”You see,” she told them, ”She is my younger sister. Of course she is shy, she has just come from the village. We want to stay together. Sisters. We want to make good homes in a new country. We want to be good wives. Cook? Of couse. And cleaning, we are very good at that.”
In the mornings now, while we waited, our short hair gave us free time. We studied. Nangka had a map. She had dictionary with polite words in English. ”Now we are here,” she said, pointing to the islands, hundreds of them scattered like green ink against the sea. She pointed out the places we might go. One was huge, shaped lke a fat bull with no horns and stubby legs. Another was like a wild boar, chasing a bright bird across the water. This last one was an island and much smaller, but it was the one I liked. There was so much water.
”I don`t know.” Nangka said. ”It`s very cold there. Colder than you can imagine.” She paused, listening to footsteps in the hallway until they died away. The boldness of what we were doing made her brisk and worried.
”Stop dreaming,” she said. ”We must practice.” She read from her small book.
”Good morning,” she said. ”How are you today?”
”Fine,” I replied. ”Thank you very much, I am fine.”
I was raw, I was green, I was a girl who had never seen snow. How could I know, when they showed me this man, how to judge? He was pale, that`s what I saw, pale and rather fat. He wore glasses and behind them his eyes looked like small gray clouds. He said he was a water man. He had drawn a dam and now he was here to build it. When he left he wanted to take home a wife. He had chosen me from a photograph the agency had given him. He said he would interview two others. I kept my head bowed in the polite way, though it was harder now. My hair swung against my shoulders and my head kept drifting up. He asked me questions about my life, he asked me to stand up and walk back and forth across the room.
”Your parents,” he said. ”Is it true that they have died?” I nodded, still silent. And then I knew a way to judge him. I looked up, directly at him.
”I had a brother too,” I said. ”He was killed by a cow.” I watched him very closely, but he did not laugh. He listened. He listened to my story. ”I`m sorry,” he said.
And he did not laugh at me, not once.
”That`s lucky,” said Nangka, when I told her. ”He is kind.” We sat in the bare morning light, our books hidden beneath the mattress, speaking in whispers, comparing our fortunes.
”And yours,” I said. ”Nangka, how was he?”
”Ugly,” she said. ”Like a rambutan fruit. He was hairy, and underneath the hair his skin was red. Even his nose was red, like a hybiscus. His hair is as dark as mine. It covered his whole face.”
”But kind?” I asked. ”Was he also kind?”
”I don`t know,” she said. She was looking at the wall then, remembering. ”He asked strange questions. I kept my head down. He came over and unfastened all my buttons, one by one. He opened my blouse like curtain. Yet he did not touch me. He stared, but he did not touch me.”
”Not kind,” I said.
”No,” she agreed. ”Not very kind. But he is from the same wild-boar island as your water man.”
I live on this foreign island, but it will not tell me what to feel. If there were palm trees, a brown river, lean wooden houses against the jungle and hybiscus, I would know. Even in that city, with all the noise, the scent of cooking food and open drains, of smoke and sewers, I woke up and I knew. But here the sky is a watery gray, the snow softens everything, pales all color. I am always cold, it seems, though the water man has a house with heat, and has bought me many sweaters. Jim, he says, smiling with his eyes like clouds. Call me Jim. He is a kind man, but when I look at him, when I look around, there are only white things, cold things, and I feel nothing about them, nothing, I feel nothing at all.
That we escaped at all the miracle of course, a kind of gift, and I must remember that. We were very lucky. No one followed us when we left that morning, no one saw us go. The only things I took were my locket and the clothes I wore, a crisp white skirt and blouse I bought with the money I got for my gold cross. It was so early that all the shops were closed. The streets were filled with a blue gray light, and not even the fishwives were open yet. Our footsteps echoed against the metal shutters of the shops. Nangka wore a simple dress of dark blue silk, which she had stolen months ago. Her lips were a clear red, her hair was dark black, her skin the color of cut wood just after it has rained. She was beautiful, I thought. She said we both were.
We sat together in the center of the long airplane. Other girls were with us. They leaned into the windows, pointed out shoreline and cities, or the vast expanse of sea. Some of them slept. Nangka and I did none of these things. We barely even spoke, we were so nervous. At the landing my ears filled up with something and gave me so much pain I wanted to scream, and when I had to say good-bye to Nangka I could hardly hear what she said. But I saw her, I kept her face in my mind. I told myself there was no reason to worry, her new address was folded in my locket by a picture of my brother. I touched its metal, warmed by my skin, and I let her walk away with that man, out into the night.
I wrote her many letters:
Dearest Nangka, after I left you we came to this place by train. It was early morning. The houses are so close together here, like at home, but each one has a small gate, a fence around the garden. The water man says there are flowers, but I am always cold. Yesterday I gathered sticks and branches from his garden. I saved them in the kitchen and asked could we please have a fire. I did not understand his expression, and then he laughed. He showed me the switch. First there is a humming, than a light that moves like fire, but you can touch it. Later there is a heat that bakes my skin dry. Nangka, I felt so foolish I wanted to die, but he is a kind man. The floors in this house are soft with rugs and the walls have a paper that is fuzzy when you touch it. Nangka, please write to me, is this how it is for you?
Dearest Nangka, my sweet friend, did you get my letters? Everyday I wait for the mail but there is never anthing from you. Today we went to the shops at the end of the block. It is so strange, Nangka, there was nothing there I could recognize, though he wants me to cook. Everything is wrapped in plastic. I cannot feel the oranges or the meat, and nothing has a smell. When I was home alone there was snow. I did not know what it was at first. Then I remembered the wise woman and went outside to feel it. It is white and burns like the smoke that used to come from the factories to our room. At first I was not cold and I stood there for a long time. Then I saw a face in the window next door. It was the old woman, looking at me, and when I waved she dropped the curtain. Then I went inside and I was suddently very cold. I sat in a blanket and watched the line of white growing on the fences. I thought about that old woman. The water man, Jim, is kind, but the other people here are not kind. I see them looking at me always, and they do not smile. Nangka, I think of you always, is it the same for you?
Dear Nangka, I am so worried. Here are some stamps. I am sending you these stamps so that if he does not let you out you can get a letter to me. Wait for the mailman. Nangka, I miss you. I would rather be back at that place with you than to be so lonely here.
I sent these letters with dimishing hope. Still, I put them in the box everyday. I did not hear and did not hear, and soon my own letters began to come back to me. I saved them, and one day, desperate, I showed them to Jim.
”She has moved,” he said, pointing to the yellow sticker.
”Yes, but where? Where is she now?”
He shook his head and handed me the letter back. His skin was very white then, and his fingernails were blue, like the envelope.
”It doesn`t say, I`m afraid. She didn`t leave an address.”
”She wouldn`t do that,” I said. ”We are like sisters.”
It was too late when I realized my mistake. Jim studied me. He said, ”I thought you were sisters.” But when he saw me folding with loss, he put his arm around me. ”There,” he said, ”it doesn`t matter. Look, do you have her new name? Do you know what man she came with?”
I remembered him at the airport, face like a hairy fruit, when he put his arm around Nangka`s shoulders and drew her away. I remembered how small she looked beside him, her last smile to me. I remembered that he was not kind.
”No,” I whispered. ”No.”
”You`re shivering,” Jim said. He turned up the heat and put another blanket around my shoulders. When he frowned I could see the fine red lines surface on his forehead, a map of his thoughts. He listed things we could do. Write the agency. Contact the embassy. It was possible, he said, that we could find her. At least we could look.
”But you mustn`s hope,” he said. ”It isn`t likely, and you mustn`t get you hopes up.”
Three months have passed, and still I do not hope. Nor do I pray, though I have found a church and I sometimes go there. One day I was shopping, holding a ham swathed in plastic, when I saw the nun. She wore short skirts, which surprised me, skirts that brushed her knees and dark black tights. Her hair was covered by only a black cloth and no wimple framed her face. She was pale, I saw that her hands were as white as soap. She was a nun and I followed her. A block, half a block behind, I followed her, marking the way in my memory. She was young, I could tell from the way she walked, the long swing of her legs. It was spring by then. The sun was warm on my face and hands, and the trees looked like half-plucked chickens with their small pale leaves.
The church she went to is big, but though I come here often, I am nearly always alone. I sit in the front pew, near the statues which crowd around the altar. These are faces I recognize, smooth expressions of grief and rapture I find familiar. I do not have these feelings anymore, such extremes of pain or ecstasy. My life on this cold island has a pattern, but my feelings have paled like the skins of people here, my smiles are smiles of habit only. It is true I do not suffer. I think if I went back, saw the hybiscus and brown river of my childhood, pain would flower in me to match the colors I could touch. Even here, in this place that is a shadow of my other life, the memories are stirred. My brother had dark eyes, and the skin beneath his fingernails was the rosy pink of coral. My mother smelled like jasmine, she wove bright waxy orchids in her hair. When she sang to me there was bouenvillea outside the window, fushia leaves like flames. There was green all around us, deep and rich, and when the rains fell they ran like juice from the sky. Even Nangka, with her city voice, knew the power of red on the lips, of deep blue silk that fell around her calves.
This is what I think of at that church. I see the statues, and I am reminded, faintly, of what to feel. I close my eyes and see first my brother, pulled from the river on the day he did not drown. He is pale beneath his skin, like these statues, but he is alive, and that night my mother wears a red dress to church, she tosses flowers into the baptismal fountain to celebrate his life. I go on like this, remembering, feeling a surge of life and color. But then there are te other things, which also come. My mother with a fever that sent water streaming from her skin, my brother turning his head to wipe the tears of wind from his eyes. Or Nangka, head tilted back, her hair wet and heavy, before that last inch was cut away. The worst memory is Nangka, turning past the strange arm to give me one last smile, while behind her the snow was falling, cold and dusty and sealed from us by glass.
I open my eyes, then, filled with memory, and seek the faces of the statues which at home would let me weep. But there they are so pale, and like me their tears are frozen in their eyes. They are as cold as mountain earth, but all the same I seem to hear them speak.
Listen, they whisper, their voices as urgent as wind before the rain. Let me tell you. Let me tell you how it began.
