Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  The soldiers who escorted us had tied Mrs. Weller’s valises and parcels down the center of the cabin. The other seats were occupied by a French woman and her Chinese husband and child and two Chinese officials with their families.

  Outside, Mr. Weller and Tot stood waving, their figures like moving water in the heat waves rising from the airstrip. Mr. Weller, the night before, had told us he intended to stay in Tihwa until he “could see the whites of those Red eyes.” Tot did not intend to stay. As soon as we were gone he would start back overland to Kashmir with a fellow Sherpa he had met in the Tihwa bazaar, but he would not turn away before us, and looking down on him as he stood out under the parching desert sunlight, I felt my throat fill with sadness. That frank, gentle face, his ready laughter and familiar phrases, did much to help me in this difficult journey. He had promised that someday he would find us again, but that prospect seemed to vanish with him as we taxied down the runway, and he shrank to a small dark grain.

  We stopped only for refueling, flew two days to Hong Kong. The windows were no bigger than chappatis, but when the clouds cleared at night sometimes I could see the lick of fighting below, like fireflies.

  We arrived in the monsoon. Hong Kong was piled high with refugees, everyone shoving and crying, carrying their households on their backs and huddling in what doorways they could find to shelter from the rain. I remembered equal crowds of refugees during India’s Partition, two years earlier. I wondered if these people, too, would set each other on fire, or rampage through the streets at night, or cut each other’s hearts out. Lawrence told us there were not enough beds at any price, so we would all have to share one room. I was grateful for the chance to stay close to Mem and Lawrence for at least one more night.

  3

  In Hong Kong the downpour made a screen, and the darkness was glossy with pink and green from the neon ideographs blinking outside the window. Moths had destroyed the curtains and carpet, and the room smelled of mildew and rancid oil. Kamla slept curled on an old loveseat. Joanna lay beside Lawrence.

  He had offered to sleep on the floor. Don’t be ridiculous, she told him. They had danced this stupid dance until they both were worn to the quick. They had taken turns leading and following each other to the end of the earth, and for what? The Hong Kong airport had been electric with the screams of hysterical women and desperate men forced to leave loved ones behind—husbands, wives, children lost at the crucial moment. How many of those were not lost at all, but in fact had run away?

  Aidan had abandoned her. If she didn’t believe this she would become one of those hysterical women—or worse. She had to blame him. She needed to hate him. She thought of the photo they’d found at the site and felt her heart in shreds.

  Through a wartime “mate” at the telegraph office, Lawrence had succeeded in getting a cable off to Reggie Milne that afternoon. Six hours later they’d received their reply. Simon was mended. Kashmir stable. The welcome mat was out.

  Simon loved Lawrence. Kamla, too. They loved being with him. They loved his stories, his bawdy songs, the way he held their hands and laughed. They loved his playfulness and his longing.

  Joanna closed her eyes. She moved her arm. Her hand sank into the thicket of hair that covered Lawrence’s chest. She felt him waiting, motionless, and when she did not pull away, he rolled onto his side to face her.

  “I don’t know what to say to him,” she whispered. “I don’t know what to say to my own son.”

  “The words aren’t important. You are what counts. Having you back.”

  “I’ve failed.”

  “Not everyone can be rescued,” he said.

  After a moment she asked, “When your son died, how long did it take before you stopped seeing his face every time you closed your eyes?”

  She was afraid he would pull away and close against her, but it was an honest question that she needed to ask. He replied by drawing her to him. For several minutes they lay perfectly still. His hands clutched the thin cotton of her shift. Her cheek grazed his neck. She could feel the muffled thump of his heart, smelled the oils of his body seeping through the shower-clean surface of his skin.

  He did not smell like Aidan. This simple reality hit her with a visceral punch, and she froze, her stomach clenched.

  Then Kamla sighed in her sleep. The girl’s breath lilted melodically.

  When Joanna moved her eyes to the opposite wall she could see Aidan watching them, his black hair combed neatly to one side, his mouth tipped up in a smile. Go ahead, he seemed to say. I dare you. And in the next instant she kissed Lawrence. Out of desire to punish Aidan. Out of raw physical hunger. She couldn’t tell the difference.

  Lawrence yielded, cradling the back of her head, and their mouths met with a jarring of teeth and tongues. She wound her legs around his hips, ground her palms against his bones. But as the truth of this contact came home to her, Aidan’s presence vanished. Now with a violence of abandonment she clasped Lawrence, rocking, sobbing without sound. He stopped her sobs with kisses. She touched his eyes and felt her own tears. Soon she could not distinguish between his anguish and her own.

  His jaws opened and closed on her shoulder, and the silent concussion of his breath penetrated her skin. The hollow of her throat filled with sweat that he lapped up with his tongue. When his mouth continued down the ladder of breastbone she shuddered and arched her back, and her moved his hands and held her like a bridge on the verge of collapse.

  4

  In public, Lawrence and Mem did not so much as brush elbows. Through our week in Hong Kong, as we waited for hours in one line or another to arrange passage back to India, they hardly dared to look at each other, and when they did, as often as not, they quickly looked away. Perhaps I had fooled them into believing that the pace of my nighttime breathing was a measure of my mind. But I saw that the moon had returned to Lawrence’s eyes, and I knew the act between man and woman. I knew from my days at the flash house. I knew by the force of Golba and his men. I knew also that what transpired between Mem and Lawrence must be the same yet vitally different. I willed this difference as I lay watching the pulse of lights outside, as I absorbed the sighs of skin and breath within. In this way I became their accomplice.

  After four days, we boarded the first of many planes that would take us back to Simon. We flew west from Hong Kong to Rangoon, Burma, then to Calcutta, touched down in Delhi, and continued directly north to Srinagar. Lawrence showed me each stop on his big map, which he smoothed across my knees. The line that he drew to mark our travels resembled the head of a dog with a long pointed snout. Srinagar lay at about the spot where this dog might prick up his ear.

  I wondered what Simon had been doing all these weeks since we parted. I wondered if he would blame me for returning instead of his father. I wondered if he would notice the moon in Lawrence’s eyes, and I worried above all else that this might break the fragile thread that had bound us in Simon’s absence.

  It would be months before I pieced together the answers to these questions, before Simon knew me well enough to confess that he had not missed his father.

  He was too busy, he told me. Even as those first weeks turned into months, he and Ralph Milne had filled each day with their play as junior Kims, dressing up like Pathans, haunting the bazaars and addressing each other by code names, or swimming underwater breathing through straws. He never stopped long enough to wonder if his father was coming back. He missed his mother, of course, felt her absence like a stomachache that was sometimes stabbing and sometimes dull but always just embarrassing enough that he did not dare complain about it. And maybe that was the problem: If he’d let himself miss his father, too, he couldn’t have concealed all the missing. But as it was, Dr. Milne made a kindly substitute father, Dr. Akbar a stupendous uncle, and, after all, he was used to his real father being gone. So he lived as if content on the Milnes’ spacious but not too fancy houseboat.

  It was summer, and the rumors of war that continued to ripple through Kashmir had little eff
ect on Simon as he soaked up the attentions of men and boys, learned to wield a sword and shave a birch branch, dive like a cormorant and whistle out the side of his mouth. Sometimes, as they lay awake at night with the windows open to the lake and moonlight like talcum filling the room, Ralph would wonder aloud what it was like to have a mother. His own had died days after he was born, and his father had never remarried. Simon, lying for the sake of the other boy’s feelings, told him that if he had to choose, he would rather have a father.

  “But your mum’s lovely,” Ralph protested. “She even wears men’s trousers!”

  Simon nodded. He had thought at first that he could never forgive Mem for sending him back with the Milnes. But he discovered in spite of his anger that these, his first weeks ever away from her, were also his own. And neither being away from her nor being on his own, apparently, was fatal. He reminded himself that some of his classmates in Delhi, mostly children of diplomats, were left from the age of five or six in summer camps or boarding schools for months at a time, and these weeks with the Milnes were better than any summer camp. There were also days when he recalled the awful dizziness and headaches he’d experienced in the high mountain passes and was almost grateful for the bullet that had sent him back. It would be a good story to take to school, the scar great show-and-tell. Mem was lovely, and brave, and good. He pretended to let Ralph persuade him. But what troubled him now was that he hadn’t entirely been lying after all. Not that he would rather have a father than a mother, but that he’d rather have a different father than his own.

  His dad loved him. Simon knew that. He used to give him bone-crushing hugs. He used to muss his hair. He would let Simon sit on his lap and spread the jam on his toast. Simon knew that his father had gone away for nearly a whole year when he was really little, but Simon couldn’t remember those days. What he remembered was packing for India alone with Mem while his father was busy in his office with papers or off at meetings or work. It was around that time when his father began to push him away, when he never seemed to hear what Simon said, when he always had a line between his eyebrows or eyes filled with argument. Mem said his father would be different when they got to India, but he wasn’t.

  Simon remembered their last family holiday together. A Christmas car trip up to the hill town, Mussoorie. Simon recalled how endless the drive had seemed, especially toward the end with his mother’s fingernails digging into his shoulder as they rounded the hairpin bends, his own eyes fixed on the back of his father’s head as he sat up front beside the Sikh driver they had hired for the trip. A large, neat head it was, with tucked ears and freshly barbered black hair lying flat beneath a brown felt hat. His father sat erect, never slouching, and watched the road as if he were driving. A sharp groove divided the back of his long neck from his starched collar to the trimmed base of his scalp. If his father were a puzzle, Simon thought, a special piece would go in there. He touched the back of his own neck, but felt only soft flat skin and the top knob of his spine. Finally his curiosity got the best of him, and he leaned forward and pressed his finger against the hollow, and it was indeed like fitting a peg into a hole. But to his surprise, though the day was cold, his father’s flesh was hot. It twitched and jerked at the unbidden contact, and Simon snatched his hand away. He expected—wanted?—his dad to turn and scold him, ask what in hell he thought he was doing, and then, perhaps, to laugh. But his father kept his eyes on the road and never said a word. Mem pulled Simon back against her, combed his hair with her fingers, and promised they were nearly there. Moments later they reached the town, where snow lay like wedding cake frosting and the bells of Christ Church were tolling.

  Simon’s father spent that holiday reading and working on one of his newspaper articles while Simon and Mem went off on long hikes—explores, Mem called them. At night, from the alcove in the hotel room where they set up his cot, he could hear the smooth rumble of his father’s worry like thunder rolling over his mother’s lighter, quicker reassurance.

  Simon could not remember his father once reading him a bedtime story. Dr. Milne read the boys a different story every night. Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, Ali Baba and his forty thieves. And Kim, the book Lawrence said was based on real-life explorers and spies. Simon’s stomachaches only sharpened when he received his mother’s letters saying that she and Lawrence had very nearly caught up with Simon’s father.

  Then, one afternoon at the end of June, he and Ralph came back from a swim off a neighboring houseboat to find his mother and Lawrence waiting in Dr. Milne’s parlor. It was such a surprise he burst into tears. So did Mem. She hugged him so hard he saw stars. She kissed and kissed him. Lawrence mussed his hair and grinned. They shook hands like grown-ups, then Lawrence, too, pulled him into a hug that lifted him off his feet. Finally he wiped the wet out of his eyes and noticed Kamla standing back beside Dr. Milne. He wondered out loud why she was there, and Mem said, “She’s going to stay with us.” Kamla smiled, and Simon didn’t know what to do next or what Mem was talking about, and partly that’s because all the while he was thinking his first words ought to have been, “Where’s Daddy?” But he never did ask about his father.

  He didn’t want to. He didn’t dare. He saw now how his mother had changed—how thin she’d become, how deep shadows had grown around her eyes, how sharply her cheekbones stood out. She stood there rubbing her lips together. She kept crying without making any sound, touching his cheeks and shoulders and arms, and swallowing as if something were caught in her throat.

  It was Lawrence who had to tell Simon that his father was still in China. Probably he was okay, but they’d been ordered to leave the country before they could find him. The politics had changed things. They couldn’t continue the hunt, so they must go back to Delhi to wait for word. Maybe Simon’s father was already there. Maybe he’d come out of China through another route. Anyway, his dad was sure to get out soon.

  “No worries, mate,” Lawrence said, grinning too hard.

  Even seeing Mem’s strange behavior, Simon had not been worrying until Lawrence said that. Why did grown-ups always tell children not to worry, when children knew this could only mean the grownups were lost and scared?

  5

  As Joanna studied the reconnaissance map on Akbar’s desk, she could smell the weedy warmth of Lawrence’s hair. He leaned beside her, kneading the back of his neck with one hand as he traced the map’s pale, veined colors with the other. Through the carved cedar doorway, she could see Simon and Kamla tying gaily colored ribbons on the tail of a cat that young Ralph Milne held captive. The children were laughing.

  Akbar jabbed the map with one nicotine-yellow finger. “I think you were less than two miles from Osman’s camp.”

  Joanna used the glass loupe he handed her. To the northwest of the sardine-shaped Heaven’s Pool, a small cross-hatched area was keyed “Osman, the Terrible.”

  “Is this your writing?” Lawrence asked.

  Akbar came around his desk and handed a bound manuscript to Joanna. “The map was sent to me with this book by my good friend Lloyd Harkness.” He seated himself in a large red velvet armchair across the room. “Lloyd was a fellow Central Asia scholar. We met at Oxford. Later he chose the political arena, while I gravitated to ethnography. But we stayed in touch.”

  Harkness, Joanna read from the frontispiece, was the Asian correspondent for the Chicago Daily News and consultant to the State Department. She sat down, holding the manuscript so that Lawrence could read over her shoulder.

  “Only last year,” Akbar continued, “Lloyd made the same trip your husband was attempting. Please look where I have marked.”

  A red leather bookmark directed Joanna’s finger to the page.

  Osman, in his yurt headquarters high in the Tien Shan…a tremendous Kazakh with hamlike hands and beetling eyebrows, forty-nine years old…. His steel gray eyes and black beard reminded me of the Mongols who terrorized and conquered Eurasia centuries ago, yet at the same time his stature seemed heroic, as if he’d just stepped from so
me mythic tale.

  Osman first organized his nomadic bandits against that same Chinese despot Sheng Shih-ts’ai who had imprisoned Kamla’s father. He allied himself with rebels in Mongolia and the Ili region, but when those rebels later sided with Stalin, Osman turned against them and joined Sheng’s Nationalists. He defended these shifts as proof of his anti-Communist zeal.

  According to Harkness, this man was a monster. He had burned down villages, pillaged farms, press-ganged conscripts, and murdered several hundred of his fellow Sinkiangese. When his own nephew was sent as a peace emissary by his former Mongol allies, he responded by executing the child.

  Yet the United States was grooming this sterling fellow. Osman cuts a rakish figure at dinner parties at the U.S. consulate in Tihwa, and enthusiastically champions the strategic importance of Sinkiang as a base for American operations against the Red Peril to both East and West.

  Consul Weller, it seemed, not only had supplied Osman with funding, arms, and military expertise, but in his zeal to unite Sinkiang’s “divided house,” he had teamed him with the “Butcher of Turfan,” a young warlord who had risen to power by leading an army under the green Muslim banner against an insurrection of lightly armed civilians. The people were protesting Chinese Nationalist brutality and corruption. When they saw their fellow Mohammedan’s banner they rushed to welcome him as a brother. He replied with machine gunfire, killing thousands.