In the Shadow of the Banyan (5 page)

I looked around the courtyard, but not a soul was in sight, not even Old Boy. I knew the rule—no grown-up, no open gate. At least when there had been war. But now there was no war. My heart pounded, my breath quickened.

“OPEN!” again came the voice. “OR I’LL SHOOT IT DOWN!”

“Wait!” I croaked. “Just wait a minute!” I looked around and spotted a footstool partially hidden under a gardenia bush a few feet away. I brought it over and, standing on top of it, pulled back the latch—

A column of smoke burst in. He was all black—black cap, black shirt, black pants, black sandals. He stared down at me.

“Good morning!” I greeted. “You must be Dark One!” Of course I knew he wasn’t a
tevoda,
but I was determined not to be afraid.

“
What?
” he asked, seeming more confused than I.

“Dark One!” I rolled my eyes, drawing him into my game. For a
tevoda,
fake or real, he wasn’t very polite.

“
What?
”

He wasn’t very smart either.

“I’ve been expecting you.”

“Look,” he growled, half exasperated, half threatening. “I don’t have time for your stupid game.” He brought his face close to mine. “Where are your parents?”

“Where’s Milk Mother?” To curb my fear and stall his intrusion, I pretended to look past the gate to see if she was hiding in a corner somewhere.

“Go!” He pushed me. “Tell your parents to come out. Now!” He pushed me again and I nearly tumbled headlong into a flower bush. “Go!”

“All right, all right.” I ran and skipped, calling out to everyone, “A
tevoda
is here!”

•  •  •

“He’s a Revolutionary soldier,” Papa said.

What?
He didn’t look like a soldier. Soldiers, I thought, were men who wore fancy uniforms decorated with stripes and medals and stars. This boy was wearing the plain black pajama-style shirt and pants that peasants wore for planting rice or working in the fields, and a pair of black sandals made from—of all things—a car tire! The only color in his entire ensemble was the red-and-white checkered
kroma
—the Cambodian traditional scarf—that belted his pistol to his waist.

Tata came out and gasped, “
Le Khmer Rouge
.”

I was even more shocked.
This is a Khmer Rouge?
Where was the many-named larger-than-life deity I’d expected?

“Stay here,” Papa said to all of us. “Let me talk.” He went over to greet the boy, his manner unusually respectful.

“Pack your things and get out,” the soldier ordered.

Papa was taken aback, stammering, “I-I d-don’t understand.”

“What’s not to understand? Get out of the house—get out of the city.”

“
What?
” Tata demanded, forgetting Papa’s warning as she marched toward them. “Look here, young man, you can’t just burst in—”

Before she could finish her sentence, the soldier pointed his pistol at her. Tata stopped in her tracks, her lips parted, but no sound came out.

“Comrade,” Papa said, touching the soldier’s arm. “
Please
. There are just women and children here.”

The boy looked around, his gaze moving from Papa to Mama, to Tata, then to me. I smiled. I wasn’t sure why, but I held the smile. He put down his gun.

The air moved again, and I felt my heart beating once more. Still, for a moment there was only silence. Finally, Papa spoke. “Comrade, where are we supposed to go?”

“Anywhere—just get out.”

“For how long?”

“Two, three days. Take only what you need.”

“We’ll need a little time to pack—”

“There’s no time. You must leave now. The Americans will bomb.”

Papa appeared flustered now. “You must be mistaken. They’re gone. They won’t—”

“If you stay, you’ll be shot! All of you! Understand?”

Without further explanation, he turned and marched out the gate, the pistol now held high above his head as if to shoot the sky. “Long live the Revolution!”

•  •  •

We had to move fast. If the Revolutionary soldier came back, he would shoot us. We didn’t know when that would be, if he would come back in an hour or a day, or if it was all a bluff. But Papa said we couldn’t take any chances. We had to leave now. Tata argued, “I refuse to be chased out of my own house like a rat!” Papa gave us no choice. Mama broke into a sob. Radana, on the bed, hugging her beloved bolster pillow to her chest, began to howl at the sight of Mama’s tears. Mama rushed over to comfort her. “I don’t know what to take,” she whimpered, looking at the large armoire with all her clothes still on their hangers. “We take money and gold,” Papa said matter-of-factly. “Anything else we can buy
on the street.” He unlocked Mama’s old vanity dresser and scooped out her jewelry from their boxes—necklaces, earrings, rings, and a jumble of other valuable items. He grabbed Radana’s bolster pillow, which made her howl all over again, and sliced the seam open with a pocketknife. He stuffed all the jewelry into it among the cotton batting and hurried out of the room. He rushed through the house grabbing books, pictures, boxes of matches, anything he could think of, anything he came across. Outside, he tossed everything into the trunk of our blue BMW.

I caught him by the sleeve. “Where’s Milk Mother?”

He stopped, looked at me, and sighed. “I don’t know.”

“Aren’t we going to wait for her?”

“We can’t, darling. I’m sorry.”

“What’s revolution?”

“A kind of war.”

“But you said the war was over.”

“That’s what I thought, what I hoped.” He looked as if he was about to say something else but then changed his mind. He was utterly distracted.

I let him go. He rushed back into the house.

•  •  •

I sat in the backseat of the BMW, sandwiched between Grandmother Queen and Tata. In the front Mama held Radana on her lap, pressing her lips to my sister’s head, rocking back and forth. In Mama’s arms, Radana had calmed down, lulled into sleep by the rocking, exhausted from her earlier crying. Papa slipped into the driver’s seat and started the car. His hands shook as he gripped the steering wheel.

Old Boy walked to the gate, his back bent as if he were carrying a sack of rice. He was not coming with us. He would stay behind to take care of the gardens. He would rather face the soldier alone than let his flowers die in the heat. No one could convince him otherwise.

When you love a flower, and suddenly she is gone, everything vanishes with her.

As he held the gate open, Papa inched the BMW forward. I stretched my neck and looked into the rearview mirror. I saw the balcony,
vacant and still. Had it always been like this, like no one had ever lived here? Suddenly I realized what it was that had followed Papa into the house, trailed his footsteps like a shadow several mornings ago when he returned from his walk. It was this moment. Our leaving. Our “being gone.” We hadn’t yet left, but already I saw and felt what it would be like without us here. How was it possible? I didn’t understand. But there it was. Our prescient absence.

Everything began to recede. The cooking pavilion where Om Bao reigned with her spatulas and spices. The women’s lower house on whose wooden steps the servant girls gossiped, relaxed, enjoyed their freedom from household chores. The master house where every morning I greeted the day, where stories spread their wings like the birds and butterflies in the surrounding trees. The dining pavilion that held all the conversations and meals and visits. The banyan tree under whose shadow lay sacred ground. The gardens with their clusters of bumblebees and blossoms.

Then, at last, the whole of the courtyard.

Only Old Boy remained, standing by the hanging bougainvillea bush near the gate where he had always stood. He waved. I turned and waved back.

He shut the gate.

four

T
he streets were packed. People, cars, trucks, motorcycles, mopeds, bicycles, cyclos, oxcarts, pushcarts, wheelbarrows, and things that didn’t—
shouldn’t
—belong on the streets of a city: ducks, chickens, pigs, bulls, cows, mats, and mattresses. I couldn’t have imagined a water buffalo caked with mud, or an elephant carrying the mahout and his family. But there they were, part of the throngs that pushed and pulsated in every direction.

Beside us, a farmer pulled his pig by a leash. Panicking, the sow squealed as if being slaughtered. A bit farther away, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle barely escaped a horse rearing in fright when a truck suddenly blasted its horn. Papa kept a firm grip on the steering wheel as he maneuvered the car inches at a time through the dense traffic. When we left home, he had briefed us on the route we would take—we’d go to Kbal Thnol and meet up with my uncle and his family. This was the meeting spot they’d agreed on in case of an emergency. From there, we’d drive together to our weekend house in Kien Svay. He’d made it sound so easy. Now it seemed hugely complicated to cross a small intersection or even move in a straight line.

Next to me, Grandmother Queen began to moan. She wanted Papa to turn the car around, take us back home, but of course we couldn’t go back. Revolutionary soldiers were everywhere, dressed in black from head to toe like the one who’d burst through our gate, waving their guns,
ordering everyone to leave. Families poured into the streets, dragging suitcases cramped with belongings, cradling baskets stuffed with dishes and cooking pans, wooden stools and chamber pots. A woman balanced two baskets on a bamboo pole over her shoulders, a child in one basket and a stove in the other, with a rice pot perched precariously on top. An old blind beggar shuffled barefoot along the street, a walking stick in one hand and a begging bowl in the other. He groped his way through the swarm of bodies. No one stopped to give him change. No one seemed to pity him. No one even noticed. “GET OUT OF THE CITY!” bellowed voices through bullhorns. “THE AMERICANS WILL DROP THEIR BOMBS!”

Soldiers pushed and shoved anyone in their way, not caring who was old and who was young, who could walk and who couldn’t. A man on crutches fell down and tried several times to pick himself up. A Khmer Rouge soldier saw him, yanked him up, and pushed him on. At the entrance to a hospital, a sick old woman clung to the arm of a young man who looked as if he might be her son. A young nurse in uniform wheeled a patient out on a hospital bed, adjusting the intravenous bag above the patient’s head as she went. Nearby, a doctor ripped off his surgical mask, gesturing emphatically, as if trying to reason with the soldiers. One of them put a gun to his forehead, and the doctor stood suddenly still as a statue, arms raised in the air, his latex gloves smeared with blood.

A young father passed by, carrying one son on his back and another in front, the rest of him loaded with bundles and necessities—food, kitchenware, sleeping mats, pillows, blankets. His wife, with a child on her hip and another one on the way, hung tight to his arm as they twisted their way through the crowded street. A teenage boy pushed past them, holding his bleeding stomach in his hands as he tried to look for help. No help came his way. I was seeing a million faces at once, and everyone looked like everyone else. Scared. Lost.

We crawled by a half-destroyed building, with pieces of rebar protruding from the blocks of broken cement. In nearby alleys and corners, half hidden behind mounds of rubble, government soldiers frantically shed their forest-green uniforms and threw them into bonfires. In the
back of a noodle stand a man was about to take off his camouflage shirt when a couple of Khmer Rouge soldiers spotted him. They dragged him out and pushed him into a truck full of other government soldiers.

In front of a school bookshop a group of students huddled close together, hugging their books to their chests. A Khmer Rouge approached a middle-aged woman, who looked like she might be a teacher, and tore the glasses from her face. He threw them to the ground and smashed them with the butt of his rifle.

Smoke was everywhere, as black as the soldiers’ clothes. On sidewalks, books and papers burned in piles. Ashes flew up into the air, like burnt butterflies. I wondered why they were called Khmer Rouge—“Red Khmer.” There was nothing
red
about them. Why did they have so many names?
Revolutionary soldiers, Communists, Marxists,
was how Papa would invariably refer to them, and Tata never failed to retort,
Khmer Rouge, rebels! Thieves! Jungle rats! They won’t last.
She predicted their victory would be short-lived and called for their punishment.
They should be hanged like the common criminals they are. Revolutionaries,
Papa would insist, his tone tentative, as if he himself had yet to discern their true name, their intentions.
You must be careful how you speak of them.
I wondered what they were really. Soldiers or peasants? Children or adults? They looked neither like
devarajas
nor
rakshasas,
the mythical gods and demons I’d imagined them to be; in those plain black clothes they looked more like a race of shadows, each one a repetition of the others.

We came to a huge crowd gathered in front of a tall wrought-iron gate, behind which I could see part of the façade of a white-pillared villa. People pushed and shoved one another, fighting to get to the entrance. Those up front banged on the iron bars, pleading to be let in. Some tried to climb over the high wall, cutting themselves on the sharp metal prongs lining the top edge. A few made it over, but most were pulled back down by the competing horde below. Two men punched each other, then two more, three. A fight broke out. Women screamed, children whimpered and howled like puppies.