In the Shadow of the Banyan (44 page)

The next day she asked me questions I didn’t know how to answer—“Why won’t you talk? Why?” She gripped my shoulders, her eyes searching my face.

I said nothing. Deep inside of me, my voice screamed from a hole where I had buried it.

•  •  •

“The wind of the Revolution is blowing too gently! We must take the strongest measures to purify the state! Democratic Kampuchea must be rid of all contaminations! We must weed out the enemies from among the people! We must cut them down! Pull them out! Yank them like weeds from among the rice shoots! No matter how small they are, how harmless they may appear, we must destroy them before it’s too late!”

Mouk stood on a stage, a bullhorn in his hand, the sickle-shaped scar on his face twitching even as he paused to survey the crowd before him.

“Remember that servants of the king once lived in the palace, teachers still know how to read and write, and chauffeurs once drove cars. Our enemies are always our enemies! We must seek them out, bring them forward, and destroy them! Destroy what we cannot use! The time has come for another war! A war to purify our state! We must cleanse
ourselves! Our Motherland must be pure of foreign elements! We must separate the contaminated Khmer from the pure Khmer! We must eliminate those who
look
and
act
like our enemies! Those with Vietnamese faces, Vietnamese eyes, Vietnamese names! We must separate them from
real
Khmers! Only by taking the strongest, most extreme measures can we speed up the wind of the Revolution!”

The enemy now had a face. Anyone who
looked
Vietnamese,
behaved
like Vietnamese. I didn’t know who the Vietnamese were, or what they looked like, but Mouk—who had now become the head of the Kamaphibal—said they were here among us. He ordered his soldiers to drag out an example. It was Mui’s father.

“I am Khmer!” Comrade Keng shouted.

“Yes, but your wife is a Vietnamese whore!”

“No, we are all Khmers—”

Mouk shut him up. A bullet through his mouth. I closed my eyes.

When I opened my eyes again Comrade Keng was gone, but his blood seeped down from the stage to the ground and I couldn’t help but think how it looked just like any other blood—red, glorious, shining.

Mouk screamed into his speaker, “Vietnamese spy! This is what happens when we find you!”

•  •  •

The next day I woke up as usual before dawn and went to the outhouse behind the villa. In the hazy dark I heard sobs coming through the trees from Mui’s house. “Hush!” a voice growled. “Get in the cart!” More sobbing, louder now. I couldn’t move. I stayed hiding in the outhouse. A short while later Mama found me on the front steps of the villa, the morning sun shining on my face. “It’ll be a scorching day,” she said, sitting down next to me, her skin brushing against mine. I made no reply.

She turned and looked at me. “You’re shaking,” she said, putting her arms around me. “Why are you shaking?”

My teeth chattered, and I hugged her back, glad for her nearness.

We sat in silence, except for the sound of my teeth. After a while she said, “It’s still too early. Won’t you come back inside?”

I shook my head and pulled myself away. I wanted to be alone.
Go away.
She looked at me, puzzled. Then, nodding, she got up and climbed the stairs back into the villa. I remained where I was, my mind running back and forth, throwing itself in every direction. I wanted to escape—get out of this place. But where? Where would I go?

Finally, my oxcart came. I climbed into it. Again, the driver brought me to the hut where I guarded the rice fields from the crows. Here I could talk without words, without sounds—

“No!” A scream suddenly split the wind from the forest behind me. I heard them. I knew their voices, had recognized them on the first sobs. “No! Please, comrades, no!”—Aunt Bui. “Mother! What’s happening?”—Mui. I walked toward the voices. “Please, don’t do this! I beg you!”

“Dig!” The same male voice I’d heard earlier at the outhouse. “Do you want me to shoot the girl first? I said dig!”

I stopped. Mui’s frightened weeping. I could hear it.

Aunt Bui’s giggle—where is it?
Vietnamese, the soldiers had called her. Her skin was too light, they said. Her eyes slanty, Vietnamese eyes.
What about her giggle? Is that Vietnamese too? Where is it now? Why won’t she laugh? Laugh, damn it. Laugh!

“Deeper! More!”

The sound of digging echoed and vibrated. I lowered myself to the ground, careful not to make a noise. I waited. I did not know why. Why I waited. Had I not heard enough, seen enough? Had death deepened my appetite for more? Dulled my senses to violence—a friend’s murder? Was it shock, paralysis that kept me there? I couldn’t explain it, but I remembered all those times when death had brushed by me and I’d close my eyes or turn away. I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t let those I loved face death alone. From now on, I told myself, I would stay put, be here for them, and when their spirits left their bodies, they would see that I’d been here all along to hear their last words, their last breath, and they would know that I had witnessed not only their deaths but, more importantly, their fight for life, their desire to live.

I pulled my legs up toward my chest and rested my head on my
knees, telling myself my fear was nothing compared to that of my friends. I silenced the voices inside my head. I calmed my heart. I braced myself—embraced them.

Then came the thud of a club meeting skull, one, two, and nothing more. Behind me, the crows flew out of the rice fields, wings beating toward the sky.

thirty

D
isquiet settled over Ksach. Talk of battle echoed the distant ring of gunfire. We were at war, whispered the townsfolk. Cambodia and Vietnam were fighting. Each day more people were returning from the camps where work had suddenly ceased. They arrived in a constant stream, unaccompanied by guards or soldiers or camp leaders. The town leaders did not question their return. None of them seemed to care. Mouk and many of the soldiers had left for the battlefields some time back. Now the remaining soldiers and Kamaphibal were getting ready to leave as well, not to fight but to retreat into the jungle. Defeat was inevitable, they admitted gravely. They loaded their oxcarts with supplies—food, weapons, and ammunition. The Vietnamese would kill us if we remained, they warned, urging us to go with them. We Cambodians should stick together, they said, as if they had forgotten they were our torturers and killers, as if we would trust them now. Except for their relatives and those close to them, the rest of us chose to stay behind and wait.

Once they were gone, we rushed into the town center and storehouses. There was no squabble, no argument. There were so few of us left and the dead watched us from everywhere. So we each took what we could find, enough to survive one more day, and, if we lived through the night, then we would come back, scavenge for more. Mama, sifting through clothes abandoned by the wives of the Kamaphibal, found a
roll of what looked like foreign money. She quickly tucked it inside her shirt. I wondered what she would do with it. She baffled me. I filled my pockets with rice from a pile I uncovered under an overturned basket, stuffed a handful of the grains in my mouth, and drank it down with juice from a nearby pickle vat. A short while later, I threw it all back up. Mama found me a green banana and told me to eat it slowly to calm my stomach. But even this felt like too much food.

Back at the villa everyone talked freely again for the first time in a long time. “I don’t understand . . . one Communist regime against another? How can they be fighting each other?” asked a woman, and a man sitting next to her replied, “These Revolutionaries—they feed on chaos.” Another murmured, “I’d dreamt of this moment many times. Now it’s finally arrived.” He was of Chinese background and, like Chae Bui and Mui, his family had been purged for their impurity, their physical resemblance to Vietnamese. The only reason he survived was because he’d been sent away to haul stones in a remote mountain quarry. “Three years and eight months,” he continued, “that’s how long this nightmare has lasted. Now finally we glimpse dawn, and I am alone.”

I watched him, my eyes glued to the Adam’s apple gliding in his throat, like a lump of sorrow he could neither swallow nor spit out. I thought of Big Uncle. Mama pulled me away.

•  •  •

An orange glow lined the edge of distant forests. No one slept. We stayed up and waited. The fighting raged on to the morning. The smell of gunpowder filled the air and the sky rumbled as if it would rain. Then at dawn the Vietnamese came. Over the Mekong the sun rose, slowly coming into view, like another world, perfectly round and blazing red. The town was taken over by convoys of army vehicles. A row of camions and tanks parked on the paved road in front of the villa, engines humming with victory, excitement. A Vietnamese soldier, standing atop the roof of one of the trucks, grinning deliriously, called out in broken Khmer, “Anyone? Anyone?” He stared at us, stunned by our appearance and, as if thinking we were ghosts, added, “Anyone still alive? Anyone to leave—come!” He gestured to the vehicles. There was plenty of room, he
explained. They were heading in different directions. He and his convoy were heading for Kompong Thom. Several convoys would go to Phnom Penh. We were free, he said. We should go home.

Mama cried and buried her face in my chest. All around us people were crying, the sound like the downpour that came after everything was dead. Like female rains.

“It’s over, Raami,” she said, wiping away her tears. “Now we can leave.” She pulled Papa’s small notebook from our bundle of clothes and from between its pages drew a piece of paper folded into a boat the size of her thumb. “Papa left us this.” With trembling hands, she unfolded the paper and spread it open, then, in a tentative voice, began to read:

Raami, it is my greatest regret that I’m not able to do more as your father. If your wings should be broken, darling, this paper boat will ferry you out, not across water, but across land. Land between lands. On one side is a border between here and hope. On the other is a border between two hells. To the east is a land where the sun blazes as red as here. To the west is a land of golden temples. Now, you are far from hope. But if there’s a sliver of opening, a crack in the wall somewhere, you must take it, walk through to the other side. You must head west, follow the stars until sunrise . . .

Mama paused, clearing her throat, then explained, “A map, he’d called it when he thrust the bundle of his belongings at me that morning. He left us a map, he said, in the folds of his clothes. I read these words a thousand times over, Raami, before I realized they were coded for you and me. I should’ve known what he meant, should’ve seen the outline of another place, another life, in the contour of this paper boat.
East . . . where the sun blazes as red as here
—Vietnam.
West . . . a land of golden temples
—Thailand.
You must head west
. . .
until sunrise
—a new beginning. Listen to me, Raami.” She cupped my face, the letter rubbing against my cheek. “I see one red flag coming down and another going up, one regime after another, they’re all the same. We can’t stay here. This
may be our only chance. Now there’s a way out, and we have to take it.” She paused. “I will do what I can. Bargain and compromise in any way possible to get you out of this place. I thought of going home, Raami, but there is no one there. Only ghosts await us. I need you to let them go, the voices in your head. I need you to stay with me, hear me instead, even if you can’t speak.” She swallowed hard. “No matter what happens next, however I may fail, it is life I’ve chosen for you. Do you understand?”

I nodded. Yes, we were going to leave this land and its ghosts. But if we failed, if we died along the way, she wanted me to understand that we would die trying to live. She was fighting for my survival while preparing me for the possibility of my death. But I understood this already. I’d lived long with this possibility, and if we survived our next journey, it would be nothing short of a rebirth.

She looked down at the letter, turned it over, and said, “The rest I believe is for you.” She looked at me. “Would you like me to read it?”

I shook my head.

She held my gaze, and after a moment, said, “I understand.” Then she tucked the open letter back into the pocket notebook and I saw that it was the same size as the other pages. “I’ll go gather our things—I’ve collected enough rice to last us a while. Also . . .” She hesitated. “Also, I went into Chae Bui’s house. She’d told me where she’d hidden their gold. We’d promised each other, Raami, that if one of us should survive, we would look after the other’s child. Mui is not here. But . . . but I believe Chae Bui would’ve wanted me to do what I can to save you, even if it means stealing from them. Their ghosts may follow and haunt us, but it’s something I’m willing to live with.” She stopped, as if waiting for me to respond, but when I didn’t, couldn’t, she continued, “We’ll leave right away.” She placed the notebook in my hand, straightened up, and, as she turned to go, said, “Once your papa told me there was still hope. He was right. Always, there’s hope.”