Survival in the Killing Fields (20 page)

We drove south on Monivong, the noise of the engine unnaturally loud in the empty boulevard. We came to the Faculty of Law, which the Khmer Rouge had taken over as a barracks. Soldiers were
eating meals, squatting in front of cooking fires with their mess kits. They stopped us out in the street. But One-Pen told them, ‘It’s just medicine for Angka.’ And I nodded my
head vigorously and said, ‘Yes, medicine for Angka.’

American-made trucks captured from the Lon Nol regime were pulling up to the Faculty of Law compound just then. Khmer Rouge soldiers stood in back of the trucks, waving to their comrades inside
the compound, glad to come into Phnom Penh from the dull countryside. ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ they were shouting. ‘Long live our splendid victory over the imperialists! Long live the
Kampuchean revolution!’ This time, I noticed, the
mit
kept his mouth grimly shut, even though he shouted the same slogans in Wat Kien Svay Krao. There was rivalry between his unit and
others.

I drove the Vespa down the boulevard, over the Monivong bridge, and onto National Route 1. It was late afternoon. I had accomplished much. I had gotten clothes for Huoy and myself. Gold and
silver and medicine for trading. In a subtle way I had even struck back at the Khmer Rouge for what they were doing to my family and to our society. The tension I had felt since morning was giving
way to elation.

We ran into checkpoints along the road, but at each of them I yelled, ‘Medicine for Angka!’ and we passed easily.

After I came back from Phnom Penh, Thoeun and the four remaining nurses asked me whether they could return to their villages. To them I was still the boss, the
luk
doctor, which was why they asked permission. The revolution had not yet ‘liberated’ their minds.

I told them to go ahead. And why not? The war was over. The country was at peace. It was time for them to reunite with their families and return to their ancestral villages. Thoeun left first. I
saw him off at the riverbank, grinning, his head still twitching from side to side. He pushed his motorcycle down the gangplank and onto a cargo boat and vanished in the crowd of passengers. The
boat, with a red flag flying from its cabin, chugged into the Mekong’s main current and slowly upstream.

Then the nurses left, on foot, with their bundles balanced on their heads. I wasn’t worried about their safety. The Khmer Rouge didn’t rape or rob, and everyone else was so afraid of
the Khmer Rouge that there was little crime. But I was sad. Their departure tore a little more of the past away, and I preferred the past to the present.

The nurses were taking a roundabout route to Takeo Province: first north on National Route 1 toward Phnom Penh, then west on a dirt road to the Bassac River, across the Bassac by boat and
finally south on National Route 2. Many others from Takeo were going the same way, and Wat Kien Svay Krao was gradually emptying.

Now the rest of us had to decide what to do. We had our gold and our medicine. There were no more reasons for staying. It was time for us to leave, to choose a destination before the Khmer Rouge
chose one for us.

Huoy, her mother and I decided to go to the Changs’ home province of Kampot, southwest of Takeo along the Gulf of Siam. A cousin of Huoy’s made regular trips to Thailand by boat, or
used to before the revolution. She thought we could go with him. That was our final destination, Thailand, Cambodia’s neighbour to the west. It was a Buddhist country, with a culture much
like our own. It was also an American ally, in no danger of going communist. If we could only get there, we would be free. We didn’t want to live under Khmer Rouge rule, or under any
communist regime. We had heard that Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, had fallen to the communists. South Vietnam, Cambodia, even Laos – one after another, all the countries nearby were
falling to communism, except for Thailand.

My father had another plan. He wanted the whole family to go back with him to the lumber mill. He said that the Khmer Rouge would need someone like him, the former owner, to run it. If he
couldn’t run the mill we would all follow him to the town of his birth, called Tonle Batí, which was near Samrong Yong but had better soil and more water for farming.

I didn’t like his plan. Whether we went with him to the lumber mill or to Tonle Batí, it would leave us under Khmer Rouge control. I told him we would go with him to the mill and
then decide what to do from there. After all, if we could get to the lumber mill, we were also going in the right direction for Kampot.

The compromise didn’t please him. It didn’t please me much either. But in truth I was of two minds about staying with my family. The good feelings when Huoy returned had given way to
the usual quarrelling. My brother’s wife, Nay Chhun, barely spoke to me, and she was always being nasty to Huoy because Huoy and I weren’t officially married. The whole family was on
edge, and the reason was uncertainty. We did not know what life under the Khmer Rouge was going to be. It was just as well that we were leaving.

We left in the morning – the entire Ngor family, the two Chang women and I, plus the entourage of servants and drivers and their children. We were thirty-odd people in all, with two
trucks, two fourwheel-drive vehicles, a car and a motor scooter. Behind my motor scooter was the cart that Thoeun and I had taken from the clinic.

Each vehicle had half a tank of fuel. We pushed them along National Route 1, to save gas. Later, we turned onto the dirt road and the wheels got stuck in sand, we started the motors. The men
pushed harder, the motors roared, and the wheels spun around, sending plumes of sand to the rear. Once the vehicles were free, we turned the engines off and pushed again. I pushed the Vespa by the
handlebars, and Huoy pushed it from the back of the trailer, which carried our luggage. It seemed like a dream, that I had actually ridden the Vespa to and from Phnom Penh.

It was hard work, pushing. The weather had that almost unbearable humidity that comes in the last months before the rainy season, when the sky turns hazy white and the sun is like an oven.
Slowly we passed blown-up houses and decapitated palm trees. The landscape was empty of people except for city exiles like ourselves, walking or pushing cars along the dusty road.

On the third day we reached the Bassac River, a lazy, muddy channel sunk far down in its banks. We camped by the riverbank next to a house belonging to my aunt on my father’s side. The
roof and the upper storey of her house had been destroyed in the war and she was living on the ground floor in a tent supported by the concrete columns. My aunt was glad to see us. She prepared the
best meal she could under the circumstances, using fish from the river and fresh fruit picked from trees.

Next we had to find out how to cross the river. Pheng Huor went out on a bicycle to explore, and he found four pirogues, about the size of canoes, whose owners were willing to work for us. But
the boatmen wouldn’t accept Lon Nol currency in payment, no matter how much he offered. They wanted fifteen cans of rice per boat trip, using cans from Nestle’s evaporated milk as a
measure. It was the first time I had heard of using rice as money, but it made sense. Everyone needed and used rice. It was the perfect medium of exchange.

Because the boats were small, we could take only the lightest vehicles across the river. Papa decided to leave everything but the jeep behind with his sister. Pushing them had been exhausting
anyway. He also decided it was time to let the drivers and their families go off on their own. He gave them money and food and they went off after saying their farewells. And it was a sad,
scaled-down expedition that travelled across the river: the jeep, with each wheel riding in a separate small boat, the boatmen poling their way across; the Ngors and the Changs and all the extra
gasoline and the supplies; and finally my Vespa and its trailer.

By the time we unloaded everything on the other bank we were tired and short-tempered. We camped and made a fire. When Pheng Huor’s daughter Ngim upset a cooking pot, I cuffed her on the
head. The girl’s mother, Nay Chhun, shook her finger in my face, which is very rude in our culture, and told me never to touch her children again. I said that if her children needed lessons
in behaviour I had the right to teach them. I lost my temper, she lost hers and soon we were shouting at each other at the top of our lungs. A Khmer Rouge soldier came over to stop us.

‘No yelling!’ he said. ‘Angka doesn’t allow people fighting each other! If you don’t stop I will bring both of you to
Angka Leu
.’

I had never heard of Angka Leu. It means ‘higher organization’ in our language, and nothing more. But the way the soldier said it suggested that Angka Leu was something to fear. Nay
Chhun retreated, muttering and flashing nasty glances. When I had calmed down, Huoy told me not to discipline Nay Chhun’s children even if they needed it. Whatever Angka Leu was, Huoy said,
it was best to avoid it.

We never did get to my father’s sawmill. There was a bridge between it and National Route 2, and the soldiers wouldn’t let us cross. Papa tried telling them that he
wanted to get the mill working to help the regime, but they wouldn’t even listen.

Even before we reached the bridge, however, I had decided to leave. I had no problem with respecting the family hierarchy, in theory. Life means being part of a family. The older members are in
charge, and every individual works together harmoniously to benefit the whole. But in practice it was one problem after another. If I wasn’t quarrelling with Papa it was with my older
brother, and if it wasn’t with him it was with his wife. Much of the quarrelling was my own fault, but that didn’t make it any easier. For all my maturing as an adult, inside I was
still the hyperactive, hot-tempered boy with the short fuse. My instincts told me to get away from my family, just as my instincts told me to get away from the Khmer Rouge. I had to live on my own
terms.

As Papa sat glumly by the roadblock, I explained to him that we had to go. Reluctantly he gave his permission. When the good-byes were over, Huoy, her mother and I found ourselves walking down
National Route 2.

We had walked for an hour when three Khmer Rouge with rifles stopped us. They were children, maybe ten years old. They didn’t search our bodies – that was against their code –
but they went through the luggage in the cart behind the Vespa. They didn’t find the medicine, which I had hidden inside the rice supply, but they did find my camera, some medical equipment
and my medical textbooks.

One of the child-soldiers opened a textbook and saw the type printed in the Roman alphabet. My medical books were all in French.

‘You are CIA,’ he remarked in his high-pitched voice.

It took me a second to follow his train of thought: since I had a book in a foreign language, I was working for foreigners. This made me an agent of the CIA.

‘Eh?’ I said. ‘What does it mean, “CIA,” comrade? I have never heard of it before.’

‘Where did you get the books?’ he demanded suspiciously. He picked up a speculum and some surgical clamps. ‘And what are these for?’

I said, ‘I don’t know. People were throwing them away on the street, so I picked them up and kept them. The same with the books. If you want any of them, keep them. I don’t
know how to read anyway. I was just going to use the paper from the books to wrap things in.’

One of the other soldiers said to the first one, ‘Ah, yes, good idea. We can use the paper for rolling cigarettes.’

The first one tossed my pharmacology textbook and two pathology books to his comrade, who ripped out a page, tore it into quarters, sprinkled tobacco on the paper, rolled a cigarette and lit it
with a gold lighter.

‘Angka needs these too,’ said the first soldier, grabbing a handful of medical instruments.

Then they let us go and began to search people who had arrived after us.

We walked on. We came to other checkpoints and were told to turn off the highway, to begin farming nearby. Fortunately I knew the names of all the villages, and at each checkpoint managed to
convince the soldiers that we were going to the next village farther on.

The next afternoon we reached Samrong Yong. At the north end of the village, a few houses still had parts of their roofs intact and others had walls or concrete supporting columns, but none of
them was whole. The market in the centre of the village was gone, except for a few smashed wooden benches among the knee-high weeds. The old French-built blockhouse wasn’t there and neither
were the trees. Everything had been flattened. All the landmarks had vanished. I couldn’t even find my family’s home.

Then I saw it: concrete walls that had toppled over and lay flat, like giant playing cards. Grass grew in the cracks of the walls, and the garden was buried in weeds.

We camped that night on the fallen-over walls. There were no other people nearby. No dogs to bark, no roosters to crow. The village was as quiet as if it had been abandoned a hundred years
before. A lone Khmer Rouge, a child, sat at the road intersection with his rifle.

Before the revolution, most Cambodians felt a strong loyalty to their home villages. Even those who moved away to a big city like Phnom Penh continued to identify with the
place of their birth, which inevitably had an accent all its own, different even from the accent of the next village over. Samrong Yong was home. It was an extension of my family. To see it
destroyed was almost like seeing my own family dead. I tried to keep my grief hidden from Huoy and her mother so they wouldn’t be saddened, but they must have known what I felt.

From Samrong Yong we went to Chambak, the next town. There was nothing left of it except staircases rising into empty air.

An hour’s walk beyond Chambak we came to another checkpoint, manned by young, barefoot Khmer Rouge. For the first time they asked me my profession. I said I had been a taxicab driver in
Phnom Penh. Then they asked Huoy if she had worked for the Lon Nol government. Huoy lost her presence of mind and I broke in, saying that she used to sell vegetables in the market and that her
mother used to take care of our baby. Huoy, hesitating, added in a small voice, ‘Yes, I was a vegetable seller. My husband was a taxi driver. What he says is true.’