In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

  “All of it.”

  She stopped and looked down at me from the top of the stairs. “Did you say all of it?”

  I nodded.

  She hurried into the hut.

  “The child is getting her appetite back,” Mae said. “It’s a good sign.”

  Mama smiled, and her smile was like the sun after the rain.

  • • •

  At the fields, she kept smiling all day while she worked.

  “You are full of private thoughts, Comrade Aana,” the Fat One said. “The Revolution does not recognize private thoughts.”

  Mama beamed. She radiated.

  • • •

  It appeared Radana was indeed getting better. She’d stopped vomiting. She had mild diarrhea, but at least she was eating again and most of what she ate stayed down. Color was returning to her cheeks. Still too weak to sit up, she now lay on the mat, playing with a spool of white thread. Mama sat close by, letting out the seams of the white satin dress we’d brought from Phnom Penh, so that when Radana recovered and gained back her weight she could wear it. I stared at the tiny pink silk roses along the collar and the butterfly-shaped bow in the back, wondering where my sister would prance around in such an un-Revolutionary dress.

  Mae poked her head through the doorway, and smiling at Radana, gurgled, “Look what I caught for you!” She held out a string, at the end of which dangled a toy grasshopper woven from coconut leaves. Radana stared at her, then at the dangling grasshopper. She didn’t react, her eyes listless. Mae turned to me and sighed, “It’s really for you.”

  I took the grasshopper from her and dangled it in front of Radana’s face. I bobbed it up and down, twirled it around and around, and made all sorts of noise. Still, Radana did not react. I kept trying, counting the tiny brown scabs on her face left over from the infected bites, which looked not unlike little eyes staring at me. The Organization has eyes and ears like a pineapple, I thought, giggling to myself, imagining Radana to be the Organization. Then all of a sudden Radana’s lips curled into a smile and she let out a hiccup-like chortle. Mama abandoned her mending and moved closer to my sister. “Do it again,” she said to me. “Make her laugh again.”

  For the rest of the evening, we tried to make Radana laugh, and she did, each time a bit longer and louder.

  • • •

  The next day we rushed home from work to see how Radana was doing. She lay on the straw mat where we’d left her, her head tilted to one side on her small bolster pillow, her eyes only slightly open. Mae sat massaging her tummy while Pok hummed some sort of folk tune, his voice raspy like the sound of a bamboo reed.

  Mama knelt down beside them, her hand stroking Radana’s cheek. “How’s my baby?” she whispered, parting the wisp of bangs on Radana’s forehead, now looking enlarged with her face so gaunt.

  “She was calling for you today,” Mae said, “mhum mhum mhum, and looking at me like I had full breasts!”

  Radana licked her lips at the word “mhum.”

  “She must be hungry again,” Mama said, watching her with such enraptured love I thought that too must be un-Revolutionary.

  “I fed her some porridge already,” Mae told her. “She ate like a piglet!”

  “What about the cassava?” I asked cautiously. On the way home, we’d stopped by a villager’s house and traded Papa’s watch—the Omega Constellation—for a cassava root. “Is that for Radana?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to ask right out for it. I felt horribly ashamed of my hunger, believing that this constant ache for food was a kind of greed, a weakness of character. The lumpy knot twisted inside my stomach.

  “No,” Mama said. “It’s for you.”

  • • •

  Mama handed me a plate with cut-up chunks of the boiled cassava, sprinkled with bits of palm sugar. One of the Sweetheart palms that was still giving juice had recently produced enough for us to boil down to make a small block. I breathed in the aroma, the heat from the cassava melting the sugar, making the smell even stronger. Lying on the mat, Radana put out her hand and murmured, “Mhum . . . mhum . . . mhum . . .” She sounded like Mae’s cow, I thought.

  Mama shook her head at me and said, “Your sister’s stomach is not ready for it yet.”

  “Mhum,” Radana said, more forceful now. “Mhum.”

  It was her word for milk. A baby’s word, and as such it was also her word for Mama.

  “I’m here,” Mama told her. “I’m right here beside you.” She clicked her tongue, trying to distract Radana’s attention from my plate.

  “Mhum!” Radana screamed, even though it wasn’t much of a scream.

  “I’ll get you some porridge.”

  Radana pointed at my plate. I felt a sharp pang grip my stomach, then shoot to my chest and bloom, tentacular and radiant, like a jellyfish pulsating in the dark of the sea. I winced from the intensity of it. Mama looked at me, as if to ask, What’s the matter? But I couldn’t explain it, this sudden heart-searing love for my little sister, who, if anything, had been more or less the bane of my existence, not because of anything she’d done but precisely because she was my little sister; who now, though still immune to despair and lacking any real sense of herself, seemed driven by the same physical need as mine—to feed her hunger, to stay alive. She kept pointing at my plate.

  “Yes, that’s porridge,” Mama lied. “I’ll get you some.”

  “No!” Radana cried, shaking her head. “Want that!”

  “I know you do.” Mama lifted her up from the mat. “When you get better, you’ll have some.” Turning to me, she ordered, “Take it outside—hurry and finish it!”

  I ate it so fast I burned my tongue.

  • • •

  Later that night Radana sobbed herself to sleep, murmuring, “Mhum . . . mhum . . . mhum . . .” Outside, Mae’s cow replied, Maaaw . . . maaaw . . . maaaw!

  I clamped my hands over my ears. They went on. It was unbearable.

  twenty-one

  Radana died. Mama woke me up to tell me this. She wasn’t crying. She just sat in a corner, hugging Radana’s bolster pillow to her chest. “I wanted so much for her to get better,” she murmured. “I wanted so much for her to get better . . .”

  I don’t understand. When did she die? How?

  “But she died,” Mama chanted, “she died . . .”

  I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and saw Radana lying next to me. I shook her, first softly, then hard. She didn’t move. I waited. There wasn’t a sound. “Radana,” I whispered, then louder, “Radana!”

  “All she wanted was to eat.” Mama rocked back and forth. “If I had known . . .” Her words spun around my head, like a noose twirling round and round, ready to strangle me. “But it’s too late now. Too late for cassava. Too late for sugar. For everything.” She laughed. “Her last meal.”

  I heard noises below us. I looked down and, through the slatted bamboo floor, saw a torch burning and Pok working beside it. He sawed and hammered. A coffin for Radana.

  She died.

  The stars had come out for her, gathering in the doorway, blinking in silence. Everything seemed familiar. I didn’t know why. Had Radana died once before? I remembered Mr. Virak’s baby, the quickness with which he’d slipped away. Radana couldn’t be dead. She was getting better. This was a dream. It had to be. Wake up!

  “Wake up, Radana. Please wake up . . .”

  “Come, child,” Mae said to me. “Help me prepare your sister.” She lifted Radana into her arms. On the straw mat, I saw a wet shape. Radana’s body print in sweat. Or maybe the shape of her spirit, a shell left behind. Mae undressed her and placed her in the big wok we used for boiling palm juice. There wasn’t anything else to put her in.

  I looked at her body, now that she was no longer in it. Her rib cage. Her arms. Her chest bones, like a pair of hands with fingers splayed, protecting her heart, each bone as slender as one of Mama’s fingers. I poured water while Mae sponged her with a cloth. I wished I knew how to chant like a monk. I wondere
d what you’d say to bless someone who couldn’t be blessed anymore—I hope the forest where your spirit goes has no mosquitoes. I hope malaria doesn’t follow you there. I hope your suffering ends here and now . . .

  When we finished, Radana smelled like burnt palm sugar. Mae dried her and brought her back to the straw mat. Mama moved from her corner, moaning, unable still to shed tears. I no longer had to imagine it—she was a ghost, her spirit leaving with Radana’s. I wanted to ask Pok for a nail from the coffin. I wanted to nail Mama’s spirit to her body. I wanted to nail her to me.

  She chose the white satin dress she’d fixed for when Radana would get better, the un-Revolutionary dress with the shiny shantung bodice, the lacy tulle skirt, the row of pink roses at the collar, and the butterfly-shaped bow in the back that I imagined would flap like a real butterfly’s wings when Radana ran. A white night moth chasing a girl-shaped dream. White. Yes, I remembered now. White, the color of mourning. Not black, like the color of the Revolution. Nor saffron, that of vanished monks.

  Radana was gone.

  She had died while I was asleep. Mama put the dress on Radana. “Go to sleep, go to sleep,” she hummed, like a woman playing house with a lifeless doll. “It’s not morning yet, go to sleep . . .” Was she speaking to me or Radana?

  She had woken me to tell me Radana would not wake up again. Ever. Temporary was forever and forever was now. Death was now and eternity. I’d always remember it.

  Mama handed Radana back to Mae, who took the eggplant-colored sampot hol Mama had given her as a gift when we arrived and wrapped it around Radana, swaddling her like a newborn so that only her face was showing. Then she laid her next to me and covered both of us with a blanket. I put my arm around my little sister and held her tight, as if the warmth of my body could make her body warm again. “Still a baby,” Mae wept. “A silkworm in her cocoon.”

  “A butterfly not yet born,” Mama echoed, rocking back and forth.

  But tomorrow is her funeral.

  • • •

  In the morning while we gathered on the bamboo platform under the hut, the Fat One appeared wearing black and a smug look on her face. She’d brought the other wives of the Kamaphibal with her. Members of the Burial Committee, she said. “We’re your comrades, Comrade,” she reminded Mama. “We’ve come to offer you our support.” Whatever it was—this support of theirs—it would not do. Mama wanted only Radana.

  “You are adopting the correct attitude, Comrade Aana. Tears are signs of weakness.”

  The others murmured their agreement. They were as young as Mama, all with children of their own. But they didn’t understand her sadness. They praised her for being strong—for not crying. “Regret is poison. Crying for the past is against the teaching of the Revolution. You’re on your way to become a true Revolutionary.”

  Mama looked at them. She didn’t answer. They surrounded her, like vultures surrounding a mother hen, their eyes on her dead chick, greedy and waiting.

  Pok had finished building the coffin. He lifted Radana into it and as he did so a teardrop fell from his eye and rolled down her cheek so that it looked as if Radana were crying for herself, as if she grieved her own death. In the morning light her skin was as white as the dress she was wearing, and her eyeballs, I noticed, no longer glided back and forth under her closed lids as they would when she dreamed. Dying is when you close your eyes, Papa had once tried to explain. Sleep without dreaming. Radana died. She was no longer dreaming.

  They would take the coffin to bury, the Burial Committee explained. Somewhere among the rice fields. A body shouldn’t be wasted. Radana would fertilize the soil. She would be able to serve the Revolution better than she could when she had been alive. We should be proud. The men and women who had sacrificed their lives for the Revolution were buried this way. They had no coffin. Radana was lucky. She had a coffin. Hers was a bourgeois death.

  “There will be no religious ceremony.” The Fat One wanted to make sure we understood. “Ceremony is a feudal custom of the rich. And there will be no prayer. Prayer is false comfort. It won’t bring the child—”

  “Enough!” Pok cut her off. He closed the coffin and nailed the lid shut.

  Mama handed the Fat One the rest of Radana’s clothes, neatly folded and stacked in a bundle tied with the red ribbon, the same one she had bought from the little girl selling New Year’s jasmine when we were leaving Phnom Penh, when red was her favorite color, when she was young and strong and beautiful. Did she want the ribbon and the clothes buried with Radana? “Please take this . . .”

  “Your daughter won’t need these things where she’s going,” the Fat One told her.

  “But you can’t send a child into the next world without her belongings!” Mae protested. “Have pity on her soul—”

  “The dress she has on is enough!” the Fat One snapped. “The rest is bourgeois luxury!”

  “Please,” again Mama murmured, her whole body trembling as she held the bundle out. In her lap was Radana’s bolster pillow, darkened with dried sweat stains from all those times Radana had lain on it burning with fever. It was too old and dirty to be taken into the next life or be of any use in this one. No one took notice of it. They all had their eyes on the bundle.

  Finally, the Fat One took it. “We’ll see what can be done,” she said, tucking the bundle under her arm. “We can carry the coffin ourselves. None of you need to come.”

  Mama nodded, lifting Radana’s bolster pillow to her chest.

  I stared at her, panic rising in my throat. Don’t just sit there! Do something! Tell them to bring Radana back. She isn’t dead! Why do you just sit there hugging that stupid pillow? Bring Radana back! She isn’t dead! Bring her back!

  I jumped from my seat and followed the Burial Committee to the road, my heart hurling against my chest, like Radana’s small fist banging on the coffin’s lid as she screamed, Out! Let me out! Or was it my own rage? “Where are you taking her?”

  “You don’t need to know!” one of them hissed. “Don’t follow us.”

  “Let her,” the Fat One snickered. “Let her follow her sister if she wants.”

  • • •

  When we were alone again, Mama let out a heartbreaking scream. I scooted closer, offering my heart—my love—for her to break so that hers wouldn’t have to, but she only screamed louder, rearing her head like the mother cobra I’d once witnessed Pok and a group of men trying to catch for food. The men had dug a hole in the ground not far from its nest and placed a pot of boiling water in the hole. Hidden behind some bushes, they used a long bamboo pole to invade her nest and quickly rolled one of her eggs into the pot amidst the cobra’s frantic hissing. The cobra reared her head at the pot with her egg in it, let out a hiss—so sorrowful and human that I wept for her—and plunged herself into the scalding water. Had there been a pot of boiling water in front of us now, Mama would’ve done the same.

  “Give me back my baby!”

  It was my fault, of course. Radana died because of me. The certainty of it overwhelmed me now, as I remembered all those times I had wished she too would have polio so that we would be the same. Now she was dead. I hadn’t loved her as completely as I myself had been loved, and even though I’d vowed I would, it was too late. Death had already dug a hole in the ground and set its trap.

  “My baby!” Mama screamed again. “Give me back my baby!”

  Pok came in and pulled me away, his body shielding my body, blocking me from Mama’s screaming—her shattering.

  • • •

  Later, I found refuge under the Sweetheart palms. I wanted to be alone, to hide from everyone, from the world. Pok came walking up the dirt road from the river, a fishing pole in one hand and two catfish strung on a leafy vine in the other. When he passed the cow by the haystacks he gave her a pat. She let out a plaintive “Maaaw.” She appeared like any other bovine, witless and uninterested, until she mooed, and only then you realized she was still grieving, capable of sustained sorrow, as if death, the awareness
of it, is a universal consciousness, the thor that allows us to empathize with another that’s not of our own kind. The wooden charm Pok had carved and fastened around her neck with a rope hadn’t done one bit of good. It hung there, a constant reminder of the baby she’d lost, and, looking at her now, I wished for this grieving beast of burden a human disease—forgetfulness.

  Pok nodded and moved on. I pulled back, pressing myself against one of the palms. I didn’t want to talk to him. I just wanted to be with the palms. Their solitude spoke to mine, my sense of isolation. But Pok saw me. He came and sat down, his back against the other palm. For a minute or two we kept silent and avoided each other’s eyes. Then he tilted his head back and, looking up, said, “Do you know which is thnoat oan and which is thnoat bong?”

  I said nothing.

  “One morning that one grew out of a seed,” he went on, nodding at the palm I was leaning against. “Several mornings later this one peeped out.” He turned and tapped the one he was leaning on. “Also from the same seed. We separated them and planted them in these two spots, with enough distance between them so that when they got big their fronds wouldn’t overcrowd and they’d more likely bear fruits. But, the funny thing was, as they grew they kept leaning into each other, each year a little closer, until their trunks crisscrossed, as they are now. You see, we thought of them as our children. Or at least, the spirits of the children we could’ve had, wished we had, and that’s why we called them thnoat oan thnoat bong.”

  All this time I thought they were “sweethearts,” when I should’ve known oan-bong also means “younger-older siblings.”

  “Now, it seems, one has stopped giving juice, and from the look of those fronds, it isn’t going to make it.” He paused, swallowing. “But the other, we hope, will push on.”

  He let some minutes pass in silence, then, looking up again, said, “Those vultures! I’ve seen them for days now.” He untied the kroma that belted his shirt and swung at the air above us, as if this was enough to chase the vultures away. “You and your sister will always be connected. You were her older sister. You watched over her, you protected her—you did—the best you could, and now she will watch over you and protect you.”