The Storm We Made, page 4
Abel stood up as tall as his thin frame could muster. He glared down at Master Akiro. “Japanese fuck,” he’d muttered.
That was how he had ended up here in the coop, bleeding alongside a dying rooster.
* * *
Abel had always been taller than everyone and fair, his eyes a hue of gray so light that his mother told him she could see the stars reflecting back at her when she looked at him. He was the only one. Both his parents had skin the color of murky coffee, as did his siblings, Jujube even darker than that, a fact she sometimes lamented.
He had always loved being fair. When he was a toddler tugging at his mother’s arm, older ladies on the street would stop, pet him, and surreptitiously hand him his favorite sour-plum candy. When he grew taller, girls from the neighborhood tittered and pushed each other when he walked by, even the older girls. Abel’s fair skin, his looks, and his disarming smile meant that he was always able to get what he wanted. He understood the concept of charm long before he knew the word for it.
But here at the camp, his fair skin was a curse. The supervisor assigned to his quadrant, Master Akiro, took a particular loathing to Abel, perhaps because Abel was the closest to his visualization of the white enemy. Master Akiro was thinner and slighter than Abel, so it made Abel furious to be so afraid of him. Every time the supervisor’s small, sharp eyes turned in Abel’s direction, Abel would feel his stomach lurch, and whatever tiny bit of food he had consumed for the day would rise and pool at the back of his throat, threatening escape.
For the first couple days after Abel arrived, Master Akiro engaged in simple cruelty. He would walk by the line of boys digging or carrying heavy loads, and when he reached Abel, he would drag his rifle on the ground so it knocked Abel around the ankles, causing him to trip and slide into the dust. Eventually, days became weeks and weeks turned into months, and the cruelties Master Akiro inflicted became more complex. Like the time when Master Akiro had made him and Rama stand side by side: Abel, his fair skin flushed by sunburn and mottled with dirt, and Rama, broad-shouldered and dark-skinned, the tips of his fingers dotted with white spots where cuts and calluses accumulated.
“Do you think their blood is the same color, huh? Blackie and Whitey?” Master Akiro said to himself. Then he raised his voice so all the boys and men in the quadrant would look up. “Let’s see!”
Abel wished he had passed out like Rama had when the blunt knife blade scratched back and forth over his arm, frustrating Master Akiro because it was taking too long to draw blood. But Abel would not scream, biting his tongue so blood flowed in his mouth too.
“The same! Their blood is the same!” Master Akiro yelled, holding both Abel’s and Rama’s arms in the air like victorious fighters, dark, thick streams of blood running down their elbows.
* * *
In the chicken coop, Abel watched Master Akiro’s boot tips, muddy and discolored, kick the door open. It was almost sunset. The other boys would be going to the mess hall now for dinner. Abel noticed his battered body cast a crooked shadow on the ground; the air had become still, windless, the buzzing of mosquitoes around him a rageful harmony. The dirty boots came to a stop in front of Abel.
“Up,” said Master Akiro’s thick voice.
Abel raised his eyes and stared up into the supervisor’s nose. A drop of sweat from Master Akiro’s face improbably dripped onto Abel’s lip, forcing him to taste the salt and dirt from his tormentor’s body.
“Get. Up.” Master Akiro shoved his boot under Abel’s body and forced him onto all fours. The mosquitoes seemed to buzz louder, drowning out the horrifying realization that ran through Abel’s body as the sound of Master Akiro’s belt buckle hitting his holster rang through the quiet evening. Abel felt the tiniest of breezes as Master Akiro’s pants fell on the dusty ground. He tried to crawl toward the door, toward the dying rooster, anything to get away from what he knew was coming, but the supervisor pulled him back by the shirt. The two white hens squawked and the brown one stared at Abel, her eyes blank, knowing. As Master Akiro’s penis scraped Abel’s insides, Abel heard him mutter, “Same as white lady, same as white lady.” Through a gap in the coop door, Abel stared into the orange ball of sunset in the distance, willing his knees not to buckle.
CHAPTER FOUR
JUJUBE
Bintang, Kuala Lumpur
August 16, 1945
Japanese-occupied Malaya
Jujube was having a rough day at the teahouse. It wasn’t her first rough day; she’d been working at the teahouse for almost a year, and she was used to a certain level of rudeness from the soldiers who patronized the shop, leering glances, rough hands, spitting words. But the last couple of weeks had felt different, a tension threatening to break like a dam.
Three soldiers gathered at a table in the center of the teahouse, shoulders slumped, eyes glazed.
“They will leave us in this godforsaken place to die,” said one of the soldiers, a stout man with patchy hair. The soldiers assumed she did not understand Japanese.
“They may bomb us, but Americans are no match for our men,” another one, younger, said hopefully.
“Either way, we drink,” the third one muttered, pulling out a bottle of murky liquid and passing it around.
Jujube looked helplessly at her teahouse manager, Doraisamy. It was only eleven o’clock, and they did not permit alcohol at the teahouse. She assumed the soldiers had gotten the sharp-smelling liquor on the black market since it was so difficult to come by otherwise. Doraisamy shook his head. Let them, he mouthed. Jujube nodded. Doraisamy was right; nothing good would come of reprimanding the soldiers.
* * *
The previous week, on the evening of August 9, just as her family had sat down to dinner, her father had screamed in excitement when the static crackled through the illegal radio he kept hidden in a flowerpot. As the static cleared, a voice broke through, announcing that the Americans had dropped nuclear bombs on Nagasaki. Their neighbor Andrew Carvalho, a little man who worked alongside their father at the sheet-metal workshop, burst into their house waving a telegram.
“I’m told it looked like a mushroom cloud. The towns will not survive!” Mr. Carvalho pulled their father to his feet.
“THE AMERICANS!” her father had said, rising shakily from the floor. “If they win this war, I will go to America to shake President Truman’s hand.”
The two men crowded around the radio, food forgotten. Jasmin, with a wink at her sister, tipped the last of their father’s food onto her own plate.
“Ma, what do you think? Should I clean up the dinner?” Jujube said.
But her mother had disappeared, footsteps echoing down the hall, the sound of the bedroom door slamming shut. Jujube sighed as she began stacking the plates, clearing the table. She would take care of everything, as always.
* * *
As Jujube walked back to the teahouse kitchen, averting her eyes from the table of soldiers, she heard a soft voice murmur, “Sorry for they are embarrass.” It was her favorite regular customer, Mr. Takahashi, stumbling over his tenses.
Mr. Takahashi had first come in on a rainy day the previous December, after she’d been working at the teahouse for about three months. Unlike the soldiers who grabbed her by the strings of her apron or spat at her feet, he had stared shyly at the table and said, in Japanese-inflected English, “My name is Takahashi.” He pointed down the street. “I teach. At the school over there.”
Over the next few days, Jujube had watched him from the glass window that separated the kitchen from the dining area. She noticed that he avoided the low, rickety wooden tables that the soldiers gathered around, favoring instead the small green one in the left corner, a little bit away from the rowdy soldiers. He wore the same brown blazer every day, the sleeves scuffed, the fabric beneath his pits stained dark from sweat. Always alone, he would flip through the local newspaper absently, rubbing the newsprint off his fingers and onto his gray pants, leaving little smudges that Jujube wondered if he knew how to clean. He was only an inch or two taller than she, and whispers of gray dotted his sparse mustache. His ears pointed a little too far forward, and those, in combination with his thick but too high eyebrows, gave him the air of an owl, she told Jasmin later. He always said “please” and “thank you” in English when she poured his tea.
One day as she passed his table, he’d looked at her above the rim of his teacup and said shyly in Malay, “Apa koh-bar?”
“KHA-bar,” Jujube corrected in spite of herself.
Every morning after that, he would come in and greet her, “Apa khabar,” in his soft lilt, and Jujube found herself nodding. One day after his greeting, she surprised herself by responding, “Khabar baik.”
His eyes lit up like a child’s. “I’m doing well also!”
About two weeks after he first arrived, he waved Jujube over.
“More tea, sir?” she’d asked, pointing at the ornate blue kettle she was holding, steam rising from the spout.
“Can I give you something?” he asked. As her eyes met his, he looked down, inviting her gaze to the white saucer under the teacup, and on it, she saw the tattered edge of a red food ration coupon.
“For you.” He smiled. “For a Christmas present.”
Jujube’s family, like every family for the last two years, was allocated one food coupon that entitled them to a quarter bag of rice every week. It was a struggle; sometimes her siblings’ stomachs growled so loudly they could be heard in the next room. Jujube’s mother had taken to mixing waxy tapioca root with their rice, creating a congealed sticky texture that Jujube hated. It filled their stomachs, so it didn’t feel like sour acid gnawing a hole in there, but it made everything taste like glue.
Before his disappearance, Abel had grumbled endlessly about the tapioca, coming up with a new reason every day for their mother to stop mixing it into their rice. “Ma,” he would whine, “do you know that raw tapioca root is dangerous?”
“Boy, do you think I was born yesterday?” Their mother would roll her eyes and pull Abel into her arms.
“Ma,” he would squeal, wriggling away, “it has cyanide! It will kill us, you know.” He stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth and crossed his eyes like a cartoon character. “Dead!”
“Only if I don’t soak the root well enough, silly. Now help your mother rinse it.”
Mr. Takahashi’s red food coupon would double their ration, and Jujube’s mouth watered at the thought of fluffy rice, rice that could soak up curry and spices, rice that didn’t congeal, thick at the back of her throat. She grabbed it off the saucer, crushed it in her palm, and started to walk back into the kitchen. Then she paused. “Thank you.” She could feel Mr. Takahashi smile into her back.
From then on, every couple of days, Mr. Takahashi brought her a new gift. Sometimes he brought books, children’s books full of pictures that Jasmin loved, or novels, Penguin Classics like The Swiss Family Robinson and Jane Eyre, that Jujube devoured. Sometimes he brought meters and meters of cotton, which her mother used to make them all new shirts; sometimes he came with a beautiful but useless ornament like a carved wood turtle or a porcelain ashtray. But Wednesdays were the best day. Each Wednesday morning, Mr. Takahashi came into the teahouse with a single tattered red food ration coupon, and each Wednesday evening, their family ate like kings. Jasmin laughed, her lips crinkling on her sallow skin, and if they were lucky, Jujube’s mother smiled all the way up to her eyes.
At first Jujube had thought he wanted sex, like the rest of them. She’d asked her mother what to do if one day he were to take her into the back of the teahouse, throw her onto the pile of wet garbage, and hold a knife to her neck. Her mother’s advice had been simple: “Stay still.” For the first few weeks, Jujube waited, hands shaking, for Mr. Takahashi to claim his prize. But all Mr. Takahashi did was talk. He would sip his tea, the steam blowing up his nose, and chat about this and that. Sometimes they discussed the relationship between Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester (Jujube thought it romantic, Mr. Takahashi felt it inappropriate); sometimes he told her stories about his family in Nagasaki (everyone worked in the Mitsubishi factories, making ships and munitions—they were all metalworkers who were good with their hands, except Mr. Takahashi, who used to get made fun of for reading all the time). And then at exactly 10:20 a.m., he would stand up abruptly, say, “Recess is over!” gulp down his tea, and go back to his school.
* * *
The soldiers roared, their drunken bickering echoing through the teahouse.
“Do not be worry,” Mr. Takahashi said as he got up.
“Are you going back to the school, sir?” she asked.
“Yes, and I will see you tomorrow,” he said.
* * *
The truth was she didn’t like growing fond of Mr. Takahashi. She had heard about the kind ones, of course. The sergeant who, when told to ransack a home and clear everyone in it, had left the youngest baby alive, hidden behind a dustpan. Or the doctor who had injected his young comfort-women patients with harmless viruses that gave them a rash, so they would become undesirable enough not to have to go back to servicing the soldiers. And now Mr. Takahashi. But kindness did not excuse mass violence, kindness did not bring Abel back, kindness wouldn’t keep her safe. She consoled herself by telling herself she was getting something out of it, the red coupon that helped keep her family alive.
Also, Mr. Takahashi could be pedantic sometimes, his teachery ways coming through unexpectedly. Six months into their curious friendship, he’d asked her what she hoped to do after the war ended. Jujube had been startled; she hadn’t spent much time thinking about this for herself. She knew that she wanted Jasmin to go back to school, she knew that their mother hoped Abel, before he disappeared, would go on to join the civil service—it meant a stable, safe office job that guaranteed the grant of a tiny but serviceable tract of land where he could build a house for his eventual family. But for herself? Jujube shrugged at Mr. Takahashi’s question. She might be too old to go back to school; she could not see herself married. It didn’t matter, she didn’t matter, and no one knew when the war would be over anyway.
At her shrug, Mr. Takahashi’s eyes had flashed. “You need to see more for yourself,” he said, which had surprised her. “You can be scientist, journalist, you just need to get the… the…” He wavered over the word, then said it in Japanese: “… credentials.”
Then he was standing up, chair pushed back, voice raised. “You cannot survive this and live a dead life.” Beads of sweat dotted his forehead.
She felt her hand holding the kettle become clammy. It felt like it was slipping. She willed herself not to drop it. “Sir, Mr. Takahashi, sir, I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry,” she murmured.
The air in the already stuffy teahouse thickened. Other customers, soldiers mostly, had put down their teacups and turned to look at them. A tall soldier with an uneven mustache reached for his weapon.
“Sir, I’m sorry, I didn’t… What can I do to make this better?” Jujube pleaded. She felt the soldier move closer.
Doraisamy waved frantically from the kitchen window. Do not make trouble, Doraisamy’s eyes said.
Mr. Takahashi sat down heavily and shook his head at the advancing soldier. “No need.” Then he turned to Jujube, eyes dark with remorse. “I am sorry,” he said. “My daughter is in Nagasaki. We are just two. Her mother is no more. My daughter, you and she are—What is English word? Alike.”
As the months wore on, her conversations with Mr. Takahashi continued with quiet regularity. Sometimes he would invite her to sit and read the plays of Shakespeare together, doing voices, Mr. Takahashi stumbling over words like “forsooth.” Sometimes he would write letters to his daughter in Nagasaki, in English (“I want her to learn!” he said). He was worried because lately his daughter’s replies had waned. Perhaps the letters were not arriving? Perhaps the mail carriers were being shot down? But faithfully, he wrote, calling over the sound of the whirring fans in the teahouse to ask Jujube for words: “What is word for when a child grows up into an adult?” (“Matures,” Jujube would reply.) Sometimes he would have her read over his letters.
“Make it more loving, like a father to a daughter,” he would say. “Affection is not something I learn for teaching.”
She would reply, “Add this: ‘I miss you all the time.’ ”
* * *
Things were not going well at home either. About two months after Abel disappeared, a pair of soldiers had shown up at their front door, rapping angrily. Her father, face ashen, had answered.
“Ada guniang kah?” one of the Japanese soldiers said in Malay, tapping his rifle on the ground.
Jasmin, in the kitchen, stopped chopping the onions she’d been tasked with and turned toward Jujube. “Sis, what’s a guniang?”
“Basement. Now,” Jujube whispered, grabbing Jasmin’s arm and rushing them down the rickety wooden steps into the tiny cellar space her father had dug to hide valuables and food in the event that their house was ransacked. Jujube heard her mother click the wooden door above their head and, a minute later, the footfall of heavy military boots.
“You have girls?”
Jasmin opened her mouth as if to cry, and Jujube clamped her hand over it.
“No, sir, only boys here. Maybe you try next door?” Her father’s voice echoed above them. Jujube admired how still and unwavering he sounded. The strength of his voice reminded her of what he was like before the war, convincing and fearless. Now most days her father shuffled through the house coughing, his face creased with worry. He told their family that they were the lucky ones; most of his British colleagues had been taken away to Changi Prison, some killed en route, but even if his words said so, he did not sound grateful, only brittle with sadness.
