In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

  “Anywhere—just get out.”

  “For how long?”

  “Two, three days. Take only what you need.”

  “We’ll need a little time to pack—”

  “There’s no time. You must leave now. The Americans will bomb.”

  Papa appeared flustered now. “You must be mistaken. They’re gone. They won’t—”

  “If you stay, you’ll be shot! All of you! Understand?”

  Without further explanation, he turned and marched out the gate, the pistol now held high above his head as if to shoot the sky. “Long live the Revolution!”

  • • •

  We had to move fast. If the Revolutionary soldier came back, he would shoot us. We didn’t know when that would be, if he would come back in an hour or a day, or if it was all a bluff. But Papa said we couldn’t take any chances. We had to leave now. Tata argued, “I refuse to be chased out of my own house like a rat!” Papa gave us no choice. Mama broke into a sob. Radana, on the bed, hugging her beloved bolster pillow to her chest, began to howl at the sight of Mama’s tears. Mama rushed over to comfort her. “I don’t know what to take,” she whimpered, looking at the large armoire with all her clothes still on their hangers. “We take money and gold,” Papa said matter-of-factly. “Anything else we can buy on the street.” He unlocked Mama’s old vanity dresser and scooped out her jewelry from their boxes—necklaces, earrings, rings, and a jumble of other valuable items. He grabbed Radana’s bolster pillow, which made her howl all over again, and sliced the seam open with a pocketknife. He stuffed all the jewelry into it among the cotton batting and hurried out of the room. He rushed through the house grabbing books, pictures, boxes of matches, anything he could think of, anything he came across. Outside, he tossed everything into the trunk of our blue BMW.

  I caught him by the sleeve. “Where’s Milk Mother?”

  He stopped, looked at me, and sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “Aren’t we going to wait for her?”

  “We can’t, darling. I’m sorry.”

  “What’s revolution?”

  “A kind of war.”

  “But you said the war was over.”

  “That’s what I thought, what I hoped.” He looked as if he was about to say something else but then changed his mind. He was utterly distracted.

  I let him go. He rushed back into the house.

  • • •

  I sat in the backseat of the BMW, sandwiched between Grandmother Queen and Tata. In the front Mama held Radana on her lap, pressing her lips to my sister’s head, rocking back and forth. In Mama’s arms, Radana had calmed down, lulled into sleep by the rocking, exhausted from her earlier crying. Papa slipped into the driver’s seat and started the car. His hands shook as he gripped the steering wheel.

  Old Boy walked to the gate, his back bent as if he were carrying a sack of rice. He was not coming with us. He would stay behind to take care of the gardens. He would rather face the soldier alone than let his flowers die in the heat. No one could convince him otherwise.

  When you love a flower, and suddenly she is gone, everything vanishes with her.

  As he held the gate open, Papa inched the BMW forward. I stretched my neck and looked into the rearview mirror. I saw the balcony, vacant and still. Had it always been like this, like no one had ever lived here? Suddenly I realized what it was that had followed Papa into the house, trailed his footsteps like a shadow several mornings ago when he returned from his walk. It was this moment. Our leaving. Our “being gone.” We hadn’t yet left, but already I saw and felt what it would be like without us here. How was it possible? I didn’t understand. But there it was. Our prescient absence.

  Everything began to recede. The cooking pavilion where Om Bao reigned with her spatulas and spices. The women’s lower house on whose wooden steps the servant girls gossiped, relaxed, enjoyed their freedom from household chores. The master house where every morning I greeted the day, where stories spread their wings like the birds and butterflies in the surrounding trees. The dining pavilion that held all the conversations and meals and visits. The banyan tree under whose shadow lay sacred ground. The gardens with their clusters of bumblebees and blossoms.

  Then, at last, the whole of the courtyard.

  Only Old Boy remained, standing by the hanging bougainvillea bush near the gate where he had always stood. He waved. I turned and waved back.

  He shut the gate.

  four

  The streets were packed. People, cars, trucks, motorcycles, mopeds, bicycles, cyclos, oxcarts, pushcarts, wheelbarrows, and things that didn’t—shouldn’t—belong on the streets of a city: ducks, chickens, pigs, bulls, cows, mats, and mattresses. I couldn’t have imagined a water buffalo caked with mud, or an elephant carrying the mahout and his family. But there they were, part of the throngs that pushed and pulsated in every direction.

  Beside us, a farmer pulled his pig by a leash. Panicking, the sow squealed as if being slaughtered. A bit farther away, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle barely escaped a horse rearing in fright when a truck suddenly blasted its horn. Papa kept a firm grip on the steering wheel as he maneuvered the car inches at a time through the dense traffic. When we left home, he had briefed us on the route we would take—we’d go to Kbal Thnol and meet up with my uncle and his family. This was the meeting spot they’d agreed on in case of an emergency. From there, we’d drive together to our weekend house in Kien Svay. He’d made it sound so easy. Now it seemed hugely complicated to cross a small intersection or even move in a straight line.

  Next to me, Grandmother Queen began to moan. She wanted Papa to turn the car around, take us back home, but of course we couldn’t go back. Revolutionary soldiers were everywhere, dressed in black from head to toe like the one who’d burst through our gate, waving their guns, ordering everyone to leave. Families poured into the streets, dragging suitcases cramped with belongings, cradling baskets stuffed with dishes and cooking pans, wooden stools and chamber pots. A woman balanced two baskets on a bamboo pole over her shoulders, a child in one basket and a stove in the other, with a rice pot perched precariously on top. An old blind beggar shuffled barefoot along the street, a walking stick in one hand and a begging bowl in the other. He groped his way through the swarm of bodies. No one stopped to give him change. No one seemed to pity him. No one even noticed. “GET OUT OF THE CITY!” bellowed voices through bullhorns. “THE AMERICANS WILL DROP THEIR BOMBS!”

  Soldiers pushed and shoved anyone in their way, not caring who was old and who was young, who could walk and who couldn’t. A man on crutches fell down and tried several times to pick himself up. A Khmer Rouge soldier saw him, yanked him up, and pushed him on. At the entrance to a hospital, a sick old woman clung to the arm of a young man who looked as if he might be her son. A young nurse in uniform wheeled a patient out on a hospital bed, adjusting the intravenous bag above the patient’s head as she went. Nearby, a doctor ripped off his surgical mask, gesturing emphatically, as if trying to reason with the soldiers. One of them put a gun to his forehead, and the doctor stood suddenly still as a statue, arms raised in the air, his latex gloves smeared with blood.

  A young father passed by, carrying one son on his back and another in front, the rest of him loaded with bundles and necessities—food, kitchenware, sleeping mats, pillows, blankets. His wife, with a child on her hip and another one on the way, hung tight to his arm as they twisted their way through the crowded street. A teenage boy pushed past them, holding his bleeding stomach in his hands as he tried to look for help. No help came his way. I was seeing a million faces at once, and everyone looked like everyone else. Scared. Lost.

  We crawled by a half-destroyed building, with pieces of rebar protruding from the blocks of broken cement. In nearby alleys and corners, half hidden behind mounds of rubble, government soldiers frantically shed their forest-green uniforms and threw them into bonfires. In the back of a noodle stand a man was about to take off his camouflage shirt when a couple of Khmer Rouge soldiers spotte
d him. They dragged him out and pushed him into a truck full of other government soldiers.

  In front of a school bookshop a group of students huddled close together, hugging their books to their chests. A Khmer Rouge approached a middle-aged woman, who looked like she might be a teacher, and tore the glasses from her face. He threw them to the ground and smashed them with the butt of his rifle.

  Smoke was everywhere, as black as the soldiers’ clothes. On sidewalks, books and papers burned in piles. Ashes flew up into the air, like burnt butterflies. I wondered why they were called Khmer Rouge—“Red Khmer.” There was nothing red about them. Why did they have so many names? Revolutionary soldiers, Communists, Marxists, was how Papa would invariably refer to them, and Tata never failed to retort, Khmer Rouge, rebels! Thieves! Jungle rats! They won’t last. She predicted their victory would be short-lived and called for their punishment. They should be hanged like the common criminals they are. Revolutionaries, Papa would insist, his tone tentative, as if he himself had yet to discern their true name, their intentions. You must be careful how you speak of them. I wondered what they were really. Soldiers or peasants? Children or adults? They looked neither like devarajas nor rakshasas, the mythical gods and demons I’d imagined them to be; in those plain black clothes they looked more like a race of shadows, each one a repetition of the others.

  We came to a huge crowd gathered in front of a tall wrought-iron gate, behind which I could see part of the façade of a white-pillared villa. People pushed and shoved one another, fighting to get to the entrance. Those up front banged on the iron bars, pleading to be let in. Some tried to climb over the high wall, cutting themselves on the sharp metal prongs lining the top edge. A few made it over, but most were pulled back down by the competing horde below. Two men punched each other, then two more, three. A fight broke out. Women screamed, children whimpered and howled like puppies.

  A shot resounded.

  The crowd became suddenly still. A soldier stepped through the half-open gate, pistol held high above his head. He issued an order, waving left and right, and quickly the crowd divided to allow for a narrow path in the middle. The other soldiers standing guard began plucking out the foreigners and letting them through, while pushing the Cambodians back out onto the street.

  Beside me, Tata murmured in disbelief, “Good god, they’re doing what they said they would—they’re expelling all foreigners.”

  “Is it a diplomatic sanctuary then?” Mama asked, turning to Papa.

  “A temporary one, it looks like,” Papa replied, staring straight ahead at something.

  “They’re not letting anyone in without a foreign passport.”

  I followed his gaze to where a young couple stood a little apart from the crowd. The man was a barang, one of those white giants with hairy arms and a protruding nose; the woman Cambodian and heavily pregnant. He was telling her something, an earnest expression hovering over her frightened one. She nodded, tears streaming down her cheeks. He took her face in his hands and pressed his lips to hers. A Khmer Rouge soldier marched over and shouted at them, his face contorted with disgust. The barang tried to explain—My wife, my wife, his lips seemed to be saying in Khmer—but the soldier paid no attention. Two more strode over and pulled the couple apart. The man cried out, the woman sobbed. A mob quickly came between them.

  Papa pushed forward with the car. I looked back, searching for the barang, but he’d disappeared. I looked for his wife. She too was gone. I blinked, once, then again. Still, I couldn’t bring them back. They were lost, as if erased from the human landscape.

  We headed away from the villa, turning left onto Norodom Boulevard, which cut through the middle of the city. Papa had thought traffic would move more quickly here since it was a main thoroughfare. But it turned out to be even more congested, its lanes no longer visible as tanks and army trucks crawled alongside smaller vehicles, its once cleanly swept sidewalks now littered with indiscretions: an old man spitting into his chamber pot, a little boy relieving himself, a woman going into labor. Papa wanted to get off the road and head toward Sisowath Quay along the river instead. But every turn we came to was crammed, impossible to penetrate.

  We had no choice but to push on, weaving our path now around the Independence Monument, whose giant mauve flame steeple seemed dwarfed by the unbroken mass surrounding it. Voices echoed from every direction through bullhorns: “DON’T STOP! KEEP MOVING! THE ORGANIZATION WILL PROVIDE FOR YOU! THE ORGANIZATION WILL LOOK FOR YOUR LOST RELATIVES! KEEP MOVING! GET OUT OF THE CITY! THE ORGANIZATION WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU.”

  Who was this Organization? The Khmer name—“Angkar”—sounded to me like “Angkor,” the ancient stone temples whose steeples bear the carvings of giant faces looking down at you. I imagined the Organization to be a living version of one of those carvings, a deity of some sort, or a very powerful king. I propped myself up on one knee, chin resting on the headrest, and looked out the back window. My eyes followed the movement of a Khmer Rouge soldier as she headed toward our car. She stopped just a few feet away to talk to a skinny old man who reminded me of Old Boy. The old man put his palms together, pleading with her, his hands like a bobbing lotus in front of her face. It seemed he wanted to go up the steps of the Independence Monument, maybe to rest, to find someone, to get his belongings, I could only guess. The girl shook her head and pointed in the direction she wanted him to go. He persisted, pushing against the flow. The girl slipped her hand under her shirt, pulled out a pistol, aimed. A shot rang in the air. It echoed, like three separate shots, one after another. People screamed, pushed against one another, tried to run but couldn’t.

  “What was that?” Mama asked, jerking to full alert.

  The old man dropped to the ground. A dark pool bloomed around his head. A halo of blood. Crimson like the betel nut juice dripping out the side of Grandmother Queen’s mouth.

  “What was it?” Mama asked again.

  Still, no one said anything.

  “KEEP MOVING!” The Khmer Rouge soldier marched past our car now, her arm raised high, gun in hand. “KEEP MOVING!”

  I turned and faced front, sliding into the seat, closing my eyes. The noises outside beat on my eyelids, and I felt my lashes fluttering like a pair of wings severed from the burnt body of a butterfly.

  “GET OUT OF THE CITY! THE AMERICANS WILL BOMB! THE AMERICANS WILL BOMB!”

  “Pray to the tevodas, child,” Grandmother Queen said, patting my head. “Pray to the tevodas.”

  “DON’T WORRY ABOUT YOUR HOMES AND BELONGINGS! JUST GO! GO! THE ORGANIZATION WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU!”

  I prayed to the Organization.

  • • •

  By midafternoon, we arrived at the edge of the city and found a place to wait on the side of the road under a cassia tree. Just ahead lay Kbal Thnol, the traffic circle where Papa had told his younger brother to meet us. To the left stretched Monivong Bridge, which would take us out of the city toward Mango Corner, our weekend house. We would wait and cross the bridge together with my uncle and his family. This way we wouldn’t run the risk of being separated and sent in opposite directions.

  We searched among the hundreds and thousands of faces that went by, but there was no one we recognized, no one who resembled my uncle or aunt or their twin sons. Once or twice when a Khmer Rouge soldier glanced our way, Papa restarted the engine and inched the BMW forward, pretending to move along with the crowd. I took in the faces drifting past us.

  Among the scared and confused, a few seemed unafraid of the soldiers, indifferent to the threat of the Americans’ bombing. Near us a woman walked up and down the street selling fried bananas, waving a dishrag to keep the flies away. A little girl came along dangling an assortment of jasmine garlands around her arms. She traded a small garland for a fried banana. “New Year’s jasmines!” she called out. “New Year’s jasmines!” She had a voice, I imagined, a New Year’s tevoda would have—crisp, clear, like a bell ringing at a temple in the early dawn.

  The little girl cross
ed the street, nibbling on the banana. She must have felt Mama staring at her, for she swung around, smiling, and ran to our car. Mama chose a garland with a long bright red ribbon spiraling down like the tail of a macaw and handed some money to the girl, who flashed us a big smile when she saw the amount. She went skipping away toward the fried-banana seller.

  Mama detached the ribbon from the garland and gave it to Radana to play with. Then she hung the jasmine on the rearview mirror, letting the fragrance fill our car. When I looked again, the little girl had disappeared among the crowds, but I could still hear her voice singing, “New Year’s jasmines, New Year’s jasmines, get them while they’re fresh . . .”

  A large fire suddenly shot up in front of a row of shop houses a block away. Cries and gasps rippled through the streets as small crowds gathered to watch. Through the flames and smoke, I saw soldiers hurl armfuls of paper into the roaring blaze. Several pieces fluttered about like stringless kites, only to fall back into the fire. I caught sight of a little boy lunging forward to grab a sheet the size of a banknote. A soldier seized him by the neck and threw him aside, which had the effect of keeping others away from the burning pile, now smoldering with heat waves as palpable as membrane.

  All of a sudden Papa restarted the car and aimed for the bridge. A Khmer Rouge soldier was marching straight toward us, a pistol in hand. Again, I prayed to the Organization.

  • • •

  The soldier—a boy with freckles a shade darker than his cane-sugar skin—walked alongside our BMW, finding ways for us to move along the crammed, narrow lane around the traffic circle. I’d thought he was coming to shoot us. When he slapped the hood, Papa steered to the right, and when he slapped the side, Papa steered to the left. As we got on the bridge, Papa poked his head out the window and said, “Thank you, Comrade!” The boy broke into a smile and saluted Papa. Then just as quickly, he turned back and started directing other vehicles onto the bridge.