The last immigrant, p.8
The Last Immigrant, page 8
“I come home and I relax. Like having a beach in the house,” Cephas had told him.
Cephas was also a reader. A large bookcase teemed with double rows of books on each shelf. There were books everywhere. On the floor. On the coffee table.
Cup in hand then the sink, Ismael saw a book in the kitchen obscenely spread-eagled on the bench. He read the title on the cover, Notes from the Underground. Dosteovsky.
He had started reading the book in his undergraduate years but never finished, although it was a very thin book, because he had fallen in love with Nat, and somehow in the joy of being in a relationship, he could not bring himself to identify with the narrator’s pain, neither did he want to.
He’d always meant to continue with the book as he loved the author but losing it, he forgot. Over the years he had always meant to look for the book in a library or a bookshop, perhaps to get it on his Kindle, to finish it…it was one of those things on his must-do list, but he had been distracted by other books and the circumstances of his life.
He thought he might have lent the book to Nat. Vaguely he recalled it lying on her bedside table. He had known, hadn’t he, the moment he met her, that vivid Eurasian girl in the library, no, not met, he had encountered the gaze of her elongated fish-shaped eyes somewhere along the Dewey Decimal System of books at K–L. Then he saw her smile. That was it. He touched the slightly tattered cover of the book.
Cephas must have been reading it while stirring the pot of noodle soup he had put together for a meal last night or he might have been reading while munching on his two rounds of a loaf for breakfast or waiting for the cheese to melt on the open-faced sandwich he had placed under the grill for midday lunch.
“I see you haven’t finished this?” Ismael said, turning to Cephas, who was standing slightly open-mouthed behind him.
“No…forgot I left it here,” Cephas said. “Wouldn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. I’m talking about my clients. Too depressing.”
“Do you bring your clients here?” Ismael asked.
“No, of course not. Just the counselling room.”
“You know I haven’t seen your counselling room in a while.”
The counselling room, leading off the living room, had pale blue cushions on the floor and no furniture. Large assemblages hung on the walls. One of them was a gigantic hammer and a tiny bird’s nest.
“Yeah, that’s for my clients,” Cephas had told Ismael when he had first shown the room to him. “You know, to project themselves into the nest like ‘I’m in that nest and the hammer is above my head and I feel safe? Or frightened?’ They can choose.”
“I see,” said Ismael, who saw himself in the nest with Imelda extending curious paws over his head. He almost laughed aloud but checked himself. He did not want to appear unsympathetic.
“Look,” said Cephas, “most people don’t have a sense of what they feel. It’s a mind-body disconnect. I’m just trying to help them know their feelings and integrate their minds with their bodies.”
Ismael muttered that he’d never had that problem. Maybe that was his problem.
Cephas sighed. “A little kid might say, ‘I want to be an artist or poet’ but the parents say that only special people can do that so the ‘special self’ splits off and the kid puts it away because he is not allowed to have it. That skill gets hidden away for safekeeping because the consequence might be ridicule or, in the child’s mind, even death, if one comes from an incredibly abusive family.”
Ismael had stared at the blue walls. He knew he did not have that excuse to make concerning his family. He had caused the split himself.
“Come in,” Cephas said. “Nothing’s changed much.”
Ismael felt that urge to laugh again when he walked into The Nest. His eye was caught by a small Chinese tower standing on a cabinet.
“That’s a study tower,” Cephas said, following his eye.
“Yes,” said Ismael. “I know. We have one too.”
“Your mother was Chinese, wasn’t she?” Cephas asked.
“Yes, she was. Partly. Do you know ancient Chinese parents locked their children up in these study towers before the civil service examinations so they could study in peace and quiet?”
Ismael picked up the tower to examine it. The price sticker had been partly scratched off but it looked to come from the same shop as his.
“They had to be poets before they could assume government posts as part of the exams was writing poetry. They didn’t exactly pick the best poets. Seems Li Po failed three times,” Ismael said, putting it down.
Ismael’s interest in Chinese artefacts was due largely to his mother. His father was originally from Iran but had resided in England before his marriage. Ismael’s mother was born in Singapore under British colonial rule.
Once the haven of the orang laut, the quaintly named “men of the sea” or pirates, the “Lion City” was named Singapura by the rebel Sumatran prince of the Srivijaya Empire, Sang Nila Utama, who was washed up upon its shores in 1299, while fleeing his pursuers. The prince had seen an enormous beast with an orange body and black head he believed was a lion. Stamford Raffles claimed the island in the 19th century for an East India Company, playing the squabbling Malay sultans to expand the British Empire.
“My mother knew a bit more about these towers than I do,” Ismael said. “Nat does too.”
Ismael’s mother was Chinese with Malay and, apparently, Dutch heritage. This came through in her cooking. Ismael fondly remembered her pineapple tarts, crisscrossed, hot, sweet and crumbly. She baked tins of them every Chinese New Year.
“It must have been quite a love story,” Cephas said. “Your parents, I mean.”
“Yes,” admitted Ismael, “some people said it was an odd relationship because my father was Muslim but my mother was Christian.”
Had his parents not formed an alliance of sorts? Not only between the People of the Book but also between a Muslim nation and an Asian one?
“How did they meet?” Cephas asked curiously.
“On a beach in Pulau Tioman. My mum was on holiday. My dad was in Malaysia on a business trip but took a few days off to go to the beach.”
“And no one objected to the marriage?” Cephas wondered.
Ismael replied slowly, “I don’t know. My father said that according to Islamic custom, my mother was not obliged to be a Muslim because the children inherit the father’s religion and my mother was, um, one of the People of the Book as the Koran calls Jews, Christians and Muslims. They had a civil marriage. My mother did not convert and my dad did not force her to.”
Ismael reflected on his parents. They had gone their separate ways to worship. Ismael missed his mother when he was praying in the mosque with his father. He was not sure if his father knew it but his mother would pray in her own way for him each night as she put him to bed; she would use her finger to trace the sign of the cross on his forehead before kissing him goodnight.
“They were very much in love,” Ismael said in sudden amazement and sorrow filled him.
After their fated meeting, they had returned to their own countries but kept in touch. After several letters, Ismael’s father went down to Singapore for a visit and proposed. They were married under the fading reign of the British Empire and lived in Singapore through its tumultuous early years of independence, its repressive childhood, rebellious teens and difficult maturation into adult years before migrating to Australia.
“They had their problems in the marriage as most couples do but they stuck together, till death,” Ismael told Cephas.
They had died within two weeks of each other: one from illness, the other from a broken heart when the red thread between their fingers snapped. Ismael had seen it. His mother had gone first. His father crouched by her bedside weeping with a dangling red thread from his little finger. He had walked into their home and he could swear to that. He had seen the other half of the thread tied around his mother’s dead finger laying limply on the bedsheet.
They had shrunk before his eyes, as they grew older. Their lives became small and petty, surrounded by quietness, tidy gardens, fixed prices and the occasional traffic. They no longer seemed to quarrel.
“So what are you?” Cephas had asked him in the early days.
“I’m Muslim,” said Ismael. He was Muslim but with more than a touch of Zoroastrian in his make-up and he was open to all religions.
“Do you know Zoroastrianism found its way to China? A Persian embassy was set up in the sixth century—I think under the Northern Chi Dynasty.”
While he was in the States, he had immersed himself in the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment sitting naked in a circle holding hands with other students, both male and female, likewise undressed. After his studies, he had married Nat and moved to Australia to live in Holland Park, which boasted the first mosque ever built in Brisbane back in 1908.
“I envy them,” said Cephas, looking at Ismael with eyes diminished behind his glasses. “I’ve never had that kind of love.”
*
Nat’s friends were full of faith. They came to the house and prayed over her, laying hands upon her and covering her breasts with cloth anointed with oil by their church pastor.
Ismael had never let their different religions stand between them. After all, it was the same God. That was what the Koran had stated. Muslims did not believe in a different God from the Jews or the Christians. Nat’s faith reminded him of his mother.
But he worried when she started cancelling her medical appointments. “God will heal me. He spoke to me and said He will make me an example,” she had said confidently.
He kept his fears to himself and did everything he could to help her and more, but the pain increased over the months and the lump on her breast began to bleed.
“Why are you letting her do this?” his daughter said.
Ismael could not answer.
“Mum, you have to go to the hospital,” Sara told Nat.
Her mother merely smiled and repeated that she was getting better. “The naturopath did a test and I’m in the pre-cancer stage. That means I’m well. All I have right now is a virus.”
“That’s not true!” Sara was tense.
“I’d like to rest,” Nat said, turning away.
Ismael watched the scene from the doorway. His daughter pushed past him on her way out but he had seen that her eyes were red with held back tears.
Ismael had tried to make Sara see sense, that it was unnecessary to cause her mother more distress. Sara had walked stiffly away from him. She started spending more and more time out of the house. Ismael did not know where she went: it could be to a friend’s house, the shopping mall or the library.
Ismael had been granted six months’ unpaid leave from work. By fluke, his boss, Janice, was away at that time, undergoing refinements in her methods and other essential training in Canberra, and her temporary replacement was indifferent. Without much fuss, he signed the application Ismael laid before him.
Ismael was now the one looking after Nat, adjusting her chair, cooking special meals, as she would eat only certain foods, all of which had been mentioned as edible in the Old Testament, and she followed diets the naturopath recommended.
Daily, he had to grind the almond kernels into white powder, which she ate by the spoonful.
*
Sometimes Ismael sat in a chair looking out to the front yard when Nat was resting in bed. She was still able to move but she no longer liked going out. Ismael had a passion fruit vine twining around a tree growing in his flowerbed. He hadn’t planted it there; it was possibly a wild growth or some previous owner’s madness.
That tree overshadowed much of the flowerbed and its roots ran underneath so that most of the flowers he planted there died. Well, that was the reason he thought up. More likely, he was an indifferent gardener who seldom watered his plants. Ismael had grown up as the privileged only son in his family and he had lived in the city: he had little reason to learn to grow flowers, vegetables and the like.
Ismael’s passion fruit vine was out in the open, which meant anyone wandering past might help themselves to its fruit. He had seen Anna, whose garden bordered his flowerbed, shaking the branches of his tree, which partly extended over the low fence into her side. She used a long stick; Ismael merely waited for the wind to blow the fruit down.
He was fair and, if he might say so, generous, because under the Queensland criminal code all the fruit of the vine belonged to him because the tree was on his land and anyone taking the fruit would be stealing. He did not pick up the fruit, which rolled into her garden (entering her garden would be trespass and he would be liable to be prosecuted under civil law). He had learned this much from Maurice.
The excitement of his day, he could explain to Sara, consisted of listening to the wind blow through the leaves and then upon spotting a yellow passion fruit in his garden, opening the front door to pick it up.
Ismael did not begrudge Anna the fruit she took. Passion fruit was selling for close to a dollar per fruit at Woolworth’s and the ones you saw there were brown and wrinkled without the smooth, pure, yellow, hard shell of the ones dropping from amongst the branches of Ismael’s tree. The shell had a soft furry feel to it when it was freshly dropped.
“Aren’t they lovely?” Anna said to him once. She innocently picked up the fruit under his nose. “I make passion fruit butter from them. Fills up the jars.”
“Spread on toast?” Ismael enquired.
“Sometimes or a cracker.”
She did not offer him any of her boasted jars of butter.
“I also use the seeds and pulp on my pavlova,” Anna said. She went back in with her collection.
Ismael had enjoyed eating pavlova when Nat had made them. They were basically a sugar hit. The meringue base crumbled light sweetness on his tongue; then there was the drizzling of passion fruit upon whipped cream, bites of golden peaches, bursting mandarins and slightly tart kiwi fruit adding substance to the whole experience. He had discovered that it was a dessert invented in 1935 by Herbert Sachse, an Australian chef, and subsequently named after the ballet dancer Anna Pavlova.
Chapter 11
As the sun dipped into a pink sky, Angel could be seen climbing the hilly streets; she carried a haversack. She had a casual job as a junk mail deliverer. It helped to work off the fat.
However, she often struggled to finish as it became too hot to walk during the day so she began early on Saturday morning and completed her rounds in the late evening.
She was glad she was not carrying a heavy load. Her mind was full of a TV news report about coconut-shell-hugging octopuses living in the waters of North Sulawesi in Indonesia.
“Why can’t we do that?” she had asked her mother.
“Live in Indonesia?”
“No, duh. Use coconuts for protection. Some people do. You know the hula dancers wear coconut shells over their breasts.”
Her mother had not been impressed. Angel was finding it hard to talk to her. Her mother lacked confidence in the order of the world and had not wanted her to take on her little job.
“I’m fourteen and three-quarters,” shouted Angel. “You’re always saying I spend too much money so now I want to earn my own and you say I can’t.”
“Not safe,” her mother had struggled to keep her voice under control. “Don’t shout.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s just around the neighbourhood.”
“I can drive you,” her mother ventured.
“I don’t need you to follow me around!”
So, in the end, Angel got her way. She remembered the day when her employers had dumped a sack of sample tins of baked beans at the front door, which she was supposed to deliver. Her mother had opened the front door and called her.
As Angel hurried to the door and opened the sack, she heard from behind her a snicker, quickly smothered. She looked suspiciously at her mother.
“I’m going to the shops,” Wei Ti said hastily and moved towards the car.
Angel pulled her sack of tins indoors and sat on the floor trying to calculate the number of rounds she would need to make that day, based upon the number of tins she could carry and the amount of time her legs would take in walking. As she dragged herself wearily up the hilly streets into the late evening, she almost gave up on her first job. Her heart was pumping so hard, her face was flushed and her thighs tingled with sweat and coursing blood.
The sun showed no mercy burning later into the day than it was meant to. When Angel got home, she was dripping with perspiration.
On being greeted by Wei Ti, she replied that she was alright and she was hungry. She gobbled the food her mother put before her without paying too much attention to what she ate and then she got up. She would not admit that she was tired.
Wei Ti washed the dishes and stared at the depressing sky outside. It looked like rain. She stacked the plates and bowls on the drainer. She thought the worst thing about being a single parent was having to make decisions. She had to make them not only for herself but also for her daughter, decisions that would affect her life, and often she didn’t know if she was doing the right thing. For example, her daughter kept moaning that she didn’t want to go to the neighbourhood school. Her friends were going elsewhere.
“You have to take two buses to get to their school. Take you an hour and the school is next to a very busy road,” Wei Ti pointed out.
But Angel said, “You don’t understand what it’s like. Having to go to a school where I know no one and it’s hard for me to make friends.”
Wei Ti almost shouted, “Okay, you’ll have to live with no friends unless you want me to drive you to high school. Think about it. You can walk to school and walk home.”
So Angel had acquiesced. She had a horror of appearing like a baby before her high school peers and did not want Wei Ti to drive her to school. Now Wei Ti worried that she might rebel and make the whole experience of school an unpleasant one for herself. It was not that she didn’t understand how awful it was to be friendless; she understood very well.
