The Black Isle

by Sandi Tan

  “Let’s go home,” he said, his whisper echoing down the desolate street.

  Look down on yourselves from the stars, I cried,

  Look down on yourselves from the stars.

  They heard me and lowered their eyes.

  WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA

  “Soliloquy for Cassandra”

  PART TWO

  The Haunter

  OH, HOW I PINE FOR YOUTH, even the unpretty parts. Even as this intruder sits in my room, hanging on to my every word.

  I was young; now I am old.

  My stupid hands. They’re shaking again. How many little tapes have I filled? Ten now, each nicely numbered. I crown the existing stack with the newest one. It clatters when it strikes its sisters. Slight wobble.

  In the darkness of my sitting room, the professor applauds.

  “Original.” She sounds amused. “This is the first I’ve heard of the jellyfish invasion. And I’ve combed those beaches in my studies, so to speak.”

  Does she think I’m lying?

  “But no, I don’t doubt you for a second. You were there, with your very unique way of seeing. It’s refreshing…your empathy with the natural world.”

  “Stranger things have yet to be mentioned, Professor.”

  “And I look forward to hearing about them. About everything, actually. Warts and welts and all. Spare no detail.”

  I don’t see her smile but hear it animating her voice, giving it a forced note of intimacy. Suddenly I’m seized by a feeling of dread. She is, after all, a complete stranger.

  I look around my apartment. This woman and I are sitting in the shadows when we should be greasing our knuckles in a well-lit ring, the better to see what the other’s got. Damn the winter. It’s just past four and already black outside.

  I get up to turn on a lamp.

  “Don’t bother with the lights,” she says. “I’m not afraid of the dark. And I can’t imagine you are either.”

  “No, I’m not.” Truth be told, I feel better not seeing her face. Faces can be extremely deceiving. In the quiet, my stomach rumbles, juices roiling in the void. “But tell me, Professor. Do you see as I do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “See.”

  “Oh! No,” she says. “I wouldn’t be in academia if I did. Why?”

  “Because not long ago, there was a ghost in this apartment.”

  She is quiet for a while. Then, very timidly, she whispers, “Is it still here?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.”

  Again, silence.

  My gut betrays me again with another round of gastric purring. I blame the night for taking a slightly sour turn.

  “Do you need to get something to eat?” she says, surprising me with her concern.

  “No, no, I’m fine. I prefer to carry on. May I?”

  Again, I scan the darkness for him, my ghost. I hope he will linger long enough to hear my side of the story, to forgive me for what I had done. But him and the professor—what is their dark connection?

  Dear fiend in the shadows, are you listening?

  11

  Turnipheads

  I’D FORGOTTEN ALL ABOUT CHRISTMAS. But on the tram three days after the air strikes, I saw the fairy lights strung across High Street, each parabola anchored by a lone blue star.

  The lights caught my attention because they had been left on in broad daylight, eating up precious energy. This small disorder unsettled me as much as the ruins I had seen—it hinted at a much deeper chaos.

  After I’d spent days convinced my family was dead, Li had telephoned to say that he and Father were fine. Naturally, when I begged him to join us, he refused. “They’ve already hit Chinatown twice; there’s no way they’ll hit us again.” These lights—uncannily optimistic, spookily wasteful—reminded me of his cocky tone of voice.

  I spent an hour haggling with one of Mr. Wee’s contacts, a seedy Cantonese named Fatty Wai whose black-market operation was located within a halal butchery near the Balmoral Hotel. Mr. Wee had asked me to buy chicken breasts; Fatty Wai gave me only heads and necks. Mr. Wee had asked for a tin of corn oil; Fatty Wai said he could spare only used, blackened grease of indeterminate origin. His attitude improved when I waved a hundred-dollar note at him, but this didn’t spare me a new round of negotiations. By the time we closed the deal, I was ready to collapse.

  The tram took longer than usual to appear. There were four others waiting with me in the shelter, all women—though one had her hair shorn to resemble a young boy—and all nervous. We had each come from Fatty Wai’s or an unregulated shop like his. Staring at the deserted street, we clutched our groceries, disguised under burlap sacks and newspaper as refuse or household items we were trying to hawk. I guessed that the others were either high-class servants or unloved daughters-in-law. None seemed accustomed to taking the tram. But with few private cars traversing the roads, public transportation was the best way of remaining discreet.

  Finally, I heard a light, metallic rattling in the distance and felt my companions’ relief: Our ride was approaching. Except, of course, I was the one person familiar enough with trams to know that this wasn’t one.

  The noise grew closer. From around the corner washed a great wave of bicycles. Hundreds of young Japanese men, maybe even thousands, decked out in short-sleeved shirts, khaki shorts, and canvas sneakers, were pedaling in silence down the unobstructed street. None appeared to be armed. They could have passed for local schoolboys were it not for their stiff, expressionless faces and the white strips they wore on their foreheads emblazoned with the bloodred Rising Sun.

  “They look like they’re here to bring peace,” murmured the girl beside me, the slight creature whose hair was shorn. Her eyes stared with a dangerous optimism.

  “Don’t be fooled,” I whispered.

  The bicycles vanished. Minutes later, we heard stuttering blasts of gunfire echo from the colonial quarter and Chinatown, all the way perhaps to the river.

  By the time the tram finally arrived, an hour late, the five of us were in jitters. One of the girls decided to walk after all, fearing ambush. The rest of us got on and prayed to get home alive. We closed our eyes when our ride passed Wonder World. It rang with screams, followed by the soulless rat-a-tat of machine guns.

  The next day at high noon, the Japanese infantry marched through Tanglewood, their senior officers trailing behind in jeeps. The invaders weren’t alone. They had Westerners in tow—a few soldiers but mainly civilians. Most of these prisoners were dressed in nothing but shorts and negligees, clearly rousted out of bed with no grace or warning, and not even permitted a minute to put on their shoes. The harsh noonday sun laid bare their once-white feet, now dark with dirt and cuts, already brown, already red.

  There was no triumphant fanfare, only clattering engines, synchronized boot claps, and the fearful whimpers of the captives. The Japs had infused this victors’ tattoo with their famous quiet restraint. But I wasn’t fooled. Such understatement was a conscious choice. It was their way of boasting.

  You’ve got the wrong whites, I almost shouted. These are not the powerful and the vain. These are drunks, innocents, do-gooders, pacifists even—the ones left behind.

  Daniel, Violet, and I watched the procession from the sitting room window, while Mr. Wee stood in the open doorway. His hand rose to his brow in a salute when one of the jeep-riding toads aimed a squint at him. I was mortified at his easy submission. But I supposed he had no choice.

  “They’re marching them to Shahbandar,” Mr. Wee said.

  He didn’t need to say any more to bring a chill into our hearts. Shahbandar Prison was more than ten miles away, and if the parade had taken this detour along the winding three-mile vein that was Tanglewood, it would also surely go through other enclaves where the Europeans once lived and played. The prisoners would have to walk twenty more miles before they reached the dank, rat-infested cells of Shahbandar, the Victorian jailhouse formerly assigned to the criminally insan
e, notorious for its midnight wails, heard for miles around.

  “Serves them right, red-hair pigs!” Little Girl blurted from the gloom behind us.

  Mr. Wee turned and glared, and her smile faded.

  At the tail end of the cavalcade, two skinny soldiers, no more than sixteen, leapt from the back of a slow-moving jeep and scurried to our house bearing a cloth package. The grimmer of them presented it, with both hands, to Mr. Wee. But this was no gift. It was the flag. The boy soldiers pointed at the upstairs balcony: display it.

  The Japanese reserved the pomp and circumstance for a radio address that evening by a certain Lieutenant Colonel Jodo, a limp-voiced man who announced that our isle was henceforth to be known as Lighthouse Island.

  “Dear Islanders, I am honored to deliver the good news: The great nation of Japan has established the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in which Lighthouse Island will play a key role. Japan has come to free your people from the yoke of the degenerate West, as Moses once freed the Jews, as the Buddha once redeemed the poor. You will no longer be enslaved, my friends. You will no longer suffer in silence and indignity under the white man’s command. Stand up, Islanders, as we appreciate our beautiful national anthem. May the emperor’s reign last ten thousand years.”

  His voice was replaced by the hissing of a record, which bled into a prelude of drums and cornets. The anthem itself, sung by a male alto, was composed of tuneless ee’s and oh’s. When he was done, a choir of young children repeated the ugly song; it was no improvement.

  As we listened to this in the living room, Mr. Wee gazed at the bleeding Christ over the mantel.

  “Well, they’re certainly efficient,” he said. “We have to give them that.”

  There was a knock on the sitting room door. Little Girl poked her head in. “The men are here, sir,” she announced in the stiff, official voice she used with him.

  Mr. Wee nodded and turned to Violet and me. “Ladies.”

  We understood. He wanted us out of the room before his VIP cabal could be led in. Violet took her needlepoint sampler and stood up quickly. She’d been steadying her nerves by sewing aphorisms all week—today’s was No coward soul is mine, by Emily Brontë—and knew herself well enough to admit that politics ruined her equilibrium. I, meanwhile, lingered, waiting until she left before I spoke.

  “Mr. Wee, I have relatives in Chinatown. If you let me into your plans, I can alert my brother. We can help you organize. I mean no disrespect, but it really does help to speak Chinese there. I know Mandarin, Shanghainese, and a few other dialects…”

  “Cassandra.” He raised a hand, vexed. “I have enough to worry about as it is.”

  “You know you can trust me—”

  “Listen to Daddy, dear.” Daniel remained by his father’s side, drawing strength from this manly consolidation of opinion. “Go upstairs. I’ll join you in a little bit.”

  As I ascended the stairs, the shadowy figures in the hallway below filed into the sitting room. I felt an unexpected hollowness when I remembered that Kenneth was not among them.

  The next afternoon, which was dreadfully overcast, I bicycled along backstreets to Li and Father’s temporary lodgings not far from Wonder World. On the telephone, Li had described it to me as a large rooming house. It turned out to be a slum—corrugated tin shacks pressed together to form a makeshift village.

  Everybody there seemed to know them as Camel and Bitter Gourd. They’d apparently made themselves useful, if not exactly beloved. Father—that is, Camel—sold cups of bird’s nest without inflating his prices, which was considered honorable, while Li became the slum’s unofficial warden, doing rounds at all hours wielding a parang. Through these small acts of community, Camel and Bitter Gourd had ingratiated themselves enough to Mr. Sun, the unofficial chieftain, to secure a shared sleeping berth in his shack.

  When I arrived at Mr. Sun’s hut, Li was alone, tying a bandanna around his forehead in the Japanese style, except that his displayed a hand-drawn Taoist yin-yang symbol. The dark rings under his eyes told me that his anemia had returned, but he was buzzing with nervous energy, perhaps fueled by coffee or, I feared, some less benign drug. The sight of him made my tears well up. The sun had tanned his skin and bleached his hair so they were now almost the same shade of brown.

  “Why are you here?” he said coldly. But I could tell he was moved because he refused to look me in the eye.

  I flung myself at him. My boy was all skin and bones, and his flesh smelled like old rain.

  “Li, you have to come with me.”

  “What are you talking about? I belong here.”

  I glanced at his soggy surroundings. The morning’s drizzle had not yet dried and another storm was already due. Chicken mesh stood in for a window, and rusted soup cans caught the rainwater that was still trickling down from the roof. The bunk he shared with Father was nothing but a bundle of blankets laid out on a wood pallet; my back ached just to gaze at it. The whole shack could so easily collapse on them, just as that shop had crushed Liu Shanling and Liu Shanmin.

  “Don’t judge me,” he said softly.

  “I’m not judging you. I want to save you.”

  “Save me? Now you sound like them.”

  I tried another approach. “Guess who I saw the other day? Cricket, of all people! He was at the house. Imagine that!”

  “Who’s Cricket?”

  “Our errand boy, from Shanghai. Remember?”

  “Nope. Everything from back then has vanished. If Mother were standing here in front of us, I doubt I’d recognize her.”

  I noticed the lump on his forehead he’d been trying to conceal behind the yin-yang symbol of his bandanna.

  “What’s that? Are you hurt?” I reached for the cloth.

  “Don’t touch it.”

  “Come on, let me have a look.”

  Li plucked off the bandanna. A gold disk fell into his palm. It was the toffee medallion from our day in the park, all those years ago.

  “I can’t believe you still have it.”

  “It’s my only souvenir,” he said. “Aside from you and him, of course.” He caressed the disk and slipped it into his pocket.

  A flurry of footsteps raced past the tin shack, bodies scraping against a wall and making the whole hut rattle. Li’s attention, like a dog’s, instantly shifted.

  I grabbed his calloused brown hands. “Listen to me. Stay with us. You’ll have your own room and you can take baths. You can protect these people from there.”

  “Protect the slum, from a mansion?” he scoffed. “Even if I wanted to, I—”

  More fleeting figures passed the shack, along with anguished cries of “Lopak-tau lei lo!”—the “Turnipheads are here,” Turniphead being the slang for a Japanese soldier.

  Li moved his sleek frame to the doorway and peered out. His jaw tightened when Father appeared, panting.

  “They’ve come in!” Father said. He didn’t register my presence. “They’re asking for healthy Chinese men. Nobody knows what they really want.”

  Li picked up his parang.

  “They have guns, my boy,” Father cautioned. “The slum is surrounded.”

  “I don’t care. I’ll go down fighting.”

  “You’ll get everyone killed,” I said.

  Father finally turned to me and the blood drained from his face. “Oh! My little girl.”

  “I want you both to come with me,” I told him. “Before it’s too late.”

  Father threw a helpless look at Li, as if he’d given up his own free will and ceded all decision-making to his son.

  “It’s already too late.” Li’s words remained absolute, even as doubt began to cloud his eyes. “You better go home. I can take care of myself.”

  I embraced him once more, my fingers slowly easing the parang out of his grip. This was the most I knew I could do. I whispered into his ear, “If they try to take you, tell them you’re Malay.”

  He put his face next to my cheek and sniffed at the air—or rather, he inhale
d me so deeply that I felt my pores quiver. I knew what he was stealing, what he was trying to capture forever in a lungful: the scent of shampoo, perfumed soap and fresh towels, relics from a world now lost to him. He brushed his lips against my skin as if I were an exotic flower to be savored, not kissing me only because Father was present. Then he did it anyway—right on the lips. His lips were every bit as soft as I remembered.

  “China man…China boy! China man…China boy!”

  The refrain being bellowed up and down the alleys grew louder as the soldiers waded deeper into the pitiful maze at the very center of which we stood. They were closing in. Their calls reminded me of the old karang guni man from Bullock Cart Water, the one Li and I hid from as children. Only there was no hiding to be done now.

  “China boy!” This voice was curt and close and accompanied by the sudden glare of a flashlight. I froze, expecting gunfire. Through the doorway, I saw a soldier’s muddy boots and the glinting tip of his bayonet.

  Li gently withdrew from my arms and nodded at Father, who gave me a wince of apologetic regret—he wanted to come with me.

  “Let’s see what they want,” Li said. Before I could say or do anything, he and Father surrendered themselves. When I ran to the door to look, it was as if they’d been devoured by the disembodied voice. They had already disappeared.

  Winding my way out of the slum, I saw lorries roar away from the cluster of shacks, bursting with human cargo. The men were penned in like pigs, watchful and passive, holding on to each other to keep from falling off as the lorries rocked along the bumpy, unpaved road. I’m sure that if I’d seen Li among them, I would have run after the trucks, screaming like a banshee. In the past hour, the roiling clouds had grown denser, darker. I pictured Li and Father in their open lorry bed. Soon, the deluge would soak them completely.

  As I got on my bicycle, a little boy raced across a muddy field toward me. He was about six years old, his delicate round face stained with dirt and tears.