Little Brother Read online

  After the meal the younger children thundered out of the house to slide down a dusty slope on a bent sheet of corrugated iron, and Sen led a reluctant Vithy to the hospital.

  Sen stopped in a broad quadrangle bordered by long buildings, each one twice the size of the hospital at 007, hemmed by small flower gardens and facing a wheezy loudspeaker on a pole. ‘That’s it,’ Sen said, pointing ahead. ‘And that’s my hospital too.’

  ‘Oh.’ Vithy recognised Dr Harris sitting in the sun drinking a cup of tea and he wanted to go somewhere else.

  ‘See?’ Sen bowed his head so Vithy could see the curved scar that crossed his head almost from ear to ear.

  ‘What happened?’ Vithy stepped back in surprise.

  ‘Oh, I got shot,’ Sen said very casually. ‘On the head.’

  Vithy stared. ‘Near 007?’

  ‘Near what? Oh, you mean that kid that got shot a couple days ago. Nah, wasn’t me, I’m fit. An Aussie doctor took him off somewhere to die yesterday. I was hit a month ago. Got better in that hospital. They are tremendous doctors here. If they can’t cure you here nobody can.’

  ‘Vithy! Sen!’ Dr Harris stood up and waved the cup as if it were a flag.

  Sen ran across the quadrangle to her and she caught him in a bear hug. Vithy trailed slowly in his wake.

  ‘Good news, Vithy,’ Dr Harris beamed at him. ‘Saro’s awake and she’s got visitors. Your father has found you!’

  For a moment everything had become granite and motionless. A statue of Dr Harris was holding a statue of Sen and they looked as if they were about to laugh. And some tea was hanging in the air between the tilted cup and the ground.

  Then he was past them, through the door and running into the shadowy building with his mouth wide open and his eyes alight.

  There was a great carpet of mat beds with men and women lying quietly, looking at the roof or the tall metal fans. Light was only seeping into the building through the doorway and under the heavy sunblinds. Vithy stumbled in the dim light before he could see Saro with a tall man hunched by her mat

  Saro recognised him and frowned. ‘Oh. That boy.’

  The tall man turned and half-smiled.

  And Vithy stopped and felt something tearing at his throat.

  Of course the man wasn’t his father. He couldn’t be. He was her father. He had just forgotten.

  ‘The doctor says I should thank you. Thank you,’ said Saro. ‘But why does she keep on calling you my brother?’

  Vithy swallowed. He mumbled, quickly, ‘Must be a mistake.’

  ‘Yes. Well, I’ll see you later. I want to talk to my father now.’

  The tall man looked up almost apologetically, then turned to Saro.

  Vithy shuffled sideways towards the door. He didn’t seem to be able to see properly any more.

  Dr Harris caught him and steered him into the open. She found him a chair and sat opposite him without a word. She pulled a packet of barley sugars out of a pocket and offered them to him. There was no sign of Sen. He blinked at the sweets and shook his head.

  She popped one into her mouth. ‘I take these to stop myself smoking.’ She closed the packet and put it away. ‘Saro. She’s not your sister, is she?’

  Vithy shrugged.

  ‘You should have been left down at 007, Nong Samet, shouldn’t you?’

  Vithy stared at his knee.

  ‘Shouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a bit better. Look, we can use you here, but no more lies, all right?’

  Vithy nodded.

  ‘Why did you want to come here?’

  ‘I wanted to find my brother.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Him. What about the rest of your family?’

  Vithy shook his head.

  ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’

  Silence.

  ‘Vithy, when I first came here I had done a long stretch at casualty in a city hospital, and I thought I’d seen and heard everything. Okay, that was then. Now, three months later, I really have heard everything. Everything that happened to you and your family has happened to hundreds of people in this camp. Share your load.’

  Vithy did not move.

  Dr Harris looked at the rigid boy before her for a while, then sighed. ‘All right, we’ll just have to find that brother of yours.’

  The next morning Dr Harris brought Vithy a small pile of paper on which he was to write a brief notice. Vithy wrote:

  Would anyone who knows where is Muong Mang, son of Muong Phi of Sambor please say hello to Muong Vithy at Hospital Two at Khao I Dang.

  Thank you,

  Muong Vithy.

  Dr Harris looked at the notice then had Vithy translate it into English from the Khmer in which it was written.

  She looked at the translation for a while, then nodded. ‘It’s all right. Now give me twenty copies.’

  ‘Twenty copies?’ Vithy stared at his small notice and multiplied it in his mind.

  ‘For the other camps.’

  Vithy eventually finished his notices and gave them to Dr Harris, to be taken to all the other border camps in Thailand. Now all he could do was wait.

  But for Vithy waiting was going to be busy. While he was writing his notices, Dr Harris had found a spare green smock and Ponary had stitched it down to his size. He trailed Dr Harris and Frank around the hospital, feeling foolish as Saro stared at him from her mat, but noticing the few warm smiles that floated from the patients over the doctors and settled on him.

  Next day he woke from a wild chase through a grotesque forest to the smell of soya and fish. He realised that for the first time in a long, long time he wasn’t worried about what he was going to eat today. He opened his eyes to find Sen and three other boys staring at his green smock as if it was an emperor’s cloak.

  ‘You a doctor?’ said Sen.

  Vithy stretched, and yawned. ‘Oh, I lend a hand when they need me.’

  ‘Hoi!’ said Sen, impressed.

  But Ponary looked in. ‘Hoi, surgeon! You better get washed before the operation, eh?’

  ‘Operation?’ said Vithy.

  ‘Breakfast.’

  But Vithy arrived at the hospital after breakfast eager, nervous and almost running past the loudspeaker as it tried to sing. For the first time since he had been marched from his home he was wanted, not just a number to feed and get work from, but because of the things he, Muong Vithy, could do. It wasn’t until later that he began wondering if there was anything special he could really do in the hospital.

  For a start Dr Harris was not at the hospital. Nor was Frank. In fact no one at the hospital that morning seemed to know why he was there or what he was supposed to do.

  ‘Dr Harris?’ said a nurse called Coldstream who sounded like a general. ‘She’s at the border this morning. Might be in this afternoon. D’you want something?’

  ‘Dr Harris says that I am to help.’

  ‘In the hospital?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah well … Can you wash up?’

  Washing, drying, sweeping, adjusting the shades, polishing pots. Nurse Coldstream could find all the work in the world for Vithy to do in the hospital and nothing that needed him especially to do it. The patients watched him in silence, judging his movement with the broom and his clumsiness with the screens. After several hours of hard labour he didn’t worry about the watching patients, not even Saro with her cocked nose. He was just too tired to care.

  Dr Harris didn’t come to the hospital in the afternoon and there was no message from Mang during the day. Vithy trudged back to Ponary’s house, ignored Sen with his rattan ball, ate and slept.

  The following day Dr Harris was back in the hospital. She was peering into one of the pots Vithy had cleaned and polished with Nurse Coldstream by her side. She looked up and Vithy felt his stomach drop.

  ‘Vithy, you clean these?’ said Dr Harris.

  ‘Um, yes …’

  ‘Nurse Coldstream is glad I brought you from Nong Samet. Good
job.’

  Vithy flickered a smile uncertainly across his face as he began to understand what Dr Harris was saying, then he grinned at Dr Harris, Nurse Coldstream and the entire hospital.

  Dr Harris led Vithy into the ward and stopped before an old woman on a mat and pressed her hands together before her, bowing slightly, saying, ‘Choumreap sour, lok,’ or, ‘Good day, madam.’

  The old woman nodded at Dr Harris without smiling and muttered, ‘Choumreap sour.’

  Dr Harris turned to Vithy. ‘And this is where you come in. I’m afraid my knowledge of Khmer has just about run out. Please introduce us.’

  Vithy squatted by the old woman’s mat and pressed his hands together in polite greeting. In Khmer he said, ‘Good day, madam. My name is Muong Vithy from Sambor. This is Doctor Harris and she wants to help you.’

  The old woman looked at Vithy with new interest, then her eyes glittered across to Dr Harris. ‘I am Tevoda, but there is nothing you can do for me.’

  Vithy turned to Dr Harris. In English he said: ‘This is Tevoda and she says there is nothing we can do for her.’

  Dr Harris frowned. ‘Of course we can do things for her. Ask her why she says this.’

  ‘What is wrong?’

  ‘I am dying.’

  Vithy rocked back on his heels in silence.

  ‘Well?’ Dr Harris said.

  Vithy translated.

  ‘Rubbish. Tell her she is only a little sick in the belly and when we cure it she will be bounding about like a deer in no time at all.’

  Vithy translated and Tevoda actually smiled for a moment, but her face sobered. ‘How does she know these things? I am not carrying a baby.’

  ‘She is not a midwife. She is a doctor. She knows everything.’

  ‘How can that be? She is only a woman.’

  ‘They teach women everything now. In universities and colleges.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Everywhere. Even in Phnom Penh girls were at the university. My sister, Sorei, was going to go to the university at Phnom Penh when she got through high school …’ Vithy petered out.

  Tevoda nodded. ‘Ah. That is before the wars. Everything is before the wars …’

  Dr Harris intruded. ‘Vithy, just what are you and Tevoda talking about? I feel left out.’

  ‘Oh, I am sorry,’ Vithy said. ‘Tevoda was asking me about you.’ Tevoda nodded and smiled at Dr Harris, with new respect in her eyes.

  Dr Harris smiled back. ‘You must be doing it well. Go on.’

  ‘Where does this doctor come from?’ Tevoda asked.

  ‘I think – America?’ Vithy looked up at Dr Harris.

  Dr Harris caught the universal word ‘America’ and shook her head. ‘Australia is closer.’

  ‘Storyla?’ Tevoda frowned then shrugged. ‘No matter,’ she said in English.

  ‘Good. Let’s get down to work.’

  After that the doctor’s round went smoothly. With Vithy as a sympathetic mouthpiece, Dr Harris probed, tapped, listened to and dosed Tevoda, and Tevoda was willing to admit that she might not be dying at the moment. Then there was the boy, Vithy’s age, who had just lost a leg and Dr Harris was trying to tell him he would walk again with an artificial leg, a girl with a fever, five thin young men recovering from rickets, ten people from eight to forty with injuries and wounds they had suffered in the border camps. And there were more. At the end of the day Vithy was exhausted but he had begun many friendships.

  Dr Harris stopped him in the yard outside the hospital. ‘It was a good day, Vithy. Thank you very much.’

  Vithy suddenly felt embarrassed. ‘Ah, it is a good job you give me, Dr Harris.’

  ‘Rubbish. Do you know how hard we have to look to find someone who knows English, Khmer and a little bit of medicine as well? You’re a handy lad, Vithy.’

  Vithy glowed and scratched at a knuckle. ‘Thank you, Dr Harris.’

  ‘Oh I think we can drop that outside the hospital. Betty will do.’

  ‘Ah, well …’

  ‘No, really.’

  Vithy shrugged and turned his toes into the dust. But he said, ‘Well, good afternoon, Betty.’

  ‘Good afternoon Vithy. See you tomorrow.’

  Vithy skipped home to Ponary’s house absolutely certain that the hospital would crash in chaos without him. It was a lovely feeling.

  But there was still no sign of Mang.

  THE BUS

  Vithy did not explore Khao I Dang until the third week, and even then it took a remark from Sen to drive him from his comfortable little kingdom.

  He had settled quickly into a contented routine and for a while he didn’t want anything else. It was enough to sleep and eat at Ponary’s house, work at Betty’s hospital a two minute walk away, sometimes carry vegetables home from the crowded open market, and be surrounded by his people speaking his language. And not being afraid.

  It hurt a little when Saro left the hospital without saying a word to him, but he’d seen Ko, the boy with one leg, race Betty fifty metres – and win. Tevoda had got up from her mat and bustled about the hospital to spread the latest gossip among the patients. Frank spent an afternoon teaching him how to play checkers, so he could teach patients. You could see new friends getting better every day.

  And one day Betty came to him with an old transistor. ‘I don’t suppose you would know how to make this work?’ she said.

  At Sambor, with Mang the Master hovering about and doing everything, he could not. At the Big Paddy, where you were taught not to think, he would not. But now he had fixed an outboard motor, built a bike and saved a girl’s life. Now he could, would and did. Simply by scraping a dirty point under the battery plate.

  ‘You’re too much!’ said Betty. ‘Where’d you learn all this?’

  ‘Ah, we had a business under the house at Sambor,’ Vithy said. ‘We’d fix almost anything. Motorbikes, bicycles, radios, toys, anything.’

  ‘You and Mang?’

  ‘Mainly Mang. I was the helper. It was a good business, but we had trouble all the time with Sorei’s ducks.’

  ‘Ducks? My brother has a flock of them on his farm. Lovely eggs. But he only gets me on the farm as a sort of cheap amateur vet. What sort of trouble can those lovely birds give you?’

  Vithy sighed. ‘All sorts. When they get through our fence they peck at our glue and oil and swallow our ball-bearings and when Dad chases them from his vegetable garden they all flap through our workshop. And then Dad is shouting and we’re shouting and Sorei is running about screaming. So Mum sends us all from the house to cool off. When we get back we have a huge meal of duck and vegetables and rice.’

  Betty smiled. ‘That’s the first time I’ve got you talking about your family outside Mang. They sound great.’

  A shadow passed across Vithy’s face but Betty knocked it away with a quick peal of laughter. ‘Do you know I was once a duck? Really. The theatre group I was in decided to put on a pantomime with pirates, giants, singing cats and a dancing duck. Me. Everyone thought they had never seen such a splendid-looking duck as me. I still feel I should have killed the director.’

  So Vithy had to tell of his dad on the riverboat to Phnom Penh, dancing and playing his khene.

  Vithy and Betty spent hours every day talking, in and out of the hospital. When she wasn’t a doctor, Betty was becoming more fun to be with than Sen and for some strange reason she seemed to like Vithy almost as much as he liked her. The small area around the hospital was a great place to be and Vithy did not want to see any more of the sprawling camp.

  But then Sen caught him watching some children kicking a ball around in the dust.

  ‘Want a game?’ asked Sen.

  Vithy shook his head. Kids’ games.

  Sen sat beside Vithy. ‘Still nothing from your brother?’

  ‘No. Are you waiting for anyone?’

  Sen shrugged. ‘No. There’s no one left to wait for.’

  �
��Oh.’

  ‘It’s all right. This way I got nobody to worry about. There’s just me and the camp and Ponary. That’s all.’

  Vithy hunched over his knees and looked bleakly into the distance.

  ‘Perhaps he’s sent you a note.’

  ‘I am waiting for it.’

  ‘No, I mean he might have missed your note. He might have got here first and sent you a note on the bulletin board.’

  ‘Why would he do that? I told him where I am.’

  ‘He may not be looking at the bulletin board. He may have sent a message and now he’s just waiting for you to read it. Have you seen the camp bulletin board …’

  Vithy walked very fast from Sen, angry at his own stupidity. It seemed that the moment he didn’t have to think to survive, he just didn’t. When a silly kid comes up and tells you what you should have worked out weeks ago you ought to be kicked in the head.

  He hurried down the dusty lanes between the huts, past the new skeletons of bamboo that Ponary’s older children were helping turn into houses with windows and floors. He passed under the tall blue water tower, like some ancient dragon rearing above the camp, and past the few fibro-cement buildings. Everywhere loudspeakers were crackling and whooping at him. By the time he reached the front gate of the camp Vithy was realising that Khao I Dang was becoming a small city.

  Vithy wandered into another hospital compound, Hospital One, and saw several buses parked beyond the gate before he was directed to a tall bamboo building. He had no trouble in finding the notice board. In a wide room filled with Khmer handicrafts, paintings, carvings, woven fabrics, a cluster of people swayed before a paper snowstorm tacked to a wall.

  It took Vithy ten minutes to get close enough to the board to read the notices, and then he could not find his own notice, let alone a message from Mang. He stood before the board, continually jostled and trodden on, as he stared at sad little notes on torn pieces of paper, coloured discs, photographs that were little more than grey blobs, and sometimes neat typed appeals. Calls from mothers to sons, sons to sisters, sisters to grandmothers, grandmothers to anyone in the family at all. And nothing for or from Vithy.