by Joan Silber
“Oh!” I said. “I hope you don’t want that.”
A mix of expressions passed over his face. He had not expected open flirting and was embarrassed—and then more pleased than he wanted to be—and then when he really looked at me, there was quite a lot of sadness in his eyes.
MY BROTHER WAS LAZY the first days back—he ate his morning rice at noon and lay in bed reading the books I had brought. Then his old restless energy returned and he walked all around the town, looking into every shop. He went off on a day trip by boat to Singora, a pleasant journey (he said) to the headquarters of his firm. He came back with orders to go out again, in search of another fabled mountain of ore. I was sorry to see all of them go away so soon. On the dock I watched Zain stepping with agile ease into the narrow longboat and heard him say, “Ikut, tuan,” which I knew meant, As you wish, boss.
But I was not sad to have the house to myself. When Roger, the boldest of the teachers at the school, walked me home from supper one night, he said, “Our poky little town isn’t too dull for a bright young thing like you?”
“Not at all,” I said.
“Do you like canasta? I could come by for a game of canasta someday.” He cocked his head, with its pomaded pale-brown hair, and smiled.
“The truth is,” I said, “I like to be alone in the afternoon.”
“A lie isn’t necessary,” he said. “A simple no, thank you, is fine.”
“I say what I mean.” This was not entirely true.
“It’s not natural,” he said, “to choose to go without company day after day.”
“Going without,” I said, “is very natural to me since I lost my parents. I don’t expect you to understand.”
This shut him up, though it was distinctly underhanded on my part. Under my snooty tone, I was not really fibbing either. People thought they couldn’t go without a lot of things, but the various forms of poverty carried their own instruction. Being an orphan had by degrees made me more self-reliant, and the freedom of this had its own slow-burning pleasure.
Roger went home sulky, but I went in with the bracing sense that an embarrassingly stupid argument had clarified my thoughts.
I STARTED TAKING LONGER WALKS, Outside the confines of the town, down the buffalo-cart roads. Any people I passed always greeted me pleasantly. In the heat of midday much of the road was deserted. I was thrilled when I came upon a group of monkeys in a grove, but when they lowered their heads and began to creep toward me, all together, I backed off, alarmed. A group of women, passing by on the road, laughed and put their baskets of fruit down and clapped their hands loudly, and the monkeys fled. As I was thanking them, the women tried to give me fruit. They carried the baskets on their heads, which meant they were Muslim Malay—I knew from Som that the Buddhist Siamese hardly let their heads be touched. “Very good!” the women kept saying about the papayas. “Good eating!”
I thought of Owen always declaiming how glad he was that his work took him into the countryside, where his contact with people was almost enough to make him think well of mankind. The longer he was here, he said, the more he preferred the company of the residents of Asia to that of the selfish, fearful foreigners who had washed up on its shore. If he stayed here any longer, he was going to disappear into the landscape, like a speckled moth against bark, and there were worse fates, weren’t there?
MY WALKS GOT LONGER, along the roads going inland, with paddies and forest on either side. Often I wanted to bring back a flower or a leafy stalk, but the stems were too fleshy to break, and I had a rational fear of sticking my hand in the foliage. I knew about snakes. What I was really afraid of were tigers, and there was scant chance of meeting one on the roads. Zain said he’d only seen one from a distance even in the deep jungle, and their favorite food was not human anyway. He did hear about a woman bent over to tap a rubber tree who heard a tiger’s growl close behind her, but she must have looked like a four-legged animal to the tiger. She got away by climbing the rubber tree, a strategy to remember. Any rustle in the thick growth along the road made me jump. One day I was sure I heard a large animal’s heavy breathing behind the trees, and I ran foolishly toward home. The next day I made myself go out again. I had no one to brag to about my fortitude, so I invoked my father.
I would have given anything to be with my father again on the trail. He had loved those Catskill woods, full of hickory and hemlock and oak, a landscape so different from here it was exotic to think of. When I remembered home now, the colonnaded porch of our old house in Kingston, it was incomplete and only half true. And the great swath of the jungle was also incomplete to me, for all its teeming density as I drew near it. I began to think of each spot on the globe as a mere part, the section any lesson had to be broken down into.
WHENEVER I WENT to the market, I kept thinking I saw Zain walking by, though Zain was off trekking in the jungle with my brother. In my mind I played out our chance meeting at the market, which featured delightful banter that led to candid and astonishing confessions of hidden passion on both sides. Could he not divorce his wife? I knew that Muslims could divorce. And then I might stay with him, disappear into another city or vanish into a kampung, a village where we might live quietly by a river, doing whatever we wanted, night after night.
OWEN STAYED AWAY longer this time. I tried not to think there were good reasons most people lived along the rivers and not in the depths of the forest, where Owen’s crew tramped along. I worried for seven weeks, until I heard men’s voices outside with my brother’s among them. I opened the door to see a ragged and cadaverous line of porters. The corpse with a beard who walked behind them was Owen. The darker figure with a leather face was Zain.
“A bit rough out there,” Owen said. I watched Zain unlace his shoes at the foot of the stairs, eyelet by eyelet, as if moving at all were a difficult maneuver.
By the time Owen would tell me anything, the men were all gone, and he was bathed and swilling down Som’s galangale soup. “Too much rain,” Owen said. The third week, one of the little Siamese ponies hauling a cart had slipped on the bank of a river, and a crocodile had risen up to attack its leg—the men managed to beat and stab the reptile until it let go and sank. But the pony was suffering and useless and had to be killed. Owen never carried firearms, so he’d had to slit the pony’s throat, a thing he hoped to never have to do again. Some of the men would eat the meat and some wouldn’t. And this same accursed river had led them into a foul-smelling swamp with an especially thick population of mosquitoes. Half of the men had come down sick within weeks, and Owen admitted to being still feverish. But he was excited too—every stream had shown blue-black grains of ore in the washing sieve. He and Zain thought there was ore-bearing ground between the creeks, perhaps richer as you went down. He could hardly wait to go back once they’d gotten a concession for the land. A buried vein of ore was there waiting for the taking.
“Only rest, Owen,” I said. “You look awful.”
“This could mean quite a lot of cash,” he said. “But I know you’re not the one to think about these things.”
He stayed on the veranda for days, letting Som bring him water and fruit, sweating into his coverlet, and taking quinine. He let me read to him from Tono-Bungay, my favorite H. G. Wells, and I thought we were a comfortable household, however temporary. And perhaps we were not temporary.
WHEN OWEN WENT OFF to the headquarters in Singora and I was alone in the house again, Zain paid a visit, which surprised me. He brought me a giant jackfruit—a good two feet long, and not a pretty fruit, with its gnarled shape and its greenish skin covered with bumps. I thanked him profusely. He hacked it open with his knife, and we sat eating its bright yellow flesh on the veranda.
He didn’t say much to my questions about his health (fine) or remarks about how the rains had stopped. I tried not to let the silence make me stare at him. I exclaimed repeatedly over the remarkable taste of this remarkable fruit.
Zain in profile looked like a superbly formed monument. He was ve
ry still. And then he took an envelope out of his pocket, with his name and an address on it in our alphabet.
“My wife writes,” he said. “Someone writes for her, and someone reads for me.”
“Oh,” I said. “How are your children? Everything all right?”
“Nothing wrong,” he said. “But I think is too hard for her. Not natural, woman living without a man.”
Oh, wasn’t it? How did I live, then?
“Aren’t the relatives kind to her?” I said.
“Sometimes the aunt is bossing her,” he said. He seemed to want me to know how fine and delicate and commendable his wife was, and how she suffered in this situation. “Doesn’t complain,” he said. “Not usually. Rare.”
“Must be difficult,” I said.
“I am sorry for her,” he said. “You can see, but your brother doesn’t see.”
“Yes,” I said. How desperate I was, that this flattered me.
“Maybe from you he’ll see. You can speak.”
And then, with his usual unhasty gestures, he got up from the veranda and took his leave.
When Owen came back from his firm’s headquarters, he was fired up about going back to mark out the boundaries of the claim. His face was suffused with a sweating animation which, to me, his sister, did not look like him at all. He charged through town, bargaining for supplies, chatting up every vendor, laughing at his own witticisms. Dilys said he was a fiend of tin fervor.
So it surprised me when he came in to supper one night suddenly glum and slow. “Things are all messed up now, Cory,” he said. His voice was hoarse and dull.
Zain had asked if he might have an advance of fifty ticals on his salary so that he might go visit his wife. He had to go at once, he couldn’t wait till he got back from the next expedition.
“She sheds a few crocodile tears and he comes,” Owen said. “I think she’s picked a bad time on purpose.”
Owen had refused him the fifty ticals. “I couldn’t very well pay him for deserting, could I?”
“Oh, Owen,” I said. “You have to let him go.”
“Do I?” he said. “I don’t think so. I don’t think you understand any of this.”
THERE WERE NOT MANY secrets among the foreigners in our little city, and over dinner at Dilys and Gerald’s school, all the staff told Owen they knew how vexed he must be.
“It’s an excuse to avoid going back out on that nasty pestilential trek,” Gerald said. “I don’t know that I believe that bit about the wife.”
“Zain doesn’t lie,” I said. “He’s not like your sneaky schoolboys.”
Roger chuckled. “If you say so.”
“His wife can write?” Dilys asked.
“Her uncle can,” I said. “He writes Malay in the Roman alphabet, the way they do in British Malaya. Zain can’t read it, he always has to get someone to read the letters to him. Usually it’s Owen.”
“Not this time,” Owen said.
“They just tend to be slackers,” Dilys said. “Lovely people otherwise. A bit violent sometimes.”
“He speaks Malay, Siamese, English, and quite a bit of Chinese, he’s a brilliant tracker, he can keep maps in his head and he’s Owen’s bookkeeper too, he knows how to dredge a mine and recite verses from the Koran, and he likes poetry. It’s an accident of history that Owen’s the tuan and he’s not.”
“I didn’t know history had accidents,” Gerald said.
“He has a whole life separate from Owen, but Owen can’t imagine it,” I said. I gazed right at my brother, I wasn’t afraid of him.
There was a general pause, not only in the conversation but in the motions of everyone at the table. They had stopped to look at me more closely, to take new stock of my appearance, to guess how long Zain had been my lover. I regretted that there was no grounding for their suppositions.
“Owen has himself to think about,” Dilys said. “Don’t you, Owen?”
“So it seems,” I said. “And is that really admirable? Why is what you all teach against every day in your classes considered praiseworthy in business?”
A rather sweet-faced new teacher named Christopher said, “Yes, well, I think most people are split in two. We’ve not yet found a moral way to deal with money.”
I looked at him with great relief.
“Well, the Communists think they’ve found it,” Gerald said.
We were off on a long discussion of political economy. Was there any morality embedded in capitalism’s reward of initiative? Could a country like Siam, where day laborers were known to leave work when they had as much cash as they needed, ever be as prosperous as America or Europe? Perhaps no one thought about Zain at all anymore or Owen’s dilemma, though I thought they continued to look at me and to survey my body in its damp blue cotton dress, as if it had a role they had not suspected before.
I WAS NOT KIND to my brother that week—I ended every sentence with a jab against him, with a bit of sarcasm about his once-declaimed kinship with the local populace. Now he had to worry about setting a bad precedent.“I hope you hear yourself,” I said. “Look what it’s done to you. It’s wrecked you.”
He waved me away—he hated me too. He moved about like a man in a very black funk.
Christopher, the new teacher, came by one day with a week-old copy of the Straits Times. He was done with it, he wondered if we might want to read it.
“Isn’t that nice of Christopher?” I said to Owen.
“Couldn’t just chuck it out,” Christopher said.
“It might cheer me to read about a few catastrophes,” Owen said. “Something really horrific with a lot of painful deaths would be just the ticket.”
“Zain is still here in the city,” I said. “Som saw him on the street.”
“Did she?” Owen said.
“If you let him go to his wife, as he’s asked,” Christopher said, “you’ll be able to hire him again. If you don’t, there’ll be bad blood between you and he can never work for you.”
Som had said something similar. I’d thought it a Siamese way to think.
“Well, he’s not really going anywhere, is he?” Owen said.
“Neither are you,” I said.
AT THE END OF THE WEEK Zain came to the house. His face was closed and he said very little to me, despite my chirruping welcome. I left him alone with Owen on the veranda and withdrew to my own room, where I could hear the rumble of their voices. Neither of them looked pleased when they parted, but Owen raised his eyes to heaven in comic thanks once Zain was gone. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew he’d come around.”
And the very next day Zain set off with my brother again. It broke my heart to see him directing the workers onto the boat, though he held his head up and his shoulders squared and showed no sign there was any capitulation in what he’d chosen. My brother’s face was solemn, with no smirk of triumph on it; he must have been dreading the weeks in the forest with a dour malcontent for a companion. He still trusted Zain—with his life—their dispute notwithstanding. I pointed this out to anyone who started any conversations on the topic.
“Maybe Zain’s wife will understand,” Christopher said. “He could write to her?”
“There are Chinese scribes at the market who can write to anyone,” I said. “They can probably send messages to tigers or elephants if you want.”
“Your average elephant,” he said, “is probably only interested in conversations about food. And at certain times of the year, less delicate topics.” He was the natural science teacher.
“I saw monkeys,” I said. We were seated on a sofa in the parlor of Dilys and Gerald’s house after dinner. Pretty much everyone had seen monkeys.
“Pig-tailed macaques,” Christopher said, when I described them.
“I saw an animal I was sure was an anteater,” Dilys said. “It turned out to be a poodle that belonged to one of the Chinese boys. Heaven knows where they brought it from.”
“Can an imported creature be happy in surroundings not meant for him?” Ala
n said.
“We’re happy. Some of us,” Dilys said. “We imported ourselves.”
“Well, imported plants, they say, try to take over. They choke out the native species,” I said.
“Do all of them do that?” Alan said. “Do they have to?”
“Ask the poodle if he’s happy,” Roger said.
Gerald suggested that we interview the animal for the Bangkok Post. Did he find the kitchen scraps here too spicy? Did he fancy the local Fifi’s?
“Corinna should interview him,” Dilys said. “She’s very curious about local customs.”
I wrote to Helene: The question about Owen is whether boss is a role that drives out all others. My poor brother, he loved Zain. My opinion of Owen is low at the moment. And my advocacy did Zain no good—maybe it made things worse for him.
I knew I had cited Zain yet again in a letter, even as I was trying to school myself away from thoughts of him. I had no wish to be silly forever or to indulge in what came to feel like secret futility.
THE MONSOONS STARTED before my brother came back. They were no heavier than some of the earlier rains had been, but they kept on every day, and the streets around the square were lapped by muddy water, the side roads softened to muck. Nothing was ever going to dry out. The city was a sponge, a puddle, a giant waterworks. People moved through the curtains of beating rain with surprising good humor. They were not, of course, surprised. I had the cover of an umbrella but I no longer went farther than the market.
My dripping brother came back at the steaming end of a day when the rain had thinned to drizzle and the light was draining from a white sky. The men set down their boxes and baskets under the veranda—I did not see Zain. “He’s gone off already to Kota Bharu,” my brother said. “I hope he takes a good bath before he falls into the arms of his wife.”
Over supper I heard glowing reports of the new claim. I tried to prise from these a sense of how things stood between Owen and Zain. Owen, at least, was no longer angry. Zain had worked very hard and had been especially vigorous in making sure the men below him did not shirk. He had beaten one Chinaman with a stick for stealing extra rice and fired another for drunkenness.