Survival in the Killing Fields (18 page)

I listened to her story and sighed inwardly. We were together again – that was the most important thing. Looking at her, dressed in the same grimy trousers and blouse she had worn since
the day of the evacuation, I wished that she had remembered to bring more of her possessions. But that’s how she was, losing her composure when anybody started shouting. There was no point in
being angry with her. And how could I be angry with her when one of the few things she had remembered to bring were photographs of me?

Huoy and her mother moved in – with me, Thoeun my guard from the clinic, and the remaining nurses, under the house on stilts that I had commandeered for my family. We had no privacy. I
continued to sleep alone on top of the oxcart. But there was a change. Tacitly, without announcement, it became understood that Huoy and I were the same as husband and wife. Without any formal
ceremony, we had become a married couple. The nurses treated Huoy with respect and consideration. My parents, my brothers and their wives all were very kind to Huoy, at least for the time
being.

But now that my personal worries were over – finding my family, finding Huoy and finally getting my parents to accept Huoy – I was able to take a larger view of our situation, and I
didn’t like it. True, we were lucky to be alive and together. Around us in the village of Wat Kien Svay Krao were thousands of Cambodians separated from the people they loved, wandering
around lost and unhappy, not knowing what the next hour held or where they would find their next meal. My family was very lucky in comparison to other families nearby. On the other hand, all our
efforts to make a place for ourselves over the preceding years had been for nothing. All our hard work at the lumber mill, all my studying at school. We had not been in favour of the revolution. We
had not been against it. We didn’t even care about politics much. But now that the revolution had come, we had been bulldozed by it, reduced to the same level as the other exiles around us.
And there was no new society building. Just the rubble of the old one.

A few months before the takeover I had finally been awarded my degree from the government medical school, the culmination of seven years’ effort. Outside of my work for the government, I
was the main practitioner in and part owner of a prosperous gynaecological clinic. What good was my medical training now, when the Khmer Rouge wanted to kill doctors?

I had also been a businessman, owner of a gasoline delivery service. I had seventeen million riels in the bank in savings, enough at prerevolutionary prices to buy a couple more gasoline
delivery trucks for my fleet. What was that worth now, if it was worth anything at all? The Khmer Rouge did not seem to use any currency at all. Would they let me return to my bank to claim my
savings? With every day it seemed less likely. Every day they announced through loudspeakers that we would have to go to the countryside.

Our only usable assets were those we had with us: two gasoline trucks, the Mercedes, the Land-Rover and the jeep. They were all worthless now, unless the situation changed. My little Vespa too.
There was no more gasoline to be bought or bartered for. And then it hit me. Barter – that was the key. In an uncertain future, we needed things to barter with. But what did we have to
offer?

Gold and jewellery would be useful, gold especially, for everyone recognized its value. Medicine would be valuable too. We needed medicine for ourselves, to protect against infections, malaria
and all the other ills of a tropical climate. The medicine we did not use we could barter with. I had brought the medicine from the clinic, but we needed more.

We needed clothes too. Not just for barter but for wearing. I still had on the black trousers I had worn on April 17, along with the woman’s blouse I had taken after somebody in the
hospital had stolen my shirt. Huoy didn’t have fresh clothes either. Already we looked like the rest of the refugees. I had brought a pile of sarongs from the clinic but those wouldn’t
help much. What could we do? The cars and trucks in front of the house looked more and more like useless sculpture, like monuments to the past. But it was a past I was unwilling to abandon. We had
worked too hard to become rich to leave all our wealth behind.

Sitting on the oxcart under the house I realized that, somehow, I was going to have to get back to Phnom Penh.

Every morning, when the recitation was over, the same young Khmer Rouge soldier shuffled out of the line and walked to our vicinity of the village, to keep watch over us. He
slept each night in a hammock slung from the poles of an open-sided shed behind our house. He wore an old green Chinese-made uniform with a Mao-style hat. His trousers had a hole in the seat. There
were rips along the cuffs and more rips at his elbows and collar. There was no pen in his pocket, meaning he was the lowest grade of soldier, like a private.

In spite of his shabby appearance he was full of revolutionary fervour. Several times a day when the mood struck him he fired his AK-47 into the air and began yelling slogans: ‘Long live
our victory! Down with US imperialism! Long live the independent, peaceful, neutral, nonaligned, sovereign, uh, peace, uh, peaceful, neutral Cambodia!’ He usually stumbled over the longer
slogans because he wasn’t very bright and he didn’t know what some of the words meant. His rifle fire made us nervous, but gradually we realized that he didn’t mean us any harm.
He had a wide, round, smiling Cambodian face. Beneath the tattered uniform and the political indoctrination was an uneducated country boy.

I never learned his name, so I just called him
mit
, meaning comrade. He began to hang around the house, attracted to the sight of all the young women. He was never rude or suggestive to
them – the Khmer Rouge soldiers usually obeyed that part of their code.

Still, to be on the safe side, I instructed Huoy and the nurses to be careful. They were to do nothing to suggest that I had ever been a doctor. They weren’t to talk to him at all, unless
he said something to them first. When they cooked food they were to eat immediately, to avoid having to invite him to join. Instead, they were to set food aside for him. When I returned from
wherever I had gone, I took the food out to the
mit
and he and I ate together. If there was going to be any trouble for my house, I was going to be the lightning rod.

The strategy worked. If the
mit
had something to say to the household, he said it to me, as the spokesman. We never had problems. And on several occasions he brought us vegetables and
pork, in the spirit of ‘serving the people.’ The nurses prepared the food, and I made sure he got generous portions.

I tried to get closer and closer to the
mit.
I reasoned that if the Khmer Rouge sent us out into the country to live, he might become our supervisor. If that happened, perhaps he would
give us easy work assignments. I tailored the way I spoke with him – polite but friendly, in an accent that closely matched his. Though I never asked him personal questions, I guessed he was
from Svay Rieng Province, on the Vietnamese border. Many of the villages in Svay Rieng had been levelled in the fighting and bombing, just as my village had been. He had been swept into the war,
like me. The only difference was that he had been swept into the other side.

‘What about Angka’s plan for the nation?’ I asked him one evening as we settled down to eat. He took out his spoon, wiped it on his torn trousers and reached for the rice. Next
to his rifle, his spoon was his favourite possession. It was US-military issue, made of stainless steel that would last forever without rusting. Khmer Rouge soldiers, who never used forks or knives
for eating, always valued the US spoons highly, which was strange considering how much they hated the United States.

‘There were too many people in the city,’ the
mit
said with his mouth full. ‘Maybe Angka will have to push them to work as farmers. Angka has a new doctrine, for
building a new society.’

He wasn’t telling me anything I hadn’t heard before. I decided to prod him gently.

‘Who
is
Angka, comrade brother?’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ said the
mit.
The question didn’t bother him. He didn’t seem to have thought of it before.

‘Did you see Angka during the years of fighting against the capitalists?’

‘No, I’ve never seen Angka. But I hear about Angka all the time.’ He piled more rice and pork on his spoon and put it in his mouth.

That was as much as I ever learned from him about the leadership of the Khmer Rouge.

A few days later the
mit
came around and saw us sitting underneath the house in the shade. Two more of my nurses had found their families. In preparing to leave, they had spread the
medicine from the clinic on top of the oxcart and were helping themselves to their share.

‘So much medicine, eh?’ said the
mit. ‘
What sickness can you use it for?’

The nurses told him the medicines could treat many kinds of illness. I was sitting nearby, pretending I knew nothing about the matter. The
mit
picked up some glass ampules with clear
liquids inside – for vitamin injections, as I could tell at a glance – and asked me what they were for. With a vague wave of my hand I answered that the medicines on the oxcart could
treat any disease he could think of.

He sat down next to me. ‘Do you have any serum for transfusions?’ he asked. Serum was the general term for liquids to be injected intravenously into patients, everything from glucose
and saline solutions to vitamins to blood products. A picture flashed through my mind of liquids travelling down IV tubes into the arms of unconscious patients. In the hospitals I had hooked up IV
tubes countless times.

‘We have all kinds of medicines here,’ I said, as carelessly as I could.

‘Can I have some?’ the
mit
said. ‘Angka doesn’t have any. When we give transfusions we have to use coconut juice.’

I tried to ignore what he said about coconut juice. I told him evenly, ‘Sure, you can have serum. I’ve got a lot of it. But I didn’t bring it here. If you come to my house in
Phnom Penh I will give you as much as you want. If you have some way to get back to town I’ll give you any kind of medicine you need. No problem at all.’

A thoughtful expression crossed the
mit’s
face. He asked me if I were really serious. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Friends of mine gave me lots of medicine. Plenty of it. We
kept it at home for our family use. If I had a way to get back to Phnom Penh I’d give you as much as you want.’

The
mit
said he would find out about the matter and walked off. I wondered if he actually had a way to get back to Phnom Penh. It was worth trying, anyway.

Then my mind turned to thinking about coconut juice. Flowing into human veins? Coconut juice! Like something monkeys would use if they were playing at being doctors!

Then, as I thought about it more, I realized that coconut juice might work under certain emergency conditions.

When a green coconut is still growing on its tree, and a boy shinnies up the trunk and knocks it down, and then cuts off the end of its husk with a machete, he finds a watery liquid inside, a
bit sweet, almost clear. This is coconut juice (as opposed to coconut milk, which comes from grinding and then straining the nut’s white flesh). Rural Cambodians drink the juice all the time.
It’s a wholesome natural product and perfectly clean, except for the germs that come from the machete. If the juice were sweet and sterile there was no real reason why it couldn’t be
used as a battlefield substitute for glucose solution, to give energy to a patient too weak to feed himself. But – and it was a big ‘but’ – I couldn’t imagine the
Khmer Rouge sterilizing their machetes. Drinking contaminated juice is not necessarily harmful, because the stomach can cope with many kinds of bacteria. Injecting contaminated juice into the
bloodstream is another matter – it could easily be lethal to a patient who was already weakened.

And that wasn’t all. The sugar content of the juice varies from one coconut to another. I knew from childhood that coconuts two months old aren’t ripe, that coconuts five months old
are generally sweet and that at seven months the juice begins to sour, with white strands from the coconut flesh coagulating in it. Would Khmer Rouge medics test the juice before pouring it into
the IV bags? Probably not. From what I’d seen, and from the way they’d been looking for doctors to kill in the hospital, they didn’t have much respect for standard medical
practices. If they wanted Western-style transfusion serum now, it was because they envied it, just as they envied American-made spoons. Not to mention because their wounded soldiers were dying from
coconut juice transfusions.