For the Sake of All Living Things

by John M. Del Vecchio

  Nang did not stay past the first dozen. The cliff no longer thrilled him as it once had. Instead he returned to his home. He attempted to sleep but could not. The moaning from the gorge seemed particularly loud, as if the voices were trapped in by the low clouds and mist. He arose. Turned on the radio. There was no broadcast from Phnom Penh. He refused to tune in Hanoi. Nang cleaned himself. He checked his closet for his best uniform and changed clothes. Then he went to the central room where he had collected a number of books, but he could not read. Instead he hefted the file of the old peasant. Nang sat, looked at the photos, began to read. The last confession was stilted, the work of coercion. Nang read only the beginning, then he read the start of an earlier version. Then he put them aside and lifted the spiral notebooks labeled #1 and #7. He flipped through the last. This creature surely was a spy, an agent of the Americans. Freely he’d written accounts of secret meetings, of aiding escapees. Why he’d not been dealt the ultimate measure earlier Nang didn’t know but he suspected collusion and bribery involving the cadre of Sangkat 117, the old man’s last site, perhaps even involving Arn or Ku.

  Nang put notebook #7 down. He sighed, rolled forward in his chair, was about to return to bed. But his hand opened notebook #1. Immediately it grabbed him. Nang read quickly, reread carefully. He knew some of the people...this was the story of the trip to Stung Treng, Lomphat and Plei Srepok. Nang closed the book. His abdomen and chest burned. He swallowed hard to keep the bile down but immediately belched the hot acid to the back of his throat. He closed his eyes. Into his memory leaped a vision of a giant. He opened his eyes. Looked about. “My father was Kambu,” he said aloud. “The other father is dead. Kambu. Kambu. He is the father of all.”

  Again Nang opened the notebook. Again he read. Again he shut the pages and closed his eyes. The written words jarred loose all sorts of memories. Again the giant, now surrounded by total village immolation. “Yiii...” the giant screams. “For all eternity our blood will call for revenge.” Whose words? “Watch over Mayana.” Who speaks to me? “Yiii-KA!” The head, the neck split clean. Ears scraping naked body. “I—” Nang bolted up, erect, rigid, yelling, “I am the giant!”

  “Huh?” Nang sees himself standing. He looks around. Met Nem, the house teacher, and Met Kosal, his bodyguard, have rushed to the room. “I must go.” Nang barks the order at himself. He is feverish, frantic. He runs. Kosal runs with him, follows him to the path to the cliff. Nang is sprinting at a pace Kosal can’t match. He reaches the fork of the path but takes neither way. Instead he bears left and crashes through the undergrowth. In the canyon along the base of the cliff he passes a set of stone stairs, then a three-tiered wall, then a large bust of Buddha. The three-tiered wall curves with the cliff base and in the apex there is a shrine. Splattered thickly over the shrine are the dead, the mutilated dying—thousands. Nang climbs the pile at the base of the lowest tier. He is certain he will not be there. Millions of flies swarm. First light has broken. The illumination is soft on the oily dripping pools of yellow, brown, red swirls, massive pockets of maggots. Black birds descend with the dawning. They pick at the carnage, the decomposing, the disfigured. Nang waddles maniacally into the depths of the offal, “papa? Papa?” He sloshes to the center and climbs the second tier. No stone can be seen beneath the body dump. “Papa!” Nang pulls through bodies of children, flipping them to the lowest level. As he grasps, one screams. The shriek amid the constant hum of flies and the thunderous groaning horrifies him. He lurches back, stumbles, falls cascading backward to the bottom. Again he climbs, to the first, the second, now to the third tier. “Papa! Papa, you didn’t abandon me. I thought you left me. They lied. They lied to me. I thought you died. I thought you hated me. Papa!” Nang lifts face after face. Where? Where could the old peasant be? “Papa! Papa, I was such a disappointment to you. But...you...you didn’t leave me.” Oh...oh...oh, Lord Buddha, help me, help me find him. “Papa!” Nang is crying, frantic, distraught. “I tried to become all you could want...to become everything I could. I too will be enlightened. For your sake. Papa, please help me.” Nang drooped, plopped down amid the corpses. “You,” he said sadly to one. “Have you seen my father?” Then he looked up. The upper rim of the cliff looked to be a thousand kilometers high. “Papa! I’m so frightened...everything around me...there are ghosts everywhere.”

  Nang rolled to his knees. He crawled along the top tier, crying, blithering, unable to see through the clouds of insects he’d stirred up. Then he saw the face. The eyes were opened. It was not broken. The body too appeared intact. But it was without life. Nang moved to Chhuon. He sat the old body up, leaned it against other corpses, then sat next to it, lifted its arm and put it over his own shoulder. “Papa, what should I do? Should I have my children spy on one another, eliminate one another? Look at that child there. She didn’t deserve to live. What of your life these eight years? Would it have been better to die at Plei Srepok? Look, Papa! Look at them all. I am the giant now! They were his enemies. These people, they’re not enemies of the state!” Nang righted a head with his left foot. “You, old woman, did you love your children? This man”—Nang hugged his father—“he loved me.”

  From high above, the radio, the Voice of Democratic Kampuchea, turned to top volume, blasted urgent words. Yotheas scurried. Nang looked up. Amid the buzzing and moaning he could not at first make out the distant words. Then distinctly he heard the message. “Two Viet Namese divisions,” the voice blared, “are advancing west along Highway 19 through the highlands of Ratanakiri. Soldiers of the Northeast Zone...”

  Nang straightened up. They approach us here, eh? he thought. He removed Chhuon’s arm from about his shoulders, looked into Chhuon’s face. “I must go now, Papa. Good-bye.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  March 1977

  FOR MORE THAN A year Vathana had existed in the gulag of Sangkat 117. It was the time of the great starvation, the second famine. But to call it a year is very odd. Time crumbled. There is no time in a gulag. For a while Vathana made daily trips to the fertilizer factory but then she was allowed to return to the fields. She was expected to tell all. She told no one.

  In the gulag all people were now to eat in the communal dining place, but there was room for only half and rations for only half. The healthiest people hustled from the fields to gain a place in line, the weakest stumbled and fell and died. Midline was a place of shoving, cutting, prodding. Yotheas encouraged it until it became tiresome. Then they bashed people with their clubs. Each day people became more desperate; each night the rice riot became worse. Some nights the yotheas announced there would be no rice and the people would have to “make do.” Always they blamed enemies. “The rice shipment we expected was seized by imperialist saboteurs. Anyone caught hiding rice will be severely punished.”

  As the famine deepened cadre changed, first at srok level, then at khurn. The newest cadre were the most cruel. The population of the commune rose with new deportees, then fell because of “natural causes.” In August 250 people died of starvation in Sangkat 117; in September, 300. More people came, more died. Two communes were combined and together totaled 12,000 workers. Then a mobile youth brigade of 2,000 was force-marched toward Battambang or Siem Reap. No one knew for certain. With it went Mey’s eldest daughter. In October rations were cut further. Now, in the center of thousands of hectares of rice fields, the ration for an adult full-time field worker was seventy kernels of corn per day. Other adult workers—mat weavers, tool makers—received thirty-five. For nearly 10,000 people the enforcers, chiefs and controllers allowed but ten children to be on fishing detail. Foraging was prohibited. October’s death count stopped at 400 but there were more.

  Robona and Vathana were frail, Amara was the weakest. All were distraught. “I went to Met Rama,” Amara said to her sister and cousin. The three lay on mats on the raised floor of the hut. Everywhere about them, under them, falling on them, was water. It was the time of the heaviest rains, the time the sparsely manned cadres had the least contro
l over the people. “I said, Amara’s lips quivered, “Brother, we must have food.”

  “Did he answer?” Vathana asked. Others in the hut took note of their speech and the three women huddled closer and lowered their voices.

  “he said it is his order to see each person has one milk can of rice each day. but he said there is no rice. i said, ‘then let us eat the forest.’ he answered he would not stop us but he was not the security enforcer but nava was. i kissed his feet and left, tomorrow one of us must get food, you’re the strongest, we’ll tell the mekong you are ill.”

  The next day the two sisters went to work. Vathana lay moaning on her mat until all the women except the old mat weavers left. Then she rolled to her knees and slowly crawled to the doorless doorway. Purposely she made her belches loud as if she were about to vomit. The old women eyed her, shied back, pretended not to notice. Another one nauseous from overexertion and starvation, from dysentery or other diseases. Another one probably to die in a day or two. Best not to get to know her. What could one do?

  Vathana backed to the door, let herself slowly down into the water. It came to midthigh. She rolled her skirt up and stumbled away. The area north of the hut was intermittent forest, empty of fields, of people. She came upon a path and followed it. The rain came hard all day. The sky and land and vegetation blurred in their grayness. Here she picked a water lily stalk, broke it, chewed it to mush though her gums seemed barely able to keep her teeth in place. She swallowed it knowing it would have been okay cooked, fearing raw it would make her stomach swell. She came to a banana tree with no fruit. She picked a young leaf and again chewed. Her experience with Kpa, Le and Sam helped her forage but in her dazed and feeble state the land seemed picked clean. Then attached to a large lily she spied a snail. Her eyes darted about ensuring that no one saw. She snatched it and stuck it in the waistband of her skirt. Now she looked frantically for snails, for shrimp. In the water were dozens of small fish. She tried again and again to snap one up. She caught one. The slower she moved her hand in the water, the more she was able to grab. These too she rolled in her waistband until she had several dozen. She caught three more and ate them on the spot, savored them, crunching their delicate bones between her few good molars. She caught another, was about to pop it in her mouth when she spied movement. She hid. Four girls stumbled toward her. They were filthy, covered with sores, as sickly as the sickest in her commune. The girls saw her but only one seemed to comprehend. Lowly the one muttered, “How much food do you get in your cooperative?” It had become the new idiomatic greeting of all Democratic Kampuchea.

  In fear Vathana said nothing. The girls wandered on. Vathana trekked deeper into the forest. She came to a slight rise. The earth was saturated and the path was slick. She fell. She raised her head. This mud oasis, she thought, it could be a hideout. She rose. Now she walked more carefully, more afraid, as alert as her condition would permit. Months without proper nutrition affected her ability to concentrate. Swimming in her mind was the thought of ambush but it wouldn’t coalesce. She stumbled down the rise into a small clearing, into a slime pit where blackbirds fed ravenously, where smaller birds chirped and dove on scraps dropped by the ravens. Before she saw it she sensed it, felt the restless spirits of souls not blessed with proper ceremony. Then she saw the bodies floating as if suspended in a viscous twilight, face up, facedown, no face at all, floating in the rain, swimming, struggling to the surface of the pool, the decomposition gases filling internal sacs, rising, muck wings for the departed who could neither kick nor stroke but only do the deadman’s float until they broke the surface faceup, facedown, no face at all. Vathana fled. In her haste and dizziness she took a wrong path and ran into a clearing where a hundred low-lying objects were wrapped in opaque plastic bags. Again the feeling, again the hesitation, again the fixed eyes searching confirmation of a terror she wished not to confirm. A torn bag. A head crushed beyond recognition, the bag tied at the neck, the entire body buried. Vathana backpedaled, faster and faster. The fish in her waistband spilled. She spun, ran, fled, fled from the dark age of the thmils, but these were not thmils, not foreign atheists, but Khmer men and boys and girls turning the nation upon itself, turning it into a charnel house.

  “You! Halt!”

  Vathana stopped. A calm descended upon her. It would be better to die than to witness more. She turned to the voice. It was Met Nava. With him was Nem. They were killing the girls Vathana had seen earlier. Calm vanished. She ran hard. She would have run on leg stubs had they cut off her feet; on hands had they taken her legs. Her heart pumped wildly. She crashed through brush, splashed in the low water, lunged, dove-rose-dove in the deep.

  That night there was an education session. The words changed little, the people in their exhaustion barely heard. “You work well,” Met Nava told them. “You are strong. You don’t need to eat. Work. There is no need to think. Give yourselves to Angkar. Angkar protects all, provides for all. Rebuild yourselves in the spirit of Angkar Leou.” Then came new orders. Do this, do that. “Tomorrow all will double their production. Mothers may suckle newborns only one month. Then they will be given to the lactaters of the children’s center.” Do that. Do this. Not that. Not this. This and this. People became confused. Confusion was punishable by death. Nava shouted, “Someone was seen stealing food from the people. She entered the forest. That person must stand.” No one moved. “If she does not stand—we know who it is—her family will fade away.”

  Vathana lightly shut her eyes. Lord Buddha, she thought, they can only kill my body.

  “Stand!”

  Vathana rolled to her side but before she could rise seven women were up. Others began to cry. Then a man stood. Then another and another. Robona stood. Amara stood. Tears ran on Vathana’s cheeks. She stood. Everyone stood. To save face Met Nava grasped the closest woman to him. She was never seen again.

  The rice gruel and the corn soup became yet thinner. One six-ounce can of rice in water per day was issued to sustain twenty adults. Met Nem teased the starving by letting them watch her eat plates of pork ribs, large boiled fish, dishes of vegetables. Some people went crazy. Others became apathetic. Bodies consumed themselves. Muscles atrophied. Skin sagged from bones without meat. Bones weakened as the minerals were metabolized to keep the organism alive. When few people could work and production fell below quotas, yotheas and mekongs feared that their lies to the enforcers, the padded production figures, would become sources of suspicion. Then they turned their backs when people plucked and ate worms from the fields. For many it was too little, too late. By the time the waters began to recede a quarter of the people of Sangkat 117 had died.

  The first of the new rice was picked early and eaten green. This too caused problems because the grain was indigestible. A thousand people fell ill. In her sickness Amara gave Vathana her three-year-old son. To Robona she gave her five-year-old daughter. Her baby was dead. “You will get well again,” Vathana whispered to her cousin.

  “No,” Amara said. She was too weak and too ill to rise from her sleeping mat. “When the mekong allows, you must take him. If I see him again, I will eat him.”

  As Vathana brushed Amara’s hair from her eyes, Amara, unseen, under a rag blanket, slit her wrist with a shard of glass. Her head drooped to one side. Vathana thought she slept. She brushed her hair, quietly singing a sweet lullaby. Then she knew Amara was dead. “Go, dear Sister,” Vathana whispered in her ear. “Go to the true life.”

  As fast as the new crop came in the yotheas ordered it removed. People stole what they could but the famine did not stop. At night, after work, Vathana’s mind ran terribly. She could not stop her thoughts. She was not yet ready to love her new son whom she was allowed to visit only one hour each week. For this she felt guilty. The guilt led to frustration, and the frustration to anger. She was angry at Angkar. Angkar was lies. Angkar promised them food for work but though the crop was sufficient there was no food. She was angry at the cadre who now openly admitted to being Communists. She was an
gry at Pol Pot who now openly admitted to being head of Democratic Kampuchea. Now Robona was near death. Her body swelled, blood flow to her extremities stopped. She lay down and refused to rise up. Vathana’s anger turned to Lon Nol, then to America. Shame, she thought. Shame on America for bringing on this misery. Shame on them for their indifference. Do they know? Do you know, John Sullivan? Does he know? How does he react? Does he cry for me? How does America react? Surely they know. Are there demonstrations in Washington? Maybe in Paris? Shame on them for their half-boiled policies. It would have been better to give no aid at all. None. Not just enough to keep us alive and suffering. They are as bad as the Khmer Rouge. Will they aid us again, bring us to life again, keep all Kampuchea suffering only to let us die again? John L., our daughter is lost. You didn’t even see her.

  Then came new demands. Angkar, all were told, wishes the population to double. Women no longer menstruate, Vathana thought, and Pol Pot wants the population to double! Men! Do you know this, John L.? Do your people cry for mine? Do they know of this bloodbath? You warned me. How I hate myself for not believing you. You wanted to teach me? I used to teach my brothers and sisters how to forgive. In Phum Sath Din I helped Samay with his schoolwork. Oh, how Papa had plans for the family. Between the extremes, he said. In a Buddhist-Socialist state we would live well. But there is no state. Nothing can be done. All is lost. When I die I will go to my mother and to my children. Let us all die together. Let the Americans drop their atomic bomb. Then we can escape this life.

  The night Robona died Vathana cried over her body. Beneath the platform a child spy heard her and the next day she was told she would not eat for a week. To cry was to criticize the regime.

  In a few days Vathana’s body swelled. Her hands and feet became cold. She could not urinate though her urge was constant. She lay down and like Robona refused to rise for morning work call. At midday an old mat weaver came to give her water but she had no desire to eat or drink. Her eyes dulled, her body bloated, her lungs became congested. She lost control of her anal sphincter and diarrheic water fouled her skirt and mat. When conscious she thought to rise, to clean herself, prepare her body for death, but she did not care. Someone moved her from the hut. Someone forced palm sugar water down her throat. She vomited.