In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

  “Would you like to help me with my morning chores?” she cooed at Radana, who, looking at the ground still wet from the night’s rain, curled her toes in fearful distaste. “I didn’t think so.” She laughed.

  While we ate our porridge, Mae began sweeping the ground around the hut, a broom in each hand, looking all arms and legs, like a spider hard at work. She moved with the lightness of the coconut-spine broomstick, her arm no bigger than its handle, no less sinewy, and as I watched her leap briskly from one spot to the next, I wondered where she stored her energy, her ancient agelessness. She picked up the debris brought in by the wind and rain, working her way to the plot of vegetables at the edge of the land. I quickly finished my porridge and followed her. There she showed me how to pinch off the drooping blades of the lemongrass so that there was room for new growth, and while I did this she went about rescuing the half-buried stalks of turmeric and galangal, whose banana-like leaves gave off a faint scent that reminded me of Om Bao’s curries. She lifted the bitter gourd vines back onto the bamboo trellis that stretched over a couple of rows of curly cabbage. It seemed childlessness had made her more maternal to everything that lived, everything that had fought to survive. “Soak up the sun!” she clucked at the green tomatoes, and at the kaffir limes, “Keep those vors away from my little ones!” She gave me a betel-stained grin and, shaking her head in incredulity, marveled again how at this juncture in her life, she should be blessed with children—“When it’s almost too late!”

  “Why?—Why is it almost too late?” I thought we’d arrived just in time.

  She chuckled, blushing. “Pok and I are so old, you see, and soon we’ll return to the spirit world.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Older than I can count!” She laughed.

  A rooster suddenly crowed: Kakingongur!

  “Finally, he rises!” Mae declared, looking around. “Where’s that scoundrel?”

  I pointed to the clay vat near the thatched enclosure. The rooster, with its neck stretched out, bellowed again: Kakingongur!

  Mae hollered back at him, “You’re no use to me! I’m up half the day already, done all my chores, and you’re just clearing your throat!”

  The rooster flapped his wings as if to say, I’ll show you, old woman! and for the third time asserted, Kakingongur!

  We returned to the hut. Mae set aside the twig broom and, hitching up her sarong, squatted down in front of the cooking fire. She removed the porridge pot and placed it on the ground. Then, using a piece of firewood, she pushed the stones farther apart from one another to build a perch for a bigger pot.

  “What are you going to cook?” I asked, swallowing, thinking perhaps she was going to steam some rice cakes.

  “I’m going to boil some palm juice to make sugar.” She coughed, hands waving away the clouds of smoke mushrooming from the fire when she added the piece of rain-dampened log. “I—I need your lungs, child.” She gestured to the moribund embers, still coughing. “Give it a good puff.”

  I squatted beside her, huffing and puffing, until a flame burgeoned like a leaf and caught on. Mae poured what was left of the palm juice from the flask into a large soot-blackened wok, and just as I was beginning to think the wok was much too big for such a scant amount of liquid, Pok appeared, a cluster of stringed bamboo flasks jostling weightily on each shoulder. He removed the leaf coverings and emptied the flasks into the pot, filling it to the rim with sweet-smelling juice. Mae added more wood to the fire and set the liquid to boil.

  Happy with the exhaustion of a morning climb, Pok lowered himself slowly onto the bamboo platform and, from a large box made of palm leaves Mae had set out for him with all their chewing ingredients, treated himself to a quid of tobacco. Then he began to tell Mae about our morning excursion, his hands busy all the while whittling his wooden calf into existence.

  eighteen

  We settled into Stung Khae during what Pok called the “lament of the monsoon,” that period of the season when the rain came in a steady drizzle throughout the morning, then wailed inconsolably in the afternoon, before it softened to a sob that was to last through the evening and sometimes well into the night. While some creatures like scorpions drowned and died, others like frogs and toads multiplied, the rain driving them into a wild cacophony of rasps and croaks on the surfaces of ponds and puddles littered with gelatinous spawn. Out here in the natural world, it seemed to me, life and death were simultaneously celebrated and mourned, neither more noted than the other.

  The rains did as much to transform the landscape as Revolutionary fervor did to alter the life of the countryside, so that at times it appeared the power wielding the monsoon was in cahoots with the power wielding the Revolution. Shortly after we arrived, part of Stung Khae and most of the outlying lowland became flooded, turning the once earth-solid geography into a moving lake of shifting compositions. Huge masses of water hyacinth appeared suddenly one morning as if by inspiration, like islands in an archipelago. For several days they glided lazily across the aqueous canvas, carrying silhouettes of birds that had come to rest on the thick spongy leaves or to drink from the pouch-like blossoms. Then a rainstorm, descending like the broom bristles of a god bored with the scene, swept the floating islands away and replaced them with fields of undulating lotuses. The lotuses bloomed, pink and white, and eventually gave way to sturdy green pods. Pok would take me out in his palm-tree dugout, and while he scoured the water for shrimp hatchlings and minnows with a bamboo chniang, I harvested the pods, breaking the stems at about an arm’s length below the surface of the water so that they’d retain moisture and remain fresh until we returned home at lunchtime. Some days, though, we’d stay out all afternoon, lunching on the rice and pickled papaya shrimp Mae had packed for us, letting ourselves drift among petals and pods as if in a dream, and snacking on fresh lotus seeds whenever hunger struck us. We’d go on drifting like this, without a word exchanged, and if a need ever arose for amusement, or simply to confirm our presence amidst the stillness, I’d tear open a lotus pod, take a hollow shell that had yet to develop a seed, and smack it against my forehead. Pok, woken from his reverie by the loud pop, would slowly turn to me, and noticing the telltale red blotch on my skin, invariably respond with a pop against his own forehead. This much said, we’d fall back into our silence, drifting like two lost souls, needing neither to be found nor rescued.

  Once when it drizzled gently, he and I forgot ourselves completely, caught as we were in our daydreaming. When finally we returned home at dusk, drenched and weather-beaten but bearing a boatload of pods and more minnows and shrimps than we could eat for the next several days, Mae was beside herself with excitement because of the bountiful catch and with worry because—as she put it—“Lord Buddha, I thought you were carried away by the ocean tides!” Pok and I exchanged amused glances, expecting her to be no less dramatic. But Mae wasn’t entirely exaggerating, for from our perch of land, the surrounding waters did resemble linked inland pockets of the sea. As for Mama, she knew I was in good hands. In Pok’s care, I’d learned to swim, not very well yet, but enough to propel myself to safety.

  The flood brought both plenty and scarcity. Fishes, crabs, crawfish—not to mention throngs of unusual creatures and crickets the villagers considered long-awaited seasonal delicacies—swarmed the water, often right into our nets and traps, and what we didn’t eat that day, Mae would pickle and preserve to carry us through the days and weeks ahead.

  But rice—the lack of it—became a great fear for everyone. The flood had brought a whole host of problems, chief among which was the loss of already planted paddies to total submersion. According to Pok, these paddies, which lay smack in the middle of the flood zone, shouldn’t have been planted in the first place, at least not until the monsoon began to abate. At such time a traditional method known as “rice-chasing-water” would be used, whereby farmers rushed to transplant rice seedlings where the floodwaters had just receded, following the path and curve of the moving ebb as if chasing t
he water. It was an effective, time-honored mode of planting, he explained, as the soil would be rich with nutrients and minerals brought by the flood from as far as the Tonle Sap Lake and the Mekong. But the Revolutionary leaders and soldiers knew nothing of rice-chasing-water and in their fervor to speed up and increase production had ordered the villagers to fill the paddies with precious rice seedlings, which had all drowned and died. Fragments of their blackened, rotted stems resembling those lethal needle leeches now floated everywhere, possibly carrying plant diseases that could affect other planted paddies.

  Whether in response to the villagers’ fear of a rice shortage or their own fear of the Organization—whose name punctuated every public utterance and exchange like an exclamation mark—the Kamaphibal rushed forward again with their plans, this time to communalize the villages’ rice supplies into one big reserve. They sent Revolutionary soldiers to announce there would be a “broad political” meeting to establish a communal granary at the estate of a former landowner. Every villager was required to attend. Some, preferring solid ground, braved the winding muddy roads on their oxcarts, while many more took to the water. Strings of boats and canoes threaded the rolling current, like stitches in a silk cloth, as villagers from all over the commune headed toward the same destination. We got into our palm-tree dugout and eagerly joined the pilgrimage. Despite the serious purpose of the trip, there was an air of festivity to the whole scene. The day, bright and clear, boasted an after-rain glow—a brilliant blue sky with florets of still white clouds. A sun-scented zephyr brushed our faces and carried our greetings across the water to one another—“Afternoon, fellow seafarers! Afternoon, comrades! Let’s race!”

  But on arriving, the mood changed completely. Everyone stopped talking and the apprehension about the meeting enveloped us like gloom. Pok moored the dugout to a willow sapling clinging to the side of an embankment. We all got out and walked the short distance to the appointed place. On one side stood an expansive, tier-roofed house surrounded by aged fruit trees, and on the other, a granary under the shade of lofty, ancient-looking hardwoods. We followed the crowd to the granary where enormous farm tools—wooden threshers, winnowers, querns, mortars, and pestles—sprawled across the straw-and-husk-covered ground like the exoskeletons of giant insects. Children climbed the bulky equipment, ignoring their parents’ warnings. But when the Kamaphibal appeared, all movements and sounds ceased. A man stepped forward and introduced himself as Bong Sok—“Big Brother Sok.” He had the leanness of a giraffe and the hooded eyes of a nocturnal creature, one of those fabled khliang srak, whose cry was said to portend the death of a sick person. The others’ deference to him told me he was the face of the local Kamaphibal, the leader of the pack. He wasted no time in pleasantries and started the meeting right away.

  “This spot has great significance,” he said, hardly moving his mouth, but with a voice so morose it had the effect of silencing even our breathing. “The estate, as we all know, once belonged to a rich landowner. But now, among these remnants of wealth amassed through greed, the spoils of feudalism, we shall build a cooperative of collective wealth.” His brow arched, revealing a bit more of his hooded eyes, but his facial expression remained unaltered, impassive. “Reactionaries may question our effort to advance the Revolution . . .”

  I’d come to recognize the eloquence of their threat. They all spoke like this, sugarcoating their malevolence with fanciful words. I had only to look at Bong Sok, hear his grim hooting, to be wary.

  “But we know their voices when they speak, we know their faces even as they hide in our midst.” He paused. “Go home. Prepare your rice. Your comrade soldiers”—he nodded in the direction of the soldiers gathered in a long open-air wooden structure—“will follow you shortly to collect your contributions.”

  With that, the meeting promptly ended, and the villagers scrambled to get back into their boats or oxcarts.

  As we feared, by the time we arrived back in Stung Khae, the soldiers were there. They took away everyone’s rice. In turn each family received a ration for the week, which amounted to about a small can of rice per person per day. So it was that the four of us—Pok, Mae, Mama, and I—together received only four tin cans a day, not five as it should have been. Radana was too small to count as a full person, the soldiers said. So she received none.

  • • •

  A week or so later came Pchum Ben, a sacred Buddhist festival in which the Cambodians commemorate the spirits of the dead. Under the Organization’s rules, we were not allowed to celebrate any religious holiday, but Mae said we would honor it anyway. Knowing that my birthday preceded it, I realized I must have turned eight. Mama looked at me with remorse, but I did not feel sad or aggrieved that my birthday had come and gone without her remembering. It was better this way. We wouldn’t have been able to celebrate it as we’d done back home, with family and friends, with abundant food. Besides, I thought, eight was wrong—inadequate somehow. I was almost certain I’d become much older and, in these past months, had come to regard the reflection of the little girl I sometimes caught in the surface of the water as a kind of sprite—a phantom of guilelessness passing under my gaze before she vanished again among the ripples. So when Mae made a surreptitious midnight offering of food and drink to the spirits of the dead, I offered a prayer for my own ghost, for I could bear to imagine my own death, but I could not—would not—allow myself to think of Papa’s. When Mama did, praying along with Mae, whispering his name, invoking his spirit to partake in the measly offering of food, I resented her for luring him from the safety where I’d hidden him—the sky, the moon, that secret sphere of my hope and imagining—back to this awful, aching hole in my heart. I wanted to tell her I did not need this night, or any other, to commemorate Papa’s spirit, to call forth his presence. He was always with me. The next morning Pchum Ben was no longer, and I welcomed the day for its ordinariness.

  Aside from this invocation of sorrow, our memorial return to loss, we adapted well to Stung Khae—to our new life as peasants and Mae and Pok’s “adopted” children, to the ever-changing rules of the Kamaphibal, the volatility of the Organization and his predilection for chaos, as if calm was suspect, itself an enemy. I quickly learned my way around not only the village but also the villagers, who were linked every which way, like the rice fields, their associations often overlapping and so circuitous that it seemed impossible at first to keep straight who was related to whom and in what way—by blood, marriage, thor, or all three. I learned also that peasants were no longer just neak srae but should be addressed as Neak Moulathaan, the “Base People,” or more commonly, Neak Chas, the “Old People,” meaning they were the “base” from which we’d all come, the “oldness” from which hereafter everything would begin anew. By contrast, city people like Mama and me were Neak Thmey—the “New People”—new to country life, or maybe “new” as with animals that had yet to be broken in, to be tested and tried. “Old” or “New,” my two elders told me, people were people, and I must gauge for myself whom I could and could not trust. And so, as I navigated the human terrain, as I negotiated for my survival, I began to discern what Pok had wanted me to see that day when he walked us across the rice fields and showed me what lay beneath the paddy water—that hidden in the unbroken and seemingly imperturbable monotony of rural geography, existed those, like the needle leeches, who fed on blood and destruction. If I was to survive my uprooting and transplantation, I must grow and stretch myself as a young rice shoot would. I must rise above the mire and muck, the savagery of my environment, while appearing to thrive in it.

  For her part, Mama did her best to assimilate. She tried to cover as much as possible that side of herself that would invite endless critique and criticism. Attuning her body to the habits and rhythms of country life, she would get up before dawn to help Mae and Pok tend to the various chores around the house, and by the time daylight broke she would have already washed our dirty clothes from the previous day and hung them up to dry on the line, cooked and pa
cked our lunch, and readied herself for a day of planting. In the fields, she performed better than could be expected of a New Person, drawing on her girlhood experience of growing up in the countryside, while hiding the fact that she had been the daughter of a provincial landowner who owned vast tracts of land and throngs of servants and that what she knew of farming came from watching them rather than performing the labor herself. She dyed her clothes muted colors, hid her long hair under a kroma, and spoke the village vernacular, sometimes going as far as affecting the lilts and twangs of the rural accent. Her transformation was like the reverse metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a caterpillar. Her true nature, her core, lay quiescent like a pupa inside a chrysalis, and when alone, away from the watchful eyes of the Organization, she would hug and kiss us, pick wild jasmine and insert the faintly fragrant blossoms into the folds of her clothes, and comb her long hair with lazy, indulgent strokes. Once, while attempting to replace the broken handle of her toothbrush with a bamboo stick, she slipped, saying, “Grandmother Queen—” She was quick to correct herself: “Grandmother, I meant . . . Your grandmother said black teeth were a mark of beauty in ancient times. Now I know why. The stain seals your teeth, keeps them from rotting out when you don’t have any toothpaste or a proper toothbrush.” Then, without looking up at me, she added, “You mustn’t think this is our life, Raami. This isn’t who we are. We’re more.”

  It was her usual refrain, and every time she said it, I couldn’t help but believe ever more firmly that who we were resided in all we had lost, that the disappearance of home and family, this gaping hole left by Papa and the others, gave shape and weight to our persons, as air to balloons, so that we hovered and drifted, light-headed with grief, anchored to solid ground only by a flimsy thread of self-knowledge—this faint notion that once we had been more, that there had been more to ourselves besides loss.