Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

As he gave me back my glasses he glanced at my wrist, but I had already removed my watch and put it in hiding. For that matter I had also removed the spark plug from my Vespa, to be able to prove that the Vespa wasn’t working, in case someone tried to take that too. The Khmer Rouge code forbade the guerrillas from taking private property, but the guerrillas didn’t always obey it, just like they didn’t obey the provision of the code against harming the people.

  I got away from the soldier as fast as possible and walked to a small dirt road along the riverbank. Below in the river, exiles from the city cooled off, bathing decorously in their sarongs. Large motorized cargo boats pulled out from shore, bringing passengers back to their home provinces in a programme organized by the Khmer Rouge. Thousands of boat passengers left each day, without diminishing the number of people living in Wat Kien Svay Krao.

  Somehow, without a real turning point, life had become a succession of days spent wandering along the highway and hanging around the village. Phnom Penh was in the past. The news about the future was vague and conflicting. First we would hear that Angka was going to give us land to clear and farm. Then we would hear that Angka was going to push us on to some other location and deal with us later. We never knew what was going to happen. Every day, Thoeun and I went out foraging for food. With foraging, fishing and bartering, I had reverted to a way of life I had known in childhood. It was not hard for us. Under other circumstances being in Wat Kien Svay Krao might have been enjoyable. But there was always an edge of anxiety to the waiting.

  Then toward the end of April I found a distant cousin who said he had seen my family. I went at once where he directed, to a section of the crowded wat courtyard I had not explored before. I spotted two of the family’s gasoline trucks, piled with luggage and crates of live chickens. How could I have missed them before? As I pushed through the crowd Pheng Huor came up to me. Where were you?’ he said with a hint of annoyance, as if I had kept him waiting for a meeting. Then his smile showed through. ‘Everybody’s been looking for you. Did you see Huoy?’

  ‘No, I lost her. Where’s Papa?’

  Pheng Huor pointed to a makeshift tent made from a tarpaulin suspended beneath a tree. I went inside. My father was sitting at a table. Same old Papa, bags under his eyes and big protruding belly. He was dressed in a faded T-shirt and shorts. His face was spread in a broad smile.

  ‘Why didn’t you come home?’ he said. ‘Everyone was looking for you. We waited for you until almost three in the afternoon. We couldn’t wait any longer. The Khmer Rouge pushed us to leave home. Are you alone?’

  ‘No, Father, I brought eight nurses and a guard from my clinic, but I haven’t found Huoy yet.’ My brothers and their wives crowded into the tent. My mother came up next to me. Her hair was in a bun and she seemed to have more white hairs than before.

  ‘Yes, we didn’t know what would happen to your nurses,’ my mother was saying in her kindly fashion. ‘I was worried about them. They don’t have any other men to take care of them.’

  ‘Do you have enough rice?’ my father was saying at the same time. I said we did. He reached in his pocket and counted off fifty thousand riels. I took the money to please him and then asked him if he would like to come live in a house instead of a tent. The family in the house above the nurses and me was planning to leave soon. He said he would like that very much.

  In a few days, my parents, three of my four brothers and their wives and children moved into the house above. They were all that was left of the immediate family – my number-one brother had been estranged from my father for several years, and my sisters were all with their husbands’ families.

  Their new house had a normal rural Cambodian design. It was eight or nine feet off the ground on its stilts. The interior had springy wooden floorboards; a long, low, elevated sleeping platform where they could spread their mats and hang their mosquito nets; and a kitchen in back whose floor and walls had generous-size cracks to allow air ventilation. My brothers and the drivers pushed the vehicles over from the wat and parked them in front of the house – the two gasoline trucks with the empty tanks on the back, plus a Land-Rover, a jeep and a Mercedes. The drivers, their wives and children and most of the servants remained in the wat courtyard, where there was more space.

  Now that I was reunited with my family I was nearly content. Family is the glue that holds society together. Life makes more sense for being connected to the past through parents, and to the future through children. Being together also had its practical benefits. For one, more people to rely on in case of emergencies. For another, more food, because my family had stockpiled food and taken it with them from the city. And finally, I had gained face for bringing the family into the house, because I had done my duty as a son; and my father had gained face because I had put him literally above me.

  And yet I was not truly content. Huoy was alive. Or at least probably alive, because she was not the troublemaking kind, and the Khmer Rouge would have left people like her and her mother alone. But how could anyone like me, who had seen Sam Kwil hauled away, feel sure of this? And if Huoy were alive, where was she now? What if she had gotten to the Route 2 turnoff before it was closed? Then she would have gone to my father’s sawmill, or to my village. She would be waiting for me there. What if she hadn’t been swept up in the southern evacuation at all? She and her mother lived along the road to the west, which led to the airport. She could have gone that way. Or she might have gone to the south after all. I might have missed her, just as I had missed spotting my family for more than a week in Wat Kien Svay Krao.

  Wat Kien Svay Krao was becoming a less and less attractive place. The weather was still hot, and most people camped on mats in the shade. At every campfire, people waved vigorously above their plates to keep the flies away. From radios came reports that the North Vietnamese communists were closing in on the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon. The news made us feel more isolated from the outside world than ever. High overhead, the sonic boom of the US reconnaissance planes could still be heard. We had hoped that the United States would come to our aid, but if it let South Vietnam fall, it certainly wouldn’t help us in Cambodia.

  My father was more stoic than most. ‘Yes,’ he said in his deep voice, ‘it’s the end of the old life. Now everyone will be the same class. Just like in China.’

  He turned to me accusingly. ‘You should have left the country earlier, when you had a chance. I told you to go to medical school in France, but you wouldn’t listen to me.’

  ‘Father,’ I said, exasperated, ‘when Samrong Yong fell, I told you to sell all your property and leave the country. You could have lived abroad comfortably for the rest of your life. But now it’s too late. And it’s all because you didn’t listen to me.’

  Before long, my father and I were back into our usual arguments. And if the bickering in my family and the tedium of the long days weren’t enough, my group of ten from the clinic began to split up. They had become like a second family to me. Srei, who had found her real family, was the first to go. I gave her medicine and rice. I gave her money. Somehow nothing was enough. I was upset when she left, and the rest of the nurses were crying. They had worked together for years in harmony and bonheur. And soon after that a second nurse left.

  I went back to walking around without a destination and without real hope. Out of habit, I trudged through the dirt lanes of the village to the wat, and from the wat again over to Route 1. By then the crowds coming from Phnom Penh had thinned. I was outside the village, wearing a checkered krama around my head, when a familiar-sounding voice reached my ears. ‘Sweet!’ the woman’s voice said. ‘Sweet! Mother, I’ve found him!’

  How she could have recognized me I do not know. She was on the other side of the road, with her left hand steadying a bamboo basket on her head with two water bottles inside, and with her right hand carrying a plastic-covered pail. ‘Mother, I’ve found him. Sweet, sweet!’ She was wearing an old green T-shirt and white trousers with a floral print. Her mother was carrying
a basket on her head and steadying it with her left hand while carrying a rice pot in her right hand. They looked tired and dusty. Huoy put her basket down and ran to me. We wrapped our arms around each other. She didn’t say anything and her chest heaved uncontrollably; she couldn’t get any words out. Her mother came up to us with her eyes glistening and said in a choked voice, ‘We were looking for you.’

  I said, ‘I was looking for you too. Where were you? Are you okay?’ Huoy nodded but didn’t let go.

  We moved to the edge of the road. Ma brought the luggage over and then squatted next to us, using the edge of her krama to wipe away her tears, while Huoy and I embraced.

  ‘We looked for you everywhere,’ said Ma. ‘We didn’t know where you were. We were scared you had been killed by the Khmer Rouge. We saw a lot of bodies with their hands tied behind their backs.’

  Huoy and I wanted to hug forever, but our culture does not allow such things in public. A crowd had collected around us, curious about the emotional outburst. Someone asked if everything was okay. Another voice commented, ‘How lucky they are! They met each other again, and I’m still separated from my family!’

  I picked up the luggage and we walked through the village to the house. As soon as we got to the house I walked up the steps, kicked off my sandals and stepped inside. My father was resting.

  ‘Huoy is here,’ I told him.

  My mother’s aged face creased into a smile. ‘Prepare lunch for them,’ she called back to the women in the kitchen.

  My father sat up with an unmistakable look of gladness in his face. ‘Prepare a feast!’ he shouted. And he rose to go outside.

  Huoy waited at the bottom of the stairs. ‘How are you?’ my father asked, smiling, as he and my mother went down to meet her. Huoy had brought her palms together and raised them to her kneel. Her right knee was about to touch the ground when my father got to her and raised her by gently putting his hand under her elbow.

  My brothers, their wives and the nurses had all seen Huoy try to kneel in front of my father and it touched their hearts. Everybody was crying. My mother said to Huoy’s mother, ‘You are coming here to live with us. Don’t worry. We are safe here.’ The servants were hurrying out of the house with water and food.

  At last I was whole. Huoy was with me. And my family had taken her in.

  10

  Medicine for Angka

  This is what happened to Huoy during the Khmer Rouge takeover:

  After I left her at her school on that fateful morning of April 17, Huoy discovered that the school was closed. The other teachers hadn’t shown up, the doors were locked and the sounds of gunfire were coming from several directions. By good luck she found a telephone that was still working, and she called Sok, my driver. Sok picked her up in the car and brought her back to her mother’s apartment. By then it was about eight-thirty and everybody knew that the city was about to fall. People were waving white cloth from the windows. The guerrillas had entered the streets in their muddy black clothing. Huoy told Sok to go to his own home and bring his family back to her apartment so that everybody could be together, for protection. He agreed and drove off.

  While Huoy was waiting upstairs with her mother, the Khmer Rouge on the street started shouting for everyone to leave the city. Huoy didn’t want to go, of course. But an hour passed and then another and still Sok hadn’t returned. Finally about noon two heavily armed guerrillas entered the house on the ground floor, walked up the stairs banging on the landings and finally knocked on the door of their apartment on the third floor. So Huoy and her mother had only a few minutes to grab some possessions while the guerrillas stood there waiting and yelling at them.

  Huoy went into the kitchen and collected all the food she could find, plus a rice pot and two bottles of boiled drinking water. Then she gathered every photograph she had of me, even some ID cards I had left there with my picture on them, and put them in her bag. Last she grabbed a small, soft pillow that she always slept with. Her mother packed a few clothes in a basket. They left and locked the door, the soldiers following them downstairs. Huoy wanted to go to my parents’ house, but the street traffic was one way in the wrong direction and they had to go south.

  Huoy was determined to find me. With the streets in chaos, her instinct was to go someplace where I would be likely to show up sooner or later. Since she couldn’t get to my parents’ house she decided to try my clinic. If that didn’t work she would go to the sawmill and then to my village. She brought the photos of me so she could show them to people and ask them if they had seen me. That was how her mind worked. It was only later that she realized that she had left her gold and jewellery behind in the apartment. She had completely forgotten about her valuables.

  She and her mother got near my clinic but were unable to reach it because of the roadblocks. Like me, Huoy walked back and forth, with and against the flow of people trudging on foot with their belongings, pushing their motorcycles and cars. But when she tried to cut across the flow and dodge into a side street a Khmer Rouge cadre came up to her and waved his pistol in her face: ‘Do you want to sleep here? I’ll give you an appointment to sleep here!’ he shouted. Huoy’s bravery melted on the spot. To ‘sleep’ meant to die. She allowed her mother and herself to be swept along with the traffic. They were just two more pieces of human wreckage floating out of the city with the tide, and nothing more. They found the turnoff to National Route 2 blocked off, and they were swept over the Monivong bridge and down National Route 1. They were a few days behind me on the same evacuation route out of Phnom Penh.

  I listened to her story and sighed inwardly. We were together again – that was the most important thing. Looking at her, dressed in the same grimy trousers and blouse she had worn since the day of the evacuation, I wished that she had remembered to bring more of her possessions. But that’s how she was, losing her composure when anybody started shouting. There was no point in being angry with her. And how could I be angry with her when one of the few things she had remembered to bring were photographs of me?

  Huoy and her mother moved in – with me, Thoeun my guard from the clinic, and the remaining nurses, under the house on stilts that I had commandeered for my family. We had no privacy. I continued to sleep alone on top of the oxcart. But there was a change. Tacitly, without announcement, it became understood that Huoy and I were the same as husband and wife. Without any formal ceremony, we had become a married couple. The nurses treated Huoy with respect and consideration. My parents, my brothers and their wives all were very kind to Huoy, at least for the time being.

  But now that my personal worries were over – finding my family, finding Huoy and finally getting my parents to accept Huoy – I was able to take a larger view of our situation, and I didn’t like it. True, we were lucky to be alive and together. Around us in the village of Wat Kien Svay Krao were thousands of Cambodians separated from the people they loved, wandering around lost and unhappy, not knowing what the next hour held or where they would find their next meal. My family was very lucky in comparison to other families nearby. On the other hand, all our efforts to make a place for ourselves over the preceding years had been for nothing. All our hard work at the lumber mill, all my studying at school. We had not been in favour of the revolution. We had not been against it. We didn’t even care about politics much. But now that the revolution had come, we had been bulldozed by it, reduced to the same level as the other exiles around us. And there was no new society building. Just the rubble of the old one.

  A few months before the takeover I had finally been awarded my degree from the government medical school, the culmination of seven years’ effort. Outside of my work for the government, I was the main practitioner in and part owner of a prosperous gynaecological clinic. What good was my medical training now, when the Khmer Rouge wanted to kill doctors?

  I had also been a businessman, owner of a gasoline delivery service. I had seventeen million riels in the bank in savings, enough at prerevolutionary prices to buy a couple
more gasoline delivery trucks for my fleet. What was that worth now, if it was worth anything at all? The Khmer Rouge did not seem to use any currency at all. Would they let me return to my bank to claim my savings? With every day it seemed less likely. Every day they announced through loudspeakers that we would have to go to the countryside.

  Our only usable assets were those we had with us: two gasoline trucks, the Mercedes, the Land-Rover and the jeep. They were all worthless now, unless the situation changed. My little Vespa too. There was no more gasoline to be bought or bartered for. And then it hit me. Barter – that was the key. In an uncertain future, we needed things to barter with. But what did we have to offer?

  Gold and jewellery would be useful, gold especially, for everyone recognized its value. Medicine would be valuable too. We needed medicine for ourselves, to protect against infections, malaria and all the other ills of a tropical climate. The medicine we did not use we could barter with. I had brought the medicine from the clinic, but we needed more.

  We needed clothes too. Not just for barter but for wearing. I still had on the black trousers I had worn on April 17, along with the woman’s blouse I had taken after somebody in the hospital had stolen my shirt. Huoy didn’t have fresh clothes either. Already we looked like the rest of the refugees. I had brought a pile of sarongs from the clinic but those wouldn’t help much. What could we do? The cars and trucks in front of the house looked more and more like useless sculpture, like monuments to the past. But it was a past I was unwilling to abandon. We had worked too hard to become rich to leave all our wealth behind.

  Sitting on the oxcart under the house I realized that, somehow, I was going to have to get back to Phnom Penh.

  Every morning the local Khmer Rouge soldiers assembled to recite their code of behaviour, which went like this:

  1. Thou shalt love, honour and serve the workers and peasants.