Where Waters Meet, page 21
He was still there, she could tell. Imagining him on tiptoe, pressing his thin frame against the door, holding back breath, peeping and listening in. Every presence carried a different kind of weight, and his was light but slimy. It was the sliminess that had rubbed her the wrong way. Charged by an impulse of anger, she leaped up from the mat, bolting towards the door.
“What do you want?” She flung the door open, snarling.
Little Tiger, unawares, nearly fell into her arms. Under her flinty glare he began to wither, flustered and tongue tied.
She noticed a bruise on his forehead, with a blotch of half-dried blood.
“What happened?”
He regained his breath and composure and carried the two buckets of water over the threshold, setting them beside the mat that Chunyu and Mei slept on.
“A slip, fetching water, no big deal.” He grinned, a faint twitch around the corners of the mouth.
She felt a faint sting of conscience. A rat’s world—that’s where she had sunk to, a world ruled by the law of rats. Even a rat knows, from birth, how to pick out its target, a weaker rat.
She took out her hankie, dipped a corner in the water, and helped him clean the wound.
“What was this house used for, before all this, you know?” she asked casually.
“A prison, from Emperor Qianlong’s days. You can tell from the windows and the walls.”
“How did you get here?” she continued, half-mindedly.
“My village is only three li away. They came rounding up coolies. I have two older brothers, they skipped conscriptions, by luck. Uncle Yang, the village head, said to my pa, ‘None of your boys are fighting the Japs, so it’s your turn to give one out to them now, a sacrifice for the village. If this one dies in their hands, you still have the other two.’”
She listened in silence. She was supposed to say something comforting, but she didn’t. No more pity in reserve to offer to any men, or any rats. She was all dried up.
“Who is that woman, Mama-san?” She quickly switched the subject.
“Her name is Kiyo, half-Japanese, half-Chinese. She ran whorehouses in Manchuria, quite a few, and made a load. Then her man died in the war, so they brought her to the south, to run a new whorehouse.”
Whorehouse. Brutally honest. Yes, a whorehouse, no amount of whitewash could change the base coat. One might use the word household, as Kiyo did, but it’s a household of whores.
“How come you know everything?” she asked curiously. The shrewd blood inherited from her father, lying dormant for sixteen years, suddenly leaped to life, opening a new eye she didn’t know existed in her. She now saw a vague crack that a loose tongue might lead to, somewhere, in this tightly sealed rathole.
Her interest in him, an unexpected flattery, filled his heart with raw delight. An unquenchable eagerness gushed up, pushing him to pour out what he knew, to keep their conversation alive and rolling.
“I have the ears of a dog, my pa says,” he claimed, in tremulous excitement. “I hear things, even mice chatting. I bring water to Kobayashi a few times a day; he uses water a lot to keep himself clean. The rest of them live like pigs, they don’t care. He speaks Chinese with Kiyo sometimes, when they don’t want the others to know. I hear them talk, but never make a sound.”
“Who is Kobayashi?”
“Their head guy, the one with a big birthmark on his cheek.”
Chunyu’s heart skipped a beat. The dirt-filled pores, the bloodshot eyes, the sinister dark butterfly on one cheek, the foul breath, and the first searing stab into her half-formed womanhood. What’s remembered gets a life, she read once in a book. She didn’t want to give that beast a life, but she couldn’t kill her memory either. Memory exists on its own terms and decides what life to give.
“Do you get to go out, from here?” she asked abruptly.
“Sometimes they send me to get supplies.”
“Do you have a chance to go in the direction of East Creek?” She hissed out the name as if these words gave her a toothache.
“If they want a fish meal, East Creek has the best seafood market.”
Chunyu took a deep breath, slowly exhaling, to steady her voice.
“Do you think you’ll go that way again, soon?” Her lips quivered.
“I can always suggest a fish meal, the cook sometimes asks my opinion,” he replied with a self-important air, suspecting she would probably want him to bring in something from the store, a pack of cigarettes, a bag of saponins, like the other women did.
A crack, or even a path, too easy to be trusted.
“Can you go to 25 Prosperity Street, on your next trip to East Creek, to deliver a message to my father?” she asked tentatively.
He turned pale. He might not recognize the unfamiliar face of adrenaline, but he certainly knew the age-old face of fear when he saw it.
“I don’t know how far it’s from the fish market. I have to make it back in time, you know.” He averted his eyes, stammering, “They’ll kill you, if they find out.”
True. Nothing is worth the fight when one is dead, man or rat.
But one still tries.
She removed her earrings, a birthday present from Mother when she turned fifteen, and placed them in his hand.
“Take them to your mother, gold,” she said wearily.
He held the earrings as if holding a scorpion ready to sting. Slowly, he steadied his hand and moved the earrings towards the window for a close inspection in better light. They fought the sun off fiercely, emitting a strange yellowish glow, at once warm and cold. Much to her astonishment, he put one of them between his teeth, and nipped at it. A large grin of satisfaction split his face, baring his huge brown fangs.
“It’s real gold. Uncle Yang told me real gold is soft, will leave a tooth mark.”
Suddenly he grew quiet. Thoughts were parading through his mind, she could tell, one after another, humming with audible doubt.
She waited in silence, with a slow patience that could wear through a rock, for the line of thoughts to run its course. The innocent curiosity of a child, superseded by the self-complacency of an adolescent, then by the growing greed of an adult, and finally, by the rancid fear of an old man, all in his head. What a marvel that her eyes had grown so sharp in such a short span of time. Two days, in everyone else’s calendar. Two lives, in her own.
“I don’t have any use for them, my ma is dead, and I don’t have any sisters.” After a long moment of hesitation, he gave the earrings back to her.
He finished talking, yet was not quite finished, a trail of unfinished thoughts lingering in the air.
She tried to determine which was doing the mute talking: the greed, or the fear. The answer eluded her, so she placed her bet on greed. What more could one lose when she had already lost it all?
“Maybe I’ll come back later for them.” He looked up at her, halfway between a dribbling dog and a wishful toad.
She heaved a sigh of relief. Her instinct had led her to the right bet.
Mei was still sleeping, snuggled up to her own warmth, her only way to kill the dreadful time before the night of terror struck. The beginning of their rat life.
Chunyu threw a knowing glance at Little Tiger as she moved towards the door and closed it.
The room became dimmer, the air ripe with suspended possibilities. She started to undo her buttons. Her naked body glistened in the dull light, a cold, dangerous, grayish-white mass defined by a few soft, sinuous curves.
He recoiled in shock, his breathing quickened and messy. The space between them congealed into a thin filmy wall, vibrating nervously until he decided to break it. A slimy warmth pressed itself on her breast, a shaky hand eager to feign experience, yet deeply ashamed of its ignorance. His lips parted, sounds slipping out, a string of muffled and unintelligible mumbles.
“You tell my father that his wife, the fourth one, has died. Ask him to give her a decent burial. Hire a good Buddhist monk to say a soul-saving prayer.”
She wasn’t sure if he was listening, or if her words registered, so she repeated it one more time, adding, “Don’t tell him anything about me and my sister, here.”
It was a long while before his response came.
“They say she’s pretty”—he pointed tremulously at Mei—“but I think you’re prettier.”
5.
Night plodded in. From the end of the corridor, noises rolled: shouts, curses, cigarettes tossed around, and the clanking of boots, belts, and weapons being removed.
It was an old, ugly stone-walled jailhouse, with two rows of dingy cells facing each other, connected by a shared corridor. The bigger rooms were all on one side, now the living quarters of the Japanese, the higher-ranked officers at one end, and the lower ranks the other. In the smaller rooms lived the Chinese coolies, the kitchen and laundry staff, and the women. The end of a working day for some was the beginning of a busy shift for others.
Threaded through the seething sounds was Kiyo’s calm, managing voice, a voice that had seen the world fall and pick itself up. From the fog of a language that was choppy and decisive, with a sudden rise in tone at the end of a sentence that was altogether foreign, Chunyu guessed that information and money were changing hands.
It was deadly quiet in the room. Mei seemed to have drawn, with her silence, an inviolable circle around herself that shielded her from being seen, heard, or touched. There was a piece of dirty, wrinkled fabric draped between them, now fully drawn, to prepare the space for the men who would come at any moment, to each of them. The drape, like the sun, divided their time. It closed to usher in their night of separate ordeals and opened to start their shared day of rest—if there was rest to be had.
Kiyo told Chunyu and Mei not to scream, or fight back, when they came to them. “What’s the point of kicking?” she said, matter-of-factly, as if talking about a mosquito bite. “A month? Two? As soon as the warehouse is finished, they’ll be gone. Have you ever seen a war that doesn’t end? They move on and you move on. It’s just mud on your body, a good hot bath will take care of it. Change your name, move to a new place, marry a man that doesn’t ask a lot of questions, a new life, all over again.”
How many lives had Kiyo left behind, before this one?
Chunyu could feel Mei’s presence, through the pores of the fabric that made the drape. The smell of perspiration, running hot and cold in turn, and the muted shudder that agitated the thick and unforgiving air.
“Sis?” she called out, tentatively.
Mei didn’t answer, or stir.
“At least, Mother will rest . . .” She felt a snag in her voice and stopped. She meant to say in peace, but Mother was not in peace, and would not be.
Footsteps drew nearer and eventually paused before her door. The door was a mere display, a lie, as the latch and padlock had been removed. Anything could intrude—ants, roaches, wind, a snake, a penis, or a ghost. No, a ghost doesn’t need a door. A ghost is a door by its own right, leading to another world.
Then she heard her name, the strange, fake name, spoken outside the door.
“Fumie and Sachie, the sisters, the best, I save for you, Kobayashi-san.” Kiyo’s voice was lowered, hardly above a whisper, subservient, yet slightly teasing. “Ask your men to go easy, they are young, and a bit broken.”
Chunyu’s heart gave a lurch as she realized whom Kiyo was talking to. The man with a butterfly on his cheek.
“New, those earrings, gold? You must have made another load,” Kobayashi said, in a half-mocking tone, but not harshly. His Chinese was fluent enough, with a tiny tinge of an accent.
“A gift, pretty neat, aren’t they?” Kiyo responded. There was a thin, girlish giggle kneaded into the words, approaching coquetry, but not quite. Would this woman, Mama-san, as she liked them to call her, open her thighs to these men too, when the lust outran the supply of women? Chunyu wondered.
Chunyu closed her eyes, whispering a wish to it, the dark, amorphous shadow she had seen in the twilight zone between layers of consciousness, drifting around from wall to wall, light as a wisp of smoke. She immediately knew, from the first moment it entered her sight, that it was a ghost, one of the many in this house, the unwilling and undying dead gathered from generation to generation. A collective ghost, one might say, for lack of a better word.
At first, it kept its distance, vigilant, hesitant, unsure of itself, but not entirely uncommunicative. She felt its presence, its breath behind her, around the nape of her neck, tingling and chilly. I am afraid, it was saying to her, in the language of the dead. From the fuzzy recesses of her mind, Mama-san’s words popped out, the fire on top of your head, and she immediately realized what stood between the ghost and her: the deterring force, the strength of the fire, in her.
An impulse seized her, propelling her to pass her thoughts over to it, through long, deep, slow, calming breathing that intimated safety and assurance. It gradually stopped fidgeting, growing still and peaceful, even though it would not come near her.
A conversation started between them across the room, in complete silence. Tense and distrustful initially, gradually growing more relaxed, but at no point unkind. They struck a deal, right there and then, a deal to be put to the test when night fell. Among all the monstrosities that filled the day and the space, this deal was the easiest and the least cruel.
The door was thrust open. Two men burst in, leaving a queue of others outside, waiting impatiently for their turn.
(My name is Sachie.)
Mei’s voice drifted over, from the other side of the drape. This was the only Japanese sentence she had learned from Kiyo, to be repeated over and over again, in the course of the night, in quivering, dreamlike slowness. A dose of sedative, to be refilled every few moments, to numb her senses.
A man plodded over to Chunyu’s side, a candle in his hand. There was a lantern hanging from the ceiling, shedding a dim, yellowish, diffuse light. A full measure of light was really not needed for an act that animals could perform anywhere, in the dark or in the light. But this man demanded his own designated light. The straw rustled uneasily as he bent down on the mat. A black butterfly flitting on his cheek left a burning sting in Chunyu’s eyes. It was Kobayashi, a name that could make it snow in summer, turn flowers into spiders, and all the butterflies in the universe into a nightmare.
He was different from the man on top of her two days ago on the roadside. Freshly out of a shower, he smelled of soap not completely washed away by water, the water Little Tiger had brought to his door from the well, bucket by bucket. He looked filthily clean tonight.
Between then and now, he seemed to have grown a morbid patience. Slowly, he stripped her, and parted her legs. Holding the candle close, he started to examine her, intently, studiously, as if she were a map to be thoroughly studied before a battle that could decide a war.
All of a sudden, she found herself weightless, drifting around the ceiling, bouncing from corner to corner, looking down, with a vacant apathy, at a girl naked on a mat and a man sniffing her, inch by inch, like a dog would unfamiliar prey.
She realized, with an overwhelming rush of relief, that the deal she had struck with it, the ghost of all the dead, had been honored. They had traded places, as agreed. She had assumed its form, a soul without a body, and it had entered hers, a body without a soul. Her soul, in its bodiless form, was too battered to cook up a boiling rage or a fuming disgust at the sight of the man-beast. The only energy it had left was barely enough to simmer weary scorn at the absurdities of it all. How could such a soul, a century-old fossil, have once inhabited the young body of a sixteen-year-old? She was baffled.
Kobayashi’s candle tilted, dripping hot tears on her. Not the real her, but what she had left behind on the floor, a heap of flesh and bones, a skin shed. The pain was every inch real, but not hers, because she wasn’t there, in that body.
The inspection could have dragged on longer, but his body started to rebel against his mind. The beast grew tumescent and weepy between his legs. With violent, farcical jerks, he entered the empty shell of her.
He wasn’t in any hurry to leave even after his beast had been appeased. At the top of the pecking order, he operated on his schedule, and his alone, unmoved by the anxious queue outside the door, and undisturbed by the repeated greetings from the other side of the drape by Mei, in a fainter and fainter voice, stating her phony Japanese name:
Slowly he rose to his feet, buttoning up his breeches. Unexpectedly, their eyes locked. The whimsical deal with the ghost was over, as Chunyu became aware of the regained burden of her body that she had so readily and rapturously discarded. She had nothing but her own reserve of resistance to draw on now.
She didn’t withdraw her stare, long, deep, and unwavering, demanding an answer she would never get. To her surprise, she discovered a sudden crack in his fighter bull’s eyes, revealing a razor-thin line between conscience (if he had one) and a fury that might be easily provoked with one tiny misstep.
But there had to be something, amid all the insanities, that would stand on its own ground, untouched by the slaughter and destruction. She just had to find it, in a quick second, before his conscience was totally consumed by rage.
Rage was, perhaps, just the voice of a wretchedly waning conscience. The thought struck a spark of sudden inspiration.
She decided to act on it.
“How is your mother, Kobayashi-san?” She heard her own voice, soft, quivering but calm, knowing that she had managed, narrowly, to put forward a foot.
The butterfly stopped fluttering as he stood still, utterly stunned. From Manchuria to south of the Yangtze, he had covered thousands of miles of the map of war. A veteran war-hand, he knew killing, pillage, and rape were all part of war, but conversation was not. He had overpowered many women, young and old, pretty or ugly, some too terrified to utter a sound, others weeping and begging for their lives, still others screaming, kicking, and biting in desperate attempts to break free, but there had never been a single one who dared to venture into a conversation with him, about his mother or about anything.
