The Water Beetles

by Michael Kaan

  Chow looked out each window and gestured for us to keep away. “There’s nothing we can do. Just wait inside.”

  Another blast went off and there was a low roar of something large collapsing. Mrs. Yee covered her face and began to wail.

  “Mrs. Yee, please return to your room,” said my mother. She pitied Mrs. Yee and looked anxiously at her three children. She spoke impatiently to the elder daughter. “Shun-Lai, take your mother and siblings back upstairs. You are safe while you stay in the house.”

  Shun-Lai took her mother by the arm and walked her upstairs with her sister. Shun-Yau wanted to stay with us, but his sister ordered him up.

  We quickly brought more chairs into the front hall and sat close to each other and listened to the fighting. Sheung had the radio on in the parlour with the volume at its highest, but Yee-Lin was so terrified she begged him to stay with her in the front hall. He held her close on a sofa while she sobbed. The air trembled around the house, blasting the walls in louder and louder waves. And we sat. The blasts drew closer and we didn’t move. Wei-Ming was on my mother’s lap with her thumb in her mouth and a doll in her other hand.

  Then the blasts began to move away, and a minute later they were far off again, less frequent. The receding blasts were replaced by screams outside. Women, men, children, their voices separate or rising together. They called out names, cried for help, screamed that they were burned. It was worse than the bombing. I covered my ears and rubbed them with my palms to keep the sound out. And I listened to myself sob. My mother reached over to hold me and said my name, and I uncovered my ears so I could hear her voice.

  Everyone in the house was now gathered in the front hall, and as the screaming raked the air, we sat or stood in silence and stared at the floor. I listened to the rapid, shallow breathing of a man next to me who clutched his daughter’s hands. None of us dared to part the curtains and look out the windows, and I knew what everyone was thinking: that a face might appear in one of them — torn or blackened, distorted with pain.

  From the radio in the parlour down the hall, we heard only odd cracklings of Japanese as Tang tested the dial.

  I woke with a start to hear the front door almost cracking in two. Someone was pounding hard on it. Wei-Ming was still asleep on our mother’s lap. Chow rose; he had been sleeping on a mat in front of the door, with his revolver tucked into the back of his belt. He stood warily by the door and motioned for us all to stay quiet. The person outside pounded the door again, and then a man shouted that he was a British soldier, demanding to be let in. Sheung ran up and shouted back.

  “What do you want?”

  “Let us in.”

  “I can’t.”

  Then several men shouted back at him, and they pounded against the door with something hard, like a rifle butt. Sheung looked at my mother and explained what had been said.

  “Let them in,” said my mother. “Maybe they can protect us.” She picked Wei-Ming off her lap and passed her to Yee-Lin, telling her to take my sister upstairs.

  Sheung opened the door. Three British soldiers stood at the threshold and a truck engine revved outside the gates. A tall officer with a narrow face streaked in engine grease leaned through the opening. Behind him, a younger soldier coughed violently. Four others waited behind, a few feet from the door, carrying two massive artillery guns between them. The officer squinted in the darkened entrance and asked Sheung if he was the master of the house.

  “We need your house, then.”

  Sheung asked him why.

  “The Japanese have bombed the harbour and crossed the water. They’re flying sorties over the island now. You’ve got the tallest house in the Valley. We need to put our anti-aircraft guns on your roof.” The soldiers behind must have heard only “guns on your roof,” and they pressed forward carrying the heavy weapons.

  Sheung and Chow jumped back at the sight, and the men again mistook this for agreement. In the confusion, my mother rose and yelled at them in Cantonese, and the officer told his men to stop. Behind me, most of the refugees ran to the back of the house.

  “You can’t bring this in here,” Sheung said as he eyed the massive weapons. “The Japanese will locate them and bomb our house.”

  “They’re going to bomb it anyway. You should get out. We have other guns up on the hilltop, but that’s all we have right now.”

  Sheung waved his hand towards the smoking ruins. “And go where?”

  The officer didn’t answer. Outside, ten more soldiers were carrying another four anti-aircraft guns onto the grounds. The lock on the gate was broken and they were bringing their truck onto our drive. Machine guns erupted in the distance and planes roared overhead. The soldiers looked up at the dawn sky.

  “For God’s sake,” shouted the officer. “They’re going to bomb this area any second. We need to get up there.”

  My mother seized Sheung by the arm. “Where will we go? There’s nowhere for us. Tell them they can’t.”

  The officer cast her a hateful look.

  “I’m very sorry,” said Sheung, and he put his hand back on the heavy brass door handle.

  “You bloody fool,” screamed the officer, and I knew he was desperate, not angry.

  Tang pushed Chow aside and spoke to Sheung. “Let them up there. What else can they do? It might save the city if we let them up there.”

  “Who’s going to thank us while we wander the streets? Who’ll take us in? No one. Let them in here and we’re all dead. We’ll stay together here.” He pushed Tang back, gave the officer a final apologetic look, and shut the door.

  He slammed it hard and the sound echoed through the front hall. More guns fired in the distance. My mother sat in silence with her hands trembling on her lap, as though awaiting a visitor.

  We spent the rest of the morning in uneasy silence until the distraction of awaiting the midday meal. Tang moved the radio into our father’s study upstairs and listened to it there, where the rest of us wouldn’t hear the news. The shelling died down and sounded farther away. I moved uneasily from room to room, trailing Sheung or Chow as they tried to keep busy. Ah-Tseng and my mother were preparing the lunch, mostly from the preserved foods in the pantry: salted vegetables and pork, dried oysters, rice.

  Mrs. Yee did not come down. I heard her wailing in her room, screaming for her husband while Shun-Lai, who was also crying, tried to console her. The younger girl, Shun-Po, ran to Shun-Yau’s room and shut the door. When Mrs. Yee failed to calm down, her children came downstairs with drawn faces and red eyes.

  They sat at the table and picked at their food. Shun-Yau and the younger sister started to bicker about how much rice was left in their bowls. She said he left too much behind and was wasteful, and he said the same of her. She said their father was watching them and would be disappointed.

  He started to count out the remaining grains with the tip of a chopstick. “One, two, three, four…” he said.

  Then Shun-Po reached over with hers and stirred the grains around. He ignored the taunt, nudged the bowl away from her, and resumed counting. A plane flew overhead. I was sitting between Shun-Yau and Leuk, and we decided to count out loud with him.

  “One, two, three —”

  At “four,” the air in my chest suddenly compressed. The dining room window shattered as a blast tore through the air. I heard it for only a fraction of a second before everything went silent, followed by a painful ringing in my ears.

  The blast knocked me backward off my stool and I hit the floor headfirst. The thick rug under the table saved my skull from cracking on the stone. The room spun for a few seconds, and I stared at the ceiling as a handful of reddish leaves blew in through a hole torn in the wall.

  Shun-Yau lay beside me. He blinked at me as though I had just woken him, and for a few seconds we lay next to each other in shock. Then Leuk struggled to his feet and I sat up.

  Wei-Ming screamed next to her broken chair as my mother ran to pick her up. Far off, I heard another explosion. The sound was oddly
gentle, like the rolling of a giant drum, very far away. My mother cast her eye over the Yee children, who stood jammed in a corner by a cabinet. Shun-Lai held her younger siblings.

  “Shun-Lai,” my mother said. “Your mother should come down now.”

  The girl ran up the stairs and I heard the bedroom door open with a bang. Moments later Mrs. Yee and her daughter hurried down. As they entered the dining room, another explosion sounded. Her two other children ran to her and she held them close as she collapsed against a wall, crying that they had nowhere to go, that there was no safe place anymore in Hong Kong.

  We moved away from the window. The heavy curtains had caught the flying glass, but the window and part of the wall around it was blown out. Ah-Tseng produced a first aid kit, and she and Yee-Lin checked everyone for cuts. Incredibly, no one was hurt. Chow looked out through the hole in the wall, where a large part of the grounds and outside wall lay in ruins.

  The fighting continued sporadically all day, though it never came any nearer to our house. Chow and my older brothers found some boards to nail over the hole. When they put the last board up, the room returned to darkness, and their hammers drowned out the muffled shelling in the distance.

  My mother told us all to sit together in the living room, away from the main entrance. I sat with Leuk on one of the sofas. I wanted to start a fire in the hearth because it was cold, but Chow said that would be too dangerous. Mrs. Yee sat on the sofa next to mine, her face a bloodless grey. She stared into nothing as Shun-Lai held her hand. Shun-Yau sat with Leuk and me. He looked over at his mother for a moment and then turned and whispered to me.

  “What do you think happened to him?” He looked around to see if anyone was listening.

  “Who?”

  “The last snake. I wonder if the explosion burst the glass in the cellar. Or it could have knocked the basket over. Maybe the last one got out.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If he got out, what if the floor’s covered in broken glass? He was already in pretty bad shape.”

  I tried to imagine the snake, suddenly liberated in the chaos, crawling through the gloom over the broken glass. I could hear the fine dust abrading its scales and imagined its lightness would protect it from injury.

  “No, I think he’d be all right,” I said confidently. “I think they … they have a special sense, a special ability that lets them detect danger. That’s why they’re so good at hiding, like those snakes that wait in trees.”

  He looked at me very soberly while he took this in. “It must be dark in there,” he said, and he looked at a scroll hanging on the wall, a painting in ancient script that none of us could read. “Maybe the window wasn’t blown in. Is the cellar window on the same side of the house as the dining room?”

  I furrowed my brow and with my finger tested out a little map of the house on a cushion. “Here’s the dining room wall, so the kitchen is over here. When you turn to go down the stairs, you end up here…and here’s the cellar…then that little room…No. No, it isn’t.” I wasn’t quite sure I’d got it right, but I didn’t want Shun-Yau to know that.

  “All right,” he said. He looked relieved. “But when everything’s cleared up, let’s go back down there and check on him. Maybe he doesn’t need to be there anymore. He could stay in my room. There’s an empty box in the closet, and we could feed him crickets.”

  I nodded. “You’re right, there’s no point to leaving him there.”

  We talked about it for a while, and in the end we decided that the snake shouldn’t live in our house anymore. We agreed to head back to the basement later, and if he was still alive and it was safe for us to do so, we’d let him loose in the garden. We talked a little more about the snake and how best to help him. I looked at my watch: it was eight thirty, and I was tired. I thought of my bed but stayed on the sofa with everyone else.

  The last time I took Alice to the hospital was in late July 2000, a single day that seemed to claw back all the energy I had recouped since my retirement a year before. I didn’t miss my work much, even though I’d retired early to take care of her. If I saw news stories about hospitals or developments in medicine, I felt little connection to that world. Television dramas set in hospitals baffled and irritated me, they seemed devoid of anything familiar. When I brought Alice into the emergency department that Thursday night when she could barely talk, I was wearing a pyjama shirt over my walking shorts and was still under the haze of a small whiskey I’d drunk an hour earlier. In the waiting room, I fumbled with my new cellphone as though it were an alien artifact. I wanted to act, to seize the splintering world and punish it. Instead, the world receded from my grasp, taken by a tide that even my wife was drifting into. I cursed the phone and drew stares as I broke it on the floor. Then a young doctor, a former student of mine, recognized me and called Evelyn and Chris for me from his office.

  Over the next week, as it became clear there was nothing left to do for my wife but keep her comfortable, I consoled myself with long walks around the hospital and along the water by the old port. My children stayed at the house but were mostly in the hospital with their mother. Chris had been out to Chicago frequently in the last year. Evelyn, having a family of her own and living on the other side of the world, hadn’t been for two years and had limited her information dutifully, almost lovingly, to Alice’s self-censored letters about her illness. When she arrived from Malaysia and saw her mother, she was unprepared for the change in her appearance.

  One afternoon in the family room on Alice’s ward, Evelyn confronted me and said she believed more could still be done. She said we should get another opinion, consult someone from another hospital, order more tests.

  You must know people, she said. Call them. Why haven’t you done that?

  I didn’t want to get angry with her. Chris tried talking to her, but she wouldn’t listen to him.

  You don’t understand, I said. Her lungs are badly damaged. She’s in renal crisis. All mom’s defences are gone.

  Evelyn gave me that old look of dismissal, the fourteen-year-old cutting down her blowhard dad. Then she went back to Alice’s room. Chris stayed with me and I dozed in a chair.

  Around five that evening, they both went down to the cafeteria for some dinner. I went out for a walk. I crossed the road and in a few minutes was at the old port. Parts of it were semi-ruinous, where decommissioned small- or medium-sized shipping vessels were stored before being hauled off for scrap. Most of this section of the port seemed ready for the junkyard, while canny developers had already set in on the other section, opening garish bars and fast-food restaurants that catered to the young.

  I sat on a bench and looked onto the lake. By the pier to my left a trio of shuttered vessels tossed sluggishly in the water, creaking against their heavy chains like wounded bears in a terrible old circus. At my left a half-dozen young men strode towards me, headed for the bank of new bars and restaurants to my right. I could tell they were military men on leave, given their haircuts and physiques, and the loud, rambling one-upmanship of their talk. I tried to imagine them in their uniforms, armed or wearing medals, or helmeted and shielded for combat. I imagined them wielding tanks and rocket launchers. In their T-shirts and shorts they appeared lost and reckless.

  The scant cloud of the afternoon had grown to an impenetrable overcast, and a light rain started misting down. The sun, still two hours from setting, glowed coolly behind it, a pale and distant disc. The young men shouted and waved at me as they walked past.

  Evelyn appeared next to me on the bench. She said she wanted to sit with me and let Chris be alone for a while, and I smiled because we both knew how typical that was of him. She apologized for being sharp with me earlier. I put my arm around her, and for a moment I imagined she was a child again and we were at the old duck pond near our house. We sat there and chuckled at the young recruits as they attempted to get into a bar that wasn’t open yet, trying to bluff the impervious owner into letting them in.

  In time the
mist became true rain. I pulled the hood of my windbreaker over my head and Evelyn opened her umbrella. Even as the rain began to blow harder, we stayed sitting on the bench. The bars opened and the army of revellers finally got in to start their night of drinking. The pier was a little quieter as the interiors of the bars lit up. And while we watched the water, Chris was with Alice in her room, and he was with her when she died.

  Evelyn and I were only a short walk away at the time. At the burial a week later, I couldn’t watch the coffin descend. I closed my eyes and relived the moment of death as I had known it: a lightless sun, an army without weapons, a port of rusted cargo vessels creaking in the rain.

  SEVEN

  The shelling and gunfire went on into the evening. Sheung came downstairs and said it seemed, from what he caught on the radio, that most of the fighting was happening near the harbour. Tang likened it to what he’d heard earlier that day, and the two of them sat at the dining room table and compared notes. They were still in their business suits, arms folded soberly while they talked, as though they were about to be consulted on the war’s progress. I thought they looked silly, because I couldn’t yet understand how responsible and helpless they felt and how much they had to force themselves to look and feel competent.

  One week later, on the twenty-third of December, my elder brothers’ effort of will collapsed. The pounding of the heavy guns had grown over the past two days, and Sheung said very little about what he heard on the radio. I began to doubt that there was much being broadcast.

  That afternoon, while Shun-Yau was sitting with his mother, Leuk and I went into his room. Because it was originally a spare room, it looked out onto the less attractive back of the house on Ventris Road, which in those days was more of a lane than a true street. A portion of the concrete wall that surrounded our house was lower there — perhaps four feet high — so that any adult walking past it could see into a small enclosure where the servants threw the rubbish. A truck approached and its engine ground and banged to a halt. It was a British army truck and badly damaged: the windshield was gone and part of the back was torn off. There was blood splattered on the hood and the military insignia on the driver’s door was burned away.