Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  He continued to study me with doubt in his eyes. Mrs. Shaw had gone to Kashmir, he said. He was thinking of joining her. If he did, he would take me with him. But I must wait. I must not run away before he made the arrangements.

  Of course, I promised to stay. What Lawrence proposed was more than I could have dreamed.

  Some days later he spoke to me again, but this time—just a few words—in the language of my earliest years. He asked what they used to call me. Again I sensed this was some kind of test. I answered slowly, carefully, in the same tongue. “I do not remember.”

  “I knew it!” he said in English. Then, more gently, “Where did you learn to speak Turki?”

  Afraid now, I babbled something about my childhood, about my mother and father coming together from distant worlds.

  “Do you know where you were born?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Not Kashmir?”

  I remained silent.

  “Beyond Kashmir,” he suggested. “Beyond the mountains.”

  I began to cry. The tears were so large and unexpected that I felt as though someone other than myself must be weeping. But then Lawrence put his arm around my shoulders. Don’t worry, he told me, Mrs. Shaw was making plans to travel to my native place. Perhaps she would need some help finding her way or translating the local language, if my English was good enough. Lawrence’s touch was clumsy and tentative as a skittish dog’s. I stopped crying. Though we both knew the truth, I assured him my English was good enough.

  He released me and offered his white handkerchief to dry my eyes. We had to keep our plans secret, he said, for there was no room for the other girls to come with us, and also Mrs. Shaw might still change her mind and return straightaway to Delhi. I told him I could keep good secrets, and even if I wanted to tell, I would trust no one here. He said he was sorry to hear that, but it was just as well. I must be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice, no time for goodbyes. Then he said he must go. He had work to do. I told him he was a great man.

  He smiled and picked up my hand. To my astonishment, he lifted it to his lips and actually kissed my skin. I could scarcely breathe, but he seemed to think nothing of it. We grinned at each other and for the first time I felt the pleasure of conspiracy.

  After that, I no longer feared Golba. I see now how foolish this was. The police might have come for me at any moment, and neither Vijay nor even Lawrence could have stopped them. But for the first time, I had too much hope to run away in fear. Lawrence and Mrs. Shaw really were going to help me, and as the days passed and no Golba appeared, I was even able to sleep.

  None of this made it any less terrifying to wake in the middle of the night and find a hand across my mouth. My reflex was to scream. That night in police custody raced through my mind, and I was already squirming to flee when Lawrence whispered in my ear, “It’s a’right, Kammy. It’s time.”

  Chapter 3

  1

  …the first person who presented himself was the native doctor…who came to report that an orphan boy, a Yarkandee, had been left on his hands by the death of the child’s mother in the hospital…. We sent for him, and he soon appeared, quite a rosy fat-cheeked boy, with high cheekbones and narrow eyes, very Mongolian in type, dressed in a curious combination of the garments of Mecca, India, and Toorkistan…. I cannot claim any great amount of merit for thus taking charge of the boy…. I confess the thought that had chief possession of my mind was, how much this would help my plans. Even with barbarians, it could not but be a good introduction for a stranger, to bring back an orphan of their race, found abandoned in a distant land. They could scarcely cut one’s throat arriving in their country on such an errand!

  So wrote the intrepid Robert Shaw (unrelated to Aidan by blood, though kindred in spirit) in Visits to High Tartary, 1871. Lawrence looked up from the book to the girl seated beside him, his own fortuitous orphan, enthralled by her first airplane ride. The Dakota’s roaring vibration made it appear that her fingers were trembling as they clutched the armrest. Her rapt face hugged the window. Hard to know exactly what stock could have produced such a turquoise-eyed beauty, but her linguistic skill certainly hinted at birth somewhere in Sinkiang. She might actually prove a useful translator, and just as in Shaw’s day, a mission to see a lost child home was likely to sit better with certain local “barbarians” than a search for a foreign trespasser. A show of goodwill and peaceful intentions. But more important, he hoped it would have the same effect on Joanna.

  It was folly, of course, she and young Simon trekking solo over one of the highest mountain passes in the world. She’d cabled only that Aidan might still be alive. But she’d asked Lawrence to obtain money and visas, to arrange with Hari for “indefinite leave” from her duties at Safe Haven, and to investigate whether the Herald had had any communications from Aidan.

  He had cabled her, NO NEWS HERALD OK SAFE HAVEN MEET YOU SRINAGAR.

  FLYING LEH TUESDAY, she flashed back. SEND FINAL PAPERS MONEY BY EMBASSY PACKET.

  To which Lawrence replied, WILL ARRIVE LEH WEDNESDAY PM WITH ALL.

  He looked past Kamla through the window to the successive walls of snow and stone rising ahead of them, and the narrow gap that would pull them down to Srinagar. From there it would be a military prop to Leh.

  What the hell was Aidan up to? Lawrence had planted a simple thought: use his journalistic cover to publicly nail the Soviets for sabotaging the U.N.-backed plebiscite in Kashmir. Everybody wins, Battersby had said. “Your old mate reclaims his patriotic stripes and Australia wins the prize for pinning a tail on the Soviet donkey.” And this prize, in turn, would win for Jack the glory of becoming his nation’s first official spymaster. He did have a point, though: Aidan hardly needed to twist the truth, and he should have had the whole thing wrapped up in a week without ever setting foot outside Srinagar. The wire that came in last night from Jack was succinct. Your mate. Whatever it takes.

  Lawrence smiled at Kamla cautiously unwrapping another stick of the Juicy Fruit gum he’d given her, as if it were a royal delicacy. He wished it were that easy to distract Joanna. Leh was the start of the Karakoram Trail, and her request for Chinese visas suggested that she was prepared to follow it all the way into Sinkiang. Right now China was in the middle of a far larger civil war than Kashmir’s. Refugees were streaming out of the eastern provinces by the thousands, and while the threat of Mao’s Communists might seem more muted in the west, the Soviets in Sinkiang were entrenched. The American Ambassador, Minton, had understandably resisted Jo’s trip to Kashmir. If he were consulted, Sinkiang would be out of the question.

  But Joanna had grit. She loved her husband and thought she ’d lost him. Who could fault her for wanting to find him? And if Lawrence, as a family friend, came along to lend moral support, would this not, too, make sense? So he’d tucked away a suitable amount of cash in various currencies, packed the necessary supplies, and set about securing the appropriate clearances for Joanna, Simon, and himself, and—as extra insurance—for Kamla, their orphan escort.

  The visas had been no small feat. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was jammed to overflowing with petitioners, some of whom had begun lining up at two in the morning in hopes of securing aid for relatives trapped in China. Lawrence had to bribe the desk officer fifty Nationalist yuan just to get inside the building, then spent nearly an hour elbowing his way through the teeming corridors before he spotted the clerk he was seeking.

  At least fifty people stood in the queue ahead of him. Lawrence, however, stood at least a foot taller than the tallest of the Chinese. The clerk glanced up at his approach, and his face split into a grin.

  “Lawrence! How jolly good to see you!”

  “Likewise, Y.C. Got a minute?”

  “For you? Always.” Y.C. Ng hurriedly stamped the visas of the couple seated in front of his desk, then waved Lawrence into one of their vacated chairs. He drew a folding paper screen across his cubicle, shutting out the mutinous line.

  Lawrenc
e had rescued Y.C.’s brother in ’41, during the fall of Hong Kong to the Japanese. In actual fact, all Lawrence had done was to arrange a job for the fellow in a Sydney butcher shop, but that was sufficient to save his life, and the whole family judged themselves forever in Lawrence’s debt. Money had been offered many times over. Lawrence never accepted. Now Y.C. sprang into action as if grateful to bend a few rules. No questions asked.

  Inside the back flap of Lawrence’s pass Ng wrote a personal tribute under official seal, referring to Lawrence as a “Hero of the Republic.” He improvised visas for Joanna, Simon, and Kamla, and for good measure prepared four special Chinese passports plastered with chop marks. The whole process took exactly five minutes.

  Guanxi, the Chinese called it. Connection.

  2

  The Leh airstrip dropped diagonally down the slope of an immense bowl rimmed with vertical mountains. It was paved in stone and ice and rubble, all but indistinguishable from the inclines to either side. No hint here of the spring that had been erupting in Srinagar. No trees, no grass, and only a bluish tinge to mark the distant fields stepping down to the swollen Indus. The road leading past the runway, the rectangular dwellings wedged into the mountainside, the peaks themselves with their crumbles of snow and even the cloudless but eerily reflective sky gave off so little color that when Joanna squinted, the whole scene merged into a single undifferentiated blur.

  She had flown up with Simon the day before—a harrowing flight made more so by the specter of the crash that had lured them to Kashmir in the first place. Now she saw just how easily this could happen. Flying here meant navigating between rather than above the peaks, often with no more than a dozen feet of grace off either wing. On landing the plane tipped so far to one side it seemed they must have blown a tire, a sensation created by the steep downhill grade of the runway. Yet through it all, Simon had wiggled and bounced as if they were on an amusement ride, much the same way he was now finding entertainment in flag signal lessons from the Gujarati airman waiting with them for the plane carrying Lawrence.

  Lawrence had strong-armed her, she decided, sitting down in the lean-to that served as a waiting area. Not that this plan wasn’t risky, but Akbar had sworn by their Sherpa guide, and the lighter they traveled the faster they’d move. All she needed were the travel visas and a supply of money to get her over the border, if it came to that. What she did not need was another escort second-guessing her.

  Three days after their arrival in Srinagar, the U.N. rescue team had relayed back word confirming that Aidan Shaw’s was not among the bodies found at the crash site. That same afternoon General Farr introduced Joanna to a UPI reporter who had heard that a foreigner fitting Aidan’s description was seen trekking north on the Karakoram Trail four days after the crash. Only rumors, the UPI man cautioned, but there were also reports of a serious avalanche in the same area, and no one had seen this foreigner return.

  Farr eyed Joanna as she took in the meaning of the reporter’s words. “Now don’t go off half-cocked,” he warned. It was a chance phrase, one of millions he could have chosen, but the words sent her reeling. Don’t go off half-cocked. Aidan had used those exact words when he returned from Chungking in ’45.

  He’d been gone seven dangerous months that trip, and even as they stood in the international arrivals terminal upon his return, with all the happy distractions of peacetime and reunion and four-year-old Simon’s well-rehearsed appeals to “Daddy,” Joanna could taste the betrayal in her husband’s kiss. She knew from the way he held her, spasmodically alternating between an embrace like vapor and a guilty, yanking clutch. She smelled it in his skin.

  That night, when they were alone, and before he felt compelled to touch her again, she confronted him. It was characteristic of Aidan that he did not try to deny it. Sometimes she thought her husband constitutionally incapable of telling a lie.

  “Now, don’t go off half-cocked,” he’d said instead, his eyes weighed down with sadness. “I’m home, Joanna.”

  She’d felt as though her internal organs were made of paper, which he was slowly, methodically, shredding. They would not survive a confession stocked with name, place, and physical description, so she asked only if he saw the other woman’s face when he closed his eyes. She knew they were in for it when he didn’t answer. But she also watched the glint of alarm when she said, more out of calculation than truth, that she could see herself doing the same in another place and time. She had hit her mark, and retreated before more damage could be done.

  She did not go off half-cocked, but sought out the friends of Aidan’s whose judgments she believed. The international press pool in those days, especially among China Hands, was a loose-knit group who drank together, traded information, and watched each other’s backs. In Chungking they’d lived clustered in the official Press Hostel. No affairs went unnoticed, and it didn’t take Joanna long to find among the recent returnees mutual friends who had witnessed her husband’s indiscretions. Why the picture of the willowy redhead with a slight lisp and knock-knees and Irish surname was more bearable, even intriguing, coming from neutral observers, Joanna could not say. But it was.

  The redhead was married. An adventuress playing at journalism. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she reportedly went back to her wealthy husband and manor house in Kildare. There had been tears, one public scene in the hostel barroom when Aidan threw his whiskey in her face. That night he kept on drinking, talked loudly about “women too stubborn to know when they needed rescuing.”

  Joanna could count on one hand the number of times she’d seen her husband drunk. Never had she witnessed him so passionately misbehaving, and the very thought of his despair now made her feel hollow inside. What pleasures must this woman have offered that Aidan should feel such anguish at the loss of her? She tormented herself with the inevitable images. And the inevitable question. How could she—his dutiful wife—possibly compete? She who had known all too well that she needed rescuing.

  Their estrangement only came to an end after she sought out Ben Eldon, the photographer whose life Aidan had saved in Burma. Ben had gone back out to Chungking to cover the end of the war. He’d been a witness to the affair. But as he sat with her drinking coffee in a brightly lit delicatessen in Georgetown, he said he believed this had been Aidan’s only infidelity. Joanna was trying to decide whether this made it better or worse when Ben leaned down and began to rub the trouser covering his artificial knee. He worked at his leg unconsciously for several seconds, and suddenly his face changed—he had one of those fair Southern faces, almost frail, that altered like a cirrus cloud with every passing thought. He hoisted his prosthesis onto the vinyl seat of their booth and scrunched up his pant leg to show her the works. “It’s been almost four years since this leg was real, but I still feel it itch and ache.” He rapped on the mechanical knee with his knuckles. “It’s like part of me died ahead of the rest, like I’m already part ghost…”

  Joanna shook her head. She liked and admired Ben, but she could not imagine what he was driving at. “All right, forget it if you think I’m cracked,” he said, “but when you’re out there sometimes you get into some funny chats with folks. And this one time Aidan started telling me about his mama. I’m sure you know how he felt like he’s kind of responsible for her dying back there in China?”

  Joanna considered. Aidan always referred to his mother as a “beauty scarred by history and betrayed by optimism.” She and the family had moved to China in 1920 when Aidan’s father went to work for a Belgian firm surveying railroad routes in the interior province of Shansi. They arrived in the middle of a peasant revolt against the local warlord, and in the melee the severed heads of their steward and amah were tossed onto the Shaws’ front doorstep. The family retreated to Shanghai, and Aidan’s mother began a long, bitter spiral into madness. Over the next dozen years she became convinced that the servants, local politicians, even the teachers at the children’s school were all scheming to poison her. She filled notebooks with her suspicions t
hat there was ground glass in her soup, bamboo shavings in her oatmeal, deadly nightshade in her tea. She pled with her husband to send her home to Ireland.

  Aidan’s Chinese grandmother maintained that the ghosts of the servants in Shansi had possessed her daughter-in-law’s spirit. Finally Aidan’s father gave in to his mother’s demand that she take his younger son home with her to Nanking. But by this time Aidan was seventeen, had completed his schooling in Shanghai, and was angling to go to university in the States. It was 1933. Reluctantly, his father agreed, though he would not permit Aidan to take his mother with him. “There will be time for that,” the old man promised. “As soon as you have established yourself.”

  Five months later Aidan received news that his mother had died after swallowing a cake laced with rat poison that the gardener left under a backyard azalea. Aidan, it seemed, had not established himself soon enough.

  Ben said, “Aidan first told me about his family way back in Burma, but then in Chungking one night he was talking about…” He hesitated, and Joanna stopped him with a look. She didn’t want to know the woman’s name.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “he said she reminded him so much of his mother it was spooky, and I thought, uh oh, something else is going on here, something maybe Aidan can’t even see. You understand what I’m trying to say? It was like he was still fixing to rescue his mama…”

  Joanna didn’t know if Ben was right, but she found it impossible to accuse her husband after that. Given time, his promises regained their ring of truth. Gradually the familiar smooth spice taste and smell of him returned, the sorrow retreated from his eyes, and she would feel him touching his hand to her back or watch him gently stroking Simon on his lap as he read his newspaper, and she knew her husband was really home.