It was a week before she found them. Sitting at a table two blocks away from her new home. Leong was busy at a game with someone she didn’t recognize, and Ah Ren was sitting next to his brother, so fixated on the chessboard that he didn’t look up, not once. So she waited. She didn’t play, but saw, from the number of pieces Leong had collected next to him, that it wasn’t going to take much longer.
Eventually Leong said, “Jiang,” ending the game and beaming before he spotted Wang Di. “Ah-mhm!” he called out. “Grandma Chia.”
Wang Di waved. There you are, she wanted to shout, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Instead, she sat down on the just-vacated seat and tried not to shake. Her mouth was dry and she had to swallow once before she continued. “How nice to see you,” she said, wondering how to go on. How to unearth what they might know about the Old One. How to begin. “Listen, I have something to ask you.”
She had rehearsed the words each night as she lay in bed, waiting for sleep. It came out now, stuttering and choked. As if it hurt her to say the words. While she talked, the brothers listened.
“Ah-mhm, I’m not sure I can help,” Leong said. The sun was setting but pinpricks of sweat were starting to collect on his lined forehead.
“Anything will do. Baker Teo told me that he used to work in town, at a shop. Maybe he told you where it was?”
“No, he didn’t.” Leong looked at his brother, who had stayed silent as Wang Di spoke, simply sat on and gazed past her, to a spot just above her ear. “Ah Ren?”
He shook his head.
“I’m sorry, Ah-mhm. But I’m not sure we’re the right people to ask. We saw him often but mostly we talked about chess... The only thing I can recall is that we talked about where we once lived. Which kampong, how everyone used to play outside... things like that.” He looked at his brother again before continuing. “Our parents died during the war. Pa was working at the docks on the night of the air raid. Ma passed away a few years after that. I told him this and he said that he’d lost people too.” The man stopped here and reached into his pocket. Wang Di watched as he brought out a packet of tobacco leaves and began rolling a cigarette. “But I don’t think he said who or how. This was a long time ago, maybe a decade.”
“Oh.” It was the only thing Wang Di could manage. She was about to say thank you when Ah Ren leaned forward. He had been so quiet that she had almost forgotten that he was there at all. When he spoke, it was with a voice deeper than she imagined it would be, steadier.
“His family,” he said. “He told us that they died during the war.”
“Do you—do you remember how? And when?”
“He didn’t say. But he did tell us that they’re buried in Kopi Sua cemetery. That he visits every February on their death anniversary. I remember thinking that it must mean they all died on the same day.”
“Ah Ren, don’t say things you’re not sure about.” To Wang Di he said, “I’m sorry. Sometimes my brother is a little blunt.”
“I’m not making things up. I remember it well. He said February.”
The twelfth of February. This is something, at least, Wang Di thought. She was about to leave when Leong spoke up again.
“He used to talk about you. All the time. He used to tell us how good you were with the customers, how you remembered all their names and what they liked. Told us you became the breadwinner after he had to stop working on account of his age. He talked about you all the time.”
Wang Di did not notice the ache in her knees as she walked home, or the heat, still lingering even as the sky streaked red and purple. There was a quickness to her step, made buoyant by what the brothers had told her. “Twelfth of February,” she chanted. “Twelfth of February. Kopi Sua.”
It was only when she got home that she sank back down to earth.
If Leng had been around, she would have gone over to her apartment. Leng, who used to come over on Saturday afternoons and lean against the grill gate to chat for half an hour, an hour. She would know what to do. She had been there when the Chias moved in. She had been the one who walked her to the market that first week, who had, a few years later, helped boil the herbal concoctions from the sinseh when Wang Di was ill. The last time she saw Leng was late last year, in a care facility. The care worker had shrugged at Wang Di when she’d asked for Lim Poon Leng, and Wang Di had to walk the length of one floor, passing by rooms full of yelling. She had given up and was looking for the exit when she spotted Leng slumped in a wheelchair in front of a blank TV screen. At first Wang Di had tried talking, telling her about the weather, how everyone had been given notice to move out of their building, but Leng had just sat, jabbering wordlessly, making a series of noises that sounded like a toddler learning to speak. “Hum mummm mummm mummm.” She did that for an hour. When Wang Di got back home, she told the Old One that Leng wasn’t Leng anymore, and had never gone back to visit.
Now, in the new flat, she thought about her. Pictured the two of them walking through the cemetery together, Wang Di helping brace the older woman as she peered at the words on each gravestone. She hadn’t been to the cemetery in years but she remembered how large it was. How it was more woodland than cemetery in parts. It always took her half an hour, twenty-five minutes if she was lucky, to arrive at her parents’ graves. Much of the trek would be across uneven ground, would involve ducking past the aerial roots of banyan trees and trying to avoid treading on food offerings laid out on the ground. She had stopped visiting ever since the Old One started to need a walking stick—he would have insisted on accompanying her each time, stubborn as ever. He had never asked why she’d stopped, grateful, maybe, for the small mercy of this avoided conversation and what it implied—how old he was getting, how near the inevitable seemed. She hoped that Meng was still visiting each year. Still trimming away the grass that grew out over their parents. Still painting in their names on the dark stone.
It would be impossible, she told herself. First, there was the matter of finding out the names of Soon Wei’s family members, the name of his first wife. Then there would be the graves. She had asked the brothers if they could help her look for a register, a list of people who were buried in Kopi Sua. Both of them had been apologetic when they told her that they were illiterate, that they’d left school when their father died. Wang Di had wanted to say that she understood but the brothers had gotten up then, murmuring something about returning home.
And so what, if I find them? Then what? she thought. The dead can’t talk.