by Lori Ostlund
Throughout the course of our exchange, the datuk and I made no eye contact, and when the meeting was finished, we stood, but even in parting, he did not acknowledge me, instead averting his eyes until I realized that he was waiting for me to leave first. I did, and as I closed the door behind me, I could hear him yelling and then a sound like a pig snuffling at a trough, which I suspected was Shah crying.
That night as I passed through the dark lobby of the school, I was startled by what appeared to be a shape atop the bed, a shape not unlike that made by a supine body, albeit a very large one. I drew close to the glass, quite sure that once my eyes adjusted to the dim glow of the night lights, I would find nothing more than a hefty stack of linens awaiting the next day’s lesson, but it was clearly a person and, judging from the size, I knew that it could only be Shah. Slowly, the details of his face grew more pronounced, and I could not help but feel that lying there with his eyes closed, hands clasped high atop the mound of his stomach, he looked defenseless, almost benign. I had never been that close to him, so close that I could have reached out and touched his brow were it not for the glass between us. His lids began to flutter and his eyes rolled slowly open, casting about nervously until they settled on my face, recognition hardening them into two bits of coal that burned with unmitigated contempt.
The next morning, the bed looked as it always did, neatly made, ready for service. I mentioned the encounter to no one, certainly not Julia, who would have pursued one of her usual melodramatic interpretations, bed as performance space or sacrificial altar, rather than simply a comfortable place to snooze.
Mr. Narayanasamy had warned that our work permits might take a week, even two, suggesting that we “stay put” at our hotel until they were issued. We agreed, though we had already been living at our seedy hotel for two weeks by then, two long weeks during which a man of indeterminate age wearing only a pair of shorts lay upon a plastic chaise lounge in the hallway just outside our door, groaning day and night, no doubt from the pain caused by the gaping wound that ran from one of his nipples to his navel. Although we never saw anyone attending to him, we knew that somebody was because some days the wound was concealed by an unskillfully applied bandage while other days it was exposed, flies gathering at it like poor people lined up along a river to bathe.
We had no idea what had happened to the man and did not ask, primarily because nobody had even acknowledged the man’s presence to us, but the wound resembled a knife cut, approximately eight inches long and jagged with a suggestion of violence to it, though we understood that the shabbiness of the hotel, combined with the fact that blood still seeped from the wound, contributed to this effect. Since he was directly outside our door and prone to groaning, particularly at night, we often found it difficult to sleep, but it was unthinkable that we ask him to groan less, to keep his misery to himself. There was also the issue of whether to greet him as we paused to lock or unlock our door. Julia felt that we should, that a hello was in order; otherwise, it was like treating him as though he were invisible, dead in fact, but as I prefer to pass my own illnesses without interference, I maintained that we should not ask him to engage in unnecessary politenesses when he so obviously needed his energy for mending. Of course, this quickly became an argument not about the wounded man but about me, or, more specifically, about what Julia termed my stubborn disbelief in the world’s ability to maintain a position at odds with my own, which I felt was overstating the case.
The day after we were hired, a Saturday, we walked out toward the sea along a road cramped with vehicles that blew sand and oily exhaust into our faces. We returned to our room filthy and went together into our little bathroom, which was equipped with a traditional mandi, a large, water-filled tank from which one scooped water for bathing. There, we stripped down, laughing and lathering ourselves and each other and then shrieking at the water’s coolness, welcome but startling nonetheless. We felt amazingly clean afterwards and lay on the bed, naked and wet, enjoying the flutter of the fan across our bodies, our hands touching.
We could hear the wounded man shifting repeatedly on his chaise lounge, the fact that he was moving so much suggesting that he felt stronger, perhaps even bored, and while the possibility of this cheered us greatly, for we had actually pondered what to do if we rose one morning to find him dead, there was something unsettling about the sound of his skin ripping away from the vinyl each time he moved. The thought began to creep into each of our heads that he was not feeling better at all but was instead flailing out in desperation against the narrowly defined, joyless space he now occupied. Furthermore, we worried that we had caused his agitation, that the sounds of pleasure we made as we bathed had led to his sudden despair. For the first time, we felt that the man was aware of us, even worse, that he had been aware of us all along, an intimacy that was too much to bear. It was ironic, for we had put up with so much—the sight of him, bloody and damaged, as we came and went, the groaning throughout the night—but somehow this, the feeling that our pleasure intensified his pain, this had overwhelmed us, and so we packed our bags, paused one last time over the wounded man, who was snoring lightly, and escaped down the street to the Kwee Hang Hotel, which was more expensive by far but did not involve a wounded man outside our door.
At the Kwee Hang Hotel, the long, sunny foyer was mopped twice daily, our toilet paper was monitored, and when we returned each night, the bathroom smelled pleasantly medicinal and the beds stood neatly made with sheets that bore the fresh smell of a dryer. The only thing that we had to complain about really was that the owner and his son sat for hours behind a desk at the end of this long, sunny foyer with their eyes glued to the television, across which ran the ticker tape information for the Malaysian Stock Exchange during the day and international exchanges during the night, but even this we could not really form a complaint around, for they kept the sound muted, day and night, making, only occasionally, some sort of quiet comment to one another, a low chuckle of pleasure or a disgusted “ay-yoh” when things presumably had not gone their way. Of course, it made no sense for us to be paying by the day an amount that, each month, added up to half our salaries. Even the old man and his son began to tell us as much. “Find an apartment and stop paying like tourists,” they said, but week after week, our visas were delayed, a state of affairs that we protested in only the most cursory fashion, for we were content.
Still, one feature of the room did bother us (though to call it a feature is misleading, for feature implies something added to make life more pleasant for hotel guests, rather than less): there existed, on the inside of the wardrobe door, a crudely rendered drawing of two penises, both erect and facing one another as though, I could not help but think, they were about to duel. It had been made with a thick-tipped black marker, hastily so that one of the penises had unevenly sized scrota and black slashes of hair while the other was symmetrical but hairless. Beneath the picture, in a more controlled hand, somebody, presumably the artist, had written: “I am waiting every night on the footbridge.” Since we generally opened only the left door and the drawing was on the right, we did not discover it for weeks, but once we had, we began to feel different about the room, which we now understood to have a history, a life that was separate from us, yet not entirely. It sounds naive to say that we had never considered this before, for it was a hotel after all, but until then, we had never stopped to imagine that things had been said and done in this room, upon these beds, prior to our arrival. Worse, I began to feel sheepish around the father and son, the drawing inserting itself into the conversation each time I spoke to them about something as ordinary as getting an extra towel or was warned that the stairs were wet.
We knew the referred-to footbridge, of course. From it, we had first spotted Mr. Mani’s school, and we crossed it often as we made our way to and from our favorite food stalls. But once we had learned of its secret, we found ourselves increasingly drawn there, particularly at night, when a handful of men gathered and spread out across it, maintaini
ng their posts as vigilantly and nervously as sentries. Each time we climbed the stairs, they turned toward us, their faces momentarily hopeful, hungry for something that we could not provide. Still, we felt comfortable there among men who regarded us with so little interest, and as we crossed, I sometimes glanced surreptitiously at a face and wondered what the man was thinking, wondered whether he had ever been in love.
Descending the steps of the footbridge one evening, we noticed that the light in Mr. Mani’s office was on and decided to pay him a visit, a long-overdue visit, for although we had been teaching at the school some two months, we had not yet thanked Mr. Mani for securing us the positions. It was after eight, but the outer door was unlocked, and we went in calling his name. We found him reclining on an unmade cot that was wedged into one corner of his tiny office, whiskey bottle in hand.
“My American ladies,” he announced, smiling his toothless smile and struggling like an overturned cockroach to sit up. “Kindly join me for a nightcap.” He thrust the bottle toward us, tipping forward with the weight of it.
“Perhaps we should return another time,” I said, but he looked hurt at the suggestion and, focusing deeply, stood and wobbled to his desk.
“Please, have a seat,” he said, gesturing at the cot.
The room, I had noticed as we entered, possessed a rank odor, attributable, I thought, to its smallness and the fact that its one window was closed. It was the sort of smell to which one adjusted quickly, unlike the overwhelming stench that rose up, surrounding us, as we settled on the cot, its dominant feature sourness, sour in the way of sheets that have been sweated in for nights on end and never washed, and beneath this, a secondary stink, a unique blend that included but was not limited to the following: clove cigarettes, spices, whiskey, unwashed feet, urine, and moldy books. Next to me, Julia gagged, covering it with a cough, and I, holding my breath so that my voice came out nasally, said, “We’ve come to thank you for your help.”
“I’m happy to be of service,” said Mani, looking, in fact, about to cry.
“Mr. Mani, are you living here?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied mournfully. “My Queen has banned me from our dwelling. My clothes and the bed were delivered two months ago, shortly after the splendid evening the three of us spent together. I have not seen her since. Of course, she still sends my meals twice daily, but while I know that her hands prepared them, it is not the same.”
“But why?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I cannot explain to you the mind of a woman,” he said, as though Julia and I were not women, and then he took a small sip from his bottle. “Ladies, do you know the story of the British man and the snake? It is a famous Malaysian tale.” When we shook our heads, he gathered himself up and said, “Then I shall tell you, but be warned: it is a story about love.” I acknowledged this with a nod.
“A British man,” he began, “lived on his tea plantation up in the highlands, all alone save for the servants who attended to his fairly simple needs. Each afternoon, he took a lengthy walk, disappearing with his hat and walking stick for hours, going where and doing what, no one knew. This remained his habit for many years.
“Eventually, he became engaged, but just two days before the wedding was to transpire, the man went out for his walk and did not return. A search party was formed. He was found the next morning, his legs protruding from the mouth of a large snake, both of them dead by the time that this strange union was discovered. The snake had to be hacked apart with machetes in order to extricate the man’s body. Later, it was determined that the man had died of asphyxiation, which meant that the snake had attempted to swallow him while he was still alive.”
“Should we be worried about snakes, Mr. Mani?” asked Julia, speaking for the first time. She was afraid of snakes, even more so because a pair of paramedics with whom we had chatted soon after arriving told us that they spent an inordinate amount of time removing snakes from houses.
“No, ladies, you are missing the point. I mean, yes, the snake’s behavior is the point, but only because it is highly unusual. And so there is no way to explain it, as any Malaysian will tell you, except that the snake was in love with the man, and—”
“In love?” I interrupted.
“Yes,” Mr. Mani replied firmly. “They were in love with each other, and that day the man had finally come clean—he had informed the snake of his impending marriage. But the snake could not bear the news, and so …” He shrugged, brought his hands together as though to pray, and then thrust them outward, away from each other, away from himself. “That is jealousy, you see. Everything destroyed.”
“And you believe this also, Mr. Mani?” I asked, though I could see that he did.
Mr. Mani regarded us for a moment. “Well,” he said at last, “with love, there are always two: there is the snake who devours, and there is the one who cooperates by placing his head inside the snake’s mouth.”
The next afternoon as we were leaving the school, Miss Kumar, who handled payroll, approached us. “I hear that you require an apartment,” she whispered. “I know one. Cheap. Not too big. It belongs to my sister-in-law.”
This, we knew, was Mr. Mani’s doing, for as we had stood to leave the night before, he had requested our address and, upon learning that we still lived in a hotel, shook his head in horror. “It is not right, and it is not proper,” he said repeatedly as I explained about the visas, and then, “I am surprised by my old friend Narayanasamy.”
We recognized immediately the building that Miss Kumar stopped in front of: Nine-Story Building, which we had passed numerous times, commenting on how much taller it was than everything around it and how this made it seem awkward and defenseless, like a young girl who had shot up much faster than her classmates. We entered near the courtyard, a large asphalt area around which rose the four sections that collectively made up Nine-Story Building and which Miss Kumar herded us past, saying, “Please, my sister-in-law is waiting.” But she was not waiting, and we stood outside the apartment for ten minutes until she stepped off the elevator at a trot, speaking Tamil rapidly into a cell phone. She was, in every way, a hurried woman, and when she stooped to unlock the door, knees bent primly, phone wedged against her ear with an upraised shoulder, and wiggled her fingers impatiently, we took on her sense of urgency, which is to say that we found ourselves the tenants of a dark, one-bedroom, squat-toilet apartment on the fourth floor of Nine-Story Building, closer to the bottom than the top, which was apparently considered desirable, for she mentioned it repeatedly.
Our colleagues considered our move to Nine-Story Building strange, though perhaps no stranger than the fact that we had continued to live in a hotel for months, and in the weeks that followed, they inquired frequently about our new lodgings. When we answered, “Everything is fine,” they appeared skeptical, and so we began complaining about the elevator, which smelled of urine masked by curry and made noises suggesting that it was not up to the task of carrying passengers up and down day after day. Soon we began using the stairs, which we generally had to ourselves because the other tenants seemed not to mind the elevator’s strange noises, or minded more the certainty of the exertion that the stairs required than the mere possibilities suggested by the noises, and so we went back to answering that everything was fine, dismissing our colleagues’ interest as yet another example of the unsolicited attention that we received in Malacca, where we seemed to be the only westerners in residence.
In fact, as we walked around town, people whom we had never met called out, “Hello, Miss Raffles College,” greeting us both in this same way. We were regarded as the American spinsters, teachers so devoted to our work that it had rendered us sexless, left us married to the school. We were thought of in this way because we were strict with healthy expectations—that students study and not cheat, that they arrive on time, that they not take on the disaffected pose that teenagers find so appealing—but also, I suspect, because we were women without men.
As spinsters, we wer
e thought to possess a certain prudishness, a notion that was clearly behind the request that Mr. Narayanasamy made of us one day after summoning us to his office. “We have a grave situation requiring our expeditious attention,” he began, gesturing grandly at the produce market visible from the window to the left of his desk. “That is the produce market,” he said, assuming that American spinsters would be unfamiliar with such a dirty, chaotic place, though in fact, we stopped there often to buy vegetables and practice our Malay because the vendors rarely tried to cheat us.
“I have just this morning received an upsetting visit from several of the vendors. It seems that two of our students have been observed holding hands and even”—he cleared his throat—“kissing.” He looked at us apologetically, as though explaining that we would not be receiving raises, and we nodded because we knew the couple to whom he referred.
“You must speak to them,” he declared, slapping his hand down on his desk.
“And tell them what?” Julia asked.
“Tell them that they must stop,” he explained in a reasonable tone. “Tell them that they are discrediting the school, their families, and themselves.”
“But they’re adults,” Julia said.
“Very well,” said Mr. Narayanasamy, looking back and forth between the two of us. “Then I shall speak to them, though I too am busy. Still, it is my duty to attend to the duties for which others lack time.” He reached up as though to tighten his tie, but the knot already sat snugly against his throat, and Julia and I departed, allowing our refusal to stand as an issue of time constraints.
