Love and Other Ways of Dying (46 page)

Chhang was sixteen when the Khmer Rouge controlled the country and his sister was murdered before his eyes. Accused of stealing rice, she had her stomach slit open to prove her treachery (there was no rice there) and died a slow, painful death. After that—after becoming a refugee and making his way to America, to Texas—all Chhang wanted was revenge, Buddhism be damned.

An English teacher who befriended him, and who couldn’t help but notice his anger, gave him a book about Cambodia by a man named Ben Kiernan with an inscription in her hand that read: “My friend Youk, Happy birthday. May you understand your country’s history and may it help your dreams come true.…” As it turned out, Kiernan was a professor at Yale, Chhang sent him a letter, the two became friends, and when Kiernan received a half-million-dollar grant from the U.S. government to research the Khmer Rouge, he bought Chhang a plane ticket back to Cambodia—leaving Friday, January 13, 1995, a date Chhang will never forget—to begin compiling what became the largest archive of evidence chronicling the Pol Pot regime and what became the foundation for the prosecution of its leaders. Without the two of them, it’s fair to say there might not have been any trials at all.

“He changed my life,” says Chhang of Kiernan today, sitting among the piles of books and folders, dossiers and files in his
cluttered office on the third floor of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. Chhang, forty-eight, wears a white pressed shirt and chinos. Before he had a staff and assistants, he worked virtually alone, going from village to village with a field recorder, interviewing victims but also interviewing the Khmer Rouge cadres (the farmers and shopkeepers, the teachers and laborers who executed, quite literally, the commands of their superiors). In the process, and as he collected letters, documents, ephemera of all sorts, he was able to map Angkar and its chains of command, the web of killing and unapologetic doctrine. In some villages, murderers and survivors lived across the street from each other, and he’d interview both—sometimes in each other’s presence. But of the more than ten thousand Khmer Rouge cadres he and his fellow researchers have interviewed to date, only one has ever admitted to killing anyone, and in that case only “five or six people.”

“We haven’t begun to reintegrate ourselves with each other,” says Chhang. “And that won’t happen until the victims accept ownership of the atrocities—and the perpetrators claim responsibility.”

In a rare interview at the end of Pol Pot’s life, he rejected the idea that he had ordered a genocide, that he had anything to do with the deaths of nearly two million people, claiming that it was the work of unhinged elements—radicals, the Khmer Krom, the Vietnamese, et cetera—and that his conscience was clear. “When things get quiet, I go to bed at 6
P
.
M
.,” he said. “I sleep under the mosquito net by myself. My wife and my daughter live apart from me. Sometimes I do nothing, putting up with mosquitoes and insect bites. I get bored, but I’m used to it.”

But Pol Pot had wrought another kind of stark loneliness.
One mother, feeling herself being sucked away by Angkar, dying slowly in a work camp, turned to her daughter and said, “You will have to learn to live without me now.”

On the surface, Chum Mey had a typical story—if one measured such stories by torture endured, family members lost, atrocities witnessed, if one could ever accept the ingenious methods the Khmer Rouge had of robbing people of their dignity. Now he was an old man who no longer had the eyes or dexterity to repair sewing machines, and he walked slowly, carrying all of those invisible things bundled on his shoulders.

And yet he was almost natty, wearing a white watch cap, gray wool pants, a button-down short-sleeve shirt, and, from the country that produced garments for some of the world’s best-known labels, a faux Versace belt. His face was open and almond-shaped, his eyes brown. He betrayed no hint of having been blindfolded for two straight weeks or stripped and hung like an animal from the crossbar as they’d whipped him with electric cords. I forced out the image of that metal bed and the pliers they’d used to remove his toenails or the electrodes they’d put to his ears until they’d shocked him unconscious. He’d begged a twenty-year-old kid to let him live (the boy called him by the vulgar form of you,
hein
). He had no idea what CIA or KGB stood for, but they wanted him to confess to being an agent for one or the other. He prayed to the spirits of his mother and father to protect him. On the day the other mechanics, his friends, were taken to the Killing Fields, there’d been a broken sewing machine. And here he was, one of only seven to have survived S-21. How many times had he wondered why he’d been permitted to live?

As it was, he’d been too afraid to meet me in a public place.
He claimed his life had been in danger for years, all because he’d been willing to tell his story, and there were those, the relatives of those headed to trial, who wanted him silenced. Who could question his paranoia? Who could blame him for relaying the intimate details of his trauma as if he were watching himself from very far away? So there we sat in Veasna’s living room, in her new white house in a subdivision at the edge of the city as the land movers and bulldozers groaned outside, adding another walled ring to Phnom Penh as they excavated the skeletal past. Then, suddenly, the machines went silent. Lunch.

Chum Mey looked at his watch, worn on the wrist of the hand that the Khmer Rouge had broken when he raised it to block the bamboo stick whistling toward his face. He looked blurrily at the frosted-glass window as if trying to see out, unsure perhaps whether it was his eyes or the window itself that disallowed transparency.

“Eleven o’clock,” he said. “This was always the time of day when the screaming was worst of all.”

The Way They Killed, Part Four. Death became a pestilence: arbitrary, ravaging, and contagious. And it became a strange performance, too, the killers trying to outdo each other: At S-21, living prisoners were cut open with knives and scorpions were let loose inside their bodies.

The man painting the same image over and over, feverishly, incessantly
—green stroke, black stroke, the flesh-colored
—his name was Vann Nath. He, too, had lost a wife and his children. He, too, had been shackled at S-21, until they released him (
leave for using
) and brought him downstairs to a room where there were two
other painters and a sculptor. He was given paints and a canvas and three days to regain his strength. He was handed a photograph and asked to make a “realistic, clear, correct, and noble reproduction” of it. He did not know, at first, that it was Pol Pot. For weeks, he woke at dawn and worked until midnight. When Duch arrived to evaluate his first painting, Vann Nath knew quite well that his life hung in the balance. The commandant looked at it for a time, then asked the opinion of another, who said it didn’t exactly match the photograph.

“It’s all right,” responded Duch.

And that’s why he lived.

I’d met with Vann Nath at his art gallery, which was attached to a restaurant his family ran on a busy street. Clad in a dirty gray dress shirt and green pants, he was sixty-three years old now, with a head of snowy hair, baleful eyes, bushy eyebrows, and a caramel complexion. During his time at S-21, he’d produced eight portraits and one sculpture of Pol Pot. After surviving the Khmer Rouge, he’d kept painting, feverishly, incessantly, but this time he depicted the scenes of torture at S-21. He painted Pol Pot’s dystopia: the sweltering cellblock with fifty bodies in shackles; a prisoner having his fingernails removed in a torrent of blood; the whippings and near drownings; the starvation and degradation; throats slit and babies taken.

He had remarried, as many of the survivors had. After the decimation, after the sudden disappearance of the Khmer Rouge (one S-21 survivor, Chim Math, said her first act after freedom had been to eat three bowls of rice and then to break down weeping), they’d clung to each other; they’d tried as hard as they could to put it all behind them. But Vann Nath still had nightmares about Duch.

“For me, it’s the wound that can’t be healed. I knew the meaning and deepest horror of the Khmer Rouge. I lost my wife and children. When I think about it, I lose all my energy, all my bearings. It’s only my grandchildren that can take away the deepest wound now.”

“He who protests is an enemy; he who opposes is a corpse.” One starless night, late, I went out to the hotel pool after the lights had been shut off, with that Khmer saying rattling in my head. While the courtyard was silent, I could hear the faint late-night noise of the city, like the distant breaking of glass. I lowered myself into the warm water and floated for what seemed like an hour, trying to process all the raw data of genocide as I did, and yet I felt nothing. No sense of agency or emergency. No point of connection. No language in the end to describe the fugue state that the country seemed to inhabit. Hyacinth and smoke mingled in the air. Cambodia kept passing me by in windows, but there was no way through. I felt utterly defeated: Who was I kidding, being here, as if to find a unified theory, practicing my own unknowing brand of exceptionalism—as if only I could understand? I floated like this for some time, letting it all stream out until I emptied my mind, until drifting off in the deep end, until Duch’s question came back: If you’d been threatened with the death of your family, what would you have done?

What
would
I have done?

The Way They Killed, Part Five. There were so many ways they killed—it goes on and on—and none were ever tender. No method was somehow better than any other, more humane or considerate. This was murder, of course, but of the most heinous
sort. Their acts came from the darkest part of the soul. In this instance, there was a soldier with a knife who cut the clothes off a pregnant woman. A deep incision was made in the flesh of the belly, there were screams and whispers and, finally, the stillness of death. That is, what came next, what was taken and hung by the neck, was as innocent as the act was unspeakable. They hung it with the others, in rows along the rafters, to ward off evil spirits. These were called the Smoke Children.

Chum Mey sat in silence for a moment, looked up from his watch at 11:01
A
.
M
., and began speaking again, at first in a dull monotone. He spoke directly to Veasna and only occasionally met my eye. When I asked him questions, he sat looking straight ahead at the window. Then he spoke.

As the Vietnamese approached Phnom Penh, locked in a room with twenty others, you could hear bombs going off, and then you were herded with the last group from S-21, up the same road that you had disastrously traveled when evacuating Phnom Penh nearly four years earlier. At about 7
A
.
M
., your group met up with another group of prisoners being herded by the Khmer Rouge, and in that group, in one of those strange moments of fate, were your wife and son, whom you hadn’t seen in a very long time.

You watched her carefully as she walked ahead with your small son, both dressed as you were: in black pajamas. When the guards were at a distance, you spoke to her once about the scenery.

You did not touch.

By nightfall, it was clear you were being led to your deaths; members of the group were taken away, then gunfire erupted. When they took your wife and child, she screamed your name.
She screamed it over and over and over again: They want to kill us! Chum Mey,
run
!

Her voice stopped when two reports filled the air. And then you ran.

There can only be so much unmending of the body before one turns away.

In Long Beach, California, ten years after the war, at least 150 female Cambodian refugees were diagnosed with psychosomatic blindness, an otherwise incredibly rare occurrence. Doctors were perplexed: Their eyes were fine, yet they couldn’t see. According to the therapists who studied the group, their blindness was “linked to a dissociated cluster of primitive meanings, horrific images, and behavioral responses or muscular representations loosely organized around the incomprehensibility of the events and the desire or ‘need not to see.’ ”

As one survivor put it, “My family was killed in 1975, and I cried for four years. When I stopped crying, I was blind.”

Ultimately, Duch, too, disappeared: into the jungle, to China, back to the jungle again. And then, unlike those he ordered to be tortured and murdered, he reappeared. He became a Christian. He was haunted and repentant. In 1999 he was arrested and later given counsel; François Roux and Kar Savuth were chosen to defend him.

By the rules of the ECCC, the pretrial discovery phase called for the accused to return to the scene of his alleged crime and stand before his accusers. And so on a February day, amid the rusted bed frames and bloodstained floor, Duch had stood before Vann Nath and Chum Mey and a group of other guards and survivors.
He seemed so small, said Vann Nath afterward. But the painter was still filled with such fear, he couldn’t look him in the eye.

And yet however one chooses to look upon it, something remarkable happened that day. Duch tried to speak to them as human beings. “I ask for your forgiveness,” he said. “I know that you cannot forgive me, but I ask you to leave me the hope that you might,” he said before breaking down on the shoulder of one of his guards. And after everything that had transpired, after all the atrocity, one of those gathered said, “I’ve been waiting thirty years for those words.” But the other survivors said nothing.

When the ECCC officially commenced this past winter and Duch took the stand to begin a trial that will likely last until the new year, he looked tired. His face was swollen and his eyes were red. He sat at a raised podium while Kar Savuth and Roux sat slightly below in black robes and frilled white neckerchiefs. To hear Kar Savuth tell it, Duch has spent an awful lot of time crying over the past year.

So far, in the first phase of the trial, the defense’s strategy has seemed somewhat straightforward. Duch denies little, shares what he can, tries to set the record straight. He has discussed his reasons for employing torture (“I never believed the confessions I received told the truth,” he said. “At most they were 40 percent true”) and the killing of babies (“I didn’t remember it until I saw the pictures, but I am criminally responsible for killing babies, children, and teenagers”). He has discussed his beloved leader (“Pol Pot was a murderer. He was the greatest criminal father of Cambodia”) and the fact that, steeped in Khmer Rouge propaganda, he honestly never knew that torture was illegal, had never heard of the Geneva Conventions until he’d been charged.