The Size of the World

by Joan Silber

  The boys at the school were allowed (by me) to vote their choice between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard III. I favored the first, in this land of eternal summer, but the murderous connivery of evil Richard won by a very large margin. I did not expect, when I picked a Chinese boy to play him, that there would be an upsurge of anger from the Siamese students on the grounds that the Chinese were always finding their way into everything. “Why do you bother to go to school at all,” I said, “if you can’t be civilized? What are we teaching you, if not to be better than your worst selves?” They probably didn’t hear a word, but my starchy outrage browbeat them into peace. The episode saddened me, but Christopher said the boys’ bigotries and alliances shifted all the time.

  RECENTLY I’D STARTED thinking about where Artie was, what city he was playing his fiddle in and whether he had a wife. On our secret stretch of beach he had touched me under my dress but I’d stopped him, though I had recognized the shock of contact as happiness. And I thought (but I always thought) of Zain, in Malaya now, sitting on a veranda, near the noise of his children who weren’t used to him; I saw him cross-legged on the floor, gazing into the bluish twilight. Who were these men to me? Not my lovers. Perhaps I was never going to be with a man in that way. Perhaps I was going to be a foreigner to the life of the body. That part of it.

  I WROTE TO OWEN, who was thoroughly miserable at home, about how I’d seen a giant rafflesia flower on the jungle floor—almost three feet across, an orange-spotted thing with a smell like bad meat—and how I was growing orchids in our yard and how I got to see the firewalkers at the big Chinese festival, the one in honor of the Chinese woman who hanged herself when her brother married a local woman and converted to Islam. Did Owen know she cursed the mosque he built and it had never been finished? The poor brother, I wrote.

  You’re staying too long, Owen wrote. And not getting younger. Your letters make you sound as if you’re married to the land the way nuns think they’re brides of Christ.

  Helene, in her letters, started calling me the nun of the forest after that.

  I DISCOVERED BY asking him point-blank that Christopher did not have a settled attachment to someone waiting far off. “I was under the impression,” he said, “that you did.” Even I knew there were rumors that Zain had left Pattani only to break things off for good with his wife, and that he wasn’t in Kota Bharu now at all, but someplace closer, where I could slip away to him for our assignations. “I think he’s a remarkable type,” Christopher said. “But you’re in quite a spot, aren’t you?”

  “As it happens, I’m not,” I said. I wasn’t insulted at all by the imputation—no, he needn’t worry—but in my attempts to imply just what had definitely not happened, I kept explaining how admirable Zain was—not someone whose character we should sully”—and I could tell that made my protests less convincing.

  I BEGAN TO TRY to sit with Christopher at supper. He was the one decent being in the province, even if the others thought I was chasing him. Christopher asked where it was that I went on my walks—would I show him?

  How altered the walk was then, with him on the trail with me. I had always trained my intentness on certain favorite vistas, but now my powers of observation were taken up with what Christopher wanted to show me. He worried about black bears in the forest, but his choices had their delights—he knew a great deal about rattans, a climbing kind of palm that grew all over, and about the social habits of ants, who made their nests in the rattans’ leaf bases. While he pointed to the rattans’ heavy thorns and said elephants avoided them, the entire landscape was suffused with questions about what was to happen between us.

  He did not even offer his arm until we were out of everyone’s sight, but then every bit of foliage was suffused with longing and the enactment of longing. Like a very young girl, I assessed any minor touch for signs of interest, but we were neither of us that young and the handholding moved, before much distance had been covered, into the frankness of kissing. He was a subtle and persuasive kisser, and my returned enthusiasm seemed to strike him as a splendid turn of events he could scarcely believe.

  So we did not get very far on these walks, only just outside the town and beyond the more crowded roads. We had to take care not to scandalize the locals either and were always interrupting ourselves if we heard anything like voices. Once we almost choked together laughing because we had stopped in panic at the approach of several chickens.

  The walks were mostly taken on Sunday afternoons, after our days of classes, so we had to proceed week by week. It took a few months before we discovered an abandoned lean-to, on a hillside beyond a turn in the road—it had probably once been used by someone from the valley watching a few sheep. After Christopher checked the ground, we could sit there, more or less concealed, in our hideaway; we could remove some of our clothes. The slatted wood smelled of ferns and tropical rot, and when I took off my sandals, I thought, I am sealing my fate.

  AND SO I DID. Soon Christopher was visiting me more openly in my bungalow at certain hours; soon there was gossip that we were engaged. My brother heard the gossip back home in Kingston. Owen wrote to me: I suppose someone like you can be happy on a teacher’s income, though our parents would be disappointed. Everyone knows Chris is a decent fellow, but I hope this is not happening just because you want to stay on.

  In fact, I was not really engaged—I chose to believe that the rashness of my risk had bonded us, and nature was sweeping us along on a wave of bodily amazement. Christopher did seem as amazed as I was. Luck favored us, in that I still bled every month; I certainly knew very little of how to avoid conception. But I had the sense to worry, and the presence of this worry brought us to more open discussion.

  AND HOW SOON SHOULD the taking of vows be done, and what ceremony? We were always standing in the wet garden of my house, waiting out the rain under the edge of the roof, getting giddy together. I was glad to settle myself at last—glad (mostly) that the long suspense was over.

  Dilys said, “If you don’t settle on Christopher, you might think of going home soon, where no one knows you.” She meant: knows about you and Zain. Perhaps there was a general feeling that Christopher was behaving handsomely in regarding me at all. Christopher himself only said, “I must’ve been good in a past life, to have a girl like you in a place like this.”

  JUST BEFORE OUR wedding there was a note from Zain, of all people—congratulations, tahniah, in the pretty Arabic script the Siamese used for Malay. We had to get the student Ibrahim to read it. I never knew how news traveled so efficiently in that region, but Zain had an address now, written on the envelope in block letters in an alphabet I could read.

  Som, who was a great fan of Zain’s, showed the card to everyone. How could I have imagined an endless future with a man I could barely talk to? What had I been thinking? Of another life altogether. I did hear of people having such lives. Now it seemed like a sealed door, a kingdom under the sea.

  After the wedding, Christopher moved into my little house. The back room where Som had slept became his study, and he set up his microscope and a desk and chair where once there had been only a pallet on the floor and a tiny Buddhist altar in the corner. Som’s old mattress lay alongside the old one in my room, which was now the room of a couple. In the nights, one of us often woke the other to play out dreamy hungers in humid half sleep. I could hardly remember when my life had been otherwise.

  I did not see that it cost more to be married, despite my brother’s warnings. Our weekly splurge was sweet snacks from the market, and I saved for fabrics I sewed into clothing. The dress I made was a little lopsided—was I becoming eccentric after all?—but I liked the brightly printed cloth and wore it anyway. The students—especially the Chinese—always had trouble saying Christopher’s name, Llewellyn, which was now my name, but they tried valiantly, which I found very touching. I was susceptible to all tender feelings.

  IT TURNED OUT that the odd fit of my dress was due in part to my being pregnant, which it took
me a stupidly long time to guess. Could we feed a third mouth? Dilys, who did not have children herself, actually said, “Oh, dear,” when I told her.

  The mosquitoes were very bad that season. It was important that they not bite me and give me malaria, because everyone, even Som, seemed to know that quinine was an abortifacient. I had to rely on the mosquito netting and piles of burning coconut husks to keep them away. We’d hear the buzzing outside in the night. How could I be happy here? But I was.

  And our beautiful daughter Thea was born very healthy at the hospital in Singora. Som brought me a bamboo cradle, which hung from the ceiling beam by ropes and whose rocking helped shush the baby. I could not have managed without Som. I was so busy coping with the interesting duties of motherhood that I was not even very upset when I read in the paper about the markets’ Crash in the U.S. and in Europe.

  “What does that mean, crash?” I said to Christopher. “It’s nothing but a violent metaphor for the action of paper.” We both knew what it meant, but it seemed remote from us in the land of bursting fruit and flooded green paddies. All around us was evidence we were in a place distant from these forces.

  BY THE TIME THEA was walking, enrollment was down at the school. The teaching staff soldiered on, combining classes, and we did excellent productions (in my opinion) of Jonson’s Volpone and (at long last) Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the start of each term, fewer and fewer boys came back. The tin my brother’s old company dredged from the ground was no longer being bought overseas. No one needed the local plantations’ rubber either. Less cans, less automobiles, less tires. Dilys and Gerald sputtered and struggled and went from petty complaint to haughty valor. I myself did not mind teaching “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to a group of three boys, but the Church threatened to close the school.

  OUR CHINESE STUDENTS had always been prone to runaway superstitions, and now they spun ghost stories about the Japanese. Reality was bad enough—the Japanese occupied the entire province of Manchuria—but the boys spread their own rumors of demon generals. The youngest were afraid of what might happen to them in sleep, and Dilys and I had to go in at night to settle them. The Siamese boys tended to think the Japanese were not so bad. There were fights with the Chinese boys about this.

  I ALWAYS TOLD THEA THAT I was blown to Siam by a hurricane. Lucky winds had carried me across the seas. My father, the king of Florida, had lost all his fortune, and he and his queen had perished. But when I landed in this place, the fruit dropped into my hand without my ever asking, and coconuts fell at my feet, cracking open to show their juice. Som told Thea she’d seen a sea eagle hover overhead just to toss a delicious fish into my frying pan.

  IN THE WINTER, in a lucky lunar month, Som was married to a boy from her village. On Sunday afternoons I had myself rowed along the river, with Thea on my lap, on the winding route to the village, which was not all that far away. Som’s family made a great fuss over Thea and was nosy about me, and we had many amiable, half-translated conversations, all of them understood by Thea.

  I WROTE TO HELENE:

  Thea likes it that we bring gifts when we go to Som’s, and she runs to put a bolt of cloth or some strings of pretty beads in the grandmother’s lap. Her rapture in bestowing bounty embarrasses me—I don’t want her to grow up thinking she is a local dignitary—but the people here are always laughing and gracious. I don’t know how else we could behave, though I always wish I did know.

  DILYS WAS SO SKILLED in making do and carrying on, so remarkable in her frugal tricks, that I was not prepared at all when orders came from England in the fall to close the school once and for all at the end of the term. I didn’t want Thea hearing, and she screamed and wailed when she did hear.

  But couldn’t our little family of three find a way to stay on? Christopher and I had endless, excruciating discussions. “In the villages they live without any money at all,” I said.

  “Are you planning to work in the fields?” he said. “Or just live off Som’s generous relatives?”

  Sometimes he said, “They’re better off here without us.” I’d always thought poorly of my brother for being a colonial, for digging up the country and carting off pieces of it. I suppose I’d thought well of myself, then, for being a traveler, whose task was only to appreciate. And now I’d spent all these years tormenting flocks of boys with Wordsworth’s daffodils and the rigors of the English sentence. Good years for me, but perhaps only so-so for the country.

  “Home will be lovely,” Christopher said. “I miss England. Don’t you ever get homesick?”

  “For what?” I said. “Only someone who didn’t know me at all would ask a question like that.”

  I WAS BITTER AGAINST going back with Christopher to chilly England. I had a secret dream of staying on alone, of taking Thea with me to Bangkok and working as, say, a secretary for some company. And I had another, wilder, and more vivid notion too, of slipping across the border and staying with Zain—Thea and I in a house with Zain and his family: what was I thinking? It seemed much more real to me than going home.

  IN THE END CHRISTOPHER was persuaded to try Florida. “Sunshine and hurricanes. At least I won’t need my woollies,” he said. Sometimes I remembered that his staunchness was always dear to me.

  I wrote to Zain: I am so sorry that I won’t see you if you ever come back to Pattani. I always thought you would.

  Christopher came in just as I was about to walk out with the envelope, and he saw the address. “What are you plaguing the man for?” he said. “Haven’t you bothered him enough?”

  “Why wouldn’t I write to let him know we’re leaving?”

  “He doesn’t care,” Christopher said. “It’s in your head. You think you can have friends here the way you do at home, as if no one here notices who has more of everything. They coax and cadge you and you don’t even know what’s going on. It’s all a golden haze in your imagination. Thea speaks the language far better than you do.”

  Christopher looked hideous to me then, with his reddened, freckled face and his sandy hair slicked against his head. All the sweetness in my marriage was not worth anyone having the right to speak to me this way. Jealousy made him pathetic, but I was afraid of him too, of what he might say next. I believed he was wrong, but I could hardly fail to know he was not entirely wrong, and I hated his wanting to smudge and burn the years behind me.

  And when I went to visit Som for the last time, after I ate sago pudding with her family and played my last game of tossing stones with the grandmother, and Som walked me to the river where the longboat waited to take me back to Pattani, when Som burst into tears and threw herself against me and we both sobbed and made jokes about our sobbing, a part of me was relieved and triumphant.

  ZAIN SENT A LETTER with a farewell poem in Malay! It reached us only a few days before we left, and I was very careful about packing it so that I could frame it later. Nowhere did Zain, who made his living working for foreigners, say how he was getting by. The poem (he was not its author) was some sentimental ditty about the words for goodbye in Malay being different if you were going or if you were staying. Looking at it made me angrier that I had to leave, and I was quite difficult on the boat. I was in the early stages of pregnancy too.

  NONE OF US WAS HAPPY at first in Florida, where Christopher taught science to the kids of U.S. Navy men from the base at Key West. I was the only one who had been in Florida before but all of it looked different to me. Thea hated everyone in her kindergarten and cried because we couldn’t buy satay in the street. I cried because I was surrounded by sappy American dolts who knew nothing about anything, but we all came around slowly to liking what we could. And then I had our new, noisy baby Bob to busy myself with. He was a loud crier and a charming chuckler.

  Thea did not remember very much of Siam as she got older. But no one could meet me or Christopher without knowing we had spent time there (by then it was called Thailand, which I never could get used to). We liked to use words in Siamese to each other—not in front of
the dek, you’re looking suay—just to remind ourselves we had not made all of it up. Our house was filled with objects—a triangular silk cushion, a wicker ball, a ladle made of coconut shell—displayed in honored spots. We were so notorious for nattering on about the place that Thea’s school asked us to give a presentation. With a lantern slide projector, we showed squinting photos of us in front of orchids, and I explained how to extract milk from shredded coconut, and Christopher sang a national anthem that was out of date, and we were such a hit we repeated this every year.

  Did I feel silly? Surprisingly not. I was not beyond irony—au contraire—but I could never resist the oddly reliable pleasure of trying to explain (though it couldn’t be explained, not by me) the elusive connection between place and happiness.

  Sometimes parents would say we must be very glad to be in the U.S. now. This was usually because they confused Siam with China, or with some other country bordering Japan (no one believed me that Japan, made up of islands, had no borders). Christopher and I seemed to live in a zone of secret knowledge. This was the zone where we were lovers.

  We could not get anyone to seriously think that where we had been was a real country. Our souvenirs looked stagey even to me—the palm-straw farmer’s hat like a flattened cone, the broom of dried grass. Despite what I said in school assemblies, I myself had never husked or grated a fresh coconut in my life. We had loved Siam, but we were pretending to a higher level of Siameseness than we had. The pretending was a great joy to us.