For the Sake of All Living Things (81 page)

“They’ve no money,” Vathana said. “No families. There’s no money to pay for their care.”

Sullivan snapped his left arm back, setting the pesky flies abuzz. One landed on the sweat of his upper lip and scurried to his nostril. He shook his head violently, snorting like a horse, then grabbed Vathana’s wrist and pulled her farther from the storeroom door. “It doesn’t take money to clean the place up.”

“It takes more than we can do,” Vathana said, politely, cold.

“More?”

“So many casualties. We’re not equipped for war. War is civilian casualties and dead young men and my country destroyed.” Again several flies landed on Sullivan’s left arm and burrowed beneath the red hair. Slowly he moved his arm down and before his torso. He squeezed his left hand into a fist making the arm hard and rigid. “We look to America to save us,” Vathana said, not looking at Sullivan but back toward the storeroom. “In our time of need we look to America for salvation. But of course America must first protect its own soldiers in Viet Nam.” Sullivan made his right hand into a rigid paddle and slowly brought it into striking position. “We suffer from this limited intervention,” Vathana said. “Better all or none. Why do you hold back? If ever there was a country with a just cause, with need, it is Cambodia.” The flies on Sullivan’s arm were both facing toward his face. Sweeping in low-level from behind, slapping hard, he splattered two insects, the fly guts popping like pimples, leaving puslike globs smeared in the red hair. The slap snatched Vathana’s attention.

She bit down, repressing an urge to retch. “Do not kill,” she ordered, “the living thing.”

Sullivan looked up. Her eyes were on his. “Do not kill...” he mocked. “You’ve got to be kidding. Flies?”

“If all would care about all living things”—Vathana dropped her eyes—“perhaps all these people wouldn’t die.”

“Five hundred men are murdered around me. Suong! Villages as far as you can see wiped out! And you care about a fly?!”

“Buddha says all living things.”

“God!” Sullivan slapped a hand to his head and pulled his hair. His speech was quick. His eyes bugged. “You Buddhists are nuts. Tell me, where does it stop? A fly! You asked me for tetracycline. What do you think that does? Do you think it escorts bacteria to the bladder? Maybe carries it there to be pissed away. Waves good-bye, too. Those are living things. You want to kill them. You’ve got to draw the line someplace. What will you do, what will you kill, in order to save living things?”

Two hours later, after a nearly silent lunch with her children and Sophan, Vathana and Sullivan strolled beneath the shade trees at the edge of the Mekong just north of Neak Luong’s center. They had not been able to reestablish the warmth they had once shared, yet both wished for, needed, the warmth.

“The land is broken,” Vathana said. She placed her hand in his. “The economy is in shambles. Troops are demoralized. I don’t know if the country can survive.”

“It’s got to,” Sullivan said sadly.

“The government’s weak,” Vathana said. “It can’t protect us. They collect taxes but abandon the people. Nothing is right anymore.”

“It would be worse if the Communists won.”

“I don’t know. There are rumors of...” Vathana paused. She wasn’t certain if she should continue.

“...a coup.” Sullivan finished the sentence.

“Yes. They say Son Ngoc Thanh may become the new head of state. That Sirik Matak has urged Lon Nol to relinquish total command.”

“And what do you hear the Americans say?”

“What
do
they say? You must know.”

“I don’t. I think the embassy plays ignorant.”

“Maybe they’re not playing,” Vathana said seriously. Sullivan took it as a pun and laughed. He moved to put his arm around her but she squeezed his hand and kept it at her side.

“The students say he no longer knows the country.” Vathana repeated a phrase which had become common. “There’s no longer a reason for the people to fight.
Bonjour
is everywhere. Worse than before.”

Sullivan released Vathana’s hand. They had reached the spot along the bank where they’d made love a year earlier. How badly he wanted her again, yet how angry he was with the morose talk of demoralization and corruption, the fatalism in her tone. He knew disagreeing would further drive the wedge between them, yet accepting the defeatism would drive a wedge between him and his own beliefs.

“He is corrupt,” Sullivan said. “And he’s inept. His stupid orders botched Chenla II. But still there’s reason to fight. Fight the enemy and the corruption.”

“We get no support,” Vathana responded. “Officers build villas with paychecks from phantom troops, from sales of weapons to the Khmer Rouge. Why should our soldiers fight?”

“God damn em,” Sullivan rasped. As he let his anger ooze its intensity flashed. “Damn em! Even you. They’re getting to even you.”

“Yes. They are getting to me.”

“Those jackasses!” Sullivan blurted. “There’s a blatant murdering evil out there and their fanatic corruption masks it. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Leaders! They derive their strength from those led, not from some sort of ‘High Holy Powers’! Those bastards. They concentrate on false glory, and they forget responsibility. That’s what’s losing. Don’t get sucked in!” Sullivan stopped as abruptly as he’d begun. His tone softened. “Vathana. Dear, dear Vathana.” He almost whispered the words. “Don’t get sucked in by the rhetoric. There’s good reason to continue to fight.”

Late that afternoon Sullivan made hospital rounds with the Angel of Neak Luong. He knelt by feverish soldiers in the storeroom and held their hands or rubbed a coin on their chest as he’d been shown. He washed wounds with boiled water and rebandaged infected tissue with stained, boiled, air-dried reused strips of cloth. He cleaned watery shit from floors, cots and mats, and he struggled to maintain some sense of cause and effect. After four hours of listening to the gasps, wheezes, painful groans, after only four hours of being shit, pus and blood covered, after only one shift of watching Vathana hold and comfort two men until death, he, American army captain John L. Sullivan, who had seen thousands die in battle, found himself wondering if capitulation to the Communists might not end the war and the suffering.

When evening came Sullivan and Vathana washed the residual filth from their bodies and clothes and left the hospital. But the residual stench clung in their nasal sinuses like creosote in a chimney and the residual images stuck in their minds as if stored on film.

“There’s a film at the cinema,” Vathana said. “We can go. I’ll translate for you.”

Heat from the road radiated up and kept them hot even though the air had cooled. They walked in bursts, quick paces interspersed with pauses. She led him first into an alley, up a set of stairs, across a long balcony and down a second alley to a small room with a few tables—a backdoor cafe. There they shared a bowl of shrimp soup cooked with lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves and hot Cambodian chili peppers. To cool their mouths they shared a Howdy Cola. At first they spoke little, only enough to keep them in motion.

“Tomorrow you return to the capital?” Vathana asked.

“I can say I missed the chopper.” Sullivan smiled.

“Can you miss it a long time? There’s so much to do here and so few hands.”

“I’m afraid only one day. With the charges and all, I’m lucky to have escaped at all.”

“I wish you could stay longer. In two nights there is a meeting of the Khmer Patriots for Peace. And the next day there’s the meeting of the Rivermen for a Just Government.”

“Khmer Patriots?” To Sullivan the phrase meant a Communist front organization.

“Yes. It’s a very good group. Very active. The Refugee Association has become a branch. Without the KPP the camp couldn’t survive. Every day the KPP attracts more members.”

“Are there more groups?”

“Oh yes. I’ve joined the Khmer Women’s Association but you can’t come to that meeting. Most of the hospital volunteers are KWA.”

“I wish I could come.”

“To the women’s meeting?” Vathana laughed.

“To the KPP, maybe.”

“If you do, I’ll introduce you.”

“Who runs these organizations?”

“People.”

“Vathana...”

“Yes.”

“Be careful.”

“Be careful?”

“Yes.”

“Of what?”

“In Viet Nam the Communists would develop organizations like these. There’d be a hidden core of guerrillas. They’d infuse the whole group with their slogans, their ‘revolutionary spirit.’ ”

“Oh John! We’re not Communists! These are the
only
groups doing anything for the people. We can’t wait for outside salvation. Buddha teaches us to depend on ourselves.”

Again Sullivan backed off emotionally. As he did, he wondered why his love was so tied to his ideological beliefs, why there was no room in his heart for variations in thought. Vathana also cooled. She kept her face turned, not just the slight, polite amount to one side but far to the side, as if it had become painful to look at the red-haired foreigner so laden with inner contradictions.

The movie was the most popular film in Cambodia in 1972. A king of the Angkor era was the focus of an evil plot by his third wife and her secret lover, a powerful warlord with a huge army. Through black magic the monarch discovered the conspiracy and with hexes he forced the soldiers of his adversary to battle and decapitate each other. Quietly Vathana translated the Khmer to French and whispered it to Sullivan, but he seemed not to need the translation so she stopped.

When the movie was over and they were alone she told him, “Sometimes I think of you, my American, like that king.”

“Do you plot against me?” Sullivan tried to joke.

“No. Of course not,” Vathana said seriously.

“If you did,” Sullivan said, clutching her hands, not giving her time to explain, “I would forgive you.” He attempted to embrace her but she stepped back. He pulled her closer. She put her head down and gave him only her hair to kiss.

“You forgive me?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Even though I’ve done nothing?” She pulled away. “Humph!” She recommenced the walk to her camp hut. “Do one thing for me.”

“Anything.”

“Tomorrow, when you go, take a photo album to Phnom Penh for me. To my mother-in-law. Safer there than in Neak Luong, eh? I don’t wish it destroyed.”

For days they had not tortured him, had not asked him a single question, had even allowed him a bucket of water in which to wash himself and his clothes. The dry season was in its last weeks and each new afternoon sky seemed to grow heavier, darker. Still it had not rained. After six weeks of beatings and rope tortures in the small ex-storeroom of the ex-pagoda, Chhuon’s body was raw, bruised, as sore as if he’d been caught beneath a stampede of water buffalo or pounded by the concussion of a large bomb. As his strength had drained and his will to resist paled with each blow, his beliefs hardened. Even snared in fatalism and hopelessness his Buddhism, his nationalism and his adoration of Khmer family traditions strengthened as if the ropes and blows were concentrating his beliefs into his very core. The eighteenth of March had been preceded by threats, had arrived with the “last” interrogation, then had passed without explanation. To Chhuon’s disappointment they—Hang Tung, Trinh, Trinh Le, who else he didn’t know—had rescinded the order of public hanging, had bettered his treatment and had ceased the physical torture, only, he thought later, to change tortures.

At first he welcomed the break. Every day he had been dragged from the blackness of his cell, interrogated and beaten. Sometimes his wrists were tied behind his back and he was hung by his hands until just the tips of his toes touched the floor and his shoulders screamed in pain, the muscles and ligaments slowly tearing under his own weight and the good-natured slaps on the shoulders by the guard. “Names! Everyone who has helped you.”

“I’ve done nothing.”

“You are the head of the resistance. We know that.”

“Someone lies.”

“You are known as Cloud Forest.”

“Never. They made it up.”

As the ligaments stretched farther, as cartilage popped and Chhuon’s feet rested more squarely on the floor, his interrogators raised the rope. “Cloud Forest. Give us all the names.”

“There are no others.”

“So you confess to your crimes alone.”

“No crimes.”

Some days the tortures lasted only a few minutes, other days he was beaten for six hours straight. Sometimes they tied him and left, then returned in five minutes and beat him again. Other times they tied him and left him alone for hours. He never knew what they would do. In the beginning, on the days he braced himself for the worst, it always seemed they were most lenient. Then he’d lapse and they’d set upon him with such vengeance he’d pray for the release of death.

“You can get away with nothing. We know everything. What we don’t have are two identifications to verify each conspirator. We’ve picked up sixteen. Ten implicate you. They’ve provided us with many names. Only a few have been identified by just one. Should we incarcerate those with just one identifier? You’re the leader. Tell us the names so that we don’t unjustly kill a villager to avenge the whim of one of your evil lackeys.”

“I know no names.”

“You know code names.”

“There is no one. I’ve done nothing.”

“It’s only a matter of time. Vanatanda supplied you with the plastique. The boy Sakhron brought you the cartridge trap.”

“Vanatanda is a monk. I know no boy Sakhron.”

Again and again and again the questions and beatings until Chhuon could barely remember what was real and what was the reality they wished him to tell. Then it stopped. His shoulders, fingers, ankles, feet, hips, and back tightened, recoiled as if they were springs overly stretched. And his mind recoiled. At first his anxiety grew because of the pattern of greatest wrath following lax days. Then that gave way to a vision of himself hanging by the neck from a rope secured to the pagoda’s porch roof carrying beam. And that to thoughts and conjectures about the rumors. How had he heard? He couldn’t recall. All Viet Namese officers had been withdrawn to the headquarters camp. Why? Were the nationals gaining? Had the Americans invaded? He had been cut off from all news except that which the guards or interrogators passed on. Had they indeed told him of the extractions? Certainly they had. Why else would Trinh Le have told him it wasn’t true? There was a plan to remove the Viet Namese settlers too. Of that Chhuon was sure. Oh how he wanted to ask for news of his family. He had had such a good life. What merit he must have earned in the last to have been granted the good wife, Sok. And his children—each one so special. Vathana in Neak Luong with her husband, both under the guidance of Mister Pech. An image of her at birth floated pleasantly in his mind’s eye. For the moment he breathed easily and his pains evaporated. Samay would be twenty now. Perhaps he had found his sister in Neak Luong. That would be best. There were the little ones who had died so young, at birth and at one year, died to be spared witnessing the atrocities of what had happened to our country and our people. And Kdeb and Yani...