Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  “Well, I guess that makes two of us.” She met his look.

  “What are you going to tell him?”

  “The truth. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”

  “That should keep him warm at night.”

  “Lawrence—” But her voice cracked. She wiped her eyes with the back of one wrist, blinked two, three times, hard. This time he made no move to touch her.

  “You’d better do it, then,” he said.

  She told him, as best she could, but whether due to the whiskey or the shock or the toll of altitude, or the simple fact that this level of abandonment was beyond his ken, Simon seemed immune to the words and smiled mutely in response. Even as he was repositioned and belted to the litter and she pulled the oilcloth hood of his jacket up over his head. Even as she kissed his cheek and touched his hair, as she clung to his small, damp hands, still he could not grasp what was happening.

  Finally the porters picked up the litter, and she moved along with them out onto the trail. The wet rock stretched black and slick, draped with fog. Two steps became five, then ten. Milne led the way as the path narrowed, forcing a single file.

  Suddenly Simon’s eyes rolled back toward her. She’d begun falling behind. Now she stood perhaps twenty feet away, stopped cold in the center of the trail. Her arms stiffened, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides. She was still close enough to read his face, saw tears, the first flash of bewilderment. Those brown eyes grew larger, impossibly round. His head twisted in the same anguished contortion as when she’d left him the first day of nursery school. Yet there was no comparison. This time he didn’t make a sound. Even as the distance thickened, and she stayed back and he moved forward until the fog drew a wall between them, he said nothing. Nothing.

  2

  I waited to tighten my claim on her. With Simon gone she was sad and quiet, no longer Mrs. Shaw. Only Mem. My Mem. I spoke these words to myself in secret: My Mem—mimicking Simon.

  Please understand, I enjoyed Simon, but I could not ignore his weakness. I had watched him squirm and kick in his sleep, heard him gasp and cough his way up the passes. He complained of hunger and pain, the cold wind in his ears. He begged to rest. Lucky boy, Dr. Milne had called him. Lucky in spite of his weakness, I thought, or perhaps, among the firenghi, weakness brought luck? I was not a firenghi, and experience had taught me long ago that I could afford neither to show my own weakness nor protect the weakness of others. Still, I kept turning the question in my mind. How much to hide? How much to reveal? What would I have to do to become a lucky one, myself?

  The mountains grew fiercer and much colder as we marched on, and Mem and Lawrence exchanged few words. During the days I kept closer to Tot, saying little and demanding less, but when the sun fell and everyone settled around the fire, Mem and Lawrence seemed to expect me to take a place between them. As Lawrence told his stories of the mountains and men who had climbed here before us, he made me follow along in his books. He commanded me to stop him when I did not understand. In this way my English improved, but sometimes his breath was so sour that it pushed me away from him. Sometimes his voice rose unaccountably or he would burst for no reason into laughter. Often Mem watched him with an expression of mistrust.

  One night after the caravan drivers and the Muslim family had retreated from the fire, Lawrence was reading from his notebook about the many, many bones we were passing along the trail. Some, he said, dated back to caravans hundreds of years ago. And not all belonged to animals.

  To my surprise Mem reached out and curled an arm around my shoulder. “Can’t you see you’re scaring the poor child to death!”

  Lawrence shut his book with a slap. “To death,” he said. “Well, what’s wrong with ’at? Least I’ve heard it’s warm down there.”

  His breath was fouler than usual, and he leaned right into her face.

  “You’ve been drinking!” Mem pulled me away from him.

  “S’alright,” Lawrence said. “Just a snippet of Muhammad’s hooch to boost the furnace. He doesn’t much like to share. You know”—he winked—“good Muslims don’t drink, so it follows the skin’s nearly empty. Then I’ll be sober as a judge, though I can’t say I’ve known many sober judges. You, Kammy?”

  I didn’t dare speak. I had known plenty of men who drank liquor in the flash house. Some became jolly. Some became cruel. I could not imagine Lawrence becoming cruel, but the way Mem drew me to my feet told me she thought differently.

  “Why are you doing this?” she demanded.

  Lawrence remained sitting. He ran a hand over the thick beard that had grown across most of his face. He had purchased a rawhide hat in Panamik, which he wore low over his eyes. His nose was as red as a chili pod and the layers of wool and sheepskin clothing made his shoulders and chest as massive as a bear’s. Yet he had never looked more gentle to me.

  He folded his arms around his knees and rocked backward. “I haven’t touched the whiskey, Jo. It’s yours if and when you need it.”

  The softness of his voice seemed to melt into the hiss of the embers. I felt Mem’s grip on my shoulders loosen. There was a long silence. Then she asked, “Would you like me to comb your hair, Kamla?”

  I nodded even though it saddened me to leave Lawrence sitting alone.

  Inside our tent that night, I nudged and rolled and sidled so close that finally Mem opened her arms. She said, “You poor thing, you’re freezing. Why don’t you come into my sleeping bag with me?” I moved so fast she could not think of changing her mind.

  With our sheepskins and felt boots, the English long underwear and thick woolen sweaters that we wore day and night, there was hardly room for the two of us in that kapok cocoon. I do not pretend it was comfortable, and in truth I was not cold sleeping alone. But I nestled against her, and she wound her arms around me. When later I woke to feel her crying secret sobs, I lay very still in the scoop of her body. I let her think I was sleeping. Her tears became my secret, too.

  In the days that followed I often thought of the firenghi lady I had spied in Delhi weeping over her fancy dress. The loss of a child, of a husband to me seemed far better reasons for tears, yet still my Mem concealed her sorrow. I had known all along she was not like the others.

  No, I thought. She was like me.

  And yet she had one vanity, which I loved. Every morning she applied a drop of perfume to the inside of each wrist and the hollow of her throat. Then she would touch me with that same moistened fingertip, and I would feel again the thrill of closeness, of daring and trust I had felt the day in Panamik when we stood naked before each other. That bath had been our last, and we had not changed our clothing since. The freezing cold and lack of water made washing nearly impossible, and the smell of human dirt and sweat hung heavy over the entire caravan, yet each morning Mem and I would step from our tent wearing the stinging clean scent of carnations. “Our secret weapon,” she called it.

  Now sometimes on our marches I would steal close and touch Mem’s hand. Her fingers would close around mine and I would look up into her face. Over our weeks together her skin had browned to the color of cinnamon. The tip of her nose peeled to pink. Her hair had lightened with the sun, and her eyes now looked into me as if seeing some great distance.

  Often, as Mem held me this way, I would catch sight of Lawrence watching, and I felt as if a silken thread bound me to these two. As long as this thread held, I was safe, yet I knew that once it was broken, I would be cast away. You see, I pictured my guardians like the Hindu gods my flash house sisters had taught me. Lawrence took the form of the great Protector, Shiva, so powerful yet also ascetic and sensitive. Mem could only be Lakshmi, the goddess of good fortune. But her husband was not Lakshmi’s bird-god Garuda. Instead he appeared to me on a white horse as Vishnu’s tenth incarnation Kalkin, destined to bring the present age of the world to an end.

  I knew that if we found Mem’s husband, she would immediately return with him to Simon and everything would change. While Lawrence said that he and I
would continue on in any case, that he would do all in his power to help me find my father, I could plainly see that Mem, not I, was the reason he made this journey. So I did not join Mem at the edge of the trail as she studied the rocky hillsides. If I saw a biscuit wrapper or tin that Mem or Tot had failed to notice, I turned my head away. And when Lawrence handed me his binoculars, I trained them not on the nearby streams and gullies but up to the tops of the mountains where not even birds could fly.

  At the same time, I believed that if I were good in other ways, at least I would not break the thread myself. So each night I helped erect our tent. I worked with Tot to prepare our supper of lentils or rice. I kept myself as clean and uncomplaining as possible and pleased Mem by learning to read the words she would draw for me in her notebook.

  To please the gods I also helped the others in the camp, bringing water to the ponies or searching for dried bits of dung for the fire. While the begum cooked her husband’s food or saw to their encampment, I would rock and sing to her infant daughter. This last was not solely for the gods, of course. I loved the way those tiny fingers wrapped around my own, the strength with which they grasped me. The baby’s face was soft and pink, her eyes like narrow seeds of light, and I could just imagine her traveling each day, buffered by the darkness, snug against her mother’s breast. I envied her safety and protection. But I should have known better.

  As we descended from the high passes all the rivers we encountered were swollen with melted snow. The Black Jade, however, was by far the wildest. It ran so green and swift that it seemed to boil over the jagged bottom. This would not have mattered except that the gorge was very narrow. The trail would vanish on one side of the water and pick up on the other, forcing us to cross back and forth, and the yaks and ponies, still weak from the passes, would lose their footing and be swept downstream, screaming and kicking, their boxes floating like wings to keep them from drowning.

  The begum always rode with her baby folded into her burqa. Together they rode behind her husband, and because of her many garments, she sat sideways on her mount. Holding the child she had only one hand free, and with this she clung to her pony’s mane as if in constant terror. The animal must have sensed this, because he was often skittish. As we made our way along the Shahidulla Gorge I heard the begum’s husband scold her to relax, but I cannot imagine that he could relax if forced to ride in such a way. And she had safely ridden over the highest of the passes and crossed many rivers already. So they went on as before.

  We made the last and most dangerous crossing at three different points of the river. The caravan men split into groups, the first crossing upstream with the pack animals, and the others divided between the Muslim family and our group at the lowest point. This way, if a pack animal were swept away, the lower men had a chance to catch it. But the ponies we rode carried no floatable boxes, and Tot warned us to look out for each other, lest we be pulled under.

  In our group, Lawrence crossed all the way first, then I started, with Mem and Tot behind me. Almost immediately the water rose to my pony’s belly, covering my boots. The current felt like hands of ice beating and grabbing my legs. It was so cold and so loud, but also exciting. As I reached the middle of the river I felt the spray on my cheeks, saw Lawrence grinning from the far shore. I looked up at the walls of stone, the sky a thin wedge of turquoise above us. Then I turned my head and saw the begum tip sideways into the water.

  The rapids had swept her pony’s legs out from under him. If the caravan leader had not been riding alongside, the begum, too, would have been swept away, but Muhammad reached over and seized her by the shoulders, hauling her like a great black fish over his saddle.

  It all happened so quickly. I saw the pony spin around and under, hooves pedaling out of the water, the foam tinted pink. The begum’s husband shouted from shore, but the crash of the river drowned his voice. Behind me Tot yelled for me to move on, it was too dangerous to stop.

  Suddenly I saw two small pink hands reaching through the foam. The river rose as if opening its mouth and spat out a misshapen bundle of rags. I glimpsed the baby’s coal-black curls, then the rapids swallowed her again, perhaps a dozen yards directly upstream from where my pony stood swaying beneath me. He had found secure footing and seemed as unwilling to move ahead as I was to have him do so. I curled my legs around his belly and leaned sideways, opening my arms to the currents. Again I caught sight of the baby, much closer now and hurtling toward me. Her swaddling had come loose. Lengths of white cotton spread in a web. Then I touched her skin. The surface felt hard and slippery as eggshell. Impossible to grasp.

  When my fingers closed I was holding only cloth. Still, I thought it must be fastened around her. But as I drew the swaddling toward me, the pull of the river was stronger. I could not see the baby now for the spray, the green-black water, the canyon’s deafening echo.

  3

  Kamla couldn’t swim. When Joanna saw the torrents pounding through this section of the gorge, she had begged Tot to rope them together, but he insisted that would only endanger them both. So they’d put the child on the tallest, steadiest pony, with Lawrence going first to test the rock bottom. Joanna wanted to cross next to Kamla, but Lawrence yelled back that the solid outcropping narrowed at the middle, with a sharp drop and uncertain footing over the edge, so she was behind Kamla when the girl stopped in midstream.

  Tot yelled to keep moving. Joanna put up her hand. She could see something was wrong, the way Kamla twisted sideways in her saddle, searching the river with her eyes. Above them the Muslim woman had lost her pony. The rapids were sweeping the poor animal downstream, but the begum herself had been rescued.

  “You can’t stop!” Joanna shouted, and dug her heels into her pony to nudge Kamla’s mount. Her right leg was pressed against the larger animal’s flank, their combined weight tilting against the rapids, when suddenly Kamla lurched as if to throw herself into the water.

  Instinctively Joanna reached to catch her, but the abrupt shift of balance and motion spooked her pony. He dodged sideways, and Joanna felt him yank out from under her as she pitched forward. Her arms closed around Kamla’s waist.

  In the next second the water slammed over them, dragging them under. Joanna’s single thought was to hold on to the girl, but the cold was so intense and the battering of rocks against her arms and spine so incessant that she could not be sure of the location of her hands. The first time her head cleared the water she saw the ponies rear up, biting the foam. Then Kamla came up gasping and Joanna was pulled back under.

  Whether they traveled ten feet or a thousand she had no idea, but when she next surfaced she heard Lawrence’s voice thundering down the gorge: “Catch!”

  He was standing on an outcropping above them, twirling a loop of rope. Joanna found her feet, Kamla by some miracle still in her arms. They’d washed into a shallow, protected cove.

  The girl’s hair was in her mouth, and their clothes were pasted together, heavy as a double suit of armor. “Are you all right?” she cried. Kamla glanced at her, white-faced, over her shoulder. She was shaking, but managed to nod.

  Then Kamla put her hands in the air, and the rope sailed toward them. And Lawrence was hauling them to safety.

  He threw a blanket over them, wrapping them tightly in his arms. Joanna looked up and saw tears in his eyes. She felt Kamla’s heart thrashing against her own.

  “I try,” the girl blurted out. “The river is too strong!” She pulled back, looking past them up the shoreline to the Muslim merchant, who stood as if planted in the rock.

  He was hammering a fist in their direction. Behind him his wife crouched, doubled over, the black mass of her burqa heaving. Even above the noise of the rapids, of her own retreating panic, Joanna could hear the wails pulsing through that black shroud, like the screams of a mortally wounded animal.

  The caravan drivers discovered the baby’s corpse on a gravel spit nearly a mile downstream. Muslim practice required that the body be wrapped and buried immediately, bu
t they had to carry her for another hour before they found earth deep and soft enough to turn. As the baby’s father chanted his prayer and the mother sat, mute now and rocking back and forth, the men placed a boulder over the shallow grave.

  “It is so that wolves do not eat the body,” Tot explained so matter-of-factly that Joanna hated him for it.

  They went on in a numb, exhausted procession. No one spoke directly of the Muslim child’s death, but its shadow seemed to settle squarely on Kamla’s shoulders. The fact that Kamla had touched the baby yet failed to save her made her responsible in the eyes not only of the father, but the caravan men as well. In a matter of minutes, the girl and her firenghi guardians, as well, had become a bad omen. The men scowled at Kamla as she passed and cursed behind her back. When Joanna asked Tot what they were saying, he answered, “They do not trust her.”

  The accident had not been Kamla’s fault, any more than it was Joanna’s or Lawrence’s or Tot’s. Less than it would have been her own fault, Joanna thought, if she and Kamla had drowned. If anyone was to blame for the infant’s death, it was the father. What could he be thinking to keep his wife inside that death trap on a trek like this! Joanna searched for some means to convey her sorrow and sympathy for the woman. Offers of food, company, a clasp of hands. Even under these conditions, even across the language gap, such ritual tokens might have provided some comfort. But the merchant did not let his wife out of his sight, and if Joanna moved too close, he would stand glowering between them.

  In the evenings two camps formed as Joanna and Lawrence and Tot closed ranks to protect Kamla. Lawrence quit drinking. Not even whiskey, though Joanna thought if ever there was a time for drink, this must surely be it. They had fuel for only a brief and single fire every night, and that barely sufficient to cook a meal; warmth was out of the question in any case, so the separate groups would cook and eat quickly, then retire to their opposing zones. If it was not too cold, Tot would entertain the girl with games devised from pebbles and rope. Joanna spelled out words and sentences for her to read, and Lawrence would steer them into a four-hand round of gin rummy. Later, with the two men keeping watch outside, Joanna and Kamla would huddle in their tent and sing melodies dredged up from Simon’s infancy. The girl, for her part, seemed to crave this attention. Outwardly she showed neither fear nor distress in the wake of the accident, but in the blue light of dawn Joanna often opened her eyes to find Kamla gravely studying her face as if fearful she might never wake. Then she would hold the girl close—or as close as their many layers of clothing permitted—and she would tell her about America, and Simon, and their house in Delhi, subjects that here seemed remote as fairy tales.