The Black Isle

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by Sandi Tan


  By ignoring my advice, Kenneth had sent me a clear signal: He could and would do whatever he wanted. Cricket’s and Issa’s sudden resignations only confirmed this; at least, I told myself, I wasn’t the only one who felt cast aside.

  After dropping off my letter, I went to see Issa at his Arab Street apartment and tried to persuade him to have tea at the Kandahar coffee shop. He agreed only when I told him that I, too, had severed my ties with our old friend.

  “Better late than never, I suppose,” he said. “But I know how flexible your vows are, Cassandra. Remember when you swore you’d never get involved with spirits again? Then before I knew it, there you were, profiting from your gift. I never said anything because it’s none of my business, but I was disappointed. You’ll never know how much I regret teaching you. Because in the end, you’re just like the rest of them.”

  The accusation stung. I was nothing like Kenneth. “Quelling them is not the same as calling them up. I was working to clean the Isle up. I did it for all of us.”

  “Lie to yourself all you like.”

  I looked him in the eye, wondering if I still had a friend in him—and wondering, too, if I’d been lying to myself.

  “What really happened at Redhill?”

  He smiled and folded his hands. “No comment.”

  Cricket was even less forthcoming, though I’d never have guessed it from his effusive new manner. I met him at the tea room of the Metropole hotel, where decades ago I’d gone looking for Odell and found instead his widow.

  Each time I brought up Kenneth or Redhill, he steered the conversation to property values or my health, and offered me more Earl Grey, more scones—anything to get me off the subject. He talked about his family and the rigors of splitting time between two households: His first wife, whom I’d seen at Kenneth’s wedding, was Indian, from a Hindu background, and he had married his second, a “very bossy little” Roman Catholic Peranakan, just before the government outlawed polygamy.

  Two families! As with Issa, I was moved by how we had drifted apart over the years, how I hadn’t made any effort to keep abreast of his life, his thoughts. The darkest effect of my time with Kenneth suddenly became clear—the casualty wasn’t my heart but my world. During those years, with secrecy guiding both my work and my life, I had turned isolationist, voluntarily becoming my own island. Two families. Too late to close this chasm now.

  “When I was younger, I used to worry about being lonely, and now look at me!” Cricket chuckled, and lit up a cigar. “I just don’t have the patience for politics anymore. My wives and my children, they take up all my time and energy.” He poured me more tea. “I’m glad you’ve expanded your wardrobe—black was not a happy color. Now that you’ve come back to life, you should think about settling down, too. It’s not too late, you know. It’ll do wonders for erasing bad memories, believe me.”

  Over the next years, I followed Cricket’s exploits in the news. He went into the soft-drink business and did quite well for himself, eventually owning the largest bottling plant on the Isle. Each time I drank a bottle of Fanta Grape, I thought of him smiling at me.

  Issa, on the other hand, disappeared. I’d called at his apartment again but the landlord told me he’d moved out in a hurry, leaving no forwarding address. Nobody in his neighborhood, not even the owner of the Kandahar coffee shop, had any idea where or why he had gone. Even odder, I thought, none of them appeared to care in the slightest. Issa, a pillar of the tight-knit community and former right hand of the prime minister, had upped and vanished and nobody cared. It could only mean one of two things. Either they hated him or were harboring him from outsiders like me.

  “People come and go here all the time,” said an old Arab at the Kandahar, the teh halia bubbling with gingery heat in his glass. “Didn’t you hear? PM says our island’s the crossroads; we’re the blahdy center of the blahdy world.”

  Without his former comrades, the prime minister embarked on a building spree, like all the best dictators. To be fair, he built no monuments in his own honor or stadiums in which to deliver his sermons. It was his vanity that he should always appear humble, pragmatic, never vulgar. And so he erected apartments, schools, hospitals, and factories from north to south, making the entire island a testament to his caring.

  His new idea was to turn the Isle into a base for foreign businesses—British and American petroleum refineries, Swiss banks, Japanese electronics firms. In return, Kenneth made these companies employ a high quota of Islanders, even in management, righting the exclusionary wrongs of old British rule. If he couldn’t sail the Isle to the developed world, he would bring the developed world to it.

  I found most of Kenneth’s plans admirable; they brought prosperity and stability to our country. What I objected to was the disinterment of graves in cemeteries for nothing nobler than golf courses and shopping centers, playgrounds to subdue a restless, gentrifying middle class—and worse, the Medusa’s head of motorways he was planting near the city center, over where Redhill had been. With each such project, I called his office with new warnings. He was playing with fire. Never once did he call me back.

  I had to do something. One afternoon, I made my way to the construction zone that was the Redhill Memorial Highway—oh, the false piety of the name! There, looking at the progression of concrete Xs each five stories high, I was hailed by two ghosts who’d perished in the blaze, a schoolboy and an old man.

  As gray dust from the excavating cranes and dozers fell over our heads like snow, an echo of the fire that had brought us all here, they spoke to me:

  “I was a light sleeper so I heard them,” said the boy in Teochew, his emotions still raw. “They came in the night, like shadows. At first I thought they were thieves, you know, the ones going round, but then they threw a burning match into our room. I tried to wake my mother and my two small sisters. But the fire…It’s not fair! I didn’t get to run or say good-bye. My mother and sisters were killed in their sleep. That must be a happier way to die because I haven’t seen them here, and I’ve been waiting. I don’t leave in case they come back, but to be honest, every day, my memory grows weaker.”

  What the older ghost had to say was grimmer still: “Two live babies were buried at the base of these pillars last month. I tell you, I saw them put those crying twin babes in the ground. A Taoist geomancer came in and blessed them; then they threw the soil over them. I know of this superstition from my old home village. In Swatow, we believed in such things because we were uneducated brutes, but I didn’t think people would believe in the same rubbish here. Now, I’m an old man and I’m not bitter about dying, but I want everyone still alive to know that wrong has been done here. People must know! Those poor babies may have been orphans, but their lives were robbed! It’s a horrible, meaningless sacrifice.”

  I knew the testimonies of dead men would mean nothing to Kenneth, who was too occupied with the big picture to truly be a great man. But they weren’t worthless to me.

  I got down on my knees. I said a prayer for the dead twins and for my two confidantes, who, surprised that anyone cared, began to fade before my eyes.

  18

  The Prime Minister and Lady Midnight

  EVEN TO THOSE WHO KNEW HIM WELL, Kenneth Kee became increasingly hard to grasp. While ideas of free love and personal liberation were flourishing in the West, he fed himself on the works of Han Fei, the ancient Chinese philosopher known for his cunning statecraft. Kenneth called it pragmatism; I called it paranoia.

  For here’s how Han Fei spelled out the qualities of the ideal leader:

  He is so still that he seems to dwell nowhere, so empty that no one can seek him. He reposes with non-action above and his ministers tremble with fear below.

  Han Fei also said one should hire only minions whose loyalty could be bought and exile those who exceeded their duties; their facility, after all, meant they could switch sides. I often found myself wishing Kenneth’s head had been filled with Machiavelli instead. It would have kept him much nicer.<
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  So it came as a great surprise to me when, early in the year 1972, he called me out of the blue.

  “I have your sisters.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My people seem to have located them. Or at least, their last known address.”

  I was speechless. I’d mentioned them to him just once—decades ago—and he had remembered.

  “I know it’s taken years, but I feel I owe it to you. I can’t guarantee they’ll still be there, but it’s the best my sources have been able to drum up.”

  I flew to Shanghai the following week, with Kenneth’s office arranging a secret visa to get me into Mao’s China. That was the first and only time I took advantage of my proximity to his power. I’d never accepted so much as a chocolate Yule log from the prime minister’s office at Christmas, when even the night watchman took home two.

  China in 1972 was nearly unrecognizable from the country I left in 1929. The joie de vivre and glamour of prewar Shanghai had vanished, replaced by a whole population in identical blue workers’ coats; the only ones who didn’t wear them were small children and the dead. Instead of the reassuring mandarin peel and mothball smells of my childhood, the city air was heavy with the stinks of the new China—cigarettes, mentholated ointments, and moonshine—all three sometimes emanating from a single person, in this case my assigned driver, Old Chen.

  Most of my beloved buildings in the French Concession had vanished, as had the old rickshaws. Now everyone pedaled around on chunky, creaking bicycles, flooding the streets from dawn until the city shut down hours earlier than before. There was no more neon, no more billboards advertising British gin. I felt a complete stranger, a foreigner. Did Kenneth really send me here for my sisters or to show me what a true totalitarian state looked like?

  “Do you remember when Shanghai was glorious?” I asked Old Chen, who I guessed to be around seventy and old enough to remember.

  “No, madam,” he replied. “I lived in a sampan on the river. It was never glorious to me—not ’til now.”

  The Chinese had reclaimed the city, but I realized these were not my Chinese. The streets had been renamed and renumbered by forceful nationalists to suit the forceful, nationalist mood. Our street, Rue Bourgeat, had become ChangLe Lu, or the Street of Long Happiness, and it was on ChangLe Lu that my sisters supposedly still lived.

  As Old Chen’s car wove its way along the street, avoiding bicyclists, I realized we were approaching our old address. The white colonial-era town houses had fallen into disrepair, divided and subdivided into dreary little units. It sickened me to imagine my twins clad in those dreary blue coats, cooking broken rice in some windowless room, their noses blackened with soot.

  I had Old Chen drop me off at the old Paradis children’s park, now called People’s Space 45 and completely shorn of trees. The patch was barely the size of a primary school playground. Perhaps its edges had been chewed away by road expansion, or perhaps the park had always been this small.

  Three codgers in blue coats trudged through the grassless lot, their breath curling from their mouths in white floral tufts. I scanned the grounds for the gated rose garden. It was gone. The old hedge maze survived but had been sawed down to knee height, probably to guard against private acts that might sully this public space. Gone, too, was the potting shed against which Li had handled his first cat. With these old markers eradicated, the park was clean. Not a single ghost. The Red Guards had done a thorough job: The place was now inhospitable to the living as well as the dead.

  A few trees remained, denuded of leaves. I made my way to the largest, which I remembered as a great flowering mulberry bush. Deep inside its skeletal frame, too bristly to reach into, I spied tiny, rolled-up scrolls in scarlet, turquoise, and indigo, the hues still rich. These were the old sweet wrappers, of course. I hadn’t seen such colors since arriving in Shanghai, where aside from the workers’ blue, everything came in washed-out shades of gray. They gave me hope, these bright shards. Perhaps my sisters could be just as untouched by history. After all, I’d always thought of them as magical girls. Why wouldn’t they be magical women?

  Something caught the corner of my eye.

  I turned to see a moving patch of black. A white-haired man in a long black cape walked briskly toward the far edge of the park. He carried a cane—in cinnabar red.

  Could this really be?

  I raced across the park, curbing the temptation to shout, and trailed him onto the road. But the old rascal kept disappearing—behind a bank of toilets, behind a street cobbler’s stand, around the corner of an abandoned stable—only to surface again, ever more distant, ever more fleeting. After five minutes, I lost all sight of him, if it was him.

  I made my way by memory to our family’s old town house. Just as I’d guessed, it bore the new address Kenneth had given me. My sisters had stayed constant through all these years! But everything else had changed. Not only was there no gate between our house and the street, but also the outside world seemed to have flooded into the property like a tidal wave, sucking out all barriers in its undertow. The front door was missing. As for the windows, the glass had been haphazardly replaced with boards and blankets. The walls, once so strikingly white, were now mold black and guano gray. I hadn’t lived here in decades, yet I felt defiled. I wanted to find somebody—anybody—so I could scream at them. How could they let this happen to my family’s house?

  Nobody could possibly live here. This was not a home. This was a photo essay torn from the pages of Life magazine: the Ravages of Communism. But I had come all this way, and I wasn’t about to leave without going inside.

  As I stepped over the threshold, a small boy scurried through the dark on all fours. He pushed past me and sprinted out into the sunlight, trailing behind him a ragged woolen flag, probably a blanket. I felt like running after him, to smack him for daring to steal from my sisters. But had he? In truth, he could have come from any of the subdivided coops. Where our cozy sitting room once stood there was now an entire apartment with its own locked door. The same was true of the kitchen and the servants’ quarters beside it.

  I looked up the old stairs. I had a feeling that my sisters, if they’d truly chosen to remain, would have fought to be assigned the place of their youth—the narrow hallway once clogged with their cot.

  Climbing the freezing steps, I found two apartments. My parents’ old room made up one, its door locked. The twins’ space formed the other, its door wide open.

  And there I saw them.

  Xiaowen and Bao-Bao stood in this grimy, unlit hallway, one braiding the other’s hair. I’d been right about them being oases of color. Both wore short-sleeved cotton dresses, one peony pink, the other sky blue—the colors of springtime.

  My eyes welled up the instant I saw them. They were so terribly young—teenagers still—their cheeks flushed, their hair long and black and lustrous. I just stared at them for several minutes, soaking in their radiance.

  I wanted to believe I could tell them apart. But I couldn’t. Rather than hurt their feelings with an error, I whispered both names—“Xiaowen! Bao-Bao!”—and moved in to embrace them together. It didn’t matter that my arms went right through them. They felt my love—they had to have.

  “Oh my God, how I’ve missed you two.”

  They stared back at me impassively, amused by my emotional display but also baffled: why them?

  “Don’t you remember me?”

  Again, two pairs of doe eyes stared, blank.

  I yearned to hear them talk, to match their teenage voices with the baby ones I knew. I wanted them to call me, Jie jie, if only to humor me, and to tell me what had happened to them. But they seemed unwilling or unable, and returned, fully absorbed, to their activity. When the one finished braiding her twin’s hair, she undid the plait, combed the hair straight with her fingers, and began braiding it all over again, ever patient, ever loving, as if trying to perfect the art. I could imagine her repeating this to infinity and, entranced by their presence,
could have stood here watching them forever, had it not been for the bitter cold.

  “Xiaowen, Bao-Bao,” I tried again. “Say something!”

  They smiled a response, but both sets of eyes closed me off. It was nobody’s fault. These two had learned to sieve out the living, as I’d often done with the dead, and I could find no way to break through. We stood on opposite sides of the greatest divide.

  Taped to the wall behind them was an old illustrated poster. Chairman Mao’s round, beaming face loomed like the sun over an idealized family. Dressed in the coveralls and red scarves of the worker class were a sun-tanned father, a powdery-pale mother, a girl and a boy, both around seven years old, and a pair of identical toddler girls. A cocker spaniel romped in the foreground, clenching a spanner in its teeth.

  I knew instantly that the image had been lifted from one of our studio portraits, the ones Father left behind—us at our finest hour, reimagined for the coarsest of times.

  “That’s us!” I pointed to the image. “That’s our family!”

  But my sisters chose not to hear me.

  Like Father had once done, I stared at the twin girls in the picture, unable to tell who was who.

  I wanted to take the poster with me—it was all that was left of my family. But alas, it would only remind me of what I’d never have again. The only place I could ever hope to keep us all together, out of space, time, and history, was in my mind.

  And so, at age fifty, with half a century and my ghost work behind me, I devised a quiet life for myself.

  Since working invisibly was what I did best, I settled into another profession in the shadows. I became a librarian.

  It was during this time, while watching over the reference reading room at the National Library of the Black Isle, that I encountered that pair of Belgian anthropologists, Lucas Van Kets and Marijke Jodogne. Both gaunt and so blond as to be nearly white-haired, with skin burnished ochre by the sun, they struck me as castaways from another continent’s wreck.

 

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