Survival in the Killing Fields (35 page)

Huoy brought me to the hammock, but I didn’t want to sit in it because I wasn’t clean. Someone brought a pallet of split bamboo and I lay down on that. The neighbours had gathered
around, everyone silent except for Huoy, who was crying.

They boiled water, and Huoy and the other women used their kramas like washcloths to clean me. By then most of them were crying, because they knew what happened when people disappeared and there
could be no more pretending. What had happened to me could happen to them. They brought gifts of medicine, a capsule of ampicillin from one, a capsule of tetracycline from another and from the rest
a couple of aspirin and some herbs. I opened the antibiotic capsules and sprinkled half of each directly on my wounds, saving the rest for later.

One of the older ladies who had brought herbal medicine finally said what had been on everyone’s mind.

‘Samnang,’ she said, ‘maybe you did something bad in a previous lifetime. Perhaps you are being punished for it today.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think my
kama
is not so good.’

Chev gave me time off from work to recover from my injuries. I lay in the hammock, suspended from two trees on a hillock, resting and watching.

I tried not to think too much about my experiences in prison. The pregnant woman, the wolves, the burly man with the Montagut shirt – I tried to suppress them all from my memory. But the
bruises on my body, the infected cuts and the stump of my little finger were reminders of something that could not be ignored. I began to analyse what I knew of the Khmer Rouge system of justice.
Or rather, injustice.

I had not known that the prison existed until I was taken there. I had never heard of it. The reason was perfectly simple. Few who went there ever returned. Why they had let me off so easily I
did not know. Nor did I know why they had gone to the trouble of taking me there at all instead of simply taking me out to the woods and killing me, which is what the soldiers usually did with
their victims in the late afternoons. Why were some taken to prison and the rest to the woods?

Maybe, I thought, prison was the punishment for political crimes, and death in the woods was the punishment for breaking simpler rules, like loitering at the work site. But that couldn’t
be true. Why was gathering wild food a political crime instead of a minor infraction? Why was being married to a Lon Nol officer a political crime? More to the point, why was either of them any
kind of crime at all?

But that question had no answer.

Perhaps, I thought, there were two parallel systems of punishment. A prison system, part of a bureaucracy that needed to be fed to justify its existence. And another, informal system that gave
the cooperative leader freedom to hand out the punishments, though the effect on the prisoner was ultimately the same.

In either case, the prison or the woods, the key man was the cooperative leader, since everyone on the front lines took orders from him. In our cooperative the leader, Chev, didn’t do any
of the killing himself, or at least didn’t kill anyone that we saw with our own eyes. Nor did he allow his soldiers to kill anyone in public. That was another holdover from the Khmer Rouge
code of the old days, when the guerrillas were still trying to gain popular support: ‘Thou shalt behave with great meekness toward the workers and peasants, and the entire population,’
the code said. Now that the Khmer Rouge had won the war and their contempt for the ‘new’ people was so obvious, it was strange that they even pretended to stick to their rules. In
effect, the new rule was, ‘Do not kill anyone in plain sight.’

And in fact Chev
was
a killer himself. More than once, as I recovered from my wounds, I watched Chev accompany the soldiers to the afternoon arrests. He stood around pretending to inspect
the canals until the soldiers and prisoners were out of sight. Then he nonchalantly followed them with a hoe over his shoulder, stopping now and again with the pleased expression of a man who is
enjoying his afternoon stroll. There were never any gunshots later. Chev used his hoe to kill. The next day he was invariably in a cheerful mood, walking around energetically without his hoe. He
killed to feel good about himself. If he purged enough enemies, he satisfied his conscience. He had done his duty to Angka.

Why? Why did they kill so many? For the Khmer Rouge in general, from the lowest-ranking soldier to the burly interrogator who had chopped off my finger to the ever-smiling Chev, the act of
killing other human beings was routine. Just part of the job. Not even worth a second thought. However, there were differences in their backgrounds, and in their motivations. The low-ranking
soldiers, for example, were young and uneducated. Few of them had any independent sense of right and wrong. In the civil war they had been trained to kill Lon Nol forces. When they were ordered to
kill ‘new’ people on the front lines they obeyed automatically, without thinking much about the difference. For some of them, of course, and for the prison interrogators, there was an
element of
kum-monuss
in what they did. But the prison interrogators were older and higher-ranking than the soldiers, like the two-pen rank of the burly man who chopped off my finger.
Officers like that didn’t kill just to obey, or to get revenge. They enjoyed it. They were sadists: torturing others was the ultimate proof of their own power.

But for Chev and other front-lines leaders there was a more sophisticated reason for killing, and that was political necessity. When they talked about sacrificing everything for Angka, they
meant it. Whatever got in the way of Angka’s projects had to be eliminated, including people. To them, though, we weren’t quite people. We were lower forms of life, because we were
enemies. Killing us was like swatting flies, a way to get rid of undesirables. We were a disappointment to them because we never finished the projects on time, because we didn’t work hard for
twenty hours a day, because we were constantly wearing out and getting sick.

The worst thing was that the killings seemed so normal. Maybe not normal, but inevitable. The way things were. To us war slaves, the old way of life was gone and everything about it half
forgotten, as if it had never really existed in the first place. Buddhist monks, making their tranquil morning rounds, didn’t exist anymore. Three-generation families, where the grandparents
looked after the little children, didn’t exist anymore. Shopping for food in the markets and staying to gossip. Inviting friends over to eat and drink and talk in the evening. It was all
gone, and without that pattern we had nothing to hold on to. Demoralized, split apart, like atoms removed from their chemical compounds, we let the Khmer Rouge do what they wanted with us. We
didn’t fight back. In the fields we were two thousand men and women with hoes, and Angka was only two or three brainwashed teenagers with rifles. Yet we let the soldiers take us away. Why?
Because it was in our nature to obey leaders. Because we were weak and sick and starved. Because it was
kama.
We did not even know why, but we submitted to them.

There had been an evening, before I went to prison, when a few of us talked about rebellion. It was one of those rare evenings when we did not have to go back to work after the political
meeting. About a dozen of us from the old elite sat around a fire. We swore an oath of secrecy and talked about an armed uprising against the Khmer Rouge. Our leader was a ‘new’ person
named Thai, who had once been a Lon Nol soldier. Also there was Pen Tip, the tiny X-ray technician from Phnom Penh whose path often crossed mine. We talked about seizing weapons. We talked about
heading for the border of Thailand to join the freedom fighters, the Khmer Serei, who were supposed to live there. But that’s all it was, just talk. Gradually, as the evening wore on, we
stared for longer and longer periods into the flames, not saying anything. Resistance was hopeless and we knew it. The Khmer Rouge had already won. We looked into the fire and our thoughts were sad
and far away. Just like every evening, at every campfire on the front lines. Gazing into the flames and feeling tired and defeated.

But even though we were defeated, and even though we could feel ourselves slipping farther down into slavery, we didn’t lose hope. Or a lot of us didn’t, anyway. Take Huoy and me,
for example. I had been to prison, but I had survived. That was something to be grateful for. And while I was away in prison something very good had happened to Huoy: she had been transferred from
hauling mud baskets in the canal to preparing food in the common kitchen. The kitchen staff didn’t have to work in the evenings, or work very hard at all. Most important, they could always
get enough to eat. While I was recovering from prison Huoy brought me rice twice a day, hidden in the rolled-up waist of her sarong. It was real rice, a welcome change from watery gruel – the
same rice, she told me, that Chev and his soldiers ate at every meal, as much as they wanted.

Once again, like the time when I had dysentery, Huoy proved to be a perfect nurse. Besides bringing rice and preparing meals, she mended my clothes. To cheer me up, she sang to me in her clear,
soft voice. Without soap or antibiotics she couldn’t stop my infections, but she changed my bandages twice a day, and boiled them in water to sterilize them before hanging them up to dry.
Since leaving Phnom Penh I had seen a new side of Huoy, and it made me respect her more and more: whenever anything needed to be done, she taught herself how to do it, without any prompting. She
was good at everything she did. Except for losing her mother, which grieved her every day, she had adapted to the hardships of the new regime better than most people, and much better than me. Of
the two of us, I was supposed to be the strong one, but it wasn’t turning out that way. I was the one who was always getting in trouble or getting sick.

When I had recovered enough to walk without a cane I was sent back to work with a mobile crew of eight people, none of whom I had known before. On our first day we were summoned to the common
kitchen, where Chev addressed us. Huoy was only a few yards away, pouring rice into huge vats, signalling to me with a frown that I should keep my mouth shut. She didn’t have to worry about
that – I was far too afraid of Chev to say anything. But there was no way I could hide from him. He knew with a glance at my bandaged ankle, at the bandaged stump of my finger, what had
happened when he sent me to Angka Leu. I kept my face blank and my eyes averted. My usual expression.

Chev smiled and nodded at us pleasantly.

He said the cooperative needed to build a bridge. Because we had no lumber, our task would be to go to the old temple on top of the mountain, tear it apart and bring its lumber down.
‘I’m sure you agree that this is an excellent plan. Am I wrong or right?’

‘Right,’ everyone in the group said.

‘Exactly,’ said Chev. ‘It is better to destroy the temple, which is useless, than to have no bridge. We don’t need Buddha. What we need are bridges for the people’s
transportation. The gods cannot build bridges for us. We must take our destiny firmly in hand.’

My face registered agreement. But I thought, We don’t need Buddha at this point in history? Are you crazy? Now we need him most of all.

Chev was still smiling at us with his wide, full lips.

Motherfucker, I thought, did Buddha ever do anything bad to you? If you destroy Buddha’s temple, Buddha will get you back. Maybe not in this lifetime, maybe not even in your next lifetime.
But someday. And I hope it’s soon. Because I want to see you suffer. I want to see you die an awful death, like the prisoners at Chhleav.

Nobody moved.

He looked at each of us in turn. He peered closely at me. He was testing me, to see whether I had learned my lesson in prison.

Finally he dismissed us.

Our group walked without escort from the common kitchen to the road and from there to Phum Phnom. A path near the Khmer Rouge headquarters led into the forest to the base of the mountain
ridge.

We climbed up the switchbacks in the trail. As the land flattened at the edge of the plateau, we saw some concrete monks’ quarters on stilts, still intact. Farther on we passed the remains
of wooden quarters already torn down by scavengers like us. Above we heard the faint, tinkling sounds of wind chimes.

It was a clear day toward the end of the dry season. The landscape was bright with yellow flowers. Pigeons and brown-speckled turtle-doves flew from branch to branch in the nearly leafless
trees. Over the treetops on the lower slopes we could see the alluvial plain spread out far below. A steam train whistled in the distance. It came along the tracks, the miniature locomotive
belching a cloud of black smoke, the long line of cars moving through the curves like a snake. A train like that had brought us to Battambang, a long time ago.

We rested. It was an odd sensation not to have anyone supervising us, to sit down when we wanted. We listened to the train as it chuffed along, the clicking of its wheels and the hooting of its
steam whistle growing fainter and fainter. And then above us we heard the tinkling of wind chimes again.

We walked up to the wat. To the side of the wat and perhaps two thirds its height was the large
stupa,
or funeral monument, that had appeared as the smaller of two white dots when I was
ploughing in Phum Chhleav. Seen close it was a graceful example of its type, two square layers at the base, then a large bell shape with convex and concave circular bands, and finally a tapering
spire on top. Within the large stupa lay the ashes of some prominent person, perhaps the person who had given the money for the wat to be built.

The wat itself was ten or twenty years old, with walls of concrete and wooden beams, and planks supporting a roof with faded coloured tiles. The building was not so much ruined as purposely
destroyed, a sight that swelled my heart with grief. Outside, Buddha statues lay toppled over, their parts scattered. The grounds were grown up with weeds and vines and littered with scraps of
saffron cloth, the kind the monks had used for their robes, and also the kind tied around the trunks of holy
bodhi
trees.