The Headmaster's Wager Read online

  “Then take my daughter with you to Indochina. Better that she escape with you, though almost worthless, than stay here and be devoured by Japanese dogs. Remember, I am choosing you as an option preferable to dogs. Come tomorrow at the same time for your wedding.” She waved him off, not moving from her carved chair.

  Trembling, he backed away in stumbling bows, and fled down the stairs. That was how the couple became engaged. Cecilia’s mother did not offer her daughter’s hand. She commanded Percival to take it. As he left the apartment, Percival rejoiced at his good fortune—that the very rubble and stink that he was picking his way through had led to his engagement with the girl he longed for. The next day, they were married in the sixth-floor apartment by one of the La Salle priests who had somehow survived the Japanese invasion. Cecilia wore the cheongsam in which Sai Tai had once been married, and glared at her mother through the whole ceremony.

  A few days later, standing on the deck of the Asama Maru in formal dress, the newlywed couple waved goodbye to Sai Tai, who sat in a canopied rickshaw on the dock. As Hong Kong retreated across the choppy water, Cecilia said, “I dreamt of Paris, or London, but I have married a country bumpkin who is dragging me into the Indochina mud.”

  “But you spread the rumour that we wished to marry—”

  “Were you stupid enough to believe that I would actually want to marry you?” She whirled away from him. “I fooled with you precisely because it was inconceivable that I could ever marry so beneath me. I did it to keep my mother’s suitors away. If it wasn’t for the war, she would have agreed by now to send me to England or America—in order to get me away from you!” She stalked towards the companionway, and shouted across the deck, “Now see what I’m stuck with!” She disappeared below. Percival looked around, saw the other passengers turn away.

  As they reached open water, Percival clenched the rail at the edge of the deck, fighting down a sick feeling. The shallow-bottomed freighter began to roll. Had Sai Tai plotted a double victory, calling Cecilia’s bluff and forcing the marriage to show her control of her daughter as well as send her to safety? He stood, unbalanced by the sea, as flecks of black soot drifted from the smoky stack and ruined his one decent, white suit.

  When Percival made his way unsteadily down below deck, lurching against the growing motion of the boat, he did not know what he would say or do. He appeared in the doorway of their cabin. He spoke from instinct. “Cecilia, we’re married now.”

  “Look at your suit. What a mess.”

  “Isn’t there something special between us? What about when we were up at the Peak, holding hands and talking.”

  “A worthless muddy peasant covered in soot.”

  He closed the door, walked up to her, took her shoulders, and pressed his mouth to hers. In the Western films they had seen together, this was what the man did when the woman was upset, and then the beautiful starlet would melt into the man’s embrace. He wasn’t sure what to do with his lips or tongue, but he tried to scoop her towards him with his arms. Cecilia bit his lip, hard. When he pulled back she laughed, “You coward, can’t even stand up to your wife?” He touched his lip, tasted the salt, looked at his red fingertips. She said, “Is that what you call a kiss? It’s like kissing a block of wood.” Percival rushed upon Cecilia, they fell to the floor of the cabin with a lurch of the boat, and Percival forced his hands up her blouse. She struck him with her fists, landed punches on his sides. His lip bled freely, he kissed her through her angry insults, smeared her face red with his blood. Until his jacket was off, trousers, and then her blouse, and now they both struggled from their clothing until they began to move together rather than apart.

  Afterwards, he rolled on his back, his sex a wet snail curled up on itself, sated and guilty. What should he say? He felt like crying, but a man must never cry. Had he hurt her? But a husband did not apologize to his wife. The ocean slapped the boat over and over. After a long time listening to the water meeting the hull, he said with regret, “Now that it’s done, it’s not what I thought.”

  She turned on her side. Naked, she was more perfectly beautiful and terrifying than he had ever imagined—ivory skin and smooth curves. She said, “It’s not for thinking, then. And you’re not done.” She put her hand between his legs.

  The second time, Cecilia straddled his hips and reached down to put him inside her, began to move. Once she was satisfied she draped herself over him like a sleepy cat. Percival was grateful for this quiet space which did not require words. Could this peace contain them, however they had arrived here? Tears welled, streamed down his face. He said, “I may not be what you wanted, but I love you.” The words were exposed, vulnerable on his lips.

  Cecilia had an expression he had never seen before. For a moment she was unsure. Then, her face solidified. He couldn’t tell if she had taken a decision or simply defaulted to something in the face of confusion. “Well,” she said, “it seems even a peasant is good for the animal things,” and climbed off him, began to dress. A steaming, humiliated anger clouded Percival’s image of Cecilia. His wife stared at him, defiant, as if demanding that he strike the first blow if he wished to break her shell. He stood, put on his clothes, and went out into the salt spray of the evening.

  Cecilia stayed in the cabin for most of the journey to Saigon. Percival spent the time pacing the deck. On occasion, Cecilia would appear there and summon him by saying, “There’s something I need from you.” Or she might say, “You’re still here? I thought you had fallen overboard.” He would take her wrist and pull her down to their cabin, the other passengers whispering after them.

  Sometimes, he would go below deck telling himself that if only he persisted with tenderness, the peace that came after sex might last. On other occasions, at a snickering glance from a fellow passenger, he’d decide in frustration that he had marital privileges to exercise and storm downstairs. Sometimes, Cecilia led as she had on the dance floor, told him to move his hand or his tongue in a particular way, to go faster or slower. Other times, she alternated between beating him and caressing him. Whether she initiated it or he did, whether he went hoping for peace or to assert himself, their sex often opened a door to a truce, which Cecilia then closed with a torrent of insults.

  As the tugboat pulled the Asama Maru up the dull brown thread of the Saigon River, Percival and Cecilia stood on the deck of the freighter, watching the dense tropical foliage drift past, listening to the strange, raucous welcome of the jungle birds. He had been twelve years old when he had last seen his father, on Chen Kai’s visit to Shantou five years earlier. Now, he was married, and would meet his father again as a man. On that trip in 1937, Chen Kai had promised Muy Fa that the next time he returned to China it would be to stay. He had almost enough gold, he told her. Chen Kai did not say whether he would bring Ba Hai to China, and his son silently hoped that the Annamese woman would stay in the Gold Mountain country. Then, just months after Chen Kai had returned to Indochina, the Japanese had occupied Guangdong province. By 1939, they were in Indochina as well. The birds screeched around them, and Percival realized with surprise that there was no mountain here, golden or otherwise. Small local fishing boats with bright-painted eyes on their prows returned his suspicious gaze.

  A bored moustached Frenchman glanced at their permits and Percival’s forged laissez-passer, and waved them down the gangplank. Saigon was an awkward jumble of European facades sprawled across a mud flat. Before they were off the gangplank a cyclo driver seized their luggage. He saw that Percival and Cecilia were Chinese and offered to take them to Cholon. Bumping along in the cyclo, which swerved erratically to avoid expansive mud puddles, they left Saigon on the road to Cholon.

  Cecilia said, “A wretched hole.”

  Percival replied, “There are fewer Japanese here.” Whether it was the collaboration of the French administration, or had something to do with the oppressive heat, the Japanese soldiers they saw seemed slower moving, more calm, than the ravenous troops in Hong Kong.

  Upon arriv
al, despite having seen photos, Percival was surprised at the size of Chen Kai’s house looming over him. Was this it? The red-painted sign announced, “Chen Hap Sing,” the Chen Trade Company. Surely his father must have collected enough gold to return to China if he had built a house like this? Percival knocked on the door and told the servant who he was. The servant vanished inside. Shortly after, it was Ba Hai who appeared in the doorway. In person, she looked even smaller. After Percival introduced himself and Cecilia, Ba Hai stared at them through a long silence in which it was impossible to say whether she was more shocked or angry at their arrival.

  She said to Percival, “You must call me ma and treat me with the same respect as you would your mother.” Ba Hai spoke the Teochow dialect, but in a way he had never heard, with the accent of her native Annamese tongue. She turned to Cecilia. “You may be young and beautiful, but if you forget that I am the first woman of this house, I will scratch out those pretty eyes of yours.” With that, she told a houseboy to take Percival to see his father, turned, and disappeared.

  The houseboy led Percival up the stairs to the building’s family quarters. The servant opened a door, and Percival peered into the high-ceilinged room. It was well proportioned, the windows tall but shuttered against the daylight. There was a smoky, sweet-scented gloom. Percival recognized the source of the smoke. Some of the old men in his Hong Kong rooming house had been devotees. Why was the houseboy showing him this room? Where was Chen Kai? Then Percival saw that against the far wall, slumped on an ornate bed, was a skeletal figure who wore only a cloth around his middle and whose ribs heaved mightily as he sucked on a pipe of opium.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE SOUNDS OF TENNIS HAD STOPPED. Percival looked up from his lemonade to see Cecilia at his table, her opponent’s hairy arm around her waist.

  “The Viet Cong are keeping your knives bloody, Doctor?” Percival could not recall the surgeon’s name. If he had remembered, he would have pretended not to.

  “Nah. Disposable scalpels. Always clean—at the start of the case, anyhow. Pleiku is hot this week. Choppers bring them every morning. Kids, right? Fresh off the plane, all blown to bits, calling for momma.”

  “Then you fix them?” said Percival.

  “Humpty dumpty,” the doctor snorted. “The Cong bury these little jumpers. Charge pops up so-high and blows the kid’s balls off. Cuts off his legs, too. See, I figure they intended it to rip out a soldier’s chest, but the yellow soldier is so much shorter, they calibrated it wrong.” He laughed and looked to Cecilia, who smiled obligingly. How did she put up with the smell of white men’s sweat, Percival wondered. It stank like river oxen.

  Cecilia noticed the two glasses. She caught the eye of the waiter, gestured to bring another.

  “Don’t worry about me, honey. You’ve got a business deal to discuss, right? I’ve got to go.” He bent for a peck on the cheek from Cecilia, but she found his lips with hers, made a show of the kiss. Percival drank his lemonade.

  “Wow,” the surgeon winked at Percival, “a country worth fighting for.”

  “Bye, love,” she called sweetly as he left. Cecilia sat and drank a whole glass of lemonade. Her chest still heaved from the effort of the game.

  “A new business partner?” Percival asked in Cantonese. “Or a friend?”

  “Everything is business,” she said.

  “It’s like that with you, isn’t it?”

  She leaned forward. “Dai Jai must leave Vietnam immediately. The mood in Saigon is sour. I heard of one officer in the Rangers who turned in his brother to the quiet police.”

  “A suspected communist?”

  “Supposedly. Or a family feud. But there’s no time to waste, Dai Jai is in danger.”

  “How did you hear of his problem so quickly?”

  “His problem? Your problem. I’m sure this is your fault, always blabbering on about China. For all the times you talked about returning there, if only once you had actually gone!”

  “I tell Dai Jai to marry Chinese, but I should remember to advise him that his wife must also be Chinese inside, unlike his mother.”

  She laughed. “Is that supposed to be some kind of insult? Pathetic.”

  “It is from his mother,” said Percival evenly, “that Dai Jai learned to speak before thinking.”

  “His mother thinks about surviving and advancing in this world. As for defying some trivial new rule from Saigon, from whom else but you could Dai Jai get such a nonsensical idea?” She signalled for another lemonade. “Anyhow, when you already teach Chinese students English, why should you oppose teaching them Vietnamese?”

  “It’s different. English is profitable,” said Percival. “We may not have to teach Vietnamese anyway. As you know better than anyone, the right contacts can change any Saigon policy. Mak is making inquiries.”

  “Mak, always Mak. It’s good Mak has replaced your brain, as your own was always so lacking.” She switched to English. “Listen to me. I don’t give a shit about your school. Think about your son.” Then back to Cantonese. “We must send Dai Jai to Europe or America, before he is taken from us. I will arrange it.” She drained her glass. Percival watched the beautiful line of her throat undulating as she swallowed. He had loved kissing her there.

  “Did you rehearse that vulgar English expression just for me? You would send him to a place full of foreigners?” he said.

  “You would say he is a foreigner here.”

  “Of course he is. But why should he leave, when I am well connected in Vietnam? I’ll protect him. Anyhow, if he goes anywhere, it should be to China.”

  Cecilia laughed. “You are so predictable, both in what you say and what you fail to do. If you really wanted to go home to China, you would have gone by now.”

  “I stayed for you.”

  In 1945, after the Japanese surrender, people were moving in every direction. Cecilia had challenged Percival to do what he said he wanted, to return to China. She would not go. He was still in love with her then, hopeful that things would work out between them. He stayed. When he was eager to return in 1949, to cheer Mao’s unification of the country, Cecilia became pregnant with Dai Jai and there was no question of travel. They had waited a long time for a child, had thought themselves barren. Then came the school, and with it the money and its enjoyable uses. By the time of their divorce in 1958, Percival, like many other Cholon businessmen, was regularly sending money home to help the Great Leap Forward but knew that to enjoy his own profits he must remain outside of China. Already, by then, it was important to keep such remittances secret, for China had made its full transition from being an ally in the defeat of Japan and fascism, to being a communist threat to America and the free world.

  “Bullshit,” she replied. “Tell you what—you keep the Saigon dogs from getting near our son. I will speak to my friends about sending him abroad. These days, there are ways to send people to America—for studies, for technical exchanges.”

  “I will make this little issue vanish. My contacts can easily do it.”

  “Don’t be so sure. Besides, you mean Mak’s contacts, your money.”

  Percival swirled the ice in his glass, rattled the hard, cold cubes.

  “Good day, hou jeung.” She called him headmaster the same way she had once called him a country bumpkin, and walked away swinging her racquet.

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, HAN BAI DROVE Percival into La Place de la Libération. From across the square, Percival saw a dark Galaxie parked in front of Chen Hap Sing. Two men leaned against the hood.

  “Han Bai,” said Percival, “go the back way.” The driver swung the car around, like a great white whale in a sea of cyclo wheels, feet, and vendors’ pushcarts. They turned off from the square and went around through the narrow lanes under the tamarind trees and the long, flapping flags of laundry to reach Chen Hap Sing. Percival told Han Bai to stay in the car in case they needed to slip away with Dai Jai in the trunk.

  Percival crept in the kitchen entrance, surprised the cook and the co
ok’s boy, who had begun to prepare dinner. He asked where Dai Jai was, and they shrugged. How could he have been so stupid to stay in Saigon all day without having someone watch Dai Jai? He had forbidden his son to leave the house, but he should have asked Foong Jie to keep an eye on the boy. The headmaster passed through the central hallway, and from the classrooms he could hear the voices of teachers and students. He went up the stairs to Dai Jai’s second-floor bedroom, calling out to him. But the boy was not in his room. He peeked down through the slanted shutters to confirm his fears. It was the same two men who had visited Chen Hap Sing the previous morning. They leaned back against the hood looking bored, large sunglasses perched on small flat noses. Was his son in another room? Perhaps Dai Jai had noticed the car and hidden himself? Percival crept from room to room through the family quarters, aching for Dai Jai, checking behind furniture, whispering his name. He said a hurried prayer at the ancestral altar. At each window, he peeked out. They were still there. The dark car must have been parked there for some time, as several vendors had settled comfortably into their trade around it.

  Finally, Percival went up to his own third-floor bedroom and looked out into the street again. He tried to convince himself that there were any number of reasons, having nothing to do with his son, why these men might have returned to Cholon. Besides, if they had come to make an arrest, why did they sit outside? Unless, he thought with a chill, they had already checked for Dai Jai, knew he was not in the building, and were waiting for him to return.