The Map of Lost Memories (12 page)

Anne gazed over the slanting rooftops below. “When I first arrived in Shanghai, I was enchanted by how it smelled of jasmine right before dawn. During the first months, I could barely sleep; I was afraid of missing that perfumed hour. At the same time, I was sure I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. I abandoned a decent husband, a comfortable home,
the regard of my family. My father never forgave me. When he died, he had not spoken to me for eight years.”

“Has it been worth it?”

“I’m thankful every day for that moment of recklessness. How else would I ever have made it to the other side?”

“What do you mean,
the other side
?”

“The place where one feels truly alive. Too many people surrender to a place of safety. That place where all they do is long to sleep so they can dream about living. Even if you don’t find what you think you’re looking for, darling, it’s the going out and looking for it that counts. That is the only way you can know you have lived.”

Irene persevered through the remains of the day, refusing to think about what had happened—what could have happened—with Roger. She returned to her hotel room, gathered her belongings, and paid her bill. Letting herself into Simone’s apartment with a key that Anne had given her, she went to the bedroom to try to figure out what Simone might want or need, and discovered two trunks behind a screen. They looked as if they had been hastily packed, piled with the circuslike assortment of clothing that made up Simone’s wardrobe. Irene secured the trunks, asked the landlord to send them to the dock, and gave him a forwarding address for the central post office in Saigon. It was important to do things publicly. She did not want it to appear that Simone was running away.

From Simone’s she went to Marc Rafferty’s. She had begun to wonder if she and Simone should hire a bodyguard, and he seemed the right person for this kind of advice. But the nightclub was locked, and when the Algerian watchman for the brothel across the street told her that Marc had already left Shanghai, she realized that she had not come for counsel. She wanted to see him again. Even though she could not tell him what she and Simone had done, she wanted the reassurance she had felt sitting with him in his bar.

Irene made it through the night with the help of a bitter herb from Anne’s tall lacquer jewel case of narcotics, each of its drawers offering its
own means of escape. When she woke on the morning of the
Lumière
’s departure, her head was filled with mud. The bungalow, the Chinese countryside, the body in the grass—all were buried so deep that she could not have dredged them up if she had tried.

A smoky drizzle dimmed the city, but it did not, as one would expect, cool the dawn hour. Instead, as Irene stood in line at the customs shed with Simone and Anne, heat percolated through the steaming air. She found it hard to believe that she was already leaving Shanghai. Hadn’t she just arrived, standing on the deck of the
Tahoma
, admiring the Bund’s massive stiff-upper-lip banks and trading houses? How impressed she had been by the respected names mingling shoulder to shoulder down the waterfront: Jardine Matheson & Co., Asiatic Petroleum, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. But that was before she learned how little respectability was valued in this city.

Simone, who had positioned herself between Irene and Anne, was wearing the most outlandish hat Irene had ever seen. Its brim folded and flopped around her face, and she had to hold on to Anne’s arm like a blind woman whenever she walked. Occasionally she would lift the brim and peek around furtively, and comment on this man or that. “He’s watching me, do you see that? They know it, they all know it, how dangerous I am.”

Roger’s death was undoing her. Of course people were gawking at her, or rather at her clownish hat with its trim of multicolored ribbons. They couldn’t help themselves, the coolies loading cargo and the British soldiers standing guard. Even the beggars, limbs swaddled in strips of ocher-stained cotton, cast second glances, as did husbands saying goodbye to their wives and children, who would wait out the city’s latest nuisance—a rash of kidnappings from which even infants were not exempt—in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Irene tried to think of any of these men as a threat, but she couldn’t, and she knew that this was her shortcoming. She had underestimated the Brooke Museum’s trustees. And she had underestimated Roger, even though everyone from the countess to Marc Rafferty had cautioned her. But it felt safe here on the docks, so routine, with the porters transferring luggage and the odor of roasting garlic seeping through the tincture of
drenched river weed. Even the American destroyers sent to protect Western interests seemed innocuous, drab as the overcast sky, surrounded by sampans that looked as if they had drifted downriver from a previous century. Sails the color of damp tea leaves drooped above the domesticity of bamboo birdcages, sleeping cats, and limp, faded laundry.

Anne pressed a packet into Irene’s hand. “Have her take this as soon as she’s in her cabin. If she doesn’t want it, dissolve it into her drink.”

Irene tucked the envelope in her pocket.

Anne’s pale blouse was stained through with sweat, and her gray bob was uncombed. But although her appearance was unusually careless, her tone was not as she put her hands on Simone’s shoulders and said, “You’re going home, my darling.”

Solemn in spite of her hat, Simone said, “I’m going to make you proud of me.”

“If you need anything, anything at all, I will always be here for you.” Anne leaned in to kiss her cheek, and Simone hugged her. Blinking rapidly, trying not to cry, Anne said, “Be careful. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you. Either of you.” She let go of Simone and pulled Irene to her. Instinctively, Irene stiffened before slowly reaching around Anne’s waist. Anne tightened her embrace. Up close she smelled of nutmeg. Irene did not move. She did not want Anne to stop holding her.

“That man,” Anne whispered into Irene’s hair. “Near the noodle cart, do you see him?”

“Yes.”

“His name is Eduard Boisselier. If anyone has been sent to watch Simone, it’s him.”

Simone went straight to her cabin and took the sleeping powder without resistance. There was enough left over for Irene, who was grateful to disappear into her own cabin and sleep for the rest of the day. When she woke, the temperature had plunged. Headed for Saigon via Hong Kong, the steamer had reached the open sea. Gone were the polluted, oily gray waters of the Whangpoo, and with them the billboards advertising Tiger Balm and chewing gum. The air through her open window smelled clean,
of cold water and salt. She wrapped a wool blanket around her shoulders and went outside. Her breathing constricted in the alkaline chill. Waves fanned against the side of the ship, and the gray phantom of a gull paced the wake. She leaned against the railing.

As she stared out at the water, a cloud fled, and a luminous flight of moonlight poured over the vast expanse of the East China Sea. Constellations spread across the sky and were absorbed into the curving retreat of the earth. It was as if while sleeping Irene had entered a new country, an unspoiled landscape invulnerable to the decay that lingered beneath the incense and jasmine of Shanghai. She held the letter opener over the railing and let it go. It sparked as it knifed the water. Marc Rafferty had said that you cannot know what a place like this does to a person until it has done it to you. Irene wondered how long it would take to discover what Shanghai had done to her.

Our plan had been a slight affair, and quite vague: we talked about it so much that it assumed familiar shapes—far away in Cambodia there were huge flowers waiting patiently until we should come and pick them. Then suddenly, as though the sky had darkened, the adventure took on another form.

CLARA MALRAUX
,
Memoirs

The following morning, Irene entered the
Lumière
’s meandering salon through a mahogany door with a porthole murky from years at sea. The steward greeted her with an invitation to join the day’s bet on the ship’s speed. She declined and scanned the room. It reminded her of the lobby of a hotel that had once been grand. The burgundy fleurs-de-lis on the carpet had faded, and the scuffed wooden floor showed through in patches. It was not even eight, but tables were already occupied by the ship’s middle-aged set, fleshy European businessmen and their wives, who looked perpetually overheated, despite the foggy air. Dehydrated old colonials sat alone, reading newspapers they had brought from Shanghai, and a Chinese man dressed in a neat gray business suit had been seated
off to one side by himself, the only Oriental in the room. Having scarcely eaten the day before, Irene had woken up hungry, but her appetite withered at the greasy smell of bacon and frying butter. She spotted Simone at a table tucked in the corner, staring out the window into the thick marine drizzle.

Anne had given Irene enough pills, powders, and vials of henna-colored liquids to keep Simone sedated all the way through Saigon and Phnom Penh and into the Cambodian jungles. But as appealing as that possibility was, Irene knew they must confront what had happened. It would not be easy, for even as she said good morning, she could feel the cold pressure of Roger’s gun against her face. She could see Simone’s hands coated in blood. There were moments when it felt as if that night would be superimposed on her life forever. She lit a cigarette, and with the timidity that follows the sharing of a profound intimacy, she asked, “How do you feel?”

“I can’t say that I’m happy right now, but I no longer feel unhappy. May I?” Looking uncomfortable in her lavender blouse, such a demure item of clothing compared to her outrageous outfits in Shanghai, Simone took the cigarette from Irene. “Roger forbade me to do so many things,” she said, inhaling hungrily, as if the smoke was a lost part of herself she was trying to recover. “I think you should know, Irene, that while it was happening, I was thinking about the temple.”

Irene had expected Simone to avoid talking about Roger’s death, and the bluntness of this statement surprised her.

“I hadn’t planned to do it, I’m certain of that. But it was in my heart,” Simone said. “I can’t pretend I didn’t want it. That it didn’t feel good once it was done. When I cried, I thought at first it was because I felt regret. Then I realized it was because I had forgotten what it felt like to be free. Even though I knew I could go to prison, I was finally free.” She studied the gray haze spiraling off the tip of her cigarette. “I’m not sorry. But you. I’m worried about you.”

“Me? Why?”

“I’m afraid of what the guilt will do to you.”

“Why would I feel guilty?” Irene asked, unsettled by how defensive she felt.

“If you hadn’t come here, I wouldn’t have killed him.”

“Are you saying this is
my
fault?”

“You don’t think you have any blame in it?”

Irene looked outside, at the fog thinning along the deck, revealing the outline of a life preserver secured to the railing. She had been so concerned about Simone’s fragility that she had not considered her own. “I didn’t mean to hit him with the car.”

“And I didn’t mean to stab him in the throat. I was flailing. Trying to keep him away from me.” Simone opened Irene’s cigarette case and examined its contents, even though she was not finished with the one Irene had given to her. “We killed him so we could find this temple.
We
, Irene. And I think that given the choice, we would do it again.
That’s
what I need to know if you can live with.”

“But we didn’t go out there to kill him,” Irene insisted. “We didn’t plan on it. You said so yourself.”

As the sun thawed the last smoky strands of fog, baring deep blue bruises of open sea, Simone said, “Be honest with yourself. It was in your heart too.”

The first half of the voyage from Shanghai to Saigon passed with agonizing slowness. Each day Irene sat on a canvas lounge chair gazing out at the distant fringe of the Chinese shore, while Simone strolled idly around the deck, dragging the back of one hand along the railing as she passed beneath the balconies of the first-class staterooms on the level above. Overhead the twin stacks released tufts of smoke that wavered like low-lying clouds before evaporating in the cool air. With the smoke came the smudged odor of burning coal, its residue mingling in the dry white skim of salt that Irene washed from her face every night before bed.

Simone wore floral dresses with modest scalloped collars, a style similar to those common among the other young female passengers. This conformity was an obvious attempt to blend in, and it disappointed Irene, for she had enjoyed that particular eccentricity of Simone’s. But she understood the necessity. In this floating bulwark of one-dimensional provinciality, Simone did not need help standing out. Everyone knew who
she was and whom she was married to. To the financiers and military officers aboard the
Lumière
, a man like Roger Merlin was a natural enemy. To their wives, because marriage in the tropics is about loyalty—not to husbands but to an idea of civilization, often at risk of collapse from dengue fever or incompetent servants, let alone political upheaval—Roger was contemptible. As his wife, Simone was a blatant reminder of the threat to their colonial privileges and the status they could never achieve or afford in their homelands.