He was caught stealing rice when he and two other men were assigned to work in the cooking shed. In four years, this only happened once. Wordlessly, they knew what to do. When they had served everyone, they scraped the burnt rice-crust from the bottom of the black cooking urn and shoved it inside their clothes. When they returned to their hut, they left the rice on the straw of the roof to dry out so that they could store it.
A Black Bandit boy walked by and found out. He must have been monitoring them all along, knowing they would pilfer.
‘Why is this on the roof?’ A sweeping motion of his hand knocked the rice crusts to the ground.
‘We were hungry.’
‘You were hungry, eh? You didn’t get enough to eat?’
‘We did. We did,’ they protested. Once before, Kuan remembered, when they were eating in the communal food hut, the man next to him had muttered that his rice porridge was not cooked properly.
‘Half-raw, eh?’ asked a Black Bandit who caught his words. He motioned to two other soldiers who set upon the man and led him away. He was never seen again. You had to be careful about food. Even talking about it could kill you.
‘We might get hungry later,’ the man to his left now stammered to the boy soldier.
‘Hungry, eh? Then come here.’ The Black Bandit led them back to the kitchen. He filled a vat with scoopfuls of rice. He stacked it on. The three of them watched the white mound grow and grow. ‘Eat this.’
‘Now?’
‘No, when you reach Nirvana. Yes, now! You said you were hungry! Eat this up, all three of you. When I come back and find that you haven’t filled up, you will all be dead.’ They sat down on the floor and began to fill their mouths.
Holes holes holes – a human being was all about satiating holes, he thought. Holes for the filling with food, holes for the smelling of danger, holes for the seeing of which parts of your body might drop off from infection, holes to release excrement and holes for the expulsion of sex secretions, not that such a thing existed anymore in this world. Finally, holes for the hearing of Angkar dogma, because if you didn’t listen, they might make you dig your own grave. This was the ideology that reduced a whole human soul to a single man’s digestive tract. All that mattered in the revolution and all he wanted to do was to gorge, and now that the soldier had given him permission to do it – in fact, forced him to – he was scared of dying. A human stomach that has been starved for so long will not stretch so far.
The two other men knew it too.
‘You haven’t eaten enough!’ the man to his left accused him. ‘You’re going too slow! Stop thinking about taking a shit and keep eating!’
Who knew that eating used up so many muscles in the jaw and in the face? In the throat too. Masticating could be as exhausting as working.
‘What about you? The spoon has been far from your mouth for too long. I saw you taking it easy, taking a rest.’
Even having too much food could cause malice.
The Black Bandit had left, but they were watched by an old villager who was a constant in the kitchen, one of the Base People. It was impossible to hide any of this rice on their bodies. They would just have to eat and die, which to Kuan seemed better than being bludgeoned on the head with the back of an axe.
There was the unmistakable smell of something frying. They all sensed it, he and the two other men. The smell made them take in two more handfuls of rice. They could pretend that the oily scent and the rice were one, something new. Even when granted a reprieve in the middle of hunger, with more rice to eat than was humanly possible, after only twenty minutes all of them had begun craving something else. Were humans the only creatures whose desires could never be fully sated? The buffaloes in the field weren’t craving chrysanthemums.
The old man in the kitchen walked over and put a small fried dried fish down in front of them without saying a word. Then he left. He had watched them squish the grains into the smallest possible balls and scoff them down until their eyeballs bulged, and he knew they could not keep going without a second wind. That fish was their second wind. They mashed it into tiny crumbs and flakes. That feisty fish fought a battle with the army of bland grains. It conquered with every successful swallow until the war was over, the bowl was empty and they had won.