Janice Lee - The Piano Teacher

“Very unfortunate. A man has jumped off the pier. Apparently he had just lost his job as a cook. He’s being taken to the hospital now, but he’s dead.”

“How awful.”

“Yes. It’s all getting cleared up now, and they’ll be resuming the service.”

The sea was green and brackish. When she stepped onto the gangplank, she could see rubbish floating on the water below. Someone died there today, she thought, and could not reconcile the momentous thought with the dirty surface that had paper wrappers and orange peel floating on it.

Once on the boat, her motion sickness and nervous apprehension merged and made her unable to speak. She sat, trying to focus on one spot on the faraway horizon. Two weathered men in singlets and grimy trousers clambered around the deck, winding and unwinding the thick sea rope around various posts, and pushed the boat off the dock, chattering loudly all the while. Their skin had the texture of brown leather and their teeth were yellow and cracked as they spoke.

Around them were locals, a couple with a baby, the woman exhausted-looking, the baby wailing. Claire’s stomach flipped and she looked away. The baby cried on and on, sickened by the waves. A man dressed in an undershirt read a newspaper. The front page carried a photo of two English sappers who had been lately much in the news for murdering a local woman. They had been sentenced to death yesterday, the first Europeans since the war to get such a punishment.

“Their faces are so young,” she said to Will.

“They’re getting what they deserve,” he said. “Too much the old attitude. They think they can treat the locals like animals. It’s a different world now.”

“The woman was an amah at the barracks.” Claire was not sure if she meant it as innocently as she said it. She had been around Will enough to know it was throwing something down.

“And?” Will said. It was the first time he had been sharp with her.

Later, he told her a story. A family had had their amah follow them while they were being interned during the war. She was to bring them extra food and supplies whenever she could to Stanley camp, which she did, in a large picnic basket. She had been with them for sixteen years, from when she was a young girl, and the family had been very kind to her, so, when they were interned she was determined to show them her loyalty. The amah brought food faithfully, every week, until one week she had not appeared. The day after she was to have come, the family received the same picnic basket. Inside was a small hand, wrapped in dirty towels. “They thought it a funny joke. Of course,” he said, “the truly sadistic Japanese were the exception, but they were all we could think about and all we ever remember. We never knew what happened, whether she had offended someone or done something wrong or was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The story was his apology. She knew he didn’t owe her one. This was how she knew his affection.

At Macau Station there was a portrait of the governor, Commodore Esparteiro, with mustache and white hat, waiting to greet the visitors.

“He looks very distinguished,” Claire said.

They stepped outside passport control to instant chaos. Clamoring men pressed up against the steel fences, waving their hands, shouting.

“Taxi, taxi.” “Car, car, drive you.”

Will went off to the side and negotiated with one quickly in Cantonese. When he spoke the language of the locals, the unfamiliar sounds coming from his familiar mouth, she felt her insides tighten, something more than desire. The driver looked at her, understood instantly. He leered, showing brown, chipped teeth. She looked away and let Will put his arm over her, he instinctively knowing what had just transpired.

“Let’s go now,” she said, grateful for his protection.

“Almost done,” he said, and finished up the bargaining.

In the taxi, the air was thick and it was unbearably hot. Will rolled down the windows. As the car picked up speed, the wind was filled with particles that hit her face, but it seemed churlish to complain at this, the beginning of their romantic escapade.

Here I am, she thought, a woman on an illicit holiday in the Far East with her lover. She looked out at the people on the street. They didn’t know. Her secret was safe with them, their blank Oriental faces, their busy lives unencumbered with her transgressions.

They got out of the taxi at the Hotel Lusitania, off the Largo do Senado.

“This is the center of town,” Will said. “And that over there is Sao Paolo, the white stone façade of an old Jesuit church. It’s just the front that’s left.”

“Was it the war?”

“No, a fire in the 1800s. We’ll go there later. You can still see all the reliefs and carvings. Quite beautiful.”

The lobby was shabby but grand. Will seemed to know his way around.

“Have you been here often?”

“I used to come a fair amount,” he said. “But not in the recent past.” They were shown up to their room by a Chinese bellboy, and when the door closed behind him, they looked at each other, shy once again.

“You look different here,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

In the waning light of the day, sun streaking through the dusty window, they reacquainted themselves with each other, their displaced bodies somehow new, somehow more thrilling.

Afterward he said, “It’s almost like we’re an old married couple, coming away to a new place together.”

“It’s nice,” she said. His tenderness was new and it unnerved her.

“It is.”

“What is it you have to do here?” she asked.

“I have to pay my respects to someone,” he said.

“Am I to come?”

“If you wish.” He twirled her hair around his fingers. “It doesn’t matter.”

They took a taxi to a cemetery. Will paid the driver and got out. Paint peeled off a dilapidated, vacant guardhouse. A large tin sign with garish red Chinese characters teetered precariously above it.

“A cemetery!” she said. “You know how to treat a girl on holiday.”

“Do you know anything about how the Chinese bury their dead? ” he said, ignoring her.

“No,” she said. “Is it very different from our way?”

“Yes.” He consulted a map on the wall and traced his finger along a route. “Here we go.”

The air seemed thicker here. Claire didn’t want to breathe in, for fear that the essences of the dead would enter into her. She had grown more superstitious despite herself during her time in Hong Kong. In the cemetery, there were tombstones-smallish gray stones with English and Chinese characters interspersed-and paths intricately intercut among the graves, with rough stone steps leading up a hill.

She read the tombstones as they passed.

“ ‘Here lies William Walpole, brother of Henry.’ No other family, I suppose. He died in 1936 at the age of forty-three. And this one, ‘Margaret Potter, beloved.’ I like that one. I think I would want something simple on my tombstone, don’t you?”

Will spoke as if she had not said anything.

“It was very difficult after the war, you know, to catalog the dead. For the most part, they did mass graves. But it was very hard on the families. Not having the body of their loved ones to bury.”

“The ceremony is what comforts, a little, at least, I would think.”

“Yes, these rituals came about for a reason. People need something to focus on, to focus their grief on, and to keep busy. All over the world, rituals are part of death. It makes you hopeful for humans, that they have something in common.”

“In civilized times,” Claire said. “People are different when lives are at stake, not death.”

Will looked up, surprised.