Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  “If I’d been there,” she dared to ask him one night, “in Chungking, if I’d been there with you, would it…?”

  They were sitting in the darkened living room, winter, watching the snow come down. He reached across the distance between their chairs and took her hand. His fingers threaded through hers. “No,” he said, finishing her question for her. “It would never have happened.”

  Simon hove into view, up on the airman’s shoulders, oblivious to the altitude and pumping his arm like the leader of a band while his new friend sang the Indian national anthem. It was because of Simon that she’d stayed home in ’44. He was still so little then, still Simon of the cowboy hat, who clung to her hand in crowds and wept when she left his sight. There could be no thought of taking him to China, but neither could she leave him. Simon had come first. He was her baby. How could it have been otherwise?

  The whir of an engine sounded in the distance. Though the plane was not yet in sight, the airman deposited Simon back in the lean-to and marched out with his flags at the ready. Simon’s face was chapped pink by the wind and cold, his slight body doubled by the bulk of the long sheepskin jacket they had acquired in Srinagar, but he could hardly contain himself as he showed her the signals the airman had taught him. He was older now, sturdier, more resilient. He needed her less—she encouraged him to need her less. As if to prove it, when Joanna tried to hug him, he impatiently squirmed away.

  This time, it might just be that Aidan needed her more.

  “When do you think Tot will get here?” Simon asked.

  “He promised by tomorrow.”

  Tot was the Sherpa guide Akbar had recommended. Dr. Akbar, bless him, had not made a peep when Joanna said she meant to go after her husband. On the contrary, he announced that if he were younger and not suffering from the gout he would accompany her himself. But he knew she’d be better off with Tot and insisted on introducing them.

  The nickname was minted by a British mountaineer who’d hired the Sherpa years earlier, but it stuck because Tot liked the sound and because every foreigner he met said it suited him. He stood hardly more than five feet tall with bright eyes, big ears, and a childlike giggle, but also powerful shoulders and huge hands and a joyous air not the least undermined by his supreme but understated confidence in his own ability. He wore a red Ladakhi robe, green felt Himachal cap, and English plimsolls with red and blue leggings. Dr. Akbar told Joanna that Tot’s expeditions had never lost a man. She couldn’t help asking, “What about women and children?”

  That startled Akbar. Evidently he had not understood that Joanna meant to take Simon along on this rescue mission. After a thoughtful pause, he said, “You are welcome to leave Simon here with me, Joanna. He is young, after all. And China is at war.”

  “So’s Kashmir,” she pointed out. Dr. Akbar’s generosity did not entirely preclude the possibility (always present in Asia—and probably the world over) that he had befriended her for some less savory motive of his own. But the offer was already moot because even as they spoke, the Sherpa was entrancing Simon with a series of rope tricks. Joanna interrupted to hire him. They would travel the Karakoram Trail, she explained, as far as was necessary to determine the whereabouts and condition of her husband.

  Tot grinned broadly and said that in that case, he must start right away. He assumed that she and Simon would fly as far as Leh, but since he did not like his feet to leave the ground, he preferred to trek. It would take no more than four days, he assured her, and they could start after her husband as soon as he arrived.

  Again now she wished Tot alone were accompanying them. She dreaded having to explain—to justify—her decisions to Lawrence. But she had no choice. Simon pointed to a glittering speck that had just emerged from behind the low peak near the end of the runway. “That’s him!” he said.

  The plane banked steeply and dropped, one wing several feet lower than the other. It met the ground in a series of hops, brakes screaming as it shuddered to a halt.

  Simon started forward, waving frantically. Joanna yanked him back for fear he’d run straight into the propellers. She reminded herself that Simon loved Lawrence. And Aidan trusted him.

  Then the door swung open and he appeared at the top of the air steps, his bulk seeming to dwarf the fuselage. Bareheaded, wearing only a dark green sweater and no overcoat, he created a burst of fog with his breath, yet appeared not to notice the cold. He lifted a hand to shade his eyes, and Simon dashed forth, yelling. Lawrence grinned, and in spite of herself Joanna felt a spasm of relief. The sheer solidity of him, the familiarity of that smile, even the strange dance of those mismatched eyes promised reassurance.

  Simon was just reaching the bottom of the steps when Lawrence turned back into the plane. A second later a much smaller figure appeared beside him, huddled inside a black leather flight jacket. Joanna blinked, thinking the altitude must be distorting her vision. But no. It was a child. Lawrence put his arm around her, started her down toward Simon. Celery green fabric flowed beneath the flight jacket. A black braid draped over one shoulder. The child held her chin up, aquamarine eyes reaching toward Joanna.

  Her heart turned over. My God, she thought looking from the girl to Lawrence. Have we all lost our minds?

  It took them close to an hour to walk back to the rest house, with Simon exuberantly clinging to Lawrence and singing songs to impress the girl. The boy clearly had no reservations about these new companions. Indeed, he could hardly wait to show Kamla their rest house and bedroom, which he unilaterally decided she should share with him and Joanna. And for her part, the girl seemed to take Simon as much in stride as she took her reunion with “Mrs. Shaw.” She smiled and nodded at both of them, and when they reached the rest house she obeyed Simon’s command to sit while he showed off all the wooden tops and puzzles he’d picked up in Srinagar. Joanna couldn’t imagine what Lawrence must have told her to set Kamla so at ease.

  But she waited until the children were engrossed in their play before steering him back to the outer room. “What on earth possessed you?” she whispered.

  “C’mon, Jo. Aidan would never forgive me if I let you and Simon set off alone.”

  “You know what I’m talking about. Bringing that child here is insane and probably illegal.”

  “No more illegal than anything else she’s been through. Besides, I knew you wouldn’t want me to leave her back.”

  “You’re a mind reader, are you?”

  “Call it a hunch, but I believe, one way or another, she’d have disappeared by the time you got back to Delhi. Hari’s put Vijay in charge, and while the lad means well—”

  “You actually think she’s safer here?”

  He hooked his thumbs in his belt. “I do… actually. And she can serve as a translator.”

  “Her English isn’t good enough to translate a nursery rhyme!”

  “She’s a bloody quick study. And she knows Turki. I’m pretty sure she’s originally from Sinkiang.”

  “I mean to find Aidan long before we reach Sinkiang!”

  “Then why’d you have me bring those Chinese visas?”

  Joanna faltered. “Insurance… I don’t plan to need them.”

  “And I hope you’re right. But in any case, I’ve promised Kamla to see her home.”

  “Home?” She sat down at the long plank table where her maps were spread, showing Sinkiang to be more than three times the size of France. “Did she tell you where exactly this home is?”

  He gave her a hard look. “I like the challenge of lost causes.”

  She watched him reach toward her, cup his hand over her ear. Thinking he was going to touch her, she flinched. Instead he opened his palm. She felt a shiver of air travel the length of her neck. Between his right forefinger and index finger he held a small paper rectangle. “I found this as I was heading out the door.”

  She took the piece of paper, a photograph of Aidan she’d never seen. He was grinning, relaxed, the sun in his eyes. His hair hung shaggy around the ears. The sha
dow of a beard outlined his chin, and he looked as though someone had just told him a joke. Joanna’s stomach clutched. “Where did you get this?”

  “I had my guide shoot the two of us in Afghanistan. It’s the way I remember Aidan in the war, how he is in the field. How he would be now. That press photo you’re carrying makes him look like a bloody spy. I’d show this instead.”

  She ran her finger along the rough, scissored edge where Lawrence had cut himself out of the shot. “Why’d you do that?”

  “’Cause you don’t need a picture of me.” He paused. “I’m the one that’s here.”

  She felt his eyes simultaneously holding her back and drawing her forward. “I suppose I should thank you. For being here.”

  “That’s not what I want.”

  “What do you want, Lawrence?”

  “I want this not to be a lost cause.”

  3

  After we joined Mrs. Shaw and her son in Leh, I began, like the others, to call her Mem. It seemed strange, at first, as if I must be addressing someone new or changed. But I sensed that something had changed, or would very shortly, and so I did as she requested, for it was she who said, most abruptly, “No more Mrs. Shaw, Kamla.” And the son, Simon, explained, “I call her Mem. Like Mom. Like memsahib. Like Mom in India.” He told me to do the same.

  Lawrence had warned that Mrs. Shaw might not approve of my coming, but I knew when she returned my smile at the airfield that my claim on her was still good. She took my hand. She touched my hair. She shook her head and asked how on earth Lawrence could have brought a child like me to this “godforsaken place.” I could hear in the softness of her voice that she was not truly angry. And while I could not have explained why, I knew that in her secret heart she was content that I had come. Her son did not bother to keep his pleasure secret, but danced around me like a young monkey.

  Simon and I were friends from the first. He reminded me of the boy Surie who lived near the flash house—spoiled as a son had every right to be, but also innocent and eager. That evening Simon made a game of splashing his soup and gobbling sweets until Mem sent him from the table, yet he was not at all contrite and later, while Mem and Lawrence pored over maps, he showed me the rope tricks his new friend in Srinagar had taught him. He knew enough Hindi and I enough English that we just understood each other. I called him Little Brother and taught him a song my father used to sing about the rustle of chikor in the grasses under the gleaming moon.

  As I sang I recalled how this melody would bring tears to my eyes in Indrani’s house. Here in Leh the old words filled me with joy. For Lawrence had promised to take me home. We would all travel into the mountains to find Mem’s missing husband, he said. And I would find my father. In the meantime I was given a cot in the very same room as Mem and Simon. This room was little more than a whitewashed cell with a gray cement floor and red and blue Ladakhi rugs pinned up over the windows, but the cot was more comfortable than either Indrani’s kitchen floor or the charpoy at Safe Haven, and I lay with my father’s song in my mind long after the others were sleeping.

  I awoke the next morning to find Mem and Lawrence in the main room. There was argument in their voices. I did not understand all the words, but I heard my name once or twice, and the name of Mem’s husband, Aidan. Mem looked worried and angry and frightened. She would not meet Lawrence’s eyes and he would not turn his away from her.

  As I stood in the doorway, I noticed a new man seated by the fire listening intently. I saw at once that he was a hill man with wide, flat features and a strength of muscle and bone far greater than his height. Neither old nor young, he winked at me and salaamed with his hands. I returned the greeting. Then the argument stopped and Simon came up behind me rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Mem introduced the stranger as Tot, “our Sherpa guide.” Simon explained that this was the very friend who had taught him the rope tricks. The Ladakhi owner of the rest house, a woman who melted about us like a shadow, brought a plate of dumplings, momos, and cups of thick buttered tea, and after we had eaten we walked together into the bazaar like a tribe of newfound friends.

  The marketplace seemed to crouch beneath the walls of Leh’s great palace, which sat up on the hill like an old squat toad. The palace, the road, the buildings and mountains all were of the same chalky gray, and yet there was no shortage of color. Buddhist prayer flags flapped their bright reds and blues along the road, and the stalls were piled high with rich brown grains, purple cabbages, slab apricots and eggs, goatskin capes, and Ladakhi neckpieces made of silver and turquoise and orange-red coral. Simon held my hand, and we swung our arms, our voices echoing between ancient stones. I wore a set of his clothing—Western jeans and a red flannel shirt. This made me feel free and new. Soon we were skipping through the narrow alleyways, and I realized that I had not skipped since I was a small, small girl.

  Lawrence bought a threaded top for Simon and a new blue felt jacket for me. Mem strode ahead, with Tot to carry her purchases of yak-wool blankets and caps and leggings, leather boots and water flasks, and dried meat and rice. The bazaar was thronged with hill men, Turki traders, Buddhist monks spinning prayer wheels, and peasants selling the crafts they had produced over the long winter. The morning was warm and fresh, surely cause for celebration, yet the marketplace produced so little noise that it seemed, except for ourselves, Leh must be a city of mutes. Only later, listening to Simon pant as we struggled up a steep rock hill, did I remember something I was told long ago—that when air is brittle and thin, talk is a waste of breath.

  It was then that Mem turned to me and asked if I had ever been here before. And I realized, quite dumbstruck, that I had.

  4

  “Kamla was here before. Did she tell you?” Joanna passed a mug of tea to Lawrence across the table. It was late. The children had gone to bed, the innkeeper off to her own lodgings. Tot had just left for town and the hostel where he was staying.

  When Lawrence didn’t reply, she went on, “She remembers the palace, the silence of the bazaar, all the red and blue and yellow prayer flags. And Srinagar, too. The shikara. Water lilies. Just in the short time you stopped to change planes it all came back to her. Did you realize?”

  He shook his head. “Not in so many words.” He watched her draw her elbows tight against her chest, press her mug against her cheek. Only her hair fell loose and relaxed, swimming with light from the kerosene table lamp. Over the few weeks he’d known her Lawrence had seen that hair in knots, trailing strands from the cover of hats and scarves, twisted up the back of her head, or caught with combs so that it seemed to strain with a restive will of its own. This was the first time he’d seen it freed.

  “She says she walked into India over the mountains. No pack animals. Nothing. And I believe it. The altitude seems to have no effect on her.”

  “Anything else?” he asked quietly.

  She lowered a hand to the map in front of her. “There’s only one trail over these mountains. If we follow it back she’s sure to remember more. If she could make it at—what? Four? Five?” Her voice spiked.

  “If survival were a sure thing, we wouldn’t need to go at all. I’m as eager to be off as you are, believe me, but Tot knows what he’s doing.”

  Her shoulders twisted, her eyes darting to the ceiling. She bit down so hard on the corner of her mouth that blue tooth marks formed in her lower lip. This had been building ever since the Sherpa’s arrival that morning. Joanna had her heart set on starting after Aidan as soon as Tot appeared, and when he refused she tried every angle to persuade him. Prods, orders, pleas, demands, and regular sidelong glares at Lawrence to back her up. Tot, however, was not trying to thwart them. His grin never wavered as he insisted his first concern was for their safety. On his trek from Srinagar, he’d heard continuing rumors of bandits along the Karakoram route and of more avalanches. To reach the Nubra Valley, where Aidan had been sighted, was only a few days’ march from Leh, but if they then decided to continue over the passes, they would need some sort of escort to
get past the border guards, and considerably more provisions than Joanna had now—more than they could acquire in the Nubra. Tot assured them it would take no more than a day or two to find a caravan and fill out their equipment. In any case, this delay would help their bodies adjust to the altitude. He was not asking permission.

  Joanna didn’t dare force Tot’s hand—not with the children at risk—but all day Lawrence had sensed her frustration. She needed to release some of that fury, and he didn’t mind her venting it on him. If anyone deserved it, he did, whether she realized that—would ever realize it—or not. Now, however, her defiance wavered as she came back to him and tried to stare him down.

  He might have warned her. Primitives he’d encountered in New Guinea during the war thought his eyes marked him as a god, or witch doctor at the least. And in the Foreign Office, it had derailed his opponents more than once to look up and find this split image glaring back at them. His ex-wife refused to fight with him because she said his eyes gave him an unfair advantage. Only Davey loved this defect. As a baby he would cover the green, then the gray—their own brand of peek-a-boo—to see which color would appear when he pulled his hand away. Later, when Davey began to pick up tunes from the ether around him, “Jeepers, Creepers” became his personal favorite. “Jeepers, creepers, where’d you get those peepers?” The high, reedy voice would taunt and tease, luring his father down to meet Davey’s own merry eyes, matched and dark as two licorice slices. Forehead to forehead, they’d have staring contests as his son kept humming the question to which there seemed no answer. Still later, he would grill Lawrence, taking a more scholarly approach—did he see different colors from each one, what made the color in an eye anyway, why was he the only person in the world to have two different eyes, was that a good or bad thing, what would Lawrence think if Davey became an eye doctor when he grew up? Lawrence told him anything Davey did was sure to make his dad proud. Then Davey died and now, as he watched the squirming in Joanna’s gaze, he hated his mismatched eyes.