Nineteen
A guard confessed
in a documentary that he had feelings for an enemy
he interrogated. She was nineteen.
Young & single. He said,
he was also young,
like everyone else who worked the prison.
First set of questions he asked, she acknowledged
ignorance of the KGB and CIA,
after she sat many days blank,
with just her name and place of her birth written out,
for her personal history. She erased more than she wrote,
he said. She had five sentences written
on the shadows of what erasered off.
The first two were the same. The third sentence,
she believed she’s still nineteen because
it’s just the beginning of dry season. He asked how she knew.
She said that her mother had always told her that
she was born after the rice harvest and
was a considerate baby,
waiting to be born after all the work was done.
He mentioned he had suspected that
perhaps she feigned her education, because
she was so pretty and demure.
At the second course of the interrogation, he slapped
smack on the desk with the stick he was carrying.
Each time, she pee’ed.
Later, he stripped her half-way down
and whipped until blood
beat like rubies on skin. He said he felt so sorry
that he felt compelled to help her write
her personal confession of having been recruited by the CIA
from her village. She was nineteen, educated
(up to grade school). At the end again he said,
she was very pretty,
and dragged his eyes away from the camera,
reminiscing, like a master breaking in a young girl-slave,
and then saying, I did her good.
Some Tales
1.
At the beginning, tales dropped into my ears or eased themselves into me while I was nearby. Some I’d already heard and some were brand new. These new tales I got only bits and pieces. Though they were small pieces of here and there stories, they ingrained into my brain like no other tales before. What I did not get I asked Mother to explain; and, her explanation was, don’t worry about it. But, these bits of the stories dropped into my dreams, and they made me cry out for her.
In my dreams: I found myself buried underground, alive; my stomach gashed open as they pulled my guts out; I stood and watched as they butchered my father for his gall bladder, like the green glob from the inside of a fish. Often, a baby from a fat belly was lifted out. Sometimes from mine and other times from mothers’ I knew.
About four months into our life at the new village, rules under the Khmer Rouge remained somewhat the same. This was before our separations, and in a time when thoughts of each life were still unique with its group of characteristics (or what’s agreed quietly between parents and children); each child’s hot-temper, loving, sweet, sharing, or stubborn. Rights to this and that were believed as deserved; privacy was not an unannounced search, family secrets remained among parents, sons, and daughters.
A typical evening brought out the same routine for each family; spreading out the blankets to sleep on, keeping the cooking fire going, and grabbing the spot next to Mother and holding onto her because it would be harder for the ghosts to take us both. Where any typical night outside the hut was a world always masked in darkness.
Loud bang-bang carried from hut to hut. Each popping carried the same sound we had heard when the soldiers paraded through the street of our city homes. This is how it went; how I’ll always remember that night and the days followed.
I heard the bang--bang just before I fell asleep. I was jolted. I felt bothered. It sounded familiar. My big eyes turned to my mother, Go to sleep, she told me. Then, the roosters announced the morning, which opened with curious whispers. That next morning’s whispers did not make their ways to me till much later. So, I carried on like any day, fishing with my brother.
On a raised narrow dirt path, a partition between the rice fields, I followed my brother. This was the way we usually took to catch fish from the streams. I knew this because we took left and left meant wooden houses on stilts would greet us first, just before the dirt road and the running streams. We had not gone this way for a while now. I was excited that my brother decided to go this way because this way usually led to the fenced-off ground where food was more readily abundant to steal (my brother favored take from the regime and borrow from the old villagers). As such in this case, just taking for our hunger.
About a hundred yards into our walk, from the edge of our village, my brother plunged suddenly into the young rice field. A vision of a large crab sat in my head, I paused and shrilled. “Why are you in the water, Brother? Is there a crab in the water?” My brother shook his head and gestured for my hand. Then he whispered, do your best not to step on the young grass. He guided me to step to the edge of the path. I skimmed over loose soil and he treaded the thigh-high water, muddying up the water behind us.
2.
Time elapsed: passing feet kicked
and compressed; raindrops
packed and washed. Ruts marked
on the dirt incline; ran off dirt ebbed
into the mud bed of the rice field.
The sunken earth marked its border:
a three-sided rectangle, one side smeared off
and the other two defined
the height of a grown man.
It’s now a fist in depth
and taken over by shallow-rooted
weeds and grass, willowy and tender,
gripping dirt
to shoot up straight
over the spilling grave.
Peauladd Huy was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Her work has appeared on Blue Begonia Press (chapbook Souvenirs for my Daughters), Khmer Institute, Cha, Asia Literary Review, and Nou Hach.
A guard confessed
in a documentary that he had feelings for an enemy
he interrogated. She was nineteen.
Young & single. He said,
he was also young,
like everyone else who worked the prison.
First set of questions he asked, she acknowledged
ignorance of the KGB and CIA,
after she sat many days blank,
with just her name and place of her birth written out,
for her personal history. She erased more than she wrote,
he said. She had five sentences written
on the shadows of what erasered off.
The first two were the same. The third sentence,
she believed she’s still nineteen because
it’s just the beginning of dry season. He asked how she knew.
She said that her mother had always told her that
she was born after the rice harvest and
was a considerate baby,
waiting to be born after all the work was done.
He mentioned he had suspected that
perhaps she feigned her education, because
she was so pretty and demure.
At the second course of the interrogation, he slapped
smack on the desk with the stick he was carrying.
Each time, she pee’ed.
Later, he stripped her half-way down
and whipped until blood
beat like rubies on skin. He said he felt so sorry
that he felt compelled to help her write
her personal confession of having been recruited by the CIA
from her village. She was nineteen, educated
(up to grade school). At the end again he said,
she was very pretty,
and dragged his eyes away from the camera,
reminiscing, like a master breaking in a young girl-slave,
and then saying, I did her good.
Some Tales
1.
At the beginning, tales dropped into my ears or eased themselves into me while I was nearby. Some I’d already heard and some were brand new. These new tales I got only bits and pieces. Though they were small pieces of here and there stories, they ingrained into my brain like no other tales before. What I did not get I asked Mother to explain; and, her explanation was, don’t worry about it. But, these bits of the stories dropped into my dreams, and they made me cry out for her.
In my dreams: I found myself buried underground, alive; my stomach gashed open as they pulled my guts out; I stood and watched as they butchered my father for his gall bladder, like the green glob from the inside of a fish. Often, a baby from a fat belly was lifted out. Sometimes from mine and other times from mothers’ I knew.
About four months into our life at the new village, rules under the Khmer Rouge remained somewhat the same. This was before our separations, and in a time when thoughts of each life were still unique with its group of characteristics (or what’s agreed quietly between parents and children); each child’s hot-temper, loving, sweet, sharing, or stubborn. Rights to this and that were believed as deserved; privacy was not an unannounced search, family secrets remained among parents, sons, and daughters.
A typical evening brought out the same routine for each family; spreading out the blankets to sleep on, keeping the cooking fire going, and grabbing the spot next to Mother and holding onto her because it would be harder for the ghosts to take us both. Where any typical night outside the hut was a world always masked in darkness.
Loud bang-bang carried from hut to hut. Each popping carried the same sound we had heard when the soldiers paraded through the street of our city homes. This is how it went; how I’ll always remember that night and the days followed.
I heard the bang--bang just before I fell asleep. I was jolted. I felt bothered. It sounded familiar. My big eyes turned to my mother, Go to sleep, she told me. Then, the roosters announced the morning, which opened with curious whispers. That next morning’s whispers did not make their ways to me till much later. So, I carried on like any day, fishing with my brother.
On a raised narrow dirt path, a partition between the rice fields, I followed my brother. This was the way we usually took to catch fish from the streams. I knew this because we took left and left meant wooden houses on stilts would greet us first, just before the dirt road and the running streams. We had not gone this way for a while now. I was excited that my brother decided to go this way because this way usually led to the fenced-off ground where food was more readily abundant to steal (my brother favored take from the regime and borrow from the old villagers). As such in this case, just taking for our hunger.
About a hundred yards into our walk, from the edge of our village, my brother plunged suddenly into the young rice field. A vision of a large crab sat in my head, I paused and shrilled. “Why are you in the water, Brother? Is there a crab in the water?” My brother shook his head and gestured for my hand. Then he whispered, do your best not to step on the young grass. He guided me to step to the edge of the path. I skimmed over loose soil and he treaded the thigh-high water, muddying up the water behind us.
2.
Time elapsed: passing feet kicked
and compressed; raindrops
packed and washed. Ruts marked
on the dirt incline; ran off dirt ebbed
into the mud bed of the rice field.
The sunken earth marked its border:
a three-sided rectangle, one side smeared off
and the other two defined
the height of a grown man.
It’s now a fist in depth
and taken over by shallow-rooted
weeds and grass, willowy and tender,
gripping dirt
to shoot up straight
over the spilling grave.
Peauladd Huy was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Her work has appeared on Blue Begonia Press (chapbook Souvenirs for my Daughters), Khmer Institute, Cha, Asia Literary Review, and Nou Hach.
