Survival in the Killing Fields (14 page)

I pushed on with the Vespa. Whatever hopes I had for the Khmer Rouge were fading fast. They were supposed to liberate us, not tie us up and make threats about obeying Angka’s rules.
Whoever Angka was.

The air was stifling. The streets were filled from one side to the other. We were no longer residents of Phnom Penh. We were refugees, carrying whatever we could. The wealthy pushed cars or
flatbottomed handcarts, with sacks of rice, suitcases, pots and pans, televisions and electric fans. The poor carried nothing but their rice pots. Grocers carried groceries, booksellers pulled
carts with piles of books. It was strange, I thought, the things people treasured. Televisions and fans wouldn’t be much use outside of Phnom Penh, where there was no electricity.

A few blocks from the hospital I came to a private medical clinic similar to mine. An exodus of the sick and crippled had begun. All the patients were leaving by order of the Khmer Rouge. A
one-legged soldier hobbled on crutches, holding his spoon and mess kit in his fingers. Behind him another man with a bandage over his eyes and amputated legs was being wheeled along the sidewalk on
a hospital bed, the IV bag still hanging from the bed rack. Slowest of all was an elderly woman who clutched the front of her sarong with one hand, to keep it from becoming unfastened, and kept her
other hand on the shoulder of a female companion for support. The old woman was saying in a feeble voice, ‘I’m very tired. Please stay here, I’m very tired. I can’t go
on.’ Her companion, who was holding the old woman’s IV bag, said, ‘Try your best, dear. Keep walking. Come on now, walk as best as you can. I know you’re tired, but you can
make it.’

I asked the old woman what kind of illness she had. She said she didn’t know, she hadn’t brought her medical papers with her. Her friend explained that she had a pain in her
stomach.

‘Let her rest first,’ I said to the second woman. ‘Don’t rush her. Let her take a few steps at a time, if that’s all she can do. But if you can, take her to the
Sokchea clinic, next to Tuol Tumpoung market. I’ll be there.’

Standing in a doorway, I reached for the woman’s wrist, to take her pulse. It was faint and slow. Then I pulled her eyelid down to check on her blood supply. The tissue was pale and
anaemic; if she had been healthy it would have been red. A short young Khmer Rouge with fierce eyes and muddy black clothes came up to us. He shouted, ‘Go! Don’t stay here!’ in a
high-pitched child’s voice. He was not much taller than his rifle.

I said politely, ‘Yes, we’re leaving.’ The child-soldier walked on, yelling, ‘You have to leave! Go now!’ in his high voice to people in other doorways. He was a
few steps away when he raised his AK-47 and fired a burst of ammunition in the air. The old woman trembled and I had to steady her. He walked farther down the sidewalk, yelling and firing in the
air.

I gave the two women the directions to my clinic and wished them luck. When I walked on, I was in a terrible mood. Why were the Khmer Rouge making patients leave the hospitals and clinics? What
was the advantage of that? Maybe the Khmer Rouge had some reason for emptying the city, but they didn’t have to hurry the weak and sick. A picture flashed into my mind of the operating room
in the hospital. Of a patient on the table, with a long incision in his abdomen. Of the young soldier I had left to die.

I turned west and then south onto Monivong Boulevard, one of the main avenues of the city. Here traffic was even slower. The mass of people shuffled onward, but it was difficult to move. Around
me on all sides were feet and shoulders and heads. Khmer Rouge stood on every street corner, urging us on, and more Khmer Rouge rode scowling past in jeeps and open trucks, waving pieces of red
cloth and red handkerchiefs tied to their bayonets. The civilians in the street wore white armbands and headbands and white towels around their waists. There were white handkerchiefs tied to the
radio antennas of their cars, and white sheets hung from the windows of the houses. But already the earlier joy, that the war was over, had disappeared, and its place was taken by the smell of
fear. On the sidewalk, a man changed from his Lon Nol army uniform into black pajamas.

Something beyond understanding was happening. Between our hopes of liberation and the scowls on the guerrillas’ faces, between their order to leave the city ‘for three hours’
and knowing that it took three hours to move three blocks was a chasm that our minds could not cross. We could only sense that some enormous event was unfolding and that we were part of it, and our
fates were no longer ours to choose.

I saw an opening in the crowd, ducked into a side street and parked the Vespa, locking both the steering and the ignition. The clinic could wait. I had to look for Huoy and my parents.

I walked on side streets, then north on Monivong. Without the scooter it was easier to manoeuvre, walking against the flow, dodging the Khmer Rouge, staying out of their sight. But the same
bobbing heads and shoulders that hid me made it harder to see. I kept scanning the thousands and thousands of faces. No Huoy. No father and mother either.

I saw families going around blocks on all four sides, walking around and around to give the appearance of moving, hoping that the ‘three hours’ of evacuation would soon end. The
women wept, searching for lost children. The men darted back into their houses, remembering another pile of clothing, another sack of rice, another hidden cache of gold. They piled suitcases in the
trunks of their cars, ran from their cars back to their houses and back to the cars again and shouted at each other to hurry along.

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
sompeah
ed me, raising their palms imploringly to their foreheads. ‘Please see me first,
luk
doctor.’ ‘Please save my life,’ they said. I
sompeah
ed 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 krama 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.