Princess Bari (18 page)

I thought to myself:
Ali is alive. I can feel it.

It had been months since Ali had left for Afghanistan, with no contact and no trace of his whereabouts, so it was only natural that almost everyone assumed he and his brother were dead. Luna and Grandfather Abdul kept their heads down and wouldn't look at me or say anything. Lately, everyone had been doing the same whenever Ali came up in conversation. They thought it was too late to try to comfort me by telling me not to worry, that he would be back soon. But I had seen Ali in my dreams. I'd seen Usman as well. Maybe because Ali was my husband, he was always talking or laughing or getting angry, just as in real life, but Usman would only stand at a distance and watch me, or would turn and walk away even as I called out to him.

One day, Auntie Sarah called while I was working at Tongking. It wasn't Lady Emily's scheduled day, but she asked me to hurry over. I took a cab. As soon as I walked in, Auntie Sarah gestured for me to follow her upstairs.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

She shook her head and sighed.

“She's asked me three times whether you've arrived yet. She's a mess. Do whatever you can.”

When I entered the bedroom, the curtains were drawn and the lights were out. The room was completely dark.

Auntie Sarah called out timidly: “Madam, Bari is here.”

“Okay.”

Lady Emily's voice was very faint. Auntie Sarah gave me a push and disappeared. I kept going in the direction of the push, and came to a stop at the side of the bed. I couldn't see a thing, so I had to switch on the bedside lamp. A bottle of cognac sat on the nightstand next to a round snifter. Lady Emily was drunk. I crouched down near her pillow.

“Shall I prepare a massage?” I asked.

“That stupid man took three bullets to the back. They told me to ID his body, and then they pulled back the sheet. He'd grown so old in the last few years that I barely recognized him. He had lost so much hair too. And oh, that big belly of his! Hideous.”

I listened quietly. Outside, fat clouds drifted through a clear blue sky, and the leaves on the trees that lined the road were green and beautiful. But Lady Emily lay half-naked, covered only by an untied bathrobe, her limbs splayed. Her sagging breasts were like half-empty leather flasks.

“Turns out that whore had a lover back home in Thailand,” Lady Emily said. “She flew back three or four times a year to see him. Probably stole a lot of money, too. I bet she got sick of sleeping with an old man and was out of her mind when she shot him. The police asked if I wanted to see her. Why would I want to see that murdering bitch?”

Lady Emily covered her face with her hands and began to sob hysterically. She turned on her side and pulled her knees up to her chest. I tried to console her as I straightened her limbs out, covered her with a towel, and began to massage her shoulders.

“Okay,” I said. “Forget about the awful thing that happened. Just let it go. The memory will fade in time. Don't let it consume you.”

Her knotted muscles began to soften as I rubbed and kneaded. I made my way down the backs of her thighs to her calves and down to her feet. As I squeezed and stroked her feet, my eyes closed automatically. I shivered and my shoulders trembled; my body seemed to grow colder and lighter much more quickly than usual.

*

Someone is standing in the dark: a figure dressed in a loosely draped, dark brown garment made from a rough fabric. I recognize the apparition as Lady Emily's nanny, Becky.

Please help her
, I murmur.

In a hoarse voice, she says:
You're in no position to be worried about others.

I say that we speak, but in fact we use no words. No sooner do she and I think of the same place than the furniture in the room vanishes and the darkness lifts. We stand in the middle of a parched land rough with rocks and dry grass. Wrinkles crease the corners of Becky's dark eyes as she gazes out over the windswept expanse.

Aren't you looking for your husband?
she asks.

Where are we?

The middle place, between the world of the living and the world of the dead, where shamans like you and I can come and go. Even after death, we can traverse this place.

Am I dead, then?

You die and return to life. There's something here you want to see.

In an instant the sky turns black as night, and a loud noise like thunder booms. Lights flash around us. Machine guns rattle, and the sound of cannons threatens to tear my eardrums. I glide over the rugged land. A small village appears. Black smoke rises, and I see houses on fire. People pour out of a narrow alleyway. Bodies lie in the street. Men with missing arms and legs scream. I hear planes and helicopters overhead. Tanks roll into the village on their metal wheels.

I run like mad until I see a mosque in front of an empty lot, and rush into the corridor. Inside, hundreds of men and women are praying, their bodies prostrate on the stone floor. They keep bowing, standing up and kneeling down in silence, over and over. I ask the women, some in full
burqa
and others with only
hijabs
covering their hair:
Have you seen Ali?

Ali? Who's Ali?

Anyone here seen Ali?

Their questions fly back and forth through the mosque until the entire place is filled with their voices. I hear someone at the far end call out to me:
I saw Usman. He went to Kunduz.

Murmurs of
Usman, Usman
and
Kunduz, Kunduz
spread through the mosque again. I push my way through the crowd in search of the speaker of that voice. But they all turn their backs when I get close. I keep pushing, burrowing further into the mosque. Someone grabs me by the scruff of the neck, and I am propelled between the pillars and back out to the corridor.

Those are the spirits of the dead
, Becky says.
They're all stopped at their memories from when they were alive.

Is this Hell?

No, it's like a way station. There's no such thing as Heaven or Hell. If they work hard, they'll be able to move on to a better place, the same way that babies are born and grow up. Souls with many sins take longer and are stuck at a lower spot.

I think of Kunduz, and immediately a dusty street, a bell tower and low houses appear. I see a plaza in the village where a market is held. There are wooden display stands and awning poles. But the streets are empty, and the houses are all shuttered. I hear a sharp whistling sound followed by an explosion. Dust billows up like a cloud and blocks out the sky. A shell lands in the plaza, and a large crater appears. Another shell lands on the roof of a house. Cement and stone shards fall like hail.

I picture the outside of the village, and in a flash I see a group of men standing with their arms in the air on the side of a road overgrown with dry weeds. There are several trucks. Soldiers with bare feet and military jackets over their tunics aim guns at the men. An officer shouts, and the soldiers fire. The men collapse; several break away and run. They fall face-first. The image vanishes, and it grows dark as the ground ripples with their crawling bodies. I run over to them.

Usman! Is there anyone here named Usman?

I hear a familiar voice behind me.

Bari? What are you doing here?

I turn, and Usman is standing there, tall and with big hands just like his older brother. He has a long beard that makes him look ten years older.

Ali came looking for you. Did you see him?

We parted ways immediately.

Shapes, wavering like wisps of smoke, watch as soldiers toss their bodies into trucks.

In a flash I am whisked away on the wind to where the land ends. I see sand and open water. Towering behind me are enormous mountains carrying heavy loads of snow on their heads. Becky stands next to me and gazes out over the ocean.

Your husband is at sea
, she says.

Where is he going
?

I don't know, but it looks as if he's headed to where the sun sets in the world of the living.

Help me. Please take me there.

When I plead with her, Becky gives me the same cold, expressionless look that she had when I first saw her in front of the bonfire.

Everyone suffers
, she says.
But they have to fix their own problems. That's true for Emily and true for you, too. Now let me ask you this: why can't I be with him?

Who?

My husband in the world beyond.

Let's go look for him.

I can't find him. He left long ago, on a ship. I spent my wedding night with a wooden effigy. The village elders all remember his name. They say he was a brave warrior who hunted lions.

We gaze out at an endless sea that is so blue it is nearly black.

*

I opened my eyes slowly, very slowly, as if peeling off strips of wet paper that had been gluing my eyelids shut. The world around me changed, and I was back in my body. Lady Emily was still asleep. I got up and pulled back the curtain: it was already after dark. I thought again about the scenes of war and Usman's death that I had seen so clearly. I remembered how Ali had not appeared even once, and I pictured the beach to which Becky had taken me. I was certain that Ali was still alive somewhere. When I was a child in North Korea, the adults taught me that if I truly wanted something with all of my heart, then I shouldn't tell anyone or it would never happen, it would only slip further out of my reach. I made up my mind that I would not tell anyone how certain I was that Usman was dead and Ali alive. I decided to hide it from Grandfather Abdul as well.

X
iang came to Tongking several days after the Lunar New Year, looking for me. I was with a client. Vinh, who'd finished with her client first and was resting outside in the waiting room, poked her head through the doorway and waited for me to look up. I looked at her questioningly, and she gestured behind her with her thumb. I assumed she meant someone was waiting to see me.

I wrapped a hot towel around the client's feet and went out into the waiting room. I didn't recognize the woman there at first. She wore a short skirt, boots that came all the way up to her knees and a loose jumper that left her shoulders bare. Her hair was long, straight and parted down the middle like a stereotype of an East Asian girl. She sat with her legs crossed, but stood up halfway when she saw me, raising her butt off the chair awkwardly.

“How've you been?” she asked.

I could not for the life of me place her smile.

“I'm sorry … Do I know you?”

I tilted my head to one side as I looked at her, and she answered in a small voice: “I'm Xiang.”

For a moment I thought:
Who's Xiang?
Then I clapped my hand over my mouth. She looked so much older that she was almost unrecognizable. Her once-pale face had turned dark, and the once-taut skin around her eyes was sagging, but what made it even harder to tell that it was Xiang was her caked-on makeup. I clasped her hand in surprise. At that instant, a rush of regret, like a kind of guilt, came over me.

“I meant to look for you,” I said. “But other things kept getting in the way. I'm so sorry …”

“I only need a minute of your time. Are you busy?”

“No, I have time.”

I took her across the street to a caf
é
. When she rested her hands on the table, I saw that her nail polish was chipped, and that the seams in her jumper were coming undone. She kept glancing at the counter and then at the entrance, as if she was nervous about something.

“Lou told me where to find you,” she said.

“Have you been in that same place this whole time?”

“I moved around a bit … Situation's the same.”

What she meant by “the same”, of course, was that she was still working in brothels. As she and I had been through so much together, there was no need to beat around the bush.

“Have you considered finding a different line of work?” I asked.

“What's it matter now?” Xiang said. “Anyway, I'm doing fine.” But then she pressed both hands against the table suddenly, leaned forward and blurted out the words she'd been trying to keep inside: “Loan me some money! I'm really in a jam, and you're the only one I could think of.”

I didn't want to tell her that I'd already paid off my smuggling debt, or ask how much she still owed. The only reason I'd managed to free myself was because Uncle Lou had been willing to vouch for me, but for all I knew she might still have been in the snakeheads' clutches.

“How much do you need?” I asked.

“Two hundred pounds. Or even just a hundred.”

“I don't have any cash on me, but I'll get it for you.”

Xiang waited in the café while I went back to the salon and asked Uncle Tan for a hundred-pound advance on my wages. She gulped down two glasses of water in quick succession. When I handed her the five twenty-pound notes, she grabbed the cash and got up immediately.

“Look at the time,” she said. “I swear I'll pay you back next week.”

She went outside, waved goodbye and then ran in the direction of the Underground. I stood on the sidewalk and stared after her. She never once looked back.

Something wasn't sitting right with me, so when my shift at the salon ended I called Uncle Lou. He didn't have long to talk, because they were getting ready for the dinner rush. When I told him that Xiang had come to see me and asked how she'd been living, he apologized right away.

“She begged and pleaded, saying she wanted to see you, so I had no choice but to give her the address. That girl isn't going to make it. I'm pretty sure she's on drugs. She can't go back to China either. It's really sad. Anyway, I'll pay back what she borrowed from you.”

I told him it didn't matter and asked whether or not there was anything he could do for her.

He sighed. “You have to have the will to live first. That's the only way you can earn other people's trust and get help.”

Naturally, Xiang did not come back the following week. I had no intention of collecting on the debt, but decided to use my next day off to try to track her down. I thought that if we opened up to each other, we could find some way to help her. That was my plan, but somehow I never found the time to follow through.

One night, I happened to miss the last Underground train while coming home from a friend's birthday party with Luna. We boarded a night bus near Piccadilly Circus instead. Sitting in the back of the bus was a large group of drunken girls dressed in short skirts and wearing bright makeup and garish accessories. They chattered loudly; one was slumped in her seat, asleep. As I looked at them, I noticed an East Asian woman behind them gazing vacantly at the passing streetlights. She must have felt me staring at her, because she turned and looked at me. Our eyes locked. The expression on her face was so dark that I couldn't look away. When she got off the bus on some quiet street, I kept looking intently out the window at her. She stood and stared back at me. I felt as if I was looking at Xiang.
Ah,
I thought,
the ties that bind us were already formed long ago, in the heavens. Like a finely woven spider web that ensnares us all.

Ali had still not come home, and there was still no news; meanwhile, Hurriyah Suni had grown rapidly and was crawling everywhere, grabbing onto things to try to stand up, falling down and crying. I would leave her upstairs with Grandfather Abdul while I went to work, but it wasn't easy for him to keep up with her. Some days I came home to find him and his great-granddaughter conked out together on the bed. He finally asked his friends at the mosque for help finding a babysitter, and ended up hiring the daughter of a Pakistani family that ran a small corner shop selling cigarettes, bus tickets, accessories and other such items. The son went to school, while the daughter, Ayesha, helped out at the shop. Ayesha agreed to look after Hurriyah in the afternoons, when her mother took over for her at the store. Grandfather Abdul offered to pay for the babysitting, but I firmly refused. It was my child after all, and even if he was a blood relative, he was already doing so much just by taking care of her in the mornings.

I hadn't been to Lady Emily's house in nearly a month, as she was travelling frequently around that time. When I finally returned, Auntie Sarah greeted me at the door with a smile. I'd long been in the habit of guessing the mood of the rest of the house by the look on her face when I arrived, so the moment I saw her, I said: “I take it something good has happened.”

“An angel's come down from Heaven,” she said, practically humming the words.

I gestured to show I didn't understand, and she turned to lead the way.

“Let's hurry upstairs. The madam has some bragging to do.”

We headed for the stairs, but I could already hear the breathless giggling of a child coming from the living room. Lady Emily was clapping her hands and shouting. We stood and watched for a moment as the two of them scampered around the room in a game of tag.

“Ah, Bari!” Lady Emily said when she noticed me. “Come in and meet Anthony.”

The boy was running toward me, so I scooped him up on reflex. His face crumpled into a startled frown. He reared out of my arms, reaching for Auntie Sarah, who stood next to me, so I passed him over to her. He was a handsome little boy with black hair, dark eyes and fine features.

“Take him into the kitchen and give him something to eat,” Lady Emily said.

Auntie Sarah took the child downstairs while Lady Emily and I had tea. She told me the baby belonged to her late husband and his Thai mistress. Her husband's sister had been looking after him while the mother was in jail, awaiting trial for the murder. The sister-in-law had called her a while back and, after some hesitation, Lady Emily had gone to see the child herself. The moment she saw him, she knew she had to bring him home.

“My heart felt like it was caving in the first time I saw him.”

She already had one child – a grown daughter who'd married an Australian man –but said the moment she brought the boy home, the house seemed to come back to life, and that she even felt as if she was growing younger.

I looked around at the living room, its curtains open wide for a change. “The house feels different now,” I said with a nod. “That's a good sign.”

“You know, it's the strangest thing,” she said. “The hatred I used to feel toward Anthony's mother is fading. The mere thought of her would fill me with indignation, and I held all Southeast Asian women in low regard.”

As I massaged her feet, I felt her body relax. Her good mood must have transmitted itself to me, because the anxiety and frustration that had been weighing me down for so long seemed to lift as well.

It was early summer, and Hurriyah Suni was a month away from her first birthday. Rain had been falling all day, making it dark inside the salon even though we were nowhere near closing time yet. I turned up the lights. The rainy weather outside seemed even darker and drearier. Uncle Tan suggested closing the salon early, and everyone seemed to agree that the weather called for it.

When Luna and I walked out of the salon, a woman who had been standing under the eaves of the building next door blocked our path. I recognized her immediately this time.

“Xiang!”

Xiang wore an oversized coat that looked like an army field jacket over her skirt. She must have been standing in the rain for some time, because her wet hair was stuck to her head.

“I've been waiting for you,” she said.

I grabbed her hand involuntarily. “Come home with us,” I said. “You'll get sick if you stay out here.”

I pulled her under my umbrella with me. Luna kept glancing over at us as we walked. Xiang asked us to wait a moment in front of a small shop while she ran inside. Luna turned to me as if she'd been waiting for an opportunity.

“Who is she?”

“An old friend from back home.”

“She looks homeless. Is this safe?”

“She's been going through a rough time. I have to help her.”

Xiang had gone in to buy a pack of cigarettes. As soon as she came out, she ripped open the pack, lit one up and puffed away on it feverishly. When we got to our building, Luna went into her own flat without saying a word, and I knocked on the door to mine. The door swung open and Ayesha greeted me.

“I think Hurriyah can tell when her mum is coming home. She kept whining and refusing to go to bed.”

Hurriyah Suni was sitting on the floor surrounded by wooden blocks, but she crawled over to me quickly when I came in, already on the verge of tears. I picked her up and wished Ayesha a good night.

“What pretty eyes,” Xiang murmured.

“Did you eat dinner? I'll make something for us.”

“I'm fine with
ramen
.”

“Really? That's good. Actually, I was a little worried. It was raining too hard to get groceries.”

While I was heating up a bottle for Hurriyah, I turned to see Xiang putting a cigarette in her mouth.

“If you have to smoke, please go outside to do it,” I warned her.

She looked surprised, then put the cigarette back in the pack and sat on the sofa with her knees drawn up. I fed Hurriyah first and changed her diaper, then gently patted her on the back while singing old lullabies. She soon fell asleep. I put her to bed and came back into the living room to find Xiang sniffling and crying.

“What's wrong?”

“Hearing those lullabies reminded me of when I was young.” She grabbed a tissue to blow her nose and wipe her eyes. “I'm sorry I haven't paid you back.”

“It's fine. Take your time …”

I asked her questions while we ate.

“Are the snakeheads still bothering you?”

“No. After about a year, they handed me over to a new house and cancelled my debt.”

“Why don't you go to the police? If you get deported as an illegal alien, then at least you'll get to go back home.”

“I don't want to go home. I like it here.”

“Then find a new job. You could do foot massages like me. I'll talk to my boss.”

Xiang chuckled. “It's too late for that …” She wouldn't look me in the eye. “Everywhere I go, it's all the same.”

We slept beside each other for the first time in a long time. Before falling asleep, we lay in the dark and talked about everything she'd been through in London. She told me about the girls brought over from Asia, Russia and Eastern Europe to work in neighbourhoods like this one. About women whose families went through hell to find them and take them back home, only to watch as the women returned within half a year. About accepting money to sleep with just anyone, with people you didn't love, trusting and relying on the man who pimps you out because you believe he's your lover. About the kinds of things that take place in every city in every part of the world.

Right before we fell asleep, Xiang murmured something in the dark: “No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to remember Zhou's face anymore.”

“Zhou?”

“My husband … We left him behind in Dalian, remember?”

In a voice as sleep-addled as hers, I said: “That's right. He didn't make it onto the boat.”

We didn't say anything more. I slipped into a deep sleep.

*

I see a barren land devoid of even a single tree. White-hot sunlight blazes down on sand – just the sight of it makes my throat parched and my chest heavy. Inside a square wire fence shaped like a chicken coop, someone kneels in a fetal position with his head pressed to the ground. His hands are tied behind him. I cannot see his face, but I recognize those familiar shoulders right away: there's no doubt it's Ali.