Survival in the Killing Fields (49 page)

But the dry season of 1978 was a difficult time in the Phnom Tippeday region. The common kitchen began serving smaller rations than before. There was a warehouse nearby, a large building with
mud walls and a metal roof, next to the railroad tracks, but the rice inside was not meant for us. Occasionally the doors opened and soldiers loaded great, heavy sacks of rice onto railroad trains,
or else onto trucks, and we who had grown the rice sadly watched it disappear.

Toward the end of March 1978 the common kitchen began skipping meals. At first I simply stole more food to make up for it. My partner was a courageous twelve-year-old boy named Tha, who fed his
crippled father, his pregnant mother and two small children with what he stole. Together we went on night-time expeditions to the common garden on the mountainside, near the ruined temple. One
night the civilian guards at the garden heard us coming, threw stones at us and yelled at the top of their lungs for the soldiers. There was only one thing for us to do: Tha and I climbed above the
guards, threw stones at them and shouted ‘Thieves! Thieves!’ at them as loudly as we could so the soldiers wouldn’t know whom to shoot. Quickly we threw vegetables in our sacks
and came crashing down the mountainside with our sacks in one hand and hatchets in the other. When we came back to the village we cooked our food out in the open. Except for stealing itself, there
was nothing to hide. With the common kitchen closed part of the time, everybody prepared private meals. Angka’s authority was breaking down in front of our eyes.

In April 1978 the common kitchen in Phum Ra closed entirely. The bells stopped ringing. There were no more loudspeaker announcements, no more music.

One of the first to stop working was Pen Tip. He was like a weather vane, sensing which way the political winds were blowing. Others followed his example. A few ‘old’ people who were
closest to the village leaders, or who were particularly scared of the soldiers, continued to work at their jobs. But most wandered off into the fields and jungle to forage.

At our house, by mid-April, there was no more food left in the hiding places. We ate the water convolvulus, the cabbages and the underdeveloped yams from our garden, then the flowers from the
pumpkins and the leaves from the taro. It was too early for the corn and beans and other vegetables, and there were no bananas on our trees.

We had already eaten the ducks. The common kitchen had taken some of the chickens, and I had given the rest to someone to raise in a remote location, out of Angka’s reach.

I was worried. There is little that helps a pregnant woman as much as food, and little that complicates a pregnancy as much as malnutrition. I didn’t say that to Huoy, but she knew it
herself.

By her fourth month of pregnancy she was no longer nauseous, but there was little for her to eat. The weather was unusually dry and hot.

Though the common kitchen was closed, soldiers continued to take people away for gathering wild foods. It had no effect. After three and a half years of listening to promises about the
country’s future, the patience of the ‘new’ people and even the ‘old’ people was exhausted. We foraged in the open. We stole more than ever before, during the day as
well as the night. Everybody stole. The guards at the common gardens stole until there was not an edible leaf left, and then they left the garden gates open. Tha and I made trips into the rice
fields, to glean the leftovers from the rice harvest. People were everywhere, bending over, scanning the ground, picking up unhusked grains of rice, wandering uncertainly this way and that. In an
entire day I collected less than a can of rice and saved it all for Huoy. All the wild food was gone, picked by other hungry people.

Huoy became depressed.

It was not just the lack of food, though that was the greatest part of it – the unrelenting emptiness in her stomach, day after day, just when she needed food the most. Adding to her
sorrow, draining her strength further, were other events that affected her mental well-being. Like the purges. The latest purge was against the ‘Vietnamese’. The Khmer Rouge leaders had
the same racial prejudice against the Vietnamese as the Lon Nol regime did. They decided that Cambodians of Vietnamese descent and even Cambodians who spoke the Vietnamese language were the cause
of all our problems and that it was necessary to purify the nation of traitors of this type. The
chhlop
Yoeung came around, trying to discover who in our village spoke Vietnamese, and many
were taken away. Huoy, who had grown up near the Vietnamese border, spoke fluent Vietnamese. The
chhlop
didn’t find out, but still she became depressed.

But it was not just the hunger and the purges that depressed her. Earlier in the regime there had been one element of truth to the communists’ claim of moral superiority: Khmer Rouge cadre
and soldiers did not take bribes. Now even that was no longer true. With gold, people could get food from the common kitchen, even though it was closed. With gold, they could get relatives or
friends reassigned from the front lines.
Bonjour
, Cambodia’s great moral weakness, had reappeared.

I spent long hours consoling Huoy.

‘You have to be strong, sweet,’ I said. ‘Don’t allow yourself to be sick. If you are sick, I feel sick. If you have any kind of disease in your mind or your heart, give
it to me, but get rid of it. I want you to be healthy.’

‘Yes,’ Huoy said, but she was unconvinced.

She lay on the smooth wooden bench in our tiny house, tired, hot, fanning herself. She was six months pregnant, with a swollen belly.

‘I have never seen this kind of government before,’ said Huoy listlessly. It was her favourite complaint. ‘I have read a lot of history books, about Europe and Asia, but I
never read about anything like this. No hospitals. No communication. If we lived in any other country, we could send a letter out to relatives abroad, and they would send money or food. But we
cannot even send a letter out of Cambodia. We are not even allowed to have pencil or paper to write a letter. If we object they say we are CIA, or KGB, or spies for the Vietnamese. There is no way
to call for help.’

‘I help you,’ I said.

‘But you are hungry too,’ she said. ‘In Sihanouk’s regime and Lon Nol’s regime if you were poor you could at least go out and beg. Or you were free to find wild
foods in the countryside. But here, nothing. Nothing. Even beggars cannot survive.’

I didn’t know what to say to that. It was all true.

‘The government treats us worse than animals,’ she murmured. ‘Nobody cares. When someone dies on the dykes of the canals, nobody comes to take the bodies away. Only the
vultures. Or the
chhke char-chark.
Or the cannibals. People are eating people. That’s what we have come to.’

‘I have heard the stories,’ I answered. ‘But I do not think there have been many cases. The Khmer Rouge do not like cannabalism either.’

Huoy fanned herself, staring at the thatch ceiling.

‘If there is no food, maybe the baby will be retarded,’ she said. ‘Or deformed.’

‘No, sweet,’ I said firmly. ‘I have examined you. I have listened to the baby’s heartbeat. The signs are all good. The baby will be fine.’

Huoy didn’t seem to hear me. Her attention had drifted, and her thoughts were focused on something far away. ‘If there is no food, how can I make milk in my breasts?’ she
whispered. ‘How long can I go on like this? How long has it been since Angka has given us food?’

‘No, don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Your breasts will automatically have milk. Automatically. I’m a doctor. This is my specialty. I know.’

‘Yes, I know the milk comes automatically,’ said Huoy. ‘But maybe there won’t be enough.’

I didn’t know what to say to that either. She was right. If she was as malnourished when she delivered the baby as she was now, she probably wouldn’t be able to produce enough milk.
But for the moment, breast milk was the least of our problems. Even her malnourishment didn’t worry me as much as the state of her mind.

Ever since the Khmer Rouge had taken over I had talked with Huoy, trying to encourage her. At first she believed me, and kept her spirits up. She said she understood that we had to wait for
things to improve. But that was before the death of her mother. After that, Huoy was never quite the same. We went to the front lines, my father and brother died, and I kept getting sent to prison.
And as Huoy saw conditions worsening each year, she became discouraged. She didn’t have the instinct to fight when all the odds were against us. To her, there was no use fighting anymore. The
hunger, the terror, the
chhlop,
the corruption, the energy the baby drew away from her – all these things combined to break her will.

Her weight loss showed first in her cheeks, which lost their roundness. Then in the outline of her jawbones and her collarbones. All her ribs were showing.

I went out every day, all day, searching for food but finding only a handful. There was nothing left of Hok’s gardens or any of the common gardens. Every plant had been plucked.

I took gold out of my waistband pocket and tried to buy rice, but there was no more for sale, at any price, anywhere. There was only rice flour. For a
damleung,
more than an ounce of
gold, I bought two small cans of rice flour weighing less than half a pound. I gave it all to Huoy but it wasn’t enough. I went to the railroad workers for help but they said sorry, they were
not allowed to talk to me because of the purges.

I went back to foraging for wild foods. The forests were barren. No bamboo shoots, red ant nests, tokay lizards, water convolvulus patches or field mice. Nothing, because of the drought and
because of all the other foragers. From foraging I went back to trying the black market, and from the black market I went back to foraging. I tried everything, many times over. There was no more
food.

Huoy was seven months’ pregnant when she felt a pain like a menstrual cramp. It went away and then a few hours later she had another one. I gave her another obstetrical exam. It was just
what I feared: a softening of the cervix, and the beginning of dilation.

‘You’re going into labour,’ I told her.

Huoy looked at me with her great round eyes, and she saw into my thoughts but said nothing. She turned her head to the wall. After a while I heard her whisper, ‘Help me, Mother. Please
protect me.’

Yes, please protect her, I thought. A premature birth. No intensive-care unit, no operating room. No food for Huoy or the child. And
chhlop
hanging around, looking for trouble.

Under the Khmer Rouge’s puritanical rules, it was forbidden for a man to deliver his wife’s baby. If I delivered it myself the neighbours would know and the
chhlop
would find
out and that would be the end of me. Or if I did anything that suggested I was a doctor, that would be the end.

Luckily a midwife named Seng Orn lived in a village nearby. I knew her from Phnom Penh, where she had worked as a midwife at a hospital. Between Seng Orn and me was friendship and respect.

If the birth was normal, Seng Orn and I could handle it easily. If there were complications, maybe we could handle it but maybe not. For one thing, I didn’t have surgical instruments,
antibiotics, anaesthesia or any of the standard equipment of an operating theatre. For another, I was out of practice in performing obstetrical surgery. For the last year I had been a fertilizer
maker, and before that a house builder, and before that a rice farmer and canal digger. I still had my doctor’s skills, but I was rusty. The worst problem, though, was the presence of the
chhlop.

In the back of my mind there was one last option to try in a true emergency. Not the front-lines clinic for war slaves. Not the local hospital in Phum Phnom for soldiers and ‘old’
people. There was only one place: the old government hospital in Battambang City. I had heard that a former professor of mine, one of the most eminent doctors in the nation, was teaching at the
hospital. The Khmer Rouge were said to tolerate his brand of Western medicine. But I knew there was only a small chance that he was really in Battambang or that Huoy and I could get permission to
go there.

Huoy’s contractions were irregular and far apart, which is common for preliminary or ‘false’ labour, before the first stage of true labour begins. I held her hand as the
contractions took her, and looked around our tiny house. It was so primitive. The thatched roof, the dirt floor. No running water or electricity. I would have given anything to be back in Phnom
Penh.

Between contractions, Huoy asked me to help her bathe. I walked her out the back door to the minicanal and washed her tenderly. We went inside again and she lay down on the bed, clutching her
small blue kapok-filled pillow to her chest. I built a fire in the lean-to kitchen and made sure we had plenty of wood and lots of water. Later that afternoon, when the labour pains were forty
minutes apart, I summoned a neighbour of ours, an old woman, to watch over Huoy. I went to get Seng Orn.

I ran to the village at the base of the mountain where Seng Orn lived. She said she was ready to go but needed permission. We went to see her village leader, who refused to let her go at first,
and gave in only after prolonged pleading and arguments. When we got to Phum Ra, we had to report to Uncle Phan, my village leader. His adopted son Yoeung, the
chhlop,
eyed us closely as we
left and then followed us out into the yard.

By the time we returned to the house, it was nearly sunset. I took my watch out and timed the labour pains, which were half an hour apart.

Cautiously, I looked out the door. In the twilight stood the figure of a boy, facing us as he leaned against a tree, smoking a cigarette.

Huoy lay on the bed, a small oil lamp beside her and another borrowed lamp at her feet. I massaged her limbs, smoothed her hair, wiped her face with a damp cloth.

When she went into contractions she looked at me and then her attention turned inward. Frowning, contorting her face, she clenched my arms very, very tightly, so tightly I thought my bones were
going to break. The contractions peaked and then sometimes went on to a second or third peak before going down. Finally, as the pain eased, Huoy relaxed her hold on my arm. She became aware of her
own tiredness, and then me sitting next to her. Her face was wet with perspiration, and I smoothed the wet strands of hair away from her forehead and tried to encourage her.