The Secrets of a Fire King (3 page)

“If I were less honest,” my father went on, “I’d let you go ahead and marry my daughter. But I can’t condemn a young man like you to the uncertain life my daughter would offer. You need a strong woman, someone to support you. My daughter will spend her life in this house, as it has been willed. When I die, of course, this place will become hers. I’ve prayed on this, for guidance, and I’m sure that it is so.”

The night was warm, yet as he spoke I was shivering on the porch, shaking so hard I had to tuck my hands within my arm-pits to keep my fi ngers from knocking on the wall. For I could understand the meaning of this night. My father was driving my suitors away, not for their sake, but for his own. He wanted to ensure himself a peaceful old age, someone here to care for him.

I, Eshlaini, was to be the one. This was no divine destiny, but my father’s will. The young man was standing up to leave, shaking my father’s hand, expressing his thanks, and the sight impelled
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me to do what for years I had believed was an impossible thing.

I stood up in that window and I spoke against my father.

“It is not true, what my father is telling you,” I said.

Both men turned to me, shock on their faces. It was the young man I looked at first. I was so exhilarated at my own boldness, the blood pulsing in my heart, that I expected the same from him. I suppose I thought that he would take my hand and run with me out into the night, but instead he averted his eyes at once. I watched him for a moment, my blood pulse slowing with anger first, then with humiliation. He stared at the wall, a muscle twitching in his cheek. It was my father who finally spoke, in the gentle voice one uses on children and the mad.

“Rohila,” he said. “This is not for you to decide. Go to your room at once.” The young man turned away. He would not look at me, or speak.

“Rohila,” my father repeated, but I interrupted him.

“I have been listening,” I said. I knew that I probably looked half mad, my hair flying around my head, my face streaked with tears, my voice in a shrill pitch. “I heard you promise me the house. If you will not let me marry, Father, then at least do this: add my name to your will with this man as your witness. Ensure me that my future will be as you have decreed.”

“It is not I who have decreed this,” my father said. But he looked at me so strangely, as if it was the fi rst time he had ever seen me clearly. Then he shrugged. “Nevertheless, it is a small thing. This is the least valuable of my properties, and it will only take a moment to add it to the will.”

That night I sat up in my room for a long time, the paper in my hand. It was my true name they had used, my legal name, to will this house to me. Though the house was small, worth very little, and though I knew I would never have another suitor, a strange satisfaction mingled with my anger. I had this paper, after all, with my true name. I knew the small victory I had won.

What happens to an anger, so fierce it burns the inner eyelids with a white light, when it goes too long unexpressed? I can tell you—it turns into a black nut, a bilious knot in the gut, a dark
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coiled seed. I could feel it every day, tending to my father’s needs, the years of my own life passing one by one. At night I sat before the mirror, scanning the new wrinkles where none had been, clipping at the hairs that sprouted on my chin. I dreamed of leaving, but in those days there was no place a woman alone could go. I was tied to the house by the great chains of past and present circumstance. My anger leaked out in strange ways. Sometimes I broke things, secretly, that he would not notice missing for months—a small vase from my mother, the fountain pen from some famous general. I buried his medals in the backyard. At times it seemed that I was mad, as he claimed, but I had only to press my fingers against my stomach to reassure myself about the truth. That was where the anger had settled, tense as a muscle. I could feel it there, hard skinned, thick as a chestnut.

One day, after years had passed, I saw that my father was going to die. He was in his eighties, trim and to all appearances healthy, but that morning I noticed the tremor in his fingers as he ate his breakfast rice, and when he signed the letters I had typed his hand was shaking so badly that I could not read his name. He resisted doctors for the longest time, but when he fi nally went they confirmed what I had guessed long before: he had a year, or less, to live.

On that day the dark seed sprang open. I felt it releasing, the sap of it running through my veins. As each day passed and my father grew weaker, new shoots made their way through my arms and legs. I felt myself growing alive from within. When I held my father’s elbow to assist him to the porch, when he took more and more frequently to his bed, I felt leaves unfurling, inner flowers blooming in my fingertips and cheeks. By the time he was bedridden it was nearly complete, a new self about to be born. I hummed as I cared for him, swabbing the loose fl esh of his legs, arranging the sheets.

I began to speak to him too, though I had been a silent girl, curled quietly around my anger. Cancer had eaten through his voice box, and so he could not answer me when I told him what it was I planned to do with that house he had left me. His eyes followed me around the room as I opened windows, dusted the
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fan, poured water from a glass pitcher and held it to his lips. One day I told him I would burn it down, sending the blue fl ames high above the trees, curling the walls and furniture into nothing more than ash. Another time I told him I would rent it to people from different faiths, people who would cook pork in the kitchen, keep dogs to wander freely from room to room. A house of illicit women, I murmured, arranging his pillows, with lovers stepping in and out and sighs of passion floating from every room. I stood up, as if struck with an idea, and said I might even bring a lover here myself.

My father made a noise deep in his throat, and I look down.

He was speaking without sound, his lips moving in exaggerated motions, easy to read.

“Rohila,” he was saying. “No more. Don’t.”

“Rohila’s dead,” I told him briskly, pressing a damp cloth first against one cheek, then the other. “She’s been dead for decades, you ought to know that.”

There was a pause, then his hand against my sleeve again. I looked down. He struggled with the words, and I felt a bright tingling just beneath my skin.

“What was that?” I asked, though of course I had seen it.

“Say it again?”

His lips trembled, his flesh shaped my name.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Eshlaini.”

Roots shot to my toes, took permanent hold. It was only my name, yet to me it was like a flash of the sun, a trigger for the quick photosynthesis of joy.

Flesh is the only destiny. In the end that’s all I will concede to fate. My father lived his life as a powerful man, but even he could not die as he would have wished, quickly and with dignity. Instead he went with agonizing slowness, rotting from the inside out. It was not merciful, the way his body went before his mind did. Toward the end I discovered maggots living in the soft fl esh around his few remaining teeth, and I had to watch his eyes, still knowing, while I plucked them out and swabbed his gums with antiseptic cream. Days later he burned with fever, his fi ngers like
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smoking sticks in my palm. He seemed to shrink before my eyes, his skin going tight and hard around his bones. He toughened, became nutlike. Though I bathed him with lightly scented water, though I pressed cool cloths against the pulsing heat of his forehead, I could not stop the transformation that was taking place. He shrank within himself, and his skin clung to the new shape. It was days and days before I understood. There he was, his skin gone rough and dark, his body coiled. I stared at him in recognition, then. He was the dark seed I had discarded.

As he lay dying, the family came. On planes, by car and train, from the distant foreign cities and the nearby villages, all came.

They pressed my hands when they entered the house, they touched their fingers to their hearts and mouths in gestures of intimacy and love, but they did not see the transformation that had taken place, they did not look me in the eyes to notice.

What drew their attention was the will, and most especially the codicil that left the house to me.

Of course they knew about the promise, made twenty years ago to seal my fate. Twenty years ago, when mosquitoes clouded the dark rooms of that house, and the jungle rose up like a mystery behind it. No one wanted the house then, the least valuable of my father’s properties, and so it was an easy promise. I, Eshlaini, would be made to give my life, and in return I would be guaranteed a house.

Twenty years ago. No one imagined then that the city would expand, pressing outward like a deep breath, to make this the most valuable land my father owned. This land, sold now, would make us all rich beyond belief. Before his death I heard them discussing this, in twos or threes. Carrying my father’s bedpan, lifting him from the sheets to clean his sores, I heard the whispers coming from the bottom of the stairs, from around the corner. They could not take it from me, but they wanted it, and this was the most surprising thing of all: I could see on their faces, turned so kindly toward me, that they thought I would give it to them without a fi ght.

After my father died, there was a family meeting. The will was read out loud then, and discussed. Finally my eldest brother,
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named for the soldier, turned to me. He was short, like my father, with the same balding head.

“Rohila,” he said. “This house is yours, as was once promised, though we can’t imagine that you want it. It is so big, after all, hardly suitable for a woman alone. I would like to offer you a place in my own home, comfort and family for life. In return, of course, you would sign over the house to the general estate our father left.”

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, not-ing 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
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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 fl ashing.

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 bam-The Great Chain of Being

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boo 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 fi ll 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.