For the Sake of All Living Things (110 page)

Then the first Krahom cadre had returned. Then Vathana had packed their small bundle, clothing for the children, a sleeping mat, a blanket, a small cooking pot, the last of their rice. In her skirt waistband she’d rolled the gold chain necklace John Sullivan had given her. She’d placed Su Livanh in the
khan
, hung it from her neck, grabbed the two older children and escaped onto the midnight highway leading north.

For a week the wind had carried the aroma of rotting flesh. It wafted in from battle areas where corpses lay unburied, it hung in the humid night air. It coated her skin, burned her eyes. Maggots had become flies in the mutilated carcasses lying where they’d fallen. Now the night air was thick with buzzing.

She did not scurry as did others. With Su Livanh hung in the cloth and Samol, at four, and Samnang, strong at five and a half yet still a little boy, by the hands, how could she dart from concealment to concealment? Instead they walked calmly, lightly, attempting to keep to the shadows but also trying to appear normal. She spoke quietly, encouraging and reassuring the children. “In a few days,” Vathana said, “you’ll see your grandmother and grandfather.”

“Grandpa’s house!” Samol’s voice was loud, enthusiastic.

“No. Not the villa. Much farther away. My father’s house. You’ve never met him.”

“Bu-ba-ba-ba.”

“He loves you very much,” Vathana said to Samnang. “Before you were born he came to pray for you. He is the most wonderful grandpa.”

They walked for hours. The outskirts of the city were in ruin. Sophan...Teck...The ache in her heart nearly swallowed her. A hundred times Vathana repeated inwardly, Don’t look back. Don’t look back. Yothea presence on Highway 15 leading north was sparse, by night seemingly nonexistent. Vathana paused frequently. Will I ever see the pagoda again? she thought. Then she thought, No, it has burned. What of my first halfway house? The levees? The fish market? Don’t look back, she thought, yet she turned and she knew she was near the spot by the river where she had taken John Sullivan. Where Su Livanh had been conceived. Why did you abandon me, Captain Sullivan? Don’t look back. The night seemed quiet, quiet between distant explosions. The air felt peaceful, peaceful between sporadic acrid-metallic waftings, between the clouds of flies and death smell. The children tired but bravely pushed on. Don’t look back. Oh, Sophan...Don’t look back. Oh, Teck...Oh, my Teck...Don’t look back. This hurts so much. Vathana’s eyes filled with tears.

Somewhere in the blackness to their right stretched the dried marsh swamp and Boeng Khsach Sa. Still they walked and walked and walked. Then they could go no farther. Vathana’s mouth was dry. It was difficult to speak. Samol began to whine. Only a little farther, Vathana thought, and we would see Mister Pech’s villa. Does it still stand? Dare she mention it to the children? Silently she herded them off the road into the shadow of a bamboo hedge. Quietly she brushed the ground to clear it of stones, twigs or insects. Then she unrolled the mat, yawned, lay along one edge with Su Livanh cupped in the bend of her body. Samol and Samnang snuggled in. She unfurled the blanket and they slept.

The sky was crystalline yet the ground air was hazy with dust churned up by the passing of a mobile work brigade. Chhuon stood bareheaded, relaxed, waiting as ordered for the phum enforcer. His skin had darkened, his hands grown coarse, his feet callused. Before him, sitting on the ground in the shade of their hut in the line of children’s huts, four small girls, no more than seven years of age, sat cross-legged obeying every command of the neary, herself but eleven. Gracefully their hands moved, as gracefully as ballet students of the old court. Back and forth to a softly hummed cadence, back and forth lightly honing the edges of the bamboo daggers.

“Now all Comrade Children have fifty.” The neary’s voice was severe. “By noon all will present Poh one thousand.” She glanced over her shoulder at Chhuon, then turned, jerked the
punji
stake from one little girl and tested the tip and the blades. “No!” she screamed. She lunged forward, punched the girl’s face. The girl fell, scrambled back to position without a sound. The neary sat back. “Angkar wishes you to work better. Or do you wish to be disappeared?”

Chhuon eyed them, a slight scowl on his face, Krahom approval. Through all the turmoil and deprivation of the past five years he had learned when to speak, when to be silent. His special knowledge of rice had made him valuable to Met Vong, the enforcer in charge of Phum 117. Vong called, him Poh, a rural dialect form of Pa, the equivalent of “Pop,” or “Pappy.” At fifty-two Chhuon was an elder and Vong, for all the new speak and new order, still maintained a remnant of traditional respect. With Vong, Chhuon did not act the ignorant peasant. The time and need had passed. Under Vong, though living conditions were harsh, he, the entire commune, had entered a state of stable systematic enslavement. Poh, Chhuon, was again a boss, not the nominal chief of rice. The 1974 crop had been decent, the quota for the army had been met, no one had starved. It was something few Krahom communes could claim.

As Chhuon watched the girls, Vong approached. He halted behind Chhuon. “Soon,” he said quietly, “we’ll have many more mouths to feed.” He issued no greeting, wasted no words. “You must make the rice grow faster.” Chhuon turned. He watched the enforcer’s hands. He did not look at his face. The hands jittered. “Angkar has achieved glorious victory. The oppressed of all cities have been liberated.”

Chhuon tilted his head in such a way as to keep it bowed yet to glance at Vong’s chin. “Comrade Enforcer, one can only be kind to rice. One cannot hurry it.”

“Poh, when new people arrive, they will be hungry. Grow the rice quickly.”

Chhuon’s mouth opened slightly, his cheeks tightened—almost a smile, not a smile, smiling was prohibited. If Angkar’s representative said it will grow quickly who was he to say otherwise? “You say new people, Met Vong?”

“In the whole world”—Vong’s face beamed—“in all times, no people have ever driven out the imperialists to the last man. Only Khmer! Only Khmer revolutionaries. Only we have scored total victory. Khmers can do anything. From the very highest center the word has come, ‘This is the work of God. For mere humans it is too imposing.’ ”

Now Chhuon did smile. It was not the ancient enigmatic smile of Cambodia but a lesser grin, an approval without happiness or ambiguity. “We must prepare for them,” Vong continued. “When they are fed we shall celebrate the great Seventeenth of April Victory. Come.”

Chhuon followed Vong. They walked a narrow raised path through the low forest of the wilderness zone. Hundreds of thousands of
punji
stakes lined the broad trenches below the path, aimed not outward to stop attackers but inward to keep the inhabitants from fleeing. In the heat Vong paced like a rising executive. They neared a work site where half the commune’s inhabitants, about five hundred people, were expanding irrigation canals and dikes. Weeks before Vong had pointed to the old half-kilometer-long dikes and said, “The new fields must be doubled. If that dike were moved five hundred meters how much more rice would grow?”

“It can’t be moved before the rains,” Chhuon had answered.

“It is the wish of Angkar,” Vong said coolly.

“It would be better to build a second dike and leave...”

“Have it moved or deal with Met Khieng.”

Chhuon had forced his teeth together. He’d paused, run quick mental calculations. Five hundred more meters would achieve twenty-five hectares. In the best conditions that would yield thirty metric tons of paddy. But even if the half-kilometer dike could be moved and two 500-meter connecting dikes constructed in time, the area just wasn’t suitable. It had been cratered by bombs or artillery. How was not important. What had happened to the subsoil was. Like much of the Cambodian basin the subsoil of the northern new wilderness zone was laterite, a substance that remained soft and permeable as long as it remained wet. Once dried the laterite hardened like brick. Rewetting had little effect. The bombing had drained the area of Vong’s proposed expansion. Clods of hardened laterite surrounded stagnant puddles of oily water. Once again, Chhuon had thought, we’re to revert to know-nothingness. “I’ll do whatever Angkar Leou asks of me,” Chhuon had responded. “I’m happy to serve.” Then he thought of a silent, subtle retribution, a retaliation for this stupidity, a simple satisfaction to sabotage Angkar, to assuage new pain and old. “Yet...” Chhuon paused.

“Yet what?” Vong sneered at Chhuon’s apparent challenge.

“Yet Khieng...” Chhuon whispered.

“Khieng what?” Vong snapped.

“Comrade,” Chhuon said, “if we’re to finish such a project before the rains, we’ll need all the workers.”

“Of course.”

“Khieng...” Chhuon hesitated.

“Yes?” Vong was adamant.

“He...he takes...he takes all the women. Sometimes one or two, sometimes ten. Even more! He keeps them from work...all day.”

“On the last day,” Rita Donaldson wrote, “everywhere I heard the questions, ‘Why has...’ ” She stopped, steadied her quivering hands. The tremor would not cease. She wrote on, a wobbly scratching on the page. “ ‘...why has the United States abandoned us? Why don’t the Americans do something?’ ” Again she paused. The trip from Phnom Penh to the Thai border had been an extension of the nightmare she’d been witnessing for months...an ever-worsening nightmare. Snatches of news had circulated among the expelled Westerners. In South Viet Nam the ARVN 18th Division, which, she’d read, had severely damaged the NVA 6th and 7th Divisions at Xuan Loc in March and had held off the 6th and 7th reinforced by the 341st for the first two weeks of April, was said to have been destroyed by the NVA 10th and 304th Divisions flanking them en route to Saigon. “Five to one,” the rumor went. “Tremendous ARVN gallantry,” many whispered, “but too little and too late.” Was, Rita thought, America abandoning South Viet Nam, too? Rita bit the knuckle of her right thumb. She tried to think, to ponder the question, but the horror and fear that engulfed her blocked her inquiry. The Khmer Rouge had corralled the Westerners in the French embassy, then expelled them, overland, via bus and train, to the Thai, border. Some expellees had been allowed to group together. Others were partially or totally isolated. She had not been allowed to write, had been restricted from viewing. Still she’d heard rumors, glimpsed an atrocity—a heap of bodies by a rail siding east of Pursat. Arriving in Thailand she’d been dazed, exhausted, in shock.

Slowly she jotted notes. “Many of Lon Nol’s troops voluntarily relinquished their arms in order to attend assemblies with Norodom Sihanouk...It is rumored that Sisowath Sirik Matak, on the last day, sent a letter to President Ford in which he wrote, ‘My only mistake was to have trusted the Americans.’...One Khmer man said to me, ‘You Americans, you don’t really believe there is any other world. You sent millions of boys, spent thousands of millions of dollars, but you never knew that we Khmers lived here. That this is our country, because we have always lived here. It’s like you just want to have war, eh? Yet what you do, you were right to do, but you are frivolous. That’s why you tire of war. You never knew us. As a nation you were never serious. That’s why when—how do you say?—the fad, the fad of war, it wears off. That’s why you can abandon us.’ ”

“Bu. Ba-ba, ba-ba. Bub-ba!” The sun had risen. Twenty meters away on the road a thin unbroken line of refugees flowed from Neak Luong. “Bub-ba!”

“What is it, Precious Heart?”

“Bub-ba! Bub-ba!” Samnang grasped his mother’s wrist and pulled.

Vathana rubbed her eyes. She shook her head. Her long black hair fell from her scarf and cascaded down her shoulders, arms and back. She brushed it back with her spread fingers. “Oh,” she said. “I thought we’d get out before that started.”

“Bub-Ba-
Ba-Ba!
”

“Settle down. We’ll eat first then join them.”

Samnang tugged harder. His good arm compensated in strength for his gawkish side. He nearly knocked her over.

“I’m hungry,” Samol cried.

“Sophan.” Su Livanh also cried and her crying feathered Samol’s and the volume of the two little girls ascended until Samnang, frustrated, excited, just pushed them back to the mat and wrenched his mother up to follow?

“Bub-Bub-
Ba-Ba
.” _

“Yes. Yes. Show me, then let’s get on the road. Perhaps in the old regions, where they’re established, we’ll find a better life.”

Vathana followed the boy behind the hedge. Her eyes popped. Her heart plummeted. In the dusty rubble of dry stalks were piles of human parts. Torsos. Hundreds of headless, limbless torsos stacked vertically like broken pawns awaiting a chess match. Arms, neatly lined up, a hundred lefts, a hundred rights. Legs, footless in one pile like lumber, footed in another. Feet, in pairs. And heads. Hundreds of heads. Perfectly ordered, arranged by size in columns and rows. Vathana’s body convulsed, then went limp. She sank to her knees. Her waist seemingly liquified. She fell to her hands. Her arms collapsed. “Bu-ba-ba-ba.” Samnang shook her. Her body trembled. She hugged her son close to her, recovered enough to stand, to back away. She reached to her bosom, grasped the Buddha statuette Chhuon had given her so many years before. “Blessed One...” she exhaled. She said no more. Holding Samnang’s hand she ran to the sleeping mat where the two girls were pilfering the bundle for cooked rice. Don’t look back.

Again they walked, now in column with thousands of fleers. From time to time Vathana stopped, shaded her eyes from the sun with her hand and tried to look up the highway to ascertain what lay head.

“Don’t stop, Sister,” a kindly middle-aged man whispered to her.

“Eh! The little ones need to rest.”

“There are soldiers in the trees. Don’t look. Don’t stop.”

“Where should we go?”

“Go as far as you can.”

“For how long?”

“For as long as you can.” The man became silent as they neared a clump of palm trees at the shoulder of the highway. Vathana followed his lead though others about them chattered carelessly. A few cars crammed with families and belongings overtook them. On the next open stretch the middle-aged man asked quietly, without looking at her, “Do you have any money?”