I could see Wang’s eyes in the mirror. He looked angry. He banged the double doors to the garage as he put the car away.
‘She’s playing a dangerous game,’ he said to me, sitting over his tea in the kitchen. ‘If they see her with him that will be the end of things for all of us. They’ll think we’re not to be trusted.’
When we got back I had nothing to do. Mrs Elsa said she would look after Mari until bedtime. She went into the living room and closed the door, and I clacked my way up and down the passage like an abandoned mah-jong tile.
I went into the kitchen and stood next to Lam while she washed up. She told me the man’s name was Ryan. He drank Mexican beer and had deep pockets. He was a Canadian soldier. Mrs Elsa and the captain spent all their time chasing happiness, didn’t they, Lam said to me, so why not us? I didn’t have the heart to disagree with her.
She soaped and rinsed the plates with absent-minded strokes, staring out of the window, dreaming of a long voyage on a steam ship to Canada, a house to call her own, and a life far away from this one.
3
It was just a practice, the air-raid siren. A dummy run, the captain called it. I liked the way he said it, nice and gentle, reassuring. We were supposed to carry on as usual.
The papers hanging off newsstands ran big headlines alongside photographs of the new air-raid shelters they’ve put up downtown. It looked like a scene from a street opera: wardens in uniform stood in a line while a crowd of Wan Chai shoppers looked on open-mouthed. Above the low concrete blocks, which had 500 PERSONS daubed on them in oily paint, were hoardings pasted with man-sized advertisements for soft drinks and flower cakes. There must have been at least five hundred people right there on the street. A hawker had set up shop at the head of the crowd, facing away from the shelter, selling produce directly from her basket.
I wanted to buy the newspaper to show the letter-writer the next time I saw him, so he could read me the story that went with the picture, but I had just posted what was left of my month’s wages home, sending everything I had left because of Mother’s cough.
I walked around in a daze. Mari had just started teething and I was getting no sleep. She would be settled down as usual, but after an hour or so she would scream loudly out of the blue; the noise would slice into my dreams like the air-raid sirens, waking me instantly. At first I didn’t know what to do, what could be wrong, so I stood helplessly over her cot and watched her cry, as she wouldn’t let me touch her. When I realised what it might be, I rubbed poppy syrup into her gums to soothe them, feeling the enamel of her milk teeth about to push through the skin, hard against my fingers. I washed and changed her and gave her a fresh nappy. Then we would sit in the nursing chair by the window for a while watching gunboats passing up the channel under the low moon; I would put a few drops of gripe water on the tip of a teaspoon and get Mari to swallow them, and then, once she had calmed down, I’d put her back to sleep. She was over nine months old by this time though, with teeth coming through one after the other. When she had been through a bad week, I would sigh with relief to see the sharp tip of a tooth poking out of the bloody gum like a tiny white fin, only to be woken a few nights later by the next one. I got used to it. I got up and applied the necessary treatments all in the same order each time without thinking. When it was over I fell back to sleep, only to be woken after two hours to go through the whole thing again. In the mornings we slept late and woke up with our eyes dry and itchy: it was as if Mari and I had been on a long journey through dreams peopled with vague grey shapes that moved silently past us, alone with each other. I think she felt it too. She pulled in close to me, holding onto the ends of my hair. ‘Ta-da, Ta-da, Ta-da,’ she said, over and over. ‘Shhh!’ I said to her, giggling, because it was a joke between Mrs Elsa and the captain that Mari had decided she was only going to say one word, for the moment at least, and that word was going to be something that sounded like ‘Daddy’.
I no longer spent my days off in the kongsi fong looking out of the window; instead I walked around Victoria and Central and Sheung Wan, breathing in as much cool air as I could. It wasn’t always clean air, especially if I was walking along the waterfront, past the ferry terminal and the cargo jetties, but it felt fresh after the long nights in Mari’s nursery. I told myself I didn’t want company, but I went to see the letter-writer more and more, just to talk. He seemed to understand that I didn’t need him to talk back, and I began to spend longer at his stall. I enjoyed the open, honest expression on his face, and the peaceful scraping sound that his pen made on the paper. When the letter was finished and folded away in its envelope, he would take his glasses off and rub the inner corners of his eyes with his forefinger and thumb. Then he would sit back with his hands clasped in his lap.
Today, though, he kept his hands on the table. His fingers weren’t touching mine, but as he looked at me, I wondered what it might feel like if they were, if this was how Lam felt when she was with Ryan.
He pointed up at one of his signs, hung up alongside the calendars and illuminated scripts.
‘You see that saying up there?’
I nodded, although of course both he and I knew it meant nothing to me.
‘To Choose A Lucky Day,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t intended on working on the day you came to me first. But then a feeling came over me that this was going to be a special day, and that I must work, even though I was tired. So I came and set up stall as usual. I hung up my work as you see it now, unfolded my table, set out the stools, took four small bricks and put them under the table legs so it wouldn’t wobble as I wrote. I did everything exactly as I always do it. And then something happened. You arrived. And I realised that I had indeed chosen my lucky day, Lin.’
But I didn’t know what to say. I still felt it, that unfurling inside me, as I watched his still face, with one eyelid that hung down just a little lower than the other, and I wanted him to keep on looking at me across the table that didn’t shake on its legs, but I was thinking of the spring day when I came to Hong Kong. I had left Canton to make money for you, that’s the truth, but also to see something other than the relentless furrows of our fields, the tireless wriggling of the silkworms, more demanding than babies. I wanted to get away, and have no one to think about but myself, once my money was safely on its way to you every month. I wanted to sit in the botanical gardens in the company of friends, with showers of water spraying out of hoses in the background. I wanted to look at the beautiful clothes of women like Mrs Elsa, and to care for a baby like Mari, who has everything already, so all I have to give her is love. I had never thought about a man before I left Canton, except Father, and when I left I was glad not to have to think about him any more.
‘Would you like me to teach you to write your name, Lin?’ the letter-writer said. ‘And then,’ he whispered, putting the tips of his fingers very lightly on my nails, ‘I can teach you how to write mine.’
The stool screeched against the pavement as I got to my feet. I walked quickly the way I had come, back to the kongsi fong. I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to see his puzzled face.
The streets were quieter than I had ever seen them; shops were closed and doors to buildings usually kept open were securely barred. Washing, hung to dry on ropes that ran above the street from one building to the block opposite, flapped in the breeze like paper birds. In the kongsi fong my feet made an empty sound against the wooden stairs, as if there was no one else in the building, and when I got to our room I saw that some of the other girls had cleared out their belongings and gone. I sat in my cubicle and surveyed the contents of my life: three bags of clothes and a bottle of lavender water that Mrs Elsa had given me. I thought to myself, even if I wanted to go home now, where would that be – the Pearl River Delta, Sheung Wan, the Peak? There’s a little of me that has been scattered through them all and taken root there, and to try to cut the shoots that have pushed their way out like sweet potato leaves and bring them together in one harvest would make me someone else entirely.
Whoever that person would be, she wouldn’t be me.
4
I was up on the roof terrace hanging out the washing when the bombing started. Although I had wrung the sheets out by winding them tight, they were still heavy with water and awkward to pull up onto the line without letting the other end drag on the dusty tiles underfoot. The early morning sky was misty above Victoria, and over in Kowloon the rows of windows along the wharf glinted in the sun. At the bottom of the hill was the race course, the grass cut so short it looked like a green lake. I was happy, although it was cool and I had come up without a coat, and hanging wet sheets was always hard work. I enjoyed the peace of these few moments on the terrace alone, when I could think about the rest of the day, about what Mari was going to wear, when we would go to the park, and the noodles and fresh fruit Lam and I had bought for our supper.
The first thing I heard was the drone of aeroplanes from the other side of the hill. I turned round to look, but my hands were full of damp linen so I couldn’t shade my eyes and had to scrunch them up against the sun. Flying in over the Peak like squat, gorged mosquitoes were six planes, so low I could see the burning red circles painted on their sides. As they flew over the apartment their undercarriages started to open. They must have been about halfway down the hill when they released their load. The first bomb fell on the cemetery on Ko Chiu Road, and the earth opened up like a flower, sending out a shower-burst of chipped slabs, metal vases, bits of wood and incense sticks.
After that there was another boom, and another, more smoke and debris floating up through the wooded hill that separated us from the rest of the city. I ran down the steps from the roof, through the apartment to the living room, pegs snapping against the linoleum as they scattered all around me, a bundle of washing still in my arms.
There was no one there. The captain had gone to the customs office early. It was Christmas morning, and he needed to deal with some urgent business before the festivities began, he’d said.
There were more hammering bangs – not from outside this time, but from inside, then the wrenching, splintering noise of doors being broken in. Down on the ground floor, then the second floor, then the apartment next door.
I ran to Mrs Elsa’s dressing room, where she was sitting at her mirror doing her hair. She was still in her negligee, covered up by a house coat wrapped around her middle with one of her elegant sashes. She hadn’t done her make-up and her face looked young.
‘Hide!’ she said straightaway. ‘Hide Mari.’ There was fear in her voice but no hesitation.
I went to the nursery and lifted Mari from her cot without my usual clucking and shushing and took her straight to the laundry room. The brass locks on the front door of our apartment were strong, and by the time the door had been kicked in I was crouched over in the empty clothes basket with Mari in my arms. I slotted the lid into place over our heads and hoped she wouldn’t wake after being lifted so suddenly from her cot. I heard the back door of the apartment being pulled to, and thought that Lam and Wang must have decided to risk going the back way down to the garage, to hide in the Bentley’s generous boot.
The laundry basket was made of wicker, with tiny slats all the way round. I sat and waited. There were men inside the apartment now. There were shouts, and the sound of heavy boots along the passageway, I didn’t know how many pairs, maybe four or five. I heard someone kicking doors open in turn: the captain and Mrs Elsa’s bedroom, Lam’s tiny room. Mine. Wang’s. The laundry room.
A pair of green canvas trousers came in, stopping next to the basket. I could smell sweat, men’s sweat, bodies that needed washing. Every time I breathed, the darkened inside of the basket jumped and shook around me, like a volcano about to explode. I thought of the worst thing they might do. I remembered Mother’s story about the Japanese soldier who liked to take the babies of his enemies, throw them in the air and watch them land on his raised sword, for fun. The victor’s pleasure.
The green trousers were so close to me that I could see the bumps and shapes made by the textured khaki, craters and hollows forming and re-forming as he took each step towards the middle of the room. His view must have been obscured by some of the towels hung up to dry from a pulley; I heard him tut as he pushed them aside.
Mari opened one of her small fists in her sleep. Her fingers stretched out one by one. She grabbed onto my plait and pulled it like a horse’s tail, her eyes still shut. I sank my teeth into my tongue to bury the pain.
The soldier had turned around and was making his way out of the room, pushing towels aside as he went.
They kicked the kitchen door open. I heard glass breaking, plates being thrown to the floor. Mari turned her head towards me in her sleep. I stroked her cheek with trembling fingers. She took a deep breath and settled back into her dreams again.
They were walking around the living room now, the sound of their boots muffled by the rug. Springs creaked as they sat down in the easy chairs. There was a tinkle of glasses.
I peeped out through the gaps in the laundry basket at the empty corridor. It looked as it always did. Framed photographs of the captain and Mrs Elsa hung on the wall, people dressed in winter coats standing on a beach next to a stormy sea, smiling at the camera. On the hall table was a black porcelain jug with inlaid flowers in gold lacquer. Next to it was an ornate clock.
I closed my eyes and willed this to be a normal day. The kind of day when everything would turn out exactly as I had planned it; the laundry, Mari’s walk in the park, the pleasure of her nap-time before supper, when all I had to do was stay with her and let my thoughts wander. Mrs Elsa would be in the dressing room, while the captain sat out on the terrace enjoying a pink gin before dinner. I waited to hear the clink of ice cubes, the door to the sitting room opening and closing, and the silence of them kissing, before he served her a soda with lime, the way she has it every day when he comes home from work.
But when the sitting room door was opened again, the heels that tramped their way back out were even heavier than before, and unsteady. I don’t know if it was the whisky that had reminded them what it was they were here to do, that time was not to be wasted. The dressing room door was kicked open. There was a click. A shot was fired.
Mrs Elsa didn’t scream or shout. There were noises: cupboard doors being opened, or kicked in.
Mari was awake now, her eyes unblinking, staring at me in the dark. She didn’t make a sound. The crown of her head smelled of sugar cane.
The door to the dressing room was flung open, and they came out again, the heavy boots. Their canvas trousers passed the laundry room door, which was still open. In the middle of them was Mrs Elsa, walking in her bare feet. I saw the lace trim bottom of her night gown. As they passed the hall table one of the men lifted an arm and casually pushed the porcelain jug. I heard the smash as it hit the floor.
The same thing had happened in the apartments all around us. People were being rounded up and herded out of the building. The soldiers shouted all the time, either at their prisoners or at each other, or both. I heard an engine outside, a lorry, or a truck.
One of them yelled in English: ‘In! Get in!’
There was the crack of something hard against flesh and bone, a man’s cry. Perhaps he hadn’t moved quickly enough. They must all have been moving quickly after that, because I didn’t hear it again. Doors were shut, a tailgate lifted and bolted into place. The engine chugged some more, shifted gear and moved off down the hill. Other trucks followed it, their tyres crunching through the wreckage from the blown-out cemetery.
Mari had fallen back to sleep. I kept on staring at the broken-up jigsaw view of the hallway from inside our cocoon. The thousand pieces of the shattered porcelain on the linoleum; the photographs on the wall above. There was one of Mrs Elsa and the captain standing in a field with a man and woman with white hair. Even though the picture was black and white, you could tell that the plants billowing out in the wind around them had grown from rapeseed. The flowers were so full and ripe they had blurre
d into one velvet cloud under the glass. Father would have been proud of such a good crop. No wonder the white-haired man was grinning, his hand on the belly of a tractor. Mrs Elsa looked taller than the rest of them, as if she had been cut out of a magazine and glued onto the picture.
I wasn’t afraid any more. The men had gone.
My arms and legs were stiff from being curled up in the laundry basket with Mari. I limped straight into Mrs Elsa’s dressing room. Her clothes had been pulled out of closets and armoires and ripped apart or thrown to the floor and stamped on under their dirty boots. Her plum-coloured silk evening gown had been cut open down the middle. A white chiffon dress had mud on the tunic. Printed blouses had been torn off their hangers and thrown all over the room, as if the men had been looking for something.
I went over to the dressing table. Mrs Elsa’s jewellery box was open. She didn’t wear much jewellery: ‘You can’t take it with you, can you?’ was one of her favourite phrases. It was what she always said when Lam was helping her to get ready for a dinner at the Peninsula, or cocktails at the Gloucester. Lam said it meant there was no point spending big money on small items you’ll have to leave behind when you die. But Mrs Elsa was proud of her gold-and-diamond watch, and her engagement ring, a ruby set into a band that she said was made of something called Welsh gold. It was so pale that it had looked almost silver against the black velvet of the box. It wasn’t there now. The box was empty.
Remember the studio photograph Lam and I sent home to you, Third Sister, how you admired our black-and-white uniforms? You were awed by the fake flowers in vases that stood on a column between us, and the painted curtain that set the scene behind, the oily glimmer of the moon on the bark of a goat-horn tree. But it was our jewels you were most proud of, wasn’t it? We both wore identical rings, and a bracelet on one arm, mine on my right, and Lam’s on her left. Well, let me tell you a secret. Those jewels weren’t paid for by Mrs Elsa and the captain. They weren’t given to us in return for our hard work. They were painted on by the photographer’s assistant. All the girls pay a few cents extra to have it done.
The Rice Paper Diaries Page 6