For the Sake of All Living Things (112 page)

The rubber plantation gave way to the wilds of the Srepok Forest and the lonely progress of the small family slowed further. Now there was no more rice. Daily patrols could be seen or heard on the main roads or in new camps being hacked from the jungle. Old villages had been abandoned, torched, the wells polluted with the carcasses of draft animals. Execution sites, small in comparison to the ones in the heavily populated area to the south, were not uncommon. The Srepok had become a no-man’s-land. Even the animals had abandoned the region. There was no whoop of monkeys, no caw of birds. Only mosquitos and black flies flourished. By April’s end when the first slight rains dampened the dusty earth, Vathana and her children had reached an area just east of Kratie. They had walked nearly three hundred kilometers in twenty-two days; they had nearly an equal distance yet to cover. Vathana’s feet were raw from the constant walking, carrying Su Livanh. Samnang seemed to be thriving. Each day he became a better tree climber, here picking bananas, there a coconut, at five and a half, partially deaf, dumb, with one side of his body contorted and asthenic, the forager and provider. Occasionally they crossed old paddies which should now be being turned, readied for the May planting, but which lay fallow, abandoned. Occasionally they crossed the route taken by a column of deportees. Always it was the same, the road’s edge littered with corpses—people who could not keep up, the aged, the very young, those previously wounded. Often they had not been killed but simply left to die of thirst. Here an elderly woman hung at a smashed water-supply pipe; there a man lay facedown in a puddle reached too late; bloated corpses emitting the stench of decay. Always now Vathana and the children were thirsty.

“In a few days it will rain,” Vathana told them. “Maybe tomorrow. Divine Buddha...Say it with me. ‘Divine Buddha, we are not frightened.’ ” Their progress slowed further as they spent ever-increasing amounts of time foraging for food, searching for clean water. From the modern conveniences of prewar Neak Luong through the refugee camp years to the first steps north to now, time had accelerated in reverse, dropping Vathana from an agricultural and early industrial era, through all the steps between, back 10,000 years to foraging subsistence. The rich ecosystem of the Srepok favored them. Edible plants were plentiful; damp-land newts and dry-wood efts were numerous. In order to preserve their walking time they cooked only in midafternoon, throwing into the pot all they had gathered in the morning. Still the foraging slowed them.

Still it did not rain. Their lips cracked. Their throats parched. Water became an obsession, yet Vathana dared neither turn west toward the Mekong nor tarry at any of the dry rills long enough to dig for wetness. “Soon. Soon. Grandpa will have water. Grandpa knows where. Grandpa knows how. He loves you very much. He loves me, too.”

Cuts on Vathana’s heels festered. The pain shot to her ankles, up the Achilles tendons to the base of her calves. She did not see Samol drink from the cistern with the two rotting heads. Had she seen, from a distance, she questioned whether she would have had the strength to stop her. By evening the child was ill. Vathana carried her. Samnang carried Su Livanh. Vathana was faint.

“ba. baba. ba! ba! ba!”

“what is it, precious, heart?” Samnang pulled his mother, directed her. She had been tottering aimlessly. She knew it but she’d been unable to concentrate.

Samnang pulled hard. Vathana stumbled after him. She stumbled up a slight incline then down a sudden dip to the shallow valley of the small Kampi. Water trickled between rocks in the riverbed. Samnang pulled yet harder but Vathana held him back. She knelt and forced him to his knees. Samol’s stomach had been gurgling loudly for an hour. Now, as they said a prayer of thanksgiving, she heaved. Vathana startled. She cleaned her daughter’s mouth, “slowly, precious heart,” she whispered. “there may be soldiers.”

“Bub-bub.”
The boy blurted, his utterance as if saying, I couldn’t care less. He bolted for the stream. Su Livanh, her little legs no match for the undergrowth, tumbled after him. Vathana followed. Before she drank she washed Samol’s face and mouth and let the child drink her fill.

“mama, i don’t feel good,” Samol complained. She heaved the water she’d just swallowed.

For four days they stayed by the Kampi. Beneath rocks in the riverbed Samnang found tiny thin-shelled clams and hundreds of hermit crabs, Vathana’s physical strength returned. She cleaned the sores on her heels, and the pains which had shot to her calves subsided. She washed the mud from Su Livanh’s hair and skin and she washed all their clothes. Still she did not feel strong. Lethargy, depression, exhaustion grasped her mind.

Samol had not been able to keep anything in her stomach. She could barely walk from the sleeping mat to the river. The first hard rain fell in mid-May and the girl shook with chills all night. In the morning she’d woken with diarrhea squirts on her legs. Vathana washed her, bundled her in the blanket. The trek continued. Samol cried for hours. “It hurts, mama.” She clamped her elbows to her sides, her tiny arms and hands tight to her chest. Through the blanket, from her face, Vathana could feel the girl’s fever radiating. “It hurts so bad, mama.” Then Samol lay limp, spent, in her mother’s arms.

Now it rained every day. Vathana decided to head west, to find Highway 13, to find a village or camp. Despite the water Samol became lighter and lighter. “We must find a doctor,” she told Samnang. “We must find medicine. What root would the
khrou
boil? What will stay down?”

They walked all night. They walked all the next day. They walked until dusk. Samnang never complained. He carried Su Livanh on his back. She whined about her legs being sore. He carried her on his hip as Sophan had carried him as an infant. They saw no one. The land was deserted. Highway 13 was empty. Not even a roadblock. They walked north hoping to be interdicted, to be captured. Samol’s abdomen became hard. She shriveled. In the dark Vathana tried to force her to sip, to drink just a little water. It rolled from her mouth.

Now they rested. Now they foraged. Now they walked. Days passed. Vathana said little. She carried Samol. Samnang carried Su Livanh. They did not seek the security of the forest but walked the highway north. Several times they were stopped. The old people of the “liberated” zones had been forbidden to give aid to the deportees, yet in true Khmer tradition the family found small bundles of rice, a few vegetables, even a cooked eel in amongst their belongings. John, Vathana thought in mental flaccidity, why, why have you abandoned me? Why have you abandoned your daughter? Don’t look back. Divine Buddha, I am not afraid. Sophan, will you carry Samol for me? She’s not heavy. Teck would carry her if he weren’t at the front.

South of Stung Treng where Highway 13 junctions with 19 they were stopped. A yothea demanded their papers, their passes. Vathana freely handed him the blue cards from her bundle. He screamed at her but the sharp words fell softly into the mush of her thoughts. He pulled the scarf from Su Livanh’s head. Her light hair shocked him. Then he peeled back the blanket from Samol’s face. The skin was black, wrinkled. “Leprosy,” Vathana said softly.

The yothea jumped back. “Bu-ba-bah-bah,” Samnang blurted.

“It’s gotten into his ears,” Vathana whispered. She pointed to Su Livanh. “Into her eyes and hair.”

The soldier stepped back. He yelled to others along the road and they too backed away. “Go. Go now. Get away from here.”

As they left they heard the radio, again Samdech Euv’s voice: “...A general amnesty has been decreed. All soldiers and workers of the Lon Nol regime...”

It took them six more days to reach the bridge which crossed the Srepok to Phum Sath Din. Vathana no longer looked at Samol. Nor could she look upon her other children. It was midday. Through the canopy Vathana sensed that high clouds had gathered and that rain was imminent. She paused. She whispered the prayer to the spirit of the water which Chhuon had taught her as a child. The forest about her was very high, very dense, much denser than she remembered but, she vaguely thought, that is because I’ve lived in the city for many years.

“Bub-bub ba bub.” Samnang was anxious to cross. They had reached their destination.

Vathana prayed against the evidence of her vision that what little she could view was a matter of war weariness. She dragged her feet. “Come here,” she said to Samnang. “Let me straighten you.” Methodically she preened her son.

“Grandpa,” Su Livanh said. “Grandpa and Grandma.”

“I want them to see how pretty you are,” Vathana whispered. Tears dropped from her eyes.

“Mama.” Su Livanh smiled. “Samol?”

Vathana did not uncover her other daughter. Instead she straightened her own clothes, let down her hair and re wrapped it in her krama.

They crossed the bridge. The high trees made her feel very small. They walked the old street to where her home should have been. The jungle had encroached upon the clearing, had invaded the shattered structures and interned the memories of the village. Go to your home village, Vathana thought. Go to the village of your parents or your grandparents. That was the order. But what are we to do if the village is no longer there? Now she could not keep from crying openly. She collapsed, trembling on the dirt floor of the old orchard. She dropped Samol. “Papa,” she cried. “Papa, I need you. You haven’t seen your granddaughter. I can’t carry her any farther.” Vathana cried hysterically. “Mama. Mama, see my son. Oh, Mama. Mama, you have three beautiful grandchildren.”

“Do not cry, child.” There is a voice in the orchard. Vathana looks. Through her tears she sees nothing. She’s not sure she heard the voice.

“Bub-ba. Bah-ba-ba-ba.”

“Don’t be frightened.” It is an old woman. Perhaps not so old. She is in rags. “What’s your name?”

“Cahuom Vathana.” Vathana has not moved. From where she has fallen she sees the wraith standing by the angel house. The post is thick with vines but the little shrine is intact.

“Then you are my niece.” The voice is lithesome.

“Who are you?” Vathana sees the woman has no eyes. “Where is the village?”

“Grandpa?” Su Livanh whispers.

“I came from the pile of the dead, Niece. But I am not dead. My husband wanted me to go with him but I told him it was better he go alone.”

“Go? Go where?”

“They have all gone. Years now. You must go too. You can’t...”

“How do you live, Auntie?”

“I find food.” She laughs an ugly distorted cackle and Su Livanh crushes to her mother’s side. “Bury the dead child here. In the orchard. Then you must go. Go west.” Again the cackle. “You can’t stay here. Go now. West. Otherwise they will send you to the ancestors.”

The small paddies carved from the jungle in late 1973 and improved in 1974 by the inhabitants of Phum 117 had been abandoned. New jungle had been cut without leaving treelines. The people were roused at four in the morning and sent to work moving the new dike, constructing the connectors, filling the year-old feeder trenches which regulated the irrigation level. Eight hundred people worked the new system, Chhuon amongst them. He clawed at the laterite clods as he planned, prayed, attempting to achieve the impossible, a viable agricultural system on a landscape as inviting as the moon. At seven the workers stopped for a ten-minute breakfast of rice soup, then they pushed on till noon. Again they rested, rested not the traditional Cambodian siesta, 12 to 4, but broke for an hour. The rains were coming. The new people were coming. They worked through the heat of the afternoon and into the dusk. Again they rested, again for but an hour. Then by the light of bonfires built of new-cut jungle they pushed on until eleven, even midnight.

“It must be done. It must be done. We must finish,” Met Vong pressed Chhuon. “When the dikes are complete the people can rest.”

“They’ll be too tired to plant.”

“New people can plant.”

“Will they? Will they bring enough food to last until harvest?”

“Make the rice grow quickly. Angkar holds you responsible.” Chhuon’s hut was still the one-man cocoon he’d rewoven after Sok’s death in December 1973. He had made several improvements. Heavy branches in the platform had been replaced with hollow bamboo making the cocoon lighter, more easily moved. Both ends could now be opened to catch the slightest breeze, or closed for total privacy. In the walls were open pockets for his few belongings and the hidden pocket for his notebooks. At midnight, a week after the first city dwellers arrived, he wearily crawled through the hatch, closed it, lay his head on a flimsy straw pad and became the chrysalis of a future free man. He listened carefully. Would a
chrops
crawl under the platform tonight? For the informer who caught him, anyone with a notebook, Chhuon knew, it would mean extra rice or a day’s rest. In hunger, Chhuon also knew, people would do anything. He listened. He’d laid a few dried leaves beneath the platform. With it low to the ground it would be difficult for a
chrops
to trick him. Chhuon smiled. Very slowly he raised one hand. He let his fingers find the side pocket, let two split the banana leaf and snip to find the book. Slowly he removed it. Now he rolled noisily, hacked, resettled as if asleep. The smoke from bonfires hung on the ground amid the small huts and the one neary dorm. All about people coughed. He coughed himself into position to scribble a few notes.

The hysterical know-nothingness of the enforcer, and thus of Angkar, is beyond description. All knowledge of cultivation is subordinate to Angkar’s will. Yet one can live in a draconian land, only if one follows the rules. Now we are Democratic Kampuchea. The rains come. New people come. Gone is the proper rhythm of life, the rhythm of rice. Gone is Khum 4, replaced by Sangkat 4. To earn merit by showing compassion is prohibited. Tonight I shall guide Mir and his family to the path to the border. I pray they find safety.

For a week they came. For a month. For two months. At first a trickle. Then a flow. Then a constant plodding procession. By July they numbered ten thousand. They had no food, few possessions. They were more battered, more emaciated than the residents of Phum Sath Din had been two and a half years earlier. New People. City dwellers. Four of five were women or small children.