Survival in the Killing Fields (13 page)

I went to the scrub room and began washing my hands at the sink. An orderly whose name I could never remember helped me into the operating gown and tied the strings for me at the back of the
blouse. I went back to washing. ‘Boss?’ he said. ‘What do you think? The situation isn’t too good, is it? Have you heard about the government negotiations with the
communists?’

‘No, I haven’t heard anything about it. I just came in from my clinic.’

‘Well, the situation isn’t good,’ said the orderly. As if that was news.

I put on gloves. We went together to the operating room. The patient was on the table, unconscious, with intravenous tubes running into his arm, one for blood and another for glucose. The
operating staff had already assembled: the anaesthesiologist, the nurses and another doctor, whose name was Pok Saradath. The X-ray film was already clipped into place on the translucent glass
above the operating table. I went over to look at the film. The patient had been hit by a grenade. There were burns on his face and shoulder and puncture holes as big around as a finger on his
abdomen where the shrapnel had entered. His belly was distended from the wounds and the internal bleeding. He was groaning in a low voice. I ordered some more anaesthetic injected in the rubber
valve in the IV tube.

The orderly left by the front door.

The operating room was quiet. We heard the sounds of gunfire coming from the outside in several directions. Pok Saradath, a longtime friend and colleague, worked beside me, dressed as I was in
gown and mask. He made the long incision for the laparotomy and we began talking in the cheerfully obscene language that had always been part of the operating room protocol.

‘. . . son-of-a-bitch Lon Nol government,’ Saradath said. ‘If Lon Nol is incapable, why doesn’t he just step down to make life easier for us . . ?’

I glanced up from cleaning the exterior puncture wounds. I raised my right arm and shook it uncontrollably in my imitation of Lon Nol, and Saradath understood, his eyes glinting with humour
above his gauze mask. ‘Because if he steps anyplace he falls,’ I said.

‘And why do you think he is going to fall, medically speaking? You know, I heard he has tertiary syphilis,’ said Saradath.

‘No, he fucks too much. Damaged his spinal cord.’

‘That corrupt son-of-a-bitch. He holds on to power and everybody else suffers. All the families separated because of the war and nobody making a living.’

‘Not true. It is very easy to make a living if you don’t mind threatening innocent people and demanding their money. There are some very good jobs to be had around Phnom Penh. If you
are a policeman or an army officer you can get rich very quickly.’

The orderly poked his head between the swinging doors. ‘I have news: the soldiers near the bridge have surrendered. Everybody is waving white flags. On the streets, on the buildings,
everywhere,’ he said. He withdrew.

We kept on working. The room was quiet. Through the walls we could still hear the boom of artillery.

The orderly stuck his head in the room again. ‘The Khmer Rouge are now in Phnom Penh!’

I had removed the shrapnel from the patient, and Saradath and I sewed up the wounds in the intestinal walls. I tied off a suture and got a different-size needle from the nurse and then bent back
over the patient.

‘Well,’ said Saradath, ‘let the Khmer Rouge come in and get it over with, so we can reunite with our families.’

‘Anything would be better than this,’ I said. ‘Anything at all.’

The orderly came in and said he had seen two young Khmer Rouge jump over the fence and run into the hospital compound, one with an M-16, the other with an AK-47.

There were perhaps a dozen people in the operating room. I told them, ‘If the Khmer Rouge come in, just be quiet and be careful. We don’t know what they’re going to
do.’

Footsteps sounded out in the hall and the doors slammed open.

‘Don’t move!’ an angry, high-pitched voice yelled. ‘Don’t move! Raise your hands!’

I was facing the wall, standing over the patient. I put my needle down and slowly turned around with my hands raised. There was blood on my gloves, but everyone else had their hands above their
heads and there was blood on some of their gloves too.

The guerrilla wore a ragged black shirt, black trousers and black rubber sandals made from automobile tyres. He was dark-skinned, a racially pure Khmer holding a US-made M-16 rifle. The doors
slammed open again and another guerrilla came in dressed the same but with a Chinese-made AK-47. He pressed the barrel of the AK-47 to my temple.

‘You the doctor?’ he demanded. ‘You the doctor?’

‘No, the doctor left by the back door a minute ago,’ I said. ‘You just missed him.’

‘
Liar!’
He had fiercely bulging eyes and a high voice.

He was, at most, twelve years old.

I didn’t move a muscle.

He pushed the string of my green operating cap with the barrel of his rifle. The words came out in a burst. ‘You
liar
! If I don’t find the doctor I’ll come back and kill
you!’

I stayed calm on the outside. All my instincts told me that this was a time to stay absolutely still and show no fear.

The fierce look in his eyes changed to something like uncertainty.

‘Let’s go,’ he said to the other guerrilla. The two of them left by the back door.

We lowered our hands. The nurses were crying.

‘Boss, we have to leave,’ one of the nurses said to me. ‘If they don’t find a doctor outside they’ll kill us.’

I thought for a second. The patient was lying on the table behind me, unconscious. His intestines were back in place, but we hadn’t finished sewing him up.

‘Be quiet,’ I told them. ‘Nobody move.’

We heard the slapping of the guerrillas’ sandals recede along the hallway. Thoughts occurred to me faster than I could put them into words. It was like being surrounded in a gang fight as
a boy. All of my illusions were gone. They had broken into the sanctuary of the operating room. They were stronger, and we could only try to outwit them. Or evade them.

Half a minute passed. No more footsteps.

‘Okay,’ I told the room, ‘everybody has to leave right now. Go now and don’t wait. The patient stays.’

Saradath whirled on me. ‘You son-of-a-bitch!’ he said. ‘We have to finish the patient first!’

‘Finish
what,
mother-fuck? We have to leave now. Get out of here!’ And though Saradath and I had the same rank, he gave in because I sounded as though I knew what I was doing.
Everybody scurried out of the room except for Saradath and me. We took a last look at the poor young soldier on the table with pale, waxen skin and the long, open incision in his belly. He was
going to die. Saradath and I left the room by the front doors and walked rapidly down the corridor together. The corridor was the same as always, yet it looked different, and I couldn’t
believe what had just happened. I had my arm around my friend’s shoulder and I slapped the back of his head and he slapped mine. We got back to the scrub room and my trousers were hanging
there but my shirt was missing. Somebody had stolen it. Pok Saradath’s clothes were there. There was a woman’s blouse on another hook with short tails and three-quarter-length
sleeves.

‘You don’t want this, do you?’ I said. He shook his head and I put it on. We dressed quickly.

I went to my office in another wing of the hospital. Everybody there had gone. I grabbed my briefcase and went outside. My Vespa was parked there on its kickstand with the red cross taped on the
back of the seat. I put my key in the ignition.

Guerrillas in ragged black uniforms swarmed over the hospital grounds. Most of them held AK-47s, the communist assault rifle with its ammunition clip unmistakably curving out from the underside
of the stock in the shape of a banana. They had the same fierce, angry expressions as the two in the operating room. I paused to look at them. There was something excessive about their anger.
Something had happened to these people in their years in the forests. They had been transformed. They were not like the Cambodians I had known, shy and a bit lazy and polite.

‘Get out!’ they shouted. ‘
Get out!
Everybody has to move! Now!’

I started the Vespa and rode it several hundred yards to the gate. The security guard was gone and the gate was closed. I turned off the engine, opened the gate myself and walked through.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of people filled the street, plodding south, where the Khmer Rouge told them to go. Thousands more stood in windows and doorways,
unwilling to leave, or else came out from their houses offering flowers or bowls of rice, which some of the guerrillas accepted with shy country smiles and others coldly ignored. Car horns blared.
From distant parts of the city came the chattering of assault rifles and the occasional boom of artillery. The fighting wasn’t over, but white bedsheets hung from the buildings as signs of
truce and surrender.

The Khmer Rouge strode through the boulevard, tired and bad-tempered, armed with AK-47 rifles and clusters of round, Chinese-made grenades on their belts. Their black uniforms were dusty and
muddy. They had been fighting all night; some had waded through ditches. A few specialists carried the big tubular rocket-propelled grenade launchers on their shoulders, accompanied by soldiers
carrying the elongated grenades in backpacks. Here and there were
mit neary,
the female comrades, firing pistols in the air and shouting harshly at the civilians to hurry up and leave. They
were young, the Khmer Rouge, most of them in their teens. Their skins were very dark. Racially they were pure Khmers, children of the countryside. To them Phnom Penh was a strange, foreign
place.

Directly in front of me a guerrilla, with the wide-eyed smile of a boy with a new plaything, tried to take a motorcycle for a joyride. He revved the throttle to maximum rpm. As he released the
clutch, the front wheel skitted left and right and then the machine lurched forward from under him and into the crowd. He picked himself up from the pavement and walked off scowling, leaving the
bike on its side and pedestrians holding their legs in pain.

I put my Vespa in neutral and walked it into the street. No sense starting the engine and wasting gasoline. The crowd was shoulder to shoulder. There was no chance of getting through.

A Khmer Rouge shouted, ‘You have to leave the city for at least three hours. You must leave for three hours. You must leave for your own safety, because we cannot trust the Americans. The
Americans will drop bombs on us very soon. Go now, and do not bother to bring anything with you!’

Was I supposed to believe him? I wondered. After what had happened in the hospital? My instincts told me no. The guerrillas on the street had the same fierce expressions as those who had burst
into the operating room. They looked totally unlike normal Cambodians, except for their dark, round faces. And yet a part of me wanted to believe that they were telling the truth.

The harsh voice yelled again, ‘If you have weapons, put them on the sidewalk. Let Angka collect them. The war is over now and there is no more need for weapons. The weapons are the
property of Angka!’

I glanced to the side of the street. Sure enough, a few trusting civilians came out of their houses and put their AK-47s, their M-16s, their pistols on the sidewalk. I wondered: Who is Angka? Or
what is Angka?

In the Khmer language,
angka
means ‘organization’. Angka was the Organization-logically, I supposed, the Khmer Rouge command group. What did that imply? That the guerrillas
were going to try to organize the Cambodians? That wasn’t likely. If there was ever a disorganized people, it was us. Peasants who farmed when and where they wanted, employees who were casual
about showing up for work, a society so
laissez-faire
that nothing ever got done. Even Sihanouk hadn’t been able to organize us when he was our ruler, and he had tried. Where was
Sihanouk now? I wondered. Was he part of Angka? Wasn’t he the leader of the Khmer Rouge? When was he going to come back to Phnom Penh? Why hadn’t they mentioned his name?

All around, people muttered, ‘Why evacuate the city? We don’t want to go. The war is over. The Americans are not going to bomb us. We don’t want to leave.’ They walked
and stopped, took two steps and stopped again. Those with motorcycles pushed them by the handlebars, as I did. Those with cars pushed them with the help of friends or relatives. Nobody started
their engines. There was no room on the road to drive. There was no gasoline to spare. When could we buy gasoline again? What would become of my gasoline delivery company?

I trudged south with the flow of the traffic, in the general direction of my clinic. A contingent of Khmer Rouge approached from the opposite direction. In front of them walked a
frightened-looking man whose hands were tied behind his back. Shoving him forward was a
mit neary
with a pistol. She was a large-breasted woman who had done everything possible to appear
unfeminine. She wore her blouse buttoned to her neck and her sleeves rolled up to the forearms and a checkered krama wrapped around her head. She was as dusty and angry as any of her male comrades.
As she neared me, she waved the pistol in the air and addressed the crowd:

‘The wheel of history is turning,’ she declared. ‘The wheel of history rolls on. If you use your hands to try to stop the wheel, they will be caught in the spokes. If you use
your feet to try to stop it, you will lose them too. There is no turning back. World history will not wait. The revolution is here. You must make your choice, to follow Angka or not. If you choose
not to follow Angka, we will not be responsible for your safety.’

She gave the man in front of her another contemptuous shove. He staggered, the whites of his eyes showing his fear. As they went past me, she waved her pistol again and shouted, ‘Everybody
is equal now! Everybody is the same! No more
sompeah
ing! No more masters and no more servants! The wheel of history is turning! You must follow Angka’s rules!’