The Water Beetles

by Michael Kaan

  My aunt seemed uninterested in the radio. Leuk and I were intensely curious to hear the news, but we had to suffer through an evening musical show instead. I asked my uncle if there had been any news earlier about the war and Hong Kong. For a second I thought he was asleep, but then he opened his eyes and shook his head, reaching over to turn the radio off. “Nothing,” he said.

  “How can there be nothing?” said Leuk. “Didn’t they say anything about Hong Kong?”

  My uncle waved indifferently. “No, nothing at all. Just the usual about the Japanese. It was mostly about them being in northern China.” He spoke as if this were somewhere in Europe.

  “We saw a crowd on the courthouse steps today,” I said. My aunt dozed on the divan, her head propped uncomfortably against the ornate wooden back. “What was that?”

  “Ah,” said my uncle. “A trial concluded today. And I was the presiding magistrate.” He straightened in his seat as though he were in court, but everything around him — the dim lighting, the cramped provincial parlour, the low droning from my aunt’s nose — diminished him to a silhouette in an old chair.

  Leuk leaned forward. “Did someone commit a murder?” he asked eagerly.

  “No no,” my uncle replied, regretting his small effort to gain attention. “Some silly grown-up matters. Nothing you need to worry about. Tai Fo is very safe. Even the Japanese aren’t interested in us.”

  My aunt started awake in her chair and looked dopily around and then sent us to bed. Yee-Lin stayed up with them a little longer, and as I got into my pyjamas I heard muffled bits of conversation through the bedroom door.

  Leuk and I moved our mattresses around so that our heads came together at right angles in the corner under the window. Yee-Lin returned and lay down on a cot with Wei-Ming, and they were both asleep quickly. In the dark, with only a little moonlight coming through the small window, Leuk and I talked. It was a long whispering conversation, as though we were in hiding. We talked about the movies, about school, the classmates we missed and the ones we didn’t. As we talked, a thin bar of moonlight crawled across the wall opposite, like a snake.

  We talked about the occupation: the soldiers everywhere, the rations, the water. I told Leuk about Shun-Yau and the snakes, and we wondered how he and his family were doing and if they had reached Guangdong safely.

  Then Leuk turned on his back and said, “I wonder how Mother’s doing.”

  Instantly, a terrible ache spread outward from my ribs. My limbs burned and my stomach tightened, I pressed my lips together, and before the sadness overcame me, I grew angry at Leuk for mentioning her. Since the evening we left the house, I had tried to keep my thoughts of our mother for only the most private spaces, when I was alone and masked by darkness, like the first night on the boat.

  I told him bluntly that I didn’t care, but the words came out half choked and wetted. I turned onto my side and faced the wall, away from the fading bar of moonlight, protected by the darkness and my anger.

  FOURTEEN

  One morning on the way to school, we stopped at a pond by the road. We passed it every day, and in the week since our arrival in Tai Fo we had become fascinated with the sudden appearance of flowers at the pond’s edge and a group of turtles that lived in it. We left our school books on the road and crouched at the edge, with our shoes right at the limit of the earth before it became muddy, and peered into the water. Wei-Ming threw some vegetable scraps in, taken from the midden in our aunt’s house, and within seconds a turtle appeared. With his long snakelike head and jaws, he snapped up the rotten leaves and stems, and small beetles fled from the concentric rings of his motion.

  When the water calmed, I looked at our reflections. We were still as thin as when we had left Hong Kong, despite the relative abundance that our aunt and uncle enjoyed in the countryside. I didn’t obsess over food as I had back in the city, but my belt still tied at the same spot it had before, and I noticed the thinness in my sister’s face, who should still have had a little of her childhood plumpness.

  “I don’t want to go to school,” she said into the mirror of the pond. “I hate the teacher.” Wei-Ming had been moved back to the other classroom after her first day of accommodation. Now she endured the boredom of a class that was a year behind what she had been learning at St. Mary’s. She found a stick and traced its tip over the water, trying to entice the beetles up the shaft.

  “We have to show up,” said Leuk. “If you don’t, the teachers will tell Uncle.”

  I tried to guess what our uncle would do. I couldn’t imagine him beating us. We saw him in the evenings only, lounging in his chair with tea and a newspaper, his left eyelid drooping in anticipation of sleep.

  School was a bore and there was little for us to do in the village. There was no cinema, no theatre club, no organized sports, and the local kids kept their distance. We sat together at lunch and walked home together every day. We did our homework quickly, usually finishing it before the end of the school day. When this became known, the few kids who had talked to us cut us out completely.

  We left the pond and got back on the road, speeding up to get to school on time. In the village, a couple of policemen were blocking off a large part of the town square, and some labourers were building a platform in the middle as though for a performance. Women swept the steps of the courthouse, and a man was preparing to unfurl some banners from its eaves. I guessed there would be a festival starting soon. Wei-Ming asked me if I knew what it was, but we were in too much of a hurry to stop, and in any case the policemen were urging everyone along.

  I thought about the square during the school day to relieve my boredom. On a piece of foolscap during a history lesson, I sketched out the platform in a corner of the page and decorated it with lanterns and drew fireworks in the air. Leuk, who was made to sit three rows away so that we wouldn’t talk to each other, kept stealing quick glances over at me to see what I was doing. I covered the sheet carefully with my hand. At the end of the day, I snapped my books shut and we were the first out the classroom door.

  By then the notion of something exciting happening in the square had become a small obsession. It would be fun, it would relieve our boredom in this village, it would be like the parties in Hong Kong. Wei-Ming ran beside us until she dropped her tiffin boxes. We stopped and reassembled them quickly, and I wiped my greasy hands on my pants. People walked past us and glared in disapproval. Most also seemed to be heading to the square. I took Wei-Ming by the hand and we walked quickly.

  The platform was up, but there were no lanterns, and the banners were illegible as they snapped in the wind. All that had changed since the morning was that a simple wooden arch like a picture frame had been put up. There were people everywhere, and hawkers had gathered at the fringes of the crowd. We had managed to worm our way close to the front of the audience when the smell of grilled snacks reached us. I lost a brief argument with my siblings and had to go back through the crowd to buy them.

  They were nothing like the snacks back home before the war — some simple rice cakes with shallots and peanuts. But I got one for each of us. As I waited for the hawker to wrap them up, I looked over the crowd and saw my uncle standing in the doorway of the courthouse, flanked by a policeman. The courthouse doors were open wide. My uncle looked very different in his formal robes, which I assumed he changed into at his office — not the drowsy old man I knew from the parlour. This was one of those events where public officials are called on to declare the start of the celebrations.

  I held the snacks close as I pushed back through the crowd, and handed them out to Leuk and Wei-Ming. We devoured them quickly, peering between the adults around us. I didn’t see any other children there.

  The policeman stepped onto the platform. Then he just stood there. He stared far over our heads towards some distant point, and I began to sense I should not follow his gaze to see what it was. In parts of the crowd a silence — like breath being held — rolled over until I could hear Wei-Ming breathing next to me. I
n other parts people’s chatter grew louder and more rapid, and the few bits I could make out sounded like gibberish. From far off, outside the crowd, a voice broke through. A large bell rang three times.

  “Make way! Make way!” a man shouted. I sensed the crowd breaking up on one side, and people shuffled to clear a path. I couldn’t see anything, and Leuk and Wei-Ming had no hope of seeing either. The crowd opened up near us. A policeman stepped forward. Behind him, a man and a woman stumbled, and behind them were two more officers. As the procession mounted the steps to the platform, I saw the couple had their legs shackled, and they bowed forward as if bearing an unseen weight. Their wrists were bound behind them. Strapped to their backs were long bamboo poles that rose at least three feet over their heads, and hanging from these were large paper banners with the words adulterer and murderess.

  I heard a man near me say that the woman and man were lovers, and that she had paid someone to kill her husband. They were haggard and drawn, not with hunger like me, but as if from the exhaustion of some inner torment. The other policemen positioned the couple directly beneath the wooden arch facing the courthouse. Both ­officers took their own places beside the prisoners. Standing with the courthouse to our side, I saw all their faces in profile — the policemen, the man, the woman — and in each of them a waxen heaviness weighed their features down. I felt an oppressive weight spread across the whole square, as though we too should stare downward.

  Our uncle now emerged from the courthouse. Through the open doors flanked by rippling banners, he walked slowly down the stairs accompanied by a young clerk holding a scroll. He stepped through the crowd towards the platform, his black robes fluttering like wings. His face was placid, undisturbed, in contrast to the figures on the structure. As my uncle stepped onto the platform, the chained man began to shake and sob in a high-pitched voice. A policeman’s face shone with sweat. But my uncle remained aloof, his plump jowls hanging comfortably beneath a look of ceremonial boredom.

  His clerk handed him the scroll and my uncle read it out — the full indictment, the confessions, the high price of shame, the poor example set for the young, on and on. I watched the man and woman as they bowed deeper into their grief, restrained from collapsing only by the shackles at their backs.

  I remember this event as embodying so much of the adult world that I was learning to detest: the love of obedience and ceremony, the overbearing sternness, the slowness — and the strange agonies of love that seemed to bring nothing but torment, as they had for Mrs. Yee. And around it all, like an old and crumbling wall against the world, curled the shadow of regret.

  In the faces of the man and woman I now saw this pain — as they equated their past to this moment and all their shame. For the first time in my life I grasped the meaning of these grieved expressions, of torment coming not from soldiers or emperors, but from inner weakness, from failure. The woman swung her head from side to side as she wept, and her tears fell onto the platform.

  I lost track of what happened next. Wei-Ming seized my hand and pulled hard on it, shouting at me and trying to draw me away. She began to scream. Either Leuk was silent or I couldn’t hear him. The droning pronouncements stopped abruptly up on the platform, and then the prisoners’ heads were bagged like livestock and ropes were swung over the arch. With a nod from my uncle, the lovers rose slowly into the heavy air, turning and twisting like broken twigs. They swung crazily at first, and then more slowly as they succumbed to the dwindling rocking of their bodies under the arch. At last the woman kicked and briefly entwined one leg around the man’s, and he seemed to cling to it with his. In my confusion I thought I felt the panicked tugging of her limb, but it was Wei-Ming yanking my arm and shouting my name.

  “I want to go!” she shouted again. Leuk already held her other hand and was starting to lead her away through the crowd, who were stupefied by the spectacle. I heard them all exhaling, open-mouthed, a damp and foul atmosphere choking the square. Unable to look away, I let Leuk and Wei-Ming pull me through the inert mass of the villagers. I ran home behind them, stumbling from the lightness that seemed to fill my skull.

  We slowed as we got near the house. Leuk was sweating in the cool breeze. His shirt stuck to his back even through the undershirt, and Wei-Ming hung on my arm and dragged her feet over the gravel. I caught up with Leuk before we reached the door and touched his arm.

  “Don’t tell anyone about this,” I said. He frowned and pulled his arm away.

  Our aunt and Yee-Lin were at the market, so the three of us had the house to ourselves. Inside, we took off our shoes and put our school bags down, and it was as though my weight had been cut by half. Leuk and I stood in the middle of the parlour for a moment. Wei-Ming dropped down onto the sofa with a pillow and fell asleep. Her hair hung lank across her face as though she had been drowned. Leuk and I sat down in our usual chairs, but as soon as I sat down I felt queasy, thinking of our evenings with my aunt and uncle. I stood up again and leaned against a wall, staring sideways at the kitchen door.

  Leuk rubbed his eyes. “Do you think those people are really dead?”

  It took me a moment to understand what he’d said. I thought I recognized death: the shaking and the stillness, the strange humidity that hovers over it. I realized that today was the first time I had witnessed people dying. I’d heard it happening, standing in my bedroom looking over the darkened skyline of Hong Kong, where there was nothing to see but buildings on fire.

  I wondered about the man and woman on the platform. Had they been cut down unconscious? Had they been further humiliated before the crowd? I wanted to believe this, not because I longed for the cruelty, but because I didn’t want them to be dead, whatever they had done. And yet, in the faces of the crowd, even as I ran confused among them, I had seen the acceptance in their eyes that came with witnessing destruction and somehow taking part in it.

  Wei-Ming gave a low groan, like an old woman, and shook herself awake. She sat up abruptly, her hair still over her face, and began to ramble incoherently.

  “Where’s Mama?” she shouted. “Where are all my things?”

  My shoulders and back tightened. “What do you mean?” I shouted back at her. “Are you stupid? Don’t you know where we are?”

  Wei-Ming looked as if she had been drugged. She tried to brush the hair away from her eyes but couldn’t manage it. She rose awkwardly from the sofa, took a second to regain her balance, and with a sob ran into the bedroom.

  I looked at my brother. “Don’t stare at me,” he snapped. Then he rubbed his eyes again, harder. His words sounded like nonsense, and he looked as though he wanted to hit me.

  I walked into the kitchen and took a glass off the shelf. I filled it with water and drank, and as soon as I tasted it, I realized I was dying of thirst. I refilled the glass and drank more. I drank again and again, working the pump handle so violently it creaked and the water poured over the lip of the glass and my hand. My throat ached and I felt I might vomit. Thinking I was sick, I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot as if they’d been scratched, and my lids sagged as though I hadn’t slept in days.

  Despite what the three of us had seen, we didn’t start to fear or mistrust my uncle. We kept up our evening routine in the parlour with him and my aunt. But where he had once struck me as bland and ordinary, I saw him now as two different people: an idle conversationalist, and a stern executioner. I reflected on my uncle’s sense of ceremony, on Shun-Lai’s disappearance, on the cart loaded with corpses. I could explain none of these things, yet I began to see them not as chance events but as revelations about the limits of my understanding. My uncle’s little routines, his evenings sitting by the brazier, head tilted towards the radio, his floral teacup — these things still fit with my earlier view of him, though a side of him was now unknowable to me.

  I replayed trivial details from the day in the square that helped distract me from the moment at the heart of the event: the crowd talking over my uncle, the shabbiness of
the officers’ uniforms, the crude wooden arch, so inferior to the great architecture of Hong Kong. In my thoughts I diminished and mocked everything under my uncle’s command, even those puppets that dangled over his stage. And when we sat down to eat each night and I thought of the dark world outside, I was still glad he had taken us in.

  I keep a small garden that has been shrinking over time. When I first brought it into the world, in our backyard in Chicago, rough-sided and oppressed by weeds, it was a walkable square. I made it large enough to stride through, so I could enjoy exploring it. I formed it into provinces: squashes and melons here, chilies in one corner, a patch of foundering taro, unfailing cabbages everywhere else. On warm spring mornings the scent of compost rose from it like incense.

  I put a lot of time into the garden, though mostly it did its own invisible work: the roots mined the softened history in the soil, the long-decayed plants and insects having degenerated into that warm, unsensing pulp that covers the whole earth.

  Time is arching downward. The garden now is a set of four square pots that I arranged inside a larger square on the balcony off the flat, but the contents are simpler. Two of the pots have some edible greenery that someone else planted there, though I can’t recall what it is. That would be my granddaughter’s handiwork. The scent of the garden is exotic: Kuala Lumpur doesn’t have the cool seasons of Hong Kong. Even after seventy years, the start of November suggests to me that a chill must be coming, but that change of weather never comes to pass. The memory of cold just pricks at my skin, reminding me of what was.