It seemed one evening that the Black Bandits had stolen away into the night. That was the evening when, all night long, they heard the bom bom bom sounds of distant manmade thunder that meant no good. Perhaps the bombs were going to rain down on them now, curtains on a final closing act of a dark and meaningless show that no one was watching.
The next morning when Kuan awoke, the Base People said that they had seen the Black Bandits running away through the village. The city people slowly started to wander, testing the perimeters of the sudden silence, marking its borders.
The village chairman and his family had also disappeared. The only sign that anyone had been living there was the meowing beneath his hut. The chairman had kept a cat as a pet. How could they keep such things alive when people could not even find food for their children? Of course, the first thing his brother Kiv did when he found out the Black Bandits had gone was find that cat and kill and eat it.
Nearby a group of men had teamed up to chase down a cow in the fields. The cow seemed to sense that something was wrong, that this was not the usual herding. No, this was predatory. There must have been at least a dozen people with sticks. When they finally caught the cow, they whacked it over the head, knocking it to the ground until it was lying on its side. Dozens more looked on, yelling out useless advice. He tried to beg for some meat but they paid him no heed.
It was a lie when Buddhism declared that all animals were created equal. All animals were not created equal; the only thing universal about the different species was their suffering. In the wild a lion doesn’t spare a deer, and the cat does not seek karmic bliss with the mouse. Hunger has priorities.
That night, people were talking, saying that the Black Bandits really had disappeared. The Vietnamese soldiers, who had burrowed in underground tunnels like hungry moles, had emerged and driven away their enslavers.
‘Let’s go back then,’ his mother decided. They did not want to be in this place for a moment more. They wanted to find their house in Phnom Penh, even though the keys had been lost long ago. They would return missing half their number and all their things. Now it was just his mother, his sister Kieu, his brother Kiv, Suhong and their three children.
They packed their luggage – their grass mats, some rice, their few remaining clothes. The following day, they started walking in the afternoon, and by night they reached another village. All the houses had been ransacked, and people were crammed into any hut they could find. They spent the night on the floor of an abandoned shop, and the next morning they kept walking.
On the road they met a local villager, a teenage boy who had a puppy curled in his arm. His brother swapped something for the puppy. They led the puppy along with them by a piece of string. Soon they came to a river, where there was a Vietnamese soldier. The soldier took a liking to the puppy and played with it. They waited patiently until the soldier had left.
His brother could kill the cat, but could not bear to kill the puppy, so he asked Kuan. But Kuan couldn’t kill the puppy either. He couldn’t bear to smash something into that happy-yappy face, or to puncture its neck with a knife. In the end he put it in a sack so that he didn’t have to see. Tying the sack with the piece of string that had been the leash, he drowned the puppy in the river. They cut it up, cooked it and ate it. His brother, who was the one who couldn’t bear to kill it, ate the most.
*
Now that the Black Bandits were gone, the Vietcong soldiers were in charge of herding everyone back to their hometowns. Kuan remembered the discipline of these young soldiers. ‘Everyone back to their bases!’ was the command of their leaders before the sun set every evening and all the Vietcong would finish their conversations with the Cambodians and retire. There was absolutely no fraternising after dark.
Walking back to Phnom Penh, they were told that those who arrived first would lay claim to the houses. It didn’t matter that you had once lived there; it was now finders keepers.
On the road they swapped stories with others in steady deadened voices: ‘I saw babies thrown in the air and caught on the ends of bayonets.’
‘They thought my sister stole rice, and they sliced open her stomach to search for the proof.’
‘I watched my father die. They tied his hands behind his back and sealed a plastic bag over his head.’
Others were stone silent, since it took about seventy muscles in the face to mutter a single word, and they were exhausted.
Some men begged for a spare set of clothes to ‘walk the road’. This meant that they wanted to exchange their black rags for proper clothes before quietly finding a place to die. Others lost their minds and did not bother to retrieve them. He met a man who had feigned madness when he was about to be executed, so that the Black Bandits would not kill him.
‘Kuan, the night they were going to execute me, I pretended I was crazy. The Black Bandits had to test out whether it was for real or not, so they mashed up a bowl of hot chillies and fed it to me spoonful by spoonful. I had to laugh like a fool being tickled or else. The children used to hit me and I couldn’t even swat them off. I didn’t mind because I could wander away from the collective and no one really pried into what I was doing. I found more food.’
Madness, Kuan thought, seemed the appropriate response to the regime. To play the innocuous fool gave a man a better shot at life.