The Storm We Made, page 23
There had never been any other way, Cecily thought. Behind her, the scar-faced baby cooed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CECILY
Bintang, Kuala Lumpur
August 29, 1945
Japanese-occupied Malaya
When the Japanese first arrived in December 1941, Gordon had been defiant, still reeling from the revelation that the charming merchant they’d known as Bingley Chan had turned out to be a conquering Japanese general. When the military convoy drove through town, Gordon refused to come out at first, squashing himself determinedly into a round rattan chair. “No,” he said. “I will not bow to that two-faced crook.”
It was only when Cecily explained, first patiently, then angrily, that it was necessary to show allegiance to the ruler of the moment, that Gordon did not have to jump for joy but did need to think about his future and that of their family, that he joined her on their doorstep, eyes trained to the ground, refusing to watch the approaching parade.
After that, for weeks, Gordon would gather with old colleagues at one another’s houses, sipping what was left of their whiskey stores and making up strategies for how the British would retake Malaya from the Japanese.
“The Japanese have no ships, so it should be a marine approach,” proclaimed Andrew Carvalho from next door.
“We are too important to the Crown for them to leave us to a bunch of barbarians!” Mr. Lingam said.
“In fact, I have it on good authority that MI6 has dispatched spies who will defeat the Japanese from within!” announced Mr. Tan, his voice loud and full of conviction.
What did he know about spies? thought Cecily spitefully.
But as the whiskey supplies dwindled, food became scarcer, and more of their British counterparts were captured and sent to Changi Prison, the men began to fear that they would be next. Stories of inhumane torture used against suspected traitors began to reach them. For Gordon, the last straw was when the Japanese soldiers came for the resident, Lewisham, and dragged the man away, arms tied behind him like a hog. Cecily watched Gordon’s lips twist in agony, watching the white man he admired so much be reduced to begging for his life in his underclothes. In the days that followed, Gordon, whom she could not ever get to shut up, barely finished a sentence.
In fact, as the years passed, both she and Gordon changed. In Cecily, the change manifested as erratic conduct. She chattered incessantly or blasted around the house in fits of productivity—cooking and cleaning and mending—then abandoned her tasks when she felt the unbearable darkness taking over, leaving behind the detritus of home life: bits of meat lying half cooked in oil, clothes half washed in the bucket, jars of pickled vegetables open and covered with ants.
The worst of it was the rage. Cecily could feel it bubbling up inside her, coils of anger that bloomed outward from her chest, so strong she could feel the heat in her toes and in her ears, and even when she tried to control it and press it down, it would rush through her screaming for release. And release she did. Sometimes she wouldn’t even remember what terrible things she had said, just the swollen feeling of gratification that followed when the hurt registered on Gordon’s or the kids’ faces. It was their desolation that stayed with her, so much that she took to her room for days afterward. Like when Gordon had gone to get rations and been able to bring home only a bull’s testicles, resulting in the scream of Abel’s boyish laughter. She had shouted so loudly her head rang with the echo, watched her son’s face color with pain and shock. Later that night she woke up and walked over to her sleeping son to brush his wiry curls off his fair, open face, and had cried for all the pain she could not hold in. She didn’t know how to tell them that her anger was not at the things they did but at what she herself had done to make everything the way it was.
While she expanded with rage, Gordon shrank, bags of sagging skin hanging off places that used to be filled out, under his chin, his arms, his eyes. But even more than that, his personhood shrank. Gordon had been a man obsessed with climbing the British institutional and social ladders that had governed their lives. Without those institutions, he was unmoored. Still, unlike Cecily, he did his duty. Every morning he would faithfully make his way to the sheet-metal workshop to which he had been conscripted and return in the evenings with torn-up hands and a bag full of meat rations. But it was as if a switch had been turned off in him. He retreated out of their bed, curled himself on a mat at the far end of their room. Nothing seemed to get through to him; his eyes were shadowed. The only thing that even momentarily tethered Gordon to the world was Jasmin, who always knew how to crawl into her father’s lap and hum an off-key song, which would bring a tiny smile to his drawn, empty face. So when Jasmin ran away, Gordon ceased to exist, his light extinguished completely.
* * *
The doctor was shaking his head. “Perhaps,” he said, addressing Jujube so he could avoid looking at Cecily, all wild-haired and without undergarments, “it is for the best. More peaceful for him this way.”
When the coughing first started, Gordon was worried, would study his just-coughed-on palm or handkerchief for blood, wondering if he had consumption. But when it became habitual, he stopped covering his mouth, just let the coughing fit reach its wheezing, panting conclusion. After a while, the echo of Gordon’s cough became as much a sound of their home life as any of the children’s voices.
When Jasmin had been gone ten days, Gordon’s wheezing had become so bad that his lips took on a purplish tinge. Her husband was an academic man meant for clerical work and numbers; he was not suited to the forced labor; his work at the sheet-metal workshop had taken its toll—gone was the man who used to irritate Cecily with his plumpness and pomp, and in his place, a tired, coughing ghost. And then Gordon slipped into a coma. It was so uneventful, so without fanfare, that Cecily knew he could not have planned it.
“What do you mean?” Jujube demanded, always exact, needing the precision of the doctor’s words.
Cecily watched her eldest daughter rub her hand harshly over her eyes, not allowing herself even one tear. Unlike her parents, Jujube had not cracked and was the only thing holding their home together. It was she who found ways to keep food on the table, it was she who had called the doctor when she wasn’t able to rouse her father, it was she who still, Cecily knew, searched every day for Jasmin. Cecily wanted to reach out and hold her eldest, remind Jujube that she was still a child, that she was allowed to crack, to feel. But Cecily held her arms by her side. Jujube’s sorrow, like everything else, was Cecily’s fault, and no amount of consolation was going to help.
“His lungs are not working well. It will be less painful this way, and he can be in his own home, resting,” the doctor said to Jujube, running two fingers through his hair, refusing to state the obvious. It dawned on Cecily that once again, as she had seven years ago with Lina, she would wait for an innocent to unknowingly cede his life to a cause that she saw now held no more meaning.
“Will my father… die?” Jujube asked, blinking rapidly.
“Yes,” said Cecily as the doctor said, “Just—just keep him comfortable.”
Then the doctor left their stinking, cramped house in a hurry, eyes trained anywhere but at the two women.
In the coma, his sallow face cradled by pillows, his breaths uneven and whistling through parted lips, Gordon looked almost at peace. And maybe he was, Cecily thought. She wished she could switch places with him, wished she could extinguish the horrific realization that her family, once five, was now just Jujube and her.
“Why is this happening?” Jujube whispered. This time she did not rub her eyes quickly enough, and tears escaped them.
Cecily felt the admission on the tip of her tongue, the whole long, tedious story of her betrayal pushing its way through her, her daughter’s sorrow compelling her into honesty. Grasping the tip of her tongue between her teeth, she bit down, tasted blood. No, she told herself. In three years, their family had lost three people, the cost of the lie of a new Asia. Jujube would not, would never, understand.
Then Gordon coughed, a loud, phlegmy hack that echoed through the room. Jujube whirled around. “Pa,” she said, her eyes hopeful, willing her father awake.
But Gordon’s eyes remained closed and stayed closed. They did not know it yet, but a week later, he would stop coughing and breathing entirely.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
August 30, 1945
Two weeks before the Japanese surrender in Malaya
ABEL
On the rare mornings he was able to wake up early, Abel liked watching the sunrise. It was the one time the camp was quiet, and the one time he didn’t feel like an overwhelming disappointment to himself and to others. He would sip from a bottle of toddy, imagining it was the bitter black coffee his mother used to make in the morning at breakfast, the coffee that he would drink too hot because he could never wait, the torture of the burn down his throat almost pleasure. Some mornings at the camp, Abel felt a shiver of wind creeping through the distance, its swish nearly but not fully drowned out by the chirping of the crickets. But this particular morning, it was drizzling, slim drops of rain that pinched his neck and back. All of it reminded him that, at the very least, he was alive.
Because the truth was, even if he drank to forget all his pain, the unwelcome memories requiring more and more toddy to push them back, he did not want to die. He often moaned that he wished the others would leave him to kill himself, an exhortation that made Freddie look away sadly. But it was always a lie.
The camp had made Abel confront his mortality every single day. Some days, when Akiro had beaten him harder than usual, he’d wished he were one of those people who wanted to die. It wouldn’t have taken much, with his body so weak and riddled with injury. It would’ve been as simple as climbing up and throwing himself off a tree or slashing his wrists with one of the many sharp implements that littered the camp. Yet the uncertainty of death scared him. He wondered about the people he would have to leave behind. His family loved him; his mother loved him especially. The idea that his death could intentionally hurt her made him seize up inside; he could not bear the thought of her sorrow.
So this fear of dying needled him into basic survival. This meant remembering to eat occasionally and finding safe spots for shelter, away from the dangers of landslides or falling pieces of wood. It meant that this fateful morning, as the drizzle fogged up the gray sky and made the air humid, it was Abel who was the first to spot the planes, their wings swooping through the air in formation, like a gale of white birds against the creeping ball of orange sun struggling to rise. The toddy swirled in his stomach, the familiar sourness creating a knot of gas and the buzz beginning its resonant whir through his head. But even in his haze, he knew. He knew. His body untangled itself, intent on surviving, his knees cricking painfully as he rose to his feet, moved one foot in front of the other.
Run, his body screamed. Run.
* * *
JUJUBE
It was not an exaggeration to say that everything in Jujube’s life was fissured with despair. Jasmin had been gone for nearly two whole weeks, and some days Jujube felt so overwhelmed by terror over what could’ve happened to her sister that she couldn’t breathe. Her father’s illness had become so acute that he lay motionless in his bed at home, eyes shut, comatose. He had a few days, the doctor had said the day before, and after the doctor left, Jujube had held vigil by her father’s bed, willing herself to talk to him, to remind him of her voice, to beg him to come back. But she hadn’t known what to say, how to express the burning fury that choked her every day as she wondered what they’d done to deserve everything their family had to live through. Instead she had sat silently, watching the dark shadows on the wall, her father’s labored breathing the only echo in the room.
Her mother would be completely silent for days on end, barely eating, barely moving from her stool by the window in her bedroom. Then suddenly she would begin talking, an incessant stream of confusing, jumbled information. She muttered in a manic way about “going to see him” and “this is what he does to women.” At first Jujube had thought Cecily was referring to Gordon and tried to reason with her mother. “Pa is sick and needs to rest.” But her mother would wave her away impatiently, unseeingly. “He owes me,” she would mumble. And Jujube would walk away and close her mother’s door quietly, resignedly, behind her.
Jujube had hoped that, as in the past, her mother would come around. But this time, things seemed to be escalating. Her mother had grown gaunt from eating infrequently but also puffy from her inconsistent sleep schedule. At night Jujube would hear her pacing up and down, the wooden floorboards creaking like there were rats in the walls. And then by dawn, exhausted, she would fall asleep for an hour or two before restarting her vigil by the window.
At the teahouse, Doraisamy came out of the kitchen and snapped his fingers obnoxiously in front of her nose. “Hello, hello, are you here, Jujube? Are you going to do your work? You know I can get a thousand girls to replace you?”
It took all her willpower not to bite Doraisamy’s curling fingers. Instead, she pulled the tea towel and her apron off and dropped them in his hands. “Sorry, sir, I have to go back to my house for lunch. I’ll come back quickly, sir.”
“I swear I will sack you,” Doraisamy shouted at her retreating back. Then, as though rethinking his options in real time, he yelled, “You better come back within an hour!”
When Jujube reached the house, the sun hung hot in the late-morning sky. Her shirt pressed against her back, and she knew that unsightly sweat stains pockmarked the cotton, rendering the already thin material see-through.
“Ma?” she called out. She did this out of habit. Her mother, cloistered up in her room, almost never responded these days. “Ma, I came home early. I can make some lunch!”
A clattering. Jujube froze. Her mother emerged from her bedroom in a brown dress with a faint yellow stain on the front; Jujube didn’t want to know what it was. Her mother smelled like rotting fish, and her hair was lank with grease and tangled into knots.
“Ma,” Jujube said, heart pounding. “You came out of the room today. How are you feeling?”
“I’m so sorry, my girl. I have to tell someone.”
“Tell someone what? Ma, please.”
Jujube pulled her mother into the bathroom, tried to scoop some water from the tank with the red dipper to throw it over her mother’s stinking hair. But her mother struggled free, wriggling past Jujube with surprising strength.
“I know someone who can find your sister. It’s all my fault. But he can help us. He will,” her mother burbled incoherently.
“Ma, you’re making no sense. You know Jasmin ran away. And it’s my fault, not yours.” That was the first time Jujube had admitted that out loud. She swallowed the guilt wedged in her throat, blinked away the image of Jasmin’s tearful, pleading face as she was being shoved into the basement.
“Years ago I helped a man, and he was a bad man, Jujube. I have to make things right,” Jujube’s mother continued without appearing to hear her.
Jujube’s exhaustion rolled through her. She couldn’t argue with her mother like this anymore. “Please. I’m just going to get you into bed, Ma, and I’ll make us some food. Stop it.” She pressed an arm into her mother’s back, perhaps a little more roughly than she had intended. She was just so, so tired.
Without warning, Jujube’s mother shoved her hard, across the wet bathroom floor. It was bright behind Jujube’s eyes when she heard the crack ring through her, but before she could fully register the sound of her own head hitting the cement floor, the world faded out.
* * *
CECILY
The familiar smell of grass and jasmine assailed Cecily’s nostrils as she approached the large white house. Cecily still thought of it as the old resident’s house, where she first met Fujiwara as Bingley Chan. The house didn’t look as different as its current circumstances would imply; it still loomed above everything at the edge of town, its driveway long and steep, its lawn well maintained. The clean white exterior was a little worn by the years, but generally its majesty had not diminished. To think she had once come to this house as a guest of the British resident, dressed in beautiful clothes, important enough to be feted, to stand on its porch and inhale the fresh scent of rain as music rang through its halls. Cecily looked down at herself. Her toes were dry and exposed in her worn slippers, and the nail of the first toe on her right foot was ridged and green-gray with a fungal infection. She was wearing a brown housedress—one she had been wearing for days as she’d lain unbathed, rocking back and forth in her room. The smell of herself wafted to her nose. She was sour, bitter, rotting, a shadow of the woman Fujiwara once knew, hysterical where before she was quiet, broken where before there was strength.
As if pitying her, the late-morning sun dipped behind the clouds. Cecily took big steps and pulled her legs up the steep driveway meant for automobiles, not the shaking legs of a breaking woman. Even without the sun, the air was hot, and her housedress clung to her body in patches of sweat, under her arms, behind her knees, between her breasts. She tasted a drop of sweat rolling down her upper lip into her panting mouth.
She knew she should have come to Fujiwara sooner. But when her brain was muddled the way it was, time passed strangely, as though everything were misted with dreams. Jasmin would walk into the house so soon, so very soon, she thought every day, and sometimes she managed to trick herself into believing she could hear her daughter’s chirping laugh echoing through the house. But then she’d wake up, and despair would root her in place, and she would be reminded over and over what had happened. And how she had set it all in motion.
