Survival in the Killing Fields (19 page)

In my mind I saw a lingering, awful image of medics in bloody black pajamas chopping open coconuts and pouring dirty juice down IV tubes.

The next day the
mit
returned. He asked me again if I was sure that I had a lot of serum in Phnom Penh. I answered again that I had plenty and that he could take as much as he wanted if
we could get back to Phnom Penh.

He asked me how we would get there.

I looked at him and shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Comrade, we could go together on my motor scooter, if you like,’ I said, as if it were the last thing that either of us wanted to do. My
old white Vespa was parked under the house by the oxcart, with the red cross on the back of the seat carefully removed. ‘But I don’t have any gas. I’d need four or five litres, at
least.’

In truth, I did have gas, but I had drained it from the tank and kept it hidden, in case of emergencies, along with my spark plug. Huoy and I had talked it over the night before. We had decided
that it was even more important to be able to drive away on a few minutes’ notice – if, say, the local Khmer Rouge started slaughtering civilians – than to go into Phnom Penh for
medicine and gold. Besides, I didn’t want to seem too eager to go back to Phnom Penh.

‘We will go to the city tomorrow,’ the
mit
said flatly. Then he walked off, presumably to report to his superiors.

When he left, I took the spark plug out of hiding, cleaned it and screwed into the Vespa’s cylinder. I examined the bike from one end to the other to make sure everything was in good
working condition.

In the morning, the
mit
showed up with ten litres of gasoline, twice as much as we needed. What a huge amount that seemed – to me, the former owner of gasoline delivery trucks! I
poured the precious fuel into the tank before he could change his mind. With him was another cadre with a torn but neatly mended Chinese-made uniform, a belt holster with pistol and a
blue-and-white checkered krama knotted around his neck like a scarf. He also wore one pen in his breast pocket, meaning that he was an officer. One-Pen looked like an ordinary Cambodian, with a
face that seemed normal and happy rather than cruel.

Without more talk I pushed the Vespa out from under the house and started the motor. I already felt good: for the first time since the communist takeover I would be riding the bike instead of
pushing it. The nurses and my entire family looked on from a polite distance. By the pillars of the house, Huoy gave me a wide-eyed look that implored me to be careful. I winked at her, signalling
not to worry. I tied my krama around my neck the way One-Pen did, hoping it would make me look a bit more like a Khmer Rouge. Then I got on and One-Pen behind me and then the
mit
on the
back, all three of us jammed together. We drove off, up the dirt embankment and onto the elevated national road. As I accelerated, my krama flapped in the breeze.

A few pedestrians were still walking toward us along the highway. Transients still camped out by the thousands on either side of the road. A truck convoy appeared in the
distance, grew larger and passed us, heading toward Vietnam with its mysterious hidden cargo.

I drove on through the morning heat. In half an hour we covered the distance that had taken me days to walk. Near the Monivong bridge, people still milled around, though fewer of them than
before. At the edge of the bridge there stood a new checkpoint, a sandbagged machine-gun emplacement with a canvas top for a roof. Beyond it lay a double row of concertina-wire barricades, with
space to pass first on one side and then the other.

I stopped at the checkpoint and cut the engine. One-Pen got off. He walked into the tent, promptly returned and got back on the Vespa.

‘Comrade brother, they accepted our pass?’ I asked as I started the motor again.

‘No problem,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘When you come with me, it’s never a problem.’

We drove past the barricades and over the arching bridge. There were no civilians on it. At the highest point there was another sandbagged machine-gun emplacement, with clear lines of fire over
the bridge in both directions and over the river below. At the far end of the bridge we passed through another set of barricades and another checkpoint.

We had entered Phnom Penh.

We drove up Norodom Boulevard, where Phnom Penh’s wealthiest families once lived. In a few of the houses, Khmer Rouge soldiers relaxed on upper-floor balconies. Others strolled on the
streets, sidestepping the piles of trash and rubble. Debris was everywhere – bottles, books, discarded clothing, mounds of garbage, broken glass, everything imaginable. Motorcycles had been
overturned and abandoned for lack of gasoline, or because nobody knew how to use them. In nearly every block we saw burned car bodies and trucks with flat tyres and smashed windshields.

I reminded myself to concentrate on the mission. But the sight of the ruined boulevard made me ache with sadness. For all its faults, for all its corruption, Phnom Penh had been a lovely city.
And now to empty it, to leave it to the flies – I downshifted to steer around an overturned truck, and tried again not to think about it.

The city was very quiet.

We came to another pair of concertina-wire barricades in front of Lon Nol’s former residence. I slowed down, manoeuvred through the gap in the first barricade and headed for the second. As
I did, the
mit
on the back of the bike merrily shouted ‘Hello, comrade!’ at a soldier on the sidewalk. The next thing I knew, the soldier had pulled his pistol out and was firing
it in the air and shouting for me to stop. I braked to a halt by the second barricade.

The new soldier stalked angrily to us. I stood there facing straight ahead, my feet on the ground, my hands on the handlebars. I was only the driver. ‘What unit do you belong to?’ he
demanded.

‘The 207th,’ One-Pen answered.

‘You do, huh? Well, next time don’t call out to me,’ the soldier said to the
mit. ‘
This area is under my control. I don’t want any yelling from the 207th or
any other unit. Do you understand?’

The
mit
said he understood. I took a deep breath and drove off. Behind me, I could hear One-Pen cursing about the units occupying Phnom Penh and how stupid and backward they were compared
to his own.

One-Pen ordered me to turn down another street and I did. In the middle of the street, near the abandoned US embassy, a half-dozen civilians were pushing an old car. One-Pen told me to drive up
to them and I did. He got off. While the civilians stood there with their heads bowed, he yelled at them to get out of the city, that they were late, that they had to go out into the countryside,
and so on. When he finished taking out his anger on these innocent people he got back on the bike. ‘That’s better,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Now go back the way we were
going before and show me the city.’

So began our tour of Phnom Penh, with me as chauffeur and guide. It was like a ghost city, with its buildings in place but its people missing. In the empty streets my Vespa’s engine
reverberated like the buzzing of a fly in a closed and empty room. There were no other vehicles on the streets except for the burned and overturned cars. There were no other people on the sidewalks
except for the occasional Khmer Rouge walking silently in rubber-tyre sandals.

I drove back up Norodom Boulevard, past the Royal Palace and then the old stadium. We came to the French embassy. Here was an unexpected sight – white-skinned Westerners on the embassy
grounds, a lot of them. But there were guards outside, and I didn’t dare stop to find out what was going on.

I drove past the medical school, to the Central Market and up Charles De Gaulle Boulevard. Finally I stopped the Vespa in front of Huoy’s house and turned off the motor.

The street was deserted except for the three of us.

In the ground-floor cafe the tables and chairs were still neatly arranged. Nobody there either.

The city was silent except for the faint sound of gunshots in the far distance.

I locked the Vespa and beckoned the others to come along. To my surprise, I wanted them along, for protection. I unlocked the front door and we climbed the stairs, talking quietly.

As I arrived on the third floor ahead of the others, the door of the apartment across from Huoy’s opened a crack. The wrinkled face of an old woman peered through. I knew her. She was the
mother of a commercial pilot who had lived there.

She shut the door suddenly when she saw the two soldiers behind me. The old lady must have been hiding there since the takeover.

The Khmer Rouge heard the door shut, but they didn’t investigate. They were probably as scared as I was. I unlocked Huoy’s apartment, showed them inside and brought them to the
glass-fronted display case I had given to Huoy long ago. ‘The medicine’s in here,’ I said. ‘I’ll get you something to carry it in.’

Like someone in a light trance, who acts capably but at the same time watches his own actions with detachment, I found a zippered flight bag for them and a big duffel bag for myself. They
squinted at the bottles’ labels, which were in French. Meanwhile I reached down to the bottom shelf among the cleaning rags and found a rolled-up black cloth. It was heavy. Inside was the
gold.

‘What are in all these bottles?’ One-Pen said to me.

I palmed the gold and crossed the room to Huoy’s dresser with the duffel bag. ‘I’m not exactly sure, comrade. Why don’t we just take what we can now and figure out what
it is later?’ I wrapped the black cloth in one of Huoy’s blouses and stuffed it in the bottom of the bag. Then I found her jewellery box and put that in the bag. I put as many of her
clothes as would fit on top of that. I fastened the duffel bag shut. It had taken only a minute. The Khmer Rouge were still taking medicine from the shelves and putting it in the flight bag, but
they were hurrying. They didn’t want to stay in the apartment longer than necessary either.

On the way out I took a tin of cookies from the table and gave it to the soldiers, as a gift. They wanted to know what it was. I explained that cookies were a kind of Western cake. Poisonous?
they wanted to know. I ate a cookie to show them. Then they each had a cookie and smiles spread across their faces. I don’t think they’d ever had any kind of sugared pastry before.

We clattered down the steps to the street, ignoring the old lady in the other third-floor apartment. I started the Vespa, put the duffel bag on the floor of the scooter between my feet, and we
drove off toward my bachelor apartment while I mentally rehearsed what I was going to do.

When we got there I locked my scooter again, an irrational act considering that nobody was around to steal it. We went inside. Arriving at the medicine cabinet ahead of the others, I reached on
top of it and closed my fingers around a heavy gold ring. I put it in my pocket. Then I started shovelling the medicine out onto the floor and suggested that they just take it now and sort it back
in the village.

When they were busy once again, I went across to my clothes bureau. In the top drawer were several sets of handworked Cambodian betel boxes, each box with an animal, like a tiger or elephant or
crocodile, in raised relief. More barter objects. I wrapped them in clothes and put them in the duffel bag. In another drawer was an envelope with twenty-six hundred dollars in US currency. That
too. Then I opened the bureau drawers and stuffed the clothes into the bag – all except for the bottom drawer, which held my military uniforms. Finally I grabbed both sides of the bag, pushed
the load down with my foot so everything would fit, and fastened the snap. One-Pen held up a plastic IV bag with liquid inside and asked me if it was serum. I told him maybe, but we could find out
for sure back at Wat Kien Svay Krao.

They were squatting in front of a pile of pills, ointments, solutions and lotions, the
mit
’s AK-47 beside him on the floor. They didn’t have much room left in their flight
bag. I took a towel and selected what I wanted most: antibiotics for infections, chloroquine for malaria, antidysentery and antidiarrhoea pills, vitamins, Mercurochrome for cuts, Xylocain and
syringes for pain-killing injections. I worked fast, tying the towel into a bundle. One-Pen was picking up one medicine bottle after another uncomprehendingly, puzzling over the letters of the
Roman alphabet, trying to figure out what pills did by their shape or colour. The
mit
had already given up.

‘Have you got water here?’ the
mit
asked.

‘Yes, comrade. Help yourself,’ I said absently.

I helped One-Pen finish packing while the
mit
went off to find a drink. Then from the bathroom came a sound of gushing water and the
mit
cursing in a loud voice. I went into the
bathroom to look. Sure enough, the
mit’s
chest and shoulders were drenched. He hadn’t known that if he turned the faucet underneath the shower head, water would come out. He
looked at the sink but decided not to risk it, because the sink had faucets too. Then he spotted water in plain sight and bent down and cupped his hands to drink it. He lifted water from the toilet
bowl to his lips and slurped it gratefully. ‘Tastes just like water from a well,’ he remarked. Then he bent down with his hands cupped and got some more. When he stood up he was licking
his lips, a contented man. He had figured out how to use a Western-style bathroom.

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to laugh out loud, to break the tension. But I kept my jaws clamped shut and said nothing. And at the same time I felt sorry and disgusted that this poor rural boy
didn’t know what toilets were for.

We left my apartment. I took my medicines from the towel and repacked them in the luggage compartment on the left side of my Vespa. I put the duffel bag between my feet again. We drove off, the
engine echoing through the silent streets.

We were on our way back.

In a few blocks we came to an abandoned school. Before the takeover it had been called Lycée Tuol Svay Prey. Now there was nobody in it. Weeds grew knee-high in the schoolyard. We
didn’t stop there, nor did I give it a close look at the time. But later that year the Khmer Rouge security police took it over and turned it into a prison. They called it S-21, and later it
was also called Tuol Sleng. It became a symbol of Khmer Rouge atrocities, just as Auschwitz was a symbol of the Nazi regime.