In a Rocket Made of Ice

by Gail Gutradt

  Miss Kalliyan walked by. She made a show of snubbing me. Although she was thirteen years old, she could not tolerate my giving so much attention to a new girl. Miss Kalliyan acted the same way when I made ginger tea for Miss Malis when she had a cold.

  All of these children have had love, and what they most need snatched away from them through death or desertion or betrayal. Some have better strategies than others for filling their needs, but as with all of us they struggle, and they often do things that bring just the opposite result from what they have hoped for. The hitting, sulking, aggression and demands are just clumsy ways of asking, flailing around for something they cannot name. They don’t know any other way to express their pain and need and their anger at being abandoned. There are so many children. It is hard for them to always have to share everything, never to be first, never to get enough.

  The second year I returned to Wat Opot I brought a large suitcase full of Legos that were donated by the children of a friend in Maine. There were thousands of pieces. Finally, I thought, we will have enough so that all the children can play. They will build amazing things.

  I unzipped the suitcase in the middle of my porch. The kids stood round, astonished. They had never imagined such a toy. Day by day the pile grew smaller. I became the Lego Police, frisking the kids as they left the porch so that they would not smuggle away pieces in their pockets. But one day on my way to dinner I watched Mister Kosal bopping across campus, flying three strips of Legos arranged like an airplane, and making sputtering put-put noises. He was overjoyed, absorbed in his wonderful toy, and it struck me that while the pedant in me was fixated on the idea of the children being able to build complex structures and learn principles of mechanics, the kids as always were using their imaginations to transform sticks and leaves and rocks into toys.

  Within a month or two, very few Legos were left in the toy box. Several times a day Socheat would present me with some pieces he said he’d found. I began to suspect he was sneaking them away just so he could make a show of returning them, so I always thanked him profusely. But maybe—no, probably—the other children were happy just to reach into their pockets and touch something special from another world that was theirs, and theirs alone.

  I wake up suddenly from a nap. Someone is banging on my door.

  “Chee-um!” Blood.

  Rebecca, the nurse, is in Phnom Penh, and Wayne has sent for me.

  Srey Mom is in the dormitory, coughing up blood. By the time I arrive the children have gathered around her, a circle of protection, while Wayne tries to listen to her heart sounds above their chatter.

  Madame Ketmoni [ket-mo-NEE], an adult patient who looks after Srey Mom, tells Wayne that the bleeding started in the pickup truck as they were riding back from Takeo, where they’d seen the doctor. Wayne questions Ketmoni persistently, in English and Khmer. Maybe it is just the drug Srey Mom is taking for tuberculosis. That can turn sputum red and might be mistaken for blood. Maybe that’s all it is, just a carsick child and some red-stained vomit. But Ketmoni is adamant, and a little offended that Wayne should doubt her report.

  Wayne asks everyone to be quiet while he listens intently through his stethoscope. He knows that if Srey Mom’s heartbeat is fast and weak, she is bleeding internally, and he can only put her to bed and wait for death to take her. But her heartbeat is strong, so he suspects it is only a little old blood that she is coughing up. And it is the weekend and the doctors at the hospital have all gone home until Monday. There is nothing to do but watch and wait.

  Wayne tells me that sick children can go downhill very fast and that in America a child with HIV and TB would be put on the critical list. Srey Mom cannot be given antiretroviral medicines until her tuberculosis has been treated, and there is not enough medical technology in Cambodia to treat what may be happening inside her tonight.

  Years later, when I asked Wayne to explain how a child like Srey Mom, who might have been confined to a ward in the West, was allowed to run and play with the other children at Wat Opot, he spoke of the need to accept things as they are. “Death was just around the corner for many of these kids, and neither I nor she thought she would be a survivor. So it was important to treat it casually so she didn’t get scared and give up.”

  Later, in bed in the hospice, Srey Mom is hungry, and I ask Madame Ketmoni to bring her some food. Pesei is there, next to me. His father and mother died of AIDS; he shares this moment’s anxieties. He nursed his own parents, and his presence is a quiet offering. He will do what is needed. Ketmoni returns with Srey Mom’s dinner. I feed her and remain close by. Then Ketmoni hugs me. It is the first time she has shown any affection toward me—and, for that matter, my first toward her. On this night we are both mothers.

  It is later still, nearly lights out. Srey Mom has climbed out of bed and is sitting on the ground throwing up blood. The children stand in a ring around her, but not too close. They understand about AIDS and blood and everyone knows which children here are HIV positive. Wayne says the bleeding might be coming from her stomach or her lungs, or perhaps it’s just a blood vessel in her throat, opened by her persistent coughing.

  We lay her in bed again, and I sit with her. She moves my hand to her chest, right over her heart, to ease the pain or perhaps to ease her loneliness, and I leave my hand there, patting her gently until she falls asleep.

  It is almost midnight when Ketmoni comes for me. Srey Mom is coughing up a lot of blood. By the time I get there, Wayne has put a large block of ice on her chest, as much to keep her still as to try to stanch the bleeding. The blood is bright red, so it is probably not from her stomach. It could be from her lungs, but she has been coughing heavily and Wayne is still hoping it is only from her throat. Srey Mom looks small and scared. Wayne tries to insert an IV by candlelight. He is blind in one eye from when he was wounded in battle as a medic in Vietnam, and his “good” eye has a cataract, so he strains in the dark to find a tiny vein. We bring the candles closer, as in some arcane ritual. But in spite of Wayne’s training and his years of experience, tonight he cannot find a vein. For now it’s impossible.

  Wayne is exhausted. He was up all the previous night nursing a dying man, so he asks me to stay here in the hospice with Srey Mom. All through the darkness and into the morning I wake up every hour or so to replace the ice on her chest, or to give her medicine to keep her from coughing. Wayne figures that if the blood is only coming from her throat, and if we can keep her still, the lesion may heal. So many ifs.

  Her coughing wakes me once more. She is restless and feverish. Her shirt is soaked through and in her sleep she has thrown off the ice. Nearby, Serain, in mask and gloves, moves quietly among the patients, speaking softly in the darkness to comfort and calm a frightened woman.

  I am reminded of something Rebecca had told me when I first arrived, about how patients come into the world rocked by their mothers, but how there is no one to rock them as they leave. So I hold Srey Mom in my arms and rock her and stroke her flushed, frightened face.

  At dawn I place my palm on Srey Mom’s forehead; at last her fever has broken. Once more I notice the crickets and chuckling geckos, the howling dogs and hurdy-gurdy sounds of the wat. From two rooms away I hear Wayne snoring. Serain studies English by candlelight under her pink mosquito net. Patients moan and shift, their thin bodies rustling on the plastic mattress covers.

  It’s daylight when we carry Srey Mom back to her own bed. I sit by her side, rubbing her back as she drifts into a deep sleep, and suddenly I have a vision of myself as part of an eternal lineage of mothers and fathers who have sat up for countless sleepless nights with sick children. I am hot and exhausted and still worried, and I close my eyes and feel the touch of my father’s hands as he used to give me alcohol rubs when I was small and had a fever, and my vision dissolves into tears.

  Pesei’s sister Miss Jorani has been doing her school lessons on her bamboo bed nearby. She walks over quietly and fans me with her notebook. She kneels down and looks up into my face and as
ks, “You cry?”

  I nod. “Yes, I cry.” She reaches out her hand and touches my arm for a moment. Her touch is gentle and cool. Then she goes back to her lessons.

  Over the next few days, Srey Mom’s throat heals and there is no more blood. I bring her a little doll to comfort her and keep her still, and children come to sit with her on her bed, or play nearby.

  Only when it is over, when she can play and run with the other children again, can I bring myself to ask Wayne the questions I dared not articulate when we did not know whether Srey Mom would live. How can you open your heart completely and love the child who needs it most, the one who might die? And how can you go on loving the next one and the next, after they do?

  Wayne’s calling has been to work with the dying. In this new world, where children can grow up HIV positive, there are different challenges. How can we help them to live with AIDS? What sort of lives will they have? What work can they do? As the first generation of HIV-infected children entering young adulthood, will they be able to marry or have children of their own?

  But for me in this moment it was a question of how to love, whatever the outcome. Not without attachment—how could that be possible? But to accept that love and grief, caring and mourning, are manifestations of the same fierce instinct. For when we close our hearts, out of fear of pain, we do unspeakable violence to the children and to ourselves. We distance ourselves from life, and from all opportunities to share with them the joy of living. In the end, to shut our hearts would bring us to an untimely and tragic death-in-life. And worst of all, for the children this would be the final, the cruelest abandonment.

  6

  Boys with Barbies

  Wayne and I tried to keep Srey Mom in bed until her throat healed, but that proved to be a difficult task. As soon as she began to feel better she wanted to run around and play. But before we could stop her the exertion would reopen the wound in her throat, she’d start coughing up blood, and we would have to begin all over again, keeping her motionless for hours with a block of ice on her chest. I brought her toys and books and sat with her, but it was hard for her to keep still. She was only six. Between tuberculosis and AIDS she had been sick most of her life, and, as Wayne put it, “Srey Mom doesn’t do sick well.”

  A donor from the United States had sent a box of Barbie dolls, but Rebecca had forbidden me to let the girls play with them. Rebecca was trying to teach them not to be concerned with appearances and to concentrate on developing their minds and spirituality and self-confidence. She felt that the dolls, with their ample busts, constricted waists and impossibly long legs, would undermine the self-image of growing young women and nullify everything she hoped to accomplish. I saw her point, yet it seemed such a waste to withhold them. But although I could foresee the fun they would have, and that it would likely overshadow any enduring harm, I respected Rebecca’s wishes, and the dolls remained hidden away.

  But today was Sunday, and Rebecca had taken the girls and the smallest boys into the village to attend church. Only some of the older boys stayed behind. A wicked impulse formed in my head: I just had to see what those boys would do with the Barbies. After all, Rebecca had not said the boys couldn’t play with them!

  I dumped the plastic anorexics and their accessories onto the bed next to Srey Mom—a dozen Barbies and scads of outfits: from spangled gowns to minute bikinis, silver sandals, cat’s-eye sunglasses, patent leather boots and spiked heels with polka-dotted bows on them. Srey Mom and I were having a wonderful time, and before long the word went out and every boy on campus (and a few more I’d never seen before) came running from all directions toward the dorm’s open door. With a whoop they fell to. They did what boys do: they investigated, dressed, undressed, peeked, giggled, prodded, tossed, guffawed and beheaded, and then put them all back together and returned them to me, miraculously whole and virginal.

  I loved the rollicking way these boys played with the dolls. Like girls, they too enjoyed assembling miniature outfits, meticulously doing up the tiny buttons and snaps, and delicately, almost reverently, combing the dolls’ long blond hair. These boys had no preconceptions, no sense that this was girl stuff. They were totally open.

  About that time Rebecca came back with the girls, who joined the party at Srey Mom’s bedside. Not that I could have hidden the fact of the dolls from them anyway. Nope, the Barbies were out of the bag, and there was no getting around that. Rebecca saw how excited the kids were, and all in all she proved to be a good sport about the whole thing.

  The lovely Miss Kalliyan held the doll she had just dressed close to her heart. Her eyes were shining and she uttered to me perhaps the only English sentence I had ever heard her speak: “Gail. I want.”

  Maybe Rebecca was onto something after all.

  Eventually the boys wandered off, but the girls stayed. I had some chores to do, but when I returned something caught my eye. Among the Barbies was one single dark-skinned doll, and she lay on the table, abandoned.

  Just about any cosmetic product I saw in Cambodia, from face cream to underarm deodorant, contained skin whiteners. Cambodians know dark skin will peg them as a peasant who works in the rice fields. A few days before, I had talked with one of the girls about the perils of some of the home-brewed skin bleaches for sale in the local markets—I had heard that some even contain mercury. She was a natural beauty, and I explained to her how worried I was that she should feel it necessary to bleach her lovely face into what would look like an ashen gray mask. She listened politely but uncomfortably, not wanting to disagree with an elder, but I could see how socially compelling it was for her to have lighter skin. Years later, when we knew each other better, this young woman would tell me that her father’s mother had not wanted him to wed her mother because she had dark skin and came from a poor family.

  Today I noticed she was sharing a doll with another girl, so I offered her the orphaned Barbie. Her reaction was immediate, phobic and physical. “No!” she exclaimed, withdrawing her hands and jumping back. She actually seemed frightened, or so it seemed to me, that some of that darkness might rub off on her.

  A while later I wandered back, curious to see how they’d worked it out—or hadn’t. As there were many more girls than dolls, I was certain someone would be tempted to break the taboo.

  I was not prepared for how they actually solved their problem. Someone switched the heads on two dolls, so there was a brown face on a white body, and a white face on a brown one. I supposed their logic went that now each of the two children could have a doll that was at least partly white.

  7

  Opening the Gates

  A wrought iron gate, left casually open, marks the boundary between the Wat Opot Children’s Community and the grounds of the Buddhist temple next door. On each side of the gate a yard or so of fence, no longer plumb, struggles to assert itself from amid the weeds. This is the formal entrance to the campus.

  When I first came to Wat Opot, drivers would turn off the main highway and travel a mile or so down the dirt road that runs through the villages, and then turn onto the temple grounds. Your taxi or moto would drive right through the Buddhist wat itself, and in through the northern gate. But by the time I returned the next year a new access road had been built along the outer wall of the wat. The need for a second road puzzled me, but Wayne would explain that the monks had been disturbed by the attitude of some of the moto drivers. The wat grounds are sacred, and when you come inside it is proper to remove your hat. Some of the moto drivers who were new Christians had begun to flout this custom.

  The new road meant that Wayne had to build another entrance, on the western end of the compound: a wooden fence with a latched corral-type gate, broad enough for trucks and cars. This gate, one might reason, would keep hungry neighborhood cows from raiding our crops. But opening and closing the gate meant getting out of your vehicle twice; this was too much of a nuisance for most people, so usually the gate stood open. Cows wandered in and out at will, grazing on flowers and feasting on the s
truggling vegetable garden. In truth, the gate was irrelevant: even when it was latched, the cows simply leapt over the fence.

  Then too, all those cows could just walk around to the other side of the volunteers’ housing and amble onto campus unimpeded. They spared neither the thorny pink bougainvillea bush nor the succulent philodendron vines that shaded our porch in the dry season. So Wayne installed yet another fence with a sort of turnstile, but the kids ducked under it, and even though it was no moon gate the cows jumped over it all the same.

  Back on the north side, a little ways down from the old main entrance, behind a small silted pond where the monks collect water for their gardens and almost hidden among the weeds, is a set of crumbling concrete steps that allow access between the temple grounds and the Wat Opot campus. From the gazebo where we gather for breakfast every morning, we have a lovely view of white cows descending the staircase for a breakfast of their own—the tender crowns of young mango trees that Vandin planted across the field from the crematorium. Once, Wayne spent a slow afternoon building a teetering construction on the topmost step. He balanced cinder blocks and wood scraps and a couple of fat rusty springs from a truck suspension. He hoped the cows would knock pieces off as they tried to brush by and be spooked by the noise, but they just stepped placidly over the debris and ambled onward. Wayne might have installed a more serious barrier, a set of cables or a gate with a spring, but in that moment he just enjoyed playing with blocks.