Shadow Theatre

by Fiona Cheong

  Yes, of course I felt disappointed with the boy, disappointed because there was something cannibalistic in the man's smile when he unbuttoned my blouse with his eyes, his teeth like a razor on my throat. Even if he was the boy's uncle, the boy had lied to me in another way, you see, and because he was the age my brother would have been, because I was so innocent, because right up to my wedding day, I had been allowed out only with my amahs (my mother, you remember, died giving birth to my brother), I wanted to believe boys were not like men, that at fourteen or fifteen, a boy had not yet become my husband, or other women's husbands, or my father. But I could not idle the morning away, feeling disappointed. I had business to take care of, and dawn was just over the horizon, a vague lightening of the sky beyond the river, a purplish tint in the shadows around us.

  "Where is your husband now?" the man asked again.

  Somewhere I couldn't see, a rooster had begun to crow.

  Yes, I remember his voice. I will always remember his voice, and I remember how I answered the question. "Sleeping." Flatly, without background, not like a wife or a daughter or a mistress, and not even like a servant or an amah. I said it as if Alvin weren't my husband, as if I were a hotel maid who cleaned his room, or one of those immigrant girls removing trays from a table he had sat at in a hawker center. I spoke as if he were a passing customer, with a stranger's face like the faces of other customers, hair, nose, eyes, mouth, cheekbones, nothing to make him stand out, nothing to endear him to me. As if I myself had crumbled into sand, chips of granite, filaments of rain now starting to rattle the trees.

  "Razim told you about the payment?"

  "Yes. Are you going to do it yourself?"

  "What? Oh, you mean the accident. No, of course not. I have someone better, a tourist." He looked up at the rain, only a thin drizzle coming through the banyan leaves. "You are sure your husband will remain asleep?"

  I wasn't sure if he was testing me to see if I would speak truthfully to him, if Razim had told him about Halimah's powder or not. Not that Razim knew about Halimah, but he knew I had a powder from a bomoh. So I said simply, "Yes, I am sure." Then, feeling bolder once more at the memory of Halimah, I asked him if Razim had specified that he could only watch, that he was not to come near me or touch me.

  He smiled, and that, too, I will always remember, for even someone so depraved can have a beautiful smile.

  'That's what they like to do," he said. 'They like to watch only. Come."

  T I 1 E R I: W I R E FIVE others, besides Razim's uncle. We may as well call him Razim's uncle as any other name. You can hear from his speech he was not your usual kampong fellow, although he was Malay, or so he looked to me. The other five were foreigners, all with blond hair. I thought they were brothers. Perhaps they were, perhaps not. I couldn't tell them apart, except for one who had the grace to blush when I began undressing.

  The other woman, I don't remember her face at all, but she was Eurasian, too. As it turned out, she was the reason the five brothers, the foreigners, were interested in our show, because of her operation, you see, because this other woman used to be a man and what the foreigners had paid for was to see what happened if a woman like that made love to another woman, to the kind of woman they themselves might make love to, a woman like me.

  Yes, we touched wherever they wanted us to touch, as long as they kept their own hands away. It was only a show, my darling. Worse things than that can happen in this life, and worse things have already happened. All the wars that men wage among themselves, girls always get trapped in them, and yes, boys, too. Always the children, and often, women.

  It was only a show, no longer than an hour. It wasn't hard to get through. All the while my gaze was fixed on the slope of the ceiling, or on the chinks between the planks of wood that made up the walls of the room. Only for one disturbing moment did I wonder if Razim was in the house, if perhaps this was his house, too, and then I managed to disentangle myself from the thought, and for the rest of the hour, my soul was sitting on the rooftop in the rain, drinking in my coming freedom in the wet dawn.

  WAS II I I E R E. No other way? The truth, as I've said, is seldom the first thing we see. Dust is all around us, not only in your dreams. Once, two young men held down a child, prodded and poked into her as if she were a doll, choked her on her own vomit, and one of the men was already a father, and the other, his best friend, my Alvin. This happened, and there were no witnesses, only a brother who would never be forgiven for wandering away from his sister to watch some older boys playing soccer in the field next-door to the community center (the brother, five years old, had been told to stay with his sister, whose body would be found two weeks later), and only your mother, who when she became pregnant with you, began to dream of a girl lost in a field of sugar cane, who kept calling to her.

  That was why your mother came home. She thought the girl was you, your soul waiting for you here. She didn't know about your sister until the two of you were born, your sister first, then you. The placenta tore when we pulled your sister out, leaving only a wrinkled scrap curled around her foot. But you came out slippery like a tadpole, and almost fully sheathed.

  Why did I lie to Fatimah? Because this story now belongs to you, my darling.

  Your grandmother, Valerie Nair, believed your sister had no heart, that the doctors had missed nothing, that there never was a heartbeat. You hear what I'm saying? Your sister was a stillbirth.

  YOUR GRANDMOTHER, VALERIE, bathed her before the ambulance arrived. In an enamel basin, in frangipani water, on the floor of your mother's bedroom, away from the windows. She knelt over your sister's body and rubbed off the blood, peeling the placenta from your sister's foot and slipping it into her own pocket. We all saw it. Your mother, I, and Sister Rosalind, who also was there that night and had not yet decided to become a nun. Yes, they were close, Sister Rosalind and your mother. They were childhood friends, like you and Fatimah. Rose, Sister Rosalind was called in those days.

  We had to change the water six times before it remained clean when we immersed your sister.

  I took you from your mother when Rose-Sister Rosalindwho was watching by the windows, saw the ambulance arrive.

  We were in the bathroom downstairs when the men entered your grandmother's house. You were already asleep, a limp and heavy wonder in my arms, your hot breath blowing over the hair on my skin. You flinched when the men went up the stairs, and I heard you whimper, but when they came back down, carrying your mother and your sister, you were quiet.

  Your mother's bedroom was already cleaned up when the men saw it. They didn't know about you, and all they would have heard if they had been listening on the stairs would have been the water I had left running in the bathroom sink, a rhythm to keep you soothed, a murmuring like your mother's blood, to make you think her muscle was nestled against your head, her hones cradling you.

  Neither Rose nor I asked your grandmother that night what she was going to do with the piece of placenta in her pocket, and later it seemed to me, as it must have to Rose, that some questions should he left alone, that perhaps it was better for you not to know everything.

  Now you've kachaued all of that, my darling, you and your grandmother, as perhaps is the inevitable outcome. No doubt, she still has it, that piece that was stuck to your sister's foot locked away in one of her lacquered boxes, tucked between the pages of your mother's last hook, the one your mother was trying to finish writing before you were born, the one she was afraid her American publisher would not accept and yet she had written it anyway, for you.

  Rose and I searched high and low for it that night, while your grandmother sat outside with you on the patio. Perhaps some of what you dream is hers, the trace of eau de cologne from her skin, the taste of limes and jasmine in the dark. It was the only time I would break my promise to your mother to keep you away from your grandmother until you were grown up. Because your grandmother was already falling ill-that was why your mother gave you to me, and why I let your grandmother hold you t
hat night. Her mind had already begun to send words out of her mouth that made no sense. What she believed about your sister having no heart, about there being a hollow space in her rib cage where the heart was supposed to be. She was sure she had felt the hollow space when she bathed your sister.

  If she approaches you again, ask her for that book, your mother's book. See what she says. Rose and I never found it. I am sure your grandmother has it. But don't follow her into the house, my darling, if only to honor your mother's last request.

  No matter if some of the neighbors see you. They won't recognize you. You do not have your mother's face.

  LISTEN TO THE wind outside. Nothing so beautiful as the freedom of the wind, the music it makes roaming through the branches of the banyans. Hear how it slides between the leaves, sprinkling what we have been into the night, the ashes of our skin, droplets of what you and I have spoken and will speak, here in our time together, here a humming consonant, there an open vowel, our memory gathered and looped like necklaces and bracelets over the earth's own blades of grass.

  We are the earth's own, my darling. Hear how your mother is not lost, never lost. Hear which beads in the wind are hers.

  Your grandmother may have used Halimah's powder on your grandfather, and I was not the only one who had always suspected it. You understand our silence now?

  Now go and let Malika know we will be ready to eat soon. Then come back and bring another candle. No, leave the windows open. It will not rain, not tonight.

  GLOSSARY

  -1 I.'GLISH. THE E.'GLISI I vernacular of Singaporeans, is a hybrid language formed from the blending of King's English, Hokkien, and Malay, languages spoken by this island's largest communities following British colonization. Hokkien is properly termed a dialect, originating in the Fukien province in China. Malay is indigenous to the region, and while the path of its formation remains uncertain, Arabic and Sanskrit influences are evident.

  WANT TO express my deepest gratitude to Shalini Puri and Amrita Puri, whose loving and insightful reading kept this book from disappearing. To Carlos Canuelas Pereira, Katheryn Rios, Geeta Kothari, Mark Kemp, Michelle Wright and Virginia Nugent, who brought me solace, silence and food. To Edward Washington, who tended so many fires in the early stages. To Lydia Fakundiny, for her example of precision. To Toi Derricote, for her constant faith. To my colleagues and students in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh, especially Mariolina Salvatori, James Seitz, Nancy Glazener, Gerri England, David Bartholomae, Catherine Gammon, Richard Ing and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, whose help and encouragement were indispensable.

  Thanks to the Small Grants Program of the University of Pittsburgh Central Research Development Fund and the Hewlett International Grants Program at UCIS for their support. To C.M. Turnbull for his work in A History of Singapore 1619-1988, which provided the particulars of modern scholarship on the topic. To my editor Laura Hruska for her thoughtful suggestions, and my agent Alice Martell for her tenacity.

  Thanks to my mother for my first library card. My father, who once insisted that human character without compassion was worth nothing. Butch and my cousins, for ghost stories. My brother, who graced our childhood with his humor. Caroline, Ah Lian and my Koko, for taking care of us.

  Special gratitude and love to Christine Kanagarajah, Angela Yeo McKenzie and Mabel Ng, for inspiration and memory.