The Moonlight Palace (7 page)

“But you hate government housing,” I said. “You’ve always said so.”

“Full electricity,” Uncle Chachi went on as if he had not heard me. “Indoor showers. The latest in household appliances. All the modern cons. Close to everything. Close to the mosque.”

“We are close to the mosque now!” I cried, outraged. “And what’s to become of Sanang and Danai?”

“The government will provide for them as well,” Uncle Chachi said, frowning at me. “I have looked into the matter.”

“A young girl like you should not be chained to antiques,” said British Grandfather.

“We are not antiques!” cried Nei-Nei Down. “And the girl loves it here—” But then she stopped herself. “But me, I detest it.”

“What’s wrong with all of you?” I cried. “Has everyone gone mad?”

“Perhaps your relations long for an easier, simpler life,” Dawid told me later. We discussed these things earnestly, out of earshot of the old folks. “It happens, as people get older. They crave stability, simplicity.” Dawid was always near me these days, as if he thought I were some delicate creature who might dissolve. But I felt I had never been more clearheaded. Indeed, I believed I was the only completely rational creature left in the palace.

I tried approaching the family with logical, practical suggestions.

“We could close off a few of the rooms,” I said. “Save expenses that way.”

“No,” said Grandfather. “It is too late for that.”

“I am not leaving,” I said.

“Agnes—,” British Grandfather began, but Nei-Nei Down interrupted angrily.

“You say that now, but someday you will meet a man, and he will want to live under his own roof with you. He won’t want a lot of old relatives around. He won’t want to live in this decrepit place. And you yourself will feel differently.”

“I will not. Never.” I did not reveal what I was secretly thinking—that Geoffrey Brown already seemed to be in love with our palace, that he liked the residents, and was considerate of each one of them. As for me, I was head over heels. And I was being courted by the handsomest, most charming man in the world. We had seen each other numerous times, Geoffrey Brown and I. Once he left his beautifully carved cane by our front door, and I returned it to his office, taking a tram to deliver it. Was it my imagination, or did the other passengers look at me with envy as the ward of such a beautiful object? Brown sent violets to thank me. With a note on violet-colored paper, in black ink, his strangely masculine, scrawled hand. At first, we seemed to run into each other at the Kampong Glam Palace by accident, but we had lately dropped this ruse and become, in a manner of speaking, friends. There was always a slight formality between us, even when he first took my hand and held it. He looked startled to find my hand clasped in his; my heart was hammering so hard I could barely feel my own fingers.

We kept our budding romance a secret. In front of my family, he treated me as courteously as ever. I tried to act indifferent to his comings and goings, under Nei-Nei’s watchful eye. She did not trust any young man, and she had never gotten over her initial dislike of Geoffrey Brown in particular. But my secret dream life was my own, a separate existence from the life in which I moved, spoke, and acted like an ordinary schoolgirl. My inner world was as vast, unlimited, and enchanted as any fairy tale.

I could imagine Geoffrey simply parking his long black car behind the palace at the end of each day. We could take one of the large bedrooms together on the third floor, perhaps the unused red one with the peony wallpaper. When I showed him this room, he took several snaps of it; he shot the view of the garden from the bay window. He was the only man I had ever met who appreciated the palace and its beauty as much as I did.

And he was equally passionate about Singapore, which of course, as a native, I often took for granted. “The first time I landed in Singapore,” he told me, “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.” Geoffrey was in every way a progressive. He believed in the future. He believed in Singapore’s place in that future. For him, it was almost a religion, and he could not bear when people spoke of Singapore as a backwater place. He was zealous. “For true progress to be made, a generation must be sacrificed,” he said.

My time alone with Geoffrey became sweeter as life at home became more difficult. Ever since that terrible dark night of Deepavali, our world had turned upside down. Somehow it never righted itself. As rainy as November had been, December was even wetter. Barely a day went by without an early morning rain shower and an afternoon thunderstorm. I think all of that rain unhinged British Grandfather’s mind. He kept forgetting that he was bound to his wheelchair, that he no longer lived in London. He would wake in the middle of the night and try to use the bathroom himself. One night he crawled to the kitchen. And he was behaving strangely in other, more dangerous ways.

For instance, British Grandfather began holding bonfires at night, behind the palace. Little Danai did most of the work, while British Grandfather oversaw the flames. These were beautiful but dangerous. More than once, I had to drag the fire farther from the door, to keep Grandfather from burning down the whole palace. None of us had any idea what he was burning. Some of it was rubbish, but much of it appeared to be papers, documents and letters and so on. I found him poking the embers with a long stick, stirring the white edges of the paper around until they caught fire, too, curled up, and disappeared.

“What are these things, Grandfather?” I once asked.

He turned his head sharply to look at me. “Nothing important,” he said. “But they weigh me down. I like to leave things tidy.”

“I don’t like to leave things at all,” I said.

“I know you don’t,” he answered, stirring the ash with his stick. “But it is an art you will have to learn to master.”

NINE

A True British Christmas

F
or us—a largely Buddhist and Muslim family—Christmas had always been a minor holiday, a pleasant excuse to overeat and indulge in strange, non-Singaporean foods, like puddings. But that year, British Grandfather demanded a full-blown, traditional Christmas. He wanted everyone to have presents, he said. He insisted that we buy and decorate a tree.

Of course, we had to do everything on the cheap. It was a bad time for extravagance. We no longer had the income from Omar Wahlid and the student Wei, nor did it seem likely we would find a new boarder in the palace’s current state of disrepair. I suspected, too, that the gathering of Singapore police on the night of Deepavali had done nothing to help our reputation as landlords. No one wanted to live where there had been an attempted bombing, but this was less dreadful than the idea of living in a place where the police descended in droves. Not one prospective renter had yet responded to Uncle Chachi’s flowery Room Available ad in
The Straits Times
.

Because we had never had a Christmas tree, all of our decorations were left over from Chinese festivals, complemented by a few bright items I managed to salvage from Deepavali. Traditional Christmas trees did not grow in Singapore, so Nei-Nei Down took me with her into a nearby wood to find something suitable. She was delighted when we happened upon a stand of gooseberry trees. We dug up one sturdy sapling, wrapped the roots in burlap, and transplanted it into a rice pot that Danai had accidentally blackened and burned. The gooseberry leaves, Nei-Nei Down assured me, made a delicious vegetable dish. And the root bark of the gooseberry provided powerful medicine. She insisted on carrying the tree back to the palace herself, wrapped up like a royal infant in burlap bunting. Soon the gooseberry was swimming with paper golden fish from the Chinese New Year Festival, red ribbons from the Autumn Moon, bells and garlands from Deepavali. You could barely see the branches beneath all the glittering splendor.

But British Grandfather—that gentle soul, who had never in my presence uttered a word of discontent—turned away from our tree in disgust. At first he refused even to look at it. He kept his eyes fixed on the wooden floor. “Is it too much to ask,” he said, “for one decent English Christmas?”

Nei-Nei Down went away muttering furiously under her breath. Uncle Chachi looked crestfallen. He put one hand on my shoulder. “I knew there were too many colors,” he said.

Undaunted, Nei-Nei Down threw herself into preparations for Christmas dinner as if she were the one true veteran of the family, and this holiday a war. She ordered a turkey from the Zan-Khee Market. She went to the greengrocer’s in the Colonial district and purchased all sorts of strange items: white button mushrooms and green stalks of celery the color of pale jade; watercress and a tin of cranberries; fresh chestnuts. We puzzled over the recipes in her cookbook,
The Englishwoman’s All-in-One Cookbook: Little-Known Secrets
. Nei-Nei Down had never once followed a recipe and had been given this book as a wedding gift. The Englishwoman’s recipes included foreign mysteries such as Yorkshire Pudding and Deluxe Roast Beef. Geoffrey Brown helped me to acquire the black-market beef, which Nei-Nei Down regarded in disgust. We seldom ate red meat; her dishes consisted of rice and vegetables, seafood and fish with a little duck or chicken now and then for variety. The hunk of roast beef sat bleeding into its brown paper in the middle of the kitchen. It looked as if it had been sawed from the side of some poor cow.

“Maybe it is like medicine,” Nei-Nei Down said hopefully. “If this dish brings him back to us, so be it.” I knew she worried about British Grandfather. To his face, she was often short-tempered and irate, complaining over his poor appetite and grumbling when he was too tired for his usual round of Five Stones or cribbage with Uncle Chachi. She seemed to believe she could bully him back into health.

But behind Grandfather’s back, she was kind and considerate. “We must remember to take our shoes off at the door, so as not to disturb British Grandfather,” she would say. She visited the Chinese herbalist and purchased countless concoctions and sweet-smelling teas. For his sake, she even let me obtain noisy Christmas crackers, though she must have known that they, like the bleeding side of beef, came through the detestable offices of her nemesis, Geoffrey Brown.

Nei-Nei limited Geoffrey’s visits to twenty minutes or less, and he nearly always remained closeted alone with Grandfather during these brief stays. Geoffrey was unlike any young man I had ever known. He was only twenty-two, yet he had accomplished so much. I honestly wondered when he found time to eat or sleep. He seemed to appear at our doorstep as if he’d been delivered in a box—neatly pressed, correctly dressed, and smiling, with one of his adorable crooked teeth pointing in. Little lovesick Danai continued to worship him—his courteous manners and his golden hair were an ever-fascinating topic of secret conversation between us. Of course, I relished any excuse to talk about him or hear his name. Such is the foolishness of lovers—I managed to wrangle an invitation for Geoffrey to Christmas dinner, under the guise that British Grandfather might find something heartening in the company of a fellow Englishman.

“Anything is possible,” admitted Nei-Nei Down. “As long as he doesn’t exhaust your grandfather’s strength by staying all night.”

“He won’t,” I assured her. “This is Brown’s holiday, too. I’m sure he has other visits to pay.”

“Perhaps,” said Nei-Nei.

“And he may know some Christmas traditions we would overlook,” added Uncle Chachi, coming around the corner.

Nei-Nei Down crossed her hands over her chest. “Stop sneaking up,” she said. “You’ll give me heart failure, and then who will cook this big Christmas dinner?” She made a face. “So much fuss over one little baby,” she said.

As it turned out, Geoffrey Brown brought the only edibles for our Christmas feast—a real plum pudding, with a pitcher of sauce on the side; some herring; and Christmas crackers from the Smith factory in England. (He would accept no money for these, though he allowed Nei-Nei Down to pay for the beef, after vehement debate.)

He had brought two sets of themed Christmas crackers, which were all the rage. They were little noisemaking toys. The first was called “Mrs. Brown’s Luggage,” and the crackers came cunningly packaged inside what appeared to be a steam trunk. That and the play on his own name, Brown, was, I thought, a terribly clever choice. I pointed it out to the others.

“Usually, we open with Christmas crackers to create a festive mood,” said British Grandfather. “But I think tonight we shall save them for the end.”

“Yes, Mrs. Brown’s Luggage,” said Nei-Nei Down. “Trunk
s . . .
suitcase
s . . .
leaving one’s home. The baby Jesus had no place to rest his head, either. Very clever,” she said, grinding her teeth at Geoffrey in what was supposed to pass for a smile. She would never, ever forgive him for keeping Grandfather out so late that one night.

“I also brought these crossword-puzzle crackers,” Geoffrey hastily pointed out, pushing them toward her. These were cunningly wrapped in black-and-white-patterned paper, to resemble a crossword. “There are small puzzles inside.”

“Uncle Chachi loves crossword puzzles!” I chimed in. Of all the fans of this latest craze, there was no greater fan than my Uncle Chachi.

That seemed to mollify Nei-Nei to some degree, for Uncle Chachi, normally cool to Geoffrey Brown, if not aggressively hostile like Nei-Nei, could not conceal his delight and obviously wanted to open the crackers right away—but he deferred to British Grandfather. Christmas was, after all, the Englishmen’s holiday.

Nei-Nei was much distracted by the disaster of her cooking. The roast, though we had baked it for hours, still bled at the center, and poor Grandfather, sawing away, could barely slice it into portions. The so-called Yorkshire pudding was a gluey mess, and inside the chestnut stuffing, the chestnuts, a complete puzzlement to Nei-Nei nestled in their hard brown shells, crunched against our teeth. We made our way through each course with grim determination, concentrating as much as possible on the tinned cranberry jelly, the herring, and the pudding. Only Nei-Nei’s chicken rice, made with egg and vegetables, tasted as it should, but because it was merely a side dish, she had not prepared enough. I noticed that Nei-Nei herself pushed the rice away with one hand, dumping a large spoonful onto poor, bewildered Dawid’s plate.

When she offered some to Brown, he demurred. “I don’t eat chicken rice,” he said. “Never saw the point of it.” There was a silence. We gawked at him. I didn’t dare look at Nei-Nei’s face. Didn’t eat chicken rice! He might as well have spit on the Singapore flag.

“But I’m sure yours is delicious,” he added. Still, he didn’t touch it. He praised the roast and the pudding. But I noticed that he himself ate nothing but bread and butter.

“A true English Christmas!” British Grandfather agreed. At each new course, he offered another toast. “To the cook!” “To the empire!” “To Singapore!” and finally, with the puddings, tearfully, “To memories of Christmases past!”

At last it was time to open the Christmas crackers. It seemed a shame to ruin them, they were so beautiful, and had they come from anyone other than Geoffrey Brown, Nei-Nei would have exclaimed over them, too. I wondered, somewhat exasperated, when she would get over her foolish prejudice against this working-class white Englishman. It seemed as stupid as despising a man because he was a Jew, or because he came from Malaya and his skin was a shade darker or yellower than ours. My nei-nei was above all this, yet she had not spoken more than two or three sentences to my lovely, helpful Geoffrey all night.

It was a small act of revenge, therefore, that when I paired the Christmas crackers—it took two people to pull them—I made Nei-Nei share hers with my suitor. We called Danai and Sanang to join as well, and the table seemed instantly more festive with the addition of these two.

“Will it be very loud?” asked Danai. “Will it sound like dynamite?”

“Does it burn the fingers?” asked Sanang.

I did not want to admit that these same worries had been in my mind. Now, the whole table began shouting out questions. “How do you hold it? Will what’s inside come spilling out?”

British Grandfather and Geoffrey Brown explained the inner workings of Christmas crackers, while Uncle Chachi pretended to be an expert on these as well. Uncle Chachi was my pulling partner, and he kept issuing dire warnings and strange advice.

“You might want to wrap your hand in a napkin as I am doing, Aggie, like so. Be careful. Be very careful. Never mind what they say, I have heard of Christmas crackers exploding into flames.”

At the count of Ready, Steady, Go, we all pulled, and the crackers made a satisfying
Bang!
Nei-Nei Down let out a yelp of fright. Grandfather roared with laughter. Little bits of colored confetti came flying out and settled onto the table like red and green and pink snow. After a moment, little Danai said in a trembling voice, “Mine didn’t work.”

Dawid, her partner, looked guilty. “I must have done something wrong,” he murmured. If the world had ended, I’m sure Dawid would have taken the blame for that as well.

“No worries.” Geoffrey stepped in briskly. “There’s always a few that don’t go off. —They say it’s good luck. You’re the lucky one!” He came round the table to Danai and reached for the box of Mrs. Brown’s Luggage crackers. “May I?” he asked.

Geoffrey looked down into Danai’s face with his usual bright, friendly gaze, his smile quirking up one corner of his mouth. “Ready?” he asked her. He held out one end of the cracker to her. The girl raised one thin hand, and then hesitated.

She lowered her head. “I can’t do it with everyone watching,” she whispered.

We all pretended to look away. The cracker went off with a sharp snap.

“Huzzah!” cried Grandfather.

Geoffrey did not reclaim his seat, but made his farewells standing near Danai. He looked like an actual knight in shining armor, with the gaslight flickering around his golden hair.

I walked him to the palace door, leaving the others behind a moment.

Geoffrey reached into his coat pocket. He tossed a sprig of mistletoe into the air, caught it, and kissed me. Of course, we never made any public display of affection in front of my relations. We contented ourselves with stolen kisses, a squeeze of the hand, a lingering look.

“I will be back,” Geoffrey promised. “Whatever else may happen, you can count on that.”

Back at the dining-room table, we gathered up our mottoes from the torn Christmas crackers and read them aloud—mostly treacly sentimental sayings—and tried on our little paper hats. The Christmas crackers left an acrid scent lingering in the air. It reminded me of Deepavali, when Omar Wahlid had strapped explosives across his body and set out to blow up the palace. I thought I must be the only one thinking of this, but British Grandfather said in a shaky voice, “That was a bad night. A terrible night for us all.”

With our silly crepe paper hats on, the tips of the hats drooping, we looked like inmates at an imbecile institution, or an inebriate asylum. What a foolish holiday Christmas was! I thought. So much waste. The roast still sat in the middle of the table, congealing in its red juices, and at a gesture from Nei-Nei Down, Sanang and Danai began to clear the table, bearing the roast away like a corpse.

We had already opened our Christmas gifts that morning—small gifts but extravagances, given our circumstances. My salary at Kahani’s had after all done little to change matters, and wintertime was an expensive season. With the late monsoons came more rain damage, more needed repairs. But Grandfather had insisted on presents. Nei-Nei and I had each received bottles of perfume. The servants also were given gifts, and Dawid, a handsome engraved pen. I had no idea where the money for all this munificence had come from. Surely not from Grandfather’s pension—which went to our necessities. Nor from Nei-Nei’s household money, of which a lavish portion had gone toward this Christmas feast.