The Black Isle (43 page)

Kenneth may have claimed allegiance to Communism but I never once saw him toting around the books of Marx and Engels or heard him proselytize. The only Russian works I ever saw him read were novels—
War and Peace
and
Crime and Punishment
. Communism, I quickly grasped, was a convenient banner under which to unite his disparate recruits. His populist goal was actually more basic and, at the same time, grander: independence. This was our only real religion, and we kept the faith zealously.

Much of what we did in pursuit of independence has a poor reputation today, and I am slightly embarrassed to recount our activities in detail. Suffice it to say that many in Kenneth’s camp studied maps, made blueprints, shot guns, and built bombs.

Not Cassandra, however. Kenneth excluded me from this training, assigning me instead to “domestic” tasks. Like the five other female recruits, my duties were to cook and clean, raise fowl, and grow vegetables, in service of the men. I bristled at the role but couldn’t complain. We saw fighters returning from raids bloody and in pain. A youth named Samuel Lee died from an attack by guard dogs, his mutilated body left behind on enemy land.

We kitchen hands knew whenever something terrible happened. Dinner passed in a grave silence, the food hardly touched and the whisky soon gone. Cricket became my gauge: His trembling hands spoke volumes. And in washing the men’s clothes, we witnessed the private evidence of fear staining their undergarments.

I also reacquainted myself with the jungle. I became intimate with its plants and creatures—our stomachs depended upon its offerings, after all. I couldn’t bear the thought of our men risking their lives on a daily basis only to sit down to a supper of boiled yam and grass soup. Subsistence didn’t have to be drab. Not when mangos, bananas, coconuts, and passion fruit proliferated around us. For our men, I cooked stews with jungle fowl, slow-simmered with pepper and clove, stolen in fistfuls from nearby plantations.

For three years, this was how I lived—my voice hushed, my head low, grateful to have a purposeful life, where my work bore visible results: full bellies, clean clothes, brave men.

As it happened, the Melmoth plantation sat next to our fifth and final campsite. It had never quite recovered from the trauma of my family’s caretaking, but its dilapidation proved ideal. Kenneth used its weed-covered lobes as a training ground for his unit.

Posing as a traveling salesman, he had met its current owners. They were a fresh-faced English couple named Manning, who’d purchased the estate for next to nothing, taking it on as more of a romantic experiment than a proper commercial enterprise. Armed with pickaxes, they had tried to revive the remaining plant stock without any hired labor—which would have been a tragic mistake if they’d actually been serious. Kenneth quickly grasped that the Mannings would never be able to keep up with the jungle, nor did they have any genuine desire to do so. Ironically, it was their indifference that kept them safe from his plans. He loved the way that, instead of the Union Jack, they flew a Jolly Roger on the rusty old flagpole in front of the house.

The Mannings would have been easy to finish off, but Kenneth desperately wanted to believe that they were special. From the clattering typewriter sounds he heard emerging daily from the caretaker’s house, he decided that they were poets. When he wasn’t speaking of annihilating the enemy, he brought the Mannings to life with loving descriptions: Mr. Manning was curly bearded and walked around in batik shifts, his nose deep in books, while the blond, ethereal Mrs. Manning liked to play tunes of her own devising on a pan flute. “Bucolic pagan reveries,” Kenneth called her compositions, “evoking wood sprites on a midsummer’s night.”

“They remind me of many good people I knew up at Oxford,” he once declared over dinner, in a tone that verged on Wodehousian parody. “I do like those two. They make such handsome mascots.”

Cricket made his own forest friends. Although hard to reconcile with his trembling hands, it was well known in the camp that he was Kenneth’s best killer, not just a formidable shot but a stealthy hand with a bowie knife.

Every now and then, to soothe his nerves, he returned to the insect love of his youth. I sometimes saw him striding out of the bush at dusk with bright green stick insects, red moths, and monarch butterflies clinging to his hair and clothes. In those moments, he looked majestic, peaceful, and his colorful discoveries brought much-needed bursts of optimism to our bandit camp.

It was in the camp that I watched Kenneth the Leader begin to flourish and my old friend Kenneth slip away from me.

Not only had he sentenced me to a segregated life, far from the center of action, but also he deliberately distanced himself. Instead of being inducted into the charmed circle, I became for him, as soon as I arrived, just another recruit with whom he shared no history. He rarely spoke to me alone, and when he did, he conveyed only kitchen orders or complaints in his damned neutral tone. Though I saw him almost daily for three years, I learned less about him than I had from our rushed conversations in hallways during those first crucial days of the invasion, when he barged his way into my life with Daniel.

So what kept me there wasn’t altruism. It was something more complex, more elusive. After all, it was I who’d led Kenneth to the Wees’ treasures. Every Sunday, when the camp sat down to its communal supper, I pictured the pawned jade brooch or silver teaspoon that had paid for the meal. Each time a bomb exploded, Mrs. Wee’s diamond rings came to mind. No doubt these thoughts occurred to Kenneth, too. Whether or not we shared a spiritual connection, the gold Rolex he wore even on the most sweltering of days was surely a constant reminder that he and I maintained a material bond.

For three years, I watched him devote his energies to secretive planning, taming both body and tongue—his diction had regained all of its original luster—and living in what appeared to be fastidious, monastic solitude. Not that he was a Zen master. There were many days when he wore the aggressive loneliness of the banished child, ready to hurl rocks at his friends.

His remoteness made me all the more determined to win back his affinity, or at least our prewar cordiality. Gaining his attention, however, was another issue. Increasingly, he lived in a bubble of his own making, with Issa and Cricket guarding him like sphinxes. He was shielded from the rest of us. Even when by chance he ended up next to me at one of the Sunday feasts, he never addressed me except to say, “Pass the salt”—a criticism, by the way.

Many in his position might have used it to procure lovers or companions. Not Kenneth Kee. As far as I knew, Kenneth always slept alone.

After we firebombed the first few plantations, the British began fighting back in earnest. They built high fences around their estates, armored their vehicles, and hired mercenary commandos to comb the rainforest, searching for us.

We had no choice but to keep moving around like fugitives. Even as our opponents grew stronger, Kenneth was determined that we not give up. It was a sour irony indeed that both sides had been toughened by their loss to the Japanese.

One night in early 1951, after several dispiriting weeks in the rain-pelted wilderness, Issa gathered the remainder of our group, halved to a mere fifteen, around a small fire. It was the first time this hater of public speaking addressed us. Naturally this brought me a feeling of dread.

“We have reached a turning point,” he said, his voice growing graver. “I was in the city this morning. A state of emergency has been called. Chinese students have been holding boycotts, protests, just like in China. All the schools have been closed for weeks now. I saw police charging into Chinatown, waving their truncheons. And they weren’t afraid to use them, even on children. But it’s not just Chinatown that’s in trouble. Factory workers are on strike. Bus drivers are on strike. Everybody’s on the street, all the time—cops, looters, troublemakers. Everybody’s restless. It’s like the old days, only now there’s no longer the same old fear. It’s
complete
chaos.”

Recruits whispered among themselves. Without saying it, Issa had stirred up the doubts we’d been quietly harboring for weeks. By being in the jungle, were we fighting on the wrong front? For once, I was grateful that Li remained confined in Woodbridge, and not free to raise hell on the streets.

Issa waited for the murmurs to subside. “I strongly believe we should return to the city and join in the struggle there.”

“Nonsense,” Kenneth cut in. “Let the schoolboys make noise. Up here is where we stand a chance of victory.”

Issa did not argue. He had registered his point—that was all he’d wished to do. Quietly, he nodded and receded into the darkness.

The group, including Cricket, trickled back to their tents, until only Kenneth and I were left standing by the dying fire. In the glow of the embers, I saw how tired he looked, how gaunt. He was in dire need of a good night’s rest and, I felt, a friend’s good faith.

“Ken—” I began to say.

He turned away, perhaps shunning me, perhaps daring me to come closer. I couldn’t tell what he wanted. After a few minutes of his impenetrable silence, I left him alone.

That night, I went to Issa’s tent. He jerked up, grabbing his keris. Seeing me, however, did nothing to subdue the look of trouble on his face.

“I need your help,” I whispered. “I can’t do this on my own.”

He understood instantly. Our conversation had been interrupted years ago, and it was time that we saw it through to the end.

I followed him deeper into the jungle, feeling a surge of déjà vu when I realized that his hair had regained its original length and luster, although most of it had turned gray. But he no longer intimidated me. His footing was not always sure, and in his withered right hand, which could no longer make a proper fist, I saw the abominable effects of torture. He was now less a ruthless pirate than an aging chieftain, long abandoned by his tribe.

After we had walked about a mile, he abruptly stopped. “Do you know the nearest burial ground?”

I, too, understood instantly and assumed the lead. I took us through the darkened wood to Blood Hill on the old Melmoth estate.

Since the poetical Mannings had never bothered to put up barbwire or even keep dogs, we simply walked onto their property. The caretaker’s house was dark, and it was safe to assume that the young couple was asleep. Of course, if either had come running out with a loaded rifle, Issa and I would be finished. We only had parangs with us to slice at the bush and fend off beasts.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I said, and came to a halt. “Why did the Wees call you Issa if your name’s Iskandar Ibrahim?”

The moonlight glistened off his smile. “I have no idea. I suppose it’s easier to say, and I never bothered to correct them. At least they didn’t call me Ahmad, which is what they called every other Malay—including my father, whose name was in fact Abdullah.”

He had none of his old bitterness, and this surprised me. But as we walked, I realized I had better warn him about my past in these woods.

“Years ago,” I said. “When I was a girl here, I…met a pontianak.”

“You
met
a pontianak?” He paused. “Did you
meet
a bomoh, too?”

“Yes, a sinister one.”

“And were you by any chance having your—”

“Yes, yes, it was that time of the month.”

“Well, then. Blood and black magic. A very dangerous mix. Playing with corpses is not exactly my territory, nor should it be yours. I hope that episode ended well.”

“I think so.”

“And you’re not by any chance now—”

“No,” I assured him.

He drew in a deep breath, not wanting to let uncertainty enter into the mix. “All right, we have to keep walking, Cassandra, if we want to complete our task before the sun comes up.”

“What about badis?”

“What about them, Cassandra?”

I was about to confess my botched summoning, but his tone—nurturing and impatient, all at once—made me too ashamed. Why bring up that old embarrassment? We were about to go and mend things now. Clean slate.

“You’re right,” I said. “We should keep walking.”

Blood Hill was every bit as bald as I remembered. We climbed up its grassless slopes and stood atop its crest, surveying my old dominion. Even in the moon-silvered dark, I could see where the twin lobes ended and the jungle began. How small my universe had been.

“Kenneth is not doing well,” Issa said when we finally sat on the dry, hardened soil. “Mentally, physically. Independence means too much to him. He thinks it’s his way of correcting history.”

“What do you mean
correcting
?”

“Ever since Shahbandar, he replays the past in his mind, over and over. When some people do that, they learn from old mistakes. Not Kenneth. He dwells on them.” He took a breath. “You see, Daniel was also at Shahbandar.”

Of course. The thought sickened me.

“Don’t worry. Kenneth blames only himself. But if you hadn’t agreed to come up with us this time, I really don’t know what he would have done.” He stretched out his arms and looked around us. “You don’t see many ghosts in the jungle, do you?”

Good—change of subject. “Even when I was a child, it was quite
clean
here.”

“But do you know why?”

“Fewer unhappy deaths?”

“If only. People have been dying here for thousands of years, and I assure you most of those deaths were not happy. No, it’s quiet here because the spirits of the jungle live inside the trees. In my ancestors’ time, we had bomohs dedicated to putting them there. When one starts seeing spirits in the jungle, it’s time to get worried—it means that every tree has been occupied.” He touched my right hand with his withered one. “Tonight, we’ll have to call them out. And a graveyard is always a good place to start.”

Goose bumps scurried along my arms. Even in the moonlight, his hand repulsed me. It looked and felt like a mummified rat.

“You must understand, Cassandra, I don’t believe in using spirits for personal ends. They’re not toys. Once we’ve called them up, we can try to make them obey but ultimately, they’re just like people—it’s up to them. But Kenneth’s plan…Sooner or later, the Brits are going to find us. I won’t survive Shahbandar again…”