Chapter 9
when gigi learned she was pregnant, she didn’t cry.
There was no point in crying, really. Not the way Xuan did when she became pregnant during the winter, her howls echoing through Nam Koo, following Gigi wherever she went.
Auntie took her away, dragging her down the stairs and out into the circular driveway, where a drab grey car was waiting.
When Xuan came back four hours later, she was quiet and sleepy, and she did not emerge from her bedroom for three days.
When she did return to the dining room for breakfast, Gigi put her arm around her shoulders and Xuan shed one tear, and then a second, before eating her congee with her eyes cast downward.
They never spoke of the pregnancy or how it had ended. There was only one possible ending.
Auntie had always told them to keep track of their cycles, and Gigi had tried, but her periods had never been regular.
Her mother had told her that they might not even out until she was in her twenties, and Gigi was only nineteen.
Maybe her period was just late. It probably was.
But one morning, she woke up with a headache and the compulsion to purge everything that was in her stomach.
Every grain of rice, every drop of tea, every shot of whisky the soldiers had made her drink.
As she was throwing up, staring into the porcelain insides of the sink, she knew she was pregnant, knew that the knot lodged in her stomach could not be brought up into her throat, ejected through her mouth, and forced down the drain. She did not cry.
Gigi leaned back against the pillows on her bed and repeated the names of the soldiers she had entertained through gritted teeth. Kenji. Ren. Hirohito. After each name, she shuddered, remembering the yellowed teeth of one, the rancid smell of another, the hands that choked her when he came.
There was one soldier, Tatsuo, who had been coming to her room every other night.
He was stationed in Hong Kong for the next few months, he had told her, and he liked her.
Some nights he wouldn’t even have sex with her, but instead sat on the chaise with her on his lap and asked her questions about her life before Nam Koo, in Cantonese that was near perfect.
(She had thought, when she listened to his flawless accent, that he must be an intelligence officer, a code breaker perhaps, someone else who might know her brother, but she never asked because of course he would never tell her the truth anyway.) There was not much to tell—she had only been a schoolgirl when she was brought here—but he asked and she tried to oblige.
“My father left us when I was a baby,” she told him. “Mama said he went to Canada, and maybe that is true. Maybe he has a good job and is saving money to come back to us.”
Tatsuo traced his fingers up and down her thigh. “How would he find you here?”
Gigi shrugged. “Aren’t all fathers tied to their children, destined to find them when they are lost?”
“That sounds like a fairy tale.”
“Perhaps. But we tell ourselves stories all the time to help us through the days.”
Tatsuo was quiet for a moment and ran his hands over his short, almost-shaved hair.
“My mother once took my sister and me to a Buddhist temple, so we could make an offering and get our fortunes on these little rolls of paper. My sister was so excited, but me, I didn’t care.
I was a twelve-year-old boy, and all I wanted was to play baseball.
I was pretty good too. Don’t laugh,” and he gently shook Gigi’s shoulder while she giggled into her hand.
“It’s true! Anyway, my sister’s fortune was forgettable, something about keeping her virtue and reaping rewards.
Mine was different. It said, ‘You will see many ugly, terrible things, but you must always seek moments of beauty to remember in hard times.’? ”
He brought out a camera then and asked to take a photograph of her, so that he would always remember how beautiful she was.
She didn’t feel beautiful and she was sure he was lying, to make himself feel better, to make this moment a love memory that he could take with him when he was murdering or plundering or bombing, and not a memory of a transaction between a man and a whore.
A moment of beauty for him, but what was it for her? Gigi shivered.
“I will bring you a copy,” he said, “so you know how glamorous you look.”
He kissed her and carried her to the bed, where he undressed her slowly and later fell asleep curled against her back. Gigi didn’t love him. He probably didn’t love her. But this was preferable to so much that could have happened instead.
Gigi sat on the same bed now, wiping the vomit from her mouth with a scarf.
Tatsuo had shipped out last week, gone to the Dutch East Indies, he had said, although she didn’t know if that was true.
He had told her many stories—his father had been a sake maker, his mother was a slave to her children, he had a younger sister who wrote him letters about how hungry she was, about how the family had hidden in a root cellar at their neighbour’s house when the bombing had started—and Gigi tried to imagine this family, sitting on the floor around a low table for dinner.
His mother was small, he had said so, and she tried to conjure a small woman in a kimono, sweeping the front steps to their house, sweeping the dirt from the inside out to the yard.
She tried to imagine the straight black eyebrows of his sister, the curl of her back as she read romance novels in a sunny corner of the house.
But Gigi couldn’t see any of it in her mind, and she realized this was because many of these details were likely not real, designed to lull and comfort so that he could do whatever he liked to her.
They were just words, a stream of stories about nothing, and therefore not about war, or about what Nam Koo hid inside its walls.
If he was the father, that would be bearable. Tatsuo was not evil or, at least, not as evil as most of the others. If she had met him at a party, maybe she might have said yes when he asked her to dance.
It was time for breakfast, and it wouldn’t do to be missing from the table.
Gigi pulled a day dress from the closet and a pair of stockings from the dresser.
Sitting on a stool, she smoothed the folds of the dress over and over.
Auntie would send her to get an abortion.
She knew this. It was the best thing, really, because in order for her to have this baby, she would have to run away, find a place to live, maybe even beg a distant relative to take her in.
The dress was smooth under her fingers, a thin silk, purple with a light gold thread.
She could hear her own heart, thumping against the walls of her chest. If she could also hear her baby’s heart like an echo against her own, she did not admit it, even to herself.
When she stood up, she turned toward the bedroom door and watched as the doorknob turned.
She expected to see Auntie, ring of keys in hand, ready to ask her nosy questions or inspect her for flaws.
Maybe a pimple on her chin or a thread dangling from a seam.
But when the door opened, standing at the threshold was a girl in a green dress and hat, facing away into the hall.
No, not facing away. Gigi knew her, knew the straightness of her body, the rigid posture, the hair that fell down over her face.
The shock of recognition was painful, a bolt that scored through her belly and stirred up whatever was left inside, making her dizzy and nauseated all at once.
She looked behind her, but there was nowhere to run.
In the thin morning light, the girl walked into the room, her steps deliberate and unhurried as she made her way toward Gigi, who had backed up against the armoire, the ridges of its fearsomely intricate trim digging into her spine.
The sound of the girl’s shoes hitting the floor was like the breath of someone who was barely alive.
Gigi saw no hesitation in her movement, only a sure-footedness that was both slow and inexorable.
There were only fifteen feet between Gigi and the door.
This room had seemed cavernous when she first arrived, almost the size of her mother’s entire apartment, but now it seemed unbearably small, a sliver of air captured between four walls.
The faceless girl walked toward her. Ten steps away.
Six steps away. Now only inches from Gigi, not even an arm’s length.
She reached out, and Gigi feared she might cut her open with her fingernail or grab her violently by the neck, the way her mother used to hold squirming chickens before she cut off their heads.
But no. Instead, the girl reached behind Gigi and pulled at the double doors to the armoire until Gigi stumbled forward, out of the way.
She began rummaging through the coats and dresses, pausing as she held up each one on its hanger, before moving to the next.
She was looking for something, for a purpose.
Gigi swallowed to keep the vomit down, unable to tear her eyes away from the girl’s stiff arms, from the straw hat stained with mould or dirt.
She had first seen her just before she was dragged here.
Had she been an omen? A foreshadowing? Could Gigi have saved herself from this pain and humiliation if she had only understood the signs?
The faceless girl was pulling a dress off its hanger, the green taffeta with the full skirt.
She held it up to her body, and Gigi could see that its emerald green was richer and deeper than the green dress the girl wore, which was faded to a shabby muted shade, like stagnant pond water on an overcast day.
But even so, with her sewing eyes, Gigi could tell the dress would be a perfect fit.