For the Sake of All Living Things

by John M. Del Vecchio

  Somewhere in the blackness to their right stretched the dried marsh swamp and Boeng Khsach Sa. Still they walked and walked and walked. Then they could go no farther. Vathana’s mouth was dry. It was difficult to speak. Samol began to whine. Only a little farther, Vathana thought, and we would see Mister Pech’s villa. Does it still stand? Dare she mention it to the children? Silently she herded them off the road into the shadow of a bamboo hedge. Quietly she brushed the ground to clear it of stones, twigs or insects. Then she unrolled the mat, yawned, lay along one edge with Su Livanh cupped in the bend of her body. Samol and Samnang snuggled in. She unfurled the blanket and they slept.

  The sky was crystalline yet the ground air was hazy with dust churned up by the passing of a mobile work brigade. Chhuon stood bareheaded, relaxed, waiting as ordered for the phum enforcer. His skin had darkened, his hands grown coarse, his feet callused. Before him, sitting on the ground in the shade of their hut in the line of children’s huts, four small girls, no more than seven years of age, sat cross-legged obeying every command of the neary, herself but eleven. Gracefully their hands moved, as gracefully as ballet students of the old court. Back and forth to a softly hummed cadence, back and forth lightly honing the edges of the bamboo daggers.

  “Now all Comrade Children have fifty.” The neary’s voice was severe. “By noon all will present Poh one thousand.” She glanced over her shoulder at Chhuon, then turned, jerked the punji stake from one little girl and tested the tip and the blades. “No!” she screamed. She lunged forward, punched the girl’s face. The girl fell, scrambled back to position without a sound. The neary sat back. “Angkar wishes you to work better. Or do you wish to be disappeared?”

  Chhuon eyed them, a slight scowl on his face, Krahom approval. Through all the turmoil and deprivation of the past five years he had learned when to speak, when to be silent. His special knowledge of rice had made him valuable to Met Vong, the enforcer in charge of Phum 117. Vong called, him Poh, a rural dialect form of Pa, the equivalent of “Pop,” or “Pappy.” At fifty-two Chhuon was an elder and Vong, for all the new speak and new order, still maintained a remnant of traditional respect. With Vong, Chhuon did not act the ignorant peasant. The time and need had passed. Under Vong, though living conditions were harsh, he, the entire commune, had entered a state of stable systematic enslavement. Poh, Chhuon, was again a boss, not the nominal chief of rice. The 1974 crop had been decent, the quota for the army had been met, no one had starved. It was something few Krahom communes could claim.

  As Chhuon watched the girls, Vong approached. He halted behind Chhuon. “Soon,” he said quietly, “we’ll have many more mouths to feed.” He issued no greeting, wasted no words. “You must make the rice grow faster.” Chhuon turned. He watched the enforcer’s hands. He did not look at his face. The hands jittered. “Angkar has achieved glorious victory. The oppressed of all cities have been liberated.”

  Chhuon tilted his head in such a way as to keep it bowed yet to glance at Vong’s chin. “Comrade Enforcer, one can only be kind to rice. One cannot hurry it.”

  “Poh, when new people arrive, they will be hungry. Grow the rice quickly.”

  Chhuon’s mouth opened slightly, his cheeks tightened—almost a smile, not a smile, smiling was prohibited. If Angkar’s representative said it will grow quickly who was he to say otherwise? “You say new people, Met Vong?”

  “In the whole world”—Vong’s face beamed—“in all times, no people have ever driven out the imperialists to the last man. Only Khmer! Only Khmer revolutionaries. Only we have scored total victory. Khmers can do anything. From the very highest center the word has come, ‘This is the work of God. For mere humans it is too imposing.’ ”

  Now Chhuon did smile. It was not the ancient enigmatic smile of Cambodia but a lesser grin, an approval without happiness or ambiguity. “We must prepare for them,” Vong continued. “When they are fed we shall celebrate the great Seventeenth of April Victory. Come.”

  Chhuon followed Vong. They walked a narrow raised path through the low forest of the wilderness zone. Hundreds of thousands of punji stakes lined the broad trenches below the path, aimed not outward to stop attackers but inward to keep the inhabitants from fleeing. In the heat Vong paced like a rising executive. They neared a work site where half the commune’s inhabitants, about five hundred people, were expanding irrigation canals and dikes. Weeks before Vong had pointed to the old half-kilometer-long dikes and said, “The new fields must be doubled. If that dike were moved five hundred meters how much more rice would grow?”

  “It can’t be moved before the rains,” Chhuon had answered.

  “It is the wish of Angkar,” Vong said coolly.

  “It would be better to build a second dike and leave...”

  “Have it moved or deal with Met Khieng.”

  Chhuon had forced his teeth together. He’d paused, run quick mental calculations. Five hundred more meters would achieve twenty-five hectares. In the best conditions that would yield thirty metric tons of paddy. But even if the half-kilometer dike could be moved and two 500-meter connecting dikes constructed in time, the area just wasn’t suitable. It had been cratered by bombs or artillery. How was not important. What had happened to the subsoil was. Like much of the Cambodian basin the subsoil of the northern new wilderness zone was laterite, a substance that remained soft and permeable as long as it remained wet. Once dried the laterite hardened like brick. Rewetting had little effect. The bombing had drained the area of Vong’s proposed expansion. Clods of hardened laterite surrounded stagnant puddles of oily water. Once again, Chhuon had thought, we’re to revert to know-nothingness. “I’ll do whatever Angkar Leou asks of me,” Chhuon had responded. “I’m happy to serve.” Then he thought of a silent, subtle retribution, a retaliation for this stupidity, a simple satisfaction to sabotage Angkar, to assuage new pain and old. “Yet...” Chhuon paused.

  “Yet what?” Vong sneered at Chhuon’s apparent challenge.

  “Yet Khieng...” Chhuon whispered.

  “Khieng what?” Vong snapped.

  “Comrade,” Chhuon said, “if we’re to finish such a project before the rains, we’ll need all the workers.”

  “Of course.”

  “Khieng...” Chhuon hesitated.

  “Yes?” Vong was adamant.

  “He...he takes...he takes all the women. Sometimes one or two, sometimes ten. Even more! He keeps them from work...all day.”

  “On the last day,” Rita Donaldson wrote, “everywhere I heard the questions, ‘Why has...’ ” She stopped, steadied her quivering hands. The tremor would not cease. She wrote on, a wobbly scratching on the page. “ ‘...why has the United States abandoned us? Why don’t the Americans do something?’ ” Again she paused. The trip from Phnom Penh to the Thai border had been an extension of the nightmare she’d been witnessing for months...an ever-worsening nightmare. Snatches of news had circulated among the expelled Westerners. In South Viet Nam the ARVN 18th Division, which, she’d read, had severely damaged the NVA 6th and 7th Divisions at Xuan Loc in March and had held off the 6th and 7th reinforced by the 341st for the first two weeks of April, was said to have been destroyed by the NVA 10th and 304th Divisions flanking them en route to Saigon. “Five to one,” the rumor went. “Tremendous ARVN gallantry,” many whispered, “but too little and too late.” Was, Rita thought, America abandoning South Viet Nam, too? Rita bit the knuckle of her right thumb. She tried to think, to ponder the question, but the horror and fear that engulfed her blocked her inquiry. The Khmer Rouge had corralled the Westerners in the French embassy, then expelled them, overland, via bus and train, to the Thai, border. Some expellees had been allowed to group together. Others were partially or totally isolated. She had not been allowed to write, had been restricted from viewing. Still she’d heard rumors, glimpsed an atrocity—a heap of bodies by a rail siding east of Pursat. Arriving in Thailand she’d been dazed, exhausted, in shock.

  Slowly she jotted notes. “Many of Lon Nol’s troops voluntar
ily relinquished their arms in order to attend assemblies with Norodom Sihanouk...It is rumored that Sisowath Sirik Matak, on the last day, sent a letter to President Ford in which he wrote, ‘My only mistake was to have trusted the Americans.’...One Khmer man said to me, ‘You Americans, you don’t really believe there is any other world. You sent millions of boys, spent thousands of millions of dollars, but you never knew that we Khmers lived here. That this is our country, because we have always lived here. It’s like you just want to have war, eh? Yet what you do, you were right to do, but you are frivolous. That’s why you tire of war. You never knew us. As a nation you were never serious. That’s why when—how do you say?—the fad, the fad of war, it wears off. That’s why you can abandon us.’ ”

  “Bu. Ba-ba, ba-ba. Bub-ba!” The sun had risen. Twenty meters away on the road a thin unbroken line of refugees flowed from Neak Luong. “Bub-ba!”

  “What is it, Precious Heart?”

  “Bub-ba! Bub-ba!” Samnang grasped his mother’s wrist and pulled.

  Vathana rubbed her eyes. She shook her head. Her long black hair fell from her scarf and cascaded down her shoulders, arms and back. She brushed it back with her spread fingers. “Oh,” she said. “I thought we’d get out before that started.”

  “Bub-Ba-Ba-Ba!”

  “Settle down. We’ll eat first then join them.”

  Samnang tugged harder. His good arm compensated in strength for his gawkish side. He nearly knocked her over.

  “I’m hungry,” Samol cried.

  “Sophan.” Su Livanh also cried and her crying feathered Samol’s and the volume of the two little girls ascended until Samnang, frustrated, excited, just pushed them back to the mat and wrenched his mother up to follow?

  “Bub-Bub-Ba-Ba.” _

  “Yes. Yes. Show me, then let’s get on the road. Perhaps in the old regions, where they’re established, we’ll find a better life.”

  Vathana followed the boy behind the hedge. Her eyes popped. Her heart plummeted. In the dusty rubble of dry stalks were piles of human parts. Torsos. Hundreds of headless, limbless torsos stacked vertically like broken pawns awaiting a chess match. Arms, neatly lined up, a hundred lefts, a hundred rights. Legs, footless in one pile like lumber, footed in another. Feet, in pairs. And heads. Hundreds of heads. Perfectly ordered, arranged by size in columns and rows. Vathana’s body convulsed, then went limp. She sank to her knees. Her waist seemingly liquified. She fell to her hands. Her arms collapsed. “Bu-ba-ba-ba.” Samnang shook her. Her body trembled. She hugged her son close to her, recovered enough to stand, to back away. She reached to her bosom, grasped the Buddha statuette Chhuon had given her so many years before. “Blessed One...” she exhaled. She said no more. Holding Samnang’s hand she ran to the sleeping mat where the two girls were pilfering the bundle for cooked rice. Don’t look back.

  Again they walked, now in column with thousands of fleers. From time to time Vathana stopped, shaded her eyes from the sun with her hand and tried to look up the highway to ascertain what lay head.

  “Don’t stop, Sister,” a kindly middle-aged man whispered to her.

  “Eh! The little ones need to rest.”

  “There are soldiers in the trees. Don’t look. Don’t stop.”

  “Where should we go?”

  “Go as far as you can.”

  “For how long?”

  “For as long as you can.” The man became silent as they neared a clump of palm trees at the shoulder of the highway. Vathana followed his lead though others about them chattered carelessly. A few cars crammed with families and belongings overtook them. On the next open stretch the middle-aged man asked quietly, without looking at her, “Do you have any money?”

  “A little,” Vathana said. In her mind she asked the Lord Buddha to forgive her for using such vagueness.

  “Throw it away,” the man whispered. “They’ll say you’re a capitalist.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Don’t ask. Cut your hair.”

  “I’ll roll it up.”

  “It would be better to cut it now. Angkar will demand it later.”

  “The Khmer Rouge?”

  “The Organization. Is that baby yours?!”

  “She’s my daughter.”

  “She’s not Khmer.”

  “I was married to an...a Frenchman. He was killed by the bombers in 1973...before she was born.”

  “Tell no one of him. Blacken her hair. They’ll think you’re an agent or a spy.”

  “Who?”

  “ssshh.”

  At midday a few armed yotheas joined the column. They were smaller than the troops who had taken Neak Luong but they too were without smiles, seemingly without emotions.

  “More quick. Walk more quick.” The yotheas scowled. “You, you don’t go more quick.” They singled out an elderly woman who shuffled by the road’s edge.

  “My legs,” Vathana heard the woman say, “are too old to go more quickly, Nephew.” The woman’s manner was sweet and respectful.

  “You run,” one yothea screamed furiously.

  “Run?!” The old woman stopped and smiled. “Me?” She laughed gently, gaily. “If I could run, I would have joined you in the forest years ago.”

  The angry yothea lifted his rifle. A shot cracked. Vathana saw the woman fly back as if a sudden gust had caught a leaf. Then she dropped without life. Vathana covered Su Livanh’s head with a corner of her krama, pulled Samol tightly to her leg and doubled their pace. As they passed the body she kept her head down, her eyes on the road. With horror she saw Samnang’s feet. From an aid package the boy had taken a pair of red, high-top sneakers. They were Samnang’s pride. At the next stop they would go.

  The road was now full of uprooted city dwellers and villagers and the roadside was littered with corpses. For all the walking their progress was painfully slow. It took them two days to reach the road junction which led to the villa where Vathana’s father-in-law had been assassinated in 1971. How strange it looked on the rise. What had it seen? The NVA, the KVM, the return of FANK and the ARVN. American bombs had cratered the lawn yet someone had restored the landscaping. From the road Vathana could just see two groups of people standing amid bright bougainvillea and jacaranda blooms. As the column shuffled north, the grounds became clearer. Vathana noted one group of perhaps three hundred men, many in FANK officers’ uniforms. The second group, from the hospital she thought—she recognized a nurse, then several, then an aide—was much smaller. Scattered about them were dark-clad yotheas. As she watched, the scene transformed soundlessly. The officers made four long neat ranks. Above them, by the arch from which Pech Lim Song and his old servant, Sambath, had been hung, a man was addressing the assembly. The civilian staff clumped to one side. Now Vathana saw children. They were on the villa’s great veranda watching as if attending a parade. Vathana felt relief, joy. She thought to break from the road column, to join the people at the villa. It’s a sign, she thought. An omen. Reconciliation. She placed a hand over Samnang’s shoulder, turned him slightly and whispered, “Your grandpa built that house.” Behind the children on the veranda were a few women but mostly the young appeared to be unattended. Vathana snatched a glance toward the rear of the column. Far back she saw three yotheas helping a family with small children. Again she thought it was a reconciliation. Again her hopes rose.

  She stopped, stopped her son. She was about to step from the column when men in the rear rank began jolting, falling. Vathana’s eyes narrowed. From other ranks men bolted only to be seemingly upended in midstride. Then the sound. Explosive banging of a dozen automatic weapons. The civilians stood paralyzed. Children’s screams reached the column. On the road refugees hung their heads, shuffled more quickly. Vathana clamped her hands over Su Livanh’s ears and eyes but she could not turn away. Now hospital members attempted to run only to be toppled, to fall like rag dolls tossed casually down on soft verdant lawn. Red blotches burst upon the green. Vathana shook. Don’t look back. Children were brought to f
ind their dead parents then forced to watch as the bodies were disemboweled. Vathana froze. Evacuees behind her nudged her, pushed her. Still she was unable to turn.

  “Bub-ba-ba!” Samnang pulled. He no longer found the scene of interest.

  “Divine Buddha...” she whispered. “Say this,” she said to her children, “it will protect you. ‘Divine Buddha...’ ”

  Late afternoon of the seventh day of their trek, Vathana was stopped at a checkpoint. The middle-aged man who’d warned her earlier had stayed with her for three days, had somehow obtained rice and water for their meals, and had disappeared leaving her with most of the ten-kilo sack of good rice. His last words to her were, “Try to appear ugly. Don’t be the Angel. Some of them like beautiful girls.”

  “What is your name?” the checkpoint guard asked.

  “Yani.”

  “Do you have any papers?”

  “No.”

  “Read this.” Vathana grabbed the page printed in French and English. She turned it clumsily sideways. Then upside down. “Read this one.” The interviewer snatched the first page from her hand and handed her one printed in Khmer script.

  Vathana held it for some moments. The interviewer fussed impatiently. “Kam—pu—che—a.” She read slowly. She smiled at the interviewer, flashing blackened teeth.

  “Angkar Leou wishes you to write who you are. Do you understand?” The man handed her a ballpoint pen and a pad and indicated that she should move to an area where others were scribbling furiously. Vathana leaned forward, over the table. Samnang leaned in. He stared at the page then blurted, “Bub-ba-ba-ba.”

  “Bu. Bu-bu.” Vathana mimicked him lovingly.

  “Ba. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.” The boy laughed loudly.

  In childish strokes Vathana marked the page. “Over there,” the interviewer snapped. Her filthy appearance disgusted him. And the baby, covered with muck. To the line behind her he called politely, “Angkar needs pilots. Engineers. Teachers. Anyone who speaks French.” He moved to push Vathana from the table. “When you’re finished bring it back.”