For the Sake of All Living Things (120 page)

The bed of the cart was waist high but the cart was stacked with dead higher than Vathana’s shoulders. Vathana propped the corpse upright against the heap, purposely struggling, attempting to delay, to give herself time to think. “Hurry!” the man shouted. He dragged himself back over the dead, grabbed the old woman’s shoulder and jerked, flinging the light body up, almost over the pile. “Walk beside or ride,” the deformed man ordered. “It’s three kilometers.”

He sat cross-legged at the front of the cart. One ankle and foot bent back on its leg and stuck up in front of him like a saddle horn. One arm and shoulder had also been broken and rehealed unset so the arm came not from his side but like a stiff triple-bent branch from his chest. The hand, too, was stiff. On it he rested the hemp rope reins to the noses of two water buffalo. “Either come now or I’ll bring you with them.” He jerked his good hand at the back of the cart.

Vathana said nothing. She did not move. She was afraid to ride with the dead, afraid to offend the driver if she didn’t. He snapped the reins. The buffalo began their lumbering gait. Vathana fell in behind, a funeral procession of one. At first he led her down a road between fields of workers, then down a narrow road into the forest. The wheel ruts deepened and became mud trenches. The mud clung to the wheels and the buffalo stopped. The man cursed. He flicked the beasts with a switch. “You,” he yelled. “Push!” Vathana placed her hands on the cart. It rolled slowly. She closed her eyes. Her face bumped an outthrust arm, then a foot. She opened her eyes, averted her face to the road and the mud.

For half an hour she pushed deeper and deeper into the forest. Then they came to the pit. Thirty wraiths converged on the cart. Of all the horrors she’d seen she now faced a still more repugnant sight. The workers here were not men, not women, but some aberrant transformation of humanity—filthy, odious, mostly naked, starving, thin as reeds, sickly gray.

She stepped back. They had no eyes. They bumped and smashed one another, prodded by a single screaming yothea with a long bamboo rod. Frantically they tore the bodies from the cart. The yothea screamed, jabbed them, directed them to the central pit. One beast held Vathana’s last corpse, the gentle old woman, by the lower jaw. He dragged her into the work site. In a minute the crater was filled with dead bodies and savage mutants. Then, by feel, the mutants ripped faces apart, snorting, laughing inhuman noises. Then the bodies were crushed, dismembered, shredded with small hatchets. One worker in her blind frenzy fell across a corpse and immediately was slashed by four others. It may have been moments, maybe hours—to Vathana time fled the universe—until the bodies were reduced to a red muck stew. Vathana saw one worker grab a hunk of meat, bite it. A yothea impaled him with a bamboo lance. Other workers hearing his scream scurried to him, reduced him to mush. Now other worker-pairs were brought forward carrying dirt pallets hanging from shoulder poles. They, too, had been blinded.

Quickly, efficiently, they padded to the edge of the central pit and dumped in their loads. Then they disappeared and a third blind team came and descended into the pit with spades and poles. These were the stirrers. They mixed the bodies with the dirt until the central pit was a smooth bowl of purple-brown fertilizer. A fourth team, these with sight, shoveled the mixture into baskets until the pit was scraped clean. Then the baskets were carried to a storage shed for aging.

As Vathana and the deformed man turned the cart to go, a second cart arrived from another direction. At that Vathana noted the pit was a hub with eight spoke roads. Behind her the wraiths shrieked gleefully. The skin of Vathana’s back tightened. She walked behind the cart, afraid they were behind her, afraid they would set upon her, rip her apart, afraid to look back, afraid to close her eyes, to keep them open, afraid she had now been chosen to progress, to move forward from collector to transporter to shoveler on down until starving, blind and crazy she was hacked to death while eating what she herself had dismembered.

“I’ve been trying to place it in perspective,” John Sullivan said. He had been sitting across the table from her for a long time. Through the window of the small bistro he could see the last of Washington’s cherry blossoms. Coolly she had laid out the humanitarian efforts she’d planned, his role as she saw it. To Rita he seemed relaxed, except that his fingernails methodically tore away the wet paper labels from his sweating beer bottles.

“Me too,” she said.

Ever since he’d responded to her second correspondence—every day, almost all day—Cambodia and Vathana had been on his mind. The more he’d tried to bury himself in his work on the Pradesh ranch, or the more he’d sought to mask the intrusive droughts by concentrating on difficult mathematics, physics or chemistry, the more he’d been drawn to the material he’d begun accumulating on Southeast Asia. And in his study of math and physics and chemistry he’d found a higher mental discipline, a greater ability to analyze the events he’d repressed but could no longer ignore.

“You know what I’ve been wondering?” he said. He was on his fourth beer; the alcohol, the enclosure, was giving him a headache. And Rita looked so different to him—a business suit, stockings and heels, her hair done up. Only her pale blue eyes were the same.

“What?” she said.

“When the Communists entered Phnom Penh and Saigon, the war ended—or that ended the war.”

“Yes.” She had turned sideways in her chair. His eyes caught a glimpse of her legs. “Ended the war, but not the suffering,” she said.

“It’s something I don’t understand,” he said, leaning back. He could not think and look at her legs. “If we were invaded, if we’d fought for a decade for our land, would we give up if Washington was occupied? The French didn’t when Hitler held Paris. Why did Thieu order his divisions to cease resistance instead of ordering them into hiding? Why didn’t he establish a jungle headquarters? Maybe down in the bewitched Seven Mountains by Tri Ton. Why didn’t Lon Nol or Sirik Matak order FANK to establish bases in the Cardamom Mountains? Would Americans, if we were war weary, fall for those Communist ruses—there’s only seven supertraitors who must answer for their crimes? Everybody else will be granted amnesty?”

“It’s irrelevant, isn’t it, John?” Rita said.

Sullivan ignored her attempt to limit the thought. “Not we Americans,” he said too loudly. “We’d never fall for such blatant bovine excrement, eh?”

“Eh!...?” She chuckled. She wanted to defuse what she saw as growing anger. “Becomes a part of you, eh?”

“Not Americans,” Sullivan continued. His head was back, his eyes toward the ceiling. “Not in the wake of having fought.” He looked forward, at her. “I mean, we’re too sophisticated for such tricks. We’re too knowledgeable. Eh? Of course we,
Americans
, war weary from a war not even near our homeland, did fall for that exact ruse, did accept that exact Communist propaganda, that promise of Utopia if the imperialist pigs would just tuck tail and withdraw. Take their troops, their advisors, their material and moral support. Ha! It’s one thing to accept defeat for someone else, another thing to accept one’s own defeat. Eh?! We wouldn’t do that, would we? We’d fight to the end. Wouldn’t we? What do you think?”

“John!”

“What
do
you think?” he asked even more aggressively.

“I don’t know,” she snapped. “You chase your wild theories. I just want to stop that misery.”

Sullivan gritted his teeth to keep from shouting. “You bitch,” he growled. “Why were you against stopping it five years ago?”

“Look!” Rita stared him in the eyes, forcefully smacked the table with her index finger. “You can accuse me of anything you want. I can’t turn time back. But right now I’m trying to correct a horrible situation. I thought I wanted your help.”

“I’m...what the hell more could I have done?” He closed his eyes, squeezed them, squeezed his hands to fists on the table.

“I’ve got a letter,” she said. Her voice was icy.

“Hum...” He opened his eyes. He didn’t understand the reference.

“Do you remember a Khmer named Louis?”

Sullivan shook his head.

“From Neak Luong. He was a friend of Pech Chieu Teck’s, Cahuom Vathana’s husband.”

“A little guy,” Sullivan said. “Real small.”

“Um-hum. He made it to a Thai camp.” Sullivan leaned forward. Words formed in his mind but would not come to his lips.

“You bastard,” Rita said. “One thing you could have done is told me.”

“Told you what?”

“You could have told me how beautiful that Cahuom woman was.” Sullivan didn’t answer. “Do you know about Amerasian children?”

“I know chil—” he began. “What kind of children?”

“Amerasian,” Rita said. “Kids with American fathers and Asian mothers. Kids left behind.”

“I’m not up on them.”

“There was a little girl born in Neak Luong on the day it was bombed. You did know that the American B-52s bombed Neak Luong, didn’t you?!”

“No, dammit: I haven’t seen that. When? What happened? Was...Dammit! I told you I didn’t read any papers for three years. What girl?”

“A little red-haired baby. You bastard! You don’t even know, do you?”

“Vathana! A red-haired...”

“Cahuom Chhuon,” Chhuon signed the document which stated that he had not been mistreated during his detention, that he, freely and openly submitted his confession of espionage.

“That’s very good,” Met Ku whispered to the torturer as they watched him. Chhuon sat at a flimsy table, his head hanging, almost resting on the top. “Very good,” Ku repeated. “Have you photographed him with it?”

“He’s going now.”

“Good. Met Nang will be pleased.”

An underling grasped Chhuon by the elbow and pulled him up. The boy was young, plump, uncomfortable in his new job. “Eh,” he said to Chhuon, “you escaped from the mouth of the crocodile. The rest is easy.”

Chhuon did not look at the boy but instead turned to where Ku and the torturer stood. He glanced at them, turned away, shuffled slowly in the direction the boy pushed. The boy shoved. Still Chhuon shuffled. “When you escape from the crocodile,” he muttered, speaking neither to the underling nor to himself, “you sometimes find yourself in the mouth of the tiger.” Chhuon laughed. The saying was an old Khmer proverb. The boy, Chhuon was sure, did not understand. He repeated it louder. The boy paid no attention. “Are you a Buddhist?” Chhuon asked. Still the boy did not answer. “I am a Buddhist,” Chhuon said. “Do you know your vows? No, eh? I will become enlightened for the sake of...” The boy shoved him harder. He stumbled and fell. “You do know them, don’t you?” Chhuon rose. He felt sorry for the boy. How difficult, Chhuon thought, this is for him. He needs to be so strong and he has so little strength. “...all living things.” Chhuon said the words disconnected from the beginning of the vow.

Again the boy shoved him. Again he fell. The boy jerked him to his feet. “Shut up...ee...en...enemy. You...” Agitation, fear and confusion showed in the boy’s eyes. “...You...Enemies of the people voluntarily forfeit their humanity.”

Chhuon was photographed with his hands tied, with a single cotton thread, behind his back. It would have been nothing to break the thread but he had been warned if his thread broke they would poke out an eye of the girl before him. The girl was similarly warned, as was the man after. About the photography hut there was a line of sixty people. Surrounding them were two squads of guards. As Chhuon joined the line of those completed he heard older yotheas in jolly debate. Was it better to put a child before a parent and thus force the parent to watch as they jabbed the child’s eye with a bamboo needle—yes, said a few—or better to put the parent first, trip the child, scream blame at the child as they cut the mother’s or father’s eyeball? Empirically the guards had tested their hypotheses. Best was still debated, though certainly it was good to pair fathers with sons, mothers with daughters; good, too, to separate the members of those pairs with one unpaired enemy of the people. Thus if the unpaired fell and broke his thread causing a wife’s eye to be impaled, the husband could retaliate by tripping, snapping his binding and causing the stabbing of the eye of the person between. How careful the Khmers were of their threads. How they tried to protect one another. How difficult it was to keep their wrists together standing for hours in line while one by one the enemies of the state were photographed. Keeping them docile was this promise: they were so despicable that the state had decided to expel them to Thailand. All they needed to do was follow the path and climb the escarpment without breaking their thread, and they would be allowed to cross into the imperialists’ hell.

The last picture was taken. The column, five oozing from the left eyeball, began the thread march through the jungle toward the base of the cliff. A careful excitement fluttered in their souls. Expelled to Thailand! “Lord Buddha, keep me from falling, keep the one behind me from falling too.”

The trail rose slowly as it approached the foundation of the great escarpment, then it forked, veered left, and rose steeply. Quietly, slowly, the damned climbed. From somewhere above came music, then various announcements, then more patriotic songs. Chhuon recognized the trail, the ruse. He recognized the music and voice and knew that in the tree house soldiers were playing Radio Phnom Penh to mask the moaning from the abyss. He knew there would be no Thailand at the top of the climb. But he did not know what to do. His eyesight had continued to weaken in the months of torture and confinement and he felt cheated as he climbed that his insight had not improved. Was it better to yell, to scream, “It’s a trick. They’re going to kill us all,” or was it better to remain quiet and allow his column mates a last hope, a last day before death? If he yelled and they broke and ran surely the soldiers would shoot everyone. If they didn’t break but thought only that he, Chhuon, had cracked, gone mad, then the soldiers would beat him to death and the others would march on as if he’d never been one with them. Each step made the decision more difficult.

The column closed and opened like an accordion, depending on the difficulty of the climb at the lead. At one close a third of the way up Chhuon stopped, breathed deeply. His old legs were weak, rubbery. He could not fall. He could not break his thread.