In the Shadow of the Banyan (28 page)

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 packed 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.

“Remember, Raami,” again and again she would tell me, amidst the
clamorous directives of the Revolutionary soldiers and Kamaphibal:
Forget the old world! Rid yourselves of feudal habits and imperialist leaning! Forget the past!

“Remember who you are.”

Let go of the memories that make you weak! For memory is sickness!

“You are your father’s daughter.”

Whenever she said this, guilt gripped me. I wanted to tell her I was sorry I’d revealed Papa’s name. I’d done so only because I was proud of him. I wanted to tell her I was sorry because even now I wasn’t sure if I understood it—why my pride had taken him away. But “sorry” seemed too small a word, and whenever Mama reminded me that I was Papa’s daughter, it felt more like a rebuke, as if I had failed to keep him close, to cherish him. She never said she blamed me, but once she came close—“However you loved your papa, Raami, you must learn to keep his memory to yourself.”

•  •  •

One morning at the rice paddies, a group of women known to be the wives of the Kamaphibal came up to us. Standing on the dike so that they were a couple of feet higher than we were, Bong Sok’s wife, Neak Thot—the “Fat One,” as everyone referred to her behind her back instead of “Comrade Sister”—cleared her throat and croaked, “Comrade Aana, we’re quite pleased you’re doing so well. You’ve shown great Revolutionary material.”

Mama straightened up from her planting and, with the back of her hand, wiped the beads of sweat from her forehead. She gave no reaction to the woman’s praise.

The Fat One continued, “Most New People aren’t as adaptable as yourself, you see. They’ve shown no progress at all since they arrived”—shaking her head in dismay—“despite our effort to reeducate them.” She let out a prolonged sigh. “Ah, they’re still the spoiled bananas they’ve always been! All mush on the inside!” Her cronies tittered. She silenced them with a look. “What was it that you did before Liberation?”

Mama separated a section of rice shoots from the bundle she was cradling and, with her back bent once more, pushed the shoots into
the inundated soil. “I was a servant,” she replied without looking up. “A nanny.”

“I see. What exactly did you do?”

“I fed and took care of my mistress’s children.”

“Really!” one of the other women exclaimed, unable to hide her disbelief.

The Fat One crooned, “We never would’ve guessed looking at you.” She squatted down on the dike and then reached over to caress Mama’s arm. “Your skin is smooth as eggshell, Comrade Aana.” Her eyes shot to Mama’s hands, which were soiled with mud and plastered with plant bits. “You have the fingers of—how should I say?—a
princess
. Ah, so delicate and well preserved!” She let out a false laugh.

Mama stood frozen to her spot.

“Let’s hope they don’t get ruined in this muck,” the Fat One simpered. Then, on her feet again, she sauntered away, as though she had only stopped for a brief friendly chitchat while on her way elsewhere. The others tootled along behind her. “You’re right, Comrade Sister, they are like spoiled bananas!” one parroted, and another retorted, “Good for nothing except fertilizer!”

When they were out of hearing range, I turned to Mama and demanded, “Why did you say you were Milk Mother?” I felt inexplicably betrayed. “
You’re not her
.”

Mama stared at nothing in particular. “I was wrong to insist you remember who we were. I was wrong. None of it matters now, Raami. All we had, what we were. None matters at all. We’re here now, stuck to this place.”

“You’re
not
Milk Mother.”

“From now on, you’re the daughter of a servant,” she murmured, staring at her murky reflection in the ankle-deep water, “and I’m that servant.”

What about the story of us being fruit growers from Kien Svay? “Papa said—”

“Papa, Papa!” she snapped. “He would still be your father if—”

She stopped herself. But it was too late. I understood what she
meant to say. Yes, he would still be with us, if I hadn’t revealed him to the soldiers.

“There’s no Papa!” Tears pooled in Mama’s eyes but she bit them back. “If anyone asks, you have no father. You don’t know him. You never knew him.”

I said nothing. I felt a rift, like a fault line, that suddenly cracked open on the ground between us, widening as it lengthened.
You have the fingers of a princess.
As if afraid of the Fat One’s words, all of a sudden Mama was choosing to forget, eradicating from her memory all that we had been, bunching up the facts and burying their roots in the quagmire of denials and unattended pain, as I became more determined to hang on to every detail.

She turned her back to me.

As much as I needed reassurance, I told myself I must not go to her. I must stay instead on my side of this divide and separate myself from her because this was the only way I would survive.

nineteen

H
arvest was upon us and with it the endless work, the long days cutting and collecting rice in the fields, the late nights threshing. One evening, as the sky turned a dusky grey, we arrived at the communal granary and joined the excited throngs gathered to celebrate the first official festivity of any kind since our arrival in Stung Khae. Traditional music blared from a speaker nestled in the fork of a giant cashew tree, with an electrical wire connecting the speaker to a small black cassette player at the base of the trunk. Both the speaker and cassette player were rigged to—of all things—a car battery. I thought of the camion that had brought us to Stung Khae months earlier.
What ever happened to it? Was the battery pried from beneath its hood?
A group of seven or eight Revolutionary soldiers, all male, stood guard, keeping at bay a gaggle of children eager for a closer inspection of this strange music box with its mouthpiece high up in the tree, like a dismembered organ, a heart beating with the
thum-thum
resonance of a folk drum. A couple of the soldiers hooked arms and started dancing, playing off each other’s steps as the sound of a bamboo flute and coconut lute mimicked each other’s melodies. Others sang, chorusing in unison,
Oh, the glory and riches of Democratic Kampuchea, the strength and beauty of its peasants
. . . It was all very bizarre, like falling into a hole where familiar things—cassette player, car battery, and electrical wire—had been squirreled away and recycled into a patchwork of nostalgia. Still, I was wooed, my mind anesthetized by the traditional melodies
dubbed with Revolutionary-inspired lyrics and the atmosphere of camaraderie and merrymaking. It was harvest as we’d celebrated before the war, before all this, when farmers would gather to give thanks to the earth and sky, honor the sun and rain, make offerings of warm rice flakes to—

The moon,
I thought, remembering that harvest celebration always had a moon. I looked up and there it was, high above the giant cashew tree, just a faint silhouette of it now, but surely there, round and porous, like a giant bubble suspended in the sky, a hole into which I might slip and find fragments of a story told to me on a night much like this one.

The music stopped, and my reverie was broken. The Kamaphibal had arrived. People stopped whatever they were doing and gathered around to listen. I searched among the faces for Bong Sok and the Fat One, but they were not in the group. One of the other members began to speak: “The work of the Revolution is far from done! We must forge on! We must continue with our struggle! The Organization needs everyone, every single able body, to help make Democratic Kampuchea prosperous and strong! A glorious and shining example to the world, to the oppressed millions out there, the suffering masses that have yet to experience our Socialist regime!”

“
Cheyoo, cheyoo!
” the Revolutionary soldiers shouted, and the crowds echoed, “Hooray, hooray!”

The Kamaphibal continued, “There’s no better time than now, the first harvest since Liberation, since the emptying of the cities, to show the world we have taken a huge stride forward!” He made a sweeping gesture: “We have all this rice to prove it!”

Again, the crowds cheered, their shouts made more thunderous by a long, resounding clap. Then, I saw her—the Fat One, standing some distance away, surrounded by her entourage of portly peers. Dread swept through me and again I broke out in goose bumps.

“At the end of the work night,” the Kamaphibal droned on, “we will celebrate, according to village traditions, with a feast of rice flakes! The Celebration Committee has been set up”—he gestured in the direction of the Fat One and her cronies—“and these extraordinary ladies will see to it that each and every one of you has his fill!”

This time the cheers were deafening.

•  •  •

Night fell. Mounds of threshed rice surrounded us, their shadows linking, wavering in the moonlight, creating an impression of sea and mountains, the karst topography I often imagined in mythical legends. We’d been working long enough and it seemed we ought to have a break soon. But the bell had not rung. I gathered several bundles of the cut rice, offered one to Radana, and, pulling her along, kept to the path lit by the fire pits dug deep into the ground to keep sparks from flying astray. While we children were required to work, what and how much we did were not strictly defined. Instead the expectation was that we help as much as possible, and in between jobs we could run around and play, provided that when called upon to aid we must immediately put aside our games—“as good soldiers would when called to arms,” said the Kamaphibal—and assume the task demanded of us. One of our duties was to bring the bundles of cut rice for the grown-ups to thresh and in turn take the remaining stalks to the collection saved for thatch and fodder. In general the threshing and pounding, which required more physical exertion than skill, were relegated to the New People, who, according to the Kamaphibal, needed to be toughened up through as much labor and strain as possible. The dehusking and winnowing, which required special handling, were assumed by the Old People, who could easily manipulate the deceptively simple-looking winnow baskets without tipping them over and spilling the rice, or spin the hand-operated wooden chaff blower without grinding the grains into bits. Mama was among those assigned to thresh. She’d taken up her usual place behind a propped-up wooden plank, against which she beat a bundle until all the grains fell out, before taking up another bundle from the pile next to her.

Seeing how utterly absorbed she was in her task, I marveled at her transformation. It seemed her body, rawboned and strained, could no longer support thoughts and feelings beyond food, work, and sleep. Since that day at the rice fields, confronted by the wives of the Kamaphibal, she’d stopped speaking of Papa completely, never once mentioned his name again, not even to remind me not to talk about him to others. I
hadn’t understood it then, but I did now, and I no longer resented her for it—this decision to bury him, to blot him out of our memories as if he’d never existed. It was clear that while food fed our bodies, gave us strength to work and breathe another day, silence kept us alive and would be the key to our survival. Anything else, any other emotion—grief, regret, longing—was extraneous, a private, hidden luxury we each pulled out in our separate solitudes and stroked until it shone with renewed luster, before we put it away again and attended to the mundane.