‘’Course it was.’ Elliot smiled and turned to Van. ‘How about letting me talk to some of those refugees now?’
‘Sure, sure. No problem. Garee, he take you.’
They walked through the camp, Elliot, Ferguson and one of the thugs, who kept a wary eye on Elliot. Ferguson seemed preoccupied, animosity apparently forgotten. ‘Hey, Elliot,’ he said. ‘Who is that guy?’
‘McCue?’
‘The runt with the knife.’
‘Vietnam vet.’
‘Shit, ain’t we all?’
‘Tunnel rat,’ Elliot said. ‘Did three tours.’
Ferguson whistled, an expression of awe. ‘Hey, I heard about them guys.’
Elliot smiled. ‘Be glad he didn’t fillet you.’
Ferguson lapsed again into contemplative silence, leading them abstractedly between rows of mean little huts. A group of children stopped and stared at them. Big brown eyes in shrunken faces, looking out through a film of indifference. There were no games played here, no cries of joy or petty squabbles, just the lacklustre eyes, brittle sticks of arms and legs poking out from torn T-shirts and dirty shorts. There was no curiosity in their stares, not even fear. Flies crawled over their faces, in mouths and nostrils, children too inured to them to bother.
Elliot was uneasy, disconcerted by their gaze. He had felt eyes like these on him before. But it was only now, for the first time in his life, that he realized what it was in these eyes that so troubled him. It was an emptiness. Where there’s no hope, what else could there be? It was a look he and the others had seen for more than sixteen years in the eyes that looked back at them from their shaving mirrors each morning. Strange, he had never thought of soldiers as victims before. Soldiers fought, lived or died, won or lost. These, these children, they were the real victims of war. Yet he knew that he, too, somewhere, at some time, had become a victim. He looked away, seeing only himself reflected in the dull stares. Ferguson shouted at the kids and waved an arm. But they continued to stand watching, unmoved.
It was dark in the huts after the glare of the sun. The air was fetid. Rows of makeshift beds, groups of ragged refugees, sometimes whole families camped in the gloom, eating, sleeping, dying there. The food dished out by Van Saren’s thugs was never quite enough, the medical services provided by the overstrained relief agencies at best inadequate. Prompted by the threats of Ferguson, often translated by his indifferent rifle-toting deputy, they told their stories. Elliot had wanted to ask questions — numbers of Khmer Rouge, the lie of the land, roads, rivers. But all he could do was listen, silenced by the simplicity of the narratives, the unemotional, undramatized pictures of hell painted in single bold brushstrokes.
One man sat on his own, squatting on the filthy blanket that covered his bed. His hair was matted, his face blank, his eyes dead. Ferguson’s deputy barked at him in Cambodian. The man ignored him and looked at Elliot. ‘I speak English,’ he said. ‘Are you another newspaper man?’
Elliot shook his head. ‘Just interested.’
‘No one is interested without a reason.’
Elliot felt rebuked, though there was no hint of it in the man’s voice. He acknowledged the truth. ‘I have a reason.’
The man shrugged. He didn’t want to know what it was. He had no cause to be interested. Ferguson sat on the bed opposite, picking his teeth with a bamboo splinter. ‘Get on with it!’
Elliot caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and saw McCue standing there. Ferguson glanced at him with unconcealed hostility. He didn’t like anyone to get the better of him, especially another Yank. ‘Where’s Slattery?’ Elliot asked.
‘Drinking.’ McCue pulled up a broken stool and sat down. ‘Thought I’d listen in.’
‘I ain’t got all day,’ Ferguson snapped. He prodded the refugee with his cane. ‘I told you to get on with it.’
The man shrugged. He told them his name was Chan Cheong and that he was twenty-eight. Elliot was shocked. He would have taken him for forty. ‘I was a truck driver in Lon Nol’s army,’ he said. ‘I lived with my wife, Key, and my two sons, in Phnom Penh. My oldest boy was eight, my youngest not yet two. When the Khmer Rouge came I threw away my uniform and when they emptied the city we took what we could carry and went north.
‘The road was choked with people just like us. Thousands and thousands of them, young and old, sick and dying. When the old and the sick fell in the road the soldiers made their families go on, and if the ones left behind were not dead already, they were shot and pushed to the side of the road or dumped in the fields to rot. That first day there were so many people on the road we covered no more than two or three miles. By the end of the day we had thrown away most of what we had, because it was too heavy to carry. And always the soldiers pushed us with their guns to make us hurry, or fired shots in the air.
‘Every so often there were checkpoints where they asked questions. Endless questions. And those they thought had been soldiers they took away, and made the rest go on. But we knew that the soldiers were shot. For myself, I said I had been a taxi driver and they believed me. They made us walk for days, and we did not dare to stop to rest or sleep. We had to walk through the night and carry our children. Children cannot walk for ever without sleep.
‘After about a week, we reached a town called Kompong Thom. There, a woman I had known in Phnom Penh identified me as a military driver. I said she was lying, but they took me away and made me join a work party of what they called liberated soldiers. We worked until we dropped, every day from first light until well after dark, building a dam. If anyone stopped for a rest he was shot. So for as long as we could stand we worked without stopping.
‘Sometimes they gave us a day off and told us we were invited to a merit festival. But those turned out to be long hours of indoctrination. We had to sit and listen to endless communist slogans blasted out from loudspeakers. The only good thing about the merit festivals was that I had the chance to be with my family again, if only for a few hours.
‘Then one day we were told there was to be a big freedom celebration for all the newly liberated who had arrived from Phnom Penh. We were to wear our best clothes for the occasion, and were taken in buses to a Buddhist temple on the mountain. There were about two hundred of us gathered there. Former soldiers, officers, doctors, nurses, teachers. Everyone was very frightened when they locked us in. But the guards would not answer our questions, telling us only that everything would become clear to us at the meeting that night.
‘It was raining and dark when they started to call us out, one family at a time. I think I knew then that we were to be killed. Everyone did, but no one said it. It was nearly three hours before they called my name, and Key and myself went out carrying our boys. A soldier told us to follow him and took us down a path through the woods. Another group of soldiers was waiting at a clearing. They were sheltering from the rain under the trees and smoking. When we came they got up and tied our hands. But I held my arms taut so that the knot was not tight and I could loosen it. They asked me again what my work was. A taxi driver, I told them. You’re lying, they said. You drove for the military. Then they asked my wife, what did your husband do? She was in tears and could lie no longer. He drove for the military, she said. And I knew that we had no hope.
‘They took the baby from her arms and she pleaded to let them die together. She screamed when they blindfolded her and then bayoneted the child. Then they bayoneted my oldest boy. They had not blindfolded me. I was to watch as they stripped my wife and stuck their bayonets into her. I turned and ran into the woods, trying to free my hands as I went. They fired after me, dozens of rounds, but I was more frightened of the bayonets than the bullets. Then I fell down a steep slope and into a dry stream bed, and rolled under some ferns that hid me. A grenade went off and I was showered with damp earth. But in the dark they could not find me and finally they gave up. I think, maybe, I was the only person in the temple that night to escape with his life.