The Secrets of a Fire King (27 page)

Our footsteps echoed against the metal shutters of the shops.

Nangka wore a simple dress of dark blue silk, which she had stolen months ago. Her lips were a clear red, her hair was dark black, her skin the color of cut wood just after it has rained. She was beautiful, I thought. She said we both were.

We sat together in the center of the long airplane. Other girls were with us. They leaned into the windows, pointed out shore-line and cities, or the vast expanse of sea. Some of them slept.

Nangka and I did none of these things. We barely even spoke, we were so nervous. At the landing my ears filled up with something and gave me so much pain I wanted to scream, and when I had to say good-bye to Nangka I could hardly hear what she said. But I saw her, I kept her face in my mind. I told myself there was no reason to worry, her new address was folded in my locket by a picture of my brother. I touched its metal, warmed by my skin, and I let her walk away with that man, out into the night.

I wrote her many letters:

Dearest Nangka,

After I left you we came to this place by train. It was early
morning. The houses are so close together here, like at home,
but each one has a small gate, a fence around the garden. The
water man says there are flowers, but not now. The air smells
wet and earthy. He says it is too early for the fire, though I am
always cold. Yesterday I gathered sticks and branches from his
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garden. I saved them in the kitchen and asked could we please
have a fire. I did not understand his expression, and then he
laughed. He showed me the switch. First there is a humming,
then a light that moves like fire, but you can touch it. Later
there is heat that bakes my skin dry. Nangka, I felt so foolish
I wanted to die, but he is a kind man. The floors in this house
are soft with rugs, and the walls have a paper that is fuzzy
when you touch it. Nangka, please write to me, is this how it
is for you?

Dearest Nangka,

My sweet friend, did you get my letters? Every day I wait for
the mail but there is never anything from you. Today we went
to the shops at the end of the block. It is so strange, Nangka,
there was nothing there I could recognize, though he wants
me to cook. Everything is wrapped in plastic, I cannot feel the
oranges or the meat, and nothing has a smell. When I was
home alone there was snow. I did not know what it was at
first. Then I remembered the wise woman and went outside
to feel it. It is white and burns like the smoke that used to come
from the factories to our room. At first I was not cold and I
stood there for a long time. Then I saw a face in the window
next door. It was the old woman, looking at me, and when I
waved she dropped the curtain. Then I went inside and I was
suddenly very cold. I sat in a blanket and watched the lines of
white growing on the fences. I thought about that old woman.

The water man, Jim, is kind, but the other people here are not
kind. I see them looking at me always, and they do not smile.

Nangka, I think of you always, is it the same for you?

Dear Nangka,

I am so worried. Here are some stamps. I am sending you
these stamps so that if he does not let you out you can get a
letter to me. Wait for the mailman. Nangka, I miss you. I
would rather be back at that place with you than to be so
lonely here.

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I sent these letters with diminishing hope. Still, I put them in the box every day. I did not hear and did not hear, and soon my own letters began to come back to me. I saved them, and one day, desperate, I showed them to Jim.

“She has moved,” he said, pointing to the yellow sticker.

“Yes, but where? Where is she now?”

He shook his head, and handed me the letter back. His skin was very white then, and his fingernails were blue, like the envelope.

“It doesn’t say, I’m afraid. She didn’t leave an address.”

“She wouldn’t do that,” I said. “We are like sisters.” It was too late when I realized my mistake. Jim studied me.

He said, “I thought you
were
sisters.” But when he saw me folding with loss, he put his arm around me. “There,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. Look, do you have her new name? Do you know what man she came with?”

I remembered him at the airport, face like a hairy fruit, when he put his arm around Nangka’s shoulders and drew her away. I remembered how small she looked beside him, her last smile to me. I remembered that he was not kind.

“No,” I whispered. “No.”

“You’re shivering,” Jim said. He turned up the heat and put another blanket around my shoulders. When he frowned I could see the fine red lines surface on his forehead, a map of his thoughts.

He listed things we could do. Write the agency. Contact the em-bassy. It was possible, he said, that we could find her. At least we could look.

“But you mustn’t hope,” he said. “It isn’t likely, and you mustn’t get your hopes up.”

Three months have passed, and still I do not hope. Nor do I pray, though I have found a church, and I sometimes go there.

One day I was shopping, holding a ham swathed in plastic, when I saw the nun. She wore short skirts, which surprised me, skirts that brushed her knees, and dark black tights. Her hair was covered by only a black cloth, and no wimple framed her face. She was pale, her hands were as white as soap. She was a nun, and I
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followed her. A block, half a block behind, I followed her, marking the way in my memory. She was young, I could tell from the way she walked, the long swing of her legs. It was spring by then.

The sun was cool on my face and hands, and the trees looked like half-plucked chickens with their small pale leaves.

The church she went to is big, but though I come here often, I am nearly always alone. I sit in the front pew, near the statues that crowd around the altar. These are faces I recognize, smooth expressions of grief and rapture I find familiar. I do not have these feelings anymore, such extremes of pain or ecstasy. My life on this cold island has a pattern, but my feelings have paled like the skins of the people here, my smiles are smiles of habit only. It is true I do not suffer. I think if I went back, saw the hibiscus and brown river of my childhood, pain would flower in me to match the colors I could touch. Even here, in this place that is a shadow of my other life, the memories stir. My brother had dark eyes, and the skin beneath his fingernails was the rosy pink of coral. My mother smelled like jasmine, she wove bright waxy orchids in her hair.

When she sang to me there was bougainvillea outside the window, fuchsia leaves like flames. There was green all around us, deep and rich, and when the rains fell they ran like juice from the sky. Even Nangka, with her city voice, knew the power of red on the lips, of deep blue silk that fell around her calves.

This is what I think of at that church. I see the statues, and I am reminded, faintly, of what to feel. I close my eyes and see fi rst my brother, pulled from the river on that day he did not drown.

He is pale beneath his skin, like these statues, but he is alive, and that night my mother wears a red dress to church, she tosses flowers into the baptismal fountain to celebrate his life. I go on like this, remembering, feeling a surge of life and color. But then there are the other things, which also come. My mother with a fever that sent water streaming from her skin, my brother turning his head to wipe the tears of wind from his eyes. Or Nangka, head tilted back, her hair wet and heavy, before that last inch was cut away. The worst memory is Nangka, turning past the strange arm to give me one last smile, while behind her the rain was falling, sealed from us by glass.

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I open my eyes, then, filled with memory, and seek the faces of the statues, which at home would let me weep. But here they are so pale, and like me their tears are frozen in their eyes. They are as cold as mountain earth, but all the same I seem to hear them speak.

Listen,
they whisper, their voices as urgent as wind before the rain.
Let me tell you. Let me tell you how it began.

Gold

On the day that gold was discovered near his village, Mohammed Muda Nor had worked all morning tapping rubber. At one o’clock he walked out from the airy rows of trees, waved to Abdullah, the entry guard, who was already eating his lunch, and started down the dusty road home.

The call to prayer wavered from the village mosque, and it seemed to Muda that he could see it, waves of sound shimmering concurrently with the midday heat. It was the end of the fruit season, one of the last hot weeks before the rains began, and the weather was a fiery hand against his back. Muda walked with his straw hat pulled down low over his forehead, so he didn’t see the children running toward him until they were quite near. They circled around him and pulled in close, like the petals on a closing fl ower.

“Pachik Muda.” It was his oldest nephew, a boy named Amin.

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ter, Maimunah, who stood brown and naked beside him. “Uncle, our mother says for you to come quickly to the river.” Muda stopped to consider. He was hungry, and the river was in the opposite direction of his home. He had risen before dawn and had worked hard all morning. Each tree required a narrow cut in the bark and a cup, precisely set, to collect the rubbery white sap. There were hundreds of trees in his area. He had worked hard, and he was hungry.

“Tell your mother,” he said, “that I will come later. Right now I am going for my lunch.” He expected them to run off then. They were the children of his sister, Norliza, and they were rarely naughty. But instead Amin released his sister’s hand. He reached out and tugged at Muda’s sarong.

“My mother says to come,” he repeated. “Please, Pachik Muda, she says it is important.”

Muda sighed, then, but he turned and followed the children back along the road. Red rambutans and smooth green mangoes hung from the trees. He plucked some of these and ate them as he walked, wondering what he would find on the riverbank.

Norliza had worked the rubber too, before she married, and she would not take him lightly from his rest and prayers.

When he reached the river he saw a cluster of women standing on the grassy bank. Norliza was in the center, her sarong wet to the knees, holding something out for the others to see.

“Norliza,” he called. He was going to scold her for consuming his time with her bit of woman’s nonsense, but before he could speak she ran to him and uncurled her fist. The lines in her palm were creased with dirt, so that the skin around them looked very pale. The words he had planned stopped in his mouth. For on her palm lay a piece of gold as large as a knuckle. It was wet with river water, and it caught the noon light like fire in her hand.

“The children found it,” she said. “I was digging for roots.” Norliza was a midwife, known in the village for her skill in herbs and massage. She came into the jungle every week to search for the healing roots and bark. “I was digging there, near the trees by the river. The children were playing next to me, sorting out the rocks for a game. This one they liked because of its shine. At fi rst
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I did not realize. It was only when Amin washed it in the river that I understood.” Her dark eyes gleamed with an unfamiliar excitement. “To think,” she said. “To think he might have dropped it, and I would never have known.”

Muda reached out and took the knot of gold. It was smooth, almost soft, against his fingers. He ran his thumb against it again and again. Some of the women drew close to stare. Others, he noticed, were already moving away with the news.

“It’s not real,” he said loudly, and dropped the lump of gold back into his sister’s hand.

“Muda!” she said. She looked up at him from dark eyes. Once she had been the most beautiful girl in the village. Now the dark eyes were connected by a finely etched skin, and the expression on her face was reproachful. He took a deep breath and spoke again.

“I’ve worked all day in the rubber, and you waste my lunch time with this foolishness. You are a silly woman,” he added, though it gave him great pain to see how she flinched under the eyes of the other women. A ripple of murmuring voices moved through the crowd. They had lived in the village all their lives, and he had never spoken to his sister sharply. Even the women who had reached the road paused and turned back to watch. “You are a foolish woman,” he repeated. “Foolish. And I am going home.” He turned and walked away with slow dignity. He didn’t look back, but when he was certain he was out of sight he began to run with a speed he had not summoned since he was a boy.

Khamina was washing dishes when he burst inside. His lunch was set out on the floor—a plate of fish stuffed with coconut, a vegetable curry, several small bananas—but he paid no attention to it. Instead he ran to the wooden porch where his wife was squatting amid a pile of soapy dishes.

“Khamina,” he said. “Give me your cooking pot.” She stood up in surprise and gestured to the soapy wok soaking in the water. Then her eyes narrowed, and she looked him up and down.

“Muda,” she said. “Why are you running through my house with your shoes on? Where is your mind? Today I scrubbed these floors, and here you are dragging the rubber field across them.”
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“Khamina,” he said. He had scrubbed the pot and was now pouring water over it, clearing away the soap. “Let me tell you something. It is no time to complain about a little mud. This is an important day. My sister Norliza may be here soon. If she comes I want you to tell her that I have gone back to the river. Tell her to come there at once. She is not to speak to anyone. Do you hear me? Not to anyone! Tell her to come alone.” Muda splashed water on his face. Then he picked up Khamina’s cooking pot and left the house. She followed him, stepping over the food he had ignored, standing in the doorway to watch him running through the heat of the day, her black pot swinging from his hand.