by Ho Sok Fong
The best destination is probably the savannah. Yes, that’s it, then we could really run away from it all. But then again, I’m not sure I could bear to be completely forgotten. It’s hard to say, will this calm us down or break our heart?
At the thought of being completely forgotten, tears well up. The Gombak River flows a long, long way. Why so sorrowful, why so reluctant to leave?
Anyway, all we have is this blind horse. Pass through a forest that crashes like the sea, follow the Gombak River down the mountain. Stroke the horse’s ears, press bare feet into the stirrups; I have to learn to handle a blind horse. I feel that Aminah and I are bound together like a thick scab plastered over a throbbing heart. Sunlight explodes from behind the trees and dazzles my eyes. Aminah, I call. She abides in me, still and quiet, and later we will be each other’s secret, one that neither of us can deny. The horse is quiet, the stones are smooth, the forest is thick, the coast is far away.
For a second I watch a blade of grass. I do not move. I watch a wavering thread of light for a long, long time. When you don’t say or think anything, it’s like sinking into mud. Once everything is completely gone, I’ll speak from my heart, right into the air. Please blow away my longing. Slide down this slope, follow the expressway, traverse fields and lichen-encrusted mounds, pass through container ports, climb up slopes, rise above thundering freight trucks and jangling train rails, blow over the grass by the tracks and scatter the sand from between the sleepers, one grain at a time, don’t stir up dust, keep on until you get to his house. Knock over the fence and pass by the orange trees. If the stuffiness is getting to him, he’ll appreciate the breeze.
After a while, the tree-sea roars. The wind swoops down from the tall, tall sky and lands on top of me.
The rain stops for two days and the leaves start to rustle as they walk. Aminah and I sit very still and quiet, drying our toes in the sun.
October
“This would lure him on for many a night to come to dreams of sea and wide horizons.”
— Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask
A NORTH WIND. A quiet as sturdy as a cliff face against the ocean.
The sea breeze blew across Kikuko’s temples and inside her flower-patterned collar. October, season of shifting winds; of winds in chaos. A southwesterly in the morning could turn to a northeasterly by afternoon, making it a perilous time for voyages at sea. Set off for Sulawesi and you might end up drifting toward Palawan. Venture into the Pacific and you might never come back.
In the balloon, it would be calm to start with, because it would sit inside the wind. But then would come a pause, a switch in direction, a sudden breath of warm air. The earth would spin in giddy circles down below—roofs, ship masts, people; all bright as stars. The bay a blue plate, revolving slowly from west to east, and the air silent, undetectable except for the currents dragging you along, pushing away the shoreline beneath your feet. Ocean waves would knit together and surge forward as a blazing, shimmering expanse.
It was the wrong season for flying, but Sir Kimson Wings, highest-ranking official in the North Borneo Armed Constabulary, would not take no for an answer. Hans, the Dutchman, had informed him that conditions were most stable over Sandakan.
“The wind is changing,” said Sir Kimson. “It’ll chuck it down soon.”
“Rain’s no problem,” said Hans. “There’s, there’s plenty of hot air.”
“It won’t fall? Good to hear. Kikuko, you first. We can put a trapeze in, you can swing around under the basket. You’ll love it!”
Bullshit, thought Kikuko. Aloud, she said, “But my dear sir, I thought all I had to do was stand in the basket while we made a quick loop around Sandakan? And then didn’t you say there’d be a magnificent ship, coming to take me for a sail?”
“Let’s shake it up a bit! Set Sandakan on fire, give people something to look at. Maybe one day they’ll set up a balloon championship,” replied Sir Kimson.
A dozen assistants were scattered across the lawn around the balloon, each holding a bamboo pole hooked to a net over the lower half. They kept the casing taut, lest the air flow stopped and the whole thing collapsed in flames.
Despite the breeze, Sir Kimson’s whiskers glistened with sweat and damp patches extended along his back and under his arms. A long white tube, perhaps for a telescope, was slung across his shoulders. He stepped into the basket and made an exuberant little turn; there was room for three or four passengers. Kikuko peered up into the balloon and saw a small burner with a glowing yellow flame.
“To go up, just, just turn up the fire, and up she goes,” said Hans.
Hans was short and slight, with eyes that rolled upward as he spoke, as though to watch a film playing inside his head. He explained how to light the fire, direct the hot air, open and close the deflation vent.
“For steering, I apologize, but there’s, there’s not much you can do with this kind of equipment,” he said. “Not unless it’s a Zeppelin. And, unfortunately, I don’t know about Zeppelins. Only hot-air balloons.”
“Who cares?” exclaimed Sir Kimson. “That German dogshit can go to hell!”
“Yes, yes, too right. Germans, no point in that. Float, just float away, it’s the purest feeling of all, leaving the earth behind.”
Kikuko listened demurely, clasping her parasol. The burner hissed. What would it feel like to fly in this thing?
The balloon was very big and the burner looked far too small to inflate it. They waited a good long while, but the casing remained slack. They waited until a fine drizzle rustled against Kikuko’s parasol. Darkness fell.
“Shit, you goddamn celaka!” fumed Sir Kimson.
“No need to stop,” said Hans. “It’s fine, the burner’s still going.”
But it was no use. The drizzle blew in sideways, cold and wet against their exposed arms and toes, and the balloon’s red fabric slowly shriveled. Then a gust of wind came through and defeated it once and for all, toppling it across the dampened grass, where it lay splayed and enormous.
The burner went out, and they had to drag the whole contraption across to the shed, out of the rain.
Kimson stared at the blurred gray lawn, his eyes glazed with boredom.
“It had better fly tomorrow, palui. For two weeks you have been wasting my time and money…”
Hans wrung out his hat and put it back on. The resulting creases made him look slightly comical, as if he had a dishcloth on his head.
“Perhaps, the balloon, somewhere, a leak,” he said. “They can be hard to find, because the layers—there’s taffeta, paper, more taffeta…”
“Are you a man or not? Fix the fucking leak! Or don’t you even have the guts for that?” bellowed Sir Kimson.
Sir Kimson had a face of thick black whiskers, which made him look a lot like Jesus, as depicted in paintings around town. He had lived in North Borneo for over thirty years, which was even longer than Kikuko. Earlier in his posting, he was stationed in Api, where his arsenal of guns made nearby pirates piss themselves in terror. Even the notorious Caos, the father-son duo that had been rampaging across the South Seas for more than three decades, had been terrified into submission; they had vanished shortly after Sir Kimson had arrived. He had only recently been transferred to Sandakan. His troops included Ceylonese and Bengali soldiers, as well as indigenous Dusun. The latter knew the terrain and were famed for their tenacity and endurance, making them expert at tracking escaped prisoners.
There were all sorts of rumors about Sir Kimson, each one painting him as a terrifying force of nature. Even Kikuko found herself racked with nerves in his presence.
But her pulse still quickened whenever she recalled his tenderness at their very first meeting. They had been at church, and he had knelt down to free the hem of her skirt from where it had caught on a pew. At every meeting thereafter, he became more and more of a mystery to her. Kikuko felt like she was interacting not with one man, but with a host of different people, all sprung from the same root. Inside Sir Kim
son were children, elderly people, young men, even a few women.
Sitting beside him now, Kikuko was uneasy. The flames in the brazier felt like they were burning through her temples. She knew what it was, bubbling away on top. The house doors had slammed shut. The butler, who usually lurked gloomily around the drawing room, had slipped away somewhere. Over the last few weeks, the housemaids had been dwindling, and it made Kikuko suspicious: Was Sir Kimson eating them? She thought of the dinner party on her first visit to the house, when a petrified kitchen girl had dropped a plate of roast chicken and turned as green with fear as someone facing a firing squad.
Although, in truth, Sir Kimson was not overly fond of guns. He preferred whips and doing things “the good old-fashioned Malay way.” Which meant that after the whips came salt, immersion in the river, nails, mud, and earthworms stuffed into the seven vital apertures of the head.
“The old aristos were real gila babi! Crazy, crazy pigs!” he declared. “Sat around with their fat bellies, inventing rules. Pity they’re all Muslim now. It’s all just about inheritance these days.”
He poked a scalding metal stick into the bowl of a very long pipe, then gently shook out a clump of black paste.
“Anyway, death is too good for that cocksucking governor and his monkey secretary. He doesn’t know who I am. Exile him to the desert islands! Let the savages give him hell.”
He said nothing further. He inhaled deeply on the opium pipe and let thick white smoke curl from his nose. His eyes turned soft and contented. A little while later he passed the pipe to Kikuko, raising his chin in her direction. At first, she was reluctant to take it. Then, without quite intending to, she complied. Smoke coiled gracefully before her eyes.
The letter that had made him so angry danced in the flames and was swallowed up.
Time pitter-pattered back and forth. A map hung on the wall. Kikuko knew that it was a map, but not what it showed. It might have shown Japan, because Sir Kimson had once said to her, “You see it? That little prick that’s flown out of the trousers and come down splat in the Pacific? Your damned emperor is a little crotch louse, creeping in bush hair from the day he was born. No brain, no balls, and he thinks he can take Shandong!”
Now he threw her onto a strange chair, curved like an enormous cow horn. In an echo of its splayed lines, he wrenched her legs apart.
“Getek cunt!” he said. “Idiot telingung woman. Whore.”
He always shamed her like this. Desire rose in her forehead and rolled in waves to her groin. She feared him but she wanted him. She wanted to caress him and soothe away his troubles, but he didn’t mention them again. It was as though he’d never even laid eyes on that enraging directive from the governor general’s office, now ashes on the table.
The final smear of sun across the window made her think of the altar in St. Michael’s church. The countless Sundays she had spent enduring those interminable sermons, delivered in unbearable, incomprehensible English. And here was this rogue with his garble of Sulawesi, Hakka, and mixed-up English words. The church English was too exalted for her to understand, but understanding Sir Kimson’s only served to humiliate her.
The evening mist had settled in. The only light came from the little opium brazier. There he was, stark naked now, towering over her, God, they looked so alike—Kikuko was frightened again. Sometimes, fantasy took over and she could believe that Sir Kimson and Pastor Chiu were two little children cleaved apart by the events of August. She watched his skin ripple as he thrusted and imagined the soul inside it. Instantly, she was boiling hot and shuddering, on the verge of passing out.
If you despise me, she thought, I can’t bear it, it hurts, it hurts…
It made her want to die. Her world was trapped between two dark currents. When Sir Kimson released her, they moved to the Persian rug, where he fucked her hard. This version of Kimson was uncharacteristically sweet, and Kikuko sucked at him as thirstily as a newly hatched insect.
Growing a chrysalis was easy; retreating to a cave and sleeping until dark was easier still. But she felt old, and that if she kept on being fearful, the gates of time would slam shut forever. So she had done something she would never normally have done: she had scraped off her shell and risked throwing her whole body into the open. It felt like she had stripped off her clothes and hurled herself into a ravine, where the mud along the bottom was soft but full of thorns, growing as frenziedly as weeds. One brush and they sank into her bones, making her body froth and bubble.
Since September, she had made up her mind: even if it was not just her imagination, even if those thorns were real, she would love them.
The rain grew heavier, into a crashing shroud. She felt a sudden, consuming urge to go somewhere far away. But she knew the sky would be no different, and so she stayed inside the pouring night. Dry land was a long way off, but paradise was near.
She could see the rain pooling in the grooves of the windowsill. The rolling roof tiles beyond looked close enough to touch.
“Slut,” said Sir Kimson. “You’re wet enough to sink a boat.”
When he hurt her, she fell to the bottom of the ravine. But then he would be considerate again, and she’d gently float back up.
It isn’t real, she told herself. Sir Kimson is Sir Kimson, Pastor Chiu is Pastor Chiu. Once the rush of the opium wore off, her earlier anguish swept back in. She studied Sir Kimson’s face as she put on her clothes.
It was the cheekbones, she decided. The cheekbones stretched out the lines of his cheeks. Add to that an intense, concentrated gaze, a pair of protruding lips, and that was both their faces, almost mystically identical. Oh, they are so alike, she thought. Maybe I’m the only one who’s noticed.
She’d known Sir Kimson for less than two months, since August. He had walked ahead of her down the church aisle and sat at the opposite end of her pew. By that time, Pastor Chiu was already on the ship home. To win support from friends, he’d said. He planned to stay three months and take the next season’s ship back. But he’d be off again before long, leaving Sandakan for Canton, to join Sun Yat-sen’s alliance.
Kikuko had intended to have a quiet morning. And she had, until she saw Sir Kimson’s face; then she felt caught on a hook. When she walked out of the church that Sunday, she was so unsteady that she almost fell down the stairs.
Pastor White, devout man of God, could not have imagined that by urging Kikuko to pray, he would be thrusting her into the arms of this knighted monster.
Early the previous year, Pastor White had paid his first visit to what people called her “coffee house,” to talk to her about Jesus. He came quite a few times after that, bringing psalms translated into Japanese, which he would read aloud: “O my soul, thou hast said unto the Lord, Thou art my Lord: my goodness extendeth not to thee.” For the most part, Kikuko was unmoved, although there was one sentence that made her so indignant she had to laugh.
“Thou hast redeemed my life.”
It was not that she wouldn’t like to believe it.
“But I’ve already redeemed myself,” she said to Pastor White. “How can God redeem me again?”
She had come south over twenty years before and had a decent grasp of the native tongues, as well as Hakka and English, but the never-ending weekly sermons were difficult to follow. At the very end of February, just after Chinese New Year, Pastor White appeared once again on Japan Street. He told her that he had found a pastor fluent in Japanese.
This new pastor was from Taiwan. He’d spent the previous two years in Api and only recently moved to Sandakan. He had gone straight to the Basel Mission, and they had agreed to lend him the church kitchen for his services.
The kitchen was quiet on Sunday mornings. There were very few believers: seven or eight workers from the Japanese-run cacao plantations, among them two Chinese from Taiwan. Kikuko attended with Kusa Noriko and Hanaga Yoshiko; the three of them walked over together, or hailed a rickshaw, turning off the main port road onto Singapore Street, geta sandals clacking as they appr
oached.
They sat upright and very still, at the far end of the long kitchen table surrounded by chairs. Light flooded through the back door. A faint chill carried in on the morning air.
In early March, Kikuko had arrived and observed the pastor stand up and smooth down his clothes. She remembered it vividly. He had gone to retrieve some booklets from a cloth bag hanging from a pillar. It was early morning, but already sweat was staining the fabric under his arms. For some reason, she found herself staring brazenly at those big damp sweat patches, until he felt the weight of her gaze and spun around.
She felt a rush of shyness.
He observed her with childlike intensity. He introduced himself as coming from Keelung.
“Another port,” he said. “The mountain road is just as steep as here.”
He wrote his name on a small blackboard with a piece of chalk: Chiu Shou-ching. He had a neat, clean-shaven face. He was very learned. There seemed almost nothing he did not know, from astronomical geography to indigenous folklore, and Kikuko grew used to listening to him from the far end of the kitchen table. There was a purity to his character that she had never encountered in anyone else. Much later, she was finally able to find words that described the strange feeling he inspired in her: it was like opening a window in a pitch-black room.
She thought of the Amakusa Islands. She had almost forgotten her hometown, but still remembered its hard, dry sand. The earth in Amakusa was hungry and it swallowed a lot of people. People died chewing sand. There were more dead people in the ground than there were live rats above it. Her house had been as dark as a rat hole and, in it, her mother had grown weaker and smaller by the year, as if gradually sinking into the earth; as if there were something on the soles of her feet, pulling her in. One winter she decided that she no longer wanted Kikuko around. Kikuko drank a little ginger tea and left with a stranger, onto a boat going somewhere else. “If you don’t like it, jump overboard,” said her elder brother. Ten-year-old Kikuko did not jump overboard. Though death was scarier than hunger, her stuffy wooden box was scarier than death, but she wasn’t allowed out of it onto the deck.
