Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  “What are you telling me?” Her voice seemed to creep out of her. But she would make him say it.

  “They think he’s gone over. I mean, they all think he’s gone over, not just J. Edgar and his merry band.”

  “On the basis of a single photograph?”

  “I sincerely doubt that.” His jaw worked, and she thought he would continue. Instead, he gripped the wooden arms of his chair, preparing to stand. “I’m really sorry to do this, but if I’m not at the airport in an hour, my head’s gonna roll.”

  She watched him get up.

  “I don’t know any more than I’ve told you,” he said, “and it could severely compromise my friend—and me—if you let on that you’ve seen this. But I know how hard you’ve been searching for Aidan. Though I don’t expect you to thank me, I couldn’t not tell you after all we’ve been through. You understand?”

  Steady on his feet now, he opened his arms to her. She accepted the hug without feeling it, though she was dimly aware of his smells, of Brylcreem and Ivory Soap and Old Spice—scents from another life.

  He kissed her cheek and eased the photo out of her grip, trading it for his card. “If you need anything…”

  She dug her teeth into her lower lip and shook her head.

  “You will survive this, Joanna.” And then, “I’m sorry. He fooled us all.”

  3

  After the monsoons ended, the cool months arrived. Still Lawrence did not return. Mem did not say that she missed him, but it was clear in her silence, the absence of her smile, the sadness of her touch. I dared not even speak his name. And Simon pretended nothing had changed, but in fact, he was changed most of all. At school he had taken up with the naughty boys, enticing them with his Houdini tricks, which he practiced by the hour. One day I caught him showing off the scar where the bullet had grazed his leg. He told the boys he had nearly died. Another bullet nicked his ear, he said—and he showed the cleft in his left earlobe from which Lawrence used to pull magic coins to amuse us those first nights in Leh. Another day he and his new friends were kept in after school for placing toads in teachers’ cupboards and writing dirty limericks on the blackboard during lunch.

  Mem paid little attention. Lately, when not at work, she was lost in her papers, her telephone calls, her staring into space. Even when she read the notes the headmistress sent home, she would merely kiss the back of Simon’s neck. “Keep an eye on him, Kamla, would you? He wears me out.” Then Simon would grin at me as if I were his accomplice.

  But I preferred to follow Mem’s example, escaping into my books, my schoolwork and private thoughts. So it was that on the last Sunday in September, when Simon went off with his friends to fly kites over the desert, I stayed home with Mem.

  Nagu and the new cook had gone off to market, and Mem was in her room with the tats down as she had been for days, working, reading. She needed to be alone, she said. I had heard her in the middle of the night pacing her bedroom floor, and I should have known better, but I was trying to read the book she had given me in Kasauli—Jane Eyre. I was enjoying it a great deal, as it told the story of an orphan like myself, a most resourceful girl, but the language was difficult. I needed help, and I dared to knock and then open Mem’s door. She was lying on her bed under the mosquito net, surrounded by newspapers. I asked her to explain the meaning of the word precocious. I had thought she might take me onto her bed, and we might read together. Instead, Mem sighed and said, “You are precocious.” Then she pointed to a shelf beside the desk and told me to take the dictionary there, and close the door behind me.

  I was disappointed but not unhappy. To me that little leather-bound volume was a treasure chest. I curled up on the living room sofa with the dictionary in one hand and my book in the other and would have been content to remain there all day, only minutes later I heard a familiar cry outside.

  “Aina! Best-quality looking glass!”

  You see, among the parade of vendors who streamed down Ratendone Road each day was a boy who rode a bicycle laden frontward and backward with mirrors. Round mirrors, framed mirrors, small flashing mirror stars and long rectangles the size of a door. He tied them on with jute twine so that his bicycle resembled the pictures I had seen in some of Simon’s books, of an American circus calliope. And he would ride through the neighborhood singing out, “Aina! Best-quality looking glass!” He was a sweet boy, the son of the glass-cutter who manufactured these mirrors. I seem to recall he wore spectacles like Mahatma Gandhi, and he also had Gandhiji’s large ears. And Nagu had befriended him, I think, or perhaps he knew his father because I would often see the two of them chatting by the front gate.

  Ordinarily, if Mem wished to buy a mirror, she would send Nagu down to negotiate. This had not happened in some time, as Mem lately seemed to avoid reflections of herself. But a few days earlier Simon had his friend Brian Wilcox over, and Simon was showing off the cricket bat Mem had given him for his birthday. There had been a sandstorm, so they were playing indoors. Brian tossed him a low ball in the hallway, and Simon hit it too hard. He shattered the living room mirror. “I cannot deal with this,” Mem said when she saw the damage. So on this Saturday morning, when I heard the familiar cry, “Aina!” at the gate while Nagu was gone, I thought I might please Mem by replacing the mirror myself. I had a little money tucked away, and I knew that Nagu would repay me from his household allowance. I took my wad of rupees and hurried to the gate.

  At first I thought that some trick of the heat had caused my vision to waver, but when I came closer I saw that indeed this was not the usual boy. This mirror wallah wore no glasses and his ears were like those of a mouse, but what I noticed most about him were the terrible scars on his legs from the hem of his shorts to the top of his feet. They were old scars, white and brown, that had shriveled the skin like crepe paper. He gave me a hard and curious look as I asked where the usual boy had gone. He said there had been an accident, that Dabbu had dropped one of the mirrors and broken it, severing two of his toes, and so this boy was taking the route until Dabbu was well again. I said please to pass on our respects and wishes for a swift recovery, then I selected a mirror and bargained a little over the price. All this time the wallah continued to stare at me until I felt that I must have a piece of spinach between my teeth or some pickle in my hair. Still he said nothing but accepted my payment, examining the wad of rupees in my hand with a look of disbelief that again mystified me. The old mali, Musai, came to carry the mirror back to the house. But as I was about to close the gate, the aina wallah put out his hand.

  “Is it really you?” he asked. “The girl who ran away?”

  In that instant it was as though my past appeared in demon form and breathed fire into my eyes. I shook my head violently and said, “No, you are mistaken,” and shoved the gate closed as quickly and forcefully as I was able. But as I leaned my full weight back and locked it I could hear him still outside, laughing. It was the laugh of the alley, a laugh borrowed from goondas and lecherous men. Then I knew him, too. This was the boy Surie whose burned legs Mem herself had tended, who had grown almost into a man in the months since I last saw him in the lane behind the flash house.

  I tried to convince myself that Surie meant me no harm. Perhaps he no longer lived near the flash house. With luck, Indrani might be dead. One and a half years had passed, after all. To me it seemed like thirty, and because my existence had altered so radically, I thought surely those I had known before must also have moved along. You will say this is nonsense. I was living still in India. The streets teemed with people whose lives had been laid out for them generations ago, for whom the notion of change was as threatening as war. I knew this. I had witnessed the convulsions when Partition gripped the city. I had seen the residents of Old Delhi chop off the heads of their neighbors and burn their own daughters alive rather than agree to change. But illusion had gripped me in much the same way as the madness of those days. It had cast me under a kind of spell that seemed to change all rules. I was thinking like a firenghi even
though I was not one of them.

  I was thinking this boy is nothing. What could he do to me now? It is not even worth troubling Mem. Better just leave it alone. But I knew in my heart that this boy Surie held the power to destroy me.

  I buried my nose in my book all afternoon and kept my alarm to myself. That night Simon wanted to know what was wrong, but I took a tip from Mem and simply muttered, “Headache.” I was glad Simon had made other friends. I was glad to be free of his questions, his need. But I directed my anger at Lawrence. Though I had no reason to believe this, I thought, if Lawrence had not gone away, Surie would never have found me. If Lawrence had been there, I might have told him, and if I had told him, he might have comforted me. But Lawrence was not there, and so I blamed him for my own fear.

  4

  In India it is possible to drown without touching water. “You travel this place long enough,” Lawrence told an Austrian he met one noon near the Hindu mountain shrine of Yamunotri, “and you realize nothing’s more trivial than human desire. Just look—” He swept his arm back to indicate the gorge they’d just ascended, with its clusters of pine and vertical shale walls, the switchback trail blooming color and skin, the sheen of oiled black hair. Families rode four to a pony or were carried by up to five porters on flat-bedded wooden dandies. Some wore gold-laced turquoise and magenta, others saffron tatters. Old men struggled with the support of acolytes. Old women bent over hand-hewn staffs. Veiled girls plucked edelweiss and buttercups, while their brothers threw stones to tempt avalanches. Lawrence continued, “They’ll reach the temple, dab their foreheads with the headwaters of the Yamuna, mumble some hackneyed prayer, then hightail it back to their milk tea and whiskey before the sun goes down.”

  “But it is magnificent, no?” The Austrian’s eyes fixed on the snowcaps ranged above the gorge. He was a mountaineer and intended to spend the next six months exploring the Himalayas.

  “Magnificent. No.” Lawrence squinted at the parade of human ants until they blurred. “It is simply…motion.”

  So he marched from one staggeringly beautiful landscape to another. By the end of September, he had trekked the width of Uttar Pradesh, skirted the base of Nanda Devi, and hiked through the Valley of Flowers. He slept in the open, in pilgrim rest houses, in old caravan serai and Buddhist hostels. He wandered through camel auctions and Hindu melas, worshipped at altars for the blue-skinned Krishna. He spun prayer wheels at abandoned lamaseries and consigned his own prayers to the turning drum. In roadside dhabas he watched tubercular porters gamble for cigarettes. He caught rides on the backs of wagons loaded with the skins of freshly slaughtered lambs. He listened to the drug-induced ravings of a sadhu in an ashram in Badrinath, witnessed the stabbing death of a midget who’d been caught stealing a packet of sugar. He drank and danced until he passed out in the fleshpots of Rishikesh.

  In three months he chalked up a baker’s dozen recruits for Jack, including the Austrian mountaineer, and posted watchdogs of his own from Nepal to the Pakistan border. He tripped across equal numbers of agents on the American and British payrolls, all competitively scouting for Communists, but he still was no closer to a reading on Aidan than he’d been in Calcutta.

  Then, in Simla as he walked into the Cricket Club one evening, he spotted Reggie Milne.

  “By God!” Milne grabbed his hand. His bluster did not conceal the fact that he’d misplaced Lawrence’s name.

  Lawrence had no such difficulty. The Karakoram beard was gone, the hair was cut, thinner and grayer than it had been last year, and he was wearing tweeds instead of khaki, but Milne’s blue eyes retained their practical ease, receptive yet noncommittal and deceptively placid.

  Lawrence reintroduced himself and offered to buy a round of drinks. Milne went him one better and offered supper.

  “Started a practice here in Simla,” he said, tucking into a large bowl of mulligatawny. “Been in Asia too long to go home.” He threw Lawrence a shrewd glance. “From the look of you, I’d say you’re in the same boat.”

  “Probably right. Hadn’t given it much thought.”

  “Not something you do think about. One day, it’s just a fact.” Lawrence had a sudden memory of Milne reading Ivanhoe to the boys on his houseboat in Srinagar, one arm around each of them while they steadied the book on his lap. Afloat.

  “How’s that boy of yours?” he asked.

  Milne replied with a broad grin. “Stellar, thanks. He’s in school in Mussoorie. Still asks about Simon. I’m sorry we haven’t kept in touch.”

  “Simon’s all right. Kamla and Joanna, too.”

  The doctor’s voice altered to a clinical timbre. “That’s good. I hesitate to ask, but did anyone ever find her husband?”

  “Not yet. Joanna’s still hoping he’ll surface one of these days.”

  Milne watched him across the table. “What’s your guess?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking,” Lawrence said.

  The doctor absently tapped his left ring finger on the damask cloth. “I’m not entirely sure myself. But when that Sherpa came back to fetch me on the trail—”

  “Tot.”

  “Yes. He told me a bit about Joanna’s situation. Led me to believe her husband was in danger. I can’t say why, and I never dared put the question to Joanna, but I got the impression he might be a danger to himself.”

  Lawrence stirred his soup and let the clamor of the dining room settle around them. “Suicidal?”

  Milne nodded. “As I say, I didn’t see the point of raising the question when you returned to Srinagar. It was none of my business, in any case.”

  Lawrence said, “I think you must have misunderstood.” Though this did explain why Milne had been so willing to take Simon back with him to Srinagar—and why he hadn’t opposed Joanna’s continuing the search. “Aidan’s no more suicidal than your average foreign correspondent. If he were, he’d never have made it to Sinkiang, and we know he got as far as Tihwa.”

  “Right. Wouldn’t take much to off yourself in the Karakorams, would it?” Milne smiled grimly. “I suppose it’s politics, then. Probably poked his nose into one Chinese corner too many. Same thing happened to a couple of the Swedes I worked with in Yarkand.”

  “Did you figure out who was responsible?”

  “My bet’s the Nationalists.” Milne wiped his mouth. “Bloody butchers, half of them.”

  “Even with foreigners?”

  “Not in the beginning. But after the Western powers started climbing into bed with Chiang Kai-shek, everybody became fair game.”

  “What do you mean, fair game?”

  “Well, I tried to stay out of the politics as much as possible, but you couldn’t plug your ears. It was the Americans made the biggest mistakes. Bloke named Freeman didn’t know his arse from his armpit, running around playing pat-a-cake with every bandit in the province. Hard to play with one without making an enemy of the others, but he thought if he dealt them all in they’d learn to love each other and him. Instead he put everybody at risk.”

  “Freeman.”

  “Douglas Freeman. Called himself a linguistics specialist, but I have it on some authority he was really one of those Central Intelligence agents.”

  Lawrence dimly recalled Mrs. Desai mentioning a linguistics specialist who had taken Alice James drinking. “Was he based in Kashgar?”

  “Spent time there, no doubt. But I think he did most of his business up north, with the British and American consuls. Weller and Henderson drew down the funds, Freeman distributed the wealth.”

  “What happened to him after the takeover?”

  “Disappeared.”

  “Did he get out?”

  “If he’s lucky.” Milne drank his beer.

  “He didn’t come out with Weller?”

  “I was in Srinagar when Weller’s motley crew straggled in. A more pathetic bunch of Chinese and Kazakh robber barons you can’t imagine. But Freeman wasn’t among them.”

  Lawrence buttered a piece of bread, trying to appear
offhand. “I met a news writer a few weeks back who told me an American had been reported in a prison in Alma-Ata. Fair-haired, fair-skinned. Don’t suppose that could have been Freeman?”

  “Possible.” Milne leaned back with a thoughtful expression. “You know who might know about that, though. Akbar.”

  “Akbar. Joanna’s friend?”

  “Right. He always joked about being apolitical, which meant a third of his friends were Soviet sympathizers, a third Congress Indians, and a third Muslim Leaguers. There was, of course, considerable overlap. If anybody would know, he’s the one.”

  “He still in Srinagar?” Lawrence asked.

  “Was when we left two months ago, but he’s not well. My guess is stomach cancer, though he absolutely refuses to get a proper diagnosis and treatment. For all his Western training the old boy’s a fatalist at heart.”

  “Have you kept your houseboat?” Lawrence asked.

  “Why? Need a place to stay?” Milne cast him another shrewd smile. “You’re welcome to use the boat anytime you like. I’ll let Waza and Mistri know to look out for you.” Then, with regrets, he excused himself. “Going down to see Ralphie for the weekend,” he said. “I’ll give him your regards.”

  5

  Day after day Joanna scoured the press. The U.S. papers, of course, were filled with news of the war in Korea and anti-Communist hysteria. Joanna imagined Aidan’s detractors would be delighted to learn that he was the traitor they had always claimed, and she fully expected to see his defection announced in banner headlines. But there was nothing, not even a footnote confirming Ben’s leak. Wishful thinking, she knew, but she couldn’t help wondering if Ben might conceivably be wrong. She had looked at the photograph so fleetingly before he whisked it away that inevitably now she started to question whether it was really Aidan, whether there might be some other explanation…