Excerpt from The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

During interviews with people who had suffered atrocities at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, I found that most preferred to look forward. When I pressed them on personal history, however, they would slip into the mournful past tense. The stories I heard were inhuman and terrifying and repulsive. Every adult I met in Cambodia had suffered such external traumas as would have driven most of us to madness or suicide. What they had suffered within their own minds was at yet another level of horror. I went to Cambodia to be humbled by the pain of others, and I was humbled down to the ground.

Five days before I left the country, I met with Phaly Nuon, a sometime candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, who has set up an orphanage and a center for depressed women in Phnom Penh. She has achieved astonishing success in resuscitating women whose mental afflictions are such that other doctors have left them for dead. Indeed her success has been so enormous that her orphanage is almost entirely staffed by the women she has helped, who have formed a community of generosity around Phaly Nuon. If you save the women, it has been said, they will in turn save the children, and so by tracing a chain of influence one can save the country.

We met in a small room in an old office building near the center of Phnom Penh. She sat on a chair on one side, and I sat on a small sofa opposite. Phaly Nuon's asymmetrical eyes seem to see through you at once and, nonetheless, to welcome you in. Like most Cambodians, she is relatively diminutive by Western standards. Her hair, streaked grey, was pulled back from her face and gave it a certain hardness of emphasis. She can be aggressive in making a point, but she is also shy, smiling and looking down whenever she is not speaking.

We started with her own story. In the early seventies, Phaly Nuon worked for the Cambodian Department of the Treasury and Chamber of Commerce as a typist and shorthand secretary. In 1975, when Phnom Penh fell to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, she was taken from her house with her husband and her children. Her husband was sent off to a location unknown to her, and she had no idea whether he was executed or remained alive. She was put to work in the countryside as a field laborer with her twelve-year-old daughter, her three-year-old son, and her newborn baby. The conditions were terrible and food was scarce, but she worked beside her fellows, "never telling them anything, and never smiling, as none of us ever smiled, because we knew that at any moment we could be put to death." After a few months, she and her family were packed off to another location. During the transfer, a group of soldiers tied her to a tree and made her watch while her daughter was gang-raped and then murdered. A few days later it was Phaly Nuon's turn. She was brought with some fellow laborers to a field outside of town. Then they tied her hands behind her back and roped her legs together. After forcing her to her knees, they tied her to a rod of bamboo, and they made her lean forward over a mucky field, so that her legs had to be tensed or she would lose her balance. The idea was that when she finally dropped of exhaustion, she would fall forward into the mud and, unable to move, would drown in it. Her three-year-old son bellowed and cried beside her. The infant was tied to her so that he would drown in the mud when she fell: Phaly Nuon would be the murderer of her own baby.

Phaly Nuon told a lie. She said that she had, before the war, worked for one of the high-level members of the Khmer Rouge, that she had been his lover, that he would be angry if she were killed. Few people escaped the killing fields, but a captain who perhaps believed Phaly Nuon's story eventually said that he couldn't bear the sound of her children screaming and that bullets were too expensive to waste on killing her quickly, and he untied Phaly Nuon and told her to run. Her baby in one arm and the three-year-old in the other, she bolted deep into the jungle of northeastern Cambodia. She stayed in the jungle for three years, four months, and eighteen days. She never slept twice in the same place. As she wandered, she picked leaves and dug for roots to feed herself and her family, but food was hard to find and other, stronger foragers had often stripped the land bare. Severely malnourished, she began to waste away. Her breast milk soon ran dry, and the baby she could not feed died in her arms. She and her remaining child just barely held on to life and managed to get through the period of war.

Copyright © 2001 by Andrew Solomon