Wang Di had just arrived at Kopi Sua when it started to rain. A fine rain that seemed like nothing at first but, after ten minutes, began to form a pool on the top of her head so that rivulets of water ran down the sides of her face. Her cotton blouse was damp. Her feet making little damp sounds in her cotton shoes. She cursed herself for forgetting the umbrella. But it didn’t look like rain, she argued uselessly, childishly.
The cemetery was almost deserted. At the gate, the entirety of which was bright green with moss, she had run into a middle-aged couple stepping out of a taxi. She’d decided to ask them for help and was walking toward them when the woman spoke, murmuring something in English. Then they had taken one turn, past a tree, and were gone. Wang Di stared at the land before her, a craggy spread of grass and rock. There were more graves than she remembered. This meant that there was less ground for her to walk on, more spaces in which she had to negotiate every step, pardoning herself whenever she came close to stepping on a paper plate of kueh or a bowl of white rice. Brown hell notes, half-burned and still folded in the shape of gold ingots, clung to the bottom of her shoes so that she had to pick them off and return them to their owners.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Wang Di kept saying.
When the rain finally stopped, she dried her face with her sleeve and dug the walking stick into the ground, plowing past the graves that looked new, well kept. On the bus ride, Wang Di determined that Soon Wei had not visited in ten years. Maybe thirteen. She wished she knew what thirteen years of neglect looked like on a grave but settled on a plan to dismiss the ones that had recently been fed and tended to, then the ones that were engraved with English words instead of Chinese. The next step would be to search for those with a date between 1942 and 1946. Simple as that, she told herself. She did not want to think about what came next, what happened if she found a tombstone that met all the above criteria. It wasn’t as if she would be able to read the words on it. She had an image of herself standing there until someone walked by. It might take hours. Days. That, she hadn’t planned for. Shoved the thought aside when it flitted past her, light as a moth.
The search made her glad that the Old One had asked for an urn but she understood the need for this. This need for ground, for a square of space. Many times, she had to push away branches and twigs, fallen over the stones like a lock of hair. A few were unmarked, identifiable only with painted numbers. Some had photos on them, aged sepia faces peering out at her. Elderly faces and young ones. Too young. Some were flanked by red lions and guards dressed in uniform. Some were entirely crumbled, sinking into the ground like lost ships at sea. She had counted and rejected fifty-five before she realized that she was going to have to return on another day, was leaning on the walking stick, grateful for the cloud cover when she heard rustling, then a voice.
“Thigh bone.”
Rustle, rustle.
“Root.”
Wang Di saw a small object arcing through the air before landing in front of her with a sigh. She made her way over to the voice. An open grave. The smell of earth and black.
“Hello?” she called out. “Who’s there?”
Another pause. “Hello?”
The first thing the man said when he emerged (half-clothed, bandanna on his forehead) was, “Ah-mhm, what are you doing here? It’s almost six.” His face was flushed, as if embarrassed from having been caught talking to himself, or from physical exertion, Wang Di couldn’t tell.
“I’m looking for a grave.”
“It’s almost six. Going to get dark soon. Come, I can walk you to the bus stop.”
“Maybe you could help me. I’m looking for a grave from the years 1942 to 1946. I don’t have the names but there must be a register, right? With the dates in it?”
“Have you been looking through the cemetery like that? At the dates?”
Wang Di nodded.
“Ah-mhm.” He scratched his head. “I have to tell you that some of the graves have been exhumed. You know...dug out for cremation. That’s what I’m doing right now. Making sure that I have every last fragment of the body. The people you’re looking for might not be here anymore.”
“But why... Where do they end up?”
“Oh...in one of the columbariums. Depends on where the next-of-kin decides to put them.”
“And the register? There is a list of all the bodies, all the people, right?”
“Do you have a serial number?”
“No. I don’t.”
“I’m sorry but without a serial number... Who are you looking for? Your relatives?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know,” she said, driving the walking stick into the ground to make sure she wouldn’t fall when she swung around, a hundred and eighty degrees, to go back where she came from.
She told herself she hadn’t lost anything. That the thing she was looking for had already been lost when the Old One died. It was a matter of coming to terms with never having had it in the first place. The search had simply distracted her from the fact of having failed him, of never being able to recover him, his story. No, she hadn’t lost anything.
The fallout occurred a few days later.
It was the way the neighbors huddled in, clucking their tongues outside her door, that did it. That, on top of everything else. She heard their tutting, lizard-like, too familiar, and she was twenty again, taking up too much space in her parents’ attap hut. Feeling as though she should never have returned.
It came back to her. How she had gone out onto the streets for the first time in years and how people had stared, as if they knew just from looking at her. How the neighbors found out and started treating her as if she were contagious, pulling their children away from her, turning to spit whenever they ran into her outside the public outhouse. Word spreading around like grease, getting onto everything. She had tried setting up a stall at the market, against her mother’s protests. And for five days, she had returned home in the afternoon with a full basket, the vegetables turned soft in the heat. So she went round to the cheap eateries that had popped up everywhere to ask if they needed help in the back, cleaning the kitchen, the toilets, anything. Even there, out of the light, she wasn’t wanted. The thing they called her, that they whispered when she had her back turned—“comfort woman”—like a slap to the face, like shutting her in a cupboard. Some of them saying that she had done it for money. That she had been looking for a husband. An easy life.
Even after her marriage, she had felt the shame of it clinging to her. The way a fishmonger never fully got the stench of scales and sea out from under his fingernails. They had walked down the street the morning after their wedding (each having stayed on their side of the bed that night, Wang Di clinging to the edge), Soon Wei showing her the neighborhood. Chinatown. Their first home, a dingy little room smelling of tobacco and cooking oil. I’m someone’s wife now, Wang Di thought, as her husband walked next to her, pointing out the indoor cinema, the best shops to get their provisions, his favorite food stalls, but Wang Di wasn’t listening. Was transfixed, instead, by the appearing and disappearing faces of Huay and Jeomsun, first hiding among the market-goers, then slipping closer, until both of them were walking alongside her. “Where have you been?” she whispered, mindful of her new shoes, the clunky weight of them as she stared at their bare feet. But neither of them replied. Huay was smiling as usual and Jeomsun was holding her gaze with clear eyes that said everything and nothing. “You have to go,” she eventually said, though she was dismayed when they did, vanishing as easily as children playing hide-and-seek. She was helping Soon Wei pick out a batch of vegetables from a stall, was making an effort to smile at him, when she saw Huay again, ten paces away from her. This time, Huay had something in her arms. She felt a jolt when she saw who it was, saw the furred crown of his head, his too-pale skin.
“Cheng Xun,” she said out loud, and pushed past her husband, scattering green onto the ground. By the time she got to them, they were gone again and she was left standing in the middle of the market. “Where did you... Cheng Xun?”
She was still searching for them, was spinning around in her confusion when Soon Wei reached her, approaching slowly as if she were a wild animal one needed to be careful with. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m—” She looked up and saw that everyone was watching, backing away a little. “It’s just...”
“Don’t mind them. Busybodies. Don’t give them a moment’s notice.” And he had given her his arm. She had slipped her hand into the crook of it. Everyone stared to show that it wasn’t done, contact like that, not even between man and wife. “Come, come,” he hushed, and they had walked off. Got the groceries for the week. The first of many Sundays.
Wang Di heard the Old One’s voice now. Gravelly with age. Don’t mind them.
“I know, I know. You’re right but...”
It was the neighbors. Their whispers and looks that did it, made her habit creep back into her bones like pain from an old break. Along with it came memories of the other women. The ones she had left behind. Her friends. Huay, especially. Her bitten nails. The way she drew a perfect parting down the center of her hair each morning, even when she was ill. All of her. Flitting through the open door of Wang Di’s mind, like a bird flown into a room, trapped and panicked.
She began again with little things. Hard-boiled sweets, a kaleidoscope of colors in their cellophane wrappers. Matchboxes filched from coffee-shop tables. Plastic bags blowing in the wind, which she caught with the toe of her shoe. Little things that she could fit into her pockets. She was almost proud. Felt like she could say to him, See? Nothing in my cart.
When her gleanings stopped fitting into her pockets, she started negotiating.
“I’ll throw out the pile of leaflets,” she said as she returned home with a box of videotapes. A small plastic aquarium with a few stones in it in exchange for getting rid of a pair of scissors, so rusted over it wouldn’t open again. A chipped vase for a pair of shoes that was missing most of one sole. She filled her new home with it, took out the news clippings he had cut and plastered them on the wall again, as if to say, See? You’re the one who started it in the first place. She took the rustling of the curtains, or a sudden burst of rain, for his disapproval.
“Last time, last time. I promise.”
It was only when she woke up one morning to a flat she could hardly recognize, half filled with things from outside in place of the belongings the two of them had bought and saved up for over the decades, that she thought she had to stop. Again. It was the cutlery that did it. Getting up at six and opening the drawer to find it almost empty except for a pair of chopsticks, a spoon, and a ladle. She thought she had been robbed until she remembered that she had put out a large coffee can crammed full with cutlery and utensils the day before in return for bringing home a Lego bucket. The curtains had flapped when she came in and she had put her hands up and said, “I know, I know,” gone around looking for something to trade in, finally settling for the drawer full of kitchen utensils. Things that she would never need again, she told herself. No more reunion dinners, folding a batch of pork dumplings all afternoon for the New Year Eve’s meal, cooking up a pot of chicken curry that would last a week. Or savoring the look on his face as he tiptoed over to the pot to have a look at the curry bubbling and rolling over the fire.
She got to the void deck as quickly as she could but the bin had been emptied and the coffee can was nowhere to be seen. Not next to it or behind it, when she moved it around to check. She was just straightening up, shifting the bin back into place, when the lift pinged and the neighbor walked out, fluorescent-yellow track shoes on her feet, a towel around her neck.
“Oh,” the neighbor said, backing away a little, as if startled by a stray cat.
“Morning.” The greeting fell out of her mouth like an apology. She didn’t mean to say it. Didn’t know why she did.
More for the ladies to talk about. And then, with a stab of regret: I used to have friends too, she thought. She wondered where Jeomsun was. Whether Huay’s people had ever found out about her. Tried to picture what they might look like now, the two of them attritioned by the passing of fifty-five years: Huay, shrunk small and plump; Jeomsun, leaning into a walking cane with her strong arms. Wang Di tried to hold on to those images but they were quickly replaced by others more familiar to her. Two women, infinitely young. Bruises inked on their faces and bodies. Dirt and skin under their nails because they had stopped caring. A pool of water gathering in the hollow of Huay’s clavicle.
Wang Di rode the lift back up, closed the door and looked around her, at the things she had brought in over the course of the last few weeks. All to obscure the white walls, the space within her empty little cage. Soon, there would be enough even to block out the windows and she wouldn’t have to hear the voices of other people, sailing up with the hot air, the sound of other lives going on around her, creeping into her dreams.
To meet the silence that greeted her each day, she filled the kitchen with sounds: the kettle’s sharp cry, the round splash of hot water into her tin mug, and the clinks her spoon made while she stirred in a half teaspoon of sugar. These were sounds she was used to. She poured coffee into two mugs, put pastries on two plates, same as every afternoon. Then she turned around to look at her new apartment, at how she had, in the span of mere weeks, gathered and crammed so much into the bit of space that it was starting to look exactly like her previous flat, the home she had lived in for years and years. The Old One had tried to stop it from getting out of hand in the very beginning, the first year they were married. Once he went as far as leaving the flat with a filled trash bag when it was still dark out so that he could get rid of them without her knowing. It took her a day to realize that they were gone; the things he had taken were old clothes, washed, worn, and mended until they couldn’t be saved anymore. Instead of discarding them, Wang Di had pushed them into the back of the wardrobe. She told herself that she couldn’t live without them—the buttons that could be repurposed, the quilts she could patch together with their varying block and floral patterns of blue and pink and green. When she realized that he had disposed of the lot of them, the absence of these objects—their very potential—lurked between them like a third party in their marriage. Less than a week later, she had already begun assembling a small collection of plastic bottles, string, and shopping bags in the wardrobe, beneath her trousers and under things. It took little time for them to spill over and into the sleeping area. The Old One left them alone this time.
Now, she pictured undoing all of it—pulling open the tops of the boxes in the kitchen so that their insides, a mass of red or blue plastic bags, sprang out. There were four boxes filled with these, and one with red rubber bands, all coiled into each other. Under the bed were loosely bound bales of cotton and satin, more boxes, and one suitcase falling apart but filled with cloth samples. And the dining table. That would be last. She thought about sweeping everything on it into a large trash bag; it was covered with mail that had arrived since she moved in—all of it lay unopened, unread.
What would happen if I got rid of it all? Nothing, she told herself, even as the thought sat her down, making the chair yelp. She would get rid of everything except for the large furniture and kitchen things. Except for the Old One. Except for his things.
That night, she had just closed her eyes when she heard him. A long, throaty exhale, just the kind of sound he used to make when he was falling asleep. She was so sure of it that she sat up and put the light on, even touched his pillow (his side of the bed, the sheets, which she was surprised to find were cool) to make sure that he hadn’t been there, wasn’t still there, really, it was just her ears playing tricks. In the end she sat up half the night listening out for him. Her mind wandering back to their first evening together after their truncated wedding ceremony where the only guests had been her parents and Meng. They had not touched each other then. Not that first night. Nor the next. He hadn’t asked for anything from her. Not even tried to until she went to him, the end of that week because she had wanted to. She had been nervous, going to bed. Her head had been filled with the scent and warmth of him, gathered in her all day. And she had moved toward him, under the thin covers, after he settled in. Pushed her face into his chest the way she’d seen that starlet with her beloved in the only movie she’d ever watched. Soon Wei had taken his time. Undressing himself before asking her if it was okay to undress her as well. Lifting her top off her, as if he was afraid to even brush her skin with the cool cotton, and then kissing her face. First her left cheek, then her right, before moving on to her neck and collarbones. How different he had been. Wang Di was glad she remembered this. The details as fine as if they’d been sketched just yesterday. That night, as she listened out for him, she let herself bathe in this one memory until she fell asleep again.
The next day, she sleepwalked through her collection round, wanting to hold on to the feeling of him almost being there.
It was this that slowed her down. She was opening the door to her apartment when she heard the phone and hobbled over just in time to pick it up and hear a solid click, then the dial tone. Still, she held on to the receiver and whispered, “Hello, hello? Is that you?” before putting it back in its cradle.
“If that was you, call me again. I needed time but now I’m ready. Call me.” Even as she said this, she was ridiculing herself. Stupid old woman. Crazy old woman. Like the neighbors said.