Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  With my head in her lap I saw only her face. The large, round, dark eyes. The lush, thick eyebrows that had never needed makeup. The hollow cheeks. When I lay down my eyes saw the woven reeds of the wall and the light filtering through.

  The other huts nearby, my parents’ and my brothers’, now seemed incredibly far away. It was impossible even to think about going there. My brothers visited me once but they didn’t come back, and this made me angry. I had given them medicine, but they wouldn’t use their gold to buy medicine for me. Family ties meant nothing to them now. Everybody was looking out for himself. And then I stopped resenting my brothers. I was too weak to care.

  Day by day, as the invaders and the protectors fought their battle in my intestines, I lost more and more weight. My clavicles protruded. Every rib showed. My legs were like matchsticks, except for my knees and ankles, which bulged out, big and knobby. My weight was down to about seventy pounds.

  I lay on my side and a fly landed on my face and I did not move. I felt the fly walking on my cheek, felt the little legs as it moved around, and I knew it would head for the moisture at the corner of my eyes. And then I sensed Huoy’s presence as she moved close and then felt the air as she fanned the fly away. Huoy lowered the mosquito net around me. I focused on the gauze of the mosquito net and then on the light coming through the cracks in the reed wall.

  I heard the grumbling of the thunder and the freshening of the wind as the storms came in. Raindrops fell on me and I didn’t move. Huoy went out in the rain and tied a krama to the outside of the walls to stop the rain from coming in.

  I was very detached. If I wanted to lift my leg I thought about it and then my mind wandered and later I remembered and watched myself do it. My leg seemed very far away and I looked at it objectively, as if it were somebody else’s. It didn’t look like my leg. It was too thin.

  I dozed but didn’t sleep. My intestines were bubbling with liquids and gas and every few minutes some more spurted out the back end. Nothing could stop it from happening. The poisons kept coming out and coming out but inside the bubbling and the gurgling and mixing went on and it always produced more. Food only made it worse. Maybe if I had a huge amount of pure bland rice I could have quieted my stomach, but Huoy and I were down to one can of rice. That was all the food we had. Huoy ate nothing but the salty broth from the Khmer Rouge. The rest she fed to me.

  Up through the thirtieth day, some deep intuition told me that I was going to outlast the infection.

  Then, on the morning of the thirty-first day, something changed. I decided to take my pulse, but before I could do it my mind wandered. Where was Huoy? I couldn’t hear her in the hut. I turned my head and then twisted it farther and then through the cracks in the hut saw her outside, taking the clean sarongs from the drying line. What was I thinking about? Oh yes, my pulse. I’ll have to move my right hand to my left wrist. If I tell my hand to move, it will obey. If I do it now, I won’t forget. Better do it while she can’t see.

  I watched my right arm swing over and the fingertips of my right hand probe for the pulse in my left wrist. Not there. There. Yes. The beat is very slow.

  My heart is slowing down.

  In a few more hours it will stop.

  Huoy came in with the folded sarongs and put them away. Then she knelt by me and smoothed the hair back from my forehead and wiped my face with a damp cloth.

  ‘I don’t feel well,’ I said. ‘I think I am going to die. Please, bring my father here.’

  ‘You aren’t going to die,’ she said firmly. ‘We’re going to live together a long time, you and I.’ But she herself didn’t believe what she was saying. Huoy went to get my father and they both came back and sat beside me, Papa looking down at me with his wrinkled face. I could remember when he was much younger and fatter.

  I told my father that I was going to die in the next few hours. I asked him to take care of my wife. Huoy, I said, had taken good care of me but just didn’t have the means to save my life. ‘If anybody says anything bad about her, don’t believe it. I want you and Mama to take her in. Don’t let her live with anyone else in the family. So take care of yourself and take care of Huoy and the gods will bless you.’

  My father told me not to worry, that I wasn’t going to die. But when he went outside he set candles and incense on the ground under the mango tree and got ready to pray.

  Huoy sat next to me. ‘Keep being strong in your mind,’ she said, over and over. ‘Keep being strong and you will never die.’ She stroked my face and cleaned my face and body with a damp towel. The tears rolled down her cheeks and she didn’t hide them.

  ‘Be happy if I pass away,’ I answered.

  Outside my father was saying in a loud voice, ‘Let him go to a wonderful paradise! Let life be good, the next place he goes. Let there be enough food and enough medicine.’

  I said to Huoy, ‘Even if I die I will still protect you. I will take care of you all your life.’

  My mother joined my father and they knelt and prayed together. Then Mama came into the hut and sat next to me, massaging my limbs. She looked truly old now, old and grey. Together my mother and my wife stripped me of my sarong and tried to dress me in a new shirt and a new pair of trousers to die in.

  ‘Please don’t,’ I said. ‘It’s a waste to put me in new trousers. You can trade them for something after I die.’

  ‘I don’t care about trading,’ Huoy said as they put my feet in the trousers and pulled them up. ‘There’s nothing to trade for. If you die, I die.’

  I lay on my side and waited.

  In the early afternoon there was a sound of footsteps and a big loud voice.

  ‘Come get your yams! One person from every family, come to my house! We’ve got yams! Come get your rations! Get your yams!’ It was the civilian leader of Phum Chhleav, a burly man who reported to the man on horseback. With him were the section leaders of Phum Chhleav and a crowd of excited followers, talking and waving. It was the first food the Khmer Rouge had distributed for private use in three days.

  I sent Huoy to get our ration. My father had already disappeared to get his.

  I lay back and began thinking about yams. They are long, crooked tubers, quick to grow in a tropical climate. They contain minerals and vitamins, but they are basically carbohydrate. Put in a fire, they burn. They turn into charcoal.

  Huoy had left the fire going beside me, with a tea kettle on the three stones. When the water boiled I pulled the ends of the wood away from the fire, but I didn’t have the energy to make tea.

  After a period of time had passed, how long I do not know, Huoy returned. She showed me the ration: one small yam the size of her fist.

  Huoy was looking at the yam with a glazed, intent expression. How long had it been since she had eaten a real meal? Two weeks? Three weeks? Had she eaten well since the dinner with the field mice?

  I said, ‘Sweet, please give me the food to eat. I think if I eat it, it will help my stomach. I know you are hungry like me, but we still have rice. You eat the rice.’

  We still had not touched our one last can of rice. We were saving it, though I do not know why. Our hunger could not have gotten worse.

  Huoy looked at me with a sad smile and nodded. ‘Whatever you want, I will do it. I want you to stay alive. As long as we both are alive we will be happy.’

  I told her to burn the yam without cooking it first. She put it in the fire. When it was completely burned, she took it out to cool, trimmed off the wood ashes, and cut it into small pieces. The yam was black all the way through except for some small soft yellow specks. She put my head in her lap and she fed it to me with a spoon, one piece at a time, until it was gone.

  I felt stronger.

  My trips to the garden diminished from five times an hour to three. The next day they decreased to two an hour, and the day after that to once an hour. The burned yam had helped turn the tide. It enabled my natural resistance to grow.

  Within a few more days, I could eat solid foods.


  After another week had passed, Huoy picked me up, draped my arm over her shoulder and gave me a long stick to use as a cane. She helped me walk. I had to reteach my legs to obey.

  We only took a few steps. But the next day we walked around the hut.

  It was fifty yards to the railroad track. It became my goal. Every day I walked nearer, and when I finally made it I had to stop to rest three or four times along the way.

  Huoy and I sat on the railroad tracks, near a trestle with water underneath. I was tired but triumphant. Huoy was happy and smiling. We talked as we always had in the old days, calling each other ‘sweet.’

  A healthy young woman from another village came walking down the railroad tracks, carrying a sack over her shoulder. She walked past us, then turned around in surprise. In those times, even husbands and wives were supposed to call each other ‘comrade.’

  ‘Is that your husband?’ the young woman asked Huoy. Her tone was pleasant and courteous, her accent from Phnom Penh.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ Huoy answered with a smile. ‘He was very sick, but he’s better now.’

  The young woman put her sack down. She reached in it and pulled out a piece of fruit. I knew the fruit, though I have never discovered its English name. It has a very thick rind, and like guava leaves it is a folk remedy against stomach ailments. ‘Older sister,’ she said to Huoy, ‘give him some of this. It will be good for his health.’ She broke it open on the railroad track and gave us half.

  I put my palms together and raised them to the middle of my forehead.

  She asked whether we were from Phnom Penh. I said yes, told her my real name and said I used to be a doctor. She asked me whether I knew her uncle so-and-so. I said yes, he was my professor in medical school. We began a conversation, using all the terms of politeness in the Khmer language, talking about old times in Phnom Penh.

  Before she left, she dug in her sack again and gave us an ear of corn. It lifted our spirits, meeting this courteous young woman who, incidentally, we never saw again. It reassured us that in spite of the Khmer Rouge, compassion still existed and Cambodian high culture still lived. We watched her walking down the tracks and disappearing in the distance.

  I said, ‘Sweet, I’m going to live.’

  The sun sent low rays across the landscape. The air was cool. I ate a portion of the outer fruit as medicine and gave the rest to Huoy. We went underneath the trestle to bathe, and Huoy scrubbed the dust and dirt off me.

  That evening we cooked the ear of corn. I made Huoy eat every kernel, as a small gesture of repayment for the yam she had given me. I loved and respected Huoy more than ever. I put her above me. She had saved my life.

  16

  The Parade of the Selfish and the Dying

  When my weight rose to about a hundred pounds I was sent back to work in the rice fields. I didn’t mind. Just being out in the fertile fields of Battambang made me feel better. The rice plants were large and bushy, higher than my waist. From the middle of the paddies the dykes were invisible, except as gaps in the thick carpet of green. When a breeze came through the rice, the smell was so sweet and clean that it made my stomach rumble with hunger. So much rice! In a few more months, in the harvest, we could eat bowl after bowl of steaming white rice, as much as we wanted. That’s what we had been promised.

  By now, toward the end of the rainy season, the hard work – ploughing the fields and transplanting the seedlings – was over. Only light tasks were needed, like regulating the water levels. It was easy. A few other men and I walked around on the tops of the dykes with our hoes. The dykes were eighteen inches to two feet high. Wherever the rainwater was in danger of flooding over the dykes we began chopping holes, letting the water spill from one paddy into the next and then the next, until the extra water reached the edge of the field. Then we rebuilt the dykes with the hoes and our hands.

  We were wet and muddy all day long, but the job was a good one. We had little supervision. No Khmer Rouge soldiers standing over us with whips. The soldiers hardly came into the fields at all. Even better, we were able to collect food while working.

  Whenever there is water in rice paddies there is life – frogs, snails, tiny shrimp, small fish or crabs. In Phum Chhleav the crabs were the easiest to catch for those who knew the trick. It was no use trying in the early mornings or the late afternoons, when the water was cool. Then the crabs were out among the rice plants, holding on to the stalks with their claws. If they heard you coming they dropped to the bottom and swam sidelong away. But in the middle of the day, when the water was warm, the crabs retreated to their burrows in the dykes. You could catch them by reaching into the burrows with your hand – the quicker the better, because they bit with their pincers, sometimes hard enough to draw blood. I put the crabs in my shirt pockets. They couldn’t climb out. I always wore the same shirt in the fields, a Lon Nol-era camouflage-coloured parachutist’s shirt with big pockets and extra pockets that Huoy sewed on the inside. I worked in the fields with my shirt tails out and my pockets bulging with live crabs.

  We cooked the crabs in our hut in the evening, after the regular dinner of thin rice gruel and the political meeting that usually followed. Sometimes Huoy and I ate fifteen or twenty crabs each. Every family in Phum Chhleav had someone working in the rice fields, and everybody ate crabs in secret. The few times that Huoy and I managed to get meat or fish, we cooked and ate the flesh first, then put the bones back in the pot, waited until the bones were soft and ate them too for the calcium and the proteins and the nutrients in the marrow. We wasted nothing.

  Food was power. For all the talk about a revolutionary society in which everyone was equal, those at the top ate reasonably well and those of us at the bottom were chronically malnourished. Every day, when the gong rang for lunch, mit neary brought a vat of watery rice to a hillock in the fields and ladled watery rice into bowls for the ‘new’ people. Meanwhile, the soldiers went off to the Khmer Rouge headquarters, the row of three houses near the railroad tracks. The rest of us had seen oxcarts laden with supplies pull up to those three houses. We saw the smoke from the cooking fires every day. We didn’t need to be told what was happening inside. But when the soldiers came back to the rice fields, licking their lips, looking well fed and content, they pretended not to have eaten anything at all. They took up bowls and ate watery gruel the same as we did. They spooned the liquid into their mouths with loud slurping noises and said, ‘Look. We eat like you. Exactly the same food. It’s enough for us, so it should be enough for you. You people really are lazy. You must work harder, to show your gratitude to Angka.’

  With or without their rifles, the soldiers had an aura of power about them, like big, muscular village bullies. We were weaker and afraid of them. We weren’t strong enough to fight back, so we kept quiet and ate our crabs in secret and waited for the rice harvest to come so we could eat all we wanted. But the Khmer Rouge had other ideas for the rice crop.

  One morning I straightened up from opening a dyke in the rice fields to see a lone figure in the distance. It was the old man on horseback. He rode slowly along the trail by the railroad tracks, coming toward us from the railroad station at Phnom Tippeday. He looked the same as before, his silk sarong doubled up to his waist and the edge of his black culottes showing underneath, his krama around his middle. He rode leisurely along the path until he got to the three houses, then dismounted and went inside.

  Comrade Ik didn’t come to Phum Chhleav unless he had a reason.

  A few hours later, after lunch, he led his horse out on the dykes of the rice fields. He walked this way and that, inspecting the rice plants and the water levels in the paddies. Whichever way he moved, I unobtrusively moved in the opposite direction, so the two of us wouldn’t meet. Finally he reached the edge of the fields, mounted and slowly rode off.

  There goes bad news, I thought.

  Comrade Ik’s orders filtered down the Phum Chhleav hierarchy and eventually to the leader of my work group, who was, a ‘new’ person. He told us the news t
he next day while I was standing in a paddy in water up to my knees, leaning on my hoe. ‘We will move from Phum Chhleav fairly soon,’ he announced pompously. ‘We don’t know precisely when, but Angka will tell us the date later on.’

  I didn’t allow emotion to show on my face. I didn’t trust the group leader, even though he was from Phnom Penh like the rest of us. He was heavier and stronger than we were, with clear, healthy skin. I wondered where he was getting his food. My coworkers didn’t trust him either. He had scarcely turned his back when they began to complain.

  ‘See? See? They’re doing it again!’ said a man I had known in Tonle Batí. ‘They always say, ‘If you work hard, you can eat.’ Now that we’ve worked hard and planted the crop, they want us to move away! Where will we go now? Whose crop can we eat now, if we cannot eat our own?’

  ‘Yes,’ said another one bitterly. ‘Some armies kill with bullets. The Khmer Rouge kill with rice! I cannot believe it: we have rice all around us, but we cannot eat it! I have never seen so much rice in my whole life, and I have never been so hungry.’

  I said nothing, though I agreed with them. With so much rice, with so many people sick, it was the cruelest of crimes to take us away before the harvest. But it didn’t surprise me that they were doing it. To me, the only question was whether they were doing it to kill us intentionally, or whether they were doing it by mistake. For if there was one thing sure about the Khmer Rouge, it was that they knew nothing about planning. They were always starting projects but not finishing them, then going on to the next.

  Discouraged, we slowed our pace in the fields. If we could not eat the rice around us, we were not going to work hard to produce it.

  As things turned out, the Khmer Rouge didn’t trust our group leader either. A couple of days later we saw soldiers lead him away with his arms tied behind his back – caught for running a business after work, trading gold to ‘old’ people for meat.