Survival in the Killing Fields (32 page)

‘Back to work, comrades!’

I climbed down to the bottom of the ditch again and picked up the hoe. And I sighed.

In the late morning, when there was no more shade in the bottom of the canal, they turned on the loudspeaker system at the common kitchen. The music came to us faintly but clearly across the
fields. It began with the national anthem:

‘The blood,’ I sung grimly to myself, ‘. . .frees us from slavery!’ I knew every word. The rise and fall of every phrase, the timing of every gong and xylophone
flourish.

. . . And our terrible revolution, I sang in my mind.

After the national anthem came a song called ‘Hooray for the Courageous, Strong and Marvellous Revolutionary Soldiers’ Group’. After this came ‘New Safety for the Small
Town Under the Light of the Glorious Revolution’, and then ‘Our Splendid Fighting Comrades Struggle to Study the Revolutionary Way of Living’. I knew them all, and hated them.
They were all so un-Cambodian. I pictured an imaginary loudspeaker on the bottom of the canal, swung the hoe and smashed it. Swung again and smashed it again. And then found that I was swinging the
hoe to the rhythm of the music. There was no way to avoid it. Not when I knew every phrase, every beat.

After ‘Revolutionary Soldiers’ Groups Protect the Safety of Democratic Kampuchea’ the loudspeakers mercifully fell silent. Once again the sighs of the workers and the
chittering of birds accompanied the sounds of hoes chopping into clay.

Then ‘The Glorious Seventeenth of April’ started out of the loudspeakers again.

At lunchtime they rang the bell:
DING . . . DING . . . DING . . .
Before the first bell had stopped, we fell into a line and trudged off, merging with other lines that converged on the
common kitchen.

This kitchen site, on a large hillock nearly cleared of trees, was only a few days old. The kitchen crew had erected a framework of wood and bamboo over the fire pits and had put the first
thatch panels up on the roof. A few soldiers had slung their hammocks between the poles at the far end of the framework. Outside, mounted on top of a bamboo pole, were the loudspeakers, facing four
directions, with wires running down the pole to the tape player and a truck battery near the soldiers’ hammocks. From a branch of one of the remaining trees hung a metal car wheel: the
bell.

Nine of us sat on the ground in a circle while the tenth, our group leader, went to the kitchen to get our rations. Toward the others of my group I felt little emotion. No hostility, but no real
liking. People were always leaving the group for other work assignments or coming in from the villages of the ‘back lines.’ You never knew them long enough to trust them, to become
friends.

Our group leader was a ‘new’ person like us, with torn trousers and sweat-matted hair. He stood in a long line that edged slowly close to the ration table. At the table was a
mit
neary
with the blackened teeth of a betel chewer, about forty years old. Her left arm steadied a baby riding on her hip. She had been nursing the baby, and as she moved, the nipples on her
enormous breasts were covered and then uncovered again by her unfastened blouse. With her right hand she served portions of watery rice with a coconut shell ladle. As our group leader came near her
in the line, she put the ladle down. Using her thumb and forefinger, she wiped the thin red streams of betel nut juice that had dripped from the corners of her mouth. Then she wiped her hand on her
buttock and took up the ladle again.

This particular
mit neary
was well known in the cooperative for stealing from ‘new’ people’s luggage. At night in her hut, she and her fellow female comrades tried on
the mascara and rouge and lipstick and the Western-style bras they had stolen and pranced around in front of mirrors, admiring their looks. In the morning they reverted to the usual
mit
neary
look, hair pulled back of the ears, breasts pushed flat against the body by traditional Cambodian vests, and no makeup. All but this woman, who wore twin circles of bright red lipstick on
her cheeks.

Finally she ladled the portion of watery rice into the pan that our group leader held. By the time he returned to the circle with the pan and a stack of rusted bowls, the rest of us were sitting
expectantly on our haunches with our spoons out.

‘Stir it well this time,’ growled the skinny man who worked next to me. ‘Be fair.’

The leader stirred it obediently. Ten pairs of eyes focused on the thin, whitish gruel as he spooned it into the bowls. ‘All right, let’s eat,’ he said when he had served the
last drop.

‘No!’ barked the skinny man. He went on all fours to examine the bowls from above. ‘You didn’t stir it right. Look! This bowl has much more rice in the bottom than the
others! Everybody can see!’

We all leaned forward, licking our lips. The broth was semi-opaque, with long strands of mucus-like rice matter lying in it, but the white rice grains were visible at the bottom, one layer deep.
There was a bit more rice in the bowl he was pointing to than in the rest.

‘Not true!’ complained the woman in front of whom the bowl had been placed. She turned toward the skinny man. ‘You’re always saying I get more rice, and I’m tired
of it. The portions are fair, and I’m going to eat mine!’

‘Hold it! Hold it!’ the rest shouted, and somebody grabbed her wrist so she wouldn’t eat. The woman and the skinny man began arguing, and it lasted until the leader spooned
broth and a few grains out of the woman’s bowl, over her protests, and sprinkled the drops around the circle. Then the leader put leaves on the ground next to the bowls and sprinkled salt as
equally as he could on top of the leaves, though not equally enough to stop the bickering.

Without eating, I got up from the circle, carrying my bowl and salt, and went over to Huoy, who rose from her group and joined me. We walked off the common kitchen’s hillock and past other
groups sitting in their circles arguing over food and past other crowded hillocks. Finally we found a shady spot where we could be alone.

I spooned some gruel into her bowl. ‘Eat,’ I told her. ‘Keep your strength up.’ I took the
sdao
leaves out of my pocket, rinsed them with boiled water from the
canteen and put them between us. Huoy spooned gruel from her bowl and put it back into mine.

‘Men need more food than women do,’ she said. ‘You work harder than me.’

The work groups all argued over food. Husbands and wives quarrelled over food, each trying to take more than the other. Huoy and I argued but we were always trying to give each other food
instead of taking it away. It was a special closeness in our relationship that began, I think, when she had nursed me through my sickness in Phum Chhleav. I had never forgotten that she had given
me the yam, and I was always trying to make it up to her.

In the end we compromised, as usual, and spooned equal portions of watery rice into our mouths and munched the bitter
sdao
leaves.
Sdao
tastes like quinine, which is probably not a
coincidence, since
sdao
is at least a semi-effective substitute for quinine as a malaria medicine. I didn’t mind
sdao,
but it was the rice I savoured. I swallowed each mouthful
slowly, crushing the soft grains against the roof of my mouth. I could feel it giving energy to my body. Even the watery broth was good, because rice had been cooked in it. When I came to the last
spoonful I paused, not wanting to eat it, because when I did the meal would be over.

A cadre banged on the metal car wheel with a stick, and everyone rose to their feet to bring the rusted bowls to the common kitchen and reform the lines.

DING . . . DING . . . DING .
. . Everyone in the cooperative was standing near the common kitchen. We could all hear him perfectly well. Why he couldn’t just ring the bell once I do
not know, unless it was to punish us.

DING . . . DING . . . DING . . . DING . . . ding, ding, ding, ding, dingdingdingding . . .

The afternoon was the same as the morning, only longer. There was no breeze in the bottom of the canal. I swung the hoe, but it seemed heavier than before. The group didn’t make much
progress. We hadn’t dug as far as the wooden stake. They gave us a tobacco break, and then they played music again to make us work faster. I would have done anything they asked if they had
only played different music. But they didn’t. The cooperative had only one tape.

The worst part of the day was late afternoon. That was when the soldiers came to take prisoners. We never knew ahead of time whether they would come, or who they would choose, or how many. The
uncertainty made the waiting worse.

As one side of the canal fell into shadow, and then the bottom and part of the other side, and I set down my hoe to carry a basket of clay to the top of the dyke for the thousandth time that day
– that was when I saw them. Three soldiers, walking across the fields directly toward me. I climbed down to the bottom of the canal with the empty basket, my heart pounding. Maybe it’s
my turn, I thought. Maybe the time has finally come. I came up with another load, but by then the soldiers had veered off to a spot farther along. When they walked away from the canal, there were
two ‘new’ people in front of them, with their heads bent in utter sorrow and their arms tied tightly behind their backs.

What had the prisoners done wrong? We knew not to ask. Asking wouldn’t bring them back. It only endangered those who dared to question. There were no laws under the Khmer Rouge except the
law of silence. There were no courts except Angka Leu. Maybe the prisoners hadn’t worked hard enough. Or they stole food. Or a
chhlop
, a spy, overheard them making remarks about Angka.
People disappeared. That’s all we knew. And I knew that someday I would be one of them.

It was after sunset, the orange light fading quickly from the western sky, that the bell rang next. I climbed out of the canal, walked briskly to a minicanal with water in the bottom, and jumped
in fully clothed for my bath. Dripping wet, I rejoined the line as we walked back to the common kitchen.

At dinner it was too dark to see the rice at the bottom of the bowls, and there were fewer quarrels. The food was also better: in addition to the watery rice and salt we were given water
convolvulus, the Cambodian equivalent of spinach, gathered from the wild by the kitchen’s food-foraging team. Huoy and I ate together. We hoped to go back to our hillock, make a quick fire,
put the tea kettle on and cook some more
sdao
leaves and a few snails Huoy had found during work. But we didn’t get the chance. The bell rang right after dinner.

At that hour the bells were a summons to a political meeting. They were like the
bonns
that we had been to earlier, but on the front lines they were called by the English word
‘meeting,’ pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable:
meeTING.
We had three or four a week.

The entire collective assembled in a field next to the common kitchen. The first speaker was Chev, the leader of the cooperative. He had a soft, mild voice, and he paused often to smile at the
audience. Everybody was afraid of him. Chev said the digging of the canal was going much too slowly. We would all have to sacrifice and work much harder to get it finished in time for the rainy
season.

‘Some people here are very lazy,’ said Chev. ‘They do not want to participate in the revolutionary activities because their minds are in the past, on capitalist times. They
slow the project down. They would like to stop the wheel of history. But we don’t need these people. We don’t want them. They are counterrevolutionaries and CIA agents. Am I wrong or
right?’

‘Right! Yes, right!’ we answered, and applauded to show our approval.

Chev said that such people were our enemies and we must hunt them down and eliminate them, and asked if this was wrong or right. We clapped and said yes, he was right. He told us how lucky we
were to be living under Angka. The Cambodian people had been waiting thousands of years for such an opportunity, and was this wrong or right?

Huoy and I sat at the rear of the crowd with our backs against a tree trunk. It was truly dark. I pulled the brim of my hat low over my forehead and shut my eyes. The state of rest that I
allowed myself was not sleep. It was more like a controlled doze, since part of my mind stayed alert, like a soldier on sentry duty.

‘. . . or right?’ Chev demanded.

‘Yes, right!’ I answered, clapping my hands together without opening my eyes. I had been to enough meetings not to have to pay any more attention than that.

After Chev, lower-ranking cadre took turns speaking. Out of their mouths came words that their brains didn’t understand: ‘. . . waging a continuous offensive to launch a struggle to
achieve a very spectacular great leap forward for mastery of the elements. . . .’ Their real purpose was not to say anything new but to demonstrate their orthodoxy. In a regime where
individuality was discouraged, they showed their enthusiasm by imitating their leaders. They talked and Huoy and I leaned against the tree trunk, gathering strength for what was still to come.