Mey told Khron of their hardships, of Vathana’s arm and eyes, of Nebella’s great age, of his infant son’s need for palm sugar. Khron was cautious, yet helpful. “Boil the water, save a little for the baby. Have the girl soak her hand in it as hot as possible, as long as possible.”
“But we have no pot.”
“I will give you a pot. Then you must go.”
“You are very kind.”
“hide it,” Khron whispered, “even rama cannot protect you from the high organization if it is found.”
That night as the others slept Vathana soaked her hand. Voen mixed the coals of the fire with mud then rolled two hot compresses and held them on the large node at Vathana’s elbow and the now swelling ones at her armpit, “tonight,” Voen whispered, “you must read chhuon’s notebooks.”
“yes, mama,” Vathana whimpered.
“also, cut your hair.”
“my hair?”
“amara says a yothea longs for you.” With that Voen crept from the hut. Only because there were so many workers and so few fanatical cadre were people able to do anything other than as strictly ordered. Thus the people retained secret freedoms the new masters were never able to extinguish. Voen returned. “when the moon is up, read, now sleep.”
Vathana removed her hand from the pot and dried it on her skirt. The notebooks were in her lap. She at once felt excited and terrified. It was still dark. How could she sleep? Would she awaken for the moon? If she slept until the 5 a.m. gong Met Nem or another cadre might find her with the books. Surely she would be disappeared. And she would not have read her father’s words. She touched the spiral bindings. They too were warm. Oh Papa! Oh Papa! she thought. How I miss you. How I wish to be with you and Mama. How I wish to be your daughter once again. She opened the first page and gently tickled the paper. No longer did her arm ache. No longer did her body cry. She closed her eyes. When she opened them the moon was high. Immediately her head snapped to the door, to the aisle between huts, checking. Then she listened for breathing below the floor. Often Nem hid below the platforms searching, always searching for evidence of seditious acts.
In Chhuon’s orderly fashion the notebooks were numbered—two to six. There was no number one.
Forgive me, my children, for not having seen all that has happened—for having seen it and for not having the vision or the courage to understand what I saw.
Oh Divine Buddha, Vathana prayed, help me. Give me the courage to read. She now read the story of her father and her Uncle Sam and the tinker and all that had happened to her mother and her home village while she had been languishing as the wife of Teck, then while she had flourished under the tutelage of Pech Lim Song. She read of the people who fled and the people who arrived, of Hang Tung and the first night booby trap which killed two soldiers as she rendezvoused with John Sullivan.
When the morning gong sounded Voen sprang up, whisked the notebooks from Vathana’s lap, disappeared, reappeared empty-handed. Mey went to the communal kitchen for the hut’s rice soup. The line was long. Before he returned, Amara and Vathana left for their distant work site. To be late meant to be disappeared.
Through February and March Vathana labored amid thousands of slaves at the massive site. Not once did she miss a day, though many others—weak, sick, starving—quit. Not when she read her father’s account of his burying her grandmother; not when she read of her mother’s death. Some who quit were allowed a day or two to rest, others were sent to the “hospital” to die, some were simply disappeared never to be seen again. Each night Vathana stole time to read more of Chhuon’s words. When she finished the books, she reread them. Then she studied them. By April she had much of the story committed to memory and she contemplated burning the books but she could not. They were her father. Even had he been a stranger she would have guarded them with her life. It was the story of the Northeast and she had promised to live to deliver it to the world. Now at night she chanted the words aloud, in her mind, chanted them in the monotone of the sacred Pali prayers so as to ensure that every word would be exact.
And she made vows. I will not let them get me. I will obey. I will follow their rules. I will be a first-class peasant.
But the rules changed. Almost daily new directives came from the Center of Angkar Leou. And with them came The Purge. Met Khron, the kind yothea, was disappeared in mid-March, replaced by Met Deth. Rumors of mass defections of Krahom troops and of a second revolution swept the commune. The new masters tightened their grip. Yotheas, cadre and high chiefs of the northern zone were replaced by new officials from the eastern zone. With the communal “hall” erected, there no longer were family meals in family huts. No longer could a mother save a spoonful of her ration for her child. Then all the children except infants were taken to be reared at the children’s center. “I will feed you better than your mother,” the caretakers told them. “She did not love you. She kept your food for herself.” The children were schooled to spy on their parents, on all adults, to sing Communist songs and to rampage through the peasant huts. Soon people began to fear the children and one another. Men and women were separated. Fathers were afraid to ask about the well-being of their offspring. No one mentioned those who had been disappeared. At night meetings, held in Sangkat 117 every tenth night, flirting was banned. It was punishable by death. People became afraid to speak, to even look at one another. Families were officially dissolved and the people regrouped into labor brigades of men or of women, into mobile task forces of teenaged boys, into production companies of teenaged girls. Boys of ten to twelve were sent to military training camps, those of eight and nine to the new schools of the cruel.
Khmer culture was to be destroyed. None of the old glues which had held people together were tolerated. Long gone was the monarchy. Its potential return had been a powerful source of strength for many people. In April, Norodom Sihanouk, with these words, resigned:
Today, my dream that Kampuchea would recover and strengthen forever its independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and neutrality, and acquire a system capable of giving the people and the nation true sovereignty and perfect social justice, and a national life that is absolutely clean, without stain, corruption, and other social ills, has been fulfilled beyond anything I could imagine, thanks to our fighting men and women, peasants, laborers, and other working people, under the enlightened leadership of our revolutionary Angkar.
...on March 18, 1970, I swore to myself and to the Kampuchean people that after I had accompanied my countrymen to complete victory over U.S. imperialism and the traitorous clique and after the opening of the new revolutionary era, I would retire completely and forever from the political scene, for my role would logically come to an end.
Thus, all my fondest wishes have come true.
Buddhism and all religions were further devastated. One day in a field near Vathana a peasant had broken and in desperation he’d pointed at the man next to him and screamed, “That man! He was a monk! In the old days he sapped the people.” Immediately both men were whisked away. The screamer returned. About his head was a new krama.
Now there was no family. Everyone fell into one of three categories: workers, peasants, or soldiers; the new constitution so pronounced. Everyone was equal. Everyone worked. All work was matched to “the scientific distribution of labor.” In the dry season eighty percent dug major canals and reservoirs and built the high dams and long dikes. Ten percent built the minidikes. Ten percent made tools and performed service functions like preparing food. One’s nuclear family was now one’s work unit; one’s extended family became one’s company, battalion, regiment and division. The Center’s agricultural obsession with rice became ultrazealous. Work teams were forced to destroy small hut-side vegetable plots because only rice was necessary. That there was no science in their science meant nothing to the new masters. Science was rigid Communist ideology.
Again rations were cut.
When the rains came emphasis shifted from constructing fields to plantin
g. For a month Vathana, Amara and Robona worked side by side in a flooded paddy picking and bundling rice seedlings for replanting. They worked barefoot, their black sarong skirts tied up, their legs exposed. At first the work was easy compared to carrying pallets of dirt but daily their production quota was increased until it was impossible to fulfill. The women worked quickly picking with both hands, knocking the root mud off against their feet, tying the bundles with reed leaves. The work was monotonous yet Vathana found a satisfaction in mastering it. Her fears now centered on the long orange and brown leeches which undulated in the water about her legs, the occasional snake which slashed between the seedlings fleeing her dashing hands, and the deformed ex-soldier with the red banner who now appeared wherever she worked, eyeing her continuously, perhaps even spending nights under the floor of her new hut.
In May her job changed. She was put on fertilizer detail collecting human excrement to be mixed with rice chaff. Her ration was reduced. She did not know why. In June she was sent back to the fields to plant. Again the man with the red banner stalked her. For days she dared not raise her head. Chrops were everywhere. Vathana hated herself for it but she came to suspect Amara of colluding against her, of telling the deformed man of their conversations, perhaps even of the notebooks. At night she sought Voen’s advice but her aunt had been transferred to a different unit.
Again Vathana was pulled from the fields. Now she was assigned to the job of collecting bodies of the dead, of searching them, removing their clothes, then bringing them to a central point for processing. From there they were carted away. How the work frightened her. The smell of death clung to her, and Amara and Robona shunned her. But it was the spirits of the dead which most terrified her. So many of the dead were freshly killed. From so many blood still oozed. And even here the teams had quotas which if unfilled meant a further reduction in rations—or worse. Some days it was easy. She and a partner were led to shallow holes with ten or twenty corpses clumped under pillows and clothing. Flies swarmed thickly, invading their nostrils, ears and eyes. Vathana and her partner descended into the pit, dragged one body up, performed the newly prescribed ritual of rape and robbery, then carted the stripped meat to the central point. All day, every day, Vathana prayed. Divine Buddha give me strength. Lord Buddha protect me. I will not let them get me. I will obey. Enlightened One, bring this soul to the one heaven for all people. Vathana prayed but she no longer cried for the dead.
Some days it was difficult to fill the quota and Vathana found herself waiting beside old and feeble bodies, waiting for the death rattle of collapsing lungs, waiting so she might cart the corpse to the central point. Divine Buddha, protect this spirit. Let it leave this swollen wretched body and pass to a new life of joy and peace.
One afternoon as she perched in a squat beside an old seemingly unconscious woman whose face was cloaked in open sores, perched like a vulture afraid to look at its prey, looking, staring the thousand-meter stare of tragedy, a voice hissed from the ulcerous lips, “is that you, angel?” Vathana tightened. Her face snapped to the noise. An urge to fly, to flee, swept over her. She covered her mouth with her hands, “from great suffering...” The voice was weak. “...pray with me. you are the angel, yes? of neak luong. i lived in your camp, you washed my face, you taught me the prayer.”
Vathana’s jaw trembled. She clenched her teeth. Then, “yes...yes, old mother, yes, dear old mother.”
Together they prayed softly, “from great suffering comes great insight; from great insight comes great compassion...” The old woman began to wheeze. Vathana grasped her hands.
“it is the destiny of kampuchea,” the old one said.
Vathana did not answer but continued the prayer. “...from great compassion comes a peaceful heart; from a peaceful heart comes a peaceful family...”
“i do not blame anyone,” the woman whispered.
“...from a peaceful family comes a peaceful community...”
“there is no fault, angel, no fault.”
“...from a peaceful community comes a peaceful nation, from a peaceful nation...” The old woman’s body shuddered, then froze. Vathana’s eyes teared as they had not in a long time. The woman’s insides collapsed noisily, the rattle escaping through her open mouth. “...comes a peaceful world.”
Vathana dragged the corpse from the small hut. The woman was light, as if there were no physical bulk at all under her dilapidated black clothes. Vathana checked the body for gold or gems then dragged it to the collection point. The oxcart was waiting. Driving it was the deformed ex-soldier who’d been ogling her.
“What are you called?” the man asked harshly.
“Met Hana.” Vathana cowered with the corpse by one of the cart’s large wheels.
“The old cart team has been moved forward. Put that in back.”
“Lift her?”
“Yes! Are you stupid? You can see I can’t bend. Do it, then get up here.”
The bed of the cart was waist high but the cart was stacked with dead higher than Vathana’s shoulders. Vathana propped the corpse upright against the heap, purposely struggling, attempting to delay, to give herself time to think. “Hurry!” the man shouted. He dragged himself back over the dead, grabbed the old woman’s shoulder and jerked, flinging the light body up, almost over the pile. “Walk beside or ride,” the deformed man ordered. “It’s three kilometers.”
He sat cross-legged at the front of the cart. One ankle and foot bent back on its leg and stuck up in front of him like a saddle horn. One arm and shoulder had also been broken and rehealed unset so the arm came not from his side but like a stiff triple-bent branch from his chest. The hand, too, was stiff. On it he rested the hemp rope reins to the noses of two water buffalo. “Either come now or I’ll bring you with them.” He jerked his good hand at the back of the cart.
Vathana said nothing. She did not move. She was afraid to ride with the dead, afraid to offend the driver if she didn’t. He snapped the reins. The buffalo began their lumbering gait. Vathana fell in behind, a funeral procession of one. At first he led her down a road between fields of workers, then down a narrow road into the forest. The wheel ruts deepened and became mud trenches. The mud clung to the wheels and the buffalo stopped. The man cursed. He flicked the beasts with a switch. “You,” he yelled. “Push!” Vathana placed her hands on the cart. It rolled slowly. She closed her eyes. Her face bumped an outthrust arm, then a foot. She opened her eyes, averted her face to the road and the mud.
For half an hour she pushed deeper and deeper into the forest. Then they came to the pit. Thirty wraiths converged on the cart. Of all the horrors she’d seen she now faced a still more repugnant sight. The workers here were not men, not women, but some aberrant transformation of humanity—filthy, odious, mostly naked, starving, thin as reeds, sickly gray.
She stepped back. They had no eyes. They bumped and smashed one another, prodded by a single screaming yothea with a long bamboo rod. Frantically they tore the bodies from the cart. The yothea screamed, jabbed them, directed them to the central pit. One beast held Vathana’s last corpse, the gentle old woman, by the lower jaw. He dragged her into the work site. In a minute the crater was filled with dead bodies and savage mutants. Then, by feel, the mutants ripped faces apart, snorting, laughing inhuman noises. Then the bodies were crushed, dismembered, shredded with small hatchets. One worker in her blind frenzy fell across a corpse and immediately was slashed by four others. It may have been moments, maybe hours—to Vathana time fled the universe—until the bodies were reduced to a red muck stew. Vathana saw one worker grab a hunk of meat, bite it. A yothea impaled him with a bamboo lance. Other workers hearing his scream scurried to him, reduced him to mush. Now other worker-pairs were brought forward carrying dirt pallets hanging from shoulder poles. They, too, had been blinded.
Quickly, efficiently, they padded to the edge of the central pit and dumped in their loads. Then they disappeared and a third blind team came and descended into the pit with spades and poles. These wer
e the stirrers. They mixed the bodies with the dirt until the central pit was a smooth bowl of purple-brown fertilizer. A fourth team, these with sight, shoveled the mixture into baskets until the pit was scraped clean. Then the baskets were carried to a storage shed for aging.
As Vathana and the deformed man turned the cart to go, a second cart arrived from another direction. At that Vathana noted the pit was a hub with eight spoke roads. Behind her the wraiths shrieked gleefully. The skin of Vathana’s back tightened. She walked behind the cart, afraid they were behind her, afraid they would set upon her, rip her apart, afraid to look back, afraid to close her eyes, to keep them open, afraid she had now been chosen to progress, to move forward from collector to transporter to shoveler on down until starving, blind and crazy she was hacked to death while eating what she herself had dismembered.
“I’ve been trying to place it in perspective,” John Sullivan said. He had been sitting across the table from her for a long time. Through the window of the small bistro he could see the last of Washington’s cherry blossoms. Coolly she had laid out the humanitarian efforts she’d planned, his role as she saw it. To Rita he seemed relaxed, except that his fingernails methodically tore away the wet paper labels from his sweating beer bottles.
“Me too,” she said.
Ever since he’d responded to her second correspondence—every day, almost all day—Cambodia and Vathana had been on his mind. The more he’d tried to bury himself in his work on the Pradesh ranch, or the more he’d sought to mask the intrusive droughts by concentrating on difficult mathematics, physics or chemistry, the more he’d been drawn to the material he’d begun accumulating on Southeast Asia. And in his study of math and physics and chemistry he’d found a higher mental discipline, a greater ability to analyze the events he’d repressed but could no longer ignore.
For the Sake of All Living Things Page 94