SHORT STORIES

ON THE FOREST OF CAMPUCHEA

From the perspective of the prisoners, improper word that some experts advice us to change for prolets, there are always some signs that people could take for the arrival of proletarian's paradise. They assume that because they are digging less graves as each day is passing. Some scholars say this is a very common illusion and they called it "paradisism". Other commentators are more bent on the technical precision and they say this should be called PAS; that comes from "paradisiacal adventist syndrome". The lesser amount of graves is due to the fact that in some places are using tractors instead of diggers. But the glossators are not all in accord. Some say that in revolutionary Campuchea there were few tractors and most of them were rusting idle for lack of spare parts or fuel. There are also people from the "ecologist school" that say they were doing less and less graves because they were in the monsoon season and they let the corpses to decompose in the rivers and channels to recycle the organic nutrients. This also was saving a lot of "proletarian hours work" that were invested with more profit into the quinquennial plan schedule.
     In any way, some scholars believe they can detect a moment or inflection in the curve of the killings that look as if they were on a down slope. We do not know the reasons for this downward trend. Perhaps there is always a moment that starts a bourgeois decadence and one looses the revolutionary ardour; or perhaps one is getting fed up of killing so many enemies with your own gun. You can not understand more all this and start wondering things. They are coming out so many enemies, but from where all they come? Where were so many of they hidden?

You know that all these people your guards are keeping for the labours in the ricefields are your class enemies; but you never suspected in your worse nightmares that they would be so many. And even as they are dying of malaria and hunger, you feel appalled because they are bringing you more and more with each week; they never stop coming. They are like mushrooms that grow up in humid forest and you are caught unprepared for these trials. You have taken over yourself the burden of killing a lot of them with your own bare hands, but had to use a handgun, as they are hundreds and hundreds of them. And the hundreds add up to make thousands, and the thousands are making the tens of thousands. Even you are also suffering in this war because after so much shooting you got a blister on your index finger and had to delegate this serious duty to you aid field comrade.

You never have been good in school with the maths. There is a time that you get tired of keeping this diary with all this figures and writing in careful letters "today I have done away twelve enemies of the people". Even the political commissar had to tell me "dear comrade, do not write any of this trash. A true revolutionary do not counts death enemies." You feel alone, as the mind of the party has not visited you in months. So you feel that your faith is weakening. It must be that you it lacks some vitamin in your food, always eating this rotten rice without even a poor sauce to help it. I know that all these worries are pure selfishness on my part and petit bourgeois day dreaming. This all is due to the suffocating heat of the forest so you suffer these nightmares of revolutionary impotence. And so your wondering keeps coming again and again; and one feels miserable, as I am almost certain that we would not achieve the goals proposed by the Central Committee. Could we be able to kill all those enemies that keep coming here? Would we able to achieve a million deaths? Could we one day surpass the two million mark? You know that is not good to worry too much, as the supreme leader has his mind full of wisdom and everything under his command. But one is suffering of revolutionary ardour because of the tropical heat. And due to the excessive sweating one is loosing some body salts and start to doubt and to wonder, how could it be that there are so many enemies of the people? You thought they were only a few oligarchs, a dozen of them, perhaps even less.

In the first days of the liberation you could see them clearly with their plump bellies and his chubby cheeks. This was a sure proof that they were the bloodsuckers of the proletarians. But in just a month they are loosing their plump bellies and the chubby cheeks and you are now unable to distinguish the bloodsuckers from the real proletarians. Sometimes a guard gives a kick on the rear to a prisoner for making him to hurry on the march, then he falls down and is too lazy to get up. Sometimes this fall stops the walk of all the people. They have a lack of faith in your determination and you do not want this could grow up in their minds. It would be a bad example for others, so one of the guards shut him right on the head and put apart the corpse to clear the path of obstacles. And all this is well within the revolutionary norms, as you do not take your duties lightly. But your faith is weakening and there is much time that you do not have a meeting with the commissar to confess all your doubts. Then it happens that you can not distinguish anymore the very and true proletarians from the people's enemies, and you see all of them starving in rags.
     Now you are feeling stunned with the heat and have not way to distinguish who are the true enemies of the people. So you start to thinks they all are the enemies. Were not this the case, what are they doing in this damned humid forest?

Some times I feel the malaria's fever. I do not know how this could happen to me, as I am a true revolutionary. Then when you are feverish, you feel assaulted by an ocean of doubts and had horrible nightmares. Then you start to cry in paroxysm saying: We are all the enemies of the people! We all deserve to be exterminated! That sort of things. Fortunately your aids love you much, and even forgive you for these weaknesses. So they tie you and gag you to avoid the prisoners could hear your cries of desperation.
     When the fever goes off you got a chat with your aids and guards and all them are in accord that this revolution is causing many hardships to all. The have let their girlfriends, or even their wives, in unknown whereabouts just to liberate the proletarians. So we keep here doing all our duties in this forest, eating rats and wild fruits to have the strength to comply with the orders of the central committee.
     You have suffered a lot pressing the trigger of your gun and even you have a little callus on the index finger. There were days when your finger was bleeding. That is why you need to have a dream and tell yourself and cheer you up: Soon we would achieve a million deaths. That is only a little pride, a forgivable sin, just to lift your spirit. But being a modest revolutionary, you do not love exaggerations but the just measure of the things. You realise that you are nothing more than a guard, and even you do not know that soon your party would enter on the glorious path of History with a steady foot, as all of you have modestly surpassed all the previous marks of massive exterminations. In relative figures, of course, as your country is a very small, but then you see that the merits of our party are higher.

Comradedud

THE END