A Mind of Winter (15 page)
Outside, the air was even more putrid than it had been inside. The streets were coated with an oily film—muck from the port deposited by the pummeling rains. My cracked shoes made the going treacherous. I slipped and slid and, though I did not fall, each step threatened a tumble. I thought about the pipe that had miraculously appeared at some point in the middle of the night. But sharp needles were already whirring in my skull and I cursed the inferior offering. Around me, the air thickened the way it did before a renewed onslaught of rain. I quickened my pace, moving now on the balls of my feet, which lessened the feeling that I was about to topple, and it hit me: I had lost an entire day. It had been night when I drifted off in the stranger’s putrid room and night again now. Not the same night, surely: too much had happened.
No matter
, I thought.
The days may as well shrivel up and disappear
.
A faint breeze, tinged with salt, reached my nostrils. Had the flutter of air come from inland, it would have been tainted with the smell of goat dung and human waste. I turned in the direction from which it blew, hoping this would lead me back to the sea.
My North Star
, I thought bitterly,
this scrap of salty air
. Although I knew it was hopeless, the idea of finding Ma Ling beat in my mind like a trapped moth until it felt like it would knock a hole in my skull. I turned into a side alley and, for a moment, everything went black. Then, the impression of a heavy, tarred cloth being pulled back, and of light slowly entering some vast humid room. I found myself curled on the ground. As I picked myself up, a puffy sensation of pain swelled in my left knee. Limping along the alley, I felt a burst of determination.
I’m going to find Ma Ling
.
The alley turned to a street and back to an alley again, and then ended abruptly at a crumbly brick wall. I sensed rather than heard human motion, and picked my way slowly over the uneven stones. Sure enough, a man, moving up against a wall. His back was toward me—a broad back, and the man too tall to be Chinese. Faint moonlight drizzled through the flat, water-heavy sky, making the smooth material of his shirt dully gleam. Silently, I tiptoed toward him until I was right beside him. It was only then that I saw the little face pressed sideways against the wall. What struck me most was the look of forbearance in the child’s face. At that instant, the girl slowly moved her eyes, and I found myself peering into two steady, blank pools. Without thinking, I leapt upon the man and, possessed suddenly of uncommon strength, tore him away and flung him to the ground. The child stayed pressed against the wall, still holding the rags of her dress around her waist in delicate dirty fingers, regarding me with a calm unblinking gaze. A flicker of fear crossed the girl’s face. Something had scared her. And then I realized that I was uttering a peculiar, sustained scream.
I turned around. The man, having righted himself, withdrew into the shadows; I could just make out that he was fastening his pants. I lunged at him, and found myself again sliding into muddy blackness with nothing to catch me, and nothing to grip. Next thing I knew, I was running—sure-footed, now, despite the broken heel of my shoe and my swelling knee. But I was not moving as fast as I might have been and, in a flash, realized why. There was a small hand in my own, someone beside me, trying to keep up but slowed by a child’s stride and the slipperiness of bare feet on wet stone. I moved my grasp to her wrist and continued in a half-run, half-stumble, the girl flying weightlessly alongside me.
I continued to stumble and the nausea hit. My nose and eyes streamed; the little hand was limp in my own. I stopped, and turned to look at her. In place of the blank eyes, I saw flat terror. My own eyes were flooding, my chest heaved with sobs. For a moment, I faced the girl. I let go of her hand. She looked at me, bewildered.
“Go,” I said harshly, using the street-slang word and shoving the child who stumbled, almost fell, then raced away, a gray streak of energy in the dark.
* * *
Somebody is banging on the door. My hand flicks jerkily before my face, shooing away mosquitoes and flies that do not exist. The door bursts open. My eyes are dry but I manage to crack them open. A dim figure stands in the door frame: Han Shu, his round face distant and otherworldly as a moon.
“Just wait until you see who I’ve brought you!” he booms. I watch Han Shu’s large frame thrusting toward me in a series of strange little jerks. He is moving that way, I realize, because there is somebody with him, someone he is prodding before him. I raise my head, squint my eyes in an attempt to focus my gaze.
“Ma Ling,” I manage to croak, and I reach a bony arm in the girl’s direction.
“Yes,” Han Shu gaily declares. “You see? I’ve found her! I’ve brought her back! Can’t say it was easy, all the sleuth work and scouting about. And the little rascal did put up some resistance. But no matter, now that we have her back
home
!”
At this Han Shu, in a spasm of joy, reaches down and clasps Ma Ling to his chest, raising her so that her legs dangle in the air. He sets the girl down again and turns her by the shoulders to face me.
“Well?” he says breathlessly. “What do you say?”
I look hollowly at my employer.
“Christine, don’t you see? Our plans! It’s all still possible! … Don’t worry,” he continues, apparently to Ma Ling. “She’s a little under the weather, your teacher. Has been for some time. But she’ll come around.”
I crane toward Ma Ling, my neck aches from the effort. I take in the way the girl has draped her scarf over her shoulder—was that the olive and yellow Hermès?—in an only partially successful effort to hide a large tear in her dress.
What have you done?
I want to shriek at Han Shu, but in my daze, say nothing. Ma Ling, too, remains silent. Han Shu fondles the girl’s hand lovingly, then plucks at the torn silk flap of her bodice with thumb and forefinger.
“We’ll fix this, my pet. You know Christine’s skill with a needle. We’ll have you all fixed up again in no time.”
My eyelids droop. I again try to speak, there is something I want to say, but the tongue in my mouth is no longer my own, it belongs to some foreign and mechanical realm. I fumble at my side for the pipe, my hand a blunt bulbous object not wholly within my control.
“Your afternoon refreshments, my dear, that’s what you want,” Han Shu says.
He pulls from his pocket an enamel box, then picks up the pipe I’d been groping for. Using a tiny gold spoon, he scoops out a brown pellet.
How did you get her back?
I want to say, but the effort is too great. And besides, I think dimly, the thought floating away from me at the very instant it appears, that isn’t the point, the blur of Ma Ling’s fierce eyes make that clear.
Someone is holding the pipe to my lips. I feel the small close heat of the sticky, swollen lump, perched above the hole on the stem of the pipe. If there is a point to it all, I sense it is somewhere in the room: somewhere between the cracked boards of the floor and the peeling paint of the ceiling; in the spaces beneath the metal frame of my cot, perhaps, which squeaks pleasantly as I lean forward to allow Han Shu to slide the slim tip of the pipe’s stem into my mouth—or off in a dusty corner, fleshy and inquisitive as a mouse. I suck in the smoke, close my eyes tightly, and lower my head back down to the cot.
How desperately I had wanted to see Ma Ling again; how I had longed to encounter her, if only for one last, brief moment. Something stirs briefly within: that beautiful oval face, those clear dark eyes narrowed with loathing. I can feel my mind glazing over. I hear Archibald’s voice, as though he were there in the room. “What do the English know about opium. Ha! Visions of wicked Chinamen, exotic Eastern scenes run amok! No subtlety. No imagination. A child’s playroom equipped by a dull-witted adult. To strip the great treasure of Egyptian Thebes of imagination—its very essence! A crime, I tell you, a punishable crime, by my lights.”
A violent clapping threatens to splice my eardrums, a thousand or more hands drawn together in a cacophony of cheer. I crack open my eyes. It is only Han Shu clapping his hands, smiling at Ma Ling who is standing, listless, beside him.
“How charming,” I hear him declare. “Our family, reunited at last!”
There is no reason to leave my room. Everything I need, everything I want, is here.
When did Han Shu change his tactic? Arrange it so that every morning one of the girls would tap on the door, enter quietly, and leave a small bulging cloth bag. No more tiny turquoise box with its limited cache. It is a marvel. No more waiting, no minutes to count on the ornate face of the clock around my neck. No infuriating ticking. From time to time, the door opens; another girl appears holding a bowl of soup or a mound of rice, a glass of sweet red syrup or a goblet of wine.
A cloisonné bracelet rattles on my wrist. I straighten my arm by the bed, and the bracelet clatters to the floor. I watch it spin to rest.
Living is a horizontal fall.
Who said that? Someone Archibald was fond of quoting.
“To hell with him.” I say it aloud, and I wonder who I mean. Archibald? Or Han Shu, who is giving me what I want, serving it up in great dollops?
I live in an igloo of cold black bricks
, I think. Or Robert. Is that who I mean?
Yes, I found it there, wedged in the back of Robert’s rolltop desk that should have been locked but wasn’t. I never gave Robert a chance to explain.
What if
—? What if—there were some explanation, other than the one I’d presumed?
I look down at my thin hands, notice, on the back of one, an unseemly scab.
I remember Ma Ling up in her room; recall the look in her eyes, last night, of loathing.
I didn’t wait for Robert to come back; I remember only a frenzy. No thought, just blind animal action.
I knew only that I had found unmistakable evidence, that my suspicions about Robert had been confirmed—and worse.
I had stuffed the offending scrap back into the slot, not grasping that it was to be my ruin too. I grabbed my shawl and bag and fled—down the stairs, through the grand foyer, and out the front door into the cold evening. I walked, then ran, in my flimsy evening slippers; ran until I could hardly breathe.
I have drifted off; now, I open my eyes.
At first it is hard to tell, but then I am sure. The smoke has changed color—and odor. It is gritty and hard, it smells of wet tar. My eyes burn as it drifts upward. I stare into it, hoping for some vision.
Mold from a bowl in the corner of the room taints the air with its intimate animal scent.
No visions, no. How long has it been? How long since the smoke has offered up more than numbness?
I see Ma Ling’s face again. Not filled with loathing, but—beseeching.
I sit up, brush at my face, wipe my eyes. I cross to the window. It is very dark outside, the kind of blackness that is the true heart of the night: three, maybe four in the morning. My head breaks open into clarity. Why had it not occurred to me before?
Things are not always what they seem
. My words echo hollowly around me. Carefully I dress. Sandals in hand, I leave my little room, tiptoe to the third floor, and open the door. Ma Ling, still in her dress, lies curled on the bed. I touch her shoulder.
“Ma Ling,” I whisper. She starts awake. The hopeful new eyes of awakening. And then, in her face, a fireworks of feeling: hatred, longing, despair, a child’s wish to be held. I put a finger to her lips, batting with my other hand at the thick blue spiderwebs that swing before my eyes. I try to stifle the hollow cough that plagues me now. I reach for Ma Ling’s hand, as I had reached for her hand in the thicket of another moonless night, and again she unfolds her limbs and rises. I scoop up her shoes, and together, Ma Ling and I, hand in hand, make our way down the stairs and out through the front door.
It might have been miles, it might have been the merest crossing of a street; all I recall is steady movement through heavy night air, and Ma Ling’s soft hand in my own. The darkness thins in the light of a sliver moon; puddles and dubious tricklings glisten amber and white.
I feel an awful pain in my gut; my brain is a torturing buzz of want. But I do not feel that deadly longing for the smoke; the fierceness, now, is a different sort of love.
We remain silent until I come to a halt, miles distant, in front of the neat, well-cared-for building where Barnaby has his lodgings.
“We’re going home,” I say. “Barnaby will help us. We’re going home, Ma Ling. To England.”
The North Shore of Long Island. Summer, 1951.
T
he year I spent in London during the war, I never made it to the Continent. One time, the Red Cross truck which was to take me from Ostende to Paris was blown up in a skirmish—news I received by telegram at my hotel in Dover where I was readying to sail. On the eve of another scheduled departure, my travel papers were destroyed in an air raid while I sat in the bomb shelter in my nightdress, sipping tea. So, I ended up documenting what was there, in London. But the closer I got to London’s version of the war, the further away from the war I felt.
Now and then, I would stumble upon someone injured in a bombing. You might think being brought face-to-face with such suffering would heighten the reality of it all, but actually, on those occasions, I felt even more at a remove. One early morning, I crept from the bomb shelter minutes after an attack, before the all-clear siren had sounded, only to find, four blocks from my own unscathed lodgings, a man crawling through the ruins of his house. He was moving very slowly, seemed to be looking for something with intense and unbroken concentration. I picked my way over the rubble, got close enough to hear what he was mumbling—something about ice, how he needed a bag of ice. Then I saw the raw stump where his right hand should have been, and realized that what he was groping for with the fingers of one hand was the missing other, which must have flown off in the explosion. I knelt, yanked off my scarf, set about bandaging the man’s exposed wrist. Dawn was just beginning to break, a thin glow through the billows of smoke that hung above the trees.