The Black Isle (31 page)

I covered my eyes in case I saw their ghosts and wept so hard that even Mr. Wee was moved.

“Let’s go home,” he said, his whisper echoing down the desolate street.

I’D FORGOTTEN ALL ABOUT CHRISTMAS
. But on the tram three days after the air strikes, I saw the fairy lights strung across High Street, each parabola anchored by a lone blue star.

The lights caught my attention because they had been left on in broad daylight, eating up precious energy. This small disorder unsettled me as much as the ruins I had seen—it hinted at a much deeper chaos.

After I’d spent days convinced my family was dead, Li had telephoned to say that he and Father were fine. Naturally, when I begged him to join us, he refused. “They’ve already hit Chinatown twice; there’s no way they’ll hit us again.” These lights—uncannily optimistic, spookily wasteful—reminded me of his cocky tone of voice.

I spent an hour haggling with one of Mr. Wee’s contacts, a seedy Cantonese named Fatty Wai whose black-market operation was located within a halal butchery near the Balmoral Hotel. Mr. Wee had asked me to buy chicken breasts; Fatty Wai gave me only heads and necks. Mr. Wee had asked for a tin of corn oil; Fatty Wai said he could spare only used, blackened grease of indeterminate origin. His attitude improved when I waved a hundred-dollar note at him, but this didn’t spare me a new round of negotiations. By the time we closed the deal, I was ready to collapse.

The tram took longer than usual to appear. There were four others waiting with me in the shelter, all women—though one had her hair shorn to resemble a young boy—and all nervous. We had each come from Fatty Wai’s or an unregulated shop like his. Staring at the deserted street, we clutched our groceries, disguised under burlap sacks and newspaper as refuse or household items we were trying to hawk. I guessed that the others were either high-class servants or unloved daughters-in-law. None seemed accustomed to taking the tram. But with few private cars traversing the roads, public transportation was the best way of remaining discreet.

Finally, I heard a light, metallic rattling in the distance and felt my companions’ relief: Our ride was approaching. Except, of course, I was the one person familiar enough with trams to know that this wasn’t one.

The noise grew closer. From around the corner washed a great wave of bicycles. Hundreds of young Japanese men, maybe even thousands, decked out in short-sleeved shirts, khaki shorts, and canvas sneakers, were pedaling in silence down the unobstructed street. None appeared to be armed. They could have passed for local schoolboys were it not for their stiff, expressionless faces and the white strips they wore on their foreheads emblazoned with the bloodred Rising Sun.

“They look like they’re here to bring peace,” murmured the girl beside me, the slight creature whose hair was shorn. Her eyes stared with a dangerous optimism.

“Don’t be fooled,” I whispered.

The bicycles vanished. Minutes later, we heard stuttering blasts of gunfire echo from the colonial quarter and Chinatown, all the way perhaps to the river.

By the time the tram finally arrived, an hour late, the five of us were in jitters. One of the girls decided to walk after all, fearing ambush. The rest of us got on and prayed to get home alive. We closed our eyes when our ride passed Wonder World. It rang with screams, followed by the soulless
rat-a-tat
of machine guns.

The next day at high noon, the Japanese infantry marched through Tanglewood, their senior officers trailing behind in jeeps. The invaders weren’t alone. They had Westerners in tow—a few soldiers but mainly civilians. Most of these prisoners were dressed in nothing but shorts and negligees, clearly rousted out of bed with no grace or warning, and not even permitted a minute to put on their shoes. The harsh noonday sun laid bare their once-white feet, now dark with dirt and cuts, already brown, already red.

There was no triumphant fanfare, only clattering engines, synchronized boot claps, and the fearful whimpers of the captives. The Japs had infused this victors’ tattoo with their famous quiet restraint. But I wasn’t fooled. Such understatement was a conscious choice. It was their way of boasting.

You’ve got the wrong whites,
I almost shouted.
These are not the powerful and the vain. These are drunks, innocents, do-gooders, pacifists even—the ones left behind.

Daniel, Violet, and I watched the procession from the sitting room window, while Mr. Wee stood in the open doorway. His hand rose to his brow in a salute when one of the jeep-riding toads aimed a squint at him. I was mortified at his easy submission. But I supposed he had no choice.

“They’re marching them to Shahbandar,” Mr. Wee said.

He didn’t need to say any more to bring a chill into our hearts. Shahbandar Prison was more than ten miles away, and if the parade had taken this detour along the winding three-mile vein that was Tanglewood, it would also surely go through other enclaves where the Europeans once lived and played. The prisoners would have to walk twenty more miles before they reached the dank, rat-infested cells of Shahbandar, the Victorian jailhouse formerly assigned to the criminally insane, notorious for its midnight wails, heard for miles around.

“Serves them right, red-hair pigs!” Little Girl blurted from the gloom behind us.

Mr. Wee turned and glared, and her smile faded.

At the tail end of the cavalcade, two skinny soldiers, no more than sixteen, leapt from the back of a slow-moving jeep and scurried to our house bearing a cloth package. The grimmer of them presented it, with both hands, to Mr. Wee. But this was no gift. It was the flag. The boy soldiers pointed at the upstairs balcony: display it.

The Japanese reserved the pomp and circumstance for a radio address that evening by a certain Lieutenant Colonel Jodo, a limp-voiced man who announced that our isle was henceforth to be known as Lighthouse Island.

“Dear Islanders, I am honored to deliver the good news: The great nation of Japan has established the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in which Lighthouse Island will play a key role. Japan has come to free your people from the yoke of the degenerate West, as Moses once freed the Jews, as the Buddha once redeemed the poor. You will no longer be enslaved, my friends. You will no longer suffer in silence and indignity under the white man’s command. Stand up, Islanders, as we appreciate our beautiful national anthem. May the emperor’s reign last ten thousand years.”

His voice was replaced by the hissing of a record, which bled into a prelude of drums and cornets. The anthem itself, sung by a male alto, was composed of tuneless ee’s and oh’s. When he was done, a choir of young children repeated the ugly song; it was no improvement.

As we listened to this in the living room, Mr. Wee gazed at the bleeding Christ over the mantel.

“Well, they’re certainly efficient,” he said. “We have to give them that.”

There was a knock on the sitting room door. Little Girl poked her head in. “The men are here, sir,” she announced in the stiff, official voice she used with him.

Mr. Wee nodded and turned to Violet and me. “Ladies.”

We understood. He wanted us out of the room before his VIP cabal could be led in. Violet took her needlepoint sampler and stood up quickly. She’d been steadying her nerves by sewing aphorisms all week—today’s was
No coward soul is mine
, by Emily Brontë—and knew herself well enough to admit that politics ruined her equilibrium. I, meanwhile, lingered, waiting until she left before I spoke.

“Mr. Wee, I have relatives in Chinatown. If you let me into your plans, I can alert my brother. We can help you organize. I mean no disrespect, but it really does help to speak Chinese there. I know Mandarin, Shanghainese, and a few other dialects…”

“Cassandra.” He raised a hand, vexed. “I have enough to worry about as it is.”

“You know you can trust me—”

“Listen to Daddy, dear.” Daniel remained by his father’s side, drawing strength from this manly consolidation of opinion. “Go upstairs. I’ll join you in a little bit.”

As I ascended the stairs, the shadowy figures in the hallway below filed into the sitting room. I felt an unexpected hollowness when I remembered that Kenneth was not among them.

The next afternoon, which was dreadfully overcast, I bicycled along backstreets to Li and Father’s temporary lodgings not far from Wonder World. On the telephone, Li had described it to me as a large rooming house. It turned out to be a slum—corrugated tin shacks pressed together to form a makeshift village.

Everybody there seemed to know them as Camel and Bitter Gourd. They’d apparently made themselves useful, if not exactly beloved. Father—that is, Camel—sold cups of bird’s nest without inflating his prices, which was considered honorable, while Li became the slum’s unofficial warden, doing rounds at all hours wielding a parang. Through these small acts of community, Camel and Bitter Gourd had ingratiated themselves enough to Mr. Sun, the unofficial chieftain, to secure a shared sleeping berth in his shack.

When I arrived at Mr. Sun’s hut, Li was alone, tying a bandanna around his forehead in the Japanese style, except that his displayed a hand-drawn Taoist yin-yang symbol. The dark rings under his eyes told me that his anemia had returned, but he was buzzing with nervous energy, perhaps fueled by coffee or, I feared, some less benign drug. The sight of him made my tears well up. The sun had tanned his skin and bleached his hair so they were now almost the same shade of brown.

“Why are you here?” he said coldly. But I could tell he was moved because he refused to look me in the eye.

I flung myself at him. My boy was all skin and bones, and his flesh smelled like old rain.

“Li, you have to come with me.”

“What are you talking about? I belong here.”

I glanced at his soggy surroundings. The morning’s drizzle had not yet dried and another storm was already due. Chicken mesh stood in for a window, and rusted soup cans caught the rainwater that was still trickling down from the roof. The bunk he shared with Father was nothing but a bundle of blankets laid out on a wood pallet; my back ached just to gaze at it. The whole shack could so easily collapse on them, just as that shop had crushed Liu Shanling and Liu Shanmin.

“Don’t judge me,” he said softly.

“I’m not judging you. I want to save you.”

“
Save
me? Now you sound like
them
.”

I tried another approach. “Guess who I saw the other day? Cricket, of all people! He was at the house. Imagine that!”

“Who’s Cricket?”

“Our errand boy, from Shanghai. Remember?”

“Nope. Everything from back then has vanished. If Mother were standing here in front of us, I doubt I’d recognize her.”

I noticed the lump on his forehead he’d been trying to conceal behind the yin-yang symbol of his bandanna.

“What’s that? Are you hurt?” I reached for the cloth.

“Don’t touch it.”

“Come on, let me have a look.”

Li plucked off the bandanna. A gold disk fell into his palm. It was the toffee medallion from our day in the park, all those years ago.