by Aimee E. Liu
The next afternoon we buried my mother under a sky dark as charcoal. Her sisters wailed. My father and I stood a distance apart. I wanted him to pick me up, but he told me I must be strong enough to stand alone. A few minutes later the soldiers came and ordered my father to leave me. I watched two of them grab his arms and drag him to the street. I watched them push him into that black car. I started to cry as the car pulled away, but my mother’s sisters covered my mouth. They would beat me, they said, if I made a sound.
They took me to their village outside the city. I waited for my father to come for me, to take me to his other home, as he had promised. Instead, my uncle came. He put me on the back of a donkey and led me away at night. When I cried he told me my father would meet us in the mountains.
For the first weeks we traveled only in darkness or along trails out of sight from the main road. Uncle instructed me to call him Fotedar and said that the desert was full of bandits and policemen, who would be equally troublesome to a lone man and child. At first I told Fotedar when I was tired or hungry or sore, but he replied with the back of his hand. After that I understood the cost of weakness. I complained no more, and as my reward, he talked about the land beyond the mountains where my father and he had grown up. A land of lakes and trees and silvery waters, and snow and radiant meadows exploding with wildflowers. I pictured my father in this place, which he, too, had often described. I believed Fotedar. I imagined meeting my father within this crown of mountains that he called the Vale of Heaven. I thought this was my father’s plan.
Gradually a truce settled between my uncle and me. Now when we rested he told of boats, the shikara he and my father had poled for British soldiers and officials and their wives. This was how my father had wangled his way into the British Army, Fotedar told me. “He was always a good groveler, that one.” But when the big war started in Europe and the British began sending Indians to France and Italy and Burma, that’s when my father finally came to his senses. He ran away following the dak trail over the mountains to Sinkiang, took up with my mother…and, Fotedar would always finish, “now look at him.”
But when I “looked at him” I saw my father in uniform, the shiny colored ribbons fastened with polished brass pins, the horn buttons closing his pockets, the creases in his trousers, which he had my mother press with stones heated in the fire—even though he would not show these clothes outside our home. Or back even further I saw him as a boy, poling his way across the mirrored lake with reflections of snow-colored mountains and veils of pink and yellow blossoms. These visions carried me over the passes, past the heaps of bones and dying animals. They comforted me when our own donkey died, her knees buckling beneath her, and we had to walk the rest of the way. The weight of my pack bent me forward. I stuffed the splits in my shoes with dung to keep out the cold. Kashmir, my uncle told me. My father was a Kashmiri soldier. I was Kashmiri.
But then when I asked my uncle where and when my father would meet us, he turned and put his hands on his hips. He stared down at me as if I were a worm he meant to crush.
“Your father is dead,” he said. “Forget him.”
I could not breathe. I did not believe him. My father had promised to meet me in the Vale of Heaven. But Fotedar forbade me to ask more questions, and whenever I mentioned my father now he twisted my arms so cruelly that I lost my voice.
Kashmir, I told myself, watching my feet, the moon, the snow and bones and ice and stone—anything but Fotedar. In Kashmir all would be well, somehow.
But my father did not meet me in Kashmir, and we stopped in the city of the lake only long enough to buy a yellow sari and a new pair of sandals for me, to spend a single night in a house full of men who put their hands on my head and shoulders and ran fingertips over my chest. And laughed just as Golba and his men would later laugh the night they raped me.
The lake shimmered in the distance as we boarded a bus bound away from the mountains. “You need women,” my uncle Fotedar told me. “What would I do with a girl child?”
“I was living with women,” I tried to protest, but I had not been sorry to leave my mother’s sisters, so the words died in my throat.
After many days bumping through a country that I could hardly see for its brown clouds of dust, we arrived at a city larger and more modern and bustling than any I could have imagined. But Fotedar took me directly to a lane of squat dung-colored buildings on a street not so different from the one I had left behind, except that cows and girls in brightly colored saris wandered everywhere. While my uncle talked with an older woman, I rinsed my hands and face at the public tap. I listened to strangers chattering in foreign tongues. Only the wall posters spoke to me. “Callard & Bowser,” I recognized from the sweets my father would bring from his trips. “Pears’ Soap,” two words I could read apart, though I did not then see their connection to the glossy round cake in the picture. “Bombay Gin,” I had read on the bottle of white fire my father sometimes drank. The posters gave me hope that when my father was released from prison he might find me here.
But the hand that grasped my shoulder and pulled me away from the water pump did not belong to my father or even to Fotedar. My uncle was gone, without a word. The old woman he had been talking to told me this was my home now. She asked for a name to call me.
“Ka—Ka—” I meant to say Kashmir. Kashmiri. I did not understand.
But Indrani cut me off. “All right, then. Kamla. Why not?”
By the time I learned to speak Hindi, I had buried the name my father once called me even as I buried the daughter he once knew. Kamla, my new sister Mira told me, means the lotus flower. A symbol of rebirth and survival, the blossom that grows in the stagnant pond, beauty that rises from filth. “A most suitable name,” said Mira. “A most suitable name.”
3
The lorry rattled into Tihwa on the tenth of June 1949. Late afternoon, the heat still brutal, the sun smeared across the horizon as if by a sooted thumb. Lawrence leaned out the window. The stink of flesh and gas, metal and sweat had become more familiar than the taste of water, but now the reek of coal from nearby mines choked all other smells. Outside the walls of the old city, the bazaar spread in a depressing patchwork of cardboard and corrugated tin stalls, ground displays of rusty nails and hinges, dried fruit and rotting vegetables shrouded in flies. The merchants wore porkpie hats or skullcaps and dingy robes. Women went without veils. Yellow-haired Russians with florid cheeks squatted next to Tatar traders, and Kazakh herdsmen led white stallions past kneeling camel trains. Chinese flyboys wearing leather jackets pointed camera lenses and gun barrels with equal hilarity.
Tihwa was a Chinese puzzle of Nationalist bureaucrats and secret police, Soviets masquerading as White Russians, and local Muslim functionaries with clandestine loyalties. According to Lawrence’s researches, the Brits had been quietly shuttling back and forth among these factions for over a century, but the Americans with their wartime infusion of planes and guns and Yankee bravado had shifted the puzzle decidedly to the right. Before leaving Delhi Lawrence had equipped himself with briefing sheets on all the key players in Sinkiang, and the American consul, Daniel Weller, ranked at the top of the list. “Just keep your head down if you get that far,” Jack had warned him during their final telephone conversation. “No official identity. No affiliations beyond friendship. If this mate of yours is playing some game of his own, I want to know, but I have no intention of getting hung with it. And Weller could easily hang us if he discovers who you are.”
As they turned in past the Marines guarding the U.S. consular compound, Lawrence watched Joanna peering forward. In this dusky, insistent light, with her windblown hair ringing her face, she looked terrified. Between them Kamla sat with her head lowered. Her hair had slipped from its accustomed plaits so he could not see her face, but the tension of her body betrayed her. She was coming home.
No affiliations beyond friendship, Lawrence thought bitterly. It was far too late for that.
“Do you have any idea what a fool
thing you’ve done,” Weller demanded a half-hour later. “Any idea what’s going on here?”
“Thanks.” Lawrence accepted the tumbler of Scotch the consul held out to him.
They were waiting in the consulate drawing room while Weller’s wife got Joanna and Kamla settled upstairs. Yet again, Aidan and Alice had eluded them. They left Tihwa almost as soon as they arrived, Weller had told Joanna. Over a week ago.
The American consul lifted his glass. He was well padded, of medium height, with salt-and-pepper hair. Clean-shaven. Blue button-down shirt and chinos. Ivy League, Lawrence thought. Yale, according to his briefing sheet. “Gan bei.” Bottoms up.
“I’ve heard rumors.” Lawrence skirted Weller’s question.
“Well, you’ve no business coming here on rumors. We’ve just been ordered to evacuate all nonessential personnel. And I promise you, if my wife has to leave, so do you. We’re just waiting for a plane to come available.”
“We heard the Reds took Shanghai.”
“Yeah.” Weller uttered a grunt of disgust. “Without a shot.”
Lawrence glanced around the room. Chinese rosewood furniture and silk brocade. Porcelain vases. Cloisonne ashtrays. “Gifts” from local Nationalist strongmen, no doubt. “Is an evacuation this far west really warranted?”
“I don’t make the orders.”
“But you’re the expert here. Are things really that bleak?”
Weller leaned back in his chair. “Far as I’m concerned, an air base here in the west is our only hope of stopping the Soviets from taking this whole goddamn continent. We should be beefing up, not clearing out. But tell that to Truman.” He gulped down his drink.
Lawrence thought of the shipment of arms that had traveled with them from Kashgar. He asked, however, only about Aidan and Alice James.
Weller snorted, “I thought there was something off about those two. More than just the girl’s snooping, I mean.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Weller?”
“Dan.”
“Dan, then.”
“Well, he didn’t exactly warn us his wife was on his heels.” He tapped his thumbs on the rim of his glass. “I can’t help but wonder if that cable she sent wasn’t what prompted him to clear out.”
Lawrence didn’t respond. Joanna hadn’t mentioned sending a cable.
“Also, I ran a routine check—I always do on any foreigners who wander in unannounced. Nothing on the girl, but Washington wired back that China’s the last place your pal Shaw ought to be hiding out. Is he or isn’t he?”
“Is he or isn’t he what?”
“Red.”
Lawrence frowned. “He wrote a couple of articles criticizing Chiang Kai-shek, but far as I know the only card he carries is his press card.” He yawned broadly as if the whole subject bored him. Bloody American bullshit. “Why do you say it’s the girl who’s snooping?”
“She’s the one asking questions. But she’s on the warpath over ancient history. Purges, secret jails, firing squads, all that’s over and done with. Sheng got the boot in ’44.”
“Sheng. The old warlord?”
“Right.” Weller lowered his large head, dislodging a hank of graying hair, which he shoved impatiently behind his ears as if reminding himself to get a haircut. “Sheng Shih-ts’ai. Nasty piece of work.”
Indeed. According to Lawrence’s information, Sinkiang’s former governor had murdered more than two hundred thousand during his time in office. But he had an inkling that wasn’t what Weller meant. “How so?”
“Bastard kept changing sides. Played to the Bolsheviks one year, Chiang the next. Whoever seemed more likely to grease his palm. Hard for the locals to know where they stood.”
And for the likes of you to know how to play him, Lawrence thought. He asked, “Where is he now?”
Weller jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “After the Soviets beat Hitler back at Stalingrad, Sheng figured Stalin was the man to please, so he started rounding up Nationalist agents. That was one about-face too many for Chiang Kai-shek.” He played the name out in a drawl.
And Lawrence continued to play dumb. “Chiang had him executed?”
“Executed! What good would that do?” Weller stood up, holding his empty glass. “Sheng’s worth too much alive. He made a healthy contribution to the Kuomintang coffers in exchange for early retirement.”
Yes, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the Yanks’ prince of humanitarian justice. Lawrence watched Weller stride across the room to the bar tray. As the consul said, Sheng was old news. Maybe tales of the warlord’s atrocities had drawn Alice, but what could be in it for Aidan? There was doubtless a reason this local history never left Sinkiang—a reason that might not curry favor with Aidan’s accusers if he wrote up the gory details. But perhaps this reason itself was the lure. Aidan had a perverse streak. When pushed to the wall he was as likely to break down the wall as he was to fight back.
Lawrence started at a sound by the door, thinking it was Joanna and Kamla, but only a houseboy glided past. He shifted his inquiry. If Kamla was now eleven—say, five when her mother died—then her father would have been seized in ’43. During Sheng’s last grasp. He said to Weller’s back, “I heard Sheng treated the Indians right shabbily…”
“The traders, yeah.” Weller spoke over his shoulder as he refilled his glass. “Yellow and brown never wasted much love on each other, and in Sheng’s clink the brown boys got the shaft. They used to hang in cages out in the bazaar, slowly strangling to death. And I mean slowly. Days. People here ate it up.”
Lawrence studied the spirals of lush design in the silk beneath his feet. He thought of Kamla’s rigid back as they entered the city. “Who’s in charge now?” he asked.
As the consul turned, Lawrence thought he detected a stiffening of the man’s sun-reddened neck. “Nobody worth a damn. With Chiang Kai-shek running off to Formosa, we’re gonna be left high and dry.”
“You mean the U.S. intends to hang on here even after—”
“Don’t be stupid.” Weller examined Lawrence with a look that said, who the hell are you, anyway? Clearly, he didn’t know.
“All right.” Lawrence shrugged offhandedly. “Alice James, cub reporter. What’s her story? Or, what does she think her story is?”
Weller brought the decanter and topped off Lawrence’s drink. “Damned if I know. Hell of a looker, though.”
This last had the spin of a gambit. Lawrence elected to pass. “Where did they go?”
“Back to India, if they know what’s good for ’em.”
“You don’t know?”
The consul melted back into his chair. “I’m telling you, there was something off. They slipped out of here before dawn, for Christ’s sake. No thank-you, nothing.”
Right. And Weller didn’t have enough contacts or interest to track them down?
“No one’s reported them since?” Lawrence asked.
“Well, there’s always reports. Some of my tribesmen said they saw some foreigners heading up toward Ili Territory. But plenty of Russians in these parts look like foreigners.” He nursed his drink.
My tribesmen, Lawrence repeated to himself. Ili was an area to the northwest of Tihwa that straddled the Soviet border. A bastion for rebels backed by Stalin.
Weller turned at a clicking of heels in the hall. “There you are, Lill. Thought our guests must have eaten you.”
Mrs. Weller swept in with a businesslike nod in Lawrence’s direction. She was a stout middle-aged woman with a chest like the prow of a well-built ship. This particular feature was shown off to full effect by a sleeveless yellow shirtdress, belted at the waist, and polished black high-heeled pumps, which both elevated and pitched her forward. Considering the two individuals before him, Lawrence was drawn back to one of Tracy’s comments shortly before their divorce. “You see, darling, people who are meant to be married resemble each other. They grow to resemble each other all the more the longer they’re together, while you and I could not have grown more different.” The Weller
s evidently were meant to be married. Lill even had the same cagey look about the eyes. Jack’s warning was well taken. Lawrence didn’t trust either of these two as far as he could throw them.
Christ, he thought, Weller’s clichés are rubbing off.
The eagerness with which Lillian Weller drained her first martini told Lawrence that Joanna had been working on her upstairs the same way he’d been grilling the consul. As she lowered herself into a leather armchair beside her husband, Lawrence pretended equal interest in his own drink.
“So what’s with the kid,” Weller said suddenly, and Lawrence suspected his host had been rewinding their conversation, clearing it, as it were, to the beginning. Now he noticed a flaw.
“Oh, honey, it’s just awful,” answered his wife. “She was kidnapped during the Sheng years, taken off to be sold in Delhi. Joanna’s rescued her and brought her back.” She turned to Lawrence with a pinched expression. “It’s awfully good of you to help, but you can’t honestly expect to find her family here in this place, after all that’s happened.”
Good for Jo, Lawrence thought. Playing the lost child on a new set of heartstrings. “That’s just the point,” he said. “We don’t know what’s happened.”
“Happened to what?” Joanna appeared in the doorway with Kamla close behind.
“To the two of you,” Weller said. “Drink?”
But Joanna seemed unprepared for such a question. She started to shake her head, then stopped, glanced at Lawrence and quickly looked away. Her hair was wet and pulled back tight. She stood scrubbed and tan and skinny in a pale blue dress that Lillian must have given her. Gone was the aura of terror—trepidation, it must in fact have been as the countdown she’d started with that unmentioned cable drew to an end—but in its place now appeared a reluctant vulnerability that Lawrence had never seen in her before. She hardly looked older than Kamla. As he stared, she brought her gaze back to his.