by Jean Moran
The dish must be empty of food. She looked round for somewhere to pour it. A tall jar, almost of human height and complete with a lid, occupied one corner. After scraping the contents of the bowl into it, she replaced the lid and ate the fruit.
It was half an hour or more before she heard the approach of shuffling footsteps. Faking sleep, she heard the things being gathered up, a pause as though the gatherer was studying her, perhaps making sure she was as near comatose as she usually was at this time of day.
She heard the door being closed. Once she was sure she was alone, she got up quietly but without thought of escape, not yet. The first thing she had to do was evaluate her chance of getting away, which was now her only option.
There wasn’t much to see through the fretwork shutters, but she recalled most of the details before they’d been locked and barred against her. The suggestion of movement came from the upper floors where the three residents bobbed around on the balcony.
She recalled her visit to the kitchen and the wide opening in the southern part of the house, the moon door in the outer courtyard. Go through the first, then the moon door, and she would be almost free, but free to do what?
All she knew was that she was in a house on the periphery of Shanghai, but where would she go after that? The world was still at war. As far as she knew, Hong Kong was still occupied. Going back there would mean returning to the camp.
The harsh truth was that this was China and she was a foreigner. If it was just her escaping she might stand a chance, but she had Dawn to think of. She couldn’t leave her behind. She just couldn’t.
Kim disappeared for days on end, then reappeared, and when he did, she had to seem to be under the influence of whatever was added to the broth.
At the slightest sound from outside, she fell back onto her bed feigning unconsciousness. Everything depended on her keeping up the pretence of being drugged, her voice softly slurred, her head lolling as though her neck was made of rubber.
To her great relief he seemed persuaded, his fingers tracing lines across her brow. She was supposed to feel languorous, but she felt only revulsion.
‘You need more rest. The child will not be brought to you any longer. She has a new mother.’
She wanted to protest that Dawn was her daughter and remembered Luli saying she was at the mission, where she should have been safe. But this new mother? Who was she?
Time was now of the utmost importance. She would have preferred more time to plan but that did not seem possible. She had to grab whatever opportunity came along.
He no longer made love to her when he came to her but he did try to persuade her to smoke the opium pipe. Each time she turned her head away, feigning weakness.
This appeared to exasperate him. ‘You will learn it is best to obey me. Bow to me.’
She felt herself sliding onto the floor, his hands maintaining pressure on her shoulders. ‘Bow to me.’
Pride and fear battled for her mind. Fear for her child won. She let herself slide, bowed to him, her head between his feet.
*
The jar was big enough to take a lot of the food she was pouring into it. Some of the evening meal had to follow, but it was more difficult to decide which dishes had been drugged and which were safe to eat.
She decided rice was the safest, and proved this when she gave some of the meaty sauce to one of the cats that prowled outside the window. The cat lay down and was soon sound asleep. The only problem was that she couldn’t give it all the food because then it would die, which in itself might prove suspicious. That, too, had to go into the jar.
She thought through the consequences. The food would not be detected while the weather was cool but in warm weather the stench of rot might escape despite the lid.
Time dragged with nothing to do and no visits from either her daughter or him. At night her sleep was lighter than it had been with the drugged broth, which she guessed was being administered so that she took more easily to smoking opium. She supposed the other women had been through the same experience and pitied them.
The door was still locked. Nobody gained entry except for those servants who did not speak English.
She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, steeling herself. She’d do anything to regain access to her child. Only Luli could help her with that.
She braced herself when she heard him enter the room that night and felt a cool draught of air as he lifted the coverlet and studied her naked form.
To her relief the silk coverlet fell back over her body and she smelt the mix of fresh male sweat and sweet-scented body oil as his arm wound around her.
She wondered what would happen if she sat up and confronted him.
Whether he sensed she was not properly asleep, she didn’t know, but the next morning there was only fruit and dried fish for breakfast. The room was bathed with light. The outer shutters had been removed.
The sound of laughter outside drew her attention. Dawn was dipping her hand into the carp pond, Luli beside her. Rowena washed and dressed quickly, in a green silk tunic and trousers, then sped outside.
Beaming with delight, she headed for Dawn, ready to hug her as she’d never hugged her before.
Luli grabbed her. ‘Madam. Do not touch her. Bad things will happen if you touch her.’
Rowena frowned. ‘What things?’
‘The master will lock you away again if you do so. I am to tell you this. He gave me permission to bring her from the mission to say goodbye.’
‘Goodbye?’
‘That’s what he said. She is to live at the mission.’
She was immediately bombarded with mixed emotions. On the one hand Dawn was her child. On the other, if she failed to escape Dawn would be safer at a Christian mission than she would under Kim’s roof.
Luli leaned close and bowed her head. ‘I have to tell you that you may now eat with the other women – if you want to.’
‘Until the master decides otherwise,’ she murmured, but accepted that this might be a defining moment.
Later she went with Luli to put Dawn down for her afternoon nap. Tears stung her eyes as she considered what was happening. Dawn was the child to whom she had been unable to show affection and now she was banned from doing so.
For a moment she stood looking at the sleeping child. How could anything so beautiful have come into being in such a cruel manner?
*
That evening a handwritten note was brought to her room: Tonight this noble house has guests. I would like you to act as my hostess and mistress of my house. The dress I wish you to wear will be brought to you and you will wear your hair down.
Was it an invitation or an order? She wasn’t sure.
The cheongsam-style dress was delivered just after she’d bathed and pinned up her hair. It was red and displeasing. The colour was too bright and the slits in the side went far too high, exposing the smooth flesh of her thighs, like the prostitute she’d seen with dragon tattoos up her thighs. Throwing it to one side, she took out the one he’d first given her. Despite its design there was something classic about its cut, the gilded mandarin collar, the gold thread writhing like plant tendrils over its glossy surface.
Kim was formal in a traditional black outfit. He smiled as he entered her room. The smile faded on seeing what she was wearing. ‘I want you to wear the red dress I sent you today.’
She pulled a face. ‘But this is a red dress. Besides, the other one makes me look like a whore.’
‘I wish you to wear it. And your hair. I wish you to wear it down. Your lips must also be red.’
He didn’t give her a chance to say that she preferred her hair pinned up, that a formal style suited an evening event. Her hair unpinned and falling around her shoulders tended to be wild and made her look like a gypsy – or worse.
He plucked out the pins and ruffled her hair as it fell, then watched her peel off one dress and put on the other.
‘Quickly. And the shoes I sent you.’
She’d totally forgot
ten about the shoes, which were of the same red as the dress and had high heels – not at all Chinese and not as comfortable as the slippers she’d come to love wearing.
‘There,’ he said at last. ‘That is how I want you to look.’
She caught sight of her reflection and gasped. ‘I look like a high-class tart.’
‘You will look as I want you to look.’
She felt a knot of fear in her stomach as she wondered at his purpose for dressing her like this. Was he going to sell her to a house of ill-repute, of the kind that proliferated around the docks of Hong Kong?
‘I won’t do it!’
He frowned. ‘You will. If you don’t, you will never see your child again. Now come. We have guests waiting. Follow.’
Scared of what he would do if she didn’t, she did as ordered, her black hair bouncing, the red silk dress slithering around her thighs.
23
The house guests were not at all what Rowena had expected.
Gerhard and Maretha Grobler were in their forties, Lutheran missionaries from Johannesburg who, by virtue of their German ancestry, were allowed to live within an old cantonment especially designed and built for foreigners. They greeted her warmly enough, but their expressions were judgemental.
Gerhard fixed his gaze firmly on her face as though she were a profanity that hurt his eyes. His wife’s countenance flickered with disapproval as her eyes travelled from Rowena’s tumbling hair over her red dress to her shoes.
‘So what did you do before you met Kim?’ Maretha asked.
‘I was a doctor.’
She saw Kim’s condemning glare before he stepped in to expand her response. ‘But then she was taken sick and had to stop. Now she is here she no longer needs to do that.’
The old Rowena wouldn’t have failed to protest. The new one was obliged not to because she wanted to know what was going on. Dawn was spending more and more time at the mission and she wanted to ask them how she’d settled in.
‘Doctors are responsible people. You do not look like this,’ said Maretha, once again eyeing the red dress and tumbled hair. ‘A man’s job, I think.’
‘I think so too,’ said Kim, flashing a warning look when it seemed likely she was going to defend her corner.
‘Not safe out here for a woman,’ said the heavy-set German padre.
‘Is it safe for you to be in China?’ snapped Rowena.
‘We have survived, but we are of German descent. We are not enemies,’ said Maretha. She pointedly looked Rowena up and down, seeming to think her an enemy on more than one count if her outfit was anything to go by.
‘The church requires us to administer wherever the need is greatest,’ Gerhard explained over his second glass of sherry. ‘Are you a Christian, Mr Pheloung?’
‘Buddhist,’ Kim replied.
Rowena tried not to let him see her sneer. Buddhist indeed. Firstly Buddhists didn’t believe in a god, and secondly Kim only believed in himself.
‘And you, Rowena?’
‘Christian, but I don’t attend church as often as I should.’
‘Evidently,’ said Maretha. ‘Has your daughter been baptised?’
‘No. The only minister in the prison camp I was in died before she was born.’
Maretha looked surprised. ‘But that can be rectified.’
‘I haven’t got round to it.’
‘Tell me, with the circumstances of her conception, did you not think to have her adopted when she was born, or put into an orphanage?’
‘In war?’
‘Ah, yes. The war. We thought about running an orphanage, but decided that God did not require us to go in that direction. We need to preach. We need to bring the heathen and the fallen to the Lord, and that includes a child of mixed parentage.’
Rowena had the feeling that she was one of those fallen, a woman of wanton appearance. As for her child, was it really so wrong that she hadn’t yet been baptised?
When they at last got up to leave, she thought it only polite to offer to shake hands, but neither offered theirs, instead bowing curtly from the waist, almost as if there was something soiled about her touch.
She attempted to follow them out, thinking to go beyond the moon door and learn more about the surrounding terrain, the road leading to Shanghai and perhaps to freedom.
Kim stopped her. ‘Stay here. They are my guests, not yours.’
‘So what was I supposed to be tonight?’
‘A brood mare.’
‘I will not be that.’
‘You will be anything I want you to be.’
‘Or you’ll beat me black and blue?’
‘No. I will beat your child black and blue.’
Rebellion, she realised, had to be kept in check if she was to allay his suspicions while she made plans for her and Dawn to escape.
That week the Groblers came for a second visit. On this occasion she was left with Maretha, Kim making an excuse of showing Gerhard the aviary where he kept finches, song thrushes and brightly coloured lovebirds.
‘I have always wanted a daughter,’ Maretha said, over a low table of dark green tea.
‘And you had only a son?’
‘Please don’t misunderstand. I adore my son and am so grateful I have him. But I would so love a daughter, even one who was not flesh of my flesh. We can give the child we choose a very good home and, of course, a strict Christian upbringing.’
‘I hope you find a child deserving of your charity.’
Rowena felt her blood chill when Maretha beamed broadly. ‘We think we have, my dear. We truly think we have.’
They visited a few more times, but it wasn’t until some weeks later when the swallows were diving after the last insects of the day, that the first steps of losing her child were put into operation.
That night, when she lounged naked beneath a silk robe, Kim arrived unannounced and without knocking.
He proceeded to lie on the opposite sofa, smoke from a sensor sitting on the table rising in a leisurely skein before his eyes. ‘I have a question for you.’
‘I hope I can answer it.’
‘What would you do for the most precious thing in your life?’
She had a feeling she knew where this was going, but kept her fear in check. ‘That depends.’
‘Your child. What would you do for your child?’
‘I think you already know the answer to that.’
‘The life of your child is in my hands. She will live or she will die. It depends on you.’
She could barely believe what she had heard and was too frightened to say the wrong thing.
‘I bought you. I bought both of you.’
She looked at him, thinking of when she’d first seen him in Kowloon: she had been charmed by his courtesy and enthralled by the classic lines of his face, the way he’d come to their rescue.
‘You’ve rescued me a number of times.’
‘Rescued. Yes. I decided I wanted you the first time I saw you in the hospital. A female doctor. A fine mind. Not one who submits easily. That is you.’
It was not quite what she’d expected. ‘From the time you saw me in the hospital?’
‘I thought you a beautiful and enticing challenge. I wasn’t sure I could achieve my objective but, as it turned out, the fates and this war played a helping hand.’
‘I still don’t understand.’
‘Then I will explain, my dear. You see, I have a hobby. I enjoy moulding people into what I want them to be. That is what I shall do with you. The other women are my earlier accomplishments. They would die for me. Their days are empty in order that I and I alone am the focus of their lives. When not administering to my needs, they satisfy their dreary days in dreams of opium – which you, my dear, will eventually use to fill your time. Not administer to the sick. Not read books. I will mould the children too. They will not know any other way of living and have no will of their own. Women and children. I also love beautiful objects. The moment I saw you I thought what a challenge i
t would be to mould an educated woman, a doctor and Westerner at that, to something I want her to be, not what she wants to be.’
‘You’re...’ She stopped herself saying he was insane.
‘A scientist. Mind-bending I believe they call it.’
Her every nerve tingled with disgust and horror. ‘You will not bend me.’
‘Come. Follow me to the reason you will become what I want you to be.’
Through dimly lit rooms he took her to where Dawn was sleeping in a small bed made especially for a child. There were others in the room, the small figures of children rounded beneath the heavy cotton coverlets.
‘See how she sleeps,’ he said, as he ran his fingers over Dawn’s cheek.
She stirred at his touch, but did not wake.
‘The sleep of one with nothing to fear, who knows she is loved but will soon know abandonment. That is what she will be told, that her mother has abandoned her.’
She forced herself not to show any emotion, not to do anything that would cause him to react because she could not know what he would do. Inside she felt a sick and terrible fear and also a deep resolve. She had to get her daughter and herself out of there.
‘Come.’
He took her hand and guided her through the darkened house to the garden. He undid the thin ribbons holding her robe closed and it fell from her shoulders, pooling around her ankles and leaving her naked.
Everything around her was silk: the velvet dark night lit only by paper lanterns, his voice, her skin.
‘Please let me go, or let my child go. I’ll stay here with you willingly if you allow me to do that.’
‘Come, come. I decide who goes where. I was surprised to see that you had a child. It was not part of my plan but, as I told you, I avenged myself on the perpetrators for raping you in the first place – not so much revenge for you, my dear, but for myself.’
He pulled the piled silk back up around her shoulders and turned away. His head fell forward, his hair loose around his shoulders as he lit a cheroot, his words mingling with the rising smoke.
‘You will accompany me to Kowloon. Yes. I think that is a good idea.’