The Storm We Made, page 11
“I’ll go get Pa at the factory,” Jujube said. Someone, she thought, had to take charge.
In between panicked gasps, her mother said, “He owes me; he will know.”
“Who will know? Ma? Who?”
Jujube’s mother fell silent, but she twisted the fingers of her left hand so much that Jujube worried they would break. Jujube sank to the floor and crawled through the oil to her mother, knowing somehow that if she didn’t manage to get through to her, things would only get worse.
* * *
Unlike other Eurasian mothers, Jujube’s mother had never been focused on Jujube’s looks, or her marriage prospects, or any kind of ability to attract boys. When Jujube had gotten the job at the teahouse, she had thought she would have a tough time convincing her mother that the extra money would be worth it. Instead, her mother had smiled a rare smile and looked almost proud.
Still, for so long, Jujube’s mother had exhibited a nervous anxiety that often dampened the mood of any room she walked into. She was always twisting one hand into another, a deep frown line cleaving her face in two. But Jujube knew her mother had not always been this frantic, nervous woman. She was old enough to remember a time when her mother had smiled full smiles and thrown back her head when she laughed but they were faint, these memories, scuffed on the edges, the way shoe scratches against walls leave an imprint but not a mark. Jujube remembered crouching in her favorite hiding place, the little shaded drain under the kitchen window, and from this window, hearing the voice of a man she didn’t recognize wafting out, and even more surprising, hearing a deep belly laugh—familiar because it was her mother, unfamiliar because her mother so rarely laughed that way. In her mind, Jujube had called the man Uncle Toothpaste, because he smelled like the bracing cool scent her mouth emitted after she’d brushed her teeth. She’d seen him one time, standing outside the sundry shop. She’d recognized the minty scent from her days sitting under the window, and she’d whirled around to see a short, smooth-faced man watching them both. Jujube’s mother must’ve noticed too; her hand had tightened across Jujube’s and became clammy and unpleasant. Her mother had closed her eyes briefly and inhaled in a small, rattling way down the back of her throat. Then she’d opened her eyes and pulled Jujube into the shop, walking by Uncle Toothpaste as though she didn’t know him.
As Jujube grew older, Uncle Toothpaste became one of the many made-up stories that Jujube told Jasmin at night when they curled together studying the moon. Uncle Toothpaste will help us if the soldiers come, Uncle Toothpaste will bring Abel home, Uncle Toothpaste will stop Pa from coughing.
“What does Uncle Toothpaste look like?” Jasmin had asked one day, big blinking eyes looking up from her perch in Jujube’s lap. But try as she might to recall, Jujube couldn’t remember a single defining feature of the man’s face. Only that mint scent, tickling the back of her nose.
CHAPTER TEN
CECILY
Bintang, Kuala Lumpur
1936
Nine years earlier, British-occupied Malaya
Cecily was a woman who liked categorization, who found solace in order. Even the dichotomy that her life had become—housewife and spy—felt like tidy boxes she could open and close as the circumstance warranted. Most days she played her role as the unspecific, forgettable wife of a local administrator, tolerated, unquestioned, barely noticed. She was an irreproachable mother to her children; she mingled with other mothers, gossiped about minor neighborhood scandals, fed, clothed, and read to her children. Gordon was known to describe her as everything one would need in a wife and mother, one who anticipated and fulfilled needs, lived unremarkably, almost happily.
And, as an informer for the Japanese Imperial Army, she was appropriately diligent—she knew how to parse the intel from the unnecessary, had a knack for flitting in and out of Gordon’s meetings and overhearing just enough for her to put together the pieces with Fujiwara. Informing was like a big puzzle, little pieces here and there: a scrap of a log, a torn map, a murmured tail end of a conversation. And when she and Fujiwara put it together, parceled the morsels of information into a tangible report of intelligence for his bosses, it felt like so much power, like she could do anything in the world.
This proclivity for order meant that Cecily did not enjoy yearning; she did not enjoy its lack of solidity. On some days her yearning for Fujiwara felt hopeful—the days when he smiled, the days when he told her that everything was coming together, the days when they cracked a particularly tough piece of intel. But on other days her yearning felt panicky, like everything depended upon her ability to get his approval and she would not be able to function without it. In one of these throes of panicked yearning, she had kissed the tiny sliver of skin above Fujiwara’s upper lip, above the faint mustache he’d tried to grow to look more dignified. As her lips pressed into him, he had held himself completely still, neither leaning nor recoiling. And when she’d pulled away, tasting salt, the smell of mint hair cream all around her, he had looked at her, said, “Thank you,” and continued their work deciphering the map of the swamplands they had been reviewing, as though she had simply handed him a dossier or said hello.
She took her yearning out on Gordon, much to his delight. “You exhaust me,” he said once after a particularly vigorous night, his sweat coating the sheets and her, the open window blowing a tepid breeze over them. “Could a man be luckier?” Cecily had tightened her jaw and scowled her dissatisfaction into the dark bedroom.
* * *
In early 1936, when the monsoon winds began transitioning from northeast to southwest, the arson at the port was the talk of the town. It had been just about two months since their daring intel grab at the resident’s dinner. That morning, the newspaper arrived with angry block letters:
FEBRUARY FIRES AT PORT LEWISHAM, FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED
The night before, everyone in the neighborhood had rushed out and watched as the orange flames curled through the night sky as though trying to touch the moon. To Cecily, the ashy air smelled like victory. The newspaper talked about what a crippling blow this was to the British air force, how many RAF planes were laid waste, that only someone with inside information could have known that the port was designated for RAF plane repair. A mole. She saw photos of blackened remains of the hangar structures looking like skeletons shaking against the backdrop of the muddied river water. Cecily pressed her hands against the newsprint, fingers dusted gray. She licked the newsprint off her fingers when Gordon wasn’t looking. It tasted like Communion wafer, like nothing. She steeled her lips in a thin straight line across her face, maintained an expression of concerned seriousness, but inside her was a gush of warmth at their success, the direct impact her intel had on the Japanese effort. Later that day at the sundry shop, she dropped an off-white piece of notebook paper, her newest piece of intel, Gordon’s logs of vegetation at a nearby stream. On the back corner of the crumpled paper, she scribbled:
Overjoyed. What next?
* * *
For the next two weeks Bintang became a rush of agitation and breathless speculation. All around Cecily, men were being hauled in for interrogation as the British desperately tried to weed out the mole. Rumors swirled in the neighborhood, fences were whispered over, husbands would fail to return home in the evenings, and their desperate wives would go knocking on doors begging neighbors for information. But the doors were slammed; no one wanted to be seen colluding with the wife of a suspected traitor.
Meanwhile Cecily’s initial exultation passed quickly. Gordon returned home every day with eyebrows pressed together, lines of worry creeping under his eyes. She peppered him with questions—who was hauled in for questioning, where did they think the leak came from, how would they know when they had the mole, how did they get information out of the people they took in? Gordon was patient. He did not have many answers, but he did his best: Today they took Lingam in; it’s hard to pinpoint the origin of the leak because there were no missing documents, just evidence that specific high-value areas of the port were targeted by the fires; they think they’ll just know who the mole is when they catch him. But when Cecily pressed him for just how they would get this information out of the men, Gordon’s face darkened. “There are ways,” he said. “You don’t want to know.”
But Cecily did want to know. And in the absence of news, her sleep was filled with imagined torture, faceless men beating her within an inch of her life, her children screaming as they watched. She became preoccupied with the limitless ways there were to die.
“Gordon,” she asked one night after putting the children to bed, “would it be better to be hanged or to be drowned?” She immediately regretted her question when the bottom of Gordon’s jaw began to quiver, and his eyes glistened, suspiciously wet. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just scared.”
Gordon wrapped his arms around her. “We are safe,” he murmured into her hair. “I’ve never given them any reason to doubt my loyalty.”
Cecily knew she should have felt guilty that poor, ignorant Gordon was trying so hard to give her comfort from his body, to shield her from the very worst. But instead, she prickled with loathing, skin hot with disgust. Fujiwara never would have given in this way, never would have shown her such weakness.
But where, in fact, was Fujiwara? For fifteen days after the fire, she had waited for a sign from him, some sort of instruction on what to do, even if it was to lie low. This was the longest they had gone without communicating in the two years she had been informing for him. She startled at every noise, sweeping every corner of the town for a glimpse of him. But she could not seek him out. It was always he who found her, who told her what to do, where to meet, and without his anchoring, she was lost. How loathsome to rely on a man this way. His silence threw her into a spiral of confusion—sometimes anger, sometimes shame, sometimes fear. The emotions roiled in her, settling into a hard rock at the base of her stomach that made everything—eating, shitting, sleeping, existing—a huge effort. It took every wisp of energy she had to maintain normalcy: to feed her children, to greet her husband, to go to the market, to gossip with the other wives, to say hello to people on the street, to make dinner, to playact simplicity, all the while her body screaming for a man who had seemingly left her at a time when she needed him most.
After a series of starts and stops, the British began focusing their attention on the Chinese population, convinced that Zhou Enlai had embedded Communist agents within their ranks. Kapitan Yap, Mrs. Yap’s husband, was their most immediate suspect; it didn’t take long for rival clan chiefs to give up the hiding place of their embattled kapitan, who had been holed up at his widowed daughter-in-law’s house. The British officers who arrived to arrest him chained him by the neck like an animal and threw him into a lorry. That was the last anyone ever saw of Kapitan Yap.
Kapitan Yap’s arrest unleashed a spate of violence in Bintang. With their leader out of the way, the Chinese clans began fighting among themselves to take his place, and people began whispering about civil war. Mrs. Lingam, whose husband, Arun Lingam, managed palm oil and rubber estates, was furious at the English. “They only suspect us! What about the gweilos themselves? Why don’t they suspect their own?”
In the days following the arrest, the wives gathered at Mrs. Yap’s house in a show of support, murmuring consolations and bringing her hot tea. Cecily had always hated this pantomime of care; no one actually cared. They were all just itching for information, little nuggets they could discuss among themselves later, gems they could shine up and bring back home to their husbands, who, despite pretending not to care about neighborhood gossip, also wanted to know everything.
Mrs. Yap was nearly catatonic, rocking back and forth on the floor, face swollen and bulbous, a shameful sight. Though all love was humiliation, in a way, Cecily supposed. All love was someone breaking their soul into smaller pieces and offering the broken pieces of themselves as a puzzle to someone else—help me put myself back together. Sitting as a part of the circle of cooing, fussing women, she studied the back of Mrs. Yap’s head. Usually Mrs. Yap’s hair was parted in a straight line down the middle of her head and pulled back smoothly into a very high bun. But today her part was jagged, bumpy, raised like angry snakes.
“Can I get you anything?” she whispered to Mrs. Yap. She did not expect a response.
“Get me out of here,” came the whispered reply. Mrs. Yap’s breath no longer smelled like shallots and milk; it was bitter and sharp, the breath of someone who hadn’t gargled in days.
Cecily knew she should feel guilt, this family torn apart for her crime. Yet she felt nothing for Mrs. Yap; all she ached for was Fujiwara. That was the most humiliating thing of all: Fujiwara had changed her, and because he had changed a tiny bit of her into something she was proud of, he had left something of himself in her. He had given her a bigger, brighter version of herself, and once she’d had a taste of this new self, she craved more, so much more.
“I’ll get you some water,” she said to Mrs. Yap. Cecily rose, walked to the kitchen, and without looking back, opened the back door of the house and left.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ABEL
Kanchanaburi Labor Camp on the Burma/Thailand border
August 18, 1945
Japanese-occupied Malaya
Abel’s eyes flew open. It was morning again, his third day in the chicken coop. It felt like he was living in a loop, one where every morning he was greeted by the angry pecking of a brown hen who did not enjoy having him encroaching on her space. The night prior, he and Brother Luke had assumed opposite sides of the chicken coop and glared at each other across the darkness. Abel had thought about crawling over to Brother Luke and beating his face into a pulp—the man had sold him into this horrible life, after all—but he didn’t think he would win the fight, broken down as his body was. Brother Luke, for his part, did not seem to recognize him, which infuriated Abel even more; how many families had Brother Luke done this to? How many more boys had he snatched from their families and sold to the Japanese, and in return for what? Brother Luke was trapped in the same coop that he was.
The door to the chicken coop was unlatched again. Both boy and man shrank to their respective corners, preparing for the worst.
“White Boy!” Master Akiro said, bending his head to fit under the coop.
Abel noticed that Brother Luke’s shoulders dropped in relief, which made him clench his own fists in anger. It wasn’t fair.
“You like this? You want this?” Master Akiro had opened a flask and was swishing the liquid around inside. The unmistakable sweetness of toddy swept toward Abel, over the humidity and smell of chicken feces. Abel wanted to grit his teeth and look away, to hold his own against this man who had beaten him into a bag of broken bones, who had, just hours ago—No, he didn’t even want to think about what had happened. But Abel’s body betrayed him; he craved the drink so badly that he found himself sniffing the air like a rabid animal, crawling toward the door, toward Akiro, toward the toddy. He needed to feel the burn scorch its way down his esophagus; he wanted the warmth to spread through the nerves that were screaming now from the cuts, bruises, bites, and breaks; he wanted to drink until the shouting in his head became an even buzzing that wrapped around him like a blanket.
“Ah, ah, no.” Master Akiro ducked away and capped the flask. “Not free of charge, White Boy.” Akiro reached for something on the ground and tossed it toward Abel as if throwing food into an animal pen. It made a loud thud as it hit the ground. All the chickens except the dead rooster squawked, flapped their wings, and moved toward the edges of the coop in indignation. Master Akiro had thrown a slim, long piece of rebar. Abel had touched, carried, and laid down steel rebar many times before as part of the work he and the other boys did to build the railway tracks.
When he looked up, Abel was surprised to see that a small crowd had gathered at the doorway and around the chicken coop fence, both Japanese soldiers and camp boys alike. They crammed against one another, pushing to get a view. He scanned the crowd: Ah Lam was there, and Azlan, and Rama. Then he saw Freddie standing slightly away from the crowd, as usual, blue eyes narrowed and fixed on Brother Luke. Abel opened his mouth to ask what he was supposed to do with the rebar, but his voice came out as only a choke. Master Akiro laughed a little cruel laugh.
“You kill. I give you drink. I let you out,” Master Akiro said.
The camp boys and soldiers outside the chicken coop roared, “Fight, fight, fight!”
Brother Luke was screaming by this point. “No, please, boy, no.”
The world is cruel, Abel thought. Here before his feet was the instrument to do the thing he had wanted to do—kill the man who had destroyed his life, sold him into slavery, taken him from everything he had ever loved. But now he was to do it for sport, for the entertainment of everyone around him, with his violated body, under the glare of Master Akiro. Abel knew he should feel guilty, he should feel fear, he should feel something, but all he felt was bone-crushing exhaustion. He wondered if he even had the strength to pick up the rebar.
“Do it, White Boy, or you stay in here. Then he kill you.” Master Akiro pointed at Brother Luke, who was squatting on his haunches, inching away from Abel. Abel looked around the coop as the faces huddled close to the wire, boys and men alike, stamping their feet and making so much noise that the coop vibrated. The brown hen was clucking and flapping her wings in terror. With every vibration, the dead rooster’s body jumped, and Abel wished they could swap places, that he could be a shell of himself rotting in the corner, not holding the life of a man he hated in his hands.
“Abe, you have to.” A voice behind him, just beyond the fence: Freddie, having made his way to the part of the fence nearest to Abel. Freddie looked at him unblinking, a disquieting calm in the chaos.
