For the Sake of All Living Things

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “Kampuchea is one nation, eh?” Nang feels cheerful as they walk the path toward Site 13. “It should have one language, the Khmer tongue; one people, Khmer people.” He chuckles. That Chhuon has not responded means nothing to him. He wants to show the old man how the new site operates, he wants to brag, yet to him the old man is naught but a temporary anonymous audience. “Why should Khmers share Khmer soil with Thais, Chams, Chinks, phnongs, yuons, eh?” The trail begins to rise. The moaning is as constant as a waterfall’s hum in a canyon; as deep as prayers chanted in Pali. “You talk of natural order. Of how man disrupted it. Ha! Now it’s time to let the natural order return. They have no right here. The yuons had agents in the cities so we moved people to farms. If they had stayed in the cities the yuons or the imperialists would have stirred them to rebel. Did you know the yuons appealed to the KGB and the CIA to eliminate Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan? It’s true. We have proof. My friend, Rin of Svay Rieng, has sent me proof.”

  As the trail snaked closer to the huge rocky escarpment the forest dropped away. Suddenly a long column of climbing men, women and children came into view. Chhuon could not make out details. He could not distinguish faces. But he could discern that people were climbing with heads down and hands behind their backs.

  “Follow close after me,” Nang instructed. “Don’t stray. You needn’t be purified.”

  The path with the long column circled to their right then disappeared in folds of the escarpment. Nang’s path ran straight then zigzagged in a series of tight switchbacks and newly sculpted stairs. To their left was the four-hundred-foot horseshoe cliff. Directly above them, in a high tree on the wide ledge before the final thousand-foot escarpment which led to Thailand, Chhuon could make out the silhouette of a tree house. A woman screamed. Someone laughed. Nang laughed too. “Climb quicker, old man.” Then not a laugh but a titter.

  “What’s that cable?” Chhuon’s eyes followed the thick wire from the tree house out over the abyss toward a tower on the far side. At the center were various dark spheres but his eyes were too poor to discern their function. He climbed more slowly now. His skinny legs and decrepit feet cramping as he negotiated the steep narrow stairs. Each switchback brought him closer to the edge of the abyss until finally one took him so close the updraft hit him full in the face. He gasped, squeezed his old features attempting to block the wretched odor. He shook. His legs trembled, about to collapse. With the hot, rising, putrid updraft came the full volume of tormented moans. Chhuon stumbled. From above more laughs, more cries. Nang’s arm shot toward the old peasant. His forefinger stabbed the pitching Chhuon, hooked his armpit, righted him as if he, Chhuon, were a weightless rag doll. “Not yet, old one,” Nang said compassionately.

  “Wha...wha...” Words would not form.

  “They’re only Viet gian.” Nang chuckled. To him it was a pun, using the Viet Namese term for Viet Namese traitors. He smiled more broadly when he realized Chhuon understood the words. “We only kill Viets here,” Nang boasted.

  “The...other trail...”

  “Oh, maybe some Thais. Or Chinese. They walk that way thinking they’re being expelled to Thailand. They’re no trouble. Besides, if it’s not one’s fate to remain alive, this must be accepted, eh?”

  Again the scream from the tree house. “What happens there?” Chhuon asked, dazed yet compelled to understand.

  “Some of the ladies...” Nang’s sentence was shattered by his titter. Then, “Come. You walk in front. I’ll push you up.”

  “How many...?” The words came hard to Chhuon. “...Why?”

  “Just enough to purify the country,” Nang said lightly. “When they get here, they know. They’ve elected to die. They are always quiet.”

  “But...but...People take refuge in silence.”

  Nang’s voice snapped sharp. “They’re all enemies.”

  “But...”

  “Viet gian.”

  They reached the ledge. A squad of yotheas sat beneath the large tree. Immediately upon seeing Nang they sprang up. In rapid conversation Chhuon watched this situation evolve. As two yotheas bitched quietly that they’d not gotten their turn, a naked and beaten young woman was pushed down the tree house ladder. Two soldiers held the prisoner as a third tied a red-checked krama about her head. Nang laughed caustically, stared into her blindfold and rasped his stubbed hand on her wet privates. Then he backed away. “Let the old one watch.” Nang winked at the yotheas. Then loudly he scolded the soldiers and added, “I’ll take her to clean up.”

  To the woman Nang spoke easily, softly, calling her “sister,” as in the old days. At first she hesitated, then she freely let him guide her along a trail which brought them to the midpoint of the horseshoe.

  Near Chhuon the yotheas chattered happily. “Four meters,” said one. “Two,” said another. “No, not Met Nang. He has much courage. Half a meter.” “She’ll grab him and pull him over,” said the boy who’d guessed two.

  “Why...What has she...” Chhuon knew what would happen but he did not believe his foreknowledge.

  “She had a cooking pot,” one of the yotheas explained.

  “A pot...” Chhuon’s words were weak.

  “A bourgeois pot,” the yothea said. “She must be an imperialist. Ooooo! Look!”

  Nang stood not a half meter back but at the very edge of the cliff. His back was to the cliff, his claw arm stretched to her. Like a delicate flower he guided her toward him. Then she vanished.

  That bastard, Nang thought. Hysterical know-nothingness...of Angkar...Nang turned a page of the notebook labeled 7. He Skimmed, read a note here, a section there. Tonight I shall guide Mir and his family to the path to the border... Nang slammed the notebook closed. After all I have done for him. What tricks do his field plans contain? Stupid. How could I have let him trick me? Ma is Meh, Pa is Poh. He thinks that’s wrong? Nang grasped the two books, lifted them before him, shook them violently. “Know-nothing enforcers, eh?” He seethed aloud then seethed in silence. “Met Arn,” Nang screamed. Then he muttered, “Perhaps the enforcers, even the chiefs and controllers, but not me. I know everything. I’ll show him. He’ll reveal his network. Every shred of evidence of seditious acts will be exposed.” Nang glared at the books. “Arn,” he shouted. “Read these. I can’t stand them.”

  “Why do you hate so?” Chhuon’s mouth was swollen, distorted. The words came garbled. “Hate does not cease by hatred, hatred ceases by love. This is an old rule.” Again the torturer hit him. How long the beating had lasted he didn’t know. How long he’d been in the detention camp he didn’t know. Nor did he know how many times he’d written his biography. He prayed for the escape of loss of consciousness, for the peace of death. Yet it had been Nang’s orders that this one must not be killed, must not die until he told all and in repentance killed himself. How easy it had been to acquiesce to the first demand for a biography. But the first had not been accepted. He wrote a second, more detailed account of his life. The torturer filed the papers and beat him. Standard Krahom procedure: by virtue of the character of the enemy, the first and second writings were necessarily false. The science of interrogation demanded beating to obtain truth. Chhuon’s file grew. There was a mug photo of him, his wrists tied behind his back. Then came his two notebooks—the last and the first—Voen had concealed the others. Then the biographies, the first two unread. The third and fourth analyzed along with the denials of confession. Nang had personally chosen the torture specialists for their sadistic repertoire, had personally instructed them in the best tortures to extract strategic information about enemy plots. For days on end Chhuon was punched, kicked until unconscious, then revived with buckets of water, then tied to a metal cot and given electric shocks, then revived and placed in solitary confinement in a sheet-metal box which became an oven under the sun.

  “You must not cry,” the torturer snarled. “When you are hit, when you are lashed, when you receive electrification, you must remain silent. Tell us all your contacts.”

  Ch
huon whimpered.

  “Tell me!”

  Physically he could bear no more.

  “Tell me!”

  He babbled. “Buddha says, ‘To hold anger is to grasp an ember with the intent of throwing it at another. You are the one who gets burned.’ ”

  “Ha!” Again the fists, the rope lashes. They broke a hand, a wrist. Then, “This is your last chance, buffalo shit. You will write a confession. You will tell all your contacts. They can’t help you. No one knows you’re here. You’ve been disappeared. Your cocoon made a splendid fire.”

  The next day, before they hung Chhuon by the neck, he was taken to witness a fresh kill. Hung and nailed to a torture shed wall was a man. His pants had been removed, his genitals had been impaled with spikes. “Ha.” A yothea nudged Chhuon. “You see how Met Nang deals with special enemies, eh?”

  “He...” Chhuon stuttered. “He...is a...”

  “Ha! He was...”

  “Met Khieng...”

  “They say he stole the virtue of many workers.”

  “But...a cadre of...”

  “No one, old man, is above the Will of Angkar.”

  Chhuon’s frail body, covered with scabies, scars and scabs, barely pulled the kinks out of the thick rope. The specialists laughed, grabbed his feet and tugged down. The noose tightened. Blood to the brain stopped. Chhuon dropped toward unconsciousness. Yet the release of death was denied. They lifted him, lowered the rope, loosened the noose. An hour later they hung him again. Then again two days later.

  Then for a month they left him alone in a clean cell, fed him yothea’s meals twice a day through a slot opening, let him emerge to wash and clean his bucket once a week. Then they returned him to the hanging chamber, tied his hands behind his back, placed the noose about his neck and raised him to his toes.

  “We know the truth. You have not told the whole truth.” A yothea read the accusations. He smirked. “Why do you hide the truth from Angkar? Angkar does not wish anyone’s death, yet your behavior proves you will not be converted.”

  Chhuon began meditating on his body rhythms. He would shut them out. Shut out the pain, the fear, the loss of self. Slowly they hoisted him. He could feel the blood of the carotid artery pulsing against the rope. He concentrated on the beating. Then in agitation his mind slipped. He felt the air squeezing through his constricted trachea. Then the thought, Kdeb! Why have you abandoned me? His strength snapped. His will to forgo life, to release himself from suffering evaporated. A wave of anguished desperation crashed upon his waning consciousness. Pulse. Kdeb! pulse, kdeb. pul...Then with immense concentration and effort, “Wait!”

  The specialists smiled. Laughed. Lingered to allow Chhuon’s frantic kicking to reach its zenith. Then they lowered him and loosened the noose. “Wait. There is...” Chhuon sobbed. He had been broken. “I will write it all.”

  “vathana, are you awake?”

  “yes.” Vathana lay between her Aunt Voen and her cousin Robona. Though the night was warm they huddled close. To Voen’s other side was her second daughter, Amara, and Amara’s three young children. Filling the one-room hut were ten more people—Voen’s in-laws.

  The moon had not yet risen. The air was still, “you must learn quickly,” Voen whispered. Quietly she explained the lies they’d invented to secrete their background from the new masters, the cadre of Angkar. Voen tested Vathana, corrected her answers, asked again until Vathana gripped the tale as reality.

  “what of my father?” Vathana finally asked.

  Voen told her of the great evacuation from Phnom Penh and how on the tenth day her husband’s soul left his body. Of how she had then begged him to close his eyes and go peacefully, of how he had lain staring at the sky and of how the soldiers had made her leave him. As Voen spoke she wept and Vathana wept too and said a prayer that her uncle’s spirit would not torment them. Then Voen said, “here they are not so cruel, rama is very kind, yam, she is fair, beware nava, he’s the one who disappears people, there is one, met soth, at the higher level, some say he cuts off heads and eats hearts and livers.”

  “auntie, what of my father? chhuon? you said...”

  “ssshh. sometimes there are soldiers under the house, when it’s safe, i’ll tell you.”

  Nights and days passed before they were again able to speak securely. Met Rama, chairman of the tribunal of enforcers for Sangkat 117, interrogated Vathana on her second day. He accepted her story that she was Voen’s daughter though Vathana suspected he knew it was a lie. Then he assigned her to work.

  It was now Vathana’s turn to live the life of the incarcerated in that Asian Sparta where since the second deportation the distinction between new people and old, or base people and 17 April people, had blurred. Sangkats received orders via state radio. The harvest season was ending. The radio became obsessed with building dikes and digging canals. “Hurry. Reap the rice quickly. We must return to the dikes. We shall move forward to master the water. It is year zero. The land is one vast work site where night does not exist, where work is unending, where workers labor in joy and enthusiasm without fear of fatigue.”

  Vathana labored at a massive work site with thousands of men, women and children, labored like a black ant with the emaciated in their tattered black uniforms, with few tools and with little expectation. On whatever scale previous projects had been undertaken, they were now increased. Democratic Kampuchea was ordered to rebuild the agricultural system of canals, dikes and reservoirs that had existed during the golden age of the Angkor Empire more than 900 years earlier. The entire nation was to be blanketed with a network of rice paddies a thousand meters square, and between the paddies ten-meter-wide irrigation canals were ordered dug. Feeder canals and minidikes were to be built to subdivide the larger fields. The dikes around the larger fields were each to be four feet high and ten feet wide. Thus, a thousand-meter dike contained approximately 2,430 cubic yards of dirt—about three hundred pickup-truck loads! And such a dike was merely one side of one paddy.

  Vathana touched the node just above her elbow on the inside of her left arm. It was as large as a plum. Her entire arm, her entire body, ached. She dared not stop. Only one night earlier Nava had come and questioned her as to why she had no children. It hurt her to answer, to deny them. She did not sleep. In her anguish she’d heard the soldiers roust the family of the next hut “for a meeting.” They were not at work the next day and Met Nem, the mekong who was Nava’s favorite, was seen with the blouse of one of the women.

  Without talking Vathana glanced to Amara and both lifted the pole from which hung a pallet of earth. Up the path, out of the canal, in line behind a hundred pairs of women like themselves, they carried the dirt to the ever-expanding dump point. Then, in line, they walked back for the next load. Slowly the canal lengthened, slowly the dike rose. Without shoes the women’s feet callused but without sufficient food their bodies did not replace the skin and their feet wore away.

  Vathana shivered. She’d been hot all morning. Now she felt cold and clammy. Again she felt her arm. A week earlier she’d cut her thumb relashing the pallet to the shoulder pole. There seemed to be little infection, only a small red ulcer, yet from it came a poison her body could not defeat. She looked up. On the dike top an older deformed man was staring at her. He held a red banner on a long pole, rocking it back and forth to some inner cadence. Their eyes met. Quickly she looked to the ground. He’s Khmer Rouge, she thought. Wounded during the war. They’re the most cruel.

  Again the glance to Amara. Oh God, Vathana thought. What have they loaded us with? Amara led but after a few steps Vathana stumbled. The pallet skidded, dust rose, clumps of dirt fell off. “Ha!” The man with the banner laughed loud. “She’s no farmer’s daughter. One like you has never touched dirt.”

  Vathana coughed, quickly scooped the dirt back onto the pallet. The dust of the work site was thick in the air. At ground level it was nearly impenetrable. Her eyes filled. Quickly she rehoisted her end of the pole. The pain in her eyes was excruciating, as
if someone had thrown slivers of glass against the cornea. She tried to blink, to squeeze her eyes but the dust implanted further. Behind her the line bunched, “amara,” she whispered frantically, “i can’t see.”

  “just follow,” Amara whispered back.

  They did not stop for lunch though late in the afternoon other workers came and fed each a cup of thin rice gruel while their pallet was being loaded. Seeing Vathana’s eyes the worker whispered, “do not cry, sister, it is forbidden, they will take you to the forest to be educated.”

  “it’s only the dust,” Vathana whispered back.

  “they’ll think you criticize them,” the woman said. She lifted the hem of her skirt and wiped Vathana’s face.

  The work continued until eight o’clock. Exhausted, Amara led Vathana back to the hut. Nebella, Voen’s mother-in-law, greeted them with hugs and tears. She was old and had been spared from work in the fields. Her work was to make plaited mats, to cook for the hut and to watch over the children. Now there were new rules. The cooking pot had been confiscated. All would eat in a communal hall yet to be built. The children could watch over one another—five-year-olds could care for infants—Angkar so pronounced. Nebella, at sixty-six, would pack the dikes with a wooden tamper. It was Met Nem’s pronouncement.

  There was but one man in the family hut, Mey, Voen’s husband’s brother. The women beseeched him to go to Met Rama to plead for his mother. “i will,” he told them, “but first i must get our food. until the hall is built, i’m to go for the hut. if i don’t, no one will be given anything.”

  Mey was frightened. To him, seeking out Rama was like asking to talk to Pol Pot. Instead he went to Met Khron. In Sangkat 117, there were about thirty mekongs (unarmed) and yotheas (armed). Perhaps half, though they strictly obeyed orders, were tolerant of the people’s requests. Half of these were kind in a traditional Khmer sense. They seemed to recognize their charge of, and responsibility for, the wards of the commune and they took the responsibility seriously. This was particularly true of the older yotheas and those of the old Rumdoah (Sihanoukist) faction. To them the job was an adjunct to their lives. To the younger, more heavily indoctrinated, their jobs became their lives.