by Joan Silber
“Tuan,” Zain said, “lapar, tak?” He called Owen tuan! It made me gasp and want to laugh.
“He’s asking if I’m hungry,” Owen said.
Various tidbits were purchased—chicken grilled on bamboo skewers, steamed balls of minced fish, and a thick stew of beef in coconut that Owen said was water buffalo. We strolled about, eating all of it with our fingers, like greedy children at a fair. The Chinese buns with sweet pork were Owen’s favorite; Zain, who was Muslim, wouldn’t take any.
Muslim! I hadn’t thought. “And does he want one of those wives who lives forever behind a veil?” I asked Owen.
“Never mind,” Owen said. “I’ll tell you later.”
IN THE FIRST PLACE, Owen told me after supper when Zain went off to meet friends at the night market, surely I could see very well that many Malay Muslim women didn’t wear veils or headscarves at all (really, I hardly knew what I was seeing yet). In the second place, Zain had a wife—he’d married young and fathered two children too. His wife had not liked Pattani, because of the troubles, but Zain loved his home district.
“What troubles?” I said.
“Before I came. A big bloody revolt four years ago.”
“A revolt against what?”
Pattani, as he’d told me before if I’d only been listening, had once been the capital of a Malay Muslim state. A Siamese king had conquered it some four hundred—odd years ago, and the locals, Owen said, had been revolting pretty often ever since. In Owen’s opinion, the more panicky the Siamese got about controlling things—the more they put Bangkok commissioners over every regional bigwig, the more they banned the Malay language in schools, the more every local dispute was decided by an outsider—the more violent outbreaks there were. “Poor bloodthirsty beggars,” Owen said. The Muslims pretty much always lost. After the last mess, an uncle of Zain’s wife had died in jail in Bangkok under very questionable circumstances. She said she couldn’t stand to live in such a country.
Zain said no one could make him leave his home, no one. They quarreled bitterly, and in the end he consented to let his wife go across the border to Malaya, to Kota Bharu, where she had relatives. She was sure British regents were a lesser evil than the Siamese. Only recently had he seen his children again.
“Does he love his wife still?”
“He seems to,” Owen said. “Don’t make a whole valentine out of this, Cory. But he does, I think.”
Owen said that on this trip Zain had brought gifts for his little daughter and son, a piece of pretty silk and a kite and a painted wooden top that he had shopped for very carefully, but the visit had not gone well.
AT NIGHT ON MY kapok-stuffed pallet of a bed, I could feel all of them in the house—Owen in the bedroom next to mine, and Zain and Ho Lu Ki at the back of the house. Men were breathing and sighing and turning in their sleep all around me. I assumed they slept nude, as I did, so we were a house of bare forms, like dolls in a factory. Most of what I could hear, actually, was the thrum of crickets and the occasional djok-djok of lizards in the thick air outside, the endless whirring clicking sounds sealing us in, as I was sealed in my tent of gauzy white mosquito netting. My aunt had wondered if I would feel safe here, though truly that category had been taken from me by the hurricane. I was wrapped now in vibrations I could hardly think of decoding, and I liked (as much as I’d liked anything for six months) giving myself over to this strangeness. It was so dark I couldn’t see my own hand, and I had a lovely sense of escape.
THE NEXT MORNING, as we were drinking tea and eating rice noodles, Dilys came into the bungalow with the Siamese girl who was to work for me.
“Oh, Owen,” Dilys said. “You really couldn’t get a better house?”
“It’s very nice,” I said. We were sitting on the floor, with a cloth set out before us.
The girl bowed with her palms together, as they all did, and backed away, but Dilys continued to loom above. “We’ll get some proper furniture made for you when your barbarian brother leaves,” she said.
The girl’s name was Som and she hardly looked more than thirteen, but it was hard to guess. She wore her hair in the short brushy cut Siamese women here favored, and she was bare-shouldered, wearing a tiny singlet over a sarong whose ends were crossed between the legs to form pants. Dilys assured me she spoke quite a bit of English. When prodded, she did say, “Happy to mee you.” She was nothing to be afraid of, at least.
“Perhaps Owen will want to stay home now that he has one,” Dilys said to me. She seemed to address one person at a time. I wondered how she taught school in this way.
I DID GET TO SEE the school, in that first week before Owen left. We went to a recital of boys performing an abridged version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. An English boy in a white-sheet toga played Mark Antony and a Siamese ten-year-old struggled heroically with Julius’s lines. If he could learn a language, surely I could. He was stabbed with a monstrous dagger with a wavy blade that Owen, whispering next to me, said was a cardboard version of a Malayan kris. Only one Malay boy was in the production. Muslims avoided mission schools, Owen said, but the Siamese government had shut all Islamic schools a few years before, and one parent now sent his boys here. We clapped wildly when the curtain was lowered, and a young brunette woman teacher in spectacles came out and curtsied. I had the notion she might become a friend. Owen said, “Not her. She’s leaving.”
It did not take much poking to discover that the woman had been interested in Owen, who was quite a prize here, where English-speaking men were few and far between. And Owen had positively fled—“not ready for a missionary lass.” (This made me want even more to see his Siamese beauty.)
Zain sat in the back row, peering with somber concentration at the stage. I wondered if it made him melancholy for the missed years with his own children or was just a baffling entertainment. He didn’t have the sort of face you could tell from.
AT THE END of the week Owen said to me, “You’re fine, right?” Meaning he really could not wait any longer before going out on another prospecting expedition. I went down to the river to see them off, as they lumbered their way onto to the boat. Zain directed like a traffic policeman and carried nothing, Ho Lu Ki dragged a wagon with sacks of rice and pots in it, and five Chinese workmen—my brother called them coolies—had huge baskets on their backs or trunks strapped to them, while they pushed wheelbarrows loaded with gear in front of them. “Once we’re further into the interior,” Owen said, “we’ll get elephants to help. They’re slow to ride but they jolt less than the buffalo carts.”
It looked to me as if he was not coming back in a hurry. “Home in a month,” he said. “Think you have enough to do?”
“Plenty,” I said. “I’ll improve each shining hour. And tell Zain I said to keep you out of trouble.”
“He buys my trouble for me,” Owen said. “Pretend I didn’t say that.”
I WALKED BACK to the house by myself, a pleasant morning traipse through the streets of shops and houses. I had to walk around a stubborn sheep in the road, across from one of the showiest Chinese temples. A Malay woman threw up her hands in a charade of frustration and I shrugged in wry agreement. I was so used to behaving calmly with Owen that I was not uncomfortable on my own, despite a persistent fear of getting lost down the wrong side street.
Som waited for me at the house. I had been told not to bow back. She’d made me what I gathered was a favorite lunch of Dilys’s—something involving hard-boiled eggs in a dark, sweet tamarind sauce. I had been dreading our poor attempts at an exchange of language, but we both did better than I expected. She responded very well to joking—she was just a girl—and my efforts to imitate the wood rats who lived in our garden and ate all the bulbs (I snuffled and chewed and smacked my lips) produced riotous giggling.
At the end of the week I wrote to Helene:
I am installed in my new abode! Dilys the Formidable wanted to have workmen come and build a dining table, but I refused. (Though I’m not as good at sitting on the f
loor as I like to think.) The whole house is on stilts, with the front veranda a few feet lower than the rest—you would like it. The only room that’s dreadful is the bath—you can see through the slatted floor and I’m afraid every morning of what might crawl through—but I wash nonetheless, pouring cool water from a jug, brave soul that I am.
My hours are my own. I worried before Owen left, but it turns out I like my regal solitude. It suits me more than the life at my aunt’s, where she was so eager not to let me languish. In the cool of the morning I busy myself with walks—sometimes the tiny Som is my chaperone, and we walk as far as the harbor, for the pleasure of seeing the sea—on the way back we hear the calls to prayer at the mosque, and in the afternoon I try to teach myself Siamese from a book. They have forty-four consonants in their alphabet, which I think is too many. I read and I look at each tree and lizard in the garden and try (don’t shudder) to mentally describe it to my father. He would have liked it here.
Sometimes I dine with Dilys and her husband Gerald and whatever teachers don’t have to sit with the whole thundering school of boys. The two male teachers are, alas, not my type—one is timid, one is smug—and the nice female is leaving soon. Not a one of them is as alluring as Zain—cf., my last letter—I am not stupid and know that is a bad idea.
“WE CAN GET MORE boys enrolled,” Dilys said at dinner, “if the government keeps sending down Siamese men to work in the civil service. Some of these fellows are ambitious and want their sons to know English. Though it’s the Chinese boys who are the really hardworking ones. The Siamese tend to be just a leetle lazy. Not so lazy as the Malay, of course.”
“I suppose I think,” Tess, the woman teacher, said, “that they’re all pretty much the same. Just boys, really.”
“Well, at heart they’re the same,” Dilys said. “They’re children of God, of course. But you know the trouble we had getting Ibrahim to learn his lines for the play. You had to practically nail him to the floor and pour the script down his throat.”
“I thought he did quite well,” I said. “A very decent Cassius.”
“He got it at the last minute,” Gerald said. “They’re not the most organized people.”
“Well, Zain keeps my brother organized,” I said. “Owen couldn’t get across the street without him.”
“Couldn’t he, now?” Dilys said.
“I don’t think you want to know all the things he does for your brother,” Gerald said. “Let’s just say he introduces him to young ladies.”
Tess looked extremely distressed; her whole face clenched. I wanted to hit Gerald, and Dilys looked as if she did too.
“Well, we all loved your Shakespeare,” I said. “What’s your next play?”
“Once Tess goes home,” Alan, the timid teacher, said, “we have no drama coach. Culture goes downhill in Pattani.” He laughed between his teeth.
I WAS VERY HAPPY to get back to my little house after the supper. Alan walked me back—I prattled on about the mosquitoes because he was too shy to say much—and I walked through my door with the exhaustion of a sorely tried young woman who’s left an unbearable party in a Jane Austen novel. I thought of Artie, who would have had wonderful, withering things to say about the Dilys group. He’d once put me in stitches summing up a table of Miami matrons listening to his dinner orchestra. I had not thought of Artie very much since my parents died; I’d been angry at him for being gone before he might’ve helped me even a little, and the glow of him had been blotted out by a greater dark. And now I had Zain to brood over. This brooding was my own business and could be kept harmless.
I HAD SETTLED IN quite well. My house had no running water or electricity or gas stove or telephone, but we had great ceramic jars of stored rainwater and nice oil lamps with pierced shades and a good brazier and no one far away we needed to talk to. A person didn’t need that much, it turned out, at least not here. I suppose it pleased me to manage so neatly. Thus far I had spent very little of the money Owen had left me with. Som was already paid and our food was cheap enough. I liked to look over the coins, each tical with its imprint of three royal elephants. In Som’s village there were people who never used cash at all.
WE OFTEN HAD light rains, a glistening sprinkle that dried at once in the heat. But one day there was an unseasonable burst of heavy rain that lasted for hours. I had never seen so much water fall from the sky so hard—a god did seem to be pouring buckets. We were still in the drier months, but the rains came the next afternoon and the next, though the air never cooled. It was on the fifth day that my brother and his crew came back.
“Don’t look at us, Cory,” Owen said at the door. “We’re a sorry sight.”
They were a dank and muddy bunch of men. Their shoes, by the front stairs, were like inky pools of sedge. Zain greeted me again with the gesture (I knew now it was common politeness) that meant I-keep-you-in-my-heart. He looked taut and exhausted. The Chinese workers went off to a lodging on their side of the river, while Zain and Ho Lu Ki waited in the kitchen for their curry.
“What a useless trek,” Owen said, alone with me in the living room. “We were lost for days and days—it’s very nasty not knowing where you are in the jungle. If it weren’t for Zain, we’d still be walking in circles. We were down to eating roasted bamboo rats and ferns for dinner. And Old Wang—don’t ask me about him.”
I didn’t ask, but Owen went on about what a vile and despicable company he worked for—headed, it seemed, by Old Wang. “The whole cold-blooded enterprise,” he said, “is enough to give the title Oriental Trading Firm more of the smelly reputation it already has. They might have killed me.” I could not quite follow what Owen was incensed about. It seemed Old Wang, that nefarious Chinaman, had plotted to outsmart a nefarious Dutchman, who had in turn duped him, which was how Owen had gotten stuck following a dangerously faulty map. “Small loss to them if we all disappeared in the jungle,” Owen said. “They’ll milk the blood out of a snail.”
“It’s very ironic,” I said, “that the worst in people is brought out by the lust for tin cans.”
“Don’t be suave and brittle, please,” Owen said. “Now is not the time.”
BUT I WAS GLAD to see my brother. I had Som fix dishes I knew he liked for dinner and we had bottles of beer, a hard-to-find treat. “Did you manage without me, then?” Owen said.
“Didn’t miss you a minute,” I said. Fortunately he thought I was being lively.
“The house looks very nice. You’re good at this. Not all women are, I don’t think.”
“I guess you know,” I said. “How are all your girls these days?”
“Don’t know. Zain found someone for me in a village, before we got lost. But I really want to go see Noo Kiang. She’s the one. Anywhere in the world people would call her beautiful. Next trip I’ll get there.”
“Do you brood about her all the time?”
“Well, a lot,” my brother said. “More than a lot. I can’t tell you what we’ve done in dreams.”
“Maybe you’re the one who should marry,” I said. “If you never plan on going home anyway.”
“I didn’t say never, did I?” he said.
“I WISH,” OWEN SAID later that night, “that our father could’ve seen this operation I’m part of here.” We were standing in the dark garden looking up at a gaudy spangle of stars.
“I thought you hated the firm.”
“But we’ve accomplished really a lot. You didn’t see the ingots of tin piled up on the docks in Singapore.”
“Do the Siamese get any of the profits from this tin?”
“Our father wouldn’t have minded about the Siamese,” Owen said.
“Probably not,” I said. I thought that my brother and my father were decent men, both of them, pulled along by the machine of greed. The machine had eaten my father.
IN THE YARD the next morning my brother sat out dressing his leech bites with Tiger Balm, the ointment that had made a Singapore family rich. I knew by now that leeches were only tiny b
lack inchworms whose clinging didn’t hurt at all, but when they dropped off you bled a lot and had an itchy scab. “Know how Zain keeps them off?” Owen said. “Tobacco paste, smeared on the legs. They hate it. But it washes off if you’re wading in the creeks.”
“How did the amazing Zain save your neck this time?”
“He was the one who figured out our map didn’t fit where we were and we stood a chance of getting stranded for some tiger’s breakfast. He was able to find the river—don’t ask me how—and our compasses led us out.”
“What will you ever do if he stops working for you?”
“Zain is loyal. That’s the nature of the man. I don’t think you can understand.”
“Surely he’s not tied to you forever?”
“I’ve saved his life too, you know, more than once.”
“You did?” I said. “That’s good you did that, Owen.”
NOW THAT SOM was living in the back room, Zain and Ho Lu Ki bunked in a lodging house. I had a secret worry that Owen might bother Som, but those were not his methods. Som was a gentle little gossip; she had worked for Dilys and Gerald and could tell what they had tiffs about (money). She was very playful and we sometimes had water fights when she was trying to help me bathe. Zain came upon us one day in the market—Som loved to go there—it was her chance to see people she knew. We were buying an enormous jackfruit, whose pungent yellow-orange flesh I had grown to like.
Zain wanted to know—he had more English than I’d thought—if I could buy these at home, and I said, “No, but I love them.” Zain said he would send them all the way to me in America carried by one of those light-brown sea eagles with black tails. I tried to say in Siamese, “Why I ever go home?” (I only knew simple tenses).
Zain gave me a nice smile, and he didn’t smile often. But what he said was, “I think you will go. Anytime you’re ready, you can buy ticket.”