Vong, in sleep, startled. His legs twitched. Nang watched, amused. Then he sat. Other than a cooking pot, a few plates and mosquito netting, the shack looked empty. Hidden, in walls, in the floor, above the rafters, were the squad’s tools. “There are places,” Sar had told him when he’d reported to Mount Aural, “right, in the city”—the high general sounded amazed at his own revelation—“places to do secret work. The soldiers are foolish. The police have eyes like moles in sunlight. We can move about as easily...”
Nang thought of Met Rin. He was pleasant. He was competent. But he and the Gray Vultures of the Eastern Zone, Nang thought, have not suffered as have the Black Watercrows of the North. Rin can smile, can laugh. He thinks nothing of patronizing the business ventures of impure women. Nang ground his teeth. His stomach churned. Outside, the evening sky rumbled and raindrops broke loose and crashed heavily on the roof.
Nang thought of Sar, thought of him as his first teacher, thought of his great influence. “Shanghai Communique or not,” Sar had said. “Nixon, Zhou Enlai or not. China will not discard Viet Nam. Perhaps the imperialists will sell out, but not the Chinese.” Sar had leaned closer to Nang. He had whispered conspiratorially. “This is absolutely secret. I’ve just returned. Sihanouk sees the military aid. He says, China grants the yuons aid on the same massive scale as the Soviets. But what of the Krahom? We brought the yuons here, we can get rid of them, eh? That spring offensive, it wanes but it determines the nature of future actions. Or of negotiations. Still our ‘allies’ hinder our supply delivery. Still there are Khmer Viet Minh cadre. This is where you come in, Nang. Did you know in China, hero leaders are killed? In this way potential leadership is eliminated. The revolution is protected, eh?”
Warped thought, Nang thought. Someone called Sar’s words “warped thought.”
Nang ran the tip of his tongue over the edge of his teeth. His thoughts jumped back to Rin. “Did she make you kneel?” he had asked quietly the first time Rin had returned from the district by the old casino.
“Kneel?” Rin had laughed out loud. “No! Of course not.”
“Did she suck your fingers?” Nang had asked.
“My fingers!” Rin guffawed. “Fingers?!”
“Mine sucked my hand,” Nang blurted. “Really. She did.”
“You’ve never been with a girl, have you?” Rin’s smile was bright, his words loud enough to attract Reth and Vong.
“I have,” Nang insisted. “Not a prostitute, either.”
“Maybe your mother?” Rin chided him without maliciousness.
“She was a sister. A sister in the Sisterhood of the Pure.”
“Doesn’t sound pure to me,” Reth injected slyly.
Nang spun. Reth backed off. Rin chuckled, coughed out, “Fingers?!”
At the first combined meeting with Sar, Rin had whispered over Nang’s shoulder, “Hello, good friend. Do you remember me?”
Nang had not needed to turn. He recognized the voice. “Met Rin of Svay Rieng,” he’d said slowly.
“Ay. Now we get to work together. This is very good.”
“Only twelve of you,” Sar was saying. “You’ll work the capital in three teams. One runner, one sniper, one agent, one sapper. This is where you each fit in.”
The second time Rin returned from the old casino district he put his arm about Nang’s shoulder. “You’re a puppy, aren’t you?” He’d laughed and winked toward Reth.
“A puppy?! What are y—”
Rin tapped the scar on Nang’s face. “You’re so young...” He slid his fingers under Nang’s nose. Nang jerked his head away. Rin laughed. “You know, Puppy”—Rin laughed—“you were right. It is like she sucks your fingers. Do you like her smell?”
Nang shook Rin’s arm from him, stamped to the wall of the hut. I don’t need to sneak off, he told himself. I don’t need that...that...disgusting odor.
After the team had settled and become accepted amid the refugees, Vong left, returned with word from the Center. “There are four names,” Vong had said. His speech was standard rural.
“Use the capital dialect,” Nang admonished him. “The walls may hear you.”
“Tell us!” Reth sat up, delighted, their work would finally begin.
“Not everyone, Met Nang”—Vong was angry—“is as good with words as you.”
“Tell us,” Rin said.
“Xiao Zhongshu,” Vong said. “He’s a butcher but he supplies rice to FANK soldiers so they do not desert.”
“I know of him,” Reth said. “His shop faces an open area on Mount Penh. The shot will be easy.”
“Ney Suon and Non Sarar,” Vong said. “Both are Sihanoukists. Suon was KVM but he wants to defect to Angkar. He has said the NVA liberation war is only for the South. No longer Cambodia. Yet he has told some that he is afraid of Krahom bitterness.”
“Better to concentrate on those overseas Chinese imperialists,” Rin said. “We should leave the KVM alone.”
“Ah,” Reth scoffed, “you say that because you’re from the East. I know them too. I can eliminate them.”
“It is the wish of Angkar,” Vong said. “Last is Pech Chieu Teck. He is reported to play all sides. Do you know him?”
“No,” Reth answered. Rin shook his head. Nang squeezed his chin with his claw.
“His mother is a Sisowath,” Vong said. “She is very corrupt. And his wife sleeps with an American. He is reported to have had contact with KVM agents, to have received documents from an American advisor.”
“The name is familiar.” Nang had tapped the side of his head, unable to place it. “It makes no difference. You point him out to me. I’ll take care of him.” I’ll take care of him, Nang thought. Again he rose, looked in the mirror. I’ll take care of them all.
“Having a drink, Captain?”
“Oh! Mrs. Donaldson. Ah, no! I mean...”
“Rita.”
“Rita. Just a Coke.”
“You don’t drink?”
“With friends.”
“Then let me join you and buy you one. I owe you that.”
“You don’t owe me...”
“You know what I wrote, I didn’t mean to harm you...personally. I’ve done some homework on you. You’re a real Boy Scout.” Sullivan swallowed hard. “I mean that as a compliment.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“I’d like to get to know you better.”
Sullivan looked into her face. Her blue eyes were clear, hard yet pretty. He turned away. “I’d like that, too,” he said.
Two hours earlier John Sullivan had been wracking his brain over the new reports and his half-finished letter to Vathana. In South Viet Nam President Thieu had declared martial law and lowered the draft age to seventeen. Saigon’s students were in an uproar. Many who were three, four, even five years older held seventeen-year-old IDs to avoid the eighteen-year-old draft. In Washington, antiwar Congressmen and demonstrators were saying they would allow full capitulation in exchange for peace. Peace? Sullivan had thought. The fighting in the South had deadlocked around An Loc with high casualties on both sides. And a new U.S. Senate delegation report on Cambodia had just been released. The report concluded:
The government of the Khmer Republic, and especially the Khmer military, has taken advantage of United States assistance over a sustained period of time, substantially subverting the intended purpose of that assistance. The situation which the delegation found is wholly unacceptable.
“Good God!” Sullivan had fumed. “Those jackasses. Of course it is. The Cambodians don’t have any idea what the hell they’re doing and they’ve got no one to teach them. No one, because you jackasses have made it illegal.”
Sullivan had banged his fists on the desk, stood, paced. He tried to sit but couldn’t. His stomach was knotted so tight he could barely breathe. He had written twice more to Vathana. Both letters had been trivial, light and, he hoped, attractive. But he had not heard from her. Again there was talk of Neak Luong falling but with the siege and relief of A
n Loc, fighting about the lower Mekong had tapered off. Still, Sullivan felt he could read the writing on the wall. The Senate report was so damaging. What was the alternative to fighting? he’d thought. Accepting the indiscriminate abuse of power by those totalitarian humanoids passing themselves off as...as what? Nationalists? What could he do to save her? Yes, he thought, he would marry her. He ripped up the letter he’d begun...started again.
Vathana,
Just a few words from the Faulkner book I told you about. I’m sure you’ll like these quotes. “...victory without God is mockery and delusion, but...defeat with God is not defeat.” Also, “...one child saved from hunger and cold is better in heaven’s sight than a thousand slain enemies.”
He is one of America’s greatest writers, yet to me, now, he sounds very Cambodian.
Sullivan paused. He asked himself if he should send those quotes. Was he encouraging her to accept the Khmer Rouge? That was not his intention. How could he attract her? How? How? How? The same corruption which had caused Sihanouk’s downfall was present in the new regime, and after the combat deaths of so many, dissatisfaction with the government had become disgust. And he, John L. Sullivan, represented that government! He returned to the letter, wrote a bit about Lon Nol, his kbuon (holy writ), his racism, his rantings over the history of the glories of Chenla the Rich. He changed subjects, wrote about the success in South Viet Nam of dragnet operations against the VC—how his and many other teams had worked into ever-higher echelons of the Communist infrastructure, how they had been able to protect most of the population, how the Viet Cong had been on the verge of collapse and how the present offensive had been partially conceived to reestablish VC strength. But none of it was the letter he wished to send. Such an ache wrenched his gut he could no longer concentrate. I must be with her, he thought. She must come and be with me.
“Another cognac, John,” Rita Donaldson said.
He smiled. She wore thin tropical pants which came to her ankles, but with her legs crossed her ankles showed and the skin radiated a delicious glow. “Sure. Let me get this one.”
“The paper’ll pay for it.”
“Oh. You sure?”
“You really did give it your best shot,” Rita said. “You shouldn’t feel so down. Really. They all took their best shot.”
“Best!”
“Yes. You’ve been very professional.”
“So fucking what?” His voice rose. Immediately he reined it in. “That don’t mean...shit.” He was feeling the alcohol. “What’s important is victory.”
“Victory? John! All that means is another ribbon on your unit flag.”
“It means not defeat.” Sullivan seethed. “Defeat is failure. Failure means...”
“Is that what you’re afraid of? Failing? Your male pride! The ‘can-do’ spin...”
“Failure means slaughter and enslavement. There’s no grade for effort.”
“Maybe it means an end to the killing.”
“You want to stop the killing? Then, damn it, let us win the war.”
Ferns brushed his legs soaking the tattered cloth of his trousers. Rotten limbs snapped dully beneath his barefoot steps. Vines caught him, held him. Branches slapped his face, covering him with their accumulated raindrops and with ants, aphids and small ticks. He, they, had walked for months. Each time they had settled they were told the land was taken and they’d been forced back to the roads, to the forest, finally forced north into the undulating foothills of the Dangrek Mountains—the new wilderness zone.
“Phum 117,” the cadreman announced.
Chhuon looked at the land. Two days earlier he had buried his mother. Before him, before the living vestige of Phum Sath Din, was a broad slope covered with low brush and high bamboo stands. Surrounding the slope was intermittent forest. The land appeared virgin, as if not a single being had ever traversed it. It was not inviting.
“It is a beautiful town, eh?” The cadreman beamed. Behind him his skeleton crew of armed yotheas silently nodded approval. Behind them the bulk of the unarmed militia, the Rumdoahs, quietly acquiesced. Behind them villagers shot furtive glances at one another.
“They said there was a town waiting,” Chhuon said. His voice was clear. The months of walking, settling, waiting, walking again, which had worn down many had been a time of recovery for Chhuon. The Krahom had provided minimal rations for the regained people. There had been no starvation. The Rumdoahs, responsible for direct food distribution and care of the people, were basically honest, basically sincere, basically traditional Khmer. Chhuon’s status as elder, as anti-yuon resister, as one who had endured torture, elevated him to a protected position. On daily marches when rations had not caught up to the column, small gifts of meat—a bird’s breast, a rodent’s leg—or vegetable matter—bamboo shoots, morning glory greens—appeared in Sok’s cooking pot without her seeing the contributor. “ ‘New houses,’ they said.” Chhuon’s words carried back into the column. “ ‘Full granaries,’ they said. Comrade Soth, where are these things?”
“Chairman Cahuom,” Met Soth said softly, “if you open your eyes very wide, you can see the granaries, the houses.” Soth moved closer to Chhuon, spoke even more softly, “don’t be like mister hem or mister ny. for the good of the people. remember, had we left you where you were, everyone would be dead from american bombs.”
As quietly as Soth, Chhuon said, “i remember my mother.”
The old woman had succumbed slowly to the hardships of the march. Over and over she had lamented beneath her breath, “Our ancestors, lost. Our home, lost. Our friends, lost.” For her it had become a marching cadence. “Lost. Lost. Lost.” No hardship is as difficult to bear as the loss of one’s country and for the Khmers of Phum Sath Din the forced relocation was essentially that. “lost. Lost. lost.” Every step represented greater distance between her and her cultural roots, “lost. lost. lost.” The evacuation from her homeland added depression and loneliness to the depression and loneliness of old age. For days she did not eat. Each ounce Chhuon gained his mother lost. Just as his legs became strong enough to negotiate the roads and trails without crutches or cane, her legs deserted her. For several days young men of the column helped her, but each already had a heavy burden and there were but a few who had not been conscripted. “Peou,” Chhuon’s mother called. “Let me hold the little one for a moment.”
“He’s with the children’s group,” Sok told her.
“Just for a little while,” the old woman pleaded feebly. Her face did not contort, her heart did not break, when Chhuon, after beseeching Soth, told her Peou could not come. He was in lessons. “Just for a little,” she mumbled sadly. “Like I used to hold him.” Then she lay down on her side and curled about her youngest grandchild who was not there. The column was at rest. Men gathered firewood, women prepared the rice. Chhuon’s mother stroked Peou’s hair, then snored softly, then ceased. When Chhuon went to wake her she had returned to the corner where the ancestors sit.
“See! There!” Soth pointed toward a bamboo thicket. “There are houses there, eh?”
“Houses?”
“Yes, Mister Chairman. And there. Granaries, eh?”
Chhuon did not answer. Met Nhel stepped to his other side. “I see paddies, there. And there, a boray to catch and hold rain and runoff. Those paddies will give two, maybe three crops a year with such efficient irrigation.”
“Now you see it, Mister Chairman, eh?” Soth laid a hand on Chhuon’s arm. His face beamed. “It is a very beautiful town, eh?”
“The soil is poor,” Chhuon said. “It’s mostly clay.”
“You see the village?” Soth demanded.
“A very beautiful town,” Chhuon replied with scorn.
“Now,” Soth ordered. “Build what you see.”
The new Khmer Krahom structure of government which now controlled the regained people of the Northeast, along with the people evacuated from the Northern Corridor, varied little from the KVM structure of the Viet Namese Communists. Names cha
nged. “Provinces” became “areas”; Khet Kampot became Dumbon 35. District names were dropped for numbers; Kompong Trach became District 77. The term for “village” remained’ phum, and phums retained their original names unless relocated, whereupon they too received numbers. Other levels were added: the krom or family group, 10 to 15 families, up to 90 people; above the village came the khum or canton, a cluster of villages; above that was the srok or sector, which in some areas was equal to a small district. Chhuon’s new “town” became Phum 117 of Khum 4, Srok 16, Dumbon 11. And Chhuon officially became 11-16-4-117-1. On paper everything had achieved perfect order.
For weeks the regained people of Phum 117 cleared the land without tools. Hands bled, arms ached. Almost as quickly as they cleared, the underbrush grew back. A single saw blade was secured and the first mutual assistance group, a krom pravasday, was established and directed to cut bamboo poles and distribute them directly to the heads of each interfamily unit. “You are the main force driving the revolution,” Soth told the workers. “Follow the Movement and you will master the countryside and own the land.”
Shovels were requisitioned from srok level. Fields were laid out, the boray was cordoned off with scraps of bamboo driven into the saturated earth like defeated sentinels slumping at irregular intervals. “Build a new mentality,” Soth encouraged the shovelers. “Build a spirit of combative struggle. This is your land, eh, Mister Chairman? Anyone who harms you, who harms your belongings, who harms your phum, he is evil. He is your enemy.”
“...he is my enemy,” Chhuon repeated. He jabbed his spade into the clay, pulled back on the handle. The earth parted, making a long sucking tthhhth-muk. Anyone...Chhuon thought. He looked down the line of the lengthening irrigation ditch. It’s past planting time, he thought. There are no seedlings. There will be no harvest. Above them on the slope were a line of family dwellings—simple huts. Anyone who harms you...He lifted the shovel and dropped the contents into an old winnowing basket for the two young girls to take to the dike. Again he jabbed the earth. Amid the dwellings was a small, low, curved hut built on a platform and lashed to four vertical corner poles. It was little more than a woven pup tent, a two-person cocoon. “We’ve no children,” Chhuon had said to Sok. “Peou is with the Liberation Youth Class. Samay...” He shook his head. “We’ve no belongings. All we need is a roof to keep the rain off while we sleep.”
For the Sake of All Living Things Page 69
