In The Killing Field (© Biswapriya Purkayastha)
Page 2 "Here he is," the guide said. The reporter turned. The man who had come out of the nearest
hut was thin, and short, even for a Cambodian. He was probably around fifty but
seemed ageless, his features cast as though they could never change, and the
hair on his head was greying but still thick and hung to the collar of his
yellow T shirt. "This is Mr Khieu," the guide said, and turned to the man.
In the jabber of speech that followed the reporter heard her own name, badly
mispronounced as it was. The former Khmer Rouge, Khieu, bobbed his head, smiling,
and gestured. "He asks if we’d like to go inside," the guide said. Nodding, the reporter stepped through the low doorway,
pausing briefly to remove her shoes. The interior of the hut was dark and
surprisingly cool. Khieu gestured again, at a cot set against the wall. "Is this his house?" The reporter sat on the cot, and the
guide followed suit. "Yes. His and his family’s." The guide talked briefly to
Khieu. "He says he sent his wife and kids to the town for the day. He doesn’t
want them disturbing us, he says." "Pity; I’d wanted to meet them." The families were about the
only thing that had distinguished one former Khmer Rouge from another. They
provided something on which to hang her story. "Could I ask him some questions,
please?" Half an hour later the reporter sat back, trying to hide her
disappointment. The story she had heard was almost a carbon copy of the others
she’d been told so far; she could even have answered her remaining questions
herself, and not got a thing wrong on the essentials. "Isn’t there anything
else he could tell us? I haven’t heard anything from him I haven’t already
heard before." The guide and the former Khmer Rouge man talked for a long
time, the latter gesturing vehemently. At length the guide turned back to the
woman. "He says..." he hesitated briefly. "He says he has a story from back
when he was a soldier, during the Angkar rule, which he can tell. But he
does not know whether he will be believed, and he doesn’t want to be laughed
at." The reporter shrugged mentally, but reached again for her
recorder. "I’m not going to laugh at him," she said.
*********************************** That
year the stench of the corpses rotting in the fields by the river had grown so
strong that the boys used to tie their chequered scarves over their faces when
they crossed them. The flies were like a blue-green carpet over the rotting
corpses, scarcely bothering to rise when disturbed. The oldest bodies were
already skeletons, and yet more were dumped daily, intellectuals from the
cities, or malingerers and counter-revolutionaries from the villages who defied
the word of the Angkar. That summer Khieu was thirteen years old, and had already
been a soldier for three years. He no longer remembered his parents or his home
in a village on the other side of the Mekong. He knew his sister, of course,
but then he saw her almost every day; she was already, at the age of ten,
senior to him in rank, and rarely acknowledged that he existed. One evening, the village committee declared that the fields
by the river could no longer be used to dump the bodies of the enemies of the
revolution. There was an old, ruined temple on the fringes of the forest, and
the committee decided that henceforth this would be the dumping ground. Some of the older Khmer Rouge cadre demurred. "That temple
is the home of the old spirits," One-Eye Samnang had protested. "We must not
anger them." The head of the committee laughed. "Brother, there is no
such thing as a spirit, and there is no better use for those old temples than
this. You will see to it that tomorrow’s lot are put there." "But, First Brother..." Samnang’s remaining eye was wide
with fear. "The spirits of evil may walk the earth if we disturb the temple." "Enough," the committee head snapped. "You will do what you
have to do." His furious gaze roved over the gathering, and everyone fell
silent, even Samnang. [ Continue to page 3 ] |