eyes.
I walked away and thought ‘I’m going to throw up’. I did. The yogurt and masticated fruit I had for breakfast shot up my throat and once the acid taste hit my tongue my cheeks expanded, then I coughed once and swallowed it all back down. I didn’t think I had the right to vomit on this soil.
When I lifted my head I saw a gazebo with benches and a poster on the wall. It said:
EVEN IN THIS 20TH CENTURY, ON KAMPUCHEAN SOIL THE CLIQUE OF POL POT CRIMINALS HAD COMMITTED A HEINOUS GENOCIDAL ACT. THEY MASSACRED THE POPULATION WITH ATROCITY IN A LARGE SCALE. IT WAS MORE CRUEL THAN THE GENOCIDAL ACT COMMITTED BY THE HITLER FASCISTS, WHICH THE WORLD HAS NEVER MET.
WITH THE COMMEMORATIVE STUPA IN FRONT OF US, WE IMAGINE THAT WE ARE HEARING THE GRIEVOUS VOICE OF THE VICTIMS WHO WERE BEATEN BY POL POT MEN WITH CANES, BAMBOO STUMPS OR HEADS OF HOES. WHO WERE STABBED WITH KNIVES OR SWORDS WE SEEM TO BE LOOKING AT THE HORRIFYING SCENES AND THE PANIC STRICKEN FACES OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE DYING OF STARVATION, FORCED LABOUR OR TORTURE WITHOUT MERCY UPON THE SKINNY BODY. THEY DIED WITHOUT GIVING THE LAST WORDS TO THEIR KITH AND KIN. HOW HURTFUL THOSE VICTIMS WERE WHEN THEY GOT BEATEN WITH CANES HEADS OF HOES AND STABBED WITH KNIVES OR SWORDS BEFORE THEIR LAST BREATH WENT OUT. HOW BITTER THEY WERE WHEN SEEING THEIR BELOVED CHILDREN, WIVES, HUSBANDS, BROTHERS OR SISTERS WERE SEIZED AND TIGHTLY BOUND BEFORE BEING TAKEN TO THE MASS GRAVE!
WHILE THEY WERE WAITING FOR THEIR TURN TO COME AND SHARE THE SAME TRAGIC LOT.
THE METHOD OF MASSACRE WHICH THE CLIQUE OF POL POT CRIMINALS WAS CARRIED UPON THE INNOCENT PEOPLE OF KAMPUCHEA CANNOT BE DESCRIBED FULLY AND CLEARLY IN WORDS BECAUSE THE INVENTION OF THIS KILLING METHOD WAS STRANGELY CRUEL SO IT IS DIFFICULT FOR US TO DETERMINE WHO THEY ARE FOR. THEY HAVE THE HUMAN FORM BUT THEIR HEARTS ARE DEMON’S HEARTS. THEY HAVE GOT THE KHMER FACE BUT THEIR ACTIVITIES ARE PURELY REACTIONARY. THEY WANTED TO TRANSFORM KAMPUCHEAN PEOPLE INTO A GROUP OF PERSONS WITHOUT REASON A GROUP WHO KNEW AND UNDERSTOOD NOTHING, WHO ALWAYS BENT THEIR HEADS TO CARRY OUT ANKAR’S ORDERS BLINDLY. THEY HAD EDUCATED AND TRANSFORMED YOUNG PEOPLE AND THE ADOLESCENT WHOSE HEARTS ARE PURE, GENTEL AND MODEST INTO ODIOUS EXECUTIONERS WHO DARED TO KILL THE INNOCENT AND EVEN THEIR OWN PARENTS, RELATIVES OR FRIENDS.
THEY HAD BURNT THE MARKET PLACE, ABOLISHED MONETARY SYSTEM, ELIMINATED BOOKS OF RULES AND PRINCIPLES OF NATIONAL CULTURE, DESTROYED SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS, PAGODAS AND BEAUTIFUL MONUMENTS SUCH AS ANGKOR WAT TEMPLE WHICH IS THE SOURCE OF PURE NATIONAL PRIDE AND BEARS THE GENIUS, KNOWLEDGE AND INTELLIGENCE OF OUR NATION.
THEY WERE TRYING HARD TO GET RID OF KHMER CHARACTER AND TRANSFORM THE SOIL AND WATERS OF KAMPUCHEA INTO A SEA OF BLOOD AND TEARS WHICH WAS DEPRIVE OF CULTURAL INFRA-STRUCTURE, CIVILISATION AND NATIONAL CHARACTER, BECAME A DESERT OF GREAT DESTRUCTION THAT OVERTURNED THE KAMPUCHEAN SOCIETY AND DROVE IT BACK ON THE STONE AGE.
With each sentence my sight became more blurry as tears slid out of my eyes but I got mad at myself and told them to stop and soon they were numb.
How dare I cry? What the hell did I know of hurt, much less horror? Fuck all. Now or ever.
I was nauseous and angry and stunned. How did the world I know let this one let this? How come I didn’t know about this? How, how, how?
I got up and walked to look at more of the killing. The first stop is what looks like a dirty dugout, about four feet wide by seven feet long, with sticks all around the sides as a gate. The sign here, on a wooden plaque with white writing says ‘MASS GRAVE OF 166 VICTIMS WITHOUT HEADS’.
Every few feet there was a sunken-in lump of ground covering bodies. The grass on top was sparse and little; a reminder the shovels covered the last of them not that long ago or, I imagined, that life ceased to grow where this kind of death was kept.
In the middle of the field was a tree, once used as another tool for torture. In bold letters, this spot’s sign said ‘KILILNG TREE AGAINST WHICH EXECUTIONERS BEAT CHILDREN’. Deep from where its roots met the ground to far above my head were the thick indents of machetes. Somehow trickles of blood, of child’s blood, dark, almost black blood, remained. A stump beside it has three bones on top, leg bones maybe, that didn’t make it into a grave.
Adjacent to the killing tree was another, this one so round I wouldn’t be able to fit my arms even half way around it. This tree was without the marks of knives but also aided in the killing. It was called the Magic Tree, according to the sign, which said: THE TREE WAS USED AS A TOOL TO HANG A MICROPHONE WHICH MAKE SOUND LOUDER TO AVOID THE MOAN OF VICTIMS WHILE THEY WERE BEING EXECUTED.’
I let my tears fall as we walked away from the field, single file. We opened our own doors to the BMW while little boys rushed up, shirtless and shoeless, holding out their dirty palms. “Please lady. One dollar. Please.”
In every Cambodian face I saw after the fields, I saw the killing, the beating, the bones. Just 30 feet away cows were feeding on weeds, children were running outside a classroom, a man was cutting hair inside a sheet metal hut.
We didn’t say a word to each other on the drive back to the city.
I kept my head cocked towards the window. It strained my neck and I didn’t want to look out anymore but I didn’t want to look inside the car either. I couldn’t look into the eyes of men on bicycles passing or of grandmothers washing babies. Is your sister in that ground, just over there? What did you have to do to keep your skull on? What does it do to you to have to live so close to that horrible, horrible place?
I started thinking maybe I could do something. I wanted to do something, like work in an orphanage, or maybe even adopt a child and take it back to Canada with me. I was picturing it already: me and two little boys, one on each hip, smiling as we stepped off the plane at the Calgary airport. I instantly decided I wanted boys – I never liked girls much – and that I should take two, so they wouldn’t be so alone in a new place together. I was like a little kid letting my adoption fantasy run wild. I couldn’t take them this trip, I thought, but before I left Asia for good I would have two little boys to take home. It would be a nice story, wouldn’t it and I would be little miss Mother fucking Theresa for doing it, but I knew just as quickly as I had day-dreampt it up that it probably wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. I didn’t have a job or a car or even a home to go home to. They’d be better off here.
“Where are we going now?” Amanda asked our driver, breaking nearly 20 minutes of silence.
“S-21,” he said, and kept his eyes on the road, offering no more of an explanation.
None of us knew what S-21 was. We had hardly done our research about this country or this city or its ugly history. Turned out our next stop, S-21, was the genocide museum.
*******
For $2 US you can see where hell had a home on earth. We paid our money to a man in a beige uniform and picked up our free information brochure about the genocide museum, known to Cambodians as Tuol Sleng, the former Khmer Rouge S-21 Prison. For a little over 10 minutes we each read it, word for word, occasionally letting out an “Oh my God” or two, until we were done and understood just where we were.
S-21, once a high school, was set up in 1976 as a secret torture house where KR guards, mostly under the age of 15, kept unruly Cambodians in the cruelest of ways.
We walked into the closest building first. Like the other two, former classrooms had been converted into cells, mass holding rooms and interrogation, or rape, areas. Today the bottom level here holds the start of a photo exhibit meant to preserve this piece of history through ghastly shots of the prisoners alive, barely alive and leaving life.
Each board holds about 30 8 by 10” black and white pictures behind a glass front. Women, men and children are posted in these groups, taken pre-torture. The men look skinny, more so because their arms are tied tightly behind their backs, and this pose makes their head seem bigger and their eyes jut out so that no matter where you try to look on the picture, your own eyes are always drawn to theirs. They look the most afraid, the most aware of their fate. The women don’t look quite as frail but they are broken, like zombies, there is no life in their eyes. I imagine they tried to trick their minds into believing they were already dead so they could get on with dying. But the little boys and girls, well, this is what breaks your heart because they don’t look sad or scared and you wonder if, when the photographer stood before them, they had any idea their next picture would be their last because children, though clever, are hopeful. I hope they weren’t hoping then.
One woman and child were granted a much larger space for their place in the exhibit. In the back corner of the second room, in a glass case, is the most gut-wrenching thing I and other S-21 visitors will see. A mother with a bob and a pale blouse is holding her naked newborn child in her arms with her eyes staring directly forward. Like two dolls, their faces are emotionless and unreal. Behind them is a thick metal contraption set on a hunk of wood. There’s some kind of pulley and gears around the top of the device which smooths into a skinny piece with a corkscrew end. It would dig and twist into the back of her brain until she was dead with the baby below.
‘I’m not going to get sick. I’m not going to get sick. I’m not going to get sick,’ I kept repeating to myself, just like in The Little Engine That Could book. It was working quite well until Amanda and Beth said they felt sick out loud. I just had to ignore them and keep on walking.
I stood outside in the middle of the old high school grounds. Each building was tall with faded white paint and thick barbed wire clung from the ground to the top of the third floor ‘to prevent prisoners from committing suicide’ a sign said.
Building two is where you get to see the individual chambers, rooms perhaps one foot by four feet, where there is still blood on the same red and white checkered tile we were walking on, where foot clamps and chains are still tied to the ground, where scratch marks are defined on the wooden walls.
Again, like the others, I took pictures. I took shots of the chamber rooms, all 12 with the doors open, of the insides and the floor and the blood and the marks. In one brick-walled cell, in the corner, was a wide shadow and even now, looking at the picture, I can see the face of someone, their nose and eyes pointed towards the light.
Up on the second floor the space is open and along the back wall are the shackles that held the feet of 60 men and women who were forced to lie on the ground beside each other, connected by this long line of heavy burgundy metal.
Between building two and three the biggest tool of torture is on display. Three thick pieces of wood 30 feet long are linked to form a square, with brackets on the base, like a soccer net. Beneath it, on the ground, is a life size pot. Guards used this apparatus as an interrogation aid, beating prisoners silly while they were hung upside down from the crown by their feet. When the blows rendered them unconscious, they were dipped down into the water until they woke so the questioning could resume.
The last, third building, is just as brutal as the two before. This is where prisoners endured agony alone. Each room on the ground floor has a picture nearly the size of the entire wall showing how prisoners were tortured in the very same room. A man missing parts of his stomach, just a dark face and upturned feet, is photographed lying on the metal cot I can touch if I want. I can lift the black whip beside the bed, too, or put my hands over his own bloody handprints, still on the wall. His bloody handprints are still on the wall.
******
We couldn’t find Sopan, our driver, when we walked out of the museum and into an alley where he said he’d be. We drifted into a little outdoor shop with Christian crafts like wall hangings that said things such as ‘Lord, Carry Me’. I picked up a basket holding about 50 little hand-carved names and at the top were CHRIS and BRANDON, the names of my two step-brothers, whom I rarely talk to anymore. It was a sign, I felt, that I was just where I was supposed to be. Later, I bought bracelets at the market made from rolled up magazine paper. The proceeds went to a local NGO and the bag they were put in was made from a Cambodian newspaper page. Of the handful of words in English was the name Natalie – another reminder I was on a pre-destined path. I decided not to buy my brothers’ name keychains. But I, like a lot of folks who leave the museum must, felt like I needed a little Jesus in my life so I bought a cross keychain made from a twig.
******
We were 10 minutes early for the bus back to Bangkok on Friday morning. We got out of the BMW and walked past the fruit ladies and the gum ladies and the water ladies. We had 10 minutes. Two cigarettes, I thought. I often timed waiting events according to how many cigarettes I could fit in. Standing outside the door alone I was prey to the walking vendors and the kids with empty eyes and empty hands.
“Lady, you want newspaper?” a teenage boy asked, flipping through his stack to show me headlines of the Cambodia Daily, the Bangkok Post and even TIME.
Then the bread man came up with dozens of loaves of baguettes, buns and croissants in clear plastic bags. “Lady. Hey lady,” he said, shoving the bread against my arms, as if when it touched me I would then want it.
I brushed past him and stepped on the bus to see Amanda and Beth with their hands on their hips, thoroughly dissatisfied with the aqua blue plastic seats with purple and white stars, the barely functioning air conditioning and the non-existent bathroom.
“This is shit,” Beth declared. Beth, so very British, joined Amanda and I two days earlier when we were leaving Siem Reap. At 23, she could have been 17. Her skin was flawless and she was tall and thin and had long, wavy blonde hair. The only thing, I decided, that must have kept her from being on the runway or under a spotlight somewhere was an extremely thin set of lips and an occasional lisp. The three of us got along well and were minding budgets so we shared a room, a driver, drinks and despair over the next few days.
The bread man and the gum lady banged on our windows, waving their wares, as if we hadn’t already seen them, as if seeing the stuff outside the bus would propel us to run off and buy it. Beth closed her curtain. Amanda smiled, teasing them. I said no then looked away.
Then I remembered we still hadn’t given away our bag of Canadian goodies Amanda’s mom sent with my mom who had visited me in Bangkok a month earlier. Inside were two white frisbees with the read maple leaf in the middle, wash-off tattoos of the flag, pencils, a picturesque calendar of Canada in 12 of its glories and a few other things with neon green Liquidation World stickers on the back.
For once there were no needy children around so I waited with the bag until two children, a boy about three and a girl, perhaps five, came and stood before me. I handed them the bag and the bread man turned around. I stepped in front of him so he knew it was for them, not him. I got back on the bus and watched out my window as the children looked inside, with the bread man beside them. They dug through it a little and I don’t think they had a clue what anything was but they were damn excited about it. They ran off, skipping and smiling and without looking back at me.
The bread man, knocking on our windows for the second time, had the two Frisbees under his arm.
“That pisses me off,” I said to Amanda, pointing to the awful man.
“Natalie, maybe it’s their Grandpa, and he’s just holding it for them. Maybe they didn’t know what it was so they bartered with him for bread. Just think of it like that.”
So I tried to think of it like that and I wasn’t quite so pissed off anymore.
It was just past 7:30, our departure time, and the bus still wasn’t full or moving so we started talking about the night before.
“Did the guy at the hotel even say sorry about last night, Beth?” I asked.
“No. He just said ‘OK, $5 off.’ I told him that wasn’t good enough. I don’t think we should have to pay for the room at all. Then he said half price, without even looking at the room.”
She re-told her conversation with the same snotty, not-backing-down British accent and tone she often used and sometimes I was embarrassed because of her rudeness and other times it made me embarrassed of my Canadianness because even though I got smiles, she got things done.
And it was a good thing, because the previous night RiverStar Hotel had shown us a view of Phnom Penh’s water that was not exactly pictured on the brochure.
Shortly after three a.m., I heard rain. It was coming from above and it was tapping on the roof and the windows in a constant way. Good. This rain is good for Cambodia, I thought, smiling as I turned over back to sleep.
When Amanda got up to go to the bathroom at four Beth noticed the edge of her bed, from the top blanket to the mattress, was soaked. From somewhere above, water was leaking down only onto Beth’s bed.
“Jesus Christ. The roof is going to come down soon,” Amanda said, joking and climbing back into her cool dry blankets.
But the rain was beginning to fall faster and harder so Beth got up and walked into the hall to see if it was raining like this anywhere else on the fourth floor. Just a few feet around the corner water was crashing down onto the pale green linoleum from a place in the middle of the roof, which certainly was going to cave any minute.
“Oh my God,” I heard her say, so I sprang from my bed, also in my boy-short underwear and tank top, to see the water. Amanda, in her pink cotton nightie that just barely covered her ass cheeks, was right behind me.
“Holy shit you guys,” she said as she caught up, just as another girl, who had the sense and respect to dress in the middle of the night, opened her door.
“We should really, really go tell someone,” I offered, trying to keep my feet out of the ever-rising puddle.
The other girl, who had blonde hair and an Australian accent, explained her boyfriend was already downstairs doing that very thing. We looked at the roof and floor and each other and then laughed.
The elevator dinged and we all turned around, nearly naked, to see the boyfriend and the poor hotel guy on night shift who would have to figure out how to deal with all of this. He looked scared and stunned and I’m not sure if it was more because of the water or the women. We tip-toed hurriedly back to our room and looked at our own little leak.
Still giggling like girls at a sleepover, Amanda and I laughed louder and longer as Beth proclaimed, “This is shit,” and went back into the hall.
“Excuse me. Excuse me,” she yelled at the hotel guy, who was throwing as many buckets as he could onto the floor.
I felt awful for him. This poor shmuck is alone, dealing with a mere flood, naked laughing girls and now a British one who wouldn’t let up about her wet sheets. So, he abandoned the hall and found a huge metal tub, the kind they use for washing clothes and linens and threw it under our own crumbling roof. Like I said, Beth got things done. We tried to ask how it was happening and, knowing no English, he pointed at the roof. Between looking out the window and seeing no rain and realizing we were on the top floor with leaks in very specific spots, we figured out that a water pipe had burst. He was just about to leave our room when the crack in the roof started widening and water gushed down, smacking the bottom of the bucket. What did we do? Got out our cameras and, still laughing so hard we couldn’t talk, still too naked to be seen in front of strangers, started taking pictures standing on my bed, the furthest from the water.
“This is just too fucking funny,” said Amanda. But two minutes later she decided it wasn’t funny at all. In fact, it was “downright fucking ridiculous” because now she’d lost sleep and on top of that, which is at the top of unforgivable sins to be committed against Amanda, it smelled like a toilet in our room. Toilet and cigarettes. I had taken the opportunity to smoke during the festivities.
If anyone on the bus was able to make out our recounting of the events, they didn’t think it was nearly as funny as we did. Cambodia, we agreed, had been a hell of a journey, and yet we still had 11 hours until we’d be back in Bangkok.
At eight the bus driver started the engine and the tires kicked up red dust as we slowly left the parking lot. Almost every 15 minutes afterwards the driver pumped the wheel, eliciting the horn to honk twice quickly. We weren’t sure if it was to let motorcycle drivers know we were behind them or if it was because people in the passing villages might want to hop on, or both, but at 9:15 Beth announced she was going to “shove the horn right up his rear.”
Just then we stopped and a family climbed on. One boy, two boys, three boys, an old lady and an old man, who all managed to squeeze into the only two free seats – directly behind Amanda and me.
“Natalie, they smell and they’re touching me.”
“I know. I know.” It was awful of us to say but it was true and it was awful. The little boys were on their grandparents’ laps so their little heads and hands were all around us. Instinctively, as those with weak stomachs do, I began breathing through my mouth.
I tried to think of what they smelled like. How am I going to describe this when I write?
“I bet it’s worse than the Bog of Eternal Stench, you know, from the movie Labrynth,” Amanda said, speaking through her red shirt, which she had pulled nearly up to her eyes.
“Yeah,” I said, still thinking of adjectives and metaphors to help someone reading this recognize the smell in their minds. I could feel one of the boys breathing on my shoulder.
I concluded they just smelled like little boys, little boys whose skin or clothes hadn’t seen water in weeks. Little boys who probably played in the dirt a lot and maybe sometimes it stuck to the sweat on their skin and maybe sometimes a little of their supper fell onto their shirts, and maybe when they turned around to go pee a little dribbled on their shorts as they pulled them back up to their bellies. Little boys all around the world can, and often prefer, to smell just like this.
Their grandpa’s face was just inches from Amanda’s. He kept making this sound, like he was sucking on a sucker and then a sound like when you lick your lips and circle your tongue slowly above your teeth. It was gross.
“Natalie, it’s gross,” Amanda said, in her whiny voice.
“What does he have in his mouth?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. I just can’t look. He’s right there.” So I looked and couldn’t find any source for the noise other than his lips, teeth, tongue and saliva. It was unending and unnerving.
We were all very crabby, very fast. We were tired, hungry, hot, uncomfortable and unable to breathe without a screen. Only 10 more hours. Well, the good news is, I told myself, it really can’t get any worse. And for the first time that I’d ever said that, I knew it really actually couldn’t. Not on that day, on that bus, anyway.
Amanda remembered we still had some candy in our little backpack and got it out. One of the boys was now sitting in the aisle, on the floor, while his brothers slept on the old people.
“Amanda,” I whispered. “I think we should share.”
She didn’t like their company and frankly neither did I but she knew she should so she did. We swallowed ours whole and had two more.
A few minutes later I felt the youngest one again, this time his fingers instead of his breath, against my shoulders. I turned back and could only see one eye peeking around the seat and his hands under my nose.
“You’re awake now buddy?” I reached down and grabbed the candy. There was three pieces left. “Have the whole darn thing,” I said, looking at him as his hands and face quickly retreated back to his grandma’s side. She unwrapped a purple piece and I heard him plop it in his mouth.
He moved his face back to the space between the window and my seat and the sucking noise started. I couldn’t see him chewing it, but I could tell when he rocked it from one cheek to the other, plunking it against the bottom of his mouth, out to the middle of his lips, where he sucked on it, and back in again, where he sucked harder. It was the same sound his grandpa was making. I started to cry. It wasn’t gross anymore, it was sad, and sweet. He was sucking like that to find ways to taste as much of the candy as he could, to make it last as long as he could.
With my right hand on the left side of my chest, between my breast and collar bone, I turned my head a little closer to the window and listened and cried.
I both fear and hope that everything I ever do, everything that happens to me, will be compared to Cambodia.
posted by Natalie at 7:42 AM
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