Survival in the Killing Fields (39 page)

The visit of my sister-in-law Nay Chhun that afternoon gave me a chance to practise. Nay Chhun and I didn’t like each other. We hadn’t had a real conversation since before the
revolution. She had never visited me when I was sick in Phum Chhleav. But this was a chance to repair the damage and forge a new relationship. When she asked how I was, I answered, ‘Not too
badly, thank you.’ She said I had lost weight, and I said with a smile, ‘Who hasn’t?’ I asked her how she and my brother were. We had a superficial but polite
conversation.

What absorbed my attention was not Nay Chhun but my father, who went silent and cold when she approached. On the front lines he avoided her, except when she was with my brother. Papa had finally
seen into her character. Yet when she left he heaved another sigh and wiped a tear away – glad, I supposed, that she and I were finally on speaking terms.

Such changes in my father! In the old days, when he was rich, he barely noticed Huoy when she came into his house. That I had chosen a poor woman like Huoy embarrassed him. Because of him Huoy
and I never had the wedding we wanted, with the monks and the ceremony and the families coming together and the great feast with half of Phnom Penh invited to the tables. Huoy had paid a price for
not being married, with insults from Nay Chhun, Aunt Kim and my other relatives – insults to which she never replied.

But the past didn’t matter anymore. We were all on the same level now. My father brightened visibly when Huoy came back from the kitchen that afternoon. His entire manner changed, and a
smile creased his wrinkled face. That was what I had been waiting for, to know that he welcomed her into the family.

But it was my fate barely to recover from one disaster before being hit with another.

I went back to work. The first sporadic rains had fallen. The weather was hot and muggy, as it always is before the real rainy season begins.

Chev assigned my group to create paddies for large-scale rice farming – dyked fields much longer and wider than those of the prerevolutionary peasants. It was a good idea in theory,
because big paddies would allow us to put more land into cultivation than before, with proportionately less maintenance. The problem was with the plan for the dykes. Instead of just taking half of
the old dykes out to create fields twice as large, which would have been a sensible plan, Chev told us to tear all of them out and then build new ones. It was an enormous job, with no practical
benefit, and it had to be done in a hurry. Perhaps Chev wanted us to show how zealous we could be in proving our devotion. I worked in mud up to my shoulders. The air was hot, the mud was cool, and
I went back and forth. I was exhausted. From the woods nearby came swarms of mosquitoes.

When I came down with shivering fits twice in one day, and then with fits at the same times the next day, it seemed almost like a blessing. It was a perfect excuse for getting out of work
without faking it. There was plenty of malaria around. Everyone knew the symptoms.

Released from work, I set out to find medicines. My first choice was Western medicine, either quinine or a similar drug like chloroquine. I didn’t have any myself. I looked and asked, but
there was none to be found on the black market. There were people moaning and shaking with malaria in all the long-houses – crowded, unclean places that stank of urine and buzzed with
flies.

Next I tried the regime, which had three levels of medical care. The top cadre could go to a reasonably good, Western-style hospital in Battambang City, but that was off-limits for me. Ordinary
Khmer Rouge and ‘old’ people could go to a smaller regional hospital in Phum Phnom, but I couldn’t get in there either. There was only the front-lines clinic, the place where the
nurses called the patients ‘war slaves’. This was an ordinary house on stilts next to a yam garden. When I went there, the clinic staff announced a meal, and the war slaves, who were
pathetically thin, crowded in line and started pushing each other to get to the food table first. One patient started a fight, and a
mit neary
broke her serving ladle over his head getting
him to stop.

In this clinic there were only two medicines: vitamin injections and homemade malaria pills. The multivitamin solutions seem to have been made in Phnom Penh by someone with a basic knowledge of
pharmacology. They were stored in old Coca-Cola bottles. Following standard medical procedure, the nurses sterilized the hypodermic needles in boiling water, but before they gave the injections
they ran their dirty fingers along the length of the needles to make sure the needles were firmly attached to the syringes. As a result, almost all the patients developed abscesses at the injection
site. Few of them recovered from the illnesses that brought them to the clinic in the first place.

The malaria pills were made at the clinic from yams grown outside in the garden and
sdao
leaves. The mixture was ground up with a mortar and pestle, baked in sheets and stamped into pill
form with M-16 shell casings. The pills were popularly known as ‘rabbit turds’ because of their circular shape and tan colour. I was given a handful of rabbit turds and walked away
quickly, before the nurses could give me an injection. The
sdao,
I thought, would be mildly helpful against malaria;
sdao
was one of those folk remedies that had a basis in fact. But
it was the yam in the pills that appealed to me. Yam was food.

As the malaria infection attacked more of my red blood cells, I grew weaker. I lay on the white plastic mat in the longhouse and waited. I felt cold and unable to stop shivering. The next thing
I knew, Huoy was sitting astride my waist holding my arms, and my father was holding my feet. I was drenched with sweat. They said I had been unconscious, flailing around convulsively with my arms
and legs. I didn’t remember any of the fit. All I knew was that I was thirsty. I drank what seemed to be gallons of water without stopping.

Huoy and my father took care of me together. When I had used up the rabbit turds my father gathered
sdao
leaves and bark. I ate the leaves, and Huoy brewed the bark into a tea for me to
drink. My father roamed through the forests at dawn, looking for new, tender bamboo leaf shoots with the dew still on them. This was a traditional Cambodian cure. He also made a Chinese medicine
for me with shavings from a piece of animal horn he had brought with him from Phnom Penh.

Huoy was worried too. Every day she went off looking for Western medicines. Finally she found eight 300-mg quinine tablets and bought them for a
damleung,
or 1.2 ounces, of gold. I took
half a pill in the morning and half at night, along with the
sdao
leaves and the
sdao
tea and my father’s traditional cures. With the medicine and with the devoted attention of
Huoy and my father, I recovered.

Then it was back to work. The rains arrived. Water flowing down from the hills filled the canals and poured across as if no obstacle were there. The paddies were submerged
except for a few of the higher dykes, which protruded like the lines on a chequerboard, and the hillocks, which were like chequers, some of them in the middle of the squares and the rest out of
position on the dykes between squares. Chev came to inspect, carrying his hoe. He was muddy from head to foot. Under the water surface, invisible from sight, were the delicate green shoots of the
rice seedbeds.

‘The seedlings will die in a few hours if the water does not go down,’ Chev remarked. He spoke calmly, but as I followed his gaze to the flooded fields I felt weak. It wasn’t
our fault! The canal hadn’t been deep enough to contain the water. We didn’t have the manpower to build dykes to protect the seedbeds. We had only four in our group – two out with
malaria, another two taken away to the woods.

‘You must take your destiny firmly in hand,’ Chev told us as he began to walk away. ‘If you lose this battle, you will be responsible.’

We went back to rebuilding dykes with a desperation made worse by knowing that whatever we did would not be enough. I prayed while I worked. The others did too. And that afternoon, by the
kindness of the gods, the rain stopped. The runoff water ceased flowing. The water level in the paddies subsided and the green shoots of the rice seedlings reappeared.

But the next day the rains fell again. Every day the work was urgent. Dykes washed out, patches of rice were swept away. I put everything in my work. It was a matter of saving my own life and
also raising rice, so the cooperative would have food to eat.

Chev decided to reorganize the cooperative with two common kitchens a mile apart. My father and brother were assigned to the new kitchen, but I still saw them often. A major purge began. The
soldiers took captives morning and afternoon. Instead of marching them away immediately, the soldiers made public examples of them, tying them to trees and shouting to anyone who would listen what
they had done wrong. I tried not to look or listen. I had enough on my mind just getting through each day.

So I wasn’t really paying attention when I trudged back toward the longhouse at the end of an afternoon early in the rainy season of 1976. There were puddles on the footpath. I walked
around the puddles half-noticing how they reflected the sky. ‘See the enemies here! See the enemies!’ a teenage soldier was shouting, like an announcer at a carnival. ‘Angka
caught them for stealing food! They stole food from all of us! See them now, while you have a chance! Learn from their example!’ Near the soldier’s feet sat several captives with their
hands tied around a tree trunk. Their faces were angled away. I was wondering how much the dinner rations were going to be when something caught my eye: one of the captives was my father.

I froze.

My father turned his face and looked sadly into mine. His lips moved. He wanted to explain something to me. He wanted my help.

‘Why have you stopped?’ the soldier yelled at me. ‘Go on!’

The people behind me had almost collided into my back. They turned to look at the prisoners and their muttered comments came to me from far away. ‘They are already old. Why make them
suffer?’ said one voice. Said another, ‘That’s a nice old man there, the skinny one. Why kill him?’

‘Go!’ roared the soldier.

It was like looking into a tunnel, seeing my father’s eyes widened in sorrow and fear and not being able to see anything else. He signalled me to go. Numbly, I obeyed.

Huoy’s face was already swollen from weeping. She knew. She had heard that a high-ranking official visiting the new kitchen had seen my father scoop rice from the sides of a
fifty-five-gallon drum. He had asked Chev why the ‘new’ people were scavenging for food while they should be working. Chev arrested Papa on the spot.

Around sunset the procession walked slowly past our long-house. Papa was roped to two other prisoners. A soldier walking behind them held the end of the rope in his hand. As they came close, my
father lifted his head and looked at me. There was no accusation, merely an immense sadness. From where he was going there was no coming back.

Plant a kapok tree, he had told me.

I went outside the longhouse and sat on the ground. There was a lump in my throat and the tears rolled down my cheeks, but I didn’t say anything. Plant a kapok tree.

When three days had passed, Huoy and I brought our evening rations back to the longhouse with some candles. Our neighbours knew what we were doing and left us alone. Late at night, Pheng Huor
and Nay Chhun arrived. We lit the candles. My brother and his wife went first, because they were older. They
sompeah
ed to the improvised altar, put their palms on the ground three times,
bowed down until their foreheads touched the backs of their hands another three times and prayed. Huoy and I sat behind them until they had finished and it was our turn.

I prayed that my father be reborn away from Cambodia.

Day after day the purge grew worse. Some were taken away for complaining, most for stealing food to stay alive. We tried to learn why the Khmer Route were killing so many but found no real
reason. It was just something they did, a craving they could not satisfy. They created enemies to devour, which increased their appetite for enemies.

Shock, horror, grief – with the death of my father, part of us died too. Under control of an alien force we responded, but without energy to spare. We were beings so imperfect and fragile
in manufacture that we wore out constantly, or were destroyed for being defective by those who did not care. Everything was gone. Society was destroyed and monks and temples destroyed and markets
and families and the bonds between humans destroyed. There was no hope.

Two weeks later, my brother and his wife were taken away with their hands tied. I never learned why. They never came back. Huoy and I had a service, the same as we did for my father,
sompeah
ing, bowing, praying. We lit the same candles, which were already burned down to stubs. There were only two of us to pray for their souls. We wondered who would light candles for
us.

The sky was clear at dawn.

By midmorning the first clouds had sailed in from the west, puffy and white, like the cottony fibres of the kapok tree.

The clouds billowed and grew and spread out until they blocked the sun.

From far away came the sound of thunder, a low rumbling, like bombs from a B-52. The air turned cold. The wind rose, the rice flattened in the fields and the trees bent over on the hillocks with
their leaves flying off horizontally.

Small tornadoes of dust and rice stalks spun through the fields and onto the bare ground by the longhouses. Clothes flew off clotheslines. Thatch panels flapped on the roofs and wood frames
creaked. The people tied their kramas tightly around their heads, and clapped their hands over their faces to protect themselves from the dust.

For a minute or two, the wind paused and the trees and the rice straightened. It was as dark as twilight. In the stillness the birds chirped with unusual loudness and clarity. Swallows dipped
and rose through the air, hunting for insects.