When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge Paperback Read Online Free PDF Page B

and he does.
    Tha does not recover, however. He shuts down, taking nothing in, giving nothing out. He only breathes. Mak and Pa are always by his side.
    My parents haven’t prepared us for the idea of death. It is never discussed. When Tha dies, our mother cries very hard. Her ragged sobs scare me and yet pull me to her. Pa ’s eyes are red, wet with tears. He covers his face and leaves the house. I am saddened by the death of my older brother, who once let me hold a baby crow, warm and wriggling, with its tiny feet scratching for a perch in the palm of my hand. But in a way, my parents’ distress and helplessness bother me even more.
    Increasingly, our lives are spinning out of control.
    We have been squatters in the house of Kong Horne, Mak ’s uncle, for a month when he returns with his wife and children. The house is filling up. People gradually return to Takeo, and life slowly begins to seep back into the vacant streets.
    With a growing household, our family moves into the second floor of the home—a place with an eerie history. Years before I was born, a Vietnamese woman broke into my uncle’s home intent on stealing jewelry, gold, and silver ingots that were hidden in a stack of firewood—a crude but practical safe-deposit box for many Cambodians fearful of inflation and the shifting value of paper money. The intruder somehow lured my seven-year-old aunt upstairs. No one knows what happened. Perhaps she was trying to scare her into revealing where the gold and jewelry was. Maybe she was silencing a witness. In the end, the woman hanged my aunt by her neck, suspending her small body by a rope from a ceiling beam. The murderer was later found hiding under a bed upstairs not far from the body. She never did find the gold.
    For years the entire second story of the house was closed off. Cords of wood and thick wooden poles were stacked against it to counterbalance the evil. Whenever we get scared, my great-grandmother rattles off her spiritual defense, a rapid string of Pali words that come out as a chant, asking Buddha to ward off the bad spirits, to set up an invisible boundary so that ghosts can’t enter. In Cambodian culture you can also ward off ghosts in a single gesture: a defiantly uplifted middle finger.
    At night my mother swears she can hear someone pouring tea. Some nights when she rises to get water, she spies a dark shadow sitting on the hammock. One night I call out to my father. Someone is running a finger down my arms, as light as a spider’s touch. “ Pa , ghosts!” At first he pretends to misunderstand. “What? Ant?” he teases, deliberately confusing two words that are phonetically similar. By my third cry, he comes running.
    Amid this place of death and ghosts, there is more destruction.
     
     
    Something drops down loudly. The house shakes. I open my eyes. It drops again and again as if a big fist were pounding on the ground. Ry runs out of the mosquito netting. I follow behind her. It’s dark. When Ry and I reach the hallway, Pa, Mak , Aunt Cheng, Than, Chea, and Ra are already crowded by the front window.
    “ Putho [Mercy]!” Mak cries out, wincing with each strike.
    I want to see what they’re looking at, and squeeze through them to reach the window. Gigantic tongues of fire and smoke lick the black sky, lighting up the landscape in the distance, somewhere on the other side of the Bassac River. Silhouettes of planes loop in the darkness with sequins of light pouring from them. The sequins dissipate in the brushy shadow of distant trees, then erupt in enormous explosions, bright fire on the earth. We see it before we hear it, the explosion arriving as a delayed echo. Each burst concludes with a huge mushroom of smoke.
    “ Pa? ” I squeeze my father’s hand, looking up at the shadow of his face. He doesn’t say anything, but keeps on looking at the burning sky, trembling. I stand there with Pa watching it after everyone else has gone back to their beds.
    Never before have I seen