by Sandi Tan
As we walked by the parlor, the large crucifix caught his eye. He raised his brows again but refrained from comment. In any case, it did not alarm him, as Mr. Wee had hoped. If anything, it only amused him.
I counted six discrete gunshots from the driveway, each louder and more appalling than the last. Six. This meant there was still a chance that one of the men, Mr. Wee, had been allowed to live. Then, as if to shatter my tiniest hope, Agnes began to bay in the courtyard behind the house.
“Come on, darling,” Taro said as he drew me up the stairs. “It’s about time we got better acquainted.”
He didn’t touch me that afternoon. What he did was odder.
“Where do you sleep?” he asked.
I showed him the bedroom Daniel and I shared. He instantly began looking through the wardrobe and drawers, fingering my undergarments one by one, pausing only to gaze at me with the same tenderness he’d given me in the car. Was he willing me to fall in love with him? Trying to convince me of his love? In either case, he sought my complicity. When he finished going through my things, satisfied that I’d hidden no weapon, he unlocked the handcuff binding me to him.
Immediately, I made a run for it. But he shut the door and leaned into it. When I rushed to the open window, he whipped out his revolver and aimed it at me.
“Do you really want to die?” he asked. “Because I will shoot you, you know, before you can even jump.”
He stood before our full-length mirror, and I peered at it to see if there were others in the room, encircling his body as they had once Daniel.
There was nothing; we were completely alone. Even the monsters had fled.
“What do you want from me?”
“I would like you to be yourself,” he said. “I would like you to behave as you would on any other ordinary day. Like an ordinary housewife.”
To behave as I normally would—at gunpoint? In front of the enemy?
I wanted to scream but my body betrayed me instead. A warm stream flowed down my legs, and the silk carpet beneath my feet grew soggy.
Taro clucked. “Is this what you call acting like yourself, Momoko?”
Momoko? Was this a term of hate?
He put away his gun and folded his arms. “Clean yourself up. Remember, we’re civilized people, not monkeys.”
He sat by my bath. There was no hint of lasciviousness when he watched me, although his eyes were fixed upon my body. He observed me as a physician or tutor might—with curative, instructive intent, rather than as a man. I learned very quickly from this, and from the way he’d given orders from the car, that he was not one who liked to dirty his hands. If he wanted me dead, he would have a lackey do the deed; as long as we were alone, my life was unlikely to be in danger.
“What have you done with Daniel?” Just saying his name left me shuddering.
“As long as you’re good to me, Momoko, you will see him again.”
“What about Mr. Wee?”
“Momoko…”
He persisted in calling me that word, that name, which sounded like something one might call a child or a pet.
When I emerged from the bath, shivering though the day was warm, he picked out a red silk cheongsam from my wardrobe and laid it out on the bed. As I dressed, the smell of Cantonese cooking wafted up the stairs: soy sauce, sesame oil, rice wine, braised green onions. The servants! Were they still in the house?
He escorted me downstairs with his arm wrapped firmly around my waist, like a man leading his fiancée to a ball. Nothing about him looked threatening, let alone murderous, and this was precisely his most unnerving aspect. He had mopped his face and neck with a wet towel as I dressed. Now, with his hair moistened and combed down and his shirt crisp, he looked polished enough for supper with royalty.
The dining table was set for two and lit with candles. No sign of the servants anywhere. Yet fluffy white rice filled our bowls, and a main platter held two fatty eels, braised in the cook’s recognizable style with chopped scallions as garnish. Just seeing these creatures, their heads still intact with cloudy eyes and serrated teeth, turned my hunger to revulsion. That poor girl at the tram stop…
“Won’t you dine with me, Momoko?” He sat me down first, then took his place across from me. I noticed the absence of knives, forks, or chopsticks.
“What have you done with the servants?”
“I’ve done nothing. They cooked and then they left.” He tipped an open bottle of red Bordeaux over my goblet and poured, then clinked his glass—pointedly empty—against mine. “Chin, chin.”
“But you aren’t drinking.” It could be a fatal mistake if I didn’t make him taste the wine first.
“Wine doesn’t agree with me. I prefer sake.”
I retracted my hands. “Well, I won’t drink alone.”
“Fair enough.” He poured himself a glass and took a big gulp, wincing with distaste. “But you ought to have gathered by now that I mean you no harm. Quite the contrary, Momoko.”
Smiling, he pushed the serving spoon into the belly of an eel. Instantly, the creature’s gills flexed and fluttered. It was still alive.
He placed the juicy fillet atop the rice in my bowl.
I tried to contain my horror. “After you,” I said.
“Thank you, but Chinese food…” He wrinkled his nose.
“Then why all this trouble?”
“Because I wanted to give you a final taste”—he cast me a smile that conveyed a galaxy of nostalgia—“of your old life. Isn’t this a classic Chinese delicacy? I was served a dish like this in Shanghai once—the body cooked, the head left alive. The chef very proudly said it proved that the fish was fresh, and I thought, ‘Barbarians.’ Now, eat.”
I did as I was told, spooning rice into my mouth without really tasting it. When he told me to have more wine, I did that, too. I sought oblivion, and the wine helped. Glass after glass, I drank it all down until my cheeks were burning.
I kept my eyes on the eel, hoping it would finally be still. But its gill continued to twitch.
Taro stood up theatrically, and with his eyes fixed on me, sauntered to my side.
I tried to appear calm. “Why do you call me Momoko?”
“You remind me of a girl I once knew named Momoko. The similarity is uncanny: the same penetrating eyes, the same stubborn jut of the chin, the same eagerness to flirt one moment and to scold the next. It’s as if you were put here to torture me with memories of her.” He paused. “Momoko was the love of my life. Every time I touched her between her legs, she would be silky wet. It was like stroking a live oyster.” He smiled. “Once upon a time, I was going to marry her.”
“Did she die—of disgust?” I used the bluntest words I could.
“No, no, she’s quite alive. She just… didn’t wish to be with me, that’s all.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Look at me,” he said, his voice suddenly sterner. “Momoko.”
Standing before me, he pushed hard on the backrest of my chair, and it tipped backward, taking me with it. My surroundings did a cartwheel, and the chair landed with a loud crack. I braced myself: This was it. This was the part where he avenged his shattered ego by slicing open my throat.
With quick hands, he pitched the chair out from beneath me and flung it to the side of the room; it clattered across the wood floor and struck the wall. Then he leaned over me, possessive yet not wholly certain of his power, like a tiger surveying his prey.
“Momoko,” he murmured, gazing at me with wretched torment.
Saying her name galvanized something within him. In a second, his hand moved under my skirt. I felt his fingers probing between my thighs.
I struggled, trying to push his face away, but he held me down. It wasn’t just him I had to fight off—the wine had fogged my head, paralyzed my reflexes.
I succumbed.
The next day, I awoke, alone in bed, a little past noon.
It seemed like another universe—calm, free of air-raid sirens and the sounds
of gunfire. Had I been freed?
I descended the stairs cautiously, groggy from last night’s drinking. The aroma of soy sauce and sesame oil clung to the air, along with a sickening marine tang. Otherwise, all was clear; it seemed I was alone in the house.
On the dining table sat the evidence of last night’s feast—spent candlesticks, my rice bowl with its crown of oleaginous fish flesh. The chair remained on the floor, turned on its side, against the wall.
Ravenous, I decided to grab myself a bite of rice. As I reached for a spoon, I saw that both eels, sitting in a congealed puddle in the center of the table, were missing their bellies. Their eye sockets played host to colonies of flies.
Just then, a black cat, mangy and yellow-eyed, leapt up from one of the chairs. It began padding around the eels, hissing at me.
“It’s all yours, kitty. All yours.”
The front door beckoned. I burst out of the dank corruption of the house and into the embrace of the outside world. Fresh air ought to save me.
It was blazingly bright outside, the air filled with birdsong and the chirrups of crickets. But the view was terrible. Suspended from the porte cochere were two carcasses—man and dog, except neither was wholly man nor wholly dog. The heads of Mr. Wee and Agnes had been severed at the neck and exchanged. The two bodies were strung horizontally, limbs pulled aloft. Blood pooled on the drive below, the edges already blackening to a crust.
A scream tore loose from my throat.
As he’d done once before, Taro rushed from behind me, scooped me up in his arms, and kicked the front door shut behind us.
“They weren’t meant for your eyes,” he said.
Looking at him, I recalled the kind face of the man I was supposed to marry—my real fiancé, not this impostor, not this murderer.
“Daniel!” I shrieked as loudly as I could, in case he was near and able to hear me, in case he’d been held in the storeroom or the servants’ wing, in case he could still detect the love in my voice.
The back of Lieutenant Colonel Rukumoto’s hand lashed across my face.
I don’t remember the rest.
Weeks passed. Maybe months. I couldn’t tell. The monsoons had arrived sluggishly and washed away just as sluggishly; then the new year had come and gone. I only knew about this passing of time because there had been endless, sticky days with biblical torrents of rain, and there had been firecrackers—then, before long, no more of either.
What concerned me on a daily basis was flesh. My flesh kept me alive. Not my intelligence, not my pluck, not even my ability to see ghosts, which, incidentally, was meaningless in a house where ghosts feared to tread. During the day, Taro kept me locked at home with his silent goons. I was free to spend these hours as I chose, so long as subterfuge and contact with the external world were not involved. And every evening, like an old-fashioned businessman, he returned to me, the house, and his waking dream of middle-class domesticity. I was how he numbed himself; I did for him what ten bottles of sake could never do.
I, in turn, began to look forward to his return, just so I had somebody to talk to. Of course, conversation came with a price of Taro’s asking, and I soon adapted to this barter in skin. Sex became a way for me to crush the hours, to escape from the present and forget, forget, forget. I fled into my body.
It was also how I survived. Every night, the mindless act of removing my clothes bought me—and poor Daniel—another day away from prison or death. Whenever I did not submit as he pleased, my captor brought up Daniel’s name—casually, of course, because all he’d need issue was a casual order and Daniel would be no more. With these tart little reminders, he ensured my compliance. But he wasn’t always a brute. No, he was often startlingly gentle, exemplary even, and on those monthly days I was unavailable to him, he was content to watch me eat, sleep, bathe—in effect, study me as I carried out the ordinary acts of life. He had no interest in my desires, never solicited my opinions; to him, I was a specimen, a pet, a thing.
The more mundane my activity, the more pleasure he derived from it. I learned not to panic when he stole into the bathroom to observe me brushing my teeth as if it were the most enthralling demonstration on earth.
He called me his wife. To the junior officers who frequented the house, I was also unofficially acknowledged as such, although they called me Okasan, which meant “Mother.” I was never paraded out in the world or showed off to Taro’s superiors at parties, because as a self-avowed traditional man, he believed that the world of the home and the world of the workplace should never mix. In fact, so convinced of his own dictum was he that I was never let out beyond the courtyard of the house, and even then, not without the supervision of some expressionless uniformed cretin who kept his hand on a pistol.
I consoled myself with the thought that I was experiencing a parallel confinement to Daniel, to Li, to Father, trapped in their respective cells, though there, of course, the similarity ended. Yes, I worked like a slave cleaning the house, but Taro gave me all the creature comforts he could gather during wartime, short of diamonds and foie gras. We had air-conditioning; we ate beef. He plied me with wine and, even better, cognac, chocolate, and books, trying to prove to me that he had a soul. I was not even expected to cook. One of his flunkies, an eighteen-year-old from Kobe whose family had run a tavern, became our chef. My epicurean offerings were required only in the boudoir.
Yet not one day went by without me thinking about Daniel, Li, and Father. I even worried about Kenneth, with his band of merry men in the forest. How could these fighters, mere flesh and blood, do battle with bombs? Of course, as Taro’s “wife,” I knew better than to bring up my fiancé’s name. Already each time I mentioned Father or Li, asking to see them, he met my words with an icy silence, as if I’d uttered something so vile that he couldn’t even bring himself to respond, that with my thoughtlessness I had violated the sacred rules of our union. He would use this as an excuse to get drunk. And when Taro was drunk, he was not a man worth negotiating with. He did not appreciate conversation, and he got very, very rough.
Several times each day, I gazed into mirrors, checking for ghosts. They were never there. I found myself praying for their return—even the spirit of Mr. Wee, who had cause to hate me—so I could glean from them news of the outside world or coax them into frightening my captors. I wanted my allies—my army, as Issa had put it.
Oh, Issa. I’d been afraid of the wrong things. The horrors I had witnessed far eclipsed the ghouls of his graveyard. But how could I right my cowardly wrong when I was no longer free to cross the street, let alone find my way back to Forbidden Hill?
An idea popped into my head one morning during my prisoner’s constitutional—that is, my daily laps along the rim of the courtyard. I had the post-rain redness of the roses to thank for this bit of inspiration. They made me think of the gated rose garden in Shanghai and the dead children whose blood, Sister Kwan told us, gave the blooms their glow.
“Of course,” I whispered when the inspired kernel took root.
My two young wardens eyed me cautiously.
“Okasan?” the shorter and softer of them said.
“Stop calling me that, will you? I’m not your bloody mother.”
“But, Okasan…”
I kicked off my slippers and stepped away from the concrete, onto the soggy muck. The soldiers exchanged anxious looks, trying to second-guess my next move. I’d never strayed before, nor had I ever spoken to them.
“What are you doing?” said the taller, sterner boy, hands at his waist.
I leapt onto the most freshly heaped mound of dirt behind the rosebushes, the sure sign of a recent burial. The soil was still springy beneath my feet. “Won’t you join me?”
From their horrified expressions, I knew my instincts had been right—the murdered men lay below. This wasn’t the sacred heart of any cemetery, nor did I know the words to Issa’s chants, but improvisation was better than inaction, and I had nothing to lose. The two boys conferred in quick-fire Japanese as
I unbuttoned my blouse.
The sterner one, feeling the strain of Taro’s dictum to not hurt me, spat out his distaste. “Okasan, stay on path! We do not want you to have accident!”
“Accident? You mean, like this?” I flopped myself down on the sickening earth, the mud smearing all over my skirt and shins. I folded my legs as Issa had done and threw my blouse aside.
The sight of me in my brassiere, covered in mud, sent the boys into a panic.
“Okasan, obey!”
Using a twig, I began loosening the clods around me; then I rubbed the muck on my face, neck, arms, and chest. The mineral, living smell of the earth and the thought of the bodies beneath me made me want to retch, but I played at harmless high spirits, like a child making mud pies. I had to. “Come and join me!”
I continued in this manner until the humorless martinet stormed away, presumably to telephone Taro, leaving his comrade to watch over me.
“Please, Okasan,” the nicer boy begged. “You must stop. Isamu-san says he wants to shoot you with gun.”
My stomach turned but I continued to smile.
“We are forbidden to touch you, Okasan.” He kept a safe distance on the edge of the concrete, as if the plant bed were molten lava. “We only watch you. For safety.”
I closed my eyes and tuned out the world. I had to act fast, even if it was unlikely that Isamu would shoot his superior’s wife for mere horseplay. I grabbed the twig in both hands and began rowing. Left, right, left, right—just as I had rowed on the grave of Issa’s father. I realized the precise elements were lacking, but I had to try, just as I’d improvised on the plantation and then again with the ghost of the first Mrs. Wee. No longer could I witness this war as a passive bystander.
It was time to round up my ghosts.
“Forgive me,” I whispered to the bodies below.
Not knowing Issa’s Arabic chants, I called upon prayers from every cobwebbed crevice of my girlhood, murmuring and repeating this motley catechism with the hope that they would cede their customary meaning and take on the watery lingo of trance. This was harder to achieve than I’d supposed because, aside from me not being in the silent heart of a cemetery, my guard was continually barking, his voice warped with rising panic.