Spirit Play

by Barbara Ismail

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I needed to dress this way,’ she said earnestly, ‘so you would think I was completely crazy.’

  ‘It worked,’ Osman assured her.

  ‘See? I wanted to make sure you saw that my son didn’t mean it, that he was innocent.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m following you,’ Osman said politely. She ignored him.

  ‘You must let Kamal go,’ she instructed him. ‘Because he didn’t do anything, and Murad killed Jamillah and now he’s dead too, so you see, it all works out.’ She smiled broadly at them both. ‘I’ve solved it for you.’ And she looked around, awaiting the grateful thanks she reckoned she deserved.

  Chapter 29

  MARYAM INSISTED ON LEAVING the station and walking over to the market, where they could sit at Rubiah’s counter and consider what they’d just heard. ‘I couldn’t stay there a moment longer,’ she told Rubiah when they had settled. ‘It looks like…well, I don’t even know what it looks like. It’s covered in blood. I don’t think Murad had any left in him.’

  Rubiah gasped. ‘How did it…? Why?’

  Maryam shrugged and looked over at Osman to give the details, such as they were. Rubiah turned pale as she heard the details, then sat down heavily on her stool. ‘God in heaven!’ she breathed.

  ‘But I think she’s lying.’ Maryam told them. ‘It’s so convenient to blame Murad for it now that he’s dead. And she hates him anyway, so she’s not looking to honor his memory. I think both these families think their children did it, and they’re trying to shield them.’

  ‘Kamal?’

  ‘Of course. He came in my window, why not Jamillah’s? That poor kid has the wrong parents.’

  ‘Well, I certainly like that better than Zaiton.’

  Maryam nodded, her thoughts far away. ‘Not that it matters who you want it to be. If that’s the basis, then we have the murderer and he’s already dead. Very convenient.’

  ‘Yes, it’s too bad,’ Rubiah said. ‘But,’ she brightened, ‘just because she’s crazy, doesn’t mean she isn’t telling the truth. Maybe it was Murad,’ she ended hopefully.

  ‘More likely Kamal,’ Maryam told her.

  Rubiah made a disappointed moue and went back to stacking coffee cups. ‘What now?’

  ‘Kamal, I guess.’

  Before Maryam could actually leave her own yard to head off to the police station, Zaiton and her father accosted her. Zaiton had clearly been weeping: her face was damp, red, puffy, her eyes nearly closed and her nose stuffed. ‘What’s the matter?’ Maryam asked, concerned. Had she lost the baby?

  ‘Zaiton and I, we…’ Aziz didn’t seem able to quite get it out. ‘That is, we came to speak to you.’ He looked tired, now that she looked more closely; in fact, he looked completely wrung out.

  ‘Come up, please. And you look like you could use some coffee and something to eat.’

  As they entered the living room, Zaiton sniffling loudly, Maryam asked Aliza to serve. Her hair was now in a bob, sleek and thick, and if still somewhat shorter than she would have chosen, it was nothing to stare at with pity.

  Zaiton looked at Aliza and began wailing. She was saying something, Maryam was sure of it, but couldn’t understand a word. She waved Aliza into the kitchen with a look telling her food was a top priority. Aliza quickly scampered down the stairs, relieved not to be listening to Zaiton, whatever her problems were.

  ‘Now, you just calm down now and tell me what’s the matter.’

  Maryam reminded herself that this girl no longer had a mother, and she fought down her impatience to be done with this. The right thing, the neighborly thing to do would be to provide the maternal advice she clearly needed so sorely. She patted Zaiton on the back and encouraged her to speak.

  ‘I did it.’

  ‘You did what?’

  Zaiton choked, and Maryam handed her some tissues.

  ‘Tell me, Zaiton. I can’t help you if you won’t.’

  She looked inquiringly at Aziz, who was examining his hands. Aliza and Yi came in with steaming hot sweet tea, chocolates, and a heaping plate of cookies. They both stood there, watching Zaiton quizzically; Aliza shrugged minimally and started pouring.

  ‘Drink this,’ Maryam ordered her when the choking sobs subsided. ‘And have a cookie.’ She heard herself with amusement, she sounded just like Rubiah.

  Zaiton held the cup in two hands and looked up at Maryam. ‘I killed my mother.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She did,’ Aziz said tiredly. He looked like a man who was finished with living. ‘That’s why we came. To tell you.’

  ‘I… What?’

  Zaiton nodded. ‘I didn’t mean to. But I did.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh, Mak Chik, just take me and put me in jail. I can’t even live with myself.’

  ‘Tell me what you did.’

  She sniffed and wiped her eyes. ‘When she went to sleep and I wanted to talk to her, I…I pushed her.’

  ‘Off the bed?’

  ‘No, on the bed, but she rolled over on her stomach. And I think that’s when she suffocated.’

  ‘Why didn’t you roll her back?’

  ‘I was mad because she didn’t talk to me. So I just left her there and went out.’ She put her head in her hands.

  ‘Was she not able to move?’

  ‘She was sleeping.’

  ‘She’d just fallen asleep?’

  Zaiton nodded.

  ‘Do you think she would have been able to move while she was sleeping?’

  ‘Not if she was suffocating.’

  ‘You know,’ Maryam said gently, ‘you really have to hold something over their face to suffocate anyone. Not just have them roll over.’

  Aziz cut in. ‘Thank you, Kakak. You’re trying to see the best of it, and I appreciate what you’re doing. But we, our family, can’t live with this anymore, hiding the truth like that. It was an accident, and I don’t think Zaiton meant to do it.’

  He put both hands over his face for a moment before continuing. ‘I will stand by my daughter,’ his voice was thick with tears. ‘We’ll get a good lawyer. She didn’t mean it, but she did what she did.’

  ‘But we don’t know…’

  ‘We’re going to the police station to turn ourselves in. I hope they’ll let her come home, being in her condition, you know. But I don’t know…’ His attention wandered, and he seemed unable to focus.

  ‘I’ll come with you—to help,’ Maryam reassured him. ‘We’ll see what can be done.’

  Maryam managed to get Osman alone before Aziz and Zaiton could confess.

  ‘I don’t know if she did it,’ she told him urgently. ‘I mean, I just don’t know. She feels so guilty for having left her sleeping on her stomach—what she’s going to do when the baby comes I can’t imagine. But even if that’s what killed her, it wasn’t intentional.’

  She shook her head sadly. ‘This poor family is just beside itself. Do you think you could let her go home instead of staying in that jail with Hamidah?’ She shuddered. ‘She’s having a baby after all, and Hamidah is…let’s say, unusual right now.’

  Osman nodded. He looked exhausted himself. ‘Let me talk to them. She can’t stay here now. Nobody should have to stay here after what’s happened. Even I don’t like it.’ He gave her a wan smile and left to meet the two standing at the desk.

  Maryam watched from his office as he took them into his room. The last two days had been like a preview of hell.

  In ways no one could adequately elucidate, the news of Zaiton’s confession spread through Penambang immediately, and when Maryam returned from the police station, surely no more than an hour after she’d left, everyone already knew.

  Her neighbors were gathered outside in small knots of people, shaking their heads with the inexplicable evil of it all. Mothers wondered at the unnatural order of things, and people who would never have mentioned the timing of Zaiton’s baby now murmured about it as an illustration of just how far off the r
ails the girl had gone. Pregnant before marriage, killing her own mother; it was as though she were possessed by the devil himself.

  Rahim had gone back to his family in Semut Api, escaping the scrutiny the family could expect to come under. He pleaded with his parents to allow Zaiton to come and stay with them when she came back from the station, or got out of jail, whichever came first. But they counselled him instead to divorce her that very evening, and when the baby arrived, to take it from her immediately and raise it with the help of his parents. Or better yet, a new wife.

  His mother pointed out ominously that a girl who would kill her mother might easily kill her child; obviously, she had crossed all boundaries of acceptable human behavior and was now operating in the shady area peopled by evil spirits.

  And what of this child, she mused. Would it be a normal human child, or a supernatural one with a taste for blood and matricide? Perhaps, his father suggested, Zaiton was a spirit herself, which would explain a great deal, and Rahim had barely escaped with his own life before she turned on him. None of this described the wife Rahim knew, and it all frightened him. He refused to divorce her and went to sleep rather than speak to anyone further.

  In the market the next morning, Maryam found a tearful and frightened Zainab at her stall, pale and tired. She tried to comfort her, assuring her it would be alright.

  ‘And anyway, I’m not convinced it was Zaiton at all,’ Maryam stated with more confidence than she actually felt. After all, her reason for doubting it was only that it was unthinkable to believe it true, and she knew this was inadequate at best, and dangerous for everyone at worst. Still, it was not a time to air her doubts to this distraught sister.

  Zainab folded her arms on the counter of Maryam’s stall and buried her head in them. ‘He’s divorcing me,’ she said, her voice strangled and muffled by her arms.

  ‘What? Zainab, I can’t hear you at all.’

  She raised her tear-stained face and blew her nose on an offered tissue. ‘He’s divorcing me,’ she sobbed. ‘Because my sister’s an evil murderer, and we might all be…polluted.’ She commenced wailing again. Rashidah came to investigate from the stall next door.

  ‘What happened?’ Rashidah’s brows were drawn up, and she patted Zainab firmly on the back, as you would a baby you wanted to burp.

  ‘My husband’s divorcing me because my sister killed our mother,’ she choked. ‘He doesn’t want anything to do with our family anymore!’ And once again, she dissolved.

  ‘Alamak! She killed her own mother?’

  Maryam shrugged, then nodded slightly. ‘She’s confessed to it. But I don’t know, maybe she didn’t really… It’s hard to know the truth,’ she admitted. ‘But divorcing poor Zainab! That’s just not fair.’

  ‘Look what’s she’s done!’ Zainab drew breath and steeled herself for another speech. ‘Running away to get married, and I had to go all the way to Pantai to get her! And then I had to make sure our father was alright, and have the kenduri, and now this. She’s possessed!’ she told Rashidah. ‘She’s ruining my life!’

  ‘I know it seems like that now…’ Rashidah struggled to seem optimistic.

  ‘It doesn’t seem like it,’ Zainab corrected her. ‘It is it. Look what’s happened to us—to me, my kids. Oh Mak Chik,’ she implored, ‘Can’t you help me?’ And a bout of fresh tears quickly commenced.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ Maryam declared stoutly. ‘And Mak Chik Rubiah will help also…’ As though summoned, she straight away appeared at Maryam’s elbow.

  ‘Mak Chik Rubiah will help what?’

  ‘Poor Zainab,’ Rashidah explained. ‘Her husband wants to divorce her because of Zaiton killing their mother…’

  ‘Allegedly,’ Maryam reminded her.

  Rashidah rolled her eyes at Rubiah.

  ‘I heard about it. She confessed?’

  Maryam nodded, unwilling to raise her voice over Zainab’s cries.

  Rubiah shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t even know what to say.’

  ‘She thinks she pushed her over on her stomach and she suffocated.’

  Rubiah raised her eyebrows. ‘Are you sure that’s all she did?’

  ‘I’m not sure about anything anymore. I’m just hoping it isn’t true; any of it.’

  ‘My poor mother,’ Zainab gasped. She would make herself sick with all this crying, Maryam thought. This kind of raw emotion, call it hysteria, opened the sufferer to all kinds of spirit invasion. It was dangerous on many levels. Maintaining a calm equilibrium was most conducive to health, both physical and mental.

  Though Zainab certainly had reason for tears, in the end it would harm her, and possibly the rest of them. And Zainab was a mother, whose children might be facing a most difficult time. She owed it to them to keep her wits about her. Maryam told her so.

  Zainab nodded, so swollen from tears, it was difficult for her to breathe. ‘You’re right, of course, Mak Chik. I’ll try to control myself…’

  ‘Where is your father?’

  ‘At home, I think.’

  ‘Rahim?’

  ‘Gone back to Semut Api.’

  ‘Has he…?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. He loves Zaiton. But,’ she reflected, ‘I’m sure his parents will advise him to get a divorce. They’ll be afraid of Zaiton and what she’ll do to them. Who wants a girl who’s killed her mother?’

  Who indeed?

  Chapter 30

  MARRIAGE NEGOTIATIONS were notoriously delicate discussions, offence could be easily given or taken. Maryam had put them off until she felt herself strong again and up to the challenge of oblique and metaphorical speech which, while indirect, would still be understood by all who heard it.

  And she was up to it now; the family delegation was leaving for Kedai Buluh, to at last speak to Rosnah’s parents about marriage. Maryam and Mamat, Ashikin and Daud, Rubiah and Dollah were ready to meet Malek and his wife, Zahara, and converge upon Rosnah’s family. Maryam worried there were too many of them.

  ‘Do you think they’ll be overwhelmed when we come in? We’re such a big group.’

  ‘They’ll have all their relatives there too,’ Mamat assured her, fussing with his songkok, a black velvet brimless hat worn with traditional Malay clothing, pushing it forward and backward on his head, testing it for best effect. ‘Their house will be packed.’

  Maryam decided on the extra bangle. She’d been debating it, wanting to look prosperous, but not so prosperous that the family would demand an exorbitant bride price or too lavish an array of gifts. Maryam and Mamat had discussed it, and they wanted to provide clothes and jewelry which were as generous as they could afford to be, keeping in mind they’d be doing it again in a few years with Yi.

  However nervous she was, Maryam was also confident that Rosnah’s family were in circumstances much like their own and inclined to be reasonable. Malek had smoothed the way for negotiations, having had a quiet word with Rosnah’s father, a distant relative of Zahara’s. All was now in place.

  Ashikin and Daud arrived first, as friends of the prospective bride, and the two girls withdrew to a bedroom to discuss the negotiations. Traditionally, Rosnah would have peeped at the conclave from behind a door, or maybe entered to serve refreshments. She would be serving today, allowing the in-laws to get a good look at her, so they would not buy a buffalo in the middle of a field. The traditional rules would be observed, though nowadays, with girls going to school and knowing each other’s friends, it was hardly the mystery it had been in times gone by.

  The full complement of Azmi’s family arrived, as did the home team, and Mamat’s forecast was correct: the house was crammed with people, all wearing their best with their most refined manners on show. Rosnah served the refreshments, and all Maryam’s kinfolk smiled beneficently upon her and thanked her profusely. When she and Ashikin had retired to the kitchen, Mamat cleared his throat and began his prepared remarks.

  The whole business was approached indirectly, so as to avoid embarrassment to either side s
hould the negotiations ultimately be unsuccessful. It provided plausible deniability to the participants, who could claim to be discussing some other, wholly innocuous matter, and not marriage.

  In this vein, various remarks were exchanged: first, fathers and uncles, then mothers and aunts, taking turns, adding their own literary flourishes. Behind the game, however, serious business was being conducted, and finally all were satisfied that the deal was, in principle, agreed. The details on money and gifts would be discussed at another time by a representative from each side.

  After oceans of coffee and mountains of rice cakes, Maryam and the full entourage left, thrilled at their skill and luck in carrying off such a delicate matter, more convinced than ever that Rosnah was the perfect wife for Azmi and his sister marvelously clever to have thought of it and bring the union to fruition.

  Ashikin called Azmi later to give him the results, and to remind him again that it had been her idea. It would improve his character to realize how much she’d done for him.

  The enam sembilan mark, a distinctive braided rope indentation on Maryam’s forehead, was fading, but she believed she would forever see it there. She examined herself in the mirror when she took off her headscarf, and so far had not dared to leave the house without that scarf. Mamat swore it now looked like a faint red mark, completely unnoticeable, and she was ready to go out as she had before. But the image of how it looked at the beginning swam before her eyes, and she thought everyone else’s eyes were immediately drawn to it, so she kept herself swathed.

  Aziz’s clear belief in Zaiton’s guilt led Maryam to confront him, now buoyed by the success of marriage negotiations. He was sitting on the porch of his house, looking woebegone, and she greeted him, trying to be cheerful and optimistic about Zaiton’s possible innocence.