The Size of the World

by Joan Silber

  Helene also believed in outlawing all inheritance of money. I had missed talk like that and was cheered to be with her again. I said that I was against greed, and Helene said that was a religious belief, not a political one. Had no state ever tried to put it into practice? “Russia is trying,” Helene said.

  She brought in more local news too than I could get from my aunt, some of it not so welcome. Ted had gotten engaged over the summer to a person named Priscilla (whose nickname was Prissy and rightly so) and they were buying the pretty stone house with turrets three blocks away.

  In my letter to Owen, I said I was depending at present on the generosity of Aunt Leonie, and no one could be kinder, but I did not like to think of my future as a long continuance of this situation. Kingston hardly felt like home. I could be of use keeping house for him in Siam, if he would have me. He knew that I was sturdy, and I had already adapted well to a hot climate. And think of the points he’d gain in heaven for taking in an orphan of the storm!

  I wrote several versions before mailing it. What was I doing? I had no money of my own. I didn’t want to stay with my aunt and I was too timid to try to support myself in another city. I was going to become more timid still, more lost to all effort, if I stayed.

  Are you sure? Owen wrote. It is rough here, and there aren’t many other people from America or Europe. The best I could do would be to set up a house in Pattani, a nice enough town, but I would be away much of the time. Corinna, try to think clearly. It’s not so easy to go back once you’ve come.

  I COULD SEE HIS reluctance (and perhaps his Siamese women already kept house for him) but I saw there was an opening for me, a hole in the darkness. I saw my chance and I took it. My aunt kept exclaiming, with some dismay, how brave I was. Was I? I had only the smallest idea of the place where I was going.

  HELENE, WHEN SHE SAID GOODBYE, Said, “It’s good you have Owen.” And indeed he was all I had, my own boyish, blustering brother (and I hoped he wasn’t wishing too hard I’d gotten myself married). I had a long train ride to San Francisco, and these days without conversation were a relief to me. People think being alone is an unfortunate feeling but it isn’t, altogether. On the ship to Singapore, I liked my tiny stateroom, with everything tucked into its nooks. It had no portholes, and I awoke the first night afraid of suffocating in the closeted dark. The fear made me miss my parents—I had no one to cry out to. In the morning I was better, and on sunny days it suited me to sit out on the lower deck with my book in my lap and the great ocean all around. I was still too dulled by loss to be excited, but it freshened me to be where I was.

  A woman named Beatrice from San Francisco, who was en route to be married to a pearl trader in Singapore, liked to play canasta with me, though I was a lackadaisical and sloppy card player. She was full of laughter, chatty and quite tickled with herself. I had been more like that once. We bet a few coins on each game, but I stopped this after I lost every round. Beatrice said if I did not have the spirit of a gambler, how was I to thrive in a new place? “Surely,” I said, “there’s more than one way to be a foreigner in Asia.” She didn’t know any more than I did, really.

  There were men we might have flirted with on the boat—Beatrice did, actually—some British civil servants coming back from holidays and a man going out to a rubber estate in Malaya. For myself I had lost the will to charm anyone. I did expect this to change.

  When we docked at Singapore I tried to make out Owen’s figure in the crowd at the wharf. I kept thinking I saw him and then I didn’t. If Owen didn’t appear, I had no idea what to do, on that dock full of strangers. I was not so clever as I liked to think. How silly and cringing I must have looked to anyone nearby. And then I saw a man running along the quay wearing a pith helmet, the green-lined kind the English called a topee. He was sun-darkened and squint-eyed and older, but Owen under the hat. It was a very good thing to hear him call my name.

  “I’m here!” I shouted. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, Corinna. I hope it wasn’t a rough crossing.”

  “It was fun, really,” I said.

  I could see, as he hugged me, that he was relieved that I didn’t seem such a mess as he must have feared. He was my older brother, used to thinking I could hardly buckle my shoes. I was unspeakably thrilled to see him.

  We were surrounded by Chinamen—in straw boaters and business suits, in loose cotton pajamas with their hair in queues under conical hats, or stripped to the waist hauling my steamer trunk onto the top of a motorcar. I heard their rapid up-and-down speech and I understood that I was in Asia—Asia!—and I had a flush of being proud of myself. As if I’d never had a second’s fear.

  OWEN TOOK us to a clean, quiet, small hotel, all louvered shutters and white-painted wood. I had just time to splash water on my face before he had us go down to the lounge for cooling drinks. Singapore was hotter even than the boat had been. I was glad I was enough of a flapper not to wear anything like a corset, but the silk of my undergarments stuck to me. In this place, the liquid of the body was barely contained, a primeval marsh seeping through the pores.

  “I’m not used to cities anymore,” Owen said. “I bet I look like someone who’s just crept out of the jungle on all fours.”

  “You look all right,” I said. “A little toasted and tightened.”

  “I go days without speaking a word of English,” he said. “My Siamese isn’t that good—tone languages are hard—but my Malay’s really not bad. I learned it fast when I first came and I keep in practice.”

  “Who do you speak Malay to?”

  “Zain, my man, the fellow who knows everything. You’ll see how astounding he is when you meet him. And people on the eastern side of the peninsula mostly speak Malay.”

  “What do you boss your workers in?”

  “Most of the workers are Chinese, actually—they seem to pour out of China, looking for work—but they can follow what they need to in Malay or Siamese. And I need Siamese for the villagers in the west.”

  “And for the ladies too?”

  “Yes,” he said, smirking a little. “But there’s only one lady now, so try not to act as if you expected me to have a horde.”

  “Will I meet her?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “She’s in a village, you’ll be in the city. There’s some English people who have a school and one of the women is going to help you get set up.”

  “I’m sure I’ll like it, wherever it is. Do you feel at home here now, do you think?”

  “Me?” he said. “I carry my house on my back, I’m a bachelor.”

  “On the ship coming over,” I said, “people tittered about how the single women were the fishing fleet, come out to hook husbands. It’s a very old joke. I told them I was going to live in a tent in the jungle with an orangutan for a fiancé.”

  “Did you?” my brother said. “That can be arranged.”

  “An orangutan who plays the clarinet and grows orchids,” I said.

  In the chairs around us, cooled by the overhead fans, shone the faces of young men in stiff collars and linen jackets. Some of them eyed me from over their whiskeys, as men often did. I was not quite ready to eye them. My brother thanked the waiter in Chinese, which made one table of men murmur in amusement.

  “I don’t know why they’re chuckling,” my brother said. “They’re in a city where the richest companies are Chinese. Idjits, those men are. That’s how they say it. Idjits. I don’t, you know, hobnob with Europeans or Americans anymore.”

  I was going to make a joke about his having gone native, but I had the sense not to be buffoonish. Owen had always been a thoughtful boy, and now he’d had years of nursing his opinions all on his own. I wasn’t smitten with the oafs at the next table either, but I hoped Siam had others. It was my bad luck if it didn’t.

  OWEN WAS EAGER to get out of Singapore, though it seemed quite a fantastical city to me. The Chinese were the most numerous, but on the streets we saw tan-complected Asians that Owen told me were Malay fr
om the interior and other races I could not identify—Tamil from South India (he said) and others. I tried to talk to the Chinese shopkeepers while Owen bought supplies for his treks.

  “It’s simpler in the jungle,” he said.

  “I’m going to start calling you Tuan Simple,” I said, just to show I, his sister, was not entirely taken in by his scrupulous rusticity. And I had already learned the word in Malay for master, though I felt an American would say boss instead.

  THE TRAIN WE TOOK NORTH, up the spine of Malaya, was called the jungle railway, a rickety and dingy length of cars, but it excited me greatly to look out the window and catch sight of the grasslands giving way at last—ah, look—to hillsides dark with palm trees and dense, still thickets of leafy overgrowth. The massed trunks and vines and aerial roots were like a giant hedge veiling out the sun. Here and there I’d spy a slatted wooden house on stilts in a clearing, and once a group of children waved at the train. I could scarcely believe that each time I glanced again I still saw jungle; the word had become a room in my imagination and I hardly credited the swath of deep green with its own reality. I was transfixed at the window, quite out of myself. Owen was pleased that I watched with such interest.

  We were two days on the train, sleeping on beds that dropped down like narrow padded shelves. Owen found his too short—he was a tall man here—but I liked mine fine. I liked all this, I liked being with my brother again. Owen went out at the stations to buy cut fruit and leaf-wrapped pyramids of coconut rice with oily bits of dried fish in it. I was very set on being a good sport, because I was scared every time Owen left me and I didn’t want him to know. We stopped finally at the very northeast edge of Malaya, in Kota Bharu, a town where Owen said his man Zain had family.

  Owen was looking to the luggage when a slender dark man, wearing a faded cloth suit and white canvas shoes like a European’s, walked straight at us. I hoped it was Zain, and it was. He and Owen seemed wonderfully glad to see each other, and he greeted me with a very courteous gesture—he put his hand over his heart.

  I wanted to see more of Kota Bharu, which seemed to be a drab provincial city with shops and markets, but my brother hastened us in a parade of rickshaws to the boating dock, and there we waited for an hour with nothing to do until the motorboat set sail noisily along the coast. Under the blare of the engine I tried to converse with Zain. Had he had a good visit with his family? His face clouded, and he said something that my brother translated as, “So-so.” He was a stately man, I thought, and good-looking, with the lean cheeks of a cat and a quiet voice. In my head I was writing a letter to Helene about him.

  “NOW YOU’RE IN SIAM,” my brother said, when we got off the noisy boat. We were at the mouth of a river, a muddy, mosquito-infested shore, and not till I was seated in a rickshaw and had crossed a bridge did I see the city of Pattani. It looked no different to me from the towns of Malaya and had (I was told) once been part of a separate Muslim kingdom with other bits of Siam. I saw pale buildings with colonnades and vertical signs painted in Chinese writing and narrow shops all clumped together and streets full of men—Chinese in their black trousers and Malay in their neatly tucked sarongs.

  The place had a distinct and interesting odor, of muck and smoke and ripe fruit and briny fish, a dark riverine odor. My brother directed our rickshaw to the Siamese quarter, on the other side of the river from where the Malay and Chinese lived. We stopped in front of a grand gray edifice. I could tell from the sounds outside that it was a school, and Asian boys in uniform were chasing each other in the backyard. When Owen pulled the rope of the bell, a young Siamese man answered—his words were all nasal cooing and soft popping sounds, like nothing I’d heard in my life—and then a sweating blond woman was dashing toward us. She wore a cotton frock with a belt around the hips, only a little dowdier than what I wore, and she looked to be in her thirties. “I’ve been waiting and waiting!” she called out. “Are you bushed and done in? You look it, all of you. I can have them set out a pitcher of lime juice. Are you hungry? Tell me if you’re hungry. She’s much prettier than you, Owen. Much.”

  This was Dilys, my alleged guide to setting up house while Owen was on the road, and I was relieved that she was not quite the starchy Englishwoman I’d feared. She and her husband ran the school, which was sponsored by the Church of England. “You’re a good girl to come and help your brother,” she said. I didn’t think anyone believed this version of events, but I was glad to hear her say it.

  I did not even notice until we were sitting in her parlor, drinking a very nice limeade and eating a lovely greasy snack called curry puffs, that Zain was not with us. He had gone off to the kitchen with the servants. I was disappointed because I had been formulating things to ask him, but Dilys kept me busy with advice. “It’s a bit suicidal to go outside without a hat. Servants here don’t like it if you hover over them. Make sure your food safe has its legs in paraffin to keep out the ants. Shake out your shoes and the scorpions won’t bother you.”

  I said I planned to scare the scorpions myself. Owen was giving me a look: Don’t mock her. “You’ll be all right, then,” Dilys said, a little grimly.

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON by the time we left and made our way to the house that Owen had taken for us, a few streets away. Before my arrival he had hardly lived anywhere, staying in the houses of village headmen or on the floors of temples or in some wretched rooms his firm rented in another city. The house he had found us here was a wooden bungalow, unpainted outside and in, like a hunter’s cabin in the Catskills. Owen made us all take off our shoes before we walked on the floor, with its clean covering of bamboo mats. The luggage had gone ahead of us, and my big steamer trunk seemed the only furnishing, except for some wooden cabinets and some stiff wedges of pillows to lean against, and beds set low on the floors of the side rooms, which someone had made up with beautiful coverlets of gold-threaded brocade. That someone, it turned out, was Zain, who was having a bright pink fruit drink in the kitchen and gossiping with Ho Lu Ki, the cook. The cook, a Chinese boy who did not look more than nineteen, had a little English and made a friendly speech to me that included the words, “Tuan lucky sister.” Was tuan very lucky to have such a commendable sister, sacrificing her comfort to come here? Or did the cook think I was lucky to come to this paradisiacal country? I wished I knew.

  But I liked my new house. I liked the windows looking out to what my brother said were casuarina trees, which gave off a piney turpentine scent, and to a neighboring yard hung with someone else’s laundry, gay printed cottons and filmy scarves. I was sorry my mother couldn’t see how bright and sprightly this part of the town was, and how well I was doing for myself, husbandless though I happened to be. My father would have wanted to know about the region’s insects—we were burning coils of incense to keep them away—and the birds and reptiles. I was doing my best not to think about the reptiles. I would have liked my parents there, Owen and all of us together. Part of me believed they still waited for me at home.

  Owen and I had supper by ourselves, sitting cross-legged over a tasty mess of chicken with soya sauce and rice. In such a small house we could hear Ho Lu Ki and Zain in the kitchen, scraping at their plates, and I thought we were a parody of a mansion. Separate quarters but no indoor plumbing.

  “How can it be true,” Owen said, “that Dad left you with no money to speak of? You don’t think the lawyer duped you out of it, do you?”

  “Oh, Owen,” I said. “It was Dad’s doing—his eagerness to throw all his eggs in one basket. And then the basket broke. Just like that. It did make me believe that money was only paper.”

  “I wish it were. I wouldn’t have to run around in the rain scraping every creek bed in the forest for tin ore.”

  “And grabbing every tinny plot for your company.”

  “Oh, the company has suffered—big dip in the tin market a few years ago. Market’s up again now.”

  “I hate markets,” I said.

  “You sound like a little spoiled flapper after a
ll,” Owen said. What did Owen know? He was clinging to what could be lost in a second. I felt superior for the lessons of loss. I was forgetting then that Owen had lost his parents too.

  Anyway, I was too old for him to speak to in this way. “If I cared more about money, would I be less spoiled?” I said.

  Neither of us wanted to fight just yet. I could see Owen pausing. “I should have sent money home,” he said.

  “What a horrible idea,” I said. “They would have been insulted.”

  “I should have done something,” he said. I didn’t want to say: They would have died anyway.

  “I should have married someone,” I said. “They would’ve been happy at that.”

  OWEN AND ZAIN went with me the next day to one of the great bustling markets in the street, where I was allowed to buy some woven bamboo boxes for my clothes and some lengths of batik fabric to make the bungalow more human. The lines of crowded booths, with every vendor calling out to us, made me a bit dizzy. Zain did our bargaining—sometimes he spoke in Malay and sometimes in Siamese. I watched his expressions—cajoling and bantering or frowning with feigned shock—as he bargained for me. How was I ever to do this myself once he and Owen were off hunting tin? Dilys would come with me—oh, she was good at this, yes—and I was to be given (Owen actually said “given”) a girl who would cook and clean and live in the back of my house.