Survival in the Killing Fields (27 page)

Until I got sick, I practised anyway. So did my two doctor friends, before the Khmer Rouge took them away, and so did a clever little fellow named Pen Tip, whom I will tell you about later. I
visited my patients’ huts at dawn or dusk with my stethoscope and blood pressure cuff concealed in my clothing. Without laboratory tests I could only base my diagnoses on their symptoms and
tell them what medicines I thought they needed. They had to buy the medicines themselves on the black market, either with rice or with gold.

The most common symptom of illness was oedema or swelling. It was related to the lack of proteins in our diet and possibly to the high proportion of salts in the broth we drank at meals. Instead
of getting thinner as they starved, the people with oedema became bloated with fluid, usually first in their legs. In the most extreme cases, the victims were unable to close their legs together;
the men got huge, distended scrotal sacs. The cure was very simple – food – but anybody who had extra food was hoarding it.

The range of infectious illnesses was amazing. Cuts filled with pus and wouldn’t heal properly. Skin lesions were common, especially fungal infections; we ‘new’ people were
always outdoors in the rain, and our skins didn’t have a chance to dry. There were cases of malaria, pneumonia and tuberculosis. Almost everyone in the settlement got common diarrhoea, and
many got amoebic dysentery, a much more dangerous infection of the intestinal tract. That’s what I got, dysentery, presumably from drinking contaminated water when my resistance was low.

By the time I got sick, I had used up all my antibiotics and dysentery medicines treating my father and my brothers, who had been sick before me. Huoy went out to get medicine from people I
knew. She looked and asked, but there was nothing available. Finally she traded a
damleung
of gold, or 1.2 ounces, for fifteen 250-mg. tablets of tetracycline, a standard antibiotic.

I took one capsule of tetracycline twice a day as long as the supply lasted. In normal times I would have prescribed double the dosage, for a total of 1,000 mg a day, plus an antidiarrhoea
medicine such as Tifomycin.

To supplement the tetracycline I tried folk remedies. When rural Cambodians get diarrhoea or dysentery they eat the tender, bitter leaves at the branch tips of guava trees. There were guava
trees nearby. Huoy collected the leaves and made me a tea out of boiled guava leaves and bark. Nothing happened. I stayed home and shuttled back and forth from the reed mattress to a latrine she
had dug for me near our tiny garden. I couldn’t think clearly without an effort, and then only for moments at a time.

As my dysentery grew worse, my world shrunk to the hut and the garden. I was too weak to go anywhere else. Whatever I knew of the outside world came to me: the sound of the steam whistle of the
railroad trains hooting far away and then the metal wheels rocking and clicking on the metal tracks and the driver wheels going round and round
CHUFchufchufchuf
as freight trains went by. I
heard the rapid, rhythmic clicking of the maintenance crew as it poled its way along, twice a day. And every morning through the cracks in the hut I saw the burial processions. The dead were
wrapped in plastic tarps or cloth and carried on wooden boards suspended at either end from a long piece of bamboo, which rested on the mourners’ shoulders.

Sometime after the first week with dysentery I had just come in from the garden when Huoy came back from work. All the tetracycline was gone. ‘Please, sweet,’ I begged her.
‘Sell some more things. Ask around again.’

In my confused, weakened state I didn’t even trust her. I wasn’t sure she was doing all she could.

‘Don’t you believe me?’ Huoy said, standing over me and looking down with her sorrowful eyes. ‘Trust me. I am trying my best to get the medicine.’ She went out
again but still she didn’t find any.

There was one other remedy to try: eating carbon from burned food. It works by trapping gases, like the activated charcoal in certain kinds of cigarette filters. For the most part, the carbon
only reduces the symptoms of diarrhoea or dysentery, but sometimes it has a marginal effect on the infectious agent itself.

The problem with burned food was that we had hardly any food to eat, or burn. My father brought some strips of pork to the hut. He and Huoy carefully trimmed off the fat, then grilled the pork
in the fire until it was black on the outside. I ate it but vomited it up.

I was long past feeling any shame about my dysentery, even though it is an ugly and humiliating disease. I was simply too weak to care about modesty. Day and night, several times an hour, I
shuttled between my pallet in the hut and the hole in the yard, where I lifted the edges of my sarong and squatted. When I got up I glanced at the pus and blood and liquids I had left behind to see
whether I had gotten any better, but by the end of the second week I hadn’t. When I lay down there was a sloshing, gurgling noise inside my intestines. Sometimes I even saw my intestines
moving from the gas expanding inside. There was a war going on, with amoebas on one side and my bodily defences on the other. My body was pouring its resources into the battle, getting used up,
wasting away.

By the seventeenth or eighteenth day I felt nothing. Lying on my side I had diarrhoea and didn’t even know it until I reached around with my hand and discovered the wetness.

I had eight sarongs left from the stack I had taken from my clinic. I used them like diapers. By the twentieth day I couldn’t walk. I had to crawl out to the garden on all fours. Huoy went
to the authorities to get permission to stay away from work to take care of me.

She was a perfect nurse. She bathed me day and night. She cooked the little bit of rice we had and fed it to me a spoonful at a time, with my head in her lap. After feeding me she kissed me and
stroked my hair. A wondering, sorrowful expression came over her, and I knew her thoughts: if I died, a part of her would die too.

With my head in her lap I saw only her face. The large, round, dark eyes. The lush, thick eyebrows that had never needed makeup. The hollow cheeks. When I lay down my eyes saw the woven reeds of
the wall and the light filtering through.

The other huts nearby, my parents’ and my brothers’, now seemed incredibly far away. It was impossible even to think about going there. My brothers visited me once but they
didn’t come back, and this made me angry. I had given them medicine, but they wouldn’t use their gold to buy medicine for me. Family ties meant nothing to them now. Everybody was
looking out for himself. And then I stopped resenting my brothers. I was too weak to care.

Day by day, as the invaders and the protectors fought their battle in my intestines, I lost more and more weight. My clavicles protruded. Every rib showed. My legs were like matchsticks, except
for my knees and ankles, which bulged out, big and knobby. My weight was down to about seventy pounds.

I lay on my side and a fly landed on my face and I did not move. I felt the fly walking on my cheek, felt the little legs as it moved around, and I knew it would head for the moisture at the
corner of my eyes. And then I sensed Huoy’s presence as she moved close and then felt the air as she fanned the fly away. Huoy lowered the mosquito net around me. I focused on the gauze of
the mosquito net and then on the light coming through the cracks in the reed wall.

I heard the grumbling of the thunder and the freshening of the wind as the storms came in. Raindrops fell on me and I didn’t move. Huoy went out in the rain and tied a krama to the outside
of the walls to stop the rain from coming in.

I was very detached. If I wanted to lift my leg I thought about it and then my mind wandered and later I remembered and watched myself do it. My leg seemed very far away and I looked at it
objectively, as if it were somebody else’s. It didn’t look like my leg. It was too thin.

I dozed but didn’t sleep. My intestines were bubbling with liquids and gas and every few minutes some more spurted out the back end. Nothing could stop it from happening. The poisons kept
coming out and coming out but inside the bubbling and the gurgling and mixing went on and it always produced more. Food only made it worse. Maybe if I had a huge amount of pure bland rice I could
have quieted my stomach, but Huoy and I were down to one can of rice. That was all the food we had. Huoy ate nothing but the salty broth from the Khmer Rouge. The rest she fed to me.

Up through the thirtieth day, some deep intuition told me that I was going to outlast the infection.

Then, on the morning of the thirty-first day, something changed. I decided to take my pulse, but before I could do it my mind wandered. Where was Huoy? I couldn’t hear her in the hut. I
turned my head and then twisted it farther and then through the cracks in the hut saw her outside, taking the clean sarongs from the drying line. What was I thinking about? Oh yes, my pulse.
I’ll have to move my right hand to my left wrist. If I tell my hand to move, it will obey. If I do it now, I won’t forget. Better do it while she can’t see.

I watched my right arm swing over and the fingertips of my right hand probe for the pulse in my left wrist. Not there. There. Yes. The beat is very slow.

My heart is slowing down.

In a few more hours it will stop.

Huoy came in with the folded sarongs and put them away. Then she knelt by me and smoothed the hair back from my forehead and wiped my face with a damp cloth.

‘I don’t feel well,’ I said. ‘I think I am going to die. Please, bring my father here.’

‘You aren’t going to die,’ she said firmly. ‘We’re going to live together a long time, you and I.’ But she herself didn’t believe what she was saying.
Huoy went to get my father and they both came back and sat beside me, Papa looking down at me with his wrinkled face. I could remember when he was much younger and fatter.

I told my father that I was going to die in the next few hours. I asked him to take care of my wife. Huoy, I said, had taken good care of me but just didn’t have the means to save my life.
‘If anybody says anything bad about her, don’t believe it. I want you and Mama to take her in. Don’t let her live with anyone else in the family. So take care of yourself and take
care of Huoy and the gods will bless you.’

My father told me not to worry, that I wasn’t going to die. But when he went outside he set candles and incense on the ground under the mango tree and got ready to pray.

Huoy sat next to me. ‘Keep being strong in your mind,’ she said, over and over. ‘Keep being strong and you will never die.’ She stroked my face and cleaned my face and
body with a damp towel. The tears rolled down her cheeks and she didn’t hide them.

‘Be happy if I pass away,’ I answered.

Outside my father was saying in a loud voice, ‘Let him go to a wonderful paradise! Let life be good, the next place he goes. Let there be enough food and enough medicine.’

I said to Huoy, ‘Even if I die I will still protect you. I will take care of you all your life.’

My mother joined my father and they knelt and prayed together. Then Mama came into the hut and sat next to me, massaging my limbs. She looked truly old now, old and grey. Together my mother and
my wife stripped me of my sarong and tried to dress me in a new shirt and a new pair of trousers to die in.

‘Please don’t,’ I said. ‘It’s a waste to put me in new trousers. You can trade them for something after I die.’

‘I don’t care about trading,’ Huoy said as they put my feet in the trousers and pulled them up. ‘There’s nothing to trade for. If you die, I die.’

I lay on my side and waited.

In the early afternoon there was a sound of footsteps and a big loud voice.

‘Come get your yams! One person from every family, come to my house! We’ve got yams! Come get your rations! Get your yams!’ It was the civilian leader of Phum Chhleav, a burly
man who reported to the man on horseback. With him were the section leaders of Phum Chhleav and a crowd of excited followers, talking and waving. It was the first food the Khmer Rouge had
distributed for private use in three days.

I sent Huoy to get our ration. My father had already disappeared to get his.

I lay back and began thinking about yams. They are long, crooked tubers, quick to grow in a tropical climate. They contain minerals and vitamins, but they are basically carbohydrate. Put in a
fire, they burn. They turn into charcoal.

Huoy had left the fire going beside me, with a tea kettle on the three stones. When the water boiled I pulled the ends of the wood away from the fire, but I didn’t have the energy to make
tea.

After a period of time had passed, how long I do not know, Huoy returned. She showed me the ration: one small yam the size of her fist.

Huoy was looking at the yam with a glazed, intent expression. How long had it been since she had eaten a real meal? Two weeks? Three weeks? Had she eaten well since the dinner with the field
mice?

I said, ‘Sweet, please give me the food to eat. I think if I eat it, it will help my stomach. I know you are hungry like me, but we still have rice. You eat the rice.’

We still had not touched our one last can of rice. We were saving it, though I do not know why. Our hunger could not have gotten worse.

Huoy looked at me with a sad smile and nodded. ‘Whatever you want, I will do it. I want you to stay alive. As long as we both are alive we will be happy.’

I told her to burn the yam without cooking it first. She put it in the fire. When it was completely burned, she took it out to cool, trimmed off the wood ashes, and cut it into small pieces. The
yam was black all the way through except for some small soft yellow specks. She put my head in her lap and she fed it to me with a spoon, one piece at a time, until it was gone.

I felt stronger.

My trips to the garden diminished from five times an hour to three. The next day they decreased to two an hour, and the day after that to once an hour. The burned yam had helped turn the tide.
It enabled my natural resistance to grow.

Within a few more days, I could eat solid foods.