A Different Sky (66 page)

‘She might have gone underground with someone; nowadays communists live underground,' Howard suggested, noting the purple shadows beneath Little Sparrow's eyes, as she looked up at him in new desperation. The very word ‘underground' caused Little Sparrow to panic; she imagined her child wedged into a deep, dark burrow.

Howard pitched forward, stumbling on the rutted surface of Middle Road. He steadied himself and walked on, looking up at the mass of signboards plastering the filthy peeling arches of the five-foot way. A beggar and two half-naked children poked about for food in a pile of rubbish, yellow-legged Myna birds rummaging beside them.

With the Japanese gone, Middle Road was now the enclave of trade unions, the subversive heartland of the town. A few brothels, photographers and ten-cent stores now under Chinese ownership remained, but the many small restaurants and food stalls serviced the union offices of Middle Road. At last Howard saw a sign for the Singapore Factory and Shop Workers' Union, and climbed the stairs to the second floor of the narrow building. In a room with dirty plaster walls and warped floorboards he found uniformed schoolboys, some sitting around a table, heads bent industriously to paperwork, others clearing cobwebs from the ceiling with long-handled brooms. A stack
of blankets in a corner gave Howard the impression that some of these young men might be living there. At the back of the room, behind a desk, sat Wee Jack. Howard's heart lurched uncomfortably at the sight of him.

Wee Jack crossed the room to greet Howard and called for one of the schoolboys to bring them drinks from a crate of bottles by the window. Although there were several older men in the room, Howard was surprised to see so many schoolchildren, and thought of the reason he had come to Middle Road with renewed concern.

‘They come after school of their own accord to help.' Wee Jack followed Howard's gaze and seemed to read his thoughts.

‘You catch them young,' Howard replied.

Wee Jack gave a derisive smile. Years of deprivation had emaciated him and his cough now sounded even more tubercular. His sunken eyes stared fixedly at Howard from beneath a receded hairline. Wee Jack was now a paid official of the Singapore Bus Workers' Union and was prominently linked to Lim Chin Siong and other radicals amongst the agitators. His name was often mentioned in the newspapers in connection with unsavoury goings-on. Howard was thirsty, and quickly finished the orangeade. Even as he sat before Wee Jack he struggled to feel free of him, returning the man's assessing gaze as determinedly as he could. Finally, Wee Jack shrugged in apparent defeat, and reluctantly divulged the information for which Howard had journeyed to Middle Road.

‘I could find out very little about the girl,' Wee Jack told him casually, sipping at the fiercely coloured orange juice, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down.

‘All I know is that she may be with a man they call Snakehead. It is difficult to keep track of young people once they have gone underground.' Wee Jack pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, clicking his fingers to one of the schoolboys, who ran forward with a match.

‘Her mother is worried,' Howard said, irritated by Wee Jack's superior manner.

‘Nowadays, many mothers are worried about their children,' Wee Jack replied, looking coldly at Howard.

Underground for Greta was not a dark burrow but a vermicelli factory on Coronation Road. Snakehead moved frequently to avoid detection
and arrest. Before the vermicelli factory they had hidden in a rattan shop on the outskirts of the shanty town, Holland Village, in a crumbling
kampong
hut, and later in the servants' quarters of a large colonial style bungalow. The Hock Lee bus riot had thrown Greta abruptly from a world of teenage rebellion into a world of professional revolutionaries. If Snakehead had not taken her hand and pulled her after him in the chaos that followed Moon's shooting, she would have been arrested. For the first time she began to understand the single-mindedness of the committed.

Wherever they went, Snakehead's typewriter soon appeared, smuggled to him in the dead of night so that, in each safe house, he could continue to manufacture inflammatory articles for
Freedom News
. In each place different comrades joined them, sometimes a ‘mother', sometimes a ‘brother' or a ‘sister', so that to the outside world they appeared always an innocuous ‘family'. In return for safety in the community, the comrades gave classes in Chinese culture. They visited the sick, distributed food and medicine and mediated in domestic disputes, and spread communist propaganda wherever they went. Comrades also helped Snakehead relay his articles back to
Freedom News
's secret underground printing press. Greta was unused to the filth that was common to all the wretched hiding places they were forced to use. She thought of her room in the East Coast house with nostalgia. The pungent stench of toilet shacks, the eating bowls encrusted with the remnants of previous meals, and the filthy sleeping mats filled with armies of bedbugs, distressed her. Snakehead, who had grown up in a hovel with twelve siblings and only one meal every other day, was used to such things and chastised her.

‘This is the truth behind the revolution, this is what it is about, not picnics and shouting and
yenko
dancing,' he told her scornfully.

However often they moved about the insalubrious hiding places, her role was always the same: she was Snakehead's wife, washing and cleaning and cooking for him. If she had to be anyone's wife she would have preferred to be Moon's wife, but he was dead. Greta had lost count of the number of days she had been on the run with Snakehead. Although he was her ‘husband' by Party orders, he did not lay a hand upon her. Instead, he stared at her with as much dislike as she had come to feel for him. Neither of them had been free to go to Moon's funeral: as a martyr of the riot, he had been carried to his grave on
a decorated truck with hundreds of students and trade unionists streaming behind. In all the safe houses Snakehead had regular visitors, undercover contacts from the Middle School Action Committee who passed Party information between a network of hideouts and message drops. These contacts were usually dressed as fruit or vegetable sellers.

Greta had arrived at the vermicelli factory the night before with Snakehead, trudging the country road in the dark to avoid detection. The danger of arrest was ever present, and Snakehead was vigilant in watching for the spies with which he said the countryside was riddled. The vermicelli factory had been reached after midnight, and in the darkness all Greta could make out were a few crumbling attap-roofed shacks. On their arrival, a mangy dog sleeping in the yard set up a fierce wall of barking. Inside, she was shown a heap of foul rags to sleep upon, and was too tired to complain.

As light cracked open the sky Snakehead prodded her awake. As ‘daughter-in-law' of the vermicelli factory she must prepare breakfast for the family. Her ‘mother-in-law' looked her up and down and laughed. Children seemed to be everywhere; the woman bellowed constantly at them. The two oldest girls, no more than eight or nine, had younger children strapped to their backs with winding cloths, and continued to skip about their games despite their cumbersome burdens. After a meal, Snakehead went out and Greta was glad to be free of him. The woman set her to wash clothes in a yard surrounded by straggly trees and a thick fence of dwarf banana. Snakehead assured her that if she did not obey instructions it was no great matter to dispose of her, and she believed him.

She squatted down by the pump with a tin tub and a bar of hard soap. The wooden clogs she had been given were uncomfortable, the clothes in the tub were of hard thick fabric and the soap did not lather easily. Chickens pecked about her, the sun burned down on her back. She remembered her mother screaming that the sun would darken her skin and make her so ugly no one would marry her. At the thought of her mother she wanted to cry; it was possible she might never see her again. Behind the vermicelli shed was a pigsty from which came much grunting and squealing; beside it was a large covered pit of animal and human deposits. The smell from this slurry was overpowering, making her retch as she set about washing the clothes.

Under a lean-to beside the pump, large wooden vats of water mirrored her face; beneath the surface long skeins of vermicelli floated limply, like dead worms. In the shed men were already at work, kneading glutinous dough for the noodles. As she squatted down before the washtub, she watched her ‘father-in-law' swing the dough with expert abandon. Long strands were formed, which grew thinner and thinner the more he twirled them about. Immersed in scrubbing clothes, trying to work up lather from the rock-like soap, she did not hear Snakehead calling as he came in at the gate. He walked straight up to Greta with a determined expression; in his arms he carried a baby.

‘This is your child,' Snakehead said, thrusting the child at her. The infant, who was about six months old, drew back to look at her with startled eyes before beginning to scream. The weight of its small body of tightly packed bones rested in the crook of her arm.

‘It is better that we have children,' Snakehead announced. Greta wanted to speak, but no words came. The baby flailed about and she jiggled it up and down as she had seen mothers do to quieten an infant.

‘It's a girl,' Snakehead clarified. The child was indeterminately dressed in a loose top and trousers and its hair had been shaved close to its head in an effort to rid it of lice.

‘I don't know what to do with a baby,' she answered with new desperation. The child squirmed in her arms. If she dropped it, she thought, its head would break open like a cracked egg and all its brains would pour out.

‘You will learn, like all new mothers. It cost $200 of Party funds,' he replied as he turned away. The baby continued to scream, filling her ears until she felt they would burst. Behind her the piglets in the sty set up a new round of squealing.

The child was soon sodden and stinking. Greta sat in a corner of the hut with her head on her drawn-up knees and the child on a mat beside her, still screaming. She had no idea what to do with it, but marvelled that so much energy could be released from so small a bundle.

‘Probably it is hungry,' the wife of the vermicelli manufacturer said, arms on her hips, sighing in exasperation. ‘Probably it is not yet weaned and is expecting a breast to feed from,' she observed with a further sigh.

‘What am I to do about that?' Greta shouted angrily, her eyes filling with tears.

‘We will give it some diluted condensed milk and hope it will take it. You should always buy a baby weaned. It also needs a new cloth about its bottom. You will have to wash the cloths every day,' the woman replied. She was a gaunt and poker-faced woman, but had softened a little before the baby.

From the next day the baby was tied to Greta's back with long knitted strings. Its weight was forever upon her as she washed the clothes and cut up the vegetables, and picked insects from raw rice. The child snuffled in her ear all day, its tears wetting the back of her neck. Worst of all were the stinking cloths about its small hips filled with warm, squashed excrement that she must change and wash. Condensed milk, either diluted or undiluted, was not to the baby's taste and it protested ceaselessly. After three days it began to look sickly. It cried less, and its face acquired a translucent sheen.

‘If it's put back on the breast it will be all right,' Greta's ‘mother-in-law' decided and approached Snakehead determinedly.

‘It's starving to death. You will have to give it back. Buy another, one year older and weaned,' she told him.

‘I have paid $200 for it, and I will have to pay the mother all over again to give it back,' he grumbled.

‘It is Party funds and the Party has plenty. Look at how many they have bought for me,' the woman argued, gesturing to the children playing about her. Snakehead snatched the baby roughly from Greta, and with a fierce expression marched out of the yard towards the road.

He had covered no more than a few yards when he came face to face with a group of men walking towards him down the lane. Snakehead stopped and ran back to Greta, thrusting the screaming child into her arms before disappearing around the side of the house followed by her ‘mother-in-law'. Only the children continued to skip about, absorbed in their play, small siblings bumping about on their backs, some sound asleep through it all.

The men hurried into the yard. One approached Greta and took her arm so roughly she almost dropped the screaming baby, whose open mouth now seemed to consume its whole face. She could see its soft, toothless gums and the tunnel of its small red throat. The strange men were running about everywhere, and soon dragged Greta's ‘mother-in-law' and ‘father-in-law' and all the vermicelli workers into the yard. The children had ceased to play, and stood about nervously waiting
to see what would happen. A van appeared and the back doors were opened. They were all encouraged to climb inside, including the waiting children.

‘What is happening?' Greta whispered to her ‘mother-in-law'. She clung in fear to the baby who, as if understanding the seriousness of the occasion, had stopped screaming and was looking with interest at the faces about her.

‘We're being arrested,' Greta's ‘mother-in-law' replied, climbing into the van behind her ‘husband'. The excited children struggled to climb in after her, agog at their first car ride.

There was no sign of Snakehead. Greta looked desperately about, not knowing what she should do; there seemed no choice but to follow the others into the van. From the pigsty there was a continuous loud squealing; looking over her shoulder Greta noticed the pigs were running about in agitation. The slurry was partially covered, but in the gap beneath its slatted wooden lid and the top of the pit she could just make out Snakehead's anxious face. He stared at her in mute appeal, hidden up to his chin in excrement. It was all she could do not to laugh.