Survival in the Killing Fields (17 page)

‘Comrade, they don’t fit your eyes,’ I said. ‘If they did I would give them to you. Believe me.’

As he gave me back my glasses he glanced at my wrist, but I had already removed my watch and put it in hiding. For that matter I had also removed the spark plug from my Vespa, to be able to
prove that the Vespa wasn’t working, in case someone tried to take that too. The Khmer Rouge code forbade the guerrillas from taking private property, but the guerrillas didn’t always
obey it, just like they didn’t obey the provision of the code against harming the people.

I got away from the soldier as fast as possible and walked to a small dirt road along the riverbank. Below in the river, exiles from the city cooled off, bathing decorously in their sarongs.
Large motorized cargo boats pulled out from shore, bringing passengers back to their home provinces in a programme organized by the Khmer Rouge. Thousands of boat passengers left each day, without
diminishing the number of people living in Wat Kien Svay Krao.

Somehow, without a real turning point, life had become a succession of days spent wandering along the highway and hanging around the village. Phnom Penh was in the past. The news about the
future was vague and conflicting. First we would hear that Angka was going to give us land to clear and farm. Then we would hear that Angka was going to push us on to some other location and deal
with us later. We never knew what was going to happen. Every day, Thoeun and I went out foraging for food. With foraging, fishing and bartering, I had reverted to a way of life I had known in
childhood. It was not hard for us. Under other circumstances being in Wat Kien Svay Krao might have been enjoyable. But there was always an edge of anxiety to the waiting.

Then toward the end of April I found a distant cousin who said he had seen my family. I went at once where he directed, to a section of the crowded wat courtyard I had not explored before. I
spotted two of the family’s gasoline trucks, piled with luggage and crates of live chickens. How could I have missed them before? As I pushed through the crowd Pheng Huor came up to me. Where
were you?’ he said with a hint of annoyance, as if I had kept him waiting for a meeting. Then his smile showed through. ‘Everybody’s been looking for you. Did you see
Huoy?’

‘No, I lost her. Where’s Papa?’

Pheng Huor pointed to a makeshift tent made from a tarpaulin suspended beneath a tree. I went inside. My father was sitting at a table. Same old Papa, bags under his eyes and big protruding
belly. He was dressed in a faded T-shirt and shorts. His face was spread in a broad smile.

‘Why didn’t you come home?’ he said. ‘Everyone was looking for you. We waited for you until almost three in the afternoon. We couldn’t wait any longer. The Khmer
Rouge pushed us to leave home. Are you alone?’

‘No, Father, I brought eight nurses and a guard from my clinic, but I haven’t found Huoy yet.’ My brothers and their wives crowded into the tent. My mother came up next to me.
Her hair was in a bun and she seemed to have more white hairs than before.

‘Yes, we didn’t know what would happen to your nurses,’ my mother was saying in her kindly fashion. ‘I was worried about them. They don’t have any other men to take
care of them.’

‘Do you have enough rice?’ my father was saying at the same time. I said we did. He reached in his pocket and counted off fifty thousand riels. I took the money to please him and
then asked him if he would like to come live in a house instead of a tent. The family in the house above the nurses and me was planning to leave soon. He said he would like that very much.

In a few days, my parents, three of my four brothers and their wives and children moved into the house above. They were all that was left of the immediate family – my number-one brother
had been estranged from my father for several years, and my sisters were all with their husbands’ families.

Their new house had a normal rural Cambodian design. It was eight or nine feet off the ground on its stilts. The interior had springy wooden floorboards; a long, low, elevated sleeping platform
where they could spread their mats and hang their mosquito nets; and a kitchen in back whose floor and walls had generous-size cracks to allow air ventilation. My brothers and the drivers pushed
the vehicles over from the wat and parked them in front of the house – the two gasoline trucks with the empty tanks on the back, plus a Land-Rover, a jeep and a Mercedes. The drivers, their
wives and children and most of the servants remained in the wat courtyard, where there was more space.

Now that I was reunited with my family I was nearly content. Family is the glue that holds society together. Life makes more sense for being connected to the past through parents, and to the
future through children. Being together also had its practical benefits. For one, more people to rely on in case of emergencies. For another, more food, because my family had stockpiled food and
taken it with them from the city. And finally, I had gained face for bringing the family into the house, because I had done my duty as a son; and my father had gained face because I had put him
literally above me.

And yet I was not truly content. Huoy was alive. Or at least probably alive, because she was not the troublemaking kind, and the Khmer Rouge would have left people like her and her mother alone.
But how could anyone like me, who had seen Sam Kwil hauled away, feel sure of this? And if Huoy were alive, where was she now? What if she had gotten to the Route 2 turnoff before it was closed?
Then she would have gone to my father’s sawmill, or to my village. She would be waiting for me there. What if she hadn’t been swept up in the southern evacuation at all? She and her
mother lived along the road to the west, which led to the airport. She could have gone that way. Or she might have gone to the south after all. I might have missed her, just as I had missed
spotting my family for more than a week in Wat Kien Svay Krao.

Wat Kien Svay Krao was becoming a less and less attractive place. The weather was still hot, and most people camped on mats in the shade. At every campfire, people waved vigorously above their
plates to keep the flies away. From radios came reports that the North Vietnamese communists were closing in on the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon. The news made us feel more isolated from the
outside world than ever. High overhead, the sonic boom of the US reconnaissance planes could still be heard. We had hoped that the United States would come to our aid, but if it let South Vietnam
fall, it certainly wouldn’t help us in Cambodia.

My father was more stoic than most. ‘Yes,’ he said in his deep voice, ‘it’s the end of the old life. Now everyone will be the same class. Just like in China.’

He turned to me accusingly. ‘You should have left the country earlier, when you had a chance. I told you to go to medical school in France, but you wouldn’t listen to me.’

‘Father,’ I said, exasperated, ‘when Samrong Yong fell,
I
told
you
to sell all your property and leave the country. You could have lived abroad comfortably for
the rest of your life. But now it’s too late. And it’s all because
you
didn’t listen to
me
.’

Before long, my father and I were back into our usual arguments. And if the bickering in my family and the tedium of the long days weren’t enough, my group of ten from the clinic began to
split up. They had become like a second family to me. Srei, who had found her real family, was the first to go. I gave her medicine and rice. I gave her money. Somehow nothing was enough. I was
upset when she left, and the rest of the nurses were crying. They had worked together for years in harmony and
bonheur.
And soon after that a second nurse left.

I went back to walking around without a destination and without real hope. Out of habit, I trudged through the dirt lanes of the village to the wat, and from the wat again over to Route 1. By
then the crowds coming from Phnom Penh had thinned. I was outside the village, wearing a checkered krama around my head, when a familiar-sounding voice reached my ears. ‘Sweet!’ the
woman’s voice said. ‘Sweet! Mother, I’ve found him!’

How she could have recognized me I do not know. She was on the other side of the road, with her left hand steadying a bamboo basket on her head with two water bottles inside, and with her right
hand carrying a plastic-covered pail. ‘Mother, I’ve found him. Sweet, sweet!’ She was wearing an old green T-shirt and white trousers with a floral print. Her mother was carrying
a basket on her head and steadying it with her left hand while carrying a rice pot in her right hand. They looked tired and dusty. Huoy put her basket down and ran to me. We wrapped our arms around
each other. She didn’t say anything and her chest heaved uncontrollably; she couldn’t get any words out. Her mother came up to us with her eyes glistening and said in a choked voice,
‘We were looking for you.’

I said, ‘I was looking for you too. Where were you? Are you okay?’ Huoy nodded but didn’t let go.

We moved to the edge of the road. Ma brought the luggage over and then squatted next to us, using the edge of her krama to wipe away her tears, while Huoy and I embraced.

‘We looked for you everywhere,’ said Ma. ‘We didn’t know where you were. We were scared you had been killed by the Khmer Rouge. We saw a lot of bodies with their hands
tied behind their backs.’

Huoy and I wanted to hug forever, but our culture does not allow such things in public. A crowd had collected around us, curious about the emotional outburst. Someone asked if everything was
okay. Another voice commented, ‘How lucky they are! They met each other again, and I’m still separated from my family!’

I picked up the luggage and we walked through the village to the house. As soon as we got to the house I walked up the steps, kicked off my sandals and stepped inside. My father was resting.

‘Huoy is here,’ I told him.

My mother’s aged face creased into a smile. ‘Prepare lunch for them,’ she called back to the women in the kitchen.

My father sat up with an unmistakable look of gladness in his face. ‘Prepare a feast!’ he shouted. And he rose to go outside.

Huoy waited at the bottom of the stairs. ‘How are you?’ my father asked, smiling, as he and my mother went down to meet her. Huoy had brought her palms together and raised them to
her kneel. Her right knee was about to touch the ground when my father got to her and raised her by gently putting his hand under her elbow.

My brothers, their wives and the nurses had all seen Huoy try to kneel in front of my father and it touched their hearts. Everybody was crying. My mother said to Huoy’s mother, ‘You
are coming here to live with us. Don’t worry. We are safe here.’ The servants were hurrying out of the house with water and food.

At last I was whole. Huoy was with me. And my family had taken her in.

This is what happened to Huoy during the Khmer Rouge takeover:

After I left her at her school on that fateful morning of April 17, Huoy discovered that the school was closed. The other teachers hadn’t shown up, the doors were locked and the sounds of
gunfire were coming from several directions. By good luck she found a telephone that was still working, and she called Sok, my driver. Sok picked her up in the car and brought her back to her
mother’s apartment. By then it was about eight-thirty and everybody knew that the city was about to fall. People were waving white cloth from the windows. The guerrillas had entered the
streets in their muddy black clothing. Huoy told Sok to go to his own home and bring his family back to her apartment so that everybody could be together, for protection. He agreed and drove
off.

While Huoy was waiting upstairs with her mother, the Khmer Rouge on the street started shouting for everyone to leave the city. Huoy didn’t want to go, of course. But an hour passed and
then another and still Sok hadn’t returned. Finally about noon two heavily armed guerrillas entered the house on the ground floor, walked up the stairs banging on the landings and finally
knocked on the door of their apartment on the third floor. So Huoy and her mother had only a few minutes to grab some possessions while the guerrillas stood there waiting and yelling at them.

Huoy went into the kitchen and collected all the food she could find, plus a rice pot and two bottles of boiled drinking water. Then she gathered every photograph she had of me, even some ID
cards I had left there with my picture on them, and put them in her bag. Last she grabbed a small, soft pillow that she always slept with. Her mother packed a few clothes in a basket. They left and
locked the door, the soldiers following them downstairs. Huoy wanted to go to my parents’ house, but the street traffic was one way in the wrong direction and they had to go south.

Huoy was determined to find me. With the streets in chaos, her instinct was to go someplace where I would be likely to show up sooner or later. Since she couldn’t get to my parents’
house she decided to try my clinic. If that didn’t work she would go to the sawmill and then to my village. She brought the photos of me so she could show them to people and ask them if they
had seen me. That was how her mind worked. It was only later that she realized that she had left her gold and jewellery behind in the apartment. She had completely forgotten about her
valuables.

She and her mother got near my clinic but were unable to reach it because of the roadblocks. Like me, Huoy walked back and forth, with and against the flow of people trudging on foot with their
belongings, pushing their motorcycles and cars. But when she tried to cut across the flow and dodge into a side street a Khmer Rouge cadre came up to her and waved his pistol in her face: ‘Do
you want to sleep here? I’ll give you an appointment to sleep here!’ he shouted. Huoy’s bravery melted on the spot. To ‘sleep’ meant to die. She allowed her mother and
herself to be swept along with the traffic. They were just two more pieces of human wreckage floating out of the city with the tide, and nothing more. They found the turnoff to National Route 2
blocked off, and they were swept over the Monivong bridge and down National Route 1. They were a few days behind me on the same evacuation route out of Phnom Penh.