The Moonlight Palace

by Liz Rosenberg

  “He is the handsomest man alive,” said little Danai. “Like a British movie actor. Someday I marry a man like that.”

  Brown played games of chess with Uncle Chachi and loaned him books on the art of photography when he learned that Uncle Chachi had a camera. He once even brought by a new Kodak 16mm movie camera, but Nei-Nei Down forbade it, though he only wanted to film us around the palace. Perhaps Uncle Chachi was not his usual ebullient self around Geoffrey, but he seemed somewhat awestruck by our guest. Not Nei-Nei. She blamed him for everything that went wrong. If a window became stuck, it was because Mr. Brown had opened it. If a loaf of bread failed to rise, she blamed it on his heavy tread. She did not care for his cakes or his kindness. As soon as Brown left, she would tilt the gift cake into the trash, hearing it fall with a look of grim satisfaction. And she would not touch the sweets he brought.

  “They would turn my stomach to stone,” she said.

  “But Nei-Nei,” I protested. “Isn’t Mr. Brown kind to us all? Isn’t he saving Wei’s life?”

  For there was no question that others in the government would have had Wei put to death, merely on the suspicion that he had collaborated with a Bolshevik. The Singaporean authorities were ruthless in those days, and far harsher with the Chinese than with outsiders. It was one thing to be a crazy Muslim. It was another to be a Chinese radical whose politics threatened the Singapore way of life.

  “Yes, saving,” she said. Then she bit her lip and scraped the rest of the cake into the garbage. “I forget,” she added, “how young you are.”

  Everyone seemed to be secretly fretting and fussing about me—including Dawid, who hovered around me as if protecting me from some phantom enemy. This puzzled me, for I was obviously all right; it was Wei whose life would remain in danger until he could leave Singapore.

  “Where will you go?” I asked Wei. “Home to Taiwan?”

  Wei shook his head. “I cannot go home to my father in a state of disgrace,” he said. “I will go to Malaya.”

  “To visit Omar, you mean?” I was astonished that he had not turned his back on his friend. After all, their friendship had put Wei’s whole life in jeopardy. “What will you do in Malaya?”

  “There are more than one hundred rivers in Malaya,” Wei said, “and many islands are in need of bridges and causeways. They need engineers. I do not have to pretend to be a doctor. Maybe I will get married.”

  “Married?” I said. Not once had I seen Wei walking with a girl.

  Wei smiled at my obvious surprise. Finally, he was beginning to gain back a little of the weight he had lost. I attributed this chiefly to Nei-Nei’s undying efforts to feed him as much pork-rib tea soup as possible. He touched a finger to the injury above his eye, tenderly, as if touching a lover’s hand. “You think not?” he said. “Would you not marry me?”

  “I would not marry you,” I said. I thought, if this was his idea of a proposal, it must surely be the strangest one in the world.

  “You are right to say no,” he said. “I love another.”

  This was also news. I had never noticed him paying attention to one Chinese girl over any other. “I hope she says yes,” I said.

  He laughed. “I doubt this very much,” he answered. “I loved a certain person ardently,” he told me, “and my love was not returned. —Yet out of that I have written these songs.”

  “You write songs?”

  “I am quoting the great American poet Walter Whitman,” he said. “If you like, I will loan you the book.”

  Another change, another loss. All too soon, Wei was standing in our front hallway, holding a red suitcase in his hand, a cap on his head. It made his round head look rounder; he looked, for the first time since I had known him, like a young man, and not a middle-aged pot-bellied man disguised as a student.

  British Grandfather was there in our grand front hall in his wheelchair to see him off, Danai standing just behind him, her hands resting on the back of the chair. Grandfather said, “Please do not thank me.”

  “I owe you everything, my life,” Wei answered gravely.

  I asked, “Where will you go now? What will you do?”

  Wei shrugged. “I will go wherever Omar is, and I will be happy. Someday you, too, will fall in love, and you will understand.”

  He smiled sadly at me, and then he left with his red suitcase, closing the door quietly.

  I heard Grandfather cough behind me. I whirled around. “Wei is in love with Omar Wahlid!” I said in amazement.

  “Yes,” said Grandfather.

  “You knew?”

  “That was one reason I could not let them put the poor fellow to death. Everything he did, he did for love.”

  Not long after Wei departed, Nei-Nei Down began talking very strangely. Muttering under her breath, day and night. She started complaining bitterly about the palace—how much work it was, too much expense. It was an old wreck falling down around our ears, she said. A burden. She was sick and tired of it. Now that two of our boarders were gone, perhaps at last we were free to go, too.

  I had never heard her utter such blasphemies before. I’d believed she was just as attached to Kampong Glam as I was—if not more. She had come to live in the palace as a young bride, barely more than a child, just sixteen years old. Her wedding photo shows the white columns of Kampong Glam behind her. Uncle Chachi was the best man. In the photo I like best she is leaning against him, as if trying to disappear, laughing, her hand covering her mouth. She always considered her protruding white teeth her worst feature. All of them—both sets of grandparents, and my great-uncle and great-aunt, as well as countless cousins and distant kin—had spent the happiest years of their lives under this palace roof. Here she had been a young bride, the young mother of my mother. In photographs, she is radiant, rose-cheeked.

  To my amazement, Uncle Chachi sided with Nei-Nei Down.

  “This palace,” he declared, “is old-fashioned and rotting to bits. Just once, I would like something up-to-date. One of those new three-bedroom apartments in the Rabbit Ear district”—this was the nickname for the nationally funded brick buildings that huddled side by side by side, like rabbit hutches. They were cheap, modern, and identical.

  “But you hate government housing,” I said. “You’ve always said so.”

  “Full electricity,” Uncle Chachi went on as if he had not heard me. “Indoor showers. The latest in household appliances. All the modern cons. Close to everything. Close to the mosque.”

  “We are close to the mosque now!” I cried, outraged. “And what’s to become of Sanang and Danai?”

  “The government will provide for them as well,” Uncle Chachi said, frowning at me. “I have looked into the matter.”

  “A young girl like you should not be chained to antiques,” said British Grandfather.

  “We are not antiques!” cried Nei-Nei Down. “And the girl loves it here—” But then she stopped herself. “But me, I detest it.”

  “What’s wrong with all of you?” I cried. “Has everyone gone mad?”

  “Perhaps your relations long for an easier, simpler life,” Dawid told me later. We discussed these things earnestly, out of earshot of the old folks. “It happens, as people get older. They crave stability, simplicity.” Dawid was always near me these days, as if he thought I were some delicate creature who might dissolve. But I felt I had never been more clearheaded. Indeed, I believed I was the only completely rational creature left in the palace.

  I tried approaching the family with logical, practical suggestions.

  “We could close off a few of the rooms,” I said. “Save expenses that way.”

  “No,” said Grandfather. “It is too late for that.”

  “I am not leaving,” I said.

  “Agnes—,” British Grandfather began, but Nei-Nei Down interrupted angrily.

  “You say that now, but someday you w
ill meet a man, and he will want to live under his own roof with you. He won’t want a lot of old relatives around. He won’t want to live in this decrepit place. And you yourself will feel differently.”

  “I will not. Never.” I did not reveal what I was secretly thinking—that Geoffrey Brown already seemed to be in love with our palace, that he liked the residents, and was considerate of each one of them. As for me, I was head over heels. And I was being courted by the handsomest, most charming man in the world. We had seen each other numerous times, Geoffrey Brown and I. Once he left his beautifully carved cane by our front door, and I returned it to his office, taking a tram to deliver it. Was it my imagination, or did the other passengers look at me with envy as the ward of such a beautiful object? Brown sent violets to thank me. With a note on violet-colored paper, in black ink, his strangely masculine, scrawled hand. At first, we seemed to run into each other at the Kampong Glam Palace by accident, but we had lately dropped this ruse and become, in a manner of speaking, friends. There was always a slight formality between us, even when he first took my hand and held it. He looked startled to find my hand clasped in his; my heart was hammering so hard I could barely feel my own fingers.

  We kept our budding romance a secret. In front of my family, he treated me as courteously as ever. I tried to act indifferent to his comings and goings, under Nei-Nei’s watchful eye. She did not trust any young man, and she had never gotten over her initial dislike of Geoffrey Brown in particular. But my secret dream life was my own, a separate existence from the life in which I moved, spoke, and acted like an ordinary schoolgirl. My inner world was as vast, unlimited, and enchanted as any fairy tale.

  I could imagine Geoffrey simply parking his long black car behind the palace at the end of each day. We could take one of the large bedrooms together on the third floor, perhaps the unused red one with the peony wallpaper. When I showed him this room, he took several snaps of it; he shot the view of the garden from the bay window. He was the only man I had ever met who appreciated the palace and its beauty as much as I did.

  And he was equally passionate about Singapore, which of course, as a native, I often took for granted. “The first time I landed in Singapore,” he told me, “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.” Geoffrey was in every way a progressive. He believed in the future. He believed in Singapore’s place in that future. For him, it was almost a religion, and he could not bear when people spoke of Singapore as a backwater place. He was zealous. “For true progress to be made, a generation must be sacrificed,” he said.

  My time alone with Geoffrey became sweeter as life at home became more difficult. Ever since that terrible dark night of Deepavali, our world had turned upside down. Somehow it never righted itself. As rainy as November had been, December was even wetter. Barely a day went by without an early morning rain shower and an afternoon thunderstorm. I think all of that rain unhinged British Grandfather’s mind. He kept forgetting that he was bound to his wheelchair, that he no longer lived in London. He would wake in the middle of the night and try to use the bathroom himself. One night he crawled to the kitchen. And he was behaving strangely in other, more dangerous ways.

  For instance, British Grandfather began holding bonfires at night, behind the palace. Little Danai did most of the work, while British Grandfather oversaw the flames. These were beautiful but dangerous. More than once, I had to drag the fire farther from the door, to keep Grandfather from burning down the whole palace. None of us had any idea what he was burning. Some of it was rubbish, but much of it appeared to be papers, documents and letters and so on. I found him poking the embers with a long stick, stirring the white edges of the paper around until they caught fire, too, curled up, and disappeared.

  “What are these things, Grandfather?” I once asked.

  He turned his head sharply to look at me. “Nothing important,” he said. “But they weigh me down. I like to leave things tidy.”

  “I don’t like to leave things at all,” I said.

  “I know you don’t,” he answered, stirring the ash with his stick. “But it is an art you will have to learn to master.”

  NINE

  A True British Christmas

  For us—a largely Buddhist and Muslim family—Christmas had always been a minor holiday, a pleasant excuse to overeat and indulge in strange, non-Singaporean foods, like puddings. But that year, British Grandfather demanded a full-blown, traditional Christmas. He wanted everyone to have presents, he said. He insisted that we buy and decorate a tree.

  Of course, we had to do everything on the cheap. It was a bad time for extravagance. We no longer had the income from Omar Wahlid and the student Wei, nor did it seem likely we would find a new boarder in the palace’s current state of disrepair. I suspected, too, that the gathering of Singapore police on the night of Deepavali had done nothing to help our reputation as landlords. No one wanted to live where there had been an attempted bombing, but this was less dreadful than the idea of living in a place where the police descended in droves. Not one prospective renter had yet responded to Uncle Chachi’s flowery Room Available ad in The Straits Times.

  Because we had never had a Christmas tree, all of our decorations were left over from Chinese festivals, complemented by a few bright items I managed to salvage from Deepavali. Traditional Christmas trees did not grow in Singapore, so Nei-Nei Down took me with her into a nearby wood to find something suitable. She was delighted when we happened upon a stand of gooseberry trees. We dug up one sturdy sapling, wrapped the roots in burlap, and transplanted it into a rice pot that Danai had accidentally blackened and burned. The gooseberry leaves, Nei-Nei Down assured me, made a delicious vegetable dish. And the root bark of the gooseberry provided powerful medicine. She insisted on carrying the tree back to the palace herself, wrapped up like a royal infant in burlap bunting. Soon the gooseberry was swimming with paper golden fish from the Chinese New Year Festival, red ribbons from the Autumn Moon, bells and garlands from Deepavali. You could barely see the branches beneath all the glittering splendor.

  But British Grandfather—that gentle soul, who had never in my presence uttered a word of discontent—turned away from our tree in disgust. At first he refused even to look at it. He kept his eyes fixed on the wooden floor. “Is it too much to ask,” he said, “for one decent English Christmas?”

  Nei-Nei Down went away muttering furiously under her breath. Uncle Chachi looked crestfallen. He put one hand on my shoulder. “I knew there were too many colors,” he said.

  Undaunted, Nei-Nei Down threw herself into preparations for Christmas dinner as if she were the one true veteran of the family, and this holiday a war. She ordered a turkey from the Zan-Khee Market. She went to the greengrocer’s in the Colonial district and purchased all sorts of strange items: white button mushrooms and green stalks of celery the color of pale jade; watercress and a tin of cranberries; fresh chestnuts. We puzzled over the recipes in her cookbook, The Englishwoman’s All-in-One Cookbook: Little-Known Secrets. Nei-Nei Down had never once followed a recipe and had been given this book as a wedding gift. The Englishwoman’s recipes included foreign mysteries such as Yorkshire Pudding and Deluxe Roast Beef. Geoffrey Brown helped me to acquire the black-market beef, which Nei-Nei Down regarded in disgust. We seldom ate red meat; her dishes consisted of rice and vegetables, seafood and fish with a little duck or chicken now and then for variety. The hunk of roast beef sat bleeding into its brown paper in the middle of the kitchen. It looked as if it had been sawed from the side of some poor cow.

  “Maybe it is like medicine,” Nei-Nei Down said hopefully. “If this dish brings him back to us, so be it.” I knew she worried about British Grandfather. To his face, she was often short-tempered and irate, complaining over his poor appetite and grumbling when he was too tired for his usual round of Five Stones or cribbage with Uncle Chachi. She seemed to believe she could bully him back into health.

  But behind Grandfather’s back,
she was kind and considerate. “We must remember to take our shoes off at the door, so as not to disturb British Grandfather,” she would say. She visited the Chinese herbalist and purchased countless concoctions and sweet-smelling teas. For his sake, she even let me obtain noisy Christmas crackers, though she must have known that they, like the bleeding side of beef, came through the detestable offices of her nemesis, Geoffrey Brown.

  Nei-Nei limited Geoffrey’s visits to twenty minutes or less, and he nearly always remained closeted alone with Grandfather during these brief stays. Geoffrey was unlike any young man I had ever known. He was only twenty-two, yet he had accomplished so much. I honestly wondered when he found time to eat or sleep. He seemed to appear at our doorstep as if he’d been delivered in a box—neatly pressed, correctly dressed, and smiling, with one of his adorable crooked teeth pointing in. Little lovesick Danai continued to worship him—his courteous manners and his golden hair were an ever-fascinating topic of secret conversation between us. Of course, I relished any excuse to talk about him or hear his name. Such is the foolishness of lovers—I managed to wrangle an invitation for Geoffrey to Christmas dinner, under the guise that British Grandfather might find something heartening in the company of a fellow Englishman.

  “Anything is possible,” admitted Nei-Nei Down. “As long as he doesn’t exhaust your grandfather’s strength by staying all night.”

  “He won’t,” I assured her. “This is Brown’s holiday, too. I’m sure he has other visits to pay.”

  “Perhaps,” said Nei-Nei.

  “And he may know some Christmas traditions we would overlook,” added Uncle Chachi, coming around the corner.

  Nei-Nei Down crossed her hands over her chest. “Stop sneaking up,” she said. “You’ll give me heart failure, and then who will cook this big Christmas dinner?” She made a face. “So much fuss over one little baby,” she said.