When the War Was Over by Elizabeth Becker Read Free Book Online Page A

confused, and now that his work was completed he felt nervous for the first time.

    The Khmer Rouge cadre asked him and the other bank officers to stay and help sort out other papers. “I smiled and said, ‘No, thank you, I’d rather not stay.’ They offered, then, to drive me home in one of their cars to make sure I passed through their roadblocks safely, but I declined. I said goodbye to the president, the comptroller general, and the cashier general. I didn’t want to go home. I thought I would go straight to the Hotel le Phnom. I needed a drink.”
    Komphot walked out into the hot night, and his head began to swim. Laid before him was a ravaged city, an anxious, empty city. It took Komphot some time to gain control of his emotions. There were no people! He stared at the litter on the streets, at the evidence of all he had not witnessed. There were no people!
    Shortly after Komphot had returned from lunch to the shelter of the bank, the most heartbreaking scenes of the war had filled the city streets. The Khmer Rouge had begun evacuating Phnom Penh, and among the first people pulled out were the patients at the city’s hospitals. The wounded and disabled walked or crawled; some were pushed in their beds, a relative holding an intravenous bag, pretending that might keep a loved one alive. A sobbing father carried his young daughter in a sling he fashioned from a bedsheet and tied around his neck. About 20,000 patients were thrown out that afternoon.
    After clearing out the hospitals, the small units of Khmer Rouge soldiers Komphot had seen entering the city had fanned out to the different neighborhoods of Phnom Penh. Some stood on the corners directing traffic while others went door to door telling everyone to evacuate immediately. “The Americans will bomb Phnom Penh. Leave the city at once,” they said politely. “You’ll return quickly. There is no need to take your belongings.”
    Those who protested were persuaded to submit by warning shots fired into the air. Those who fought back were killed. Komphot had heard the sound of gunfire from some of those small battles. Now all he saw was the relics. Fires were burning on the horizon. Like everyone else in the city, Komphot had slept little during the last two weeks while the city was shelled during the final attack. Now his fatigue suddenly vanished as he tried to accept what he saw before his eyes—Phnom Penh without people. It was as if he had left the theater for a short intermission and returned to discover he had missed the climax. But this was his real life, his country.
    He walked straight up Monivong Avenue to the hotel, his steps ringing loudly and his mind running wildly. He would find answers at the hotel, he told himself. It had been designated earlier in the week as an international
area, the neutral zone for foreigners. They could tell him what had happened. By the time he reached the hotel’s broad gravel driveway he was sprinting. He was so preoccupied he practically ran into an old acquaintance, an engineer at the city’s post and telegraph office. The engineer had been educated in the United States and also had been one of the bright young men in the city, a friend on the edge of Komphot’s rapidly disappearing world.
    Komphot stopped in midstride. “I couldn’t believe the look on his face. He seemed haunted. He told me the foreigners were gone, they’d been moved to the French embassy. Then he told me he had just given his child to the foreigners for safekeeping, given up his only child to strangers. I couldn’t believe it, but he refused to answer any more questions. He said he didn’t want to talk to me, that he didn’t know who to trust. Then he disappeared.”
    The foreigners had been the last people the Khmer Rouge confronted. After beginning the evacuation of the Cambodians, sending them off in all directions out of the capital, the Khmer Rouge had broadcast