Читать книгу Two Dreams - Shirley Geok-lin Lim - Страница 10

Native Daughter

“TA’ MALU!”

Mei Sim wriggled at her mother’s words.

“You no shame! Close your legs.”

Mother was standing five steps below the landing, the soft straw broom in one hand and her head level with Mei Sim’s shoulders.

Mei Sim stared down her legs which she had spread apart the better to balance her body as she half-lay on the smooth wooden landing and thought her thoughts to herself. Up came the broom and it thumped against her knees. She pulled them together and tugged at her short skirt.

“What you do here all day? Go ask Ah Kim to give you a bath.” Her mother’s round pretty face was troubled. She had had a perm just last week, and the fat curls sat like waxed waves over her brow, wrinkled with vexation. “We’re going to visit Tua Ee. And don’t sit with your legs open there. She think I bring you up with no shame.”

“Ya, ma.” Mei Sim sidled past her mother’s solid body down the stairs, glad for something to do. Every day was a problem for her until her brothers came home from school at three when they would shout at her to go away but still could be persuaded to give her a piggyback ride or to let her hold their legs in a wheelbarrow run. The house was empty and dull until then, containing only chairs, tables, beds, cupboards, photographs and such like, but no one to play with.

Ah Kim was scrubbing her brother’s school uniform on the ridged washboard. Drub, drub, drub, slosh, slosh. Mei Sim squatted beside her. Ah Kim’s stool was only a few inches high and she had her legs thrust straight in front with the wooden board held firmly between. Her samfoo sleeves were rolled up high and the pale arms were wet and soapy up to the elbows. Taking the chunk of yellow laundry soap in her right hand, Ah Kim scrubbed it over a soiled collar. Then, seizing the collar in a fist, she pushed the cloth vigorously up and down the ridges. Her knuckles were red and swollen, but her face was peaceful. “You wait,” she said, not turning away from the washboard. “I wash you next.”

Bathtime was directly under the tall tap in the corner of the open-roofed bathroom. Mei Sim was just short enough to stand under the full flow of water pouring in a steady stream from the greenish brass tap while Ah Kim scrubbed her chest, legs and armpits with Lifebuoy. She was six and would soon be too tall for this manoeuvre. Soon, Ah Kim said, she would have to bathe herself with scoops of water from the clay jar in the other corner of the bathroom. Dodging in and out of the water, Mei Sim thought she would not like to have to work at her bath.

Mother dressed her in her New Year’s party frock, an organdy material of pink and purple tuberoses with frills down the bib and four stiff layers gathered in descending tiers for a skirt. She picked a red and green plaid ribbon which Ah Kim threaded through her plaits and, her face and neck powdered with Johnson Talc, she waited for the trishaw, pleased with herself and her appearance.

Mother had put on her gold bangles, gold earrings, and a long heavy chain of platinum with a cross as a pendant. Her kebaya was pale blue, starched and ironed to a gleaming transparency under which her white lace chemise showed clearly. Gold and diamond kerosang pinned the kebaya tightly together, and the gold-brown sarong was wrapped tightly around her plump hips and stomach. She had to hitch herself up onto the trishaw and, once seated, carefully smoothed the sarong over her knees. When Mei Sim climbed in, Mother gave her a push to keep her from crushing her sarong.

Grandaunty’s house was all the way in Klebang. Usually Father took them there for visits in the evening after their meal. It was enough of a long way off for Mei Sim to always fall asleep in the car before they reached home.

The trishaw man pedalled vigorously for the first part, ringing his bell smartly at slow crossing pedestrians and hardly pausing to look before turning a corner into another narrow road. At Tranquerah he began to slow down. There was much less motor traffic, a few bicycles, and now and again a hawker’s cart got in his way. Green snaky veins zigzagged up his calves. His shaven coconut-round head was dripping with sweat. He didn’t stop to wipe it, so the sweat ran down his forehead and got into his eyes, which were deep-set and empty, staring vaguely down the long road.

After a while, Mei Sim grew bored with watching the trishaw man pump the pedals. She leaned forward to stare at the houses on both sides of the road. What interesting things to see that she had missed on their evening car rides! Here was a small stall with bottles of cencaluk and belacan neatly mounded on shelves. She glimpsed through an open door a red and gold altar cloth and bowls of oranges and apples before a dim sepia portrait. Two neneks in shabby sarong and kebaya sat on a long bench by the covered front of another house. Each woman had a leg pulled up under her sarong, like one-legged idols set for worship. Here was a pushcart with a tall dark mamak frying red-brown noodles in a heavy kwali. How good it smelled. Mei Sim’s stomach gave a little grumble.

Now they were passing the Baptist Gospel Hall where on Sunday evenings she had seen many people standing in rows singing sweetly. In the morning glare the shuttered windows were peeling paint and a crack showed clearly on the closed front door which had a huge chain and lock on it.

“Hoy!” the trishaw man shouted. The wheels swerved suddenly and bumped over something uneven. Mei Sim hadn’t seen anything.

Her mother gripped her arm and said aloud, “You bodoh. Almost fall off the trishaw. Sit inside all the way.”

“What was that, ma?”

“A puppy dog.”

She turned her head to peer behind but the canvas flaps were down.

The trishaw man was talking to himself in Hokkien. A small trail of saliva was trickling down the side of his mouth. Mei Sim could only hear mumbles like, “Hey . . . yau soo. . . chei . . .”

“What is he saying, ma?” she whispered.

“Never mind what he say. He angry at puppy dog, bring him bad luck.”

Mei Sim looked at the bare brown legs again. They were moving much more slowly, and the mumbles continued, sometimes louder, sometimes quieting to a slippery whisper. Her mother didn’t seem to mind the trishaw’s pace or the man’s crazy talk. She had been frowning to herself all this time and turning the three thick bangles round and round her right wrist. Her agitated motions made a jingle as the bangles fell against each other, like chimes accompanying the slow movements of the trishaw pedals.

They were on a deserted stretch of Klebang before the sandy rutted path on the left that led to Grandaunty’s house and the shallow sloping beach facing the Malacca Straits. Wood-planked shacks roofed with rusty galvanized iron alternated with common lots on which grew a wild profusion of morning glory, lallang, mimosa and pandan bushes. A few coconut and areca palms leaned in jumbled lines away from the hot tarmac. The sky was a blinding blue, barren of clouds, and arching in a vast depth of heat under which the dripping trishaw man mumbled and cursed. The bicycle lurched forward and the attached carriage, on which Mei Sim crouched as if to make herself lighter, moved forward jerkily with it.

“Aiyah! Sini boleh,” her mother said sharply, and almost at the same moment the man’s legs stopped and dangled over the wheels. She pushed Mei Sim off the sticky plastic seat and stepped down carefully so as not to disarrange the elaborately folded pleats of her skirt.

The man took a ragged face towel from his pocket and mopped his face. Mrs Cheung clicked the metal snap of her black handbag, zipped open an inner compartment, extracted a beaded purse from it, unbuttoned a flap and counted some coins which she clinked impatiently in one hand, waiting for him to take the change. She poured the different coins onto his calloused palm, then walked up the path without a word. Mei Sim stood for a moment watching him count the coins and, at her mother’s annoyed call, ran up the narrow lane just wide enough for a car to go through.

Waddling ahead of her, her mother was singing out, “Tua Ee, Tua Ee.” A wooden fence, newly whitewashed, separated Grandaunty’s house from the lane which suddenly petered out into a littered common compound shared with some Malay houses on low stilts. Beneath the houses and through the spaces between the concrete blocks on which the wood stilts were anchored, Mei Sim could see the grey coarse sand grading to a chalky white for yards ahead, clumped by tough beach grass and outlined at stages by the dark, uneven markings of tidal remains, broken driftwood, crab shells, splinters of glass, red-rust cans and black hair of seaweed.

Grandaunty came out through the gap in the fence in a flurry of kebaya lace. Her gleaming hair was coiffed in a twist, and a long gold pin sat on top of her head, like a nail on the fearsome pontianak, Mei Sim thought.

“What’s this?” she said in fluent Malay. “Why are you here so early without informing me? You must stay for lunch. I have already told that prostitute daughter of mine to boil the rice, so we have to cook another pot.”

Grandaunty had four sons, of whom she loved only the youngest, and a daughter whom she treated as a bought slave. She was not a woman for young girls and gave Mei Sim no attention, but she tolerated Jeng Cheung as the niece whose successful marriage to a rich towkay’s son she had arranged ten years before.

Mei Sim’s mother visited her at least once a week with gifts of fruits, pulut and ang pows, and consulted her on every matter in the Cheung family’s life. At six, Mei Sim was allowed to listen to all their discussions; she was, after all, too young to understand.

It was in this way she learned what men liked their women to do in bed, how babies were made and how awful giving birth was. She knew the fluctuations in the price of gold and what herbs to boil and drink to protect oneself from colds, rheumatism, heatiness, smallpox, diarrhoea or female exhaustion.

It was in the this way she found out that women were different from men who were bodoh and had to be trained to be what women wanted them to be. If women were carts, men were like kerbau hitched to them.

This morning she settled on the kitchen bench behind the cane chairs on which her mother and grandaunt were sitting close to each other sharing the sirih box between them, chatting and scolding in Malay and snatches of English, and she listened and listened without saying a word to remind them of her presence.

“. . . and Bee Lian saw Hin at the cloth shop . . . she told me he’s been going there every afternoon when he’s supposed to be at the bank . . . that slut is probably taking all his money, but I haven’t said a word to him, I thought maybe you can help me. What should I say to him, oh, that swine, useless good-for-nothing, I scratch his eyes out. Better still if I take a knife and cut her heart. These men always walking with legs apart, what does he want from me? Three children not enough, but she is a bitch—black as a Tamil and hairy all over. I keep myself clean and sweet-smelling, a wife he can be proud of. So itchified, never enough, always wanting more, more. That’s why now he won’t give me more money, say business bad. Ha, bad! We know what’s bad. I’ll get some poison and put it in her food, and all my friends talking behind my back. She’s making a fool of me, but what can I do? I tell them better than a second wife, not even a mistress, just loose woman smelling like a bitch any man can take, so why not my Peng Ho.”

It was Father Mother was complaining about! Mei Sim rubbed her ears to clear them of wax, but quick tears had risen and clogged her nostrils, so her ears were filled with a thick sorrow. She knew all about second wives. Hadn’t Second Uncle left his family to live in Ipoh because their Cantonese servant had bewitched him, and now he had three boys by her and second Aunty was always coming to their house to borrow money and to beg for the clothes they’d outgrown for her own children? And little Gek Yeo’s mother had gone mad because her father had taken another wife, and she was now in Tanjong Rambutan where, Mother said, she screamed and tore off her clothes and had no hair left. Poor Gek Yeo had to go to her grandmother’s house and her grandmother refused to let her see her father.

Mei Sim wiped her nose on her gathered puff sleeve. Grandaunty had risen from her chair and was shaking the folds of her thickly flowered sarong. Her Malay speech was loud and decisive. “All this scolding will do you no good. Men are all alike, itchy and hot. You cannot stop him by showing a dirty face or talking bad all the time. You will drive him away. The only thing that women have is their cunning. You must think hard. What do you want, a faithful man or a man who will support you and your children? Why should you care if he plays with this or that woman? Better for you, he won’t ask so much from you in bed. No, you must be as sweet to him as when you were first courting. Talk to him sweet-sweet every time he comes home late. This will make him feel guilty and he will be nicer to you. Make him open the purse-strings. Tell him you need money for prayers at Hoon Temple to bring luck to his business. He will appreciate you for your efforts. Some men have to be bullied like your uncle, but . . .”

She stopped to take a breath, and Siew Eng, her skinny dark daughter, crept up beside and whispered, “Na’ makan, ’mak?”

“Sundal!” Grandaunty shouted and slapped her sharply on her thin bare arm. “Who asked you to startle me? You know how bad my heart is. You want me to die?”

Siew Eng hung her head. Her samfoo was faded and worn at the trouser bottoms, and the thin cotton print didn’t hide her strange absence of breasts. She was already sixteen, had never been sent to school but had worked at home washing, cleaning and cooking since she was seven. All her strength seemed to have gone into her work, because her body itself was emaciated, her smile frail, and her face peaked and shrivelled like a ciku picked before its season and incapable of ripening, drying up to a small brown hardness.

Mei Sim had never heard her cousin laugh, had never seen her eat at the table. She served the food, cleaned the kitchen and ate standing up by the wood stove when everyone had finished.

Mother said Siew Eng was cursed. The fortune teller had told Grandaunty after her birth that the girl would eat her blood, so she wouldn’t nurse or hold the baby, had sent her to a foster mother, and had taken her back at seven to send her off to the kitchen where she slept on a camp bed. Mei Sim was glad she wasn’t cursed. Her father loved her best, and Mother bought her the prettiest dresses and even let her use her lipstick.

“Now your uncle . . .” Grandaunty stopped and her face reddened. “What are you waiting for, you stupid girl? Go serve the rice. We are coming to the table right away. Make sure there are no flies on the food.”

Her daughter’s scrawny chest seemed to shiver under the loose blouse. “Ya ’mak,” she mumbled and slipped off to the kitchen.

“Come, let’s eat. I have sambal belacan just the way you like it, with sweet lime. The soy pork is fresh, steaming all morning and delicious.”

Grandaunty gobbled the heap of hot white rice which was served on her best blue china plates. She talked as she ate, pinching balls of rice flavoured with chillies and soy with her right hand and throwing the balls into her large wet mouth with a flick of her wrist and thumb. Mother ate more slowly, unaccustomed to manipulating such hot rice with her hand, while Mei Sim used a soup spoon on her tin plate.

“Your uncle,” Grandaunty said in between swallows of food and water, “is a timid man, a mouse. I used to think how to get male children with a man like that! I had to put fire into him, everyday must push him. Otherwise he cannot be a man.”

“Huh, huh,” Mother said, picking a succulent piece of the stewed pork and popping it into her mouth whole.

“But Peng Ho, he is an educated man, and he cannot be pushed. You must lead him gently, gently so he doesn’t know what you are doing. Three children, you cannot expect him to stay by your side all the time. Let him have fun.”

“Wha . . .” Mother said, chewing the meat hard.

“Yes. We women must accept our fate. If we want to have some fun also, stomach will explode. Where can we hide our shame? But men, they think they are datuks because they can do things without being punished. But we must control them, and to do that we must control their money.”

Mei Sim thought Grandaunty was very experienced. She was so old, yet her hair was still black, and her sons and husband did everything she told them. She was rich; the knitted purse looped to her string bag under her kebaya was always bulging with money. Father had to borrow money from her once when some people didn’t pay for his goods, and she had charged him a lot for it. He still complained about it to Mother each time they drove home from Grandaunty’s house.

“But how?” protested Mother, a faint gleam of sweat appearing on her forehead and upper lip as she ate more and more of the pork.

Grandaunty began to whisper and Mei Sim didn’t dare ask her to speak up nor could she move from her seat as she hadn’t finished her lunch.

Mother kept nodding and nodding her head. She was no longer interested in the food but continued to put it in her mouth without paying any attention to it until her plate was clear. “Yah, yah. Huh, huh. Yah, yah,” she repeated like a trance-medium, while Grandaunty talked softly about accounts and tontines and rubber lands in Jasin. Mei Sim burped and began to feel sleepy.

“Eng!” Grandaunty called harshly. “Clear up the table, you lazy girl. Sleeping in the kitchen, nothing to do. Come here.”

Siew Eng walked slowly towards her mother, pulling at her blouse nervously.

“Come here quickly, I say.” Grandaunty’s mouth was dribbling with saliva. She appeared enraged, her fleshy nose quivering under narrowed eyes. As Siew Eng stood quietly beside her chair, she took the sparse flesh above her elbow between thumb and forefinger and twisted it viciously, breathing hard. A purple bruise bloomed on the arm. “I’ll punish you for walking so slowly when I call you,” she huffed. “You think you can so proud in my house.”

Siew Eng said nothing. A slight twitch of her mouth quickly pressed down was the only sign that the pinch had hurt.

“What do you say? What do you say, you prostitute?”

“Sorry, ’mak,” Siew Eng whispered, hanging her head lower and twisting the cloth of her blouse.

Only then did Grandaunty get up from the table. The two women returned to the chairs beside the sirih table, where two neat green packages of sirih rested. Sighing happily, Grandaunty put the large wad in her mouth and began to chew. Mother followed suit, but she had a harder time with the generous size of the sirih and had to keep pushing it in her mouth as parts popped out from the corners.

Mei Sim sat on her stool, but her head was growing heavier; her eyes kept dropping as if they wanted to fall to the floor. She could hear the women chewing and grunting; it seemed as if she could feel the bitter green leaves tearing in her own mouth and dissolving with the tart lime and sharp crunchy betel nut and sweet-smelling cinnamon. Her mouth was dissolving into an aromatic dream when she heard chimes ringing sharply in the heavy noon air.

For the briefest moment Mei Sim saw her father smiling beside her, one hand in his pocket jingling the loose change, and the other hand gently steering an ice cream bicycle from whose opened ice box delicious vapours were floating. “Vanilla!” she heard herself cry out, at the same moment that Grandaunty called out, “Aiyoh! What you want?” and she woke up.

A very dark man with close-cropped hair was carefully leaning an old bicycle against the open door jamb. Two shiny brown hens, legs tied with rope and hanging upside down from the bicycle handles, blinked nervously, and standing shyly behind the man was an equally dark and shiny boy dressed in starched white shirt and pressed khaki shorts.

“Nya,” the man said respectfully, bowing a little and scraping his rubber thongs on the cement floor as if to ask permission to come in.

“Aiyah, Uncle Muti, apa buat? You come for business or just for visit?”

“Ha, I bring two hens. My wife say must give to puan, this year we have many chickens.”

“Also, you bring the rent?” Grandaunty was smiling broadly, the sirih tucked to one side of her mouth in a girlish pucker. “Come, come and sit down. Eng, Eng!” Her voice raised to a shriek till Eng came running from behind the garden. “Bring tea for Uncle Muti. Also, take the hens into the kitchen. Stupid girl! Must tell you everything.”

The boy stayed by the bicycle staring at the women inside with bright, frank eyes.

Curious, Mei Sim went out. He was clean, his hair still wet from a bath. “What school you?” she asked. He was older, she knew, because he was in a school uniform.

He gave her a blank stare.

“You speak English?”

He nodded.

“You want play a game?” She ran out into the compound, motioning for him to follow.

Mei Sim had no idea what she wanted to play, but she was oh so tired of sitting still, and the white sand and fallen brown coconuts and blue flowers on the leafy green creepers on the fence seemed so delicious after the crunch, crunch, crunch of Grandaunty’s lunch that she spread her arms and flew through the sky. “Whee, whee,” she laughed.

But the boy wouldn’t play. He stood by the sweet smelling bunga tanjung and stared at her.

“What you stare at?” she asked huffily. “Something wrong with me?”

“Your dress,” he answered without the least bit of annoyance.

“What to stare?” Mei Sim was suddenly uncomfortable and bent down to look for snails.

“So pretty. Macam bunga”

She looked up quickly to see if he was making fun of her, but his brown round face was earnestly staring at the tiers of ruffles on her skirt.

“Want play a game?” she asked again.

But he said, “My sister no got such nice dress.”

Mei Sim laughed. “You orang jakun,” she said, “but never mind. You want feel my dress? Go on. I never mind.”

He went nearer to her and stretched out his hand. He clutched at the frills around the bib, staring at the pink and purple tuberoses painted on the thin organdy.

“Mei Si-i-m!” Her mother’s voice brayed across the compound. There was a confusion as the boy rushed away and the woman came running, panting in the sun, and pulled at her arm. “What you do? Why you let the boy touch you? You no shame?”

Grandaunty stood by the door, while the dark man had seized his son by the shoulder and was talking to him in furious low tones.

Mei Sim felt tears in her mouth, and wondered why she was crying, why her mother was shaking her. Then she saw the man pushing his rusty old Raleigh through the gate, without the hens, still holding the boy by his shoulder. She saw the look of hate which the boy threw at her, and she felt a hot pain in her chest as if she knew why he must hate her. A huge shame filled her and she was just about to burst into noisy weeping when she saw her mother’s red, red eyes. “He did it, he pulled at my dress,” she screamed, stretching her body straight as an arrow, confronting her lie.