In the Shadow of the Banyan (37 page)

•  •  •

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 now, 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

M
ui 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.

“Where’s Comrade Teacher?” asked Mui, always the brave one.

“She’s gone,” Mouk mumbled, the blade of grass still in his mouth. The scar on his face chewed when he chewed, a creature devouring its own face.

“Where did she go?”

“Nowhere.”

“Then why is she gone?”

He didn’t answer. He pulled the blade of grass from his mouth and played with it, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger.

“But we have an assignment,” another girl said.

We were supposed to have memorized the lyrics of “We, the Children, Love the Organization.”

“Your assignment is this!” He suddenly bolted up, banging his gun
against the desk. “Destroy this. This is all useless! Useless! Do you understand?”

We sank in our seats. No one breathed. The room was completely still.

Then Mui had to open her mouth again: “No.”

“Stupid children!” Mouk said, kicking the chair back with a loud bang. “The Revolution can’t be taught! It must be fought! Not with thinking and talking, but with action!” He picked up the chair and threw it against the wall. “Like this!” He kicked away one broken piece and stomped on another. “And this! It’s useless! The chair is useless! Understand now?”

We all nodded.

“To keep it is no gain, to destroy it is no loss! Understand?”

We nodded again.

“Get out of here then!”

•  •  •

On our way home we encountered a throng of men erecting a huge bamboo stage in the middle of the street, right in front of the town center. No one would say what it was for. A group of sullen-faced soldiers kept a careful guard. The whole town held its breath as it gathered to watch. By the afternoon, the stage was finished, standing a foot or so off the ground and completed with an arch made of woven coconut branches and sprigs of areca blossoms. There was to be a wedding, we were finally told. A mass wedding. But the whole atmosphere was funereal. A while later when the brides and grooms appeared onstage, all dressed in black and solemn looking, we understood why. They stood in pairs under the arch, each bride with her groom, and there, close to the middle, was our teacher with her groom, a Revolutionary soldier on crutches, one of his legs gone except for a short stump that jerked back and forth as he moved. The crowd was stunned. At first no one knew what to say, then the whispers began:
Her eyes are all swollen and red. Looks like she’s been crying. Wouldn’t you if you had to marry that? I’m glad we’ve no daughter of marriageable age
. . .

Mouk appeared on the stage and, gesturing to the one-legged soldier, proclaimed, “Victory to our brave soldier who has sacrificed his body for the Revolution!” He clapped thunderously. The other soldiers, waiting in the wings, echoed in unison, “Victory to our brave comrade!” Mouk, barely acknowledging our teacher, addressed the one-legged soldier, still in that loud voice for all to hear: “The Organization has chosen a beautiful wife for you, Comrade! Let’s hope she is worthy of you!” The other soldiers shouted their support: “Victory to our soldier!” Then, turning to the rest of the brides and grooms, Mouk pronounced, “The Organization unites you!” The soldiers shouted and clapped, and this time everyone felt compelled to do the same.

And just like that the wedding ceremony ended. The newlyweds walked off the stage and joined the crowd, but before anyone could ask questions or offer wishes, Mouk spoke again, silencing all with his voice: “Bring him out!” He nodded to a group of soldiers waiting in the back of the stage, and they, turning in the direction of the teak house, echoed to another group, “Bring him out!” A moment later, to everyone’s shock, the district leader appeared, blindfolded and hands tied behind him. The soldiers pushed him up to the front of the stage. They hit his head and shoulders with heavy palm fronds until he fell on his knees. Mouk pushed the tip of his gun under the district leader’s chin while another soldier removed the blindfold from his eyes.