Survival in the Killing Fields (45 page)

A story arose that Chea Huon left for the Thai border with his jeep and his bodyguards and bags of dollars and gold. I don’t know if it was true, but it was possible. As the ranking
commander, Chea Huon could have written passes to get himself through any checkpoints. He also had access to the money and gold collected from ‘new’ people when Angka abolished private
property. And he was smart. If anybody could have made it to the border, it was Chea Huon. From there he could have joined the freedom fighters, or else travelled on to another country. With bags
of dollars and gold he could have done anything he wanted. But I never really knew whether he succeeded or failed, or where he went. I never heard anything about him again.

Ironically, while the regime was slowly disintegrating in front of our eyes, with forced marriages, increased stealing, rebellions from below, and defections at the highest
levels, Huoy and I began to live better than before. Like convicts in a prison, we learned how to manipulate the rules to our advantage.

What triggered the move to a better life was another case of malaria. This time when I got sick I arranged to be sent to the front-lines clinic, the place where they made the rabbit turds. As I
had foreseen, the clinic was overcrowded. From there I got permission to recuperate at my youngest brother Hok’s house, on the other side of the mountain, near the Phnom Tippeday railroad
station, in a village called Phum Ra. Once in Phum Ra, I got permission for Huoy to join me, to nurse me back to health.

After a few days I knew we would have to move on. Long ago Hok and I had chosen different paths. He finished the eighth grade, I finished medical school. He chose one kind of woman to be his
wife, I chose another. His wife told the neighbours that Huoy and I weren’t really married, and soon the two women were not speaking to each other. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
There was an atmosphere of fear and hunger in the house. The sounds of raised voices and children crying. It was typical of households under the Khmer Rouge, but that didn’t make us like it
any better. When my sister-in-law cooked she squatted in front of the fire facing away from us so we wouldn’t see her hand moving from the cooking pot to her mouth. She thought we
didn’t notice.

But Hok was my brother, and he was also the supervisor of a vegetable garden. As soon as I had recovered from malaria, he arranged for Huoy and me to work for him. I became a waterboy, walking
back and forth from a pond to the garden, carrying a pair of watering cans on a bamboo shoulderboard, sprinkling the plants. Huoy weeded the vegetables.

A short time later, when a building site and some materials became available, I got permission from the leader of the village to build a house. Imagine! A place of our own. Ever since the Khmer
Rouge took over, Huoy and I had been transients. We had stayed under the house on stilts in Wat Kien Svay Krao, in the little hut in Tonle Batí, in the reed hut in Phum Chhleav and in the
hut in Youen’s village. We had camped on hillocks and slept in longhouses on the front lines. And finally this. This was home.

By then I was a skilled builder. Our new house was cool in the middle of the day and cozy at night. It had a view out the back, directly across the rice fields to the old temple high on the
mountain ridge. We had clean water nearby. Because we were on the back lines, we were allowed to plant our own vegetables, provided we gave some to the common kitchen.

While waiting for our garden to produce, I stole food. Each night before I went out I prayed to Buddha. I explained that I wasn’t going to sell what I stole, that I was going to take only
what we needed to survive.

I didn’t steal much from my brother’s garden. There were larger gardens up on the mountain plateau, near the wat. It was an all-night trip to sneak up to the gardens, fill a big
sack, come down again and cook the vegetables outside the village to avoid detection. I was a capable thief and never had any problems. Many times Huoy and I ate until we couldn’t eat any
more.

We liked living in Phum Ra. It was wonderful being away from the front lines. And it was not stealing that got me into trouble. It was Pen Tip.

Like me, Pen Tip engineered a transfer away from the front lines. He and his family moved to the village of Phum Ra about the same time Huoy and I did. We were neighbours. But
while I carried water to the common garden all day long, like the lowest class of peasant, and avoided the Khmer Rouge whenever possible, Pen Tip cultivated connections with the Khmer Rouge for his
own gain. He rose from the rank of group leader to assistant section leader, becoming the most influential ‘new’ person in the village.

Under different circumstances I might have found Pen Tip amusing. He was so short he looked up at people, like a child. He walked duckfooted, like Charlie Chaplin, and his eyebrows were always
moving up and down, like a man who is always being surprised. Maybe being tiny and funny-looking made Pen Tip what he was. Maybe he had been teased and pushed around a lot when he was young. But
whatever his motivations, he was hungry for power. He played up to ‘old’ people and Khmer Rouge. He ordered other ‘new’ people around. I was his favourite target, because I
had once been his social superior, as a doctor. To prove himself he needed to dominate me.

The two of us were careful how we behaved in public, because fighting was not allowed. We always spoke politely when we met. I had never told him I knew he had been responsible for sending me to
prison. He never said anything about it either. But underneath the polite exterior we both knew that one of us was going to kill the other.

How to kill him before he killed me was a difficult problem. Whenever I saw him my fingers itched to close around the handle of my hatchet and go after him. I never did, because we were never
alone. If I killed Pen Tip with a hatchet and somebody saw it, the Khmer Rouge would kill me, and Huoy would be a widow. Revenge was useless unless Huoy and I were around to enjoy the
aftermath.

There was another possibility. It wasn’t the kind of plan to share with anybody, even with Huoy, because it was so low and mean and sneaky. Growing up in Samrong Yong, I had learned that
thieves who want to kill watchdogs make a poison from the bark of the
kantout
tree. They peel the bark, grind it up, cook it with sugar and make it into cakes. The dogs eat the cakes and
die. The poison works well on people too.

Poisoning Pen Tip had two drawbacks. The first was practical. There wasn’t any sugar around – no way to disguise the nasty taste of
kantout.
Even if I somehow made the cakes,
it would be hard tricking Pen Tip into eating them.

The second problem was moral. The idea of poisoning him showed the same instinct for delayed and violent revenge that characterized the Khmer Rouge. If I poisoned him, or even if I killed him on
a dark night with a hatchet, I would become just like them.
Kum-monuss.
And that made me think about who I really was. Deep, deep within me there was a dark and violent streak, the same as
in most Cambodians. On this instinctive level, perhaps, the Khmer Rouge and I were not so different. But unlike them and unlike Pen Tip, I was capable of rising above my instincts, because of my
education. I was a doctor. My job was saving people, not killing them. I was also Buddhist. I believed that if I didn’t kill Pen Tip myself, either in this life or the next life, somebody
else would. It was
kama.
That didn’t mean I wouldn’t go after Pen Tip if I had the chance, but it did mean I could watch and wait.

Pen Tip moved first. In an administrative meeting he attended, Uncle Phan, the leader of the village, mentioned a vacancy in the fertilizer crew. Pen Tip volunteered me for the job. Uncle Phan
approved.

When I heard about it I was furious. Carrying water to the garden wasn’t low enough for me; now, instead, I would be carrying slop from the public latrines. It was Pen Tip’s way of
lowering my status even farther, of ‘breaking’ my face.

The job was also dangerous. Previous men on the fertilizer crew had died from infections entering their bodies through cuts. Even if working with untreated sewage was socially acceptable, which
it wasn’t, because of the stigma and the smell, I never would have volunteered to do anything of the kind without rubber gloves, rubber boots and lots of medicine for protection. And I had
none of those.

I started the new job, going around barefoot to the public toilets and emptying them with a pail on an extremely long wooden handle, then carrying a vat of the wastes on a very long thick pole
with another man. My social downfall was complete. I was at the bottom caste of the war slaves, who were at the bottom of Cambodian society. But Pen Tip hadn’t finished.

Three soldiers walked toward my new house one afternoon when work was over and I was planting yams in my new private garden. Until they stood next to me and clicked off the safety switches of
their rifles, I had no idea what they wanted.

It was like the other times I’d been seized: Huoy weeping, my heart pounding. Pleading to be allowed to change my trousers so that Huoy would have the gold hidden in my waistband. Having
my arms tied behind me. Being kicked to the floor. Huoy trying to keep them from beating me but being shoved roughly aside.

As I walked away, Huoy begged the soldiers to tie her up and take her too.

For the last time in this book, I ask the sensitive readers to skip over the following pages until the beginning of the next chapter. Those who want to know what happened, read on:

The soldiers didn’t take me to the prison near Phum Chhleav, where I had gone twice before. Instead, we walked across the railroad track, past my brother’s common
garden, through fields where oxen and water buffalo grazed, and into the jungle.

I felt healthy and excited. My heart was beating fast. Except for leaving Huoy a widow, I had no regrets. The waiting was over. Surely the end would come at the next turn of the path.

Since we weren’t going to Chhleav, I assumed that the soldiers were going to execute me in some spot where they had already executed others. I had never seen such a place, but it was
logical that they existed. Mass graves. Killing fields. But we walked through the jungle until it was nearly dark. We came to an old prerevolutionary village with houses on stilts, mounds of rice
straw next to them, and banana and tamarind trees. Even
kantout
trees, the kind I had thought about using for poisoning Pen Tip. The far side of the village opened up into a view of rice
fields, interrupted here and there by hillocks crowned with sprays of tall bamboo.

The soldiers went in to report to the prison office, a small hut in Khmer Rouge style with a roof and wooden pillars but no walls. Then they took me to the outskirts of the village to a long,
skinny thatch building with a corrugated metal roof and a horrible fetid smell.

A soldier pushed me into the prison and down an aisle. I couldn’t see anything. The stench in the air made me want to vomit. Slime covered the ground under my bare feet. My left foot
slipped into a ditch full of sewage. The soldier switched on a flashlight, found an empty space, untied my arms and told me to lie down on my back. I obeyed. My head knocked against something; a
man’s voice objected and I apologized. The soldier shined the flashlight on my feet. He was going to lock my left ankle into a leg iron attached to a block of wood, but he saw the slime,
wrinkled his face in disgust, and instead locked my right ankle, which was cleaner.

There I was, in jail again.

What a disappointment.

Better that they had killed me quickly.

I lay awake, listening.

A mosquito whined near my ear and flew off.

From far away came a sound of trucks on National Route 5, the road that led to Battambang City. The flash of headlights swept across the wall of the prison, then left the wall in darkness.

I listened more carefully and heard flies buzzing around, along with the mosquitoes, and the moans of the prisoners.

Outside, crickets chirped. Mice scampered along the metal roof.

From somewhere near came a howling sound as the
chhke char-chark
drifted to the edge of the jungle and prepared to take their meals.

The man to the right of me coughed and stirred, but the woman to my left was silent. When it grew light outside I saw she was thin and old and dead. I felt her wrist. It was as cold as stone and
without a pulse. A guard unlocked her foot and then mine and then the prisoner on her far side, and the two of us carried the old woman’s body out of the building. Beyond a quick prayer for
her soul I didn’t grieve. If anything I was jealous. She had taken the easy way out.

My hands were tied again and I was taken to the administrative shack. Two soldiers entered with a big hempen rice sack.

‘Is your name Samnang?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are the one who lied to Angka?’

‘I have never lied to Angka.’

‘You were a military doctor, a captain.’

Pen Tip has done this, I thought. Now I am sure.

‘No, comrade,’ I answered. ‘I have gone to jail before for this, but the charge is false. I was a taxi driver. You could go to Phnom Penh and check the files if you want to
find out.’

The soldier’s answer was a blow to my ribs. They beat me with sticks until I crumpled to the floor and then they took turns kicking me. They opened the rice sack and put my feet in and
drew it over me until it covered everything but my head. I struggled but my hands were tied behind my back and they tied the mouth of the bag over my head, leaving me in darkness.

They dragged me across the floor and then outdoors. Through the rough cloth I could feel the stubble of rice fields, then the bump when they dragged me up and over a paddy dyke, and then more
stubble and more dykes. They stopped, then hoisted me in the air.

‘Say you were a doctor! Say yes! Say yes!’

I said nothing.

Thump!
The blow hit me square across the back.

Thump!
Again.