by Arnold Zable
The evacuations began immediately. Khmer Rouge cadres bellowed instructions through loudhailers. As a ruse, they warned the residents of impending American bombings and told them they would be allowed back when the danger was over.
There were fifteen family members in Keo Narom’s household: her parents, her husband, her four children—two girls, aged ten and eight, two boys, one six, the youngest, one—several of Narom’s siblings, and an aunt. They crowded into two cars and took with them supplies of rice, cooking utensils and a change of clothing. And books and knitting needles, as pastimes for their temporary absence.
They eased past men, women and children trudging on foot and crammed into rickshaws and ox-drawn wagons. It was the hottest time of the year. Those walking had umbrellas and kramas for protection. Mothers held babies in their arms, boys and girls carried younger siblings on their backs. They pushed carts, prams and barrows loaded with tinned foods, dried fish and bedding and their personal belongings stuffed in cloth bags, cardboard boxes and baskets. Hospital patients, some attached to their drips, were steered in mobile beds and wheelchairs; the sick and disabled were helped along by relatives.
The entire city was on the move, the residents ordered at gunpoint from shops and businesses, schools, hospitals, government buildings, villas and apartments, and the makeshift huts and tents crammed in fringe camps and pavement settlements that had sprung up to accommodate the two million Cambodians who had sought refuge in Phnom Penh during five years of conflict.
Electrical appliances were stripped from stores and offices and hurled into the river. Buildings were ransacked, libraries stripped, homes gutted. Photos, books, scholarly texts, cassette recorders, washing machines and fridges, lingerie, cosmetics, tailored suits and elegant dresses—the trappings of affluence—were thrown out and set alight. The streets glowed with pyres. Dogs and pigs sniffed through the ashes. Hens pecked over dead embers.
The animals did not last long. They were caught and killed by hungry Khmer Rouge cadres and fleeing residents. Gangs of scavengers scoured the streets in search of loot. Stalled tanks and factory machinery were scattered on the boulevards. Spectacles, seized from their owners, lay crushed on the pavements. Neighbourhoods, full of life just hours earlier, were silent.
The very idea of the city was being eradicated, the social fabric shredded: universities and colleges, nightclubs, houses of culture, market places, tea houses and cafes, temples and pagodas, museums and galleries—the places where people strolled and gathered—were emptied.
Family members lost each other in the chaos. Frantic mothers searched for their infants. Some who stopped to assist a woman in labour or a sick person were shot to keep the evacuating residents moving forward. Those with cars and trucks drove until they ran out of petrol. In the evening the roadsides were lit by camp fires.
The millions out on the roads were to become known as the April 17th people, enemies of the state simply because they were city dwellers, guilty of having an education, possessing soft hands and wearing glasses, or of being engaged in commerce. They were an amorphous mass to be ‘re-educated’ in the countryside.
The killings began in the very first days, in the city and at roadblocks where identities were checked. Those judged to be collaborators with the overturned regime were singled out—politicians, public servants, military personnel—and executed. Cambodia was to be remade overnight as an agrarian utopia. The clock had been set back to year zero.
Narom and her family made their way towards Oudong District. When they ran out of petrol they abandoned one car and transferred their elderly father and the luggage to the other. They pushed the second car onwards and abandoned it when their way was blocked by a damaged bridge. There was no way back and only one way forward, subject to the dictates of Angkar, the ‘Organisation’, the shadowy entity that made up the leadership.
Narom’s father was the first to go. As a former official in the deposed Lon Nol government, he understood what lay ahead. He had resisted leaving the city during the evacuation and had warned his sons and daughters there would be no returning. Sooner or later they will kill me, he said. Why not spare myself the trouble and make it sooner? The sight of dead bodies en route from Phnom Penh confirmed his suspicions.
He refused to eat, and fought off family members who tried to force-feed him. He spat out the cooked rice they managed to squeeze through, and remained deaf to their entreaties. In his view, he was doing them a favour. The rice they would save by not feeding him would enhance their chances of survival. The second to go was Narom’s baby son who came down with dysentery. He died in her arms. Then, her elderly aunt, cut down by exhaustion and illness.
I sit in the back seat and listen to Narom and R intently. The windows are closed, and the interior is cooled by air-conditioning. Each of us has a role: teller, interpreter and listener. Story is the currency that unites us, conferring on us a detached intimacy. The milling crowds appear like a supporting cast in a pantomime.
There are moments that cut deep in the memory, and this is one of them. All the elements are assembled: the story and the enclosed space in which it is being told, the city so close, yet cut off from hearing. The stillness accentuates the melodious flow of Narom’s voice, its shifts in energy and the occasional falter.
I register each change in tone and expression, the slight shaking of her head in disbelief that such things had happened. I feel the gravity of what she is recalling, acutely aware of my own voice as it breaks the silences with questions. I am suspicious of that voice, and fearful of reopening old wounds. Fearful of what the telling is doing to the teller. But, also, possessed by a sense of obligation to hear Narom out. I cannot help but pursue the story.
Keo Narom and her family boarded a crowded motorboat making for Kampong Chhnang Province. They travelled by truck to Pursat Province, and by train to Battambang. Day by day they discarded pieces of luggage until all that remained were the clothes on their bodies. They trudged through the forest, Khmer Rouge cadres at their back, until they arrived at their assigned workplaces, somewhere near the Thai border.
They were woken at three in the morning, and they were forced out to the fields for hard labour. They planted, reaped, hauled rocks and dug ditches. They were stripped of agency and dignity, individuality subsumed into a single insane purpose. They were ill-equipped for unrelenting physical work. Their limbs ached, their minds were numb, and their bodies stank with dirt, sweat and panic. They could not believe what had befallen them.
Narom gazed at the birds flying overhead and envied them their freedom. She looked at her wasted body, and the wasted bodies moving to and from work with her. As she ate her bare rations, she dreamt of the food she once ate in Phnom Penh. She drooled over the memory of the rich, aromatic rice-porridge, her favourite. She was one of the ‘new people’, the inferior class in the new ‘classless’ order, underlings to the ‘base people’, or ‘old people’ as the peasants and villagers were now titled.
The leaders were seldom seen in public. Perhaps, if they were, the people would have noted the irony: the most prominent leaders were educated abroad: their hands were soft, and their bodies unused to physical labour. Some wore glasses. Starvation, humiliation, interrogation and murder was their modus operandi. And constant movement.
The next to succumb was Narom’s husband. A scholar who had studied literature in Czechoslovakia and returned with a master’s degree, he had the misfortune of having served as a cultural advisor to the previous government. Stripped of the power to protect his children, he was driven to despair. He killed himself by biting through his tongue and choking on it.
Narom was helpless as she watched her fifteen-year-old brother beaten to death by an enraged cadre who accused him of being lazy. There was no time to mourn, no monks to chant prayers for the dead, and no temples in which to conduct a funeral service. What energy Narom had went towards keeping the dwindling family together. One by one, Narom’s children and siblings succumbed to illness and hunger
. Perhaps the dead were the fortunate ones, she reasoned—at rest. Released from the terror.
I can see Narom’s face in the rear-view mirror. She looks straight ahead; the lights of oncoming cars catch the gold rims of her glasses. Her eyes are alternately lit up and returned to shadow. Her hands have a language of their own. Even within the confines of the car they are in motion. Her fingers form mudras, the classical gestures of Khmer dance. An entire culture is concentrated in her hands and their supple movements.
She catches me watching her. She has registered my concern. She turns to the back seat and says: ‘Don’t worry. I know how to handle it.’ Narom speaks with maternal affection. She is reassuring me. She returns her gaze to the road ahead, reverts to her neutral expression, and resumes the telling.
When Narom’s youngest sister became ill she was ordered to stay in the village. Narom was sent to a distant work area. She was not permitted to take her two remaining children with her. As she laboured, she held their presence in her mind. She existed only for them. If she lost sight of this she would lose her will and, like her husband and father, she would be finished.
Her entire being was pared back to a single purpose, to be reunited with her children. When word reached her that one of her sons was ill, she begged her overseer, a Khmer Rouge soldier, to allow her to return and look after him.
‘Are you a doctor?’ he asked.
‘I am a mother. I have to take care of my child,’ she pleaded.
‘You are not a doctor, so how can you help him?’ he replied. That was the end of it. Narom was not present when her older son died. He was nine years old.
When her sister regained strength, and returned to work, Narom was allowed back in the village. By then her last child was starving. Much of the rice that the work brigades produced was allocated to farmers and party cadres. The lower orders were expendable and fed barely enough to keep them useful. Narom foraged in the forest for roots and leaves, bamboo shoots, anything that might have been edible.
When her child died in her arms, Narom was consumed by grief. She had been robbed of her curiosity and her passion for knowledge. She did not shed a tear, she tells me. She steeled herself against it. She was one of a growing number driven to the edge of madness by the loss of loved ones, tormented by the thought that they could not protect their children, could not save them.
The Khmer Rouge had a slogan to justify the death of children: ‘When you dig up the grass, you must remove even the roots.’
On 7 January 1979, Cambodian troops and their Vietnamese allies regained Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge regime had lasted three years, eight months and twenty days; the exact length of time remains engraved in Cambodian memory. It would come to be known as the Pol Pot era; and the network of execution sites across the country, as the Killing Fields.
Marooned in Pursat Province, at first Narom had no knowledge of the liberation. The Khmer Rouge overlords were retreating west to the jungles that would become their final stronghold. They tried to coerce the people they had enslaved to come with them. They appealed to the Cambodian suspicion of the Vietnamese, warning them that the Vietnamese would torture and kill them.
Narom’s fear of the Khmer Rouge had dissolved with the loss of her children. She knew, instinctively, as did others, that they were losing their grip on power. Narom headed in the opposite direction. She began the long trek to Phnom Penh, three hundred kilometres away. Her sister walked with her.
The sisters set out in March. They slept in forest clearings and in vacant huts when monsoon rains threatened. They met up with people they had known in Phnom Penh before the terror. The group grew. They survived on the rice they found in deserted villages. Narom’s sister, twelve years younger and toughened by years of labour, hauled bags of rice on her shoulders.
Narom had difficulty keeping up. She was as thin as a famished monkey, so weak she could barely carry a pot of rice. Her sister urged her to walk faster. Narom sat down on the road, exhausted. ‘Why are you sitting down?’ her sister asked. ‘I am just watching the road,’ Narom replied. She laughs at the memory.
As they ran out of rice the sisters traded their last possessions: pillboxes filled with wax. The wax had been used to tend itches, heal skin wounds, and as lipstick. It kept the skin moist, and enabled the women to recover a minute sense of femininity. The Khmer Rouge cadres had allowed them to keep the boxes, because they themselves used the wax and prized its healing properties. For the survivors, the boxes had been a brittle link to the time before, talismanic. Handling them, and rubbing in the wax, evoked flashes of how it had once been, before year zero, a stark contrast to the terror they were enduring.
Not all was well back then. Far from it. But there was life and love and the silver ribbon they called the Tonle Sap winding its way to the mother river, the Mekong; the scent of evening breezes, and the sound of voices murmuring on balconies. The rustle of monks’ garments, and the whirring of countless bicycles.
Music surged from bars and cafes, crowds gathered at cinemas. The aroma of food issued from street stalls and residents milled at night markets. Chants echoed from pagodas, marking the passage of the day with a trusted regularity; children spilt from the confines of their classrooms into schoolyards, and with them, laughter...And now? The pillboxes were mere objects to be traded.
The entire country was on the move again, alone, and in small bands, armies of the broken returning to the homes they once lived in. Many walked in the opposite direction, heading for refugee camps on the Thai border, calculating, perhaps, it was time to be done with it and put their beloved but haunted country behind them.
Hens found their wings and lifted themselves into the air, propelled by thirst and hunger to search for water and fodder. Withered buffalo lay prostrate. Wild deer, oxen and pigs roamed the countryside. They drank waters trapped in craters gouged into the terrain by the incessant bombings of fields, paddies, roadsides and forest clearings. The landscape was marked by demolished bridges, razed homes and charred pagodas. Shattered Buddhas.
The sisters trudged on. Their feet and legs were scarred and infected by years of walking barefoot and wading in manure. Their bodies were thin from undernourishment, and their complexions darkened by sun exposure. They were of the earth and the forests, and of the dead and the barely living. Reduced to bone and tendon, beaten skin and wasted muscle.
There were times that they felt unexpectedly light, free of all they had ever possessed, like migrating birds returning to once-known pastures. But those times were short-lived, and they were seized anew with panic at the memory of what they had endured, and by unbidden images of their dead loved ones.
All they could do was will themselves on, step by step, one hardened foot in front of the other, faces turned to the rising sun, backs lit by the sunset. Emboldened by the growing herd that moved with them. The sisters arrived in Phnom Penh on 28 June. They adopted the date as their day of liberation.
We have edged past the cremation stupa. The grounds are lit up; onlookers crowd the cyclone fences. Labourers work around the clock to finish the stupa in time for the funeral. The traffic is easing and gaps are opening. R winds down the windows. The sounds of the night enter—the roar of motorcycles, the revving of cars, pop music blaring.
The spell in the car has been broken, and the delicate thread between the three of us severed. The evening heat is enervating. It is a relief to sit back and allow the flow of the city to wash over us: left to our own thoughts. Returned to silence.
The story is incomplete. There are episodes yet to be recounted, and threads to be unravelled. How had Narom regained the will to live? How had she rebuilt her life and become an ethnomusicologist and a writer of children’s stories? A doctor of philosophy? How does a person survive such loss? We will meet again when I return from travelling around Cambodia.
R parks outside the restaurant where our writers’ gathering is taking place. En avance, Narom says, as she steps out onto the pavement. The grief can never leave her,
but there is a steely resolve in her spirit. ‘Don’t worry,’ she repeats. ‘I know how to handle it.’
Forty-three years ago, in 1970, I found a place: several hundred kilometres northwest, in Siem Reap Province, called Ta Prohm. Of the many recovered temples of the Khmer kingdoms of Angkor, this was the one that drew me. Thick-limbed fig and silk trees leaned over moss-encrusted tiles and crumbling temples. Fat roots curled around walls, boulders and columns.
Time had crafted a new entity composed of living and dead matter. Tree limbs framed doorways and tracked down stairways, reaching deep into cool sanctuaries. Leaves sprouted from rock crevices, and bas relief tableaux peeped from between branches. The archaeologists too were taken by the temple’s ghostly beauty and felt compelled to work around it, enabling the complex to remain somewhat as it was when rediscovered.
I spent many hours there, while what I had seen in Vietnam settled. I was overwhelmed by what I had witnessed. There were ten thousand Australian soldiers in Vietnam back then, and upwards of half a million US troops. Twenty-year-old Australians were being conscripted. My name did not come up in the birthday lottery. Instead I had travelled there on a journalist’s visa issued by the Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok.
I had hitchhiked northeast through Thailand, and received rides in jeeps driven by allied servicemen seated beside their Thai girlfriends. I rode with Thai truckies in the elevated cabins of road-trains loaded with military equipment. We stopped overnight in towns that serviced US bases—little Americas, created in the image of the occupying army—from which B-52s set out on their bombing sorties.
I crossed the Mekong into Laos. In the countryside, vast tracts of land were scarred with bomb craters: The Era of the Blue Machine, historians have called it, referring to US bombers engaged in a secret war, which all Laotians knew about. I travelled by plane from Vientiane to the southern city of Pakse, and then to Saigon, flying low over blackened forests that had been carpet-bombed. Carpet, evoking images of beauty and comfort, a euphemism for carnage.