Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  The moon was nearly full that night. When it rose above the trees behind me, it cast an elongated shadow of the goalpost and of me hanging from the cross in the middle. When the wind picked up, the coals glowed underneath and the fire grew hotter; and when the wind slacked, the mosquitoes came back, whining in my ear and biting my flesh, where I could still feel my flesh. The moon rose silent and calm, and the shadows of the goalposts shortened. The wind stirred the treetops, and the crucified hung like strange butchered animals from the goalposts.

  Oh Mother. Oh Huoy. Please save me.

  You gods – any gods who can hear. Hindu gods. Jesus. Allah. Buddha. Spirits of the forests and the rice fields. Spirits of my ancestors. Hear me, gods: I never killed anyone. Never, never, never. I saved lives. I was a doctor and I saved the lives of Lon Nol soldiers and Viet Cong and didn’t care who they were. So why make me suffer?

  Spirits of the wind, I prayed. If the gods cannot hear, then carry the news to them. To any god who has power. Tell the gods what is happening to me.

  How Huoy would cry out if she were here. I am glad she cannot see me. Please, gods, do not punish her. She is innocent. Do not let her know what I am going through. I am one of the damned, a pret. I am already in hell. And I do not know why. I never betrayed the nation. If I killed anybody in a past life, or tortured people, then punish me and get it over with. If this is vengeance finish it, so my next life will be free.

  But I do not think I killed people in past lives. And I do not really know why they are torturing me. This has got to be worse than Hitler and the Jews. Hitler thought the Jews were different from him, like another race. But the Khmer Rouge kill their own race. And the gods do nothing to stop it.

  In the morning the guards took down those who had been crucified before us. They put plates of rice in front of the ones who were still alive and asked them questions. Then they tied plastic bags over the prisoners’ heads. The prisoners began kicking spastically, to get free. I was too weak to look for long. Or to care. All I knew was that the sun was hot on the back of my neck and my mouth was dry and my lips were cracked. Whatever was happening between the guards and the prisoners seemed incredibly far away, though it was in plain sight. When the guards dragged the bodies away and put fresh people in the goalposts, I barely noticed. What was left of me was a core – a heart that still beat in my chest, a mouth that breathed, eyes that stung from the smoke and the sun. And a brain that prayed.

  After four days and four nights with no food or water they let me down and untied the ropes. The circulation returning to my arms and legs brought a pain that was worse than the numbness and hotter than the fire. I fell over on my back and didn’t move.

  They tied my hands and feet. They tried to make me kneel, but I fell over and they grabbed my hair and shook my head until I saw the plate in front of me. On the plate was fresh rice with two small salted fish on top.

  ‘Are you a doctor?’ a faraway voice asked. ‘A captain?’

  I tried to form words, but my mouth wouldn’t work. In front of me was the plate heaped with rice.

  ‘No,’ I whispered. ‘Give me water. Then shoot me.’

  ‘If you tell the truth. Just tell Angka the truth, and you will have water and rice.’

  Blood had trickled into my mouth from my cracked lips. ‘Just shoot,’ I croaked. ‘Please, I can’t bear it. Please, Angka, if you don’t trust me, just shoot. I will be happy to die. Just shoot.’

  ‘Bigmouth!’ the guard exclaimed. He shouted to other guards, telling them to come over. They pulled me to a sitting position. Just before they put the plastic bag over my head, I glimpsed the pregnant lady next to me. She already had a bag over her head and she was kicking convulsively with both feet. They tied the bag around my neck, I couldn’t see anything, and they pushed me and I fell over again. I tried to breathe, but the plastic got in the way of my mouth and there was no air and I went wild, struggling to get the bag off, but I couldn’t and my feet were kicking and I couldn’t see. Then they pulled the bag off and I took great gasping lungfuls of air.

  They took the bag off the pregnant lady next to me, but it was too late. She had died of suffocation. A guard ripped her blouse apart and pulled down her sarong. Then he picked up his rifle, which had a bayonet attached. He pushed her legs apart and jammed the bayonet into her vagina and tried to rip upward but the pubic bone stopped the blade so he pulled the bayonet out and slashed her belly from her sternum down below her navel. He took the fetus out, tied a string around its neck and threw it in a pile with the fetuses from the other pregnant women. Then he reached into her intestines, cut out her liver, and finally sliced her breasts off with a sawing motion of his blade.

  ‘Good food,’ he remarked to the other guards. Then he bent down between her legs where the wound was still quivering and he said, ‘Ha! Look at this! Her cunt’s laughing.’ The other young guards came and looked and stood around, grinning. The flies whooshed around the body of the poor woman, whose crime had been marrying a Lon Nol soldier.

  I lay on my side without moving. They would disembowel me next, just for fun. It was nothing for them to cut someone open. Just a whim. They would come for me soon. But the seconds turned into minutes and then they walked away with the woman’s liver and breasts. ‘Enough food for tonight?’ said the nearest one, and another said in a voice that was fainter and farther away, ‘Yes, I think so. Probably enough.’

  Time passed. Five minutes or five hours, I did not know the difference. A rubber-tyre sandal shoved my shoulder and then I was on my back looking up at a guard. He said, ‘This one isn’t dead yet. Give me some water to pour up his nose.’

  Another guard came over and I found myself staring at a thin, brown-coloured waterfall descending from a pail.

  The muddy water splashed down near my nostrils and some of it went into my mouth, which was partly open. I started to choke and cough but at the same time my mouth began to work and I swallowed. I had never tasted anything so good. A change come over my body, a stirring of strength. He kept pouring and pouring in a thin, steady stream to get into my nose, and some of it did, but I tilted my head back and it filled my mouth and I swallowed again and again. The water also got in my eyes, but I blinked and concentrated on the brown water pouring down.

  When the guard emptied the pail and walked away, I felt much better.

  At twilight, the guards untied us and helped us walk back to the jail. Of our group of eighteen, only five of us were still alive, and none of the women. My feet and legs were covered with blisters, which popped underneath as I walked.

  They gave us watery rice, and after four days with no food it was like a banquet. Then they dragged us by the arms into jail and locked us into the pens again. The next day I expected to be killed but they gave me a bowl of watery rice again, and the same the day after that.

  They made me work around the prison. I gardened and raked and saw the ‘new’ people coming in and only a few of them leaving alive. In the daytime vultures wheeled overhead. At night, the wolf-like chhke char-chark snarled and growled as they ripped the flesh of corpses outside.

  Then they loaded me into an oxcart and drove me to another jail with thatch walls. Here the prisoners ploughed rice fields and tended oxen and ate the rations of watery rice. It was like the front lines, except harder, and we were all terribly emaciated, with arms and legs like sticks. I spent two long months at this place, living from one day to the next.

  Then I was released. Soldiers escorted me and some other prisoners back to our cooperative, which was in a new and semipermanent location.

  They took us to the common kitchen and told us to sit down. The soldiers went in to report to Chev.

  Huoy had seen us coming but she hadn’t recognized me and I didn’t want to say anything. She was cutting vegetables for cooking. When she finished she sat on the ground with her back to me and began cutting thick slices of banana trunk. Before the revolution banana trunk was pig food, but on the front lines it was used to add bulk t
o our rations.

  Chev came out and the soldiers read off the list of names. When she heard ‘Samnang’, Huoy froze, then turned around and stood up. She was shaking. She called out in a choked voice, ‘My husband is here! My husband is here!’ in spite of her attempts at self-control.

  Chev told me, ‘You can go see your wife. She’s waiting.’

  We walked rapidly toward each other but we were afraid to embrace. I put my arm around her shoulders like a casual friend and took her aside.

  I whispered, ‘I have survived. Don’t worry. I will stay here with you.’

  Huoy was barely able to say anything. ‘What did they do to you?’

  ‘Don’t talk right now. I have survived.’

  After dinner, when she got off work, Huoy brought me to a canal. Somehow she had procured a bar of real soap. She bathed me and scrubbed me, fighting back the tears when she saw how tight the skin was on my rib cage. The infection on my ankle was worse than before. Sores covered my legs and neck and chin. She asked me what had happened. I said, ‘Sweet, don’t ask. I don’t want to see any more tears.’

  Huoy insisted. She wanted to know why I was so skinny, why I had so many blisters, what they had made me do.

  I said, ‘If you love me, don’t ask. I love you and I don’t want to tell you.’

  Huoy let my old clothes float away in the current of the muddy water. I put on a sarong and we walked slowly back to where she had been sleeping, in a long, narrow hut with a thatched roof and no walls. She had a single hammock. Someone gave her a rice bag and she made a double hammock for us with needle and thread.

  That night she snuggled next to me. She kissed me again and again. Then she put her lips next to my ear and whispered that she had been sure I was dead. There had been a big purge, she explained. Hundreds of people had been taken away by the soldiers, tied up, a few at a time, without any reason given. Few had returned. Their places had been taken by people from other cooperatives, including – and she whispered names to me.

  I lay back in the hammock, staring in the darkness. Around us were hundreds of people in close quarters, in hammocks or on the ground. We couldn’t really talk now. That would have to wait.

  I was amazed. Amazed that I had lived, that the gods had let me survive a second time, against the odds. To have my arm around my wife’s soft female form, to feel her breathing. To hold her. She was so giving, so comforting. She was alive. And she had told me joyous news: my father was alive too.

  22

  Candles

  The last time I had seen Papa, he and my mother were hurrying after the oxcart holding Pheng Huor, Nay Chhun and the children. From there they had all gone to a front-lines cooperative much like mine, only farther south, near the foothills of the Cardamom Mountains. They had not fared well. First the three children had been taken away – sent off to a youth group, to be brainwashed into forgetting their parents and loving Angka. Then my aged mother had been sent off to another work camp in the jungles. They had not heard from her since.

  Three adults remained: Papa, Pheng Huor and Nay Chhun. By the whim of Angka, or the gods, they had been transferred to my collective while I was away in prison. My father was put in a long-house, a thatched roof on poles, with barely enough space to lie down between his neighbours. Pheng Huor and Nay Chhun were put in a second longhouse and Huoy was in a third. There were twelve of these longhouses in all, with roughly two hundred people in each for a total of approximately twenty-four hundred people.

  My father was assigned to a work group of elderly people. He fixed hoe handles, wove baskets, made bamboo shoulderboards and did other light tasks. It didn’t take him long to spot Huoy in the common kitchen. Her grief-stricken face told him what her lips could not, that she thought I was dead. My father consoled her, urged her to keep hoping. Every afternoon he went to Huoy’s longhouse to visit. When Huoy came back from work he was already there, sitting on the white piece of plastic next to her hammock.

  A bond grew between them like father and daughter. The time they spent together was their favourite part of the day. Huoy told him stories, mended his clothes, kept his spirits up. After meals in the common kitchen where she worked, Huoy cleaned the fifty-five-gallon steel-drum rice pots but purposely left a crust of rice grains along the side. Papa came along later and scooped the crust with his hands. For a man who used to be a millionaire, pot scrapings don’t sound like much, but they made a real difference to his health.

  Life on the front lines had one good effect: it stripped away everything unimportant and allowed us to see each other’s true worth. Papa finally saw what kind of woman Huoy was, that she didn’t care whether he was rich or poor and that she had never asked for anything from him, except the chance to show him love and respect. And Papa began to compare her to Nay Chhun, my brother’s wife. Nay Chhun had been very nice to my father as long as he owned the lumber mill, but she didn’t have much time for him when he was a war slave.

  The morning after I returned from prison I was resting in the hammock when Papa walked up. He was even thinner than before, with hollow cheeks and a flat belly. He wore only a faded black t-shirt and a pair of light blue culottes that had been skillfully patched in several places; I recognized Huoy’s handiwork. When he saw me, tears came to his eyes.

  When Papa asked what had happened in prison I left out the details, as I had with Huoy. He listened. He shook his head, sighing. He wept. He got up, walked around and paced back and forth, taking deep breaths.

  He had changed, I decided. When I was growing up he had always been tough and stern and sceptical. In old age, he was softer inside, more sympathetic. But he was still the leader of the family. He sat on the plastic mat beside the hammock and gave me advice:

  ‘Son,’ he said, ‘I just have to look at you to know you have suffered. People hardly ever come back when they are taken away. You have come back twice. From now on, keep your mouth shut. Plant a kapok tree. Dam doeum kor. No matter what happens, don’t give them any excuse to take you away again.

  ‘When you were a young boy you were very hothearted. Since meeting Huoy you have become less so, but you are still too angry underneath. You must cool your heart even more. Keep your emotions under control, so they will not show on your face. You have fooled many people but not everybody. If you were as smart as you think you are, they would not keep taking you away.

  ‘Yes, Papa,’ I said.

  ‘And another thing,’ said my father. ‘Pen Tip. You have not spoken of taking revenge on him, but it is written all over you. Forget it. You are an educated person; he is not. He has done you wrong, but let the gods punish him. Do not attempt it yourself. If you do, the Khmer Rouge will find out. Then they will kill you, and Huoy will be a widow again. If you see him, pretend nothing has happened.’

  This was harder to accept, but thinking it over I slowly began to see that he was right. ‘Yes, Papa,’ I said.

  ‘The Khmer Rouge are crazy and uneducated,’ he went on. ‘To survive them you must be patient and very, very smart. Use your brain, son. Look around you. The canals they are building will fall apart when the rains come. You know that yourself, because you have worked in them. They will not hold up to the rains of Battambang. Everything the Khmer Rouge try to do will fail. And they do not have the support of the people. So plant your kapok tree, son. Be patient, be quiet and stay calm. One day, sooner or later, the revolution will be overturned. The regime will be replaced and we will be free again.’

  I listened carefully. He was certainly right about one thing: the regime could not last forever. The best way to fight it was to lie low and allow it to self-destruct. Not taking revenge on Pen Tip was going to be harder. Many nights in prison I had lain awake thinking what I was going to do to Pen Tip for informing on me. I had not learned about pain without wanting to inflict it. I had not endured torture without wanting revenge. My thoughts were so dark and gruesome that I never would have mentioned them to anybody, but my father guessed them. And he was right again. It was mo
re important to avoid future suffering than to take revenge for the past. And to avoid more suffering I was going to have to become a better actor than I had been before. I was going to have to control and conceal my emotions.

  The visit of my sister-in-law Nay Chhun that afternoon gave me a chance to practise. Nay Chhun and I didn’t like each other. We hadn’t had a real conversation since before the revolution. She had never visited me when I was sick in Phum Chhleav. But this was a chance to repair the damage and forge a new relationship. When she asked how I was, I answered, ‘Not too badly, thank you.’ She said I had lost weight, and I said with a smile, ‘Who hasn’t?’ I asked her how she and my brother were. We had a superficial but polite conversation.

  What absorbed my attention was not Nay Chhun but my father, who went silent and cold when she approached. On the front lines he avoided her, except when she was with my brother. Papa had finally seen into her character. Yet when she left he heaved another sigh and wiped a tear away – glad, I supposed, that she and I were finally on speaking terms.

  Such changes in my father! In the old days, when he was rich, he barely noticed Huoy when she came into his house. That I had chosen a poor woman like Huoy embarrassed him. Because of him Huoy and I never had the wedding we wanted, with the monks and the ceremony and the families coming together and the great feast with half of Phnom Penh invited to the tables. Huoy had paid a price for not being married, with insults from Nay Chhun, Aunt Kim and my other relatives – insults to which she never replied.

  But the past didn’t matter anymore. We were all on the same level now. My father brightened visibly when Huoy came back from the kitchen that afternoon. His entire manner changed, and a smile creased his wrinkled face. That was what I had been waiting for, to know that he welcomed her into the family.

  But it was my fate barely to recover from one disaster before being hit with another.