In a Rocket Made of Ice by Gail Gutradt

Author:Gail Gutradt [Gutradt, Gail]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-35348-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

22

“We Did Not Know You”

Some of the most important things that happen for me at Wat Opot come from stillness. When I am not busy doing, I have time to notice the child who needs a friend and I am free to focus my attention completely. I cherish the moments when just sitting still creates the occasion for a child to approach me for companionship or simply for comfort, the sort of comfort they might have sought from their own parents.

It’s a hot afternoon. Once again I am trying to nap on the porch outside my bedroom. For three days and nights, pleng ka, traditional wedding songs, have been blaring from speakers in the village, speakers mounted high on poles and aimed in the four directions. Cambodians make a gift of their nuptial happiness—a gift of music to their neighbors. They scatter it broadly like seeds in a field. That is all well and good, but I haven’t slept for days now, and I’m feeling poleaxed.

Miss Jorani approaches, softly. Usually she is remote and primped, in the manner of pretty thirteen-year-old girls the world over. But today she has a fever, and her illness makes her vulnerable. Her long brown hair falls uncombed in tangles about her face. She snuggles in beside me, but the relentless music and the intense heat of the Cambodian afternoon make it hard to sleep. After a while she rolls over and whispers, “I miss my parents.”

Miss Jorani came here a few years ago with her older brother Pesei and their mother, who was dying. Their father had already died of AIDS. For a year the children took care of their mother. They washed her, fed her, massaged her as she wasted away. When I told Pesei I admired how they had cared for their dying mother, he stiffened. “I took care. Jorani played.” He had been eleven then, Jorani only nine.

Jorani and I talk for a while. I tell her that my parents have also died, and that I miss them too. This is not a dramatic moment, unless you consider that a young girl who has never spoken to me about her life or her emotions decides it is safe to open herself, just a little.

She leaves for a moment and returns with a small collection of photographs—one of those paper folders with plastic sleeves for snapshots given away free by the photo-processing houses in Phnom Penh.

In one image, Jorani’s father stands bare-chested before the stone ruins of Angkor Wat. He is slim and handsome, a man at ease, on vacation with his family. In another picture he wears a jacket and tie and checkered pants and stands beside her mother. He looks young and self-conscious, a country boy in city clothes. Her mother is smiling, pretty. She wears a red party dress. The field of tulips behind them is only a painted backdrop but they seem happy, secure, living a middle-class dream. Finally, there is a photo of Jorani with her brother, taken before the same unlikely landscape.

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