The Rent Collector (30 page)

Ki sees the cover and notes that it looks like the massive fires that burn at the dump at night, but then he adds, “At the dump the bird would never get away. It would just get burned.”

I flip through its pages but see nothing that helps me to know where Sopeap is hiding.

Ki glances around the room one last time. “I don’t think this place will survive Nisay.” He’s trying to be funny, but the city of books reminds me he’s right.

After picking up Nisay, we pass Lucky Fat and the boy follows us home. I start a fire to cook dinner, let Lucky Fat entertain Nisay—or is it the other way around?—and while the rice cooks, I continue to read through Sopeap’s essays, looking for anything I may have missed.

After carefully reading more than a dozen pages, I think I find a clue. It is an essay I skimmed over previously, one that on the surface seemed to hold no answers. I should have known to look deeper. When I explain that I may have found something, Ki asks me to read it aloud. Lucky Fat is adding his plea. The only one who doesn’t care is Nisay. Two out of three isn’t bad. Ki shovels rice into Nisay’s mouth, anything to keep him quiet, and I begin.

*****

The Old Woman and the Elephant

by Sopeap Sin

The old woman was already weary when the Khmer Rouge soldiers marched her to the work camp at Khum Speu—tired bones, tired mind, tired heart.

She didn’t expect to survive long, since others around her—younger, stronger, wiser—were killed or died almost every day. “The educated,” the new leaders of the regime announced, “are a stain on the true worker. Cities are evil. Education and learning is useless and selfish. Money and commerce are corrupt. The strength of a nation is in the working man—not the parasites who live off the laborer! Plant rice for the nation to prosper! Only those working in the fields will eat!”

They told her over and over again that she was irrelevant, nothing better than a single grain of rice in a larger communal bowl. “Remove one grain of rice and the bowl is just as full,” they would drill into her. “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.” It was a holocaust of life but also of common sense and reason.

As a child, the old woman had suffered from nightmares—fiendish, gruesome dreams that had caused her to wake screaming, drenched in sweat and fear. However, no matter how awful they seemed at the time, she always took comfort in a truth her grandmother repeated, “Fear will flee. You will always wake up when morning comes.”

In the camp, fear stayed. Everything was backwards there, topsy-turvy, upside down. Truth no longer applied, since the old woman’s worst nightmares now played out during the day—when she was awake and her eyes were open.

Only at night would relief come.

Even if an occasional nighttime dream was horrific, it was always better than the alternative that waited for her each time the sun rose.

To a rational woman, someone who valued understanding and wisdom, the Khmer revolution was especially perplexing. She was beaten once for speaking up, and then beaten again two nights later for staying quiet. If she sang the Communist songs at dinner too loudly, she was accused of insulting the group leaders and of wanting to take charge. If she hummed them softly, she was derided for not adequately supporting the new regime. It was a drought of sanity, and with each passing day her own thirst for hope continued to wane.

Reason became so jumbled that after three years, four months, and sixteen days of living as a single grain of rice, and with no answers in sight, she decided to end her existence. Who in the bowl, she reasoned, would notice?

Not wanting to give Khmer Rouge soldiers the satisfaction of killing an old woman (as if there could be satisfaction in such an act), she awoke early, before the sun, and slipped out of her hut. While others around her slept, she crept noiselessly into the darkness of the surrounding jungle.

To some it may seem that making your way into the jungle undetected was a proper escape. Not in Cambodia—and especially not in the Khum Speu Province. Anyone trekking into the jungle alone and unprotected, especially an old woman, was simply playing jungle-death roulette. It wasn’t a question of if she would die, but rather how: land mine or soldier’s bullet? Malaria or starvation? Spider bite or poisonous snake? So many interesting possibilities. On that morning, she no longer cared.

She hadn’t gone far, just a minute or two into the dense vegetation, when she heard a rustle coming from a stand of trees ahead.

“It’s come more quickly than I expected,” she said as she closed her eyes and waited for death. But neither man nor animal emerged. And then she heard the rustle again, and once more, she waited. Nothing.

It was still mostly dark. The morning’s feathery glow was just beginning to outline shapes and offer dimension. So the old woman patiently stood alone, wondering about the occasional movement and what the morning’s unveiling light might bring. By the time she could see clearly, she’d not only grown incredibly curious, she had, in fact, properly considered the uniqueness of her situation. Since she didn’t care if she perished—and would be disappointed if she didn’t—she saw no harm in moving closer to investigate. And that’s when she spied the elephant.

The animal was lying on its side in the thicket, near the base of a rather large banyan tree, occasionally shifting its head as if trying to get more comfortable. The old woman noticed stains of blood marking the animal’s side around three piercing bullet holes, each opening a wound that led toward the creature’s heart.

She knew about elephants, had learned about them in school, had read essays about them written by her students. Occasionally, her father and their driver had even taken her, as a child, up north to Battambang, where the three, on more than one occasion, had ridden elephants into the jungle with a guide. She understood that though elephants are docile in captivity, wounded wild elephants are among the most fierce and dangerous creatures on all the earth. Today, however, considering that she had come into the jungle to die, she didn’t really care. Death by an angry, charging Asian elephant would not have been at the top of her list of ways to die when she had first conceived her plan, but it would be effective, quick, and, arguably, original.

And so she stepped close to the elephant’s side and reached out to pat its leathered and worn hide. To her amazement, and perhaps even her disappointment, instead of raising up and charging her to death, the elephant simply lifted its head as if to get a better look before letting out what sounded to the woman like a disappointed sigh.

“I don’t know who you were expecting,” the woman finally replied, thinking now that this must actually be a dream, but hoping not, as she couldn’t bear to wake up to the reality of her life for even one more day. Realizing that she was tired of standing, and that the elephant didn’t seem bothered by her presence, the woman slid down against the creature’s thick, crinkled skin to rest beside its enormous domed head.

As the two lay silently together, the old woman found herself breathing in unison with the beast’s heavy, labored breaths.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

As she filled her nostrils with the humid morning air, the woman tried to separate the pungent aromas—banyan bark, rotting jungle foliage, elephant dung, blood, loneliness.

She mulled over her extraordinary predicament, letting her hands trace the animal’s features and then touch and caress its rough hide. As she did, she felt both her breathing and the animal’s becoming less labored.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

“I am sorry for you, momma elephant,” she finally whispered. “I wish there were something I could do.”

She waited for the animal to speak, for if this were indeed a dream, then talking elephants would not only be normal, they would be expected.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

But the animal didn’t speak because it wasn’t a dream. The creature simply stared back with her sad and teary eyes, perhaps wanting to reply in her own elephant way but being either too exhausted or too near death to make the effort.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

And that’s when the old women remembered learning that elephants mirror humans in numerous ways—life span, development, family ties, and feelings. Similar to people, they display a range of emotion. They will help one another in adversity, miss an absent loved one when separated, smile when they feel happy, and shed tears when they are sad. And when they are too weak to get up, they die surrounded by their grieving loved ones, just as humans would choose to die. She even remembered reading that when elephants come across other elephant bones on a trail, they will pick them up with their trunks and carry them away to the safety of nearby trees.

“What happened to you, elephant?” the woman finally asked. “Why would the soldiers shoot you?”

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

“Wouldn’t they be surprised if they arrived soon to find you lying down in the jungle, chatting with an old woman?” The bizarre notion caused her to chuckle quietly.

Another moment passed as the old woman hesitated, not sure if she should confide her secret. But then, realizing that she was talking to an elephant, she continued, “I want you to know, momma elephant, that I too am tired and that I also came here today to die.”

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

The elephant’s head shifted as her massive body shuddered, her internal organs beginning to shut down. Still the old woman didn’t move, but instead leaned in closer.

“I am sorry you are alone today, momma elephant,” she whispered.

No sooner had her words been spoken than she realized that the elephant wasn’t alone at all. For she, the old woman, was there by her side, helping the dying creature when comfort and friendship were most needed.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in . . .

And then, the elephant smiled.

. . . breathe out.

The great beast exhaled one last time and it was over.

Nearly an hour passed as the old woman remained beside the elephant, pondering the oddity, wonder, and sacredness of the day.

If she returned to the camp and told them about the creature, she would be hailed as a hero. They’d had only rice gruel to eat for many weeks, and an animal of this size would provide real meat for a very long time. But they would slice up the elephant, cut her into pieces, boil her flesh, and ultimately scatter her bones across the jungle.

The woman stood up from the ground, stretched her muscles, and then spoke to the elephant one last time.

“I came into the jungle this morning thinking only of myself, but now, I dearly need to thank you. I need to thank you, momma elephant, for truly needing me. You see, I haven’t been needed for a very, very long time. Today, you’ve made a difference—at least to me.”

She gathered enough leaves and branches to cover the body of the elephant until she was certain it was so well hidden that it would never be found. Then she retraced her early-morning path out of the jungle and back to her hut in the work camp. When the soldiers demanded to know where she had been, she pointed to the jungle path, directly toward the spot where she’d found the elephant, and then she rubbed her stomach and replied, “I didn’t feel well. Surely you didn’t want me doing my messy business near the huts, did you? You’re welcome to go into the jungle and investigate for yourself, if you like that kind of thing.”