Shadow Theatre (28 page)

It was almost half-past five, the sun sloping gently across
the bed. Shak was showing me some things she wanted me to
see before I left that evening, and what comes back to me now
is her voice. Shak's voice, the sound of it, even with her accent,
making me think of ink flowing on rice paper. Of a whisper
blowing on your skin, like that.

Outside, there was a rattling in the lime trees, and we could
hear birds squawking in the garden.

"Really, it's Catholic," Shak said, with some amusement in
her voice, and when I didn't say anything, she thought for a
moment and then she added, "All right, it's not Vatican
Catholic. More like folk Catholic. See this?" She pointed to the
plastic capsule and I looked. Deja vu, the two of us like that,
both examining something together, in those bygone days
when the world used to be so fresh, and everything we collected from it was a novelty. "It's holy dirt. Sort of like holy water,
you know? It's from a sanctuary in New Mexico, where they say
miracles have happened for people who've gone there to pray."

Shak could tell I didn't understand, probably from the way
I didn't want to admit it.

"It's Mexican-American folk religion, Rose. Catholic, from a
Mexican-American point of view. Know what I mean?" She
sighed, and I wondered if she was about to give up, so I
searched for something to say. Sometimes what you have to do
is just keep talking, right?

So I said, "Mexican?"

"Mexican-American. It's not the same thing, over there. I
mean, it's not the same thing." She sighed again. 'There's a lot
about American history we never learned, you know, Rose? Did
you know the slaves used to kill their babies to protect them
from the masters? The women. Can you imagine it? Killing your
own baby to protect it?"

"Murder is a sin," was all I could think to say, even though I
had watched the whole series of Roots, you know.

"Oh, Rose." Shak shook her head at me, eying me as if to
say, Don't he a dnmkopf. "It's not that simple. Mothers have to protect their children. All right, think about this. What if your husband's abusing your child? Say, if he's a drunk and beats up on
the child, or does worse things, and the police don't believe
you, or if you live in a country where are no laws against something like that. There are such places, you know. What would
you do?"

I looked at the shrine that was from that sanctuary where miracles were granted, even if it was American. And I asked for something to say, but no help came to me. Obviously Shak was trying
to get me to understand something very important to her, later
when she showed me the other things also. Some postcards she
had brought over from America, and her photographs from there.
I knew she was searching for a way to explain why she had stayed
away so long, why she had come back now, maybe even why I
would never see her again after this, as if she could answer something like that. Of course I didn't know, yet, what was going to
happen. All I knew was that Shak didn't fit in among us anymore.
Of course I had noticed it, how she didn't seem as happy as when
she had first arrived, as if her life in America was starting to call
her back, her heart missing someone there in a way she had never
missed me.

There were no photographs of that numbskull fellow, only
of Shak's apartment, and her tropical plants. All her rooms
had plants in them, which was something I hadn't known about
Shak before, that she loved plants. There was even a hibiscus,
imagine, which her friend Celia was watering in the photograph.

This was the friend who was taking care of her plants while
she was away. Shak must have called out to her, "Hey, turn
around," and her friend had turned around and smiled, quite
impromptu. (She was very pretty, and also I noticed she looked
mixed.)

Shak may have been waiting for me to do it, but I couldn't
bring myself to ask her who the baby's father was.

The last thing she showed me that afternoon was a piece of
her writing, which she said she had found while cleaning out
the drawers in her wardrobe. The writing was on ruled paper,
with the sentences not staying on the lines. The words had a
blurry look because the ink must have melted a bit over the
years. I recognized Shak's younger handwriting at once, her
splashing loops and lanky, daring strokes.

After I had read the piece, she said, "I don't remember it. I
was probably still half-asleep."

"You used to write down your dreams," I said, which was
true. But she had never shown me the recorded dreams because
her writing used to be very private to her.

"Yes, I did." She smiled. "I still do, sometimes."

I didn't ask her about the dream in the writing, and Shak
didn't say anything else about it. All she did was ask whether I
wanted to keep the piece.

I told her yes.

She didn't ask me why, and she never would. Nor would she
tell me about the will she was making, or that she was going to
more or less bequeath her baby to Evelina Thumboo, of all people. All that, I wouldn't find out until later, after everything was
over, so to speak.

I I I I S WAS W H Al Shak had written down:

Violent sex dreams. I'm across the road. I hear two girls learning about sex? in the house. My parents are in the house. The
girls come out because they made a mistake and got fired. My
parents go on playing. Later I hear my mother screaming. My
father wants to play the bye-bye game. My mother screams,
begs, No. My father goes to the door, opens it, says bye-bye,
closes the door. But he doesn't come out. It's only a starting point.
Once he closes the door, there's no going back. My mother
screams and screams. I rattle my fingers in my ears to drown out
the screams.

Something about two boxes. I think they put on these boxes
over their heads and walk around the room. If they bump into
each other, he fucks her. It's violent. He uses knives. One is a
metal spatula. She has 28 scars in fo days. I'm crying. If she
gets 28 more, she'll die.

Outside the house, my father says we must talk. I follow him
back across the road. I don't think he will hurt me but he's drunk.
A policeman, a friend, a wimpy sort of guy, comes with us and
tries to take my father to jail.

Underneath the dream, she had added:

My father in this dream looks different. Rougher. He doesn't
look like my dad in real life.

I couldn't make heads or tails of it at the time, and Shak
must have known this. But she must have known also, when she
gave it to me, that I would read it again and again. She must
have known I would keep trying, because she knew me.

HAT MY MOTHER'S friends say about the widow Valerie
Nair is that, for over a decade, she was brewing medicine with her husband's coffee, scooping the ground leaves into
the aluminum decanter before adding coffee powder. And so
morning after morning her husband had grown weaker, his
bones wilting so slowly, he himself didn't notice until it was too
late. By the time the symptoms of illness were unmistakable, his
bones were almost hollow, his muscle barely attached, his blood
a turbid brown like cheap ordinary tea, so that not even the
smartest doctors could save him.

This was what happened long before we were born, back when Che' Halimah was alive and living in the Chinese
bomoh's house, which itself is about to go. (No one ever calls
the Chinese bomoh by name, or understands why Che'
Halimah broke the tradition of choosing a kampong girl to take
over when she grew ill. ) My mother's friends say, the Chinese
bomoh's medicine is only so-so, but my mother tells me it's
good enough and that people have to stop asking for the moon.
She says they'll all regret complaining when the bomoh's house
gets torn down (the government's been warning for years that
kampongs are fire hazards, what with all those atap roofs). Our
kampong's the last to go, and who knows what will happen then?
That's how my mother says it. Our kampong, she says, even
though we don't live there, and I never have. But my grandfather lives there, and my mother and my Uncle Abdul grew up
there, so I say it, too, because Maria tells me it's true-our kampong will be demolished soon. And she says your kampong
because she and I are closer than sisters, and we know each
other. We don't know how Maria knows what will happen
before it does, but she's always right.

It may he that Maria was born with a veil, although Auntie
Eve says she wasn't, and Auntie Eve was in the room at the time.
(Malika wasn't. Maria says Malika came to live with them a few
days after, so she's not the one to ask.) My mother says there are
women who believe babies born with the veil bring bad luck, and
that Auntie Eve may not remember because she's superstitious
and doesn't understand. But Auntie Eve's memory seems fine to
me, and anyone can see Maria's the precious jewel of her heart.
But it may he that Maria was born with a veil, and Auntie Eve
doesn't want to say it out loud (in case a spirit passing by hears).

We don't talk about this, Maria and 1. We don't talk about
her birth, or about her mother. It's the only thing we don't talk
about, the night of her birth the only closed door between us.

So when the widow approached us at the church yesterday,
I didn't know how to warn her. Maria doesn't know what I know. She doesn't know about Auntie Eve's old neighbors and their
secret acts, or why Auntie Eve moved away, because when my
mother's friends at the kampong talk, there are things they don't
tell outsiders. And even though Maria and I have known each
other our whole lives, she's still an outsider to them.

"Girl, what's your name?" the widow asked, and when we
turned around, she was looking at Maria, her irises dark and turbulent like a nightmare.

That was how I knew it was her, the one who had gone so
far as to murder her husband by the only untraceable means. I
had never seen her before yesterday, because Maria and I don't
live in that neighborhood and we don't go to that church. We
don't go to any church, although Auntie Eve's Catholic and so's
Maria. (Sometimes they attend Mass at a church near the
Christian cemetery, when they visit Maria's mother's grave, but
otherwise, Auntie Eve likes to keep priests and nuns and anyone
holy at arm's length, as she puts it.) Maria and I wouldn't have
been there yesterday if Maria hadn't decided to join the youth
choir, if our classmate Lucinda Tan hadn't asked us, which had
happened not because Lucinda wants to be friends, I know, but
because Maria's voice is strong and sweeter than cotton candy
in our mouths, and I should have guessed, too, what Lucinda
didn't tell us but Maria knew, that Derek Ashley's in the choir.

That was why we were in the foyer, at the bottom of the spiral staircase leading up to the choir loft, at one o'clock when the
widow was there. There was no one else in the pews, and no sign
of the other choir members because Lucinda Tan had given us
the wrong time, telling us choir practice would start at half-past
one, forgetting it was starting later yesterday because the choir
mistress was dropping her friend off at the airport on the way.