Survival in the Killing Fields (48 page)

‘Sorry, I can’t go,’ I told my friend.

I put my palms together and
sompeah
ed Huoy, but she shook her head. Then I grabbed her and tickled her until she finally said yes.

‘The boss has given permission now,’ I said. ‘We can go.’

The truth was that Huoy was the boss. I liked it that way. She modified my quick temper, my stubbornness, my tendency to joke too much. She brought out my patience, my quiet side. I was her boss
too. Each served the other. I kept her alive by providing the food and shelter and love she needed. She had saved my life when I was sick. She kept me from doing rash things, like killing Pen Tip.
She was my reason for living.

When I returned from my third time in prison, Pen Tip pretended to ignore me. It didn’t matter. I knew and he knew that there was unfinished business between us. I let
him worry about it. I didn’t worry. Until the right day came, I was content to wait.

As far as I was concerned, I had gained the upper hand. I was the man prison couldn’t kill. I was the ghost who kept reappearing. And Pen Tip’s attempt to dominate me by putting me
in a low-class job had backfired. It was low-class, without a doubt, but it was the best job in the village.

The fertilizer crew was outside Pen Tip’s jurisdiction. He didn’t supervise us. Nobody really did. Few people went near the fertilizer shed because of the smell. Occasionally Uncle
Phan, the village chief, came by on an inspection tour, but he was easy to deal with. Uncle Phan told me to put salt in the fertilizer. He thought plants need salt, the way people do. I went off to
the common kitchen, shaking my head, and requisitioned salt. From what I could remember from biology courses, plants need nitrogen, phosphates and other nutrients, but they do not need salt, which
is harmful to them. I put the salt aside for my own use, and the next time I saw Uncle Phan I said solemly, ‘I have tasted the fertilizer. The salt level is exactly right. Would you like to
taste some too?’ He turned pale, like a man who was about to be sick. And that kept him away from the fertilizer shed for a while.

My colleague on the fertilizer crew was an old guy with no side teeth, named Sangam. Once a day, Sangam and I strolled leisurely to a public toilet with our tools. There were several toilets
scattered around the village. They had half-height thatch walls, meaning that someone who went inside and squatted still had his head and shoulders visible to passersby. Not much privacy at all.
The users had to place their feet on two wooden slats, and carefully – one slip could mean a fall into the retaining pit, a fifty-five-gallon steel drum cut in half. Needless to say, the
toilets were unpopular among the residents of the village, who preferred to sneak off into the bushes when no one was watching.

Sangam and I took turns emptying the steel drums with a pail attached to a very, very, very long wooden handle. We dumped the contents into another half of a fifty-five-gallon drum and carried
it between us on the longest pole we could find. At the fertilizer shed, which was far out in the rice fields, we stirred other ingredients into the drum – mud from hillocks (which was
exceptionally fertile) and rice husks or leaves. We poured the mixture onto the ground. By the time it dried a day or two later, it had lost most of its odour and was ready to be spread. Every week
or so Sangam and I made deliveries to the common gardens in an oxcart.

The only disadvantages to the job were the smell, which was awful, and the danger to health. I was extremely careful not to get cuts. I bathed twice a day and washed thoroughly with kapok soap
and real soap that I got from the common kitchen. I never got internal infections, but the red rash spread back over my feet and ankles.

The advantage of the job was that Sangam and I were left alone. It was nothing at all like working on the front lines. We didn’t pay any attention to the bells. We didn’t work hard.
I took at least one long nap each day. About once a week I stayed up all night to steal from the common gardens. When I came back from stealing I wrapped the vegetables carefully and stored them
under the pile of fertilizer, where nobody ever looked. Then I slept at the fertilizer shed until noon, while Sangam kept watch.

We used the job as a cover for getting food. If we wanted to spend an afternoon collecting red ant eggs, or gathering wild plants, or fishing, we went through the fields collecting manure from
the oxen and water buffalo, until we were safely out of sight. If I wanted rice, I splashed smelly night soil on my sleeves, pretended to be tired and lay down on a long table in the common
kitchen. When Uncle Phan’s wife, who was the leader of the kitchen, tried to get me to leave, I pretended to stay asleep until she offered me a big enough bribe of rice.

Luck was running in our direction. A railroad worker living nearby had a sick child and asked my brother Hok for advice. Hok referred the case to me. I treated the child and got to know the
entire railroad crew. These were the men I had seen poling along on their flatcar ever since I had first come to Battambang. They were members of an elite class under the regime. They ate even
better than soldiers. Their food was sent to them in boxcars, more than they could eat. They also had their own vegetable garden, which Sangam and I supplied fertilizer to, secretly, as a
favour.

They invited us to secret feasts and served me dishes I hadn’t seen in years. I set food aside for Huoy, then ate so much I couldn’t move.

With the food from the railroad workers, and the food I collected on and off the job, plus the vegetables from our garden, Huoy and I ate better than ever before. For the first time since coming
to Battambang, we were actually healthy.

What a change! Our body weights were nearly normal. We were strong from all the exercise. We had our own private house to live in, just the two of us. We didn’t like the regime, but we had
learned how to get around the system, especially now that we were away from the front lines.

My only regret, when I look back on that period, was an argument I had with Huoy. She had taken some cooked food from its hiding place in the woodpile when a boy about eleven years old happened
to walk past and see it. The boy was smoking a cigarette. He gave Huoy a long, bold, suspicious glare. When he walked past me working in the garden he glared at me too.

The boy’s name was Yoeung, and he was Uncle Phan’s adopted son. He often went around the village, joined work crews just long enough to watch the workers closely, then wandered off
again to report what he saw. He was a
chhlop.

‘
Sweet,’ I said to Huoy after Yoeung had left, ‘did you listen to me? What was I talking about just last night? What did I tell you? To
keep the food hidden.
It
means our lives. So why didn’t you?’

Huoy said, ‘I know. I’m sorry. It was bad timing, that’s all. I took out the food, and the
chhlop
was right there. I didn’t mean to.’

Something in my mind snapped, like a twig that had been stepped on. My happiness vanished. I saw myself being tied up and dragged off to prison. I went into a cold rage.

‘Don’t talk to me for five days,’ I said. ‘If you say even a word, I won’t answer.’

Huoy was silent, her eyes downcast.

Uncle Phan summoned me to his house.

I walked there slowly, thinking the end had come. If I went to prison a fourth time, there was no way I could survive.

I lied to Uncle Phan. I lied better than I had ever lied in my life, by convincing myself that what I said was true. I swore to him that the food was given to me by the railroad workers (though
in fact I had stolen it from the common garden). It was my word against the
chhlop’s,
and Uncle Phan let me go with a warning. Perhaps he thought I had suffered enough. Or maybe his
conscience was bothering him. He did not know it, but many evenings I had seen him strolling back from the common garden with a bulge in his krama. I had seen the lantern light shine through the
cracks of his house when he and his wife cooked the stolen food and ate it. In Phum Ra, everyone was a thief. Even the village leader.

So this time Huoy and I got away with it. We were not punished for stealing the food. But when I got back to our house I gave her the silent treatment anyway. I was determined to be strong and
to show her the consequences of her action.

After two days of not saying a word to her, I was standing in the doorway of the house looking out at the garden. Huoy came to me and knelt at my feet. She looked up at me, with teardrops at the
corners of her eyes.

‘Sweet, are you still angry at me?’ she said. ‘I did wrong. I was careless. If you want to beat me for it, then beat me. Do as you wish. But once you are through, talk to me.
Please talk to me.’

I raised her up and put my arms around her. I hugged her. Her body was soft and warm. And once I had hugged her I knew I had done wrong. She was my wife. She would never harm me, and I knew
that. It was the one thing I was certain of in the world.

I took a deep breath.

‘Yes, I will talk to you,’ I said huskily. Then I had to go out in the garden to clear my thoughts.

I was upset and confused. My temper had got the best of me again. After all those years of learning to control it. Underneath the adult exterior I was the same boy who had thrown the starter
wrench into the radiator of the engine at my father’s sawmill and then kicked the dog.

I had been crazy to treat Huoy that way. Crazy and wrong.

Standing in the garden, I decided never to do anything to make Huoy unhappy again. If I had a single purpose in life, it was to comfort her, and to serve her just as she served me.

We made up, and our
bonheur
was restored. The last barrier between us had been removed, a barrier I had not known about until it was gone. We became even closer than before, like the
cupped halves of male and female fitting snugly in the symbol of
yin
and
yang.

This is not to say that life was perfect. We never forgot that we were living under a shadow. We always knew that somewhere nearby, the soldiers were marching some unfortunate person away and
that we were powerless to do anything about it. Someday, perhaps, it would be our turn. Huoy and I didn’t talk about the terror much, but it was always there, like a cold hand around our
hearts.

Yet even the terror had one beneficial effect: it had driven us closer. And except for the fear itself, life had never been so good. I didn’t miss the old times. I didn’t care about
being a doctor anymore, or being rich. I didn’t miss having a motorcycle, or even wearing shoes. We didn’t like the Khmer Rouge, but we accepted our circumstances under them. We were
close to the land. We were peasants, as generations of our ancestors had been. We were healthy. We had enough to eat. We had each other’s company. We had our own house. In the late afternoons
we sat by the back door and looked at the view: rice fields spreading out into the distance, dotted with hillocks. It was perfect. One hillock rose higher than the rest, crowned with a leaning
sdao
tree. Beyond the rice fields rose the mountain, with the temple on the plateau, a reminder of the religion we had not forgotten. The sun set behind the long, uneven ridge.

Over the months we watched the rice fields change from brown to green and from green to gold, and then there was joyous news:

Huoy was pregnant.

In our pillow talk at night Huoy often said she wanted babies. She wanted to be a mother badly, but she also thought it best to put it off until the Khmer Rouge had been
overthrown, so our children could grow up in a better world. Until my third time in prison I had agreed.

But after I came back from prison for the last time, life seemed too precious and fragile to wait any longer. I told her it was time to start a family and she agreed. With the food I provided
and the larger rations we got from the common kitchen during the rice harvest, Huoy became fertile toward the end of 1977.

We knew she was pregnant because of morning sickness. She had a bad case, vomiting both in the morning and the afternoon. Even rice made her nauseous. The only foods she could keep down were
sweet. I hunted for papayas and jackfruits. I made doctor’s visits in exchange for bananas and pieces of sugar cane. Finally we traded gold for a supply of palm tree sugar. She sprinkled the
sugar on food, and that helped keep it down. But she didn’t have much appetite.

Except to find food that agreed with her, there was nothing I could do about her morning sickness. We would just have to wait for it to pass. I took my medical instruments out of hiding –
a stethoscope, a blood-pressure cuff and a thermometer – and gave her an exam, using spoons as an improvised speculum. All her signs were good. Aside from the nausea, which caused a slight
weight loss, she was healthy. She was then twenty-seven years old.

Because she was strong and relatively young, she had a good chance of giving birth successfully, or, as we say in the Khmer language, ‘crossing the sea’. Most Cambodian women thought
of childbirth as something like a long and dangerous voyage, which is how the expression ‘crossing the sea’ came into being. Huoy wasn’t too worried about the act of giving birth
itself. After all, I was a doctor. She knew that I would take care of her. She was more concerned about the upbringing of the child after it was born.

Huoy told me many times that she was going to raise our child to be religious and well mannered and to respect its elders. If there were no schools she would educate the child herself. She
didn’t really care whether we had a boy or a girl, as long as the child was healthy. I hoped for a little girl – a small version of Huoy, to grow up and help heal the suffering of the
world.

By the third month Huoy’s belly began to show. From then on she wore sarongs instead of trousers, because it was easy to adjust the size of the waist. During the days she did light tasks
in the common garden. When she came home she chewed on a piece of sugar cane, for energy, and then watered our vegetables with a small watering can, careful not to strain herself. She was beginning
to get over her morning sickness, and she had that contented inner glow of a woman who is glad to be pregnant.