Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  Joanna thought of all the burned-out villages they’d passed in the desert. She could just see the beetle-browed Kazakh in conference with this ruthless brute, both of them gulping whiskey in Weller’s drawing room as he instructed them in the fine points of land mines.

  A sphere of influence in Central Asia, wrote Harkness, could prove critical in a future anti-Soviet war. However, at the time of this writing, all details of any strategic alliances between the U.S. and forces in and around Sinkiang are considered classified.

  Yes, Akbar confirmed, like Joanna’s husband, Harkness had been investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Under pressure from certain elements of the U.S. government, he had elected to postpone the book’s publication.

  “Yet he sends a copy to you,” Lawrence observed.

  “The privilege of friendship.” Akbar shook his head. “Sadly, he suffered a heart attack this past winter. He is no longer.”

  “Weller knew,” Joanna said. “He knew they were looking for Osman. Probably he told them exactly how to find him. And then he warned Osman—”

  “You’ve no proof,” Lawrence cautioned her. “And if you start making claims like that to U.S. officials about one of their own, they’ll tell you there’s a war on. Casualties happen. They’ve dealt with crazy wives before.”

  “Crazy wives.” She looked at him. “Is that what I am?”

  Before he could answer, a screech erupted beyond the doorway, and the children burst in carrying Akbar’s mewling cat trussed up like a Tibetan prayer doll. Their faces were flushed and laughing. Joanna turned and saw Lawrence’s green eye watching her, darkened to the color of moss.

  “Did Aidan ever tell you his story about the broken mirror?”

  She was whispering into the dark as he lay beside her, face to the stars. His arm cradled her bare shoulders. The waves lapped against the hull of the houseboat with the others sleeping inside. Lawrence didn’t answer.

  “He learned it from an amah who took care of him and his brother in Shanghai. A romantic, Aidan called her…” Her voice faded, then resumed. “The story had to do with a couple who were separated when the husband went off to war. Before he left he took his wife’s favorite mirror and broke it in two. He gave her one half and took the other himself. Thirty years she waited. Finally one day an old man wearing rags and a long white beard appeared at her gate. He asked if she owned any broken mirrors. She held out the piece her husband had left her. The old man pulled its mate from his sleeve and fit the two pieces together. ‘When the broken mirror is round again,’ he said, ‘you know that your husband is home.’

  “Aidan told me there are hundreds of versions of the story,” she went on. “In some the man dies and a friend takes the mirror, posing as the missing husband. In some the man loses the mirror, and his wife refuses to recognize him. But sometimes the story turns inside out, and the husband sends his broken half to warn his wife that he’s never coming home.”

  Lawrence said, “You’re thinking of that picture of Simon, aren’t you?”

  “What matters most?” she asked. “Do know what he means?”

  “I know what you want it to mean.” He took her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. “I hope for everyone’s sake but mine that you’re right.”

  BOOK TWO

  July 1949 to December 1950

  Chapter 8

  1

  ALL THINGS CHANGED for me after we returned to Delhi—or so I wanted to believe. This time when I entered the district of radiant lawns I did not slip in like a thief but rode like a princess down the tree-lined street in Mem’s green motorcar. It had just rained, and the leaves and grass and rooftops sparkled. I smelled jasmine. A damp breeze blew. A black bear stood with his trainer by the roadside, paws up as if paying respect.

  As I stared out at the compound walls I could hear firenghi children behind them laughing and shouting in play. The very houses seemed confident, with their gleaming yards and tall iron gates. Yet even as I thrilled to the notion that this was to be my new home, I felt a dark squeeze of uncertainty. It was like watching an enactment of the gods, knowing that soon the performance would end and the actors will remove their masks and show themselves mere mortals.

  When last we had been in Delhi together I knew Mem as Mrs. Shaw. I claimed her then, it is true, but what I claimed was desire and faith rather than understanding. Now, returned to this place where I had been of one life and she of such another, my claim on her was seasoned by our mutual experience. I had memorized her smells and voices, the rhythms of her breathing. I had studied the pattern of lines on her face, the sounds of her struggle and surrender in the night when Lawrence held her. I knew her fear, her kindness, her stubborn will—her secret frailty.

  Yet as it turned out, I still did not know her. For when we returned to Delhi I discovered in Mem a whole new stranger. A wife. The wife of a man who was not there.

  You will say, surely, she had been a wife from the very beginning. Yes, but I had not seen this in her. Of course, I knew she was worried about her missing husband, and that was why we traveled so long and so hard. I even knew, without understanding, that our failure to locate her husband had caused her to become Lawrence’s lover. But in all our weeks together, I had seen only one photograph of this husband, and that was small and worn—a black-and-white portrait that she carried of a dark-haired man with pale cheeks and straight brows and long eyes set in an upward tilt. A handsome man, to be sure, but an image only. I could not picture her with this man, for I’d seen her daily instead with Lawrence. Or striding up the mountain alone.

  Mem’s husband had seemed to occupy the same place in her heart that my father occupied in mine. He was a memory, perhaps. A dream. A desire, certainly, but a desire linked so precisely with another place and time that his recovery was impossible. Foolishly I believed when I heard those sounds of flesh in the night that she had chosen Lawrence as a new husband of the heart. I wished for this union to continue, to grow, to embrace me and Simon, as well. I imagined that this was to be my new family.

  The first thing I noticed when I entered the white house on Ratendone Road was the shadow Mem’s husband seemed to have cast there. Photographs of him stared from every shelf and table. In most he posed in the company of strangers, though one showed him holding Simon as a baby, and in another he and Lawrence sat grinning down from a howdah on the back of an elephant. One showed Mem together with her husband on their wedding day. She wore a white hat with a feather stuck in the brim. He was bareheaded and smiling. She squinted, gazing up at him, as if leaning toward him with her lips and eyes. Whatever she was asking appeared to amuse him.

  There were other objects around the house which I noticed that first day—an ivory chess set laid out for play in the downstairs sitting room, an iron letter opener with a twisted shaft, a gray felt man’s hat dangling from the rack inside the entry door. On a teak desk in Mem’s bedroom upstairs sat a tall black typewriter that Simon said was his father’s. And opposite the desk stretched a wide bed with a cotton print coverlet—and two shallow indentations. As I stood in the hallway peering in, I tried to imagine Lawrence crossing that polished marble floor and settling himself in the place of Mem’s missing husband. Instead I found myself staring at yet another photograph of this man called Aidan Shaw, this time seated in front of that same typewriter, with a river flowing behind him.

  “Come, Kamla.” Mem pressed my arm. “Your room is down here, with Simon.”

  I did not move. For three months I had shared Mem’s room, Mem’s tent, often as not Mem’s bed. Now she was thrusting me away.

  “What is it?” She lowered her hands.

  I looked past her to that photograph of Mr. Shaw and knew that somehow this was his doing.

  But I said nothing. Poor Simon was waiting at the end of the hall, his small square face split in a smile. I followed Mem toward him as if being marched into exile. I remember, as we walked, the stiff swishing sound of her skirt, like the brush of a devout J
ain flicking out of harm’s way all incidental life-forms.

  2

  Back in Delhi, Lawrence asked if he should leave her. She answered him with a kiss.

  With the monsoon beating on the flat roof above them, they made love in Aidan’s house. They made love in Aidan’s bed, with Aidan’s child sleeping down the hall.

  “I feel like I’m standing in the doorway,” she told him.

  “Stand there as long as you need, Joanna.” He was conscious of her name sliding over his tongue. “If I pull you against your will, you’ll hold it against me forever.”

  Each night as he crept away he imagined a constellation of ears and eyes recording his movements. In the photographs that she insisted on leaving around the house, he began to see himself in his old friend’s self-conscious poses. With the passage of days he took to combing his fingers through his hair, sitting with hands locked behind his neck, squinting ever so slightly as he studied Joanna’s face.

  Only Kamla seemed to notice. “Why are you different here?” she demanded, coming upon him one morning in the living room. He and Joanna were to make their daily pilgrimage to the Red Cross office to scan the lists of refugees pouring out of China. Afterward, they would visit the American, Chinese, and British embassies, futilely inquiring, demanding investigations only to be told yet again that all Western and Nationalist “personnel” were being evacuated from China. They would go to the bank, where Joanna would withdraw yet another chunk of her dwindling savings—and promise to accept Lawrence’s offer of a loan just as soon as she really needed it. They would go to the post office and mail her latest pleas for help to friends back in the States. They would visit the office of Aidan’s newspaper only to be told that he had entered China on his own authority (“chasing his own tale,” one asinine typist had the nerve to joke), and that while the “powers that be” in Washington were doing what they could, Joanna would have to deal directly with the State Department. In the meantime, Bill Fisk, the prep school dropout who’d replaced Aidan, had slipped her the princely sum of five hundred dollars from the publisher to assuage whatever conscience he possessed. And the State Department already had informed her that since the U.S. had no diplomatic relations with the mainland Communists, Aidan was effectively on his own.

  Lawrence would accompany Joanna on all these rounds soon enough. But right now, he sat on Aidan’s black leather sofa, one leg thrown casually over the opposite knee, the newspaper neatly folded back into a trim column. He was wearing a starched white cotton short-sleeved shirt and, in spite of the heat, long khaki trousers with a leather belt. Kamla studied him like a stranger.

  Suddenly his scalp itched. Perspiration trickled down his back. He cleared his throat, meaning to ask what she meant. But those relentless eyes bored into him as if she could read his veins. He thought that Kamla and Davey were the only two people in the world who had ever looked at him that way. You are different here.

  He tossed the paper aside and got up, grabbed the girl by the waist. She was so light he could lift her almost to the ceiling. He danced her up and down so that her full skirt billowed. “How am I different?” he demanded back, dropping and catching her until she squealed, causing Simon to come running. “What do you mean, Kammy? Different? Different? Who’s so different now?”

  Simon clapped his hands and cried, “Me, too!”

  Kamla’s black braid was flying. One sandal had fallen to the floor. Her hands clutched at his shoulders, bare legs wrapping around his hips. He growled and she laughed. Simon shouted for more.

  Lawrence turned and saw Joanna standing in the doorway, one hand over her mouth, in her eyes an expression of longing so true he felt his heart stand still.

  He retreated to his flat, on the third floor of an unremarkable building near Connaught Place. He had taken the room originally because it was close enough but not too close to Aidan and Joanna’s. Its outside balcony overlooked a continuous tumult of commerce during the day and after dark was filled with the mutters of sidewalk sleepers and passing rickshaws ferrying their night trade. His Goan landlady, Mrs. D’Costa, had let the room to him “furnished,” which meant that he had a single charpoy, a disintegrating rattan arm chair, and a low Indian-style writing desk at which he sat on the floor beneath a naked bulb screwed into the ceiling. Aside from his stacks of notes and books, the place was as impersonal as a safe house, which it might have been but for the nosiness of Mrs. D’Costa. Before tearing off after Aidan in April, Lawrence had paid the year’s rent in advance (just as he had on Aidan’s behalf paid off the Ratendone Road rent and, through the trustworthy Nagu, Joanna’s servants’ wages), and Mrs. D’ had kept the room swept and as clean as could be expected.

  Unaccustomed to finding himself here before midnight, Lawrence poured himself a long finger of whiskey and sat turning the pages of odd editions he’d found among sidewalk stalls from Kabul to Mandalay. Memoirs of spies and cartologists, accounts of treachery and escapes from native despots. He was surprised by the size of the collection he’d amassed, and by the volume of notes he’d made on his own wanderings along the frontier. He actually had enough to write this book. More than.

  In one of the flats below, a woman began to scream. The sound was raw and ragged, with intermittent pauses like hiccups as she caught her breath. It was a noise of agony, grief perhaps, or betrayal—if there was a difference. He had first heard women cry like this during the war when they were told their husbands had been killed. Later, when Davey died, he’d thought back to those wracking, explosive wails—strangely akin to ecstasy and mysteriously beautiful—and he’d envied those women their ability to discharge so much emotion in a single howl. He wondered cynically if there was a trick to it, some muscle one twitched or nerve one stroked, like tickling the back of the throat to induce vomiting or tensing jaw muscles to wiggle the ears.

  Lawrence closed his eyes. The noise died down. Now only the blather of the street, the throb of voices from the sidewalk, filtered up to him. He went onto the balcony and stood looking out into the steamy, rumpled darkness.

  Burying Alice James hadn’t worked. Nor had adopting Kamla. So it was his turn: If through him Joanna could arouse enough jealousy, Aidan might just come raging back from the back of beyond.

  Hadn’t Lawrence engaged in far more devious deals with the gods after Davey’s death? Once he nearly killed a man in a brawl, only afterward realizing he’d meant to trade the poor sot’s life for his son’s. He’d divorced Tracy in a similar ploy. Then told Jack Battersby to fuck himself one afternoon and left Australia the next. If he disappeared, he thought, perhaps Davey would replace him. Physical suicide was the only tack he hadn’t tried, but perhaps serving as Joanna’s bait for her husband was the next best thing. Or perhaps what Kamla had detected was his desire to finally shed himself by becoming Aidan.

  Lawrence lay on his bed watching squadrons of moths and mosquitoes collide around the bare overhead light bulb. You are different here. He’d walked away without explanation, saying he would be back, but not when. A question had risen in Joanna’s eyes as she watched him turn toward the door, and he’d met it with one of his own. For several seconds they stared at each other in a draw. It occurred to him that they’d never been more honest with each other than in those few seconds of stalemate. Neither of them possessed the answer.

  Worse, he was no closer to an answer than he ’d been three months ago.

  He returned to his desk and the titles and papers that lay like pieces of a puzzle. The cloak-and-dagger antics of the Brits and Russians during the Great Game had laid a fine groundwork for the Wellers of today to play at their own hapless skullduggery in Central Asia, but was Aidan a casualty of this new round? Or would he, like the immortal British spymaster F. M. Bailey, mysteriously resurface months from now unscathed? Bailey, then an officer in the British Indian Political and Secret Department, spent seventeen months trudging around Central Asia playing cat-and-mouse with the Bolsheviks in 1919, acting the part of a double agent and traveling th
e thousand miles from Kashgar to Persia under a variety of disguises and pseudonyms. His superiors and family had long since given him up for dead when he came pounding back from the back of beyond. He pulled off the coup of survival while tweaking the nose of the enemy and was duly lionized as an adventurer—even though his exploits accomplished little of either political or secret advantage to the Brits. The superiors who heretofore had been demoted for sending him into no-man’s-land were miraculously redeemed, and Bailey and his wife spent the next twenty years comfortably hobnobbing with ministers and maharajahs until their retirement back to England in 1938.

  Happily ever after.

  If he could separate his own cloak from dagger, he’d surely root for an equally cheery outcome for Aidan. Or would he?

  The irresistible desiderium incogniti breaks down all obstacles and refuses to recognize the impossible.

  Lawrence wanted Aidan alive and gone. Alas, he couldn’t help but recognize the impossible.

  3

  Nighttime. Two children. The rote, hesitant comfort of a bedtime routine. There were baths to give, a fairy tale to read, kisses to dole out like candies. Nagu in his spotless white waistcoat brought ritual glasses of warm milk. As Joanna checked the clock the bearer kindly averted his eyes, as he had ever since their return.

  She could do this, she told herself. Hadn’t she always? The months when Aidan was traveling. The nights when he stayed out late. She had years of practice, and surely Kamla didn’t tip the scales. So silent and careful, the girl demanded nothing, was no more trouble than a shadow. At the same time, Simon clearly adored her. Just that afternoon Joanna had heard them outside laughing as Simon taught her to ride his bicycle. He had always wanted a sister or brother. Joanna had always wanted another child. No, Kamla was not the trouble.