by Yangsze Choo
Or a retrieval.
“That doctor lives further away than the other foreigners,” the driver says. “I wouldn’t walk here at night. It’s dangerous.”
“Why?”
“A lot of dogs have been eaten recently. Taken even when they were chained to the house. Only the collars and heads were left.”
Ren’s heart squeezes. There’s a buzzing in his ears. Is it possible that it has started again, so soon? “Was it a tiger?”
“Leopard’s more likely. The foreigners say they’ll hunt it. Anyway, you shouldn’t wander around when it gets dark.”
They pull up at the bottom of a long curving drive, past the clipped English lawn to a sprawling white bungalow. The driver honks the horn twice, and after a long pause, a skinny Chinese man emerges onto the covered veranda, wiping his hands on a white apron. As Ren clambers down, he thanks the lorry driver over the rattle of rain.
The man says, “Take care of yourself.”
Bracing himself, Ren makes a mad dash up the driveway into shelter. The pelting rain soaks him, and he hesitates at the door, worried about the water pooling on the wide teak planks. In the front room of the house, an Englishman is writing a letter. He’s seated at a table, but when Ren is shown in, he rises with an enquiring look. He’s thinner and younger than Dr. MacFarlane. It’s hard to gauge his expression behind the twin reflections of his glasses.
Ren sets the battered carpetbag down and reaches into it for the letter, presenting it politely with two hands. The new doctor slits the envelope precisely open with a silver letter opener. Dr. MacFarlane used to open letters with his stubby finger and thumb. Ren drops his eyes. It isn’t good to compare them.
Now that he has delivered the letter, Ren feels a great weariness in his legs. The instructions that he memorized seem hazy; the room tilts around him.
* * *
William Acton examines the piece of paper he’s been handed. It comes from Kamunting, that little village next to Taiping. The handwriting is spiky and tremulous, the hand of a sick man.
Dear Acton,
I write with little ceremony, I’m afraid. I’ve left it too long and can barely hold a pen. With no relatives worth recommending, I’m sending a bequest: one of my most interesting finds, to whom I hope you’ll give a good home. I sincerely recommend my Chinese houseboy, Ren. Though young, he is trained and trustworthy. It is only for a few years until he gains his majority. I think you will find yourselves well suited.
Yours, etc. etc.
John MacFarlane, M.D.
William reads the letter twice and looks up. The boy stands in front of him, water trickling through his cropped hair and down his thin neck.
“Is your name Ren?”
The boy nods.
“You used to work for Dr. MacFarlane?”
Again, the silent nod.
William considers him. “Well, now you work for me.”
As he examines the boy’s anxious young face, he wonders whether it is rain or tears running down his cheeks.
4
Ipoh
Friday, June 5th
Since I’d picked up that horrible souvenir from the salesman’s pocket, I was unable to think of much else. The shriveled finger haunted my thoughts, even though I hid it in a cardboard box in the dance-hall dressing room. I didn’t want to have it anywhere near me, let alone take it back to the dressmaker’s shop where I boarded.
Mrs. Tham, the tiny, beaky-faced dressmaker to whom I was apprenticed, was a friend of a friend of my mother’s, a tenuous connection that I was grateful for. Without it, my stepfather would never have allowed me to move out of the house. However, Mrs. Tham came with an unspoken condition: that she should have free access to my private possessions at any time. It was an annoying but small price to pay for freedom. So I said nothing, even when the little traps I set—thread caught in a drawer, a book open at a certain page—were invariably disturbed. She’d given me a room key, but since she obviously had her own, it was quite useless. Leaving a mummified finger in that room would be like throwing a lizard to a crow.
So it stayed in the dressing room of the May Flower, and I lived in constant fear that one of the cleaners would find it. I considered turning it in to the office, pretending that I’d discovered it on the floor. Several times I actually picked up the horrid thing and started down the corridor, yet somehow I always turned back. The longer I hesitated, the more suspicious the whole affair seemed. I remembered the Mama’s disapproving glance when we were dancing; she might think I was a pickpocket who’d had second thoughts. Or perhaps the finger itself held a dark magic that made it difficult to get rid of. A watery blue shadow, that made the glass vial colder than it should be.
I’d told Hui of course. Her plump, pretty face creased. “Ugh! How can you bear to touch it?”
Technically, I was only touching the glass bottle, but she was right—it was unsettling. The skin had blackened and shriveled so that the finger resembled a withered twig. Only the telltale crooked joint and yellowed fingernail prompted a lurch of recognition. There was a sticker on the metal lid with a number: 168, a lucky combination that sounded, in Cantonese, like “fortune all the way.”
Hui said, “Are you going to throw it out?”
“I don’t know. He might come looking for it.”
So far there’d been no sign of the salesman, but he knew my real name.
“Ji Lin” was the Cantonese way of pronouncing it; in Mandarin, it would be “Zhi Lian.” The Ji in my name wasn’t commonly used for girls. It was the character for zhi, or knowledge, one of the five Confucian Virtues. The others were benevolence, righteousness, order, and integrity. Chinese are particularly fond of matched sets and the Five Virtues were the sum of qualities that made up a perfect man. So it was a bit odd that a girl like me should be named for knowledge. If I’d been named something feminine and delicate like “Precious Jade” or “Fragrant Lily,” things might have turned out differently.
* * *
“Such a peculiar name for a girl.”
I was ten years old, a skinny child with large eyes. The local matchmaker, an old lady, had come to call on my widowed mother.
“Her father named her.” My mother gave a nervous smile.
“I suppose you were expecting a son,” said the matchmaker. “Well, I’ve good news for you. You might get one.”
It had been three years since my father had died of pneumonia. Three years of missing his quiet presence, and three years of difficult widowhood for my mother. Her frail figure was more suited to reclining on a chaise than doing other people’s sewing and washing. The skin peeled off her pretty hands, now rough and red. Previously, my mother had put off all talk of matchmaking, but today she seemed especially dispirited. It was very hot and still. The purple bougainvillea outside trembled in the heat.
“He’s a tin-ore dealer from Falim,” said the matchmaker. “A widower with one son. He’s no spring chicken, but neither are you.”
My mother plucked at an invisible thread, then gave a slight nod. The matchmaker looked pleased.
The Kinta Valley in which we lived held the richest tin deposits in the world, and there were dozens of mines, both large and small, nearby. Tin-ore dealers made a good living, and he could have sent to China for a wife, but he’d heard my mother was beautiful. There were other candidates, of course. Better ones. Women who’d never been married. But it was worth a try. Crouching closer to eavesdrop, I hoped desperately that this man would choose one of them instead, but I had an unlucky feeling about it.
* * *
Shin and I, future step-siblings-to-be, met when his father came to call on my mother. It was a very straightforward meeting. No one bothered to pretend that there was some romantic pretext. They brought Chinese sponge cakes wrapped in paper from a local bakery. For years afterwards, I was unable to swallow those soft steamed cakes without choking.
Shin’s father was a stern-looking man, but his expression softened when he saw my mother. It wa
s rumored that his late wife had also been a beauty. He had an eye for attractive women, though, of course, he didn’t visit prostitutes, the matchmaker had assured my mother. He was very serious, financially stable, and neither gambled nor drank. Studying his face surreptitiously, I thought he looked hard and humorless.
“And this is Ji Lin,” my mother said, propelling me forward. Wearing my best dress, outgrown so that my knobby knees stuck out, I dropped my head shyly.
“My son’s name is Shin,” he said. “Written with the character xin. The two of them are already like brother and sister.”
The matchmaker looked pleased. “What a coincidence! That makes two of the five Confucian Virtues. You’d better have three more children so you can complete the set.”
Everyone laughed, even my mother, smiling nervously and showing her pretty teeth. I didn’t. It was true though. With the zhi in my name for wisdom, and xin in Shin’s for integrity, we made up part of a matched set, though the fact that it was incomplete was a bit jarring.
I glanced at Shin to see if he found any of this amusing. He had sharp, bright eyes under thick brows, and when he saw me looking at him, he scowled.
I don’t like you, either, I thought, overcome with anxiety for my mother. She’d never been strong and bearing three more children would be hard for her. Still, I’d no say in the matter, and within a month, the marriage negotiations were concluded and we were settled at my new stepfather’s shophouse in Falim.
Falim was a village on the outskirts of Ipoh, little more than a few lanes of Chinese shophouses, their long narrow bodies sandwiched next to each other with shared walls. My stepfather’s shop was on the main street, Lahat Road. It was dark and cool, with two open courtyards breaking up its serpentine length. The big upstairs bedroom over the front was for the newlyweds, and I was to have, for the first time in my life, my own room at the back, next to Shin’s. A windowless corridor ran lengthwise beside the two small rooms, which were stacked in front of each other like railway cars. Light entered the hallway only if our doors were open.
Shin had barely spoken to me during the whole rushed courtship and marriage, though he’d behaved very well. We were exactly the same age; in fact, it turned out that we were born on the same day, though I was older by five hours. To top it off, my stepfather’s surname was also “Lee,” so there was no need to even change names. The matchmaker was pleased with herself, though it seemed like a horrible trick of fate to me, shoehorning me into a new family where even my birthday would no longer be mine. Shin greeted my mother politely but coldly, and avoided me. I was convinced that he didn’t like us.
In private, I’d begged my mother to reconsider but she’d only touched my hair. “It’s better for us this way.” Besides, she seemed to have taken an odd liking to my stepfather. When his admiring gaze rested on her, her cheeks turned pink. He’d given us money in red packets to buy a simple trousseau for the wedding, and my mother had been unexpectedly excited about it. “New dresses—for you and for me!” she’d said, fanning the bank notes out on our worn cotton bedspread.
That first night at the new house, I was frightened. It was so much larger than the tiny wooden dwelling, one room with a step-down, earthen-floored kitchen, that my mother and I had lived in. This shophouse was both a business and a residence, and downstairs seemed a vast and hollow space. My new stepfather was a middleman who bought tin ore from small-time gravel pump miners and dulang washers, women who panned tin ore from old mines and streams, to resell to the large smelters like the Straits Trading Company.
It was a silent, dark shop. Prosperous, though my stepfather was tightlipped and tightfisted. Hardly anyone came unless they had business selling tin, and the front and back were shuttered with iron grates to prevent theft of the stockpiled ore. As the heavy double doors banged shut behind us that first day, my heart sank.
At bedtime, my mother gave me a kiss and told me to run along. She looked embarrassed, and I realized that from now on, she wouldn’t be sleeping in the same room with me. I could no longer drag my thin pallet next to hers or burrow into her arms. Instead, she belonged to my stepfather, who was watching us silently.
I glanced up at the wooden staircase that yawned into the darkness of the upper floor. I’d never slept in a two-story building before, but Shin went straight up. I hurried after him.
“Good night,” I said. I knew he could talk if he wanted to. That very morning, when we were moving our last few belongings in, I’d seen him laughing and running with his friends outside. Shin looked at me. I thought that if this were my house and some strange woman and her child moved in, I’d probably be angry, too, but he had a curious expression, almost pitying.
“It’s too late for you now,” he said. “But good night.”
* * *
Now as I examined the bottle that I’d taken from the salesman’s pocket, I wondered what Shin would make of it. It occurred to me that there were animals with fingers, too.
“Suppose this isn’t even human?” I said to Hui, who was mending her skirt.
“You mean, like a monkey’s finger?” Hui’s nose wrinkled. Clearly, this idea was just as repulsive to her.
“It would have to be big—a gibbon or maybe even an orangutan.”
“A doctor might be able to tell,” Hui bit off her thread thoughtfully. “Though I don’t know how you’d find one to examine it.”
But I did have someone to ask. Someone who was studying anatomy, even if he was only a second-year medical student. Someone who’d proven, over the years, that he could keep a secret.
Shin would be back from Singapore next week. He hadn’t been home for almost a year, and even then, only briefly. The last holiday he’d worked as a hospital orderly in Singapore for extra income. His letters to me, never frequent, had petered out, and I’d stopped waiting for them. Perhaps it was better not to hear about his new friends or the lectures he attended. I was so envious of Shin that sometimes a bitter taste would flood my mouth. Yet I should be happy for him. He’d managed to get away.
Since I’d left school, my life had been a complete waste of time. A scheme to train as a teacher had fallen through when my stepfather discovered that new teachers could potentially be dispatched to any village or town in Malaya. Out of the question, he said, for an unmarried girl. Nurse-training was even more unsuitable. I’d have to sponge-bathe strangers and dispose of their body fluids. In any case, I didn’t have the money. My stepfather offered the cold reminder that I’d been permitted to stay on at school at his expense, long after most girls had dropped out. His opinion was that I ought to stay decently at home, clerking for him until I got married; it was only grudgingly that he’d even allowed my dressmaking apprenticeship.
* * *
There was a knock at the dressing-room door. I tucked the glass vial into my handkerchief.
“Come in!” Hui sang out.
It was one of the doormen, the younger one. He pushed the door open with an embarrassed air. The dressing room was dance-hostess territory, though at the moment only Hui and I were there.
“You know that salesman you asked me about the other day?”
I was instantly alert. “Did he come back again?”
His eyes shied away from the dresses draped over the backs of chairs, the traces of spilled powder on the dressing table.
“Is this him?” He held out a newspaper, folded open to the obituary section. Chan Yew Cheung, twenty-eight years old. Suddenly, on June 4th. Beloved husband. And there was a grainy photograph, obviously a formal portrait. His hair was slicked back and his expression serious, the confident smirk laid aside, but it was the same man.
I pressed my hand against my mouth. All this time the stolen finger had been weighing on my mind, the man himself had been lying cold and stiff in a mortuary somewhere.
“Did you know him well?” asked the doorman.
I shook my head.
The obituary was a small notice, but the word “suddenly” had an ominous air. So the s
alesman’s prediction about being lucky had been wrong. Because according to my calculations, he’d died the day after our encounter.
With a shudder, I put the glass bottle, wrapped in my handkerchief, on the table. It seemed heavier than it ought to have been.
Hui said, “You don’t think it’s witchcraft, do you?”
“Of course not.” But I couldn’t help recalling a Buddhist statue I’d seen as a child. It was a little thing made of ivory, no bigger than this finger. The monk who’d shown it to us had said that a thief had once stolen it, but no matter how often he tried to sell or throw it away, it reappeared in his possession until, guilt-stricken, he’d returned it to the temple. There were other local tales as well, such as the toyol, a child spirit made from the bone of a murdered infant. Kept by a sorcerer, it was used to steal, run errands, and even commit murder. Once invoked, it was almost impossible to get rid of, save by proper burial.
I studied the newspaper carefully. The funeral would be held this weekend in the nearby town of Papan, a bit farther out from my family home in Falim. I was due back for a visit; perhaps I could return the finger. Give it to his family, or drop it in his coffin so it could be buried with him, though I wasn’t sure how to manage it. What I was certain about, however, was that I didn’t want to keep it.
5
Batu Gajah
Wednesday, June 3rd
The person who really runs the new doctor’s household is a taciturn Chinese cook named Ah Long. He’s the one who takes charge of Ren, dripping wet as he is, and ushers him through the bowels of the house to the servants’ quarters in the back. The outbuildings are separated by a covered walkway, but it’s raining so hard that the spray wets them to the knees.
It’s difficult for Ren to judge adults’ ages, but Ah Long seems old to him. A wiry man with knotted arms, he offers Ren a rough cotton towel.
