NINE

 

All of us — my family, the Yees, Chow, Ah-Tseng, and Ah-Ming — now lived in the fourth-floor parlour. The only furniture was a single chair, and we slept on blankets and mats.

Every day, the servants and my older brothers went to the market and were harassed by soldiers on the street. Tang came back one day with a black eye but said nothing about it, and Ah-Tseng refused to go outside without one of the men. I doubt they felt they had much safety to offer. Daily we heard shots and the sounds of people being arrested or beaten. At night, violent sounds broke in from outside. There were shouts and cries and gunfire. And I heard the screams from encounters between soldiers and women in the streets, and in the dying terror of their cries I conjured images of teeth.

We were still permitted to use the toilet down the hall. One evening, a week after the Japanese took over our house, I went down there after our meagre supper. It was dark in the hallway as most of the windows were shuttered. I stayed in the bathroom a few extra moments, savouring the privacy and the small space, and examined my teeth. My gums looked red and I wondered if the coarse food we ate was harming me, and I touched my gums and teeth carefully with my fingertip. I grimaced and made faces in the mirror, until a noise outside reminded me to return to bed. Then I opened the door.

I jumped back and hit the door, which flew back into the wall with a bang. A soldier was standing in my way, one hand resting on his hip. He looked at me and said something in Japanese.

I froze and met his eye. I don’t think he liked that, because he shouted again. I stared at the floor and tried to control my breathing. He spoke again. Thinking he was angry at me for not looking at him, I raised my eyes, and he barked at me and stamped his boot on the floor. Behind the door to our room down the hall, I heard scuffling.

Even though I had just been to the bathroom, my bowels started churning. I set my hands over my stomach and held myself, fearing I would lose control and make things worse. He shouted louder and slapped my hands away.

I thought saying something, anything, would help. I took a breath with an audible shake, but all I could manage was a stammered, “Excuse me…”

He yelled and grabbed me by the top of my hair and pulled hard, and I screamed. I thought my voice was echoing strangely, but then I realized it was my mother screaming through the parlour door.

Still holding me by the hair, the soldier dragged me down the hall. I thought he was taking me back to the room, but he passed it. I stumbled and my scalp burned under his grip. As we passed the room, I heard the door rattle and bang as though people were fighting behind it. My mother shouted at me and I called back to her, and then I heard Chow telling my mother to move back.

The soldier dragged me to the top of the stairs and put one boot on the first step. He pointed to the bottom of the stairs and said something. I pleaded with him to let me go. He began to swing his arm back and forth, and I stumbled and slipped onto the first stair. I knew he was threatening to hurl me down the stone steps, and the pain began to radiate down my neck all the way to my feet as I braced myself to be thrown.

The door opened and Tang hurried out. He crouched in supplication with both arms out, nodding and bowing at the soldier as he crept forward in a waddle.

“Please, sir, let him go. Tell me what you want, but don’t hurt the boy.”

The soldier yelled back at him. With a last, decisive swing of his arm, he hurled me away from the steps towards the door. I screamed as I felt my scalp tear and my shoulder hit the hard floor. I heard another thud, and at the same moment my mother and Chow ran out and pulled me into the room. The soldier kept yelling. A moment later, as I was sitting by my mother clutching my scalp, Tang staggered back in. His nose was broken and he clutched his groin, and Sheung helped him to the chair. The soldier appeared in the doorway, shouted, and spat on the floor before slamming the door shut.

 

Two days later, our food was nearly gone. The Japanese had instituted rationing on Boxing Day and the quantities were hardly enough to live on. They allotted 6.4 taels of rice per person per day, about half a pound, and a small amount of peas or beans. I had recovered quickly from the assault in the hallway, but Tang’s face was a mass of bruises. Because Sheung had been the last to go out, Leuk and I offered to get the rations.

As we prepared to go out on our first errand alone, Sheung had us repeat the route in detail. When we were done, my mother asked us if we were sure we wanted to go, but Sheung interrupted her.

“It’s all right. They can do it.” He waved us off.

We hurried down the stairs carrying old rice sacks. I didn’t look at any of the soldiers, keeping my eyes on the floor until we were out the door.

We stood on the sidewalk and I looked down at the dry gutter. The wind lifted the lapels of our jackets as we walked. All the way down Wong Nai Chung road, we clutched the rice sacks and they flapped around us, twisting as the wind deflected off the buildings. I saw a man walking down the other side of the street. He carried a large box tied with a string handle, and from the way it swung I could tell it was empty.

Across the street, an old couple hurried, clutching bags of rations. Most of the windows in houses and apartments had the curtains drawn, and the streets were nearly empty. It had been a long time since my walk with Ah-Tseng and I felt sorry that she had been made to go out so often since.

We passed a butcher shop we knew. Its windows were smashed and the meathooks, still smeared with grease, creaked in the wind. We passed a Buddhist temple where many of my friends went. The gate was open, but it looked empty. The incense rings swung coldly from the beams and the statues loomed in the shade. Then I caught a glimpse of a monk between the columns. His slippered feet moved slowly over the flagstones while a hanging banner veiled his upper body.

We turned down a lane towards the ration centre. This was the sloped road that ran past the stables where workhorses and racehorses for the Jockey Club were kept. The stables had large wooden doors with grated openings on top. In the summer we avoided that road because of the smell, but otherwise we liked to walk down it and see the animals in their stalls. Today the doors were all shut, and as Leuk and I walked, I noted the deathly silence.

“I wonder if they took the horses,” Leuk said.

One of the stable gates was open. The large green panels of its doors had been drawn wide, and a man leaned against the frame smoking a cigarette. When he saw us coming, he straightened up but left the cigarette between his lips. He watched us as we approached, and stepped back into the shade of the doorway.

There was a large cart in the stable, the kind farmers brought their goods to market in: flat with low sides, usually filled with cabbages or bamboo crates of ducks. But this cart was piled with corpses. At first I saw only their empty faces, resting on their sides or hanging upside down, pressed together but registering no discomfort. An image of cabbages tumbling off a cart came into my mind, and of a farmer’s wife standing by it, weeping at the ruin of her goods.

I knew it was wrong to think like that, to daydream while I stared at these lost faces. But the image came quickly. More and more it was becoming my habit to see one thing and envision another, to transform the world’s images as they opened up to me. Until now I never knew I had this ability — not to change the world, but to remake and reduce it to my vanished world of gardens and schoolyards, of the kitchen and the library. And then nothing might be remembered, only retold. For there are times when we absorb the world as we grow and learn about it, but others when we make a dark exchange with it, casting out memories, pocketfuls of time, and future selves as its brutality marches into our lives.

I began to shake, and Leuk gasped and gripped my arm. There were men and women and some children. I had seen the marbled discoloration of death once before, in a beggar who had died behind our house. These bodies were smooth-skinned and clear, newly dead, but they bore the vestiges of fear: a hint of distress in the caving of the mouths and cheeks, the closed and unclosed eyes, the limbs pushed around in ways ridiculous or intimate. Though the cart was stationary, I heard it creaking on its axle as though it were being drawn away.

Inside the doorway, leaning and immersed in shadow strung with sawdust, the man stood very still and smoked and watched us.

A faint, sweet smell of drying manure drifted from the stable. The rice sacks hung weakly on the crook of my little finger, ready to blow away into the wind. I shifted uneasily where I stood. The cobblestones seemed sticky. My right leg shook uncontrollably.

“You probably didn’t know them,” said the man in a slow, level voice. He was a local too, just like the civilian who’d come to our house with the Japanese. “Not from this neighbourhood.” When he stopped speaking, the ash on his cigarette glowed like a serpent’s eye.

The wind was chill and damp, but I felt sweat seeping into the back and collar of my shirt, and again I sensed the stickiness of the ground beneath me as I shifted where I stood. I couldn’t move. I stared at the dead faces. I wished for all those bodies to be somehow…dry. Bloodless maybe, or undamaged, as though they had been gathered up in silence from the roadside after entering eternal sleep.

I seized my brother by the arm, closed up my coat, and ran with him to find the street. We looked back only once, to see if anyone was following. But there was no one in the lane. We were running from nothing. As we turned into the street, I turned around again and caught a last glimpse of the black hole we had gazed into.

“Wait, just wait!” shouted Leuk. He grabbed the back of my shirt to stop me the instant we turned the corner. He seemed winded, but he wasn’t breathing hard. He leaned back against a wall and looked up, squinting.

“What is it?”

“Just wait. I feel sick.” He held his stomach and leaned over. I thought he was going to vomit on the pavement, but he just hung there for a moment. Then he straightened up and rubbed his eyes.

“Did we get away from it?” I asked.

“From what?” Leuk was squinting again. He rubbed his eyes furiously as though dust had blown into them. He opened them and squinted again and started rubbing hard, grinding the knuckles of his index fingers into his eyes so hard I worried he would injure himself.

“Stop that!” I shouted. Then I envisioned the cart and smelled the stable air, a dry mist of ground manure and human bones. I choked and retched. Bile burned my throat.

“It’s so bright,” Leuk said. “My eyes hurt. Give me a minute.”

He passed me his rice sack as I coughed, and he leaned against the wall with his hands cupped tightly over his face. My coughing slowed. It was very quiet in the street, just the sound of the sacks crackling in the breeze. I heard vehicles and voices somewhere, though everything seemed far away.

Leuk dropped his hands. His eyes were red and watery, but he wasn’t squinting anymore.

“I’m all right now.” He took back his bag, an empty thing that flapped crazily in the wind, as though to plead that it didn’t belong there.

 

After that, we stuck to the main roads on the way to the ration centre. The Japanese had set it up in an occupied post office, where we waited in line with dozens of others. Inside, the young soldiers looked down at us with stony boredom as they dropped small bags of rice into our sacks. They all displayed the same contempt and sternness, as though trying to appear older. I saw them as infinitely dangerous, indifferent to violence. We avoided their eyes, and Leuk and I didn’t speak until our house was within sight.

As we walked up Wong Nai Chung Road towards the house, the bags of rice exerted a satisfying tug on my wrists, and I realized how tense I was. I swung my arms at my sides and liked the way the weight of the bags pulled on my shoulders.

I couldn’t help seeing all those faces, like sleepers frozen in a moment of nightmare. I tried to understand it, like a hand grasping for a light switch in a dark room. I tried to focus on the sensations of my body: the pull on my shoulders, the string handles of the rice sacks cutting around my wrists, the warmth in my shoes, and in my left ear the stuffy, nasal breathing of my brother as we tramped up the dirty pavement.

I recall this moment as the first time I became aware of the changes that had started in my body. I sweated more and my voice was breaking. I woke up in the middle of the night or in the morning with an erection, or one appeared suddenly as I dressed. I had grown a little taller and had just inherited some of my older brother’s clothes — the first time any of us had ever worn hand-me-downs. Wearing them was like pretending to be another person.

As we walked up the last stretch of pavement, Leuk stopped and looked up at our house.

“Who’s that?” he said.

It was late afternoon now, and a few illuminated windows in the house stood out against its soft grey walls. A girl in silhouette stood in a third-floor window. The curtains were drawn, but the yellow light of the lamps threw her form crisply onto the cloth. She was brushing her hair with steady strokes like a rower on a lake in summer. We stopped and watched her for a moment.

“It’s Shun-Lai,” I said finally. “What’s she doing there? That’s where the Japs are staying.”

As soon as I put my hand on the gate handle, I knew something was different. The sentries were gone, and the front courtyard was empty.

We hurried through the courtyard and up the front steps. Leuk pushed hard on the door and we nearly tripped over each other getting in. The lights were on, but there was no one in the front hall. As I looked up the staircase, I felt my face flush and my hands turned cold. It was so quiet, and I thought of the stables.

Then my mother appeared. Her shoes clicked evenly over the floor and the yellow lamplight washed over her shoulders. The sight was so familiar that the past few weeks were almost erased. When she saw us, she hurried over, shut the door behind us, and put her hands on our shoulders.

“They’ve left. An officer summoned me an hour ago and said they had been told they don’t need the house. They’ve taken all their things and left half an hour ago. We have our house back.”

We brought the rations into the kitchen, and my mother shut them up in a cupboard as though she were putting ivory into a vault. We told her we were starving, so my mother warmed some gruel for us. We ate quickly and went upstairs.

On the second floor, a door near the landing opened and Shun-Lai stepped into the hallway with a hairbrush in one hand. The news about the Japanese had made my head swim and I’d forgotten about seeing her in the window. She was in her pyjamas and a soft grey flannel bathrobe. She turned to me as I got to the top. She knew where I had been and asked how it went, and we talked a little about how good it was to have the house back.

She smiled, and her brushed hair glowed in the faint hallway light. I had seen this girl so many times, but now in the yellow light she looked different: the pale cotton, the dark bristles of the hairbrush, the wintry flannel, all lifeless things and yet painting a picture of life. Suddenly, I found her beautiful. As I thought of this, she wished me good night. I echoed her faintly and walked to my room, slightly confused.

Once in the darkness of my room, I remembered the stable and the cart. I couldn’t believe I had forgotten those people in my brief talk with Shun-Lai. I shut the door and sat on my bed as shame overcame me, and I cried quietly until Leuk came in.

That night, I lay in my old room again, with Leuk in the bed next to mine. I shook the sheets a few times because I was warm, and I felt them sink slowly downward as they expelled air over my face. The bedclothes settled on my abdomen, revealing the profile of my new body. I was thinner.

Was there less of me? I pondered the question for a while as I listened to my older brother breathe. I felt overloaded and burdened, and my head ached. My brain was turning into a crowded landscape of pictures and sounds, and my own thoughts were becoming indistinguishable from the noise I absorbed from the world around me. I felt exposed, unable to conceal my chaotic inner world.

I shut my eyes and tried to focus on the sound of Leuk breathing. Then I gave up and turned to look at him. The shutter slats were still open and the moonlight glowed on the sheets. I glanced at the clock — half past midnight. I had never lain awake so long before. Leuk was lying on his side facing me. He was quiet, his breathing hushed and tidal in the bluish light, defiantly calm. I turned away onto my side and gave in to the ticking of the clock.