Survival in the Killing Fields (26 page)

The two doctors walked along very slowly, weighed down by the knowledge of their approaching deaths. We watched them walk farther and farther away along the railroad track until we
couldn’t see them anymore. Then we still waited, expecting to hear rifle shots, but the shots never came.

‘Maybe you’re wrong,’ Huoy said at last. ‘Maybe they’re being taken away because they didn’t work in the rice fields.’

I thought this over. She had a point. Maybe the two other doctors had avoided work so they could go gather food, just as we did. Maybe they had been caught at it.

We never knew for sure, because we never saw the two doctors again, or heard anything about their arrest. But after that Huoy always insisted that I show up for work, and I did. As she pointed
out, if we worked we didn’t have enough food, but it was better to be hungry than dead.

I was sent off to repair roads. About thirty of us from our section of Phum Chhleav left together, walking with hoes over our shoulders down a winding path through the rice fields and the
jungle. In previous years a series of floods had cut huge gullies through an old dirt road. We set to work with our hoes, filling up baskets with dirt and carrying the baskets on shoulderboards.
There were no other people around, and no villages. We worked eight days without much food. When we trudged back to Phum Chhleav at last, Huoy was sitting on the ground outside our hut, waiting for
me.

‘You lost weight,’ she said.

‘A lot, sweet.’

She rose and hugged me tenderly, and hung on without letting me go. She had been alone when I was away. Alone and worried about me and grieving for her mother. And even after I came back it
would take her a day or two to recover.

‘Did Angka beat you or punish you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We just worked a lot.’

‘I have food for you,’ she said.

‘What kind?’

‘Guess,’ she said, and it had to be something special.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I have cooked mice for you. Field mice. I knew you were coming today.’

It was as if I were returning from a business trip and she had fixed me a steak or an especially nice fish as a wifely gesture. She had traded for the mice with some more of her mother’s
clothes. She was taking care of me as best she could, and it made no difference that we would never have considered eating mice when we were living in Phnom Penh. Here in the countryside mice were
a treat.

We ate the meal, and what little there was of the mouse meat was tasty, and I was touched by what she had done and worried to see that her sadness still lingered.

The next day I went to work in a rice field near the railroad track. Huoy and I were assigned to the same group of about a hundred ‘new’ people. The Khmer Rouge gave hoes to Huoy and
the rest of the women and told them to break up the topsoil where it hadn’t been broken before. Two teenage soldiers with rifles took us men to paddies that had been hoed already. There were
about eight wooden ploughs and three or four oxen by a hillock. ‘We don’t have enough oxen now,’ one of the soldiers told us, ‘but we have to plough the fields. If we
don’t plough and plant rice, we won’t have anything to eat.’

‘Oh no,’ I said to myself. ‘Are we going to use
human beings
to plough? Is this what we have to do to build this advanced society they’re talking about – go
back to prehistoric times?’

The soldier’s face combined the dull gaze of limited intelligence with an obvious contempt for us city people. He held a long whip of plaited leather in his hand. ‘You,’ he
said, pointing at one man. ‘Go to the plough. You too, and you.’ I hoped he wasn’t going to point at me. The ethnic Chinese in the group were cursing in Teochiew dialect, saying
they just wouldn’t do it.

He pointed at me.

I walked over to the ploughs.

‘You,’ said the soldier. ‘Take this plough and get on the right side.’

I stood on the right side in back of the crosspiece and all I could think about was
kum-monuss.
On my left an old female ox stood, making a sideways chewing motion with her mouth and
swishing her tail to keep the flies away.

‘Now go,’ said the soldier, cracking his whip overhead.

I began to push forward against the crosspiece. The ox walked forward in its harness. The soldier walked behind the plough, guiding it. My bare feet passed over clumps of clay with weeds growing
out of them. The first light rains had softened the clay but only on top, and the ground was still cracked from the long, hot dry season.

When we got to the edge of the field, the soldier sunk the tip into the earth below the depth the hoes had reached. The plough nearly came to a halt. By pushing harder I could still make it move
forward, but the ox was stronger and the plough swerved off to the right. I had to push with all my strength to keep it going in a straight line.

We ploughed down one side of the field, the early-morning sun shining into my eyes. It took a long time to reach the end of the field. Finally we turned the corner and began down another
side.

A rhythmic clicking noise came over my shoulder and then to one side. I turned my head and glimpsed a miniature flatcar travelling down the railroad track. Four men stood on it using long bamboo
sticks in unison to pole themselves along, two of them on each side. They sped effortlessly along and soon they they were out of hearing.

I leaned forward again and kept pushing but the wooden cross-piece was too high, about the level of my neck. I wished it were lower. Reaching up to it strained my shoulders and the small of my
back. Blisters had formed on my hands from the road repair work and I could feel them pop open and the fluid running out.

I looked around at the other paddies and saw other men ploughing with oxen and farther off the crews of women with their hoes rising and falling. I could not see far into the fields because of
the hillocks, but in every direction men and women were working. Above us all, above the treetops to the west, rose the mountain with the two white dots. Lord Buddha help me, I thought. Help us
all. Give us the strength to make it through the day.

The plough had veered to the right and it was heading toward the dyke at the edge of the field.

‘Faster, faster!’ came the soldier’s voice behind me. ‘If you can’t go faster I will whip you!’ He cracked the whip above the ox and me, in the air.

I bent forward to the work again. The neck and head of the ox filled the left side of my field of vision. The ox was making its sideways chewing motion, and spittle was drooling from its
whiskered chin. It twitched its ears to keep insects from landing nearby, but when insects bit its foreleg the ox lowered its head and licked the spot with its enormously long, thick, sandpapery
tongue. I heard its slow, regular breathing and the swishing of its tail on its back. How could anything that stupid be so strong? I wondered.

The sweat rolled down my armpits and chest. I took my hand from the crosspiece and dabbed with my krama to keep the sweat out of my eyes, then went back to pushing.

Why are the gods so blind? I thought. Did I do something wrong in a previous life that I have to do this now? Is there something terrible in my
kama
?

Life had been so good back in Phnom Penh. So relaxed and prosperous. My patients
sompeah
ed me and spoke to me politely. Huoy and I were happy. We had no worries. We ate in restaurants
nearly every night and always ate enough. But not anymore. Now we have no fried noodles. No fish cooked with lemon and coriander. Every evening Huoy talks about her favourite recipes. She remembers
the sweet desserts she used to make for my parents and says she wishes we had more food. Huoy’s cheeks have lost their roundness. She is losing weight.

I struggled to keep up with the ox, but my breath was laboured. I heard my breathing and my footsteps and the ox’s footsteps and the twittering of the birds.

Listen to the birds singing like that! Whenever they want they fly from one tree to another. They go wherever they want. When they find food they can eat it. It’s harder for people. We are
draft animals like the oxen. So maybe our
kama
is very, very bad.

Ma must have known that life was going to be like this. She was always intuitive. So she chose to drown herself in the pond. That’s why she died. What a wise old lady she was. I hope in
her next life she –

SNAP!
A searing pain across my back.

‘Hey!’ I yelled angrily. ‘How can I push if you’re whipping me? Let me rest first and then I can go back to working.’

‘Finish the field and then rest,’ the soldier replied. But after a few more lengths of the field he stopped to roll and smoke a cigarette and I took a break too. I looked around. A
woman in the next field was holding a hoe in one hand and looking at me. She was standing absolutely still and her other hand was clasped across her mouth as if she were trying to stop herself from
screaming. It was Huoy, but without my glasses I could not see the expression on her face.

When the soldier finished his cigarette we went back to ploughing. The sun was still low in the morning sky and the day was humid and hot. I could not imagine why the sun was taking so long to
move across the sky. The soldier whipped me a few more times and after what seemed like days somebody far away rang a gong. Lunchtime. The soldiers went back to their kitchen in the row of three
houses by the old canal, and some
mit neary
in black brought us out our meal, a cloudy broth with some grains of rice at the bottom.

I had blisters on my palms, on the first and second joints of my fingers and between my thumbs and forefingers. My shoulders and my back and my calves ached, and my Achilles tendons were sore.
But the whip marks hurt the most.

‘You eat my portion, sweet,’ Huoy said.

‘No, I’m okay. I don’t really have an appetite.’

‘Please. You eat it for me. You need the strength. I cannot eat it.’

After lunch the soldier and I took the plough off the rig and put a wide rake or harrow in its place, to break up the clods turned up by the plough and to smooth the furrows. The soldier
didn’t especially want to talk.

‘Not even one field ploughed,’ was all he said to me.

All afternoon he stood on the harrow to drive the points in, and with his weight it was even harder to drag the harrow than the plough. We went around and around the field. Along one side there
was a view of the mountain with the white dots but it meant nothing to me now. I kept looking at the sun, which stayed motionless in the sky.

Late in the afternoon, the railroad maintenance crew came back along the track, poling vigorously toward the Phnom Tippeday railroad station, travelling faster than the breeze.

Near sundown, the gong rang again and we quit. We had not ploughed or harrowed a single rice paddy.

In our flimsy hut, Huoy heated water and made a hot compress with strips of cloth and put them on the whip welts, which curved over my shoulders and neck to the top of my chest. She was crying.
She felt my pain more than I did. I was too tired to feel much of anything. ‘Today I prayed to my mother to take us with her,’ Huoy said. ‘I don’t know why we should go on,
being treated like this. The Khmer Rouge should just kill us now and get it over with.’

I didn’t know what to say. To myself I thought, Ma was smart to commit suicide.

It rained that night, a long, drenching rain with flashes of lightning and rolling thunder and water leaking inside the hut. In the morning I went back to ploughing, but the ground was softer
than before. And even the soldiers had admitted their mistake. Now they paired two men against each ox, or four men if there were no oxen.

The rainy season had finally arrived in Battambang. The rain was cold and nearly continuous. After a few hours in it my fingers were white and wrinkled, like staying in bath water too long. We
ploughed in the rain. Snails appeared on the ground, and when I picked one up the soldier whipped me across the back. ‘If you have time to pick up snails like that, how can we finish the
fields?’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you like the food Angka is giving you? Isn’t it satisfying enough?’

There was nothing to say to that without insulting Angka. I kept quiet. But I didn’t see why we shouldn’t pick up snails.

At night I used a tiny oil lamp inside a can with reflective sides to look for food. But there were only tiny frogs and snails to be found nearby. Bursts of rifle fire came from near the
soldiers’ houses, and I was afraid to go out into the rice fields and to the canals and ponds, where the fish and the frogs would be large and plentiful.

From my normal weight of 135 to 140 pounds I dropped to 110 to 115 pounds. Then I began having to excuse myself while ploughing to go to the bushes. At first I thought it was a case of ordinary
diarrhoea. Then I noticed white mucus on the ground and later yellow mucus and dark, purplish blood. And then I knew I was very, very sick.

I wasn’t the only sick person. Not at all. In Phum Chhleav more people were sick than healthy. The hard work, the food shortages, the unsanitary conditions and the
near-absence of medicine combined to cause illness on a scale I had never seen before in all my medical training. In the rice fields the remaining ‘new’ people worked in slow motion; in
the huts they lay down with fevers or swollen limbs or uncontrollable bowels. Every day, processions wound through the pathways of the village on the way to the burial grounds.

The greatest single factor in this public-health disaster was malnutrition. The Khmer Rouge fed us a bowl of salty broth with a few spoonsful of rice at the bottom for lunch, and the same for
dinner. That was all. They didn’t allow us to gather wild foods for our private meals, though sometimes we did anyway. Without proper nutrition, we weakened.

There were other factors. We were city people, unused to hard labour. Chronic fatigue – the kind of tiredness that comes from pulling a plough twelve hours a day – lowered our
resistance to disease just as malnutrition did. We had hardly any resistance at all. Because we were from places like Phnom Penh, we hadn’t built up natural immunities to the microorganisms
of Battambang – to the bacteria in contaminated drinking water, for instance. To make things worse, we didn’t have proper latrines or bathing facilities. We didn’t have much
medicine, and the Khmer Rouge didn’t let doctors like me practise openly.