When the War Was Over (43 page)

She continues in Khmer language and script:

Now Bophana was living the privileged life of the “old people” and wife of a cadre. She had food, enough clothes to require laundering, and a family home. She worked hard but not the punishing schedule she had before when she was required to rise before dawn to water the vegetable plots of the cooperative “five times in the morning,” and later, after completing her normal chores, returning to water them “five times in the evening.”

The old people continued to be suspicious. “My friends say many people are jealous of me,” she confided to Deth in a later letter. “They've been in the revolution for five years and no one has a husband as high as Deth—how can he rise so high?”

Deth's star rose higher. Shortly after Bophana wrote her second letter in early 1976, Deth was transferred with his office to Phnom Penh. But before he moved he went to Baray to see Bophana. When he left to rejoin his staff, Bophana was pregnant. Perhaps now they could raise their own child and live as a family. Angka had decreed that the population should more than double so that more workers could build the economy.

But Deth's dreams were dashed as soon as he was moved to Phnom Penh. It was utterly changed from the capital where he had studied as a monk just two years earlier. Apartment blocks and large houses had been made into
dormitories where men and women lived separately. These barracks were next to the cadre's place of work. There were generally canteens inside the dormitories where all meals were taken. There was no accommodation for family life, at least not for Deth and cadre like him.

Deth's life took on the pattern of total confinement of the other workers in the city. He moved into a dormitory room with other men. They rose at dawn, ate, and walked to the office. They returned to the dormitory for all their meals and retired to their beds at night. There was nothing else to fill their hours other than cultivating the vegetable gardens or rice fields now spread out in and around the city. The hard all-male solitude of the war continued in this cloistered life. The men were promised family leaves but not families for some time. There was no room for Bophana.

Worse, there were reasons for Deth to begin to fear for his own safety, not just his dreams of a reunion with Bophana. Koy Thuon had other kinds of problems with women. He had dallied with the beauties of the revolutionary dance troupe. After a liaison with one woman, he had her husband—a cadre—killed to prevent him from reporting the transgression. But word leaked out and Thuon was placed under house arrest in early 1976. Then, as economic problems mounted and were blamed on “infiltration” of the party by “petty bourgeois” elements, Thuon's affair became political treason. He was transferred from house arrest to Tuol Sleng as the party unleashed a class war around the country. And he was blamed since agricultural production, cottage industries, industrial revival, and economic coordination were falling behind schedule. Moreover, Thuon was an easy target, since he no longer headed a zone and hence had no control over troops stationed in a zone.

All this meant trouble for Thuon's underlings, including Deth. He had risen under Koy Thuon's system of patronage. And he had hidden his background from the party. Angka did not know of his education or his marriage to Bophana. Before 1976, when the party was fighting the war and overseeing the evacuation and settlement of the cooperatives, there had been little time for examining the “class composition” of members or examining their ties to members of the defeated regime. There were now directives to investigate party and army members, particularly those of the old Northern Zone who could be linked to Koy Thuon.

Shortly after he arrived in Phnom Penh, Deth wrote his wife a letter filled with foreboding. He had received news that Bophana was ill. He was beginning to feel the noose tighten around him, to wonder what the revolution held in store for his wife and the country. He wrote:

Deth's long schooling in Buddhism was coloring his impressions of the revolution. Buddha preached that life was a series of cycles of suffering. Their life in this cycle was predetermined. Like other Cambodians, Deth searched his Buddhist, Cambodian culture for examples to help him cope with the spiraling horrors of the Khmer Rouge revolution. In her next letter Bophana began the practice of calling herself Sita and signing herself Sita Deth, the Sita of Deth.

Bophana became more vulnerable as agricultural cooperatives failed to produce. The December 1975 harvest had disappointed the Center. The party leaders decided the solution was the removal of bad cadre responsible for the problems, and, to accelerate the revolution, work units were ordered enlarged, family life minimized if not abolished. Everyone ate in canteens, and Bophana no longer cooked for Deth's grandmother or laundered shirts for his family. She toiled far away from their home in a work brigade and lost the protection they and Deth offered. When the new government was announced, along with the new constitution and the retirement of Sihanouk, Bophana was under constant surveillance by the ever-suspicious cooperative. The old people confidently waited for the ax to fall.

In a long, sad letter Bophana wrote calling herself Sita, she admitted the problems she had at the cooperative. By using the name Sita she implies that she will bear and endure whatever tests she must as his wife, just as had Sita in the
Ramayana.

“Dear Darling,” she began, and asked after him, worried about his illness. “My husband, do not think about Sita too much even if Sita is very ill. Your illness brings Sita more suffering. One day becomes another. Sita has cried many thousands of tears. Every day Sita's suffering increases. . . .” She worries when told that his pistol has been taken, a sign that he is in trouble. Then she writes in a rambling fashion that she is the object of dangerous gossip.

She writes as if she is close to her breaking point and pleads with Deth to rescue her:

She mentions her possible death for the first time and promises revenge. “If Sita dies please do not forget to dress me in my evening gown so I can succeed in avenging in hell. When I am dead and I am a ghost my desire for revenge will burn in Sita's chest and Sita will win total revenge.” She signed herself “Sita Deth.”

Bophana buried her anger and tried to keep up with the stepped-up work schedule at her cooperative, to avoid attention and trouble. She was sent off with a work brigade to build irrigation canals in early 1976. The party wanted some 1.5 million hectares of new fields irrigated by dams, canals, and dikes the people were to build with few tools and no technical experts guiding them. Most of the construction was done in the winter dry season, between the harvest season and the early planting season. Bophana became one of the stooped antlike figures dotting the landscape that dry season, one of the women picking up stones and carrying them in baskets to the dam site or shoveling earth and balancing baskets of dirt across her shoulders.

But Bophana was fragile and pregnant. She collapsed at the irrigation site and was taken home to rest. After a few days she was released and returned to work. But food was growing scarce. And Bophana was not the only new
person to fall ill from fatigue, hunger, and despair. After hearing Prince Sihanouk announce his retirement over the radio, many people gave up hope and risked their lives to try to leave the country. A few new people from Bophana's cooperative succeeded in their escapes in May. The cooperative chief blamed her, and for the first time she seriously contemplated suicide. She changed her mind.

She became sick again and was taken to a regional health clinic. It was staffed by ill-trained cadre the Khmer Rouge appointed to run their revolutionary medical system. They mistrusted the properly trained doctors and nurses from the old society and had murdered most of those who had identified themselves. The Khmer Rouge selected their medical staff by political rather than medical standards, choosing children of party members (such as the daughters of Ieng Sary), children of the base people, or revolutionary youth for the rudimentary training in what the Khmer Rouge considered essential medical practice. They claimed to use herbal medicines, but their understanding of that science was generally based on superstition or folklore. Khmer Rouge practitioners of so-called modern medicine were generally quacks who often did more harm than good.

When she arrived at the clinic, Bophana was given injections in both her hips for her illness. Her hips ballooned and became inflamed. And she aborted. She was released from the clinic and returned to East Baray to recover and wait for Deth.

She wrote Deth another letter, telling him about the treatment in the clinic, her fever, how her hips nearly became abscessed, and that she had had to begin work two days after her return from the clinic. “I started working again but I have no energy. I am exhausted. The medicine makes my heart beat faster and my chest burns. Perhaps my insides are bad. My darling, could you send some drugs for your wife such as tetracycline and one kilo of sugar or wait for the day that the work no longer needs me.”

Deth must have felt desperate when he read Bophana's prediction that she would die, that “the work no longer needs me.” He wrote her a letter, marking the envelope “emergency,” and sent it by special carrier asking her to persuade her cooperative chief to allow her to join him in Phnom Penh. It was a foolish move and it backfired. Not only did the chief refuse Bophana's request, he inaugurated a secret investigation of her. The local security police were called in.

Worried, Deth left Phnom Penh, managing to find officials who would write out the required travel slips, and he arrived in Baray in July to see Bophana. He lobbied the chief to allow him to take Bophana back, but he
came without permission slips for her travel and the request was denied. Deth told Bophana to stop taking the medicine given her by the Khmer Rouge “doctors” and said he would come back with the proper travel documents and bring her to the city. Somehow he did find the cadre with authority to issue such documents and persuaded him to write up permission for Bophana to join him.

But before Deth could leave Phnom Penh and bring back Bophana the revolution caught up with him. The national security police had orders to find evidence against Deth's boss—Koy Thuon—that would prove that the ministry of commerce was filled with saboteurs. As economic difficulties mounted, Pol Pot ordered a general purge, or killing of the “petty bourgois intellectuals” whom he blamed for the problems. Koy Thuon was a natural target because he was already under a cloud and because many of his subordinates, whom he had brought to Phnom Penh, had been teachers and fit the negative stereotype. When Koy Thuon was carried off to be tortured and executed at Tuol Sleng, so were many of his associates. Everyone who had come from the North Zone to Phnom Penh was suddenly suspected of being part of his “poisonous network.”

The security police were told to search the dormitory rooms where Deth lived. One of Deth's roommates was a chief suspect in the Koy Thuon investigation. But the police found little to compromise that man. They were about to leave the dormitory when one of the policemen found a more promising cache in the sleeping area of Deth. Among Deth's possessions were five poignant love letters and three photographs of Bophana. There was also the permission slip allowing Deth to travel north and bring Bophana to Phnom Penh.

Deth was arrested under suspicion as a spy for Koy Thuon. The national security police ordered the arrest of Bophana as well. The local cooperative leaders gladly handed her over to the national police. She was brought to Phnom Penh and booked into Tuol Sleng, the central incarceration center, on October 10, 1976. Once the security chief read the captured letters and figured out Bophana's background, she, and not her husband Deth, became the chief suspect. She was accused of working for the CIA, as was Koy Thuon. Deth was accused of acting as Bophana's dupe. He was executed and his file has disappeared.