Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  Another sign was the talk about the Khmer Serei. Stories had travelled from one cooperative to the next of the freedom fighters based on the border with Thailand, less than a hundred miles away. There was so many rumours about the coming of the freedom fighters that people looked up in the sky, wondering when the helicopters were going to land.

  I was still building houses on the back lines when the rebellion broke out. The leader was a man whose name was Thai. I had talked with him around a fire the year before and been sworn to silence. So had Pen Tip.

  Thai and a few handpicked men, a mixture of ‘new’ and ‘old’ people, one of them an assistant to Chev, killed half a dozen soldiers one night and stole their weapons. They went to work the next day as if nothing had happened, then killed a few more soldiers the following night. The third night they hijacked a train and rode it northwest toward Battambang City, intending to go west from there to the border with Thailand, to join the freedom fighters. It must have been a wild, dramatic ride.

  The Khmer Rouge announced they had killed Thai and his fellow rebels, and though I never knew for sure, in this case I tended to believe them. Thai should have hijacked the train the first night, when the Khmer Rouge were not on the alert.

  A purge began on the front lines to frighten the rest of us. Every afternoon for about a week, soldiers tied up about a hundred prisoners and led them into the forests for execution. Huoy told me about it. She said Pen Tip kept an especially low profile and worked harder than he ever had before.

  But even though the rebellion failed, it had one lasting effect: it destroyed the mystique of the Khmer Rouge’s invincibility. Angka was strong but not omnipotent. Angka had lost face.

  The regime did very little about the uprising and the stealing except to punish people. There were no real changes in policy, no attempts to cure what was wrong. The leaders of most revolutions would have realized that they needed the support of the people, but not Angka. Instead, the drive to restructure society went on, alienating us war slaves even farther – if that was possible. There was, for example, the matter of marriages.

  The Khmer Rouge wanted to regulate and control sex, just as they tried to control all other basic human practices, like eating and working and sleeping. Earlier on in the regime, couples who wanted to get married had to get permission from their village chiefs. If the answer was yes, they could go ahead. If the answer was no, they were in trouble, especially if chhlop found out they were having sexual relations anyway. In prison I had seen lines of young women being led away for breaking Angka’s puritanical rules of behaviour.

  But at the same time that people were being killed for the crime of sex, and hundreds of thousands of others were dying of starvation and disease, the Khmer Rouge encouraged population growth. They told us that Angka needed more comrades ‘to protect the nation’s borders and to join the struggle for independence-sovereignty’.

  The ceremony was announced in the morning over the loudspeakers. Comrade Ik, the old man on horseback, rode out into the fields to watch men and women at work and choose who to mate with whom. Some of the more clever single women insisted they had been separated from their husbands, and they were excused. But the rest obeyed. They had no choice. Whether the men and women in the couples knew or liked each other didn’t have anything to do with it.

  When the noon bell rang, the workers came in from the fields, their hair matted, their bodies sweaty, manure from the rice fields caking their feet. The chosen couples sat impassively on a long bench next to each other.

  The old man stood and said into a microphone, ‘Today Angka has allowed these couples to marry. It recognizes them as being legally married. Let the people recognize these couples as well. Angka hopes these people are revolutionary in spirit. They must have high levels of understanding of revolutionary ideals. They will have to work hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, sacrificing to help complete Angka’s projects.’

  Chev, grinning and dangerous, and sturdy, tattooed Uncle Seng, who had never hurt anyone, squatted on their haunches behind the old man, along with the other village leaders. Except for Chea Huon, who was absent, it was the same set of leaders I had seen at the dam ceremony. As usual, Comrade Ik was barefoot and shirtless. He wore only baggy shorts, a half-length sarong and a krama. His toothless lips held a banana-leaf cigarette.

  Those of us in the audience stood outside a longhouse and watched.

  The married couples sat expressionlessly on the bench, their hats in their laps.

  The old man continued, ‘The new man must know our revolution and its goals. The new man and the new woman will be creating our future society.’ He removed the cigarette, and his toothless lips broke into a leer. ‘You women must be quiet if your husband gets angry.’

  In Khmer slang, ‘getting angry’ means getting an erection.

  Comrade Ik leaned forward into the microphone and shouted, ‘Long live the Kampuchean revolution!’

  Everybody rose to their feet and repeated his words and they gave the clenched-fist salute. Each phrase was spoken three times.

  ‘Long live the great solidarity!’

  Everyone watched the married couples to see if they yelled with the proper enthusiasm.

  ‘Long live the newlyweds!’

  The brides and grooms echoed the words without a smile.

  ‘Long live the great leap forward!’

  There were other slogans. And finally, again, ‘Long live the Kampuchean revolution!’

  ‘You may now have lunch,’ the old man said with a kindly smile. The new couples went off to eat watery rice with everybody else. No feasts and no honeymoons for them. They sewed their single hammocks together and slept in the longhouses, with neighbours a few inches away on either side. Later some of them moved into the houses my crew built, or built their own. From what I heard, few of the husbands and wives really cared for one another. They certainly didn’t trust one another. They fought over food. There were a few instances of wives getting rid of their husbands by reporting them to the Khmer Rouge for stealing. Virtually no pregnancies resulted from these marriages, because the food rations were too low for the women to be fertile.

  The next time I saw the old man was a few months later, at the beginning of the rainy season of 1977, when all the heads of families were called to another special meeting. He presided again, standing in front of a microphone.

  He started off with the usual speech about building up the country’s economy. ‘You people in the second lines have to give greater support to the people in the front lines. You must plant more food to support them. You must work even harder.’ He went into a long harangue about sacrificing to achieve work goals. What he didn’t say was what everyone knew – that the work on the dam had fallen far behind schedule. A few small segments had been completed, but at the current pace it would take five or ten years before it was finished.

  Then he changed the subject. ‘The other reason we invited you here is to tell you about a man who betrayed the country. For a long time we did not know that our very own Angka had a traitor within. Before, we trusted him to the highest degree, but now we know his true character. I am talking about Vanh,’ he said.

  Behind me someone whispered, ‘Incredible! Is that why we haven’t seen Vanh driving around in a while?’ A buzz of conversation broke out, but I kept quiet. I wanted to hear what had happened to the man I knew as Chea Huon.

  ‘We have already captured Enemy Vanh,’ the old man was saying. He shifted his glance uneasily over those of us in the audience. ‘And we will find out those who have connections to him. These people will not be allowed to make trouble anymore. Furthermore, if someone in your villages says good things about Vanh, don’t believe him. Report him to Angka. Those people are Vanh’s henchmen and collaborators. They are the enemy. They will not be allowed to live in our country anymore.

  ‘That’s all. Before leaving, please give me a big hand.’

  I looked closely at Comrade Ik as I clapped. He wasn’t telling ev
erything that he knew. If Chea Huon had been captured alive, he wouldn’t be asking for our help to discover who the collaborators were. He would have already extracted the information, by torture.

  And I was glad. Chea Huon, who had become a revolutionary so early, had finally realized his mistake. He knew he couldn’t stop the madness, and finally he got out. When did he decide to leave? I wondered. Did he know it even when he met me? If so, the advice he gave me – to keep my mouth shut and keep on working – was the best he had to offer. Yes! He knew even then! Or maybe he did. He knew if I became his protégé the Khmer Rouge would hurt me later.

  A story arose that Chea Huon left for the Thai border with his jeep and his bodyguards and bags of dollars and gold. I don’t know if it was true, but it was possible. As the ranking commander, Chea Huon could have written passes to get himself through any checkpoints. He also had access to the money and gold collected from ‘new’ people when Angka abolished private property. And he was smart. If anybody could have made it to the border, it was Chea Huon. From there he could have joined the freedom fighters, or else travelled on to another country. With bags of dollars and gold he could have done anything he wanted. But I never really knew whether he succeeded or failed, or where he went. I never heard anything about him again.

  Ironically, while the regime was slowly disintegrating in front of our eyes, with forced marriages, increased stealing, rebellions from below, and defections at the highest levels, Huoy and I began to live better than before. Like convicts in a prison, we learned how to manipulate the rules to our advantage.

  What triggered the move to a better life was another case of malaria. This time when I got sick I arranged to be sent to the front-lines clinic, the place where they made the rabbit turds. As I had foreseen, the clinic was overcrowded. From there I got permission to recuperate at my youngest brother Hok’s house, on the other side of the mountain, near the Phnom Tippeday railroad station, in a village called Phum Ra. Once in Phum Ra, I got permission for Huoy to join me, to nurse me back to health.

  After a few days I knew we would have to move on. Long ago Hok and I had chosen different paths. He finished the eighth grade, I finished medical school. He chose one kind of woman to be his wife, I chose another. His wife told the neighbours that Huoy and I weren’t really married, and soon the two women were not speaking to each other. But that wasn’t the worst of it. There was an atmosphere of fear and hunger in the house. The sounds of raised voices and children crying. It was typical of households under the Khmer Rouge, but that didn’t make us like it any better. When my sister-in-law cooked she squatted in front of the fire facing away from us so we wouldn’t see her hand moving from the cooking pot to her mouth. She thought we didn’t notice.

  But Hok was my brother, and he was also the supervisor of a vegetable garden. As soon as I had recovered from malaria, he arranged for Huoy and me to work for him. I became a waterboy, walking back and forth from a pond to the garden, carrying a pair of watering cans on a bamboo shoulderboard, sprinkling the plants. Huoy weeded the vegetables.

  A short time later, when a building site and some materials became available, I got permission from the leader of the village to build a house. Imagine! A place of our own. Ever since the Khmer Rouge took over, Huoy and I had been transients. We had stayed under the house on stilts in Wat Kien Svay Krao, in the little hut in Tonle Batí, in the reed hut in Phum Chhleav and in the hut in Youen’s village. We had camped on hillocks and slept in longhouses on the front lines. And finally this. This was home.

  By then I was a skilled builder. Our new house was cool in the middle of the day and cozy at night. It had a view out the back, directly across the rice fields to the old temple high on the mountain ridge. We had clean water nearby. Because we were on the back lines, we were allowed to plant our own vegetables, provided we gave some to the common kitchen.

  While waiting for our garden to produce, I stole food. Each night before I went out I prayed to Buddha. I explained that I wasn’t going to sell what I stole, that I was going to take only what we needed to survive.

  I didn’t steal much from my brother’s garden. There were larger gardens up on the mountain plateau, near the wat. It was an all-night trip to sneak up to the gardens, fill a big sack, come down again and cook the vegetables outside the village to avoid detection. I was a capable thief and never had any problems. Many times Huoy and I ate until we couldn’t eat any more.

  We liked living in Phum Ra. It was wonderful being away from the front lines. And it was not stealing that got me into trouble. It was Pen Tip.

  27

  Drops of Water

  Like me, Pen Tip engineered a transfer away from the front lines. He and his family moved to the village of Phum Ra about the same time Huoy and I did. We were neighbours. But while I carried water to the common garden all day long, like the lowest class of peasant, and avoided the Khmer Rouge whenever possible, Pen Tip cultivated connections with the Khmer Rouge for his own gain. He rose from the rank of group leader to assistant section leader, becoming the most influential ‘new’ person in the village.

  Under different circumstances I might have found Pen Tip amusing. He was so short he looked up at people, like a child. He walked duckfooted, like Charlie Chaplin, and his eyebrows were always moving up and down, like a man who is always being surprised. Maybe being tiny and funny-looking made Pen Tip what he was. Maybe he had been teased and pushed around a lot when he was young. But whatever his motivations, he was hungry for power. He played up to ‘old’ people and Khmer Rouge. He ordered other ‘new’ people around. I was his favourite target, because I had once been his social superior, as a doctor. To prove himself he needed to dominate me.

  The two of us were careful how we behaved in public, because fighting was not allowed. We always spoke politely when we met. I had never told him I knew he had been responsible for sending me to prison. He never said anything about it either. But underneath the polite exterior we both knew that one of us was going to kill the other.

  How to kill him before he killed me was a difficult problem. Whenever I saw him my fingers itched to close around the handle of my hatchet and go after him. I never did, because we were never alone. If I killed Pen Tip with a hatchet and somebody saw it, the Khmer Rouge would kill me, and Huoy would be a widow. Revenge was useless unless Huoy and I were around to enjoy the aftermath.

  There was another possibility. It wasn’t the kind of plan to share with anybody, even with Huoy, because it was so low and mean and sneaky. Growing up in Samrong Yong, I had learned that thieves who want to kill watchdogs make a poison from the bark of the kantout tree. They peel the bark, grind it up, cook it with sugar and make it into cakes. The dogs eat the cakes and die. The poison works well on people too.

  Poisoning Pen Tip had two drawbacks. The first was practical. There wasn’t any sugar around – no way to disguise the nasty taste of kantout. Even if I somehow made the cakes, it would be hard tricking Pen Tip into eating them.

  The second problem was moral. The idea of poisoning him showed the same instinct for delayed and violent revenge that characterized the Khmer Rouge. If I poisoned him, or even if I killed him on a dark night with a hatchet, I would become just like them. Kum-monuss. And that made me think about who I really was. Deep, deep within me there was a dark and violent streak, the same as in most Cambodians. On this instinctive level, perhaps, the Khmer Rouge and I were not so different. But unlike them and unlike Pen Tip, I was capable of rising above my instincts, because of my education. I was a doctor. My job was saving people, not killing them. I was also Buddhist. I believed that if I didn’t kill Pen Tip myself, either in this life or the next life, somebody else would. It was kama. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t go after Pen Tip if I had the chance, but it did mean I could watch and wait.

  Pen Tip moved first. In an administrative meeting he attended, Uncle Phan, the leader of the village, mentioned a vacancy in the fertilizer crew. Pen Tip volunteered me for the job. Uncle Phan
approved.

  When I heard about it I was furious. Carrying water to the garden wasn’t low enough for me; now, instead, I would be carrying slop from the public latrines. It was Pen Tip’s way of lowering my status even farther, of ‘breaking’ my face.

  The job was also dangerous. Previous men on the fertilizer crew had died from infections entering their bodies through cuts. Even if working with untreated sewage was socially acceptable, which it wasn’t, because of the stigma and the smell, I never would have volunteered to do anything of the kind without rubber gloves, rubber boots and lots of medicine for protection. And I had none of those.

  I started the new job, going around barefoot to the public toilets and emptying them with a pail on an extremely long wooden handle, then carrying a vat of the wastes on a very long thick pole with another man. My social downfall was complete. I was at the bottom caste of the war slaves, who were at the bottom of Cambodian society. But Pen Tip hadn’t finished.

  Three soldiers walked toward my new house one afternoon when work was over and I was planting yams in my new private garden. Until they stood next to me and clicked off the safety switches of their rifles, I had no idea what they wanted.

  It was like the other times I’d been seized: Huoy weeping, my heart pounding. Pleading to be allowed to change my trousers so that Huoy would have the gold hidden in my waistband. Having my arms tied behind me. Being kicked to the floor. Huoy trying to keep them from beating me but being shoved roughly aside.

  As I walked away, Huoy begged the soldiers to tie her up and take her too.