For the Sake of All Living Things (117 page)

Met Kosal, Nang’s bodyguard, held Chhuon by a rope attached to the old man’s left ankle, held him a respectful six meters from Nang. Chhuon’s black trousers were worn through at the knees, thin at the thighs and ass, tattered at the cuff. His black shirt was frayed, patched in so many places it was a rag. His krama was too thin, the cloth on the verge of disintegrating. Physically—from imprisonment, from beatings, from malnutrition and slave labor—he had lost his former stature, had shrunk in height a full twelve centimeters, had atrophied of muscle and bone to the point that although he stood erect he appeared slumped. At one end, his eyes had gone bad, his vision beyond five paces blurry, closer than arm’s length, dizzying; at the other, his feet, the connective tissues deteriorated, splayed like frog flippers on the polished floor.

Nang barely glanced at the pathetic creature. In his impeccable uniform, in his spotless house, in his well-fed condition and in his iron-hard nineteen-year-old body, he could not imagine his needing this
anoupracheachon
, this subhuman. It was only an old rice farmer, like all old rice farmers. Nang did note the filthy feet on his floor, made a mental note to have the floor cleaned when the feet were removed.

“The people are hungry,” Chhuon said simply. How horribly scarred this one’s face, he thought. Like the one who...on the march from Phum Sath Din...Who saved...No...this one is much worse. Nang scowled. “It is not necessary,” Chhuon continued. Suddenly the left corner of Nang’s mouth jerked down. “Minor changes will protect the soil and ensure adequate yields for the Revolution.”

The tic at Nang’s mouth jumped again. He pushed it with his fingers to make it cease. “Met Arn said you’ve drawn plans. Are you an engineer?”

“No.”

“Were you ever?”

“No. Just a farmer.” Chhuon held out his bony callused hands. “I’ve been told you are the master of the water.”

“Humph.”

“The water is out of control. Angkar’s center is adrift. Half the fields have washed out. Half the...”

Nang stopped him. “American agents sabotaged the dikes.” He clenched his teeth, paused, angry, then screamed,
“Don’t you know? Eh!? I’ll show you!
At the border we’ll catch them. I’m sick and tired of grumbling. If you don’t wish to live here”—a quick laugh spurted—“you need not.” Nang stamped away. Then stamped back. “Bring him,” Nang snapped at Met Kosal. “We’ll join a border patrol. Then”—he sneered at Chhuon—“you’ll see. You’ll see. Every night we catch them. Give me those drawings.”

At dusk they set off. There was no opposition, no potential opposition. There was no need for noise or light discipline, no need for point or rear guards, or for flank security. Nang, Kosal and Arn rode the first mile in Nang’s newly acquired Lada sedan. They drove slowly away from their destination on a road Nang had ordered built, the only auto road in Site 169, rode as Chhuon and a dozen yotheas trotted behind. Chhuon stumbled often. The yotheas lifted him, pushed him. The car stopped. Nang, Kosal and Arn emerged. Immediately they stepped to the footpath along the road and headed back in the direction they’d come. “I’ve looked at the drawings,” Nang said pompously. “Tell me your plan.”

For an hour they walked in circuitous approach toward the border. Three armed yotheas led, then Kosal and Nang, then Chhuon and Arn, then the others. Chhuon spoke easily, compassionately. Arn scribbled notes. Nang listened, pretended to be aloof. Chhuon spoke of the living fields, of the care they required. He punctuated his points with the phrases and goals of the Revolution. “It is necessary to return the straw to the earth. This retains soil moisture. The people burn the rice stalks to cook and the forest wood for nightly bonfires. Surely Angkar’s wish for self-sufficiency is better served when we struggle to maximize the yields.”

Chhuon was silent as they crossed a clearing. As they reentered the forest he offered an audible prayer to the spirits of the trees. Then, “When the water is properly controlled there is no drought in dry times, no floods under monsoon. The water runs and cleans itself and fish are abundant. Yet if Angkar’s wishes are unfulfilled, the water loses its discipline. It washes away the soil, it leaves the high land bare. The feeder trenches and canals clog. It stagnates and becomes ill and dies. Nothing grows.”

As Chhuon talked, Nang seethed. He had made a mistake hearing the old peasant in Kosal and Arn’s presence. To simply eliminate him now would show weakness and lack of judgment.

“There are other problems,” Chhuon said. “For Angkar to come to its center and for the fighters to launch an offensive to increase yields, crops must be chosen which will gain victory over famine. This area is better suited for military crops: yams, sugarcane, maize. Grow those here and rice downwater. Then...”

“Hush!” Nang had heard enough.

“Kampuchea must not depend solely on one crop.” Chhuon rushed to include a last thought. “That invites disaster. Systems are fragile. Humans too. Massive collectives steal from the peasant his control over his own well-being. It robs him of his pride as master of his own paddy. The system fails when...”

Nang turned on Chhuon. “Enemies make it fail,” he whispered harshly. “Saboteurs. Even amongst the cadre there are agents. Two-faces want Angkar to fail. In failure America can justify its attacks. Viet Nam can launch a ‘liberation’ effort.”

“High Comrade Nang,” Chhuon said clearly, “Angkar is very great and very powerful. If an offensive is launched to improve the agricultural system, no enemy will be able to lure the cadre or the people.”

“I’ll see enemies at the base of my mountain. Bad cadre will be culled, replaced by loyal...Why do I talk to you? From here, silence.”

Quietly they moved into the thicket and rendezvoused with a preestablished ambush team. The evening had turned soft-dark beneath a rising quarter moon. Before them Chhuon saw nothing but vegetation, “they call it the underground roadway,” Nang whispered to Chhuon. “very structured, ha! we help them with baskets of food in the forest.”

Chhuon could not speak. Then too loudly he blurted, “Underground roadwa...”

“ssssh, ha. ha. it funnels to here. ha. when we lived in the jungle, we were always wet and cold and hungry, so many caught malaria we often attacked with only half force, now our enemies run from a little hardship, ha. we kill them, tomorrow i’ll show you a body dump, it’s very good, eh! maybe you’ll tell everyone and the enemies will not lure the people.”

For hours they waited. The moon rose. Nang slept sporadically, lurched at each monkey’s whoop or bird’s cry. Chhuon quietly tapped a dried palm frond before him. He listened intently, but his hearing had worsened along with all his perceptory senses. How could he signal? He turned to Arn. “How do you catch them?”

“land mines,” Arn whispered.

“But doesn’t that mar the trail and give away the site for tomorrow?”

“ssshh. each day we move back a few meters.”

“Oh.”

“ssshh.”

“What?” Chhuon tapped the side of his head. “I don’t hear so well any...” Kosal clamped a hand over Chhuon’s mouth.

Tick...Tick...Tick...Chhuon’s fingernail on the palm frond. Then a rustling down trail. Tick...Tick...Tick...Chhuon shifted, trying to see. The rustling stopped. Nang seized his old hand. “Are you awak...” Kosal’s grip on Chhuon’s mouth silenced him. More rustling on the animal path. A young man, two women. Between them a pole with young children hammocked in fishnet.

Suddenly, the first explosion. Fireball. Concussion. Roar. Then sniper fire and screams. Forty people running. Maybe more. Cries. “Help me.” Anguished pleas. “Carry me.” “I can’t.” Running. More rifle cracks. “Mama! Maaaaa-Maaa!”

Laughing. There is no counterfire. The “enemies of the people” are unarmed. Nang clicks on a powerful flashlight. Other beams crisscross the trail as yotheas review their kill. The atmosphere is festive. In the trees an escapee is caught, dragged back to the killing zone. “Please, Brothers!” The man is on his knees. His hands are together in a
lei.
Supplicant and beseeching he’s reverted to traditional behavior, to the yotheas a sure sign of sedition. They laugh heinous laughs: Nang pulls Chhuon up. Pulls him forward. In the light beams Chhuon sees the carnage. A scream-shrill-cry pierces his frail back like a javelin. “Maaaa-Maaaa!” Billows of laughter burst from Kosal, others. Nang snickers. He flicks his claw at the pleading man. A yothea chops the man’s skull with a hatchet, hits it low, behind, hard enough to damage the brainstem, not hard enough for an instantaneous kill. Death will take painful days. The method has been empirically tested and perfected by the yotheas.

“MaaaaaMaaaa!”

Two more rifle reports. More screams. More running in the forest. Chhuon spies a small boy trembling, silently hugging the trunk of a thick tree. Their eyes meet. In Chhuon there is terror, shock. He is not concerned for himself or his body. How to protect the child? He turns. A scrawny baby, perhaps two years old yet small and maldeveloped, is given to Nang. The infant’s face distorts in fear. “MaaaaaMaaaa.” All about, yotheas are stripping corpses, turning waistbands, ripping anuses, checking mouths. Here two links of gold chain are found, there a ruby.

Nang puts the infant to his shoulder. He pats her back gently with his right claw, supports her by holding her twig-thin ankles together with his left hand. “There, there,” he consoles. The infant is shrieking unintelligibly. “There, there.”

Agitated sorrow gushes from the depths of Chhuon’s soul, yet seeing Nang with the infant wakens in Chhuon a memory of a time when he held his own children such. In this horror there is this tenderness. To hold him, Chhuon thinks. To hold my Kdeb. He will find me.

The infant arches her back. Jerks her legs against Nang’s hardening grip. Blasts an ear-splitting
“Maaaa-Maaaaa!”
Pisses.

“You...” Nang holds the infant away from his gray uniform. For a second she gasps, snivels, then again screams.
“Aaaaghhh!”
Nang shrieks. He lets go of the body, grasps the ankles with both hands, shoves the infant up. The body topples over his back. Then Nang swings hard as if holding an ax, whipping forward, down, smashing the child’s head on the ground. Then immediately up, back down. The head cracks. Then up, like a hammer thrower, he swings, releases her into the forest.

For two days Chhuon cannot hold a thought. To have witnessed such evil, to have participated...his mind rejects every semblance of life. There is no ideology, no enemy, only evil, only torture for torture’s sake, killing for killing’s sake. Any instant the agitation abates, his consciousness floods with the images. He jabs at his eyes but cannot concentrate long enough to blind himself. Yet there is more. Nang is yet to bring him to the innermost circles of hell.

“You must tell me more of your plans for the fields.” Nang leads Chhuon from his home. His speech is light. The sun is high. The sky clear. Dust lingers low in the listless ground air. The ground dries and cracks and the cracks widen. Fields look like the skin of spiny horned lizards. Moaning, like a low wind through forest trees, embraces them. Chhuon does not speak. Nang prattles. He feels satisfied, sated. His newest report to the Center is full of glowing figures, wonderful statistics; the number of double agents unmasked has soared; the number of undesirable elements eliminated has jumped tenfold. Only his crop figures are inadequate. But then, with this old one’s knowledge, perhaps that could be fixed.

“Kampuchea is one nation, eh?” Nang feels cheerful as they walk the path toward Site 13. “It should have one language, the Khmer tongue; one people, Khmer people.” He chuckles. That Chhuon has not responded means nothing to him. He wants to show the old man how the new site operates, he wants to brag, yet to him the old man is naught but a temporary anonymous audience. “Why should Khmers share Khmer soil with Thais, Chams, Chinks,
phnongs
, yuons, eh?” The trail begins to rise. The moaning is as constant as a waterfall’s hum in a canyon; as deep as prayers chanted in Pali. “You talk of natural order. Of how man disrupted it. Ha! Now it’s time to let the natural order return. They have no right here. The yuons had agents in the cities so we moved people to farms. If they had stayed in the cities the yuons or the imperialists would have stirred them to rebel. Did you know the yuons appealed to the KGB and the CIA to eliminate Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan? It’s true. We have proof. My friend, Rin of Svay Rieng, has sent me proof.”

As the trail snaked closer to the huge rocky escarpment the forest dropped away. Suddenly a long column of climbing men, women and children came into view. Chhuon could not make out details. He could not distinguish faces. But he could discern that people were climbing with heads down and hands behind their backs.

“Follow close after me,” Nang instructed. “Don’t stray. You needn’t be purified.”

The path with the long column circled to their right then disappeared in folds of the escarpment. Nang’s path ran straight then zigzagged in a series of tight switchbacks and newly sculpted stairs. To their left was the four-hundred-foot horseshoe cliff. Directly above them, in a high tree on the wide ledge before the final thousand-foot escarpment which led to Thailand, Chhuon could make out the silhouette of a tree house. A woman screamed. Someone laughed. Nang laughed too. “Climb quicker, old man.” Then not a laugh but a titter.

“What’s that cable?” Chhuon’s eyes followed the thick wire from the tree house out over the abyss toward a tower on the far side. At the center were various dark spheres but his eyes were too poor to discern their function. He climbed more slowly now. His skinny legs and decrepit feet cramping as he negotiated the steep narrow stairs. Each switchback brought him closer to the edge of the abyss until finally one took him so close the updraft hit him full in the face. He gasped, squeezed his old features attempting to block the wretched odor. He shook. His legs trembled, about to collapse. With the hot, rising, putrid updraft came the full volume of tormented moans. Chhuon stumbled. From above more laughs, more cries. Nang’s arm shot toward the old peasant. His forefinger stabbed the pitching Chhuon, hooked his armpit, righted him as if he, Chhuon, were a weightless rag doll. “Not yet, old one,” Nang said compassionately.