For the Sake of All Living Things (24 page)

“He says he’s an Epicurean.”

“He’s what?”

“His only concern is his own happiness.”

“He...” Chhuon clenched his fists. “...he cannot be that...that....His father...”

“Mister Pech is wonderful. I’ve learned so much. Especially who
must
be paid.”

“Does his mother help?”

“She’s like Lady Monique Sihanouk,” Vathana said, an odd smile on her face.

“She’s good to you?”

“She bought all the furniture. She buys Teck’s clothes. She shops every day...in Phnom Penh. She won’t live here. And she doesn’t approve of my running the company.”

“Vathana”—Chhuon addressed her as an adult—“you must pay someone to ship, yes? Like I paid road donations?” Vathana nodded and Chhuon added bitterly, “Don’t pay the yuons. Even five hundred riels is too much.”

“Five hundred!? Papa! Try five hundred thousand in three months.”

“Five hundred thous...”

“Yes. And if I change from exporting rice to moving palm oil it will cost more. It will cost a large
bonjour
just to acquire the tanks. But there’s more money in palm oil than in rice.”

“You sound like Mister Pech,” Chhuon said. A sharpness crept into his voice. “Does he tell you how to think about yuons?”

“Every day the radio’s full of reports,” Vathana said. “Every day Samdech Euv has new activities to report but his talk is so general, unless you have family or workers in those areas...”

“Does he say what is happening to the Northeast? Do the people cringe? Are they as infuriated as I am?”

“Papa,” Vathana said carefully, “no one cringes. No one knows. There are bombings in the East but no one seems to care. If you tell them, they don’t believe you. I tell them I come from the Northeast and every day more of the country is lost. They look at me as if I were from another world. They say, ‘Rice is fifteen percent more than last year. You merchants cheat us.’ ”

“They don’t know?!” Chhuon was aghast.

“They don’t want to know,” Vathana said. “They’re mostly like Teck. Teck says the war will soon end. He says it’ll never reach here.” She paused. She felt she’d said too much, revealed, too much about her husband, her mother-in-law and her new city. She sensed that her father was very hurt. “But...but Papa, you haven’t told me how you are. Uncle Cheam says you work the paddies with Cousin Sam.”

Chhuon dropped his face. His complexion seemed to pale before Vathana’s eyes. “I no longer know the right way to live,” Chhuon said. He might have said, “I fear I’m crazy,” for in Khmer society the loss of way was considered borderline insanity. “Some days my body is like a stranger to me,” he confessed. “On those days I work very hard so the pain will be very bad and I’ll know that...” He stopped, looked up. Vathana’s eyes were tearing. I could tell her of the dream I had the night before the trip. He shook his head. “I feel like our family is no longer connected. Alone we have no meaning.”

They sat quietly for some time. Chhuon ate from the dishes Vathana brought, though for herself she ate only the traditional foods for mothers-to-be. Chhuon felt more and more enclosed in the apartment as day passed to dusk. He sat for a while looking at the photo album—mostly pictures of the wedding—and he was surprised to find not a single photo of himself.

“Where’s your husband?” Chhuon asked his daughter as darkness settled on Neak Luong.

“He’s out,” Vathana answered.

“Does he return?” Chhuon asked pointedly.

“Yes. He’ll...he’ll...”

“Does he hurt you?”

“Papa, how do I keep Teck from embarrassing himself and the family when he’s without a self?”

Chhuon looked at his daughter but did not speak. He lifted his teacup, sipped, contemplated the question. He understood self to mean something different from what Westerners might. In Vathana’s use, self first meant Teck’s spirit interconnected with the family spirit encompassing past, present and future generations. For her to say he has no self did not mean he lacks physical existence or ego, but that his body is without a soul, spiritually adrift on earth. In Western terms, Teck had immense ego.

Vathana fidgeted as Chhuon sipped his tea. For Chhuon the role of sage was pleasing. In Phum Sath Din his family no longer brought him their fears and problems. He thought of his own father and drew strength from the thought. He thought of his grandfathers, especially his father’s father from whom so many sought advice. “Someday,” Chhuon began, “he will change. He is young, but he will change because he comes from a proper family. He will become like his father.” Chhuon felt the explanation was inadequate. He was about to say it is a question of searching for the self and not a matter of embarrassment but he became confused and overwhelmed with thoughts of himself, adrift. He could not further answer his daughter. He shut his eyes and wished to pray but he could not pray. A terrible burning surged in his chest. Finally he answered, “When the yuons leave, Cambodia’s self will return. Now I must go.”

Nang crept forward like a rat. He froze, darted forward under the heavy pipeline which ran from the pier to the huge storage tanks, froze again. It was his seventh day in Sihanoukville. The air in the port city was clear below dark turbulent monsoon clouds. The water was greenblack. Until a week before Nang had never seen anything like the coastal city; never smelled anything like it. The entire southern coast was alien. Sea air, away from the oil refineries, smelled different from inland air, felt different. In such air sounds traveled in an unfamiliar way. The sight of distant hills dropping to paddies, then blending into Cambodia’s most industrialized city, which in turn faded to beaches and they to endless water, confused him. The first two days he was not the eyes of Met Sar, not the hardened, highly trained terrorist agent of Angkar Leou, not even the bitter boy who believed his father had been killed by Viet Namese, but simply a rural Khmer child set agog by the sight of industries and luxuries he did not know, had never even imagined. Had his contacts not brought him back to reality he might have lost himself amid the ships and wharves and sought a totally different adventure.

From beneath the pipeline Nang counted the new ships in the harbor and at the piers. Two more Soviet and one Chinese freighter, he noted. Plus the tanker. And the ship with the blue triangle on a split white and red field. And one with no markings. “You can read their flags or their stacks,” Met Ang, Nang’s senior contact, had told him. “If you don’t know the nations, remember the pattern. I’ll know.”

“You’re easy on them.” Nang had searched the young man’s face.

“We live here. We do the job.”

“How do you know what’s unloaded?”

“Everyone knows,” Ang had answered. “Ammunition is marked ‘Goods in transit’; rice and fish for the sanctuaries are labeled ‘For export to South Viet Nam.’ ”

Nang crept farther down the pipeline toward the pier. He carefully noted the pipe unions and moorings and mentally set charges where they would do the most destruction. The first day in the patrolled area the activity so dazzled him he saw only the movement of men and machines without cataloguing cargo. Now, as the giant crane at a far pier dipped into the hold of a ship and brought forth crates or pallets of bags or boxes, Nang estimated the contents and added to his mental inventory. He noted which pallets were placed before the crane for the massive forklift trucks to carry to large open warehouses; which pallets were placed to the side where men broke the wares down immediately and dispersed them either to smaller forklifts, which brought them to buildings where the doors opened only at their arrival, or directly into the backs of covered military trucks.

At another pier the side of a freighter was open. Empty trucks disappeared into the ship then reemerged laden with concealed cargo. “If the flag is red with five gold stars,” Ang had said, “then we’ll have the exact manifest and we’ll take our share. But if it’s Soviet, we need to count to confirm our lists.”

“And the goods...” Nang had questioned.

“You watch. One third goes on Royal Army trucks. One third goes to Haklee warehouses where only the Viet Namese are allowed. One third goes directly to commercial trucks. It’s easiest to bribe the Royal Army drivers. Then we supply ourselves. Yuons are hard to bribe. Commercial trucks, if they don’t pay road fees, can be ambushed.”

Nang put his ear to the pipeline expecting to hear fluid gurgling. Instead he heard the high-pitched hum of pumps. Below him, on the pier, were a few idle men. The pipeline was hooked to an offshore tanker via thick black hoses supported by a series of large floats. Nang noted the flag—three horizontal bands, red, white with three green stars, then black (Iraq). Ang will tell me, he thought, and Sar will know.

Through the afternoon and into the evening Nang remained beneath, beside, then atop the pipe. In the dull light he turned, looked up to the distant hills where huge villas shone like small cities. Nang contemplated the delivery system, the lax security of the port area, the obvious wealth of the royal officials in charge. It’s safe, he thought, because all profit. He would put that in his report. He squatted on the pipe. In his mind he formulated a plan for disruption, for total destruction of the entire facility. That too he would send to Sar. Nang noted weak points, not only of the government security forces, the Chinese and the North Viet Namese, but also of the small squad of Krahom yotheas and spies led by Met Ang. Later, he knew, he would recommend Met Ang be eliminated.

Like a wraith Nang rose, walked barefooted, exposed, up the pipe to where it passed through the chainlink fencing. He jumped off, walked to the gate and exited, a rag-clothed child somehow misplaced on the pier.

“Hey, where you going?” A uniformed man emerged from the small guardhouse.

“I look for Bok Roh,” Nang answered in Jarai-tainted Khmer.

“Who? What?”

“My father,” Nang said, shrinking, looking no more than eight.

“Eh, you can’t go in there, kid.”

Instead of fleeing, Nang walked to the man. “Are those the trucks to Bokor?”

The guard eyed him warily.

“My father driver,” Nang said.

As the sun set Chhuon followed his cousin into Phum Sath Din’s nearly idle marketplace. In their left hands they carried their weeding hoes, in their right, curved-bladed rice knives. They walked slowly past the many stalls no longer maintained, past the few stalls with shabby common wares. Gone were the many food stalls with the vast variety of fish, chickens, vegetables, fruits and nuts; gone were the small tools and appliances; gone were the familiar faces of townspeople, peasants from surrounding farms and the tailor and doctor from Stung Treng who used to come twice a month, faces seemingly unchanged for a generation; gone all and replaced by a few suspicious outside vendors who posed as tinkers or weavers. In the market, food had become secondary. Beneath the pots and pans and hammers, the tinkers sold handguns and ammunition. If paid the right price, they could obtain nearly any small arm or crew-served weapon in use anywhere in Southeast Asia. Behind the bolts of cloth the weavers bought and sold information.

Chhuon stopped in the road before a tinker’s stall. The man was small, petite as a preadolescent girl. Chhuon watched as he nimbly stacked and crated his product. “They’re like vultures,” Sam whispered to Chhuon. “They appear when a village dies.”

“Blood for blood,” Chhuon answered quietly. His eyes glazed over as he spoke. He had never used the phrase outside his home, and there only once since the first time he’d shocked his wife. “Blood for blood,” he repeated to Sam. He did not say it with the vengeance he’d used mentally ten thousand times, nor did he give it the charged emotion he felt. He said it almost apologetically. Still Sam understood.

Then Chhuon repeated it more loudly, boisterously. Two women shoppers stopped. The tinker turned and looked at him. The weaver took silent note. “Blood for blood, eh tinker?” Chhuon snickered. “Have you had a good day?” he asked in Viet Namese.

“A slow day,” the petite man answered pleasantly in Khmer.

“You are Viet, yes?” Chhuon prodded in Viet Namese.

“My mother was half Viet Namese, half Chinese,” the tinker responded so only Chhuon could hear. A little louder he said, “My father is Khmer from Kompong Thom.”

Suddenly Chhuon shouted, “Your mother is a pig.” Then he lunged at the tinker. Sam lunged, grabbed Chhuon. The tinker darted back. The women and other merchants startled as if shaken by a powerful concussion. “Yuons are pigs,” Chhuon snarled, his voice harsh, low. Then he rocked back, laughed.

Sam let Chhuon go. “Let’s get on.” He pushed his cousin. “Viet or not, this tinker...”

“I want to look at him.” Chhuon seethed. “I want to see if he killed my son.”

“I’m just a tinker,” the petite man said timidly. “From Kompong Thom. I know nothing of your son. I’m sorry if you had a great loss.”

“Ha!” Chhuon’s laugh was short, brusque. “The Prince of Death must be served, eh tinker!?” Sam put a hand back on Chhuon’s arm. Chhuon flicked it off. “Eh, tinker?” he shouted. “I hope your wares serve the Prince well.” The tinker again shied back. He did not know this man, nor did he know the local merchants, shoppers or other alien traders who had begun to cluster. Suddenly Chhuon thrust his hoe into the stall, crashing stacked pots to the ground. With a flick of his wrist he overturned a wooden box, exposing three pistols wrapped in clear plastic. He hooked one with the hoe, flipped it back to himself and caught it before the tinker could recover. Chhuon stuck his rice knife under his left arm, and while still wielding the hoe, tore the plastic from the pistol. He grasped the weapon—slowly, deliberately, he shook it as one might shake a threatening fist. “Let this kill yuons!” he snarled crazily. “Let this honor the Prince”—he hacked the air with the pistol—“as it mangles Viet Namese.”

In the next stall the weaver smiled inwardly.

Before Nang was arrested on his second day in Bokor, before he was beaten and led to the cliffs, he secreted himself in Ang’s hideout, wrote his report, sealed it and sent it by KK runner to Met Sar.

“You’ll find in Bokor,” Ang told him while he wrote, “a roadside soup stand before a house with four double pillars holding the porch roof. Ask for red and blue crab soup. Met Hout is senior. But be cautious. Bokor is owned by yuons.”