by Kim Edwards
“Oh, really,” she began, but Nangka turned her voice on her at once, chased her from the room with words as strong as stones.
She turned back to me, and put her hand on my shoulder. We looked at each other in the mirror.
“I had a brother too,” she said.
IF YOU HAVE had a brother and then lost him, you will know the kind of bond that connected us then. Hidden in the daylight corners of that place, our heads together over washing and lipstick, the demanding tresses of my hair, we talked. Nangka told me of a city life I had never imagined, of days without grass or flowing water, of a father who beat her brother until he ran away and joined the army. He was only seventeen when they sent him to the uprisings on another island, sent him to a village church and a bayonet through the liver. When she spoke of him it was in a flat soft voice that expected no answer. Her hands were in my hair and then she dropped them to my shoulders. The long nails of her thumbs rested against the chain that held my locket and my cross.
“The things that are done,” she said, “have no good logic, no explanation. You should sell that thing,” she added, nodding at the cross. “It’s nothing for luck, but the gold is good.” Her eyes had gone so dark that I could think of nothing but the night they brought me from the country.
“Nangka,” I said. I reached up and took both her hands. Her fingers were thin and cool and dry. In a moment she pulled them away and dipped them into my hair again.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. But tell me about your brother now.”
And so I did, everything I could remember. She said she could imagine him, that our brothers would have been friends. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what they would have done together.” I closed my eyes, and I talked about the river as if it were there before me. We used to go every morning to wash ourselves in the light of the new dawn. Since we could not swim we held on to the jetty with our hands, we pulled ourselves underwater and made a game of how long we could stay there. My brother was half fish, he could stay down for more than 150 counts. For me it was less, but no less wonderful. When my lungs began to spark I shot myself up. I threw my head back, water rushing from my hair, and drank the air. Each time, I opened my eyes to a new world, clearer and more vivid than the one I had left. The air was so clean, the colors so pure, the ordinary things vibrant with a life I had overlooked.
In this same way, with Nangka as my friend, my eyes opened. The new world was shabby, but I saw. I saw how worn our silk was in the daylight. I felt the roughness of our sheets, and heard the noise around us always: factory whistles, the rush of water in old pipes, jackhammers in the street below, the tinny music as they cleaned the bar. And the men. It might have been the first time, the way I took it when I finally woke up. When they made me undress, when I felt the soft damp press of flesh, I thought I would go mad. There were complaints against me. I was warned. Until Nangka, afraid because she saw that I was not, decided it was up to her to save me.
IT WAS MONTHS ago that we left, nearly a year now, and yet there are things I am not used to in this place. One of them is this: Whenever I hear trains at night, I think it is the wind. Rising and blowing, rattling the windows of this foreign house, they jar me out of sleep. I reach to close the windows, to pull the wooden shutters, to shake the man beside me and take him underneath the house until the storm subsides. Then I am truly awake, fierce and ready, and I realize that the shaking, the gathering noise, is only one of many trains. In the dark I listen to it rumble past and disappear, its noise thinning into the night. From the bed I can see the flash of light each window makes, and sometimes I can see faces, caught for an instant like a photo. I search these moments, seeing so many things. A coffee cup held to the lips, an expression of pain or laughter or surprise, once a couple kissing. Everyone is pale, like the snow that falls, every face is pale and pink. I cannot see my mother here, or my brother, and I cannot see the face I truly seek, Nangka with her bright lips and skin the color of smooth nuts, her hair hanging to her shoulders like a black wave before it breaks. Even when I hold a small piece of her hair, a piece I stole when no one was looking, I do not see her. She is somewhere in this pale country, somewhere in this snow, but after all these months I no longer expect to see her. Like me, her traveling is finished, I am sure. Like me, it is possible that she rarely leaves the house. I sit in the window until I shake with cold, I hold the soft piece of her hair.
It was her idea, this cutting.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s what we must do first.”
I put my hand to the soft masses wound around my head. Never cut your hair, my mother said. Whatever you do. It is your oldest possession.
“My hair was longer,” Nangka went on, seeing my face. “My hair went to my knees. It took me hours to comb it. Hours to dress it up each day.” She laughed. “The wedding style. After all, it was not meant for every day. At first I could not let them cut it, though I knew I should. I went that first time, and let them cut only to my waist. I went back every month and lost another inch. Until now.” She pointed to her black hair, which brushed against her shoulders. She pointed to her bangs. “Today I will get the last piece cut, and you will do all of yours. You must be brave,” she said. “Men like long hair, but not too long. It marks you as a villager. Now tell me again. Practice what we will say.”
“You are my sister,” I told her. “You are my oldest sister. Our parents died last year. We have never been apart.”
“Stop staring,” she said, tugging at my arm. “Look straight ahead.” I was walking without thinking, my eyes drawn back and forth by the lights and flowers. I had never walked in the city before.
“I can’t hear you,” I said, stopping to press my hands over my ears.
“Of course you can.” This time her tug was harder. She stepped in front of me and took my face in her hands. “Do you want to stay in that place forever? Listen to me. Are you a virgin? Are you?”
I blushed. We kept walking. “Yes,” I said. “I am.”
Nangka smiled. “Good,” she said. “You said that exactly right. Now, why do you want to marry a foreigner?”
“I want to make a good home. I want to have children. I want to see the world.”
“But we are sisters.”
“Yes,” I said. “We are sisters. And we do not want to live apart from each other. We never have in our lives.”
“All right,” Nangka said. We had reached the beauty parlor. There were rough pictures of women drawn on the glass wall with paint. They were not smiling, any of them. Their hair grew up in waves and towers. They looked at the air with their lips puckered, their eyes half-lowered. Inside there was a woman whose skin was coarse, whose hair fell around her head like an upturned bowl.
“Just an inch,” I begged, feeling her hands on my hair. “Please, no more than that.”
“There is no time,” Nangka said. “We have no time to go slowly. I’m sorry.”
“This hair is thick,” said the woman. She weighed it in her hand like a slab of meat. “If I cut it all at once I’ll do it free; hair this long I can sell.”
I closed my eyes. My mother combed my hair every morning, and once a week she rubbed my scalp with scented oil. She was proud of my hair. During festivals she wove flowers into it. This, she had said, stroking it. This is your great beauty. But what good was it to me now, a false bride? I nodded, very slowly.
Nangka took my hand.
“You’ll be happier this way,” she said. “Wait and see.”
She was right, though I wept when I saw it. The sharp ends touched my shoulders and my hair, my great beauty, was a fat braid hanging from the wall.
“Stop crying,” Nangka begged. “It was necessary. And it’s not so bad. You are still pretty, look.” She held up the mirror. My hair was gone, but she was right, my face was just the same.
“There,” she said, seeing me recover. “And doesn’t your head feel light?”
It was true, my head felt as if it were floating, disembodied. We walked to t
he agency and I kept glancing into windows, surprising myself, feeling giddy and off balance when I turned my head too swiftly and nothing weighed it down.
At the agency I stayed close to Nangka.
“You see,” she told them, “she is my younger sister. Of course she is shy, she has just come from the village. We want to stay together. Sisters. We want to make good homes in a new country. We want to be good wives. Cook? Of course. And cleaning, we are very good at that.”
In the mornings now, while we waited, our short hair gave us free time. We studied. Nangka had a map. She had a dictionary with polite words in English.
“Now we are here,” she said, pointing to the islands, hundreds of them scattered like green ink against the sea. She pointed out the places we might go. One was huge, shaped like a fat bull with no horns and stubby legs. Another was like a wild boar, chasing a bright bird across the water. This last one was an island and much smaller, but it was the one I liked. There was so much water.
“I don’t know,” Nangka said. “It’s very cold there. Colder than you can imagine.” She paused, listening to footsteps in the hallway until they died away. The boldness of what we were doing made her brisk and worried.
“Stop dreaming,” she said. “We must practice.” She read from her small book.
“Good morning,” she said. “How are you today?”
“Fine,” I replied. “Thank you very much, I am fine.”
I WAS RAW, I was green, I was a girl who had never seen snow. How could I know, when they showed me this man, how to judge? He was pale, that’s what I saw, pale and rather fat. He wore glasses and behind them his eyes looked like small gray clouds. He said he was a water man. He had drawn a dam, and now he was here to build it. When he left he wanted to take home a wife. He had chosen me from a photograph the agency had given him. He said he would interview two others. I kept my head bowed in the polite way, though it was harder now. My hair swung against my shoulders and my head kept drifting up. He asked me questions about my life, he asked me to stand up and walk back and forth across the room.
“Your parents,” he said. “Is it true that they have died?” I nodded, still silent. And then I knew a way to judge him. I looked up, directly at him.
“I had a brother too,” I said. “He was killed by a cow.” I watched him very closely, but he did not laugh. He listened. He listened to my story.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
And he did not laugh at me, not once.
“That’s lucky,” said Nangka, when I told her. “He is kind.” We sat in the bare morning light, our books hidden beneath the mattress, speaking in whispers, comparing our fortunes.
“And yours,” I said. “Nangka, how was he?”
“Ugly,” she said. “Like a rambutan fruit. He was hairy, and underneath the hair his skin was red. Even his nose was red, like a hibiscus. His hair is as dark as mine. It covered his whole face.”
“But kind?” I asked. “Was he also kind?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was looking at the wall then, remembering. “He asked strange questions. I kept my head down. He came over and unfastened all my buttons, one by one. He opened my blouse like a curtain. Yet he did not touch me. He stared, but he did not touch me.”
“Not kind,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. “Not very kind. But he is from the same wild-boar island as your water man.”
NOW I LIVE on this wild-boar island, but it will not tell me what to feel. If there were palm trees, a brown river, lean wooden houses against the jungle and hibiscus, I would know. Even in that city, with all the noise, the scent of cooking food and open drains, of smoke and sewers, I woke up and I knew. But here the sky is a watery gray, the snow softens everything, pales all color. I am always cold, it seems, though the water man has a house with heat, and has bought me many sweaters. Jim, he says, smiling. Call me Jim. He is a kind man, but when I look at him, when I look around, there are only white things, cold things, and I feel nothing about them, nothing, I feel nothing at all.
That we escaped at all was a miracle of course, a kind of gift, and I must remember that. We were very lucky. No one followed us when we left that morning, no one saw us go. The only things I took were my locket and the clothes I wore, a crisp white skirt and blouse I bought with the money I got for my gold cross. It was so early that all the shops were closed. The streets were filled with a blue-gray light, and not even the fishwives were open yet. Our footsteps echoed against the metal shutters of the shops. Nangka wore a simple dress of dark blue silk, which she had stolen months ago. Her lips were a clear red, her hair was dark black, her skin the color of cut wood just after it has rained. She was beautiful, I thought. She said we both were.
We sat together in the center of the long airplane. Other girls were with us. They leaned into the windows, pointed out shoreline and cities, or the vast expanse of sea. Some of them slept. Nangka and I did none of these things. We barely even spoke, we were so nervous. At the landing my ears filled up with something and gave me so much pain I wanted to scream, and when I had to say good-bye to Nangka I could hardly hear what she said. But I saw her, I kept her face in my mind. I told myself there was no reason to worry, her new address was folded in my locket by a picture of my brother. I touched its metal, warmed by my skin, and I let her walk away with that man, out into the night.
I wrote her many letters:
Dearest Nangka,
After I left you we came to this place by train. It was early morning. The houses are so close together here, like at home, but each one has a small gate, a fence around the garden. The water man says there are flowers, but not now. The air smells wet and earthy. He says it is too early for the fire, though I am always cold. Yesterday I gathered sticks and branches from his garden. I saved them in the kitchen and asked could we please have a fire. I did not understand his expression, and then he laughed. He showed me the switch. First there is a humming, then a light that moves like fire, but you can touch it. Later there is heat that bakes my skin dry. Nangka, I felt so foolish I wanted to die, but he is a kind man. The floors in this house are soft with rugs, and the walls have a paper that is fuzzy when you touch it. Nangka, please write to me, is this how it is for you?
Dearest Nangka,
My sweet friend, did you get my letters? Every day I wait for the mail but there is never anything from you. Today we went to the shops at the end of the block. It is so strange, Nangka, there was nothing there I could recognize, though he wants me to cook. Everything is wrapped in plastic, I cannot feel the oranges or the meat, and nothing has a smell. When I was home alone there was snow. I did not know what it was at first. Then I remembered the wise woman and went outside to feel it. It is white and burns like the smoke that used to come from the factories to our room. At first I was not cold and I stood there for a long time. Then I saw a face in the window next door. It was the old woman, looking at me, and when I waved she dropped the curtain. Then I went inside and I was suddenly very cold. I sat in a blanket and watched the lines of white growing on the fences. I thought about that old woman. The water man, Jim, is kind, but the other people here are not kind. I see them looking at me always, and they do not smile. Nangka, I think of you always, is it the same for you?
Dear Nangka,
I am so worried. Here are some stamps. I am sending you these stamps so that if he does not let you out you can get a letter to me. Wait for the mailman. Nangka, I miss you. I would rather be back at that place with you than to be so lonely here.
I sent these letters with diminishing hope. Still, I put them in the box every day. I did not hear and did not hear, and soon my own letters began to come back to me. I saved them, and one day, desperate, I showed them to Jim.
“She has moved,” he said, pointing to the yellow sticker.
“Yes, but where? Where is she now?”
He shook his head, and handed me the letter back. His skin was very white then, and his fingernails were blue, like the envelope.
“It doesn’t say, I’m afraid. She didn’t leave an address.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” I said. “We are like sisters.”
It was too late when I realized my mistake. Jim studied me. He said, “I thought you were sisters.” But when he saw me folding with loss, he put his arm around me. “There,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. Look, do you have her new name? Do you know what man she came with?”
I remembered him at the airport, face like a hairy fruit, when he put his arm around Nangka’s shoulders and drew her away. I remembered how small she looked beside him, her last smile to me. I remembered that he was not kind.
“No,” I whispered. “No.”
“You’re shivering,” Jim said. He turned up the heat and put another blanket around my shoulders. When he frowned I could see the fine red lines surface on his forehead, a map of his thoughts. He listed things we could do. Write the agency. Contact the embassy. It was possible, he said, that we could find her. At least we could look.
“But you mustn’t hope,” he said. “It isn’t likely, and you mustn’t get your hopes up.”
THREE MONTHS HAVE PASSED, and still I do not hope. Nor do I pray, though I have found a church, and I sometimes go there. One day I was shopping, holding a ham swathed in plastic, when I saw the nun. She wore short skirts, which surprised me, skirts that brushed her knees, and dark black tights. Her hair was covered by only a black cloth, and no wimple framed her face. She was pale, her hands were as white as soap. She was a nun, and I followed her. A block, half a block behind, I followed her, marking the way in my memory. She was young, I could tell from the way she walked, the long swing of her legs. It was spring by then. The sun was cool on my face and hands, and the trees looked like half-plucked chickens with their small pale leaves.