When the War Was Over (6 page)

He went back inside to his desk. Standing there was a young soldier in black pajamas with a weatherbeaten face. He asked Komphot if he could direct him to the minister in charge. “I told him he was confused. There were no ministers. This was not a government building. It was a bank. He left immediately.”

This young Khmer Rouge, the first Komphot had ever met, seemed a simple, disoriented young man and little else. Komphot sat down and finished some paperwork undisturbed by the meeting. Around 10:00 that morning the country's Buddhist patriarch went on national radio calling for order: “The war is over, we are among brothers,” he said. “Stay quietly in your homes.”

Shortly thereafter a top general of the defeated Khmer Republic army forces also spoke on the radio. He ordered all fighting to cease because “negotiations are in progress.”

About noon, Komphot got up from his desk to keep a lunch engagement with his cousin In Nhel, who worked across the street at the national railway company as the director. By then Monivong Avenue had begun to resemble a parade route, at least in Komphot's eyes. Khmer Rouge soldiers were
walking up the avenue in small units. He waited for one group of the black-pajamaed soldiers to pass before crossing the road to meet his cousin at the railway company's canteen. They spoke of the war's end and wondered what role Sihanouk would play in the new government. Two hours later Komphot returned to the bank. Waiting for him was an important emissary from the Khmer Rouge.

“He was clearly an intellectual,” said Komphot. “He wanted to see the bank president, who had gone home. Then he told me he wanted to confiscate all the bank notes and valuables, gold and so on. I had to explain private banks did not keep gold, only notes. Then he said the Americans were planning to bomb Phnom Penh and he had orders to take away everything of value.”

This threat of an American attack did not bother Komphot. He didn't believe it and told the cadre he needn't worry. He knew the Americans, and they wouldn't do such a thing now that they had lost. “I talked to the cadre, calling him brother, making him familiar with me, like a friend. I'm always outgoing and I felt comfortable with him. I even joked that our vault was so strong not even bombs from a B-52 could destroy it. But the cadre asked me to find the president.”

Komphot got on the telephone and reached the president at his home. The president agreed to come back to the bank at once. But two other officials were needed to unlock the safe: the comptroller general and the cashier general. Komphot agreed to drive to their homes and bring them back to the bank. Along the way he saw what he considered predictable scenes. The Khmer Rouge were collecting all the weapons of the citizens; by war's end civilians had begun carrying pistols for protection. He saw piles of weapons in the street, but he failed to notice what was missing—any sense of celebration. He was wrapped up in his mission. When all were assembled at the bank, the three top officers opened the safe. Komphot had to supervise the counting of the notes, about $1 million in Khmer money. He made out a receipt, it was duly signed, and the keys to the safe were given up to the Khmer Rouge. It was now evening, nearly 7:00, and the cadre asked Komphot to put the money back in the safe.

Even though he had spent the better part of the afternoon counting notes in the quiet chambers of the bank, Komphot could feel the mood of the city change. He heard intermittent gunfire, repeated automatic rifle bursts from all directions. A clerk had whispered to him that the Khmer Rouge were ordering people to leave the city. But the radio had not broadcast an evacuation order. Komphot was confused, and now that his work was completed he felt nervous for the first time.

The Khmer Rouge cadre asked him and the other bank officers to stay and help sort out other papers. “I smiled and said, ‘No, thank you, I'd rather not stay.' They offered, then, to drive me home in one of their cars to make sure I passed through their roadblocks safely, but I declined. I said goodbye to the president, the comptroller general, and the cashier general. I didn't want to go home. I thought I would go straight to the Hotel le Phnom. I needed a drink.”

Komphot walked out into the hot night, and his head began to swim. Laid before him was a ravaged city, an anxious, empty city. It took Komphot some time to gain control of his emotions.
There were no people!
He stared at the litter on the streets, at the evidence of all he had not witnessed. There were no people!

Shortly after Komphot had returned from lunch to the shelter of the bank, the most heartbreaking scenes of the war had filled the city streets. The Khmer Rouge had begun evacuating Phnom Penh, and among the first people pulled out were the patients at the city's hospitals. The wounded and disabled walked or crawled; some were pushed in their beds, a relative holding an intravenous bag, pretending that might keep a loved one alive. A sobbing father carried his young daughter in a sling he fashioned from a bedsheet and tied around his neck. About 20,000 patients were thrown out that afternoon.

After clearing out the hospitals, the small units of Khmer Rouge soldiers Komphot had seen entering the city had fanned out to the different neighborhoods of Phnom Penh. Some stood on the corners directing traffic while others went door to door telling everyone to evacuate immediately. “The Americans will bomb Phnom Penh. Leave the city at once,” they said politely. “You'll return quickly. There is no need to take your belongings.”

Those who protested were persuaded to submit by warning shots fired into the air. Those who fought back were killed. Komphot had heard the sound of gunfire from some of those small battles. Now all he saw was the relics. Fires were burning on the horizon. Like everyone else in the city, Komphot had slept little during the last two weeks while the city was shelled during the final attack. Now his fatigue suddenly vanished as he tried to accept what he saw before his eyes—Phnom Penh without people. It was as if he had left the theater for a short intermission and returned to discover he had missed the climax. But this was his real life, his country.

He walked straight up Monivong Avenue to the hotel, his steps ringing loudly and his mind running wildly. He would find answers at the hotel, he told himself. It had been designated earlier in the week as an international
area, the neutral zone for foreigners. They could tell him what had happened. By the time he reached the hotel's broad gravel driveway he was sprinting. He was so preoccupied he practically ran into an old acquaintance, an engineer at the city's post and telegraph office. The engineer had been educated in the United States and also had been one of the bright young men in the city, a friend on the edge of Komphot's rapidly disappearing world.

Komphot stopped in midstride. “I couldn't believe the look on his face. He seemed haunted. He told me the foreigners were gone, they'd been moved to the French embassy. Then he told me he had just given his child to the foreigners for safekeeping, given up his only child to strangers. I couldn't believe it, but he refused to answer any more questions. He said he didn't want to talk to me, that he didn't know who to trust. Then he disappeared.”

The foreigners had been the last people the Khmer Rouge confronted. After beginning the evacuation of the Cambodians, sending them off in all directions out of the capital, the Khmer Rouge had broadcast an order by loudspeaker to everyone in the hotel telling them to leave; the hotel was not a protected zone. The foreigners went to the French embassy. The more sophisticated Cambodians, like the engineer Komphot had just met, knew the French embassy could not protect natives.

If he had allowed himself, Komphot might have screamed in dismay. One part of him was saying, “This is the last day I'll walk down these streets of my home.” Then he checked himself. “This can't be true. I must give them the benefit of the doubt. We'll all come back.” He retraced his steps in search of his cousin, In Nhel, the head of the railway. He couldn't face this nightmare alone. By chance he found his cousin one block later, and the two drove off in Nhel's car to the outskirts of the city, to a neighborhood known as Tuol Kok, where Nhel owned a small hut secluded from the road.

There they hid with Nhel's family and quietly talked. They wanted to forget the Khmer Rouge. “I wouldn't let myself go crazy,” Komphot said. “I had to hope. I couldn't imagine giving away a child after one day of the Khmer Rouge. I didn't want to overestimate what the Khmer Rouge were doing. I wanted to be rational.”

After three days their hiding place was discovered in a systematic sweep of the city by the Khmer Rouge. A soldier came up to their door and said politely, “Brother, comrade, please move out. You have to go at least three miles out of the city. The imperialists are going to bomb the city. When it is time you can return.”

Now Komphot wanted to believe the bombing story. He and his cousin left with the family but without their valuables and did as they were told. They left the city in the direction of the northern Route Five. The Khmer Rouge had told them to return to their home villages, the village of their parents or grandparents. Since Phnom Penh was Komphot's “home village,” he decided to follow his cousin Nhel to his home village, a small town in Kompong Cham province. In a few hours they caught up with the multitudes, the people who had been banished while Komphot was counting bank notes.

They were on the outskirts of the city, a thick sea of people jammed on the narrow highway being marched to the countryside by the soldiers in black pajamas. Komphot was reminded of a crowd caught in a sports stadium with no exit for escape. It also seemed to him as if a giant had poured everyone out of the city and they were pretending not to notice. The rich still had money and were buying food from roadside merchants asking absurd sums: $100 in Cambodian currency for a pound of rice, $50 for a fish caught in a canal. The poor had nothing and went without. The sick lay dying on the roadway. No one stopped to help a stranger. No one thought of confronting the Khmer Rouge and ending this pathetic march. That would require confronting a lifetime of illusions, so they trudged on. Every day at 4:00 P.M. they were told to sleep, spilling on top of each other. Before dawn they were waked and told to march on. They stuck in cliques with people of their own class or background. Komphot and his cousin and his family walked with other educated Khmer from Phnom Penh; shopkeepers walked with shopkeepers, beggars with beggars. Like this Komphot marched for ten days until the crowd of thousands reached a crossing at the Tonle Sap River and Komphot and his cousin traveled east, toward the home village.

They stopped at Prek Kdam, on the other side of the river, a small village now crammed with some 30,000 people also waiting to move on to their home villages. Here there was food and Khmer Rouge officials were waiting to screen the people. In Nhel was called before one. Komphot had been told by people in the crowd that the Khmer Rouge determined whom they wanted by asking certain people to write their “biographies,” a description of their lives, particularly what they had done during the Lon Nol regime. “The Khmer Rouge asked my cousin to write his biography, and I asked if I could, too. We had heard people were being taken off to ‘study'—we thought this meant to a school for brainwashing. We wanted to go together so we would have each other's company and be released together.”

Another distant cousin, a man who had been a customs officer at the capital's airport and who had joined them on the highway, said he wanted to go with Komphot and Nhel, and the three presented themselves to the Khmer Rouge. “We volunteered everything about ourselves and said we wanted to go together. They took Nhel and the customs officer, but they said they didn't want my biography. The cadre said to me: ‘When we want your biography you will be asked for it.' I was left standing alone.”

Watching his friends walk away, under the armed escort of the Khmer Rouge, Komphot was struck with a jolt of complete fear. Nhel was gone and Komphot had no idea when he would return. Since April 17, Nhel had been his constant companion; their conversation had been a shield protecting Komphot from the awful scenes surrounding him. They had walked for twelve days from Phnom Penh to Prek Kdam less mindful of the poor and hungry, the dying and the missing, than their own intense political conversations about what the evacuation meant, what role Sihanouk would play in the new regime, when they would return to Phnom Penh, and what they could do for the revolution. They had maintained the fiction of their boulevard life as long as possible. Now there was silence. Komphot was alone and filled with dread.

He walked back to the remaining group of relatives—Nhel's wife and children and a few cousins. Suddenly he lost hope. The family group, reduced to six people, was ordered into an already packed truck and driven about ten miles, then dumped into a deserted paddy field. It was raining. There was no food and they spent the night huddled together. The next day they were moved to a nearby village, where they were given the space under a hut on stilts normally reserved for animals. “We lived like pigs, taking whatever was available, the scraps of food offered us. I realized we were under custody of the revolution, not a part of it.”

Slowly they were moved across the province, from one miserable stopover to another, until they reached their native village near Speu Chamcar Leu, an area of rich rice fields adjoining Cambodia's rubber plantations. It was now May 16, almost one month since the Khmer Rouge victory. There would be no return to Phnom Penh, no return to life as Komphot had known it. The family was not allowed to go back to their home but sent to live in a large “cooperative” of some 1,500 families living in village clusters under the control of a triumvirate of Khmer Rouge cadre. In his cluster Komphot was assigned to a production unit with twelve other adults and given his family's first monthly ration of food: thirty pounds of rice for every full-time worker, fifteen pounds for those who worked part-time, nothing
for the children, who were expected to share the adults' rice. That was it—no fish, vegetables, oil, or meat. Finally Komphot was utterly frightened.