by Tan Twan Eng
“I am making some changes to it,” he replied. “The soldiers who came for me took pleasure in wrecking my garden. For a long time I wondered if there was a point to my restoring it. I did not want another group of soldiers to destroy it again. I put off the repairs until a few months ago.”
“These changes, how long will it take to finish them?”
“Probably another year.” He stopped to examine a row of heliconia flowers. “There are some new ideas I want to realize.”
“That seems a long time just to finish a garden.”
“Then it is clear that you know very little. Rocks have to be dug up and moved. Trees have to be taken out and replanted. Everything has to be done by hand—everything.” Aritomo snapped off the twigs of some low-hanging branches. “So you see, I cannot accept your commission.”
I was wracked by bitter disappointment. “I’m willing to wait a year,” I said eventually. “Even two years, if that’s what you need.”
“I am not interested in your proposal.” He strode to a large boulder hulking by a hedge; I followed him a second later. The stone came up to my hips. Set into its flat surface was a hollow the size of a small washbasin. Water trickled from a bamboo flume, filling the hollow before overflowing down the sides. A bamboo dipper lay beside the natural basin. Aritomo scooped it into the water and drank from it, passing it to me when he was done. I hesitated, then took it from him.
The water was icy, tasting of moss and minerals, of rain and mist. Bending to replace the dipper, my eyes were drawn across the water’s surface to a gap in the hedge, through which a solitary mountain peak in the distance could be seen. The sight of it was so unexpected, so perfectly framed by the leaves, that my mind was momentarily stilled. The tranquility in me drained away when I straightened up, leaving me with a sense of loss.
“A tea master horrified his pupils by planting a hedge in his garden, blocking the view of the Inland Sea for which his school was famous,” I said, half to myself. “He left only a gap in the hedge and set a basin before it. Anyone drinking from it would have to bend down and look at the sea through the hole.”
“Where did you hear that story?”
For a moment I considered telling him that Yun Hong had read about the tea master in a book, but somehow I knew he would not believe me. “A Jap told me,” I said. “In the camp.”
“A soldier?”
“He wasn’t in the army. At least I never saw him in uniform. I never knew what he was. His name was Tominaga. Tominaga Noburu. He told me that story.”
Something flickered in Aritomo’s eyes, fleeting as a moth risking a candle flame; it was the first time I had seen any hint of uncertainty in him. “I have not heard his name in years,” he said.
“You know him?”
“That tea master was his great uncle,” he said. “Why do you think he planted the hedge to block out the famous view?”
“Tominaga explained it to me,” I said. “But I’ve only just really understood it now—the effect of seeing the view is much more powerful than if the sea has not been obstructed.”
He observed me for a few moments, then nodded.
We were approaching his house when the housekeeper came out with a tall, sandy-haired European. “Afternoon, Mr. Nakamura,” the man said. He turned to look at me. “And you must be Yun Ling. I’m Frederik.” His accent was unlike his uncle’s, more English. I guessed him to be about two or three years older than me. “Uncle Magnus sent me to drive you home. He’s worried there might be trouble.”
“Has something happened?” asked Aritomo.
“You haven’t heard? It’s been on the news all morning—the high commissioner’s dead. The CTs killed him.”
Aritomo glanced at me. “You must go.”
At the weathered door of the front entrance Frederik stopped and said, “Oh, Mr. Nakamura—Magnus asked me to remind you about his party. Why don’t you come with us? We’ll wait for you.”
“I have work I must finish,” Aritomo said.
He unlatched and opened the door. I hung back, letting Frederik squeeze past me to his Land Rover parked across the road. Aritomo bowed to me but I did not return it: it brought back too many memories of the times when I had been forced to do it, how I was slapped when I did not bow quickly or low enough.
I opened my mouth to speak, but Aritomo shook his head. I stepped through the doorway and then turned to look at him. He bowed to me one more time and shut the wooden door. I stood there for a moment longer, staring at it. I heard the latch drop and the key turn in the lock.
CHAPTER FIVE
Every child longs for a larger-than-life uncle, and because I had none, Magnus Pretorius became a figure of fascination to me, although he was hardly anything more than a vague presence in my life when I was growing up. What I knew of him I heard from my parents and from the things they left unsaid, the broken-off twigs of conversations I picked up whenever I walked in on them, and from what Magnus told me after I got to know him better.
Arriving in Kuala Lumpur from Cape Town in 1905, Magnus worked as an assistant manager in one of Guthries’s rubber estates in Ipoh. He liked to tell people that he had been employed only because the interviewer discovered he could play rugby. It was during this period that he became friendly with my father. They went into business together, buying up a rubber estate, acquiring a few more over the years.
Outstation planters lived in isolation among the rubber, with the nearest European neighbor usually twenty miles or more away. Growing up in Penang, I had heard stories of planters drinking themselves to death, or dying from snakebite or malaria or a variety of other tropical diseases. Hemmed in by the neat, unending lines of rubber trees, Magnus came to hate the life and began searching for better prospects. Drinking at the FMS Bar in Ipoh one weekend, he overheard a government official talking about a plateau three thousand feet high on the Titiwangsa mountain range. The man spoke of plans to turn it into an administrative center of government and a hill station resort for senior officials of the Malayan Civil Service.
Magnus, who had once hiked up one of the mountains in that region, saw the potential of the plans immediately. A week later he obtained a concession of six hundred acres in the highlands from the government. He sold off his shares in the rubber plantations to my father just before the Great Slump, an act that my father would always hold against him.
A government surveyor, William Cameron, had mapped out the highlands in 1885. He had come upon the endlessly unfolding misty mountains and valleys while traversing the ranges on his elephants, charting the borders of Pahang and Perak. “Like Hannibal crossing the Alps,” I would often hear Magnus tell visitors during my stay in Majuba.
Magnus brought in seeds and tea plants from the hills of Ceylon. Laborers were shipped in from southern India to clear the jungle. In the space of four, five years, the slopes and hillsides in his estate were covered with tea bushes. The tea trees eventually became stunted from the workers’ constant picking, like the bonsai trees maintained by generations of Japanese nobility. A few years after he started planting, two other rival tea estates were also established in Cameron Highlands, but by that time the Majuba label had taken root in Malaya.
It was the only brand of tea my father prohibited in our home.
Frederik tried to engage me in conversation on the short drive back to Majuba House, but my thoughts were on Aritomo and on my failure to convince him to design a garden for me. Staring out of the window, I paid scant attention to the terraced slopes of the vegetable farms outside Majuba, or the occasional bungalow we passed. It was only when the Gurkha at Majuba House opened the gates for us that I noticed the cars parked in the driveway.
“What’s happening here?”
“Magnus’s braai. He has one every Sunday,” Frederik said. “Starts at eleven in the morning and usually goes on till seven, eight at night. You’ll love it.” I vaguely recalled Magnus telling me about the braai the night before, but I had forgotten all about it.
&nb
sp; In the passageway outside the kitchen, we nearly collided into Emily scurrying out with a tray of strange-looking tubes. “Aiyoh, we were so worried about you-lah,” she scolded me. “Everyone’s outside already.” She nudged her chin at the back of the house. “Go and join them. No, not you, Frederik! You come and help me. Take these out to Magnus.” She pushed the tray to me. The glistening tubes, I saw, were coils of uncooked sausages, each one about an inch thick and one and a half feet long.
Fifteen to twenty people were gathered on the terrace garden behind the house, a mix of Chinese, Malays and Europeans. Some lounged in rattan chairs while others stood talking in small groups, a drink in their hands. The day was bright and windless, but the atmosphere was somber. A woman laughed, then stopped abruptly and glanced around. Plates and cutlery and casseroles of food took up a long table at one end of the terrace. Curries simmered over charcoal stoves and sunlight winked off the tuberous bottles of Tiger Beer planted in a tub of ice. In the shade of a camphor tree, Magnus watched over a barbecue grill that had been made from an old oil drum cut in half lengthwise and laid on a trestle. The ridgebacks lazed at his feet, scratching themselves and looking up at me as I approached.
“Ah, you’ve been found!” Magnus said. “Knew you’d be at Yugiri when you didn’t show up for breakfast.”
“I’ve never seen these at the Cold Storage,” I said, handing the tray of sausages to him.
“Boerewors. Made them myself.”
“They look like something Brolloks and Bittergal might leave behind,” I said. The dogs glanced up at the sound of the names, their tails flattening the grass.
“Sies!” Magnus grimaced. “Put them on the braai. You’ll soon see how lekker they taste.”
The sausages were flecked with coriander seeds and other spices Magnus refused to divulge. “It’s my ouma’s recipe,” was all he would say. They gave off the most wonderful aroma when they began cooking over the coals and I realized suddenly that, except for the tea I had drunk with Aritomo, I had consumed nothing all morning.
“Before you think I’m being disrespectful”—Magnus tilted his bottle of Tiger Beer at the people scattered across the lawn—“by the time we heard about Gurney’s death, it was too late to cancel.” He took another swig from his bottle. “You get what you wanted from Aritomo?”
“He turned me down.”
“Ag, shame. But stay here. For as long as you want. The air will do you a world of good.” His eye searched the crowd. “Didn’t Frederik remind him about the braai?”
“He has work to do,” I said. Magnus picked up a pair of metal tongs. “Were there reprisals against him when the Occupation ended?”
“By the anti-Japanese guerrillas?” He wiped his lips with his hand. “Of course not.”
“He told me he was arrested.”
“Well, the Brits couldn’t charge him with anything,” Magnus replied. “And I vouched for him.” He turned the boerewors over and fat dripped into the coals, sending up a cloud of fragrant smoke. “He made sure we weren’t sent to the camps. At one point in the war he had more than thirty people working for him. All of them—and their families—survived the war.”
“We should have come here to wait out the war.”
He stopped rearranging the sausages on the grill and looked at me. “Weeks before the Japs attacked, I told your father to bring all of you here.”
I stared at him. “He never said anything about it.”
“He should have listened to me. I wish he had.”
The noise of the party behind me seemed to recede into the distance. I felt a sudden fury at my father’s obdurate pride. Magnus was right—things would have turned out differently: I would be unharmed, my mother would not be lost inside her mind, and Yun Hong would still be alive.
“You knew early on that the Japanese would attack us?” I asked, watching him carefully.
“Anyone with half a brain looking at a map would have realized that,” Magnus replied. “China was too big for Japan to swallow—all it could do was nibble at the edges. But these smaller territories in the southern seas were easier meat.”
Frederik came out with another tray, this one filled with lamb chops. “Buy a donkey,” Magnus said to him.
“Buy a what?” I wondered if I had heard him correctly.
“I’m trying to make this young man here speak more Afrikaans,” Magnus said. “He’s been mixing with the English for so long he’s forgotten his own language. Tell her what it means.”
“Baie dankie,” Frederik said, and I asked him to spell it out for me. “It means ‘Thank you.’ I’ve been taking lessons in Malay too,” he added. “It’s funny, how many words they both share: pisang, piring . . . pondok.”
“It’s because of the slaves taken from Java to the Cape,” said Magnus. He poured his beer into the coals and asked the two of us to follow him. He introduced us to the guests. In spite of the chill in the air, I was the only one wearing gloves.
“Meet Malcolm,” Magnus announced. “He’s the Protector of Aborigines. Be careful of what you say when he’s around—this man speaks Malay and Cantonese and Mandarin and Hokkien.”
“Malcolm Toombs,” the man said with a warm smile. He was in his late forties, with a guileless face I immediately took to. It probably helped in his work, looking after the welfare of the Orang Asli.
“Not a grave person, in spite of his name,” Frederik whispered to me.
We piled our plates with food from the buffet table and were about to start eating when Toombs asked us to stand in a loose circle. Magnus’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing. We closed our eyes in a minute’s silence in memory of the high commissioner. Only now did the full import of Gurney’s death strike me. Despite what the government had been telling us, things were getting worse.
“How’s the boerewors?” Magnus asked once everyone had sat down and begun eating.
“They taste much better than they look.” I chewed, swallowed and said, “How did Gurney die?”
“Terrorists ambushed his car and shot him. Happened yesterday afternoon on the road up to Fraser’s Hill,” Magnus said. “They were going on holiday, apparently—he and his wife. Traveling in an armed convoy.”
“And yet they managed to kill him,” said Jaafar Hamid, the owner of the Lakeview Hotel at Tanah Rata. He pulled his chair closer to us.
“Why was the bloody news kept back until today?” Magnus asked.
“Everything’s censored these days,” I said. “But, by now, there’ll hardly be a wireless anywhere in the world that isn’t broadcasting what has happened. They must have already killed him when you were bringing me here from the station. That’s why there were so many army vehicles on the road.”
“That’s possible . . . ,” Toombs said quietly. “It’s quite a coup for the Reds. They’ll be dancing and singing in the jungles tonight, I’m afraid.”
“Gurney’s wife?” I said, looking at Magnus.
“The wireless said the CTs fired at the vehicle in front first. When they started shooting at his Rolls, Gurney got out from the car and walked away from it.”
“That was reckless of him,” one of the European women spoke up.
Magnus corrected her immediately. “He was drawing fire away from her, Sarah.”
“Poor woman . . . ,” said Emily.
Magnus squeezed his wife’s shoulder. “I think it’ll be good for us to look at our security measures again, come up with some suggestions to improve them.”
“There’s not much more we can do, is there?” a middle-aged man said. Earlier he had introduced himself to me as Paul Crawford, telling me that he owned a strawberry farm in Tanah Rata and that he was a childless widower. “We’ve put up fences around our homes, trained our workers to be sentries, and formed a Home Guard in the kampongs. But we’re still waiting for the special constables we asked for.”
When the war ended, I had hoped I would never have to experience something like that again. But here I was, in the heart of another
war.
“Those few weeks after the Japs surrendered,” Emily said, “we kept hearing about the communists killing the Malays in their kampongs, and the Malays taking their revenge on the Chinese. It was frightening.”
“The Chinese squatters I’ve spoken to still believe that it was the communists who defeated the Japs,” Toombs remarked.
“My first week in Malaya,” Frederik said, “a soldier told me he had been with the first batch of troops coming back to take control of the country. He thought the communists had won the war. Every town his regiment drove through had buntings and posters celebrating the communists’ victory against the Japs.”
“Malaya, Malaya,” Hamid grumbled. “None of you find it strange that what you English so carelessly named ‘Malaya’—my tanah-air, my home—didn’t officially exist until only recently?”
“This is my home too, Enchik Hamid,” I said.
“You orang China, you’re all descendants of immigrants,” Hamid retorted. “Your loyalty will always lie with China.”
“That’s nonsense,” I replied.
“Oh, I’m sorry. You’re a Straits Chinese, aren’t you? Even worse! The whole lot of you think home is England—a place few of you have ever seen.” Hamid rapped his chest with his fist. “We Malays, we are the true sons of the soil, the bumiputera.” He looked around at us. “Not one of you here can be called that.”
“Please-lah, Hamid,” Emily said.
“Old countries are dying, Hamid,” I said, keeping a grip on my anger, “and new ones are being born. It doesn’t matter where one’s ancestors came from. Can you say—with absolute certainty—that one of your forebears did not sail from Siam, from Java, or Aceh, or from the islands in the Sunda Straits?”
“What do you mean, that Malaya didn’t exist until recently?” This was Peter Boyd, the assistant manager of a rubber estate; he had only arrived from London a few weeks before to take over from his predecessor who had been killed by the CTs.