In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

  “They’re not ours to keep,” he cautioned. “They belong to the Organization.”

  She made as if to smack him on the shoulder. “You! Stop spoiling my happiness!” And to Mama, “Pok doesn’t believe in miracles.”

  He smiled but did not refute his wife’s accusation. Adjusting the weight of the bundles on his shoulders, he observed Mama, noting, as I noted, the wave of sorrow rising to her face as her eyes took in the surroundings: the small thatched hut with its ladder-like steps, each rung a section of roughly-cut bamboo; the bare-bones platform beneath the hut where, like our teak settee back home, I imagined, all the events of their lives took place; the dirt floor around it, scattered with baskets of dented kitchenware and household tools. “It’s . . . it’s not much,” he said, cutting into her thoughts, his tone apologetic.

  Mama flushed with shame. “No, it’s not that . . .” She seemed about to explain but said instead, “It’s lovely. It really is.”

  I focused my gaze on him. You deserve better than our thatched roof. He hadn’t meant the rooster at all when he spoke these words.

  Again, the wife seemed thunderstruck. “Maybe there’s something to this new god after all. The Organization, the Organization! Everyone shouts his name. Oh, how I prayed and prayed to him! Now he’s granted my wish! I couldn’t have asked for nicer children!”

  • • •

  They called each other “Pok” and “Mae”—“Pa” and “Ma”—as if these simple terms of endearment they tossed back and forth bespoke not only their love for each other but also their shared longing—the children they would’ve liked to have had but didn’t. “You’re our children now,” Mae kept saying. “Our home is your home.” She fluttered about the room like a mother swallow building her nest, picking up the straws that had fallen onto the slatted bamboo floor and tucking them back into the thatched walls. “Don’t be shy, make yourselves comfortable, anything you need, anything at all, you let me know, you help yourselves, all right?” She spoke merrily, continuously, switching without pause from house to history, telling us how since she was thirteen, married to Pok, who was fifteen, she had wanted children of her own, how over the years she had prayed and prayed, made offerings to every god and every spirit of every world, but none heard her pleading, until eventually she grew old and wrinkly and came to accept her childless fate. Not that she was complaining, in case the gods were listening now. Yes, she admitted, she and Pok were blessed in other ways. They had their land, planting was hard, but harvest brought enough, if not always plenty, and, aside from her barrenness, they experienced no grave sickness or catastrophe, which was nothing short of a miracle, considering all their years, the wars they’d lived through.

  Then came the Revolution, and its Maker, whose presence was everywhere, whose power the soldiers endlessly touted—No rain? The Organization will make sure water gets channeled to your fields. Not enough rice? The Organization will show you how to double, triple your yield the next harvest. Who was this Organization? she wanted to know. Was he a demigod, like the king, or an enlightened sage, like the Buddha? He must be a divine being. If so, surely then she should heed his call to worship, to make the necessary offerings and sacrifices. The Organization needed volunteers, the soldiers told her. Neak Moulathaan—“Base People”—true peasants to house some evacuees from the cities. She didn’t understand what was required of her but agreed to put herself and her home in the service of the Revolution, believing that this was the Organization’s way of granting her and Pok their long-buried wish for children, for companionship other than their own, and when she saw us—Oh, looking forlorn and forsaken!—she knew she’d been called upon by some great power to mother, or at the very least to offer a shelter.

  Mae looked around and, sighing, concluded, “But this could hardly be called a house. You need more,” echoing Pok’s earlier sentiment. “I feel so ashamed to offer you this.”

  Their hut had only one room, half the size of my bedroom back in Phnom Penh, and since we couldn’t all fit—Mae, beaming again, laid out plans right then and there—we girls would sleep inside, and Pok would sleep outside, on the raised bamboo platform under the hut. Mama, putting Radana down on the floor so she could rest her arms, turned nervously toward Pok, eyes trailing him as he brought in our belongings. Mae immediately quelled Mama’s worries. “He’s grown up with the winds and rains,” she asserted. “His leathery old skin’s tougher than time!” Pok walked to the back and put the bundles near a pile of straw mats. He seemed to possess an easy calm about him, an unconcern for all things said in his presence, whether true or not. But, at his wife’s nudging, he corroborated, “Yes, I like the fresh air.” He faced us and smiled. Then as if to dispel our skepticism and give proof to his words, he happily slung a rolled-up straw mat over his shoulder and went back down the stairs, leaving us in his wife’s charge.

  “Oh, where are my manners!” Mae gasped, horrified to see us still standing. “I just talked and talked this whole time. You poor things. Sit down, sit down. Rest your tired souls.”

  sixteen

  Mae pulled out three rolled-up straw mats from the pile against the back wall and spread them out over the slatted bamboo floor. These woven palm-leaf mats were our sleeping mats, she explained, not to be mixed with the eating mats woven from rice stalks, which we would never bring into the house because the smell of rice and fish would attract ants and all sorts of insects. We had to be careful out here in the countryside where bugs with teeth as sharp as saws could chew to dust in a week what people had taken months to weave.

  Dusk had descended and, after a thorough wash and a dinner of hot steamed rice and broiled fish, I felt ready to rest—to plunge into a deep, long sleep. Mae’s voice—its folksy rhythm and twang—relaxed my body, soothing every ache and strain.

  From one of the covered rattan baskets, she pulled out a couple of faded, patch-filled blankets and shook them vigorously. “Hmm . . .” She frowned, vexed by their appearance. “They didn’t seem this bad when it was just the two of us.” She sniffed the blankets, and then, back to her enthusiastic self, joyfully declared, “Oh well, at least they’re clean!”

  She handed one of the blankets to Mama. “I put some dried kaffir leaves in to keep away, you know . . . vor.”

  “Snakes” was what she meant. I remembered Old Boy would do the same—calling venomous snakes “vines”—as he went about watering our gardens, believing that to say their real name was to call forth their presence. It was a common country superstition.

  “Thank you,” Mama said, eyes glassy with exhaustion.

  Radana echoed toothily, “Thank you, thank you.” She was no longer scared of Mae’s crinkly face and gash-like mouth. Instead, lips puckered in imitation, she seemed fascinated with how it always moved, how words and sounds constantly bubbled from it like water from a brook. She struggled out of Mama’s lap and toddled about the hut, babbling nonsense, mimicking Mae’s incessant speech and movements.

  Mama began to sort through our belongings. She folded clothes, smoothed out the creases, and stacked them in three separate piles—hers, Radana’s, mine. As reduced as our possessions had become, the bright colors seemed extravagant, ostentatious against the thatched walls and ceiling. There was Radana’s satin dress, so white and shiny it glowed. Where would she wear that? It was all trees and rice fields here.

  Mama put the satin dress at the bottom of Radana’s stack and, emptying the bundle, took out the small bolster pillow, once hardened with jewels but now softened with loss. Papa had drawn a face on it one afternoon at the temple when Radana wouldn’t stop pining for her beloved teddy we’d forgotten back in Phnom Penh. It was a silly cartoonish face—a bear with round eyes and ears and curly hair like a girl. “Princess Honey Bear”—Papa had anointed his creation with my pet name. Now I waited for Mama to laugh as she had that afternoon. But she could only stare at it, eyes brimming with tears.

  Seeing the bolster, Radana rushed to take it out of Mama’s hands. She squeezed it,
hugged it, and kissed it several times over—her much-missed makeshift doll. Plunging her thumb inside her mouth, she plopped down in the middle of the room to cuddle it. “We sleep!” she announced, in case no one understood what she was doing.

  “You do that,” Mae chuckled. “Here, when the sky closes her eyes, we close ours, too.”

  “Sleep!” Radana said again, more forcefully this time.

  “All right, all right, I’ll shut up now.”

  Mae covered Radana with the blanket in her hand, sat down beside her, and, caressing the little one’s back, hummed a familiar lullaby.

  Radana fell fast asleep. Mae got up and, with hushed steps, set about putting up the mosquito net, the bamboo floor creaking softly beneath her feet as she moved from one corner to another.

  Meanwhile, Mama had untied the other bundle, on top of which lay Papa’s leather pocket notebook, his silver fountain pen, and the Omega Constellation watch—all loosely wrapped in one of the embroidered white handkerchiefs he used to carry in his pants pocket. He had prepared the bundle himself but must’ve decided at the last minute he wouldn’t need it. Now, here it was—a funeral pyre of his personal effects. Suddenly, I recalled having seen him with the notebook the night before he left. I heard again the sound of paper ripping. Had it been a dream? Had he really gotten up to write and, perhaps not liking what he’d written, torn out the page? I felt the urge to snatch the notebook from the pile, but I couldn’t bring myself to read his words without him being here. I couldn’t bear his poetry without his presence.

  A sound escaped Mama’s throat, and she hunched over, cradling her stomach, her hair falling forward so that it curtained her face from me. One hand clamped over her mouth, she tried to muffle the sound, her body quaking from the effort. But I heard it anyway. Her grief flowed out of her, spreading like Mae’s blanket, covering me with its tattered fringes and patched-up holes, and my heart broke again, not for my father this time, but for her, she who must bundle us up, the remnants of their once shared love, and continue without him.

  Mae, sensing something wrong, paused in the middle of tying the mosquito net and asked, “Are you all right, child?”

  Mama nodded and, pulling herself together, finished unpacking. Then she drew an eggplant-colored sampot hol from the pile and walked over to Mae. “This is for you,” she said, holding it out to our hostess.

  Mae looked at the handwoven silk sarong and, seeming overwhelmed by the gesture as much as by the loveliness of the gift, said breathlessly, “Oh no, I can’t.” She shook her head. “I can’t—”

  “Please. I don’t know how to thank you . . .”

  Again, Mae shook her head, then, recovering from her enthrallment, said sternly, “What would I do with it? This is cloth for tevodas, not an old crow like me.”

  “It’ll be lovely on you,” Mama told her, lowering her gaze to the silk and caressing it. “This color . . . it was my mother’s favorite. Please take it. It would make me very happy.”

  Mae looked askance. Then, sighing, she said, “I’ll keep it until you need it back.”

  Outside, dusk turned a shade darker and brought with it a mild, cool breeze, which now and then stirred the leaves and rice stalks, sending flocks of birds sweeping across the landscape. Still, the rain didn’t come. I wished it would. I wanted the sky to cry, to lead the way for me.

  I looked out the side window and saw the two crossed palms. “Thnoat oan thnoat bong,” Pok and Mae called them. “Sweethearts.” They swayed in locked embrace, serenading each other with a mournful creak. Lightning flashed in the distance, followed by a rumble. They’re playing with magic again, I thought, seeing in my mind’s eye the twins rolling, gnawing each other like puppies among the clouds, the ax and crystal ball changing hands. I stilled the image in my head.

  Unable to stay erect any longer, I stretched out on my stomach beside Radana and looked through the narrow spaces between the bamboo slats. There, directly below us, was Pok, perfectly content on the raised platform, his feet dangling over a fire, which, from my perspective, appeared to be licking his toes. He was whittling the piece of wood I’d seen him with earlier, and when a stray chip flew into the flames, it smelled like boiled palm juice.

  “That old man is always doing something,” Mae said, reaching over to tuck in the edge of the mosquito net under the straw mat. “He can’t keep still. He whittles and carves and chisels till he falls asleep and sometimes that never happens, and he’ll end up staying awake till dawn. If you watch him, you’ll never get any sleep.”

  “What’s he making?” I asked, turning over on my back.

  “A little calf for my cow,” Mae said. “It died a couple of weeks ago. The calf, I mean. Poor thing. Now the mother pines and pines. Listen, you can hear her . . .”

  I listened, and sure enough, from somewhere behind the hut, came the sound—Maaw, maaw, maaw . . . I’d met the cow earlier when it roamed over to the edge of the property while we were washing inside a nearby roofless thatched enclosure. It was the thinnest-looking cow I’d ever seen, and I’d thought it was going to eat the thatch. But it just stared at me, moaning, as it was doing now, Maaw, maaw . . .

  “Pok thought he’d make her a little carving. To hang around her neck.”

  “You mean like a charm?” I felt certain that even an animal as dull witted as a cow would know the difference between her real calf and a miniature wooden replica. “Why? What for?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Mae said, closing the front door. “I suppose he just wants to give shape to her sorrow.”

  “Oh.”

  Mama pulled Radana closer, sharing one blanket with her, while I shared the other with Mae. I lay sandwiched between Mae on my right near the door, and Radana on my left, next to Mama by the wall. Mae yawned, mumbled something or other, and then, after what seemed like a few short seconds, fell sound asleep, as though knocked out cold by the night.

  Soon, she and Radana were snoring back and forth, like a pair of whistles answering each other’s calls, while Mama and I searched the dark for the shapes of our sorrows.

  • • •

  Translucent drops of rain clung to the leaves and grass, like ladybugs whose vivid colors and patterns had washed away during the night’s torrent. I lingered in the doorway, wrapped in Mae’s blanket, my legs stretched out in front of me, yawning, waiting for sleep to leave my body, for dreaming to subside. Before me the quilted landscape of rice paddies and sugar palms unfurled as the sky peeled back its gauzy tier, revealing nearby tree-shaded huts standing much like ours on slightly elevated land and, at farther distances, the dark green silhouettes of neighboring villages rising like burls and whorls in an otherwise smooth fabric. Rainwater brimmed the paddies, and the slender green stalks appeared much taller than I remembered.

  In one of the paddies closest to the hut, partly shielded by a screen of tender blades, a brown-speckled duck—female, I guessed, from her muted coloring—plunged into the chalky water, wiggling her tail in the air, then popped back up, shaking her head, burrowing her bill into her feathers. A private morning ablution.

  On a strip of inundated land, a water buffalo stood swishing its tail, grazing the tufts of green flecked with lavender blossoms—water morning glory, judging by its elongated leaves. Nearby a man—the buffalo’s owner, I assumed, from the ease with which the two kept company—with a kroma wound tight like a pair of boxers around his hips, plodded with careful steps, holding up a cone-shaped fish trap, which he suddenly plunged into the shallow water, his whole being riveted by the thrill of a catch. A naga serpent! I imagined something spectacular, my mind ever leaping toward a story, the possibility of escape, freedom.

  How strange, I thought, that everything seemed so different. This place, which only the day before had felt like a chasm of stillness and silence we’d fallen into, now burgeoned with activities and sounds.

  The water buffalo let out a loud snort, nostrils flaring, its huge head swinging in annoyance, its curved horns like a pair of sic
kles slicing the air. A flock of birds burst from a nearby bush, shocked into exhilaration. The man with the fish trap looked up, hand over his forehead, shielding his eyes from the hardening sun, as if contemplating the possibility of his own flight. Papa, I thought. He’d always wanted to fly. Be as free as that hawk!

  A rooster crowed, followed by another, and another, setting off a chain of cock-a-doodle-doos that echoed from hut to hut, from one village to the next.

  I went down the steps and walked barefoot across the wet ground. From somewhere high up, a man’s raspy, reedy voice crooned, Oh, sarikakeo bird, what are you eating? . . . whistling when the lyrics eluded him. I turned my gaze skyward and there was Pok coming down the trunk of one of the Sweethearts, a stringed bamboo flask swinging from a leather strap around his waist.

  He looked down and, seeing me standing below, greeted, “You’re up!” He hopped onto a patch of grass, agile and light. “Just in time!” He nodded at the bamboo flask. “Want some?”

  “Palm juice?” I’d never had it for breakfast before.

  “Ah, not just that, but the nectar of youth!” He smiled, his face all crinkly, his teeth so stained he looked toothless, a hundred years old. “Heaven’s gift to us mortals! It keeps us young!”

  “Does it?”

  He laughed. “Well, maybe not.”

  I looked away, embarrassed by my slip, and tried to change the subject. “Where’s everyone?”

  Pok nodded toward the back of the house. “They’ve gone to the river to wash.” He unhooked the flask from the handle of his sheath knife and hung the flask on the bottom-most notch of the bamboo pole snaking up the full length of the palm, like the vertebrae of a long-ossified dragon. “At this early hour, the juice is as cold as . . .” He seemed at a loss for just the right word.

  “Ice,” I offered, thinking maybe the day before I’d misperceived his reticence just as I’d misperceived everything else.