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Shadow Theatre

Page 12

by Fiona Cheong


  Che' Halimah, she was watching me as I turned my face away, watching me as I went down her front steps. She knew I had seen what I did not wish to see. I could feel her hand as if it was on my back, stroking me.

  Then I heard the door close. Then I wondered, how had I known that was a kris he was holding? How come I had been able to see what was on the ground, at his feet?

  I could hear the voice, speaking as if not from inside the house, as if coming from the air itself. Someone was asking, "Like this?" The one in the corridor. I knew it must be her.

  Che' Halimah was saying, "No, slowly. Arrange carefully. Take your time."

  "Like this?" the one in the corridor asked again. I could hear she was young, maybe only a few years older than Abdul.

  "Slower."

  Jibrail-Gabriel, you would say-he was silent. Him the witness and the messenger. This knowledge came to me like something spoken, but not within my understanding. Only Mahmud used to understand things like that, everyone saying Mahmud had magic in him. He would touch the soil, and watch how the roots of trees were growing, in which directions. Whenever you couldn't find him at home, you knew he was in the graveyard. Sitting underneath a tree, studying the leaves when they floated down. Why he did not have enough magic to save himself when the thieves came? Not enough to save Kadir, Noi, Bettina. Only me and Abdul. Only us two were left, and Bapa, because Mahmud had told me to go with Bapa when Bapa went out to the shop that night, and to take Abdul along.

  Abdul was the one to hope in now. Day after day I would tell myself, concentrate on Abdul.

  That night I still didn't know, what had happened to me.

  "Will they come back?" the one in the corridor was asking.

  "One of them will come back."

  This one. It's this one, ya?"

  "Betul. Good. And the other one?"

  "The other one ... "

  "Not the boy."

  "The other one ... I can't see her."

  "Slowly."

  "Where's the other one?"

  "Slowly. Don't move your hand so fast. See, your arrangement is not right. Concentrate."

  Quiet, Che' Halimah's voice. Patient like the angels.

  "Who's that?"

  "Look closely. Look again."

  "This one will die."

  "And the baby?"

  "A baby will live."

  "Correct. Betul. Good."

  THE RAIN WAS fierce when it came, the sky loose as if the universe was fighting, as if everywhere trees were bursting open, as if petals were exploding, the wind slashing the bunga kubur to shreds. Birds were screaming in the leaves, and while the water poured down, the air smelled like blood, as if somewhere nearby, blood was dripping through the night.

  After that, it was over. That Saturday morning at sunrise, there was not a sign left.

  Abdul, he was so protected, the rain didn't wake him. Bapa also, when we went to see him in the hospital, he wondered how come he had slept through a thunderstorm like that. All the nurses were chattering about it, he said. Only I had been awake. I the only witness in our kampong.

  Now you.

  ALIKA COULDN'T REMEMBER most of what she had been dreaming about as she roused herself out of the cane armchair to answer the phone, which had been ringing for some time in the living room. (Malika had heard it while asleep, an ambiguous melody forming in the distance.) There had been a river in her dream, a glistening expanse of iridescent water, vibrant with slippery shapes beneath the surface. Malika could still hear a voice calling to her from the riverbank as she groped her way around the door jamb and towards Madam's rosewood stand. (She hadn't noticed yet that the bulb in the patio lamp had blown its fuse, nor was Malika aware of the book in her lap slipping to the floor when she had stood up, so concentrated were her efforts on recovering the details of her dream before she was fully awake and lost them.) She couldn't be sure as the voice faded if it had been a man's or a woman's, or a child's. What she had heard, first, was a flurry of leaves, and then that voice fanning out over the water like praises to Allah broadcast from one of the old mosques in the evening. (Sali would ask if it could have belonged to the man in the songkok but Malika would say no, something about this dream had felt different to her. It didn't have the ambiance of her old recurring nightmares.)

  Madam's rosewood stand was underneath the window with the mango tree outside. It was hand-carved (found in the same shop in which Madam had bought her jewelry boxes), with slim notched legs to resemble bamboo, and three square shelves. Phone hooks sat on the bottom shelf, the phone was on the middle shelf, and on the top shelf was a miniature jade tree (freed, like the Italian sculptor Michelangelo's angels, from a rock of pink jade), its opalescent leaves upturned as if surrounded by rushing wind. (Madam used to keep the tree wrapped in brown paper and stored in a cupboard in her bedroom, to protect it while the children were growing up, but in 1982, while Malika was helping Madam clean out various cupboards around the house on the weekend that Michelle was leaving for Australia, the tree had been taken out and set on the rosewood stand as a temporary measure-"Just till I can find the right home for it," Madam had said. Michelle's husband had just been transferred by the textile company for which he worked to Perth, and Madam and Malika had had only had a few months to get used to the idea. On that weekend, the thought that none of the children was likely ever to live in Singapore again had exploded with such ferocity in both of their hearts, only the most mundane and repetitive of tasks were manageable. Malika would remember how before it had occurred to Madam to clean out the cupboards, the two of them had dusted and polished all of the furniture and mopped the floor in every room. Even the windows and sliding doors had been washed, Madam getting down on her knees and scrubbing the steel grooves with the mindful attention of a servant. She, Malika, couldn't explain why the jade tree was still on the stand, where it had since lost six and a half leaves, the tip of the seventh most recently. This last one had been broken by the youngest of Michelle's girls, Nicole, who had started learning to walk last December. Caroline's and Francesca's boys had each had his turn when they were Nicole's age, all except for the eldest, Brendan, the gentle and musically minded one, the one Madam would not admit was her favorite).

  She fingered the jagged nub left by one of the missing leaves as she lifted the receiver with her other hand.

  "Malika?"

  It was Madam, sounding worried. Malika glanced over her shoulder at the clock and saw it was half-past nine. "Yes, Madam, everything's okay at home," she said promptly. "Sorry, Madam, I fell asleep while reading."

  "Alamak, you. Gave me quite a scare, you know."

  Malika could hear in the background the papery rush of wind through treetops and a scattering of leaves on a hard surface (perhaps a cement pavement or the tarmac of a car park). "Sorry, Madam," she said again, wondering where Madam was and what had led Madam finally to use the hand phone Caroline had given to her at Christmas, which Caroline had programmed so that her own hand phone number, Francesca's and Michelle's, and Madam's home phone number could each be dialed with a single press of a button. Madam had been carrying the phone around in her handbag, insisting she didn't know how to use it-"One can't teach an old dog new tricks," Malika would hear her say, whenever the topic of computers arose, particularly the topic of the government's mandating the use of computers in the school curriculum. (It was Caroline who was paying Singapore Telecoms directly for global service on Madam's phone, afraid that if she left it up to her mother, Madam would willfully let the account lapse.)

  Madam didn't tell Malika where she was or whether she had been driving around all the while. What she told Malika was that she was going to stop at the Newton hawker center for a bowl of tau suan. She had called to ask if Malika would like some tau suan or another kind of dessert (as Malika had several favorite desserts and one couldn't easily guess at what she might have a taste for, and Madam would know this, having had Malika in her house since Malika was twelve).

  Malika imagined the
sweet, glutinous lentils sticking to her palate, too sweet for what she wanted on this night. She pondered her other options (knowing all the stalls at Newton well, where each stall was situated and which might be closed due to an illness or a family vacation). A slice of tapioca cake? She wouldn't have minded a slice of tapioca cake, but as her favorite nyonya stall was nowhere near Madam's favorite tau suan stall, Malika settled on pulot hitam from a stall just down the aisle from the latter. She realized as she gave Madam her answer that she would have preferred tapioca cake to the sweet rice, craving suddenly the aftertaste of coconut milk when baked, but then what she wanted more than a savory comfort was for Madam not to weave her way around more tables than was necessary, traipse past all those hungry eyes, listen to the carnivorous longing manifested in sighs and low whistles (although from what I've heard and to which Malika would agree eventually, Madam herself didn't appear flustered by the men, so accustomed was she to their intrusive stares, to their cheap gestures of desire in the fluorescent public light-boys had been following Madam home from school and whistling at her from hawker tables along the Malaccan roadside ever since she was a young girl, when her breasts were only just starting to grow and she was wearing basic cotton bras of the market variety, size 28, three for fifteen cents).

  "Malika, if you're tired, don't wait up for me-ah?" Madam was saying. "I'll put the pulot hitam in the fridge and it'll be there for your breakfast. Okay?"

  When Madam hung up, the click at the end of the line was so quiet, Malika almost missed it. She listened for a moment longer, then put the receiver back in its cradle.

  Beyond the lower branches of the mango tree caught in a splash of light from the living room windows, Madam's garden was a sea of black and gray leaves (Malika's own words when later she described the darkness outside). There was a stillness to the air interrupted only by the slender shimmer of the white posts of the car porch, and a glint of fencing at the edge along the hibiscus bushes of the family next-door. (Malika thought she could see the umbrella tops of the family's papaya trees as well, but she wasn't sure if this was only because she knew the trees were there.) Nothing was moving in the sugar cane, not a frog or a snail or the tremor of a breeze. The British gentleman's house over the wall on the other side of Madam's garden was silent, as were all of the neighboring houses, and even the insects seemed asleep in the grass.

  It was then that Malika recalled her earlier sense of foreboding (realizing at the same time that the patio lamp was out, she was turning away from the windows to get a new bulb from the storage cabinet in the kitchen when she noticed the upper windows in the next-door family's house, and the head of one of the children leaning over a windowsill-Malika wasn't sure which child it was, but when she thought about it later, she would wonder if something in the child's posture had hinted to her it was the daughter, who must have climbed onto a chair to look out at something in the garden. But at what was anyone's guess, as all Malika could hear when she looked back upon this night was its soundlessness, and a soft trickle of rain, peculiar only because the rain would fall elsewhere on the island, miles away in the vicinity of Miss Shakilah's neighborhood, where Sali and I were).

  Malika switched on the light in the corridor and made her way towards the kitchen, past the photographs of Madam's grandchildren on the walls. (Some had been taken during their visits to Singapore, a few when Madam had gone to visit them, always without Malika because much of the family's savings had been depleted by Madam's husband's illness and because visas to Western countries were hard to get for someone suspected of travelling as an employee, which was why the photographs of Madam's trips were for Malika inexplicably painful and pleasurable, as on the one hand she missed how things used to be, when Madam had taken her on all of the family's vacations-to Cameron Highlands, Bali, Sydney-and on the other hand Malika missed the children, both Madam's daughters and the grandchildren. She missed seeing and hearing them wandering about the house, sweat gleaming off their faces like the shine off freshwater pearls).

  She paused as she often did at the last of the photographs, which showed Madam and Brendan laughing into the camera on their way to Sentosa Island in September of 1978 (the year Brendan was three and Francesca had flown home after only eight months in London, armed with complaints about the lack of spice in English food, which Malika hadn't doubted had been one of Francesca's reasons for coming home for a visit so soon, but as Madam had suspected as well-she had confessed as much to Malika-it probably hadn't been the only reason).

  One could almost hear Madam laughing in the photograph as she pressed her face into Brendan's curls and sniffed at the salt and sunshine in his hair. It had been a windy day. There were waves in the water and Malika could feel the tickling of the wind through the collar of Brendan's blue-and-white-striped T-shirt. She could feel Madam's happiness, absolute and full, as if that visit of Francesca's hadn't been at all worrisome for her, which Malika knew wasn't so. (It had been completely out of character for Francesca to leave her job, even temporarily, more so for her to stay with her parents for two months. When asked how it was that her husband didn't mind, Francesca had replied airily that as Gareth had been promoted recently and was overwhelmed with new responsibilities at his father's law firm, he had welcomed the opportunity not to have the children underfoot for a whileBrendan wasn't much of a problem, but Bryce at eighteen months was prone to throwing tantrums. "Gareth's not used to living in the same house as someone with a temper," Malika would remember Francesca's saying to Madam. Both she and Madam had intuited that Francesca was referring to her father, in his healthier days. Everyone in the family had been used to him.)

  Malika didn't know if Madam had ever asked Francesca directly if there was turmoil brewing in her marriage. (Francesca's other visits home weren't clouded in the same way. She would never again return for more than a week's holiday, although the boys would sometimes stay a month. Whatever marital distress there was appeared to have dissipated over time, and the topic had not arisen since. If there was anyone who knew for sure, it would be Caroline or Michelle, but the sisters were loyal and Malika knew one would never betray another's confidence.)

  A breeze lifted the hem of the window curtain above the sink as she stepped past the photograph of Madam and Brendan and entered the kitchen (before her hand touched the light switch). Malika saw the ashy white lace shudder like a naked shoulder across the room. She would speak later of the impression she had had of moonlight grazing a collarbone, and of a scar nestled at the base of a throat, a tiny white scar shaped like a clipped cuticle. Then her thumb had hit the switch and the fluorescent light came on, and Malika could not determine if she had only imagined there had been someone in the room. (And so there would always be loose ends when she talked about this night. Even the shape of the scar was a loose end, as when Sali asked, "Why compare it to a clipped cuticle, Malika? Why not use something more poetic, like a crescent moon or something," all Malika could do was shake her head and caress her red bead, smiling inwardly at the endless fraying of clarity. Was it simply her imagination or was there some truth to the somewhat visionary texture of the moment? Was enlightenment possible only if one endured fracture and incompleteness of meaning?)

  Of course such thoughts would occur to Malika only later. As the kitchen light flooded the room she reminded herself visions were bestowed only upon saints or poets (of any religion, and only later would it occur to us to wonder if when Westerners spoke of visions, sometimes they had seen ghosts). Malika stepped towards the storage cabinet, flipped open the pale oak door, took out the box of light bulbs, and plucked one from its cardboard pocket. As she set the box back on the upper shelf of the cabinet, she sensed again a chilling foreboding, this time like the blunt tip of a knife against her tailbone. Malika could feel then the existence of a common world between the girl in the sugar cane and the shoulder, the collarbone, the throat and the scar. But as she was neither poet nor saint, for months (until the birth of Miss Shakilah's baby), Malika would ascribe these
sensations to her imagination, overflowing wave upon wave like the heartache in Madam's house.

  She closed the door of the cabinet, switched off the kitchen light and as she left the room, a lizard crossed the floor behind her, flicking its quick, small tongue.

  ~c »t I : I I M L ti l i i t MAN wearing the songkok would visit Malika only for a minute. At those times he wouldn't enter the room, but remain outside in the passageway, his scent stealing across her floor from the crack underneath the door (a syrupy blend of rose oil, sandalwood, and some kind of fruit). At other times Malika would open her eyes to see him standing by the windowsill, the bone of his arm visible through his sleeve as he rested his hand (always his left hand) palm down on the narrow ledge. (When the moon was full the massive shadows of the flamboyant trees would waver against the translucent glass, the separate branches indistinguishable at this hour. On the floor by Malika's bed the moonlight would fall in a broken square as it passed over the top of the man's songkok, grazing the tip of his shoulder and the line of his arm. Malika would remember these facts in plodding fashion when the day arrived on which she began to doubt the rationale of boundaries prescribed between truth and imagination (Miss Shakilah's words to Madam during another of their conversations). She would wonder then (as she would remember Miss Shakilah wondering) if beyond one's cognitive senses there was a door swinging back and forth between the two, if truth was a cave within what one perceived to be merely a memory, or a nightmare or a dream, or a fantasy inspired by a library book. The flamboyant trees looming outside her window, the cut of moonlight on her floor, the tilt of the man's songkok and the angle of his arm, even the way the cuff of his sleeve touched the windowsill-they would return to her with a significance inarticulable to anyone else, but from what we could see, it brought her moments of peace and in the end that would have to be enough.)

 

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