Creepers and vines hung like giant cobwebs from the trees. Hidden like a trapdoor spider, Nadia counted off the hours, the minutes. Consulting the luminous hands of her wristwatch, she held off until 3.a.m., waiting for the whispers and isolated conversations to subside. Then, convinced that the Formosan sentries had dropped off to sleep, she inched forward.
Smoke from the guards’ canteen drifted over the moonlight. The smell of boiled rice and dried fish hung in the air. A hot, stuttering breeze threaded through the stodgy trees, soundlessly. Leaves yielded. Bamboo thickets shuddered. The fogged air was stifling.
Couched in an opaque mist which folded itself over her, Nadia kept herself small and tight. She had to be alert and very careful. Avoiding the dry twigs and branches that laced the boundary floor, she edged into the damp darkness using quick elastic steps, holding on to the shadows. As she moved, she winced; the heavy cloth bags thumped lightly against her ribs; the shoulder straps were biting into her shoulder blades. The weight of the bags made her perspire and the salt sweat trickled into her eyes. She wiped it away – in the darkness she could see perhaps five yards ahead, no more. A leaf crackled as she placed her foot down. She froze, waited, waited some more. Her eyes raked the smothered landscape.
She became so preoccupied in trying to cushion the sound of her footfalls that she almost lost sight of the watchtower high above her, its brass and thick glass glinting weakly in the spotlight’s shadow. Sitting alone, she saw the lookout engrossed in a book of sorts, his head bowed, preoccupied. A minute later, when she looked back, he was gone, swallowed by the mist and crushed shadows.
Heart trembling like a candleflame, she counted to ten and held her breath, then proceeded along the fence-line as quick as she dared. Not even a few moments had passed when she paused in mid-step, leg and knee suspended in the air, to listen to the surrounding night noise, the mulch of maple fronds fumbling underfoot, the scuffling of squirrels in the conifers. It took her about forty minutes to negotiate the hundred odd yards to the meeting point. By the time she got to the tree with the red branches and fringe-fingered leaves, she was exhausted and quivering from adrenaline. The waves came smashing into the rocks below.
She fingered the lucky glass charm around her neck. The ground was coated with fern pins, which pricked her arms and elbows, forming crisscross cross-hatch patterns on her flesh. Chock, chock, chock, went the song of the tree frogs. She lay behind a line of tall grass, a long drop of a hundred-feet lay behind her, her ears intercepting the voices of the patrolling guards, wise to the rustle of night animals, the Ooo-oo-ooo call of the horned owl, the sultry fizz of the whispered wind lifting off the trees, the crashing waters below. She concentrated on separating these sounds, compartmentalizing them, so that she might recognize the sounds of danger when they came.
She pressed her face against the grass; the heat wrapping her up like a fist. Surrounded by the smells of seawrack and damp earth, the sweat trickled down her back, down her neck. She listened to the sound of the night crickets and remembered that Uncle Yugevny had once taught her how to measure the air temperature by counting the chirrs. ‘Count the number of cricket chirrs in 15 seconds then add 39,’ he’d said. Within a minute she’d worked out that it was 86 degrees F.
Time passed slowly. A procession of dark-bodied ants shuffled past her nose, carrying a wasp in segments. She watched the black cortege make its way into a hole like shiny-hatted undertakers. Again, her skin crawled as her thoughts turned to death.
She peered into the night, lifting her eyes, not her head. Her mind waited, extracting the fugitive sounds from the natural. Chock, chock, chock, went the song of the tree frogs. Weren’t there wild dogs here, she wondered? Silent hunters? Tigers even? A bat scraped overhead, filling the night with excited squeaks, its wrinkly wings thrumming the air. A branch tilted and yielded a clump of heavy, dry plumage. And then, suddenly some boots appeared before her. Two men, Formosans, were talking into the electric silence. They approached the wire and stopped. She could not tell whether they had seen her. Separated by twin fences, three feet apart, Nadia smelled their sweet tobacco burning, saw the red tips of their cigarettes, the sockets of their eyes, their gargoyle silhouettes.
The cigarettes were handed from black hand to black hand.
The guards cleared the phlegm from their throats and hawked, the sound of bones rattling in a sack.
‘‘Hoi!’’ one of them shouted. He seemed to be staring straight at Nadia. She stiffened. Fear, dark and metastasized, came rushing down at her; it spread through her like ganglion roots. It ran up the bones of her back.
The guard picked up a stone and threw it so that the stone went crashing into the thicket to her left. There was a thrump of noise. A vast stretch of silence followed. As Nadia waited, muscles cocked, a disturbed lizard raced over her legs. Its claws caught on the underside of her knees, sharp tail snaking, shooting through the grass. Shrivelling, she remained death-like. Her crisscrossed flesh turned to goose pimples. She felt her fingers dig into the dirt, straining to get away. Seconds later, the guards were gone, dissolved in the great swells of darkness. Chock, chock, chock, went the song of the tree frogs.
She had watched him dance towards her, moving through the degrees of light and shadow, darting like a black crow through the curtain of stippled fog.
He crawled the last few metres to the fence.
Lying flat to the ground, they looked at each other. His shirt was ragged and unbuttoned to his chest. She noticed that his neck was long and skinny; his eyes huge against his face. ‘‘How do you feel?’’ she said in a whisper, her mouth shutting with a snap.
‘‘Like a sucked lemon,’’ said Iain, his face agleam with moisture. ‘‘Dry, wasted, and sour at the edges.’’
‘‘I’m glad you still have a sense of humour.’’ They were separated by over three feet of wire. ‘‘This is a Red Maple, by the way, not a flame tree.’’
‘‘I’m from Sutherland. We don’t have trees in Sutherland, only thistles.’’ He smiled. It was a smile as welcome as an umbrella going up in the rain. He turned his face towards the sky and wrinkled his eyes. It began to drizzle. ‘‘Your hair looks nice,’’ he said. There were no traces of his earlier resentment. ‘‘A little shorter than I remember it. Reminds me of your flapper days.’’ For a moment he stared at her. Then, as if short of breath, he said, ‘‘You must have had quite a journey.’’ Barely audible. ‘‘How are you?’’
The past throbbed inside her like an engorged muscle. Nadia wanted to reach for his hand, run her fingers against his cheeks; a lightsome, delicate touch. Instead, she stretched her arm through the fencing and began to pass Iain cartons of cigarettes, parcels of dried meats and wrappings of preserved fruits. ‘‘I’m fine.’’ Her eyes, a promise of softness, skimmed over his face. ‘‘Eat this now.’’ It was a tangerine.
He put the tangerine to his mouth, bit into the skin, giving it a long suck. ‘‘What about Mamuchka, how is she?’’ he asked.
‘‘She’s well. She says why couldn’t I be like Maria Carvalho who lives next door. She married a doctor not a Scottish civil servant.’’
Iain grinned. ‘‘And Papashka?’’
‘‘Getting increasingly forgetful, but as good as can be expected given he’ll be eighty this year. He spends most of the day playing chess or Chinese chequers with Yugevny. Poor Mamuchka can’t find half the things in the house because he keeps hiding things.’’
‘‘Hiding things?’’
‘‘In case the Japanese take over the Tabacaria.’’ The corners of her mouth rose fractionally. She had a tin of Pall Mall in her hand. ‘‘These aren’t for smoking, they’re to be used as currency.’’
‘‘Do you have a plan?’’
‘‘There’s a boat that will take us to Macao.’’
‘‘A boat? It’ll be too dangerous escaping by boat. The shipping lanes must be littered with magnetic mines and the Japanese launches are fast and heavily armed. We’ll never outrun them.’’
Nadia ignored his concerns. ‘‘It will be here in three days. You have to tell me where is the best place for me to cut through the wire and when?’’
‘‘You have a wire cutter?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Let me have it.’’
‘‘No, Iain, if you’re caught with it, they’ll behead you.’’
He looked at her. ‘‘The problem with cutting through the wire is that it’ll make a God forsaken racket. Listen to this.’’ He flicked the fence with his wrist and the thin sound reverberated down the channel. ‘‘It’s a big gamble …’’
‘‘I was always a good fan tan player.’’
‘‘If you start snipping through it, the guards are bound to hear.’’
‘‘In that case, someone will have to distract them. Give the guards the food and the tobacco. The same goes for the naughty postcards.’’
‘‘Alright. Meet me here tomorrow night. Same time. We’ll do it then.’’ She nodded, handed him another carton of cigarettes, careful not to snag her arm on the barbed wire. His fingers crossed the threshold. He put his hand on her wrist and she stopped. She felt as though there was little air entering her lungs.
A lengthy moment passed; a long, damp, cocooned silence. Then Iain bundled his loot into a blanket and folded it over the goods, corner-to-corner, twisting the top into a knotted loop to form a handle. ‘‘Now go,’’ he said, ‘‘before anyone sees you.’’ He made to leave.
‘‘Wait.’’
Her heart was surging like a pump.
Under a shudder of moonlight she passed him something more, a manila envelope.
He gave Nadia a look. ‘‘What’s this?’’ he said, pushing his face against the fence, separating shadows from light. Inside was a rectangle of sheeny paper.
‘‘It’s a photograph,’’ she said.
The black and white portrait was a close-up of a child. He squinted, bending the image towards the light. ‘‘Who’s the little girl?’’
A pleading look stretched across her face. Her cheeks turned hot. ‘‘Her name is Valentina. She will be 3 years old in September.’’ A silence. ‘‘I named her after your mother. She’s your daughter, Iain.’’