In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

  Big Uncle coughed, his face turning dark purple. I thought his tongue would fall out. A soldier looked our way and Big Uncle, suppressing his coughs, resumed his digging, his movements as mechanical as if he’d never known any other way to move, as if his mind was capable of no other thoughts except those of the task before him.

  I looked around, searching for Mama, but I couldn’t see past the plumes of dust. My eyes felt gritty. When I blinked, I saw sandstorms, I felt fire. When I swallowed, I tasted the desert on my tongue. I felt my inside drying up, fissuring with drought lines, my entire body a cracked coconut shell. Around me the ground was broken and scarred, with holes and ditches that resembled half-dug graves. We’re burying a dragon, I thought, but I’m the one dying under the sun. I’m digging my own grave. Or else we are burying ourselves. Big Uncle’s words echoed in my head, mingling with my own thoughts. Burying ourselves, burying ourselves . . .

  The bell rang, like a series of drawn-out gunshots. People put their tools down and began heading toward an elevated stretch of unbroken land where rows of straw huts stood against a background of trees. I stared and blinked, stared and blinked, my eyes searing with pain. I saw embers and flames, sparks flying everywhere. Are the huts burning, or am I on fire? I couldn’t be sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me. Flames leaped and danced, licking my face. I’m on a funeral pyre. But whose?

  Big Uncle sat down next to me, waiting for the traffic of black figures to subside. Baskets lay scattered all around us, like giant shells, a whole sea of dead clams. The gravediggers have stopped digging . . . Hoes and shovels crisscrossed like bones in an open field. Dirt and rocks gathered in small mounds resembling termite hills. One small mound will be enough to bury Radana . . . My mind wandered, a long, thin snake slithering across the bare ground. She was small when she died. Even smaller than when she was born. If she had a grave, it would look like a termite hill. It wouldn’t stop the Mekong from flooding the rice fields, but it would keep Mama from drowning in her own tears. Tears that came and tears that haven’t come. Like the season’s rains. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll build a grave before I die. Not a grave for the Dragon Yiak. But a termite hill for Mama’s sadness.

  I looked up, trying to guess what time of day it was. The sun was right above me, sitting on my head. I was ready to explode. The bell kept ringing. Ringing ringing ringing . . .

  I was thinking strange thoughts. I was seeing strange things. I saw millions of tiny stars. Blinking blinking blinking . . .

  A woman walked toward us. Big Uncle said something, but I couldn’t understand him. His voice sounded as if it came from the bottom of the Mekong, as far down as where the naga serpent lived. Is Big Uncle a naga serpent—a dragon yiak called Buried Civilization? Once he had been a yiak. Now he was a gravedigger, digging termite-sized graves. Why? Why does everything seem so small? The woman stood before me. She had no face. Only eyes. Black moons in clear white skies. I knew her eyes. She unwound the dust-covered kroma from her faceless face. A bandage around her wound. She smiled at me, and when I saw the sadness in that smile, I knew who she was.

  The stars stopped blinking. Night met day. A kroma covered my body. I was dead before I could build Radana a termite hill next to the Dragon Yiak’s grave.

  • • •

  “You fainted in the sun,” Mama said, then added, attempting a smile, “but you’re all right now.” She felt my forehead and neck with the back of her hand, searching for traces of the sun in my skin.

  Night had arrived, it seemed, and the only light was from the torch outside near the doorway of the long communal hut. I swallowed at the sight of its orange-black flame. I tasted its dry heat in my throat. My back was soaked with sweat. Yet I felt cold, shivering with lightness, as if my spirit had lifted and there was only this shell of my body.

  Mama pulled the blanket up to my chest. I licked my lips, looking for water in the muted glow of the room, noticing a row of empty straw mats and pillows. Mosquito nets, with their sides thrown over the top, hovered above, like ghosts in flight.

  “Here,” she said, handing me a bowl of what looked like watery rice soup. “It’ll make you feel better.”

  I sat up and drank the liquid but left the rice. I wasn’t hungry, just thirsty. I handed the bowl back to her and, wiping my mouth with the back of my wrist, lay down again on the long communal bamboo bed.

  “Are you still cold?” she asked, head tilting, worries fluttering across her face. Or maybe they were shadows of her eyelashes when she blinked. “Do you want to eat something?” She caressed my chin. “I can try to get you something. Fruit, sugar. Just tell me.”

  I couldn’t speak. I could only remember . . . the feeling of her hand on my skin.

  “Maybe you just want to sleep now.” She let down the mosquito net above me, tucking in the edges under the mat. “I have to get back to work.”

  I nodded.

  She walked to the doorway and then turned to look back at me. In the torch’s light, her shadow grew and threw itself on me.

  I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep. She left, the light of the torch fading with her footsteps. I turned and faced the wall in front of me. A narrow walking space separated the wall from the bed. I knew she had chosen this place because of the wall. She could climb in and out without having to talk with the other women who shared her hut, and when she slept, she could face the darkness, alone. It was how she had slept since Radana died, hugging the wall, facing nowhere.

  I heard noises outside, the hums and drones of night creatures. An owl hooted, and another answered, telling each other an endless tale amidst an endless banging of hoes and shovels, the earth being smashed. When you hear an owl, so they say, death is nearby. But owls were always hooting in Democratic Kampuchea, and when someone died, they were as quiet as people, afraid to speak up, to cry out loud. I had learned not to be afraid of owls or other night creatures. Animals are not like people. If you leave them alone, they won’t hurt you. But people will, even if you’ve done no wrong. They hurt you with their guns, their words, their lies and broken promises, their sorrow.

  The crickets made whirring music to accompany the owls’ tale. The trees stirred to listen. Once in a while the wind yawned. In the distance metal tools broke the earth in a monotonous rhythm, and nearby, just above my head, whispers echoed tentatively back and forth.

  “How is she?”

  “I’m losing her . . . Maybe I’ve lost her already.”

  “You’d better head back to work. I’ll check on her.”

  At night even the walls had voices.

  • • •

  He walked into the hut. I knew his limping even if I couldn’t see his face. He stood at the foot of the bed where she had stood just a moment ago. In the dark Big Uncle was all shadow. “Are you awake?” he asked.

  I nodded and sat up in the mosquito net.

  “Hungry?”

  “No, just thirsty.”

  “Come outside then.”

  I followed him, wrapping the blanket around myself. Outside, the moon was a white hole in a black sky. We sat side by side on the giant root of a tree with leaves that resembled turtles’ hearts. In front of us a kettle perched on three rocks and, under it, the ash was still warm.

  “We borrowed the kettle from the kitchen,” Big Uncle said, pouring water into a bamboo cup and handing it to me. “The camp leader allows us to take turns to come and check on you. How are you feeling?”

  I kept quiet, my eyes on the Dragon Yiak’s grave. It seemed bigger at night. Everything was under its shadow. Bright orange flames dotted the broken landscape, illuminating the endless lines of black figures digging and carrying baskets. Buriers of dragons, I thought. Diggers of graves. Up and down. Up and down. They looked like ghosts. Ghosts burying ghosts.

  Big Uncle, noticing my stare, said, “There’s no logic to it.”

  Buried Civilization, he had called it. The Dragon Yiak had a name. It had no logic. But it had a name.

  Suddenly,
a patch of clouds glided past the moon and, for a moment, I thought I saw the spirit of the Dragon Yiak floating above us.

  I put my cup out for more water. Big Uncle refilled it. A warm breeze blew, rustling the leaves above us. Big Uncle looked up and said, “There will remain only so many of us as rest in the shadow of a banyan.”

  “A prophecy, I know.”

  The prophecy, Papa had explained that day long ago when Om Bao went missing, said a darkness would settle upon Cambodia. There would be empty houses and empty roads, the country would be governed by those with no morals or teaching, and blood would course so high as to reach the underbelly of an elephant. In the end only the deaf, the dumb, and the mute would survive.

  Big Uncle stared at me, startled.

  If he meant to comfort me by saying that there was nothing I could’ve done because Grandmother Queen and the others were among the damned of the prophecy, I wanted to tell him there was no such thing—no such prediction, no such curse. Neither was there a sacred tree under whose shade we’d be safe. There was only this burial ground, and we would all die here, in our communal grave. I couldn’t find the words. So instead I said, “Grandmother Queen said it was our karma.”

  Big Uncle was silent.

  twenty-eight

  Day and night seemed caught in a rut, sending us round and round in the same monotonous rotation. The only indication that we’d moved forward at all was the growth of the embankment, which appeared to have doubled in size and length since my arrival, its surface scaly with pebbles and rocks and unbroken chunks of hard, dry clay. It was the biggest hand-constructed mound I had ever seen, and the absence of trees and plants, its grave-like nakedness, added to its monstrosity. While steps were dug into the sides to make climbing possible, it was still a dizzying height to overcome. At the top one could see everything in its vicinity. Along one side, beyond the ragged, hollowed-out earth, our huts stood on an elevated tract of land, the women’s huts separated from the men’s huts by several long, open-air thatch-roofed halls that made up the communal mess, with the kitchen and the soldiers’ quarters in the back. Beyond that, past the fields of grass and some woods, loomed the darker, impenetrable silhouette of the much-feared Haunted Forests. On the other side, dry lowland scrub prevailed, stretching endlessly into the horizon. Nowhere though could we see a river, not even a small one, let alone a mighty, raging force that would warrant the construction of this colossal levee.

  This morning, as every morning, as soon as the sun rose, I took my place in a large crater with other children, who seemed less like children than little old people with their distended bellies and skeletal limbs. We, the stronger ones, squatting on our haunches, broke the earth with bamboo spades, while the weaker ones gathered it into the shell-shaped baskets thrown in a pile by a long procession of men and women coming down the embankment. There was a continuous flow, as many lines going up as those coming down. Mama was on her way down and heading toward me, taking the long way around, passing one crater after another where she could have exchanged her emptied baskets for a pair of full ones. If a soldier caught her taking the detour, she would be punished, forced to work longer than everyone or, worse, deprived of a meal. When she got to my crater, she unhooked her empty baskets, lowered them to the ground, slipped me a krotelong, a kind of water bug resembling a cockroach, hooked two filled baskets on her stringed bamboo yoke, and was on her way up again. I feigned a coughing fit and, bringing my loaded fist over my mouth as if to silence myself, devoured the water bug in one swallow. Then, both hands again gripping the handle of my bamboo spade, I continued digging around a rock, loosening it bit by bit. There ought to be more water bugs seeking refuge in the cool, moist earth underneath. If not, I thought, there would be other insects. Even scorpions were preferable to nothing.

  Several yards away, Big Uncle moved along a deep, narrow ditch, his shoulders rising and falling, as he bent down to dig and pulled up again to throw a shovel of dirt over the edge. At the other end crouched a group of boys, small enough to move along the cramped space. They scraped away the edges to widen the opening, their coughs and gasps falling in rhythm with the sounds of earth breaking around them.

  As we worked, the camp leader walked about, bellowing through a bullhorn, “The Organization needs us now more than ever! We’re fighting the Vietnamese. They’re pushing on our borders, pounding us every which way, trying to steal our country every chance they get.”

  He was nearly bald and hefty, certainly one of the few meaty bodies among hundreds of skeletal ones. His mouth was always moving, if not speaking then eating. His wife, an equally fleshy being, was the head of the kitchen.

  “Yes, they may be Communists like us, but they’re Vietnamese first. So they’re our enemies! We must defend ourselves against them! We must strengthen our country from within! And how would we do this? We must build mountains to stop the Mekong from flooding the rice fields.”

  What Mekong? What rice fields? My mind wandered. I felt hungry, more than ever now that I’d eaten the water bug. I dug harder around the rock.

  “All over the country, reservoirs, canals, ditches are being built so that rice can be planted throughout the year! Not just during the rainy season! Democratic Kampuchea is a powerful nation! The rest of the world will depend on our rice! We could have plenty to eat, but who could think of eating when our soldiers need our rice.”

  My hunger turned to thirst. I wiped the sweat from my nose and licked my palm dry. It tasted salty—gritty with dirt.

  “We must continue our struggle! The Revolution is a constant battle! We must search for enemies! Be always on the lookout for them!”

  I looked in the direction of our huts, remembering the water canteen I’d left at the foot of the bed in my rush to get to work.

  “They’re everywhere! Not just outside our borders.”

  The sounds of digging echoed across the expanse, bouncing from crater to ditch, filling my ears and rattling my bones so that I could not separate myself from every bang and thud, the incessant bark of the camp leader.

  “They hide among us, sharing our beds and our meals!”

  I closed my eyes and let my body go . . . let the skin fall away . . . let the bones shatter and disintegrate . . . until only hunger and thirst remained.

  “And when we find them, we must rout them out!”

  Finally, I dislodged the rock and, with all my strength, pushed it over. Nothing. Not even ants. Not one miserable bug to eat. The earth was as dry as it was hot, inhospitable to life.

  “We must crush them like termites!”

  I dug a hole and buried myself, this seed-like knot I’d become, and waited for rain.

  “We must show no mercy!”

  Mama came again but had no food to offer, only a faint smile, which I lacked the strength to return.

  “Show no pity!”

  She put the empty pair of baskets down, hoisted up another pair filled with dirt, and went on her way, following the flow of people in front of her, her steps slower now, her body quaking more with every footfall.

  “We must be rid of them, babies and all!”

  He bellowed the same message five times over. I wanted to bang a hoe against his head. Reprieve came only when the bell rang.

  • • •

  We were allowed enough time to use the woods or, if we wanted, go down to the creek behind the huts to refresh ourselves with a splash or two of water. Most people stayed put. Except for the call of nature, there was no reason to move, no reason to waste our energy. Big Uncle got out of his ditch and lowered himself next to me in the crater. At some distance away, the camp leader stood talking to Mama, who, every now and then, lowered her head and nodded. He must’ve caught her taking the detour to visit me and was now reprimanding her. He waved her away, as if allowing her off the hook this time. She seemed grateful and hurried toward us.

  “I have to use the woods,” she said, offering me her hand. “Come.” I didn’t understand why she would need me along,
but before I could protest, Big Uncle, helping me up, said, “Go with your mama,” and to her, “I’ll follow in a bit.”

  He didn’t have to say more. I understood. Wherever we were going we couldn’t be seen walking off together. Familial closeness was against the teaching of the Revolution, said the camp leader. It eroded the communal structure and lessened productivity. Whatever he meant, it was clear that this was why the men’s huts stood separate from the women’s huts. Here even husbands and wives were not allowed under the same roof. Breaks and mealtimes were the only occasions a family could be together.

  “We’ll wait for you by the boulder,” Mama said.

  Big Uncle nodded, and Mama pulled me along.

  • • •

  We arrived at a secluded part of the woods where the creek curved around a large boulder and spilled into a pool before it dropped off and disappeared under a canopy of bamboo saplings. Mama rolled up her pants and started wading through the ankle-deep water toward the boulder. Bending down, she dipped her arm into the pool and, after some searching, pulled out two stalks of sugarcane, both as long as her forearms. She turned around and waded back toward me. Suddenly there was a loud snap. I spun around and saw a branch falling to the ground. I turned this way and that, my heart beating wildly. There was no one.

  “Sit,” Mama said, pulling me down so that we were hidden behind a thorny bush. She handed me one of the stalks and right away I bit into the hard covering, peeling it off a strip at a time with my teeth. Gnats swarmed my head, excited by the sweet smell. I broke off a chunk and chewed, grinding it with my teeth, sucking it dry before spitting out the depleted stalk onto the ground. Another branch snapped and this time Big Uncle appeared out of the thicket to our left. He came and sat down beside us. Mama broke the other sugarcane stalk and offered half of it to him. He hesitated, looking down, shamefaced.

  “Take it,” Mama said, pushing the sugarcane into his hand. “There’s no greater humiliation than hunger.”

  Big Uncle took it, murmuring, “I can’t let you risk your life—”