In the Shadow of the Banyan (41 page)

Big Uncle was silent.

twenty-eight

D
ay 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—”

“
What life?
” she snapped, then, as if to put his mind at ease, added, “That pig has as much to lose as we do. If caught, I’ll declare in front of the soldiers and guards, in front of everyone, their leader
accepted
our offer.” She was talking about the camp leader. “He didn’t know what it was—your tie pin. I didn’t bother to explain. As long as it’s gold, he said, that’s all his wife cares about.”

Big Uncle said nothing. He bit into the sugarcane, and together we ate in silence, our chewing muffled by the flow of the creek. Afterward, we gathered the chewed remnants and tossed them into the bamboo thicket.

•  •  •

We barely made it back in time. At the bell’s final call, Mama rushed ahead to claim her yoke and baskets, while Big Uncle and I negotiated a narrow bamboo bridge over what would be a reservoir for rainwater. A couple of soldiers brushing past us imitated our walk, one limping right, the other limping left, laughing hysterically, amused by their own theater. I didn’t care. Stupid animals.

•  •  •

The sun was bright, brilliantly hard. A sound broke out above our heads, like pebbles thrown against a metal roof. Suddenly millions of silvery darts fell from the sky and melted against our skin. It was raining, just like that. Across the embankment people stopped working and turned their faces up to the sky, and as they did so, the rain stopped, as abruptly as it had come. Not a drop left. Then another shower started and stopped. Again and again the sky played with us; all the while the sun never once blinked.

It went on like this for days, weeks, with small bursts coming and going, disappearing without a trace on the broken earth.
Pliang chmol,
the local folk called them, “male rains.” They came when we least expected them, when we couldn’t bear the heat anymore, and as soon as they came, they disappeared. Afterward, the sun scorched, the earth heaved, the air became heavy as steel. But the male rains were nothing to fear, we were told. They were only messenger rains. They were sent to warn us of the female rains. “Female rains?” someone asked. “What are they?”

“Rains that weep a whole river,” said a woman from a village not far from here, “and flood a plain.”

“When will they come?”

“When everything is dead.”

•  •  •

“It is time!” the camp leader declared early one morning at a meeting he’d called on the top of the embankment, the bullhorn held to his face like an extension of his oily protruding lips. “It’s time to prove our strength! On this auspicious day, April seventeenth, 1977, the Second Anniversary
of Liberation, we once again declare our might!” He looked up, as if speaking to the sky, challenging it. “See what we have built? A mountain out of nothing! Have you ever seen anything so amazing? Look! Look at the green rice fields before you!”

I looked and saw on one side our thatched huts, the trees covered with layers of dust, the ground all broken up, and on the other side the parched scrubland, blackened with patches of sun-charred grass. There was no green rice field.

“Imagine them once we have our embankment and reservoir! Yes, this area will be covered with rice. Fields and fields everywhere!”

My temples throbbed, my mind spun.

“All over Democratic Kampuchea our brothers and sisters are building embankments and digging canals! Together we will conquer the sky, the rivers! We will plant rice where we want! Even on rocks! We will have so much that we will be the envy of other nations! The Vietnamese will not bother us anymore.”

Why couldn’t he disappear like the male rains? I wished there were trees up here, some kind of shade.
Pretend you’re riding on the back of the Dragon Yiak,
I told myself.

“If we have rice we have everything! We can do anything! We must unite and demonstrate our Revolutionary might!”

Claps and cheers. I felt my skull cracking, breaking in half. I wanted to run but could not even bring myself to stand up. I stayed where I was, trapped between a grave and a burning sky, between Buried Civilization and disappeared rains, between endless claps and cheers.