A Boy Named Rindy, page 23
Chivy stumbled next to me as we marched to the trench, jolting me out of my own darkness. It took her a moment to regain her footing, so I braced her with my shoulder. Her bones dug into mine, her flesh stretched tight over her skeleton. Her knees were like the knots on a thin tree, out of place and too large to be supported by her frame. Her eyes stared at me from the black holes sunk into her face, as if they too were eating into her like a puddle eats into the ground. I pitied myself, but the sight of Chivy broke me. Without words, I wiped the tears on her cheeks, smearing mud in its place.
Filing into the trench, we began. Taking up a shovel, I thrust it into the hard dirt, glancing into the dim distance. We had completed our assigned section of the reservoir, and Vichet praised our work, but the light had slowly been dimming in his eyes and the passion leaking out of his words, like the air from a bike tire. He couldn’t believe in the ideal of Angkar any longer, the cracks had become too large, and he’d seen beneath. If Angkar was a man or god I didn’t know, but I did know it was evil, and no good could be found there.
Plunging my shovel into the dirt one more time, water sloshed in my hollow stomach. My stomach had grown tired of grumbling for food because I had stopped responding to it. I had stopped feeling constant hunger, which had dulled to an ache. Yet every once in a while, I would feel that little slosh of water and remember that I still needed food. We had had more than a watery bowl of soup since they took the rice away, but I would swallow the panic of starvation along with my soup, hoping the liquid would quell the other in my stomach.
“I have to go.”
I looked up. It was as if Chivy spoke to the fly crawling into her mouth. I nodded and watched as she struggled out of the trench, her black uniform flapping off of her body like a flag of surrender. I was afraid Chivy was surrendering herself to the hunger that was eating her from the inside out.
I trudged out of the trench, carrying a basket to dump at the top. I could see Chivy squatting in the dirt behind a pathetic little bush. Falling over, she propped herself back up again before shakily standing to her feet. Shame had been steadily vanishing each day, blown away with the wind that continued to peel a new layer off the ground. In its place was left something almost animal. We relieved ourselves wherever we could. I didn’t have to go much though, because there was nothing for my body to discard. It hoarded everything it got.
“Get back to work,” a soldier shouted at Chivy, as she paused, staring at the ground absently. Chivy struggled back into the trench, not bothering to swat the flies speckling her face. I poked at one crawling into my ear before waving them off of her. My hand lingered, as if drawn like a magnet to her waning cheek. I touched her for a mere moment, but the feeling of her skin beneath mine sent a ripple of life through me. Chivy just looked at me, eyes void of the usual mirth and wittiness. I cringed when returning her gaze, but it captured me, and I couldn’t look away. Breaking the trance, Chivy grabbed the shovel and went back to work.
Think of something to cheer her up. Think!
“I’ve got to go.” She caught me off guard, because she had just relieved herself. I looked at her questioningly, but Chivy didn’t begin her climb out of the trench as I expected. Instead, she kept shoveling, her hands loosely gripping the bamboo handle.
“Didn’t you say you had to go?” I whispered after a while of digging. Chivy looked up and stared at me. Her black eyes didn’t only look sad, they mirrored something else. Panic.
“You’re going to be all right, Chivy,” I whispered quickly before the soldier caught us talking. “We’re going to get through this. Don’t lose your love of life. Don’t lose your laughter.”
I don’t know what made me say it, but the look she wore drug it out of me. She didn’t respond, but merely kept digging, elbows jutting in lifeless, mechanical movements. She wore the look all day and worked like she was the shell of a human. At last, the darkness of morning wore into the darkness of night and bells clamored for us to return. We marched back, dusty and hungry prisoners of Angkar.
“Goodbye, Rindy.” Chivy turned to face me, before returning to her section of the camp. “Thank you.” Her eyes were alive with moonlight. The panic was there too, staring, but so was something else. What was it? Turmoil played out across her features like wind rippling over grass, making it sway beneath its power. It was as if she was struggling between the options of giving into panic or continuing to swallow its bitter drudge. I wanted to reach my hand out toward her in a feeble attempt to touch her, to draw her in close and make her feel safe. I wanted to whisper into her ear that we were going to make it out alive and she was going to grow happy and strong. I wanted to curl my arms around her shoulders and knees, to add my flesh to hers and to shield her from the cruelty of the world. I wanted to draw her close and never let go. I reached out my hand—.
“Move,” a soldier shouted, jerking me back to reality. He sharply motioned with his gun for Chivy to go her way and for me to go mine.
“Goodnight, Chivy,” I called, taking one more glimpse as she walked into the darkness.
The morning bell began to sound, it was static over the speakers, and I struggled to hold onto sleep, ignoring the bell for as long as I could.
“Everyone up.” a soldier called, forcing me from my denial.
Uncurling myself, I grabbed the shovel and basket outside my hut and joined my battalion, which was already marching toward the reservoir. Scratching the back of my head, I tried to pick at the lice dancing on my scalp. The smell of rotting teeth and body odor rolled around in the air between those of us marching. I hadn’t cared in a long time if it was mine or someone else’s as it was all of us in varying degrees. Then I noticed that something was out of place.
Chivy. Where is Chivy? I craned my neck to search for her, the question pounding my brain with each marching step.
“Chivy?” I whispered, not caring about the attention I was drawing.
“Chivy, where are you?” I called louder, panic mounting with my voice.
“Silence,” a soldier yelled routinely, his cold, unconcern showing on his every taught feature. My comrades responded with blank stares and shrugs. She wasn’t among us. My stomach clenched around last night’s supper. I wanted to vomit. I couldn’t march in sync and kept stumbling around, whispering “Chivy, Chivy, Chivy” into the black, morning air. We filed into the reservoir, but it was too dark to see far.
“Has anyone seen Chivy?” I asked the other girls, but no one even knew the name. She was just another skinny girl who moved dirt.
“You are all equal and all the same,” the Angkar orator played in my head, stuck on repeat. “Each one of you is a grain of rice: the same in value, trait and purpose.”
Chivy was just a lost grain of rice in the sea of sameness. But she wasn’t just another person to me. She was my reason for enduring the past years of torture. The one I shoveled with, the only one I dared talk to, the only one who knew my name, and the only one who didn’t see me as just another grain of rice. I loved her with everything in me. I would have given her every ounce of soup I was allotted, would have transferred her weight to myself and I would have died a hundred deaths for her.
“Chivy!” I screamed, until my voice grew hoarse.
“Shovel,” the soldier yelled down at me, the blackness of his frame barely distinguishable from the blackness of the sky. I let the blackness take me to its depths. I pleaded to cry, wanted to cry out the anguish in my soul, but nothing would come. My mind was wild with fear, but like a robot I continued to shovel, unable to stop my limbs from mindlessly moving. No one joined in my sorrow, because no one replied. Each one was fighting their own darkness and trying to swallow the panic into the pit of their own empty stomachs.
“Rindy.” I turned my head, surprised to hear my name among the nameless horde as we left the trench to get the little bit of sleep we were allowed. Vichet wound his way through the battalion. I stopped, letting the boys flow around me until he stood before me, his face illuminated by the torch made from palm branches he carried to guide us back.
“I heard you calling for your work partner, your friend.” He dropped his gaze.
I waited, my knees trembling like the firelight. My heart thudded to the sound of its flicker.
“I asked her battalion leader—” Vichet swallowed, his eyes meeting mine once again.
“She was caught…” He exhaled the words. “She was caught trying to run away with some of the older girls.”
“Was she—was she—” I stuttered, unable to ask the question, unable to set myself free from the weight of it.
“Yes, Rindy.” He looked at me, eyes squinting in suppressed emotion. “She was.”
I tried to remain upright, tried to think clearly through the words coming out of his mouth, but my mind was unable to soak them in.
“I’m sorry.” His voice faltered, then began spilling out like water through his hands. “I’m sorry. I thought I could keep everyone in my battalion from dying if I proved I was dedicated to the Khmer Rouge and if you all worked hard. I’ve fail—."
“Why aren’t you all moving?” A soldier stalked up from behind us, emerging from the darkness. “Move!”
I stumbled forward, jolted by the soldier’s command. I cast one last glimpse at Vichet as he walked behind me, his form slumped and face gaunt in the firelight. Something glistened down his face and disappeared into the hard ground. Then his eyes met mine and they blazed with fire.
41
The Fall
“I knew I could not survive it anymore.” — Rindy
November 1978
Even though I had learned her fate, I continued to look for Chivy with each passing day, whispering her name in the trench, searching for her around the cafeteria and in the shadows of the palm trees. The girl I had worked next to for the last three years had disappeared into the air as if the wind had carried her slight frame away. Yet I knew her fate was neither so mystical nor merciful because I lived in Angkar’s world. Sudden disappearance was normal. Death was normal. Grief was normal.
Glancing at my hands, I tore a loose callus so hard it made me bleed, but it brought a strange relief. The dust on my shovel mixed with the blood on my hand, making a deep red mud. My life had become like that mud. It was mixed with so many things that I had ceased to exist. I was a child of Angkar, a soldier, a worker, but the human had long disappeared. Chivy’s disappearance had sealed my fate.
My head pounded with the words she had last uttered, “Goodbye, Rindy. Thank you.” They played repeatedly, with each shovel of dirt and with each step I took. Her voice said them, whispering into my brain. I clenched my eyes closed, trying to escape in the darkness because her eyes stared at me from each hole I was digging in the dirt. They stared at me with the look of panic and the turmoil of whether or not to run like she had, knowing my fate would end in the same. But would that be so bad?
I tore at my hair. I hated myself for not throwing my arms around her that last night, for not whispering that I loved her and for not holding her close. To make her want to fight; to make her want to live. I would have tried harder to help her see that I needed her, that she was the only reason I made it through each day.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you, Chivy.
I breathed the words out, over and over and over again, until I yelled them in the air curling with dust. They were the words I wished I had said, the words that haunted me and throbbed in my chest. But it was too late.
In nightmares, I could see the plastic bag clinging to her head greedily when I closed my eyes, with her lifeless body sunk in the mud. Then a tiger leapt from her frame, chasing me until it pinned me and tore at my flesh. I always awoke gasping and unable to sleep again.
I had seen Angkar kill countless times, but I had never felt the death so personally before. Each death had horrified and haunted my mind, but Chivy’s death haunted my heart. There was no way to regain the illusion I had willingly lived under. It was shattered into a million pieces and had already blown away into the dust filled sky. Angkar was not the savior; it was the demon of death. Angkar killed us in a million different ways every day, while continuing to create new ways. The anthem that had echoed in my head with pride now caused me to cringe in rage. The checkered krama tied around my waist no longer signified freedom. It was spilled blood. The black clothes hanging limply from my emaciated body were not the color of revolution, they were the color of death. When I looked around, I stared into the unblinking, glass eyes of the others who were prisoners in the same way.
I had known the truth about Angkar for a long time, but it was easier to ignore it and live, than acknowledge it and risk being overheard by one of their many spies and sent to one of the prisons. I had never seen anyone return after being summoned by Angkar. I had kept this realization in the back corner of my mind, hidden from sight, buried in the ground of my subconscious, carefully tended, but never unearthed. We were all puppets in a play called the death game. The soldiers were merely a deader version of myself. This reality weighed on me more and more heavily with each basket of dirt I dumped. I continued to dig, but I sank deeper into the panic that was slowly consuming me too.
Three days came and went, and I knew that I could not endure another one. I had reached the point Chivy had, and I was willing to face the plastic bag if it came to that. Being left lifeless in the mud would have been better than continuing without a living heart. I dug like I always had, but my mind was sharp for the first time in months, maybe years, as if a cool breeze had blown all the dust of confusion away, allowing me to see clearly. It wasn’t a feeling of excitement, but that of resolve.
Placing my hoe carefully on the ground, blade sticking upwards, I climbed out of the trench with my full basket. I reached the top with wet palms and shaking knees, but I tried not to look suspicious. My began to pound, and I dumped the dirt and placed the basket on the ground. Then, without turning, I backed up slowly, one foot behind the other. I looked around to make sure no one was watching, before I took another step. Dirt crunched beneath my sandals, flies buzzed through the air, a soldier barked at an emaciated form not moving quickly enough. Visions of what was about to happen paraded through my mind, but I took another step. My heart raced, and I took another. Wincing, I dreaded the drop off, yet welcomed it grimly. I took another step. Then the ground crumbled beneath my heels, and I fell backwards.
I groped at the empty air and brought a landslide of earth down with me. The wind was knocked out of me, and the force of my body crashing against the dirt surprised me. A rock hit my face. My body gained momentum as I tumbled backwards. I hoped meeting the sharp hoe at the bottom wouldn’t be too painful, yet I also hoped it would be successful in creating a wound. I had to choose my escape from the trench by death or injury, as they were my only two ways out.
Rolling to a stop, I felt a sharp pain in my hip, and I winced. My consciousness disappointed me, but the amount of pain I felt was a small consolation. Trying to stand on my feet, I grimaced, pulling up my shirt to survey the damage. My waist was gouged with a cut larger than my hand, already turning purple with blood. Those around me paused their work, staring absently, but not moving toward me.
“Get working,” a soldier called down, seeing the others standing around. “Vitchet, you’ve got one down. Deal with him or I will!”
Through the dust, Vichet emerged. His face had aged, but his eyes still held something the Khmer Rouge had not yet stolen. Pity.
“What happened?” He helped me to my feet.
“I fell.”
“Can you walk?”
“A little.”
I tried to limp, exaggerating the pain. Would he notice?
He inspected the gouge, the blood already soaking my shirt. Yet black doesn’t show blood. Maybe that was by design? His movements were inexperienced and awkward but gentle. “It’s really deep and is bleeding pretty badly.”
I waited in damp nervousness, chewing at a dusty fingernail, wondering what he would decide to do with me. I felt bad lying. It was surely bad karma, but I no longer cared. Karma was a cruel taskmaster. I had seen it punish mercilessly. I had seen it kill. I just wanted to escape the trench, escape the pain in my chest for a little while. I wanted to sleep forever.
“You probably can’t shovel for a bit.” Vichet stood and grabbed me by the arm to help me out of the trench. I swallowed down a lump of guilt, like mud, as I struggled up the embankment past the others still working. With my arm slung over his shoulder, I marveled at him. How had he put on an act so well? How had he seemed to love Angkar with such zeal, when it had all been a ploy to save more boys from a leader who would have been like the others—cruel and evil? Had he ever believed in their cause? Yet when the Khmer Rouge took over the country, there had never really been any good choices. It was either join their sham revolution or die. We had all been playing the game ever since, in one capacity or another.
We walked toward the camp slowly enough for me to keep up. His gun hung over his shoulder like a costume piece rather than a weapon. When he carried it, I felt safe. When any other soldiers carried it, I felt like I had a target painted on my forehead.
“I’ve been trying to get as many out as I can.” Vichet’s voice was low, his words sparking with life. “There has been enough death here. The ground can’t take it anymore.” Then as if to himself. “I can’t take it anymore.”
I was stunned. What did he mean to get people out?
“The revolution is crumbling; they just don’t know it yet—” His voice lowered to an inaudible growl as we passed a group of soldiers playing cards. They looked at us absently, seeming curious why a soldier would help a worker rather than just kill him.
Vichet motioned for me to sit at the base of a palm tree near the longhouse where we ate, which was now vacant.
