Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  Luck was running in our direction. A railroad worker living nearby had a sick child and asked my brother Hok for advice. Hok referred the case to me. I treated the child and got to know the entire railroad crew. These were the men I had seen poling along on their flatcar ever since I had first come to Battambang. They were members of an elite class under the regime. They ate even better than soldiers. Their food was sent to them in boxcars, more than they could eat. They also had their own vegetable garden, which Sangam and I supplied fertilizer to, secretly, as a favour.

  They invited us to secret feasts and served me dishes I hadn’t seen in years. I set food aside for Huoy, then ate so much I couldn’t move.

  With the food from the railroad workers, and the food I collected on and off the job, plus the vegetables from our garden, Huoy and I ate better than ever before. For the first time since coming to Battambang, we were actually healthy.

  What a change! Our body weights were nearly normal. We were strong from all the exercise. We had our own private house to live in, just the two of us. We didn’t like the regime, but we had learned how to get around the system, especially now that we were away from the front lines.

  My only regret, when I look back on that period, was an argument I had with Huoy. She had taken some cooked food from its hiding place in the woodpile when a boy about eleven years old happened to walk past and see it. The boy was smoking a cigarette. He gave Huoy a long, bold, suspicious glare. When he walked past me working in the garden he glared at me too.

  The boy’s name was Yoeung, and he was Uncle Phan’s adopted son. He often went around the village, joined work crews just long enough to watch the workers closely, then wandered off again to report what he saw. He was a chhlop.

  ‘Sweet,’ I said to Huoy after Yoeung had left, ‘did you listen to me? What was I talking about just last night? What did I tell you? To keep the food hidden. It means our lives. So why didn’t you?’

  Huoy said, ‘I know. I’m sorry. It was bad timing, that’s all. I took out the food, and the chhlop was right there. I didn’t mean to.’

  Something in my mind snapped, like a twig that had been stepped on. My happiness vanished. I saw myself being tied up and dragged off to prison. I went into a cold rage.

  ‘Don’t talk to me for five days,’ I said. ‘If you say even a word, I won’t answer.’

  Huoy was silent, her eyes downcast.

  Uncle Phan summoned me to his house.

  I walked there slowly, thinking the end had come. If I went to prison a fourth time, there was no way I could survive.

  I lied to Uncle Phan. I lied better than I had ever lied in my life, by convincing myself that what I said was true. I swore to him that the food was given to me by the railroad workers (though in fact I had stolen it from the common garden). It was my word against the chhlop’s, and Uncle Phan let me go with a warning. Perhaps he thought I had suffered enough. Or maybe his conscience was bothering him. He did not know it, but many evenings I had seen him strolling back from the common garden with a bulge in his krama. I had seen the lantern light shine through the cracks of his house when he and his wife cooked the stolen food and ate it. In Phum Ra, everyone was a thief. Even the village leader.

  So this time Huoy and I got away with it. We were not punished for stealing the food. But when I got back to our house I gave her the silent treatment anyway. I was determined to be strong and to show her the consequences of her action.

  After two days of not saying a word to her, I was standing in the doorway of the house looking out at the garden. Huoy came to me and knelt at my feet. She looked up at me, with teardrops at the corners of her eyes.

  ‘Sweet, are you still angry at me?’ she said. ‘I did wrong. I was careless. If you want to beat me for it, then beat me. Do as you wish. But once you are through, talk to me. Please talk to me.’

  I raised her up and put my arms around her. I hugged her. Her body was soft and warm. And once I had hugged her I knew I had done wrong. She was my wife. She would never harm me, and I knew that. It was the one thing I was certain of in the world.

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘Yes, I will talk to you,’ I said huskily. Then I had to go out in the garden to clear my thoughts.

  I was upset and confused. My temper had got the best of me again. After all those years of learning to control it. Underneath the adult exterior I was the same boy who had thrown the starter wrench into the radiator of the engine at my father’s sawmill and then kicked the dog.

  I had been crazy to treat Huoy that way. Crazy and wrong.

  Standing in the garden, I decided never to do anything to make Huoy unhappy again. If I had a single purpose in life, it was to comfort her, and to serve her just as she served me.

  We made up, and our bonheur was restored. The last barrier between us had been removed, a barrier I had not known about until it was gone. We became even closer than before, like the cupped halves of male and female fitting snugly in the symbol of yin and yang.

  This is not to say that life was perfect. We never forgot that we were living under a shadow. We always knew that somewhere nearby, the soldiers were marching some unfortunate person away and that we were powerless to do anything about it. Someday, perhaps, it would be our turn. Huoy and I didn’t talk about the terror much, but it was always there, like a cold hand around our hearts.

  Yet even the terror had one beneficial effect: it had driven us closer. And except for the fear itself, life had never been so good. I didn’t miss the old times. I didn’t care about being a doctor anymore, or being rich. I didn’t miss having a motorcycle, or even wearing shoes. We didn’t like the Khmer Rouge, but we accepted our circumstances under them. We were close to the land. We were peasants, as generations of our ancestors had been. We were healthy. We had enough to eat. We had each other’s company. We had our own house. In the late afternoons we sat by the back door and looked at the view: rice fields spreading out into the distance, dotted with hillocks. It was perfect. One hillock rose higher than the rest, crowned with a leaning sdao tree. Beyond the rice fields rose the mountain, with the temple on the plateau, a reminder of the religion we had not forgotten. The sun set behind the long, uneven ridge.

  Over the months we watched the rice fields change from brown to green and from green to gold, and then there was joyous news:

  Huoy was pregnant.

  29

  Crossing the Sea

  In our pillow talk at night Huoy often said she wanted babies. She wanted to be a mother badly, but she also thought it best to put it off until the Khmer Rouge had been overthrown, so our children could grow up in a better world. Until my third time in prison I had agreed.

  But after I came back from prison for the last time, life seemed too precious and fragile to wait any longer. I told her it was time to start a family and she agreed. With the food I provided and the larger rations we got from the common kitchen during the rice harvest, Huoy became fertile toward the end of 1977.

  We knew she was pregnant because of morning sickness. She had a bad case, vomiting both in the morning and the afternoon. Even rice made her nauseous. The only foods she could keep down were sweet. I hunted for papayas and jackfruits. I made doctor’s visits in exchange for bananas and pieces of sugar cane. Finally we traded gold for a supply of palm tree sugar. She sprinkled the sugar on food, and that helped keep it down. But she didn’t have much appetite.

  Except to find food that agreed with her, there was nothing I could do about her morning sickness. We would just have to wait for it to pass. I took my medical instruments out of hiding – a stethoscope, a blood-pressure cuff and a thermometer – and gave her an exam, using spoons as an improvised speculum. All her signs were good. Aside from the nausea, which caused a slight weight loss, she was healthy. She was then twenty-seven years old.

  Because she was strong and relatively young, she had a good chance of giving birth successfully, or, as we say in the Khmer language, ‘crossing the sea’. Most Cambodian w
omen thought of childbirth as something like a long and dangerous voyage, which is how the expression ‘crossing the sea’ came into being. Huoy wasn’t too worried about the act of giving birth itself. After all, I was a doctor. She knew that I would take care of her. She was more concerned about the upbringing of the child after it was born.

  Huoy told me many times that she was going to raise our child to be religious and well mannered and to respect its elders. If there were no schools she would educate the child herself. She didn’t really care whether we had a boy or a girl, as long as the child was healthy. I hoped for a little girl – a small version of Huoy, to grow up and help heal the suffering of the world.

  By the third month Huoy’s belly began to show. From then on she wore sarongs instead of trousers, because it was easy to adjust the size of the waist. During the days she did light tasks in the common garden. When she came home she chewed on a piece of sugar cane, for energy, and then watered our vegetables with a small watering can, careful not to strain herself. She was beginning to get over her morning sickness, and she had that contented inner glow of a woman who is glad to be pregnant.

  But the dry season of 1978 was a difficult time in the Phnom Tippeday region. The common kitchen began serving smaller rations than before. There was a warehouse nearby, a large building with mud walls and a metal roof, next to the railroad tracks, but the rice inside was not meant for us. Occasionally the doors opened and soldiers loaded great, heavy sacks of rice onto railroad trains, or else onto trucks, and we who had grown the rice sadly watched it disappear.

  Toward the end of March 1978 the common kitchen began skipping meals. At first I simply stole more food to make up for it. My partner was a courageous twelve-year-old boy named Tha, who fed his crippled father, his pregnant mother and two small children with what he stole. Together we went on night-time expeditions to the common garden on the mountainside, near the ruined temple. One night the civilian guards at the garden heard us coming, threw stones at us and yelled at the top of their lungs for the soldiers. There was only one thing for us to do: Tha and I climbed above the guards, threw stones at them and shouted ‘Thieves! Thieves!’ at them as loudly as we could so the soldiers wouldn’t know whom to shoot. Quickly we threw vegetables in our sacks and came crashing down the mountainside with our sacks in one hand and hatchets in the other. When we came back to the village we cooked our food out in the open. Except for stealing itself, there was nothing to hide. With the common kitchen closed part of the time, everybody prepared private meals. Angka’s authority was breaking down in front of our eyes.

  In April 1978 the common kitchen in Phum Ra closed entirely. The bells stopped ringing. There were no more loudspeaker announcements, no more music.

  One of the first to stop working was Pen Tip. He was like a weather vane, sensing which way the political winds were blowing. Others followed his example. A few ‘old’ people who were closest to the village leaders, or who were particularly scared of the soldiers, continued to work at their jobs. But most wandered off into the fields and jungle to forage.

  At our house, by mid-April, there was no more food left in the hiding places. We ate the water convolvulus, the cabbages and the underdeveloped yams from our garden, then the flowers from the pumpkins and the leaves from the taro. It was too early for the corn and beans and other vegetables, and there were no bananas on our trees.

  We had already eaten the ducks. The common kitchen had taken some of the chickens, and I had given the rest to someone to raise in a remote location, out of Angka’s reach.

  I was worried. There is little that helps a pregnant woman as much as food, and little that complicates a pregnancy as much as malnutrition. I didn’t say that to Huoy, but she knew it herself.

  By her fourth month of pregnancy she was no longer nauseous, but there was little for her to eat. The weather was unusually dry and hot.

  Though the common kitchen was closed, soldiers continued to take people away for gathering wild foods. It had no effect. After three and a half years of listening to promises about the country’s future, the patience of the ‘new’ people and even the ‘old’ people was exhausted. We foraged in the open. We stole more than ever before, during the day as well as the night. Everybody stole. The guards at the common gardens stole until there was not an edible leaf left, and then they left the garden gates open. Tha and I made trips into the rice fields, to glean the leftovers from the rice harvest. People were everywhere, bending over, scanning the ground, picking up unhusked grains of rice, wandering uncertainly this way and that. In an entire day I collected less than a can of rice and saved it all for Huoy. All the wild food was gone, picked by other hungry people.

  Huoy became depressed.

  It was not just the lack of food, though that was the greatest part of it – the unrelenting emptiness in her stomach, day after day, just when she needed food the most. Adding to her sorrow, draining her strength further, were other events that affected her mental well-being. Like the purges. The latest purge was against the ‘Vietnamese’. The Khmer Rouge leaders had the same racial prejudice against the Vietnamese as the Lon Nol regime did. They decided that Cambodians of Vietnamese descent and even Cambodians who spoke the Vietnamese language were the cause of all our problems and that it was necessary to purify the nation of traitors of this type. The chhlop Yoeung came around, trying to discover who in our village spoke Vietnamese, and many were taken away. Huoy, who had grown up near the Vietnamese border, spoke fluent Vietnamese. The chhlop didn’t find out, but still she became depressed.

  But it was not just the hunger and the purges that depressed her. Earlier in the regime there had been one element of truth to the communists’ claim of moral superiority: Khmer Rouge cadre and soldiers did not take bribes. Now even that was no longer true. With gold, people could get food from the common kitchen, even though it was closed. With gold, they could get relatives or friends reassigned from the front lines. Bonjour, Cambodia’s great moral weakness, had reappeared.

  I spent long hours consoling Huoy.

  ‘You have to be strong, sweet,’ I said. ‘Don’t allow yourself to be sick. If you are sick, I feel sick. If you have any kind of disease in your mind or your heart, give it to me, but get rid of it. I want you to be healthy.’

  ‘Yes,’ Huoy said, but she was unconvinced.

  She lay on the smooth wooden bench in our tiny house, tired, hot, fanning herself. She was six months pregnant, with a swollen belly.

  ‘I have never seen this kind of government before,’ said Huoy listlessly. It was her favourite complaint. ‘I have read a lot of history books, about Europe and Asia, but I never read about anything like this. No hospitals. No communication. If we lived in any other country, we could send a letter out to relatives abroad, and they would send money or food. But we cannot even send a letter out of Cambodia. We are not even allowed to have pencil or paper to write a letter. If we object they say we are CIA, or KGB, or spies for the Vietnamese. There is no way to call for help.’

  ‘I help you,’ I said.

  ‘But you are hungry too,’ she said. ‘In Sihanouk’s regime and Lon Nol’s regime if you were poor you could at least go out and beg. Or you were free to find wild foods in the countryside. But here, nothing. Nothing. Even beggars cannot survive.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. It was all true.

  ‘The government treats us worse than animals,’ she murmured. ‘Nobody cares. When someone dies on the dykes of the canals, nobody comes to take the bodies away. Only the vultures. Or the chhke char-chark. Or the cannibals. People are eating people. That’s what we have come to.’

  ‘I have heard the stories,’ I answered. ‘But I do not think there have been many cases. The Khmer Rouge do not like cannabalism either.’

  Huoy fanned herself, staring at the thatch ceiling.

  ‘If there is no food, maybe the baby will be retarded,’ she said. ‘Or deformed.’

  ‘No, sweet,’ I said firmly. ‘I have examined yo
u. I have listened to the baby’s heartbeat. The signs are all good. The baby will be fine.’

  Huoy didn’t seem to hear me. Her attention had drifted, and her thoughts were focused on something far away. ‘If there is no food, how can I make milk in my breasts?’ she whispered. ‘How long can I go on like this? How long has it been since Angka has given us food?’

  ‘No, don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Your breasts will automatically have milk. Automatically. I’m a doctor. This is my specialty. I know.’

  ‘Yes, I know the milk comes automatically,’ said Huoy. ‘But maybe there won’t be enough.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that either. She was right. If she was as malnourished when she delivered the baby as she was now, she probably wouldn’t be able to produce enough milk. But for the moment, breast milk was the least of our problems. Even her malnourishment didn’t worry me as much as the state of her mind.

  Ever since the Khmer Rouge had taken over I had talked with Huoy, trying to encourage her. At first she believed me, and kept her spirits up. She said she understood that we had to wait for things to improve. But that was before the death of her mother. After that, Huoy was never quite the same. We went to the front lines, my father and brother died, and I kept getting sent to prison. And as Huoy saw conditions worsening each year, she became discouraged. She didn’t have the instinct to fight when all the odds were against us. To her, there was no use fighting anymore. The hunger, the terror, the chhlop, the corruption, the energy the baby drew away from her – all these things combined to break her will.

  Her weight loss showed first in her cheeks, which lost their roundness. Then in the outline of her jawbones and her collarbones. All her ribs were showing.