The Nicholas Linnear Novels (11 page)

By that time, the Colonel knew that he was going to marry her.

When the Colonel received the request by American courier via British liaison to join the American SCAP—the occupation forces—Command in Tokyo as an adviser to General Douglas MacArthur, the first thing he thought of was how he was going to tell Cheong. There was no question of his not taking the assignment. Already he found himself chafing to be in Tokyo.

It was early in 1946 and this part of the world was still reeling from the emotional fallout caused by the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the effect was incalculable, the ramifications endless.

He had been married to Cheong for four months and she was three months pregnant. Still he had no second thoughts about abandoning Singapore, which he thought of as much his home as England ever was. Besides the fact that he felt it was his duty to take the assignment at SCAP headquarters, he further understood quite keenly the complex problems that had developed within Japan since its unconditional surrender, ending the war, last year and he was eager to immerse himself in what MacArthur had called “steering a bold new course for Japan.”

The Colonel deliberated only a moment before he called Danvers in and told him that he was leaving for the day; if anything important came up he could be reached at home.

He arrived at the house to find Cheong taking care of him personally, having shooed Pi away from the doorway at the first hint of the Jeep turning into the driveway.

“You are home early today, Denis,” she said, smiling.

He climbed out of the Jeep, dismissed the driver. “I suppose now you’ll tell me that I’ll be underfoot of the servants’ cleaning,” he said gruffly to her.

“Oh no,” she cried, linking her arm in his as they went up the stairs and into the house. “Quite the opposite. I’ve patted them on the behinds and told them to do the work in the kitchen that they have been putting off for oh-so-long.” They went down the hall and into his study where she made him a drink.

“Ah,” he said, taking the chill glass from her. “Have they done anything for which they should be punished?”

“Oh no.” She put her small hand to her mouth as if shocked by the notion.

He nodded, happy inside himself. “Of course you’d tell me if that were the case, wouldn’t you?”

“Not at all.” She indicated that he should sit in his favorite chair and when he was comfortably settled within its soft embrace, his long legs stretched out on the carpet before him, one boot set over the other, she knelt at his side. She wore a deep blue brocaded silk robe with a mandarin collar and wide bell sleeves. Where she had obtained this rather remarkable garment the Colonel could not imagine and he had not the bad taste to ask her. “That is none of your concern,” she continued. “I am the mistress of this house. Discipline is here my concern as it is yours downtown.” She meant at the garrison house. “You must trust me to maintain a perfect aura within our house. Tranquillity is all-important to the health of one’s spirit, do you not agree?” And when he nodded, watching her eyes, she continued. “The tranquillity of one’s house is not only confined to its location and the servants therein but also to its major occupants.” She paused and the Colonel, who had been calmly sipping his drink through all of this discourse, now sat up, placing his glass on the side table by the chair. The Westerner in him longed to take her delicate, capable hands in his, lean toward her and say, “What is the matter, darling? What’s troubling you?” This, he knew, he could not do, for in doing so he would shame her. She had obviously spent much time in the preparation of her presentation. He must honor that by allowing her to come to the point as she might. If there was anything the Colonel had learned by being in the Far East for six years, it was patience, for to fail to swiftly learn that lesson was to court peremptory disaster out here where life was so different, seeming only to float upon the bosom of the eternal Pacific.

“You know, Denis, that tranquillity is only one aspect of the harmony of life. And harmony is what all people strive to achieve. Harmony is the basis of a clear mind, of a good and powerful karma.” She put her fingers along the back of his hand, which lay along the smooth worn wood of one armrest. “You have such a karma. It is very strong, like the thrown net of a master fisherman.” Her eyes looked down at her hands, one atop the other, flashed upward to his face. “I am afraid to do anything to destroy that. But now there is more than one to think of. Our karma have meshed and, intertwined, may be all the more powerful for it, yes?” He nodded again and, satisfied that she had both his attention and his agreement, she said, “Now I must ask something of you.”

“You know that you have only to ask me,” the Colonel said sincerely. “You, who of all people in this world make me the most happy, can have anything that is mine.”

Yet this heartfelt speech appeared to have little effect on Cheong. “This thing I must ask you is very large.”

He nodded.

“We must go away from Singapore,” she said boldly. Then, seeing that he did not stop her, she went on in a rush. “I know that your work means a great deal to you but this is”—she searched for the proper words that would convey her thoughts—“most imperative for all of us. For you, for me and for the baby.” She placed one palm against her lower belly. “We must go to Japan. To Tokyo.”

He laughed, struck first by the humor of it and then intrigued by the eeriness.

“This is funny?” she cried, misunderstanding his expression of relief. “It is bad for us to stay here. Most bad. In Japan our karma will flourish, expand. There lies our—what is the English word?—destiny, is that right? Our destiny.”

“I laughed only at a rather odd coincidence,” the Colonel reassured her. “It was nothing you said.” He patted her hand. “Now tell me why we must go to Tokyo.”

“Because Itami is there. She is Tsūkō’s sister.”

“I see.” She had told him, quite naturally, of her previous marriage but, beyond that, they rarely spoke of this portion of her life. “And what has she to do with our karma?”

“I’m sure that I do not know that,” Cheong said. “But I had a dream last night.” The Colonel was well aware of how much stock these people put in dream messages. They were not unlike the ancient Romans in this respect. He himself did not, in fact, totally disbelieve in their import. The unconscious, he knew, had more to do with the direction one took in life than most people were willing to admit. And, in any event, dreams were closely linked with the concept of karma and karma was something in which the Colonel had a strong belief. He had spent too many years in the Far East not to.

“The dream was about Itami,” Cheong said. “I was in a city. In Tokyo. I was shopping and I turned into a quiet side street. All about me were shops made of wood and paper the way it was in Japan when Tokyo was named Edo and the Tokugawa ruled the shōgunate.

“I passed a shop that had a gaily decorated window and I stopped. In the center of the window was a doll. It was the most beautiful doll I had ever seen. Its aura was very strong.

“She was of porcelain, this doll, white-faced, dressed elegantly in the
bushi
fashion. Her eyes stared at me and I could not look away. ‘Buy me,’ they said.

“The shopkeeper wrapped her up for me in a silken cloth and I took her home. And, as I was unwrapping her, she began to speak. Her voice was imperious and commanding and very, very firm. She was obviously a lady of a high house.

“It was Itami and she said that we must come to her. She said that we must leave Singapore and come to Tokyo.”

“Have you ever met Itami?” the Colonel asked.

“No.”

“Did Tsūkō ever show you a picture of her?”

“No.”

“Yet you are certain that this doll in your dream was Itami.”

“It was Itami, Denis.”

He leaned forward at last and took her hands in his as he had longed to do for some time. Her long nails, he saw today, were lacquered deep scarlet. He traced their satiny smoothness for a moment, savoring the feeling. “We will go to Japan, Cheong. To Tokyo. We will meet Itami, just as your dream said.”

The smile that spread across her face was like the rising of the sun. “Oh, yes, Denis? This is really true?”

“It is really true.”

“Then tell me why, for my spirit is happy and cares not but my mind, my mind cries out to know.”

The day before they left, she took him to see So-Peng.

He lived outside the city, to the northwest, in a village of oiled paper and bamboo where no Westerner had ever before set foot. It was not on any map of the region that the Colonel had ever seen. In fact, when Cheong had told him of the location, he had laughed, saying that their destination would be nought but the middle of a mangrove swamp. Nevertheless, she was undeterred and he eventually acquiesced to her wish.

It was Sunday and Cheong insisted that he not wear his uniform. “This is most vital,” she had informed him and as he donned his wide-lapeled cream linen suit, white silk shirt and navy regimental tie, he felt somehow spectacularly naked: a daub of crimson in an otherwise emerald jungle, the bull’s-eye in an unmissable target. For her part, Cheong wore a white silk dress, embroidered with sky-blue herons, mandarin-collared, floor-length. She looked a dream.

There was brilliant sunlight as they left the city; the heat washed over them in slippery waves. A listless breeze brought with it the fetid stench of the mangrove swamps but always from their left. Twice they were obliged to stop, standing perfectly still as long black and silver vipers writhed obliquely across their path. The first time this happened, the Colonel made a move to kill the serpent but Cheong’s firm hand upon his wrist deflected him from his purpose.

Far away yet seeming as close to them as the flamboyantly painted backdrop to some stage play, the eastern horizon was fairly choked with dark gray clouds piling themselves into the sky like ungovernable children pyramiding themselves dangerously. Above, the sky was a peculiar yellow; no blue was anywhere to be seen; and now and again silent white lightning flickered and forked through the gray, turning its softness for moments to marble. It was difficult to believe that it was so calm and tranquil here where they walked up the winding road, rising along the spine of a sprawling hillock.

Singapore had long since dropped from sight and, like a ship’s anchor sent overboard, it seemed to be absolutely gone, part of another world which they had stepped out of and, passing through some invisible barrier, now found themselves in a land quite apart. At least that was how it seemed to the Colonel on that magical afternoon, how it came to him again and again throughout his life in dreams during the mornings’ drowsy early hours.

On the far side of the forested hillock, all indications of the road they had been following disappeared and not even the semblance of a path through the foliage presented itself. Yet Cheong seemed to have no difficulty at all in reorienting herself and, taking his hand, guiding them to the village of So-Peng.

It lay in a leafy shallow hollow with the beginnings of a basalt mountain at its back, a natural barrier behind which, perhaps, only the stormy sea lay.

They came upon one house that seemed in all respects similar to those around it and, having climbed its three or four wide wooden steps up from the mud of the street, now stood upon its foreporch, wide as a veranda in the old South of America, covered against the torrential rains and the baking sun of the seasons. Here Cheong bade him remove his shoes even as she was doing.

The front door opened and they were ushered into the house by an old woman with steel-gray hair, elegantly coiffed, dressed in a long silk robe the color of swirled ash. She put her hands together in front of her breasts and bowed to them. They returned the gesture and, as she stood upright and smiled at them, the Colonel saw that she had no teeth. Her face was lined, to be sure, but the flesh still retained a hint of the vitality and beauty that it had obviously radiated in youth. Her black almond eyes were as luminous as lanterns, shining with the inquisitive innocence of the little girl from out of the past.

Cheong introduced the Colonel. “And this is Chia Sheng,” she said without otherwise identifying her.

Chia Sheng laughed, staring at the Colonel’s bulk, and shook her head from side to side as if to say, “What can one do with young people today?” She shrugged her thin shoulders and clucked her tongue sharply against the roof of her mouth.

Cheong, the Colonel noted, spoke only Mandarin and, without being told in so many words, he was aware that he should do the same.

They were in a room of some considerable size. No other house he had been in in Singapore, not even the main house of the estate bordering the mangrove swamps that had once been his, could boast of such space. The outside facade, he saw, had little relevance once one was inside.

More odd, however, was the fact that this room was covered in tatami—Japanese reed mats of a specific size by which all rooms in traditional Japanese houses were measured. But more surprises were in store for the Colonel.

Chia Sheng led them wordlessly through this first room, sparsely furnished with low lacquered tables and cushions and little else, down a short dimly lit hallway. Its far wall consisted of an enormous piece of jade so heavily carved that it became a latticework. In its center was a round doorway known, the Colonel had somewhere heard, as a moon gate. These existed in the houses of the very wealthy during the latter half of the nineteenth century on the mainland of China.

Across the moon gate’s opening a long bolt of silk hung from a bamboo pole laid crosswise. It was gray. Embroidered upon it was a royal-blue wheel-and-spoke pattern. This seemed oddly familiar to the Colonel, and for long minutes he racked his brain until he recalled that he had seen the selfsame bolt of cloth reproduced in a
ukiyo-e
print by Ando Hiroshige. It was one of the
Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaidō
series; he could not remember the title of the print in question. However, it had shown the design to belong to a traveling
daimyo.
Another mystery. The Colonel shrugged inwardly as Chia Sheng led them through the moon gate, white shot with black and green.