Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  When there was nobody in sight I pulled some pages I had torn from the book out of my pocket. We were on Huitième leçon, or, as it appeared in English on the facing page, ‘Eighth Lesson.’ Without effort, I read the French phrases:

  1. Puis-je vous aider?

  2. Avez-vous du thé?

  3. Bien sur. En voulez-vous?

  I pointed at the equivalent English phrases and asked Som, in Khmer, how to pronounce them.

  He looked at the first one. “Can I help you?” he said in what was undoubtedly English in a Cambodian accent.

  ‘ “Can I hel’ jou?” ’ I repeated.

  Som went on to the second phrase: ‘ “Have you got any tea?” ’

  “Haf jou enny tea?” ’ I repeated. ‘Tea’ was an easy word. It was the same as thé in French, only pronounced a bit differently. For that matter, it was like té in Khmer, té in Teochiew and not too different from cha in Mandarin. The lesson went on, the English sentences numbered down the page, the syllables receiving the stress printed in boldface. As Som pointed out, it was a lesson in British English:

  3. Of course. Do you want some?

  4. Yes, please. Give me two pounds. And a packet of biscuits.

  5. Do you want some beans?

  6. No, thanks. We’ve got some at home.

  7. Well, some bread?

  8. Yes, please. Two loaves. Oh, and half a pound of butter. That’s all.

  9. How much is that?

  10. That’s one pound twenty.

  11. Oh dear, I’ve only got one pound.

  12. You can pay the rest next time.

  13. Thanks very much. Good-bye.

  14. Good-bye, madam.

  So much food! Extra food! People were so polite! You could even pay later if you wanted! It was a bit confusing how the British used ‘pounds’ as a measure of weight as well as money, but Som assured me that people who spoke real English didn’t do that. ‘They use dollars,’ I said in Khmer, and Som nodded solemnly. ‘I like dollars,’ I told him a moment later, thinking of the twenty-six hundred dollars I brought back from Phnom Penh on my scooter, along with the medicine and the gold. Several times on the front lines I had traded a hundred-dollar bill for a yam. What amazed me was not that American money was worth so little but that it was worth anything at all in a society where money was outlawed and where there was no contact with the outside world. But there it was – something very special about America that inspired hope and faith. What a marvellous place it must be, America. So much food to eat, and people so polite to each other. ‘ “Yes, pliss,” ’ I read again. ‘ “Two loa-ves. Oh, and haff a poond of but-ter.” ’

  It seemed completely normal to me, to be walking along the canal with Som and asking him how to pronounce English words and phrases.

  We reached the dam and skirted the outdoor meeting where the ‘new’ people listened resignedly to the speeches. The message never changed: Lazy people are enemies of the revolution. Because of traitors, the economy of the country is very low. ‘Please give me a big hand,’ the speaker was saying, followed by unenthusiastic applause.

  We walked unnoticed into the longhouse. It was nearly empty, with most of its inhabitants at work or at the meeting. I located Huoy’s hammock and lay down in it and pulled the mosquito net over me. It was the mosquito net we had brought from Phnom Penh, by now torn and mended many times, and nearly black from the smoke of fires. To have one at all was a luxury. Most people kept mosquitoes away by building fires with piles of rice husks. The low, sloping, thatched ceiling reflected the red glow of fires, and smoke filled the air.

  There was another round of applause outside and finally Huoy came in.

  ‘How was your day, sweet?’ I asked. ‘Did they give you enough food? Is your health all right?’

  ‘Not too bad today, thanks. Have you been here long?’ She reached for her washcloth and jar of homemade soap and began washing her face and hands.

  ‘No, I just got here.’ I loved watching her wash. She had learned a folk recipe for making soap by burning the skin of kapok fruit, which was rich in potash, and soaking the ashes in water. She was always clean. Even her clothes were clean.

  She changed from her black work trousers and blouse into her sleeping sarong, washed her feet, lifted the edge of the mosquito net and climbed in beside me, clutching her pillow. An arm’s length away, a neighbour remarked from his hammock, ‘How nice! What a loving couple! Always coming here to visit your wife, eh, Samnang?’

  I knew this fellow. He was friendly, like most of them in Huoy’s work group.

  ‘And why not?’ I answered. ‘I give ninety-nine percent to Angka, but I keep one percent for myself. I keep my wife for me.’

  The neighbour on the other side of the hammock said, ‘Aaeee! I hope one percent of you is big and long enough to keep your wife satisfied!’

  I found myself grinning in the darkness. ‘Nothing so lucky as that,’ I said. ‘My wife hates me very much. She won’t even let me touch her in the hammock. She tells me she wants to be alone.’

  There was laughter throughout the longhouse. I always joked with them. It helped pass the time and keep our minds from other worries.

  In fact, Huoy’s soft, feminine body was snuggled next to mine, and she was kissing me on the cheek. Now that she worked on the dam, this was our only chance to be together. She put her lips next to my ear and whispered, ‘How were your rations today?’

  I whispered back, ‘Not bad. A quarter at dinner.’ A condensed-milk can of cooked rice, split among four people, dumped into watery broth. That was what a quarter meant. But I had other thoughts on my mind.

  ‘Sweet,’ I said so carefully that even Huoy could barely hear, ‘I want to go to America.’

  We turned our heads so her mouth was next to my ear. ‘You’re crazy,’ she said.

  We turned our heads again. ‘I know,’ I said into her ear. ‘But we’ve got to go there someday.’

  Som’s lessons had started me thinking about America. Plenty of food there. A very developed country. In America, dams were built with real concrete, houses actually had electricity, skyscrapers were real. Heavy work was done with bulldozers and tractors. It was a place as different from Cambodia as heaven is from hell.

  ‘I’d rather be a dog in America than a human being in Cambodia,’ I added.

  Huoy’s fingertips found my temple, pushed gently, and her lips spoke into my ear. ‘How do you know?’ said Huoy. ‘You’ve never even been outside of Cambodia.’

  ‘I just know. Let me dream in peace, will you?’ As I closed my eyes, I imagined what it would be like to be an American dog. How wonderful. Human hands would reach down to pat me and brush my fur. They wouldn’t beat me or torture me. My owner would put plenty of food in my dish, and I could eat whenever I wanted. If I got sick they would take me to a veterinarian. I wouldn’t even have to work.

  ‘Do you want to know my dream?’ Huoy whispered sleepily.

  ‘To open a pastry shop,’ I said.

  ‘Well, first I want babies. When the regime is overturned I want to make lots and lots of babies and raise them with you in a nice house, with plenty to eat. But when the children are old enough to go to school I will open a sweet shop. I just want to cook food and have good things to eat and live in a city.’

  ‘I’d still rather be a dog in America,’ I said.

  Around us, as the red glow of the mosquito fires flickered on the thatch roof, our neighbours grumbled and sank with heavy sighs into their hammocks. The snores begun. I leaned next to Huoy and kissed her, but she barely stirred. Her breathing was regular. A minute later she was sound asleep.

  It was usually like that. I met her in the hammock, we talked for a few minutes and then she fell asleep. She was exhausted. Once every few weeks we had a special night. Huoy and Som’s wife would bribe their group leader with tobacco rations and then walk through the darkness to see Som and me. Together we ate the best wild foods the landscape offered and then retired, Huoy and I to one side of the
floor of a partially built house, Som and his wife on the other, and the floor boards squeaking underneath. But most nights Huoy came into the longhouse at 10.00 p.m. so tired she fell asleep as soon as she lay down.

  At 2.00 a.m. we were woken up by the group leader.

  ‘Time to wake up! Let’s go, group! Everybody awake! Back to work!’ he shouted. To finish the dam, each worker slept only four hours and worked or went to political meetings the other twenty.

  Huoy got groggily to her feet, slipped into her rubber shower sandals, washed her face again, changed into a clean sarong and blouse and brushed her hair. Somehow she had adapted to the schedule without falling seriously ill. She trudged after her work group, carrying her hoe and a plastic container full of boiled water. I followed. I had to be up in a couple of hours anyway, and I liked to keep her company.

  Huoy’s group of about thirty men and women began to dig near the inside face of the dam. It was just like canal work. The men chopped halfheartedly at the clay with their hoes, and the women gathered the loose clay with their hoes and scooped it into baskets. I sat on the ground, slapping the gnats that settled on my arms and face. When enough baskets were filled, the group formed a human chain and passed them from one person to the next to the top of the dam. When they had done this they returned to their previous spot and sat with their elbows on their knees, in that state of rest that is not quite sleep, with one part of the brain alert for soldiers.

  From all across the dam face came the faint sounds of hoes and muttered conversations. Thousands of people were working there, though in the dark they were no more than shadows. A lone soldier wearing a Mao cap appeared in silhouette, strolling along the dam top. The comments from the war slaves began, loud enough to reach him.

  ‘Hey, comrade, go to work! We’ll give you an extra ration!’

  ‘Comrade, be careful when you make your great leap forward! You might leap into a hole and break your neck!’

  The soldier walked on without answering. He was outnumbered, and in the darkness he could not tell who was saying what.

  I pulled my watch out of the small pocket inside my waistband. By peering in the starlight it was possible to read the time. Almost four o’clock.

  ‘I have to go, sweet,’ I said to Huoy, but our neighbour from the longhouse overheard me.

  ‘You are leaving too soon, Samnang. You don’t want to stay here, to slap gnats and cuss at the soldiers?’

  They knew me as a prankster, a comedian, and I obliged them. ‘Please,’ I replied. ‘If you would be so kind, turn away, so I can kiss my wife good-bye.’

  To them I was a man who had accepted his fate but makes jokes about it. And why not? Everybody was so tired that nothing seemed to matter. Work mattered least of all. If the King of Death wanted to take us we could not stop him, but he could not stop us from laughing until then.

  The responses came in the darkness:

  – ‘Can’t I look when you kiss her? I haven’t seen anything like that in a long time.’

  – ‘You can kiss me, if you don’t mind,’ said a giggling woman’s voice. ‘I’m so horny I don’t know what to do.’

  – ‘Why should we turn away? You two are always hugging and kissing.’

  ‘And please,’ I told them, ‘close your ears so I can tell her how much I love her too.’

  – ‘. . . Aaaee! What a lover . . .’

  – ‘Tell her, Samnang.’

  ‘I’m going now, sweet,’ I said quietly to Huoy, who had half-turned away in embarrassment. ‘I’ll see you the same time tonight.’ And I touched her lightly on the shoulder.

  I went back to the longhouse to wake Som, who was asleep. We set out along the dirt road, taking the short route back to our work site, knowing that at this hour we would not meet any soldiers.

  The sky was growing light in the east by the time Som and I got back to our work site. I climbed up the stairs of a half-built house and fell asleep on the bare floor. The bell rang at 5.30 a.m. We were supposed to go to work then, but I pounded the floor to imitate hammering and stole a few extra minutes of sleep.

  26

  The Cracks Begin to Show

  Looking back, it seems clear that 1977 was the year the regime began to crack. The Khmer Rouge had tried to reorganize the nation too quickly and radically for the structure to hold. The leaders themselves developed internal feuds, and the people at the bottom showed signs of discontent and even open rebellion.

  At the time, however, I didn’t notice the changes as much as the unbearably slow passing of the days. The work was dull. In spite of Som’s English lessons I could feel my brain slowing down. It was hard to think about anything. The situation in the countryside seemed permanent. Bells controlled the schedule. Workers crisscrossed the landscape wearily, in single file. The revolutionary songs blaring out from the loudspeakers and the speeches at the meetings never changed. At meals we gathered in circles near the common kitchen and looked on with jealous eyes as our portions of rice gruel were ladled into rusty bowls.

  Food – that was our main obsession. The size of the rations, and whether the common kitchen was going to serve a vegetable along with the rice. If certain days stand out from the others in my memories of 1977, food was usually the cause. Like the time a particularly ignorant cadre suggested growing clams in the vegetable gardens. Or the night I made oxtail soup by cutting the tail off an ox that was still alive. Or the time I raided a vegetable garden, cooked the food, overate, vomited and then ate the vomit. It is extremely unpleasant to remember eating my own vomit. It was not a normal act. But it shows how malnourished my body was and how obsessed my mind was by food.

  But to some extent Huoy and I got used to being hungry. At least we could exercise a basic choice: if I was willing to take the risk of foraging or stealing, we could eat.

  What was worse than hunger was the terror, because we couldn’t do anything about it. The terror was always there, deep in our hearts. In the late afternoon, wondering whether the soldiers would choose us as their victims. And then feeling guilty when the soldiers took someone else. At night, blowing out our tiny oil lanterns so the soldiers wouldn’t notice the light and come investigate, and then lying awake and wondering whether we would see the dawn. Waking up the next day and wondering whether it would be our last.

  We didn’t talk about the terror much. There was no use. Huoy and I wanted to live; we were willing to die if we had to, but the terror forced us into a state of half life that was worse than either. Everything else about being war slaves – the grating music from the loudspeakers, the tedious meetings, the lice in our hair, the drab and endless work, the gruel we pretended was food – we could get used to, but our fear of dying was worse than death itself. I tried fighting it. I joked with Huoy’s fellow workers. I learned English from Som. I deliberately took risks in stealing, hoping to master my fear. But everything I did to rebel against it merely confirmed that it ruled me.

  I had full trust only in Huoy. We were as close as two people can be. Only grudgingly did we give portions of trust to outsiders. I began to trust Som more and more as time went on. And even this was a mistake.

  Som and I talked about everything. We were intellectual equals. I only wish he was my physical equal, because that was his downfall – his right arm, hit by shrapnel, operated on by me, but never allowed to heal properly during the takeover.

  It happened this way: Som was sent off on a detail to cut bamboo in the mountains and got less done than his fellow workers because of his withered arm. He fell into disfavour with a Khmer Rouge who, a few weeks later, also supervised the ploughing of rice fields. All work on house construction was suspended for the important job of readying the rice fields. I was part of the ploughing detail and Som was too. It hadn’t rained enough yet to make the ground soft. By using all my strength and skill, I ploughed straight furrows, but Som’s plough kept drifting to the right, the side of his weak arm.

  The soldiers came at lunchtime, when Som and I and our wives were re
sting on a hillock. They tied his arms behind his back. They kicked him and he fell head first on the ground while his wife and Huoy were sobbing and screaming. Then they took him away. The rest of us were in shock. For me it was not only shock but loss. He had been my only friend.

  I grieved for Som. He was certain to be killed. Then it occurred to me: what if they torture him? He will tell them I was a doctor! He knows everything about my past! He was still in sight, a sad figure trudging away to his death, when I forgot about him and started worrying about myself.

  I couldn’t sleep that night, or the next night. Surely the soldiers would come for me. A heavy rain fell. While ploughing the fields, I misguided the ox, who stumbled. The ox, the plough and I tumbled over into the muddy water of the rice paddy. The same Khmer Rouge who ordered Som’s death looked on. His eyes burned into mine. At lunch, on a hillock, my hands were shaking. I told Huoy good-bye. I knew the soldiers were going to take me away. But at the end of lunch the bell rang and I went back to work. I ploughed all afternoon. At the end of the day the bell rang again, and Huoy and I went to the common kitchen. There was no explanation. I was allowed to keep on waiting.

  I knew my own death was near. It could be delayed but not avoided. Maybe a few days, maybe a few months until they caught me doing something wrong, and then it would be over. I could feel myself aging from the stress. And everyone was, not just me. I came to believe more than ever before what my father had said, that such a regime could not last.

  The cracks began to show. One of the first signs was the increase in stealing from the ‘common gardens’ that provided vegetables to the kitchens. In 1975 and 1976, many ‘new’ people had gathered wild foods, but few had stolen from gardens, because we were afraid of the sentries. In 1977, when I stole, I began noticing that I had more and more company. If I saw another shadowy figure walking around in the dark, it was almost always a ‘new’ person. It was nothing we could talk about openly during the day; not yet, anyhow. But the night belonged to us. The soldiers didn’t like sentry duty anymore, and they wouldn’t go out on patrol except in groups.