Dear Small Cloud,
I received news of you through our courier. I hope that you will be able to learn useful things for us, since you are now in a doctor’s household. We need nursing care, some of our comrades have been quite ill lately. I am glad my sister stayed with you. Of course I shall not believe any rumours until I see you, when you return for the Festival, and we meet.
Sen

Thus the small, vulnerable, perhaps trivial secret, which was all of Ah Mei’s life so far, was a secret no longer, and now it seemed, without astonishment, I had always known Ah Mei to be Small Cloud. I had known of Sen, if not his name, since that day many months ago, when Ah Mei had blushed and cried: ‘The best ones never surrender, never.’ Ah Mei might have confessed, and revealed and informed, and reported on everyone, but not on Sen, not on Small Cloud, that part of her, that other she, in the jungle with Sen. Not on her love, if that was love. She had kept this one thing safe.

But now to save herself, she would betray that too, write another confession, detail more information. This time it would be final. There would be nothing left.

And so the hidden passion still alive that had come once, and once only, to the surface, would be extinguished at last. Ah Mei herself would put it out.

I waited for the police to come, with the cigarette paper in my hand, and I was dry and desolate, emptied of pity or compassion, knowing at last that there are places on the earth, in time and space, where is no space nor time, nor light nor air, nor any ground to grow for the strange weed called love.

1. Makan angin: eat the wind, equivalent of the French: prendre l’air. ↵

13

TO RE-BEHOLD EACH STAR

Pang, the young and brilliant detective, brought Ah Mei back one morning. In spite of the rumours about him, I maintained a strange liking for Pang. His good looks, the laughing devilry of his eyes, the sinister gentleness of his voice when he interrogated a suspect fascinated me. Round him eddied the ugliest whispers: of beatings and of blackmail, of extortion and even, in the past, of a raping or two … but these wraiths vanished, when he appeared, as figures visioned in a mist dispel themselves when one draws nearer their unsubstantialness.

I decided that what I liked about Pang was his candid ruthless-ness, as one admires a pacing tiger through bars, so long as there are bars. Tigers here are not the limp and dreary eunuchs of zoos in colder climates. They come fresh from the jungle. About them hangs a loose, bright tremor of passion and restlessness, which long captivity will destroy.