For the Sake of All Living Things (103 page)

“What?”

“She saw her brother—”

“Naw. Don’t tell me. Not yet. I forgot to tell you. Last night the civilian radio had Khieu Samphan’s speech. He said the regime of the seven supertraitors is ‘withering in death throes.’ He said the Khmer Rouge are only interested in bringing ‘that flesh-eating clique’ to justice. Everyone else will be pardoned.”

“You believe him, eh?”

“I don’t care anymore. Again we are losing, eh? Let them win. So what? I just want peace. I want to live in peace.”

“You fight well for someone who’s losing. Tell
them
to stop attacking. Then we’ll have peace.”

“They aren’t attacking!” Louis looked up. Not a round had fallen since predawn. He looked at Teck. A smile cracked his grouchiness. “Do...” he began. It was hard to say because to say it might hex it. Still he could not keep from blurting, “Do you think it’s over?”

“Get the radio,” Teck said. “Maybe...”

“It’s dead,” Louis interrupted.

“Hey, you’re back in,” the shopkeep said pleasantly.

“For mail and provisions,” John Sullivan answered. He had been living in a rented cabin along Owl Creek in the Badlands of western South Dakota for nearly two years.

“Mrs. Em’s got those books you ordered,” the man said. “Been there awhile.”

Sullivan looked at the round-faced man. “Hum?” he grunted.

“Something about physics, Em said. I think that’s what she said.” Sullivan’s reserve made the man uncomfortable. “Quantum mechanics, right? And organic chemistry.”

“Good,” John Sullivan said. The flow of his thoughts masked the shopkeep’s inquiry. Since the spring of 1973 he had secluded himself; solitarily hunting, fishing, hiking the streams and hills into eastern Wyoming. In the fall of 1973 he’d shot, cleaned and butchered a deer but it had made him queasy, the meat and bones without hide looked too much like human flesh he’d seen without skin. He had not hunted since. In the winter he holed up in the cabin, read the Bible and began studying an advanced mathematics text someone had left behind. He had no radio, no television, no stereo, no phone. He received no mail, no newspapers or magazines. Early in 1974 he had ordered a set of textbooks on chemistry and microbiology and set out to learn, for his own pleasure, what they had to offer. Then came the physics and philosophy of science texts. How beautifully, he saw, each revelation dovetailed with all the others. And where they didn’t, he saw, it was not the material but the presenter who erred. All year he fished and trapped and read and tried to formulate for himself, for his own satisfaction, a theory of existence which could encompass all life, all energy, all the absurdities and hurt and all the wonderment and love.

“Well,” the shopkeep said, “that’s all you ordered. Might take a paper, too. Don’t hurt none to know what’s goin on in the world.”

“Thanks,” John Sullivan said. He lugged the cardboard boxes out to his jeep and drove to Mrs. Em’s Last Chapter book and gift shop—a store stuffed with Indian moccasins and turquoise bracelets and one case of books for bored travelers passing through in their motorized travel homes. As he parked he glanced at the newspaper in the box on the passenger seat. As if there were no other words on the page a byline jumped at him: Rita Donaldson. Quickly he opened the door. His head jerked back to the box but he did not read the headline. He slammed the canvas wire-frame door. It popped back at him. He closed it more deliberately. He’d been thinking of something he’d read about particle physics, about how everything is on a cyclic continuum of creation, transformation, destruction. Over and over. Had been speculating on the ramifications of the cycle—if one observed the smallest elements, creation and destruction or annihilation did not exist—only transformation, a continual recombination into different patterns. Then Rita Donaldson had stopped him.

Sullivan stood by the side of the jeep. The morning was clear, crisp. After the winter it felt warm. He cupped a hand about his face, drew it down over his beard, down his chin and neck. Then he wiped it on the side of his dungarees. He had not read a newspaper in fifteen months, since he’d visited his folks at Christmas in 1973. At that time he’d said to his Uncle Gus and his sister, Margie, and her new husband, Bob, “All the evidence pointed to this incredible buildup by the North Viet Namese. There was some hard proof but no one wanted to exploit it. Instead, it seemed the whole world was beaming in on Thieu and Lon Nol, and because they had access to it they exploited every bit of corruption and ineptitude they saw.”

“Oh cut the bullshit, John,” Bob had said forcefully. “We’ve been reading
The New York Times
while you’ve been hiding in that cabin. We know you guys bombed those places so bad there’s hardly a civilian left. We know what impact the war and America have had on those poor people. How our country’s turned Cambodia, especially Cambodia, into a goddamned moonscape!”

“What?!” John had looked at his uncle expecting some support from the World War Two veteran but Gus had his head hung and his eyes on the floor.

“Okay, now.” His father had come into the room. “There’ll be no more talk of this. It’s Christmas. This is no time for politics.”

Sullivan walked into Mrs. Em’s, purchased his ordered books and left without speaking more than two sentences. In the jeep he glanced at the paper. Then he looked at the window of the Last Chapter. Mrs. Em was peeking at him. Thinks I’m out of it, he thought. He looked back to the paper. He had not even known the date: Monday, 31 March 1975. Sullivan started the jeep, let it idle. The front page was full of stories of battles raging in South Viet Nam and Cambodia. His eyes wouldn’t focus. He couldn’t read Rita’s article. Instead he began one with a
New York Times
credit: “Western diplomats,” the article began, “say that the Lon Nol regime has treated its people so poorly, it has forfeited the right to govern.” Sullivan huffed. He did not read on. In the middle, just below the fold, there was a map of Cambodia with five arrows ending in exploding stars. One star engulfed Neak Luong. Sullivan gritted his teeth, thought, Boy, did she make a fool of me. She was probably part of the KR’s people’s intelligence network. External reconnaissance! What a jerk I was.

He looked back at Rita Donaldson’s article, jumped to the middle. “When the end comes...” His eyes jumped to another paragraph: “...the hatred here runs so deep,” she’d written, “victory and peace may be more brutal than the brutality of this war.” The theory of relativity, he thought, allows one to experience time and space, life and death, as abstractions.

He put the paper into the grocery box. He would save it, but he would not, could not, yet, read it.

With her right hand Vathana balanced the small bundle atop her head. She walked the worn path gingerly, watching for sharp objects. Quickly she was to the alley and then to the street which led through Neak Luong. As she walked she tried not to look, tried to protect herself from a cityscape which could have been plague-ravaged Europe during the bleakest period of the Dark Ages, tried not to witness the pleading eyes of fatalistic beggars, the dull faces of children resigned to lives of poverty, starvation and war. A maimed soldier sitting splay-legged in a pocked doorway called to her. Her scant energy drained. She attempted to not see him, not hear him. Still the drain. Each shattered building, each burned-out ruin, each tattered lean-to of plastic sucked life from her exhausted body. The urge to sit, to lean into a doorway, to sleep, to join the thousands of homeless, listless, grabbed her. She fought it, attempted to shed it.

Earlier, as she and Sophan had set about their separate tasks, she’d been snared by a spurt of timid eagerness—by hope. “It’s so quiet out there,” she’d said to Sophan.

“Yes,” Sophan whispered back. “Why have the shells stopped? What do you think’s happening?”

“I don’t...” Vathana paused. Then her eyes widened. “Clean the children,” she declared. “Dress them in their best clothes.”

“Do you think...” Sophan’s entire face lit. “Oh Sweet Blessed One, is it over?” Sophan had put a hand to her lips to hide the words but she could not hide the anticipation which had infected all Neak Luong. “What will they look like?”

Vathana hunched, lowered her voice. “Like us, eh?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. They’re Khmer, after all.”

“Today,” Vathana asked rhetorically, “you’re at the hospital? Maybe their radio is working.”

Vathana had stepped to the tent corner where all three of her children were playing. She bent, kissed each. A melancholy smile spread across her face. “I must bring your father his clean shirt.” She smiled. “Sophan will clean you up. Today you must listen carefully. And”—she tapped a finger into her left palm—“stay clean.”

“Ba-ba,” Samnang said happily.

Sophan had clutched the five-and-a-half-year-old boy. “He knows, Angel,” she’d said. “He’s sensitive to things we can’t feel. I told you he’d be perfect, eh? In his way.” Vathana had smiled a euphoric fearful smile and hugged the three children and Sophan. Then she’d added the shirt to the bundle for Teck and Louis.

Vathana walked around a shell crater. Inside, at the center, she could see a half-buried rocket canister. She picked her way over the debris only to enter the debris ring of the next crater, then the next. By one crater people were picking at the mashed remains of a dog. She turned away, detoured around a pockmarked house. Behind the house she saw a young woman holding a small girl. The infant looked peaceful, angelic, except for one eye slightly opened and her left leg and foot neatly missing.

Vathana stalled. She had to decide to stay, to help, to mourn, or to go on. “Arrange for a funeral,” she ordered the dazed young mother. She walked on. It was a snap decision and it haunted her even as she told herself, First I must tend to my husband and to the living.

“There are no KR in sight,” Teck told Vathana a few minutes later. He had withdrawn to their rendezvous point, a vacant shack near the crematory.

“Doesn’t anyone know?” Vathana said. She’d opened the bundle and given Teck the clean shirt.

“What else do you have?” He unbuttoned his filthy fatigue blouse to remove it.

“These.” Vathana removed two bread rolls. “Once,” she said, “I would pay four riels. Now, they cost eight hundred. And...” She brought out two rice balls wrapped in pages removed from Ith Sarin’s book. “Also”—she smiled at Teck—“these.” From a shirt pocket she delicately pulled two cigarettes.

“I have something for you, too,” Teck said.

“What?” Vathana asked.

From a pant pocket he pulled Louis’s cloth. Carefully he began unwrapping. “Remember when we were married?” he said mischievously. Her eyes flashed at his words. “Remember?” He teased her.

“I remember,” she answered.

“It’s...” He stopped. “This is from Louis for food,” he said seriously, “but maybe...for a minute”—he held up the thin gold ring—“I could put it on your finger and pretend, like the wedding song, you are still jealous of my hot green chili, because...because you love me.”

“I am jealous”—Vathana touched his thin chest—“because, like the song, I love you. I shall be jealous of you every day.”

“If the nation is to fall,” the stocky doctor said to an orderly, “the new nation will need doctors, eh?”

Sophan looked at their backs, looked beyond them into the ward. The hospital had been rebuilt after the 1973 American bomb had hit it, but it was much too small for a city of sixty thousand plus defense force troops during active battle. Each bed was cramped with five, seven, ten patients. Rivers of diarrhea flowed from cots of those so ill they couldn’t rise. Clouds of flies swarmed amid aisles packed with family members.

“Then you think it’s over, Doctor?” the orderly asked.

“I wouldn’t have returned if I didn’t think that traitor was about to lose his head,” Doctor Sarin Sam Ol answered.

“But surely, now,” the orderly retorted, “President Ford will send in troops. As a matter of honor.”

“Honor?” Doctor Sarin scoffed bitterly. “In Neak Luong? All the world knows America’s shame. My sons...” The doctor stopped, turned, stared at Sophan with his good eye.

“Is it over?” she asked weakly. “We’ve no radio...”

“Ha! It was over years ago,” Sarin Sam Ol snapped. “My eldest son is dead. By my second son’s words, FANK is ready to surrender. My
peou
, in the maquis, now he can come home.”

To the Krahom, Preah Vihear was a
svayat
or autonomous region. In the “secret zone” south of that city Nang had prepared his team for the final victory. He was bitter. “A high-level reeducation facility,” Met Sen had told him, “to instruct ‘students’ how to live in a pure society.” Banished, he’d thought. Shunted aside just as victory is within our grasp. “Angkar Leou wishes for you to go forward and establish Site 169,” he’d been ordered. Expelled, he’d thought. Kept from the rewards of conquest. His bitterness imbued each of his
a-ksae teos,
his “telephone wires,” his new soldiers who would use the wire to bind students’ hands behind their backs.

Nang stood at the edge of a small clearing. He burped and hot acid seared his throat. In February there had been a secret high-level meeting of the Kampuchean United Revolutionary Front—the Center plus zonal secretaries and delegates from the
dumbon
and
phumpheak
levels and from the
svayats.
Nang had not been invited. He touched his face and the bitterness sizzled in him. He’d received but a verbal briefing. All the sacrifices, he thought. The years in the swamps, the months below the bombs. My face. Every
a-ksae teo
knew. Every one of them had been betrayed with him, abandoned with him, isolated with him. Hate coagulated them into a demonic band.

“We’ll need a hundred peasants,” Nang said to his aide.

“Yes Met Nang.” The young boy’s answer snapped.

“This is much too small. Clear it so when I stand here, I can see the Dang Rek cliff without looking through trees.”

“Yes Met Nang.”

“Have it done in ten days,” Nang said. He did not look at the boy-soldier. Met Sar’s words, from the messenger, were simple. “Immediately upon victory, all cities will be emptied. Prepare for many new people. Annihilation of class enemies is the highest form of class struggle.”