The Catherine Lim Collection (54 page)

“Come here.”

The old man’s voice, firm and authoritative,
came through the open door of his room as she was hurrying past. She stopped,
head bowed, heart beating.

“Come here.”

It turned out he only wanted the
back-knocking.

“The weather’s getting too cold,” he said
brusquely by way of explanation, without looking at her. Cold weather made old
bones ache, so wives and bondmaids stood behind masters and gently knocked
their backs with rhythmic small clenched fists until told to stop.

“Start,” he said, turning his back to her,
still not looking at her and continuing with the mixing of inks at his desk.

She knocked gently on his back, moving her
small balled fists expertly up and down and across the broad expanse of his
powerful back. The large, heavy clock on the wall ticked the minutes away. The
back, under the impact of the diligently working fists, began to ripple with
desire. The old man said, “Stop, that’s enough,” and swung round, and would
have caught her by the wrist and pulled her to his bed, as he had done with
innumerable bondmaids if a voice had not called then and saved her, a second
time. It was not old Ah Por’s voice, for that had been stilled forever and Ah
Por’s ashes now lay in an urn in the temple. It was the voice of a man, calling
her. She was saved by a man.

He was a scholar cousin who had been invited
into the household by Grandmother; they were told to call him Older Brother. He
came with his crate of books, shortly after Ah Por’s death and was given her
room, still redolent of the joss fumes. He was gaunt, unsmiling, with the
scholar’s taciturnity and impatience with trifles. The bondmaids, their eyes
lowered as they moved about, watched him closely and by the second week, were
able to conclude that he was unlike the other three and would leave them alone.
Indeed, they placed him squarely outside the generality of men: he showed
kindness to women.

“He did not strike me when I spilt the tea.”
“I was slow, but he didn’t say anything.” “He said ‘Thank you’ when I brought
him the blanket.”

His kindness at first intrigued them, then
drew them to him like moths; they could not stop whispering about him.

“He’s already 30 but he’s not married.”

“I heard Grandmother say he won’t marry till
he passed some important examinations in China.”

“I heard Grandmother say they have found a
wife for him in China.”

“Scholars like him don’t want to marry.”

“I don’t want him to marry and go away to
China. I want him to stay here and go on protecting me, as Ah Por would have
done.”

The words were never uttered, only deeply
felt by Golden Frond, each time she crept into the circle of whispering
bondmaids, but never leaving her own safe, reassuring circle of this man’s
presence. For the austere nobility of his scholar’s mien and manner, like the
gentle piety of Ah Por before him, had the power of repulsing the unruly forces
in the house so that Golden Frond had stepped from one warm shelter into
another, and could continue to feel safe. She hung around him, anticipating his
every need. He hardly spoke to her but she knew every fibre of his body
resonated to every distress signal from hers. Otherwise, how was she to explain
his sudden appearance at the doorway to the kitchen, at precisely the moment
when Older Cousin, importuning and slobbering, moved aside the braids of hair
on her neck to kiss her? In the blistering scorn of his look, as he stood there
in the doorway, tall and gaunt, Older Cousin had slunk away. Or his sudden loud
call to her from his room downstairs (and he so seldom called to her) at the
moment that Grandfather decided that the back-knocking should stop and swung
round with menace?

She worshipped him; she was ready to die for
him. The sounds of the men in the house awakening in the morning – the
crackling expectorations of phlegm from throat, the steamy hissing of urine
into chamber-pots – continued to galvanise bondmaids into feverish morning
activity (a younger bondmaid, aged 10 years old, had taken over the tasks from
her), but the sound she listened to was the shuffling of papers and books on
desk and a small cough which she had learnt to distinguish from other coughs.
In a sly and determined way, she had edged a fellow bondmaid out of the duty of
making his bed and sweeping his room, and taken this duty upon herself, giving
it every loving attention.

Pig, who did not like her, complained
secretly to Grandmother and told one or two more things besides.

“Golden Frond, it is not proper for you to
go so often to Older Brother’s room. You don’t have to clean it so often.”

“Yes, Grandmother,” said Golden Frond and
went on nevertheless. She thought of him as she lay awake at night, and turned
over in her mind each of the words (never many) he had said to her during the
day, detecting a new kindness here, a new depth of feeling there. Each of a
man’s words, let drop in tenderness to a woman, is never left there but picked
up by her and turned over and cast this way and that, to catch at more meaning,
and if there is none, will soon gather around itself the meanings supplied by
the heart’s yearning.

She sang a joyous song in the refuge of his
protective power.

One day, while they were alone in the house
(oh rare occasion!) he told her something. He said he was going away to China,
and would be away for many months. He had this very important examination to
take.

Her eyes filled with tears which she was
helpless to stop, no matter how much she blinked, bit her lips, bit a corner of
her handkerchief, and so she stood there, more miserable than at any time in
her life. He was standing with his back to her, looking out of the window, upon
a sea of old tiled roofs with desolate tufts of grass in the crevices and a
flock of plaintive pigeons wheeling above. At the moment that he spun round
upon hearing a small suppressed sob, she looked up at him, frightened and
miserable, and when he walked to her, took her hand and led her to a chair, she
knew the endurance had reached its end: She burst out in the full release of an
overcharged heart. Her sobbing intensified with the gentle pressure of his hand
upon her shoulder and the sound of his voice, barely audible, for he too was
deeply moved: “Don’t cry.” How could she explain that a man’s kindness to a
woman, more than his cruelty, drew tears?

It turned out that though he was going to
China, he was not going to take a wife. All those rumours about a wife waiting
for him there were groundless and stupid, he said. She stared at him, hope
breaking through the tear stains. The woman who in her imagination had
tormented her for months, standing between them and blocking out their view of
each other, was now vanquished. But what a hope! Worse than groundless, worse
than stupid. She, a bondmaid of no parentage or name, the lowest of the low
among women and he, a scholar of good family, destined for wealth and power.

In the moment of her banishing the hope
forever, he rose to promise its fulfilment.

“I am going to make you my wife,” he
announced with simple finality, “I shall make my wishes known to Grandmother
who will see to arrangements for the required betrothal ceremony, and when I
return from China, we shall be married.”

He duly sought Grandmother’s permission,
dismissed the protestations, requested her to make the necessary arrangements
and then continued quietly with his studies. Grandmother later said to her
close friends, “What could I do? Men must have their way.”

In the months that Older Brother was away in
China, the sense of peace and well-being continued, for by virtue of the
betrothal, his absence, as much as had his presence, encircled her with safety,
while all round her were the ragings of appetite and doom. One night, the
silence was broken by the screams of the bondmaid called ‘Female’ who had sat
up suddenly upon the sleeping mat she shared with another bondmaid, and then
staggered up and out of the room in a delirium. Grandmother, waking up in a
fright, went to her, calmed her and then returned her to her mat. Mystery
surrounded her whereabouts in the next few days, for she disappeared from the
house the next day and was not seen again. She was brought home from the
hospital on a stretcher and died the next morning. The story pieced together by
the bondmaids, whispering urgently among themselves, was this: a few days
before the delirious outburst, Female, in the fourth month of her pregnancy,
had been quietly taken by Grandmother and a friend to a village abortionist, a
Malay woman extremely skilled with her hands, but the abortion was a mess and
Female developed complications. Grandmother tried to still the fever with home-made
brews, but it continued unabated and Female was finally taken to hospital in a
trishaw. She got worse and died after a few days, still screaming in her
delirium.

“Ah Por, protect us all,” prayed Golden
Frond as she lit a joss-stick and stuck it in the urn on Ah Por’s altar. She
lit another joss-stick in gratitude for her special good fortune and yet
another for the success of her betrothed in his examinations in China.

She was now 18 years old; Grandfather was
73; First Uncle was 51 and Older Cousin was 26, and in the 11th year of his
imbecility.

She moved unafraid among them, strengthened
by the love and kindness of a man. There were no letters from him because she
could not read, but in the third month of his absence, she received, through a
friend who had met up with him in China, the gift of a beautiful, red silk
jacket. She would not even try on the jacket, but let it remain in its box,
taking it out now and then to gaze upon the sheen of the silk and the fine
embroidery of the peonies on the sleeves.

The news came with complete devastation. She
was working on a beaded slipper, sewing on the eyes of a phoenix when she was
told by Grandmother: Older Brother had died in China. He was midway through his
examinations when he contracted a fever, got rapidly worse and died. She
listened, then was aware of a numbness that locked up all powers of speech and
movement so that only small, constricted sounds came from her throat and the
eye-beads rolled away from her fingers, then of a penetrating chill and an enveloping
darkness that sucked her into its centre making her gasp for breath.

She lay in a stupor for days. Grandmother
called in the temple medium to say prayers and administer a drink that would
ward off the final terrible bout of madness, for women, when the scorpions
massed for the final onslaught, were known to try to escape it by hurling
themselves out of windows or into wells.

She lay helpless on her bed, a pale and
stricken ghost, making no sounds except the small groans of a misery too deep
for tears. There were the dreams of her betrothed, alive and talking to her but
these melted only too quickly into the dreams of him dead or in the throes of
death, and there was always the dream, above all the tumult, of old Ah Por,
benign and smiling and beckoning to her.

In this state, she heard voices around her,
not the voices of people in dreams, but voices of real people, in Grandmother’s
room just next to hers.

“The temple medium says she must be given a
husband, or she will die.”

“Older Cousin needs a wife. He is already
27.”

“She will be married to Older Cousin.”

She began to pray to the Goddess Kuan Yin,
to old Ah Por, to Older Brother, one after the other: “Protect me, save me”,
but it would appear that having given her protection and love for so long, they
were now weary of her incessant calls and were leaving her to take care of
herself.

She put her forehead to the floor in utmost
supplication, but it seemed they had abandoned her to the darkness.

Older Cousin, grossly fat and leering, met
her in the corridor as she was getting out of her room for the first time since
her illness, and shrieked in gloating triumph.

“You are to be my wife. The temple medium
and Grandmother say so!”

“Not so,” she said haughtily, though she
could barely speak for weakness. “I must have a husband, but it will not be
you.”

“Oh! Oh!” The unwonted defiance robbed him
of speech for a minute, and he gaped at her, his mouth opening and closing like
a fish.

“Wait till I tell Grandmother!” he blurted.

“I do not care who you tell,” she said with
still greater hauteur, looking him all over with scorn. He danced around her in
his rage and then ran off squeaking.

He ran off to complain to Grandmother and to
demand that the bondmaid be whipped for her insolence, since she was well
enough recovered from her illness. When the two of them went up to her room,
they were in time to see the flames springing up and enclosing her body in a
fiery embrace, as she sat, cross-legged, with hands prayerfully clasped in
front of a hastily set up altar on which was a framed photograph of her
betrothed. Grandmother shouted for help, Older Cousin began to jump up and down
in the manner of an overwrought child unable to control his excitement.
Blubbering, he pointed a trembling finger at the perfectly still figure in the
flames, radiant in the red silk jacket. At the moment when somebody dragged in
a mat and tried to beat out the flames, the figure keeled over in a graceful
arc and lay face down, the song of immolation still on her lips.