Shadow Theatre

by Fiona Cheong

  That's what they say, and no one mentions the sticks tied to the widow's fence the night the daughter was giving birth. My mother's friends say it was Sister Rosalind's mother's idea (whom we've never seen visiting Sister Rosalind at school-Maria says why would her mother come, Sister Rosalind won't talk to anyone and not even to the other nuns, which is true-Sister Rosalind mostly stays in her room, although some nights on retreat, or so we hear, girls have seen her sitting in the lime orchard, her back all straight on the stone bench, her gaze fixed far ahead in the distance, as if someone were coming towards her or as if Sister Rosalind's caught up remembering when someone was). My mother's friends say it took Sister Rosalind's mother over an hour to arrange the sticks, because they had to be tied straight, with all the sharp ends pointing up, an even row of makeshift swords to pierce Pontianak's belly, should she venture to fly over and try to steal the baby. But Sister Rosalind's mother wasn't in the room when the baby was born, because although she was a neighbor, she wasn't close to the widow like family.

  They say it's sheer coincidence this happened exactly twelve years ago, in 1994 when Maria was born, a year before me. (The lady Coco Han's sister disappeared that year, too). Maria's never wondered as I have, why no one knows where the baby's buried, or if a funeral was even held. Auntie Eve says the baby was taken away in an ambulance, and I don't ask her much else, because I know she knows Maria and I don't talk about this, and I won't betray Maria.

  But Auntie Eve knows, too, about Maria's dreams, and she knows I know. (Maria says it's always the same girl calling her over to the sugar cane. She says the girl's trying to make her see something, but all Maria ever remembers is the girl's bracelet sliding down her wrist, a string of green stones. She says whenever she tries to walk over to the girl, she wakes up. Malika knows about these dreams as well. You can tell Malika knows from the way she watches Maria. But Malika doesn't speak much, and I swear she must be a hundred years old and whackocrazy, but Maria loves Malika, so I don't say anything about it.)

  I had noticed the widow as soon as Maria and I were in the church, as she was the only other person there. She was over at the candles, and I thought she was just some Catholic lady, kneeling before one of the tall marble statues along the left wall (of St. Anthony, I found later, who's the patron saint of lost things), and she had seemed to be praying so intently, gazing up at the statue as if it were the saint himself, his face benevolent in the flickering light. So I wasn't on guard. Maria and I had our backs to her when she came up to us. We were facing the church doors, watching for the other choir members to arrive.

  Before I could stop her, Maria was telling the widow her name.

  "Maria Thumboo," she said, her voice echoing fearlessly in the foyer.

  The widow smiled, and I could see it in her face that she recognized Maria, even though they had never met. I could see she knew who Maria was, who she is, and that I've been right all along.

  S E E R I I I'S BA N E) L'S E I) to go after young girls. They're saying the widow had always suspected his nature, but before she had married this man, she had loved him madly and allowed herself a moment's indiscretion, telling herself he felt the same, and she wouldn't admit he was marrying her only for her family's money, which they say remains her money even though her family's cut her off. That happened when the family found out about my Auntie Bettina, when my grandmother told them. My mother was four when my Auntie Bettina was raped, and my auntie herself was only fifteen. That was when the widow should have known she had averted her eyes long enough, but my mother says she wouldn't face the fact her husband would never change, until the day she found her own daughter bleeding on her bed.

  This, too, was long before Maria and I were born, before even my Uncle Abdul was born, and before the robbery in which almost everyone in our family would be slaughtered like pigs. My mother says my Auntie Bettina was working as a hotel maid at the Goodwood, to help the family make ends meet, because we were poor and my auntie was the eldest daughter. She says the widow's husband was waiting for my auntie when she got off the bus that night, but my auntie didn't know she was being waylaid, because the widow's husband was handsome and charming, and he was a neighbor, and he was a father with a baby daughter at home. They had spoken before, so when he offered to walk her back to the kampong, she accepted, won over by his good looks and his charm but also because it was past midnight and she was often afraid, walking home by herself.

  He raped her near the tadpole pond, halfway between the kampong compound and the road. My auntie was in such shock, she walked home after that without putting her clothes back on (later, my mother would have to accompany her second eldest sister, my Auntie Noi, to the pond to retrieve the muddied blue dress and torn white panties). My mother was the first to notice my Auntie Bettina appearing out of the trees. She had woken up to pee and happened to be outside. There was a full moon, she says, and she watched her sister stepping out of the trees as naked as an animal, and when my auntie came closer, my mother saw the blood on her legs and that was when she screamed.

  No one heard the widow scream when she found her daughter, but it was what made her give in, in the end, that sweep of excruciating shame and loss of face and unabated fury. Some time had passed since my grandmother had spoken to the widow's family, and then on a rainy November night, when the air was especially potent and sweet, the widow was seen coming down the steps outside Che' Halimah's house. My mother remembers the frangipani around the house glowing that night as if the flowers were tiny lanterns, about the size of children's hands.

  She says I'm almost too young to hear all this, but old enough because I look older than I am, she says, because I'm tall for my age, and my breasts are developing, and I'm pretty.

  Not as pretty as Maria, though. I know Maria's prettier, even though Maria worries about how flat she is, because Maria's seen my breasts when we shower. Even if beauty's in the eye of the beholder, I feel Maria's prettiness. I feel it in my heart's unreeling at the sight of her, faster than a fish line hooked to a shark heading for deep water when she touches me, when she touches my breast to know how touching a breast feels. I feel it, and sometimes I think I want to kiss her. But sometimes I just want to look at her. Sometimes when we're sitting side by side, doing nothing but just talking, my heart flies like a kite let loose so high up in the sky it has become invisible, and all that's left is the fine thread tugging at me in the wind.

  My mother and I don't talk about Maria anymore, these days, not since she found out about Maria's dreams. Her face bangs shut whenever I say Maria's name, as if there's something there she would rather I not know. So I don't tell her how Derek Ashley's breaking my heart even though he hasn't yet seen Maria, because they haven't exactly met, not yet, but they will, because Maria's got it planned, and I know when they do, he'll fall for her, head over heels, even if she's flatter than a pancake right now, which is how Maria puts it.

  Because she won't be for long, and it isn't true that she's even as flat as she thinks. I've felt the bumps on Maria's chest, the rise around her nipples, which are softer than the rest of her at first, then wrinkle like raisins, just like mine.

  Maybe that was what made it possible for the widow to catch us by surprise. Because my attention was on Maria the whole time and she hadn't told me she had found out about Derek Ashley's being in the choir, and I was looking in the other direction and puzzling over why she would want us to waste every Saturday afternoon in a church, among those mournful marble statues and eerie white candles, with the prayers of the sick and lonely Catholics hanging over our heads like curses. (There seem to he a lot of sick and lonely people among the Catholics, and sometimes I wonder if it's because they're not allowed to visit a bomoh or believe in reincarnation, only in heaven and hell and purgatory, and because all Catholics get sent to purgatory first, no matter what they do. Or so it seems, because we're always offering prayers for them during Assembly at St. Agnes, after we've sung the National Anthem and recited the Pledge.)

&n
bsp; Whatever the reason for my inattentiveness, I was there with Maria, and my mother says we're responsible for every life that shares our path in this world, whether it's the life of a plant or an animal or another human being.

  But that's not why I did it.

  BFC'At SF. MARIA WAS wearing her new perfume yesterday and her skin was fragrant when we were in the foyer, fragrant like jasmine in the dark, like pandan leaves when it rains, like the world when we're listening to it from inside the cemetery (where we're not supposed to go, but what my mother and Auntie Eve don't know can't hurt us, and Maria agrees with me on this). That was why, and my heart knows it. But if Auntie Eve asks, I'm going to say it's because I recognized the widow, and she found out Maria's name, and I knew Maria might be in danger because that must have been why Auntie Eve had kept the truth from her all these years. I'll say that's why I decided to tell her, because I wasn't ready when the widow came up to us and Maria had already given the widow her name.

  I didn't mean to tell Maria everything, just who Valerie Nair really was. I decided I would just say it.

  "She's your grandmother," I said. And she's crazy."

  This was about five minutes later, after I had managed to get Maria away from the widow, and we were still at the church but outside, on the steps. There was still no sign of the choir members. I could feel the breeze sweeping down through the fan palms across the church driveway, and on the road, a few cars passed with sunlight bouncing off their rearview mirrors. We were on the Changi Road side of the church, so I knew at least some of the choir members would be coming from the other side, the Siglap Hill side, where the car park is, and the parish house. (So I didn't think we might be there at the wrong time, because some of the members could have arrived already and might be hanging out in the parish house.)

  Maria thought I was joking, at first. She laughed and pushed me in her playful way, and said, "You're the crazy one."

  "I'm not joking," I said. "That's why you don't know. She killed your grandfather, okay? She used black magic on him. That's why you were adopted by your Auntie Eve, to hide you from your crazy grandmother."

  Maria already knew she was adopted, and I knew she knew, even though we don't talk about that. So I wasn't hurting her feelings. But I hadn't meant to tell her about what the widow had done, and I didn't know until the words were out of my mouth that I would say all that.

  She stared at me as if I had just slapped her face, as if I had slapped her hard, as I would never do.

  You can't take your words back once they're out. You can't, so I just looked at her and hoped she would say something, anything, to let me know what to say next.

  "Why are you saying that?" she asked, her voice lowering to a hush, shaky with disbelief.

  I shrugged my shoulders. I felt miserable, but I still thought if I could get Maria to believe me, and believe that we had to leave the church immediately, since the widow was still inside, then she might even change her mind about joining the choir. Then she and I could go do what we usually do on Saturdays and Sundays. We could ride the bus to Ocean Theatre and see a cheap matinee, or window-shop at Katong Shopping Center and try on new jeans at Bibi and Baba and read the new T-shirt slogans, or we could cycle to Marine Parade and feed bread crumbs to the fish weaving about in the water in the lagoon, and walk in the waves on the beach, and sit on the sand, side by side, and talk into the sunset, with our arms and elbows rubbing, and her perfume blowing in the saltwater breeze.

  But Maria looked at me a long time, and then she said, calmly, "I'm going to ask my Auntie Eve if you're lying."

  And I saw her expression had changed, and I knew there was no way she would change her mind about the choir. I knew it even before she turned and stepped back into the church, without looking to see if I would follow her.

  That was yesterday.

  Today I'm remembering watching Maria as she disappeared into the dim foyer, slipping in between the church doors. I'm remembering her shoulders, and the curve of her arms in her sleeveless white blouse with the tiny lace collar and the five tiny buttons shaped like starfish down her back.

  My heart is falling as if it will never stop. Somewhere far inside me, it just falls and falls, without making a sound.

  HAT I REMEMBER about that morning is the moonlight, slipping so white through the branches of the jacaranda onto the cement floor of the hotel room balcony, and the air smelling sweet like a rebirth, like freedom. Dawn at the edges of my mind, but nowhere around us that I could see, for outside were only the dark fields and groves of trees furrowed so prettily by the moonlight, and the kampong, hidden by the trees, where the boy who had set up the meeting for me was sleeping, and the river, a black ribbon winding through the moonlight, in which the kampong families bathed and washed their things and where their sewer water emptied, all into the same river. Not that I had asked the boy about it. All I had asked him was how well he knew the man who was going to handle the whole thing-I wanted to know if he was trustworthy, of course. The man, I mean, not the boy. I trusted the boy, perhaps because he was still a boy, no older than fourteen or fifteen, I would think. My brother's age, or the age my brother would have been (the doctors couldn't explain what made him stop breathing six months after he was born, except to say sometimes that sort of thing happened)-"He's my uncle," the boy had said to me in answer to my question, and then he had added, "You want to know what I'm going to do with the money?" And that was when he had told me about the kampong and how we rich Singaporeans were spoiled, complaining about hardship when we had never tasted true hardship. And then he had apologized, of course-I think he may have had a slight crush on me. But he could also see I was genuinely distressed, because I was. You didn't get that sort of information from brochures, or from history books for that matter, in those days. And I was only twenty-three, and still very unexposed.

  Not that the boy was trying to get me to change my mind-why would he? He wanted the money. But if there had been a moment when I could have turned back, it would have been that moment, while he was talking about the kampong and I wondered, briefly only, if I myself was asking for too much. So why didn't I turn back? Was your Auntie Eve born with evil already in her soul?

  You will have to decide, my darling.

  IT WAS AI.VIN who had booked our room. Cameron Highlands was one of his haunts, you see, ever since he was a boy. I, on the other hand, had never left Singapore before our honeymoon. Anywhere else he could have chosen for us to go, I would have been as much of a stranger as I was at that hotel, so the locale didn't matter. And the room they had given us was lovely, very modern, very clean, and as the hotel was on a slope, we had that view of the countryside that I was admiring in the moonlight on the morning I was to meet the boy's uncle.

  I was on the balcony only a few minutes. Someone may have seen me, but what would anyone have thought? Just another rich man's wife, or his daughter, who was having trouble sleeping. And if another woman had seen me? She may have suspected more, but I wouldn't think it would have been enough. If a woman had seen me, she herself might have been some tycoon's wife or daughter, staying at the hotel on holiday with her family. Unless she was a prostitute, or one of the maids ... Not that this possibility of being noticed or recognized had even entered my mind, of course. Not that I had much of a plan, you see. Nor would anyone step forward later to say that he or she had seen me on the balcony around four o'clock that morning, or that shortly after that, he or she had seen a woman leaving the hotel by herself and walking off in the direction of the kampong and the river, carrying a small bundle by her side, too large to be a purse and too small to be any kind of food sack, the kind of bundle you might make from a wide silk scarf, for instance, if your purse couldn't hold all the dollar notes you needed to take with you. Not that I was ever at risk of getting caught, because Halimah's medicine was undetectable.

  Are you sure you want to hear more? Now you've gone and kachaued whomever you could find, are you at all closer to the truth? You must decide, that's
right.

  All right, then. Bring that candle over here, and close your eyes. Because the truth, my darling, is seldom the first thing we see, but the dust of conversations, floating in breath, just out of sight.

  H E WA S WAITING for me underneath the banyan tree, just as the boy had promised. Wearing a white songkok like a haji, a white kurta, and white trousers, moonlight swaying at his feet as the banyan leaves shook at my approach. No shoes. I could draw you his face, but what would be the point? He may not look the same anymore, and if years from now you want to go looking for him, if you feel you must, remember what he may be, for the boy may have lied to me, and he, being of that certain nature, can change his face, become a woman if he wants to, even return as a child, as Pontianak, as his daughter.

  You follow what I'm saying? Once you ask, it's only polite to listen, follow the spaces between our words, surrender. Otherwise, don't ask.

  Yes, bring another candle, and check the latch on that window over there, please. A wind is about to come. Hear how the birds are holding their breath.

  So. E E E WAS waiting for me underneath the banyan tree. Because of the way he looked at me, and the raw hunger in his voice when he asked, "Where is your husband now?" as if I weren't the one paying him, even with my inexperience, I was already wondering if the boy had lied, if perhaps I had been lured into their trap, if I was in danger. But then I remembered Halimah. She would have warned me, so since she hadn't, I became unafraid, only remaining wary.