Janice Lee - The Piano Teacher

The internees steep tea out of dried bark and dry grass on sheets, which they then shred and roll for cigarettes. They have lost so much weight, men’s faces are gaunt, women look decades older. Some suffer excruciating pain in their feet, the result of malnutrition, and cannot walk.

Some people are cracking under the pressure. Reggie Arbogast comes to Will to ask him to talk to his wife, who has stopped talking to anyone, but apparently she has always had a soft spot for Will, a feeling that he had certainly not known existed, and did not reciprocate to any degree. Still, he agrees to go visit with her.

Knocking on the door, he goes in to find a surreal picture-Regina Arbogast sitting on her bed dressed in a crimson evening gown, her hair put up in a messy chignon, some wisps escaping. Her eyes are smudged with black. Looking closer, he realizes it is charcoal. Her lips are messily slathered with lipstick, the crimson bleeding past her lips and onto the skin.

“Mrs. Arbogast,” he starts.

She continues to sit, looking like a grotesque marionette.

“ Regina,” he says. “You must get out. The sun is glorious today.”

She looks at him.

“Will,” she says finally. There is lipstick on her teeth.

“Yes, Regina? The fresh air will do you good if you go outside.”

“Will. You have always been a good man. I have admired you. You came to Hong Kong and were not polluted by it like so many others.”

“Thank you, Regina. I don’t k now…”

“But others are poisoned by it. It’s too easy here, life. As many servants as you want, lives subsidized by the government or your company. Everything is provided. You become weak.”

“ Regina, these are not good things to dwell on. Keep your mind exercised. I think some of the women are talking about putting on a show, a play. You should get involved with them…”

“Paaah! ” She expectorates onto the floor. “Stupid cows!”

He sits, not wanting to provoke her further.

“They are stupid, absurd women, who think a few clever lines will make us forget we’re here, in this tragedy of a situation. I despise them.”

And they, you, Will thinks, but doesn’t say.

“What would you like to do?”

She looks at him incredulously.

“What the bloody hell do you think I’d like to do? Get out of here and go home to England! ” Regina Arbogast seems to have been transformed into a dockworker.

“Language, Regina,” says Reggie, who’s just come through the door. His eyes are dull and sunken. The doctor has told him he needs vitamin C but there is no citrus to be had anywhere.

“Oh, shut up, Reggie.”

Will stands to leave.

“No, you stay,” Regina orders. “Reggie can do whatever he wants. I really don’t give a fig anymore. I have things I want to tell you, Will, because I think you deserve to know.”

“ Regina, I don’t think Will…”

“Reggie! ”

Reggie Arbogast looks at Will helplessly as if to say, See what I am dealing with? and then leaves. Will looks longingly at the door.

“ Regina?”

“Will, you were one of the ones I had high hopes for when you arrived,” she said, like the high priestess of society she had always styled herself to be. “Reggie knew about you from work and always spoke so highly of you. I wanted to have you to dinner many times.” Regina Arbogast’s dinner parties had been sought-after invitations in Hong Kong for their lavish style, elaborate themes, and restrictive guest lists, for those who had cared about such things.

Trudy had laughed at everything Regina did. “So fussy! So pretentious!” she said. “You know, she was a Manchester shopgirl before she married Reggie. All of her airs are very recent indeed. I heard he used to be a very nice man before he met her.”

“That’s very good of you, Regina.”

“But then you took up with that Liang woman. Did you know about her past? I felt she got her claws into you right away. She knows what she’s doing, that’s for sure, that one. She took you off the market before anyone else even knew you had arrived. You know what they call her, don’t you? The queen of Hong Kong!” She laughs. “It’s so preposterous! With her queer half-breed customs and way of thinking she is above everything. Forgive me but she is insufferable. I suppose love makes you blind.”

Will doesn’t know why Regina is talking to him as if he were one of her fellow society matrons and they were gossiping over tea at the Peninsula.

“I don’t know that this is the right time or place for this,” he starts.

“Listen. I have a point. You think I don’t but I do.” Regina Arbogast leans forward. “Reggie met with the governor when he arrived. Governor Young had a secret meeting the first week. The day of the Tin Hat Ball. He wanted to get to know some key people in the colony and ask their advice. He was new to the colony and didn’t know a thing about how it ran. He knew the war was getting close to Hong Kong but he didn’t want it to get out and alarm the general public, the nincompoop. So, at this meeting…” Regina sits back. “Do I have your attention now?

Will looks at her, exasperated and compelled at the same time. “ Regina.”

Satisfied, she leans over again. “At this meeting it was discussed, among other things, what was to happen to the Crown art collection at the governor’s mansion, which, as you might know, contains some priceless pieces, mostly Chinese antiquities that are sensitive because the Chinese think they were stolen, ancient texts and vases and things like that that were excavated. Reggie said they were centuries old, some of them. It was decided that the collection would be hidden away and the location would be divulged to three people in three very different situations so that no matter what happened, at least one would… survive.”

Despite himself, Will is listening, intrigued.

“And, of course, Reggie was one of the three.” Regina permits herself a smile of congratulations. “And he told me about it. But he hasn’t told me where. Or who the others were.” Her smile disappears. “He’s always been irritatingly honorable about that sort of stuff. He values country over anything, something bred into him by his family. I really think he would give me up if it came to that. Maybe even the children. I suppose he was a good choice, then.”

She gets up off the bed and shuffles toward the door.

“I don’t have any proper shoes here, and no one has been able to procure any for me. Do you know anyone? All I have are these terrible slippers that look like they belong in a fish market.”

“ Regina, why did you tell me this? ”

She smiles coyly. It is a grotesque thing.

“I have a feeling, Will. I know things are going on outside, and I know that many secrets and plots are in motion. I just wanted you to know.” She reaches over and clasps his hand in hers. They are dry and reptilian. “Consider it a gift from me.”

Trudy turns up the next week in a well-tailored suit and a hat, carrying the most enormous package will has ever seen.

“The outside is so queer,” she says, pulling off her gloves and sitting down. “There is the oddest society of people you’ve ever seen, a motley crew if I ever saw one. All the Russians who we loathed before are everywhere, and they are even more unbearable. They think they’re somebody now that everybody is gone. They’re worse than the Swiss with their self-righteousness. I was at a dinner with the doctor-you know Dr. Selwyn-Clarke, he’s the official medical adviser to the new Japanese governor who’s arrived, Isogai-and Sir Vandeleur Grayburn, who’s still delicious as ever, although terribly down about everything that’s going on, and this Russian girl, I don’t know if you remember her but her name was Tatiana, always out and about town before, but out in that bad way, drinking a little too much, a little too forward, you know, and she just said the rudest thing to him, the doctor, and she is married now to a Chinese man who is in bed with the Kempeitei and so now she’s bulletproof, or so she thinks… Of course she didn’t bring him to dinner. I think she just married him as an insurance policy. I’m going to shoot her myself when this is all over.”