1953
IN HIS DREAMS, she comes back to him. In his
dreams, she forgives him.
“I was always searching for a saint,” Trudy says.
Her hands are intertwined behind his head, her eyes looking up into
his. “I thought you were the one.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I never pretended I was
one.”
“Oh, I think you did,” she says, without anger.
“You always had that saintlike aura around you. People always
looked to you for guidance. You radiate confidence. Unlike me. I
radiate . . . unreliability. But I’m much more fun.”
He touches her hair, the fine, glossy strands of
umber and bronze.
“I never locked my door because of you,” he tells
her. “I thought even if there was the slightest chance you were
alive . . . Stranger things have happened. I couldn’t lock my door
because I was tormented by the thought that you’d find your way
back to me, and that I’d happen to be out, and that you would
leave, and then I would have missed my chance. That’s why I could
never move. People always wondered why I stayed there, stuck in the
past.”
“Of course I would find you,” she says, in her
clear, bell voice. “You’ve forgotten how resourceful I am.”
“You made me want to be the worst kind of man,” he
confesses. “If I had a family, I would have left it for you. If you
wanted a bauble, I would have stolen it for you. If you told me to
kill somebody, I very well might have done so. There’s nothing I
wouldn’t do for you, and that’s the most terrible thing in the
world. So I had to get away from it. I had to get away from you, to
preserve myself.”
“Well,” she says, amused. “I don’t know if that’s
the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me, or the nastiest.”
She has always told him she is not dependable, that
she will leave him in an instant, that she is not to be trusted,
but in all her declarations, he has just to look into her eyes, and
he doesn’t believe her.
“I like to think about when all this is over,” she
says. “I’m going to have ice cream and champagne at every meal and
bathe in honey and wine. I am going to be so profligate, you have
no idea! I’m going to act every inch the heiress and demand every
extravagance—only soaps and scents from France will touch my skin
and fresh, exotic flowers on my bedside table every night. This
restraint is just killing me. I’ve become a dour, wartime matron
and I intend to scrub every inch of that loathsome person off as
soon as . . .” But she cannot say what will end the war.
He shakes her. He wants to bite her cheek,
viciously, until flesh tears off and blood runs down his chin. He
wants to devour her whole, until she feels the pain he has been
feeling. The pain he has caused her too.
He surfaces, she recedes, he remembers the other
one, the one that’s still alive. But he goes down again, into the
past. Its pull is too strong.
The memory of those days. Sitting on his thin bed,
helpless, outraged, angered by the endless monotony around him, the
small concerns of the others—whether they were getting their fair
ration, that someone had moved surreptitiously into an empty room
that had not yet been allocated after the Americans had been
repatriated. Ah, yes, the day that the Americans left, their
government far more expedient in arranging a prisoner-of-war trade,
the indescribable feeling of watching the lorries depart, filled
with joyful, bedraggled people, pockets filled with messages from
those remaining to loved ones around the world. They promised to
get the letters out. The kinder ones had left all their blankets
and extra clothes and equipment and even money, but a few took
every last scrap, as if they wouldn’t throw it out the moment they
got home. Funny, the mentality that springs up in such a place. And
a few Americans stayed behind: the Catholic priests. They gave up
their chance to return home so they could minister to the faithful
remaining in the camp, regardless of nationality. Yes, there had
been good people.
Another memory, from even before: the first
Christmas in camp, a year or so after they had been interned. He
remembered the half-dead grass in the center lawn and the dust
kicked up by the children as they ran around, shouting excitedly in
their ragged shorts—it had been unseasonably warm. The women had
set up tables with watery lemonade and Christmas cookies donated
from those still on the outside. A program with songs and recitals
had been mimeographed and distributed. They had also managed to get
ahold of some decorations so the straggly trees on the perimeter
boasted tinsel and some garish ornaments. An old gramophone piped
Christmas carols as the internees gathered around and chatted,
sipping from their cups, a flask surreptitiously passed around.
Bill Schott had acquired a Santa Claus costume and came out with a
pillow stuffed next to his belly, much to the delight of the
children, and handed out a motley but much squealed-over selection
of presents: a collection of shiny buttons, a rag doll stuffed with
dry grass, a Christmas collage made out of leaves. The mothers had
been busy.
The Japanese soldiers watched with bemusement from
the side. They had given packets of boiled sweets to the children
earlier.
Regina Arbogast appeared before him suddenly, a red
muffler wrapped dramatically around her neck. She still had
flair.
“Will, Merry Christmas,” she said. Her husband was
next to her. It was before the torture. That would happen months
later. Will raised a glass to the couple.
“A year passes too quickly, doesn’t it? What a
difference from last year.”
“And here we are,” said Reggie.
“You enjoying the furloughs?” Regina asked. Will’s
fluidity between the inside and outside had been the source of much
envy and speculation, although he always tried to bring back
supplies to benefit everyone.
“ ‘Enjoy’ is a peculiar way of putting it,” he
said.
“Trudy is tight with the current regime.” Regina
let the statement hang in the air, a challenge.
“Is that a question or a statement?” Will asked
mildly.
“How would you know anything about that, locked up
in here?” Reggie said impatiently to his wife. “You presume too
much, Regina.”
“Well, that’s what everyone is saying.” Regina
winked. “But I suppose the less you know the better, right,
Will?”
Reggie rolled his eyes and looked apologetic.
“Oh, look here,” he said. “The choir is ready to
sing.” He took Regina firmly by the arm and led her away to where
the older children and women were preparing to perform.
Will remembers this exchange with a sick feeling,
and how it all ended up, how they were all playing at something
that ended up being all too real.
Then 1945, the recurring sounds of aircraft
overhead, whispers of a new kind of bomb. Something extraordinary,
beyond imagination, an unthinkable death toll. A giant mushroom
cloud of devastation over Japan. Snippets of information smuggled
in through the daily vegetable delivery, the spinach suddenly
wrapped in the English newspaper.
Guards looking sheepish, being slightly friendlier,
allowed more privileges. Their rations grew larger.
Trudy still a daily thought, but now successfully
muffled. None of his messages answered, no reported sightings from
the people who visited other internees. It was as if she had
vanished into thin air. Like her mother, he thought, and pushed
that thought out of his head. In war, people die. Later, he would
realize that was how a dying man would think.
And the liberation, entering a brave new world
outside, still wary of the Japanese, dangerous in their loss. Some
lashed out, killed while they could, but most trod the fine line
between conquered and conqueror, that undefined space.
As if an old creaky machine were being cranked back
into life, Hong Kong sputtered back. The buses and trams started
running on their regular schedules, stores started to receive
provisions, and prices slowly returned to normal. People ran into
one another on the street and clutched each other, remarked on how
thin everyone was, happy to have survived and to see each other,
even if they hadn’t liked each other before. Practicing the normal,
trying to get to mundane.
Otsubo was repatriated to Japan. Later, they heard
he was hung at Sugamo Prison. There was no relief in hearing the
news.
The strangeness of the first dinner party, and how
everyone slipped into it cautiously at first, and then how everyone
got comfortable so quickly it was unseemly. They complained about
the lack of basic supplies, then the lack of good help, then how
hard it was to get good wine, then everything. The amnesia of
comfort, soothing, anodyne, too seductive. They were all too soon
back to themselves.
How can a woman disappear? How can someone so
vivid vanish?
Searching for her in the aftermath, the empty taste
in his mouth, the taste of regret. Funny thing: He was always
thirsty after liberation. He procured a car and drove the empty
roads throughout the island—to her old flat, to Angeline’s old
house, to her father’s house in Sai Kung, all vacant and
vandalized, smelling musty and worse. A tour of abandoned houses.
Her father dead in Macau, unknown causes during the war. Dominick
also gone. Just another sad story.
Without the lightness of Trudy buoying him up, Will
became morose, too serious, too dark. He lurked in odd corners of
Hong Kong or stayed home, a sparse affair with one glass, one
plate, a bare lightbulb. He was no longer invited anywhere. “He’s
gone odd,” whispered around town. He could not define a new self
without Trudy.
He sank into anonymity until he caught a glimpse of
Victor and Melody getting out of their car in Causeway Bay, with
their daughter. Their daughter who looked nothing like them. He
remembered hearing something about Melody in the United States, a
tragedy, but something that had been whispered once and then never
again. He started to think. And then rang up Victor with a
hard-luck story and asked for a job, knowing that the man would
love to hire an Englishman for what he would consider a menial job,
both men knowing there was much more to the request.
Victor loved to show him off to unknowing business
associates, particularly those just arrived from Europe or America.
Will would pull the car around and get out to open the door.
Victor’s guests would widen their eyes and step into the car,
visibly impressed. An Englishman working as a driver, even for a
family such as the Chens, was almost unheard of, especially someone
like him, who’d been out and about in society before the war.
Still, most were embroiled in their own concerns and many had
emerged much changed from the war—the Dutch banker who exited
Stanley a schizophrenic and now lived in an alley building in
Sheung Wan and came out to beg with a rattan basket, his blond hair
matted and dark; or the Miller girl who had been engaged to one of
the Hos, the shipping family, but came out of the camp too used,
and now lived in Mong Kok and was rumored to be a bar hostess. Will
was just another casualty of war, and not the worst off of them.
People talked at first, but then it became just another quirky fact
of Hong Kong life.
He worked odd hours and tried to get glimpses of
Locket, but the Chens always had the other drivers take her to
school. Despite himself, he looked at her face, looking for signs
of what? Trudy, yes, but also what he could not voice in his own
head.
One day, Victor got in the car and directed Will to
drive to the Peak. On the way up, he had seemed agitated, fidgeting
with papers in the backseat.
“Mistakes were made,” he said suddenly,
opaquely.
Will had not answered, which had made Victor more
jumpy.
“Do you know what I’m talking about?” he had
asked.
“No.”
“In times of war, there are many decisions that are
made, and things that get done without the benefit of
reflection.”
“Yes, sir,” he had replied, his deference more
threatening than anything he could have said. He saw Victor’s face
in the rearview mirror. He was perspiring heavily.
“I’ve had some news . . .” Victor started.
“Yes, sir,” he repeated.
Victor hesitated, then seemed to get ahold of
himself.
“At any rate, Will, the war has changed all of us.
We’re all in this together now.”
Will remained silent.
“I’ve changed my mind, Will. You can take me home
now.”
Will swung the car around and took Victor home.
They didn’t speak on the return journey. His wages were suddenly
doubled. Will never found out what had spooked Victor but neither
he nor Victor ever mentioned the ride again.
He was waiting for something to happen. And in the
meantime, he remembered.
Trudy and Dominick locked in a terrible
embrace.
Funny how so many things seem inevitable, given
enough distance. Put a girl and a boy of similar persuasions
together in summer and see what evolves. Usually love. Two friends,
equally matched, and then one suddenly has an advantage: rarely
will they remain friends. This must have been what happened. Trudy
and Dominick, alike as two peas in a pod when things were good.
When the situation turned fraught, each reverted to form. Trudy
essentially good, Dominick an animal. The betrayal sharp.
But his own? Much worse. He knows.
“I forgive you,” she says. “I understand.”
He clings to this. Hears her say it over and
over.
How can he leave her now?