by Tan Twan Eng
I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void.
Once I lose all ability to communicate with the world outside myself, nothing will be left but what I remember. My memories will be like a sandbar, cut off from the shore by the incoming tide. In time they will become submerged, inaccessible to me. The prospect terrifies me. For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.
Frederik’s suggestion that I write down the things I do not want to forget has rooted itself into the crevices of my mind. It is futile, I know, but a part of me wants to make sure that, when the time comes, I will still have something that gives me the possibility, however meager, to orient myself, to help me determine what is real.
Sitting at Aritomo’s desk, I realize that there are fragments of my life that I do not want to lose, if only because I still have not found the knot to tie them up with.
When I have forgotten everything else, will I finally have the clarity to see what Aritomo and I have been to each other? If I can still read my own words by then, with no knowledge of who had set them down onto the page, will the answers come to me?
Outside, the mountains have been drawn into the garden, becoming a part of it. Aritomo was a master of shakkei, the art of Borrowed Scenery, taking elements and views from outside a garden and making them integral to his creation.
A memory drifts by. I reach for it, as if I am snatching at a leaf spiraling down from a high branch. I have to. Who knows if it will ever come back to me again?
During the Emergency, some of the people who were given a private tour of Majuba Tea Estate would also ask to see Yugiri. And sometimes Aritomo allowed it. On such occasions, I would be waiting for them at the main entrance. Most of the visitors were senior government officials taking a holiday with their wives in Cameron Highlands before going back to waging war on the communist terrorists hiding in the jungles. They had heard about the garden in the mountains and wanted to see it for themselves, to boast to their friends that they had been one of the privileged few to have walked in it. Murmurs of anticipation would warm the air as I welcomed the group. “What does ‘Yugiri’ mean?” someone—usually one of the wives—would ask, and I would answer them, “Evening Mists.”
And if the hour was right and the light willing, they might even catch a glimpse of Aritomo, dressed in his gray yukata and hakama, raking out lines on white gravel, moving as if he were practicing calligraphy on stone. Observing the expressions on the visitors’ faces, I knew that some, if not all of them, were wondering if their eyes had made a mistake, if they were seeing something that should not have been there. That same notion had entered my mind the first time I saw Aritomo.
He never accompanied these people on the tour of his garden, preferring that I entertain them. But he would stop what he was doing and talk to the visitors when I introduced him to them. I was certain that the questions had all been asked before, over the long years since he had first come to these mountains. Nevertheless, he would answer them patiently, with no hint of weariness that I could detect. “That is correct,” he would tell them, prefacing his answers with a slight bow. “I was the emperor’s gardener. But that was in a different lifetime.”
Invariably, someone would inquire as to why he had given it all up to come to Malaya. A puzzled look would spread across Aritomo’s face, as though he had never been asked that particular question before. I would catch the flit of pain in his eyes and, for a few moments, we would hear nothing except the birds calling out in the trees. Then he would give a short laugh and say, “Perhaps someday, before I cross the floating bridge of dreams, I will discover the reason. I will tell you then.”
On a few occasions one of the visitors—usually someone who had fought in the war, or, like me, had been imprisoned in one of the Japanese camps—would grow belligerent; I could always tell who these would be, even before they opened their mouths to speak. Aritomo’s eyes would become arctic, the ends of his mouth curving downward. But he would always remain polite, bracketing all his answers with a bow before walking away from us.
Despite the intrusive questions, I had always felt there were times when Aritomo liked to think that he, too, was one of the reasons people came to visit Yugiri, that they hoped for a sight of him, as though he were a rare and unusual wild orchid not to be found anywhere else in Malaya. Perhaps that was why, in spite of his dislike of them, Aritomo had never stopped me from introducing the visitors to him, and why he was always dressed in his traditional clothes whenever he knew a group would be coming to see his garden.
Ah Cheong has already gone home. The house is still. Leaning back in the chair, I close my eyes. Images fly across my vision. A flag flutters in the wind. A waterwheel turns. A pair of cranes take off over a lake, hauling themselves with beating wings higher and higher into the sky, heading into the sun.
The world seems different, somehow, when I open my eyes again. Clearer, more defined, but also smaller.
It will not be very much different from writing a judgment, I tell myself. I will find the words I require; they are nothing more than the tools that I have used all of my life. From the chambers of my memory I will draw out and set down all recollections of the time I spent with Aritomo. I will dance to the music of words, for one more time.
Through the windows I watch the mists thicken, wiping away the mountains borrowed by the garden. Are the mists, too, an element of shakkei incorporated by Aritomo? I wonder. To use not only the mountains, but the wind, the clouds, the ever-changing light? Did he borrow from heaven itself?
CHAPTER THREE
My name is Teoh Yun Ling. I was born in 1923 in Penang, an island on the northwest coast of Malaya. Being Straits Chinese, my parents spoke mainly English, and they had asked a family friend who was a poet to choose a name for me. Teoh is my surname, my family name. As in life, the family must come first. That was what I had always been taught. I had never changed the order of my name, not even when I studied in England, and I had never taken on an English name just to make it easier for anyone.
I came to Majuba Tea Estate on the sixth of October, 1951. My train was two hours late pulling into the Tapah Road station, so I was relieved when I glimpsed Magnus Pretorius from the window of my carriage. He was sitting on a bench, a newspaper folded on his lap, and he stood up as the train came to a stop. He was the only man on the platform with an eye-patch. I stepped down from the carriage and waved to him. I walked past the Wickham Trolley carrying the two soldiers manning the machine guns mounted on it; the armored wagon had escorted the train from the moment we had left Kuala Lumpur. Sweat plastered my cotton blouse to my back as I pushed through the crowd of young Australian soldiers in khaki uniforms, ignoring their whistles and the looks they gave me.
Magnus scattered the Tamil porters mobbing me. “Yun Ling,” he said, taking my bag. “Is this all your barang?”
“I’m only staying a week.”
He was in his late sixties, although he looked ten years younger. Taller than me by half a foot, he carried the excess weight so common in men his age well. He was balding, the hair around the sides of his head white, his remaining eye mired in wrinkles, but startlingly blue.
“Sorry you had to wait, Magnus,” I said. “We had to stop for endless checks. I think the police were tipped off about an ambush.”
“Ag, I knew you’d be late.” His accent—the vowels flattened and truncated—was distinct even after forty-odd years in Malaya. “The stationmaster made an announcement. Lucky there wasn’t an attack, hey?” I followed him through a gate in the barbed-wire fence surrounding the train station, to an olive-green Land Rover parked under a stand of mango trees. Magnus swung my bag into the backseat; we climbed in and drove off.
Above the limestone hills in the distance, heavy clouds were gathering to hammer the earth with rain later in the evening. The main street of Tapah was quiet, and the wooden blinds of the Chinese shoph
ouses—painted with advertisements for Poh Chai indigestion pills and Tiger Balm ointment—were lowered against the afternoon sun. At the junction turning into the trunk road, Magnus stopped for military vehicles speeding past: scout cars with gun turrets, boxy armored personnel carriers and lorries packed with soldiers. They were heading south, toward Kuala Lumpur.
“Something’s happened,” I said.
“No doubt we’ll hear about it on the evening news.”
At a security checkpoint just before the road tipped upward to the mountains, a Malay special constable lowered the metal barrier and ordered us out of the car. Another constable behind an embankment trained a Bren gun on us, while a third searched our car and pushed a wheeled mirror under it. The constable who had stopped us asked to see our identity cards. I felt a spurt of anger when he searched me but left Magnus alone. I suspected that his hands were less intrusive than they usually were as they patted my body: I was not the typical Chinese peasant they were used to, and the presence of Magnus, a white man, was probably a deterrent.
Behind us, an old Chinese woman was ordered off her bicycle. A conical straw hat shaded her face and her black cotton trousers were stiff with dried rubber latex. An SC rooted around inside her rattan basket and held up a pineapple. “Tolong lah, tolong lah,” the woman pleaded in Malay. The policeman pulled on the top and bottom sections of the pineapple and the fruit came apart in half. Uncooked rice concealed in the hollowed-out fruit streamed to the ground. The old woman’s wails became louder as the constables dragged her into a hut by the roadside.
“Clever,” Magnus remarked, nodding at the mound of rice on the road.
“The police once caught a rubber-tapper smuggling sugar out of his village,” I said.
“In a pineapple?”
“He mixed it in the water in his canteen. It was one of the first cases I prosecuted.”
“You’ve done a lot of cases like that?” he said as the SC raised the barrier and waved us through.
“Enough to receive death threats,” I said. “One of the reasons I resigned.”
Less than half a mile further we stopped behind a line of lorries, their tarpaulins peeled back. Scrawny Chinese attendants sat on gunnysacks of rice, cooling themselves with tattered bamboo fans. “Good. I was worried we had missed the convoy,” Magnus said, switching off the engine.
“We’ll be crawling up the mountain,” I said, looking at the vehicles.
“Can’t be helped, meisiekind. But at least we’ll be escorted,” Magnus said, pointing to two armored scout cars at the head of the line.
“Any recent attacks in Cameron Highlands?”
Three years had passed since the Malayan Communist Party had launched its guerrilla war against the government, forcing the high commissioner to declare a state of emergency. The war showed no signs of ending, with the communist terrorists—which the government referred to as “CTs” or, more commonly, “bandits”—keeping up regular attacks on rubber estates and tin mines.
“They’ve been ambushing buses and army vehicles. But last week they showed up at a vegetable farm. Torched the buildings and killed the manager,” Magnus said. “You haven’t exactly picked the best of times to visit us.”
The sun reflected off the vehicles in front. I wound down my window but that only let in a rush of heat shimmering off the road. More cars had stopped behind us while we were waiting. Fifteen minutes later we were moving again. For security reasons, the undergrowth along the road had been hacked away and the trees felled, leaving only a narrow field of stumps. Far back from the road, beneath what had once been the cool shadows of trees, an aboriginal longhouse stood high on stilts, like an ark that had been washed up by a flood. An old woman in a sarong squatted on a tree stump and watched us, her breasts exposed, her lips painted bright red.
Groves of bamboo leaned into the road, filtering the light into weak yellow patches. A lorry, overloaded with cabbages, careened down from the opposite direction, pushing us against the rock face on the side of the road; I could have reached out and pulled a clump of ferns growing on it. The temperature continued to drop, the air warmed only in the short stretches where the road dozed in the sun. At the Lata Iskandar waterfall, the sprays opened its net of whispers over us, rinsing the air with moisture that had traveled all the way from the mountain peaks, carrying with it the tang of trees and mulch and earth.
We arrived in Tanah Rata an hour later, the road entering the village watched over by a red-brick building perched on a rise. “You might want to explore the area,” Magnus said, “but remember the village gates close at six.”
Mist washed the lorries in front of us into gray, shapeless hulks. Magnus switched on his headlights, turning the world into a jaundiced murk. Visibility improved once we left the main street. “There’s the Green Cow,” Magnus said. “We’ll go there for drinks one evening.” We picked up speed, passing the Tanah Rata Golf Club. Looking at Magnus from the corner of my eye, I wondered how he and his wife had coped in the Japanese Occupation. Unlike so many of the Europeans living in Malaya, they had not evacuated when the Japanese soldiers came, but had remained in their home.
“Here we are,” he said, slowing down the car as we approached the entrance into Majuba Tea Estate. The granite gateposts were gouged with empty sockets where the hinges had once been set, like teeth that had been pulled out. “The Japs took the gates. I haven’t been able to replace them.” He shook his head in disgust. “The war’s been over for, what, six years already? But we’re still short of materials.”
Tea bushes clad the hillsides, shaped into box hedges by decades of picking. Moving between the waist-high bushes, workers plucked the leaves with voracious fingers, throwing fistfuls of them over their shoulders into rattan baskets strapped to their backs. The air had a herbal undertone, more a flavor than a scent.
“It’s the tea, isn’t it?” I said, inhaling deeply.
“The fragrance of the mountains,” Magnus replied. “That’s what I miss most, whenever I’m away.”
“The place doesn’t look as if it suffered too much damage in the Occupation.”
Hearing the bitterness in my voice, Magnus’s face tightened. “We had to put in a lot of work to rebuild after the war. We were lucky. The Japs needed us to keep production running.”
“They didn’t intern you and your wife?”
“Ja, they did, in a way,” he replied with a touch of defensiveness. “The senior army officers moved into our home. We lived in a fenced-off compound on the estate.” He sounded his horn, sending a tea picker who had strayed onto the road skipping back onto the grassy verge. “Every morning we were marched to the slopes to work alongside our coolies. But I have to say, the Japs were kinder to us than the English were to my people.”
“So now you’ve been a prisoner twice,” I said, recalling that he had fought in the Boer War. He would have been only about seventeen or eighteen then. Almost the same age I had been when I was interned.
“And now I’m in the middle of another war.” He shook his head. “Seems to be my fate, doesn’t it?”
The road took us further into the estate, winding uphill until we came to a long driveway lined with eucalyptus trees. The driveway funneled open at a circular ornamental pond, a line of ducklings on the water smearing the reflection of the house. The barbed-wire fence protecting the grounds reminded me of my internment camp.
“It’s a Cape Dutch house,” Magnus said, misreading the uneasiness on my face. “Very common where I came from.”
A Gurkha hurried out from the guard post to open the gates. A pair of large brown dogs loped alongside the car as Magnus drove around the house to the garage behind. “Don’t worry, they won’t bite.” He pointed to the darker strip of fur along their spine. “Rhodesian ridgebacks. That one’s Brolloks; the smaller one’s Bittergal.”
The two dogs looked equally big to me, their cold, wet noses sniffing at my shins as I got out of the Land Rover. “Come, come,” Magnus said, hefting my bag. At t
he front lawn he stopped, swept out an arm and said, “Majuba House.”
The walls of the one-story house were plastered in white, setting off the black thatch of river reeds combed down the roof. Four wide windows, spaced generously apart, took up each flank of the front door. The wooden shutters and the frames were the green of algae. A holbol gable with a plasterwork of leaves and grapes capped the porch. Tall stalks of flowers that I later found out were called strelitzias grew by the windows, their red and orange and yellow flowers reminding me of the origami birds a Japanese guard in my camp had so loved to fold. I pushed the memory away.
On the roof, the wind pulled at a flag, the broad stripes of orange, white, blue, and green unfamiliar to me. “The Vierkleur,” Magnus said, following my gaze. “The Transvaal flag.”
“You’re not taking it down?” The hoisting of foreign national flags had been prohibited the year before, to prevent the flying of the Chinese flag by supporters of the Malayan Communist Party.
“They’ll have to shoot me first.”
He did not remove his shoes before going inside, and I followed his example. The walls in the hallway were painted white, the yellow wood floorboards buttered by the evening sun through the windows. In the living room, a row of paintings on a wall caught my attention, and I went in for a closer look. They were scenes of a mountainous landscape, barren and stretching to the horizon. “Thomas Baines. And those lithographs there of the fever trees—they’re Pierneef,” Magnus said, looking pleased at my interest. “From the Cape.”