The Black Isle (57 page)

I was speechless. I’d mentioned them to him just once—decades ago—and he had remembered.

“I know it’s taken years, but I feel I owe it to you. I can’t guarantee they’ll still be there, but it’s the best my sources have been able to drum up.”

I flew to Shanghai the following week, with Kenneth’s office arranging a secret visa to get me into Mao’s China. That was the first and only time I took advantage of my proximity to his power. I’d never accepted so much as a chocolate Yule log from the prime minister’s office at Christmas, when even the night watchman took home two.

China in 1972 was nearly unrecognizable from the country I left in 1929. The joie de vivre and glamour of prewar Shanghai had vanished, replaced by a whole population in identical blue workers’ coats; the only ones who didn’t wear them were small children and the dead. Instead of the reassuring mandarin peel and mothball smells of my childhood, the city air was heavy with the stinks of the new China—cigarettes, mentholated ointments, and moonshine—all three sometimes emanating from a single person, in this case my assigned driver, Old Chen.

Most of my beloved buildings in the French Concession had vanished, as had the old rickshaws. Now everyone pedaled around on chunky, creaking bicycles, flooding the streets from dawn until the city shut down hours earlier than before. There was no more neon, no more billboards advertising British gin. I felt a complete stranger, a foreigner. Did Kenneth really send me here for my sisters or to show me what a
true
totalitarian state looked like?

“Do you remember when Shanghai was glorious?” I asked Old Chen, who I guessed to be around seventy and old enough to remember.

“No, madam,” he replied. “I lived in a sampan on the river. It was never glorious to me—not ’til now.”

The Chinese had reclaimed the city, but I realized these were not
my
Chinese. The streets had been renamed and renumbered by forceful nationalists to suit the forceful, nationalist mood. Our street, Rue Bourgeat, had become ChangLe Lu, or the Street of Long Happiness, and it was on ChangLe Lu that my sisters supposedly still lived.

As Old Chen’s car wove its way along the street, avoiding bicyclists, I realized we were approaching our old address. The white colonial-era town houses had fallen into disrepair, divided and subdivided into dreary little units. It sickened me to imagine my twins clad in those dreary blue coats, cooking broken rice in some windowless room, their noses blackened with soot.

I had Old Chen drop me off at the old
Paradis
children’s park, now called People’s Space 45 and completely shorn of trees. The patch was barely the size of a primary school playground. Perhaps its edges had been chewed away by road expansion, or perhaps the park had always been this small.

Three codgers in blue coats trudged through the grassless lot, their breath curling from their mouths in white floral tufts. I scanned the grounds for the gated rose garden. It was gone. The old hedge maze survived but had been sawed down to knee height, probably to guard against private acts that might sully this public space. Gone, too, was the potting shed against which Li had handled his first cat. With these old markers eradicated, the park was clean. Not a single ghost. The Red Guards had done a thorough job: The place was now inhospitable to the living as well as the dead.

A few trees remained, denuded of leaves. I made my way to the largest, which I remembered as a great flowering mulberry bush. Deep inside its skeletal frame, too bristly to reach into, I spied tiny, rolled-up scrolls in scarlet, turquoise, and indigo, the hues still rich. These were the old sweet wrappers, of course. I hadn’t seen such colors since arriving in Shanghai, where aside from the workers’ blue, everything came in washed-out shades of gray. They gave me hope, these bright shards. Perhaps my sisters could be just as untouched by history. After all, I’d always thought of them as magical girls. Why wouldn’t they be magical women?

Something caught the corner of my eye.

I turned to see a moving patch of black. A white-haired man in a long black cape walked briskly toward the far edge of the park. He carried a cane—in cinnabar red.

Could this really be?

I raced across the park, curbing the temptation to shout, and trailed him onto the road. But the old rascal kept disappearing—behind a bank of toilets, behind a street cobbler’s stand, around the corner of an abandoned stable—only to surface again, ever more distant, ever more fleeting. After five minutes, I lost all sight of him, if it
was
him.

I made my way by memory to our family’s old town house. Just as I’d guessed, it bore the new address Kenneth had given me. My sisters had stayed constant through all these years! But everything else had changed. Not only was there no gate between our house and the street, but also the outside world seemed to have flooded into the property like a tidal wave, sucking out all barriers in its undertow. The front door was missing. As for the windows, the glass had been haphazardly replaced with boards and blankets. The walls, once so strikingly white, were now mold black and guano gray. I hadn’t lived here in decades, yet I felt defiled. I wanted to find somebody—anybody—so I could scream at them. How could they let this happen to my family’s house?

Nobody could possibly live here. This was not a home. This was a photo essay torn from the pages of
Life
magazine: the Ravages of Communism. But I had come all this way, and I wasn’t about to leave without going inside.

As I stepped over the threshold, a small boy scurried through the dark on all fours. He pushed past me and sprinted out into the sunlight, trailing behind him a ragged woolen flag, probably a blanket. I felt like running after him, to smack him for daring to steal from my sisters. But had he? In truth, he could have come from any of the subdivided coops. Where our cozy sitting room once stood there was now an entire apartment with its own locked door. The same was true of the kitchen and the servants’ quarters beside it.

I looked up the old stairs. I had a feeling that my sisters, if they’d truly chosen to remain, would have fought to be assigned the place of their youth—the narrow hallway once clogged with their cot.

Climbing the freezing steps, I found two apartments. My parents’ old room made up one, its door locked. The twins’ space formed the other, its door wide open.

And there I saw them.

Xiaowen and Bao-Bao stood in this grimy, unlit hallway, one braiding the other’s hair. I’d been right about them being oases of color. Both wore short-sleeved cotton dresses, one peony pink, the other sky blue—the colors of springtime.

My eyes welled up the instant I saw them. They were so terribly young—teenagers still—their cheeks flushed, their hair long and black and lustrous. I just stared at them for several minutes, soaking in their radiance.

I wanted to believe I could tell them apart. But I couldn’t. Rather than hurt their feelings with an error, I whispered both names—“Xiaowen! Bao-Bao!”—and moved in to embrace them together. It didn’t matter that my arms went right through them. They felt my love—they had to have.

“Oh my God, how I’ve missed you two.”

They stared back at me impassively, amused by my emotional display but also baffled: why them?

“Don’t you remember me?”

Again, two pairs of doe eyes stared, blank.

I yearned to hear them talk, to match their teenage voices with the baby ones I knew. I wanted them to call me,
Jie jie
, if only to humor me, and to tell me what had happened to them. But they seemed unwilling or unable, and returned, fully absorbed, to their activity. When the one finished braiding her twin’s hair, she undid the plait, combed the hair straight with her fingers, and began braiding it all over again, ever patient, ever loving, as if trying to perfect the art. I could imagine her repeating this to infinity and, entranced by their presence, could have stood here watching them forever, had it not been for the bitter cold.

“Xiaowen, Bao-Bao,” I tried again. “Say something!”

They smiled a response, but both sets of eyes closed me off. It was nobody’s fault. These two had learned to sieve out the living, as I’d often done with the dead, and I could find no way to break through. We stood on opposite sides of the greatest divide.

Taped to the wall behind them was an old illustrated poster. Chairman Mao’s round, beaming face loomed like the sun over an idealized family. Dressed in the coveralls and red scarves of the worker class were a sun-tanned father, a powdery-pale mother, a girl and a boy, both around seven years old, and a pair of identical toddler girls. A cocker spaniel romped in the foreground, clenching a spanner in its teeth.

I knew instantly that the image had been lifted from one of our studio portraits, the ones Father left behind—us at our finest hour, reimagined for the coarsest of times.

“That’s us!” I pointed to the image. “That’s our family!”

But my sisters chose not to hear me.

Like Father had once done, I stared at the twin girls in the picture, unable to tell who was who.

I wanted to take the poster with me—it was all that was left of my family. But alas, it would only remind me of what I’d never have again. The only place I could ever hope to keep us all together, out of space, time, and history, was in my mind.

And so, at age fifty, with half a century and my ghost work behind me, I devised a quiet life for myself.

Since working invisibly was what I did best, I settled into another profession in the shadows. I became a librarian.

It was during this time, while watching over the reference reading room at the National Library of the Black Isle, that I encountered that pair of Belgian anthropologists, Lucas Van Kets and Marijke Jodogne. Both gaunt and so blond as to be nearly white-haired, with skin burnished ochre by the sun, they struck me as castaways from another continent’s wreck.

But it wasn’t just their odd complexion that got my attention. They staggered into my reading room with the hollow eyes of academics reeling from having their theories blown to pieces by life—in their case, by the grueling reality of six months on the ground in Zaire, the former Belgian colony where even running water remained a luxury.

For two weeks, they treated the cool, quiet, rational atmosphere of my reading room as both ashram and womb. One day at lunchtime, I slipped them ham sandwiches from a nearby coffee stall and directed them to the back stacks, where they devoured them ravenously. From the books they requested, I followed the drift of their research—they had a preoccupation with Borneo headhunters and cannibal cults—and soon grasped that they were vastly misinformed about our region, readily misled by juicy conjecture, and were headed into murkier waters still. Although it wasn’t my business, I felt obliged to right their course. I took them to tea at the Metropole. We struck up a pleasant rapport over scones and I told them a few anecdotes—inadvertently giving them the “interview” that would appear in their book
After the Ghost
, which at the time, given their bumbling approach, I believed had no chance whatsoever of seeing print.

Their photo of me in the cemetery, the one that labeled me “Native Girl,” was snapped by Lucas when I took them to Forbidden Hill to look at its variegated graves. The “bones” they claimed I was digging up were in fact bits of some litterbug’s fried chicken lunch that, as one with strong civic pride, I felt compelled to pick up. Their cheap attempt to make me seem like a practicing witch doctor came as a betrayal. I regretted the tea and sympathy.

Yet, the intrepidly energetic Belgians
did
lead me down an interesting rabbit hole. In the course of their poking around, interviewing headhunters on one of the nearby Spice Islands, they’d stumbled across a former resident of the Black Isle who had impressed them with his strange charisma.
“Diabolique.”
Marijke grinned. They’d met him on a clove plantation where he was preaching anarchy, and described him as a bald, nameless Malay with a bad leg. When they mentioned the scars across his chest—from being tortured, the man claimed, by bigoted government spies on the Black Isle—I felt my heart take a little skip. So
that’s
what happened to Issa.

He was leading a small army of former commandoes into the Isle’s up-country jungles where, the Belgians told me, he planned to launch attacks on the city itself.

“But why would he tell this to you?” I asked Marijke.

“I think he wants to get the rumor out, to frighten people.”

“Or to warn them,” Lucas added darkly.

Knowing the Belgians’ credulity, I didn’t trust their story. No doubt Issa felt betrayed by Kenneth’s maneuvers—as had I—but it was ludicrous to think of him, now a frail old man, plotting against his own beloved city. It sounded absurd that he’d call his fellow Islanders “colonizers, slave owners, and infidels.” I assumed the Belgians had embellished the tale with horrors they’d witnessed in Africa.

Two months later, a homemade time bomb exploded in the Chinatown bus depot. It was a busy Monday morning—eleven people died, and fifty were seriously injured. That same afternoon, another blast claimed the lobby of the Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building on High Street, killing three customers, two of them schoolgirls who had been opening their first savings accounts.

I called Kenneth’s office. His secretary put me through immediately.

“It’s Issa,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

“Then why didn’t you stop him?”

He paused and coughed out a guffaw, concealing his fury.

“He’s made it impossible to find him. He won’t talk to me. I have men on the ground—Malay men, Muslim men, because that’s what this is
apparently
about—trying to infiltrate his group. But, as you know, he’s got the jungle on his side. He’s been spouting all kinds of rot about wanting the Isle returned to its ‘original owners,’ as if they’d done such a fantastic job in the first place, and he’s using Islam as a ruse to rally those types around him. But it’s not about Islam, is it? We both know he’s always been more of a self-styled pantheist or at least a pagan. The frustrating thing is that there are dolts on this island who’ll succumb to his rubbish.”