For the Sake of All Living Things (111 page)

“A little,” Vathana said. In her mind she asked the Lord Buddha to forgive her for using such vagueness.

“Throw it away,” the man whispered. “They’ll say you’re a capitalist.”

“How do you know this?”

“Don’t ask. Cut your hair.”

“I’ll roll it up.”

“It would be better to cut it now. Angkar will demand it later.”

“The Khmer Rouge?”

“The Organization. Is that baby yours?!”

“She’s my daughter.”

“She’s not Khmer.”

“I was married to an...a Frenchman. He was killed by the bombers in 1973...before she was born.”

“Tell no one of him. Blacken her hair. They’ll think you’re an agent or a spy.”

“Who?”

“ssshh.”

At midday a few armed yotheas joined the column. They were smaller than the troops who had taken Neak Luong but they too were without smiles, seemingly without emotions.

“More quick. Walk more quick.” The yotheas scowled. “You, you don’t go more quick.” They singled out an elderly woman who shuffled by the road’s edge.

“My legs,” Vathana heard the woman say, “are too old to go more quickly, Nephew.” The woman’s manner was sweet and respectful.

“You run,” one yothea screamed furiously.

“Run?!” The old woman stopped and smiled. “Me?” She laughed gently, gaily. “If I could run, I would have joined you in the forest years ago.”

The angry yothea lifted his rifle. A shot cracked. Vathana saw the woman fly back as if a sudden gust had caught a leaf. Then she dropped without life. Vathana covered Su Livanh’s head with a corner of her krama, pulled Samol tightly to her leg and doubled their pace. As they passed the body she kept her head down, her eyes on the road. With horror she saw Samnang’s feet. From an aid package the boy had taken a pair of red, high-top sneakers. They were Samnang’s pride. At the next stop they would go.

The road was now full of uprooted city dwellers and villagers and the roadside was littered with corpses. For all the walking their progress was painfully slow. It took them two days to reach the road junction which led to the villa where Vathana’s father-in-law had been assassinated in 1971. How strange it looked on the rise. What had it seen? The NVA, the KVM, the return of FANK and the ARVN. American bombs had cratered the lawn yet someone had restored the landscaping. From the road Vathana could just see two groups of people standing amid bright bougainvillea and jacaranda blooms. As the column shuffled north, the grounds became clearer. Vathana noted one group of perhaps three hundred men, many in FANK officers’ uniforms. The second group, from the hospital she thought—she recognized a nurse, then several, then an aide—was much smaller. Scattered about them were dark-clad yotheas. As she watched, the scene transformed soundlessly. The officers made four long neat ranks. Above them, by the arch from which Pech Lim Song and his old servant, Sambath, had been hung, a man was addressing the assembly. The civilian staff clumped to one side. Now Vathana saw children. They were on the villa’s great veranda watching as if attending a parade. Vathana felt relief, joy. She thought to break from the road column, to join the people at the villa. It’s a sign, she thought. An omen. Reconciliation. She placed a hand over Samnang’s shoulder, turned him slightly and whispered, “Your grandpa built that house.” Behind the children on the veranda were a few women but mostly the young appeared to be unattended. Vathana snatched a glance toward the rear of the column. Far back she saw three yotheas helping a family with small children. Again she thought it was a reconciliation. Again her hopes rose.

She stopped, stopped her son. She was about to step from the column when men in the rear rank began jolting, falling. Vathana’s eyes narrowed. From other ranks men bolted only to be seemingly upended in midstride. Then the sound. Explosive banging of a dozen automatic weapons. The civilians stood paralyzed. Children’s screams reached the column. On the road refugees hung their heads, shuffled more quickly. Vathana clamped her hands over Su Livanh’s ears and eyes but she could not turn away. Now hospital members attempted to run only to be toppled, to fall like rag dolls tossed casually down on soft verdant lawn. Red blotches burst upon the green. Vathana shook. Don’t look back. Children were brought to find their dead parents then forced to watch as the bodies were disemboweled. Vathana froze. Evacuees behind her nudged her, pushed her. Still she was unable to turn.

“Bub-ba-ba!” Samnang pulled. He no longer found the scene of interest.

“Divine Buddha...” she whispered. “Say this,” she said to her children, “it will protect you. ‘Divine Buddha...’ ”

Late afternoon of the seventh day of their trek, Vathana was stopped at a checkpoint. The middle-aged man who’d warned her earlier had stayed with her for three days, had somehow obtained rice and water for their meals, and had disappeared leaving her with most of the ten-kilo sack of good rice. His last words to her were, “Try to appear ugly. Don’t be the Angel. Some of them like beautiful girls.”

“What is your name?” the checkpoint guard asked.

“Yani.”

“Do you have any papers?”

“No.”

“Read this.” Vathana grabbed the page printed in French and English. She turned it clumsily sideways. Then upside down. “Read this one.” The interviewer snatched the first page from her hand and handed her one printed in Khmer script.

Vathana held it for some moments. The interviewer fussed impatiently. “Kam—pu—che—a.” She read slowly. She smiled at the interviewer, flashing blackened teeth.

“Angkar Leou wishes you to write who you are. Do you understand?” The man handed her a ballpoint pen and a pad and indicated that she should move to an area where others were scribbling furiously. Vathana leaned forward, over the table. Samnang leaned in. He stared at the page then blurted, “Bub-ba-ba-ba.”

“Bu. Bu-bu.” Vathana mimicked him lovingly.

“Ba. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.” The boy laughed loudly.

In childish strokes Vathana marked the page. “Over there,” the interviewer snapped. Her filthy appearance disgusted him. And the baby, covered with muck. To the line behind her he called politely, “Angkar needs pilots. Engineers. Teachers. Anyone who speaks French.” He moved to push Vathana from the table. “When you’re finished bring it back.”

“Done,” Vathana said. She had written only, Yani. Mom: Sok. Home: Sath Din.

“I’ve never heard of it. Never mind. Get out of here. Take this pass and follow that group. You can plant. Next.”

Vathana led the children to the end of a long line of women and children. “Where are we going, Sister?” she asked the woman ahead of her.

“To the reorganization center,” the woman answered.

“What is that?”

“You!” a yothea called sternly. Vathana glanced at the armed boy. “You, Met Srei, comrade girl, Angkar forbids you to talk in line.” The boy wandered up the line.

“they are sending us to the forest to work and to be educated,” the woman whispered.

“with the children?” Vathana said without looking at her.

“they’re taking the children to the child center, it’s better, yes? one cannot watch them in the forest.”

That night Vathana slipped from the group. If anyone noticed, if anyone missed her, she did not know. She did not care. All night she and her children headed east along a secondary road. Much of the way Samnang carried Su Livanh on his back while Vathana carried Samol. “We’re going to see Grandpa and Grandma,” she told them again and again. What had been at best a vague thought to give her direction the day she’d left Neak Luong now became both her tactical plan and her guiding spiritual strength. She would unite grandchildren and grandparents for at least a brief time and the Samsara, the Wheel of Life, would be fulfilled.

The secondary road led east, circumventing Prey Veng, then north through low fields. For a week they walked at night and hid in the treelines or hedges or in abandoned peasant homes by day. Food was not yet a problem. Many of the small village silos had at least handfuls of rice. Some had bushels. Water, also, was present, if not abundant. Many of the cisterns had cups. Some of the homes had jars. Only a few wells were putrid with decaying corpses. What was not abundant was people. Here and there a village seemed to have totally escaped the effects of the war. Farmers worked their fields preparing for the coming rains. Women repaired thatched roofs while children played in the shade beneath stilt houses. But mostly the land was empty. At each inhabited hamlet Samnang asked, “Bub-ba-ba?” He wanted to enter, to be with the people. In Cambodia to live alone, separated from all others, was very rare. Growing up in the refugee camp he’d had a hundred friends, a thousand aunts and uncles. Always his mother stopped him.

“We cannot trust anyone. Not until we talk to your grandpa.”

“Bub? Ba-ba-ba.”

“Are we going to walk all the way?” Samol asked, her voice as petite as her carriage.

“If we must. A terrible evil has been unleashed, but so you will not be frightened, say, ‘Divine Lord Buddha...’ ” Each morning Vathana prayed with her children, prayed for protection, prayed for a successful journey to Phum Sath Din. Each night they walked. They spoke to no one. They avoided being seen. On 17 and 18 April the villages and camps they circled were ablaze with wanton rifle fire, music, even some skyrockets. They did not ask why. On the 19th the celebrations ceased. They had reached the Mekong at Tonle Bet across from Kompong Cham. To head north they would either have to cross the river or cross Highway 7 and follow the secondary roads through the Chup Plantation toward Kratie.

Vathana could not decide. For a day they stopped, hid. That night they did not move. Nor the next day. Don’t look back, she told herself. How would Captain Sullivan solve this? What did he say to do? What did he do to escape? But he didn’t have to carry children. Vathana worried. She moved their tiny camp to a small hollow below Highway 7. From there she could glimpse the roadway through a hundred meters of forest. The road was packed. Thousands of people. Where were they being sent? Chams by dress. The detritus of the evacuees was piled so high along the road’s edge it blocked her view. How to cross? How to move north? How to get to Phum Sath Din?

“You must stay here. Do you understand?” The children were very frightened. “Mama will be back soon. You must not move. You must be very quiet.”

At dusk she walked toward the road. The sides of the hollow converged like a funnel, the bottom rolled. From the small encampment she had not been able to see into the bottom of the rolls. She approached slowly, tree by tree. A radio played. A monkey whooped. Chills ran from arm to arm. She leaned into a tree for support. A headless corpse toppled from the other side. She stared at the base of the trees. Before her, beside her, dare she look back, sitting against the trunk of each tree was a body holding its head in its lap. Her heart ached. She wished to flee but she drove herself cautiously forward. Then a lap head moved. She froze. It was crying. No. A child. A child lay its head on the lap of its father, lay tightly holding, hugging the headless man’s leg. Vathana pressed toward the road. She could smell the smoke and see the fires of the burning city across the river. She could hear the radio of a Krahom cadreman. The voice was Norodom Sihanouk’s: “...in victory the Revolution will achieve genuine happiness...”

There was a break in the flow of people on the road. To get here, she thought, the evacuees must have been ferried across the river. “...we have attained our sovereignty, our independence...” Yes. They must come in groups, she thought. “...With the traitorous Lon Nol and his clique eliminated we shall defend and construct the most beautiful nation...” They won. Vathana felt nothing. Win. Lose. It made no difference now.

Quickly she scurried to her children. They were gone. Frantic she searched their rest area. Their belongings were gone. Then, whispered, she heard, “ba-ba-ba.” They had hidden. How her heart leaped. How wonderfully they’d adapted.

At midnight they crossed the road, their first steps into the sparsely populated regions of the Northeast. In the dim light of a crescent moon they walked, stumbled along paths of the old rubber tree plantation. Vathana had not seen the trees with their silver bark since coming south to marry Teck. At that time, she recalled, the plantation forest had been perfectly ordered, row after row; the aisles between had been clear, clean, looking manicured. Now the aisles were ripped with craters, the trees splintered and felled. Dead branches cluttered the ground. Everywhere were signs of war. They moved slowly, fearing ambush by bandits or...or who? Forest spirits? “You are good trees,” Vathana whispered as they entered an area devastated by American bombs searching for NVA tanks. “Be compassionate, trees. I know you won’t harm my children.” More trashed foliage: NVA artillery aiming for ARVN incursioners. Farther, the charred hulks of KK Chicom trucks, an old bivouac site, a burned-out clearing where FANK units had fallen. Oh, Vathana thought, if the trees could talk. She pulled Samnang closer to her side. All the misery, all the fear, the pain, ache, worry, disillusionment, all which had been put on hold, all which she’d steeled herself against, first to assist the refugees, then to help the associations and finally to flee, to walk home with her children, in the seemingly silent security of the shattered rubber tree forest—all cascaded to her heart.

“bu. bu-ba. bu-ba.”

Vathana squatted, pulled the girls in, hugged all three. “Soon,” she wept, “soon we will see Grandpa and he will fix all this. He loves you very much. He loves me.”

That night they did not go far. With the seeming emptiness of the forest, and with the fear of wandering aimlessly in the dark, Vathana decided it would be best to travel mornings and evenings when she could be certain they were on a northerly course. They lay on the mat, covered themselves with the thin blanket. The children—how good they’ve been, she thought—slept. But Vathana could not. She prayed. She planned. She projected. She meditated. In so many ways the trip had been easier than she’d expected. Food had been plentiful. Twigs, straw, paper had been easy to collect for their daily cooking fire. But the sights. They had been beyond her wildest nightmares. As she recounted their trek she tallied the bodies, the human debris at roadsides, the neatly stacked corpses at the execution sites. A hundred here, a few there, four hundred...and on and on. She meditated on the tragedy which had struck her people and the sadness of the four thousand dead she’d seen since leaving Neak Luong. She cried for the murdered. She shuddered. She wept asking, “Why? Why, Teck, have you abandoned me? Why, Sophan? Why, John Sullivan, do you abandon your daughter?” By first light Vathana had convinced herself that the slaughter was an aberrant action, a part of the final offensive which had overflowed into the victory. Soon the country with its new army and new masters would settle back. Soon Samdech Euv would reign. Compassion would return.