In the Shadow of the Banyan (45 page)

•  •  •

Hope had wheels like an army truck. It revved and hummed, as lively as the young Vietnamese soldier beaming at us from the driver’s seat of his vehicle. Mama and I and some of the villa’s residents climbed into the
back of the camion and made ourselves as comfortable as we could for the journey. Hope bore us across burnt fields, bombed bridges, broken sparrow-nest hills, and scarred rubber forests. It carried us, even as death pursued us. Corpses littered the roads and rice fields. Those killed by mines were easy to recognize—a limb here and limb there, their flesh scattered on the ground. Those murdered, their bodies whole except for a knife wound in the neck or a bullet hole in the head, we avoided looking at, because their open eyes seemed to follow us, cling to our faces, slow our steps. We rolled into a village populated by ghosts. A rooster sauntered around a family sprawled on the ground in front of their hut, pecking and squawking as if to see who was still alive. One hut after another, it was the same thing. The only difference, the only living presence, was the animals. A duck waddled and quacked, as if calling out for help. A pig snorted, heavy in its despair. A cow ambled back and forth, then lowered itself silently to the ground where its owners lay, keeping watch over the bodies. Word spread that the entire village had been massacred by retreating Khmer Rouge soldiers, probably because the people refused to follow them into the jungle. We looked at one another and considered ourselves fortunate. “At least in Ksach,” someone said, “the Kamaphibal and soldiers gave us a choice.”

We continued our journey, whenever possible sticking to wide, open roads, driving over tire tracks of vehicles that had gone before us, to avoid land mines.

At nightfall we reached a town. The townsfolk welcomed us, first cautiously, then with obvious relief. Some were blessed enough to recognize faces in our group. Those who recognized one another wept openly. The townsfolk told us only one-third or so of their population was left. A handful had chosen to follow the Khmer Rouge into the forests. “And the rest?” the Vietnamese soldiers wanted to know. “Well, the rest . . .,” said a local man, an elder who, although skin and bones, seemed to have become the strength and pillar of his community, “the rest are here with us. They are invisible, but they are with us nevertheless.”

A little girl, who I presumed to be the elderly man’s granddaughter from the way she clung to him, came forward and stared at me. I stared
back. I hadn’t looked in the mirror in a long time, but I recognized my reflection in her emaciated face. We smiled at each other. Neither of us could talk.

Later that night, we camped on the ground beneath their house on stilts, which reminded me of Pok and Mae’s hut. Mama offered the elderly man and his granddaughter a can of rice from the supply we’d brought along. They shared drinking water with us and guavas from their tree. The old man told Mama that both of the little girl’s parents had disappeared one night. They were still waiting for them to return.

Before dawn the next morning, we boarded our truck in the convoy and left without saying good-bye to our hosts. It was better this way, Mama said, as if I could talk, as if I had a choice. There had been enough good-byes already, she explained.

•  •  •

Several days later we reached Kompong Thom. Our driver said this was as far as his convoy would go. We were told to wait by the road for another truck that would arrive soon. When it appeared, we rushed into it.

Again, hope carried us. It bounced us up and down along Prek Prang Creek, on a small paved road strewn with potholes and craters. We passed choked charcoal kilns, we sped through burning cities and flaming towns. The truck brought us to the face of Masked River, where we took a cattle boat to Citrus Soil then to Blue Bamboo, and to a town called Chhlong that mimicked the sound of a gong,
chhlong . . . chhlong . . . chhlong,
the sound of time. We heard the wind heave. We hoped that time would not end for us. Not here. Not now. We’d come so far.

In Siem Reap, Mama traded charm for a ride on a villager’s oxcart. But her beautiful smile and serenading voice could only take us so far. He dropped us at a village called Banteay. Mama took out the roll of foreign money she’d kept tucked in the waist of her sarong and found another villager, a trader in the old days, who was willing to take us all the way to Samrong, where he knew of a caravan preparing to cross the border. He warned us that we might not reach Thailand. It was a dangerous feat we were attempting. He’d heard of many who starved to death in the middle of the jungle, succumbed to malaria, crossed paths with
tigers, or simply expired from exhaustion during the arduous trek. Perhaps we should wait, wait a while longer, and maybe our country would go back to normal. Mama shook her head vigorously. The villager took us across the rice fields of Srov Thmey and then through the teak forests of Phnum Chrung. At Samrong he wished us safe passage and passed us on to a man who was readying a caravan of oxcarts to journey through the jungle to the border. Mama paid the leader of the caravan with a necklace from Chae Bui’s stash of gold. He found us space in one of the oxcarts up front. There were about six or seven oxcarts and at least sixty of us. It was twilight, the best time to begin, as we would trek through the night.

•  •  •

After weeks of traveling in the caravan, mostly at night with the stars to light and guide our way, we reached an impasse. We abandoned the oxcarts and ascended on foot into one mountain range, then another, always heading west. After a week or two more, we emerged from the dense jungle onto an open plain. We stopped to rest in the shadow of some trees atop a hill. By this time, less than half of our group remained, as some had died along the way, while others were too weak to carry on and thus were abandoned to their fate. It was nighttime, but the moon shone so brightly that we could see the surrounding landscape very clearly. Except for this small rise with its clusters of teaks, it was all grass and flatness. I couldn’t tell where one country ended and another began. But the man leading us said that straight ahead was Thailand. He encouraged us to sleep and gather our strength in these brief still hours before dawn. When we resumed our journey at daybreak, we would have to move fast, to slip like shadows across the land. There might be Thai guards and soldiers patrolling the border. If they saw us, we’d run the risk of being shot on the spot or, worse, sent back into the jungle. Some people wondered why we weren’t continuing now while it was still dark. Our group leader explained he’d heard that crossing the border by daylight would give us at least half a chance. If we were caught, the soldiers or guards were less likely to shoot for fear that any act of atrocity would be witnessed. If we did make it across, there was hope of finding help.
Perhaps we would encounter some Thai farmers who, moved by our circumstances, would take us in to plant rice alongside them in their villages. We could offer ourselves as tenant farmers to a landowner. We could be servants. Miracles like this were rumored to happen, our group leader said. He himself would be grateful for any labor and food. Anything was better than what we’d endured. Everyone agreed and began to settle down to rest.

Mama spread a pair of
kromas
side by side on the bare ground and made a sleeping place for us under one of the teak trees. She lay down and beckoned me to do the same. But as exhausted as I was, I couldn’t sleep, my heart fluttering even as the rest of my body could barely move. I lay on my back, looking at the night sky through the leaves, eyes seeking the moon. Soon, I thought, we would be in another land. I was not ready to leave—to let go. We didn’t even know where Papa had been taken, where he might have last been seen. How could I ever return to him—even if only in my mind—when I couldn’t imagine the last place my father might have been? Where was his grave? Did he have a grave? I panicked. I held myself rigid beside Mama, afraid that she would read my thoughts. How could we think of freedom when he was trapped here? How could we abandon him? Tears trickled down the corners of my eyes.

Then, as if to comfort me, to calm the tremor of my heart, Mama murmured, her fingers tracing the path of my tears, the contours of my face, “You have his eyes, his cheeks, his nose . . .” She sounded tired but her voice was clear, soothing. “He built a fire, shook himself free of us, and jumped into the flames. But just as he did so, Indra rushed to save him, seizing his spirit, and flew him off to the moon. Henceforth, Indra told him, the world shall know of your kind deed.”

I was confused for a second or two. Then I realized what she was talking about.

“You know, for a long time, I could never look at the full moon without seeing it flinch—the pain he must have endured in exchange for our safety. ‘I will follow you, and you’ll have only to look at the sky to find me, wherever you are.’ How could he utter these words to you? How
could he have tried to ease you into a life without him by telling you a childish tale? I was overcome with anger toward your papa; I didn’t think I could ever forgive him.”

I remembered. It was the night before his departure. She’d lain with her back to us, her body hard as a board.

“Had I understood then,” she continued, speaking as calmly as Papa would’ve spoken to me, “that the war, this Revolution, was an old blaze reignited, decades, possibly centuries of injustice manifesting itself like a raging inferno, I could’ve told whoever were its builders, be they gods or soldiers, they needn’t have put him through that test of character. Your papa would’ve jumped into the fire of a thousand revolutions for us. And . . . and because of this, because of his willing self-sacrifice, he merited a world nobler than the one he’d left behind.” She swallowed, hesitating, as if unsure she ought to continue. “We will never know, Raami, how he lived his last moment, what thoughts went through his mind as he took his final breath, nor will we ever know the exact manner in which he perished—” Her voice caught.

Then after a moment, she continued, “I’m certain, though, he remained resolute in his belief that even without him you would live through this nightmare, that life, with all its cruelty and horror, was still worth living. A gift he would’ve wanted his daughter to embrace. This, I think, was what he was trying to tell you, a story about your continuation.”

A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and reknitting of remembered words, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence, and in the shadow it casts over our present world, we begin to understand what we only intuited in our naïveté—that while all else may vanish, love is our one eternity. It reflects itself in joy and grief, in my father’s sudden knowledge that he would not live to protect me, and in his determination to leave behind a part of himself—his spirit, his humanity—to illuminate my path, give light to my darkened world. He carved his silhouette in the memory of the sky for me to return to again and again.

I stayed mute. I could not find the voice to share with Mama what I understood.

She let out a rueful chuckle. “You know, I’d heard the story of the rabbit and the moon from my own father when he was a monk, during one of my visits to the monastery where he lived. Every child, I suppose, is familiar with it. It’s a tale you hear often at a temple. But it’s only now that I understand it—this creature whose humble form belied its noble spirit, whose action your papa emulated when he shook himself free of us so that he alone would suffer.”

I’m the only Sisowath
. . . I’d mistaken his words and deeds, his letting go, for detachment, when in fact he was seeking rebirth, his own continuation in the possibility of my survival.

“We will live, Raami,” Mama went on, sensing what I couldn’t express, speaking the words I couldn’t form with my lips. “I’m certain of this now. As for your papa, he lives in you. You are him. I’m certain also that one day you will speak again.”

I let out a sob. It was not speech. Nevertheless, it was an expression, a voice of my deepest sorrow. I mourned him aloud, even if only with this single sound.

Mama pulled me to her. I let her hold me until she fell asleep. Then, taking Papa’s notebook from our bundle of clothes and slipping it into my shirt pocket, I walked over to a clearing where it was brightest, where I could see in all directions. To my right, in the distance below, a river glimmered like a road, a moving pathway. Light blinked across the inky surface. A cluster of fireflies, I thought. Always somewhere there was light, and, though transient, it flashed all the more brilliantly because of the surrounding dark.

I took the notebook from my shirt pocket, its leather cover Mama had caressed to the softness of Radana’s skin. I opened it to the last page, the letter inserted back along its torn edge. In the likeness of the predawn tranquility that inspired my father to write every morning when we’d lived at home, I held it to the moonlight and read the part I hadn’t been able to bring myself to read in front of Mama:

Do you remember, Raami, you asked me once what that circle on your shoulder was? A birthmark, I said. But you were not
convinced. You told me instead that it is a map. Of what, I never asked you. But now I know. It is the contour of your footsteps’ journey. Life, I believe, is a circular path. No matter what misery and awfulness we encounter along the way, I hold out hope that one day we’ll arrive at a blessed moment on the circle again. It is my dream that I live beside you always.

It wasn’t a dream, of course, that image of him sitting in the doorway of the classroom at the temple ripping out the page of the notebook. In my stupor, I’d believed he was tearing up what he’d written, destroying evidence of himself. Another sob escaped my throat. This time I cried openly, loudly. I allowed myself to wonder what his last moments might have been. Was he murdered right away? Or perhaps, like Big Uncle, taken to some camp for reeducation, beaten and starved? Or perhaps, like Radana, he was claimed by disease, his body afterward left to rot in the forest or thrown in some rice paddy. I gave him the solace of death, myself the consolation that wherever he might be, he was suffering no more.