In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

  It was in this spirit that Chae Bui, the round-cheeked woman, wife of Comrade Keng, came to visit us one night, bearing a basket of goods—“Gifts to fatten you up,” she said, giggling, as she plopped herself down in front of the kerosene lantern on the floor, her round, bulbous shadow hovering behind her, filling half the room. To my disappointment, her daughter Mui was not with her, but then, I knew it was quite late and she must be asleep. Already in the mosquito net myself, and supposedly asleep, I watched silently as Chae Bui handed Mama a skewer of smoked fish, spiced dried beef, a bag of sticky rice, and a small block of cane sugar. Then she pulled out a packet of cigarettes and, handing it to Big Uncle, said, “American, one percent tobacco, ninety-nine percent imperialism.” Again she giggled, her round tummy jiggling.

  Everything about Chae Bui was round and jiggly, leaving the impression that she wasn’t so much a person as a big bubble bouncing happily about. I’d never met a grown-up who bracketed almost everything she said with giggles.

  Big Uncle thanked her, looking at the package. “I didn’t know such things still exist . . .”

  Chae Bui explained that Comrade Keng had just returned with the district leader from a trip to a town near the Vietnamese border. “Sometimes things leak through.”

  They were silent for a moment, and then Big Uncle asked, “Do you know why we’re still here?”

  “Remember that day you arrived, when the district leader had to leave abruptly in the middle of the meeting?”

  Both Big Uncle and Mama nodded.

  “Well, apparently, the leader of a neighboring district heard about your arrival and demanded that all of you be sent to your intended destination. The district leader refused, arguing why waste time and effort in transferring you to the other side of the country when you’d be just as useful here. The other leader accused him of being lenient and lacking a strong ‘political standpoint’ and threatened to expose him. It was not an outright threat, but this is what was hinted.”

  “But we are nobody,” Big Uncle said, brows furrowing. “Why fight over us?”

  “It’s not about you. It’s about them. My husband says there is a struggle between those who adhere to the Cause and those who are loyal to the Party. The district leader is probably among the few who still cling to the Cause, ideals that drew them to the Revolution in the first place.”

  “It’s all so random.” Big Uncle shook his head. “Like a bunch of boys playing rock-paper-scissors.”

  “If it’s any consolation,” Chae Bui offered, “you’re very fortunate that you’ve ended up here. Battambang is a terrible place, where they like to send ‘undesirable’ people, and you were marked as—” She stopped.

  “As that,” Mama filled in. “Undesirable.”

  The room became completely quiet, except for Grandmother Queen’s snoring.

  • • •

  After Chae Bui had left, Big Uncle lit a cigarette. He took his first drag, long and slow. Mama walked over, her lips quivering in the wavering blue light of the kerosene lantern. “May I?” she asked, shaking a cigarette out of the packet. He lifted the kerosene lantern to her, touching the blue flame to the tip of her cigarette, his eyes on her lips as she drew in breath. Then, with her arms crossed and the lit cigarette between her upheld fingers, Mama tilted her head back and blew out the smoke, with an ease that told me this wasn’t the first time.

  “It’s funny what a man wants before he dies,” Big Uncle murmured, bending down to put the kerosene lantern back on the floor. He ran his hand down the back of his head, playing with the new stubble. “In those hours I’d thought were my last, all I wanted was a cigarette.” He gave a small ironic laugh.

  Mama looked at him but didn’t respond.

  He turned from her gaze and kept talking. “The soldiers came one night to our hut. They said I needed to come with them. I asked them why. They got angry. They said I was a member of the CIA. They were young and illiterate, these boys. They didn’t know east from west, let alone know what the CIA was, what those English letters stand for. But this was what they’d been instructed to say. If they want you, and you’ve committed no crime, this is what they’ll accuse you of—working for the CIA. I suppose it’s something you can’t disprove, even if you try.

  “I needed to be removed from the family, they told me. Why? I asked, again my anger getting the better of me. What the hell for? They threatened to kill the family right there in front of me. So I went with them, I let them drag me out.”

  He paused, taking another long drag. Mama waited quietly, the cigarette still in her hand, but she’d stopped smoking.

  “They brought me to a forest, where there were huts and cages and dug-out trenches. A secret prison maybe. A military center of some sort. They were like boys playing war. There, they began my reeducation. They said I needed to purify my mind, purge it of imperialist thoughts. Memory is a sickness, they told me, and I was full of it. I needed to be cured. They took a coconut to my skull . . . There were many who died this way. But they couldn’t crack me. I was too strong, they told one another. Too big to be broken so easily. I must have foreign blood. A pure Khmer couldn’t possibly be this big, this tall. I must be the child of an American whore. They wanted me to confess. Who was my father, my grandfather? What were their names? When I wouldn’t say, they took bamboo stakes and slashed my scalp. They joked that they were looking for CIA codes, classified information. I told them I had no such things. I had no idea what they were talking about. They said they would find out from the women and children. They were convinced we’d been important people. They said they would go back to the village and bring the whole family, put them in the bamboo cage with me. They laughed, slapping one another on the back for coming up with the idea. So I told them I had foreign blood, I worked for the CIA, anything they wanted to hear, the most ridiculous improbable lies.

  “When they thought they’d broken me, I was taken back to the village. The others, I found them. Hanged from the ceiling. Their bodies swollen. Blackened with flies. Tata had told them everything, they said. Our name. We were princes and princesses. One group interrogated me, the others murdered my family. There was never any communication between them. It was all a game.

  “Only Mother was spared—too old for them to waste their effort. For days she’d lived with their bodies, and you wonder why she sees only ghosts, talks only to them . . .

  “As I’d been reeducated, they let me live. It would’ve been better if they hadn’t. I wanted to hang myself next to my wife and sons. After I buried them, I tied a noose around my own neck and closed my eyes.

  “In the darkness of my mind, I saw everyone—the twins’ smiling faces, yours, Raami’s, and Radana’s. Ayuravann’s. Then I saw my own face, I heard my own voice, the promise I’d made to your husband that I would take care of you and the girls. Even as I readied myself to die, I hoped you were alive, somehow, somewhere. Then, hope—this thin filament of possibility that somewhere you were fighting to live—took hold of me. I grabbed it and knotted it around my neck. I let it lead me, pull me back to life.

  “After that day, I began to ask about you and the girls, describing to people what you looked like, Raami with her polio, and pretty little Radana standing this high. Various descriptions. But no one had seen or heard of you. Then months later a truck was to take some people to Battambang. I thought then since there was no news of you, perhaps you’d gone that far. I asked to be part of the group. The village folk looked at me as if I was mad. Do you know where you’re going? some tried to warn me. I didn’t care. I didn’t have anything to lose. I had only the memories of India and the twins, our family and their horrible deaths.

  “The night before the truck was due to leave, I shaved my head. To mourn them. To mourn myself also, my own death, for I’d died that day with them, strangled by the realization I couldn’t—”

  His hands shook and he dropped his cigarette to the floor. He bent down to pick it up, but he fell on his knees instead, crushing the cigare
tte beneath him. He crouched there, arms over his head, and when he spoke again, his voice cracked. “I couldn’t save them. Even with all my lies, I couldn’t save them.” He wept openly.

  Mama did not move. She stood watching him, this quaking heap at her feet. She pushed her cigarette hard into the windowsill, grinding it into bits against the wood, before throwing the butt out the window. Then, slowly, she lowered herself to the floor next to him.

  Between themselves, I knew, they would never talk about the others again. It was understood that this was the least they could do for the dead—to bury their memories, if not them.

  As for myself, I could not sleep. My night was broken up by jarring images of flies, ropes, and faces I could no longer recognize. At one point, I woke, tiptoed to the stairway, and threw up.

  • • •

  The days and weeks passed quickly as the whole town rushed to build barriers and embankments before the flood season set in. The mornings were mostly cool and sunny, but the afternoons were drenching wet, with the rains coming down in thunderous, prolonged streams. Then the evenings would be hot and humid, with the sun bursting through the clouds for one last glimpse, streaking the sky orange, before its rushed descent toward night.

  This evening, the day seemed young still, not at all like dusk, the sky a brilliant blue after the usual deluge, brandishing a pair of rainbows, like Indra’s crossbows, the god’s declaration of war. The townspeople, resembling defeated soldiers, dragged their feet in exhaustion as they made their way home from a long day of hoeing and digging. Mama walked to the stairs and collapsed on the bottom step, her face and body smeared with mud. Big Uncle lowered himself on the dirt beside her. I went upstairs to our room, brought back some boiled water in a coconut bowl from our kettle, and offered it to them. Mama took a small, breathless sip and then handed the bowl to Big Uncle, who downed the rest in one noisy gulp.

  “How many embankments did you build today?” I asked, imagining mountain ridges rising like giant centipedes across fields and floodplains.

  “You wouldn’t believe the amount of dirt we had to carry,” Big Uncle said, breathing heavily. “You’d think we were building the Great Wall of China.” He handed me the coconut bowl, and said to Mama, “Now to the river—need to get this mud off.”

  “I can’t move another inch,” Mama said.

  “Stay,” he told her, reaching for the yoked buckets nearby. “We’ll bring the river to you.”

  • • •

  The Mekong was in full spate. Men with kromas around their hips and women with sarongs pulled above their chests stood bathing as the water swirled around them. Naked children rolled about on the sandy shore, slick and glistening like rain-drunk carps, indifferent to their mothers’ repeated calls to clean up. Every so often they shrieked when a frog hopped out of the grass or a crab scurried from its hole in the sand. Big Uncle put down the yoked buckets, took off his shirt, and dove into the water. He swam toward an islet with only its top now visible, his head bobbing in and out of the water, his arms beating across the currents.

  My eyes traveled past the islet, to where the currents billowed like a sheet in the wind. A water-soaked log floated by, followed by a small sapling with all its leaves and roots intact. A youngster chasing after his elder, I thought. The Mekong traveled through many lands, Papa said, carrying to us the stories of places as far as China and Tibet. If the Mekong stretched all the way to China and Tibet, I thought, places I couldn’t even see, carrying with it murmurs and echoes of those lands, then perhaps it would travel as far as the moon and carry my voice to Papa. What could I tell him? Nice things, of course. None of what Big Uncle had told Mama. Nothing about the others.

  I looked around. In one spot a boy was washing his albino water buffalo so that it stood as transparently pink as a peeled pomelo, while ignoring the mud that caked his own body like tree bark. In another, Mui was busy plucking the tiny, slender leaves of a soap bush and rubbing them onto her hair until they dissolved into countless green specks oozing with bubbles. Nearby, Chae Bui, in a black bathing sarong that made her light skin look even lighter, was engrossed in scrubbing her shoulders and chest. Comrade Keng suddenly emerged from the water and surprised them. He snapped his jaws, pretending to be an alligator. Mui and Chae Bui splashed water at him, squealing and laughing. I closed my eyes and thought, I must tell him all that I hear and see now.

  When I opened my eyes again, Big Uncle had reached the islet. He stopped and waved to me. As far as anyone knew, he was my father. It’s a story to disconnect us from the others, Mama had said. But in private, we are who we are, and he’s your uncle still. But, at a certain angle, from a distance, he looked exactly like Papa. In moments like this, when others had their fathers with them, I wished he were mine.

  I took off my shirt and went into the water, the sarong blooming around me like a jellyfish I’d seen in the sea. Big Uncle began to swim back, faster than he’d gone out, perhaps afraid I might go in too far. But he didn’t need to worry. I knew not to. Besides, I’d learned to swim from Pok.

  Big Uncle paused, looking at me, and I waved to let him know I was all right. Reassured, he moved at a more relaxed pace, his right arm thrown forward, then his left, then right again, left, right, left, drawing a series of tiny rainbows in the air above his head. I knew he hadn’t meant for me to hear what he’d told Mama, so I pretended not to know. I never mentioned the twins even when I missed them, even as I often wondered if they’d learned to plant rice, catch crabs and minnows, search the brush for bird eggs, all the things I’d learned. Once, I dreamt about them—just the twins—their faces swollen, the flesh partly eaten away by flies. Since then I resolved not to think of them before sleep, and if they slipped into my thoughts, I quickly chased the image away. I wondered now if they were where Radana was, if death was a place you could picture as you chose so that you wouldn’t be afraid to go to it.

  Big Uncle came out of the river. Gone were the mud and dirt that had caked his skin. He seemed clean. Cleansed. I followed him. He bent down to pick up his shirt from the ground and his head, spiky with new hair, brushed against my shoulder. I pressed my face to his cheek and hugged him. He stood hunched over, caught in midgesture, surprised by my sudden affection. Then, fingers folding gently over mine, he squeezed my hand, and I knew it was okay to love my uncle as I’d loved my father, in lieu of him.

  • • •

  With the two buckets of water we’d brought back from the river, Mama hid behind a bush in the back of the villa and bathed. As there was no soap or shampoo, she scrubbed her body and hair with a half-rotten lime we’d found on the ground. She’d finally cut her long black hair, and now the ends barely grazed her shoulders. Truly Revolutionary, I thought. It had weighed on her, as sadness would, I imagined, but she couldn’t cut sadness in half. It wasn’t like hair, it wasn’t dead. Sadness was alive. Or maybe she’d cut it for the same reason Big Uncle had shaved his head. To mourn them. More than a year had passed since we were all at the temple together in Rolork Meas, Big Uncle said. Judging from the rains and the level of the river, we were at the peak of the wet season, maybe July or August, and, in two or three months when Pchum Ben came again, I would turn nine. I did not think we would ever stop mourning them.

  “I can’t reach,” she said, handing me the lime. “Can you help me?”

  I took it and ran it up and down the length of her back. The skin of her right shoulder was raw and broken, blistered from balancing baskets full of dirt all day long. I scrubbed harder, wanting to wipe away her sadness, all the hurts and wounds I could and couldn’t see. She cringed from my roughness as much as from the sting of the lime.

  I lightened my touch, and she poured water on her shoulders to soothe the burning, the water flowing down her spine, which rose in the middle of her back like a chain of mountains. I could count all her bones, the round notches and the long slender canes. The mountains, the Mekong, the Great Wall of China, I thought; Mama carried them all on her back. I felt it n
ow, the full weight of her grief. I felt it in her breathing. In the words she couldn’t and wouldn’t say, in the tears that wouldn’t come, the blood that wouldn’t flow. She was no longer bleeding, she’d told Big Uncle one night when they stayed up to talk, thinking Grandmother Queen and I were asleep. Because I couldn’t keep a child alive, it seems the gods have taken away my ability to bear one. There are no gods, Big Uncle had responded. If they were the ones who gave life, created it, they’d know its value. There are no gods. Only senselessness.

  She stood up, emptying the last bit of water from the bucket onto her feet, and for a few seconds I saw her as she’d once been, light and effervescent, like a soap bubble swirling with iridescence, rising ever higher toward the sky, carrying the reflections of the trees, the mountains, the rivers, my sadness, hers, and Big Uncle’s . . .

  She was not one to explain things in detail, so she said, and yet it was she, I remembered, who’d shown me my first rainbow, pointing to the sky shimmering with raindrops and sunlight, saying, “Look, darling, a slide!” And since then, I’d learned to see things not as they were, but for what they meant—that even when it rained, the sun could still shine, and the sky might offer something infinitely more beautiful than white clouds and blue expanse, that colors could burst forth in the most unexpected moment.

  . . . up and up she drifted, becoming more elusive and transparent, barely visible, and finally nothing. All the sadness seemed to disappear, melt away as if it had never existed.

  twenty-six

  Mui and I arrived at school to find a Revolutionary soldier sitting at our teacher’s desk, his back pushed against the chair, his legs on top of the desk, and his gun balanced across his stomach. He wore no sandals, and the soles of his feet were almost as black as his clothes. He stared at us, chewing on a blade of grass like a bored ox. I recognized him by the sickle-shaped scar on his right cheek. Mouk, everyone called him. He was the town’s top soldier and we rarely saw him, but when we did, he inspired only fear.