Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  We lit the candles, kneeled and prayed to Ma’s soul.

  14

  The Plough

  We Cambodians believe in kama, or karma – a religious concept meaning something like destiny, or fortune. A person’s kama depends on what he has done in this life and in previous lives. If he has done bad deeds he will suffer, sooner or later, in this life or the next. Similarly, if he has done good deeds he will have better fortune, sooner or later, in this life or the next. The cycle of births and rebirths goes on and on, and souls carry their kama forward with them.

  Ma’s kama was excellent. She had always been kind. She had made much merit for herself through religious devotion. Her next life would be better. We missed her and we wanted to be with her again, but we weren’t worried about her soul.

  It was our own lives, Huoy’s and mine, that we were more worried about. We couldn’t help wondering: was there something in our past existence, some terrible deeds we had committed, that caused us to be punished by this regime? Plenty of Cambodians thought so, but they tended to be people who belonged to rather mystical and superstitious sects of Buddhism. They believed that old prophecies were coming true and that Cambodia was being punished for sins committed long ago. They submitted to the Khmer Rouge sadly but without objection, as if surrendering to their fates. I didn’t agree. To me, whether we had good kama or bad kama, it was important to fight the Khmer Rouge. If we couldn’t fight them openly and physically then we would fight on the inside, on the battlefields of our minds. As Huoy and I walked along the railroad track the next morning, two doctor acquaintances of mine joined us. We began a conversation.

  ‘Yes, we are religious,’ one of the doctors, an ophthalmologist, was saying, ‘but we are university-educated too. Our minds have the power to observe and draw conclusions. It is easy to blame it all on kama, but the fact is that real world events made this new regime. When he was in power, Sihanouk kept us on a neutral path, but after him we went from one extreme to the other. First we went to a corrupt rightist like Lon Nol, and now we have gone to crazy leftists. If we are being punished for anything, it is that we have abandoned the middle way.’

  ‘I agree with you,’ said Huoy. ‘We are educated and we must always use our minds. But in all the history I have read, about Europe and about Asia, I have never heard of a regime like this one. The last place we lived in, they said our projects were finished, but the canal we were working on was barely begun. Then they told us we could leave to return to our villages, but instead they sent us here. They are always lying. When was there ever a regime like this before?’

  We continued walking down a path along the railroad tracks.

  ‘Ngor, your wife is right,’ the other doctor, a paediatrician, said thoughtfully. ‘Even the other communist regimes don’t lie as much as the Khmer Rouge. Look at China. The communists there seized private property and sent city people out into the country, but the Chinese are always talking about having the support of the people. You don’t get the sense that the Chinese government turned against the people the way the regime has here.’

  ‘Without China the Khmer Rouge could not survive,’ the ophthalmologist, himself a light-skinned ethnic Chinese, said gloomily. ‘Peking gives the Khmer Rouge all their weapons and uniforms, so it should expect something in return. At the very least, Peking could put Sihanouk in charge of the regime here.’

  ‘But my good friend,’ said the paediatrician, ‘you make a mistake if you think China has any control over the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge are always talking about independence. They want to control their own revolution.’

  I said, ‘But you make a mistake if you think the communists control their own revolution. Look at all the confusion when everybody had to leave Phnom Penh. All the unnecessary suffering, like the patients having to leave the hospitals. That costs the Khmer Rouge popular support. So does the lying. I tell you, the people at the top of the Khmer Rouge, like Khieu Samphan, are highly educated, but the people under them cannot even read and write. They don’t know where their revolution is going. They don’t even know they are communists.’

  ‘Of course they do.’

  ‘No they don’t,’ I said flatly. ‘When have you ever heard them mention the word “communist”?’

  ‘That’s true,’ said the paediatrician after a moment’s thought. ‘But then what are they?’

  ‘Kum-monuss,’ I said, and they all laughed. It was a play on words: kum, a long-standing grudge that finally explodes in disproportionate revenge, and monuss, meaning people. ‘That’s what they are at the lower level,’ I said, ‘ “revenge-people.” ’ All they know is that city people like us used to lord it over them and this is their chance to get back. That’s what they are, communist at the top and kum-monuss at the bottom.’

  We continued to walk slowly down the railroad track in the morning sunlight, talking about communists and kum-monuss and the fate of the country. It was the central question in our lives, what the Khmer Rouge would do now that they were in power; it was the mystery we could not solve. We crossed over railroad trestles with brown, muddy puddles underneath. Several times we stopped to help sick people resting by the tracks. Most of them had intestinal ailments from drinking dirty water. But even though we were doctors, there wasn’t much we could do for them. Not without medicines.

  By noon we came to our destination, Phum Chhleav. Thousands had arrived ahead of us, and more were on the way – a census later showed seventy-eight hundred in all. Phum Chhleav had a railroad siding but no railroad station. About a hundred yards from the siding, where a bridge crossed a dry irrigation canal, stood three houses on stilts. The Khmer Rouge soldiers and administrators lived in those three houses. The area assigned to us ‘new’ people, on the other side of the tracks, had a double line of mango trees but no buildings at all.

  We were told to choose land and build our houses. I borrowed a knife and went off and cut some spindly bamboo and some reeds and lengths of vine, and brought them back to a shady spot under a mango tree. Huoy and I stood the bamboo and the reeds on end and tied them with the vines to make our walls. We traded one of Ma’s silk sampots for some panels of thatch, and the thatch and our white piece of plastic made our roof.

  When we finished and stood back to look at the hut there was little to admire. Our new hut was even worse than our first one back in Tonle Batí. This one was a tiny, low-ceilinged, one-room hovel that looked as though it would blow over in the first strong wind. You could see though the reed walls to the inside of the hut, so of course the water could get through too. The ‘kitchen’ inside the hut was a triangle of three rocks to put the pot on. We made a mattress out of reeds and put tufts of grass on top to make it softer. Nearby, my father and brothers made huts that were a little better, but not much.

  After a few days, when flimsy structures had risen throughout Phum Chhleav, turning farmland into a crowded slum, the Khmer Rouge called a meeting. All the heads of families were supposed to attend.

  About a thousand of us showed up and sat on the ground near the railroad tracks, waiting for the speaker to arrive. It was early morning but the day was already hot. The land was brown and dry and the sky was milky white. Far off to the south rose the Cardamom Mountains, remote and wild. To the west, behind the Phnom Tippeday train station, dominating the skyline, rose a mountain with a long, uneven ridge. On a plateau below the ridgeline were two white spots, the smaller one a stupa or funeral monument, the larger one a Buddhist temple. Below the mountain in the flat, uncultivated rice fields, a man was riding a horse in our direction. He rode bareback, without saddle or stirrups. His lean, swaybacked horse picked its way over the low earthen dykes, without hurrying.

  Gradually the horse and rider approached. The horse’s hooves clip-clopped on the hard soil. The man drew up, slid off the bare back of the horse and stood in front of us, a skinny, dark-skinned old fellow with no shirt or shoes.

  He looked around and smiled at us. There were a few teeth in his lower jaw, but his
upper jaw was as bare of teeth as a newborn child’s.

  ‘Welcome to Phum Chhleav,’ he said. ‘Angka has let you come here to help build a new society. You must work hard, but you must be patient. At the present time, Angka is poor. Angka will provide food, but sometimes it will not be enough. And sometimes the food will be late.’

  We listened with sinking hopes. The Khmer Rouge hardly ever admitted their faults. If they said there would not be enough food, it could even mean starvation.

  ‘You must understand,’ he said, ‘that we only got free recently from our capitalist oppressors. Sihanouk’ – there was a sudden rustle in the crowd at the mention of the name – ‘helped liberate us from Lon Nol and his lackeys. We are free now, but the economic situation of the country has not yet improved. So we must sacrifice. We will follow the principles of ‘The Three Mountains.’ We will attain independence-sovereignty, rely on our own strengths and take destiny in hand. What this means to every one of you is that if you work hard, you will eat. If you cannot work, you will go hungry.’

  I waited to see whether he would say anything else about Sihanouk. Like everybody else, I hoped that Sihanouk would reappear and take control of the government from the Khmer Rouge. But the old man only mentioned Sihanouk that once in passing. To him, Sihanouk was no more than a minor figure from history. He talked instead about how important it was that we city people learn from the peasants, that we build our own houses and grow rice. We were going to start with empty hands and build up the country. I sat still and pretended to pay attention. But I had heard it all before.

  The old man, whose name was Comrade Ik, had the bearing of a man who was used to being obeyed. For a guess, he had been the headman of a rural village before becoming a civilian administrator for the Khmer Rouge. He wore a faded krama around his waist, black culottes, or shorts, and over his shorts a sarong doubled up above knee level. It was a peasant style of dress except for his sarong, which was made of silk. Before the revolution few could afford silk unless they grew the silkworms themselves. But now, those who had joined the Khmer Rouge could get silk kramas and sarongs free from frightened ‘new’ people. For the Khmer Rouge, silk was a status symbol, and a lot of them in Battambang Province wore it.

  The old man had a Battambang accent. Within Cambodia, Battambang was well known for its rice crop. With its flat land and rich soil the province produced enough rice to feed the whole country. Or it used to, before the war.

  Surely, I thought, that’s why they brought us to Phum Chhleav, to grow rice for the regime. To restore Battambang to its position as rice bowl of Cambodia. We were near the railroad, which made it easy to send the rice out, but far away from the temptations of any city or town. Yes, they were going to isolate us here. I had only to look at the wrinkled old man, with his bare chest and bare feet, to be sure: from now on, our lives would be more rural than ever.

  Work began the next day. We went out into the long-neglected rice fields with hoes and began breaking up the hard soil surface. It was a long day and at the end of it there was no food. If the Khmer Rouge didn’t give us enough to eat, I reasoned – their rations averaged about a can of uncooked rice per person every two days – there was no sense in working at all. This was easy in the confusion of a big new settlement like Phum Chhleav.

  The following morning, shortly after sunrise, my wife and I and another couple walked away from Phum Chhleav and into rice fields that were not being cultivated, keeping a careful eye out for soldiers. Once we were in the fields we were essentially out of sight. Rising from the bottoms of the paddies like islands in the sea were hillocks topped by brush or trees or sprays of bamboo. The hillocks were actually termite mounds, a common feature of tropical landscapes. They were as high as our waists or our heads, and anywhere from a few yards to tens of yards long. It was impossible to see through the vegetation growing out of the hillocks, and there were so many of them scattered around the fields that the view was limited to the middle distance, usually from fifty to a couple of hundred yards. However, the mountain ridge with the temple was in clear sight above the hillocks, giving me a reference point to steer by.

  The purpose of our outing was to gather wild foods. In Cambodia we have a humorous saying about food: ‘Eat anything with two legs except a ladder, anything with four legs except a table, and anything that flies except an airplane.’ The point is that when you live off the land you cannot be particular. The Cambodian peasants, who are geniuses at living off the land, sometimes eat termites for protein, though there are many other foods they prefer. Until the rains came – the rains arrived later in Battambang than in eastern Cambodia – there were no termites above ground anyway.

  We began by looking for field mice. We hovered near the mouse holes in the dykes in the rice fields and tried to trap them with a piece of fishnet. The problem, as I realized after several hours without catching any, was that mice always have a second entrance to their burrows. I had acquired some skills at hunting and gathering in childhood, but mice-hunting was not among them.

  Next we went looking for red ants, which live in sandy forests, weaving fibrous nests in the branches of trees. Rural Cambodians put red ants in soups to add crunchy texture and protein. They also cook the ants’ eggs, which are soft and white and sour, a kind of poor man’s caviar. The challenge is collecting the ants without being bitten. When you approach, the ants rise up with their forelegs waving in the air and their mouthparts scissoring back and forth in their eagerness to bite you. When you move left, they move the same way. When you move right, they follow. For their size they are the fiercest creatures I have ever seen. Unlike the stories we heard in the bonns, ants cannot kill elephants, or even humans – their bite isn’t poisonous – but their sting leaves a mark like a needle puncture. Fortunately, after my embarrassing attempts to trap mice, I knew how to hunt red ants. I held a plastic pail with some water in it and tipped the nest in with a stick. A few of the ants crawled onto the stick and onto my arm to bite me, but I had rubbed ashes onto my hands and arms. The ants fell off harmlessly when they reached my skin.

  While collecting ants in the forest we heard a sound from nearby – to-kay, to-kay – the first syllable higher-pitched than the second.

  Tokays, as they are commonly called, are lizards about a foot long. When cooked, their flesh tastes a bit like chicken. We followed the to-kay sound to a tree not far away. When we got close there was a flash of tail as the tokay darted into a hole in the tree trunk. I climbed up after it and put the scrap of fishnet over the hole. The four of us shook the tree until the lizard fell out.

  At the end of the afternoon we wandered back toward Phum Chhleav with red ant nests, several tokays and quantities of bamboo shoots, water convolvulus and other edible plants. We had foraged off the land like peasants and we looked like peasants ourselves. I was barefoot, with no glasses or wristwatch, carrying a bundle of food tied up in my krama. Huoy wore her krama wrapped around her head like a turban. The other couple looked about the same. We were nearing the railroad track when Huoy suddenly whispered to me, ‘Sweet, sweet! Get down! Soldiers ahead!’ I dropped to the ground ahead of her, crawled to a hillock and peered through the bushes on top. ‘Stay down!’ Huoy commanded behind me.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I whispered back.

  On the path beside the railroad track two civilians were walking with two soldiers behind them, all in a line. The soldiers wore black uniforms with green Chinese hats and Ho Chi Minh-style black rubber sandals, and they carried their rifles slung over their shoulders by the straps. The two civilians had their elbows tied tightly behind their backs. A rope travelled from the first civilian to the second civilian and from there to one of the soldiers’ hands. The two civilian prisoners walked slowly, with their heads hanging low.

  I recognized them with a shock.

  ‘My two doctor friends,’ I whispered back to Huoy.

  Huoy crawled forward and onto the hillock next to me. We watched together. There was something so irrevocable,
so final about the sight that we felt our own ends had come as well. ‘These two friends of mine weren’t troublemakers,’ I whispered to her. ‘The soldiers are taking them away because they were doctors. Tomorrow it will be my turn. Everybody knows I am a doctor.’

  The two doctors walked along very slowly, weighed down by the knowledge of their approaching deaths. We watched them walk farther and farther away along the railroad track until we couldn’t see them anymore. Then we still waited, expecting to hear rifle shots, but the shots never came.

  ‘Maybe you’re wrong,’ Huoy said at last. ‘Maybe they’re being taken away because they didn’t work in the rice fields.’

  I thought this over. She had a point. Maybe the two other doctors had avoided work so they could go gather food, just as we did. Maybe they had been caught at it.

  We never knew for sure, because we never saw the two doctors again, or heard anything about their arrest. But after that Huoy always insisted that I show up for work, and I did. As she pointed out, if we worked we didn’t have enough food, but it was better to be hungry than dead.

  I was sent off to repair roads. About thirty of us from our section of Phum Chhleav left together, walking with hoes over our shoulders down a winding path through the rice fields and the jungle. In previous years a series of floods had cut huge gullies through an old dirt road. We set to work with our hoes, filling up baskets with dirt and carrying the baskets on shoulderboards. There were no other people around, and no villages. We worked eight days without much food. When we trudged back to Phum Chhleav at last, Huoy was sitting on the ground outside our hut, waiting for me.

  ‘You lost weight,’ she said.

  ‘A lot, sweet.’

  She rose and hugged me tenderly, and hung on without letting me go. She had been alone when I was away. Alone and worried about me and grieving for her mother. And even after I came back it would take her a day or two to recover.