Survival in the Killing Fields (33 page)

The bell rang again.

Wearily, we lined up in the darkness and stumbled off again to the canal.

We worked by the light of the moon and the stars. Or a few of us worked, in slow motion, just enough to keep the guards away. We dug a few basketsful of earth and no more. The rest napped on the
ground. We could have used the time better to sleep in our hammocks and then be refreshed for the next day, but there was no telling this to the Khmer Rouge.

At midnight the bell rang for the last time, a welcome signal travelling through the chirping of crickets and the hooting of owls far across the fields. We trudged back to our hillocks,
navigating by the silhouettes of trees. Huoy and I fell into our hammock. Four hours later, the bell woke us up again.

Food and sleep were all we cared about. If we could only get enough sleep, if we could only fill our bellies, if the soldiers would only stop taking people away – then we
could have thought about other things. Like setting off along the unknown routes toward Thailand. Or joining the freedom fighters, called the Khmer Serei or Free Khmer, who were said to live along
the Thai border. But escape seemed infinitely unlikely. The Khmer Rouge posted guards around the cooperative at night, and no one that I knew tried it.

Sleep was more important than escaping. I was so tired I wanted to sleep for a week. Food was even more important than sleeping. All the weight I had gained in Youen’s village had dropped
off. Once again I was down to about a hundred pounds.

The
sdao
leaves, the snails and the other food we found on the job helped but weren’t enough. So in those evenings when no meetings were held, I went out foraging again, in the rest
period between dinner and night work on the canal. I tried to gather the wild food in the evening and hide it in the bushes of the hillock where we were staying. At lunch on the following day, Huoy
and I would get our usual bowls of watery rice, bring them back to the hillock and start a quick fire with straw and twigs. We would put the rice and our wild food in the teapot, so we could
pretend to be making tea if the authorities came around. Tea, particularly medicinal tea, was still permitted.

But it was hard to gather wild foods at night. I began foraging in the early mornings, which was easier. By the time I returned to our hillock, after the first bell, the sky was beginning to
grow light. It didn’t seem like much of a risk. There were other foragers too. One morning about a month after we got to the front lines, I filled a broken mud basket with arrowroot, hid it
in the bushes near our hammock and went off to work with the hoe over my shoulder as usual. When Huoy and I came back to the hillock at lunch, the basket was missing. We asked the other couples who
were camped with us on that hillock, but they knew nothing about it. So Huoy and I ate our watery gruel and then lay down in our double hammock.

The next thing we knew, two boys were standing next to the hammock and looking down at us. They were both smoking cigarettes rolled from banana leaves. They twirled the cigarettes in their
fingertips in an identical manner, perhaps copying the style of some older smoker they admired.

They frowned over the hammock at me.

‘Comrade!’ they shouted in their high voices. ‘Angka wants to see you! Hurry!’

I sat up.

Now I knew who they were. They weren’t just ordinary boys. They were spies.
Chh/op.

They were a little old for spies. About twelve, I guessed. They wore baggy black culottes, nothing else. In our part of Battambang many boys their age wore Khmer Rouge uniforms
and carried rifles. Maybe the parents of these two were cadre nearby and had used their influence to delay their sons’ departure from home. Yes, maybe that was what had happened.

It was strange, I thought, in that long moment when the
chhlop
were peering over the hammock at me and I had not yet gotten up: nowadays you became a spy when you were a young boy, and
then when you were half grown you became a soldier. There was no such thing as childhood anymore. Before the revolution these boys would have been learning rice farming from their fathers, or going
to school, or making themselves useful to the monks in the temples. They would have learned to respect their elders.

‘Hurry up, comrade!’ That shrill, high, irritating voice. If they had been my sons, I would have beaten them for their rudeness.

‘Please,’ I said, getting up out of the double hammock, ‘I’m just putting a shirt on. I’ll be right there.’

‘My husband is
going
,’ said Huoy in an exasperated voice. As a schoolteacher she had scolded many children that age. ‘Why are you
accusing
him? He’s just
putting on a shirt. He is going now.’

‘I’ll be back,’ I told Huoy.

I walked off at a relaxed pace, the two boys behind me. I wasn’t worried. If I had done anything seriously wrong, Angka would have sent soldiers to get me, in the late afternoon. The
chhlop
were too young to be trusted with anything important.

The ‘Angka’ the
chhlop
were taking me to turned out to be Chev, the cooperative’s leader. Chev was sitting in a black hammock in a Khmer Rouge-style house, which was
just a thatched roof on poles, without sides, near the common kitchen. He sat upright with his feet on the ground, barechested, now and again puffing on a cigarette that he rotated slowly in his
fingers. He was a skinny, dark-skinned man with soft, straight hair, big fleshy lips and a wide mouth. His eyes were not cruel. He was smiling.

‘Comrade . . . ?’ he said tentatively.

‘“Samnang,” ’ ‘I said, supplying him with the name I used.

‘Very well. Comrade Samnang, you have to tell Angka the truth. This morning our
chhlop
went to look at the hillocks to see who had food. They checked. They found you had a big
basket of arrowroot. My question is this: if you had the food, why didn’t you bring it to Angka for the collective meal? Why didn’t you give it to the community? Why did you plan to eat
it by yourself?’

So. The spies had stolen the food. I should have guessed.

‘Comrade Chev,’ I said, ‘last night I went to find some food, but it was only a small quantity. It wasn’t enough for the community.’

‘You just wanted private property,’ he said in his gentle, chiding voice. ‘And that is forbidden.’

I didn’t answer. No point getting into an argument with him.

‘And another thing,’ Chev said, still smiling. ‘The
chhlop
say that you call your wife “sweet”. We have no “sweethearts” here. That is
forbidden.’

Two soldiers hurried toward us, as if late for a meeting they wanted to attend. Chev sat calmly in his hammock, smiling at me with his big lips and wide mouth. He had pointed out that I had
broken some minor rules. I was getting ready to tell him I wouldn’t break them again.

The soldiers’ voices rang out in a deep, authoritative baritone. ‘Who gave the comrade permission to go out to find something to eat? Comrade, who allowed you?’

‘Nobody allowed me, comrade,’ I answered. ‘I did it without permission. I did wrong. I’m sorry.’

One of the soldiers said contemptuously to me, ‘You see? You have too much liberty. You think you are as free as a bird, but you are a reactionary.’

‘Comrades, I had no such thoughts in my mind. I always respect Angka’s rules. If Angka says that I am wrong I accept it, and I will not do those things again.’

From his hammock, Chev said mildly, ‘Yes, you recognize yourself that you did something wrong, but this is not enough.’

‘Comrade Chev, send him to Angka Leu!’ urged the soldier who had been doing the talking. ‘Send him to Angka Leu! To Chhleav!’

Huoy had been watching from a distance. She ran up when she saw Chev nod and the soldiers begin to tie my elbows tightly behind my back. Huoy asked Chev what was happening, and Chev replied,
‘Your husband betrayed Angka. Now we are sending him to higher authorities for judgement.’

Reflexively, Huoy put her palms together and
sompeah
ed to Chev. It was the age-old gesture of respect, but it was out of place, a sure sign of her unrevolutionary background.
‘Don’t kill my husband,’ she pleaded. ‘Please let him come back. You decide what to do with him yourself, but don’t send him to Angka Leu. He didn’t do anything
to Angka Leu.’

‘No,’ said Chev with that unchanging smile he wore like a mask. ‘I cannot decide. It is up to Angka Leu.’

Huoy stood next to me. ‘Then if you send him to Angka Leu, send me too. I will stay with him.’

‘No. Samnang did wrong, not you. “His hair is on his head. His hair is not on your head.” Anyone who steals is responsible for himself. Nobody else is responsible. You stay
here.’

I had not struggled when they tied me up. I told Huoy to take care of herself, and a tone in my voice caused Huoy to step back, with her hand to her mouth in fear. She understood what I really
meant, that there was no use in her getting involved.

The soldiers led me away.

We walked on a path through the woods and over the fields in the direction of Phum Chhleav. The soldiers walked behind, holding a long rope attached to me. My arms grew numb from the tight cords
around my elbows, which restricted my circulation.

We neared Phum Chhleav but didn’t get as far as the railroad track, or the cluster of flimsy huts where I had lived a few months before. Instead we stopped at a collection of buildings I
had never seen before, in a clearing back in the woods. The prison itself was a long thin structure with a thatch roof and walls made out of split bamboo and thatch and pieces of corrugated metal.
The soldiers told me to sit down and wait.

I sat.

They left.

Here I must interrupt my story for a warning: many people find the truth about Khmer Rouge prisons extremely upsetting. Readers with sensitive feelings might want to skip over the next few pages
and begin reading again toward the end of the chapter.

Muffled sounds of human activity came from the prison, and an unpleasant smell drifted toward me in the breeze. Some wrinkled black objects hung from the eaves of the roof but
I was too far away to see what they were.

In about an hour a prison guard came out for me. He led me to a large grove of mango trees. The trees were tall and well formed, spaced at regular intervals. At the base of each tree sat a
prisoner, tied to the trunk.

The guard and I walked down a row of trees. We walked past a middle-aged woman lying face down on a wooden bench with her arms and legs spread apart. Metal clamps secured her wrists and ankles
to the corners of the bench. Her
sampot
or dress was torn, revealing her indecently, and her blouse was ripped with one of her breasts showing. As we went by she turned her head and looked
at us with an unfocused stare.

‘Please save my life,’ she moaned in a low voice.

She hadn’t noticed that I had my arms tied behind my back, or that the other man was a guard. Red ants were crawling on her hands and her arms, and her fingertips were bloody.

The guard took me to the next tree, about thirty feet away. He loosened the rope around my elbows and the circulation returned to my lower arms. He tied a longer rope to my wrists and then
around the tree trunk. I sat with my back to the mango tree.

He left.

I said my prayers.

If I have to die, I thought, at least let me die with dignity and composure.

Something crawled onto the skin on the back of my neck. Then it bit.

Damn – red ants! I craned my head backward and twisted it from side to side to try to crush the ant. Another ant crawled onto my shoulder. They were coming down the tree. My wrists and
elbows were tied behind me but I could still move the rest of my body. A lot of them were on me now. They were on my wrists – I crushed them with my fingers. On my upper chest and shoulders
– I swept them aside with my chin. On my calves too – I rubbed my calves together, then brought a foot up to help. They bit my scalp – I rubbed the back of my head against the
tree trunk, but more ants came down the trunk to get me. They were in a fighting mood, waving their forelegs in the air and working the sideways pincers in front of their mouths, daring me to
attack.

The more I struggled, the more they swarmed over me. I strained against the confinement of the ropes, scratching and moving my feet in a frenzy, unable to move enough. I imagined them biting
even when they hadn’t bitten me.

This was torture enough.

When the afternoon sun sank low enough to shine under the branches and onto me, a sturdily built man with curly hair walked into the mango grove. He wore new black clothes, black rubber-tyre
sandals, a wristwatch. Under his black shirt I glimpsed a flash of blue. A Montagut shirt, I guessed. In Phnom Penh before the revolution Montagut shirts had been a status symbol, like wearing an
alligator shirt. They were French-made, cool and comfortable in tropical weather. And now Montagut shirts were status symbols for the Khmer Rouge, like the silk kramas they stole from the
‘new’ people. Emblems of an old society that they hated but also envied.

The curly-haired man carried a hatchet and pair of pliers in his hands.

He walked down the row. He sat on the wooden bench by the spreadeagled woman.

‘Where is your husband?’ he asked her, the sound of his voice carrying to me. ‘You have to tell Angka the truth. What rank was he under Lon Nol? A captain? A lieutenant? Tell
the truth.’

The woman slurred her words together. ‘I still don’t know where he is,’ she said. ‘And he was not a soldier. He wasn’t a captain. He wasn’t a lieutenant. He
wasn’t anything like that.’

‘You still lie to Angka?’

The burly man stepped up on the bench, put a foot down on her hand, bent down with the pliers, pulled hard and came up with something in the pliers’ jaws.

‘AAAEEEEIIIIIIIIII!!! AAEEIII!!! AAAAEEEIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!’ the woman screamed, but he paid no attention.

‘If you don’t tell me the truth, I’ll take another fingernail tomorrow,’ he said. ‘If you tell the truth now, Angka will release you.’