For the Sake of All Living Things (18 page)

One evening Nang sat with Met Sar at a small table under a thatch roof held up by five posts. The older man had greeted him warmly and offered him tea. “Student Nang,” he said, “I’m told often of your excellent progress. You wished to see me.”

“Thank you, Met Sar. Yes.” Nang sipped his tea. He did not smile. “I think I want to be a disciple of the Movement,” he said slowly, “but I’m not sure. I’m trying to figure it out.”

“Let the Movement help you,” Met Sar said, his lips pulling into a thin smile. “Listen to the Movement. We’re a select group. Expose your torment to the Movement. You, Nang, have the makings of one who could someday be at the inner circle.” Met Sar spoke sincerely, gently. “The Movement is kind. The Movement’s loving hands reach out to all, even amid pain and suffering and sorrow.”

“Yes,” Nang sighed.

“Has Student Ur spoken anymore of escape?” Met Sar asked. His voice remained as smooth as before. Almost hypnotic:

“Yes,” Nang answered. “On three occasions he has approached me.”

“And you...” Met Sar paused.

“I let him speak as you’ve instructed. I try to show sorrow to cover my disgust.”

“You shall be rewarded. In the Movement you will be fulfilled. Your salvation shall be found in service to Angkar Leou.”

“To...I do not understand.”

“The Movement. Give yourself up to the Movement and you’ll be free from these self-centered concerns. You’ll be able to focus on the outer world of our people.”

Late that night Nang prayed. He thought about all the things he had been told, all he had seen. He had seen the massive stocks of rice in the warehouse in Stung Treng and the misery of poor villages; he had seen the motley government soldiers at roadblocks, the brutal yuon massacre, the sellout of Kampuchea by the likes of Bok Roh.

Suddenly they seemed to crystalize, to be seen in a new light, the light of the Movement, and that light, like a beam in thin night fog, illuminated his future, his direction. He would follow the cadres and the rules of the Movement. He would become the fighter in his people’s struggle for independence that the Movement was asking him to be. There would be much to learn but in that moment, that dark moment, he decided he would become everything he was capable of becoming. He would obey and avenge his father. He would become the Movement.

Punishment for infractions became more sophisticated. One morning Nang and Ur were spied resting under a tree while they were expected to be hunting. That night their ankles were clamped to the top of a foot-high iron post. Their arms were crossed before them, their wrists tied behind their necks. Behind their backs needle-sharp bamboo spikes had been driven into the earth. If they leaned back they would be cut. If they fell back they would be impaled. The night was not dark. Behind thin clouds the moon was full. They could see they were alone. Ur whispered to Nang, “You’ve sold out, haven’t you?” Nang did not answer. “You’ve gone to them in your, head,” Ur accused. His physical strength was near restored but he had not accepted the treatment.

“I have, eh?” Nang finally answered. Now Ur was silent. It was difficult to speak and maintain the rigid posture necessary to keep one’s stomach muscles from relaxing. “They’re right,” Nang said.

“Right?!” Ur hissed.

“They’re fair,” Nang said.

“You, a Buddhist, call them fair after what we must do to monkeys? Even in my village, when we sacrifice animals, we’re not so cruel.”

“I’m not Buddhist,” Nang said. “Buddha was Indian. Just like Met Sar said.” Ur hissed again but did not speak. “If you can kill the monkey,” Nang repeated what the cadremen said, “when you face an enemy you’ll not hesitate. You’ll kill him. If you hesitate, he’ll kill you.”

Again a pause. “I hunt better than you,” Ur said. “I stalk better than you. I kill better than you. I will not kill their way.”

Neither boy spoke for over an hour. Screams came from the compound where the
neary
were trained. Nang memorized Ur’s words. He would tell Met Din or Met Huk during the morning and Ur would endure another kosang. Nang laughed inwardly. The fool, he thought. Ur, too, memorized his words. He was certain now that Nang was a
chrop
, an informer. How quickly, Ur thought, this Khmer boy changes. He wished to tell Nang to resist, resist one day longer, but he, Ur, no longer had the energy or the desire to devote to his onetime friend. He would listen. He would play along. But he would never convert.

Chhuon stood in the hallway of the apartment building in Neak Luong. He pulled the leaflet from his pants pocket and looked again at the photo. The merriment of the crowd in the new apartment irritated him. But for Vathana, he thought, I would barge in screaming. I would...what would I scream? Chhuon’s lack of patience, today, and his recognition that the occasion was, as it should be, joyous, made him feel guilty and the guilt added to his irritability. He no longer sought to eliminate the impurities of his mind. Instead he hid them, hid his thoughts, operated outwardly in a nearly normal manner. At home, after the connecting-word ceremony, after Voen had returned to Phnom Penh and after the Pechs had left the village, Chhuon had returned to his withdrawn, spiritless state. In the months since the funeral, major shifts had taken place within him. At times he felt he no longer knew himself. The wailing had been followed by the first withdrawal and then the growing passion for revenge. Upon that broke a second wave of withdrawal mixed with feelings of helplessness and impatience as water washing a beach is mixed with seaweed and residue. The wave receded and the beach reverted to normalcy only to be inundated by a larger wave of emptiness and apathy. As those emotions ebbed he was left numb, encased, his shell impenetrable to feelings from without, incapable of allowing inner feelings to escape. Every night he dreamed of revenge. Every dawn he heard the trucks across the river and a portion of his dream returned. He did not see the khrou or the monk, and though he again served his farm clients he no longer read the agricultural journals, no longer strove to ensure that each rice experiment and each breeding animal was properly handled. He meditated on revenge, on death. He speculated on the causes of the slaughter of Kdeb and Yani. All the reassurance, all the comfort his Buddhism had given him in the past, all the strength it had bestowed at the death, during infancy, of two of his children, all the joy it had brought him after his father’s death knowing he had properly provided for his father’s spirit was dashed, was destroyed, was slaughtered with the distant violent slaughter of Kdeb and Yani, slaughtered beyond mitigation, slaughtered and aggravated because the earthly vessels of their spirits were unrecovered. Instead of reaching for religious significance he consciously courted revenge and hatred and xenophobic anguish. His grief and guilt, which should have been tempered by the making public during the rite for the dead, was instead tempered in the furnace of withdrawal.

The wedding feast was under way. The first two days of celebration had been, as Sok had whispered to Chhuon, “beautiful for a city wedding.” Chhuon, like his wife, missed some of the traditional aspects which had been set aside. Usually the ceremony was held at the bride’s parents’ home and the first day was given to erecting a three-room bamboo house for the groom. Indeed, in Phum Sath Din, villagers did erect a groom’s house, and they feasted and celebrated the village’s most spectacular marriage, but in the heart of Neak Luong no one erected a groom’s house. Instead Pech Chieu Teck, second son of Pech Lim Song, had arranged for the use of three apartments in the city’s first modern concrete-and-glass building. Vathana and her family were given a fourth-floor, three-room apartment which the new couple would occupy after their marriage. Teck and his groom entourage moved into a third-floor unit and various relatives and guests shared a flat on the ground floor where much of the food preparation took place. But the vertical separation also meant that family and friends saw less of each other and that a certain traditional warmth which should have grown from the labor of the first day was stillborn.

Chhuon studied the leaflet photo. The paper was flimsy and greatly deteriorated. Folds had become cracks, cracks turned to powder, yet the unfolded picture remained clear.

Pech Lim Song’s voice seeped from the apartment. “When Samdech Sihanouk became king,” he said, “they made him take courses in military tactics. Ha, he didn’t know the difference between a sergeant and a captain. He didn’t even know which end of a rifle the bullet came out. He boasts that he got rid of the Viet Minh by saying to them, ‘What the devil are you doing here? Get out!’ He thinks they left.”

The photo was of a mass of contorted, disfigured bodies. Six faces were easily discernible, one of an elder tied to a large X-rack, one of a girl with dry blood-rivers running from her ears. Four of Jarai youngsters in the center of the heap. The words in the fold were imprinted indelibly on Chhuon’s brain:
This photograph is supplied as a service to families or relatives seeking missing children...
Chhuon scoffed. Supplied to let us know, he thought, what you’ll do if we resist you, or if our resistance is too weak to stop you. He thought to show the photo to his older sister, Voen, to ask her to look at the other faces, at those he, Chhuon, could not identify, but he knew he could not now confront her, could never confront her with such horror.

Another voice reached the hallway. “They’re the ones who control the Northeast. But the Prince closes his eyes.”

Chhuon did not recognize the speaker. This day’s ceremonies had begun at dawn on the third floor with Teck, dressed in gold cape and loincloth, bowing to the rising sun, chanting traditional prayers. Then a priest had drawn a sword and led the groom and his male relatives to the fourth floor for the “open-house rite.” A bridesmaid, Voen, Chhuon’s sister, had come out to ring the gong Teck’s brother had carried. Traditionally the bridesmaid should have been a young girl. To Chhuon, that meant Mayana. He folded the leaflet.

“I’ve heard there’s a hundred thousand yuons in the mountains.” Again the voice was the groom’s father’s. “They’ve a base at Siem Reap. Still he doesn’t see them. They pay him, they don’t attack. Mark my words, they’ll take our country if we don’t do something

The bridesmaid had been followed by a young boy carrying a bowl of water to wash the groom’s feet. Peou had compensated well for his age, Chhuon thought, but properly Samnang should have borne the offering and received the candy gift.

Chhuon knew that Sok, too, was pained by the conspicuous absence of the younger children. In the bridal chamber he had whispered to her, “Don’t cry.”

“Don’t you cry,” Sok had answered. It was their most gentle exchange in months.

“Yes,” Chhuon had said. “We see the children and we cannot help but think of Yani and Samnang.”

“Yes,” Sok had answered dryly, and Chhuon had felt great guilt and humiliation and he’d dreaded seeing Vathana, sure she too would look at him, accusing him of his own thoughts.

Again the voice that Chhuon did not know spilled into the hall. “Samdech Euv could preserve our neutrality. He could raise a Khmer army capable of defending our borders. I know what’s happening. I’ve seen with my own eyes. I have business in Sihanoukville. My trucks travel Highways 2, 3 and 4. He allows the Chinese to unload their guns and ship them to the border...secret bases...open use of the border...his army is nothing more than a palace guard. They’ve no training, no discipline. That’s why they become thugs when they’re used. Thirty-five thousand thugs.”

Talk, Chhuon thought. It’s so easy. But this man, he’s a fool to let his voice travel places he cannot see.

Chhuon entered the room. He stood with his back to the wall, looking between heads, catching only slight glimpses of the ceremony. For him the rite known as “turning the candle” had always been the most beautiful of all the wedding rituals. Vathana and Teck sat stiffly side by side. The marriage was a contract, a religious relationship, not the union of two people “in love.” That Vathana was beautiful was ostensibly of secondary importance to Teck. He did not look at her but he was aware of her beauty. He was both thankful and resentful his father had arranged this match. That Teck was physically flimsy upset Vathana. She had expected him to be strong like her father, like his own father.

Chhuon watched his eldest daughter from the back of the assembled crowd. While his eyes beheld her he felt peaceful. Voen rose, led four aunts, each holding a candle in a circle about the couple. The aunts blew smoke from their candles onto the newlyweds to give them strength. Uncles joined the aunts. The priests and the monk chanted prayers and everyone repeated them and a feeling of joy and holiness spread and grasped all in the room. Each uncle tied a thread to Vathana’s wrist, then to Teck’s. Chhuon should have been the first to tie the thread but his legs froze and he couldn’t move into the center of the crowded room. Suddenly he felt revulsion. His eyes fell to Vathana’s hips. This marriage to the second son of Pech Lim Song is wrong. It’s not enough. She should’ve been married to a minister in Sihanouk’s cabinet or to a wealthy man, not to the second son of a second-level entrepreneur. It’s me. I am nothing. It rubs off on my children.

Chhuon breathed heavily, shut his eyes to attempt to contemplate the ceremony, to attempt to pray. He heard the whisper of the man with the loose voice and he opened his eyes. In the crowd before him he saw a man leaning, to the ear of another. “Look what happened earlier this year. Not only did the people not rise up and join the Communists, they rose up and defended themselves and Saigon. How can he back the North?”

“Are you talking politics again?” The voice was Madame Pech’s. “They’ll be coming around to visit with each of us. Please leave your politics out there. Has anyone seen the bride’s father? Did you see the rice? It’s the whitest I’ve ever seen.”

Before Nang’s class could be used to spearhead the attack on the village of Phum Siembauk, certain changes had to be made.

In the tenth week of Liberation School the conscripts changed their uniforms from baggy green utilities to the heavier black cloth of the Khmer Krahom army. They were permitted increased freedom within the compound. Already they had guided two new wheels of recruits to the cliff; had learned to use the pole not to push them off but to guide them to the edge where the recruits would, themselves, in time, commit themselves to the fall; had cruelly beaten two groups at the barren reception area thinking how strong they themselves had become and how this would be for the good of these new boys; had welcomed six groups at the end of the bamboo corridor. Of forty-six who had begun, forty-one remained. One had accidentally been killed during bayonet drill. One had been killed by being beaten after his fourth kosang. Three had disappeared in the night. Those remaining were now teamed with a battalion of older, fully trained yotheas; teamed in preparation for their baptism by fire, teamed for the reeducation of a hamlet on the west bank of the Mekong, twenty-three kilometers south of Stung Treng City.