For the Sake of All Living Things (125 page)

Now as they traversed the northern part of the zone, Vathana saw many empty phums. Many nights she lay limp and the thought would come to her, come softly without intensity, come to her emptied spirit, I have seen so much, too much, when this ends I shall never see again.

In the early months of 1978 she was so numb she followed Nang like a beaten dog. He had taken to “fucking” her every night. The sessions never lasted long and most often it was with the stub of his damaged hand. Yet some nights were “very special.” These nights he penetrated her with various objects: the femur of a long-dead victim, a long narrow ebony statuette of Pol Pot carved by a prisoner to Nang’s specifications, a loaded American 45-caliber pistol. “This is how Americans fuck,” Nang would coo. “Very special, eh?”

Through it all Vathana remained submissive, passive, at times praying, calling in her mind, Divine Buddha, Enchanted One, Compassionate One! but most often not praying, attempting on an inner plane to become nonexistent and thus to mask all emotions. She was not totally successful. “Everything I see takes a piece of my heart,” she once told one of Nang’s children. “Soon I’ll have no heart. You have a heart, eh? I’ve seen many piles of dead. I’ve seen...one time he brought me to see a forest ambush. Then he told me he brought his own father on ambush and the old man tried to warn the people by ticking his finger against a dry palm frond. Met Nang pretended to be asleep. He is very tricky, eh?” The child liked the story and told the others and for a week Nang didn’t fuck her because he was too angry.

Then he took her to the cliff. He was so proud. “Tonight,” he told her, “will be very very special. This is where I killed my father.” Nang was joyous. It was late March. The sun was high, the wind carried the sounds and smells away from the small tree house. A dozen yotheas were playing blindman’s buff with the emaciated waste of political upheaval. Some people screamed when they fell, some seemed able to see beneath their blindfolds. Some of these ran, leaped from the precipice, attempting to deny the yotheas the enjoyment of their death. Most stumbled, half dead already, finally tripping at the edge, sliding down the short lip then silently falling; the sound of their bodies hitting denied the yotheas because of the odd wind. The boys became bored and left.

“He died very well for an enemy,” Nang said. “I’ll have Met Arn fetch his file. You’ll see. You would do exactly what I did. When I was in school I was taught this.”

The day moved slowly on, the sun seemed to linger. Nang told her about the school on Pong Pay Mountain and his journey north. Between incidents he lambasted her for her weakness, for her improper background, for not having become a neary long before Lon Nol ousted Sihanouk. He raged about friends and foes. “We are betrayed by devious allies and heinous saboteurs,” he shouted. Then, “But my security apparatus will get them. It will uncover them all.” He paced, waiting for the sun to set, waiting for Arn, waiting to show her his Lakshmi, his own vision of the hell which awaits the treacherous and the evil ones. “More than eight hundred families in the district are under suspicion. There are twenty thousand ex-CIA agents in 169 alone. I will prove them all traitors, all.”

As the sky darkened Vathana stood beside Nang. She watched the lines forming up out of sight of the cliff’s edge. Arn brought the file Nang had requested. Agitated more than ever Nang rampaged amongst the papers. His hand shook, his entire body was in near spasm. “Look!” he ordered, shaking the confession before her. “See!” He snatched it back. He read a line here, there, then found and read aloud the paragraph he wanted her to hear:

...in appearance I am totally a revolutionary. I struggle to cultivate the paddies, I vigorously attack the forest, I courageously plow and rake. But deep in my mind I serve the imperialists. I can no longer hide my traitorous acts of toeing the American line. I am a feudalist. I stood with the establishment. I am not a human being. I am an animal...

“See! See! An animal! He wasn’t human. See! He denied his humanity, therefore he could be killed. I was right. Kampuchea must be purified.”

As Nang spoke the generator kicked on and lights appeared over the abyss. Vathana trembled but she could not turn away. The wind shifted. The smell was horrible but still she bore witness. Screams of those being murdered cut her like the hatchets of the fertilizer pit. She could not move. The screams, the low moaning, penetrated her veil of defensive numbness. She cried inwardly, afraid, aware again of fear, of her fear, fear of expressing an emotion. For hours she stood holding the railing, stood frozen, stood dying inside with each scream. Nang launched into a new harangue. “Today, ninety-five percent of the people live under better conditions than they did under the old regime.” On and on he went. “Without the collective system we are defenseless. Without it the yuons would disappear the entire Khmer race.” On and on went the killings. At first light the descending screams ceased. Now there was a new flurry of activity. The odor of gasoline enveloped them. “We must get down.” Nang prodded her. In the dim light Vathana could see yotheas throwing hundreds of small bags of liquid over the cliff, the bags bursting onto the mass of broken screaming groaning bodies. Then a torch. Everyone standing fell flat. From the abyss came a long FaaAHHHH-WHHUUUMP, a blast of flame, an ear-splitting roar, a swirling wind. The screaming died. Below, the mutilated living suffocated as the conflagration sucked all air from around them. The bodies hardly burnt. Some charred in small secondary fires. Now there was no moaning.

Nang led Vathana down the steep path beside the cavern, across the small trail which brought them to the base of the cliff.

“Before we used flame,” Nang said, businesslike, a subordinate foreman explaining a process to a manufacturing CEO, “the flies were horrible. Now it’s not so bad.”

“This is how you murdered your father?” Vathana’s voice for the first time was strong. Nang stepped back. “Like
this.
?”

“Well, not exactly. He really killed himself. He...”

“You’ve
murdered
all these
people
?!”

“No! They’re enemies. Every one. Everyone’s confessed. They’re animals. Old grass must be burned for new grass to grow.”

Vathana put her hands to her face but she did not hide her eyes. Black chunks of charred meat clung to bone shards which had been blown everywhere by the explosions. On the highest tier, evidently a pocket protected from the concussion, were thousands of decomposing bodies amid thousands of skeletons whose bones had been cleaned by insects and bleached by the sun. On the middle and lowest levels the bodies were mashed and macerated beyond recognition.

Nang began to back out. His joy at showing her the new system had been deflated. His anger had not yet risen. Vathana stopped him. She grabbed him by his disfigured hand, then turned back to the massacre. “Angkar has raped Cambodia.” Her voice was as hard as his.

“What do you know?” Nang’s anger finally caught. His eyes glazed. He cocked his arm to bludgeon her.

“You don’t know how to fuck,” she snarled. She stepped into him. One hand went straight to his groin. He squirmed backward. She held him. “You fuck with this.” She squeezed him. “I’m going to teach you. I’ve fucked imperialists. I’ve fucked an American. Now I’m going to teach you and you’ll know. Then you won’t have to rape Cambodia.”

“An...an...an American. You’ve...with an American. Raped! You can say Angkar has raped Kampuchea! Kampuchea’s been raped. Raped by the French. Raped by the Thais, the Japanese, the yuons. Sihanouk raped Kampuchea. Lon Nol raped Kampuchea. Americans raped Kampuchea. Now yuons again.” As he spoke his furry expanded. Vathana did not let go. He shoved fingers into her eyes. “There’s nothing”—he stepped forward, she tripped back—“nothing we do which is not justified. All deserve to die. The rapers. The looters. The invaders. The bombers. I laugh at their deaths. I gorge myself on their blood. I should rape you. It is justified.”

Vathana exploded into hysterical menacing laughter. “You’re a little boy. Your father, ha! He didn’t teach you to be a man.” Again Nang cocked a fist to smash her but she skipped back. He shuffled forward, slipped on a human heart, fell. “Let me teach you,” she taunted. “Let me make you a man.” She laughed hysterically. “Fuck me very special! Ha!”

Nang stopped. He was trapped. He could kill her but then she wouldn’t teach him. I’ll kill her after, he thought. “Okay.” His voice settled. “Tonight you teach me.”

John Sullivan sat in a bath in the Royal Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. The door to the small suite was open, and lounging on the bed reviewing the new reports was Ian Conklin. For almost a year they’d worked in the camps along the border, helping, by day, refugees as prescribed by the Cambodian Crisis Relief manual. At night they’d searched for clues to Vathana’s whereabouts, asked every new refugee if they’d seen or heard of a small red-haired girl. Very few refugees from the East had reached Thailand, virtually none from the far Northeast. Their original intensity waned, their enthusiasm dwindled in the boredom of routine. Once a month they returned to Bangkok for self-authorized R&R.

“ ‘The Viet Namese invasion of December 1977 to January 1978 threw the interior into a great state of madness,’ ” Conklin read loudly enough for Sullivan to hear over the gurgle of water. “ ‘Although the entire front advanced, there were major blitzkrieg spearheads against which KK air power (nearly nonexistent) and artillery were ineffective. Major Khmer units were ill equipped and poorly led. In the North the PAVN rolled to the east bank of the Mekong River at Stung Treng; in the South they advanced to Neak Luong with little difficulty. Radio Hanoi claimed the drive freed 150,000 Khmers. Phnom Penh reported the Viet Namese forcibly conscripted 150,000 and sent them into battle against Pol Pot’s forces.’ ”

“Probably ten times too high,” Sullivan called out. “Neak Luong, huh?”

“Yeah. Yeah, probably. ‘On 6 January 1978, the Viet Namese spearheads—with amphibious vehicles, ferry boats, helicopters, portable bridging, tanks and artillery—stopped. Phnom Penh claimed a glorious victory saying guerrilla tactics behind the PAVN lines forced the Viet Namese to withdraw. Some observers have concluded the problem was the new Viet Namese army was heavily comprised of ex-ARVN soldiers who purposefully sabotaged the invasion. On 6 February, its troops withdrawn to old border sanctuary bases, Hanoi publicly called for peace talks between the two nations—indicating that only by its good grace was the offensive canceled and Phnom Penh left standing. Pol Pot immediately rejected Hanoi’s proposal.’ ”

“You know what I think?” Sullivan called. He didn’t wait for an answer. “I think any observer who thinks the PAVN is full of ex-ARVNs is full of shit.”

“Just listen, will ya. It says, ‘The campaign resulted in the death of one third of Kampuchea’s army, about thirty thousand soldiers. The PAVN suffered almost equal casualties, though this represented but five percent of its force. In the Kampuchean interior cadre in several western provinces “planned” or launched small rebellions against the Center. All were put down, most (even those which were imaginary) by preemptive massacres. In the East dissident factions have flocked to join the new Khmer Viet Minh. Politically the interior is polarized and fragmented. Pol Pot himself has drawn distinctions between the units of Takeo, Kampot, and Kompong Speu, who are his “unconditional troops,” and all others, whom he suspects of double-dealing.’ ”

“Where do they get that stuff?” Sullivan asked.

“Same place we do, I’d guess.”

“From refugee reports?”

“There and commie radio.”

“Conk!”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sick of these border camps. I haven’t gotten to step one in a whole fuckin year.”

“Yeah. You haven’t gotten out of that tub yet, either. It’s my turn.”

“I want to go inside,” Sullivan said.

“Inside?”

“Yeah. Inside.”

Slowly Vathana unbuttoned Nang’s gray tunic. It was in her mind that she would be killed the moment they finished but that did not matter. In this one way, by this one act, she would attempt to plant a seed of love in his sterile desiccated soul. Perhaps it would germinate. Perhaps, in time, long after her body had rotted, he would abandon this murdering.

“You have very big muscles,” Vathana said. It was the first time she’d seen him without, his uniform. “You have many scars.”

“In the war...” He hesitated. He felt vulnerable without the tunic. He felt giddy. He felt foolish. “...I was stronger and quicker and more sure. I could pick a coin from a blind man’s cup without him feeling or the monk seeing.”

“Do you remember, before the war...” Vathana pulled her blouse tail from her skirt. “...I would collect
kathen
...” She looked upon Nang’s face as never before, looked beyond the burn-scar, beyond the face of her master, her executioner. “...during the
bon
I would give the alms to the monks...” Vathana lightly laid a hand on Nang’s belt. “Papa was very...”

Nang went rigid. A wave of humiliation swept over him. “Stop.” Vathana stilled. “Before...I...I want you to read my father’s confession. All of it. It is...you will understand then. Then we can proceed.”

He forced her to the cage, left, returned with the file, released her, sat. Immediately, Vathana saw the notebooks. A shudder quaked her entire body, a tremor more severe than any malaria attack, more frightening than the errant bomb on Neak Luong.

“...It...” Nang stuttered. “It was...an accident, really. He should have...What is it?”

“Those...”

“Those?”

“Notebooks. You have one and seven!” Vathana’s hand flew.
Crack!
She slapped Nang’s face, knocking him from the chair. “One and seven! You
murderer
!” Shock grabbed her, grabbed him. To her these meant Chhuon’s death. She went beyond shock, beyond horror. Met Nang, executioner....She pounced on the file. The script was unmistakable. She glared, screamed, “Don’t you wonder...why...one and seven?”

“Hum?” He was totally bewildered.

“I have two through six.” She fell to her knees, wailed a terrible crying sobbing cackling wail.