Pursuit Page 6

  I woke up and started to cry in the dark. My father was startled; he couldn’t bear the wailing, so he started to come into the bedroom to comfort me, but he knew that if he picked me up and held me until I was calm again he would miss his bus – and all chances of decent work and money would disappear, and he would have to go back to gutting fish at the factory on the other side of Kuala Selangor.

  It was raining heavily. The sound of the rain drumming on the tin roof, normally so soothing, that night agitated me, and I sat up in bed, blinking and sobbing in the dark. Outside: the barking dog, the yard turning to mud. My father stood in the doorway, staring at me. He’d been caught in the rain: his clothes were dripping and left patches of water on the linoleum that my mother would find when she came home some hours later. He’d been in a hurry; he hadn’t had time to take his shoes off and ended up leaving muddy tracks all over the floor. He stood watching me for a while, then left. The sound of my crying followed him out of the house, all the way into the rainstorm as he boarded the night bus headed south.

  I wish I could tell you that I remember him standing at the doorway, or that I could hear his breathing, heavy and rushed because he had been running. But the likelihood is that I started to cry because I’d had a bad dream and woke up for a few seconds before falling asleep again. It must have been those nightmares that only children have, where sleep and awakeness and dreaminess and reality get entangled before evaporating into a cloud that hangs over them for hours, so that even when they’re awake, they’re really still asleep, still dreaming. You and I – we don’t have this muddledness. Everything is distinct. Work time. Play time. Eat time. Sleep time. I don’t know how this change takes place in someone’s life, but it does, overnight, and they don’t even know it. I’m not sure how it happened with me – I just woke up one morning and thought, hurry up, it’s time for work now. I was fifteen years old. And that beautiful cloudiness on waking from slumber that I remembered from my childhood, sometimes sad, sometimes comforting – it had just vanished.

  The story of my father coming home in the rainstorm to retrieve his bus ticket was told and retold to me by my mother numerous times over the years, until the images of my father that evening became so sharp and true that I believed I had seen them myself. She repeated the story frequently – so often that I thought: she wants me to believe that he cared for me. I cried; he wavered. Back then we still believed that he would be coming home to us, and when he finally did we would have more money and life would be easier. My parents were still in contact, more or less on a regular basis. A letter would arrive from Singapore from time to time, a single sheet of thin paper with a rough edge where it had been torn from a notebook. You’d think that he could have at least bought decent paper to write on. My mother would read the few lines so intently you’d think it was the I Ching or some special advice sent to her by Confucius himself. Sometimes she’d read just one line aloud, slowly and seriously, like a newsreader announcing a disaster. ‘Singapore Is Very Clean.’ Or, ‘Here, Spitting Is Not Allowed,’ or ‘No One Has To Pay Bribes Here.’ I have no idea what else he said to her in those letters – everything was just condensed into those single lines, a public broadcast message.

  A few times, we walked to Ah Heng’s sundry store half a mile away to wait for a phone call from my father, which I guess he must have promised in a previous letter. Only the calls never came through. Who knows why – maybe he had to line up for too long to use the phone at the warehouse where he worked, or maybe he had to work overtime, or maybe he just forgot. How did people live without mobiles? Maybe you’re too young to remember pay phones, maybe not. It seems like only yesterday, but life was so different. It seems strange now to think about how much time we wasted at Ah Heng’s place. Hours and hours hanging around for that call which never came.

  To hide the embarrassment and pain of that fruitless waiting, my mother pretended that we needed to go to the shop to buy things. I’d sit on the sacks of rice, filling the time by memorising the way the various things were arranged on the shelves, then closing my eyes and reciting them until I got the order right. Mumm 21. Shelltox. Maggi Mee Perencah Kari. There was never very much stock, and what there was never changed position – biscuits, diapers, flour. Everything stayed where it was, covered in a thin film of dust. If I close my eyes now I can see every single object on those shelves, and I bet if you went there tomorrow, they would still be on the same metal shelves, arranged in exactly the order I’ve told you. My mother would chat to Ah Heng about all sorts of things, giving him news about my father, which wasn’t actually news because it was the same set of facts repeated every time: he had a new job; he was sending money home; he would come back soon and we would either build ourselves a new house somewhere in the Sekinchan area or move to Klang. Either way we would stop living in the house we lived in then – half wood, half cement – because the wood was rotting and my mother was tired of patching up the gaps between the planks with pieces of biscuit tins that she flattened out with a hammer. She seemed to spend a lot of time doing this, but new holes were always appearing – spots of white light, brilliant as stars. She couldn’t keep up with them; nature was stronger than she was. We had to move. I would need my own room; I couldn’t go on sharing with my parents. With my father–mother. She spoke as if we were a family, a normal, proper family, because that’s what we were, in her head and in mine, and probably in Ah Heng’s and in everyone else’s too.

  When she talked about the life we were going to have, it all made sense. It seemed connected to where I was, sitting on the sacks of rice; it was part of the same story, a story of waiting, of waiting for things to get better, because they would. We all thought we knew how the story would turn out, because why would it turn out any other way? My father was in Singapore, he was earning a decent wage in a warehouse in a country that had rules about employment, where he got paid in full on the same day each month – a detail that seems so small and irrelevant as I talk about it now, but back then seemed so important to us that it was worthy of being boasted about. Every month, without fail – no arguing, nothing, he gets his salary. I can remember my mother saying this to Ah Heng one day.

  Of course it was all fake; our lives weren’t getting any better. If they were, we would have been buying more than just a packet of cornflour or a single coconut, which Ah Heng would split in two and scrape out in his old machine which consisted of a big metal bowl and a spinning metal head. We would have been buying tins of Danish butter cookies, going out for meals in seafood restaurants; I would have had a new school uniform that fit me, that wasn’t four sizes too big because it had been bought to last me through the rest of primary school. Maybe a holiday – not anything fancy like a week all-inclusive in Bali or a coach tour of Thailand that people do nowadays, but just some time away, on the other side of the country, visiting relatives in Penang or staying with my aunt in Kampar and spending a few days eating chicken biscuits. All the things that a normal family would do. How much could a bus ticket have cost back then? Even now it only costs twenty ringgit, max. We could have done all that if my father had actually been sending money through to us.

  That was when I realised my mother’s stories were intended not to comfort me, but to reassure herself. The more she repeated the stories to me and Ah Heng and whoever else cared to listen, the clearer it was to me that she needed to cling to the belief that it was all true – that my father was still part of our lives, that our future was bright, and soon we would be living on the outskirts of Klang, in one of those new housing estates that were being built – just like the one we’re sitting in now.

  These days, it’s difficult to imagine anyone actually dreaming of living in this area. The houses all look shabby now – no one wants to live in these tiny single-storey places any more. The people who are here wish they were living somewhere else. Secretly they all want to be in KL or Petaling Jaya. The drains outside the houses are blocked up by rubbish and dead leaves; the grass on the edge of the roa
ds is overgrown and messy – the council doesn’t bother to clean up stuff on the streets around here. There used to be small gardens in front of the houses; now there are only cars, old Proton Sagas crammed into the concrete yards. A few doors down there’s an old couple who use their Perodua as a kind of outdoor cupboard. At first you think it’s just another small lousy old car, then you realise it’s full of clothes and boxes and unwanted stuff like that. The neighbours – we see each other around and sometimes we say hi, sometimes we don’t. I like it that way. No one asks me any questions.

  But it wasn’t supposed to be this way. When this neighbourhood was built, I remember looking at the tiled roofs and thinking, woah, they look so solid. In some other estates the houses have blue roofs, some have green. My mother cut out an advertisement from the Sin Chew Jit Poh with a drawing of a house just like this one. Far from the sea, where we wouldn’t have to smell the salty, stinky mud when the tide went out, full of rotting fish that slipped out from the nets of the fishing boats. A house far inland, that couldn’t be swept away by freak tides or floods or storms. A place close to the city – so near that you could feel part of it, be absorbed and protected by it. She pinned the piece of newspaper to the wall in the bedroom – a patch of colour against the bare board. These places, they felt so new, even beautiful. It’s hard to remember that sense of wonder now. You drive around this kind of estate and the streets look identical, house after house after house – they’re all the same, it crushes you. I know that’s what people from KL think. You come from the big city and you think, these places destroy your soul. Even I feel like that sometimes, and I’ve lived here for nearly ten years. I don’t know how things could have changed so much in thirty years. The houses we dreamt of then are exactly the ones we live in today, but they belong to a different world.

  I used to wonder how my parents felt about each other during that long period of separation and waiting to be with each other again – those long years of hope. Sometimes we used to watch Shanghai Tang on TV, that Hong Kong series that had just come out then, which everyone was watching. We loved the costumes, the glamour – and that song! It made my mother cry every time. Once, she dabbed her eyes and said, ‘It must be beautiful to experience such things. To be in love like that.’ And then, as if she heard the question that was forming in my head, she said, ‘It’s different for people like us. Your father and me, we don’t have time for all that.’

  Over the years, I’ve often thought about what she said. Didn’t have time for love. Is that what she meant? They were apart from each other, romance was impossible, I understand that. But love – that’s something else, isn’t it? My father was in another country earning a living far from his family, but that was another form of love. Distance is love. Separation is love. Loneliness is love.

  One day – I can’t remember when, but I was older then, a few years after my father left for Singapore – we received a letter from him. My mother read out a couple of sentences as soon as she opened the envelope. ‘I have been going to church for the past few months.’ ‘The pastor says that my life will improve because Jesus loves me.’ She stood reading for a minute or so, then took the letter into the bedroom and shut the door. I can’t remember exactly how the rest of the information filtered through to me in the weeks that followed – my mother never said anything as clear as:

  Your father is not coming back.

  He is living with someone else.

  He has another family over there.

  It was simply something I came to understand, in the way children do, that things were no longer the same. One phase of your life is over, and suddenly you are a different person, even though you don’t want to be, and had not been planning to change. The world rearranges itself around you, and all at once, you too are no longer the same. For a few bucks, my mother sold the baby clothes that she had been storing in a small box in the bedroom. She took the necklace that my father had given her on their wedding to the pawnbroker in town. She didn’t take the wedding ring – that would follow some months later. Her visits to town were quick and efficient, wordless, without any ceremony or emotion. She had something to accomplish, another chore on her endless list of daily tasks that a single woman with a young child had.

  You might say, So what? We needed money; we had to sell stuff – what was new? Still, it was different. There was a finality to those small acts that maybe the logic of adults – of clever, reasoned people like you – will interpret differently, will twist and reshape to form a kinder explanation. But a child always knows the truth, and in the end I was right. He never came back.

  PERSEVERANCE AND RESILIENCE IN THE KOLA PENINSULA

  Peter Frankopan

  1936

  MOROZ didn’t need to look outside to know what the weather was like or if the sun had risen. He didn’t care. As he pulled himself up to sit on the edge of his mattress, his muscles aching in the same places and the same ways they did every day, he breathed in slowly and watched the warm fumes form a cloud as he exhaled. He had given up counting the days long ago; if he had to guess, he might have said he’d been in Monchegorsk for just over three years. It wasn’t that time stood still, rather that he felt he was living in a different dimension.

  He pushed his toes into the paper he stuffed in his boots, a gesture against the ice and damp, before pulling them on and standing up. One of the others in the hut grunted as they ran dark, dirty fingernails through their hair in an attempt to dislodge the lice who inhabited the ramshackle wooden building along with the nine men. Moroz blinked as he opened the door and carefully walked down the steps on to the frost-covered ground before taking his usual place in the line-up, to be counted and checked by a wiry little man with a clipboard.

  It was the same routine at the same time, every day since he had been there. Things did change. Sometimes, in the summer, the sun hardly set, so the five a.m. reveille took place in daylight; while in winter, the sun struggled to make it over the horizon before noon, then sagged back below it after a few short hours. The people changed too. No one who shared the cabin with Moroz had been there when he arrived. Most arrivals lasted a couple of months; some didn’t even manage a few weeks.

  Moroz had learned to tell how long a new inmate would take to break. The ones with hope in their eyes would be first to go, victims of their belief that things might get better, of their conviction that they would be allowed home one day. Some had heard that not fulfilling daily quotas in the nickel mine or that starting a fight could result in a transfer to the Kresty Prison in Leningrad and hoped that doing one or both might get them moved south.

  Moroz would shrug when asked if it was true. He tried not to speak to anyone; he didn’t want friends whose death would only hurt him even more. And he didn’t want to be responsible either for raising the spirits of another man, or for being the one to dash them. He had no time, above all, for the wheeler-dealers, the career criminals or the sharp-witted, who thought they could thrive in the hell that was the most northerly reaches of the Soviet Union. He’d seen what had happened to them too, once each of their houses of cards had come tumbling down. If Moroz knew one thing, it was that if he was going to die up here in the bitterness of the icy Kola Peninsula, it would not be the elements that got him, nor the lead of a firing squad’s volley.

  As he was marched off to the mine, his ankle chained to the desperate figure in front and a man whose leg showed the unmistakable onset of gangrene behind him, he peered into the distance. He could see the outline of a small boat being prepared, likely for a fishing expedition; it wasn’t big enough to be one of the new vessels whose job it was to ‘protect the territorial integrity of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ – though only a madman or a Sámi or Nenets smuggler would be stupid enough to get anywhere close to where they could be caught and condemned to join the bedraggled, demoralised and almost useless band of those exiled to the north.

  Moroz never thought much about what he was doing there. That was a sure way to bring
on toska, that particular, overwhelming sense of longing and melancholy. He had seen men open their own wrists with tools they had managed to take back from the mine. He’d heard the groans they made as they bled to death. He had managed to find a way to block things out – to stop thinking. Perhaps the cold helped numb his mind as well as his hands, fingers, toes and everything else. To survive was all that mattered. He wasn’t trying to survive because he wanted to get back home; in fact, there was part of him that didn’t want to return. The idea of what he had left behind was painful enough. But he also knew that what had happened to him would have destroyed others around him – memory and reality were as bad as each other.

  When the troubles had first started fifteen years earlier, he had been almost bemused. He’d been a signalman on the railway at Lozova, a few days’ walk from where he’d been born, and would talk about the role he played in tying the ends of the empire together, whether he was wearing his uniform or not. He’d boorishly made his job sound more important and more difficult than it was. Lozova, he would tell his fellow drinkers in the traktir – the tavern by the station – was the beating heart of Russia, and it was his job to keep it pumping. As the evenings went on, he would repeat this with ever greater insistence until, in slow crescendo, his words were interrupted by the blue sound of a train passing through the town on its way from Kursk to the Sea of Azov.