“I’ve been looking for your chess partners. I tried walking past every block, past each chess table until it got late. You know, lah. Six thirty, seven, and everyone’s gone home for dinner. I’m going to look for them again tomorrow because—” Because who else is left? What else can I do? “—because even though we’ve only spoken once, you’ve told me so much about them that I feel I almost know them. They must know something about you.”
For the next fifteen minutes, as she made her evening meal, Wang Di talked about the new neighborhood. About the mall and how, instead of the smell of fish and water and earth, the market now smelled of plastic. “But the floors are clean and dry, which is good, I suppose. Remember the time I fell near the fish stalls and my ankle went the size of a mango?” She turned and looked at his picture. “Things have changed.”
The Old One had said those exact words as they lay in bed waiting for sleep one night. It had been on the news, the anniversary of the end of the Japanese Occupation. Wang Di found she could not sit still long enough to watch the uniformed men smile and talk about what they did during the war. Even lying down in the dark afterward, her hands danced, fingers twisting around each other even as it sent sharp pains around her bones, up into her arms. He had put his hand over hers, a gesture so rare that it made her look over at him.
“I don’t understand... No one wants to hear about the occupation anymore,” she’d said. “They didn’t back then, so why would they want to now, more than fifty years later? Besides, most of the people are dead.”
“You’re not doing this for other people. You’re doing this for yourself.”
She knew he was thinking about that day. When he tried to tell her about his family, what had happened during the war. How she had reacted, all the air going out of her, as if she had been punched. After that evening, he had tried a few times, but as soon as he brought up anything to do with the war, she had to leave the room. He gave up after a while. And it was only when he stopped that Wang Di realized she had wanted him to keep trying, to wear her down until she was prepared to listen. But it was much, much later before he made any mention of the war again. He had simply announced one morning, over breakfast, that he was leaving to go into the city, something about an archive, about putting away what had happened during the occupation. She had been too scared to ask him what he meant by it. Instead, she reminded him to take his walking stick along—he was in his seventies and was starting to need one on his walks. He had nodded and accompanied her to their corner—pushing the cart loaded with its folding table, the sewing machine, and bags of cloth and things. Set up shop in their usual alleyway, and left. All day, Wang Di had sat at their roadside stall, taking in the bits of sewing she could do and telling the ones who needed measuring out to return later.
“When?” they’d asked, and she had to shake her head. She feared he would never return. But he did, in the early afternoon. Went straight to work at his sewing machine, chatting with her as they waited for customers. He would do this once a week for a month, always returning in the afternoon, always sidestepping the question of what he had been doing and where. One month, that was all it took. After that, for the rest of their years together, he seldom left her alone for a few hours at a time.
“People are different now—they talk about things that we never would. You don’t know until you try.” Then his voice wound lower. “Promise me you will try. Even after.”
She wanted to chide him for saying “after,” tell him that he was crazy. He wasn’t going anywhere, that she wouldn’t allow it. She wanted to say she was old too, that she might go before him. That anything could happen. She wanted to say all this and everything else, things she should have said decades ago when they were younger. But she didn’t. She barely heard herself as she told him yes, she would.
It was with this thought that she went out each morning and evening, making her collection round and filling her pushcart, all the while keeping an eye out for stone tables on the ground floor of each building, and the people sitting around them. During the day, it was mostly women—housewives and women her age waiting for their grandchildren to arrive home from school. The men came out in the evening, one by one, laying out their wooden chess pieces, waiting for someone to sit across from them and start.
She took to going up to them and asking if they had seen the brothers but they (always men, never younger than fifty) seemed to have little patience for anything else outside the square of their chessboard and would keep their eyes on their pieces as she described them: thin, average height, in their sixties, two brothers who looked like brothers.
No one knew who she was referring to.
It was only on the fourth day that someone sat up, nodded. “Yes, yes. I think I know who you’re talking about. I used to play them. They’re really good, especially the—”
“Do you think they’ll be here today?” Finally, Wang Di thought, finally.
“Oh, I haven’t seen them for some time. A few weeks, at least.” He tilted his chin at his opponent. “Don’t they live in one of those buildings? The ones that are getting demolished?”
The opponent shrugged and hunched over the board, tapping his foot to tell Wang Di that it was time for her to go. But she stayed where she was, watching until the first man looked up again.
“Sorry ah, I really don’t know. Maybe they moved.”
Wang Di nodded, thanked him. She felt light. As if what had been keeping her whole was being hollowed out of her. She had a sense of the familiar, and knew at once, what this was. This was what it was like to lose hope, little by little.