Survival in the Killing Fields (28 page)

After another week had passed, Huoy picked me up, draped my arm over her shoulder and gave me a long stick to use as a cane. She helped me walk. I had to reteach my legs to obey.

We only took a few steps. But the next day we walked around the hut.

It was fifty yards to the railroad track. It became my goal. Every day I walked nearer, and when I finally made it I had to stop to rest three or four times along the way.

Huoy and I sat on the railroad tracks, near a trestle with water underneath. I was tired but triumphant. Huoy was happy and smiling. We talked as we always had in the old days, calling each
other ‘sweet.’

A healthy young woman from another village came walking down the railroad tracks, carrying a sack over her shoulder. She walked past us, then turned around in surprise. In those times, even
husbands and wives were supposed to call each other ‘comrade.’

‘Is that your husband?’ the young woman asked Huoy. Her tone was pleasant and courteous, her accent from Phnom Penh.

‘Yes, he is,’ Huoy answered with a smile. ‘He was very sick, but he’s better now.’

The young woman put her sack down. She reached in it and pulled out a piece of fruit. I knew the fruit, though I have never discovered its English name. It has a very thick rind, and like guava
leaves it is a folk remedy against stomach ailments. ‘Older sister,’ she said to Huoy, ‘give him some of this. It will be good for his health.’ She broke it open on the
railroad track and gave us half.

I put my palms together and raised them to the middle of my forehead.

She asked whether we were from Phnom Penh. I said yes, told her my real name and said I used to be a doctor. She asked me whether I knew her uncle so-and-so. I said yes, he was my professor in
medical school. We began a conversation, using all the terms of politeness in the Khmer language, talking about old times in Phnom Penh.

Before she left, she dug in her sack again and gave us an ear of corn. It lifted our spirits, meeting this courteous young woman who, incidentally, we never saw again. It reassured us that in
spite of the Khmer Rouge, compassion still existed and Cambodian high culture still lived. We watched her walking down the tracks and disappearing in the distance.

I said, ‘Sweet, I’m going to live.’

The sun sent low rays across the landscape. The air was cool. I ate a portion of the outer fruit as medicine and gave the rest to Huoy. We went underneath the trestle to bathe, and Huoy scrubbed
the dust and dirt off me.

That evening we cooked the ear of corn. I made Huoy eat every kernel, as a small gesture of repayment for the yam she had given me. I loved and respected Huoy more than ever. I put her above me.
She had saved my life.

When my weight rose to about a hundred pounds I was sent back to work in the rice fields. I didn’t mind. Just being out in the fertile fields of Battambang made me feel
better. The rice plants were large and bushy, higher than my waist. From the middle of the paddies the dykes were invisible, except as gaps in the thick carpet of green. When a breeze came through
the rice, the smell was so sweet and clean that it made my stomach rumble with hunger. So much rice! In a few more months, in the harvest, we could eat bowl after bowl of steaming white rice, as
much as we wanted. That’s what we had been promised.

By now, toward the end of the rainy season, the hard work – ploughing the fields and transplanting the seedlings – was over. Only light tasks were needed, like regulating the water
levels. It was easy. A few other men and I walked around on the tops of the dykes with our hoes. The dykes were eighteen inches to two feet high. Wherever the rainwater was in danger of flooding
over the dykes we began chopping holes, letting the water spill from one paddy into the next and then the next, until the extra water reached the edge of the field. Then we rebuilt the dykes with
the hoes and our hands.

We were wet and muddy all day long, but the job was a good one. We had little supervision. No Khmer Rouge soldiers standing over us with whips. The soldiers hardly came into the fields at all.
Even better, we were able to collect food while working.

Whenever there is water in rice paddies there is life – frogs, snails, tiny shrimp, small fish or crabs. In Phum Chhleav the crabs were the easiest to catch for those who knew the trick.
It was no use trying in the early mornings or the late afternoons, when the water was cool. Then the crabs were out among the rice plants, holding on to the stalks with their claws. If they heard
you coming they dropped to the bottom and swam sidelong away. But in the middle of the day, when the water was warm, the crabs retreated to their burrows in the dykes. You could catch them by
reaching into the burrows with your hand – the quicker the better, because they bit with their pincers, sometimes hard enough to draw blood. I put the crabs in my shirt pockets. They
couldn’t climb out. I always wore the same shirt in the fields, a Lon Nol-era camouflage-coloured parachutist’s shirt with big pockets and extra pockets that Huoy sewed on the inside. I
worked in the fields with my shirt tails out and my pockets bulging with live crabs.

We cooked the crabs in our hut in the evening, after the regular dinner of thin rice gruel and the political meeting that usually followed. Sometimes Huoy and I ate fifteen or twenty crabs each.
Every family in Phum Chhleav had someone working in the rice fields, and everybody ate crabs in secret. The few times that Huoy and I managed to get meat or fish, we cooked and ate the flesh first,
then put the bones back in the pot, waited until the bones were soft and ate them too for the calcium and the proteins and the nutrients in the marrow. We wasted nothing.

Food was power. For all the talk about a revolutionary society in which everyone was equal, those at the top ate reasonably well and those of us at the bottom were chronically malnourished.
Every day, when the gong rang for lunch,
mit neary
brought a vat of watery rice to a hillock in the fields and ladled watery rice into bowls for the ‘new’ people. Meanwhile, the
soldiers went off to the Khmer Rouge headquarters, the row of three houses near the railroad tracks. The rest of us had seen oxcarts laden with supplies pull up to those three houses. We saw the
smoke from the cooking fires every day. We didn’t need to be told what was happening inside. But when the soldiers came back to the rice fields, licking their lips, looking well fed and
content, they pretended not to have eaten anything at all. They took up bowls and ate watery gruel the same as we did. They spooned the liquid into their mouths with loud slurping noises and said,
‘Look. We eat like you. Exactly the same food. It’s enough for us, so it should be enough for you. You people really are lazy. You must work harder, to show your gratitude to
Angka.’

With or without their rifles, the soldiers had an aura of power about them, like big, muscular village bullies. We were weaker and afraid of them. We weren’t strong enough to fight back,
so we kept quiet and ate our crabs in secret and waited for the rice harvest to come so we could eat all we wanted. But the Khmer Rouge had other ideas for the rice crop.

One morning I straightened up from opening a dyke in the rice fields to see a lone figure in the distance. It was the old man on horseback. He rode slowly along the trail by the railroad tracks,
coming toward us from the railroad station at Phnom Tippeday. He looked the same as before, his silk sarong doubled up to his waist and the edge of his black culottes showing underneath, his krama
around his middle. He rode leisurely along the path until he got to the three houses, then dismounted and went inside.

Comrade Ik didn’t come to Phum Chhleav unless he had a reason.

A few hours later, after lunch, he led his horse out on the dykes of the rice fields. He walked this way and that, inspecting the rice plants and the water levels in the paddies. Whichever way
he moved, I unobtrusively moved in the opposite direction, so the two of us wouldn’t meet. Finally he reached the edge of the fields, mounted and slowly rode off.

There goes bad news, I thought.

Comrade Ik’s orders filtered down the Phum Chhleav hierarchy and eventually to the leader of my work group, who was, a ‘new’ person. He told us the news the next day while I
was standing in a paddy in water up to my knees, leaning on my hoe. ‘We will move from Phum Chhleav fairly soon,’ he announced pompously. ‘We don’t know precisely when, but
Angka will tell us the date later on.’

I didn’t allow emotion to show on my face. I didn’t trust the group leader, even though he was from Phnom Penh like the rest of us. He was heavier and stronger than we were, with
clear, healthy skin. I wondered where he was getting his food. My coworkers didn’t trust him either. He had scarcely turned his back when they began to complain.

‘See? See? They’re doing it again!’ said a man I had known in Tonle Batí. ‘They always say, ‘If you work hard, you can eat.’ Now that we’ve
worked hard and planted the crop, they want us to move away! Where will we go now? Whose crop can we eat now, if we cannot eat our own?’

‘Yes,’ said another one bitterly. ‘Some armies kill with bullets. The Khmer Rouge kill with rice! I cannot believe it: we have rice all around us, but we cannot eat it! I have
never seen so much rice in my whole life, and I have never been so hungry.’

I said nothing, though I agreed with them. With so much rice, with so many people sick, it was the cruelest of crimes to take us away before the harvest. But it didn’t surprise me that
they were doing it. To me, the only question was whether they were doing it to kill us intentionally, or whether they were doing it by mistake. For if there was one thing sure about the Khmer
Rouge, it was that they knew nothing about planning. They were always starting projects but not finishing them, then going on to the next.

Discouraged, we slowed our pace in the fields. If we could not eat the rice around us, we were not going to work hard to produce it.

As things turned out, the Khmer Rouge didn’t trust our group leader either. A couple of days later we saw soldiers lead him away with his arms tied behind his back – caught for
running a business after work, trading gold to ‘old’ people for meat.

The following morning the exodus began. Huoy and I removed the white tarp from the roof of our hut. We packed the tarp, the mosquito net, the mats and the clothes into bundles once again and
attached them to the shoulderboard. Another journey. We had been on the move ever since the communists took over. From Phnom Penh to Wat Kien Svay Krao. From there, the failed attempt to escape the
country, which brought us to Tonle Batí. From Tonle Batí by truck and train to Phum Chhleav, with Ma’s death on the way. And now this. The Khmer Rouge said we were going to the
‘front lines’ but didn’t explain what or where the front lines were. For all we knew we were going to the moon.

With a groan, I hoisted the bamboo stick to my shoulder. The load was heavy. My weight and strength were still below normal because of the dysentery, and I had stubbornly packed the rest of my
medical reference books in our luggage, even though Huoy had asked me to throw them away. Huoy carried the teapot in her right hand, and with her left hand she steadied a bundle on her head. We
entered the muddy pathways of the crowded settlement. In many places the paths were six inches deep in water. Garbage and human wastes flowed downhill over the paths and in and out of houses. Phum
Chhleav was on low ground, and when the rains came it caught the runoff water from higher land nearby.

Around us, the other inhabitants emerged from the huts they had built of thatch and reeds and pieces of plastic, and started down the paths. It was a cold morning. The ‘new’ people
wrapped their kramas around their shoulders to stay warm. Those who didn’t have kramas or extra shirts shivered and rubbed themselves with their hands. We walked down the paths toward the
railroad tracks, but not everybody in Phum Chhleav was lucky enough to leave. Through the open door of a hut, we saw an old lady lying unconscious against a wall. Her legs were grossly swollen with
oedema. She stank with wastes and was covered with flies. Unable to walk and too heavy to carry, she had been left behind.

As we climbed onto the railroad track, which was elevated a few feet above the nearby ground and was the only dry place in the landscape, we looked around at the pitiful spectacle. And then I
understood why the rice fields had been so empty of workers. It was as if all the patients I had visited in their huts had been multiplied many times over and put in a parade before our eyes.
People with shrunken faces and haunted, vacant eyes, with legs and arms as thin as sticks or else puffy and bloated with oedema. Leaning on canes or on relatives’ shoulders, or alone, they
walked with that terrible economy of movement that signals the approach of starvation. As Huoy and I watched, a thin, scrawny, middle-aged woman put down the end of the hammock she had been
carrying, slung under a bamboo pole. The man inside the hammock called out weakly, ‘Sweet, sweet, bring me with you! Don’t leave me behind!’ But the woman shook her head and
trudged off down the railroad track. After a moment of indecision the man carrying the other end of the hammock abandoned it too and hobbled off after her. No one went to the hammock to help the
man. I didn’t. Even if I could have helped him, there was no way that Huoy and I could have carried him. If we tried to carry him we probably wouldn’t make it ourselves. So we walked
on.

The sun cast our shadows in front of us, onto the railroad track. I put the shoulderboard down, shifted it to the other shoulder and went on. To me, every hundred yards seemed like a mile. To
other people, every ten yards was a mile. Around us the malnourished, the sick and the near-dead shuffled on in groups of two and three, dressed in whatever rags they owned. Everyone was muddy.
Some had wet their crotches or soiled the seats of their pants. They stopped to rest, covered with flies, and some who rested just stayed there, giving in to gravity. A teenage boy ahead of us
tried to get up from a sitting position. He put his palms on the ground and pushed but wasn’t strong enough. He tried again, pushing as hard as he could with his matchstick arms. With a great
effort he got his buttocks off the ground and then brought his legs underneath and shakily rose to his feet. He took a step, almost fell and then took another faltering step as we passed him.