In a Rocket Made of Ice

by Gail Gutradt

  Thinking I won’t understand their Khmer words, the boy urges her, in a stage whisper, to press me for money. I catch the word “loy”—money—but she shakes her head, clearly enjoying this adventure of posing for a photographer. Her dress, threadbare and patched, echoes somehow the precise tan and gray of the stone, and also the pale celadon green of the lichen that clings to the corridor walls. She is of that place, a daughter of the mountain, of the temple; she is stunningly at home.

  A few women who sell snacks struggle to haul their wares up the stairway as the children and I descend. I stop one of these ladies and buy drinks and food for the two children. The little girl happily guzzles her canned juice, but the boy saves his Fanta to resell, already conscious of want and responsibility. At the bottom of the mountain, the people who run the little thatched snack stand are arriving for the day. Fresh-pressed sugarcane juice mixed with lime and ice is the perfect restorative for walking home in the sweltering late-morning sun. I have stopped worrying about germs and have never felt healthier. The young woman who operates the hand-cranked sugarcane press wears a lime-green knitted beret and a rosy-cheeked smile. Her little brother pulls out a chair for me and insists I sit and rest. His yei welcomes me and chews her betel nut with her few remaining teeth. We sit side by side, holding hands, a couple of old ladies, teasing the children and happy to be alive. I nibble some num, glutinous rice with a sweet coconut center, steamed in banana leaf. I will get home too late for breakfast.

  16

  An Exclusive Club

  This morning, Wayne tested a little girl of seven, Miss Phally, for HIV. I was drawn to Phally the first time I met her because she looks like I did at that age, a round-faced, high-waisted little thing with a Prince Valiant haircut. Her mother, worn out by her own illness and burdened by responsibility for three children, is often cross with the kids, and Phally shoulders her share of the load, carrying her little brothers on her hip, keeping them out of trouble.

  Phally had been living with her grandmother while her mother was at Wat Opot with the boys, one of whom is HIV positive. When Phally herself fell ill, her grandmother, fearing the girl was infected and overwhelmed by the thought of raising a sick child, sent her to live with her mother at Wat Opot.

  Today, Wayne placed a drop of Phally’s blood on the paper test strip and watched with a sinking feeling as the first red line appeared. He prayed that a second line, the one that confirms that the test is not defective, would not appear. But it did, and in that moment a child’s reality changed forever.

  The morning Miss Phally was diagnosed with HIV I walked over to the big tamarind tree that is the central gathering place of Wat Opot. Phally was there with her brothers and mother and two other women, who looked at me questioningly to see whether I had heard the news. One lady, skeletally thin, has been ill for years. Normally she keeps to herself, sitting under the tamarind with her knees tucked under her chin, her eyes watery and her gaze turned inward. This morning she smiled at me, gestured with her head at Phally and drew with one finger on the taut skin of her palm what I first took to be a cross, and then realized was a plus, for “positive.” My mind flashed back to a day I once spent in Cairo, where a Coptic Christian man, believing me to be a fellow believer, discreetly revealed on his inner forearm a tiny tattoo of a Coptic cross. Without her knowing it, without her fully understanding the implications, Phally has been abruptly initiated into a secretive club—but this is a club that no one joins by choice.

  17

  Singing Kites

  At the end of night, in the sudden equatorial dawn, a thousand pink lotuses yawn and push their toes into the cool mud, raise their stems up through the water and stretch open their petals to the morning sun. Because it rises from decay, the lotus has come to symbolize the transcendence of desire and suffering. Ancient sages speak of a fine, pure filament inside the stem of the lotus, and liken it to the golden thread that channels our spiritual energies from the base chakra at the bottom of our spine to the thousand-petaled crown chakra that opens finally into Oneness.

  The lotus pool at Wat Opot Pagoda offers its waters to monks and villagers alike. When the monsoon comes, rain floods the tank and the fields freshen with new rice. In the dry season, when water levels have fallen and creeks have turned to dust, and fish have burrowed deep into the mud to hibernate until the next monsoon, villagers climb down the mossy steps to the pool and plunge old paint buckets through the masses of pink lotus blossoms that cover the water.

  From the steps of the temple your eye travels south, past a railing whose balusters are shaped like the eagle deity Garuda, across the pool of lotus blossoms, past the white crematorium and the gilded mausoleum of the Wat Opot Children’s Community, and finally to the distant mountain, Phnom Chisor, with its temple to the ancient Hindu gods. It is the dry season, between the Water Festival in November and the harvest, and you may see the children flying kites over Wat Opot, little square kites, like boys anywhere might make from discarded paper and sticks and knotted string. But in Cambodia there is also an ancient tradition of kite flying, and every year some of the boys build singing kites.

  Opening my eyes in the middle of the night, the moonlight is so bright on the tin roof across the yard that for a moment I imagine it has snowed and I am back home in Maine. Naked and confused, I reach for a blanket, but then I feel the heat of the Cambodian midnight, smell the faint mildew of the sweat-soaked bed, remember where I am and throw off the light cotton sarong I use for a sheet. I hear a deep thrumming, and I see from my window the moonlit silhouette of a singing kite, wheeling like Garuda over the rice fields.

  It is said that when the eagle god flies, the wind through his wings chants the hymns of the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures. The enormous singing kite, the khleng ek, sings prayers to the God of the Wind. The khleng ek sings a hymn of gratitude: for the harvest; for the sweet air that brings rain for the crops; for the wind that turns in its season to blow the rains away, allowing the sun to ripen the rice and men and women to bring in the harvest and lay it to dry and winnow the grain in their dooryards.

  By tradition, singing kites are only flown after the rainy season. To fly them during the rains might cause the winds to shift disastrously and blow the rain away from the crops at the wrong time.

  Kite flying in Cambodia is a grateful act, a miracle of survival. The khleng ek sings of freedom, as all kites do, but this ancient, sacred art was forbidden by the Khmer Rouge. Many of the old craftsmen, who could make a kite sing seven tones, perished during those terrible years. But today people all over Cambodia build and fly kites of all kinds, and the singing kite once more offers prayers for the harvest.

  The khleng ek has an abstract, humanoid shape, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, flaring again to a fringed, vaguely fallopian tail. Its frame is made of bent bamboo, and, depending on its shape, the kite is said to be either male or female. For ceremonial kites fine cloth or elaborately patterned paper is stretched across the frame, but our children find whatever is handy: old cement bags, salvaged tarpaulins, plastic bags. They tie fringes to the shoulders and hips of the kite, and double tails that trail many times the length of the kite itself. These can be nothing more than strips the children cut from the colored plastic sacks that blow and catch on trees and bushes by the side of the road. But they dance and dip and brush the sky in a glorious calligraphy.

  How does a kite sing? In some countries there are small clay whistles or gourds attached that catch the wind on chamfered edges, but in Cambodia it is the horns of the kite that sing. Mounted at the head of the kite is a broad bow, like an archery bow, and across that bow is strung a single ribbon of fiber, like a reed, tied to the bow by a string at each end. Pitch is determined by length of bow and tautness of string. At the points where the reed and the strings are joined there is a bole of beeswax. By varying the size and tautness of the bow and the mass of the wax, the craftsman may fine-tune his instrument. To test the sound a boy will tie a cord to the center of the bow and tw
irl it around his head, like an Australian bull-roarer. The kites our boys made were about two and a half meters high and perhaps two meters wide, and took five boys to launch and others to manage the tails. Some kites can be twice that large.

  The khleng ek is flown all night long. By day, when the ground is warm and the air is cooler than the earth, the kite’s song rises to heaven and is heard only faintly on the ground. But at night, when the earth cools, the sound bounces off the warm upper layers of air and villagers can relax after their day in the fields and savor the beauty of the kite’s song. The singing kites the boys made usually produced three to five tones. I never heard a kite with seven tones. Perhaps that art has been lost.

  When Chou Sarab died of AIDS, she was forty-one years old. Everything she owned, two sarongs and a few tops, fit in a bundle tied up in one bath towel. Wayne dressed her body in fresh clothes, and the monks came to the hospice to chant. Four other AIDS patients carried the white wooden sarcophagus to the crematorium. Sarab’s daughters, Miss Da and Mary, were there. No one else from her family. Only Miss Malis from Wat Opot came to her funeral, because she and Da were friends. Rebecca had helped nurse Sarab, rocking her in her arms and singing Christian hymns, and pleading with her to say the name of Jesus before she died. Rebecca did not come to the funeral. She said she was allergic to incense.

  Wayne swept the tiles at the crematorium and loaded the wood and charcoal, tucked the bundle with Sarab’s belongings beside her body, struck the brass gong seven times and lit the fire. Finally, he closed the crematorium door and everyone went away.

  I did not know Sarab well. She was a woman from the village who spent her short life working in the rice fields. She kept to herself and died modestly in the hospice, and I stayed mostly with the children. Da was living at Wat Opot with her mother when I arrived, but Mary came from the village when Sarab was dying. Mary looked about sixteen. She was big-boned and subdued and unsure.

  The day Sarab was cremated, the children were playing with Barbie dolls on the porch outside my bedroom. Mary wandered over and sat awhile after the funeral. Her long hair hung down uncombed. She wore a misbuttoned plaid shirt. She had been up for days taking care of her mother and her face was puffy from crying and lack of sleep. There was a Ken doll on the table, and Mary picked him up and held him absentmindedly.

  I had noticed the children playing with Ken earlier. Mister Ouen held Ken and Barbie in what would have been a compromising position had they been anatomically correct, and the children were tittering and pointing. They burst out laughing when I walked by, then shushed each other and tried to hide what they were doing, but when they saw I was laughing too they relaxed and we all laughed together and everything was fine. I made a mental note to remind Wayne about the sex education program we had discussed.

  Now here was Mary, facing a future with no family to protect her and a little sister to take care of. Wayne offered to let her stay at Wat Opot for a while, but she seemed hesitant. She was older than the other children, and much younger than the adult patients, and she and Da are both HIV negative. She told Wayne she was trying to decide whether to go up to Phnom Penh alone, to try to find a job in a garment factory. Getting a job might require a bribe, and Wayne worried aloud that without money she might wind up having to sell herself.

  Mary listened. She held Ken by nothing more than his little plastic feet.

  Unlike more affluent temples, Wat Opot Pagoda does not have its own crematorium. The earliest cremations of people who died of AIDS at the hospice were carried out by the village headman. He would arrive with a few other men from the village. Sometimes they had been drinking. The men burned the bodies in a shallow pit. Before antiretroviral drugs were available in Cambodia there were sometimes two or three funerals in one day at Wat Opot. Some families had little money for wood and charcoal so the corpse might be only partially burnt. Animals could be seen carrying off pieces of the bodies. Vandin and Wayne were troubled by the lack of respect shown to the dead, so they agreed to build a seven-story pa cha, a proper crematorium for family members who died of AIDS.

  Vandin had once wanted to be an architect; Wayne, son of a baker, had built ovens to bake bread when he was doing medical work in Honduras. Together they designed and built the pa cha for Wat Opot. Like those Honduran adobe ovens, the pa cha had walls two feet thick made of unfired brick. Over time, the clay bricks were fired by the heat of the cremations. The whole structure is painted white. Smoke escapes from a seven-tiered chimney. Around the base of the pa cha is a tiled platform that stays cool in the shade, perfect for napping on a hot day.

  Each cremation uses fifty kilos of charcoal and a pile of wood. These cost about 60,000 riel, or $15—half a month’s earnings for a rural farmer. When villagers cannot afford cremation they must bury their dead. Chinese people in Cambodia bury, building earth-bermed tombs shaped like horseshoes and oriented according to the laws of feng shui. These can be seen here and there, incongruously tidy amid the scrublands along the road to Phnom Penh. But burial is not the Khmer custom. So, as a kindness and a compassionate offering, Wayne will cremate the bodies of neighbors who die of AIDS in the villages.

  Mister Bott, one of the older boys at Wat Opot, is building a singing kite. He has cut green bamboo with a hand-forged egret’s-neck knife, and bent the bamboo to an elegant frame, larger than a tall man standing with outstretched arms. He is anxious to get it flying and asks me to buy plastic sheeting and heavy-gauge fishing line from the local market in Bati. I’m game, excited to see this marvel in the air, but Rebecca tells Bott he must do echai duty, garbage pickup, to earn his supplies. It’s fine with me, but I admit to a secret admiration for the boys who are too busy doing something creative and visionary to bother with earthly chores. They focus on what inspires them, and the rest merely dissipates their energies. Of course, they may grow up to be difficult men, and Rebecca’s discipline is good for them. But oh, how I love the kites and the boys who dream of flying them!

  Finally the kite is ready. Mister Bott has lashed the sheeting onto the frame and cut up plastic bags for a tail that stretches thirty feet or more across the field by the community school. Five boys carry the kite, stumbling along and holding the frame as high as they can above their heads. Some of the little kids follow, minding the tails to keep them from tangling in the underbrush. Mister Bott runs on ahead, with the string wrapped around a pair of crossed wooden slats.

  Suddenly a freshening breeze catches the kite and wrenches it from their outstretched hands. Everyone keeps running for a moment, as if they do not realize the kite is gone, and then they stop and just stare into the sky as Bott begins playing out string and the kite shoots higher and higher. Mister Kosal does a headstand, looking at the kite upside down, and some of the little kids jump up and down or do cartwheels, too exhilarated to stand still.

  Bott maneuvers the kite toward the center of campus, and the community gathers round, laughing and pointing, listening for the first song. The kite has risen high now, and to everyone’s relief it is beginning to chant a prayer, a harmonic hymn of gratitude for the ripening rice.

  From a low humming, the song jumps an octave, halves the interval, then splits the gap again, reverses to a shaded trill and, in a seesaw of notes of almost vocal timbre, touches down again momentarily where it began before tumbling in a cascading melisma to a tone half an octave below and bounding back again, never duplicating a cadence.

  Mister Bott has played out most of the string, and allows three of the younger kids to hold the spool. Everyone is excited, and the kids begin horsing around, hooting and tickling each other.

  I see it coming.

  A sudden gust of wind seizes the kite and snaps the spool from their hands, and the kite careens upward, the wooden spool bobbing after it through the treetops. The kids freeze, in openmouthed, shocked futility, but Bott lunges after the spool, vaults a barbed wire fence and hightails it across the rice fields, chasing the kite toward Phnom Chisor. For an hour we watch the kite in the i
nvisible updrafts, floating higher and higher above the fields.

  Eventually Bott returns, wet and bedraggled. He has chased the kite through streams and ditches, but in the end it disappeared into the sky above the ancient Hindu temple of Phnom Chisor. It was a beautiful thing to see it flying and know it was free to go as high as the wind would take it. And when we could not see it anymore, we imagined we could still hear it singing.

  Mister Bott is philosophical. Sometimes when you make an offering to the gods, the gods accept.

  Miss Mary laid the Ken doll back on the table. She rose from her place on the porch outside my room and wandered slowly back toward the crematorium, where her mother’s body was being consumed by the fire.

  A little boy from the village, with muddy knees and wearing a torn T-shirt, was flying a kite nearby. It was not a singing kite, nothing fancy. Just the kind of simple white kite that children in much of the world still make for themselves from discarded newspaper and knotted string. The sun was low, and in the warm light of early evening Mary watched the little kite fly in and out of the smoke from her mother’s cremation, like a spirit, or a pure white lotus rising from the mud on a thread of golden light.

  18

  Pilgrimage

  People ask me, “How did you get to Cambodia?”