Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  THERE WAS A SAYING IN KHMER from those times. The people would caution that a body “was fading away.” They would say: “Be careful or your body may disappear.”

  On the day the man, Chum Mey, was reunited with his wife (thinking her already dead), how could he have known that she had just seventeen more hours to live? They were prisoners of the Khmer Rouge, herded into different groups, in the last hours of the regime, chaotically fleeing the Vietnamese. Even now, he remembers first seeing her again, the heightened metabolic state of happiness, and though he revealed no emotion (even the act of smiling—something Cambodians do so readily—was thought by the Khmer Rouge to be unrevolutionary), he watched her carefully as she walked ahead with their small son, both dressed as he was: in black pajamas. When the guards were at a distance, he spoke to her once about the scenery.

  They did not touch.

  At that time—during the nearly four-year reign of Angkar lasting from April 17, 1975, to January 7, 1979—the killing was so random and widespread across Cambodia that death became a near certainty, especially if you were sent to the prison camp known as S-21. While the odds were roughly one in four of dying—and worse depending on your demographic (for instance, adult men died in much higher percentages)—your chance of survival at S-21 was .04 percent.

  Or put the opposite way, the odds of your death were 99.96 percent.

  Before death, though, a prisoner confessed, over and over again, until he’d named sometimes hundreds of “traitors,” in order to stop the pain of torture. The man who would soon lose his wife and who, as it turned out, was a mechanic with dexterous hands had been named and arrested, taken away blindfolded to the place where fifteen thousand others were sentenced and exterminated in nearby pastureland famously known as the Killing Fields. But then, as fate would have it, he would emerge as one of only seven survivors from the prison camp. He became living proof that somehow surviving the absolute certainty of your own death can be as horrific as murder itself. For in the end, you’re the only one left to carry the memory of fifteen thousand terrors.

  The man was forty-four years old when the body of his wife disappeared, the same age as I am right now. There is no equivalence; this is only a fact.

  And one other: At this same age, though I have three children, he’d already lost four.

  From the Book of Atrocities, the evil fable begins like this: Once upon a time, a group of men educated in Paris and steeped in Communist ideology had a dream for their homeland. To create a Cambodian society that surpassed the greatness of Angkor, the kingdom that reached its pinnacle under the god-king Suryavarman II in the twelfth century with the construction of Angkor Wat. From the jungles—where their leaders had fled to escape the repressive measures of Prince Sihanouk in 1963—they fought a guerrilla war, led by a soft-spoken, enigmatic schoolteacher named Saloth Sar. These Communists, however, did not believe in gods, kings, or culture, but they were good at biding their time. In the vacuum of power left after the eight-year American bombing of Cambodia, they swept east across the lowlands to the capital, Phnom Penh, finally wresting control from the corrupt U.S.-supported regime in 1975. (The premier, Lon Nol, had already fled to Hawaii.) Their first act was to evacuate the city, hurrying the populace under the pretense that the Americans were coming to bomb again, emptying hospitals, setting millions of people—including the elderly, lame, and pregnant—walking on the roads that led to the countryside, a scene of hunger and corpses straight out of Brueghel.

  What the Khmer Rouge had in store was a radical agrarian revolution, one with the professed aim of completely renovating society while giving the peasants a better life, of evening the rewards and feeding the hungry, of bringing a rational and utilitarian nation-state into being. At first, without the world knowing their real intentions, they were partially applauded, even by American journalists and politicians. Prince Sihanouk assured our Congress that the Khmer Rouge would establish “a Swedish type of kingdom,” and Senator George McGovern believed that the new regime would be “run by some of the best-educated, most able intellectuals in Cambodia.” But almost immediately the Khmer Rouge’s revolutionary pretenses gave way to the sickening irrationality of brutes. In that first spasm of violence, everyone wearing glasses was killed. Everyone who spoke a foreign language was killed. Everyone with a university education was killed. Word was sent to expats living abroad to come home and join the new Cambodia; when a thousand or so arrived on special flights from Beijing, they were killed. Monks, so revered in Cambodian society and long the voice of conscience there, were killed. Lawyers, doctors, and diplomats were killed. Bureaucrats, soldiers, and policemen, even factory workers (who in the minds of the Khmer Rouge were equivalent to industrialization itself) were killed.

  In that first moment, the lucky ones were directed to keep walking to their home villages—some traveled for months this way—where they were sorted, sent to collectives, and worked from sunup to twilight. A person’s worth was eventually measured by his ability to move cubic yards of earth. “To keep you is no profit,” said the executioners to the unworthy before killing them, “to destroy you is no loss.”

  Chum Mey, the man who would survive S-21 but lose his wife, realized that the troops first entering Phnom Penh were mostly lost boys from the jungle, dirty and ragged, with blank expressions, who within hours of being greeted as liberators by cheering crowds turned on the masses with their AK-47s. In the south of the city, they fired warning shots; in the northwest sector, they fired on people. Never having seen toilets before, the soldiers drank from them as if they were cisterns, shat on the floor, wiped themselves with sticks that they left strewn about abandoned houses.

  It was April, the hottest month. Fires ringed the city, the roads were so packed you could progress only in baby steps, parents were separated from their children, the sick and old laid themselves down, moaning. The man had his wife and children. At night he went down to the river to get water for them and found himself standing on bodies, and then in the water surrounded by bodies, so thick in places you couldn’t drink.

  Funny, a repugnant memory such as that clung with an almost humid fondness now, thirty-five years later, for as horrible as the moment was, his family was still gathered about him. When he carried the water back, there was still thirst to quench, voices calling for their father and husband: Here, Pa! Here! Terrible things gathered around them, but lying down for the night, he could whisper to his wife: Is this really happening?

  The leaders of the revolution were designated Brother Number One (Pol Pot), Brother Number Two (Nuon Chea), Brother Number Three (Ieng Sary), and so on. And they were nothing if not ambitious in trying to build a new society. The Brothers abolished courts and banks. They abolished money and holidays and love. They abolished time and history, setting everything back to Year Zero. And they abolished the four things Cambodians hold most dear: family, village, food, and Buddhism. Those who hailed from the city were branded with the designation “New People,” versus “Old People,” who were from the country. New People were the ones most often punished. The entire populace was forced to wear black pajamas, the women Maoist bobs. So secretive were the Brothers that for a year no one knew who was running the country. Until Saloth Sar emerged under his new revolutionary name of Pol Pot, it was as if the faceless godhead Angkar decided all.

  When it came to song, workers were only occasionally allowed to sing from a menu of revolutionary anthems like “Struggling to Build Dams and Dig Canals” or “Bravery of Construction Revolutionary Soldiers” or “Best Wishes to People in Northwestern Zone.” But a jingle secretly murmured by workers at the time spoke the truth: “Angkar kills but does not explain.”

  On the road from Phnom Penh during those first days, a Khmer Rouge cadre said to Chum Mey, the man with dexterous fingers, who would soon lose his wife: “See nothing, say nothing, do nothing against Angkar and you may survive.”

  I first went to Cambodia in 2002, primarily, as it turned out, to change diapers. My wife
had work in Phnom Penh, and thus left with her driver and translator early each morning and returned late each night, while I took care of our firstborn son, who was two at the time. Initially I thought we’d have some cultural moments out in the city, but soon realized that we were destined to spend an abnormal amount of time eating grilled cheese sandwiches by the pool.

  When we ventured out of the hotel, I pushed him in a stroller down a sodden sidewalk along the Mekong River, drifting with the hordes to the center of town, to a park there, where under a brutal sun, in the sticky, soaking heat, one could ride an elephant for a dollar. With son in arms, I climbed a rickety metal ladder, sat warily on the huge beast (his legs were chained to each other), and one with the pachyderm now, we lumbered the circumference of the park while my son, in silent panic, clutched me like a snake-spooked chimpanzee. Everyone—the mothers clutching their own babies, the fathers hand in hand with their daughters—pointed and smiled at us.

  Back at the hotel, we ate our sandwiches, swam in the pool, went to bed. We understood nothing, of course. Our ignorance was willful. We tried to sleep but couldn’t. I lay awake, remembering all the smiles in that park. Why had everyone been smiling? It made me suddenly paranoid. Was there something I hadn’t known about that elephant, that park, that set of operators? Was the joke on me? And if so, what was the joke?

  Or had they merely smiled because they could?

  I was to have one afternoon to myself in Phnom Penh, after my wife had completed her work. I scoured the guidebook—the Silver Pagoda, Wat Phnom, a drink at Le Royal—but got stuck on S-21, the famous prison camp located in a former school called Tuol Sleng. Even Lonely Planet couldn’t bring itself to recommend a visit to the site, which had been turned into a museum. Here’s what it said:

  “Altogether, a visit to Tuol Sleng is a profoundly depressing experience. The sheer ordinariness of the place makes it even more horrific: the suburban setting, the plain school buildings, the grassy playing area where today children kick around balls, rusted beds, instruments of torture and wall after wall of harrowing black-and-white portraits conjure up images of humanity at its worst. Tuol Sleng is not for the squeamish.”

  So that’s where I went.

  It was silent when I arrived, and I was trying to gauge that silence at the same time that I was guarding against it, with the same active ambivalence I’ve had visiting other holocaust museums and concentration camps. The mind proceeds with trepidation: How bad will this get? Which is another way of asking: Just how deep and dark are we? And: Am I willing to participate, even if just bearing witness? Which itself is a defense: bearing witness. After all, we are the animals, too, bearing witness to our accomplishment.

  Tuol Sleng had all the gulag charm of any nondescript concrete-block three-story building complex blooming with mold, humidity stains, and the sickening presence of evil in the unwashable blood marked into the umber-and-white-tile-checked floor. People, tourists like me, moved through the old school in ghostly rounds—as if the guards of yore—and in the background, seemingly far away, came the low rustle of the city.

  S-21 had been directed by a man named Kaing Guek Eav, whose revolutionary name was Comrade Duch (pronounced Doik). Once a teacher of mathematics, he’d first been conscripted by the Khmer Rouge to run a jungle prison camp, where he’d studiously refined his ideas about torture, and was then put in charge of S-21. It was here that he condoned “living autopsies” (the slicing and flaying of victims); that he demanded the extended use of torture to obtain confessions (including near drownings, the removal of toe- and fingernails followed by a dousing of alcohol, electric shocks applied to genitals, suffocation with plastic bags, and forcing prisoners to eat human excrement); that he ordered the murder of at least fifteen thousand people, who were taken to the Killing Fields and shot or bludgeoned (with iron rods, shovels, and axes) and then dumped into mass graves.

  Operating from 1975 to 1979, S-21 became the most infamous of 196 such prison camps the Khmer Rouge established throughout Cambodia, primarily because so many of its prisoners were the purged party loyal—and because Duch’s methods were so stunningly brutal. In 1979, when the Vietnamese drove the Khmer Rouge from power, they happened upon Tuol Sleng because of the stench of rotting corpses.

  Now Tuol Sleng was a museum—and perhaps the most potent symbol of the Khmer Rouge’s dystopia. As I crossed the courtyard, the leaves of the palm trees and banyans shifted benevolently in a breeze, and detaching the scene from its history, one might have imagined this courtyard at a swank hotel in Honolulu: pleasant, tropical, hushed. But instead of someone taking drink orders, there was a billboard posted with security regulations from Duch’s time. They began with their own warm welcome: 1. You must answer accordingly to my questions. Don’t turn them away. 2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me. 3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.

  From the Book of Atrocities: The Way They Killed, Part One. Prisoners were hooked up to a pump and IV line and had all their blood drained for use in the hospitals. According to witnesses, the breathing turned to gasps, then wheezing, until the victim’s eyes rolled back in his head, leaving only the whites. Bloodless, the corpses were then thrown into pits.

  At Tuol Sleng, you drift from room to empty room. Here stands that iconic rusted frame of a bed, used to bind prisoners. (6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.) Here the bolts that helped shackle up to fifty prisoners at a time, in holding cells, the bodies laid out on the floor like soon-to-be-gutted tuna. (7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders.…) In some rooms are photographs of the very same rooms, taken by the Vietnamese on the day they discovered the prison camp, a decomposed body left on the bed, a slit neck bled out in nearly black puddles. There are shackles and metal boxes that once held excrement for feeding. There’s a map of Cambodia on one wall, made from three hundred skulls, and barbed wire on the upper balconies, put there after a rash of suicides to keep the prisoners from jumping. But it’s the empty eeriness of the rooms that fills the imagination; the tranquility that calls up the shrieking opposite. (8. Don’t make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.)

  Located on the first floor of the middle building are some of the most famous death masks in the world, those black-and-white photographs taken of living prisoners upon admission to Tuol Sleng. And yet the captured already know they’re dead. (10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.) The fear and resignation, the dark epiphany that the flashbulb brings—some have already been beaten, some have babies clinging to them, some stand unflinching, in their last moment of public dignity before Duch’s men have their way—is made more poignant by the fact that they are trapped inside an unsolvable koan. Their confusion is writ large beneath their defeat. What they’re about to confirm, during the hours and days of interrogation that will soon follow, is that there are no right answers. That they have become victims, as one visitor put it, of an “irrational radicalism” or, more plainly, of an absolutely absurd universe, one in which the sanctity of the body is torn down again and again to a diamond-hard point, void of ideals and emotion, where ultimately dying becomes less painful than living.

  Among those who died under Duch were members of the Khmer Rouge’s own Standing Committee (caught in the spin cycle of Pol Pot’s ever-increasing paranoia, more and more high-ranking officials were thought to be turncoats) and at least eleven Westerners: four Americans, three French, two Australians, a Brit, and a New Zealander. How any of them ended up at S-21 in the first place must be seen as a horrifically random act of cosmic bad luck. In the case of two American men who were sailing from Singapore to Hawaii, they mistakenly ended up in Cambodian waters and were apprehended by Khmer Rouge patrols.

  Besides these special cases, the killing at S-21 was indiscriminate and nearly complete (99.96 percent), including th
e equal-opportunity elimination of laborers, teachers, factory workers, artists, monks, diplomats, cyclo drivers, and on and on. When one thinks of the loss of life, one wonders again at those who made it out alive. (There were seven.)

  One way was this: The Party, in imitation of Mao’s cult of personality, decided it needed portraits of Pol Pot, and two of the prisoners happened to be painters. Thus they were offered the chance to paint for their lives. (On the list of those to die, next to the painter named Vann Nath, Duch had scribbled the words: Leave for using.) Meanwhile, the prison camp needed a good mechanic, and in the case of Chum Mey, the man who would lose his wife, he knew how to fix things with his dexterous fingers, and his turn to die coincided with a broken sewing machine used for repairing the guards’ uniforms.

  And so the spinning wheel’s needle landed on the sliver-wedge that bore their names—and that’s why they lived.

  The Way They Killed, Part Two. To make love out of wedlock meant certain death, and a boy who had just reached puberty, who was confused and desperate, was caught in the act with a water buffalo. The next day everyone from his collective—from the youngest to the oldest—was gathered. The boy was paraded before the crowd, strung up, then taunted, tortured, and killed. As odd as the case sounds, survivors of the Khmer Rouge recall public executions—full of redress and mockery, disembowelment and cannibalism—as being part of the daily schedule. “Better to destroy ten innocent people,” was another saying, “than to let one enemy go free.”

  A visit to S-21 leaves an inconsolable feeling. It rides with you in the taxi back to the unreality of the hotel, through the streets of Phnom Penh, buzzing with markets and families, with the ramshackle grandeur of golden stupas and crumbling colonial architecture. And yet somewhere still behind it, one rearrives at the skeleton: the images just after the Khmer Rouge took the capital, a city drained of all human life, the colonial buildings empty and echoing, the pagodas ransacked and used to hold grain, piles of television sets and radios, burned cars and all other machines of modern life strewn in the streets, twisting columns of smoke rising from the wreckage. Behind the normalcy of today, even the veneer of progress, lurks that desolation (… it is still happening).