“Ida, good-bye!” Jade shouted, her voice hoarse from the effort, and then drew back in. Immediately someone closed the window.
Ida looked up at the spot in confusion. Why was Jade saying good-bye?
But Jade had not gone anywhere. When night came, she appeared with her mother again at the bar. Mother and daughter looked serious, even somewhat desolate. But the owner was dressed in formal wear, with a bowtie, and beaming with high spirits. Who would have thought he bent to the ground to listen to books?
In the main hall, from a dim corner, came a voice that made Ida’s heart leap and her flesh twitch. It was Reagan, Reagan was calling her; Ida heard him clearly.
“I’d like a brandy,” said the stranger, who was sitting with a companion.
The world, after all, could have voices as similar as this.
“Miss, please look over to the right.” He spoke again.
Ida saw a mouse on the wall. It squatted, gnawing, on the head of a deer. The sound of its tiny teeth scraping the bone was clear and piercing. Ida stared, the menus in her hand falling to the ground. She thought distinctly that she had seen this sight somewhere before, many years ago, with rain and seawater. It also had something to do with a strange man. But it wasn’t the man in front of her. This man’s voice sounded near to her ear: “Manila, Manila, floodwaters cover the open fields.” She turned, but the two men at the table were no longer to be seen.
Jade came to her side and, leaning toward her, spoke: “Now we both have fallen into a cavern. Such an exciting night. Haven’t you been out to see the sky? Right now the sky is purple and red.”
Jade finished speaking and bent down, picked up the menus and handed them to Ida, then went to wait on guests. Ida observed in her movements as before a kind of bodily longing, just like the snakes in the wild. Where had her guests gone? There really was not the slightest trace left behind. Ida’s heart shrank a little in pain. She thought, once again, that she had finally escaped Mr. Reagan’s clutches, and perhaps because of this he sent his voice to cover the whole earth. The earth, after all, held a man this infatuated.
She attended to many guests. They all wore numb expressions, with a look of pretending to listen to the music. There was a woman whose jacket button unexpectedly fell off. She bent down to feel along the ground, filling her whole hand with dust. The man who’d come with her also helped her look. He shone a flashlight underneath the table for a long while, so long it seemed undignified. Now the guests close by all walked over to look, surrounding them in a semicircle. The man started crawling on the ground like a cat. He crawled through the empty spaces between the tables, with people giving way in turns.
“A dropped button amounts to upsetting the whole arrangement.”
A woman wearing a dark-red coat said this in a low voice. Ida observed her excited eyes gleaming.
Ida was not herself. Wanting to avoid these people, she gathered the plates from a table and went into the kitchen. The cook at first was busy in front of the flame. When she heard Ida enter, she stopped the work in hand and turned around to face her. There was a buzzing weng in Ida’s brain. Was this Ali?
“I didn’t know you were here, that you worked here,” she said, stammering.
“Are you new here? I heard there was a new person who’d come, but I hadn’t met her. So it’s you! It’s good that you’ve come, though the work here isn’t easy to get used to.”
Ida was relieved. It wasn’t Ali. She only resembled her a great deal.
“Oh, I made a mistake. But have you worked in a place like that before?”
“Are you talking about the rubber tree plantation? Of course, fat people like me have all worked in that kind of place. The scorching climate was unbearable for me. Besides, I thought there were too many snakes. They even got into the refrigerators. I would rather be here, missing that place, than stay there myself. I left ten years ago.”
She guardedly looked toward the kitchen door, then walked over, closed it tightly, turned back and sat on a small wooden stool to peel potatoes. After a bit someone knocked at the door. She pursed her lips at Ida, saying: “Don’t pay attention, it’s the bar owner wanting to come in. Once he comes in he adds salt to the meat pies, he says it’s to test the customers’ sensitivity. He’s really insane. I think his opening this bar was an insane gesture, don’t you, Ida?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.” Ida listened to the owner’s anxious yells.
“Lunatic, a complete lunatic! He wants to go back to that army camp!” The cook turned her fat body around indignantly, and waved a spatula menacingly at the door.
“Army camp?”
“Yes. Couldn’t someone like him only have come from somewhere like that? A well-trained soldier. You haven’t noticed that the atmosphere in this bar is like an army camp? This is a place that levels individuality.”
She put down the spatula and stood there, huffing, clearly not working. Ida thought she was like an angry child. She reminded her of a penguin. In the kitchen, sounds from outside couldn’t be heard, so it was a completely different scene. Someone was poking his head in at the window. It was Jade’s boyfriend. What was he planning to ask about here? He looked extremely haggard standing under the lamp in the yard like a ghost.
“But someone like this boy ought to go to an army camp for training,” the cook said.
Ida finally understood that Mr. Reagan was inescapable. In this unusual bar, far from the farm, Ida’s mood had changed. She didn’t think of returning to the farm at all. The place where she wanted to return was her old home. In her imagination it was a vague shadow. Actually, she didn’t want to take a train there, either. She wanted to take a shortcut, and the shortcut was one of those dark holes in the bar that Jade had told her about.
One day, when music reverberated throughout the bar, Jade guided her into a dark hole. At the time they stood in the backyard talking. There was no rain, intermittent gusts of cool wind blew across the sky, the moonlight appeared clammy. By a pagoda tree someone whistled a hackneyed love song, flirtatiously. Suddenly Jade pressed a hand forcefully on her shoulder. Ida’s feet slid, then she fell with Jade into a hole.
Ah, she was overwhelmed with so many thoughts and feelings! Thunderclaps and the smell of the damp mud immediately surrounded her. The sound of shouts spread out indistinctly from somewhere. They were all familiar voices. Jade was not in the same hole as she, but in one next to her. When Ida called, she made a muddled echo, as if she were almost asleep. Surely Ida stood on the mud of her hometown. That softness could not be forgotten in a lifetime. The rain carried a thick fish smell, and it fell without stopping. Soon her hair was wet through. By her ear, a man from her hometown said: “Manila, Manila, floodwaters cover the open fields.” She remembered that she’d recently heard someone speak this same sentence. At this moment, she deeply sensed that the people of her hometown had an instinct for quick adaptation. Otherwise, in a place constantly assaulted by mountain floods, how could a race survive? Those people taking the night road, how forceful their steps were, with almost every step holding tight to the pulse of the land.
“Ida, Ida, have you seen the burning clouds of sunrise?” Jade mumbled in a low voice off to the side.
The music swelled, and the smell of the tropical rainforest grew thin. But a rooster still crowed at the light, starting and stopping, crowing and crowing.
Jade’s hard, nervous fingers hooked Ida’s fingers. They stood shoulder to shoulder. A man and woman, both drunk, supported each other home. Jade said that they had a long journey to make.
“They are returning to a house with a dungeon,” Jade told her.