For the Sake of All Living Things (39 page)

Teck countered each. “They instigated the coup...A bumbler....He’s of the old order....He’s as corrupt as Samdech Euv.”

“Bumbling! Corrupt! Do you think anyone can come in”—he clapped his hands—“like that! Take over like that! Without difficulties! Certainly, they scramble for support. I’ve been assured Lon Nol has even sent the Prince a private memo requesting his return, asking him to assist in expelling the Viet Namese.”

“Father”—Teck shook his head—“not one of those men has the intelligence, honesty or ability you have. If you ran the country, maybe there would be a chance for real reform. But you don’t. You stop short of involving yourself. We’ve only traded one king for another,
and
this one, he’s suspended the Bill of Rights. Now they arrest whomever they please.”

“At least he’s not aiding the Communists. He’s not leading the Viet Namese takeover.”

Vathana put her hand over her husband’s. She had been silent during much of the discussion. Now, with the security of belief in her opinion, she said emphatically, “Under Prince Sihanouk our shelter was ignored by the government. In nine days of Lon Nol we have been requested to file forms for assistance. All month new refugees have come to us. They’ve been bombed and attacked by Viet Namese.”

“They’re bombed by Americans.” Teck jerked his hand from under his wife’s, embarrassing her.

“The rivermen feel safer, too,” Vathana said. “If they call for help, someone responds.”

“As Lon Nol says,” Pech Lim Song said, bitterness creeping into his voice; “Sihanouk is a demon sent by the king of hell to destroy Buddhism.”

“Lon Nol is an American agent.” Teck did not disguise his anger.

“Well.” Madame Pech laughed. She tapped her long finger nails nervously on the table. “All we can really do is sit and wait to see what the Americans do, eh? If they decided to, eh? they could line up shoulder to shoulder on the western border and march east consuming everything like locusts. Or march east to west? Which is it? They do surround us, don’t they,
mon cher
? Thailand and Viet Nam
are
their satellites just, as the Communists claim. Oh dear!” Madame Pech turned to her daughter-in-law. “I must admit though, I would love to meet some Americans. What about you, Vathana? I understand in Saigon they throw the most extravagant parties.”

Softly Teck said, “Mother!”

“I mean with you, of course, dear. Just think of their wealth. Oh”—Madame Pech switched from French to English, which neither her husband, the young couple nor the servants understood—“to be as rich as an American!”

“You’ll do well with an American presence,” Teck said, ignoring his mother’s foreign phrases. “They always bring lots of money.”

“Then you also shall do well, husband,” Vathana said. Her face was calm but inside she was tense, angry—deeply angry still at this man for his heroin slumber the day she couldn’t wake him, the day she had nearly bled to death. “We’re in the same business as your father.”

“Talk of war and politics...it’s such a bore.” Madame Pech stopped the conversation. “Let’s talk, instead, of wine.”

“What is it, Mother?”

Aside to Vathana Mister Pech said, “There’s South Viet Namese and American escorts on the Mekong. And there’s talk of additional American assistance.”

“What!?” Teck yelped. Both Vathana and Mister Pech looked at him, alarmed. “American...”—he clapped his hands for emphasis exactly as his father had. From his throat burst a nervous titter—”...Lon Nol’s invited them, eh?”

“Better the Americans than the yuons,” Mister Pech said.

“It was the CIA behind the coup,” Teck snapped. “Better them!?”

“It wasn’t the Americans,” Mister Pech snapped back. “They supported the Prince. He’d moved much closer to them. This departure upsets the balance they established along the border.”

“That’s why it took them only hours to announce their backing for Lon Nol.”

“More likely the Soviets and their Hanoi clients were behind it. That’s who’s benefiting.”

“That’s who’s bene...!? The national army is seizing all Viet-owned property.” Teck’s voice cracked. “That’s who’s benefiting.”

“Still, better we align ourselves with America than with Communists.”

“Better neither,” Teck said bitterly. “Agh, Viets are only Asian Americans. They’re both expansionists. Both believe their culture’s imposition on anyone is a gift. Both are organizers, and followers of organizers! Agh!” Teck shook his fists before him like a little boy in a tantrum. “Why should I care if Americans or Viet Namese come!? Why? I should care only to kill both, to free myself and our land.”

“Humph!” Mister Pech scoffed. “How many yuons, or Americans, can you and that Louis kill from the cafes? Someday”—Pech Lim Song turned to Vathana—“he will grow up. Someday he will be like me.”

At that moment Sophan reappeared with the infant, freshly bathed and swaddled for warmth. Talk ceased. The aroma of Tiger Balm salve wafted through the room. The infant cooed, gurgled. Vathana smiled. Mister Pech’s eyes shined. “Watch,” Sophan said proudly. She loosened the blanket, nudged an arm out and placed a bamboo rattle in Samnang’s hand. The baby clumsily clutched it in a stiff hand then fiercely whipped it up and down and laughed an infant’s high-pitched snorting laugh.

As the grandfather clapped, his first servant came from the hallway. “Sir.” The old man bowed. “There’s important news on the radio. Poland has closed its embassy and in Kompong Cham two demonstrators have been shot.”

“Bring it here.”

“Wouldn’t it be wise,” Madame Pech addressed the table as the butler went for the radio, “
not
to take sides? If the Royalists return, we’ll live as before. If Lon Nol succeeds, well, so much the better. And if the Communists are victorious, you, my dear husband, should think of becoming commissar of transportation.” Madame Pech paused. She winked at her son, returned to her husband. “You do have contact with the Communists, don’t you, dear?”

Mister Pech did not answer. Vathana’s smile at Samnang’s antics drooped. Teck chuckled. “The Viet Namese call it
attentisme.
Fence sitting. Ha! I should have known.”

“It may be prudent”—Madame Pech’s voice was a sweet whisper—“to provide a little support to all sides, eh?”

“Here, sir,” the butler said, placing the Japanese transistor radio before the head of the house and adjusting the dial.

“...such a demonstration was, we are certain, the work of the Viet Cong who are masters of this kind of thing...”

“Who’s speaking?”

“A government spokesman, sir,” the servant replied.

“...incited by the Viet Cong, the demonstrators sacked the courthouse, the provincial offices. Several trucks were stolen. Some of the demonstrators approached to within three kilometers of Phnom Penh...”

“Three kilometers of the capital!?”

“I didn’t hear that before, sir. Only that a six o’clock curfew is now in force and that the army intercepted the demonstration.”

“...all patriots, especially the people of Kompong Cham, keep cool heads and remain calm...the army has been instructed to crush any further demonstrations...”

“Is that all?” Mister Pech asked as program music followed the announcement.

“Isn’t that enough?” Teck said lowly.

“The government has announced the mobilization of all former servicemen,” the servant answered. “Veterans are to report for duty. Sir, you’re a former serviceman, aren’t you?”

“I’m too old. What else did they say?”

“They said thirty-six hundred Communist soldiers are advancing on Phnom Penh. That they incited the riot. National assemblyman Trinh Hoan reported three Viet Cong columns of a thousand each have advanced to within fifty kilometers of the capital. All from the Northeast, sir. Plus six hundred from the Southeast. And sir, there is other news on VC Liberation Radio.”

Mister Pech carefully rotated the tuner until the dial lined up with a mark he’d made earlier.

“...we denounce the South Viet Namese attack into Kandal Province, which has killed fifty-three innocent people, as a heinous crime of war against the Khmer people...”

“Kompong Cham, Kandal, Phnom Penh,” Vathana murmured. “We’re surrounded by fighting.”

“...we warmly hail and actively support Norodom Sihanouk’s plan to build a liberation army to overthrow the Lon Nol regime...”

“It...it will never reach us,” Teck whispered.

“...reports reaching this station from Kompong Cham say thirty thousand patriotic Cambodian workers and peasants bravely resisted Lon Nol’s lackey army and liberated much of that city, even in the face of troops with heavy weapons raking the people with gunfire...”

“We”—Met Sar smashed his pudgy hand down hard causing papers and maps to leap from the table—“
we
are the rightful benefactors of the coup.” Again he smashed the table. He leaped up. “It must be ours.” In the empty warehouse his shout sent a whiplash of spittle slashing across the floor. “The exact stinging red ants against whom the coup was staged...the crocodiles...they profit because we are not properly organized.”

He strode left, right. He stopped before a wall map of Kompong Cham then before a poster of Mao, stopped staring like a rabid rodent into Mao’s eyes, swishing away, huffing so angrily as to choke on his words before the first syllables escaped his spit-wet lips. “Yuons!” Sar exploded. “Ingrates! Ally, humph!” He spun, crouched, as if ready to grapple with the first thing that moved. “North Viet Namese and lackey Khmer hooligans brainwashed in Hanoi!
Why!
?” He sat. Banged both fists on the report-strewn table. “Because they’ve got microphones. They’ve got speakers. They’ve got buttons!”

Met Sar untied the krama from his neck, wiped beads of anger-sweat from his high forehead. “That vindictive
anoupra-cheachon
, that subhuman king-father, Samdech Euv, siding with the very scum that led the coup, willing to destroy the country for his own vengeful pride.” Met Sar cleaned his lips and chin of saliva, his eyes of tears, his hands of moisture he found odious. He straightened the table, his tunic, his hair. At the door he calmly said to an aide, “Fetch the agents. Keep the Chams in the bunker. This isn’t for them.”

Thirty-five air miles from the border, Kompong Cham (City of the Chams) held Southeast Asia’s highest concentration of the ethnic remnant of the Kingdom of Champa, an Islamic-Hindu state which had flourished along the South China Sea until an expanding Viet Nam had wiped it out in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century city-by-city genocidal attacks. Throughout the late 1950s and into the sixties Kompong Cham was turbulent. A strong, if disorganized, Cham autonomy movement had been held in check by a ploy of Norodom Sihanouk and his Royal manipulators. They offered the ethnic masses meaningless local sovereignty while covertly prosecuting rising individual leaders who espoused ethnic unity. The Prince’s image amongst the Chams had been that of a benign dictator, a benevolent protector who held in check the ruthless ethnic Khmers. Yet despite that image, the Chams lived in fear. To counterbalance superior Khmer numbers, they entered into an informal alliance with the Communist Viet Namese, whose long-established encampments in the surrounding forest impeded Khmer domination. Though the best-educated Chams (and Krahom and Khmer Viet Minh proselytizers) had been aware of Sihanouk’s ploy, prior to the coup they had been unable to sustain a movement amongst the Cham people. With Sihanouk’s ousting, fear of ethnic Khmers increased. When government troops pulled down the last Sihanouk posters, the Chams, along with many local Khmers, went wild.

Met Sar rose like a prophet before the rank of agents. The Center had ordered him to come to Kompong Cham, to take direct command of the Krahom operatives, to infuse the nationalistic movement with a sense of urgency. Over the years, the Krahom had patiently built an extensive network of spies and proselytizers, yet here, in ten days of post-coup strain—ten days in which the NVA and the Khmer Viet Minh had overtly taken control of fully forty percent of the country, contested thirty percent and threatened what remained—even his closest and most trusted agents were cracking, turning.

Met Sar surveyed the agents with cool passion. A third, mostly older men, wore net masks to keep their identities secret; a third, mostly young men and women, stood boldly; a third, mostly boys trained on Pong Pay Mountain, stood armed.

“The Chams,” Met Sar said in a fatherly voice, “are a river. The power of their flow is unstoppable yet the direction of the flow is controllable. Accommodate yourselves to their power while you struggle to direct the flow. Move rapidly before others establish levees. Only we have the good interests of Kampuchea in our hearts.
We
, not new government functionaries, not alien invaders. Do not group us with the Communists. We alone are the nationalists.”

Met Sar paused. He stepped lightly to the first file and with his pudgy hands warmly grasped the hands of a masked agent. He moved down the line squeezing each man’s or woman’s hands in a bond of fidelity to the cause, the Movement. As he embraced his followers he said, “For each of you there are buttons with the portrait of Norodom Sihanouk. Flow with the river, lead the river, do not fight its power. Denounce anyone who denounces Sihanouk!”

“Denounce?” a young woman gasped.

“It is essential,” Sar said so all could hear, “that everyone be conscious of the purpose of the riots. Lower the riverbed in the direction of desired flow. Let the Viets lower it where our desires are the same. They will try to move their people into key positions. They will try to conscript the young. We will use the same tools but at the last we will snatch away the prize.”

As Sar worked the second row an armed yothea hissed, “They are pitiful snakes.”

“Don’t underestimate the yuons,” Sar said. “Exploit their strength and we will achieve promising successes. Without us, their actions constitute a foreign invasion. They have accelerated their Campaign X, already proceeding throughout the nation.

They invoke Sihanouk’s name while they launch attacks against national forces. In the North, in the Northwest, their aim is to occupy as much territory as possible, to expand their so-called Khmer Viet Minh revolution. In the East and Northeast their goal is to protect and further entrench their supply lines and sanctuaries. They have pulled four divisions from duty in the South for combat in our fatherland. Do not underestimate them!