Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  Like someone in a light trance, who acts capably but at the same time watches his own actions with detachment, I found a zippered flight bag for them and a big duffel bag for myself. They squinted at the bottles’ labels, which were in French. Meanwhile I reached down to the bottom shelf among the cleaning rags and found a rolled-up black cloth. It was heavy. Inside was the gold.

  ‘What are in all these bottles?’ One-Pen said to me.

  I palmed the gold and crossed the room to Huoy’s dresser with the duffel bag. ‘I’m not exactly sure, comrade. Why don’t we just take what we can now and figure out what it is later?’ I wrapped the black cloth in one of Huoy’s blouses and stuffed it in the bottom of the bag. Then I found her jewellery box and put that in the bag. I put as many of her clothes as would fit on top of that. I fastened the duffel bag shut. It had taken only a minute. The Khmer Rouge were still taking medicine from the shelves and putting it in the flight bag, but they were hurrying. They didn’t want to stay in the apartment longer than necessary either.

  On the way out I took a tin of cookies from the table and gave it to the soldiers, as a gift. They wanted to know what it was. I explained that cookies were a kind of Western cake. Poisonous? they wanted to know. I ate a cookie to show them. Then they each had a cookie and smiles spread across their faces. I don’t think they’d ever had any kind of sugared pastry before.

  We clattered down the steps to the street, ignoring the old lady in the other third-floor apartment. I started the Vespa, put the duffel bag on the floor of the scooter between my feet, and we drove off toward my bachelor apartment while I mentally rehearsed what I was going to do.

  When we got there I locked my scooter again, an irrational act considering that nobody was around to steal it. We went inside. Arriving at the medicine cabinet ahead of the others, I reached on top of it and closed my fingers around a heavy gold ring. I put it in my pocket. Then I started shovelling the medicine out onto the floor and suggested that they just take it now and sort it back in the village.

  When they were busy once again, I went across to my clothes bureau. In the top drawer were several sets of handworked Cambodian betel boxes, each box with an animal, like a tiger or elephant or crocodile, in raised relief. More barter objects. I wrapped them in clothes and put them in the duffel bag. In another drawer was an envelope with twenty-six hundred dollars in US currency. That too. Then I opened the bureau drawers and stuffed the clothes into the bag – all except for the bottom drawer, which held my military uniforms. Finally I grabbed both sides of the bag, pushed the load down with my foot so everything would fit, and fastened the snap. One-Pen held up a plastic IV bag with liquid inside and asked me if it was serum. I told him maybe, but we could find out for sure back at Wat Kien Svay Krao.

  They were squatting in front of a pile of pills, ointments, solutions and lotions, the mit’s AK-47 beside him on the floor. They didn’t have much room left in their flight bag. I took a towel and selected what I wanted most: antibiotics for infections, chloroquine for malaria, antidysentery and antidiarrhoea pills, vitamins, Mercurochrome for cuts, Xylocain and syringes for pain-killing injections. I worked fast, tying the towel into a bundle. One-Pen was picking up one medicine bottle after another uncomprehendingly, puzzling over the letters of the Roman alphabet, trying to figure out what pills did by their shape or colour. The mit had already given up.

  ‘Have you got water here?’ the mit asked.

  ‘Yes, comrade. Help yourself,’ I said absently.

  I helped One-Pen finish packing while the mit went off to find a drink. Then from the bathroom came a sound of gushing water and the mit cursing in a loud voice. I went into the bathroom to look. Sure enough, the mit’s chest and shoulders were drenched. He hadn’t known that if he turned the faucet underneath the shower head, water would come out. He looked at the sink but decided not to risk it, because the sink had faucets too. Then he spotted water in plain sight and bent down and cupped his hands to drink it. He lifted water from the toilet bowl to his lips and slurped it gratefully. ‘Tastes just like water from a well,’ he remarked. Then he bent down with his hands cupped and got some more. When he stood up he was licking his lips, a contented man. He had figured out how to use a Western-style bathroom.

  I wanted to laugh. I wanted to laugh out loud, to break the tension. But I kept my jaws clamped shut and said nothing. And at the same time I felt sorry and disgusted that this poor rural boy didn’t know what toilets were for.

  We left my apartment. I took my medicines from the towel and repacked them in the luggage compartment on the left side of my Vespa. I put the duffel bag between my feet again. We drove off, the engine echoing through the silent streets.

  We were on our way back.

  In a few blocks we came to an abandoned school. Before the takeover it had been called Lycée Tuol Svay Prey. Now there was nobody in it. Weeds grew knee-high in the schoolyard. We didn’t stop there, nor did I give it a close look at the time. But later that year the Khmer Rouge security police took it over and turned it into a prison. They called it S-21, and later it was also called Tuol Sleng. It became a symbol of Khmer Rouge atrocities, just as Auschwitz was a symbol of the Nazi regime.

  We drove south on Monivong, the noise of the engine unnaturally loud in the empty boulevard. We came to the Faculty of Law, which the Khmer Rouge had taken over as a barracks. Soldiers were eating meals, squatting in front of cooking fires with their mess kits. They stopped us out in the street. But One-Pen told them, ‘It’s just medicine for Angka.’ And I nodded my head vigorously and said, ‘Yes, medicine for Angka.’

  American-made trucks captured from the Lon Nol regime were pulling up to the Faculty of Law compound just then. Khmer Rouge soldiers stood in back of the trucks, waving to their comrades inside the compound, glad to come into Phnom Penh from the dull countryside. ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ they were shouting. ‘Long live our splendid victory over the imperialists! Long live the Kampuchean revolution!’ This time, I noticed, the mit kept his mouth grimly shut, even though he shouted the same slogans in Wat Kien Svay Krao. There was rivalry between his unit and others.

  I drove the Vespa down the boulevard, over the Monivong bridge, and onto National Route 1. It was late afternoon. I had accomplished much. I had gotten clothes for Huoy and myself. Gold and silver and medicine for trading. In a subtle way I had even struck back at the Khmer Rouge for what they were doing to my family and to our society. The tension I had felt since morning was giving way to elation.

  We ran into checkpoints along the road, but at each of them I yelled, ‘Medicine for Angka!’ and we passed easily.

  11

  Return to the Village

  After I came back from Phnom Penh, Thoeun and the four remaining nurses asked me whether they could return to their villages. To them I was still the boss, the luk doctor, which was why they asked permission. The revolution had not yet ‘liberated’ their minds.

  I told them to go ahead. And why not? The war was over. The country was at peace. It was time for them to reunite with their families and return to their ancestral villages. Thoeun left first. I saw him off at the riverbank, grinning, his head still twitching from side to side. He pushed his motorcycle down the gangplank and onto a cargo boat and vanished in the crowd of passengers. The boat, with a red flag flying from its cabin, chugged into the Mekong’s main current and slowly upstream.

  Then the nurses left, on foot, with their bundles balanced on their heads. I wasn’t worried about their safety. The Khmer Rouge didn’t rape or rob, and everyone else was so afraid of the Khmer Rouge that there was little crime. But I was sad. Their departure tore a little more of the past away, and I preferred the past to the present.

  The nurses were taking a roundabout route to Takeo Province: first north on National Route 1 toward Phnom Penh, then west on a dirt road to the Bassac River, across the Bassac by boat and finally south on National Route 2. Many others from Takeo were going the same way, and Wat Kien Svay Krao was gradually empty
ing.

  Now the rest of us had to decide what to do. We had our gold and our medicine. There were no more reasons for staying. It was time for us to leave, to choose a destination before the Khmer Rouge chose one for us.

  Huoy, her mother and I decided to go to the Changs’ home province of Kampot, southwest of Takeo along the Gulf of Siam. A cousin of Huoy’s made regular trips to Thailand by boat, or used to before the revolution. She thought we could go with him. That was our final destination, Thailand, Cambodia’s neighbour to the west. It was a Buddhist country, with a culture much like our own. It was also an American ally, in no danger of going communist. If we could only get there, we would be free. We didn’t want to live under Khmer Rouge rule, or under any communist regime. We had heard that Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, had fallen to the communists. South Vietnam, Cambodia, even Laos – one after another, all the countries nearby were falling to communism, except for Thailand.

  My father had another plan. He wanted the whole family to go back with him to the lumber mill. He said that the Khmer Rouge would need someone like him, the former owner, to run it. If he couldn’t run the mill we would all follow him to the town of his birth, called Tonle Batí, which was near Samrong Yong but had better soil and more water for farming.

  I didn’t like his plan. Whether we went with him to the lumber mill or to Tonle Batí, it would leave us under Khmer Rouge control. I told him we would go with him to the mill and then decide what to do from there. After all, if we could get to the lumber mill, we were also going in the right direction for Kampot.

  The compromise didn’t please him. It didn’t please me much either. But in truth I was of two minds about staying with my family. The good feelings when Huoy returned had given way to the usual quarrelling. My brother’s wife, Nay Chhun, barely spoke to me, and she was always being nasty to Huoy because Huoy and I weren’t officially married. The whole family was on edge, and the reason was uncertainty. We did not know what life under the Khmer Rouge was going to be. It was just as well that we were leaving.

  We left in the morning – the entire Ngor family, the two Chang women and I, plus the entourage of servants and drivers and their children. We were thirty-odd people in all, with two trucks, two fourwheel-drive vehicles, a car and a motor scooter. Behind my motor scooter was the cart that Thoeun and I had taken from the clinic.

  Each vehicle had half a tank of fuel. We pushed them along National Route 1, to save gas. Later, we turned onto the dirt road and the wheels got stuck in sand, we started the motors. The men pushed harder, the motors roared, and the wheels spun around, sending plumes of sand to the rear. Once the vehicles were free, we turned the engines off and pushed again. I pushed the Vespa by the handlebars, and Huoy pushed it from the back of the trailer, which carried our luggage. It seemed like a dream, that I had actually ridden the Vespa to and from Phnom Penh.

  It was hard work, pushing. The weather had that almost unbearable humidity that comes in the last months before the rainy season, when the sky turns hazy white and the sun is like an oven. Slowly we passed blown-up houses and decapitated palm trees. The landscape was empty of people except for city exiles like ourselves, walking or pushing cars along the dusty road.

  On the third day we reached the Bassac River, a lazy, muddy channel sunk far down in its banks. We camped by the riverbank next to a house belonging to my aunt on my father’s side. The roof and the upper storey of her house had been destroyed in the war and she was living on the ground floor in a tent supported by the concrete columns. My aunt was glad to see us. She prepared the best meal she could under the circumstances, using fish from the river and fresh fruit picked from trees.

  Next we had to find out how to cross the river. Pheng Huor went out on a bicycle to explore, and he found four pirogues, about the size of canoes, whose owners were willing to work for us. But the boatmen wouldn’t accept Lon Nol currency in payment, no matter how much he offered. They wanted fifteen cans of rice per boat trip, using cans from Nestle’s evaporated milk as a measure. It was the first time I had heard of using rice as money, but it made sense. Everyone needed and used rice. It was the perfect medium of exchange.

  Because the boats were small, we could take only the lightest vehicles across the river. Papa decided to leave everything but the jeep behind with his sister. Pushing them had been exhausting anyway. He also decided it was time to let the drivers and their families go off on their own. He gave them money and food and they went off after saying their farewells. And it was a sad, scaled-down expedition that travelled across the river: the jeep, with each wheel riding in a separate small boat, the boatmen poling their way across; the Ngors and the Changs and all the extra gasoline and the supplies; and finally my Vespa and its trailer.

  By the time we unloaded everything on the other bank we were tired and short-tempered. We camped and made a fire. When Pheng Huor’s daughter Ngim upset a cooking pot, I cuffed her on the head. The girl’s mother, Nay Chhun, shook her finger in my face, which is very rude in our culture, and told me never to touch her children again. I said that if her children needed lessons in behaviour I had the right to teach them. I lost my temper, she lost hers and soon we were shouting at each other at the top of our lungs. A Khmer Rouge soldier came over to stop us.

  ‘No yelling!’ he said. ‘Angka doesn’t allow people fighting each other! If you don’t stop I will bring both of you to Angka Leu.’

  I had never heard of Angka Leu. It means ‘higher organization’ in our language, and nothing more. But the way the soldier said it suggested that Angka Leu was something to fear. Nay Chhun retreated, muttering and flashing nasty glances. When I had calmed down, Huoy told me not to discipline Nay Chhun’s children even if they needed it. Whatever Angka Leu was, Huoy said, it was best to avoid it.

  We never did get to my father’s sawmill. There was a bridge between it and National Route 2, and the soldiers wouldn’t let us cross. Papa tried telling them that he wanted to get the mill working to help the regime, but they wouldn’t even listen.

  Even before we reached the bridge, however, I had decided to leave. I had no problem with respecting the family hierarchy, in theory. Life means being part of a family. The older members are in charge, and every individual works together harmoniously to benefit the whole. But in practice it was one problem after another. If I wasn’t quarrelling with Papa it was with my older brother, and if it wasn’t with him it was with his wife. Much of the quarrelling was my own fault, but that didn’t make it any easier. For all my maturing as an adult, inside I was still the hyperactive, hot-tempered boy with the short fuse. My instincts told me to get away from my family, just as my instincts told me to get away from the Khmer Rouge. I had to live on my own terms.

  As Papa sat glumly by the roadblock, I explained to him that we had to go. Reluctantly he gave his permission. When the good-byes were over, Huoy, her mother and I found ourselves walking down National Route 2.

  We had walked for an hour when three Khmer Rouge with rifles stopped us. They were children, maybe ten years old. They didn’t search our bodies – that was against their code – but they went through the luggage in the cart behind the Vespa. They didn’t find the medicine, which I had hidden inside the rice supply, but they did find my camera, some medical equipment and my medical textbooks.

  One of the child-soldiers opened a textbook and saw the type printed in the Roman alphabet. My medical books were all in French.

  ‘You are CIA,’ he remarked in his high-pitched voice.

  It took me a second to follow his train of thought: since I had a book in a foreign language, I was working for foreigners. This made me an agent of the CIA.

  ‘Eh?’ I said. ‘What does it mean, “CIA,” comrade? I have never heard of it before.’

  ‘Where did you get the books?’ he demanded suspiciously. He picked up a speculum and some surgical clamps. ‘And what are these for?’

  I said, ‘I don’t know. People were throwing them away on the street, so I pic
ked them up and kept them. The same with the books. If you want any of them, keep them. I don’t know how to read anyway. I was just going to use the paper from the books to wrap things in.’

  One of the other soldiers said to the first one, ‘Ah, yes, good idea. We can use the paper for rolling cigarettes.’

  The first one tossed my pharmacology textbook and two pathology books to his comrade, who ripped out a page, tore it into quarters, sprinkled tobacco on the paper, rolled a cigarette and lit it with a gold lighter.

  ‘Angka needs these too,’ said the first soldier, grabbing a handful of medical instruments.

  Then they let us go and began to search people who had arrived after us.

  We walked on. We came to other checkpoints and were told to turn off the highway, to begin farming nearby. Fortunately I knew the names of all the villages, and at each checkpoint managed to convince the soldiers that we were going to the next village farther on.

  The next afternoon we reached Samrong Yong. At the north end of the village, a few houses still had parts of their roofs intact and others had walls or concrete supporting columns, but none of them was whole. The market in the centre of the village was gone, except for a few smashed wooden benches among the knee-high weeds. The old French-built blockhouse wasn’t there and neither were the trees. Everything had been flattened. All the landmarks had vanished. I couldn’t even find my family’s home.

  Then I saw it: concrete walls that had toppled over and lay flat, like giant playing cards. Grass grew in the cracks of the walls, and the garden was buried in weeds.

  We camped that night on the fallen-over walls. There were no other people nearby. No dogs to bark, no roosters to crow. The village was as quiet as if it had been abandoned a hundred years before. A lone Khmer Rouge, a child, sat at the road intersection with his rifle.