by Tan Twan Eng
I went to a picture hanging on a wall, a watercolor of the home I had grown up in. My sister had painted it. It was the only work of hers I owned, the only one I had ever come across after the war. I lifted it off its hook and set it down by the door.
The stacks of manila folders tied with pink ribbons that normally crowded my desk had been reassigned to the other judges; the table seemed larger than usual when I sat down in my chair. The wooden stick was still lying where I had left it. Beyond the half-opened windows, dusk was summoning the crows to their roosts. The birds thickened the foliage of the angsana trees lining the road, filling the streets with their babble. Lifting the telephone receiver, I began dialing and then stopped, unable to recall the rest of the numbers. I paged through my address book, rang the main house in Majuba Tea Estate, and when a maid answered asked to speak to Frederik Pretorius. I did not have to wait long.
“Yun Ling?” he said when he came on the line, sounding slightly out of breath.
“I’m coming to Yugiri.”
Silence pressed down on the line. “When?”
“This Friday.” I paused. It had been seven months since we had last spoken to each other. “Will you tell Ah Cheong to have the house ready for me?”
“He’s always kept it ready for you,” Frederik replied. “But I’ll tell him. Stop by at the estate on the way. We can have some tea. I’ll drive you to Yugiri.”
“I haven’t forgotten how to get there, Frederik.”
Another stretch of silence connected us. “The monsoon’s over, but there’s still some rain. Drive carefully.” He hung up.
The call to prayer unwound from the minarets of the Jamek Mosque across the river to echo through the city. I listened to the courthouse empty itself. The sounds were so familiar to me that I had stopped paying attention to them years ago. The wheel of a trolley squeaked as someone—probably Rashid, the registrar’s clerk—pushed the day’s applications to the filing room. The telephone in another judge’s chambers rang for a minute, then gave up. The slam of doors echoed through the corridors; I had never realized how loud they sounded.
I picked up my briefcase and shook it once. It was lighter than usual. I packed my court robe into it. At the door I turned around to look at my chambers. I gripped the edge of the door frame, realizing that I would never again set foot in this room. The weakness passed. I switched off the lights but continued to stand there, gazing into the shadows. I picked up my sister’s watercolor and closed the door, working the handle a few times to make sure it was properly locked. Then I made my way along the dimly lit corridor. On one wall a gallery of former judges stared down at me, their faces changing from European to Malay and Chinese and Indian, from monochrome to color. I passed the empty space where my portrait would soon be added. At the end of the passageway I went down the stairs. Instead of turning left toward the judges’ exit to the car park, I went out to the courtyard garden.
This was the part of the court buildings I loved most. I would often come here to sit, to think through the legal problems of a judgment I was writing. Few of the judges ever came here and I usually had the place all to myself. Sometimes, if Karim, the gardener, happened to be working, I would speak with him for a short while, giving him advice on what to plant and what ought to be taken out. This evening I was alone.
The sprinklers came on, releasing the smell of the sun-roasted grass into the air. The leaves discarded by the guava tree in the center of the garden had been raked into a pile. Behind the courts, the Gombak and Klang rivers plaited together, silting the air with the smell of earth scoured from the mountains in the Titiwangsa range up north. Most people in Kuala Lumpur couldn’t bear the stench, especially when the river was running low between the monsoon seasons, but I had never minded that, in the heart of the city, I could smell the mountains over a hundred miles away.
I sat down on my usual bench and opened my senses to the stillness settling over the building, becoming a part of it.
After a while I stood up. There was something missing from the garden. Walking over to the mound of leaves, I grabbed a few handfuls and scattered them randomly over the lawn. Brushing off the bits of leaves sticking to my hands, I stepped away from the grass. Yes, it looked better now. Much better.
Swallows swooped from their nests in the eaves, the tips of their wings brushing past my head. I thought of a limestone cave I had once been to, high in the mountains. Carrying my briefcase and the watercolor, I walked out of the courtyard. In the sky above me, the last line of prayer from the mosque drifted away, leaving only silence where its echo had been.
Yugiri lay seven miles west of Tanah Rata, the second of the three main villages on the road going up to Cameron Highlands. I arrived there after a four-hour drive from Kuala Lumpur. I was in no hurry, stopping at various places along the way. Every few miles I would pass a roadside stall selling cloudy bottles of wild honey and blowpipes and bunches of foul-smelling petai beans. The road had been widened considerably since I last used it, the sharper turns smoothed out, but there were too many cars and tour buses, too many incontinent lorries leaking gravel and cement as they made their way to another construction site in the highlands.
It was the last week of September, the rainy season hovering around the mountains. Entering Tanah Rata, the sight of the former Royal Army Hospital standing on a steep rise filled me with a sense of familiar disquiet; Frederik had told me some time ago that it was now a school. A new hotel, with the inevitable mock-Tudor facade, towered behind it. Tanah Rata was no longer a village but a little town, its main street taken over by steamboat restaurants and tour agencies and souvenir shops. I was glad to leave them all behind me.
The guard was closing the wrought iron gates of Majuba Tea Estate when I drove past. I kept to the main road for half a mile before realizing that I had missed the turn-off to Yugiri. Annoyed with myself, I swung the car around, driving more slowly until I found the turning, hidden by advertisement boards. The laterite road ended a few minutes later at Yugiri’s entrance. A Land Rover was parked by the roadside. I stopped my car next to it and got out, kicking the stiffness from my legs.
The high wall protecting the garden was patched in moss and old water stains. Ferns grew from the cracks. Set into the wall was a door. Nailed by the doorpost was a wooden plaque, a pair of Japanese ideograms burned into it. Below these words was the garden’s name in English: EVENING MISTS. I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.
Looking above the top of the wall, my eyes followed the uneven tree line of the ridge rising behind the garden. I found the wooden viewing tower half-hidden in the trees, like the crow’s nest of a galleon that had foundered among the branches, trapped by a tide of leaves. A path threaded up into the mountains and for a few moments I stared at it, as if I might glimpse Aritomo walking home. Shaking my head, I pushed the door open, entered the garden and closed it behind me.
The sounds of the world outside faded away, absorbed into the leaves. I stood there, not moving. For a moment I felt that nothing had changed since I was last here, almost thirty-five years before—the scent of pine resin sticking to the air, the bamboo creaking and knocking in the breeze, the broken mosaic of sunlight scattered over the ground.
Guided by memory’s compass, I began to walk into the garden. I made one or two wrong turns but came eventually to the pond. I stopped, the twisting walk through the tunnel of trees heightening the effect of seeing the open sky over the water.
Six tall, narrow stones huddled into a miniature limestone mountain range in the center of the pond. On the opposite bank stood the pavilion, duplicated in the water so that it appeared like a paper lantern hanging in midair. A willow grew a few feet away from the pavilion’s side, its branches sipping from the pond.
In the shallows, a gray heron cocked its head at me, one leg poised in the air, like the hand of a pianist who had forgotten the notes to his music. It dropped its leg a second later and speared
its beak into the water. Was it a descendant of the one that had made its home here when I first came to Yugiri? Frederik had told me that there was always one in the garden—an unbroken chain of solitary birds. I knew it could not be the same bird from nearly forty years before, but as I watched it, I hoped that it was; I wanted to believe that by entering this sanctuary the heron had somehow managed to slip through the fingers of time.
To my right and at the top of an incline stood Aritomo’s house. Lights shone from the windows, the kitchen chimney scribbling smoke over the treetops. A man appeared at the front door and walked down the slope toward me. He stopped a few paces away, perhaps to create a space for us to study one another. We are like every single plant and stone and view in the garden, I thought, the distance between one another carefully measured.
“I thought you’d changed your mind,” he said, closing the space between us.
“The drive was longer than I remembered.”
“Places seem farther apart, don’t they, the older we get.”
At sixty-seven years old, Frederik Pretorius had the dignified air given off by an antique artwork, secure in the knowledge of its own rarity and value. We had kept in touch over the years, meeting up for drinks or a meal whenever he came down to Kuala Lumpur, but I had always resisted his invitations to visit Cameron Highlands. In the last two or three years his trips to KL had tapered off. Long ago I had realized that he was the only close friend I would ever have.
“The way you were watching that bird just now,” he said, “I felt you were looking back to the past.”
I turned to look at the heron again. The bird had moved farther out into the pond. Mist escaped from the water’s surface, whispers only the wind could catch. “I was thinking of the old days.”
“For a second or two there I thought you were about to fade away.” He stopped, then said, “I wanted to call out to you.”
“I’ve retired from the Bench.” It was the first time I had said it aloud to another person. Something seemed to detach from inside me and crumble away, leaving me less complete than before.
“I saw it in yesterday’s papers,” said Frederik.
“That photograph they took of me was dreadful, utterly dreadful.”
The lights in the garden came on, dizzying the flying insects. A frog croaked. A few other frogs took up the call and then more still until the air and earth vibrated with a thousand gargles.
“Ah Cheong’s gone home,” said Frederik. “He’ll come tomorrow morning. I brought you some groceries. I imagine you haven’t had time to go to the shops yet.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you.”
“There’s something I need to discuss with you. Perhaps tomorrow morning, if you’re up to it?”
“I’m an early riser.”
“I haven’t forgotten.” His eyes hovered over my face. “You’re going to be all right on your own?”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He looked unconvinced but nodded. Then he turned and walked away, taking the path I had just come along, and disappeared into the shadows beneath the trees.
In the pond, the heron shook out its wings, tested them a few times and flew off. It circled the area once, gliding past me. At the end of its loop the bird opened its wings wide and followed the trail of stars that were just appearing. I stood there, my face turned upward, watching it dissolve into the twilight.
Returning to my bedroom, I remember the plate of papaya Ah Cheong brought me. I make myself eat the remaining slices, then unpack my bags and hang my clothes in the cupboard. In the last few years I have heard people complaining that the highlands’ climate is no longer as cool as it used to be, but I decide to put on a cardigan anyway.
The house is dark when I emerge from my room, and I have to remember my way along the twisting corridors. The tatami mats in the sitting room crackle softly when I walk on them, parched of oil from the press of bare soles. The doors to the verandah are open. Ah Cheong has placed a low, square table here, with thin rattan mats on each side of it. Below the verandah, five dark gray rocks, spaced apart, sit on a rectangular bed of gravel covered in leaves. One of the rocks is positioned further away from the others. Beyond this area, the ground slopes gently away to the edge of the pond.
Frederik arrives, looking unhappy about having to sit on the floor. He drops a manila folder onto the table and lowers his body into a cross-legged position, wincing as he makes himself comfortable on the mat.
“Does it feel strange to be back here?” he asks.
“Everywhere I turn, I hear echoes of sounds made long ago.”
“I hear them too.”
He unties the string around the folder and arranges a sheaf of papers on the table. “The designs for our latest range. This one here”—a forefinger skates a sheet across the table’s lacquered surface to me—“this is for the packaging.”
The emblem used in the illustrations is familiar; what initially appear to be the veins of a tea leaf transform into a detailed drawing of the valleys, with Majuba House mazed into the lines.
“From the woodblock print Aritomo gave Magnus?” I say.
“I’d like to use it,” Frederik says. “I’ll pay you, of course—royalties, I mean.”
Aritomo had bequeathed Yugiri and the copyright in all his literary and artistic works to me. With rare exceptions I have never allowed anyone to reproduce them. “Use it,” I say. “I don’t want any payment.”
He does not hide his surprise.
“How is Emily?” I cut him off before he speaks. “She must be what, eighty-eight?” I strive to remember how old his aunt was when I met her all those years ago.
“She’ll have a fit if she hears that. She turned eighty-five this year.” He hesitates. “She’s not well. Some days her memory would shame an elephant’s, but there are also days . . .” His voice tapers away into a sigh.
“I’ll see her once I’ve settled in.” I know that Emily, like so many older Chinese, places great importance on having a younger person visit them first, to give them face.
“You’d better. I’ve told her you’re back.”
I wave a hand out to the garden. “Your workers have been taking good care of Yugiri.”
“Judges aren’t supposed to lie.” The smile on Frederik’s face sinks away a second later. “We both know my boys don’t have the skills to maintain it. And besides, as I keep telling you, I honestly don’t have the knowledge—or the interest, or the time—to make sure they do their work properly. The garden needs your attention.” He stops, then says, “By the way, I’ve decided to make some changes to Majuba’s garden.”
“What kind of changes?”
“I’ve hired a landscape gardener to help me,” Frederik says. “Vimalya started her gardening service in Tanah Rata a year ago. She’s very much a fan of indigenous gardens.”
“Following the trend.” I do not bother to sieve the disdain from my voice.
His face twitches with annoyance. “We’re going back to everything nature intended. We’re using plants and trees native to the region. We’ll let them grow the way they would have done in the wild, with as little human assistance—or interference—as possible.”
“You’re removing all the pine trees in Majuba? And the firs, the eucalyptuses . . . the roses, the irises . . . the . . . the strelitzias?”
“They’re alien. All of them.”
“So is every single tea bush here. So am I. And so are you, Mr. Pretorius. Especially you.”
It is none of my concern, I know, but for almost sixty years, ever since Frederik’s uncle Magnus established Majuba Tea Estate, its formal gardens have been admired and loved. Visitors have been coming from all over the country to enjoy an English garden in the tropics. They walk among the meticulously shaped hedges and voluptuous flower beds, the herbaceous borders and the roses Emily planted. It pains me to hear that the garden is to be transformed, made to appear as though it forms part of the tropical rain forest crowding
in around us—overgrown and unkempt and lacking any order.
“I’ve told you before, a long time ago—Majuba’s gardens are too artificial. The older I get, the more I don’t believe in having nature controlled. Trees should be allowed to grow as they please.” Frederik swings his gaze to the garden. “If it were up to me, all of this would be taken out.”
“What is gardening but the controlling and perfecting of nature?” I am aware my voice is rising. “When you talk about ‘indigenous gardening,’ or whatever it’s called, you already have man involved. You dig out beds, you chop down trees, and you bring in seeds and cuttings. It all sounds very much planned to me.”
“Gardens like Yugiri’s are deceptive. They’re false. Everything here has been thought out and shaped and built. We’re sitting in one of the most artificial places you can find.”
Sparrows rise from the grass into the trees, like fallen leaves returning to their branches. I think about those elements of gardening Frederik is opposed to, aspects so loved by the Japanese—the techniques of controlling nature, perfected over a thousand years. Was it because they lived in lands so regularly rocked by earthquakes and natural calamities that they sought to tame the world around them? My eyes move to the sitting room, to the bonsai of a pine tree that Ah Cheong has so faithfully looked after. The immense trunk the pine would have grown into is now constrained to a size that would not look out of place on a scholar’s desk, trained to the desired shape by copper wire coiled around its branches. There are some people, like Frederik, who might feel that such practices are misguided, like trying to wield heaven’s powers on earth. And yet it was only in the carefully planned and created garden of Yugiri that I had found a sense of order and calm and even, for a brief moment of time, forgetfulness.