Let me tell you then, how it began: My only brother attracted the wrath of the heavens, and stumbled into a fatal encounter with a cow.
The first time I told this story the man who was listening to me broke out in laughter. He did not see the great grief I carried with me, ugly and clumsy, a clay pot heavy with water, a perpetual weight. And so he laughed, blue eyes disappearing in his mirth. His teeth, as white and straight as small bones, were brilliant in his face. I stopped speaking. Even in that place, I was shocked. But they had trained me well, and the smile never left my lips.
”A cow,” he said, still laughing. ”Unbelievable.”
”No,” I told him, pulling my hand away. ”This story is the truth. You must not laugh at the memory of my brother.”
He finished his beer and waved for another one. Then he recaptured my hand. ”Whatever you say honey.” He was a cheerful man, round and good-natured, and he squeezed my fingers to prove his sincerity. Nonetheless, from across the room, watchful eyes glanced against my skin like the feet of a fly. I pulled my chair closer, smiled at the man. I knew the rules. But I could not stop my tongue.
”My brother,” I began, and the memories were such that I did not heed the reluctance on the round man`s face. I told him about my brother as a boy, the thick hair that fell flat against his brown skin, his long fingers tugging at my arm until I followed him. Whenever it rained we stayed outside, chasing the chickens until they fled to the dry earth beneath the house. Sometimes my mother came to the windows. She warned us of fever, begged him to come in, but he stayed outside and I stayed with him. One monsoon many years years ago, we tore off all our clothes and ran naked through the falling water, trying to catch the rain in our mouths. Sky juice, my brother called it. The sky was full of water fruit, a lush fruit that spilled juice, soaked through the clouds and fell to us. We were dripping with sky juice slid cool on our tongues, ran rivers on our arms and legs. My mother called more urgently, warm in her dry dress, warning us, but we were never sick.
And there was more: When my brother fell into the swollen river, fell into deep water that carried him downstream, past two villages and through the long pipe that led to the sea, he did not drown. He swirled through the froth, bumped against dead cats and lizards, skinned his hands on chunks of speeding wood, but he did not drown, and this filled us all with awe because he had never learned to swim.
Remembering this miracle, celebrated by a hundred candles burning in my village, I forgot where I was. I spoke dreamily and told the stranger I that I sometimes thought my brother was a saint.
The man put down his beer and looked at me. I blushed because in that place we seemed what we were not. My dress was pale silk dress with a high mandarin collar, the blue cloth cut away from my shoulders to reveal my petal skin. My hair could reach my knees in those days. It had never been cut. I spent hours with it every morning, dressing it elaborately with tinsel jewels and falling sprays of flowers – the wedding style. I resembled a bride, but of course I was not a bride. The room was filled with some and the scent of champagne and upstairs there were other rooms, small or large, simple or opulent, depending on the wallets of the men. The other girls joked about it, and ran a contest to see who would be the first to have been taken to every room. I laughed with them, in those days, and placed bets on a girl named Nangka who was both beautiful and very bold, and who was always chosen. We were like factory workers, or dreamy rich girls, seeking to relieve the long tedium of our days. We were like many things, but of course we were only one thing. This is what the man next to me had known all along.
”A saint,” he said. ”Imagine that.”
He leaned so close to me I could feel his breath. His hand stoked my neck and fastened on the chain there, which he pulled up, so slowly, I felt every tiny link brush my skin. And then the small cross appeared, pure gold, hanging from the knobby ends of his fingers. His eyes were bright and mocking now, and I was suddenly afraid.
”Are you a religious man?” I asked.
”Oh yes,” he answered.
”You are?” I tried to stroke his wrist but he shrugged me away. I felt the fly feet dancing on my neck again.
”Yes,” he said. ”And I`ll bet you pray too, don`t you? On your knees all the time, I bet. What do you pray for, sugar?”
I thought of many lies, all dangerous. And I thought of my mother, pinching my arm and telling me my tongue would cause me great trouble someday. So I looked him in the eyes and told him the simple truth.
”I pray to leave this place,” I said. ”I pray to be forgiven for these sins.”
His hand twisted on the chain. I thought he meant to break it. Instead, he let it go, abruptly. The man we all feared was standing beside me, rubbing the place on my neck where I had felt his insect gaze, the small insistent feel of his power and lust.
”This one,” he said to the man. ”She is being good to you, yes?” His fingers pressed my neck so that I had to bend my head, as if in supplication, as if in prayer. The sounds of the bar, voices, falling glass, drew closer. Through them I heard the man speak, I felt the brutal edges of his smile.
”This one?” he said. ”Why, she`s a regular little saint.”
There are saints, I have seen them, hanging bright and tormented on the high walls of the district church. They have smooth stone skin, slender fingers cupped and held to the sky, tear of glass on cheeks as cold as mountain earth. We went each year to that church to watch them emerge, carried in the ancient way on canopied platforms. They swayed, floating above the torch-lit city streets. The men saints, trembling against a smoky sky, turned and seemed to move unaided. The sisters scuttled like black birds and held us back. Do not touch, they whispered. Pray, pray, for today their tears are real.
There are saints and when my brother died I prayed to be like them, to be a woman rescued from my life, risen into the sky on a slender shaft of light, my body left behind, a lovely husk of shell and stone and glass. I prayed, but I was not answered. Day after day I prayed, until my knees were raw, my fingers numb, and I grew I weary of saints. One evening I left the church and went to the wise woman of our village. She was skilled in the future, she took me to her home and rubbed my palms with ash. I had no tears, or if I did they were solid within me by that time. The trouble I was in, you see, it was very serious. My mother was dead, having caught the fever she seemed to sense around us always. My brother had used our few saving to by a motorbike. I swear to you it was not from vanity or greed. We had a plan. My brother would deliver eggs and vegetables to the villagers. I would learn to weave. We would save and when I was ready we would buy a loom. We were so young, and we did not imagine anything that could keep us from our dreams.
I tell you it was not pride, not at first, but I think that day when my brother died he was overcome. By speed, at first, by the force of the wind in his hair. This is what I imagine. He drove so fast that the tears gathered in his eyes. He turned, just for a moment, to brush them away, to see who might be watching and when he looked back it was too late, he was already lifting in the air. The cow screamed. He heard it as he soared over the road and into the dry river, empty now, hard as concrete beneath that beating sun. The bike rode on, riderless, and crashed at last into a tree. The cow lay where it die for three weeks. I saw its body bloat, a balloon of skin taut against the stink of death, the later still, withered to the bone. My brother landed on his head. When they brought him to me there was blood coming from his ears. Within a day he died.
So I knew what must happen to me. The funeral costs, the cow to replace, the motorbike all smashed and twisted. I was young, but no one in the village would marry me now, a girl of ill-luck, weighed down with debts and grief. The wise woman knew it too. She looked at my hands, gray with ash, shaking her head at what she saw. Pain and cold. I shuddered at this, thinking death, but she said no, not death, only cold. She told me there places where it so cold that for months there is no rain.
”No rain,” I repeated. How could I come to be there, I who had stood drinking from the sky?
”What comes from the sky falls like dust,” she said. ”I have not seen it, but I know that it is so cold it burns you like fire. You must be strong. I see you in this place. You must prepare.”
She would say no more. Her fingers, stained brown with herbs, placed the things I would need in a small cloth bag. Precautionary things, medicine to make me invincible, a barrier around me that would let nothing in. She asked me if I knew what to expect and warned me that the first time was painful, but prized by many. Then she gave me his name, and the address of that place.
”Go to him,” she said. ”He is not kind, but he guards his own.”
She must have known, when she sent me. She must have seen it.
They put me in a small white room, and for so many hours I was alone. Once I tried to leave and then they took my clothes away and sent me back. One door. One window. A single bed. No food, for hours, only a sink. I drank water until imagind myself rinsed clean inside. Sitting by the open window, looking at the flat gray wall of another building, I drank and cried for my brother and my mother and myself. Then I closed my eyes and tried to imagine them, tried to reach them. I was gone then, too. I was floating, halfway to another world.
Then the men came. I was very still, somewhere outside myself, watching them from the blank space. And so it was not painful. I did not scream or bleed. More men came, and more, and I was so far away, so distant and so cold, that I did not even count or mark the ways they differed from each other. The next morning I was given a new room I was to live in. Two other girls were there, a tall woman applying bright red lipstick. She had strong bones, her hair was cut to her shoulders and pulled back severly. Nangka. The other was called Dahlia, she was slight and pale, and her hair was longer than my own.
”So fast,” Dahlia said when I came in. She was disappointed; the room was crowded with three of us. Nangka turned from her mirror and walked over to me. She held my chin with her long fingers, her hard lacquered nails. She examined my arms.
”No bruises,” she declared, dropping my arm with some disgust. ”She didn`t fight.”
”What good would it do?” Dahlia asked, already bored. ”What good would it do, to fight?”
I kept myself apart, and they did not like me. It`s true that I joked with them, I placed my bets, but inside I kept myself separate in a pure place, an arrogance of silence, and they hated me for it. Pale Dahlia ignored me, the bold Nangka was my torment. She piled her jars and lotions on my table, and dug her fingers into my arms when I complained. Her nails were bright, razor-sharp, the color of the blood she drew. What good would it do, she said, mocking me, to fight?
We had three white walls, three beds in a row, a small table by each bed and a wardrobe for our clothes. Our working clothes. Bright, like bird plumes or the scales of parrot fish. Silky, so that worn they seemed a second flesh, warm against the skin, luxurious. We washed out lipstick, the smell of smoke. We ironed away the wrinkled evidence of sweaty palms, the spilled froth of drinks. This was by day, that we washed. We did each other`s hair, compared the craziness of men. What they wanted us to say, what they asked us to do. But never what we said. Never, never what we did. I spoke and heard myself speaking from where I sat in the purest part of my brain. Nangka was rough and coarse, she spoke like the city she came from, a voice full of choking fumes and wild unexpected sounds. Dahlia was like me, quiet, from the country. We did not talk about the past but I knew this about her. I recognized her hesitancy, understood her silence.
What I remember most is the day when I had been there three months. Nangka was doing my hair, piling it on my head and poking it with pins like daggers. Kahlia moved through the room, steping in and out of the scope of the mirror. The sky was clear that morning, the sun moved in a square on the floor, and I, far away inside myself, was almost content. The night was a distant future. My skin was clean.
Then I heard Dahlia laughing. It was an awful sound, the breathy sound of an injured animal. I turned and saw her with my package from the wise woman, which she had taken from my drawer. I had learned, of course, of other precaution. Girls talk among themselves. I had put those thing away unused. But I was still so angry to see them resting in her slender hands. My voice rose high, and I descended from that pure place I had lived in.
”Give it to me,” I demanded. ”It`s nothing of yours.” But already she had pulled it open.
”Oh,” she said, holding up a paper of herbs. ”What have I found?” She tossed it to Nangka who dropped my hair and caught it, spilling dry seeds from the brittle paper.
”My god,” she said. ”You are a dope, a country idiot, if you depend on this.”
Next Dahlia lifted out my necklace with the cross and locket. These had been my mother`s and they were my only things from home. I did not understand it, why she hated me so much. We were alike. But then I understood: that was precisely why.
”A sweetheart?” she said, dancing around the room with the pen locket. She leaped onto my bed and began to make small kissing sounds. ”Someone you hope to marry?”
”My brother,” I said. It was my voice, I was saying it, and the sound of my voice knocked me from the pure place forever. I was there, then. I was in that room. ”My brother,” I repeated. ”He died.”
”Oh really -” she began, but Nangka turned her voice on her at once, chased her from the room with words as strong as stones.
She turned back to me, and put her hand on my shoulder. We looked at each other in the mirror.
”I had a brother too,” she said.
If you have had a brother and then lost him, you will know the kind of bond that connected us then. We told our stories to each other. Hidden in the daylight corners of that place, our heads together over washing and lipstick, the demanding tresses of my hair, we talked. Nangka told me of a city life I had never imagined, of days without grass or flowing water, of a father who beat her brother until he ran away and joined the army. He was only seventeen when they sent him to the uprisings on another island, sent him to a village church and a bayonet through the liver. When she spoke of him it was in a flat soft voice that expected no answer. Her hands were in my hair and then she dropped them to my shoulders. The long nails of her thumbs rested against the chain that held my locket and my cross.
”The things that are done,” she said, ”have no good logic, no explanation. You should sell that thing,” she added, nodding at the cross.
”It`s nothing for luck, but the gold is good.” Her eyes had gone so dark I could think of nothing but the night they brought me from the country, my place in the bus a dark cave of dread.
”Nangka,” I said. I reached up and took both her hands. I remember this about her fingers. They were thin and cool and dry. In a moment she pulled them away and dipped them into my hair again.
”Yes,” she said. ”Yes. But tell me about your brother now.”
And so I did, everything I could remember. She said she could imagine him, she said our brothers would have been friends. ”Tell me,” she said.
”Tell me what they would have done together. I closed my eyes, and I talked about the river as if it were there before me. We used to go every morning to wash ourselves in the light of the new dawn. Since we could not swim we held onto the jetty with our hands, we pulled ourselves underwater and made a game of how long we could stay there. My brother was half fish, he could stay down for more than 150 counts. For me it was less, but no less wonderful. When my lungs began to spark I shot myself up. I threw my head back, water rushing from my hair and drank the air. Each time, I opened my eyes to a new world, clearer and more vivid than the one I had left. The air was so clean, the colors so pure, the ordinary things vibrant with a life I had overlooked.
In this same way, with Nangka as my friend, my eyes opened. The new world was shabby, but I saw. I saw how worn our silk was in the daylight. I felt the roughness of our sheets, and heard the noise around us always: factory whistle, the rush of water in old pipes, jackhammers in the street below, the tinny music as they cleaned the bar. And the men. It might have been the first time, the way I took it when I finally woke up. When they made me undress, when I felt the soft damp press of flesh, I thought I would go mad. There were complaints against me. I was warned. Until Nangka, afraid because she saw that I was not, decided it was up to her to save me.
It was months ago that we left, nearly a year now, and yet there are things I am not used to in this place. One of them is this: Whenever I hear trains at night, I think it is the wind. Rising and blowing, rattling the windows, to pull the wooden shutters to shake the man beside me and take him underneath the house until the storm subsides. Then I am truly awake, fierce and ready and I realize that the shaking, the gathering noise, is only one of many trains. In the dark I listen to it rumble past and disappear its noise thinning into the night. From the bed I can see the flash of light each window makes and sometimes I can see faces, caught for an instant like a photo. I search these moments, seeing so many things; a coffee cup held to the lips, an expression of pain or laughter or surprise, once a couple kissing. Everyone is pale, like the snow that falls, every face is pale and pink. I cannot see my mother here, or my brother and I cannot see the face I truly seek, Nangka with her bright lips and skin the color of smooth nuts, her hair hanging to her shoulders like a black wave before it breaks. Even when I hold a small piece of her hair, a piece I stole when no one was looking, I do not see her. She is somewhere in this pale country, somewhere in this snow, but after all these months I no longer expect to see her. Like me, her traveling is finished, I am sure. Like me, it is possible that she rarely leaves the house. I sit in the window until I shake with cold, I hold the soft piece of her hair.
It was her idea, this cutting.
”Yes,” she said. ”It`s what we must do first.”
I put my hand to the soft masses wound around my head. Never cut your hair, my mother said. Whatever you do. It is your oldest possession.
”My hair was longer,” Nangka went on, seeing my face. ”My hair went to my knees. It took me hours to comb it. Hours to dress it up each day.” She laughed. ”The wedding style. After all, it was not meant for everyday. At first I could not let them cut it, though I knew I should. I went that first time and let them cut only to my waist. I went back every month and lost another inch. Until now.” She pointed to her black hair, which brushed against her shoulders. She pointed to her bangs. ”Today I will get the last piece cut and you will do all of yours. You must be brave,” she said. ”Men like long hair, but not too long. It marks you a a villager. Now tell me again. Practice what we will say.”
”You are my sister,” I told her. ”You are my oldest sister. Our parents died last year. We have never been apart.”
”Stop staring,” she said, tugging at my arm. ”Look straight ahead.” I was walking without thinking, my eyes drawn back and forth by the light and flowers. I had never walked in the city before.
”I can`t hear you,” I said, stopping to press my hands over my ears.
”Of course you can.” This time her tug was harder. She stepped in front of me and took my face in her hands. ”Do you want to stay in that place forever? Listen to me. Are you a virgin? Are you?”
I blushed. We kept walking. ”Yes,” I said. ”I am.”
Nangka smiled. ”Good,” she said. ”You said that exactly right. Now, why do you want to marry a foreigner?”
”I want to make a good home. I want to have children. I want to see the world.”
”But we are sisters.”
”Yes,” I said. ”We are sisters. And we do not want to live apart from each other. We never have in our lives.”
”All right,” Nangka said. We had reached the beauty parlour. There were rough pictures of women drawn on the glass wall with paint. They were not smiling, any of them. Their hair grew up in waves and towers. They looked at the air with their lips puckered, their eyes half-lowered. Inside there was a woman whose skin was coarse, whose hair fell around her head like an upturned bowl.
”Just an inch,” I begged, feeling her hands on my hair. ”Please, no more than that.”
”There is no time,” Nangka said. ”We have no time to go slowly. I`m sorry.”
”This hair is thick,” said the woman. She weighed it in her hand like a slab of dead meat. ”If I cut it all at once I`ll do it free; hair this long I can sell.”
I closed my eyes. My mother combed my hair every morning, and once a week she rubbed my scalp with scented oil. She was proud of my hair. During festivals she wove flowers into it. This, she had said, stroking it. This is your great beauty. But what good was it to me now, a false bride? I nodded very slowly.
Nangka took my hand.
”You`ll be happier this way,” she said. ”Wait and see.”
She was right, though I wept when I saw it. The sharp ends touched my shoulders and my hair, my great beauty was a fat braid hanging from the wall. ”Stop crying,” Nangka begged. ”It was necessary. And it`s not so bad. You are pretty, look.” She held up the mirror. My hair was gone, but she was right, my face was just the same.
”There,” she said, seeing me recover. ”And doesn`t your head feel light?”
It was true, my head felt as if it were floating, disembodied. We walked to the agency and I kept glancing into windows, surprising myself, feeling giddy and off-balance when I turned my head too swiftly and nothing weighed it down.
At the agency I stayed close to Nangka.
