by Sandi Tan
“That’s my long-term goal.” He smiled and kissed my hair. “As for my short-term goal, I want to take you back to the beach house. I want to make love to you in every room until the whole place smells like us. We’ll bring bread and cheese and wine. We’ll walk around naked for days and make as much noise as we like. We’ll live like animals.”
He had a dreamy, faraway look, the look of a boy speaking of dragons and snow-capped mountains, and I felt a surge of leonine protectiveness. I wanted to protect him and his fantasies; I wanted to protect us; I wanted to protect all the goodness in our world—for as long as I could.
“And we must go back to the cave,” he said. “Our secret cave…That’s where we should make our first child.”
Our first child. Those words, that belief in our future, that faith in me. They struck me so profoundly I could no longer hold back my emotions.
“Hey, don’t cry.” He brushed away my tears with the kindest, gentlest hands I had ever known. “I know you’re very happy, my dearest, but please, don’t cry…”
That night, I found a red candle on my dressing table. A gift from Issa, no doubt.
When I lit it, the wick sizzled like a firecracker, leaving behind in less than a minute a scarlet pool of wax.
I STAND AT THE WINDOW AND INHALE. My breath is jagged from all this talking. The memories hit me harder still. I have never met a sweeter, more honorable boy than Daniel. He should never have been with me. Violet was right. He was too good for me.
How long have I been caught in this spell? A night and a day? Two nights, two days? It’s bright outside, hardly the best time for a black reckoning. But I know better than to trust the face of things. The gnarl in my stomach has tightened again.
From the eighth floor in the clarity of noon, the city is one drab postwar Legoland, all crisscrossing telephone wires and boxy, rumbling generators atop each roof. But clear blue sky—no kamikaze crows. Miss Maddin is my crow, I suppose. She and I colliding; that would bring us symmetry, wouldn’t it?
I’ll take to my bed now and recharge. But quick, let me sweep up the bone dust I’ve strewn along the doorway. A fervent gesture at night, it looks ridiculous by day. Can’t come across as a substandard housekeeper to my Professor Crow. First impressions can follow you to the grave. I should know.
THE DOORBELL. What timing. I’ve slept only, what, three hours. Not even that.
But she is here at last. My tardy savior.
My heart pounds.
“You certainly took your time,” I say into the intercom.
No reply.
I buzz her into the building. Instead of the elevator, she takes the stairs. Quick, steady footsteps echo up eight floors of stairwell, and before long, a middle-aged woman appears in my peephole. Obviously quite fit and determined to flaunt it.
I scrutinize her. So this is Professor Maddin. Certainly not what I’ve been expecting. She’s not Dutch or South African or even European—she’s Oriental. Should I be using the more politically correct term? Asian. Most likely Chinese, maybe Korean.
She leans in, the peephole turning her nose into a beige tuber. “May I come in?”
I creak open the door. She’s tall and plain with an awkward smile, straight black hair. Under her navy blue blazer, she wears a white blouse and matching navy blue skirt. Business attire of the most generic, innocuous kind. No makeup, no jewelry. Should we compete at anonymity, she wins the gold.
She stands before me. I observe her short intake of breath as she registers my age, my stooped posture, my former beauty, such as it was, long gone to seed.
“Come in, come in,” I say.
“Sorry for taking forever. I had to make some arrangements—as you know, every little thing has to be done in person in this country, and by hand. Japan…” A flicker of a smile creases her thin, pale lips. “What a paradox.”
She steps inside. Her eyes dart across my little flat, comparing it to the image she’s had in her mind.
“Did you have to travel far?” I look at her; she’s empty-handed.
“Quite.” She does not elaborate.
I follow her reptilian gaze around the living room. Can she see as I do? Or does she see even more?
“Please, sit down. Would you like something to drink?”
“No thank you,” she says, too quickly. “I never drink.”
Is this her idea of humor? Finally, we shake hands; hers are cold but not unfriendly. She has unusually soft skin for someone who’s no longer a child.
She invites herself to my armchair.
“Please, don’t let me stop you now.” She gestures me toward the sofa, as if I were her guest—or patient. “Carry on. Lie down, if you like. Where were you?”
I stare at her. Who is she? What is she? She promised to bring me what I’ve been searching for. But would she?
“Ling, I have eyes. I have ears. I can see you’re in the middle of a story.” She pats the seat of the sofa. “Come on. Finish it and then we’ll chat.” She gives me her first real smile. “I’ll meet you on the other side.”
10
The Serpent in the Garden
I SENT INVITATION AFTER INVITATION, but neither Li nor Father came to see us. They hadn’t the time, they wrote. They’d given themselves over to the volunteerism that was sweeping through Chinatown and spent their nights scanning for enemy aircraft.
“The rich sit in rooms and twiddle their thumbs,” Li scribbled on a postcard of a tuxedoed dog tucking into a roast. “It’s working men like us who will save the day.”
I felt his words were extraneous; the card alone had made his bitter point.
China had been brought to her knees by the Japanese, and all across the Pacific, people were dreading a similar fate. On the Black Isle, we followed the worsening news with strange, morbid relish. Endowed with a deep sea-port and a steady supply of rubber and tin, we were an obvious target. It was inevitable that they would come. The only question was when.
I remembered reading in Life that German planes had rained leaflets along the uncertain boulevards of Paris: “Parisians, don’t be afraid of bombs! Paris will be spared for the glory of Hitler!” That similar leaflets had not arrived from the Japanese elicited both relief and mounting terror.
To ease jittery nerves, the colonial guardians of the Black Isle herded up all the Japanese-born civilians they could find and housed them in barracks on the isolated western coast “for their own safety.” I know that today such policies are thought inhumane, but I supported the internment wholeheartedly. Like everyone around me then, I feared and loathed the Japanese.
I pictured Mrs. Nakamura being ripped away from her octopus lover. If a civilian Japanese woman was capable of such perversity, it should have surprised no one that her compatriot soldiers were stabbing Chinese babies with bayonets and roasting them over open fires. Rumor had it some even ate them, doused in soy sauce. All across China, the Japs were rampaging, raping toddlers and grandmothers, hacking peasants in two with samurai swords, and razing villages that had been standing for millennia.
It was no longer just Chinatown that was outraged; it was the entire Island, the entire region, perhaps the entire world. Behind their elaborate pantomime of smiles, bows, and spoken pleasantries, the Japanese were showing themselves to be the most heinous savages on earth. Locking them up was the best thing our colonial leaders had done for public morale in years—crowds cheered as the aliens were trucked off. If only the government’s other measures were as forceful.
The city had been dispatching Indian conscripts in small groups, each headed by a British supervisor, to lime-wash our roadside trees to help reflect headlights should electricity be cut off. Like most Islanders, I welcomed such preparations—until I saw the Indians chatting, then arguing, and finally dispersing after doing haphazard work. I quickly discovered why. After putting on a show for ten minutes or so, the white overseers disappeared.
The colonials, in fact, were vanishing everywhere. One by one, our neighboring bungalow
s became masterless domains. Robinsons, where their wives shopped for sundries, had become host to a sea of black hair. Li told me that the same was happening at Wonder World—no more foreigners all of a sudden, not even soldiers. It was as if a silent virus had come in the night and wiped them all out in their sleep.
Every day, droning voices on the wireless preached the sermon of preparedness, yet when it came time for crucial decisions, those in charge were nowhere to be found. It wasn’t hubris, the excuse historians liked to use years later in maundering documentaries from the BBC. It was cowardice, pure and simple. Our rulers ran away. Looking back on it today, I would compare our situation to that of a play whose producers had decided in advance would fail and so made plans to be elsewhere on opening night. The Isle was doomed even before the curtains rose.
Money was no protection. One morning, I came downstairs to an inevitable development—breakfast in the Wee house had been compromised. The toast was bone dry. Violet instantly summoned the Hainanese cook.
“No more butter,” the cook explained quietly.
“What do you mean, no more butter?” For once, Violet’s indignation seemed justified.
“Fitzpatricks got no more butter. Margarine also coming to no more.”
Fitzpatricks’ big claim was if they didn’t carry an item, then no shop or market for a thousand miles would have it. No butter at Fitzpatricks meant no butter anywhere, and no butter anywhere was terrible news indeed. The vanishing had become epidemic: first the colonials, now even plain old butter.
The cook disappeared into the kitchen for a minute and returned with a tray of eggs. Her expression was grave.
“What are you doing, Ah Koon?” Mr. Wee said, looking up from the morning paper. “What’s going on here?”
The cook lifted the cardboard lid to show us two dozen eggs sitting snugly in their grooves. All of them were cracked. Peering out of each crushed shell was a bleeding little creature with obsidian eyes. Chicks, already half formed.
“Good God!” Violet cried.
Daniel swallowed and clasped my hand tight. “Dad, what should we—”
“Take those things away,” Mr. Wee whispered. “Get rid of them at once.”
“Bad sign,” the cook said in Cantonese as she left. “Very bad sign.”
I kept silent because I knew she was right.
After breakfast, Violet asked Issa to take her into town for groceries before supplies completely vanished. Daniel suggested I go along, and after a bit of resistance on my part, I gave in. This was as good a time as any for us to set aside our differences.
When we reached Middle Road, a roadblock at the junction of High Street kept us from advancing. Others like us, anxious women in chauffeured cars, were also out foraging—and failing. We watched five army lorries back out of Fitzpatricks’ loading bay, honking repeatedly for clearance. Their green tarps bulged with goods—loot.
Violet shook her head. “Father told me they’ve been ordered to destroy the food, but I didn’t believe they would do something like this. Aren’t they supposed to guard us?” For a moment, she looked as if she would leap out of the car to protest, but instead she leaned forth and tapped Issa’s shoulder. “To the Turf Club. Hurry!”
We raced back to the suburbs, arriving in time to see two lorries pull out of the Island Turf Club’s winding, palm-lined driveway. I expected to see Thoroughbreds jammed in the backs of them, whinnying and blinking their big brown eyes, but they carried only soldiers, pale young boys with grim, spotty faces. I thought this was a hopeful sign—the horses hadn’t been taken—but Violet gasped.
“Oh, God, no.”
We sped toward the stables and passed the one remaining vehicle, an army jeep parked so hastily that it dislodged a whole bed of lilies.
Row after row, the fifty horse stalls were empty, the door to each left unceremoniously open. But the eerie silence suggested something other than freedom.
From the paddock beyond, we heard the exasperated cries of an Englishman: “Boy, go that side! You deaf or what? Not there, there!”
Requiring no instruction, Issa tore the car off the paved road and drove us across the grass toward the lone voice behind the stalls. We approached slowly, cautiously, inching toward a brown pyramid in the center of the muddy paddock. A uniformed British officer, evidently the one whose voice we’d heard, was shouting orders at two Indian jockeys as they clambered up and down the mound, splashing liquid from tin cans.
“You bloody buggers! Can’t you hear me? You missed that one entirely!” The officer was so engrossed in his authority, waving his arms about, that he scarcely noticed our presence.
Fifty yards from the commotion, our car came to a halt and my stomach churned: I recognized the monstrous assortment of heads and tails. The beautiful Thoroughbreds, in the prime of their health, had been led out, shot, and stacked into this mountain of flesh. The coppery stench of death filled the air, and along with it, gunpowder and kerosene—the tripartite smells of war.
Jets of bright red squirted into the air each time the jockeys stepped on an open wound. The blood made for a slippery climb; both men lost their footing at almost the same time, slamming headlong against the faces of the creatures that until moments ago had been their treasured wards.
On the other side of the paddock, ten other jockeys stood frozen in a neat line, watching the scene in silence. A pair of baby-faced infantrymen had their rifles pointed at them, as if they were the next target. One careless sneeze on the jockeys’ part could have triggered a hail of bullets.
Issa started the car again and drove us directly toward the pyramid itself.
“Issa,” I said, “what are you doing?”
Violet buried her face in her hands. “The poor things…the poor, poor things…” She had a tender heart—when it came to animals, anyway.
“Issa, turn around and take us home,” I said.
Pretending not to hear me, the pirate continued to drive. The British officer finally turned to see us, his head tilted in puzzlement. Nervously, he reached for his gun.
“Turn around now!” I barked.
Still, Issa ignored me. The officer had his gun out and his feet planted apart, poised to shoot. The boy soldiers, too, turned their rifles to our car.
“Issa!” I dug my nails into his shoulder. “If they don’t kill you, I swear I will.”
His eyes stayed on the road, but with the taciturn pride of a sage whose prophecies were coming true, he smiled at me in the rearview mirror and very slowly set the car in reverse.
“Learn to say please,” he said.
Of course, even if I’d reported Issa’s behavior, Mr. Wee had far more important things to do than scold a stubborn chauffeur. For weeks, he had been holding late-night meetings in the house, organizing—from what I could gather—a secret team of his colleagues to form a resistance should the Isle fall. He ran it along the lines of what he knew best, the chamber of commerce, and though his men didn’t take to arms, they didn’t “sit in rooms and twiddle their thumbs” (as Li had it) either.
Night after night, they arrived surreptitiously, some no doubt unwillingly, and convened behind closed doors. Mr. Wee had made it clear I was barred from the proceedings: This was man’s work. Although he had the tact not to say it, I knew he felt that my loose—meaning female—lips could be a liability.
I was insulted, but I understood. Secrecy was paramount. As long as the British still ruled, such meetings marked Mr. Wee and his friends as anticolonial subversives. And so, the men came and went in the dark, wearing hats and scarves that kept their identities hidden from even the servants and, frankly, made them look ridiculous in the balmy tropical night. The tactic, if comical, was effective. I could never keep track of them, as only a handful were ever present at the same time and the roster constantly changed.
Daniel sat in on these summits, but reluctantly. He had little interest in politics—“It’s all deceit, all the way,” he always said—but felt obliged to give his father moral
support. His job, he told me, was to sit by his father and nod and, when the need arose, carry in refreshments. I kept wishing he would absorb a few lessons about diplomacy and planning, but he remained resolute in his indifference.
The afternoon the horses were slaughtered, Lord Pickering, the colonial governor, made a surprise announcement on the wireless explaining that the increased presence of British soldiers on the Island was necessary because factory workers had been planning to go on strike.
It says something about colonial rule that, until the brink of disaster, I had never before heard the governor’s voice. Because of this, I remember it distinctly. Lord Cecil Pickering II spoke as if he had a mouthful of caviar and couldn’t let any of those fish eggs pop: “There are some on the Isle who are doing all they can to stir up trouble. I do not know if they realize it, but they are behaving as if the Nazis were their friends. I warn those people that I regard them as enemies and that I shall deal with them accordingly.” He pronounced Nazis “gnat-sies.” No mention of the Japanese. I imagined him, after the speech, reclining on a divan in a white toga.
All twelve of Mr. Wee’s men were called together that night. I sat in our bedroom, tense, waiting for Daniel to sneak upstairs with a report. Two long hours into the meeting, the door finally clicked open to reveal the silhouette of my husband-to-be, hunched with worry.
“Father thinks the war’s already begun, though nobody in government will admit as much.” He hugged me to his chest, as much to give himself courage as to comfort me. His hands were clammy. “Someone said that Farquhar, the head of the general hospital, called an urgent meeting this morning. He told all the local doctors and nurses to be on standby. No one’s to go anywhere. The same is happening throughout the civil service—travel freeze for all Asiatics—yet one of Father’s contacts from the port said a passenger liner has just pulled in, obviously ready to ferry people away. They’re trying to decide what it all means and what has to be done. I’ve never seen Father worried like this, and honestly, it scares me.” He gave me a quick kiss. His lips, too, were cold. “I better go. I’ve told you too much already.”