Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  The guards stood over us menacingly. We watched the remnants of the building burn.

  The coals glowed in the darkness, and the metal from the roof contracted noisily as it cooled.

  As the sky grew light we saw that our skins were black from the smoke. Little was left of the jail except for charred metal sheets and blackened, twisted bodies on the ground.

  The prison-keepers never explained why they had burned the jail, and it has always remained a mystery to me. Perhaps the guards took the initiative, without orders from above. Maybe they had tired of their methods of torture and wanted some variety. Or perhaps they wanted to get rid of the building because of the awful smell.

  Of eighty prisoners, twenty-eight survived. The Khmer Rouge met among themselves to decide what to do. They brought us watery rice and then asked us which cooperatives we came from.

  They sent off messengers.

  That afternoon Uncle Phan, Phum Ra’s chief, appeared to escort me and another prisoner back to his village.

  As we walked away, Uncle Phan explained that he hadn’t known the soldiers had taken me away until after it had happened. ‘I couldn’t have protected you, son,’ he said.

  I partly believed him. He didn’t seem to know anything of my quarrel with Pen Tip. I thanked him for picking me up. But in truth, I was angry. By Khmer Rouge standards Phan was a decent man, but that wasn’t good enough. I had not done anything to deserve prison.

  ‘From now on,’ Uncle Phan was saying, ‘Dam doeum kor. Plant a kapok tree. Keep your mouth shut. Behave. Don’t do any more misdeeds. Understand?’

  ‘I will do anything to avoid an experience like that,’ I replied. ‘I have had enough suffering. Please, Uncle Phan, could we walk more slowly?’

  We stopped to rest a few times. There was a raw spot on the skin in the middle of my forehead, but it was barely noticeable compared to the lumps and the dried blood on the top of my head and the bruises everywhere else. I was weak and sore, but in better condition than after the other two times I got out of prison.

  When we got back to Phum Ra work was over for the afternoon, and Huoy was at the house. When she first saw me she wept with happiness. Then, when I came closer and she saw the discolorations from the bruises and the cuts on my head, she lost control. She sobbed with irregular gasps of air, her facial features contorted and her shoulders shook. I held her, but she would not stop.

  I stripped off my clothes and wrapped a krama around my waist. We walked in back of the house to the minicanal with water in the bottom. She bathed me and shaved the hair around the cuts on my head. Her hands were steady, but she could not stop crying.

  For all Huoy had lived through, she was soft. She was like a crab without a shell. I was her shell, her protection. When I came back to her broken, she absorbed the blows I had taken. She felt the pain even more than me.

  She would not stop crying. Even as she daubed at my wounds and soaped me, even as I abandoned myself to her tender care, I worried about her health. My injuries were only physical. They would heal. Hers were in her mind.

  28

  Happiness

  If anybody else in Cambodia survived being tortured by the Khmer Rouge three times, I never heard of it. In the Phnom Tippeday region I knew of only one other person, a teenager, who survived even twice. His hair fell out, and he turned pale and trembled at the sight of soldiers.

  Yet somehow I had survived three episodes of torture and prison as well as malaria and dysentery. I was alive. There were scars-scalp wounds, from the third prison; burn scars on my leg, from the second prison; half of my little finger missing, from the first prison. There were other injuries, mental and emotional, but I wasn’t aware of them until later. At the time, I was in reasonably good spirits. And I was amazed. I had survived when thousands of people around me had died of illness or starvation, and thousands more had been executed.

  Why did I survive?

  To me, the only answer that makes sense is that the gods willed it. It was kama. It was not chance, because the mathematical odds against me were too high. What were the chances against my surviving what I had been through? A thousand to one? A hundred thousand to one? Or even a million to one?

  Admittedly, a few factors worked in my favor: One, I am physically tough and energetic. Two, I did a lot of street fighting growing up, and that helped prepare me to outsmart and outlast my torturers. Three, I had someone to live for: Huoy. Anyone with those three characteristics has better odds than someone who doesn’t. Of course. But that still doesn’t explain why I made it through when so many others didn’t.

  There were so many times I could have died. The third time in prison, if I hadn’t been near the door when the fire started. The second time in prison, if the guards hadn’t pulled the plastic bag off my head when they did. Anytime at all, if I had admitted that I was a doctor or a military officer. I would have died of dysentery if the yams hadn’t been distributed.

  It was a miracle I was alive. I accepted it as such and thanked the gods. When I looked around, I saw other miracles. Everything, from the colour of the sky to the taste of rice to the sight of the temple on the mountainside, seemed new and fresh. And the life-force within me was the same as the force within the earth and sky and all other living beings.

  My bruises healed quickly. The nightmare of the water torture vanished from my thoughts. The days returned to their normal pattern, and still I retained this deeper, greater appreciation for everything around me. For Huoy, especially, and for our house.

  Chang My Huoy – known as ‘Bopha’ to the Khmer Rouge, known as Huoy to me. We had been denied the wedding we both wanted, first by my father, then by the revolution. But we were closer than any of the married couples around. This is not to say we were perfect. Sometimes I was harsh with her, and at other times I teased her more than she would have liked. But we were glad for each other’s company.

  I loved watching her in our new house in the early mornings. When she slept, she hugged her little blue-covered pillow to her chest, the one she had brought with her from Phnom Penh. She rose before sunrise, when the sky was growing light. She went to her small, rectangular mirror and brushed her hair, put clips in her hair above each ear, and washed her face. She dressed. As I got up groggily, she rolled the mosquito net, folded the night-clothes and the bedding and put them neatly away. There was something about her – organized, clean, feminine, desirable – that attracted me on all levels. Man to woman. Husband to wife. Strange to think that when we first met I had been her teacher. Ever since then, those roles had been reversed.

  I had always felt something special toward women, and by that I mean toward the entire female sex. In childhood, after the beating my father gave me, I realized that men were the cause of most suffering. My experiences in Khmer Rouge prisons proved it over and over. When had a woman ever hurt me? When had I ever seen a woman physically harming someone else? Never. Perhaps that was why I was so drawn to women, because they were the healers of suffering. The suffering that men inflicted.

  To me, Huoy represented the best of womankind. She never caused pain. She was a healer. She was also much smarter than me. She never got into trouble, or even into arguments. Just by advising me and by quietly setting an example, she kept me out of more trouble with Angka.

  She avoided the worst trait of women, which is idle, malicious gossip. She sought out the company of a few women who were polite and educated like herself. In her spare time she tended the house and garden, or cooked, improvising recipes from wild foods, or sang in her smooth, clear voice. She mended our clothes with precise, expert stitching. She was sentimental but practical, making trousers for herself from one of her mother’s old sampots and wearing her mother’s rubber sandals when her own wore out. She was not the most beautiful woman in the world, but she was beautiful to me. Outsiders didn’t know much about her. To them she looked like a good-natured but quiet young woman.

  I knew Huoy better than anyone, except perhaps her mother. If Huoy had a
fault, it was that she could not protect herself. Even when she was happy, the tears rolled down her cheeks. Sad events affected her deeply. She had never recovered from her mother’s death. She had prayed to her mother nonstop when I was in prison; even when times were good, she prayed to her mother almost every day. My own near-deaths and the deaths around her left her permanently saddened and frightened. We heard that my own mother had died, off in the Cardamom Mountains, and Hok and his wife and Huoy and I held a ceremony with candles and incense, the same as we had held for my father and brother. In a way I was glad that my mother had died, because it freed her from the hardships of this life, but Huoy took the news badly. I kept trying to cheer her up, but it wasn’t easy. Her mental health was fragile. She belonged to a more peaceful time, of going to the temples and raising children and running a clean and comfortable household.

  Our new house in Phum Ra was not what I had expected to give her before the revolution. It was made of thatch, except for a few corrugated metal panels along the walls. The floor was dirt. But we both loved the house and I was proud of it, because I had designed it myself and built it with my own hands. We had only to compare our house to our neighbours’ to know how good it was.

  Our neighbours lived in houses on stilts like the ones I helped build when I was on the construction crew. The pilings had sunk unevenly, and as a result the floors were tilted at various crazy angles. The metal roofs got so hot in the sun that sometimes the inhabitants fried freshwater clams on them to save building a fire.

  Our little house was sturdy and comfortable. For the site I chose a hillock, elevated above the surrounding ground, so it would never flood. We sprinkled water on the dirt floor in the morning, which kept it cool all day. Doors and windows gave us plenty of ventilation. The thatch roof kept out the sun and the rain. To protect against heat even more, I planted a climbing squash that grew up onto the roof and covered it with leaves. On the south side of the house, which got the direct rays of the sun, I planted banana trees for shade, plus climbing beans to grow up and cover the outside wall.

  The main room of the house was about ten feet by six. An L-shaped bench made of smooth boards ran along the west and south walls. Huoy and I slept on the long side and used the short side for sitting on during the day. At the far end of the bench, near the door, we kept a ceramic jar with a lid and cool, clean drinking water inside.

  The kitchen was a lean-to shed attached to the north side of the house. We stacked firewood along one wall and set three stones in a triangle to support the pot. We went through the motions of showing up at the common kitchen for meals, but like most families in Phum Ra we did our real cooking at home every day, while pretending to make tea. We had yams, taro, arrow root, onions, pumpkins, beans, squash, cabbage, cucumber, peppers, corn and other vegetables in our garden. We raised ducks and chickens. Huoy, who had strong maternal instincts, loved to gather the tiny, fluffy-feathered chicks in her hands and carry them to spots where they could peck at the termites on the ground, making their cheeping noises.

  Truly, we had everything we needed. By our standards we were rich. I had a bamboo shoulderboard, two pails and an all-purpose hatchet. We had hoes and mattocks for the garden; kitchen utensils; the crockery water jar; the mended and blackened mosquito net; and a soft, silk-like brocaded blanket to keep us warm at night. (Somebody had stolen our white plastic tarp but we didn’t care, because our roof kept us dry.) We had our clothes. We had enough food. We had hidden possessions – some bits of gold in our waistbands; my eyeglasses and medical equipment on top of the roofbeam; rice and extra food and medical textbooks in a storage cellar under the dirt floor. The French-English instruction book lay hidden between the bench and the wall, where I could reach for it when I chose. We had no Mercedes, no gasoline trucks, no bank accounts, and we didn’t care. We didn’t even miss them anymore.

  I felt reborn. Huoy made me happy. Our house made me happy. We had moved from the front lines to the back lines, where life was more relaxed. Every day I heard the whistle of the steam trains approaching and watched the trains chuff past on the railroad tracks and saw the railroad workers poling themselves rapidly along on their little flatcar, and I marvelled, like a child who had never seen such things before. When the bells rang in the village – ‘DING. DING. Ding, ding, ding, dingdingding’ – the sound didn’t set my teeth on edge, as it had earlier. The bells fit in with the trains and the birds and everything else.

  In the evenings Huoy and I went walking together to look for food. We gathered wild plants. We hunted for mice and crabs. We used our mosquito net to catch tiny shrimp and crayfish in a pond. Once we caught a big fish in the net, and when I had hauled it ashore Huoy wrapped her arms around my neck and wept.

  ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘Because I’m happy, sweet, I’m happy,’ she said. At home she cooked the fish with water convolvulus, and it was perfect.

  Sometimes the two of us were alone together, bathing in a canal. We scrubbed and washed one another. We were happy to serve one another.

  We were so close and so dependent on each other that we often joked about it. A man I knew came over to the house and asked me to go out foraging with him.

  ‘I need my wife’s permission,’ I said.

  ‘You’re scared of your wife?’ my friend said.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said. Huoy was standing next to me. ‘She’s the minister of education and finance around here. She’s minister of cultural affairs too. She runs everything. She’s the boss.’

  My friend said sceptically, ‘Oh yeah? You have to give her respect like that, in front of her?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. I turned to Huoy and asked her please to give me permission to go out foraging. Huoy folded her arms, pouted and said no.

  ‘Sorry, I can’t go,’ I told my friend.

  I put my palms together and sompeahed Huoy, but she shook her head. Then I grabbed her and tickled her until she finally said yes.

  ‘The boss has given permission now,’ I said. ‘We can go.’

  The truth was that Huoy was the boss. I liked it that way. She modified my quick temper, my stubbornness, my tendency to joke too much. She brought out my patience, my quiet side. I was her boss too. Each served the other. I kept her alive by providing the food and shelter and love she needed. She had saved my life when I was sick. She kept me from doing rash things, like killing Pen Tip. She was my reason for living.

  When I returned from my third time in prison, Pen Tip pretended to ignore me. It didn’t matter. I knew and he knew that there was unfinished business between us. I let him worry about it. I didn’t worry. Until the right day came, I was content to wait.

  As far as I was concerned, I had gained the upper hand. I was the man prison couldn’t kill. I was the ghost who kept reappearing. And Pen Tip’s attempt to dominate me by putting me in a low-class job had backfired. It was low-class, without a doubt, but it was the best job in the village.

  The fertilizer crew was outside Pen Tip’s jurisdiction. He didn’t supervise us. Nobody really did. Few people went near the fertilizer shed because of the smell. Occasionally Uncle Phan, the village chief, came by on an inspection tour, but he was easy to deal with. Uncle Phan told me to put salt in the fertilizer. He thought plants need salt, the way people do. I went off to the common kitchen, shaking my head, and requisitioned salt. From what I could remember from biology courses, plants need nitrogen, phosphates and other nutrients, but they do not need salt, which is harmful to them. I put the salt aside for my own use, and the next time I saw Uncle Phan I said solemly, ‘I have tasted the fertilizer. The salt level is exactly right. Would you like to taste some too?’ He turned pale, like a man who was about to be sick. And that kept him away from the fertilizer shed for a while.

  My colleague on the fertilizer crew was an old guy with no side teeth, named Sangam. Once a day, Sangam and I strolled leisurely to a public toilet with our tools. There were several toilets scattered around the village. They had half-height t
hatch walls, meaning that someone who went inside and squatted still had his head and shoulders visible to passersby. Not much privacy at all. The users had to place their feet on two wooden slats, and carefully – one slip could mean a fall into the retaining pit, a fifty-five-gallon steel drum cut in half. Needless to say, the toilets were unpopular among the residents of the village, who preferred to sneak off into the bushes when no one was watching.

  Sangam and I took turns emptying the steel drums with a pail attached to a very, very, very long wooden handle. We dumped the contents into another half of a fifty-five-gallon drum and carried it between us on the longest pole we could find. At the fertilizer shed, which was far out in the rice fields, we stirred other ingredients into the drum – mud from hillocks (which was exceptionally fertile) and rice husks or leaves. We poured the mixture onto the ground. By the time it dried a day or two later, it had lost most of its odour and was ready to be spread. Every week or so Sangam and I made deliveries to the common gardens in an oxcart.

  The only disadvantages to the job were the smell, which was awful, and the danger to health. I was extremely careful not to get cuts. I bathed twice a day and washed thoroughly with kapok soap and real soap that I got from the common kitchen. I never got internal infections, but the red rash spread back over my feet and ankles.

  The advantage of the job was that Sangam and I were left alone. It was nothing at all like working on the front lines. We didn’t pay any attention to the bells. We didn’t work hard. I took at least one long nap each day. About once a week I stayed up all night to steal from the common gardens. When I came back from stealing I wrapped the vegetables carefully and stored them under the pile of fertilizer, where nobody ever looked. Then I slept at the fertilizer shed until noon, while Sangam kept watch.

  We used the job as a cover for getting food. If we wanted to spend an afternoon collecting red ant eggs, or gathering wild plants, or fishing, we went through the fields collecting manure from the oxen and water buffalo, until we were safely out of sight. If I wanted rice, I splashed smelly night soil on my sleeves, pretended to be tired and lay down on a long table in the common kitchen. When Uncle Phan’s wife, who was the leader of the kitchen, tried to get me to leave, I pretended to stay asleep until she offered me a big enough bribe of rice.