The Water Beetles

by Michael Kaan

  Wei-Ming reached out with her cookie and pointed. Another crumb fell, and another fish came up as she stood. “There’s the ferry!”

  The ferryman stood at the stern of a long skiff, leaning into a bamboo pole while the motor laboured behind him. The only movement was the flutter of his loose black shirt in the wind and the slow descent of the pole into the mud. We all waved at him, and the boat drifted towards the dock.

  The ferryman leaned sideways and pushed the pole at an angle to turn the skiff. He turned with a gentle motion, thickset legs and arms moving slowly like seaweed, and I had the impression of a man who went days without speaking. He angled the boat into the current with his eyes set on the dock. The motor ran harder and I watched him shift against the pole that yoked him to the riverbed.

  When he was near the dock he tossed a rope out, and I caught it and started clumsily tying it to an iron ring on one of the posts. Already I wanted to impress him. He drew the boat up quietly to the dock and took the rope from me as he stepped out.

  “You want to cross?”

  “We want to go to Kukong,” I stammered.

  “That’s too far,” he said. “This is just a ferry, and getting there on this boat would take days.”

  Leuk stepped up with the map and handed it to the ferryman. He took it with his thumb over the front and fingers splayed out across the back so that it stayed flat. He looked at it upside down while he held it out to us, as if he had just drawn it.

  “Wah Ying,” he said. “See it? I can get you there in a day if you pay my way back.”

  The map slowly gave in to all the creases Leuk had made in it and hung limp in the ferryman’s large hand. All this walking and planning, and then all we had ahead was a town we didn’t know existed, and the only route open to us was the water. I glanced back at the road, hoping we might just get back to our original route. Yee-Lin’s face tightened, and I felt something cave in my chest. Leuk reached over and took the map back with his eyes fixed on the ground.

  The ferry bumped gently against the dock as the mud-coloured water lapped its sides. The ferryman stood quietly to the side, almost silhouetted now in the falling afternoon sun.

  While we hung in our indecision, a man and woman came down the road with a small cart drawn by a donkey. They moved quickly, staring at us as they approached. The woman had a baby bundled on her back and the cart was piled with their belongings. They stopped and looked us up and down before speaking.

  “Did you just arrive?” the farmer asked us.

  Yee-Lin and I nodded.

  “We just want to cross,” the man said. He pointed at the far side of the river. I turned to look across as if to confirm it, but the river was wide and in the sunlight I saw only the broken sparkle of its reflection.

  “I won’t be long,” the ferryman said to us. He stepped forward to look at the cart, sizing it up for his boat and the condition of the water. He gripped the side of the cart and tested its solidity through his arm and shoulder, maybe estimating its roll over the current, the motor’s force, the probability of cargo upsetting his boat. I imagined the family crossing with their cart, and the ferry tipping over, leaving them to the river’s mercy. My head hurt, and I sat down on the ground. My shoes were pale with dust.

  The ferryman helped the farmer get the cart onto the skiff. The donkey was nervous, so they wrapped a cloth over its eyes. When everything was balanced in the middle, the ferryman started the motor again and pushed off. The woman sat on the boat’s deck with the baby in her lap.

  “Five yuan to get you to Wah Ying,” he said as he left the riverbank. “That’s all. I’ll be back soon.”

  In the end, it took him over two hours to get the farmer and his wife across and come back, and by then it was early evening. The ferryman said it was now too dark and he wouldn’t leave until sunrise. We would have to sleep outside again. I thought Wei-Ming would be frightened, so we rigged up the blankets we had rolled up into a kind of bird’s nest for her, and Leuk and I found a spot near the girls where the ground was comfortable, and we covered ourselves with our jackets.

  I watched the ferryman in the moonlight. He rolled out a heavy blanket onto the bottom of the boat and then tested the ropes to make sure he wouldn’t drift away during the night. I was worried about thieves and animals, but before settling down, the ferryman walked the length of the path a few times with his bamboo pole and a lantern, listening carefully to the woods.

  “Nothing here, kids.” And instead of climbing into his boat, he took a small brazier from it and lit a coal fire on the ground near the dock. He sat up and kept watch, and I fell asleep to the sounds of the hissing brazier and the river.

  The fear of drowning must be born with us, but it must arrive incomplete at our birth, needing time to form. Once, when I was twenty-three and studying in California, I fell into a lake. I was at university and spending the afternoon with a girl I wanted to impress, a Chinese girl from Singapore, Yvonne. The French name appealed to me, though she was pretty, too. I first met her at a church function and invited her out at the end of it. The event was meant to show off the domestic skills of the young women taking part, by having them make lunch for everyone after the service. Yvonne was at a large table making noodles by hand, something she’d surely never done growing up and wouldn’t be expected to do in marriage. But she was managing it well. I watched her mound the flour and make a well, and then add the water from a Thermos while she gathered the wet dough with her right hand. The ball of dough built quickly, and she heaped more flour onto the board to roll it out. She pushed the rolling pin over the dough to stretch it out, her pale arms gliding over the soft white mixture like a boat over water.

  I asked her out on a date, and a few days later we went to the park for a picnic. I rented a rowboat and suffered a fit of nervous laughter as I paid for it, because I suddenly remembered the stupid term pleasure craft from an old English lesson. Yvonne sat across from me. Her dress was aglow in the October sun. I rowed out to the middle of the little lake and pulled the oars in to let us drift. She had left her white hat on the shore with the picnic basket, and when she raised her arm to shield her eyes, I saw the underside of her arm. The skin tone was the same as on her upper breasts. I grew painfully erect.

  I had a very expensive camera, a Rolleiflex that Sheung had given me as a going-away gift. I kept it safe in its brown leather case, and now I put it in my lap to hide my erection, and told Yvonne I’d like to take a picture of her. She was thrilled, and I started fiddling with the settings to impress her.

  Let me turn the boat a little, I said, to get the light right.

  This made her glow. She put her hands together.

  I put the Rolleiflex down carefully and picked up an oar. I moved to get up and set the oar in the water to turn the boat, but my erection touched the inside of my pants and I crouched to hide it. The boat rocked a little and Yvonne gasped. I looked down and thought I saw the camera tipping, and then worried I’d knock it with my shoe. I stumbled to one side to avoid it, and in a second I was in the water.

  I knew how to swim, but something else had taken over. I thought of the camera and Yvonne inside the little boat, neither of which could get wet. I thought of grabbing the side of the boat but saw water fly from my hands onto the camera. My pants ballooned and turned me around before quickly sucking up the water and pulling me down. I’d been nervously holding my breath in the boat; my lungs were empty.

  The lake water burned in my nostrils and throat. I was cold. I scrambled upward but went nowhere until the handle of the oar appeared, dipping into the water, and I seized it. Once my head was above the water, I grabbed the edge of the boat with my right hand, and Yvonne helped me back in.

  SEVENTEEN

  I hunched over on my seat in the boat, gripping the edge and getting angrier by the minute at Leuk.

  “I’m sure those are planes,” he repeated.

  I looked at Wei-Ming, who was lying on a makeshift bed on the bottom of the boat. She didn
’t hear the rumbling, either because she was asleep or because the sound of the water under her drowned it out.

  “If they’re bombing, why don’t we see any planes?” I whispered to him.

  “They fly low, really low,” he said. “And they could be using the hills for cover.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said.

  “I do,” he answered. “I heard it on the radio in Tai Fo one evening, someone talking about how the Japs fly their planes.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s happening here,” I said.

  “It could,” Leuk said. It was as though he wished for there to be imperial bombers crouching over us at any minute.

  My anger contracted to a leaden ache, and I told Leuk to be quiet.

  “What do you know?” he said.

  I put my bag in my lap and slid over to the edge of the boat. “Leave me alone,” I said, too quietly for anyone to hear.

  Leuk moved to his side of the boat and turned away to watch the water. I heard him sniffle. Even if he was crying, I wanted nothing to do with him. Twigs drifted past and I thought of the gutters in front of our house. My memory of Hong Kong was of a place perpetually cloudy, doors and windows shuddering in the wind, of streets either filled with silent people or empty under its long imperial watch. And here too there must be eyes, along the riverbank and in the water, and in the skies, scouring a world stripped bare by sunlight, looking for the defiant, the lost, the unexploited, the unsuspecting.

  In the evening, I sat quietly in the boat. The motor ran noisily as it had since we left, but it receded into the background and I heard the splashing of fish in the water and snippets of birdsong. Yee-Lin was telling Wei-Ming a story. It was getting dark and the ferryman hadn’t said anything for hours. I felt that we would never stop, that we would drift on and on, beyond the sight first of our enemies, to a point of no return.

  But after a long bend in the river, the village emerged. At first I saw nothing, just lanterns strung like pale emissaries among trees that seemed to rise from the middle of the water. I rubbed my eyes and squinted into the twilight.

  It was an island. That was how wide the river had spread since Lau Kwan, broad and deep enough to hold an island midstream, a dark, forested mass in the water. As we drew closer, twin stone bridges appeared like long arms reaching over the water to the riverbanks. They too were hung with lights. But the centre of the island was mostly dark.

  Against the dark green of the thick bamboo grove along the island’s banks, the grey masonry of the docks emerged. Lanterns hung in the still air and a few people walked along the docks. The ferryman stopped the motor and dropped the pole back into the water, guiding us slowly to a small landing on the far side of the dock.

  He brought the boat up to the dock and a boy ran down the steps towards us, one hand extended, shouting at the ferryman to throw him the rope. He was in peasant clothes and bare feet, and three other boys like him stood nearby and watched. The ferryman waved him off and said he’d do it himself.

  “I’ll keep my money,” he said and waved the boy off again, this time with the end of the pole. The ferryman climbed out and tied the boat to a mooring, and one by one we disembarked.

  He leaned on the pole and nodded at us. “You have all your things?”

  I looked around quickly at the small heap of bags at our feet. All our things.

  “Five yuan, then,” he said.

  He took the money from Yee-Lin and laid the coins out thoughtfully over his palm as though to read rather than count them. They stretched from the bottom of his palm to the very tip of his middle finger.

  “Do you know where to go?” he said. “There’s an inn here.”

  “Thank you, we’ll find it,” said Yee-Lin. Leuk and I picked up the girls’ bags and carried them up the steps.

  To get to the village, we first had to walk through a thick bamboo grove. We walked down the road in the twilight. I imagined the ferryman walking behind us, his pole thudding lightly on the ground like a giant walking stick, his hand extended outward like the Buddha with his open palm.

  The inn was very small and simple. The couple who ran it were serving white liquor to clusters of men at wicker tables, and when Yee-Lin approached the wife to ask about rooms, she paused and looked Yee-Lin up and down while balancing a tray of little wine cups stacked in a tower.

  “We’re full,” she said. “But there’s a family who can take you in.” She called her daughter out of the back room and ordered her to take us there. She was about my height, thin, with her hair tied untidily in the back.

  As she walked us down the village road, she took out a cleaning rag that was tucked into her belt and worried it between her hands. She ignored most of our questions.

  “The family is Lee,” she said without turning. “Their son has a new wife and the mother is sick.”

  The inn and the other buildings near it were rundown, broken shutters hanging off the windows and all the paint worn off the exteriors. The Lee house was newer. The man who greeted us was the husband. He looked younger than Sheung and Tang, but his face was grimy and his hands and arms were scraped from hard work. The girl from the inn explained what we wanted, and he nodded in the lantern light.

  “I’m Kei,” he said to Leuk. When Yee-Lin spoke, he avoided looking at her and replied to Leuk. We told him where we’d come from and why we were on the road. Leuk even told him that we didn’t want to stay with our uncle. Maybe it was Kei’s youth, or our desire to be taken in, or the ferryman’s long silence that made us want to talk. Kei looked distractedly at the ground while we rambled before interrupting us to say, “I’ll show you the rooms.”

  Yee-Lin negotiated a fee with him, which turned out to be for a single room in their house. It had two beds and there was room for Leuk and me to sleep on the floor. Kei brought us mattresses. We stacked our bags in the corner and cleaned up, and once Wei-Ming had eaten and lain down in her bed, the rest of us fell asleep.

  The house was very quiet. In the morning I found a young woman at the stove making breakfast. When I walked in, she glanced quickly over her shoulder at me. The steam and the water clinging to the vegetable leaves made the room feel very damp and chilly. Kei, still buttoning up his shirt as he stepped out of his bedroom, introduced the woman to me as his wife, Ming. She turned again and smiled. Looking at this girl, I thought of Shun-Lai, of her nightgown and her hairbrush, and her silhouette in the window the last night I saw her. But Ming was in a plain white blouse and grey skirt, and her arms were flecked with bits of cabbage, and there was none of Shun-Lai’s glow about her.

  At first, Kei and Ming kept their distance from us. Kei’s father, Mr. Lee, lived in a larger house nearby and had given this one to the couple as a wedding gift. He came over often to check on them. He was a small but fierce man who puffed almost continuously on handmade cigarettes that perched between the index and middle fingers of his right hand. His right arm moved in a seemingly permanent crook from smoking. He had a barking voice that he used to good effect, ordering his son and daughter-in-law around the house. He kept a shop in the village but often dropped by unannounced.

  We signed up for the local school, where the three teachers alternated between mumbling their lessons and enforcing harsh discipline. After attending for two days, Leuk and I started played hooky, and after no one came to look for us, we brought Wei-Ming out of school, too. There was a small river near Kei’s house, and we took to swimming there daily. Yee-Lin knew we were skipping school, but she didn’t seem to care, and on the third day she sat on the riverbank and watched us play. I noticed Kei and Ming watching us from the front window.

  They were a very quiet couple. The morning was always rushed as Kei got ready to go to his father’s shop and Ming began her housework. The house was spotless, but every morning at some unpredictable hour Mr. Lee would appear and start criticizing Ming for its condition. During these tirades she stared downward, at the floor where there might be dirt, at shoes that might be unpolished, over at
the cutting block, the stove. One morning I got up late and walked into the kitchen just as Mr. Lee was yelling at Ming. She stood before him holding a senseless combination of a broom in one hand and a pot lid in the other, her head bowed in shame. Mr. Lee sharpened the humiliation by raising his voice as I entered, reminding Ming how public her failure was.

  In the afternoons she did laundry from both houses. Mr. Lee had three pairs of pants and insisted on having two pairs pressed daily. Mrs. Lee was an invalid and we never saw her. I knew her only as baskets of soiled cloth. Her clothes and sheets were always washed separately, covered in grimy streaks of brown, yellow, and lurid green. She had no skirts or blouses, only loose gowns and wraps, and Ming boiled them each day in a large outdoor pot before hanging them to dry. Mrs. Lee’s sheets and garments billowed and sank like trapped eels in a tank, first in the roiling water, then in the wind on the drying line. When they were dry, Ming folded them so that the stains were on the inside.

  One day, after we’d been in Wah Ying for nearly two weeks, Ming moved the clothesline from the side of the house to the front. There she could watch Leuk and me swim as she hung the wash up to dry. We splashed and yelled when she appeared. I caught her smiling, then laughing a little. She took her time hanging the laundry, letting the damp cotton and linen hide her as the sheets flapped in the wind.

  I ran out of the water and up to the clothesline wearing only my soaking underwear. I grabbed a bedsheet on the line to steady myself and let the water drip from my arm onto the freshly laundered cloth.

  “Can you swim?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know how,” she said. She glanced quickly over my shoulder at the river, her eyes shifting between the water and the laundry.

  “I could teach you how,” I said. “It’s easy.”

  Mr. Lee was away in another village for a few days, so once Ming was done her morning chores, she met us down by the river wearing an old white cotton dress. I helped her in and showed her how to tread water. She got the hang of it quickly, even though that was all she could do. Leuk dislodged a piece of driftwood from some rocks, and once she was able to float with it in the sluggish river, she didn’t want to get out.