Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  “All right, then,” Henderson said. “After Hiroshima, there was a brief honeymoon period here when the Nationalists and Communists pretended to shake hands. The jails were emptied as a gesture of goodwill. Most of the former prisoners scuttled off to join the Reds in Yenan. Your boy Chand headed in the other direction.”

  “He didn’t die in prison?” Joanna lifted a hand and folded it absently around her throat.

  “No,” said Henderson. “He was headed for India, but somehow wandered into Tibet. The Tibetans have never been fond of outsiders. We think it was a misunderstanding—wrong place, wrong time, or perhaps just a communications gap: Chand couldn’t speak the local dialect, so the tribesmen took him for an intruder.”

  “Tibet’s not exactly on the main route back,” Lawrence observed.

  “It’s an alternate route,” Weller said smoothly.

  Alternate for an expendable brown “boy” running a king’s errand, Lawrence thought. He’d seen similar scenarios played out countless times during his years with Special Operations. The loyal spy who knew too much cunningly played out of the game.

  “How do you know he’s dead?” Joanna persisted.

  The slash of light had moved with the sun and now pressed against her face. She neither squinted nor blinked. Lawrence resisted the impulse to shield her with his own body.

  The British consul picked up a manila folder from the desk in front of him. “If you must, you may look at this, Mrs. Shaw. I think you’ll regret it.”

  She opened the file. Lawrence got up and came behind her. A round-faced man with light skin and amiable black eyes stared out from a constabulary photograph dated 1941. He wore a turban and a thick black beard and army fatigues. His face and lips were as delicately shaped as Kamla’s, though his nose was larger and coarser. Strangely, the eyebrows resembled her most. Just as hers did, they started far apart and slanted evenly upward, dropping short at the outer corners. It was a strong face, and not unkind, but like Kamla’s it seemed to conceal more than it revealed.

  The paperwork in the folder substantiated what the consuls had told them. It bore various official British signatures and stamps. The certificate of death was dated June 1946. No next of kin was listed.

  Joanna flipped to the photographs at the back of the folder. She uttered a low moan, and Lawrence placed his hands on her shoulders. The pictures were straightforward and graphic. The shoulders and boots pointed in opposite directions. Only the face was recognizable. It appeared Kamla’s father had been hacked to death.

  Joanna wordlessly passed the folder back to Henderson. “You understand,” he said, “all of this is strictly confidential. I’ve shared this with you purely as a courtesy.”

  Lawrence spoke. “What about Kamla? Surely she’s entitled to some compensation.”

  Henderson again looked at his watch. “I’m afraid I must go. As I told you, we have no record that Chand had a child. And evidently neither do you.”

  “Just like that?” Lawrence said. “You admit the man died serving British interests. You admit that all the evidence we’ve laid in front of you suggests this child is his daughter, and you know bloody well why there was no birth certificate—precisely because he was your spy!”

  Henderson stood up. “It’s not my policy, Mr. Malcolm. Chand never reported a daughter to his superiors. It was his choice.” He looked significantly at Lawrence. “If this is the only reason you’ve come to Sinkiang, I’m afraid you may have made the trip for nothing.”

  A question mark teetered at the end of this statement. Joanna frowned, and Lawrence fully expected her to declare her larger mission. He couldn’t tell if Henderson was fishing for this, or for some more subtle revelation from Lawrence himself. Either way, the consul had destroyed his own leverage. His disavowal of Kamla granted them full license to remain silent.

  But Joanna held her tongue only until Henderson was out the door. “Mr. Weller,” she said leaning forward.

  Weller’s wooden chair creaked loudly as he drew back. She had her hands on the desk. Her cheeks flamed.

  “Can you arrange for me to adopt Kamla?”

  8

  While we waited, Mrs. Weller and I played gin rummy—she was quite surprised that I knew how to play, but I told her Lawrence had taught me, and she nodded and said that made sense. She herself was so familiar with the game that she could shuffle and deal and make her plays without paying the least attention. All the while she talked on and on, seeming to feel it necessary to fill the air with words. She spoke with a great deal of energy, and at one point her eyes brimmed with tears. She was childless, she said. This was her “sorrow.” I thought how odd it was that she had no children and I no mother, yet there was not the least desire for affection between us. I thought of the many children we had met along the road who had also lost parents and were left to beg or scavenge for scraps as I had in Delhi. I thought if Mrs. Weller truly wanted children, there must be countless ones she could claim as Mem and Lawrence had claimed me.

  I had talked with some of those children, asked them where were their mothers and fathers. Many did not know. But others could describe their fathers’ jails as if they themselves had been imprisoned—windowless cells without water or air into which they were herded like animals. The children said men were beaten on the palms and soles with bamboo until their flesh was pulp. They were strung up by the wrists with razor wire, with their feet just touching a pile of coal dust so that any movement would lower the pile and cause the pressure on the bindings to cut their hands off, and when they were thirsty they would be given drink with sugar or salt, this to multiply their thirst until they were mad with it, and then they were given nothing. Some were put into petrol drums half filled with water that was slowly heated until they confessed to crimes dictated by their jailers. Or had their feet covered with boiling oil or branded with burning wood. Even after confessing, many still did not know what they were accused of.

  Though I tried not to, I saw my own father in many of these stories. But even as I worried that a similar fate had befallen him, I also took comfort because the tales proved that some of the men had survived. Therefore my father, too, might still be waiting to tell me his stories, if only I could find him.

  From the terrace where we were sitting, I could see when Mem and Lawrence stepped back into the hall, and I tipped the table in my haste to meet them. Mem took me by the hand. She was not smiling. I waited, hoping that her expression meant only more of the same no-news that we both had been enduring throughout these long weeks. But then I looked at Lawrence and his face, too, seemed cut from iron. Except that his one green-brown eye quivered behind a wall of tears.

  Mem led me alone out into the garden. We sat in the shade of a willow tree. A light breeze caused the fronds of the willow to sway, stirring the veil of coal dust so that it seemed as if spirits moved around us, warming us with their breath, even making fun of us sitting there so serious. Mem held on to my hand, and I thought this was all I wanted. All I had ever wanted.

  She told me my father had not died when and how I imagined, but later, after I was already sold to the flash house and had given up hope of seeing him again. She told me he died in the mountains. She did not tell me the circumstances, and she said she did not know why, though she thought it was an accident. He did not die in the death car. He did not die in prison. Perhaps he was coming to find his brother. Perhaps he was coming for me. All these things blew through my mind as she talked and held my hand. I knew they mattered more than life itself. At the same time, nothing mattered but the comfort of Mem’s skin, not as pale as it once had been but the color of roasted grain from our long hours together under the mountain and desert suns. Our travels together had made our skins almost indistinguishable. She no longer wore gloves. She had changed, and I had changed. When she said she wondered if I would like to become as her daughter now, I shook my head not understanding.

  “I am as your daughter now.”

  She let go my hand and wrapped me in he
r arms. I felt her cheek wet against my forehead, her lips soft at my temple. She surrounded me like a gathering net, pulling me inward, shaping herself against me. And then we began to rock in this bundle of darkness and sorrow and warmth, and I shut my eyes and imagined the spirits lifting the two of us as we shrank to a single flame upon the stream.

  Chapter 6

  1

  WHILE MEM AND LAWRENCE were learning what had happened to my father, Tot went into the bazaar to ask questions about Mr. Shaw. That afternoon he took us to visit a Russian mechanic who said that he had rented a jeep to a foreign man and woman who intended to drive up toward the Soviet border. The couple claimed to be Western journalists and said they wanted to interview Osman, one of the rebel chiefs whose camp lay in the mountains above Heaven’s Pool. They were supposed to return with the Russian’s jeep in three days, but that was over a week ago.

  “Aidan thought they’d be back before we got here,” Mem said to Lawrence. “That’s why he didn’t leave word.”

  Lawrence did not answer.

  When they told Mr. Weller, he said they shouldn’t believe anything they heard in the bazaar, but the next morning at breakfast he said that maybe the Russian was right. “Some of my tribesmen found a jeep in the foothills, about four hours from here.”

  Mem pulled her shirt collar around her neck, as if she were suddenly cold.

  They did not want me to come. They would be gone only overnight, Lawrence said, a quick, rough trip into the foothills north of the city with Mr. Weller and some of his men. I could stay at the consulate with Mrs. Weller, where I would be safe and comfortable until they returned. But the length of a night is measured not only by the hands of a clock, and experience had taught me that even the shortest of separations too often turned out to be permanent. My father was dead, and Mem and Lawrence’s hurried talk and nervous gestures betrayed their fear.

  So I pleaded. I used tears and silence and protests of need. I wedged myself between them, holding on to both their hands, and said I did not believe, if they left, that they would ever return.

  “Let her come,” Mem said finally.

  Because of me, no space remained for Tot to accompany us. No one realized this until the very last moment when Mem and Lawrence and I squeezed into the back of the consulate jeep and Mr. Weller got in beside Chen, his driver and translator. Mr. Weller said Tot could ride with the Chinese soldiers in the escort jeep. But the soldiers only laughed at him. “How do we know you’re not a Communist?” they barked. Tot glared at them, then stomped back across the motor court on his short thick legs. I had never seen him so angry. He told Lawrence that it was his duty to make sure we were safe. Had he not guided and protected us all the way from Leh? He felt responsible for us even here, he said. Lawrence asked again if I would stay at the consulate, but I stubbornly shook my head.

  As we drove out through the hot crowded streets no one spoke a word. Mem kept her head turned toward the lowered window. Lawrence wound and rewound his watch and tapped his thumb on his knee. Mr. Weller bent over his map up front, pulling on the brim of his cap. (The cap was dark blue with a Y stitched in white, and Lawrence whispered that in Weller’s world that Y was like the caste mark of a high Brahmin.) Every few minutes the driver would lean on his horn as we swerved around a flock of goats, an overloaded truck, or a mangy dog.

  Once we left the city and its haze of coal dust, the heat of the northern desert intensified. The sun pounded down from a cloudless sky, and we had to stop barely an hour out of the city when one of the jeep’s radiators boiled over. My father had died, but I had Mem to one side of me, Lawrence to the other, and though they each were locked in their separate thoughts, if I moved my arms just slightly I could feel their skin against my own. I could finger the folds of their shirts. They had tried to leave me, and I had not let them. A small victory, you might say, but I marked my victories, whatever their size, like gems to be hoarded and cherished.

  Not even the roadblocks alarmed me. The Han Chinese soldiers that manned them looked too lazy to give us trouble. They stood or squatted in circles and smoked. Some fingered their rifles like flutes. One caught his breath, lifted his gun, and squeezed the trigger. Mem jumped in her seat, but the soldier was only shooting at a flock of wild ducks, and when the bird he had killed dropped to the road, the other men shouted, slapped him on the back. Then they waved us on.

  “No need to look so stricken,” Mr. Weller said over his shoulder to Mem. “Remember, they’re on our side.”

  “Exactly what side is that?” she asked. But the engine roared as we turned uphill, and Mr. Weller touched a finger to his ear as if he couldn’t hear her.

  We stopped at an oasis for water, passed one last checkpoint, then turned off the main road for a wide dirt track that led up toward the Tien Shan. Any farther, Mr. Weller said, and “we’d be playing chicken with the Reds.” Lawrence explained that Communist rebels controlled the rest of Sinkiang between here and the Soviet border, but the Kazakhs who controlled this territory were “friends of Mr. Weller.”

  As soon as we began to climb, the air cleared of dust and heat. Green meadows appeared. We passed fields of sunflowers tipping their crowded faces to the sky, and sheep and cattle and horses grazed beside waterfalls that fell like white braids. Apple orchards and pastures covered the foothills, and I thought I had not seen such beautiful land since our brief flight over Kashmir.

  As we entered the forest that grew above the pastureland, however, I noticed that our soldier escorts seemed to sit higher in their seats. They clutched their rifles and peered at the road. Lawrence asked Mr. Weller what they were looking for. “Mines,” he said. Then he grinned and jerked his head toward the other jeep. “That’s why they go first.”

  I asked Lawrence what the word mines meant. He brought his fingertips together to form a ball, then flung his hands apart.

  “Don’t,” Mem said. “You’ll scare her.” I was startled by the fierceness of her voice, for this was the first she had spoken since we left the city, and she’d hardly looked at me all day. Now her eyes were glassy. She lifted an arm around my shoulders, but I had the feeling as she turned toward me that she was really comforting herself.

  “She needs to understand not to go wandering off,” Lawrence said. “Sometimes it’s wise to be a bit scared.”

  “In that case, I’m wise enough for all of us. Leave her to me.” Her mouth stretched back, as if she were trying to smile but had forgotten how. I opened my own to speak, thinking that might break the terrible spell that seemed to have settled between us, but suddenly the jeep rocked sharply to one side. Mem fell hard against me. I tasted her hair, her skin and shirt. Her panic. I saw again Lawrence’s hands flying into the air, and I suppose some part of me was afraid as well, but that’s not what I remember. I remember wanting the fear to last.

  The jeep righted itself. We had simply tipped into a deep rut. Mr. Weller made a joke about it and clapped the driver on the back. Mem pulled away from me and took a breath. She tucked her shirt into her belt. Then she smoothed my hair back from my face and asked if I was all right. I said yes. I smiled. She bit her lip and nodded.

  I turned and saw Lawrence frowning across at her, but she ignored him and he leaned forward, steadying himself on the back of Mr. Weller’s seat, to ask how much farther we had to go. Mr. Weller spoke to the driver, then yelled back that the next stretch of road was clear. The Kazakh camp was just over the rise, he said. We were almost there.

  A few minutes later we reached a crest with black spruce forest off to our left and a view to a long, glittering lake far below us to the right. “Heaven’s Pool,” Mr. Weller called.

  The sight brought a knot to my throat. I stopped breathing and felt my pulse race. Ever since we’d left India I had experienced these moments. A taste of wind, a scent of smoke, the precise color of water or stone would awaken me to the fact that I had stood in that exact place before, that I was revisiting another life. It had happened in Leh and along the trek, outside
the Chinese garrison, and again upon entering Tihwa. Each time it was as if the past were reaching out to touch me, but not without some disbelief. After all, I’d left no trace of my former self behind. No home, no belongings, no one to welcome me back. So how could I be certain I’d been here before? This time there was no doubt.

  I had come here with my father. We had ridden from the city on horseback. I remembered the quiet, the lake’s reflection so untroubled, like a vast spill of liquid silver. I recognized the smells of deodar and hemlock, dry earth and this same chill breeze, the echoes of donkey and goat bells settling like garlands on the high, thin air. We had picnicked on the shore of the pool. My father lifted me onto his shoulders and ran with me toward the sun. I believed with all my heart that day in the illusion of safety and freedom.

  The road twisted back into the forest. By the time the lake returned to view the sun had fallen behind the peaks. The sky was engorged with peach and gold, but the earth beneath it lay in shadow. As we drew closer, I saw that a large Kazakh encampment now stretched along the lakeshore—several dozen yurts in rows like white parcels tied with string. From the center of the camp rose a greasy black twist of smoke. I smelled sheep droppings and damp wool from the flocks being herded to either side of us. I saw children and women wearing long red and blue skirts and bright folded headdresses. They stood still as we approached. They studied our Chinese escorts warily and pointed without expression toward the headman’s tent.

  Everything had changed. The past might touch but it could not hold me. My father is dead, I told myself. It was a mistake to believe in illusions.

  2

  The driver, Joanna noticed, was nervous again. Each snapping twig beneath the wheels caused his head to twitch. Weller, too, breathed sharply, leaning into the windshield to scan the shadows in front of them. Mines, he’d said dramatically. We’re on the edge of rebel country. He wants us to be terrified, she thought. The man in charge, with that ridiculous Yale cap and suede hunting jacket. He thinks if we get frightened enough we’ll agree to turn back. Only the Kazakh chief seemed unconcerned. He carried no flashlight or lantern and rode with his eyes straight ahead, his white stallion seeming to pull the jeep’s lurching headlights like tethers.