The Secrets of a Fire King Read online

  He paused, and all the faces turned toward me. I felt the pressure of their eyes, and another pressure too. The idea of destiny is not an easy thing to shrug away. I knew it would be easier not to fight. I knew it would be easier to follow the path they had determined.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I do not want this house.”

  I paused just long enough to see relief relax them. My eldest brother smiled. They began to turn to each other, putting me back in my shadowy place, but before they went too far I spoke again.

  “I do not want the house. Nonetheless, I intend to keep it.”

  Words have power. I knew that from my father. Still, I watched with some surprise as what I had said rippled visibly through their faces. My eldest brother stepped forward and took my hands. Though it was said that he took after our great-uncle, in truth it is my father he resembles. I looked into his face, his expression so gentle, so concerned with my own good, and I saw the face of my father twenty years ago, when I was seventeen.

  “Dear Rohila,” he said. “You’ve had a shock. I’m sure you’ll want to reconsider.”

  “Jamaluddin,” I answered, slipping my hands from his, noting his surprise at the use of his dusty given name. “My father pledged this house to me. It was his dying wish. How can I, then, deny it?”

  Jamaluddin shook his head. “We’d thought you’d live with one of us,” he said. “We’ll see to your future, no need to worry over that, Rohila.”

  “My name is Eshlaini,” I told him.

  It was only then that they noticed how I’d changed, the scent of new, insistent life rising from my skin, hair flowing out like a sea anemone. They stepped back from me when I passed them, their eyes followed me as I walked from the room. Later I heard them discussing their options, legal and otherwise, but in the end the will held. It was destiny, I told them, smiling. There was nothing they could do.

  WHEN I SOLD that house I became a rich woman, but I live a simple life. I have a small apartment in the city, a few pieces of furniture, a brand-new car. And clothes—I threw out all my ragged sarongs, the little-girl and old-maid dresses I had accumulated over the years. In their place I bought the crisp tailored clothes I had admired in magazines, and as a tribute to my mother and my grandmother I wear bright scarves and jewelry, stones and precious metals that glisten in the dusk like tiny stars or a sewing needle flashing.

  I think perhaps it was the bright colors, the glimmer of my jewels, that drew the little girl to me. She is from the orphanage around the corner from my apartment. I used to see her every day, kicking a takraw ball around the dusty, empty field or playing jump rope with a group of other girls. She is a serious child, friendly but self-contained. One day she waved to me, and after that I found myself looking for her when I passed, found myself disappointed if a day went by without her quick eyes, her bright triangle of a face, there to greet me. I began to think of her, to wonder what had put her there, what stories she was hearing about the choices fate had left her. I began to think of ways to help her—a scholarship, new clothes, a bicycle. And then one day I had another thought.

  Why not a daughter of my own? Why not?

  MY FATHER’S HOUSE is gone now. I watched them tear it down, the machine taking large bites out of the rooms I had scrubbed so many times, the rooms that had held so much unhappiness and death. It was a relief to me, finally, when nothing remained. I find it fascinating to watch the process they follow to make these new high-rises, the steel girders and poured concrete, the bamboo scaffolding alive with workers. These workers know it used to be my father’s house that stood here, and sometimes they take me inside and show me what they’re doing. I nod, impressed, listening to the echo of my footsteps in so many layers of empty space.

  Tonight it’s dusk, and the air is spilling over with sweetness from the flowers. I sit in the car, watching the workers move in the bright pools of light, thinking of the daughter who will come to live with me next week. I’ve prepared her room—new paint, a few toys—but I’ve kept it simple. She’ll fill it up herself, soon enough, with things that are her own. I like to think of that, my house filling up with the unexpected. In the same way, it pleases me to think of the new lives that will soon occupy this space. Hundreds of people will live here, and they will have no connection whatsoever with my future or my past.

  One by one the lights go out, the workers leave, and finally the last light flickers off and returns this building to the night. I start my car then, and pull out into traffic. It’s a clear night, full of stars, and I wonder for a moment which one of them my mother looked at on the day I was born. No destiny in that, only a bright wish, a continuity of light to light. Look at me now, hands on a wheel, driving myself to a place where no one else has lived, where only the future lies waiting. I am that light. I have no other destiny. I am Eshlaini, and history ends with me.

  Spring, Mountain, Sea

  WHEN ROB ELDRED CAME HOME IN 1954 WITH HIS OVERSEAS bride, it was already winter. They drove north from the city, through the first fierce storm of the season, and the heavy snow seemed to fall invisibly through the roof of their new car, muffling their words and gestures until eventually they ceased to speak. Rob drove slowly and without stopping, fighting back a restless disappointment. The landscape he had dreamed of with such longing during his days in the navy had disappeared. In places the roads had been reduced by the storm to narrow lanes, and everywhere he looked the white fields faded into the pale horizon, the sea of white broken only occasionally by a bare tree, an isolated house, a stretch of metal fence. Even to Rob, who knew that the snow would give way to a spring of shimmering green fields and dark blue lakes, the place looked bleak and lonely. He stole glances at Jade Moon, who had pulled the collar of her red wool coat close around her neck, and whose dark eyes scanned the landscape as if seeking out a refuge.

  That winter in upstate New York was especially harsh, and Rob Eldred would always remember it as the most difficult season of his life. Although Jade Moon had grown up in a village where snow drifted high over the thatched roofs and closed the roads for months at a time, during that first winter in her new country she could never get warm. Their house was small and set into a hill, protected from the worst of the wind, yet even so Rob was always turning up the central heat as far as it would go. He would come home from work, sawdust in his hair, still warm from the exertion of building, to find Jade Moon on the couch, huddled beneath several sweaters and a down quilt. Sometimes the telephone would be off the hook, emitting a low buzz into the room. He always replaced it discreetly, without comment, knowing her terror of the disembodied voices, the unfamiliar language unsoftened by a gesture, or a smile.

  He was not a patient man, but during that long winter he was kind to her. Each evening he massaged her hands and made hot chocolate, which she drank like a child, greedily, holding the mug in both hands for warmth. He brought scented bath oils from the five-and-dime in town and drew the bathwater so hot that steam, smelling of roses or lilacs or lilies of the valley, swirled around her when she let her woolen robe slip off. He sat back on his heels, then, admiring her slender body, sculpted round by the baby that she carried.

  “Like the hot springs,” she murmured, stepping into the porcelain tub carefully, as if it were paved with hidden rocks. Once, before he knew her, he had seen her sliding into the hot water of such a spring, her skin as smooth and white as the snow drifted up behind her. Hidden behind a tree he had watched, her long legs easing through the steam, her hair like a sheet of black water to her waist.

  Now, in a strange country, she closed her eyes at the familiar pleasure. Her eyelashes were thick, and her cheekbones were set high in a face that was delicately boned, the shape of an almond. He lifted her hair to wash her back, letting the soapy water drift over the tips of her breasts, which were darkening now against her pale skin in anticipation of the baby. Later, in bed, he held her close and spoke softly in her own language, describing the events of his day, comparing the people and the p
laces to those of her own village, so impossibly far away. It was language that she craved, the steady wash of familiar syllables across her ears. And so Rob Eldred talked on, making up stories, singing bits of songs. Little by little he felt the tension drain from her, until at last she fell asleep in his arms, warmed by his voice, by the words.

  The mornings of that winter dawned clear and cold, or softened with the gray light of another impending storm. It was always a shock to him, the way the warm dark nights gave way to the white light of morning, and he moved through the small rooms carefully, quietly, trying not to wake Jade Moon. Invariably, though, she appeared in the kitchen doorway as he was pulling on his boots. Her face was empty of expression as she watched him put his jacket on, but he knew the stillness was a mask against the long, silent day that awaited her. In all their happy dreaming in the high rocky seacoast she had come from, he had never anticipated her loneliness or understood that she would find it so difficult to learn his language. On those cold winter mornings he would not walk across the floor to kiss her because his boots were already on, and they followed the custom of her country, which allowed no shoes in the house. So he smiled at her across the space instead, and walked outside into the white light, into his own unexpected isolation.

  Rob Eldred had enlisted in the navy as soon as he graduated from high school, fired with stories of the Second World War, dreaming of glorious and bloodless combat, the big guns exploding like fireworks over the dark water. He was disappointed when the navy discovered in him an aptitude for languages and sent him to school instead of to the front. When at last he was shipped out, it was not to do battle, but to sit at a desk on a radio ship, intercepting and translating messages. His war had to do with language, with the nuances of translation. He knew it was important work, though it did not always seem so. Eventually he was assigned to shore duty in the village where he met Jade Moon, and it was only then, hiking up the coast through the bombed and ruined villages, turning away from the beggars with their lost limbs and terrible scars, that he understood the extent of what he had been saved from.

  The other carpenters knew his history, and it was something they could never quite forgive him. The transgression of his easy war was compounded by the fact that he had brought home an Asian wife. The last two wars were still felt acutely in the small town that had given half a dozen of its young men. Many of the carpenters Rob worked with were older men, and had long memories. Stanley Dobbs and Earl Kelly had lost a nephew each in Korea. Euart Simpson’s only son had died during World War II, in a prison camp in the Philippines. One day Euart punctuated this fact by thrusting a photograph of his lost son at Rob. The picture showed a smiling boy in a man’s uniform, his face the image of his father’s before it grew so many lines of grief.

  “I’m sorry,” Rob said, handing the photo back. Euart sat down, the spite and challenge suddenly drained from his eyes.

  “Sorry,” Euart said, “doesn’t settle with bringing home a Jap wife.”

  “She isn’t Japanese,” Rob said, struggling between anger and compassion.

  “That don’t make no difference,” Euart said. He spat into the pile of sawdust around the planer. “She sure as hell isn’t one of us.”

  THE BABY CAME in late April, just as the lilies of the valley opened on the shadowy side of the house. In the manner of those days Rob drove Jade Moon through the winding backroads to the hospital and sat through the piles of paperwork while his wife caught her breath and bit her lips against the groans. Then she was whisked away, and twelve hours later he was allowed in to see her, sitting up in bed with her hair tied back, holding their baby daughter. Jade Moon was ecstatic, and also very angry.

  “I was asleep,” she scolded, but he was relieved to see her spirit back, as if the drug that had kept her chilled and silent throughout the long winter had worked its way through her system and been expelled. “That whole time they made me sleep, and when I woke up it was finished. The baby was already born. I have no memory of it!” He recalled the practice of her own country, where women cloistered themselves with other women for a birth, and drank certain herbs, and let nature follow its course. Jade Moon went on, complaining softly but steadily, and Rob grew conscious of the curious glances from the two new mothers in the other beds. These grew longer and more amazed as Jade Moon slipped her gown open and let their new daughter begin to nurse.

  “There is something wrong with them,” she confided to Rob, tilting her head toward the two women. “Those poor ladies, they have babies but no milk. Every day the nurse brings them cow’s milk, warm, in a glass bottle. Imagine!”

  Rob turned to see the nearest woman, who was pale and thin with red hair twisted back in a bun. She was looking at him with a severe sort of pity over the dark bobbing head of her child. When their eyes met, she spoke.

  “It’s really none of my business,” she said, “but someone should tell your wife about—about that.” She nodded emphatically at the white slope of Jade Moon’s breast, then at the bottle she held tilted to her baby. “This is a modern hospital. Civilized. We keep trying to explain it to her—we’ve even used sign language!—but she just smiles and looks embarrassed.”

  Rob, taken aback, did not know how to answer this. Jade Moon was being modest, he knew, and polite about her own full breasts when these women seemed bereft of milk. He turned to Jade Moon, who stroked his daughter’s small head as she nursed, and then he forgot about the red-haired woman. He sat down on the bed, filled with joy and wonder.

  “What were you discussing?” Jade Moon asked.

  “You,” he said, taking her hand. “Our beautiful baby.”

  Jade Moon glanced down and softened. “Yes,” she said. “Isn’t she a little cabbage?” Then she looked up at him, smiling, and said she wanted to name the baby Spring.

  Rob was surprised. He knew that Spring was a common name for girls in her country, but he knew too that this child would grow up in America, and he tried to convince her to give the child another name. Lily, he suggested, thinking of the delicate white bells that fringed the house. Or why not Rose?

  “No,” she said, lifting the small bundle and cupping its head in her hand. “Flowers are too delicate, they don’t last. I want my daughter to carry a name that can help her in life, give her strength. She was born in the spring, and spring is something that comes each year, renewing us.”

  “What about April, then?” he said. His daughter kicked and squirmed in her mother’s arms, the restless water motions of the womb. Already she had her mother’s eyes and hair, and already he feared for her, what she might suffer for her differences. “What about May, or even June?”

  “No,” she repeated, lifting the child easily to her shoulder, massaging its small back with her palm. “Spring.”

  At last he agreed, but during the two days that Jade Moon remained in the hospital, the name worried him. At work he stood in a newly framed house and handed out cigars to men who had barely spoken to him for months. He thought of the red-haired woman in the hospital and Jade Moon’s lonely days in their house on the hill. When the time came to fill his baby’s name in on the birth certificate, he found he could not honor Jade Moon’s wish. He wrote down April Celeste, and signed. Jade Moon signed too, in Roman script, smiling as she finished the shaky letters. She could not read enough English to notice the change he had made.

  “April,” the nurse said, tickling the baby. “That’s a pretty name.”

  Rob nodded and quickly moved his new family away from the talkative nurse, overcome with guilt. It was a moment he would always remember because, although it was a small thing, as tiny as a new shoot on the trunk of a tree, it was his first betrayal.

  TO ROB’S GREAT surprise the birth of his first child made things easier for him at work. Many of the younger carpenters were new fathers themselves, and this shared experience became a narrow bridge across the flow of old animosities. He started eating lunch with them at the local bakery—thick homemade bread wrapped around tuna salad
or slices of ham—and soon they invited him to join the local bowling league. For the first time since he returned from the war it seemed to him that the two halves of his life might be reconciled. He took up bowling, and then joined the Masonic lodge as well. Though it meant leaving Jade Moon home alone two nights a week, she was absorbed in the baby and seemed not to mind his absences as she had before. Also, church ladies had begun to visit her, bringing pies and casseroles, and they had seen with their own eyes that the Eldred home had the same sofa and coffee tables, the same crocheted doilies and blooming roses, that they would expect to find in their own homes. They left reassured, with promises to return. Miss Ellie Jackson, an aging spinster with a harsh voice and a no-nonsense manner, came back twice, the first time with a sheet cake and the second with an Early Reader borrowed from the primary school, determined to teach Jade Moon English once and for all. So Rob felt the pieces of his life were falling together in a complicated but understandable pattern. Their isolation, and the fact that the aspects of his life had seemed misaligned, had been a source of pain to him. Even though he had some reservations about finding Ellie Jackson in his house more days than not, he was glad that at least the bad time seemed to be coming to an end.

  IN ANOTHER LIFE Ellie Jackson might have been a missionary, so great was her zeal, so pure was her determination. She was tall and lanky, with short gray hair and small but vivid blue eyes. She swept into their little house on the hill like a change in weather, and undertook Jade Moon’s education with the same focused energy that she applied to spring cleaning or organizing church bazaars. She came by every afternoon from two till four, bringing with her cookbooks and measuring cups, and soon Rob came home not to rice and stir-fried vegetables or spicy fish, but to macaroni and cheese, hamburgers and hot dogs with beans, potato salad, and even roast lamb. Ellie was often still there when Rob arrived, gesturing at this utensil or that, making up for Jade Moon’s lack of English by increasing her volume, notch by notch, until her loud voice sometimes woke the baby. This made Rob wince, because it was useless to shout, and because he himself was guilty of it. Jade Moon did not possess his facility with language, and he did not possess the patience of a language teacher. To his shame he had heard himself repeating words again and again, with increasing volume and exasperation, as if, through the sheer force of repetition, he could make her understand.