Survival in the Killing Fields (15 page)

Again the streets were thronged. Over a loudspeaker, the new rulers repeated their message: ‘You must leave the city. Allow Angka to take care of the hidden enemies and wipe them out. You
must leave the city for three hours. You must leave the city immediately. . .’

But other Khmer Rouge began to shout to us that we had to leave for three days, without seeming to be aware that they were contradicting the loudspeakers.

We had been up all night and we felt numbed. Like walking through a bad dream. We all knew the Khmer Rouge were lying, yet a part of us still hoped they might be telling the truth. If we could
return, whether in three hours or three days, there was no sense in hurrying. We would only have to cover the same distance coming back. So we walked slowly. Everybody else in the street walked
slowly too.

The sky grew light. Around us the shapes of people took on colour and detail. Alongside me a woman balanced a large bag on her head, steadying it with one hand; behind her walked her young
children. I glanced at her and knew her. She had been a nurse in the military hospital. We had worked together for many years.

‘Doctor Ngor – ’ she began.

‘I am not a doctor anymore,’ I said. ‘Don’t call me that. Call me ‘brother.’

‘Doctor Ngor,’ she repeated, with her lower lip trembling. Maybe she hadn’t heard me. Or maybe her emotions had taken hold of her mind. And who could blame her? Phnom Penh had
fallen. We were all leaving on a journey, destination unknown. She needed to talk with someone she knew. Her face contorted. ‘We don’t know when we will meet together again. Perhaps
never,’ she said. ‘Maybe we will never see each other again.’ And she walked off rapidly with her children so I wouldn’t see her crying.

‘Don’t lose hope!’ I called out after her. ‘As long as the sun rises in the east, there is hope!’

Our group of ten came to an intersection and turned east. And just then the sun, huge and red, rose through the smoke on the horizon. We would hope. We would always hope. But the woman was
right: I never saw her again. Nor have I seen more than a fraction of the people I knew in the old days in Phnom Penh.

On that second day of the revolution, and on the following days, the weather was hot and dusty. The sky was clear, but from far above came faint sounds like thunder, the sonic
booms of jets flying so high we couldn’t even see them.

As we stood in the hot sun, shuffling forward with one foot and then the other, the Khmer Rouge fired shots over our heads to get us to hurry, and loudspeakers played radio broadcasts of the
government station, which was now under the guerrillas’ control:

‘April 17, 1975, is a day of great victory of tremendous historical significance for our Cambodian nation and people!’ a man’s voice declared.

‘It is the day when our people completely and definitely liberated the capital city of Phnom Penh and our beloved Cambodia!’ a woman’s voice responded.

‘Long live the Cambodian people!’ said the man.

‘Long live the most wonderful Cambodian revolution!’ said the woman.

‘Long live the independent, peaceful, neutral, nonaligned, sovereign, democratic and prosperous Cambodia with genuine territorial integrity!’ It sounded to me as if the man was
determined not to be outdone.

‘Long live the line of absolute struggle, independence, self-reliance and overcoming all obstacles of the correct and clearsighted Cambodian revolutionary organization!’ answered the
woman, equally determined to have the last word.

‘Resolutely maintain high revolutionary vigilance to defend the Cambodian nation and people at all times!’ the man shouted.

‘Resolutely maintain the position of struggle to defend the country and people without hesitation!’ the woman shrieked.

They went on and on in this strange communist shouting match.

Then marching music began playing out of the loudspeakers. It reminded me of music I had heard on Radio Peking, very stylized and Chinese, with a heavy regular beat and cymbal-and-gong
flourishes finishing out the phrases, but the words sung to it were the same jargon the man and woman had been shouting moments before. It was the ugliest music I had ever heard. Imagine, if you
can, what it was like for us to trudge along the crowded boulevard under the hot sun while a piercing nasal voice sang ‘The Red Flag of the Revolution Is Flying Over Liberated Phnom
Penh’:

(Cymbals and gongs banged away. I asked myself, ‘Is this
music?’)

(More banging of cymbals and gongs.)

(One step, then another. One step, then another. I wish we had some water to drink. I wish we could lie down in the shade.)

It was all very discouraging. Forced to leave our homes, rifles firing over our heads and terrible music too.

When the music ended, a speech began. ‘For the past five years,’ began the speaker, an anonymous man, ‘our revolutionary army of male and female combatants and cadre fought
most bravely and valiantly, crushing the extremely barbarous, cruel aggression of US imperialism and its stooges!’

Like the man and woman who had gone before him, shouting the slogans, and like the singer accompanying the marching music, this man didn’t seem to be able to use normal words to say what
he thought. Everything was in a special vocabulary of exaggerated praise or hatred, almost like a foreign language. His main point, when he eventually got to it, was that we were now under a new
regime, called Democratic Kampuchea. (’Kampuchea’ is just the word for ‘Cambodia’ in Khmer.) Under this democratic regime there would be no rich and no poor. We would all be
equal. And we would all have to go work in the countryside. ‘The nation must still pursue the struggle,’ the speaker said, ‘with arms in one hand and with tools in the other to
launch an offensive of building dams and dykes and digging canals!’ He went on and on, telling us that we were going to build the nation into a major power and that we were ‘gladly
going to make sacrifices for Angka.’ He didn’t explain who Angka was.

We walked about five blocks that day.

At nightfall we camped in the shape of a square, with Thoeun and I and the two motorbikes on the outer sides and the nurses on the inside for protection. The nurses took a small ceramic charcoal
stove from the handcart and started a fire, and before long they were all squatting around it with pots and spoons, cooking a meal.

I sat with my back against a kapok tree. Around us was a sea of tired people. In the street, on the sidewalks, in the yards of houses, people everywhere. The stately boulevard had been turned
into a camping ground, smoky from the cooking fires, yet somehow the change didn’t seem remarkable. If this was what revolution was like we were too tired to care. Women and children wept,
car horns honked, the Khmer Rouge tried to keep us moving with loudspeaker announcements, but we just sat there.

The nurses served dinner. We talked in low, discouraged voices about finding our families. If we could not remain in the city, our only choice was returning to the safety of places where we were
known – to our families and our ancestral villages, for we all came from villages, though most of us had family members lost somewhere in the crowds of Phnom Penh.

I told Thoeun and the nurses that they could go into the streets to search for their families anytime they liked, provided one or two people always stayed with the supplies. Then, after eating,
I got up to continue my own search.

I walked through the thick crowd and the smoke of cooking fires, up the boulevard, back, zigzagging across. I stepped over people sprawled asleep on the pavement. The streetlights were still
working, perhaps because the Khmer Rouge had not managed to turn them off. Insects flew in swarms under the bright bulbs. To the northeast, an orange glow appeared on the horizon, and later a glow
from another direction. Cinders drifted overhead. The Khmer Rouge, it was said, were burning markets, the centre of the system they called capitalist and evil; though to us markets had been the
centre of daily life, the place where we went to buy fresh food and gossip with our neighbours.

By sunrise the crowd was on its feet but at a standstill. From the north came the sound of combat, the high-pitched chatter of US-made M-16s answering the slower repetitive
bursts of Chinese-made AK-47s. Somewhere to the north, a Lon Nol commander was still holding out against the Khmer Rouge.

In the south of Phnom Penh, where we were, there was no outward resistance. We did not refuse the guerrillas’ orders. Yet we moved forward as slowly as possible, obeying without really
obeying. It was passive resistance, Buddhist-style. Why should we go? We had homes from which we had forgotten to take gold and precious possessions. Who would take care of our houses? Why were
these dark-skinned peasant boys still pushing us to leave? What was this nonsense about farming? We were city people! The war was over! It was time to reunite, time to find our families.

With my Vespa and Thoeun’s Yamaha with the supply cart, it was impossible to move. Impatient as always, I put the scooter on its kickstand, told Thoeun and the nurses to take care of it
and took off, slipping through the crowd, working to one side of the boulevard and then the other, climbing up fences and trees to get a better view.

I didn’t find Huoy or my parents. What I found was rice. A sudden pushing and shouting developed in the crowd, and by following the surge of running men I found myself in a side street, at
a warehouse with wide-open doors. Hundreds of men were already inside, grabbing whatever they could. It was a scene of wild greed. Rice bags stacked high on a wooden pallet had fallen over on one
man, killing him outright. His feet were sticking out from the bottom of the jumbled pile, and nobody paid any mind.

I threw a sack of rice on my shoulder with ‘Donated by the US Government printed on the label and staggered back to the nurses. Then Thoeun and I went to the warehouse to get more.

In the warehouse and on the streets a new code of behaviour had evolved. The new ‘law’ was that it was forgivable to steal as long as we didn’t take anything by force or hurt
anyone physically. Property left unguarded was property for the taking. At night Thoeun went off and came back to us, grinning, with two live chickens in his hands. We promptly killed, plucked and
cooked them and didn’t ask him where he had gotten them.

By the fourth day, April 20, the soldiers had given up on telling us to leave for three hours or three days, and now they were ordering us to go into the countryside. ‘Angka will provide
everything for you,’ they announced through their bullhorns. ‘Angka will see to it that the people have everything they need.’

If we had to leave the city, National Route 2 was the road for us to take. Route 2 would take us to my father’s sawmill, where my family and Huoy had probably gathered. If they
weren’t there, we could follow the road farther, into Takeo Province and right to Samrong Yong. Surely Huoy and my family would go to Samrong Yong if all else failed, I reasoned. And whether
or not they did, Route 2 was also the right road for my nurses, who were all from Takeo Province too, from villages farther south of Samrong Yong.

I made my way on foot to the traffic circle at the southern end of Monivong Boulevard, where several roads led out of Phnom Penh in different directions. At the circle, the Khmer Rouge were
waving people onto a road that led onto a bridge across the river and onto National Route 1, which was the wrong direction for us. But the other turnoff to National Route 2 was still open and a few
people were still taking it.

So we waited. Took a step forward and waited some more. Listened to the sonic booms overhead. Stood in the hot sun and wished we could bathe and change into clean clothes.

The next morning, when we got to the traffic circle at the foot of Monivong Boulevard, there was a barricade across the road to National Route 2. We were too late. ‘Keep moving,’
said the bullhorns. ‘Angka will provide for you on the other side of the bridge.’ Armed soldiers were watching. There was nothing to do but move on with the sluggish flow of the crowd,
even though it took us in the wrong direction.

At the base of the bridge were several sprawling corpses; most, by their uniforms, were Lon Nol soldiers; one, by his shoulder-length hair, a well-known Phuom Penh nightclub singer who had
displeased the new authorities. We tried to ignore the bodies and stepped onto the bridge, which formed a shallow arc, sloping upward from the riverbank to a high point in the middle and then back
down to the other side.

At the top of the bridge, a bit out of breath from the exertion of pushing the Vespa up the grade, I heard a sudden murmur from the crowd and glanced over their heads. It was one of those events
that happens faster than its meaning can be absorbed: a shiny new Peugeot on the far side of the river, driving down the riverbank. It drove into the water with a splash and floated forward slowly,
until the river current spun it around and took it slowly downstream.

There were people inside the car. A man in the driver’s seat, a woman beside him and children looking out the back with their hands pressed against the windows. All the doors and windows
stayed closed. Nobody got out.

Gradually the car sank lower and lower until only the roof was above the water. We just stared, as the car settled lower and the waters closed over the roof.