“Done,” Vathana said. She had written only, Yani. Mom: Sok. Home: Sath Din.
“I’ve never heard of it. Never mind. Get out of here. Take this pass and follow that group. You can plant. Next.”
Vathana led the children to the end of a long line of women and children. “Where are we going, Sister?” she asked the woman ahead of her.
“To the reorganization center,” the woman answered.
“What is that?”
“You!” a yothea called sternly. Vathana glanced at the armed boy. “You, Met Srei, comrade girl, Angkar forbids you to talk in line.” The boy wandered up the line.
“they are sending us to the forest to work and to be educated,” the woman whispered.
“with the children?” Vathana said without looking at her.
“they’re taking the children to the child center, it’s better, yes? one cannot watch them in the forest.”
That night Vathana slipped from the group. If anyone noticed, if anyone missed her, she did not know. She did not care. All night she and her children headed east along a secondary road. Much of the way Samnang carried Su Livanh on his back while Vathana carried Samol. “We’re going to see Grandpa and Grandma,” she told them again and again. What had been at best a vague thought to give her direction the day she’d left Neak Luong now became both her tactical plan and her guiding spiritual strength. She would unite grandchildren and grandparents for at least a brief time and the Samsara, the Wheel of Life, would be fulfilled.
The secondary road led east, circumventing Prey Veng, then north through low fields. For a week they walked at night and hid in the treelines or hedges or in abandoned peasant homes by day. Food was not yet a problem. Many of the small village silos had at least handfuls of rice. Some had bushels. Water, also, was present, if not abundant. Many of the cisterns had cups. Some of the homes had jars. Only a few wells were putrid with decaying corpses. What was not abundant was people. Here and there a village seemed to have totally escaped the effects of the war. Farmers worked their fields preparing for the coming rains. Women repaired thatched roofs while children played in the shade beneath stilt houses. But mostly the land was empty. At each inhabited hamlet Samnang asked, “Bub-ba-ba?” He wanted to enter, to be with the people. In Cambodia to live alone, separated from all others, was very rare. Growing up in the refugee camp he’d had a hundred friends, a thousand aunts and uncles. Always his mother stopped him.
“We cannot trust anyone. Not until we talk to your grandpa.”
“Bub? Ba-ba-ba.”
“Are we going to walk all the way?” Samol asked, her voice as petite as her carriage.
“If we must. A terrible evil has been unleashed, but so you will not be frightened, say, ‘Divine Lord Buddha...’ ” Each morning Vathana prayed with her children, prayed for protection, prayed for a successful journey to Phum Sath Din. Each night they walked. They spoke to no one. They avoided being seen. On 17 and 18 April the villages and camps they circled were ablaze with wanton rifle fire, music, even some skyrockets. They did not ask why. On the 19th the celebrations ceased. They had reached the Mekong at Tonle Bet across from Kompong Cham. To head north they would either have to cross the river or cross Highway 7 and follow the secondary roads through the Chup Plantation toward Kratie.
Vathana could not decide. For a day they stopped, hid. That night they did not move. Nor the next day. Don’t look back, she told herself. How would Captain Sullivan solve this? What did he say to do? What did he do to escape? But he didn’t have to carry children. Vathana worried. She moved their tiny camp to a small hollow below Highway 7. From there she could glimpse the roadway through a hundred meters of forest. The road was packed. Thousands of people. Where were they being sent? Chams by dress. The detritus of the evacuees was piled so high along the road’s edge it blocked her view. How to cross? How to move north? How to get to Phum Sath Din?
“You must stay here. Do you understand?” The children were very frightened. “Mama will be back soon. You must not move. You must be very quiet.”
At dusk she walked toward the road. The sides of the hollow converged like a funnel, the bottom rolled. From the small encampment she had not been able to see into the bottom of the rolls. She approached slowly, tree by tree. A radio played. A monkey whooped. Chills ran from arm to arm. She leaned into a tree for support. A headless corpse toppled from the other side. She stared at the base of the trees. Before her, beside her, dare she look back, sitting against the trunk of each tree was a body holding its head in its lap. Her heart ached. She wished to flee but she drove herself cautiously forward. Then a lap head moved. She froze. It was crying. No. A child. A child lay its head on the lap of its father, lay tightly holding, hugging the headless man’s leg. Vathana pressed toward the road. She could smell the smoke and see the fires of the burning city across the river. She could hear the radio of a Krahom cadreman. The voice was Norodom Sihanouk’s: “...in victory the Revolution will achieve genuine happiness...”
There was a break in the flow of people on the road. To get here, she thought, the evacuees must have been ferried across the river. “...we have attained our sovereignty, our independence...” Yes. They must come in groups, she thought. “...With the traitorous Lon Nol and his clique eliminated we shall defend and construct the most beautiful nation...” They won. Vathana felt nothing. Win. Lose. It made no difference now.
Quickly she scurried to her children. They were gone. Frantic she searched their rest area. Their belongings were gone. Then, whispered, she heard, “ba-ba-ba.” They had hidden. How her heart leaped. How wonderfully they’d adapted.
At midnight they crossed the road, their first steps into the sparsely populated regions of the Northeast. In the dim light of a crescent moon they walked, stumbled along paths of the old rubber tree plantation. Vathana had not seen the trees with their silver bark since coming south to marry Teck. At that time, she recalled, the plantation forest had been perfectly ordered, row after row; the aisles between had been clear, clean, looking manicured. Now the aisles were ripped with craters, the trees splintered and felled. Dead branches cluttered the ground. Everywhere were signs of war. They moved slowly, fearing ambush by bandits or...or who? Forest spirits? “You are good trees,” Vathana whispered as they entered an area devastated by American bombs searching for NVA tanks. “Be compassionate, trees. I know you won’t harm my children.” More trashed foliage: NVA artillery aiming for ARVN incursioners. Farther, the charred hulks of KK Chicom trucks, an old bivouac site, a burned-out clearing where FANK units had fallen. Oh, Vathana thought, if the trees could talk. She pulled Samnang closer to her side. All the misery, all the fear, the pain, ache, worry, disillusionment, all which had been put on hold, all which she’d steeled herself against, first to assist the refugees, then to help the associations and finally to flee, to walk home with her children, in the seemingly silent security of the shattered rubber tree forest—all cascaded to her heart.
“bu. bu-ba. bu-ba.”
Vathana squatted, pulled the girls in, hugged all three. “Soon,” she wept, “soon we will see Grandpa and he will fix all this. He loves you very much. He loves me.”
That night they did not go far. With the seeming emptiness of the forest, and with the fear of wandering aimlessly in the dark, Vathana decided it would be best to travel mornings and evenings when she could be certain they were on a northerly course. They lay on the mat, covered themselves with the thin blanket. The children—how good they’ve been, she thought—slept. But Vathana could not. She prayed. She planned. She projected. She meditated. In so many ways the trip had been easier than she’d expected. Food had been plentiful. Twigs, straw, paper had been easy to collect for their daily cooking fire. But the sights. They had been beyond her wildest nightmares. As she recounted their trek she tallied the bodies, the human debris at roadsides, the neatly stacked corpses at the execution sites. A hundred here, a few there, four hundred...and on and on. She meditated on the tragedy which had struck her
people and the sadness of the four thousand dead she’d seen since leaving Neak Luong. She cried for the murdered. She shuddered. She wept asking, “Why? Why, Teck, have you abandoned me? Why, Sophan? Why, John Sullivan, do you abandon your daughter?” By first light Vathana had convinced herself that the slaughter was an aberrant action, a part of the final offensive which had overflowed into the victory. Soon the country with its new army and new masters would settle back. Soon Samdech Euv would reign. Compassion would return.
The rubber plantation gave way to the wilds of the Srepok Forest and the lonely progress of the small family slowed further. Now there was no more rice. Daily patrols could be seen or heard on the main roads or in new camps being hacked from the jungle. Old villages had been abandoned, torched, the wells polluted with the carcasses of draft animals. Execution sites, small in comparison to the ones in the heavily populated area to the south, were not uncommon. The Srepok had become a no-man’s-land. Even the animals had abandoned the region. There was no whoop of monkeys, no caw of birds. Only mosquitos and black flies flourished. By April’s end when the first slight rains dampened the dusty earth, Vathana and her children had reached an area just east of Kratie. They had walked nearly three hundred kilometers in twenty-two days; they had nearly an equal distance yet to cover. Vathana’s feet were raw from the constant walking, carrying Su Livanh. Samnang seemed to be thriving. Each day he became a better tree climber, here picking bananas, there a coconut, at five and a half, partially deaf, dumb, with one side of his body contorted and asthenic, the forager and provider. Occasionally they crossed old paddies which should now be being turned, readied for the May planting, but which lay fallow, abandoned. Occasionally they crossed the route taken by a column of deportees. Always it was the same, the road’s edge littered with corpses—people who could not keep up, the aged, the very young, those previously wounded. Often they had not been killed but simply left to die of thirst. Here an elderly woman hung at a smashed water-supply pipe; there a man lay facedown in a puddle reached too late; bloated corpses emitting the stench of decay. Always now Vathana and the children were thirsty.
“In a few days it will rain,” Vathana told them. “Maybe tomorrow. Divine Buddha...Say it with me. ‘Divine Buddha, we are not frightened.’ ” Their progress slowed further as they spent ever-increasing amounts of time foraging for food, searching for clean water. From the modern conveniences of prewar Neak Luong through the refugee camp years to the first steps north to now, time had accelerated in reverse, dropping Vathana from an agricultural and early industrial era, through all the steps between, back 10,000 years to foraging subsistence. The rich ecosystem of the Srepok favored them. Edible plants were plentiful; damp-land newts and dry-wood efts were numerous. In order to preserve their walking time they cooked only in midafternoon, throwing into the pot all they had gathered in the morning. Still the foraging slowed them.
Still it did not rain. Their lips cracked. Their throats parched. Water became an obsession, yet Vathana dared neither turn west toward the Mekong nor tarry at any of the dry rills long enough to dig for wetness. “Soon. Soon. Grandpa will have water. Grandpa knows where. Grandpa knows how. He loves you very much. He loves me, too.”
Cuts on Vathana’s heels festered. The pain shot to her ankles, up the Achilles tendons to the base of her calves. She did not see Samol drink from the cistern with the two rotting heads. Had she seen, from a distance, she questioned whether she would have had the strength to stop her. By evening the child was ill. Vathana carried her. Samnang carried Su Livanh. Vathana was faint.
“ba. baba. ba! ba! ba!”
“what is it, precious, heart?” Samnang pulled his mother, directed her. She had been tottering aimlessly. She knew it but she’d been unable to concentrate.
Samnang pulled hard. Vathana stumbled after him. She stumbled up a slight incline then down a sudden dip to the shallow valley of the small Kampi. Water trickled between rocks in the riverbed. Samnang pulled yet harder but Vathana held him back. She knelt and forced him to his knees. Samol’s stomach had been gurgling loudly for an hour. Now, as they said a prayer of thanksgiving, she heaved. Vathana startled. She cleaned her daughter’s mouth, “slowly, precious heart,” she whispered. “there may be soldiers.”
“Bub-bub.” The boy blurted, his utterance as if saying, I couldn’t care less. He bolted for the stream. Su Livanh, her little legs no match for the undergrowth, tumbled after him. Vathana followed. Before she drank she washed Samol’s face and mouth and let the child drink her fill.
“mama, i don’t feel good,” Samol complained. She heaved the water she’d just swallowed.
For four days they stayed by the Kampi. Beneath rocks in the riverbed Samnang found tiny thin-shelled clams and hundreds of hermit crabs, Vathana’s physical strength returned. She cleaned the sores on her heels, and the pains which had shot to her calves subsided. She washed the mud from Su Livanh’s hair and skin and she washed all their clothes. Still she did not feel strong. Lethargy, depression, exhaustion grasped her mind.
Samol had not been able to keep anything in her stomach. She could barely walk from the sleeping mat to the river. The first hard rain fell in mid-May and the girl shook with chills all night. In the morning she’d woken with diarrhea squirts on her legs. Vathana washed her, bundled her in the blanket. The trek continued. Samol cried for hours. “It hurts, mama.” She clamped her elbows to her sides, her tiny arms and hands tight to her chest. Through the blanket, from her face, Vathana could feel the girl’s fever radiating. “It hurts so bad, mama.” Then Samol lay limp, spent, in her mother’s arms.
Now it rained every day. Vathana decided to head west, to find Highway 13, to find a village or camp. Despite the water Samol became lighter and lighter. “We must find a doctor,” she told Samnang. “We must find medicine. What root would the khrou boil? What will stay down?”
They walked all night. They walked all the next day. They walked until dusk. Samnang never complained. He carried Su Livanh on his back. She whined about her legs being sore. He carried her on his hip as Sophan had carried him as an infant. They saw no one. The land was deserted. Highway 13 was empty. Not even a roadblock. They walked north hoping to be interdicted, to be captured. Samol’s abdomen became hard. She shriveled. In the dark Vathana tried to force her to sip, to drink just a little water. It rolled from her mouth.
Now they rested. Now they foraged. Now they walked. Days passed. Vathana said little. She carried Samol. Samnang carried Su Livanh. They did not seek the security of the forest but walked the highway north. Several times they were stopped. The old people of the “liberated” zones had been forbidden to give aid to the deportees, yet in true Khmer tradition the family found small bundles of rice, a few vegetables, even a cooked eel in amongst their belongings. John, Vathana thought in mental flaccidity, why, why have you abandoned me? Why have you abandoned your daughter? Don’t look back. Divine Buddha, I am not afraid. Sophan, will you carry Samol for me? She’s not heavy. Teck would carry her if he weren’t at the front.
South of Stung Treng where Highway 13 junctions with 19 they were stopped. A yothea demanded their papers, their passes. Vathana freely handed him the blue cards from her bundle. He screamed at her but the sharp words fell softly into the mush of her thoughts. He pulled the scarf from Su Livanh’s head. Her light hair shocked him. Then he peeled back the blanket from Samol’s face. The skin was black, wrinkled. “Leprosy,” Vathana said softly.
The yothea jumped back. “Bu-ba-bah-bah,” Samnang blurted.
“It’s gotten into his ears,” Vathana whispered. She pointed to Su Livanh. “Into her eyes and hair.”
The soldier stepped back. He yelled to others along the road and they too backed away. “Go. Go now. Get away from here.”
As they left they heard the radio, again Samdech Euv’s voice: “...A general amnesty has been decreed. All soldiers and workers of the Lon Nol regime...”
It took them six more days to reach the bridge which crossed the Srep
ok to Phum Sath Din. Vathana no longer looked at Samol. Nor could she look upon her other children. It was midday. Through the canopy Vathana sensed that high clouds had gathered and that rain was imminent. She paused. She whispered the prayer to the spirit of the water which Chhuon had taught her as a child. The forest about her was very high, very dense, much denser than she remembered but, she vaguely thought, that is because I’ve lived in the city for many years.
“Bub-bub ba bub.” Samnang was anxious to cross. They had reached their destination.
Vathana prayed against the evidence of her vision that what little she could view was a matter of war weariness. She dragged her feet. “Come here,” she said to Samnang. “Let me straighten you.” Methodically she preened her son.
“Grandpa,” Su Livanh said. “Grandpa and Grandma.”
“I want them to see how pretty you are,” Vathana whispered. Tears dropped from her eyes.
“Mama.” Su Livanh smiled. “Samol?”
Vathana did not uncover her other daughter. Instead she straightened her own clothes, let down her hair and re wrapped it in her krama.
They crossed the bridge. The high trees made her feel very small. They walked the old street to where her home should have been. The jungle had encroached upon the clearing, had invaded the shattered structures and interned the memories of the village. Go to your home village, Vathana thought. Go to the village of your parents or your grandparents. That was the order. But what are we to do if the village is no longer there? Now she could not keep from crying openly. She collapsed, trembling on the dirt floor of the old orchard. She dropped Samol. “Papa,” she cried. “Papa, I need you. You haven’t seen your granddaughter. I can’t carry her any farther.” Vathana cried hysterically. “Mama. Mama, see my son. Oh, Mama. Mama, you have three beautiful grandchildren.”
“Do not cry, child.” There is a voice in the orchard. Vathana looks. Through her tears she sees nothing. She’s not sure she heard the voice.
For the Sake of All Living Things Page 88
