Survival in the Killing Fields (31 page)

The Khmer Rouge wanted a complete change of society, from top to bottom. Gone was everything that had governed our lives in the old times. Lon Nol was gone, airlifted to America before the fall;
Sihanouk was gone, his fate a mystery. The monks were gone. (‘The monks are bloodsucking imperialists. If any worker secretly takes rice to the monks, we shall set him to planting cabbages.
If the cabbages are not full-grown in three days, he will dig his own grave.’) The families were broken up, the children and the elderly sent off to live in their own groups. There were no
more cities. No more markets, stores, restaurants or cafes. No privately owned buses, cars or bicycles. No schools. No books or magazines. No money. No clocks. No holidays and religious festivals.
Just the sun that rose and set, the stars at night and the rain that fell from the sky. And work. Everything was work, in the empty, primitive countryside.

In place of the old regime there was a new government whose upper layers could only be guessed at. Angka – whoever that was – was at the top. Logically, Angka had to be a person or
group of people, but many found it easier to believe that Angka was an all-powerful entity, something like a god. ‘Angka has eyes like a pineapple,’ Chev told us, repeating a common
saying of the regime. ‘It sees everywhere. So you must behave correctly.’ The mystery of Angka’s identity added to its power, because ‘Angka’ also meant the regime at
all levels, from the topmost leader down to the lowest spy. In fact, Chev sometimes told us that we were Angka too.

Below the topmost officials was (I guessed) a layer of ‘zone’ leaders, with the ‘zones’ roughly corresponding to the old provinces. What used to be Battambang Province
was now a part of the Northwest Zone. The identity of our zone leader was unknown to me, but his top local official was a man who sped around the dirt roads on inspection tours, always sitting in
the passenger seat of a jeep. I had seen this man several times, riding with his right arm sticking out the window and his hand resting on the roof, though I had never been close enough to see his
face. Below him in the civil administration was Comrade Ik, the old man on horseback, who had addressed us in Phum Chhleav. Below Comrade Ik were the village leaders. The leader of Phum Phnom, and
overseer of Youen’s hamlet, was Chev; but Chev also had a parallel role as leader of this cooperative on the front lines. Other village leaders and a few military leaders reported to him on
the front lines, and below them were section leaders, who usually were not Khmer Rouge but trusted ‘old’ people. Beneath the section leaders were group leaders, who usually were
‘new’ people directing the work of about ten other ‘new’ people like me.

Sometimes, as I stood by the canal, hoe in hand, I had to admit: Angka, the Organization, had indeed reorganized the countryside. Before the takeover, nobody could have thought that the land
would look as it did now, with thousands of people marching to work in orderly single-file lines. And Angka did more than set the tasks. It had provided a complete philosophy, parts of which were
obviously true (the corruption under Lon Nol had indeed been terrible), and other parts of which appealed to patriotism (we needed to rebuild the country after the civil war). With loudspeakers
attached to poles near the common kitchens, our new leaders blared a new music that carried far across the rice fields. And when I listened to that marching music, with its strong and vigorous
beat, and when I saw the huge red flags flapping in the breeze and didn’t look too closely at the lines of people, I found myself believing, for at least a few moments at a time, that the
Khmer Rouge had done it. They had succeeded in remaking the country to their bold plan. They had erased the individual, except as a unit in a group. They had given us a new religion to devote
ourselves to, and that religion was Angka.

But when I looked more closely, the illusion fell apart. The people working in the canal were tired and malnourished and their clothes were torn. Just like me. Their hoes rose and fell slowly,
without energy, and their faces expressed a terrible futility and sorrow.

That’s all it took, a moment’s glance, to know that the country had turned in the wrong direction.

The Khmer Rouge pushed their own beliefs to extremes, and in doing so turned them into lies. They wanted us to work – then they worked us so hard that we produced less and less, because we
were weak. They wanted to purify the country of everything that was not Khmer. Buddha was an outsider, from India, so they destroyed the Buddhist temples. The cities were too tainted with Western
imperialist ways, so they made us leave. They wanted to eliminate everything that was not Cambodian. But they were hypocrites. Except for their dark skins, everything about the Khmer Rouge was
alien, from China. They borrowed their ideology from Mao Tse-tung, like the concept of the great leap forward. Sending the intellectuals to the countryside to learn from the peasants was an idea of
the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Their AK-47s and their olive green caps and their trucks were Chinese. Even the music they played from the loudspeakers was Chinese, with Khmer words.

The Khmer Rouge’s greatest strength was propaganda. They knew that a small lie can be caught and that a big lie is easier to get away with. Their system was so different from anything we
had known before, and so complete, that we gave in without really knowing how to resist. Even if we had been allowed to speak out publicly, which we weren’t – and if we did, they tied
us up and marched us away – there was something inadequate about trying to counter their words with arguments of our own. It just didn’t help. For example, I could say to Huoy, in a
whisper, that any government that oppressed as many of its people as the Khmer Rouge would eventually weaken itself. I could say that to her, and believe it, and she could agree with me, but it
wouldn’t do us any good. When the whispering was over the regime was still there and we were still digging with hoes and feeling tired and hungry and not even able to remember the last time
we felt any different. There was no way out of the situation. We were only left knowing in our bones that we were being abused.

There was a medical clinic on the front lines. The nurses there used dirty needles and didn’t care one way or another if their patients died. At mealtime during a visit there, I heard one
nurse calling out to another, ‘Have you fed the war slaves yet?’ It was a chance remark, but it stuck in my ears because it explained the Khmer Rouge better than anything else. All the
talk about being comrades in a classless society, building the nation with our bare hands and struggling to achieve independence-sovereignty didn’t mean anything. The Khmer Rouge had beaten
us in the civil war. We were their war slaves. That was all there was to it. They were taking revenge. And on the front lines, day and night, they ran our lives with bells.

They rang the first bell at four o’clock in the morning.

Still exhausted from the day before, Huoy and I rose out of our hempen hammock, got to our feet, rubbed our eyes, groped for the water jar and washed our faces.

Around us other couples, seen as silhouettes moving against the starry sky, did the same, or else tried to steal another few minutes of sleep. But there was no escaping the bell. It was a
penetrating, relentless noise. A command to be obeyed.

After the bell fell silent, a hiss came out of the loudspeakers by the common kitchen, followed by the music of the national anthem. A chorus of men’s, women’s and children’s
voices sang:

Another day on the front lines had begun.

At four thirty they rang the bell again. Slow, separate beats to start with, then gradually faster until the notes ran together:
DING . . . DING . . . DING . . . ding, ding, ding, ding, ding
. . . ding-dingding-dingdingdingdingding!!!
Then a pause, and they rang it again. Another pause, and they rang it a third time:
DING . . . DING . . . DING . . . ding, ding, ding, ding . . .
ding-ding-ding-ding-dingdingdingdingding!

Always, they rang the bell in series of three. Before the revolution the monks had beat their drums in the same pattern, dull, single booms at first and then faster and faster into a drum roll,
then a pause and then starting over again, in threes. With that signal, the monks had called the faithful to prayer. Unconsciously, perhaps, the cadre banging his stick against the metal car wheel
hanging near the common kitchen was replaying a rhythm of his youth. Or perhaps, in the new ‘religion’ of Angka, work had come to mean something like prayer, as a way of purifying
ourselves and showing our devotion.

By the second series of bells, Huoy and I had joined our separate groups, ten people in each. Different groups joined together, depending on their work sites, and set off across the landscape in
long, single-file lines.

I carried a hoe on my right shoulder. From the right side of my belt hung my hatchet; from the left side hung a small metal US-made field cooking pot, curved to fit against my hip, with a
tightly fitting lid on top and boiled water inside. From a cord around my neck hung my spoon. Hidden in tiny pockets inside my waistband were a Swiss watch, several pieces of gold and a worn Zippo
lighter with an extra supply of flints. I was barefoot. My long-sleeved shirt was ripped and unbuttoned. I wore a brimmed palm-leaf hat to protect against the sun, but the sun hadn’t risen
yet. There was a greyish light above the eastern horizon, just enough to see by.

When we reached the canal my group split off and went to its site, marked with wooden stakes. The canal was a dry trench deeper than I was tall and twice as far across, with sloping sides. Along
the top but set back from it were dykes made from the clay we had dug, giving the canal a height of several feet above the surrounding land, to contain floodwaters. I climbed down to the bottom of
the canal, sighed and swung my hoe. I didn’t swing it hard; my muscles were stiff. I swung again. The trick was to warm up gradually, then work at a steady pace without straining.

I swung again, putting fractionally more into it. With the edge of the hoe, I scooped the loose earth into a mud basket; the others picked it up and handed it in relays to the top of the
canal.

In the grey light the canals stretched in a straight line as far as the eye could see. Elsewhere, crews dug other canals to meet at right angles with ours, plus smaller ditches or minicanals to
tie the entire network together. The canals, the Khmer Rouge assured us, would collect the runoff water in the rainy season and hold it until the dry season, when the water would be used to
irrigate the fields. Yes, I thought bitterly, the Khmer Rouge had great faith in their canals. ‘We will grow three rice crops a year!’ an enthusiastic cadre told us at a political
meeting. ‘Nobody will ever go hungry again! And if the Americans attack us again we will dig a canal across the Pacific Ocean and invade their territory!’

The band of orange above the horizon thickened and turned to pink as the sun rose. Next to me in the bottom of the canal a skinny man gave off deep, unconscious sighs as he worked. I knew what
he was thinking. No days off, no gaiety, no incentive to work hard except to stay alive. Or half alive, which is what we were.

Don’t think about it, I told myself. Just swing the hoe and let it fall. Don’t wear yourself out but get the job done. Look at that wooden stake. When we dig that far we will finish
and they will send us somewhere else. But where will they send us? To flat ground or to a hillock? Flat ground is easier to dig, but hillocks are better. So much life in the hillocks’ soil.
Last week that snake slithering into its hole and all of us tearing the hillock apart and finally killing it with our hoes. How Huoy smiled when I brought my share to her. First time she’s
smiled that I can remember.

Chop. Chop. In either direction, the sound of hoes chopping into clay. Another hot, cloudless day. Working steadily, the sweat running down from my armpits.

When the sun shone across one wall of the canal and into the edge of the bottom, a shout rang out: ‘Comrades, take a break!’ Everyone dropped tools and climbed out of the canal. Huoy
waited for me in the shade of a
sdao
tree nearby. I reached above her and snapped off a branch, then stripped off the leaves, putting them in my pockets, before sitting down. We shared water
from my canteen. She sat with her back against the tree trunk. I sat with my back against her shins, rubbing the red, itchy sores that were spreading up my ankles and onto my legs.

Breaks were for smoking. The common kitchen distributed locally grown tobacco to the group leaders, who distributed it to workers like us. I took a wad of tobacco from my pocket and rolled a
cigarette with a piece of banana leaf, lighting it with the Zippo. I took a few puffs without inhaling, then let it die out and put the rest in my pocket. There. Anybody watching would see I had
smoked, and I would continue getting the ration. And I would trade most of my tobacco ration for food, because there were some tobacco addicts on the front lines who would rather smoke than
eat.

There were also a few marijuana smokers. Next to us in the shade of a tree, an old man sucked noisily on a bamboo water pipe and held the aromatic smoke in his lungs as long as he could before
exhaling contentedly. Marijuana smoking was an age-old tradition followed by a small percentage of rural men, and by a few others who had started smoking in Lon Nol’s army. The smokers
themselves didn’t attach any particular meaning to the drug and neither did the Khmer Rouge, who didn’t bother outlawing it. When the marijuana smokers got up from their breaks they
seemed to work even harder than before. I tried smoking it once, hoping it would do the same for me, but instead I felt an almost overpowering urge to lie down and sleep, so I never smoked it
again.