Then came the thud of a club meeting skull, one, two, and nothing more. Behind me, the crows flew out of the rice fields, wings beating toward the sky.
thirty
Disquiet settled over Ksach. Talk of battle echoed the distant ring of gunfire. We were at war, whispered the townsfolk. Cambodia and Vietnam were fighting. Each day more people were returning from the camps where work had suddenly ceased. They arrived in a constant stream, unaccompanied by guards or soldiers or camp leaders. The town leaders did not question their return. None of them seemed to care. Mouk and many of the soldiers had left for the battlefields some time back. Now the remaining soldiers and Kamaphibal were getting ready to leave as well, not to fight but to retreat into the jungle. Defeat was inevitable, they admitted gravely. They loaded their oxcarts with supplies—food, weapons, and ammunition. The Vietnamese would kill us if we remained, they warned, urging us to go with them. We Cambodians should stick together, they said, as if they had forgotten they were our torturers and killers, as if we would trust them now. Except for their relatives and those close to them, the rest of us chose to stay behind and wait.
Once they were gone, we rushed into the town center and storehouses. There was no squabble, no argument. There were so few of us left and the dead watched us from everywhere. So we each took what we could find, enough to survive one more day, and, if we lived through the night, then we would come back, scavenge for more. Mama, sifting through clothes abandoned by the wives of the Kamaphibal, found a roll of what looked like foreign money. She quickly tucked it inside her shirt. I wondered what she would do with it. She baffled me. I filled my pockets with rice from a pile I uncovered under an overturned basket, stuffed a handful of the grains in my mouth, and drank it down with juice from a nearby pickle vat. A short while later, I threw it all back up. Mama found me a green banana and told me to eat it slowly to calm my stomach. But even this felt like too much food.
Back at the villa everyone talked freely again for the first time in a long time. “I don’t understand . . . one Communist regime against another? How can they be fighting each other?” asked a woman, and a man sitting next to her replied, “These Revolutionaries—they feed on chaos.” Another murmured, “I’d dreamt of this moment many times. Now it’s finally arrived.” He was of Chinese background and, like Chae Bui and Mui, his family had been purged for their impurity, their physical resemblance to Vietnamese. The only reason he survived was because he’d been sent away to haul stones in a remote mountain quarry. “Three years and eight months,” he continued, “that’s how long this nightmare has lasted. Now finally we glimpse dawn, and I am alone.”
I watched him, my eyes glued to the Adam’s apple gliding in his throat, like a lump of sorrow he could neither swallow nor spit out. I thought of Big Uncle. Mama pulled me away.
• • •
An orange glow lined the edge of distant forests. No one slept. We stayed up and waited. The fighting raged on to the morning. The smell of gunpowder filled the air and the sky rumbled as if it would rain. Then at dawn the Vietnamese came. Over the Mekong the sun rose, slowly coming into view, like another world, perfectly round and blazing red. The town was taken over by convoys of army vehicles. A row of camions and tanks parked on the paved road in front of the villa, engines humming with victory, excitement. A Vietnamese soldier, standing atop the roof of one of the trucks, grinning deliriously, called out in broken Khmer, “Anyone? Anyone?” He stared at us, stunned by our appearance and, as if thinking we were ghosts, added, “Anyone still alive? Anyone to leave—come!” He gestured to the vehicles. There was plenty of room, he explained. They were heading in different directions. He and his convoy were heading for Kompong Thom. Several convoys would go to Phnom Penh. We were free, he said. We should go home.
Mama cried and buried her face in my chest. All around us people were crying, the sound like the downpour that came after everything was dead. Like female rains.
“It’s over, Raami,” she said, wiping away her tears. “Now we can leave.” She pulled Papa’s small notebook from our bundle of clothes and from between its pages drew a piece of paper folded into a boat the size of her thumb. “Papa left us this.” With trembling hands, she unfolded the paper and spread it open, then, in a tentative voice, began to read:
Raami, it is my greatest regret that I’m not able to do more as your father. If your wings should be broken, darling, this paper boat will ferry you out, not across water, but across land. Land between lands. On one side is a border between here and hope. On the other is a border between two hells. To the east is a land where the sun blazes as red as here. To the west is a land of golden temples. Now, you are far from hope. But if there’s a sliver of opening, a crack in the wall somewhere, you must take it, walk through to the other side. You must head west, follow the stars until sunrise . . .
Mama paused, clearing her throat, then explained, “A map, he’d called it when he thrust the bundle of his belongings at me that morning. He left us a map, he said, in the folds of his clothes. I read these words a thousand times over, Raami, before I realized they were coded for you and me. I should’ve known what he meant, should’ve seen the outline of another place, another life, in the contour of this paper boat. East . . . where the sun blazes as red as here—Vietnam. West . . . a land of golden temples—Thailand. You must head west . . . until sunrise—a new beginning. Listen to me, Raami.” She cupped my face, the letter rubbing against my cheek. “I see one red flag coming down and another going up, one regime after another, they’re all the same. We can’t stay here. This may be our only chance. Now there’s a way out, and we have to take it.” She paused. “I will do what I can. Bargain and compromise in any way possible to get you out of this place. I thought of going home, Raami, but there is no one there. Only ghosts await us. I need you to let them go, the voices in your head. I need you to stay with me, hear me instead, even if you can’t speak.” She swallowed hard. “No matter what happens next, however I may fail, it is life I’ve chosen for you. Do you understand?”
I nodded. Yes, we were going to leave this land and its ghosts. But if we failed, if we died along the way, she wanted me to understand that we would die trying to live. She was fighting for my survival while preparing me for the possibility of my death. But I understood this already. I’d lived long with this possibility, and if we survived our next journey, it would be nothing short of a rebirth.
She looked down at the letter, turned it over, and said, “The rest I believe is for you.” She looked at me. “Would you like me to read it?”
I shook my head.
She held my gaze, and after a moment, said, “I understand.” Then she tucked the open letter back into the pocket notebook and I saw that it was the same size as the other pages. “I’ll go gather our things—I’ve collected enough rice to last us a while. Also . . .” She hesitated. “Also, I went into Chae Bui’s house. She’d told me where she’d hidden their gold. We’d promised each other, Raami, that if one of us should survive, we would look after the other’s child. Mui is not here. But . . . but I believe Chae Bui would’ve wanted me to do what I can to save you, even if it means stealing from them. Their ghosts may follow and haunt us, but it’s something I’m willing to live with.” She stopped, as if waiting for me to respond, but when I didn’t, couldn’t, she continued, “We’ll leave right away.” She placed the notebook in my hand, straightened up, and, as she turned to go, said, “Once your papa told me there was still hope. He was right. Always, there’s hope.”
• • •
Hope had wheels like an army truck. It revved and hummed, as lively as the young Vietnamese soldier beaming at us from the driver’s seat of his vehicle. Mama and I and some of the villa’s residents climbed into the back of the camion and made ourselves as comfortable as we could for the journey. Hope bore us across burnt fields, bombed bridges, broken sparrow-nest hills, and scarred rubber forests. It carried us, even as death pursued us. Corpses littered the roads and rice fields. T
hose killed by mines were easy to recognize—a limb here and limb there, their flesh scattered on the ground. Those murdered, their bodies whole except for a knife wound in the neck or a bullet hole in the head, we avoided looking at, because their open eyes seemed to follow us, cling to our faces, slow our steps. We rolled into a village populated by ghosts. A rooster sauntered around a family sprawled on the ground in front of their hut, pecking and squawking as if to see who was still alive. One hut after another, it was the same thing. The only difference, the only living presence, was the animals. A duck waddled and quacked, as if calling out for help. A pig snorted, heavy in its despair. A cow ambled back and forth, then lowered itself silently to the ground where its owners lay, keeping watch over the bodies. Word spread that the entire village had been massacred by retreating Khmer Rouge soldiers, probably because the people refused to follow them into the jungle. We looked at one another and considered ourselves fortunate. “At least in Ksach,” someone said, “the Kamaphibal and soldiers gave us a choice.”
We continued our journey, whenever possible sticking to wide, open roads, driving over tire tracks of vehicles that had gone before us, to avoid land mines.
At nightfall we reached a town. The townsfolk welcomed us, first cautiously, then with obvious relief. Some were blessed enough to recognize faces in our group. Those who recognized one another wept openly. The townsfolk told us only one-third or so of their population was left. A handful had chosen to follow the Khmer Rouge into the forests. “And the rest?” the Vietnamese soldiers wanted to know. “Well, the rest . . .,” said a local man, an elder who, although skin and bones, seemed to have become the strength and pillar of his community, “the rest are here with us. They are invisible, but they are with us nevertheless.”
A little girl, who I presumed to be the elderly man’s granddaughter from the way she clung to him, came forward and stared at me. I stared back. I hadn’t looked in the mirror in a long time, but I recognized my reflection in her emaciated face. We smiled at each other. Neither of us could talk.
Later that night, we camped on the ground beneath their house on stilts, which reminded me of Pok and Mae’s hut. Mama offered the elderly man and his granddaughter a can of rice from the supply we’d brought along. They shared drinking water with us and guavas from their tree. The old man told Mama that both of the little girl’s parents had disappeared one night. They were still waiting for them to return.
Before dawn the next morning, we boarded our truck in the convoy and left without saying good-bye to our hosts. It was better this way, Mama said, as if I could talk, as if I had a choice. There had been enough good-byes already, she explained.
• • •
Several days later we reached Kompong Thom. Our driver said this was as far as his convoy would go. We were told to wait by the road for another truck that would arrive soon. When it appeared, we rushed into it.
Again, hope carried us. It bounced us up and down along Prek Prang Creek, on a small paved road strewn with potholes and craters. We passed choked charcoal kilns, we sped through burning cities and flaming towns. The truck brought us to the face of Masked River, where we took a cattle boat to Citrus Soil then to Blue Bamboo, and to a town called Chhlong that mimicked the sound of a gong, chhlong . . . chhlong . . . chhlong, the sound of time. We heard the wind heave. We hoped that time would not end for us. Not here. Not now. We’d come so far.
In Siem Reap, Mama traded charm for a ride on a villager’s oxcart. But her beautiful smile and serenading voice could only take us so far. He dropped us at a village called Banteay. Mama took out the roll of foreign money she’d kept tucked in the waist of her sarong and found another villager, a trader in the old days, who was willing to take us all the way to Samrong, where he knew of a caravan preparing to cross the border. He warned us that we might not reach Thailand. It was a dangerous feat we were attempting. He’d heard of many who starved to death in the middle of the jungle, succumbed to malaria, crossed paths with tigers, or simply expired from exhaustion during the arduous trek. Perhaps we should wait, wait a while longer, and maybe our country would go back to normal. Mama shook her head vigorously. The villager took us across the rice fields of Srov Thmey and then through the teak forests of Phnum Chrung. At Samrong he wished us safe passage and passed us on to a man who was readying a caravan of oxcarts to journey through the jungle to the border. Mama paid the leader of the caravan with a necklace from Chae Bui’s stash of gold. He found us space in one of the oxcarts up front. There were about six or seven oxcarts and at least sixty of us. It was twilight, the best time to begin, as we would trek through the night.
• • •
After weeks of traveling in the caravan, mostly at night with the stars to light and guide our way, we reached an impasse. We abandoned the oxcarts and ascended on foot into one mountain range, then another, always heading west. After a week or two more, we emerged from the dense jungle onto an open plain. We stopped to rest in the shadow of some trees atop a hill. By this time, less than half of our group remained, as some had died along the way, while others were too weak to carry on and thus were abandoned to their fate. It was nighttime, but the moon shone so brightly that we could see the surrounding landscape very clearly. Except for this small rise with its clusters of teaks, it was all grass and flatness. I couldn’t tell where one country ended and another began. But the man leading us said that straight ahead was Thailand. He encouraged us to sleep and gather our strength in these brief still hours before dawn. When we resumed our journey at daybreak, we would have to move fast, to slip like shadows across the land. There might be Thai guards and soldiers patrolling the border. If they saw us, we’d run the risk of being shot on the spot or, worse, sent back into the jungle. Some people wondered why we weren’t continuing now while it was still dark. Our group leader explained he’d heard that crossing the border by daylight would give us at least half a chance. If we were caught, the soldiers or guards were less likely to shoot for fear that any act of atrocity would be witnessed. If we did make it across, there was hope of finding help. Perhaps we would encounter some Thai farmers who, moved by our circumstances, would take us in to plant rice alongside them in their villages. We could offer ourselves as tenant farmers to a landowner. We could be servants. Miracles like this were rumored to happen, our group leader said. He himself would be grateful for any labor and food. Anything was better than what we’d endured. Everyone agreed and began to settle down to rest.
Mama spread a pair of kromas side by side on the bare ground and made a sleeping place for us under one of the teak trees. She lay down and beckoned me to do the same. But as exhausted as I was, I couldn’t sleep, my heart fluttering even as the rest of my body could barely move. I lay on my back, looking at the night sky through the leaves, eyes seeking the moon. Soon, I thought, we would be in another land. I was not ready to leave—to let go. We didn’t even know where Papa had been taken, where he might have last been seen. How could I ever return to him—even if only in my mind—when I couldn’t imagine the last place my father might have been? Where was his grave? Did he have a grave? I panicked. I held myself rigid beside Mama, afraid that she would read my thoughts. How could we think of freedom when he was trapped here? How could we abandon him? Tears trickled down the corners of my eyes.
Then, as if to comfort me, to calm the tremor of my heart, Mama murmured, her fingers tracing the path of my tears, the contours of my face, “You have his eyes, his cheeks, his nose . . .” She sounded tired but her voice was clear, soothing. “He built a fire, shook himself free of us, and jumped into the flames. But just as he did so, Indra rushed to save him, seizing his spirit, and flew him off to the moon. Henceforth, Indra told him, the world shall know of your kind deed.”
I was confused for a second or two. Then I realized what she was talking about.
“You know, for a long time, I could never look at the full moon without seeing it flinch—the pain he must have endured in exchange for our safety. ‘I will fol
low you, and you’ll have only to look at the sky to find me, wherever you are.’ How could he utter these words to you? How could he have tried to ease you into a life without him by telling you a childish tale? I was overcome with anger toward your papa; I didn’t think I could ever forgive him.”
I remembered. It was the night before his departure. She’d lain with her back to us, her body hard as a board.
“Had I understood then,” she continued, speaking as calmly as Papa would’ve spoken to me, “that the war, this Revolution, was an old blaze reignited, decades, possibly centuries of injustice manifesting itself like a raging inferno, I could’ve told whoever were its builders, be they gods or soldiers, they needn’t have put him through that test of character. Your papa would’ve jumped into the fire of a thousand revolutions for us. And . . . and because of this, because of his willing self-sacrifice, he merited a world nobler than the one he’d left behind.” She swallowed, hesitating, as if unsure she ought to continue. “We will never know, Raami, how he lived his last moment, what thoughts went through his mind as he took his final breath, nor will we ever know the exact manner in which he perished—” Her voice caught.
Then after a moment, she continued, “I’m certain, though, he remained resolute in his belief that even without him you would live through this nightmare, that life, with all its cruelty and horror, was still worth living. A gift he would’ve wanted his daughter to embrace. This, I think, was what he was trying to tell you, a story about your continuation.”
A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and reknitting of remembered words, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence, and in the shadow it casts over our present world, we begin to understand what we only intuited in our naïveté—that while all else may vanish, love is our one eternity. It reflects itself in joy and grief, in my father’s sudden knowledge that he would not live to protect me, and in his determination to leave behind a part of himself—his spirit, his humanity—to illuminate my path, give light to my darkened world. He carved his silhouette in the memory of the sky for me to return to again and again.
In the Shadow of the Banyan Page 33
