Survival in the Killing Fields
Page 18
I thought, that bigmouth Kim told the village chief.
‘I was only a student,’ I said through the door. ‘Never a doctor.’
Neang was losing his patience. ‘Everybody here knows you were a doctor. Now come on, and don’t be scared. Angka doesn’t know about your past and I will never tell. Come on. I’m the leader here. I’ll take care of you.’
‘Please give me a minute.’
I did some quick thinking. Neang had come alone, without soldiers. He had a reputation as a good-natured man. Earlier that day he had asked our work group at the canal site whether any of us had fever medicines, but nobody had answered. He knew I was a doctor even then, but he hadn’t singled me out in public. He had waited for dark instead.
Huoy sat up in the mosquito net. ‘What’s wrong?’ she whispered. ‘Are they going to take you away?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I whispered back, changing from my sarong into trousers. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’
I followed Neang to his home, which was lit with lanterns inside, the light showing through the cracks.
Neang had called on some other medical practitioners before me, and they were standing around the baby. Two of them were traditional rural healers. They were dark-skinned, heavily tattooed and wore only shorts. They had prepared a green liquid medicine, grinding palm sugar, black pepper and various leaves together in a mixture with unboiled water. They had fed it to the baby with a spoon. They had also sprinkled what was supposed to be holy water on the baby’s forehead. When I came in they were chanting to drive away the evil spirits.
Two young female Khmer Rouge doctors were also there, in the usual black uniforms and short haircuts. One of them was drawing a white liquid from an ampule marked ‘Thiamine’ into a syringe.
Oh no, I thought. Please don’t.
The baby was lying on a table, wrapped tightly in blankets. I pulled the covers back to look. A swollen belly. Skin hot to the touch. Occasional tremors in the body. Without lab tests it was hard to be sure, but my guess was meningitis as a secondary condition brought on by the fever.
‘How can I save my son?’ Neang asked me.
‘Take the blankets away,’ I said. ‘Your son is too hot. You need to cool him down. Moisten a cloth with cold water and pat him with it.’
‘No,’ commanded the mit neary with the syringe. ‘The baby has a fever because it is cold. Don’t take the blankets away.’
She was wrong, but I did not want to assert myself. She and her comrade were in charge. The one with the syringe wiped the needle between her fingers and approached the child. I winced. It was not just a matter of an unsterile needle. Thiamine, or vitamin B1, is sometimes used in Western medicine as an ingredient in multivitamin treatments but only in tiny quantities. It is never injected alone. The mit neary had drawn five cc’s into the syringe. I doubted that she could read the label on the ampule, which was in French, or that she knew that she was administering an overdose.
She jabbed the needle into the unconscious child and pushed the chamber until all the liquid was inside the little boy’s body.
The traditional healers chanted in a monotone. The Khmer Rouge women waited, sullen and bored. Neang looked at me anxiously, but I kept silent and stayed in the background. The oil lamps cast our shadows on the wall.
Outside, the crickets chirped and the bullfrogs on the lake made their deep croaking noise.
The child began shaking, not with light tremors but with deep, terrible convulsions. It fell into a coma with its unseeing eyes wide open. It twitched for another five or ten minutes and then it was dead.
I excused myself and went outside.
I took a deep breath. The chorus of crickets and frogs was louder here. Their sounds came from all directions, filling the night air.
I wanted to scream.
How I hated it all! If I had told Neang that the child shouldn’t get the injection, the Khmer Rouge medics probably would have ignored me. If I insisted, they would have reported me for interfering, and then I would have been taken to Angka Leu. To them, anything in an ampule was medicine. If a patient died after getting an injection, it was the patient’s fault. What was the purpose of a revolution like that? I wondered. What was the gain, what was the progress, when a society went from ignorant herbal healers to monkeys like the Khmer Rouge? What about the kind of knowledge that was taught in medical school? Wasn’t it worth anything? Were we supposed to forget that it existed?
Maybe, I thought, just maybe, if I had been more forceful the child wouldn’t have died. If I had told the medics to stand back, if I had put confidence and authority into my bearing, they might have obeyed me. Then I could have removed the blankets, cooled the baby down and prevented them from giving the injection. In doing so I would have risked my own life, but I would have saved the child’s.
I hadn’t done it. I had protected my own life instead.
How I hated it. The country was ruled by the ignorant. Already there were unnecessary deaths. To avoid our own deaths people like me were doing things we knew were wrong. And as we scrambled to protect ourselves, or sought to gain favour with the new powers, the old relationships were torn apart. Doctors broke their professional oaths. Families argued. People like my aunt became collaborators, and used their influence with the leaders to satisfy old grudges.
I stood in the dark thinking about the new regime. I had already seen more of it than I wanted. What I did not know was that everything that had happened so far was mild and harmless, compared with what was still to come.
13
New Directions
A week after the death of the village chief’s child, at one of the nightly bonns, we were told that Angka had a ‘new direction’ for us. ‘We have almost finished our projects here,’ a mit neary declared, though in fact the canal was barely begun, ‘and soon we will have to begin other projects. You will still be struggling against the elements to help develop the country, but someplace else.’
This news, that we were going to leave Tonle Batí, was unpopular at first with the ‘new’ people. We had planted crops but not yet harvested them. But later it was announced that we would be allowed to return to our native villages. We would walk to a collection point, and then trucks would take us to our destinations.
With that the idea of leaving looked much better. What an opportunity! Except for a few families, like Aunt Kim’s, who had been longtime residents of Tonle Batí and who would be staying, the Khmer Rouge didn’t know where we were from. I revived my plans for going to the seacoast, and from there to Thailand by boat. My parents planned to go to Battambang Province, in western Cambodia, and from there to Thailand by land. Everybody in my immediate family was ready to leave except for my number-four brother, Hong Srun. I had just helped his wife deliver a baby, and it was too soon for them to travel.
Huoy, Ma and I left our little hut with few regrets. We carried a smaller number of possessions than before, in two big baskets suspended from my shoulderboard and the rest in bundles the women balanced on their heads. My father left his jeep behind, the last vehicle of his fleet. We were all travelling lighter.
The trip was supposed to take half a day. We set out on foot through the extensive sandflats next to Tonle Batí. With the weight of the load on the shoulderboard, my feet sunk into the sand. I took off my shoes, but the sand was hot on my soles. Huoy trudged on in her leather sandals, looking as urban and fashionable as a woman could under the circumstances. Her mother, plump and unpretentious, wore rubber shower sandals, the most sensible of us all.
Soon the trail led out of the sandflats and into the forest, up and around and down and up again. Thousands of us walked on it in single file, heading generally northwest. We were not just from Tonle Batí but from many villages around. In the early afternoon, long after we were supposed to arrive at the central collection point, we turned onto another trail leading south. ‘This is what the communists mean by “new direction,” ’ I thought. ‘Taking the long way around fo
r no apparent reason.’
By evening we had reached a small valley with a railroad station. A crowd of other ‘new’ people was already there with bundles, bags and suitcases. Wood-burning steam locomotives came chuffing along the track but kept on going without stopping. Behind the locomotives were old wooden boxcars full of passengers, who were standing in the boxcar doorways, peering out from the slats along the sides, or sitting on the boxcar roofs. They didn’t wave to us and they didn’t look happy.
By now everybody knew that we weren’t going to be allowed to go back to our home villages. The Khmer Rouge had told us that just to get us to leave the places where we had been.
We waited by the railroad station for four days while trains went by, each one with a cargo of thousands of human beings, shipped like farm animals out of eastern Cambodia. It looked as though the Khmer Rouge were evacuating the entire region.
There had been a mix-up with our shipment, however. We never did get on a train at that station. Instead, we were led on foot to another village nearby, and the next day a convoy of empty Chinese-built military trucks drove in. Now the ‘new’ people nervously called out the name of the places they wanted to go. The soldiers said to shut up and get in the trucks. So we got in feeling both afraid and stupid. It was amazing that we had believed even at first that Khmer Rouge would really let us return to our home villages. We had been naïve to think they might be telling the truth, after the lies they had told us to get us to leave Phnom Penh.
Packed into the back of the trucks, we bounced down the rutted road and then onto National Route 3, heading north. It was the same kind of war-wrecked landscape we had seen elsewhere. Houses flattened except for occasional walls. Coconut trees with their tops blown off. Mango trees blackened by fire. Lon Nol military bases with overturned trucks and jeeps, and tanks with metal treads hanging loose and broken.
Our truck was in the middle of the convoy. As we neared Phnom Penh along the airport road a murmur of hope swelled and we could hear the yelling of enthusiasm from the other trucks. We entered Phnom Penh at twilight and drove through the streets at top speed. There were no people and no lights anywhere; it was the same city of ghosts that it had been in April after the evacuation. As we drove to the northern edge of Phnom Penh all hope died and then the trucks were speeding along north on National Route 5 in the countryside again. The road ran parallel to the Tonle Sap River, visible from time to time as a flat, silvery surface in the gaps between the trees.
After a stop to camp overnight we got on again the next morning and reached the town of Pursat around noon. At Pursat, a provincial capital, National Route 5 and the railroad line came together, then ran parallel for some distance to the northwest before separating again at another town, called Muong. Pursat was empty of regular inhabitants – nobody in the market, sliding metal doors pulled shut across the storefronts – but a crowd of travellers like us filled the streets nearest the railroad station. Loudspeakers announced that Angka was giving away food, and the crowd surged forward to get supplies. I stood in line and eventually got rice and salt and some dried fish.
By then it was late afternoon. A few blocks from the railroad station there was a pond with water lilies and other aquatic plants. My family chose a quiet spot on the far side of the pond, back in a grove of banana trees, where there were no other people. Here we built our fires. Huoy cooked rice. Her mother was tired but did not complain. We were windburned from the long journey in the open truck, and all of us were tired.
When Ma had eaten her fill she stood up, rewrapped her sarong around her waist and went off to the pond to get water. Huoy and I picked at our food. My father and mother and my two remaining brothers, Pheng Huor and Hok, ate with their families close by.
‘Where’s my mother?’ Huoy asked after a few minutes had passed.
‘She’s probably talking to somebody. I’ll go look for her if you like.’ I stood up and walked through the trees to the pond. There was nobody along the shore of the pond except for a few people on the far side. I squinted to see if I could make out a plump figure in a sarong.
Where was Ma?
Then I looked lower and my eyes caught a bit of bright colour on the bank. I walked closer and even before I was sure it was Ma’s rubber shower sandals my heart was beating fast.
I checked again, but there was nobody wading or swimming in the pond.
I shouted to Huoy that her mother had fallen into the water, and then I dove into it and began thrashing around to try to find her. The pond was cold and full of slippery plants and there were leeches on my arms though I barely noticed them. My father heard and he waded into the water too, old and slow but doing his best. I dove farther out from the bank and then felt something soft under the water lilies, and I pulled Ma out of the water and up on the bank. She wasn’t breathing. I lifted her up so her belly was on my shoulder and I jumped up and down. Water came out of her mouth and some rice too, but she still wasn’t breathing. Her limbs were soft and pliable but she had no pulse. I tried artificial respiration with my mouth over hers, then thumped her chest hard with my two fists together to start her heart, and then went back to artificial respiration.
I kept trying.
There was a ring of faces around me but it was no good.
‘Attention, comrades!’ said a voice echoing out of the loudspeakers by the station. ‘You will now board the train. Angka wants you to collect your belongings and get on board!’
Ma was dead. Huoy was frantic. I was numb. If there was anything more to do, I didn’t know it. My brother Pheng Huor took over. He carried the limp body to a shed and put it up on two boards. He built a fire underneath. It is a Cambodian folk belief that the spark of life continues as long as the body is soft, and the heat from a fire can bring it back. The part of me that had been trained in Western medicine was not strong enough to object, and I waited there like the rest, hoping for a miraculous recovery.
Two soldiers with rifles were watching.
Pheng Huor added wood to the fire and built up a blaze and massaged Ma’s arms and legs. But Ma didn’t respond.
‘You have to leave. Time to leave now,’ the soldiers were saying behind us. ‘No crying. Angka does not allow it.’
We could either bury Ma in the Chinese tradition, or else cremate her according to the Cambodian Buddhist tradition. We could do it either way, but it didn’t seem possible that we had to make the choice and that she was dead. I had my arms around Huoy, but Huoy was beyond consolation.
Nearby, in the banana grove, a large hole had already been dug for planting trees.
My brothers carried the body on planks and placed it next to the hole. Huoy smoothed her mother’s hair and began kissing and hugging her as if she were still alive. Huoy wouldn’t release her mother until my father patted her gently on the back and told her to let go, and then Huoy began beating the ground with her fists and her feet and her elbows and knees.
We had no candles, so we set a couple of sticks from the fire in the ground. Huoy and I prayed out loud on our knees in front of her mother with the rest of my family behind.
‘Mother, you left me! You left me all alone!’ Huoy bawled. ‘Were you angry at me, Mother? Tell me how I can serve you. You can ask me for anything you want. Just wait for me in paradise so I can be with you in the next life. Mother, oh Mother, I want to be with you. Please, please, take me with you!’ And Huoy fell sobbing with her head on her mother’s breasts.
‘If she is dead it doesn’t matter anymore,’ the soldiers said crossly. ‘You must hurry.’
Weeping without restraint, we prayed with our palms together in the sompeah, and then placed our palms on the ground in front of us and rocked forward, touching our foreheads to the backs of our hands. ‘And if you cannot wait for me in heaven,’ Huoy wailed, ‘come back into our family. I want you to be reborn as my daughter, so I can treat you well again.’
‘You have to go now,’ said the soldiers. ‘You will be punished if you miss the train.’
The train was at the station and the wooden boxcars were full. The last few passengers were climbing up to the roof, and some people helped push us up with our luggage and Ma’s too. Huoy sat next to me and it was all I could do to keep her from jumping off the train and running back to her mother’s grave.
The locomotive let out a piercing whistle and began slowly pulling out of the station, CHUFchufchufchuf CHUFchufchufchuf CHUFchufchufchuf with the wheels making a rhythmic clicking on the track. We drew out of Pursat. I sat with my arm around Huoy, protecting her from the wind, holding her together. Huoy had never outgrown the need for her mother’s love and advice. She had depended on Ma, even more than she depended on me. Now I was all she had.
The train chuffed along in a straight line. The landscape was utterly flat, rice fields reaching right to the bluish hills rising out of the plains near the horizon. The earth was dry and bare, the dykes war-damaged, the fields unplanted. Maybe that’s why they had sent us here, I thought, to grow rice in western Cambodia.
The late-afternoon light turned a rich yellow and then orange and then the sun set. A full moon rose behind us. There was no comforting Huoy.
The train took us beyond Muong and finally stopped at a station called Phnom Tippeday, at the base of a mountain rising out of the plains of Battambang Province. Huoy and I walked away from the crowd to be alone. Next to the ruins of a rice mill destroyed in the war, we found a pile of rice hulls, and there we spread our white plastic mat. We improvised an altar with bowls of rice and water and with candles given to us by kindly strangers on the train.