In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

  “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.

  “Look at the people!” Mouk ordered, excited by the sight and smell of blood, the scar on his face leaping wildly.

  With effort, the district leader looked up, and we saw that his nose was broken and blood was running from one of the nostrils, his eyes were swollen and bruised, the skin torn over his eyebrows. He was unrecognizable.

  Mouk turned to us and said, “This is the face of the enemy!”

  “DOWN WITH THE ENEMY!” the other soldiers chorused. “HE MUST BE DESTROYED! DESTROYED! DESTROYED!”

  The district leader said something, but we couldn’t hear him. He tried again, hardly able to move his lips, his voice barely a whisper: “Why?”

  “BECAUSE YOU’VE COMMITTED A CRIME!” Mouk screamed.

  “What crime?”

  “YOU’VE BETRAYED THE ORGANIZATION!”

  “How?” Blood suddenly seeped from his other nostril, as if the effort of speaking was too much. “How . . . have . . . I . . . betrayed . . . the Organization?”

  “It’s not for us to tell you your crime! You must confess it!”

  “I . . . have . . . committed . . . no . . . crime.”

  “THEN YOU’RE ALSO A LIAR!” Mouk spat on the district leader’s face.

  “TO KEEP YOU IS NO GAIN, TO DESTROY YOU IS NO LOSS!” the other soldiers roared.

  They surrounded the district leader. There were at least twenty of them on the stage alone, not counting the others on the ground among us. They pushed the district leader with the butts of their guns, beating him until he fell over on one side. Mouk and another soldier picked him up by the arms and dragged him off the stage. The others roared, “DOWN WITH THE ENEMIES! DOWN WITH THE ENEMIES!”

  • • •

  They appeared out of nowhere, the new leaders. Suddenly they were here, as if they’d been here all along, waiting to come out. They were younger, quieter, and closer to the Organization. They wore the same mask-like expression. We couldn’t tell who was the leader of the leaders. When they spoke, they had only one voice. In meetings, they would sit or stand in a row, watching and listening, surveying the faces before them with unblinking gazes. When they wanted to say something, they would whisper to Mouk, and he would speak for them. “You must dye everything black!” he told us at one meeting. “Not just your clothes but all your thoughts and feelings! You must blot out all un-Revolutionary elements! You must purge them out of your system!”

  With the new leaders came new rules. We could no longer cook and eat at home. “If we work together, we must also eat together!” Mouk claimed, the scar on his cheek twitching, leaping constantly. “A father doesn’t let his family eat in separate kitchens!” The Organization was our father, and we were his family. We must do everything together. We must share everything with one another—our spoons and forks, our pots and pans, our thoughts and feelings. If we had to, we would share the last grain of rice with our brothers and sisters. “We must say no to private property!” he thundered. “Private property is the evil of capitalism! Private property promotes greed and divides the commune! We will abolish all forms of private property!”

  Back at the villa, people rushed to hide their belongings. They stuffed gold bangles inside dried-up gourds, pushed sapphires and rubies into wet clay balls and pressed them to the corners of the room. Some sewed necklaces and bracelets into the seams of their clothes. Others swallowed diamonds. Grandmother Queen wanted us to hide her. “Tell them I’m not ready yet,” she whimpered. “Tell them I won’t go without my children!”

  “Tell who?” I asked. “No one’s here. It’s just us in the room.”

  “The spirits and ghosts—they are coming to get me. Tell them I’m not ready.”

  We heard loud footsteps coming up the back stairway leading to our room. Mama stood frozen in place, hugging Radana’s pillow to her chest. Big Uncle yanked it from her and tossed it into a basket full of dry cornhusks saved for fuel.

  The soldiers marched into our room, seven or eight of them all at once. At the sight of them, Grandmother Queen started to wail, “Go away! Go a
way!”

  “Tell her to shut up,” Mouk growled.

  Big Uncle and Mama said nothing.

  “She thinks you’re ghosts,” I told Mouk and his soldiers.

  “Is she crazy?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Tell her to shut up then.”

  Mouk looked around the room, at everything, except the box of cornhusk near the doorway. He looked at Mama, eyes lingering, in a way that made Big Uncle clench his fists. Then, as if disgusted, Mouk turned and spat out the window. “Let’s not waste our time,” he told the others. “Keep a bowl, a spoon, and a kettle for the crazy old woman. The rest goes to the communal mess.”

  They left our room and moved on to search the rest of the villa.

  • • •

  For the next several days, Mouk and his “Secret Guards”—or Chlup, as they were called, spies who armed themselves with weapons and stealth, who watched and observed without you knowing—made the rounds to each household and categorized everyone. You look like you could pull an oxcart. You’re full strength! And you look like you haven’t worked a day in the sun. You’re medium strength then! Both Mama and Big Uncle were full strength. Later that night Mama busied herself with packing. In the morning she and Big Uncle would leave with their assigned work unit to build embankments far from here. I begged to go with them, but Mama wouldn’t hear of it. “You’ll be safer here,” she said. I was to stay with Grandmother Queen. How she would take care of me, I didn’t know.

  At dawn the next morning, Big Uncle lifted me from the mat and carried me toward the doorway. I looked around the room, bleary-eyed. We were heading down to the river to wash as we did every morning, except, I suddenly remembered, this would be our last time together. I caught Mama’s moving silhouette ahead of us, like the end of a dream segueing toward daylight. I struggled to get out of Big Uncle’s arms, but he was too strong. I felt my panic rising, but I bit it back and tried one last time: “I want to go build the embankment with you.” I pressed my cheek to Big Uncle’s chest. “You can take me.”

  “Stay with Grandmother Queen,” he whispered, holding me tighter. “She needs you.”

  I glanced back at the room, to where Grandmother Queen lay on the mat, infirm and lost to the world.

  “You’ll be her child,” Big Uncle said, descending the stairs. “You’ll take my place. Answer her when she calls my name.”

  I stared at him. Maybe, I thought, it was just as terrible to leave your mother as it was to be left by her. Big Uncle gave me a wan smile, and for a moment I forgot my unhappiness, thinking how awful it was to be this giant with his enormous grief, with no one to comfort him, in the way that I, in my smallness, could be comforted.

  At the river, Big Uncle dove into the water and swam out some distance so as to give Mama and me the privacy to say good-bye. I didn’t understand why we would repeat this ritual of coming down together to bathe. Parting was parting no matter how disguised. Mama changed into her bathing sarong and put the clothes she would wear on her journey on a rock jutting out of the sand like the back of a large turtle. I purposely moved slowly with my clothes, hoping she would go in the water first. But she knelt down in front of me and began to unbutton my shirt.

  “When I was four or five,” she said, playing with a button, “very little—a baby still, according to my mother—I developed a love for Chinese opera.”

  I swallowed, bracing myself for one of her rare stories.

  “Every time a troupe came through our district, putting on a story, performing an episode in each village, I’d follow it from one place to the next, attaching myself to a relative or neighbor I knew, negotiating a meal and a sleeping place with people I thought my parents knew or sensed I could trust, so that I wouldn’t miss a single line of the story from beginning to end. My mother would forbid me to go, but I was a willful girl and always somehow managed to sneak out. I’d come back home days later, singing only Chinese opera. Once, so exasperated with worries, she called me Niang Bundaja, reprimanding me in front of everyone, saying what mothers never tire of telling their daughters—that one day when we have children of our own, we will know the agony of mothering. You know the story, of course.”

  I did. Niang Bundaja, a beautiful rich girl, falls in love with her servant, runs away with him, then becomes destitute and widowed, as her mother predicted. With two children to care for, she decides to return home, even if it means facing her mother’s wrath. But halfway into her journey, she comes upon a river. She can carry only one child at a time across the strong currents, so she takes the older child first, then goes back for the baby. Meanwhile a vulture appears, circling overhead; she tries to shoo it away. The baby, thinking the mother is waving for her, walks into the river and drowns, and as this happens, the vulture swoops down and snatches the older child. It was a stupid story, I’d always thought.

  “But what I want you to know is this, Raami—it’s never a mother’s choice to say which child will live and which will die. When I gave birth to you and then your sister and held each of you in my arms, I imagined a whole life ahead of you. Once I believed I would live forever. Death never entered my mind. Then one day, death surprised me. It caught my child’s hand and yanked her from me, and I bled until I could bleed no more.”

  She let out a sob, the sound of it like silk being ripped, a page of poetry torn out in the night. If I had Papa’s notebook and pen with me, I thought irrationally, I would draw a map of a village and it would have rivers of tears, oceans of sorrow as bottomless as Mama’s eyes, and a bridge, as delicate and narrow as the bridge of her nose, which you could cross without the risk of drowning.

  “I don’t want to lose you, Raami. So, I ask you now to wait for me on this shore. Don’t mistake my leaving for a good-bye.”

  • • •

  When we returned to the villa, Big Uncle and Mama went inside to get their belongings. I waited on the stairway. A lizard scurried across the bottom step, pausing midway to look up at me. Go away! Shoo! The lizard puffed up its sack-like neck as if to ward off my despair. I stuck my tongue out at it. It dashed off.

  There was a murmur from inside the room. I moved up closer to the doorway. “We must leave for a while.” It was Mama speaking to Grandmother Queen. “But Raami is here with you. She will care for you.”

  I resisted the urge to go in.

  There was a silence, then Big Uncle cleared his throat. “Mother,” he said, stopped, then started again, “Mechas Mae,” speaking now the royal language, as if not caring who might be listening, “I, your son, bow before you.” I didn’t have to look to know exactly what he was doing—pressing his forehead to her feet, paying his respects. “I ask for your blessing on this journey.”

  “Come back to me,” Grandmother Queen murmured, and I couldn’t be sure if she was responding to Big Uncle or if she was talking to the ghosts inside her head, repeating herself as always. “Come back to me.”

  “We’ll meet again,” Big Uncle reassured. “I will see you soon.”

  There were movements, the wooden floor creaking under their steps. I held myself still, as the lizard had done, my neck puffed up, my throat all choked. With fear or sadness, I didn’t know. A sense of loss, of losing, surged through me.

  Big Uncle emerged first. He descended the stairs and lowered himself next to me. Then Mama came out. Big Uncle got up and moved away to make room for her. But she remained standing, and I could feel her gaze on me, as if willing me to look up and meet her eyes.

  “Wait for me—” A sob escaped her throat and she could say no more.

  She rushed down the stairs, her whole body shaking as if a storm were passing through her. Big Uncle followed. I didn’t try to stop them.

  • • •

  I settled into my role as caretaker, doing my best to look after Grandmother Queen, striving always to do more than I could but achieving only just enough to get by, to keep us going for another day. Still, I had my routine and tasks, which, ironically enough, gave me a sense of p
urpose, gave some measure of structure to an existence that was otherwise hanging by a thread. First thing in the morning after waking up, I would rush down to the river with a bucket, quickly splash some water on my face, rush back up the incline with as much water as I could carry, and dump it in the small vat near the back stairway. I’d dash back and forth a few more trips so there was enough to give Grandmother Queen a sponge bath and wash our clothes. Then, with a kettle set to boil over a fire, I’d scour the ground for longan pits, round like hazelnuts, and pulpy jackfruit pits, the size of a grown-up’s thumb. These I’d toss into the fire for a bit of something to eat. Fruits found on the ground were supposed to be collected and pooled together with our neighbors’ in a basket, then taken to the communal mess. If I was caught eating any fruit or siphoning off the collection, one or both of my day’s meals would be held back. But hunger made me less afraid, less thoughtful about the consequences, and stealing became a habit. I might visit a vegetable plot in the back of a neighbor’s house, yank a melon off its vine, tuck it inside my shirt, rush into the room, and feed it to Grandmother Queen, one bite at a time, softening it first with my own teeth, as I’d seen Mama do. Another morning I might slip into a cornfield, snap off an ear of corn, break it in half for easy hiding, and, back at the villa, discretely drop it in the kettle to cook. If there wasn’t time, I’d pry off the tender kernels as quickly as I could and feed them raw to Grandmother Queen. The rest I’d eat myself, chewing even the core, sucking it dry, before spitting the remnants into the fire. Other mornings, when hunger made me woozy and completely overtook my fear of being caught, I would pluck a fruit off the lowest branch of a tree behind our house, eat it quickly on the spot, and toss the seed into the brush, not caring who might be watching.