The Black Isle (42 page)

I told myself I was going only because I had nothing better to do, but this wasn’t wholly true. I felt entitled to go, as a survivor and an Islander. I was curious to learn who the government was going to reward. Would they acknowledge the local heroes or anoint only their own, members of the Europeans-only civil service?

Predictably, they began by bestowing medal after medal on British men and women—a few seemingly unscathed by the war, others permanently shattered by their years at Shahbandar, so broken they had to be helped up the steps. I pitied them but felt no kindness whatsoever toward the committee to whom natives did not matter and native heroes certainly did not exist. They made no attempt to conduct the event in any language other than English, and I watched a family of Malays, dressed in finery for the occasion, storm away. They had grasped no more than a clutch of words. I, too, eventually broke from the crowd and worked off my irritation by walking onto the Padang, where one of the earliest and biggest bombs had fallen.

The central crater had been filled in with soil but remained bald: The grass hadn’t grown back in four years. Strange, for there was a saying on the Isle that if you stuck an ice cream stick in any field, you’d have a tree the following day.

I soon found out why. As I neared, a group of European boys and girls materialized, running along the rim of the enormous dell, stamping their feet. They were their own grave tenders, trampling on any sprig of green that emerged from the bomb site, their death site.

“I don’t want them to forget us,” a boy with pale lashes told me.

I was about to console him with a platitude when my ears perked up. At last, non-Western names were being announced on the bullhorn.

“Mr. Zhang Ming…Mr. Iskandar Ibrahim…Mr. Kenneth Kee…”

Kenneth? Could he still be alive? I began sprinting back.

I arrived to see three very familiar figures descending the steps, bedecked with red sashes and brass medallions. I was smiling so wide that my cheeks ached. There was Cricket with his pink birthmark; Issa, shorn of his long hair; and the one and only Kenneth Kee. The odd triumvirate smiled demurely at the crowd, grateful yet not exultant.

Prison had made all three startlingly lean, especially Cricket, who had been chunky from youth. But far from looking weakened, Kenneth was muscled, more sleekly defined.

I rushed to meet them at the bottom of the steps, expecting to find them surrounded by proud, weeping relatives. But they were alone.

Kenneth was the first to notice me. Naturally, he acted blasé, as if he’d expected me all along.

“I feel faintly ridiculoush, like I’d won the bronze for shot put or javelin.” He lifted the brass medal embossed in cursive:
For Gallantry
. “Not quite the Victoria Crossh, ish it?”

His voice was strange. He now had a clenched-jaw kind of lisp, as though he had missing teeth or a swollen tongue. Although I wanted to, I didn’t dare embrace him. I’d never done it, for he always struck me as one who’d disdain such intimacy. Instead it was Cricket who walked over and surprised me with a hug.

Kenneth placed a reassuring hand on his comrade’s shoulder.

“Enough, Zhang,” he said, “or they’ll demand your medal back.”

Now it was only Issa—Iskandar Ibrahim in name, if the announcer had got it right—who kept his distance. Not only were his gold earrings gone, but also his right hand was disfigured; like an unfinished sketch, it was missing its thumb. Still, the aura of a shaman hadn’t been wholly stripped from him. His cosmic arrogance had outlived the war. He stood apart from us, arms folded, finally deigning to give me the minutest of nods. With him, I knew I had to make the first move. He hadn’t forgotten that I had wronged him, cast away his advice. Nor had I.

“You look younger without hair,” I said. Foolish words, but they were all I could think of at the time.

He grunted, and then in a tone that wasn’t entirely unfriendly, said, “You don’t look too bad yourself, Cassandra.” He had pointedly dropped the “Miss.” He was no longer my servant. Fair enough.

With that, a fragile peace was forged.

“I’m starved,” Kenneth declared, and the four of us strolled away from city hall, not even waiting for the ceremony to end.

All three men had buried their medals in their pockets by the time we reached the side street. Kenneth led us to an Indian-Islamic roadside stall, where we sat on stools and wolfed down curry-dipped
pratas
, the tastiest of the Isle’s flatbreads. I dodged their questions about my wartime years, simply saying that I considered myself lucky. On their part, they didn’t recount the horrors at Shahbandar either. What nobody needed to say was how close they’d become. From the way they shared their food, like brothers in a poor, teeming family, it was clear they’d disavowed their prewar lives and the class differences that came with them.

In the joy of our reunion, we’d ordered enough for six and ate till our bellies nearly burst. But Kenneth was not one to let anything go to waste. While Issa tipped his leftovers on the street for a knot of hungry neighborhood cats, he took over my unfinished bowl of curry.

“I’ll eat it,” he said. Mimicking the cats, he lapped at the sauce.

For the briefest second, I glimpsed his diseased tongue. It was black and forked, split from the tip down.

He caught me. “Are you horrified?” he said, pushing the bowl away.

“No,” I lied.

“Quite all right to be, you know. I would be, too, if an old friend I hadn’t
theen
in a while
thhowed
up looking like a bloody
thnake
.” He laid it on thick to make his point. Then the venom faded. “Creative people, the Japsh. They
thnipped
it down the middle with a pair of
thcissors
.”

Oh, Kenneth. That he could be understood at all was clearly a supreme act of will, the result of rigorous training and the skilled avoidance of certain problem words—my name, for example.

“I’ve seen far worse,” I said.

“No doubt.” His eyes flashed with a sudden fierceness. With one ruthless, penetrating glance, he told me that he knew all about my years living in air-conditioned rooms, taking hot showers, eating square meals, and sleeping night after night with the man who’d not only murdered Mr. Wee, our mutual benefactor, but also Daniel, his friend. But how
could
he know? I’d said or done nothing to give myself away.

My cheeks prickled. It was Cricket who came to my rescue.

“So, should we tell her?” he asked Kenneth. It was strange to hear Cricket speaking English—stranger still that he spoke it so well.

Kenneth sucked in his breath. “I’d hoped to wait till teatime, but now that you’ve brought the matter up, fine.” He glanced around for eavesdroppers and, finding none, turned to me. “We are regrouping, like vermin, like bacterium. The war’sh not really over, not yet, and I think you know what I mean. They think they can buy our favor with a coin, a medal, like we’re children. We’re ash much children as Mohandash Gandhi, Chandra Boshe, or all the othersh they’re worried about in Burma, in Egypt, in Paleshtine. We’re all marching to the same deshtiny.

“You know I’m no romantic, sho don’t take me for one when I tell you that it’sh deshtiny you were there today, that we met again. The fact that you’re alive ish proof of your durability.” He spoke this last word, I thought, with a tinge of bitter irony. “We could do with a woman like you—with your unique outlook.”

I glared at Issa. Had he told Kenneth about my eyes? Issa gave me the subtlest of winks, assuring me he hadn’t betrayed the secret we shared. All right. Then did Kenneth know about Taro? Taro—my shame and sorrow. I felt a knot tighten in my gut.

“Do you hear me, Ca— Are you paying attention? I’m inquiring if you’d like to join me. Join we three.”

I was so stunned that I remained mute. A stream of what-ifs flooded my mind, ruthlessly stirring up all the questions I’d long tried to still: What if I’d gone up-country when Kenneth made his first offer? What if I’d worked with Issa to raise up armies of ghosts? What if I hadn’t met Taro? What if Mr. Wee and Daniel were still alive? Would I still go with Kenneth now?

“Yes, of course!” I nearly shouted. I was being given a purpose, a second chance. I wouldn’t let it slip by this time. And then, like a shot in the heart, I remembered Li.

Again, Kenneth was quick to read me. “Ah, but you have doubtsh.”

“It’s her brother,” Cricket murmured.

“Believe me,” said Kenneth with the soothing tones of a longtime preacher. “Family is patient. History is not.”

History also needed money. After wrestling with my conscience for a few days, I told Kenneth about the buried treasures at the Wee house. Was it immoral to steal from the dead? Who can say. All I knew was that the cause had to have funds.

As the four of us drove up to the old address, I asked Issa—behind the wheel, as ever—to let me out at the gate. Unlike the others, whose emotional ties to the place had either been extinguished in prison or never really existed at all, I couldn’t bring myself to enter the estate.

The jungle had reclaimed it. Grasses grew wild, and rustling unseen were snakes, toads, monitor lizards. These invisible residents didn’t disturb me as much as the ones I
could
see: faceless, anonymous ghosts wandering the property. Some must have been Mr. Wee’s associates and some Japanese soldier boys, but from where I stood, beyond the gate, it was impossible to distinguish between the two.

I was most terrified of encountering the dog-man. Whether it was a badi or just a restless spirit, it was proof of my failure. Another secret shame I wanted to forget.

“No need to worry about the gendarmerie,” Kenneth told me when I said I’d be the lookout. “They don’t bother to patrol here anymore. Now we watch for lootersh.”

Cricket nodded and handed me his loaded rifle, which only made me more anxious. I looked over at Issa, who gave me a sympathetic nod—he alone understood how disturbed I was by the ghosts I was seeing. Whether he had any intention of “putting them to sleep,” as he’d done the spirits of Forbidden Hill, I couldn’t tell. And I was in no mood to tell him about the dog-man.

“Under the roses” was all I needed to say. Issa knew exactly where to dig.

In a flash, the trio disappeared into the dark carrying shovels and gunny sacks.

Aside from the mating calls of cicadas and toads, the whole of Tanglewood was cloaked in an acquiescent muteness. I could hear my every breath, punctuated by the sounds of shovels striking earth.

 I told myself that Mr. Wee would have wanted his things to go to his surrogate son. If not, the colonials were sure to raid the unclaimed goods in any case. But even as I parsed these thoughts, I still felt like a thief.

One agonizing hour later, Issa’s silhouette emerged from the dark. Kenneth and Cricket followed close behind. They all carried bulging sacks, and when they brushed by me, I smelled the coppery scent of wet earth. At night in the tropics, especially after a full day of pounding rain, the soil always smelled of old blood.

Wordlessly, the three began squeezing their gunny sacks into the back of the van that Kenneth, ever resourceful, had talked a factory watchman into lending him. Their faces, particularly Cricket’s, were grim. I knew they had come upon bodies.

Cricket, his hands shaking, dropped his shovel on the driveway. It made a loud clang. We froze, but except for a barking dog going crazy in the distance, the world didn’t care.

As we sped away, I saw that Kenneth was wearing Mr. Wee’s gold Rolex, its dull shine illuminating the cab’s dark interior. It sat a little loosely on his wrist, but he wore it with delicate pride, as if it’d been his to own all along. He made no big show of it, but I could already tell that he regarded this watch, and not the brass medal, as the true reward for his gallantry, the real compensation for his mutilated tongue.

Kenneth had been right about himself: He wasn’t a romantic. He was a pragmatist. He believed in fairness, equality, and, above all, payment for work done.

“We’re not thieves,” he said resolutely as we stole into the night.

I continued working as a receptionist at Woodbridge, visiting my brother every day. By night, I went to meetings with Kenneth and his friends, preparing to adopt the life of a freedom fighter.

Li was still trapped with the mind of a seven-year-old and was prone to a seven-year-old’s tantrums. Whenever I pushed him to recall anything beyond Shanghai, he would either wail or descend into a hostile silence. Again and again, Miss Joseph advised me to give him time.

Always that word:
time
. It is a convenient illusion, beloved by so many, that time—meaning patience, meaning passivity—is able to heal all wounds. What people fail to reckon is that time is the sore itself, a greedy, devouring mouth.

I was twenty-six when I left Li and Woodbridge to join Kenneth and his group. Up-country in 1948 was no longer the untamable mass I’d known. I had somehow expected the jungle to remain vast and eternal, not realizing that while the jungle was content to remain as it had been for millennia, progress had expanded and encroached. Rubber plantations now covered twice the area they had during my days on the Melmoth estate. The Japanese, who’d invaded the Isle ostensibly for its strategic location, had also set their eye on its rubber. So, far from being dismantled, the Isle’s plantations had grown fat during the war. After the war, planters—mostly British—did their math and grew even more rubber, flattening the township of Ulu Pandan to make way for groves. Rubber had become the government’s largest source of income—and destroying the plantations Kenneth’s obsession.

When I first arrived, his camp was more precarious and exposed than I could have imagined. It sprouted in a clearing that had once been a Malay family farm.

His recruits had laid down running paths and shooting ranges over old tapioca beds. The kitchen and storehouses were improvised out of coops and barns. The thirty of us slept in tents, ready to pack up at a moment’s notice, which we had to do every few months.