Her Father's Daughter

by Alice Pung

  When they arrived at their destination village, the Khmer Rouge cadres got out of their armoured vehicle and helped them unhook the car. The soldiers wore rubber shoes made from car tyres.

  ‘This is where you’ll settle,’ they were told.

  ANGKAR

  This was the beginning of Year Zero. They were standing in line waiting to be sorted, and a Black Bandit shouted at his brother, ‘Take your glasses off, you capitalist!’ Pol Pot’s solution to the problem of teaching illiterate boys to identify counter-revolutionaries was simple: anyone wearing glasses was an intellectual, the sort of person who could sit for hours on end on their rear-end with a square block on their laps, just looking at it. So blocked by books that they could barely see the world and required others to handle its sharp edges for them, believing their blood to be more precious, their children more precocious. Let the others bleed, seemed to be their message. We have the brains. You never saw any Base Person with glasses. If they developed cataracts or went blind from illness, accident or eating the wrong thing, then that was their fate. A pair of glasses was two reflective discs with which to start a fire by using the sun.

  Kiv removed his glasses and handed them over.

  ‘Give your watch to Angkar!’ A Black Bandit pointed to Chicken Daddy’s wrist. Chicken Daddy had no idea who Angkar was, but the watch came off.

  The Black Bandit snatched it and put it on his own wrist. Kuan had seen people hand over their passports and birth certificates to the Black Bandits, who would study the documents in their hands upside-down, their brows furrowed with that distinctive fake-intensity of illiterates.

  This first collective was called Preytawa, and the first inkling they had of their higher purpose was when they discovered that they would be divided into two distinct groups: the New People and the Base People. The Base People were those who lived in the collective before the city folk arrived. The New People were the city folk, and they were to live with the Base People and learn their ways.

  The village consisted of dozens of thatched huts on stilts. No running water, unless you counted the river, and no electricity, unless you counted the occasional thunderstorm, when lightning would slash the sky, the dark wink of the celestial father’s nemesis.

  Cows and chickens and ducks lived beneath the huts, and the humans slept up top, so there was always the smell of warm fur and damp feather. Yet there weren’t enough huts for the new arrivals, so some of them had to go into the jungle with their sickles and slash away to build their homes. When they’d finished, they’d collapse in a heap, and some of their homes would collapse with them. They needed practice, these New People from the city.

  At first, the New People saw the Base People as placid folk who seemed not to put up much of a fuss about sharing their land or farming skills. The city people were divided into work units – groups of men, women and children sent out to build dams, grow rice, make fertiliser. City women who had never lifted anything heavier than a child would collapse under the weight of bucket-loads of water, their bare feet bloating with blisters. The New People realised what hard work this all was, and developed a respect for the Base People, many of whom were equally baffled by the regime imposed on them by the Black Bandits. But at least the Base People were used to this type of work.

  At the end of each toiling day, the people from the city would discover, through cramps and throbs and aches, muscles they had never known they had. The next day they would have to wake up and repeat the motions of digging a ditch or shovelling dirt to build a dam. Kuan was forced to dig a ditch each day that was ten metres wide and one metre deep. Each person – man, woman and child – had the same task, the same measurements. Then they had to carry the soil from the hollow of the ditch and dump it in the river to build the dam. It was an impossible task to do all in one day.

  His first team leader had been one of the old villagers. This Base Leader knew that they could not finish, and when the sun set, he let them stop work to rest for the night, while the other collectives worked on. Kuan stood for a while and watched the old people and small children digging away deep into the hollows of the night.

  *

  A month after their arrival, Suhong went into labour.

  ‘My equipment!’ she gasped. ‘My equipment is in my hut.’

  Did she really want to draw attention to the fact that she had modern medical equipment stashed away somewhere, her former city neighbours wondered.

  Two Base midwives heated up some charcoal under a raised rattan bed, where she delivered her third child, baby Hue. ‘A baby in the collective!’ the Base People cooed, as the proud but exhausted mother half-sat up, holding her new arrival.

  *

  One day Kuan was working in the fields when a truck drove past. It was a Pepsi-Cola truck, with some Black Bandits standing on the back swinging their Kalashnikovs.

  The man next to him stood watching the truck with his hoe in his hand and a look of absolute wonder on his face.

  This must be a real peasant from the remote countryside, Kuan thought, never to have seen a Pepsi truck before. Yet it was absurd, and almost impossible, that in this medieval hamlet a Pepsi truck should exist, should whiz past them like a blast from the past, or a long-ago future.

  Then his field companion whispered, ‘Kuan, that’s one of my trucks! That’s one of my trucks!’

  Kuan looked at him. ‘So, you were a truck driver back in your past life, brother?’

  ‘No, not exactly.’

  ‘Then what did you do?’

  ‘You’ll never guess.’

  ‘You sold Pepsi?’

  The man was silent for a while.

  Kuan continued to loosen the soil with his own hoe, wondering what the silence could mean.

  ‘I was the boss of Pepsi-Cola in Cambodia.’

  Kuan stared at the man next to him. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s right, my friend. The chief importer and supplier. That was my entire operation. And those are all my trucks. Just remember, every time you see one of those whirr past!’

  *

  Another few months into their new lives and an old man died. There was a funeral and a proper burial for him. Everyone stood around as someone’s grandfather, father and brother returned to the ground; a man they barely knew. Shortly after their arrival the city people had all been made to dye their clothes black, in big urns, so they were already dressed for the occasion.

  *

  One night, almost a year later, the New People were crammed into military trucks and driven away like cattle to their next destination, hundreds of kilometres away, on the other side of Phnom Penh. Perhaps the leaders felt that they had not been sufficiently hardened up. Their soles were still too soft, and they were too friendly with the Base People. A revolution was not a tea party, to borrow the slogan from their red counterparts in China, the same people who had sent them their military trucks.

  This was when Chicken Brother lost his wife. She was not there when they were rounding up people for the trip. She’d probably gone on one of her befuddled wanderings again. He and his children stood on the back of the truck, calling out to her, but it was no use. The trucks were about to depart and they were not waiting for stragglers.

  As daylight broke and the trucks drove through their former city, the New People stared and stared, eyes raked with wonder. Cities made the stars and moon irrelevant. Who needed to look up at the firmament when a few metres above the ground there was light of such varied colours? You could be insulated from the elements. You never even had to think about where your food came from – the earth and its animals were other people’s affairs.

  When the truck drove through the periphery of Phnom Penh, a ghost town, all abandoned, suddenly they were looking at things that were too tender, that hurt too much. The outside of buildings could bring a stab to a man’s heart. The empty street
s brought about howling sadnesses. People clutched at their heads and at their sides and at their groins. This had been their city, and they knew her face before it was pockmarked. Even with the pockmarks and craters, they still adored her.

  Their next village was called Phung Thmei, literally New Village. What was left of their possessions was confiscated. And their children were called, cleft into a separate children’s army and sent out to work wherever this team of worker ants was directed: to build a dam or clear a forest miles away, or even to an entirely different part of the country.

  The mothers and fathers watched with tears gelling in their eyes. Where before there would have been inconsolable wailing to let the little ones know you would pine for them and do all you could to reclaim them, this time the parents weren’t allowed to cry.

  All of Chicken Daddy’s children were sent – the two boys, Chicken Brother and Egg, fourteen and twelve, and fifteen-year-old Chicken Sister. Kiv’s children were too young and they were spared until the second year, when Huong was sent away too.

  The city people were pushed further and further into the remote countryside, to do the hard work. They moved through the jungles as if expecting to see orang-utans with fangs and winged spiders. They were right to be afraid, but at that time they did not understand that nature only became wicked when it was wielded by people. Palm leaves were used to saw women’s throats. Trees were for knocking the brains out of babies. Imagine that. A part of nature you saw every day was going to be used to kill you.

  Meetings were held in an open field, at night, after their work. The Black Bandits told them that they were viruses, living corrupted in the city while the guerrillas had fought the long war against the Americans in the jungle.

  ‘We don’t care about killing all of you!’ they shouted. ‘Even if there is only one man left, we could still bring about a revolution.’

  Their sentences didn’t even make sense. If there was only one man left, there wouldn’t be a ‘we’, Kuan thought. The meetings consisted of crazy men and boys at the front, yelling and waving their arms about.

  The key subject of every meeting was Angkar, which simply meant ‘Organisation’ in Khmer. ‘Angkar has as many eyes as a pineapple and can see everything,’ they were told, yet they had no idea what kind of face Angkar had.

  One day a meeting was called and every man was asked to write down his curriculum vitae. They were told that Angkar needed people with skills and knowledge to build the country. ‘Even if you are former government officials or army members, Angkar still needs you. You have a valued place in this new society.’

  He did not fall for that. Neither did Kiv or Chicken Daddy. This was not a skills audit. They wrote that they were factory workers because of what had happened in China. They knew that being a worker was the safest thing to be in a communist country.

  Not long after, they started to notice people going missing at night – the people who had written down that they were doctors, engineers, members of the former army, teachers, even students. Anyone who had brains to pop.

  *

  Kuan could not understand it. There were about five or six Black Bandit leaders to each collective of a few thousand people. The leaders were easily identifiable because they were the fattest ones in the village. Six leaders to a few thousand people, and yet no one dared to revolt. Perhaps they were all thinking about Angkar’s pineapple eyes, and believed that even if they did start an uprising, the leaders of the neighbouring villages would come over and crush it straight away.

  The Base Person, of course, was the ideal man, and all other permutations were wrong if they could not make themselves fit the mould. This meant that Cham Muslims, Chinese and Vietnamese had to hide their backgrounds. To be sure of hitting the target, the philosophy of the Black Bandits was to fire first and call whatever they hit the target. But the boys did not like to waste their bullets. So they used other methods.

  There was a woman who spoke Khmer with a slight Vietnamese accent. The Black Bandits picked up on it soon enough, and one night they picked her up as well and took her away with her three-year-old boy. The boy was beautiful in that lush, warm-blooded way of Southeast Asians, with black planet eyes. Everyone in the collective knew him well, not only because of his rare beauty but also his need to laugh, as irrepressible as the need to pee. When a water buffalo was getting washed, he chortled. When a cricket crawled on the ground and his mother grabbed it with the pincers of her fingers, he laughed. When he ran naked around and around the base of the stilted hut and one of his feet landed in a pile of chicken shit, he let loose with ineffable squeals of glee. Life could be no other way for this boy, because he knew no other life. Looking at that child against the backdrop of poultry and placid cows, and blocking off all other senses but the eyes and the ears, a person could even begin to believe that the world was still infinite. When they were both dragged away, his mother shielded him from the rain.

  The next morning, the Black Bandits were leaning against the krasang trees, boasting loudly to each other.

  ‘Women are easy to kill,’ one Black Bandit said. ‘One knock and they fall still.’

  They had made her dig. She was not scooping out her final resting place, but her final falling place.

  ‘You should have heard the way she was crying and carrying on!’

  They had smashed her across the back of the head with the blunt end of an axe.

  Once she was in, it was time to deal with her son.

  ‘I smashed the boy’s skull, but he wasn’t dead yet. His jaw dropped open and he made so much noise! Those little bastards always take longer to finish off. In the end I had to take him by the ankles and swing him round like this.’

  The Black Bandit held his arms straight out in front of him, his two fists close together, holding an imaginary object that seemed as light as the weight of two cicada skins. He then spun his body around and around and around, and each time he came to the tree he was leaning on before, he whacked the imaginary object against its trunk. The labourers had now all stopped to watch, and this time they were not punished for their stop-work. The Bandits liked having an audience.

  ‘It took five, six times before I finished him off!’

  He put his hands by his sides, unfurled his fists.

  ‘I was so dizzy afterwards.’

  When Kuan walked back towards his hut that evening, as he approached the krasang tree he noticed that the thorns held strands of fine hair, like finger-combs.

  *

  Other collectives invented different torments, the stories of which survivors would later trade like salt.

  Once, an old man was called to the front and his arms were tied up behind his back. His son was ordered to beat him with a bamboo stick. Because the son did not beat his father fiercely enough, he was accused of being an accomplice. They tied the son up too, and with a knife they slit open the father’s chest. The father was screaming. A hand went in there, rummaging through the organs as if searching for stray cigarettes in a drawer. But it knew what it was looking for – out came the gall bladder with a yank. The organ was dumped into a jar of rice wine.

  The Black Bandits announced to the people at the meeting, ‘Drinking gall-bladder juice makes people brave!’

  Men and women were sitting in the open field, stunned sick. They weren’t allowed to look away. The ground was hot.

  Then it was the boy’s turn.

  Sometimes, the eyes can see too much.

  BURIAL

  During the wet season, when the floods came, they washed away the sweet-potato leaves, the wild weeds and grasses that people had come to depend upon for food. So many died that the corpses piled up. In the village next to his, a collective of over three thousand people perished, except for their four Black Bandit leaders. People were dropping like flies beneath the scoffing sun.

  Suhong’s mother had pas
sed on during the last bad bout of starvation, and Suhong was pallid with grief. Kieu had been sent away with the adult working army, while his mother was left behind in the village to look after the village chairman’s children.

  There was an orange tree growing near the back of his hut. His fingers itched to pick the fruit, and one day he and another man scratched that itch. They were caught by a Black Bandit. Their oranges were confiscated. Their punishment was to bury the dead. ‘One has just died,’ the Black Bandit told them, ‘in the hut down south.’ They were led to that hut, their feet squelching through the floodwaters.

  It was a young man. He lay on the floor of the hut with his eyes closed and his palms towards the ground. All his ribs were countable. His wife was softly weeping. All her ribs would have been countable too, but for her black shirt.

  Kuan and his orange-thieving companion rolled the cadaver in a grass mat and carried him down the ladder of the hut. Tying the rattan mat at both ends with string, they stuck a bamboo stick through the loops. They each took an end of the stick and heaved it onto their shoulders. They were a living, walking hammock. One last free ride for the dead. Except that it wasn’t a very stable ride: between the two of them they probably did not weigh seventy kilos, and they were so malnourished and weak they kept slipping and falling into the water. Each time they fell, the blanket would become more waterlogged and heavy. They had hardly any energy, but sometimes they would talk.

  ‘Sweet Bodhisattva, Kuan,’ his friend would turn to him and say, ‘I hope you’re not going to be this heavy when it is my turn to heave you out of the floodwaters!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he would retort. ‘I am going to be the one dragging you out, and don’t worry – I will make sure you get a decent burial. Just don’t die with your mouth open.’

  The years dragged, like the leaden legs of the bodies they buried that were too heavy to lift the hungrier they became; but each time he was assigned to another burial with a new man, they would repeat the same joke.