Slow Hand (6 page)

I felt unworthy, staring at such radiance.

The man in charge of the rescue—a fast-talking Chinaman—explained things to Auntie, who was playing deaf. Her face was clenched; it was her ploy when things got difficult. And here was a difficult situation suddenly—an accident involving a white man at a time when whites were being slaughtered in the north. Not to mention all her other worries about the war.

The Chinaman was almost shouting, annoyed at having to repeat himself. The man lying unconscious on the stretcher was someone important, he kept saying. An adviser. He had flown in to help out the local militia. The Chinaman seemed to be implying that it was our duty—Auntie’s and mine—to take him in. I understood why. I was the only half-caste in the area, the only blood relation to the stranger, so to speak. Naturally, they’d bring the European to our bungalow and expect us to lodge him.

“Bring him inside; you can leave him here,” Auntie said at last, pointing her chin at me to indicate I should show them the way. I knew from the chin that she blamed me for this burden.

The men picked up the stretcher and followed me inside. I led them to my room. I turned down the thin blanket covering the thin mattress, and as they half-lifted, half-tilted him onto it, the jolting thought crossed my mind that maybe this was my father, come in search of me—although in the next instant I knew of course it couldn’t be.

When the men had left, Auntie stood in the doorway, keeping her distance, while I looked the stranger over. A discolored swelling at the side of a knee and a cut at the temple above the right ear—the source of dried blood along one cheek—seemed to be the worst of his visible wounds.

Auntie felt I should try to wake him. This required my touching him. I put my palm down on the slight frown creasing
his brow. How dark and dull the back of my hand appeared next to the pale gleam of his hair! I shook his shoulders and even slapped his cheeks. “Harder,” Auntie said, quite spitefully I thought. I shook harder but couldn’t bring myself to slap harder. Every smack left a stripe on his skin. Some time later, he did move an arm and a leg as though in the course of normal sleep—and by the time the doctor came, there were other small improvements: he stirred, he twitched, he turned from side to side in a delirium, he even opened his eyes for brief periods; and when I lifted his head to feed him the first spoonful of rice porridge, he swallowed. But mostly he slept.

The doctor was an old Moslem with a limp and a wheeze. With the war going on, doctors were scarce and getting pressed into service even in the islands. This old man had made the hike from the southern end and looked ready to pass out from the exertion. He put one hand on the patient’s chest, tapped it with his other hand, bent the patient’s elbows and knees, stuck a thermometer under his armpit, pried his eyelids apart. (Once more I was struck by the expensive color of those eyes, the color of a ring I’d seen on a Chinese merchant. A pale sapphire.)

“Coma,” the doctor pronounced at last, scratching absently at the mold on his stethoscope.

“Coma?” Auntie said. “But he wakes up sometimes. He even takes soft rice.”

“Sort of coma,” the old man said. He handed Auntie a bottle of Gripe Water, usually prescribed for baby’s wind. When she asked about the dosage, he hedged. “As needed,” he said. “But not too often.” He went down the stairs uncertainly, clutching the stair rail with something like panic.

In the beginning it was Auntie who decided what had to be done.
Give him a spoonful of coconut juice. Now wait. Now try a spoonful of rice. Now turn him on his side. Fold the rubber sheet under him. Now turn him back this way. Unfold the sheet from behind. Get the cloth and the basin.
She looked on squeamishly while giving the orders. But she wouldn’t touch him.

And why should she? For as long as I could remember, she’d spoken of white men as an unsavory breed. They were
bullies, always taking, always wanting more; they were liars, saying one thing, meaning quite another, telling the truth only if the truth was what it took to get them their way. And they were smelly.

In fact there was only one European she had known up close: my father. But the mark he left was enough to stain a race, apparently.

The thing he’d done was to leave my mother pregnant with me, forcing her into service with his lies. Lies about taking her back with him to a place called Antwerp, then—as he took off, solo—more lies about sending for her later, after he was settled.

My mother was not an island girl. Her home was on the mainland, in the dry zone, where her father worked in the oil fields run by Dutchmen like my father. It was only after my father went away that she came to this island—where Auntie, her sister, lived—to have her baby.

I was not yet weaned when she left me in a wicker basket on the floor one full-moon night to drown herself in the sea.

But along with Auntie’s rancor I sensed a grudging pride in my half-white origins. “Mixed!” she crowed, when anyone remarked on my volume of curly hair. And the books were another concession. It was only English and Dutch that she wanted me to read.

It wasn’t the first time I’d had an invalid on my hands. It was less than two years before that Auntie’s father. Old Papu, had required around-the-clock care in the last bedridden months of his life. I had the night shift then (Auntie having collapsed for the day) and had got used to the bedpan and other unpleasant intimacies.

But this one was different. Even in his wakeful states, he wasn’t alert enough to cooperate except to open his mouth for feedings or move his limbs for changings. Nor was feeding him always successful. Auntie’s close watch didn’t make things any easier. And just sponging him was an ordeal that put me in a sweat, though I was generally on my own for that—Auntie didn’t care to supervise.

But things did get easier with practice. I learned what to do about the messes (I’d even rigged a sort of loincloth that made
the cleanup easier); and I became more adept at feeding and sponging.

The spongings were partial and routine at that point. And necessary. Despite the promise of the monsoon-flower trees, the rains still hadn’t arrived and the heat festered and itched like a boil about to burst. Inside, even with all the windows open, the occasional cross breeze blew in a hot vapor that caused the floorboards to steam. Outside, the heat hit you with a force that took the breath away.

I was beginning to understand what Auntie meant about the European body odor. Strong and sour, it smelled like fermenting palm toddy. Even if you liked the smell of toddy, as I did, it wasn’t something you could let run rampant.

The hotter it got, the more spongings were called for. By the time Auntie left for her monthly shop on the mainland, the rains were long overdue and the heat had become so intolerable that I was relieved to be able to swab him off at will, unobserved, with a frequency that might have alarmed her.

In truth I could hardly wait for her to leave. No sooner had she caught the ferry than I got down to business. I filled the zinc basin with warm water and brought it, with the washcloth, to his bedside. Early on, I had taken off his clothes—the khaki shorts and shirt—and replaced them with one of Papu’s old sarongs, leaving it loose, like a sheet, around his middle. It made the cleaning and changing easier. I took the sarong off now and saw for the first time what he looked like, lying there on the rubber sheet, stripped utterly naked.

Huge. And very hairy. Tangled skeins of gold thread covered his chest, belly, arms, and legs; the threads were darker in the armpits and darkest at the crotch, forming a thick nest there, around the most startling part of his body. Unlike Old Papu’s privates, shriveled and discolored all over like fruit gone bad, his seemed to blossom firm and ripe, with a good healthy color to the skin: thick through the scrotum but so fine on the penis that the veins showed up like lines drawn in ink.

A thorough soap and scrub was what I had planned. Auntie was gone, I was alone, and it was safe. But just standing over his exposed body, free to inspect any and all parts to satisfaction—just
taking that secret liberty put me in a state. What if he came to, and his blue eyes were to shed their confusion and turn like searchlights on me?

I gave him the sponging; I even took care not to avoid the nest. But I didn’t linger; I went about it as always—briskly, hardly looking, almost entirely by feel.

Auntie was to have returned on the last ferry late that evening. When the boat arrived, letting off its few passengers, and she wasn’t among them, I knew something serious had happened. With the war getting closer—now we could hear the crackle of gunfire across the waves—she’d been overly anxious about leaving me even for the day. She would hardly have wanted me to spend the night alone.

I went home to wait. I thought of going down to the
kampong,
but soon it was dark and I was afraid—though not because I felt unsafe. No one in the
kampong
would have touched me—not even the older boys who came back to visit from their mainland jobs. One of them—a mocker and a strutter with too much coconut oil in his hair—once told me the reason why.

“Don’t worry,” he’d said when I mentioned my fear of taking the road to the
kampong
in the dark. “No one would dare touch you.”

“I’m not that great,” I said, thinking he was flattering me.

“Not that great, no,” he laughed. “I mean no one would touch you because you’re cursed.”

I sat on the front steps looking down at the swarm of flickering lights in the
kampong,
waiting for my aunt long after I knew it was too late to expect her that night. When the lights were snuffed out one by one, I went inside to Auntie’s room where I had slept on a bedroll on the floor since the day of the crash, when I’d given up my bed to the man in it now. With Auntie gone I lay on her bed, not bothering with the bedroll. The
kampong
noises had died down for the night; the palm trees rattled, but gently, in the breeze that had picked up finally after the breathless heat of the day. Still, it was not a night for sleep. I got up and went into my room, where the large, motionless figure filled my bed. Moonlight flooded through the open window
and turned the hair on his head and chest to phosphorescence, like the surf on certain nights.

I sat at the foot of the bed, weary but bolt awake. The moon made me think of my mother. It was on a night like this that she had walked into the sea. Auntie had told me a story that came back to me now.

When my mother was pregnant, there was a drought in the dry zone, where the oil fields were concentrated, and where she kept house for my father at the time. It was the worst water shortage in years, and even the Europeans were under ration. That’s when the first of the strikes began in the refineries, followed by the riots. In the turmoil of the next days the faucets in the European quarter were stone dry, and even the odd water-seller was nowhere in sight.

My mother had saved just enough drinking water to last a few days.

“For three days she took just enough from the canteen to moisten her lips,” said Auntie. “While your father guzzled, thoughtless. And there she was, a child in her belly, herself not much more than a child. Later, when he went off and left her, she told me about the drought. I yelled at her. ‘Stupid thing! Suppose the drought had gone on? What then?’

“Then, she said, she would have cut open a piece of her flesh to give him her blood to drink.”

My mother—dead at sixteen—must have been exactly my age at the time of the drought. And my father? How old was he then? The same age, could it be, as this wounded man lying in front of me? “How old are you?” I whispered, although there was no need to. Suddenly, the moonlight felt cold on my skin, and my head swam from fatigue. I lay alongside him, pressing myself very close. After a while I loosened the sarong around his waist and crawled in until we lay side by side, cocooned.

I woke with the sun in my eyes and a bitter taste in my parched mouth. I had been dreaming of drought. The rebels, in the dream, had cut the water lines, and I was stranded on a beach, gagging on mouthfuls of saltwater.

My head was still on his chest. My neck was stiff, and when I started to rub it I found my fingers were wet. But what
from? I swept my hand down across his belly—and there near his crotch was the wet patch. The moisture trailed out of the tip of his sex which lay horizontally—fuller than I remembered—across his thigh. I touched the moisture, which was clear and a little slippery. There was no odor to it. But it tasted slightly salty.

Someone from the
kampong,
one of the headman’s sons, brought me the news about Auntie later that day. On the mainland, where she had been shopping, the police had made a sweep, arresting people by the lorry load. She was among those detained.

Detained. What did that mean, exactly? How long would they keep her? The headman’s son couldn’t tell me. “Not too long,” he said, vague like the doctor. But the next bit of news hit me even harder.

“How’s the Tuan?” he asked, cocking his head in the direction of my bedroom. I had forgotten that he was one of the men present on the day of the crash—was it just two weeks ago?

“Better,” I lied, “much better.” That wasn’t a lie exactly. At least he had come to; at least we could feed him; at least he was alive.

“Not to worry!” said the headman’s son; “day-after-tomorrow they’re coming to take him to hospital.”

The news made me dizzy, and for a moment I couldn’t see straight. Looking over the shoulder of the man facing me, I fancied that the thin palm trees beyond were growing at even crazier angles than the ones along the beach, where they were almost horizontal.

“He’s not ready!” I almost cried out, but knew better. The man would have wondered.

I wasn’t ready. I wanted to keep him with me, as he was, without improvement if necessary. Once he was gone, nothing would stand between me and the void just waiting to swallow me whole. War would come to our island, I had no doubt of that now. The streams would run red, just like that reservoir up north. My aunt—like my mother, like my father—would never come back for me. And there would be a drought.