On the twenty-mile drive south to the camp, I make small talk to hide my nerves. At 8:40 a.m., we pass through the camp gates, and in five minutes we are outside the hut where Pran is staying with another family. I jump out and run inside, sputtering in French as I ask where Pran is. He’s in the long house on stilts fifty feet away, and a young man runs to get him, shouting in Khmer: “Brother, brother, someone’s here. You have a chance now. You have a chance.” Then Pran comes running out of the long house—I remember in that fraction of a second thinking how hurt and vulnerable he looked—and literally leaps into my arms, his legs wrapped around my waist, his head buried in my shoulder. “You came, Syd, oh, Syd! you came.” The words come sobbing out with the tears. We stand like that for several minutes until his thin frame stops shaking and his legs slip to the ground.
He looks at me then and says: “I am reborn. This is my second life.”
Arms around each other’s shoulders, we walk slowly into the hut and begin talking nonstop, ricocheting from one subject to another in chaotic sequences, as we grope for the meaning of our lost four and a half years.
We talk of his wife and children, of how he disguised his identity to survive the savagery of the Khmer Rouge, of old Western journalist friends, of old Cambodian friends who are now dead, of the members of his family inside Cambodia who were executed, of the Seiko digital watch he has just bought from another refugee in the camp, of the time in 1975 when he was almost beaten to death for stealing a pocketful of rice, and of the letter he wrote to me only two days before, still unaware that I had received any of the messages from him. (That letter arrives at The Times on October 24, a week after Pran and I reached the United States. It says in part: “Need see Schanberg. At least a cable from him. We have many things to write.”) Restless, pent-up, we walk through the barren camp, sipping an orange soda, holding hands, looking long at each other. There is much waiting to be said.
With trepidation, I ask the question that has been churning inside me since that distant April in 1975. “Can you forgive me for not being able to keep you safe in the French Embassy, for leaving Cambodia without you?”
“No, no,” he says, gripping my hand hard. “It’s not like that. Nothing to forgive. We both made a decision. We both agree to stay, no one pushed the other. You tried all you could to keep me, but it didn’t work. Not your fault. We stayed because we did not believe in a blood bath. We were fools; we believed there would be reconciliation. But who could have believed the Khmer Rouge would be so brutal?
“We both made mistakes, both of us,” he goes on, in a torrent of words that has been locked up so long. “Maybe we should have tried to buy a French passport. We had a lot of money. But I was never angry at you, even when the Khmer Rouge beat me near to death. I always missed you; sometimes I cry in the forest, thinking of you.”
Why did Pran wait so long to try to escape? “My brain was always thinking how to get out,” he says, “but Khmer Rouge patrols were everywhere and they had mine fields all along the border and traps made of punji sticks. I must build relations in each place where I live. I must take care with each step, to make sure I have good information and at least fifty-fifty chance of not getting killed. One time I was going to try for it but then I heard the Thais were pushing refugees back into Cambodia so I stopped the idea.” When he talks about life under the Khmer Rouge, he uses phrases very unlike him—“true hell,” “more than insane,” “below zero.”
The camp loudspeaker suddenly calls his name, summoning him to the camp office. He ignores it. I tell him that probably the embassy document has arrived, clearing him for departure to Bangkok on the following day. It has, but he is uneasy and tells me a friend of his will check it out instead. In his viscera, he is still not convinced he is free. Maybe the Thais, he thinks, will yet force him back into Cambodia. (Even when we reach Bangkok and meet old friends around the hotel pool, Pran’s eyes narrow and his voice fades to a whisper whenever he talks about the Khmer Rouge and their policies. “There’s no one here,” I say. “You can relax.” He laughs self-consciously, but he is not persuaded and looks around to see if anyone is listening.)
We start talking again about our separate thoughts and dreams since 1975. They are not very separate. Pran tells me: “I think of you all the time inside Cambodia. I imagine that you adopt one of my sons—probably Titony, the eldest—because you have only girls.”
Then he adds, in a rush of memory: “Every month, under the Khmer Rouge, I have dream that you come to get me in a helicopter. I have a radio on the ground and you radio me your position.” I tell him I repeatedly had the same fantasy, like a waking dream.
It all seems uncanny and it makes us both elated and yet discomposed. We laugh to break the spell and bring us back to the gritty dust of the camp. Now, more than ever before, we have lionized each other, given each other heroic dimensions. It is mystical, but it is also unreal, and we know that in the times to come we will have to deal with our respective warts and flaws and humanness.
But not just yet. He tells me he always knew I would be loyal to him and to my promises. “In Cambodia, I tell myself,” he says, “if I die, I die with my eyes well closed, because I know you will always take care of my family. I trust you one hundred percent.”
I tell him I prayed for him often. “Ohhh. Ohhh,” he says, marveling. “That explains it. That’s why I was so lucky.”
I have with me the many joyous written messages from Pran’s friends on The Times. Some of the writers had met him only through my constant tales. I now take these messages from my briefcase—the same briefcase that still carries that scruffy silk rose I squeezed for luck on the day we were captured in April 1975—and give them to Pran. As he reads, his eyes turn moist again.
Abe Rosenthal, The Times’s executive director, writes that “all these years… you have been in the minds of all Times men and women” and that the news of his return to freedom had brought “rejoicing throughout the paper.”
Jim Clarity, whom Pran had shepherded to many scary battle sites, says: “Pran, you are a true hero. I am proud to know you. Now that you are safe, thanks again for keeping me safe.”
Al Siegal, whom Pran also guided on a trip to Phnom Penh, writes: “With all my heart and all my love… you have given all of us another reason—the most wonderful of reasons—to be proud of our paper and our profession. We embrace you, Pran.”
Joe Lelyveld, another of Pran’s flock: “I feel freer today because you are free…. I pray that the rest of your days will be filled with peace.”
And so many more.
As Pran folds the last of the notes and puts it away, he murmurs: “They were all thinking of me. Oh, how wonderful.”
Pran’s mood goes up and down wildly that first day; he weeps at some unspeakable memory and then bursts into laughter over the wonder of our reunion and the good news I bring him about his family thriving in San Francisco. Yet he is concerned about how Westernized they may have become and how he will adjust to them, and they to him, after all this time. “Do they still speak Khmer?” he asks. I tell him I think they speak it often at home.
Suddenly, Pran asks me: “What about your book? Did you finish it?”
“How did you know I was writing a book?” I reply, taken aback.
“Oh,” he says, “I was sure with all the notes you take and papers you save you must be going to write a book.” I tell him I had become stymied on the project for many reasons, and he looks upset. But then I tell him of the Pulitzer I won and that I accepted it on his behalf as well as mine, and his face becomes incandescent.
He starts talking ebulliently and zanily about going back to work right away with me. “Can I get an American passport?” he asks. “There are many stories to do here. We could work along the border. My people are in trouble. If I had a camera, I could take pictures, too—like the old days.” I remind him, laughing, that first he has to get to San Francisco just to get his American refugee-status papers and to rejoin his family, and t
hat I have a family and job in New York. “You’re crazy,” I say warmly. He remains a driven reporter.
He chortles, too. “Yes, sure, I’m crazy,” he says. “I still want to work as a journalist.”
We also discuss the medical care he will need. His legs and feet are scarred from his march out of Cambodia. Many of his teeth are loose and rotting from malnutrition; there is a large gap between his two front teeth where porcelain fillings fell out in 1976. He keeps his hands in his pockets much of the time because when he holds them out, they shake like those of a palsied old man—also from malnutrition.
On the drive back to Bangkok the next day—October 10—we stop for breakfast at a hotel in Korat. Pran orders only milk and coffee, saying his stomach is not ready for a big meal. He is uncomfortable in the modern dining room. When he has to go to the toilet, he asks me to take him. “I feel like a monkey,” he says, embarrassed.
We arrive in our hotel room in Bangkok at 2 p.m. At exactly 2:03, the message button on the telephone lights up. The post office has just delivered a large envelope from Pran’s wife. In it are letters from his family and the first pictures of them he has seen since their evacuation from Phnom Penh on April 12, 1975. He opens the packet, reads the letters with tears in his eyes, and then examines the color photographs incredulously. Titonel, the youngest, was only three when they parted. Titony, now fifteen, has grown bigger and taller than his father from his rich American diet. Pran scans the pictures again and again, holds them at arm’s length, and shakes his head: “I don’t think I would know them if I saw them on the street,” he says, in wonder. “I am sure I would not know Titonel.”
Pran’s first telephone call to his family is both jubilant and uneasy. The electronic reunions that occupy the first part of the call are ecstatic. But then Pran tries speaking in Khmer to the children and comes away a little distressed when he realizes that the two youngest, Titonel and Titonath, understand almost nothing of what he has said. The traditionalist father in him is troubled.
But there is something more important on his mind. He gets Ser Moeun back on the phone and tells her of the fortuneteller in Cambodia who, in early 1979, read Pran’s “numbers” and told him that the forecast for his eldest son was zero—which means death or the threat of death. Pran has been worried about Titony ever since, and he now tells Ser Moeun to take him immediately to a Buddhist priest, get some holy water, and have Titony drink it. She agrees and has it done before we get to the States.
***
Culture shock is too mild a phrase to describe what overtook Pran in Bangkok. This was his first trip outside his own country, and Bangkok is a much more modern city than once-graceful and somnolent Phnom Penh. During his ten days in the Thai capital Pran did many things he had not been able to do for four and a half years, such as sleep in a real bed, eat a full meal (his first entree was escalopes de veau cordon bleu), wear a shirt tucked inside his pants, and use a mirror in which he could see his whole body. But other phenomena he was experiencing for the first time in his life: a department store (where he bought Wrangler corduroy jeans), a divided highway, pancakes and syrup.
Other things were traumatically new, too. When my story about his escape appeared on the front page of The Times on October 12, calls and cables began streaming in. Some were from elated old friends. Others were from people who wanted him to go on lecture tours, write a book, make a movie, appear on television, give interviews for magazines and newspapers.
From total disguise and anonymity and silence behind Cambodia’s bamboo curtain, Pran had stepped into the blaring media age. But what possibly overwhelmed him most was the realization—from the correspondence and clippings and letters I had brought him and from the fresh communications arriving at the hotel—of how many people had been aware of him and his plight and of how many people had cared about him through his four and a half years of misery. Though baffled by it all, he was warmed by the celebrity attention. He asked me to handle all the inquiries, and I became his press secretary. Our roles were changing, and I was somewhat disoriented by it. In fact, I wasn’t sure I liked it.
Among the cables was one from Jon Swain, the British journalist whose life Pran had saved along with mine when we were captured by the Khmer Rouge. It read: “Sydney, this is the most wonderful, wonderful news. Please give Pran my love and a big hug from someone who owes him everything.” Pran’s reply to Jon read something like a Cambodian proverb. “Hi, Jon. The world is round. Now I meet you again. Pran was in bad shape, but the life is remained. Love, Pran.”
After a few days, I noticed that Pran had begun to hum and even sing again, pleasures that were not allowed in Cambodia. He was coming alive. His health, however, remained fragile.
***
As we pushed through the many days of medical exams, security checks, and governmental procedures—both Thai and American—necessary for final clearance to leave for San Francisco, Pran was hit by periodic waves of high fever. We both eventually suspected it might be malaria, but, afraid that detection in Thailand could lead to a long period in quarantine for Pran, we decided to treat it through the easygoing hotel doctor and with store-bought antibiotics.
The first time it happened—the night of October 12—we thought it was some kind of flu or viral infection. We didn’t have a thermometer, but his body was burning up, so I threw a pile of ice cubes into a tub and made him take a cold bath. It brought the fever down somewhat, but he ached all over, so I got him back into bed, put a cold cloth on his sweating forehead, and gave him a back and head massage. I also gave him fruit juices and antibiotic tablets.
By morning, the fever had broken, and we sat around joking about the “countercolonial movement” developing in our hotel room. “You used to see to my needs,” I told him, as he laughed. “Now things are reversed. What’s going on?” I was getting rid of some of my pique over our changed roles; it was a healthy development.
Later, on another night when I was feeling achy and he was massaging my back, he told me that he had, on occasion, been ordered to give massages to Khmer Rouge troops when they were sick. “Just think of me as the Khmer Rouge,” I said, continuing our jesting.
In between his fever bouts and forays into bureaucratic red tape, Pran spent his time resting, eating, and giving interviews to television and print journalists. He also kept pulling out the pictures of his children and staring at them for long periods of time.
Though he was groping with his radically changing life and moving into the future, the past was never too far away. One morning, during a break in an interview with Australian television on the hotel’s broad lawn, he saw a line of red ants marching up the trunk of a coconut palm. “That’s what we used to eat for food when we had nothing else,” he said in a monotone. On another morning, I felt like a swim in the pool and asked Pran to join me. “No,” he said with a grimace. “I was out in the sun for four years in the rice paddies. I don’t need any more.”
In the middle of one night, we were startled awake by the phone. It was Sylvain Julienne, a French freelance photographer who had taken in an orphaned Cambodian infant in the days before Phnom Penh’s fall and had been with us in the French Embassy. He was overjoyed by Pran’s escape, but there was a shadow in his mind as well. He was desperate for news of Sou Vichith, a Cambodian photographer he was very close to. He asked Pran nervously if he knew anything about Vichith. Pran told him ruefully that the reports he heard were that Vichith died of some illness in Kompong Cham Province in the early days of Khmer Rouge control.
Our flight home to San Francisco on October 19 was an anxious eighteen-hour journey—anticipation and agitation in equal doses, as the family reunion neared. On the last leg of the flight, I turned to Pran and asked him, just out of curiosity, what was the first thing he wanted to do when he saw his family. His face spread into an elfin grin and then he just buried his head in my right shoulder and giggled and giggled in embarrassment. I told him that I had asked the question innocently, not thinking at all about m
arital pleasures, but he just kept giggling.
A few hours from San Francisco, the fever struck again. He popped another handful of the hotel doctor’s pills into his mouth, and his temperature subsided. As we neared the shores of the United States, he became very nervous, his right knee jiggling up and down like a telegraph key gone wild.
The reunion at the airport was sweet trauma—a crush of flowers, deep hugs, tears and television cameras. After that day, Pran would have no difficulty recognizing his children on the street.
We departed for Ser Moeun’s modest attached house in the Sunset section, near the ocean, where Pran’s first American meal awaited. It was Kentucky Fried Chicken; Ser Moeun had been too excited to cook. The television set was turned on to a puppet show. The family album, holding all the photographs of the years he had been away, was brought to him. He could not absorb it all, and I left with the Drypolchers for their house, so that the family could be alone.
During the night, Pran’s fever flared anew. Ser Moeun called us at 1:45 to say that his temperature had risen to 105 degrees. We rushed over and took him to the emergency room of Kaiser Permanente hospital. I stayed with him all night, as blood, urine, and sputum tests were made. He couldn’t sleep. His mind—as it had repeatedly since our reunion—raced over the past and he chattered in a stream of consciousness about our adventures in the good old days.
About the day our car broke down past the airport in desolate emptiness—almost into Khmer Rouge territory—and we frantically tried to push it back toward Phnom Penh and finally got a push from a government truck whose driver was as nervous as we were. And about the day the Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh and trained their rockets on the Hotel Le Phnom and ordered all the Westerners out and we took pictures of them with their rockets and Pran joked about getting the pictures developed at our regular photo shop, My Ho, and mailing them to the Khmer Rouge. And on and on he went.
The Death and Life of Dith Pran Page 7