Sokha and Apopeal
Darina Siv
Translation by John Marston
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When Sokha was six years old, his father gave him a mother cow to take care of. This cow's name was Chompa. She had colored patches of yellow and brown and two tiny horns.
Every day after school, Sokha took Chompa to graze in the clover fields and along the rice paddies. And before nightfall, he would lead Chompa back to the stable. Then he would wash up. He would clean his hands and feet, put on fresh clothes, and eat with the rest of the family.
One day when Sokha came back home from school, he discovered that Chompa had given birth to a boy calf. He gave it the name Apopeal because it was covered with brown and white patches. He was very happy that Apopeal had joined them. Apopeal couldn't walk far because he was still small.
A month later, Apopeal could walk beautifully, just as well as his mother, Chompa. She still suckled him. When Sokha went to school, he let Chompa and Apopeal out to graze with the other cows. When he got back from school in the evening, he led the two of them to the clover fields. There in the clover field, Apopeal liked to sleep next to Sokha, and Sokha would stroke the calf's head, neck, back, and tail. Chompa ate a lot of clover so that she'd have enough milk for Apopeal.
Once after Apopeal had been sleeping for a long time and resting under Sokha's gentle caresses, his mother wandered far away to look for clover. Waking, Apopeal got up to look for his mother, and when he didn't see her, he cried, "Moo! Moo! Moo!" When Apopeal's mother heard his distant cry, she quickly returned to him. And when he saw her, he ran to her and started nursing. Before sunset, Sokha always led Chompa and Apopeal back to the house.
One Sunday, Chompa was stricken by a serious illness. Since it was not possible for Sokha's family to get the medicine she needed, she died. The next morning, Apopeal did not see his mother, so he got up to go to the field. When he finally found her, he cried, "Moo! Moo! Moo!" His mother did not stir at all. Sokha's father told him to take Apopeal far away from his mother. Sokha saw tears flowing from Apopeal's eyes and cried hard, too. [End Page 41] [Begin Page 43]
From that time on, Apopeal could not nurse as he had before. When his mother died, he was only five months old. Sokha's father bought milk so they could feed Apopeal by hand. Apopeal would not live long if he didn't have milk to drink.
Every morning, Sokha got up early to give Apopeal milk. Then he fed him a little straw. And every afternoon, he led Apopeal to the clover fields where he used to take him and his mother. He stroked Apopeal's head tenderly and fed him fresh clover by hand.
Apopeal was now a year old. He no longer needed milk and could eat hay as his mother had. He was still small, however, so Sokha's father did not let him wander very far. In the late afternoon, Apopeal would stand by the fence, waiting for Sokha to come back from school and lead him to the clover field. In the field, Apopeal was very happy because he could run, jump, and wander. When he got tired, he would return and sleep next to Sokha, who would stroke him.
They were good friends.
When Apopeal was five years old, he was full grown. His horns spread out on each side of his head, and his legs were heavy and strong, so he could run very fast. Every morning, Sokha tied Apopeal near the school and let him graze. And after school, Sokha would ride home on Apopeal's back.
In the hot season, Sokha took Apopeal to bathe in the river. In the rainy season, he tended a small fire in the stable, using the smoke to keep the mosquitoes from biting Apopeal. He loved Apopeal very much. The other children in the village loved him, too, because he was always clean and well behaved around them.
In May 1975 , the Khmer Rouge made all the people leave the towns and go live in the countryside. All the schools closed their doors. All property and farm animals were taken away: cows, water buffaloes, pigs, chickens, and ducks were made collective property. This included Apopeal.
Sokha felt terrible when the men took Apopeal away. The people in charge of the village made Apopeal pull a cart because they could see he was very strong.
At that time, there was a great deal of hunger in the country. People received so little food that it was extremely difficult to live. They had to work long and hard and were not given time to rest.
One day, Sokha saw the village leaders with Apopeal, who was straining to pull a cart across a high bridge. Apopeal was unhappy. Refusing to go further, he began to buck. As the cart was about to fall in the river, Sokha grabbed it and yelled, "Whoa! Whoa, Apopeal! Whoa!" Apopeal recognized his master and stood still. Sokha stroked Apopeal's tail and helped guide the cart over the bridge. [End Page 43]
The cart driver didn't forget Sokha's kindness. He gave him a large parcel of rice, then left. Taking it gratefully, Sokha ran home and gave it to his father.
The time of hunger grew worse and worse. One day, Sokha was so tired and hungry from the hard work that he decided to pick a few oranges from one of the orchards. He had only picked one when he heard the village chief cry, "Thief! Thief! Thief!" Terrified, Sokha dashed toward the rice fields but stumbled over some shrubbery and fell. The village chief caught him and was about to hit him with a cane. Apopeal—where did he come from?!—suddenly appeared behind the village chief and knocked him to the ground. Sokha, relieved, ran away. And Apopeal disappeared into a herd of cows.
In those days, there were no proper schools. Children had to work as if they were adults. Every day, Sokha had to carry heavy sheaves of rice suspended from a shoulder piece. One day, he was doing this when he heard "Moo! Moo! Moo!" in the distance. An old man was leading Apopeal to Sokha. The old man said to him, "You can put those sheaves on the cow's back, son."
"Thank you!" Sokha said.
Sokha saw that Apopeal's body was soiled with mud. Gently, he stroked Apopeal's head. In return, Apopeal licked his hand.
"Apopeal! I have missed you so much. I can see you've had trouble working hard, just like I have."
Having been brought together again, Sokha and Apopeal forgot how tired and hungry they were. They felt happier than you could imagine. No matter how hard their lives had been, they were overjoyed to be together.
Because there wasn't enough food to eat, Sokha became very sick. But even though he was sick, he was forced to work. One day, it was raining very hard, and Sokha was soaked. He suddenly felt very hot. The overseers let him rest under a nearby tree. He had a high fever and began to cry and groan.
On the road, the village chief was riding on Apopeal's back. When they came to the place where Sokha was crying, Apopeal stopped walking.
The village chief raised his stick and hit Apopeal, but he refused to move. Sokha, straining to see over the tips of his toes, saw Apopeal buck up and down until the village chief fell into the water of the rice field.
When the village chief got up, he aimed his gun at Apopeal. Seeing this, Sokha jumped up and climbed onto Apopeal's back. Knowing that it was Sokha, Apopeal started to run. Sokha was so tired and weak that he knew he would not be able to keep himself from falling off Apopeal's back. He pulled his krama off and tied himself on. Then he reclined on Apopeal's back and fell asleep. [End Page 44]
When Sokha woke up, he found himself far from the village. Nearby was a hut with a pan full of rice and a grill with fish on it. He was so hungry that he ate some of the rice and fish.
He heard a voice crying from a distance, "Thief! Thief! Thief stealing my rice!"
Sokha grabbed the pan of rice and jumped on Apopeal's back, and Apopeal charged through the fields and into the forest, deeper and deeper, until he reached a place he had never been before.
That evening, at an hour when Sokha could see the sun slowly setting through the trees, Apopeal led him to a large lake covered with lotus flow-ers, many in full bloom and countless more still in the bud. The lake was surrounded by a field of grass, fresh and green.
As night fell and the air cooled, dew formed on the grass. Sokha began to feel cold. "Gee, I'm cold, Apopeal!" he cried.
Sokha regretted not having any way to fight off the cold. He wistfully imagined a nice fire, a blanket covering him, and a shirt that would keep him warm. He thought about his grandmother, who started the fire every morning.
"Apopeal, I have it!" he cried joyfully. "If we strike two pieces of iron together, we will certainly have a fire." But looking around him, he found nothing but trees and grass.
He gave up trying to find iron. Hugging Apopeal's neck in order to fight the cold, he felt an oval-shaped object on his arm. He jumped up quickly.
"I found iron after all, Apopeal!" He untied the bells from Apopeal's neck, took out the clappers, and began striking the iron pieces against each other. Little flowers of flame shot out.
Then Sokha looked for loose grass, broke up wood for kindling, and gathered them together. He struck the pieces of iron again. Sparks fell onto the pile of kindling, and a tongue of fire appeared. He went to find more pieces of wood to stack on the fire so it would burn for a long time. Once they had the warmth of the fire, Sokha and Apopeal fell into a deep, satisfied sleep.
The morning sun rose through the trees. Not very far from Sokha and Apopeal was a sound like that of an animal playing in the water. Kweek, kweek, kweek! Sokha woke up and made a small opening in the grass, crawling toward the strange sound. He saw a pair of otters catching fish by a clump of lotus plants and putting the fish on the grass. Then the otters ate the ones they had caught. A couple were left on the grass, so Sokha took them and cooked them over the fire.
Sokha and Apopeal lived peacefully by the lake full of lotus. Each day, Sokha would pick lotus, boil the root stalk, and fry fish. As for Apopeal, he had enough fresh green grass to eat. They did not worry that someone would hurt them the way they had been hurt before. [End Page 45]
One day Sokha was picking lotus when he suddenly heard a cry of pain. Looking about, he saw a rabbit with a broken leg darting back and forth to avoid a snake that was pursuing it.
Sokha tried to chase the snake away. It wasn't afraid of him at all, so he wrapped a krama around his face. The snake leaped at his face to bite him, but it just bit into the scarf. Giving up, it slithered away.
Sokha reached down, picked up the rabbit, and said, "Oh, little bunny, your foot is broken! Come, let me bandage it for you!" He lifted the rabbit gently and took it home. Then he bandaged the rabbit's leg with grass, and the next few mornings, he massaged it with dew.
Sokha's small community now had three members. A few days later, the rabbit could hop around as easily as before. At night, the three of them sat together by the fire.
A year went by quickly. Sokha had eaten all the lotus on one side of the lake. "Apopeal, I have eaten all the lotus! We'll have to move to the north side of the lake!"
So Sokha arranged a new living place on the north shore. They found plenty of grass and lotus flowers, and the grass there was just as fresh as it had been in their former home.
One day while Sokha was picking lotus to eat, he saw a baby monkey in the lake, struggling to keep from drowning. He pulled it out and took it to its mother, who was crying on the shore. The baby was overjoyed to see its mother, and the mother jumped up and down with gratitude to Sokha. From that time on, all the monkeys in the forest thought of him as their friend.
Not long after, the two otters came to live with Sokha, too.
"Brother otters, I won't take your fish anymore. I've figured out how to catch fish myself," he said.
Sokha began digging a hole in the lake mud about a half meter wide at the top and as deep as your knee. After scooping out the water in the hole and smoothing the sides, he put grass around it. When the fish swam through the grass, they fell into the hole one at a time. In the morning, Sokha found he had caught fish of all kinds: catfish, perch, roh. He was very happy. His life was getting better and better.
The third year, Sokha moved to the west side of the lake. One morning when he woke up, he couldn't find Apopeal or the rabbit.
"Apopeal! Rabbit! Where have you gone?!" Sokha cried out.
Soon he saw Apopeal in the distance, running toward him as though to tell him something important. "Apopeal, what is it?" he asked, surprised.
He jumped on Apopeal's back, and Apopeal took him to a place in the forest some distance from where they lived. From afar, he could see many monkeys gathered around two men.
"How strange! For two or three years I have lived here and never seen anyone else at all," he muttered to himself. [End Page 46]
The monkeys jumped up and down as though they were trying to keep the men from going any further. Gazing at them, Sokha yelled, "Father! Father! Brother!"
The three of them hugged each other and cried. When the monkeys saw this, they retreated to the forest.
"How did you find me?" Sokha asked his father and older brother.
"After we discovered that you and Apopeal had run away from the village, I assumed that Apopeal would bring you here because he used to come here with his mother. Now, everything is fine again in our country. You can come back home without any danger."
Sokha, Apopeal, the rabbit, and Sokha's father and brother all went back to his village. He returned to school, joining the other children. Every day, he rode Apopeal to school, the rabbit sitting on Apopeal's head.
From then on, Sokha and his family lived peacefully in their village.
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Darina Siv was born in 1957 in Pursat Province, the daughter of a schoolteacher. When she was twelve, a story she had written was chosen for broadcast on Cambodian radio. During the Khmer Rouge regime, she worked on youth agricultural teams. Soon after the regime ended, she and her remaining family members fled as refugees and were resettled in the United States in 1981 . Her story in this issue of Manoa was written the same year. Her Khmer-language novel was published in 1991 ; her English-language autobiography, Never Come Back: A Cambodian Woman's Journey, appeared in 2000 . In 1999 , she became the director of the United Cambodian Association of Minnesota. She died of cancer in 2001.
John Marston has been involved in research related to Cambodia since 1982 ; from 1992 to 1993 , he worked for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia. After completing a doctorate in anthropology, he began teaching at the Center for Asian and African Studies of El Colegio de México in Mexico City. He is the coeditor of History, Buddhism, and New Religious Movements in Cambodia.
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