Survival in the Killing Fields Read online

  Toward sundown I returned to the scooter and pushed it south on Monivong to Wat Tuol Tumpoung, near my clinic. The wat compound, surrounded by a high whitewashed wall with a crenellated top, took up an entire block. Worried-looking monks emerged from its ornate gateway, pushing their scanty possessions on a handcart – saffron robes, a few cooking utensils, a rice pot. The Khmer Rouge were making the monks leave too.

  Beyond the wat stood a Khmer Rouge cadre who was laughing deliriously as he tried to start a Vespa motor scooter like mine. I glanced at him, then stared. Under the muddy black uniform, surely, was a boy from Samrong Yong. I did not know his name but remembered him from the market and the soccer fields.

  He laughed and laughed at the incongruity of having a motor scooter after all those years of hardship in the jungle. The Vespa was a toy for him, a temporary plaything from the city life he had rejected. His smile vanished as he recognized me. I said, ‘Hello, comrade.’ He didn’t answer. Pumping and pumping the starter pedal, he finally got the engine to start. He got on and drove off without giving me another glance. Perhaps he felt that the people of his village made no difference to him now that the wheel of history had turned.

  It was dusk by the time I got to my clinic. From the outside it looked closed and empty, but when I unlocked the sliding grille doors and slipped in, dozens of patients were there. They sompeahed me, raising their palms imploringly to their foreheads. ‘Please see me first, luk doctor.’ ‘Please save my life,’ they said. I sompeahed to each of them in turn, telling them everybody would be seen but that the worst cases would be first. Scanning their faces I felt a stab of disappointment. The old lady whose pulse I had taken on the street was not among them. Well, there was nothing to be done about it.

  At the nurses’ station I asked Srei, who was my favourite nurse, whether Huoy had left a message. Srei was small and cute and like a little sister to me. She said, with a sort of pouting smile, ‘Why don’t you stop worrying about your girlfriend and take care of the patients? Hurry, we’ve got a woman in labour inside.’

  ‘How far along?’

  ‘Her cervix is dilated to eight centimetres,’ said Srei. So there wasn’t much time.

  First we had to get the clinic organized. It was almost dark outside. The electrical system had stopped working and the water system too. The staff was all there but not the other doctor who was supposed to be on duty. I told Srei to find candles and water. She should sterilize the gynaecological instruments by putting them in a tray, pouring alcohol over them and setting the alcohol on fire. Srei scurried off, and by the time I needed the instruments she had them ready.

  I changed, scrubbed and delivered the child. When it was done, the nurses reminded me about the water situation, which had not been solved. I went out to the waiting room and told the patients that those who were able should slip out of the clinic to collect water and then come back again. Thoeun, the guard, would supervise their comings and goings.

  Then I went back to work. My next patient, a civilian, was moaning from a shrapnel wound. The shell fragments had entered his back, and under the dirty krama he had used as a bandage for several days the wound had grown infected. There was no X ray to help locate the fragments, only candles and lanterns. I cleaned the outside of the wound with alcohol and tincture of iodine and injected the periphery with Xylocain to stop the pain locally. Then I explored the interior of the wound as delicately as possible with round-tipped scissors while the man groaned. Eventually I found a couple of large pieces of shrapnel near the spine and removed them.

  There were twenty patients that night, many of them women in labour. By some cruel irony they were delivering their infants on one of the least auspicious dates of Cambodian history. The nurses and the midwives and I went from one to the next. We kept the doors locked and didn’t allow light from our candles and lanterns to give away our presence inside. Every few hours Khmer Rouge pounded on the metal grille anyway, shouting, ‘Anyone in here? You have to leave!’ None of us answered, not the staff or the patients and their families. After what seemed like a long time we heard the Khmer Rouge walking away again, ordering others on the sidewalk to keep on moving. Then we peered from behind the shutters at the unending procession of evacuees outside.

  After finishing with my patients, before dawn, I slipped out the clinic door and walked northward, toward Huoy’s apartment and my parents’ house. In the dark it should have been easy to go against the direction the Khmer Rouge wanted us to take. But others had had the same idea. Ahead of me, a man walked into an intersection lit by a streetlight. A Khmer Rouge called out for him to stop and, when the man hesitated, lifted his rifle, aimed and fired. The man fell on the pavement, jerked like someone having a spastic fit and then lay still.

  I ducked behind a parked car. Others froze where they were, afraid to move.

  ‘You didn’t listen to Angka!’ the soldier shouted in the silence to those near him. ‘You have to obey. The wheel of history will not wait for you. When you move, you have to move in the right direction. You must go to the countryside.’

  I took a deep breath and walked up to the soldier. ‘Please, luk,’ I said, using the word that shows respect for a social superior, ‘I lost my wife and children. I just need to get them. They’re close to here, just up the street.’

  ‘Stop begging,’ the soldier replied roughly. ‘No more begging. And no more luk. We’re all equal now. We’re all the same level. Why do you keep the old ways of society? There is no more old society! Get out of here.’

  The lie came easily: ‘Please, comrade, my wife and children will be lost without me.’

  ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Angka doesn’t allow it! If you try to cross the street I will not be responsible for your safety. Now go!’

  I dropped back into the shadows, shaken.

  Somewhere, Huoy and my parents were wondering and worrying about me. Just as I was wondering and worrying about them.

  No use looking for them now, though. Not while this fanatic had a clear field of fire. His target lay on the pavement in a puddle of blood that glistened in the streetlight. Civilians trudging southward across the intersection detoured far around the body. Nobody dared approach to make sure he was dead or to carry the body away. Staring at the body, my mind’s eye kept seeing a patient who had been left to die on the operating table.

  By the time I got back to the clinic all the patients had left. Thoeun, the guard, had supervised the packing. Thoeun had been a soldier in the Lon Nol military until a battle wound brought him under my care in the hospital. He had irreparable nerve damage – his eyelids were half closed and his head twitched from side to side in a permanent tic – but he was very resourceful. Since he couldn’t go back to the army, I had hired him, and never regretted it.

  Thoeun had removed a fifty-five-gallon drum from a water cart and attached it as a trailer behind a Yamaha motorcycle that a patient had left in the clinic. He had piled the handcart with baskets of food and medicine, with candles and lanterns, with a stack of sarongs he had found somewhere. He had piled more on the luggage rack of my Vespa. The nurses had prepared baskets and bundles. They had wrapped their kramas around their heads, country style, to carry loads on top of their heads. They gathered around me in the hallway. ‘Are you ready to go yet, luk doctor?’ ‘Should we bring anything else with us, doctor?’

  There were nine of them altogether, eight young and middle-aged women and Thoeun, standing somberly beside the Yamaha.

  I told them, ‘From now on, be careful. If you want me to stay with you, don’t call me luk and don’t call me ‘doctor.’ Just call me ‘brother.’ Do you understand?’ They nodded their heads, wiping away the tears. ‘If anyone asks why you’re with me, don’t say I’m your boss. Just say we’re friends. But don’t worry, we’re going to be all right. We’re not going to die. Stop crying, and then we’ll go.’

  We left as the sky was turning grey, locking the door behind us. I wore the woman’s blouse from the hospital and had added a kram
a around my head, to make me harder to recognize. Srei stayed close to me, holding on to the rack on the back of my scooter. We walked south on a small street parallel to Monivong Boulevard.

  Again the streets were thronged. Over a loudspeaker, the new rulers repeated their message: ‘You must leave the city. Allow Angka to take care of the hidden enemies and wipe them out. You must leave the city for three hours. You must leave the city immediately. . .’

  But other Khmer Rouge began to shout to us that we had to leave for three days, without seeming to be aware that they were contradicting the loudspeakers.

  We had been up all night and we felt numbed. Like walking through a bad dream. We all knew the Khmer Rouge were lying, yet a part of us still hoped they might be telling the truth. If we could return, whether in three hours or three days, there was no sense in hurrying. We would only have to cover the same distance coming back. So we walked slowly. Everybody else in the street walked slowly too.

  The sky grew light. Around us the shapes of people took on colour and detail. Alongside me a woman balanced a large bag on her head, steadying it with one hand; behind her walked her young children. I glanced at her and knew her. She had been a nurse in the military hospital. We had worked together for many years.

  ‘Doctor Ngor – ’ she began.

  ‘I am not a doctor anymore,’ I said. ‘Don’t call me that. Call me ‘brother.’

  ‘Doctor Ngor,’ she repeated, with her lower lip trembling. Maybe she hadn’t heard me. Or maybe her emotions had taken hold of her mind. And who could blame her? Phnom Penh had fallen. We were all leaving on a journey, destination unknown. She needed to talk with someone she knew. Her face contorted. ‘We don’t know when we will meet together again. Perhaps never,’ she said. ‘Maybe we will never see each other again.’ And she walked off rapidly with her children so I wouldn’t see her crying.

  ‘Don’t lose hope!’ I called out after her. ‘As long as the sun rises in the east, there is hope!’

  Our group of ten came to an intersection and turned east. And just then the sun, huge and red, rose through the smoke on the horizon. We would hope. We would always hope. But the woman was right: I never saw her again. Nor have I seen more than a fraction of the people I knew in the old days in Phnom Penh.

  8

  Exodus from Phnom Penh

  On that second day of the revolution, and on the following days, the weather was hot and dusty. The sky was clear, but from far above came faint sounds like thunder, the sonic booms of jets flying so high we couldn’t even see them.

  As we stood in the hot sun, shuffling forward with one foot and then the other, the Khmer Rouge fired shots over our heads to get us to hurry, and loudspeakers played radio broadcasts of the government station, which was now under the guerrillas’ control:

  ‘April 17, 1975, is a day of great victory of tremendous historical significance for our Cambodian nation and people!’ a man’s voice declared.

  ‘It is the day when our people completely and definitely liberated the capital city of Phnom Penh and our beloved Cambodia!’ a woman’s voice responded.

  ‘Long live the Cambodian people!’ said the man.

  ‘Long live the most wonderful Cambodian revolution!’ said the woman.

  ‘Long live the independent, peaceful, neutral, nonaligned, sovereign, democratic and prosperous Cambodia with genuine territorial integrity!’ It sounded to me as if the man was determined not to be outdone.

  ‘Long live the line of absolute struggle, independence, self-reliance and overcoming all obstacles of the correct and clearsighted Cambodian revolutionary organization!’ answered the woman, equally determined to have the last word.

  ‘Resolutely maintain high revolutionary vigilance to defend the Cambodian nation and people at all times!’ the man shouted.

  ‘Resolutely maintain the position of struggle to defend the country and people without hesitation!’ the woman shrieked.

  They went on and on in this strange communist shouting match.

  Then marching music began playing out of the loudspeakers. It reminded me of music I had heard on Radio Peking, very stylized and Chinese, with a heavy regular beat and cymbal-and-gong flourishes finishing out the phrases, but the words sung to it were the same jargon the man and woman had been shouting moments before. It was the ugliest music I had ever heard. Imagine, if you can, what it was like for us to trudge along the crowded boulevard under the hot sun while a piercing nasal voice sang ‘The Red Flag of the Revolution Is Flying Over Liberated Phnom Penh’:

  The liberation forces have moved forward from all directions like a powerful and stormy fire, killing the abject Phnom Penh traitorous clique and completely liberating Phnom Penh!

  (Cymbals and gongs banged away. I asked myself, ‘Is this music?’)

  The resounding victory cries of our people and army have put an end to the existence of the enemy, liberated the beloved motherland, and definitely ended the war of aggression of the cruel US imperialists, who have all been expelled from Cambodia!

  (More banging of cymbals and gongs.)

  The red flag of the revolution is flying high over Phnom Penh, the land of Angkor.4

  (One step, then another. One step, then another. I wish we had some water to drink. I wish we could lie down in the shade.)

  The country’s destiny is in the hands of the workers and farmers. This is the reward won by millions of drops of blood shed in the struggle for final victory. . .

  It was all very discouraging. Forced to leave our homes, rifles firing over our heads and terrible music too.

  When the music ended, a speech began. ‘For the past five years,’ began the speaker, an anonymous man, ‘our revolutionary army of male and female combatants and cadre fought most bravely and valiantly, crushing the extremely barbarous, cruel aggression of US imperialism and its stooges!’

  Like the man and woman who had gone before him, shouting the slogans, and like the singer accompanying the marching music, this man didn’t seem to be able to use normal words to say what he thought. Everything was in a special vocabulary of exaggerated praise or hatred, almost like a foreign language. His main point, when he eventually got to it, was that we were now under a new regime, called Democratic Kampuchea. (’Kampuchea’ is just the word for ‘Cambodia’ in Khmer.) Under this democratic regime there would be no rich and no poor. We would all be equal. And we would all have to go work in the countryside. ‘The nation must still pursue the struggle,’ the speaker said, ‘with arms in one hand and with tools in the other to launch an offensive of building dams and dykes and digging canals!’ He went on and on, telling us that we were going to build the nation into a major power and that we were ‘gladly going to make sacrifices for Angka.’ He didn’t explain who Angka was.

  We walked about five blocks that day.

  At nightfall we camped in the shape of a square, with Thoeun and I and the two motorbikes on the outer sides and the nurses on the inside for protection. The nurses took a small ceramic charcoal stove from the handcart and started a fire, and before long they were all squatting around it with pots and spoons, cooking a meal.

  I sat with my back against a kapok tree. Around us was a sea of tired people. In the street, on the sidewalks, in the yards of houses, people everywhere. The stately boulevard had been turned into a camping ground, smoky from the cooking fires, yet somehow the change didn’t seem remarkable. If this was what revolution was like we were too tired to care. Women and children wept, car horns honked, the Khmer Rouge tried to keep us moving with loudspeaker announcements, but we just sat there.

  The nurses served dinner. We talked in low, discouraged voices about finding our families. If we could not remain in the city, our only choice was returning to the safety of places where we were known – to our families and our ancestral villages, for we all came from villages, though most of us had family members lost somewhere in the crowds of Phnom Penh.

  I told Thoeun and the nurses that they could go into the streets to
search for their families anytime they liked, provided one or two people always stayed with the supplies. Then, after eating, I got up to continue my own search.

  I walked through the thick crowd and the smoke of cooking fires, up the boulevard, back, zigzagging across. I stepped over people sprawled asleep on the pavement. The streetlights were still working, perhaps because the Khmer Rouge had not managed to turn them off. Insects flew in swarms under the bright bulbs. To the northeast, an orange glow appeared on the horizon, and later a glow from another direction. Cinders drifted overhead. The Khmer Rouge, it was said, were burning markets, the centre of the system they called capitalist and evil; though to us markets had been the centre of daily life, the place where we went to buy fresh food and gossip with our neighbours.

  By sunrise the crowd was on its feet but at a standstill. From the north came the sound of combat, the high-pitched chatter of US-made M-16s answering the slower repetitive bursts of Chinese-made AK-47s. Somewhere to the north, a Lon Nol commander was still holding out against the Khmer Rouge.

  In the south of Phnom Penh, where we were, there was no outward resistance. We did not refuse the guerrillas’ orders. Yet we moved forward as slowly as possible, obeying without really obeying. It was passive resistance, Buddhist-style. Why should we go? We had homes from which we had forgotten to take gold and precious possessions. Who would take care of our houses? Why were these dark-skinned peasant boys still pushing us to leave? What was this nonsense about farming? We were city people! The war was over! It was time to reunite, time to find our families.