Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  ‘Did Angka beat you or punish you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We just worked a lot.’

  ‘I have food for you,’ she said.

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Guess,’ she said, and it had to be something special.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I have cooked mice for you. Field mice. I knew you were coming today.’

  It was as if I were returning from a business trip and she had fixed me a steak or an especially nice fish as a wifely gesture. She had traded for the mice with some more of her mother’s clothes. She was taking care of me as best she could, and it made no difference that we would never have considered eating mice when we were living in Phnom Penh. Here in the countryside mice were a treat.

  We ate the meal, and what little there was of the mouse meat was tasty, and I was touched by what she had done and worried to see that her sadness still lingered.

  The next day I went to work in a rice field near the railroad track. Huoy and I were assigned to the same group of about a hundred ‘new’ people. The Khmer Rouge gave hoes to Huoy and the rest of the women and told them to break up the topsoil where it hadn’t been broken before. Two teenage soldiers with rifles took us men to paddies that had been hoed already. There were about eight wooden ploughs and three or four oxen by a hillock. ‘We don’t have enough oxen now,’ one of the soldiers told us, ‘but we have to plough the fields. If we don’t plough and plant rice, we won’t have anything to eat.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said to myself. ‘Are we going to use human beings to plough? Is this what we have to do to build this advanced society they’re talking about – go back to prehistoric times?’

  The soldier’s face combined the dull gaze of limited intelligence with an obvious contempt for us city people. He held a long whip of plaited leather in his hand. ‘You,’ he said, pointing at one man. ‘Go to the plough. You too, and you.’ I hoped he wasn’t going to point at me. The ethnic Chinese in the group were cursing in Teochiew dialect, saying they just wouldn’t do it.

  He pointed at me.

  I walked over to the ploughs.

  ‘You,’ said the soldier. ‘Take this plough and get on the right side.’

  I stood on the right side in back of the crosspiece and all I could think about was kum-monuss. On my left an old female ox stood, making a sideways chewing motion with her mouth and swishing her tail to keep the flies away.

  ‘Now go,’ said the soldier, cracking his whip overhead.

  I began to push forward against the crosspiece. The ox walked forward in its harness. The soldier walked behind the plough, guiding it. My bare feet passed over clumps of clay with weeds growing out of them. The first light rains had softened the clay but only on top, and the ground was still cracked from the long, hot dry season.

  When we got to the edge of the field, the soldier sunk the tip into the earth below the depth the hoes had reached. The plough nearly came to a halt. By pushing harder I could still make it move forward, but the ox was stronger and the plough swerved off to the right. I had to push with all my strength to keep it going in a straight line.

  We ploughed down one side of the field, the early-morning sun shining into my eyes. It took a long time to reach the end of the field. Finally we turned the corner and began down another side.

  A rhythmic clicking noise came over my shoulder and then to one side. I turned my head and glimpsed a miniature flatcar travelling down the railroad track. Four men stood on it using long bamboo sticks in unison to pole themselves along, two of them on each side. They sped effortlessly along and soon they they were out of hearing.

  I leaned forward again and kept pushing but the wooden cross-piece was too high, about the level of my neck. I wished it were lower. Reaching up to it strained my shoulders and the small of my back. Blisters had formed on my hands from the road repair work and I could feel them pop open and the fluid running out.

  I looked around at the other paddies and saw other men ploughing with oxen and farther off the crews of women with their hoes rising and falling. I could not see far into the fields because of the hillocks, but in every direction men and women were working. Above us all, above the treetops to the west, rose the mountain with the two white dots. Lord Buddha help me, I thought. Help us all. Give us the strength to make it through the day.

  The plough had veered to the right and it was heading toward the dyke at the edge of the field.

  ‘Faster, faster!’ came the soldier’s voice behind me. ‘If you can’t go faster I will whip you!’ He cracked the whip above the ox and me, in the air.

  I bent forward to the work again. The neck and head of the ox filled the left side of my field of vision. The ox was making its sideways chewing motion, and spittle was drooling from its whiskered chin. It twitched its ears to keep insects from landing nearby, but when insects bit its foreleg the ox lowered its head and licked the spot with its enormously long, thick, sandpapery tongue. I heard its slow, regular breathing and the swishing of its tail on its back. How could anything that stupid be so strong? I wondered.

  The sweat rolled down my armpits and chest. I took my hand from the crosspiece and dabbed with my krama to keep the sweat out of my eyes, then went back to pushing.

  Why are the gods so blind? I thought. Did I do something wrong in a previous life that I have to do this now? Is there something terrible in my kama?

  Life had been so good back in Phnom Penh. So relaxed and prosperous. My patients sompeahed me and spoke to me politely. Huoy and I were happy. We had no worries. We ate in restaurants nearly every night and always ate enough. But not anymore. Now we have no fried noodles. No fish cooked with lemon and coriander. Every evening Huoy talks about her favourite recipes. She remembers the sweet desserts she used to make for my parents and says she wishes we had more food. Huoy’s cheeks have lost their roundness. She is losing weight.

  I struggled to keep up with the ox, but my breath was laboured. I heard my breathing and my footsteps and the ox’s footsteps and the twittering of the birds.

  Listen to the birds singing like that! Whenever they want they fly from one tree to another. They go wherever they want. When they find food they can eat it. It’s harder for people. We are draft animals like the oxen. So maybe our kama is very, very bad.

  Ma must have known that life was going to be like this. She was always intuitive. So she chose to drown herself in the pond. That’s why she died. What a wise old lady she was. I hope in her next life she –

  SNAP! A searing pain across my back.

  ‘Hey!’ I yelled angrily. ‘How can I push if you’re whipping me? Let me rest first and then I can go back to working.’

  ‘Finish the field and then rest,’ the soldier replied. But after a few more lengths of the field he stopped to roll and smoke a cigarette and I took a break too. I looked around. A woman in the next field was holding a hoe in one hand and looking at me. She was standing absolutely still and her other hand was clasped across her mouth as if she were trying to stop herself from screaming. It was Huoy, but without my glasses I could not see the expression on her face.

  When the soldier finished his cigarette we went back to ploughing. The sun was still low in the morning sky and the day was humid and hot. I could not imagine why the sun was taking so long to move across the sky. The soldier whipped me a few more times and after what seemed like days somebody far away rang a gong. Lunchtime. The soldiers went back to their kitchen in the row of three houses by the old canal, and some mit neary in black brought us out our meal, a cloudy broth with some grains of rice at the bottom.

  I had blisters on my palms, on the first and second joints of my fingers and between my thumbs and forefingers. My shoulders and my back and my calves ached, and my Achilles tendons were sore. But the whip marks hurt the most.

  ‘You eat my portion, sweet,’ Huoy said.

  ‘No, I’m okay. I don’t really have an appetite.’

  ‘Please. You eat it for me. You need the strength. I can
not eat it.’

  After lunch the soldier and I took the plough off the rig and put a wide rake or harrow in its place, to break up the clods turned up by the plough and to smooth the furrows. The soldier didn’t especially want to talk.

  ‘Not even one field ploughed,’ was all he said to me.

  All afternoon he stood on the harrow to drive the points in, and with his weight it was even harder to drag the harrow than the plough. We went around and around the field. Along one side there was a view of the mountain with the white dots but it meant nothing to me now. I kept looking at the sun, which stayed motionless in the sky.

  Late in the afternoon, the railroad maintenance crew came back along the track, poling vigorously toward the Phnom Tippeday railroad station, travelling faster than the breeze.

  Near sundown, the gong rang again and we quit. We had not ploughed or harrowed a single rice paddy.

  In our flimsy hut, Huoy heated water and made a hot compress with strips of cloth and put them on the whip welts, which curved over my shoulders and neck to the top of my chest. She was crying. She felt my pain more than I did. I was too tired to feel much of anything. ‘Today I prayed to my mother to take us with her,’ Huoy said. ‘I don’t know why we should go on, being treated like this. The Khmer Rouge should just kill us now and get it over with.’

  I didn’t know what to say. To myself I thought, Ma was smart to commit suicide.

  It rained that night, a long, drenching rain with flashes of lightning and rolling thunder and water leaking inside the hut. In the morning I went back to ploughing, but the ground was softer than before. And even the soldiers had admitted their mistake. Now they paired two men against each ox, or four men if there were no oxen.

  The rainy season had finally arrived in Battambang. The rain was cold and nearly continuous. After a few hours in it my fingers were white and wrinkled, like staying in bath water too long. We ploughed in the rain. Snails appeared on the ground, and when I picked one up the soldier whipped me across the back. ‘If you have time to pick up snails like that, how can we finish the fields?’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you like the food Angka is giving you? Isn’t it satisfying enough?’

  There was nothing to say to that without insulting Angka. I kept quiet. But I didn’t see why we shouldn’t pick up snails.

  At night I used a tiny oil lamp inside a can with reflective sides to look for food. But there were only tiny frogs and snails to be found nearby. Bursts of rifle fire came from near the soldiers’ houses, and I was afraid to go out into the rice fields and to the canals and ponds, where the fish and the frogs would be large and plentiful.

  From my normal weight of 135 to 140 pounds I dropped to 110 to 115 pounds. Then I began having to excuse myself while ploughing to go to the bushes. At first I thought it was a case of ordinary diarrhoea. Then I noticed white mucus on the ground and later yellow mucus and dark, purplish blood. And then I knew I was very, very sick.

  15

  Sickness

  I wasn’t the only sick person. Not at all. In Phum Chhleav more people were sick than healthy. The hard work, the food shortages, the unsanitary conditions and the near-absence of medicine combined to cause illness on a scale I had never seen before in all my medical training. In the rice fields the remaining ‘new’ people worked in slow motion; in the huts they lay down with fevers or swollen limbs or uncontrollable bowels. Every day, processions wound through the pathways of the village on the way to the burial grounds.

  The greatest single factor in this public-health disaster was malnutrition. The Khmer Rouge fed us a bowl of salty broth with a few spoonsful of rice at the bottom for lunch, and the same for dinner. That was all. They didn’t allow us to gather wild foods for our private meals, though sometimes we did anyway. Without proper nutrition, we weakened.

  There were other factors. We were city people, unused to hard labour. Chronic fatigue – the kind of tiredness that comes from pulling a plough twelve hours a day – lowered our resistance to disease just as malnutrition did. We had hardly any resistance at all. Because we were from places like Phnom Penh, we hadn’t built up natural immunities to the microorganisms of Battambang – to the bacteria in contaminated drinking water, for instance. To make things worse, we didn’t have proper latrines or bathing facilities. We didn’t have much medicine, and the Khmer Rouge didn’t let doctors like me practise openly.

  Until I got sick, I practised anyway. So did my two doctor friends, before the Khmer Rouge took them away, and so did a clever little fellow named Pen Tip, whom I will tell you about later. I visited my patients’ huts at dawn or dusk with my stethoscope and blood pressure cuff concealed in my clothing. Without laboratory tests I could only base my diagnoses on their symptoms and tell them what medicines I thought they needed. They had to buy the medicines themselves on the black market, either with rice or with gold.

  The most common symptom of illness was oedema or swelling. It was related to the lack of proteins in our diet and possibly to the high proportion of salts in the broth we drank at meals. Instead of getting thinner as they starved, the people with oedema became bloated with fluid, usually first in their legs. In the most extreme cases, the victims were unable to close their legs together; the men got huge, distended scrotal sacs. The cure was very simple – food – but anybody who had extra food was hoarding it.

  The range of infectious illnesses was amazing. Cuts filled with pus and wouldn’t heal properly. Skin lesions were common, especially fungal infections; we ‘new’ people were always outdoors in the rain, and our skins didn’t have a chance to dry. There were cases of malaria, pneumonia and tuberculosis. Almost everyone in the settlement got common diarrhoea, and many got amoebic dysentery, a much more dangerous infection of the intestinal tract. That’s what I got, dysentery, presumably from drinking contaminated water when my resistance was low.

  By the time I got sick, I had used up all my antibiotics and dysentery medicines treating my father and my brothers, who had been sick before me. Huoy went out to get medicine from people I knew. She looked and asked, but there was nothing available. Finally she traded a damleung of gold, or 1.2 ounces, for fifteen 250-mg. tablets of tetracycline, a standard antibiotic.

  I took one capsule of tetracycline twice a day as long as the supply lasted. In normal times I would have prescribed double the dosage, for a total of 1,000 mg a day, plus an antidiarrhoea medicine such as Tifomycin.

  To supplement the tetracycline I tried folk remedies. When rural Cambodians get diarrhoea or dysentery they eat the tender, bitter leaves at the branch tips of guava trees. There were guava trees nearby. Huoy collected the leaves and made me a tea out of boiled guava leaves and bark. Nothing happened. I stayed home and shuttled back and forth from the reed mattress to a latrine she had dug for me near our tiny garden. I couldn’t think clearly without an effort, and then only for moments at a time.

  As my dysentery grew worse, my world shrunk to the hut and the garden. I was too weak to go anywhere else. Whatever I knew of the outside world came to me: the sound of the steam whistle of the railroad trains hooting far away and then the metal wheels rocking and clicking on the metal tracks and the driver wheels going round and round CHUFchufchufchuf as freight trains went by. I heard the rapid, rhythmic clicking of the maintenance crew as it poled its way along, twice a day. And every morning through the cracks in the hut I saw the burial processions. The dead were wrapped in plastic tarps or cloth and carried on wooden boards suspended at either end from a long piece of bamboo, which rested on the mourners’ shoulders.

  Sometime after the first week with dysentery I had just come in from the garden when Huoy came back from work. All the tetracycline was gone. ‘Please, sweet,’ I begged her. ‘Sell some more things. Ask around again.’

  In my confused, weakened state I didn’t even trust her. I wasn’t sure she was doing all she could.

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’ Huoy said, standing over me and looking down with her sorrowful eyes. ‘Trust me. I am trying my
best to get the medicine.’ She went out again but still she didn’t find any.

  There was one other remedy to try: eating carbon from burned food. It works by trapping gases, like the activated charcoal in certain kinds of cigarette filters. For the most part, the carbon only reduces the symptoms of diarrhoea or dysentery, but sometimes it has a marginal effect on the infectious agent itself.

  The problem with burned food was that we had hardly any food to eat, or burn. My father brought some strips of pork to the hut. He and Huoy carefully trimmed off the fat, then grilled the pork in the fire until it was black on the outside. I ate it but vomited it up.

  I was long past feeling any shame about my dysentery, even though it is an ugly and humiliating disease. I was simply too weak to care about modesty. Day and night, several times an hour, I shuttled between my pallet in the hut and the hole in the yard, where I lifted the edges of my sarong and squatted. When I got up I glanced at the pus and blood and liquids I had left behind to see whether I had gotten any better, but by the end of the second week I hadn’t. When I lay down there was a sloshing, gurgling noise inside my intestines. Sometimes I even saw my intestines moving from the gas expanding inside. There was a war going on, with amoebas on one side and my bodily defences on the other. My body was pouring its resources into the battle, getting used up, wasting away.

  By the seventeenth or eighteenth day I felt nothing. Lying on my side I had diarrhoea and didn’t even know it until I reached around with my hand and discovered the wetness.

  I had eight sarongs left from the stack I had taken from my clinic. I used them like diapers. By the twentieth day I couldn’t walk. I had to crawl out to the garden on all fours. Huoy went to the authorities to get permission to stay away from work to take care of me.

  She was a perfect nurse. She bathed me day and night. She cooked the little bit of rice we had and fed it to me a spoonful at a time, with my head in her lap. After feeding me she kissed me and stroked my hair. A wondering, sorrowful expression came over her, and I knew her thoughts: if I died, a part of her would die too.