The Howling Silence

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by Catherine Lim


  During our years in the university, Rosalind used to regale me with stories of that strange world of her ancestors. After her conversion to the Catholic religion, she became obsessed with what she said must be the ugliest taint in her family history – the systematic practice of abortion, so strongly condemned by her church, carried on by the entire female line, from her mother backwards through her grandmother, great-grandmother and forebears lost in the mists of the remote past, way back to the ancestral village in southern China. A very old servant in the family who had come from China eighty years ago once told Rosalind that as a girl, she had on one occasion witnessed the death of a newborn baby girl who was smothered with rags, and on another, seen the body of a tiny infant, half buried in the mud of the rice-field. Abortion was not as heinous as infanticide, Rosalind said, but considering that God had already breathed life and soul into a foetus from the moment of its conception, it was bad enough.

  “Oh the barbaric primitivism makes me shudder,” said Rosalind. She told me that her great-grandmother, who was the first to come from China to settle in Penang (Rosalind’s mother was born in Singapore), had used certain traditional medicines, mixed with the ashes of burnt prayer paper. Once something went wrong and she was ill with a high fever for days. The next female down the line, Rosalind’s grandmother, also relied on the traditional herbal brews as well as the services of a native kampung woman whose skilful hands did the job by a special method of massaging the stomach and the womb. This forebear was desperate enough to try any recommended method, including the insertion of opium pellets. Once she bled for days and thought she would die. As for Rosalind’s mother, she refused to talk about her methods, apart from saying that it involved the eating of young green pineapple, washed down with beer. As a little girl, Rosalind remembered a time when her mother was mysteriously ill for days, vomiting continuously.

  Why was abortion so freely practised in her family? Rosalind said that the root of the problem was the remarkable fecundity of the women, combined with the equally remarkable appetite of the men. If there had been no control of the number of children born from this awesome conjunction of lust and receptivity, there have been a proliferation beyond any ability of parents to feed, house and clothe. Despite the systematic abortions, Rosalind’s great-grandmother had eleven children, her grandmother ten and her own mother seven.

  “Didn’t any of you have any feelings of guilt at all?” she once asked her mother. She had the horrible suspicion that each time a foetus had been successfully expelled from the body, it was just one more piece of detritus to be thrown away in a rubbish bin or gutter. Her mother said tersely, “Your new religion is yours, my ancestors’ beliefs are mine.” The urgent need to feed and take care of living children left no time or energy for guilt over dead ones.

  Rosalind shuddered at the barbarity of it all, but took heart by something which her mother, in a more communicative and amenable mood, told her. There was a neighbour, a Buddhist, who, having helped at least a dozen women get rid of their unborn, began to suffer the guilt of having wilfully destroyed life. Fearing to pay for the sin in the next life, she began a strict regimen of penitential cleansing and prayer in a temple, fasting and refraining from meat for thirty days. Another similarly guilt-stricken woman, the concubine of a rich towkay in Penang went back to her ancestral village in China, to build a temple dedicated to the soul of unborn babies, which became known as the Temple of the Little Ghosts. Many women went to pray at this temple to assuage the pain of their guilt, always returning with their peace of mind restored. Some of them left touching gifts at the Temple of Little Ghosts – cans of milk, feeding bottles, rubber teats, baby rattles, baby clothes. Rosalind never ceased to be fascinated by the quaintness of such stories, which she would tell me, with much theatrical colour.

  After our university years together, we somehow lost touch with each other. As I later discovered, she had gone to the United States for a working stint. There she fell in love and lived with a man who turned out to be totally unsuitable. When she got pregnant, she decided to return home to Singapore, swearing she never wanted to see him again.

  Back in Singapore, she went for a discreet abortion at a government hospital. There was none of the trauma of toxic opium pellets or raw unripe pineapple, none of the fear of bleeding to death. She was discharged from hospital the same day, taking her place among scores of young women returning quietly to college or office, grateful for the policy of a modern state that accepted the errancies of young people, helped them very discreetly to dispose of the fruit of their follies and in general spared them the misery of their less fortunate mothers and grandmothers.

  Rosalind never told anybody about her secret. She only told me years later. When she met up with me again, our meeting was by pure accident. I was glad to see her again. She looked much thinner, but seemed anxious to rebuild her life, renting a comfortable little apartment to be on her own. She had returned, for solace, to the Catholic religion that she had briefly abandoned.

  And then it happened. One evening, after Sunday mass in church, she returned home for a restful night before starting work the next day as a newly appointed assistant editor in a publishing company. It was a few minutes past midnight – “I knew the exact time, because I looked at the alarm clock on my bedside table” – when the noises began. Thinking it was a cockroach or a rat or some nocturnal insect, Rosalind prepared to go back to sleep. There was silence for a while – “About an hour, because when I looked at the clock again, it showed me one o’clock” – and then the noises started again. This time, they seemed very much closer. Switching on her bedside lamp, Rosalind began to look around the room, under her bed, behind the curtains, under her desk, still expecting to find cockroaches or rats. She became extremely puzzled when she noticed the noises ceased as soon as she switched on the light, but started all over again as soon as she got back to bed. Exasperated, she actually shouted out, “Whoever, whatever you are, will you please stop disturbing me?”

  And it was at this point that she felt a sudden chill in the room. The chill permeated her body and caused her to shiver. She repeated, “Who are you? Will you please say something?” She waited in the darkness for an answer, and then it came. It was a small child’s voice. “Mummy,” it said. The voice sounded frightened and pleading. It said, “Mummy” again, then built up into a crescendo of terror, screaming “Mummy! Mummy!” She heard the voice dying away in the darkness, as if a crying child were being dragged away forcibly, while screaming for its mother.

  Rosalind told me she could not sleep for the rest of the night. I asked the inevitable question, “Are you sure you were not just imagining it all?” After all, there had been the trauma of the abortion and the accompanying guilt.

  “Three nights in a row?” said Rosalind. “I was a nervous wreck and had to take medical leave. I had just begun work and was already asking to go on leave.”

  After the third night, the child’s voice ceased. Then it came again, a week later. It was always the plaintive cry of the lost, abandoned child: “Mummy! Mummy!”

  I asked Rosalind why she was so sure it was the baby she had aborted.

  “I just knew,” she said. “The cry pierced me, right to the deep core of something that would have been the bond between mother and child if I had allowed my baby to be born.”

  Rosalind went on a second round of confessions and penance with the priest of her church. But the cries of the child lost in the dark wilderness of a mother’s secret shame continued. There was one night when she experienced more than a voice. She felt the touch of small, cold fingers on her face, the cold wet feel of naked baby flesh against her own. She woke up screaming.

  I advised her to seek medical or psychiatric help.

  Then suddenly I lost touch with her once more. She had disappeared. Her apartment was locked up, and the message on her answering machine said, “I will be away for a while. Please leave your name and phone number and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”


  I waited anxiously for her return. One day, about a month after her disappearance, she called and asked to see me. I was relieved to see her again. She had gone shockingly thin, but seemed otherwise well and at peace with herself.

  “Where on earth have you been?” I asked. I knew it had to do with the baby haunting.

  She said, with a serenity of look I had not seen for a long time, “You know, I didn’t think it would be like that. I felt such a deep peace in the grounds of that little temple! It took me a long time to find it; it’s tucked away in a remote hillside village that can’t be reached by bus or car. But I found it! And I’ve found my peace.”

  She had left no offerings of baby bottles or rubber comforters or toys at the Temple of Little Ghosts, only a simple note, written impulsively on the spot, in English, of a mother’s profound sorrow, shame and remorse.

  There is a perverseness in me that makes me ask the most insensitive questions. “Just how does all this square with your Roman Catholic beliefs?” I challenge. “You’re more devout than ever, Rosalind, waking up every morning at five to attend mass. Yet you believe in baby ghosts and visit temples to appease them?”

  Rosalind says quietly, “The mysteries of life and death are too great to be contained in any one religion.” She continues, gazing reflectively into the distance, “‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in our philosophy.’”

  I see copies of her beloved Shakespeare on a shelf side by side with The Tibetan Book of the Dead and an impressive-looking tome called The Psychology of Guilt.

  Rosalind tells me of a plan that is shaping in her mind. Since there is no organisation in Singapore to take up the rights of the unborn, she will go to the United States, live and work there and join an activist group called the Pro-lifers, in order to be able, should the small voice break through the darkness again to call her name, to respond with the sincerity of a contrition backed by real action.

  The Colour of Solace

  Julie did not dare say she had enjoyed herself at the Chandras’ party, because her husband hadn’t. Indeed, all the way home in the car, Tee Ngiam ranted and raged against the one person who had spoilt it all for him – Julie’s best friend, Pek Yin, only eight months a widow but already laughing and flirting with the men. It was a violation of tradition’s structures on proper widowhood. If Julie were brave enough, she would have said, “This is modern-day Singapore, you know,” or “It’s really none of your business, Ngiam.” But she was never brave with her husband. Before his judgement, she retreated inwardly into the privacy of her own thoughts and feelings.

  “That ridiculous dress,” he said. She felt obliged to say something in agreement.

  “Perhaps the bright colour didn’t suit her,” she ventured, and was instantly aware of a massive hypocrisy. For it was she who had persuaded Julie to buy that dress that day when they were shopping in Grace Boutique. Moreover, she had herself bought a similar one, in an even brighter shade of red. Of course she could never show it to him now; it would have to remain hidden in a corner of her closet.

  “That ridiculous dress,” Tee Ngiam repeated. It was worse than improper widowhood; it was a desecration of the sanctity of marriage. “Half her breasts were showing.” Julie suppressed a laugh at the thought of her husband, prim, stern, censorious, watching Pek Yin’s décolletage.

  “That slit up the side.”

  Clearly, every detail of the sexy, slinky, red dress had registered in Tee Ngiam’s mind for the sole purpose of denouncing it later. Julie made a mental note to give away her dress to her sister, Annie.

  It must have been loyalty to his dead colleague, Patrick Chang, that was causing all this resentment towards his widow. Patrick had died of cancer. At his funeral, Tee Ngiam, who delivered the eulogy, spoke feelingly about the dead man’s sterling qualities. He was a filial son, a loving husband, a devoted father. And now his widow was defiling his memory. Again if Julie were brave, she would say, “But Pek Yin was just having fun. She’s by nature a fun-loving person.”

  “Did you hear her referring to her old flame?”

  So Pek Yin, the indefatigable party animal, the unstoppable chatterbox, had offended on another point. Tee Ngiam said that when his father died, his mother, who was only thirty-four then, was so loyal to his memory that she turned down several advantageous offers of marriage.

  “Your father was a womaniser. You yourself told me how much your mother suffered. Who would have blamed her for having a life of her own after his death?” It was amazing how she could carry on these silent conversations in her head. In these silent conversations, she was actually impressed by her own clear logic and frank eloquence.

  “To this day,” said Tee Ngiam, “I hold my mother in the highest respect for that. Old flame indeed.” His disgust with the frivolous widow had not yet worked itself out. And Julie made a second mental note – to throw away the postcard that she had received the day before from someone she had met while in college in England, so many years ago. By virtue of their two or three dates, Ron Whitten would be, in her husband’s eyes, in that category of the obnoxious interloper called the “old flame”. She would destroy the postcard straightaway, which was a pity, as she had been so pleasantly surprised by it and would have liked to send one to him in return.

  Her husband had turned to her and said, “If I died, would you behave like this?” Husbands and wives tease one another about what they wish or do not wish their spouses to do or not to do, after their deaths, the magnanimous spouse urging quick remarriage to avoid loneliness, the possessive spouse threatening to come back as a ghost to haunt the remarried one, to use all its ghostly power to put an end to the shameful coupling with the new partner on the marital bed. Such playful bantering was not possible with Tee Ngiam.

  He said again, “I’m asking you a serious question, Julie. Would you behave like Pek Yin so soon after my death?”

  She was not so sure what was at issue – the insensitivity of the timing or the necessity for a permanent show of propriety by bereaved wives. She said immediately, “Of course not, Ngiam,” having learnt to respond quickly, since hesitation only provoked the suspicion that she was hiding something.

  He said, “My mother wore deep mourning black for my father for three years.” In modern-day Singapore, no wife was expected to wear deep mourning black beyond the funeral. But as usual, the answer stayed locked in her throat. She sensed what he was going to say next.

  “My reputation is important, Julie. Promise that you will not behave like Pek Yin after my death.”

  He measured loyalty in definite spans of mourning time. She was going to ask, “Eight months or three years?” but stopped. She felt a rising tide of irritation, but was able to say, without a hint of it, “Whatever you say, Ngiam.”

  “Is a year, two years, three years, too much for a man to ask his wife in return for – ?”

  He could claim an even greater devotion than Patrick Chang. Through the twenty five years of their marriage, despite the childlessness, he had remained faithful, loyal and generous to her, extending his generosity to her family. Without Tee Ngiam, her brother would not have got a job, her sister, Annie, would not have gone to the university. Her mother had told her many times, “You have a good husband. Never do anything to displease him.”

  “Do I understand, Ngiam,” she said, surprised at her own boldness, “that you don’t wish me to re-marry after your death?”

  “Why would you need to? You’ll be the most amply provided for widow in Singapore.” So it was not just a question of eight months or a year or three years. The man, from his grave, demanded life-time loyalty.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Why are we talking like this? Suppose I die before you?”

  “If Patrick Chang could have foreseen his wife’s behaviour tonight,” said Tee Ngiam angrily, unable to let go of the subject of the widow’s levity, “he would have turned in his coffin. His eyes would not have closed, but remained wide and s
taring.”

  The image was horrible; that night she had a dream in which she saw herself going to pay respects to the dead Patrick Chang in his coffin and retreating in horror at the sight of his large, open, staring eyes.

  “Look, Ngiam,” said Julie wearily, “let’s stop all this weird talk. I could die before you. And you needn’t mourn. You have my full permission to re-marry as soon as you wish. You are a very good husband and provider; I shouldn’t deny any woman my good luck.” She was not being sarcastic; she meant it.

  “You haven’t yet given me an answer,” he said.

  Their strange conversation that evening after the Chandras’ party came back in all the uncanniness of its prescience when, a week later, she received an urgent call from her husband’s office: he had collapsed and had been taken by ambulance to the hospital. She rushed over, but he was already dead of a massive heart attack. She sat down stunned, recollecting the conversation in its every detail. The sudden death, soon after the attempt to extract a promise from her, now shook the vaguely given promise into a firm commitment. The living man had asked; his corpse would receive a solemn undertaking from her. It would not be too late, for it is said that the newly dead see and hear everything that is going on.

  Julie sat beside the corpse lying in the satin-lined, flower-bedecked coffin and spoke gently to it. “I’m sorry, Ngiam, if I gave you the impression that I wasn’t grateful for all that you’d done for me and my family, that I was unwilling to grant your request.” She made her commitment slowly, carefully, in the hearing of the family members. “Ngiam, I will be in the mourning black for you for three years.” If the dead man needed that solace so badly, she would give it wholeheartedly. If his eyes opened now and his lips moved to say, “Not three years, but a lifetime,” she would have said, “Anything you wish.” No wife could go against the wishes of a dead husband who had been good to her.

 

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