The Headmaster's Wager (21 page)

Even as an ease grew into their time together, Jacqueline never said when she might return, nor did he ask. On days that she did not appear, Percival stood at the window to see if she might come down the street, despite knowing that if she had not arrived by the time the school quieted for the siesta, she would not come.

Though the most dangerous financial pressure had been relieved, Percival's days were still taken up with trying to recruit new students whose parents could pay advance tuition, meeting with certain impatient creditors, and making payments to those who could not be put off. Mak reported that he had managed to get Peters to come up with the idea of a certification of schools, but they would have to wait for him to pursue it further. The press of these problems fell away from Percival during the middle of the day. He anticipated his lover and read letters from Dai Jai as he waited. Dai Jai wrote twice a week, dutifully, and the first month of letters arrived singly, each about a week after being written.

He wrote about his landlady and his school. He wrote about things that were unfamiliar to Percival, neighbourhood committees and cadres. He wrote about the small problems that he faced. There was a difficulty with his clothing not being suitable. Apparently, everyone in China had begun to dress identically. In another letter, there was
mention of some friction with the neighbourhood authorities when he tried to sell one tael of gold. Selling gold was anti-revolutionary, Dai Jai wrote, and he was a bourgeois for possessing it.

There was no mail during the second month he was away, and then a bundle of letters—bound with a rubber band after having been cut open and read by censors—arrived together at the end of the month. Percival had the impression of pages missing, for there seemed to be gaps in the text, but the pages were not numbered so he couldn't be sure. He wondered whether the censors had been in China or Vietnam, or both. Percival did not know how Dai Jai's problems had been settled and wrote to ask, but his questions went unanswered.

Over the following letters, Dai Jai began to repeat himself, described the school where he had enrolled, the lane where he lived, the weather. There were fewer grammatical errors, but Percival learned nothing about whether Dai Jai liked the place, was interested in his classes, or was making friends amongst his classmates. He regretted his first response to Dai Jai, with its corrections of the boy's Chinese. He felt as if part of himself had gone with his son to China but was now fading, its feelings becoming opaque. But when Jacqueline visited, Percival felt whole, for everything was contained in their skin, their breathing, in the progression towards climax and the quiet that followed.

After their sex, with desire stripped to satisfaction, he was able to connect one thing to another: sex with loneliness, luck with fear, emotion with memory. Thoughts of the past were fresh. As they lay naked, Percival found himself telling Jacqueline his early memories from Shantou, of the time before his father first left for Indochina. The train passed through the village twice a week in each direction, and when Chen Pie Sou was very small, Chen Kai often took him to see it, tantalized him with wild stories about its routes. It was bound for the coast at night, and Chen Kai said it was going to heaven to bring food for the ancestors' spirits. It passed through again the next morning. Chen Kai pointed to the smoke from the front, the breath of the spirits, he would insist. When he grew a little older and no longer believed these tales, Chen Pie Sou would go to watch
the train with the village boys. Often, they would gather to bet on what would happen when it appeared. Would it stop, or simply sound its horn? If it stopped, would it be for cargo or a passenger? If for cargo, would there be a mail package from one of the fathers who was away in the land of the Gold Mountain, or a shipment for Shantou's only merchant? All these possibilities were wagered upon. Chen Pie Sou's friends complained that his luck was too good, that he won too often. He did not tell them that he assessed the odds, studied the patterns, in order to bet. He checked to see if the merchant's shelves were full. If so, he wagered against cargo. Was a packet ship due in port? Then more likely there would be a passenger or mail from the Gold Mountain. Because he won more than he lost, Chen Pie Sou accumulated old chipped mah-jong pieces, marbles, sometimes a copper coin. One day, when he proudly showed his father his stash of treasures, Chen Kai said, “My son has excellent luck! Good for you. Just remember, never wager more than you can afford to lose. Leave yourself room to recover. Have something for the next bet. That's how you'll come out ahead in the end.”

Jacqueline listened, and stroked Percival's head, considering the story. She laughed, “His lesson didn't take, then?”

He had already revealed to her that if he had lost that night to Cho, he would have lost Chen Hap Sing. It had been worth it, he said, to win her. Why did he tell her so much? It had been a relief to confess his dread of losing that mah-jong game, and his terrified hope that he would flee to China if he did. To say such a thing made it real, and then allowed it to pass away. She laughed at his convolutions, so he did, too. She was not even Chinese, he admonished himself. But then, he had to admit to himself, he was all the more free because she was not. She had no relatives or neighbours in Cholon to spread rumours. She was not a friend of a teacher who could undermine his authority, had no connection to some servant who could gossip, and was not linked to some local business family that could use knowledge to take advantage of him.

Even with Mak, Percival did not reveal his doubts or emotions. After all, he depended upon Mak and did not want him to have the
power of knowing everything. Theirs was a relationship of trust, not of intimacy. Jacqueline had no other connection to his life, and so Percival soon found that he could tell her anything. He related the stories of his childhood that he had told Dai Jai many times, but now he recounted them without their lesson, their moral, which he had applied for his son's benefit. Instead, Percival remembered how he had felt at the time, and told his lover. He told her about Dai Jai's favourite foods, that not a day went by when he did not wonder if the boy was eating well. He confessed his pain that his son was far away in China and the guilt of having opposed Saigon's Vietnamese language directive. If only he had signed the document receipt and shut his mouth. Was he a good father, though? He wasn't sure now. Percival was on the verge of tears. Jacqueline saw that, and cried on his behalf.

In the afternoons that followed their lovemaking, Percival began to tell Jacqueline things from long ago that had never been buried. He thought of his favourite teachers at La Salle, even now, when he was approaching a difficult lesson. In comparison he was a fraud, and would be ashamed if any of his old teachers knew he had the best reputation amongst English headmasters in Vietnam. They would never know, for they had all died during the war. He told Jacqueline about the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, and confessed his own cowardice. His finest classmates had tried to hide girls to save them from Japanese gang rapes. They had run off to join the Chinese resistance. Few of these brave ones had survived the war. He had sat in his room, the walls pierced by screams.

Percival confided the shameful truth of his father's last years in Cholon. He had pieced it together from the household servants. With the news of his first wife's death in Shantou, Chen Kai had become unable to sleep. For days, he wept with guilt at not having returned to China while Muy Fa was alive. He spread word that he sought a buyer for Chen Hap Sing and the rice business in order to return to China for good. Ba Hai pretended to cooperate, but in reality stymied these inquiries. She gave Chen Kai an opium pipe and suggested that he smoke it in order to rest. Desperate for sleep and for relief from his guilt, he soon came to depend upon the narcotic. Without Chen Kai's
knowledge, Ba Hai made all the arrangements for Chen Pie Sou's French
laissez-passer
and his studies in Hong Kong. She forged letters to Chen Pie Sou pretending to be Chen Kai and signed them with his red chop. She forged letters to her husband from his son. Sometimes, when Chen Kai was under the spell of sweet smoke, Ba Hai took the Annamese warehouse foreman to her bed in the middle of the day. Until then, she had crept to him at night. Now, she wanted to show the household what she dared to do. Soon, she began to fire Chinese workers on the smallest pretext and hired only her own relatives for the rice warehouse. She made sure that there was a constant supply of the purple boxes of Thai Royal Grade opium for her husband.

Though Ba Hai gave Percival and Cecilia a room of their own when they arrived in Cholon, it was at the far end of the family quarters, away from Chen Kai. Percival insisted on sleeping on a cot in his father's room, to prevent anyone from sneaking in opium. On the advice of one stoop-backed servant, Percival purchased a case of cognac. He filled a bottle halfway with black balls of opium paste, and then the rest with cognac. He slept with his head on the bottle for fear that Chen Kai might seize it and eat the opium balls. Hour by hour, day after day, when Chen Kai began to shake, Percival poured him a glass of the cloudy liquid and then topped the bottle up with liquor. “One more pipe. Please,” Chen Kai would whimper. “What kind of a son are you, to disobey your father?” For days, he protested loudly, howled and sweated. He ran to the toilet to expel his spasms of watery stool, and shook with his need for the drug. The worst of the withdrawal was dulled by the infusion, and after a painful few weeks he no longer pleaded for his drug, but suffered in acceptance, trembling.

“Drink,” Percival would say, putting the glass in his father's unsteady hands. This continued over weeks, and the infusion became more and more clear.

Ba Hai engaged in loud copulation with the foreman every afternoon. One day, as Chen Kai and Percival sat in the second-floor room, they heard the rhythmic groans begin. Chen Kai had begun eating again, and he was in the middle of a bowl of noodles. Although
his skin was still loose, there was some flesh returning to his bones. He continued to eat.

In the room above them, Ba Hai moaned, and there was the slap of bodies meeting. Chen Kai seemed oblivious to his ongoing humiliation. He said to his son, “I came to this country with nothing, and soon became a rich rice merchant, eventually the biggest trader in Cholon. When I arrived, I was homesick and wanted only to return to China. But once I had money, it stretched me between two places. I knew all these years that your mother missed me. But then, with money came pleasures. As I began to enjoy life here, I felt sad to leave it. There are fruits here, like the custard apple, that we do not have at home. The rain is different, and so are the women.” He drained his glass of cognac and held it out. “Every year, I promised I would return to Shantou for good, that I would take just one more year's profit.” Percival took the glass from his father's hand. Filled it. Upstairs, the foreman grunted breathy impatience. “I married Ba Hai to have a simple country girl in my bed, and this made it seem less pressing to return home. The Japanese invaded China, which gave me a fresh excuse not to return. Of course, they have come here, too, and Ba Hai wishes to steal my wealth and be rid of me.”

Percival put the glass down. “I'm here now, Father. I will protect what is yours.”

“Yes, I'm counting on you.” Chen Kai gestured for another glass of the infusion, and Percival hastily poured it. “Meanwhile, I'm just starting to realize what I've lost.”

Percival swallowed hard. As a child, he had imagined his father suffering to accumulate a large enough sum of gold for his family's sake. It was not a son's place to be angry at his father. Percival felt ashamed, and poured a glass of the cognac infusion for himself.

Chen Kai sipped. “You see, I was confused.” Ba Hai and her lover cried out together, and Percival began to tremble a little. Chen Kai continued calmly, almost primly, “The only place for Chinese is in China, and the only suitable wives are from the motherland. You have done well—you have taken a Chinese wife and will have a harmonious marriage.”

“Yes, Father,” said Percival, though Cecilia had been complaining relentlessly about the room they had been given, about the house, about the heat, the country, everything she laid eyes on.

Chen Kai seemed to take no notice of his second wife reaching the height of her pleasure in the room above them. “Do you think that your mother's ghost will ever forgive me?”

“I don't know. It is not my place to know, I am your son.”

“
Gwai jai
,” said Chen Kai, and sighed, closing his eyes. An obedient son.

As his energy returned, Chen Kai began to make his plans for returning to China. Percival thought that he would allow his father to study the map, even to prepare a bag, if this occupied him. He would stop his father from actually making such a dangerous journey. He would restrain him if necessary. For almost a year, this idea seemed to disappear. Later, Percival realized that his father had been waiting patiently, gaining strength. One night, having long since returned to the room he and Cecilia had been given, Percival was woken by the faint creak of floorboards. He got to the hallway in time to hear the front door, ran down the stairs, dashed out and was confronted by the oily black night into which Chen Kai had disappeared.

“So you see,” Percival said to Jacqueline, “I weaned my father from opium, but perhaps, if I had been more protective after he recovered, he would still be alive. I failed. I should have protected him better. He could have returned to China after the war. He would be enjoying his old age in comfort.”

The more he told her of his secrets, and as she accepted them along with the familiarity of their bed, the less Percival could deny that he hoped for Jacqueline each day. He must be careful that Cecilia didn't find out. He wouldn't put it past her to write to Dai Jai that his father was with a
métisse
. The boy might misunderstand. After all, he was too young to know that being lovers was not the same as love.