In a Rocket Made of Ice

by Gail Gutradt

  Rinin is bright and motivated and her mother pays for her to study with an English tutor every day after school. The first time I met Rinin she parroted a list of questions from an antiquated English primer.

  “How many chambermaids do you have?” she asked, proudly enunciating each word. I was from Amérique, so I must be rich and have many chambers in my home, and certainly a maid to tidy each one.

  “I have no chambermaids,” I said. “Not even one. How many chambermaids do you have?”

  “Oh, I do not have any chambermaids,” she replied, glancing at their all-in-one-room home. “I am very poor. And very small,” she added emphatically. She was in fact quite tiny, but with prominent ears that bore tiny gold earrings.

  “No,” I said. “You are rich and very fat.”

  “And you are very thin and very young,” she answered, catching on to the game right away.

  This became our usual greeting, whenever I would visit her family. “And how are all your chambermaids?” I would ask. And if I brought along a guest to meet her I always told Rinin that they were fabulously wealthy and had dozens of chambermaids.

  Each time I came, Rinin and I would sit for an hour with her schoolbooks. I brought her some storybooks in English and she made a habit of underlining any word she didn’t know. Then she would look it up and write the definition in the margin in her minuscule, precise hand. She was hungry to learn. Her mother worked hard to pay for her tutoring, and she hoped to send Rinin to college.

  I usually visited Rinin and Mama on Sunday mornings. Once, I took some of the kids with me, thinking they might like to meet my new friends, but they were silent and sullen, resentful that I had a connection outside with another child, someone who had a mother and spoke English better than they did. After that I tried to keep my two worlds separate. I felt bad about not inviting Rinin and Mama to Wat Opot, and it would have been hard to explain to them why. They were very kind, and whenever I went to the market Mama would send me home with bags full of fruit for the children.

  One afternoon I woke from my nap to find Rinin at my door. She had come by moto to say hello, carrying several large pineapples and a bag of papayas from Mama. Rinin prattled on in her best English, unaware of the effect her visit was having on the children, who watched us with jealous curiosity. I introduced her to some of the kids and was aware that a few of the older boys were eyeing her with some interest.

  Before she left, Rinin pulled me aside. She looked quite concerned, and announced in a voice easily audible to anyone nearby, “Mommy Gail, I think the children here are not respectful to you in Khmer.”

  I cringed. “What do you mean?” I imagined untranslatable epithets uttered behind all those friendly smiles.

  “When they speak to you they do not call you Madame Gail. Only Gail. That is not polite.”

  Knowing that the children overheard every word, I wanted to spare them any embarrassment. “Well, Rinin,” I began, “thank you, but these children do not have a nice mama like you do to teach them. Anyway, here at Wat Opot we are less formal. We are friends, and we all love each other very much.”

  After Rinin left, Ouen came and shyly put his arms around my waist. He peered up into my eyes and, looking quite grave, asked, “Maybe we should call you Madame Gail?”

  “No, I would rather you just call me Gail,” I said. “And I will call you Mister Ouen.”

  13

  Yei

  The moto is a primary means of transport in Cambodia. This small motorbike is the people’s taxi in the city or countryside. All manner of baggage is carried: twenty brace of live chickens tied by their feet, straining sacks of rice, buckets of water with fish swimming in them and great placid hogs, their enormity crammed into openwork lattice baskets. Small plastic bags—red, green, pink and black—carry palm sugar paste, cooking oil, fish sauce and pulses. The bags dangle from the handlebars like translucent Christmas ornaments.

  But this is child’s play. Your clever driver introduces cantilevering: a board engineered across the back of the bike can support a doublewide construction of several dozen Styrofoam coolers, a carved wooden wardrobe with mirrored doors, a maze of rattan chairs, a squawking, teetering poultry market in cages lashed ten feet high. Thus the moto becomes the poor man’s moving van. It is also his ambulance, and I have seen patients bouncing along on stretchers attached crosswise to the back of a moto, complete with an IV drip.

  And whole families. Three or four slender Cambodians plus children of assorted sizes often ride on one bike. The father drives, and a child or two are sandwiched between him and his wife, who rides sidesaddle. Finally there is Grandmother, her grandchild in her arms, riding backward, appended to her seat by Grace itself. Between the father’s legs rides the youngest son, holding the handlebars, proudly pretending to steer. And when there is an accident—and there are many such misfortunes—it is the little one in front who often suffers the worst.

  This morning I glance out my front door as such a family arrives on foot at Wat Opot. The stunned father clutches his child’s body; the mother is limping behind. They have all been injured, but Wayne is concerned for the boy, who flew over the handlebars, slid along the ground and struck his head on a rock. One side of his face is brilliant red where the skin has been scoured away by gravel, and the bruise on his forehead is dark and swelling fast. Wayne hands the boy a hundred-riel note—enough for an ice cream—to distract him, and sets about debriding and disinfecting the wound. The boy squirms, frightened, and tries to burrow into his father’s arms. His father holds him on his lap and comforts him, his face soft and burdened. He moves his hands here and there over his son’s body, stroking and patting him, perhaps to reassure himself that the boy has no hidden injuries. The boy grimaces and recoils again from the sting of the antiseptic. His mother stares straight ahead, stunned, never once looking at her husband or son.

  Wayne speaks in a low voice; his movements are deft and precise—a relaxed economy of motion he learned caring for the wounded on the battlefield in Vietnam, and in years of emergencies here and earlier in Honduras. He works without gloves, holding the gauze pad by one end and cleansing the wound with the other, never allowing blood to touch his fingers. Wayne once told me he has had three needlesticks with HIV-contaminated needles—all while working with gloves. He prefers to know exactly where his fingers are.

  The Wat Opot children sit on the window ledges, watching. Even the youngest children understand that chee-um, blood, is serious business.

  Wayne examines the father, but his injuries are slight, and turns to the mother, who has been sitting a little apart. She has hurt her knee, but again, it is nothing much. He gives them some pills for pain, and they rise to leave. They do not offer payment, and he asks for none.

  Soon an old yei arrives asking for medicine for her broken wrist. Occasionally people from the village come by for first aid. It has taken some time for them to understand that they are welcome here, and it has taken years for many of them to overcome their fear of catching AIDS if they step through the gates of Wat Opot. Sometimes when we are at breakfast they come to the office, shyly waiting, as peasants do, fearful of being seen as a bother. Yet in their poverty and their history and their patient humanity reside the enormous weight of their entitlement.

  The old woman’s face is wrinkled but, since Cambodians smile a lot, her wrinkles go in nice places. Her hair is the merest stubble of white. She walks with a staff, but she is upright and strong and her eyes are clear. She is wearing a neat sarong and a long-sleeved jacket over a white blouse. The fabrics are thin and faded, but they are carefully mended. Her kramah is folded precisely over her shoulder like a tartan. Perhaps she has been at the temple, or maybe she has dressed for this occasion. She has been back several times with the same complaint; her wrist mends too slowly, and it pains her. It is her left hand; she can still wield a small scythe to harvest rice with her right hand, but then her left hand cannot grasp the walking stick to steady herself as she stoops in the slipp
ery rice paddies. She is perhaps eighty years old.

  Because she sees me as an elder, or maybe because I am a woman, she approaches me first. I find the camaraderie with the old women here in Southeast Asia delightful. In Vietnam I was invited in for tea by two sisters on a dirt path behind the main streets of Hoi An. They had high cheekbones and pearl necklaces and the supple elegance of retired courtesans.

  Now the yei greets me formally, palms pressed together, and then we hug. She gives me a Khmer-style kiss—a nuzzling with the nose, a little snuffling-sniffling sound, and then we just hang out, holding hands and smiling. Some of the kids gather around her. They sit at her feet in a sort of dreamy calm, totally at ease, while she lays her hand on each one in blessing. I give her some watermelon and Mister Ouen asks her a question that triggers a burst of laughter. Someone translates for me. He has asked her, “Yei, how can you eat watermelon when you have no teeth?” The ancient woman joins the laughter and her whole face crinkles up. Ouen’s face is shining.

  How deeply relaxed the children have become with her, affectionate and light in a way I have never seen before. The change is palpable. It is the presence of something you did not realize was missing until you saw it, the sense of relief you feel when, after a long and terrible journey, you are home. And I think, what must it be like to be raised by well-meaning strangers who may love you but who do not speak your language, or know who you are, or have anything but an outsider’s intellectualized and generalized understanding of your culture and people, and of your life for that matter. And then to have someone deeply rooted in being Khmer, as this old woman is, appear in your life and remind you of who you are.

  I massage some moisturizer into her wrist. I want her for my yei.

  I suggest to Wayne that we should hire this venerable lady to visit once a week for a few hours and sit with the children. She is old and her wrist will be a handicap in her work and home life, and a little money would help her. She would be good for the kids; they could experience that gentle, grounded part of themselves. Everyone else in their lives is either preoccupied with their own illness or working with foreigners. But she is their history, and the earth they walk on. She has survived it all: Pol Pot, the war, the American bombings. But more important, she remembers the way it was before, remembers all that has been lost from these children’s lives. She could tell them the stories they otherwise would never hear. We won’t know what she says, but it’s none of our business. It’s Khmer stuff, and that’s what they need.

  Wayne likes the idea, but days pass and it never happens. I feel sad. It was a good idea.

  14

  “She Died Like This …”

  Wayne tells the story of a village family with four daughters. The eldest, twelve years old, was caring for her mother, who had AIDS. After the mother died, the father could not take care of so many children. So he kept one middle daughter at home to cook and keep house for him and brought the other three to Wat Opot. He wanted the twelve-year-old and the seven-year-old to go to school. The youngest, a baby of nine months who had been born HIV positive, arrived with her sisters. She was receiving antiretroviral drugs, but Wayne saw that she was very ill and probably would not survive.

  The three daughters slept in the same bed every night. As the youngest grew weaker Wayne moved them all into the clinic. The baby would cry if her sisters were not with her, so Wayne let them all sleep together to comfort her, even on the night he thought she might die.

  Wayne slept right outside the room so he could monitor her labored breathing, and around 5 a.m., when he heard the rattle in her throat fall silent, he knew the baby had died, lying between her two sisters.

  Death is not pretty, and Wayne does not like to make the family see the worst of it, so he washed the baby’s body and laid her out prettily with her hands across her chest, in a new dress, along with a few flowers. Wayne sent word to the father, and when he arrived Wayne told him that his baby daughter had died peacefully during the night.

  At which point the younger sister, the seven-year-old, piped up. “No, she did not! She died like this…,” and she twisted her face into the awful grimace of death.

  But it was the twelve-year-old sister whose grief was most complex. She had been caretaker of both her mother and her baby sister and both had died. Bitterly, she blamed herself.

  15

  Up the Mountain

  Many mornings I wake up early, my sleep succumbing to the blare of chanting from the wat, or I may be drawn to move about and get what exercise I can, because by breakfast we are already sweating and for the rest of the day, until early evening, movements must be slow and measured, interspersed with naps taken alone or in the company of assorted children.

  But now, before dawn, an immaculate stillness. With the moon as my flashlight I find my way out through the eastern gate and onto the dirt road through the village. Sometimes I set out alone but always, if we have overnight guests, I offer to guide them on a walk through the sleeping village and up the mountain to the ancient temple.

  Phnom Chisor is one of two small mountains that rise from the fertile belly of the rice fields surrounding Wat Opot. So flat is this area that one is able, with a little searching, to pinpoint the region of Wat Opot on a Google map by scanning due south from Phnom Penh, pausing halfway to the town of Takeo, tipping the map toward the horizontal plane and watching two small green mountains rise from the otherwise unrelieved monotony of the topography. It is easy to recognize Phnom Chisor. The semicircular bite of a granite quarry is visible on the southwest flank of the mountain, where workers mine veins of stone the color of rain clouds. For some, this enterprise is a badly needed source of income. For others, it is a desecration of the sacred; this mountain is twice holy, having, in addition to the ruins of the Hindu temple, a living Buddhist wat.

  Today I set out at about 4:30 a.m., hoping to watch the sunrise from the mountain and to walk there and back in the coolness of early morning. I suppose I could use a flashlight, but the beam destroys my night vision and lessens the delicious mystery of walking in the dark. I prefer to Braille the ruts and puddles with my toes and proceed slowly, relishing the scents and sounds of the somnolent landscape.

  Now and then a ghostly bicyclist weaves along through the mist, rusted chain rasping his progress through the stubborn darkness. A few people have emerged from their homes, crouching around tiny fires in their front yards, burning trash, warming themselves, too sleepy to say hello.

  I reach Phnom Chisor and begin climbing the hundreds of steps to the mountain temple. A festival day is coming, and there are prayer flags everywhere. Thousands of triangular pennants flutter from lines stretched diagonally across the courtyard. The flags are made of unlikely fabrics: polka dots, tartan plaids, purple zebra stripes. These are the leavings, the tiniest snippets, gleaned from garment factories in Phnom Penh, from the unrelenting labor of the sweatshops, salvaged and sublimated into prayers in the morning breeze.

  I cross the courtyard of the contemporary Buddhist pagoda that shares the mountaintop, rousing the sleepy white temple dog, who feigns aggression and then retreats into indifference. At the edge of the mountain I stand for a few giddy moments catching my breath, gazing out to the east, down the steep ceremonial staircase to the rice plains below. The rainy season is just ending and the fields are still bright green. In a few months, after the rains stop and the rice is harvested, all will be dun-colored stubble, with a few exhausted trees defining the edges of the rice paddies. Winds will raise the dust into a cloud of grit that will obscure the horizon. Then the puddles will dry, the ruts will bake white in the sun and the hard-pounded clay will crack open like the skin on an old woman’s heel.

  The temple itself is about a thousand years old, a little older than Angkor Wat. To my untrained eye it is clearly of the same general style as some of the earlier temples in the Angkor complex. It lacks the giant faces of Bayon Temple with their famously serene smiles, and the exultant jungle vines and fig trees that strangle the rui
ns of Ta Prom and make it the darling of photographers, but I’ve met few tourists here, and none at all at dawn. Only the monks from the living temple whose chants welcome the day. In the golden daybreak their orange robes glow against the rusty red bricks of the temple. Atop this mountain I find something closer to my dream of Angkor Wat than the actual experience of visiting that vast temple complex allows. There are simply too many tourists in Angkor now, too many five-star hotels. Here is the chance to be alone with the ancient stones, to arrive, breathless from climbing all those steps, and to feel the universe burst open into vistas of clouds and rice and lakes and the chanting monks and the quirky little flags offering their patterned prayers to the rising sun.

  In a rough stone corridor, its roof long gone, stands a large yoni, a concave hewn form embodying the divine feminine. The Shiva linga, the stone pestle formerly mounted in the crevice of the yoni and reifying the divine masculine, now leans forgotten in a nearby corner. Yet when devotion flowed through this sanctuary, and for centuries infused these two sculptures with spiritual life, they were wedded and worshipped. On the pitted tufa walls of the corridor you can still see the black splash stains of thousand-year-old anointings of curd, ghee, milk and honey. But in this Kali Yuga, said to be the fourth and darkest of the long ages in the Hindu cycle of the spiritual and moral degeneration of creation, here, as elsewhere, they lie apart.

  A boy and his younger sister have followed me up the mountain. Wordlessly, the girl poses here and there along the way, inviting me with her eyes to photograph her. Barefoot, she climbs on top of the yoni and arranges herself unself-consciously. Three times I press the shutter.