The Moonlight Palace (6 page)

“What were you thinking?” I demanded of Omar. I practically wailed it.

“I was thinking of Allah and Paradise,” he said.

“By blowing up the Masjid Sultan?”

“Never,” he said. “I went to the mosque to pray for strength. I am a true believer!” he said in a louder voice. A guard looked over, bored. “A true believer,” he repeated, looking at me. “You can have no idea what that means. You are an infidel,” he said, but for the first time ever he smiled at me. It made his round face look almost handsome. “You and your whole family. Aunts, uncles, all the little cousins. But,” he added, “your souls will wither and blow away like dust. No memory will remain of the infidels. —Allah is mighty, Al-Malik. Building the Masjid Sultan was the one worthy thing your great-great-grandfather did in his accursed life.”

His use of the word
accursed
, said almost apologetically, made the back of my neck prickle. Realization dawned on me with horror. “You were going to blow up our palace?” I asked. “The Kampong Glam? Istana Gelam?”

My words hung in the air, unanswered.

Omar Wahlid did not respond. Wei gazed straight ahead, as if reading something on the wall opposite, but he looked sorry, at least, while Omar Wahlid only looked fiercer.

“Answer me!” I demanded.

“Your palace was built with blood money,” he said. His words sounded as if he had been telling himself this same story many times over. “It was bartered for the soul of the Muslim people. The sultan had a holy obligation. He betrayed it when he traded Singapore for a fat salary and a luxurious palace. Nothing could be more obvious.”

“You were going to blow up our home?” My voice went up two octaves at least. Omar Wahlid had nearly solved all of our problems that night. But then again,—“You might have killed us all,” I said. “Are you completely mad?”

“I am possessed only by the spirit of Mohammad, praised be the Holy Prophet. Kampong Glam stands for the betrayal of Islam to the British Empire. If you searched all over Singapore, in every corner of the island, you could not find a fitter emblem. Believe me,” he added. “I know. I tried.”

“Oh, Omar, Omar,” I said. I reached out one hand. Whether I would have comforted him or shoved him off his chair, I’m not sure.

“Kindly do not touch me with your unclean hands,” he said. “If I had not hesitated so long, I would be in Paradise now. If only your grandfather had left the palace! Why didn’t he go watch the fireworks with the rest?”

“He’s unwell. He is in the wheelchair,” said Wei. It was the first thing he had said since I arrived.

“This is the man you must rescue,” said Omar Wahlid, gesturing toward Wei. “They are going to send me back home, to Kuala Lumpur. This for me is a reward. Him they may put to death. They think he’s a Chinese Bolshevik radical. They are more worried about him than me. He was following me, so they suspect him of trying to overthrow the government. A Bolshevik!” he said scornfully. “This—engineer.”

“They think I am Hailam,” Wei said. “Like the busboy who came close to blowing up the Grosvenor Hotel.”

“But you’re not,” I said. “—Are you?” I no longer trusted my own senses. To think that our sulky young boarder Omar Wahlid nearly blew up the Kampong Glam Palace—with Grandfather and Sanang still in it! Two old people who had always been so kind to him.

“I am from Taiwan,” said Wei. “But they consider me Chinese.”

“The Chinese Protectorate exists not to protect the Chinese but to protect Singapore against the Chinese,” said Omar Wahlid. “Wei’s life is in your hands now.”

“Wei is not political,” I said.

“No, not at all,” agreed Wei sadly. “I should have paid more attention. The larger world is a mystery to me.” He held his mouth stiffly, so his words sounded muffled.

“You had better talk to your friend Brown about it,” said Omar Wahlid. “They will put Wei to death.”

“Brown is not my friend,” I said.

“Never mind,” said Omar Wahlid. “You’ll find out, I expect. Just remember, that man is the real danger to us all. He is the true menace.”

“And not the fellow with bombs strapped across his chest.” I was trembling at the verge of tears. It had been a long, terrible night.

“No,” said Omar Wahlid. “Believe it or not, that miserable fellow was your friend.”

When I got back to the little waiting room, I tugged on Grandfather’s hand, as if I were a small child again. He was still talking with the Internal Affairs man about antique books. They had switched from botanical books to volumes of poetry. “Grandfather,” I said, tugging again. “We have to talk!”

“Please excuse my granddaughter,” Grandfather said to the man. “It’s been a tiring night. She does not intend to be rude. —Speak up, then,” he said.

“I mean in private,” I said. The room seemed to hush around my words. But what they produced was the opposite of privacy.

“There is no room for secrets in a situation like this,” Grandfather said calmly. His direct blue eyes seemed to drill into my heart. Could I count on no one? Had the whole world turned upside down?

“Your grandfather is a very great man,” said Brown. “He understands that the world is a complicated place.” He had been standing on the opposite side of the room, but now he crossed the floor and joined us. “Perhaps you, too, would like to see Omar Wahlid?” he asked Grandfather.

For just an instant, my grandfather’s face wavered. I thought I saw fear in his eyes. But it happened so quickly, I could not be sure. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

I turned on Brown. “Both of those young men are bleeding. Both have been badly beaten!” I was torn between my fury at Omar and my fury at Geoffrey Brown. My fists were clenched, and I think I would have actually struck Brown had he come a step closer. “How could you allow this to happen?”

Geoffrey Brown put up both hands. “No, no,” he said. “I’m only here to help. It’s important that you believe me.”

“Grandfather, we can’t let anything else happen to Wei. They want to kill him.”

British Grandfather flinched at my words. I went on doggedly. “He was just acting as a friend to Omar. Wei had no intention of blowing up anything. I know he is completely innocent.”

“You know this?” Grandfather said.

I said, “Wei is just an ordinary student. He loves bridges. He is always drawing pictures of bridges. We have to save him. Please.” And there I was again, tugging on his arm and crying like a child. Geoffrey Brown offered me his handkerchief, a crisp linen one, embroidered with his initials in cursive on one corner,
GB
.

Grandfather’s eyes locked with mine. “No matter the cost?” he asked.

“How can you mention cost at a time like this? Omar says they want to put Wei to death. Just because he is Chinese!” I wailed the final word,
Chi-neeeeese
. People in the room were now making an effort not to pay any attention to me. Only Grandfather stayed calm and focused.

Grandfather leaned forward and kissed my cheek. He brushed the hair out of my eyes. While he was so close to my ear, he spoke very softly into it. “You can rely on me,” he said.

I expected Grandfather to stand up and walk away with Brown. I had forgotten that he was confined to that chair. So many facts of our life slipped from my mind that night—our extreme helplessness, our poverty, the impossibility of our whole situation.

“All right, Agnes,” he said, putting his hand under my chin, and tilting my face to get a better look at me. “It is your future. We have always agreed upon that. Charles will not blame me.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “Don’t do anything on my account. Do it because it is what’s right and true.”

“What’s right and true,” he repeated. His mouth twisted a bit. “Of course, it is always for that,” he said.

British Grandfather was gone a long time, or so it seemed to me. The others made a point of not crossing my corner of the room, and the Internal Affairs man disappeared from view. One of the women offered me a cup of tea, and when I shook my head, she, too, retreated. I turned the pages of magazines listlessly, unable to absorb a word. There were advertisements for Allen automobiles and for the new low-heeled ladies’ shoes. I began reading an article about the American stock market—and when I got to the end, I realized not a single word had sunk in, so I started over again, but did no better the second time around. Geoffrey Brown himself had wheeled Grandfather out of the room, and when he wheeled Grandfather back in, it seemed to me that the two men had come to some sort of agreement. Grandfather caught my eye and nodded. His hands were shaking on the wooden sides of the wheelchair.

“There is nothing,” he said, “that one man will not do to another.”

EI
G
HT

The Glory of Geoffrey Brown

B
ritish Grandfather barely spoke on the ride home in Geoffrey Brown’s long, sleek automobile. It was the nicest car I had ever seen, a Pierce-Arrow with a bud vase in the side of the door, and a real, live red rose blooming inside the vase. The seats were deep and cushy—more comfortable by far than any of our own furniture at home. But I felt myself at the edge of tears every instant. Grandfather kept patting me on the arm as we drove through the streets of Singapore. They looked unfamiliar at that strange, bleak hour of the night, with dawn still an hour away. It had rained while we were at the Protectorate, so the streets seemed blurry, and when we drove alongside Little India, everything was dark there as well, as if Deepavali had never happened.

Nei-Nei must have sat by the palace door all night. She scurried out to the Pierce-Arrow and insisted on wheeling Grandfather inside herself, muttering all the while under her breath in Peranakan Chinese. Poor Geoffrey Brown looked completely flummoxed. He kept apologizing and trying to take the wheelchair inside, and she would try to wrestle it back—though she did need his help getting the chair up the thirteen marble steps.

“I’ll be in touch,” Brown said to British Grandfather. “I apologize for all of this. The trouble has been—unconscionable.”

“Thank you,” said Grandfather simply.

Nei-Nei Down peered with her sharp little brown eyes first at Brown, then at her husband. She wheeled Grandfather inside without another word, closing the door on Brown—and on me, as it happened, since I’d lagged a few steps behind. I could not remember a time when I had felt so tired. Images passed through my mind, one after another, as in a picture gallery. But I could not piece them together. There was not a single coherent thought left inside my head.

As I turned to go inside, Brown said, “A moment,” and ran lightly down the stairs to the long black car. He came back holding the red rose from the bud vase. I accepted it numbly.

“I hope not to remain a stranger,” he said. “I am not a villain. I hope you will believe that.”

Before I could answer, British Grandfather called my name—“Aggie!”—his voice uncharacteristically sharp. He opened the door, wheeled himself through it, and raised one hand in farewell to Brown—not waving the hand, not moving it, just holding it up, palm out. I stepped inside the palace.

“What about Wei?” I asked as the door shut behind us.

“Wei will be spared,” Grandfather said. He smiled at me, but it was not his usual beaming smile. He, too, had seen horrors that night. “You’ve a good heart, Agnes.”

“Thank you, Grandfather,” I said. “I inherited it from the best.”

Nei-Nei Down snorted. But she tapped Grandfather on his shoulder with her little claw of a hand.

After I had washed up, I tiptoed out to the hall outside Grandfather and Nei-Nei’s room. I heard the low rumble of Grandfather’s voice and caught only a stray phrase here and there. “Inevitable,” he said. “Sooner rather than later
. . .
If not for Brown
. . .
It could have been far worse
. . .
We must be grateful.”

I was foolishly glad that someone as handsome and charming as Geoffrey Brown had turned out to be our savior. My heart warmed toward him. How glad I was that I had accepted his rose! But then, I also heard a sound I had heard before only a few times in my life—the racking, harsh sound of Nei-Nei Down sobbing as if her heart would break.

In the days that followed, life began to change with shocking rapidity. It was as if we had been stuck in a photograph that suddenly became a moving picture. Omar Wahlid was deported almost at once to Malaya. We did not see our young boarder again—instead, two policemen came to our house with a border patrol officer to oversee the move. His possessions were thoroughly examined and packed into boxes, occupying only a small corner of the front hall, and then they, too, were on their way. Singapore wasn’t far from Malaya. Many Malayans commuted back and forth by bus, working in Singapore by day and returning to Jahore at night. But culturally and politically, the distance was immense. Omar was never to cross those borders again. He vanished from our lives as effectively as if he had never existed.

Wei was escorted back to our palace after a few days, considerably improved from the night I’d seen him in the Protectorate, but still much the worse for wear. Geoffrey Brown drove him to the Kampong Glam in his own car. Instead of regaining his strength as we expected, the young Chinese student continued to deteriorate from day to day. His round, smiling face became thin and expressionless. For one thing, Wei’s injuries simply would not heal. It turned out that Wei had a disease that kept his blood from clotting, so his bruises grew worse—the cut over his eye became infected, and he had to go to hospital. Never was he without a military escort. It was disconcerting, to come downstairs and always find a policeman standing in a corner of the room, sipping a cup of the bitter green tea that Nei-Nei Down provided. She had a special fondness for the red-haired Irish policeman—a fondness I did not share. The Irishman was a great tease. He was especially prone to mocking my friend Bridget—her hair color, her long nose, her gypsy-length skirts. Nothing escaped his notice. And sometimes he played the penny whistle flute—a noisome instrument that Nei-Nei said reminded her of her childhood.

On the other hand, Nei-Nei Down never forgave Geoffrey Brown for keeping Grandfather out so late that night of Deepavali. She could hold a grudge, my granny. And her dislike for Brown never wavered, no matter how kind and considerate he proved himself to be. Brown visited often. He was personally overseeing the case, Grandfather explained. His courtesy and thoughtfulness knew no bounds. He arranged medical transport for Wei; he spent hours talking alone with Grandfather. Sometimes he brought official-looking documents for Grandfather to sign—a symbol of the never-ending officiousness of the British government and its red tape—but more often he brought cakes for Nei-Nei Down and sweets for me; fresh fruit and flowers for the household. Sanang and Danai were charmed—he always remembered to bring them a little something as well.

“He is the handsomest man alive,” said little Danai. “Like a British movie actor. Someday I marry a man like that.”

Brown played games of chess with Uncle Chachi and loaned him books on the art of photography when he learned that Uncle Chachi had a camera. He once even brought by a new Kodak 16mm movie camera, but Nei-Nei Down forbade it, though he only wanted to film us around the palace. Perhaps Uncle Chachi was not his usual ebullient self around Geoffrey, but he seemed somewhat awestruck by our guest. Not Nei-Nei. She blamed him for everything that went wrong. If a window became stuck, it was because Mr. Brown had opened it. If a loaf of bread failed to rise, she blamed it on his heavy tread. She did not care for his cakes or his kindness. As soon as Brown left, she would tilt the gift cake into the trash, hearing it fall with a look of grim satisfaction. And she would not touch the sweets he brought.

“They would turn my stomach to stone,” she said.

“But Nei-Nei,” I protested. “Isn’t Mr. Brown kind to us all? Isn’t he saving Wei’s life?”

For there was no question that others in the government would have had Wei put to death, merely on the suspicion that he had collaborated with a Bolshevik. The Singaporean authorities were ruthless in those days, and far harsher with the Chinese than with outsiders. It was one thing to be a crazy Muslim. It was another to be a Chinese radical whose politics threatened the Singapore way of life.

“Yes, saving,” she said. Then she bit her lip and scraped the rest of the cake into the garbage. “I forget,” she added, “how young you are.”

Everyone seemed to be secretly fretting and fussing about me—including Dawid, who hovered around me as if protecting me from some phantom enemy. This puzzled me, for I was obviously all right; it was Wei whose life would remain in danger until he could leave Singapore.

“Where will you go?” I asked Wei. “Home to Taiwan?”

Wei shook his head. “I cannot go home to my father in a state of disgrace,” he said. “I will go to Malaya.”

“To visit Omar, you mean?” I was astonished that he had not turned his back on his friend. After all, their friendship had put Wei’s whole life in jeopardy. “What will you do in Malaya?”

“There are more than one hundred rivers in Malaya,” Wei said, “and many islands are in need of bridges and causeways. They need engineers. I do not have to pretend to be a doctor. Maybe I will get married.”

“Married?” I said. Not once had I seen Wei walking with a girl.

Wei smiled at my obvious surprise. Finally, he was beginning to gain back a little of the weight he had lost. I attributed this chiefly to Nei-Nei’s undying efforts to feed him as much pork-rib tea soup as possible. He touched a finger to the injury above his eye, tenderly, as if touching a lover’s hand. “You think not?” he said. “Would you not marry me?”

“I would not marry you,” I said. I thought, if this was his idea of a proposal, it must surely be the strangest one in the world.

“You are right to say no,” he said. “I love another.”

This was also news. I had never noticed him paying attention to one Chinese girl over any other. “I hope she says yes,” I said.

He laughed. “I doubt this very much,” he answered. “I loved a certain person ardently,” he told me, “and my love was not returned. —Yet out of that I have written these songs.”

“You write songs?”

“I am quoting the great American poet Walter Whitman,” he said. “If you like, I will loan you the book.”

Another change, another loss. All too soon, Wei was standing in our front hallway, holding a red suitcase in his hand, a cap on his head. It made his round head look rounder; he looked, for the first time since I had known him, like a young man, and not a middle-aged pot-bellied man disguised as a student.

British Grandfather was there in our grand front hall in his wheelchair to see him off, Danai standing just behind him, her hands resting on the back of the chair. Grandfather said, “Please do not thank me.”

“I owe you everything, my life,” Wei answered gravely.

I asked, “Where will you go now? What will you do?”

Wei shrugged. “I will go wherever Omar is, and I will be happy. Someday you, too, will fall in love, and you will understand.”

He smiled sadly at me, and then he left with his red suitcase, closing the door quietly.

I heard Grandfather cough behind me. I whirled around. “Wei is in love with Omar Wahlid!” I said in amazement.

“Yes,” said Grandfather.

“You knew?”

“That was one reason I could not let them put the poor fellow to death. Everything he did, he did for love.”

Not long after Wei departed, Nei-Nei Down began talking very strangely. Muttering under her breath, day and night. She started complaining bitterly about the palace—how much work it was, too much expense. It was an old wreck falling down around our ears, she said. A burden. She was sick and tired of it. Now that two of our boarders were gone, perhaps at last we were free to go, too.

I had never heard her utter such blasphemies before. I’d believed she was just as attached to Kampong Glam as I was—if not more. She had come to live in the palace as a young bride, barely more than a child, just sixteen years old. Her wedding photo shows the white columns of Kampong Glam behind her. Uncle Chachi was the best man. In the photo I like best she is leaning against him, as if trying to disappear, laughing, her hand covering her mouth. She always considered her protruding white teeth her worst feature. All of them—both sets of grandparents, and my great-uncle and great-aunt, as well as countless cousins and distant kin—had spent the happiest years of their lives under this palace roof. Here she had been a young bride, the young mother of my mother. In photographs, she is radiant, rose-cheeked.

To my amazement, Uncle Chachi sided with Nei-Nei Down.

“This palace,” he declared, “is old-fashioned and rotting to bits. Just once, I would like something up-to-date. One of those new three-bedroom apartments in the Rabbit Ear district”—this was the nickname for the nationally funded brick buildings that huddled side by side by side, like rabbit hutches. They were cheap, modern, and identical.