Survival in the Killing Fields (24 page)

Huoy, Ma and I left our little hut with few regrets. We carried a smaller number of possessions than before, in two big baskets suspended from my shoulderboard and the rest in bundles the women
balanced on their heads. My father left his jeep behind, the last vehicle of his fleet. We were all travelling lighter.

The trip was supposed to take half a day. We set out on foot through the extensive sandflats next to Tonle Batí. With the weight of the load on the shoulderboard, my feet sunk into the
sand. I took off my shoes, but the sand was hot on my soles. Huoy trudged on in her leather sandals, looking as urban and fashionable as a woman could under the circumstances. Her mother, plump and
unpretentious, wore rubber shower sandals, the most sensible of us all.

Soon the trail led out of the sandflats and into the forest, up and around and down and up again. Thousands of us walked on it in single file, heading generally northwest. We were not just from
Tonle Batí but from many villages around. In the early afternoon, long after we were supposed to arrive at the central collection point, we turned onto another trail leading south.
‘This is what the communists mean by “new direction,” ’ I thought. ‘Taking the long way around for no apparent reason.’

By evening we had reached a small valley with a railroad station. A crowd of other ‘new’ people was already there with bundles, bags and suitcases. Wood-burning steam locomotives
came chuffing along the track but kept on going without stopping. Behind the locomotives were old wooden boxcars full of passengers, who were standing in the boxcar doorways, peering out from the
slats along the sides, or sitting on the boxcar roofs. They didn’t wave to us and they didn’t look happy.

By now everybody knew that we weren’t going to be allowed to go back to our home villages. The Khmer Rouge had told us that just to get us to leave the places where we had been.

We waited by the railroad station for four days while trains went by, each one with a cargo of thousands of human beings, shipped like farm animals out of eastern Cambodia. It looked as though
the Khmer Rouge were evacuating the entire region.

There had been a mix-up with our shipment, however. We never did get on a train at that station. Instead, we were led on foot to another village nearby, and the next day a convoy of empty
Chinese-built military trucks drove in. Now the ‘new’ people nervously called out the name of the places they wanted to go. The soldiers said to shut up and get in the trucks. So we got
in feeling both afraid and stupid. It was amazing that we had believed even at first that Khmer Rouge would really let us return to our home villages. We had been naïve to think they might be
telling the truth, after the lies they had told us to get us to leave Phnom Penh.

Packed into the back of the trucks, we bounced down the rutted road and then onto National Route 3, heading north. It was the same kind of war-wrecked landscape we had seen elsewhere. Houses
flattened except for occasional walls. Coconut trees with their tops blown off. Mango trees blackened by fire. Lon Nol military bases with overturned trucks and jeeps, and tanks with metal treads
hanging loose and broken.

Our truck was in the middle of the convoy. As we neared Phnom Penh along the airport road a murmur of hope swelled and we could hear the yelling of enthusiasm from the other trucks. We entered
Phnom Penh at twilight and drove through the streets at top speed. There were no people and no lights anywhere; it was the same city of ghosts that it had been in April after the evacuation. As we
drove to the northern edge of Phnom Penh all hope died and then the trucks were speeding along north on National Route 5 in the countryside again. The road ran parallel to the Tonle Sap River,
visible from time to time as a flat, silvery surface in the gaps between the trees.

After a stop to camp overnight we got on again the next morning and reached the town of Pursat around noon. At Pursat, a provincial capital, National Route 5 and the railroad line came together,
then ran parallel for some distance to the northwest before separating again at another town, called Muong. Pursat was empty of regular inhabitants – nobody in the market, sliding metal doors
pulled shut across the storefronts – but a crowd of travellers like us filled the streets nearest the railroad station. Loudspeakers announced that Angka was giving away food, and the crowd
surged forward to get supplies. I stood in line and eventually got rice and salt and some dried fish.

By then it was late afternoon. A few blocks from the railroad station there was a pond with water lilies and other aquatic plants. My family chose a quiet spot on the far side of the pond, back
in a grove of banana trees, where there were no other people. Here we built our fires. Huoy cooked rice. Her mother was tired but did not complain. We were windburned from the long journey in the
open truck, and all of us were tired.

When Ma had eaten her fill she stood up, rewrapped her sarong around her waist and went off to the pond to get water. Huoy and I picked at our food. My father and mother and my two remaining
brothers, Pheng Huor and Hok, ate with their families close by.

‘Where’s my mother?’ Huoy asked after a few minutes had passed.

‘She’s probably talking to somebody. I’ll go look for her if you like.’ I stood up and walked through the trees to the pond. There was nobody along the shore of the pond
except for a few people on the far side. I squinted to see if I could make out a plump figure in a sarong.

Where was Ma?

Then I looked lower and my eyes caught a bit of bright colour on the bank. I walked closer and even before I was sure it was Ma’s rubber shower sandals my heart was beating fast.

I checked again, but there was nobody wading or swimming in the pond.

I shouted to Huoy that her mother had fallen into the water, and then I dove into it and began thrashing around to try to find her. The pond was cold and full of slippery plants and there were
leeches on my arms though I barely noticed them. My father heard and he waded into the water too, old and slow but doing his best. I dove farther out from the bank and then felt something soft
under the water lilies, and I pulled Ma out of the water and up on the bank. She wasn’t breathing. I lifted her up so her belly was on my shoulder and I jumped up and down. Water came out of
her mouth and some rice too, but she still wasn’t breathing. Her limbs were soft and pliable but she had no pulse. I tried artificial respiration with my mouth over hers, then thumped her
chest hard with my two fists together to start her heart, and then went back to artificial respiration.

I kept trying.

There was a ring of faces around me but it was no good.

‘Attention, comrades!’ said a voice echoing out of the loudspeakers by the station. ‘You will now board the train. Angka wants you to collect your belongings and get on
board!’

Ma was dead. Huoy was frantic. I was numb. If there was anything more to do, I didn’t know it. My brother Pheng Huor took over. He carried the limp body to a shed and put it up on two
boards. He built a fire underneath. It is a Cambodian folk belief that the spark of life continues as long as the body is soft, and the heat from a fire can bring it back. The part of me that had
been trained in Western medicine was not strong enough to object, and I waited there like the rest, hoping for a miraculous recovery.

Two soldiers with rifles were watching.

Pheng Huor added wood to the fire and built up a blaze and massaged Ma’s arms and legs. But Ma didn’t respond.

‘You have to leave. Time to leave now,’ the soldiers were saying behind us. ‘No crying. Angka does not allow it.’

We could either bury Ma in the Chinese tradition, or else cremate her according to the Cambodian Buddhist tradition. We could do it either way, but it didn’t seem possible that we had to
make the choice and that she was dead. I had my arms around Huoy, but Huoy was beyond consolation.

Nearby, in the banana grove, a large hole had already been dug for planting trees.

My brothers carried the body on planks and placed it next to the hole. Huoy smoothed her mother’s hair and began kissing and hugging her as if she were still alive. Huoy wouldn’t
release her mother until my father patted her gently on the back and told her to let go, and then Huoy began beating the ground with her fists and her feet and her elbows and knees.

We had no candles, so we set a couple of sticks from the fire in the ground. Huoy and I prayed out loud on our knees in front of her mother with the rest of my family behind.

‘Mother, you left me! You left me all alone!’ Huoy bawled. ‘Were you angry at me, Mother? Tell me how I can serve you. You can ask me for anything you want. Just wait for me in
paradise so I can be with you in the next life. Mother, oh Mother, I want to be with you. Please, please, take me with you!’ And Huoy fell sobbing with her head on her mother’s
breasts.

‘If she is dead it doesn’t matter anymore,’ the soldiers said crossly. ‘You must hurry.’

Weeping without restraint, we prayed with our palms together in the
sompeah,
and then placed our palms on the ground in front of us and rocked forward, touching our foreheads to the backs
of our hands. ‘And if you cannot wait for me in heaven,’ Huoy wailed, ‘come back into our family. I want you to be reborn as my daughter, so I can treat you well again.’

‘You have to go now,’ said the soldiers. ‘You will be punished if you miss the train.’

We put Ma in the ground and covered her with earth. We left the site and walked toward the railroad station, not believing that it had happened and that we were leaving her behind. It was
unreal. She had been with us around the cooking fire and then two minutes later she was gone. Nobody had seen her. She must have stepped into the pond to get water and then slipped on the steep
bank and drowned. But she was such a smart old lady that it couldn’t have happened to her by accident. Perhaps, I told myself, Ma had her reasons.

The train was at the station and the wooden boxcars were full. The last few passengers were climbing up to the roof, and some people helped push us up with our luggage and Ma’s too. Huoy
sat next to me and it was all I could do to keep her from jumping off the train and running back to her mother’s grave.

The locomotive let out a piercing whistle and began slowly pulling out of the station,
CHUFchufchufchuf CHUFchufchufchuf CHUFchufchufchuf
with the wheels making a rhythmic clicking on the
track. We drew out of Pursat. I sat with my arm around Huoy, protecting her from the wind, holding her together. Huoy had never outgrown the need for her mother’s love and advice. She had
depended on Ma, even more than she depended on me. Now I was all she had.

The train chuffed along in a straight line. The landscape was utterly flat, rice fields reaching right to the bluish hills rising out of the plains near the horizon. The earth was dry and bare,
the dykes war-damaged, the fields unplanted. Maybe that’s why they had sent us here, I thought, to grow rice in western Cambodia.

The late-afternoon light turned a rich yellow and then orange and then the sun set. A full moon rose behind us. There was no comforting Huoy.

The train took us beyond Muong and finally stopped at a station called Phnom Tippeday, at the base of a mountain rising out of the plains of Battambang Province. Huoy and I
walked away from the crowd to be alone. Next to the ruins of a rice mill destroyed in the war, we found a pile of rice hulls, and there we spread our white plastic mat. We improvised an altar with
bowls of rice and water and with candles given to us by kindly strangers on the train.

We lit the candles, kneeled and prayed to Ma’s soul.

We Cambodians believe in
kama,
or karma – a religious concept meaning something like destiny, or fortune. A person’s
kama
depends on what he has done
in this life and in previous lives. If he has done bad deeds he will suffer, sooner or later, in this life or the next. Similarly, if he has done good deeds he will have better fortune, sooner or
later, in this life or the next. The cycle of births and rebirths goes on and on, and souls carry their
kama
forward with them.

Ma’s
kama
was excellent. She had always been kind. She had made much merit for herself through religious devotion. Her next life would be better. We missed her and we wanted to be
with her again, but we weren’t worried about her soul.

It was our own lives, Huoy’s and mine, that we were more worried about. We couldn’t help wondering: was there something in our past existence, some terrible deeds we had committed,
that caused us to be punished by this regime? Plenty of Cambodians thought so, but they tended to be people who belonged to rather mystical and superstitious sects of Buddhism. They believed that
old prophecies were coming true and that Cambodia was being punished for sins committed long ago. They submitted to the Khmer Rouge sadly but without objection, as if surrendering to their fates. I
didn’t agree. To me, whether we had good
kama
or bad
kama,
it was important to fight the Khmer Rouge. If we couldn’t fight them openly and physically then we would fight
on the inside, on the battlefields of our minds. As Huoy and I walked along the railroad track the next morning, two doctor acquaintances of mine joined us. We began a conversation.

‘Yes, we are religious,’ one of the doctors, an ophthalmologist, was saying, ‘but we are university-educated too. Our minds have the power to observe and draw conclusions. It
is easy to blame it all on
kama,
but the fact is that real world events made this new regime. When he was in power, Sihanouk kept us on a neutral path, but after him we went from one extreme
to the other. First we went to a corrupt rightist like Lon Nol, and now we have gone to crazy leftists. If we are being punished for anything, it is that we have abandoned the middle
way.’

‘I agree with you,’ said Huoy. ‘We are educated and we must always use our minds. But in all the history I have read, about Europe and about Asia, I have never heard of a
regime like this one. The last place we lived in, they said our projects were finished, but the canal we were working on was barely begun. Then they told us we could leave to return to our
villages, but instead they sent us here. They are always lying. When was there ever a regime like this before?’