by Tan Twan Eng
“Tiew neh ah mah chau hai!” Loud, friendly swearing in Cantonese brought me back to the kopitiam. Frederik was staring at me. I blinked a few times, drank my coffee and turned around in my seat. A group of gray-haired Chinese men were sitting a few tables from us. A scrawny man opened a Chinese newspaper. Someone called out, “Diam, diam! Mo chou,” and conversation withered into an expectant silence. The man looked at each of his friends and in a slow, careful manner began to read aloud from his newspaper.
“I see this in every kopitiam I’ve been to,” Frederik said. CTs were known to come to places like this to catch up on the news and to pass messages to their couriers. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” Frederik said. “My men have been asked to help move squatters from their settlement to a new village.”
During the Japanese Occupation thousands of Chinese had gone to live at the fringes of the jungles, doing their best to avoid any contact with the Kempeitai, hoping not to be rounded up and massacred. The war had been over for six years, but those people had remained in their settlements, living off the land as subsistence farmers. The communists used the squatters as a source of food and medicine, information and subscription money; the squatters were the Min Yuen, the People’s Movement. Lieutenant-General Sir Harold Briggs, the director of operations, had recognized that they were the biggest problem of the Emergency. Across the country, half a million people—every child, every grandmother, every family, even their entire livestock—were in the process of being moved by the army into specially constructed “New Villages.”
“Which settlement are you moving?” I said.
“You know better than to ask me that.” He grinned, shaking a finger at me. “And you can’t ask me where the Sun Chuen is sited either.”
“Just checking how well you keep secrets.” I was quiet for a moment, then said, “I had to go to one of those New Villages, when I was a prosecutor.”
“Was that you—the Chan Liu Foong case?” He looked at me with heightened interest. “It was all over the news.”
“It was the last case I prosecuted.”
Chan Liu Foong, a thirty-year-old rubber tapper, had been caught supplying food to the terrorists and acting as their courier. I had visited her home in Salak South, some ten miles outside Kuala Lumpur, to give myself an idea of how she had smuggled out supplies and information. The New Village to which she had been resettled was home to six hundred squatters and their families. A double fence, seven feet high and topped with barbed wire, protected an open stretch of no-man’s-land ten feet wide. Armed sentries in watchtowers guarded the perimeter. The villagers were searched and their faces matched against the photograph in their identity cards every morning when they went through the gates, and the procedure was repeated when they returned home in the evening.
“The police showed me Chan Liu Foong’s home,” I said. “It was empty. Special Branch had taken the husband into custody and their four-year-old daughter was placed in a welfare facility.”
I remembered the sullen faces that had peered at me from the windows of the neighboring homes. To stop the other villagers from helping the communists, a curfew had been put in place. Most of the villagers worked as rubber tappers in an estate five miles away. They were only allowed outside the fences from eight in the morning until one in the afternoon. This had affected their means of earning a living; rubber trees have to be tapped at dawn, before the sap dries up.
“Didn’t they deport her to China in the end?” Frederik said.
I nodded.
“Her husband and daughter? Were they allowed to go with her?”
“My job was to make sure the terrorists were punished.”
Frederik broke off a piece of toast, wiped the last of the egg from his saucer and popped it into his mouth.
It was raining when we came out from the kopitiam. We sheltered in the five-foot walkway outside the row of shops, waiting for the skies to clear. A low, red-brick building stood on a rise, just before the road turned and went down the mountain.
“What is that?”
“It used to be a convent school, before the Japs turned it into a hospital for their troops. It’s a hospital for the British army now,” he said. “Someone told me that, shortly after the surrender, our soldiers found some young Chinese girls living there. The Japs tried to pass them off as TB patients.”
“Jugan ianfu,” I said.
“Sorry?”
“Military comfort women.”
“Ah. We came across some of them in Burma when the Japs surrendered,” he said. “They were going home. We gave them a lift.”
“Those girls would never have been accepted back by their families.” I flinched as lightning streaked the sky. “The shame of what they’d become would have been too great.”
“It wasn’t their fault,” Frederik said.
“Nobody would want to marry them, knowing that they had serviced two, three hundred men all through the war.”
He glanced at me and stuck a hand out beneath the awning. “It’s letting up. Come on, let’s run for it.”
Arriving back at Magersfontein Cottage, he switched off the engine and reached for the seat behind, taking out a brown paper package from a shopping bag. “For you. A present.”
I opened it, laughing when I pulled out the bottle of gentian violet. “So that’s why you snuck off to the Chinese medicine shop.”
“In case you get any more scrapes.”
The bottle was heavy and dark. Stroking the label with my thumb, I looked at him. “I’ll cook you a meal when you come back to Majuba.”
“Anything but chicken feet please.” He shuddered. “Can’t understand how you Chinese can eat those things.”
“Why not? They’re nice and crunchy!”
He laughed, then fell silent when he realized that I was not smiling. He looked at me, his eyes searching my face. I gazed steadily back at him. He leaned over and kissed me. His hand stroked my shoulder, then slid down my back. After a few seconds I pulled away from him.
“Come inside,” I whispered in his ear. “I’ll need some help with the gentian violet.”
Siva, the young Tamil assigned to be my guard, waited for me outside my bungalow every morning to escort me to Yugiri. In the evenings I walked home on my own, varying the time and using a different route every day.
The irritability that had been building up inside me subsided after I slept with Frederik. I had always been considered the more homely of my mother’s two daughters and after the war it had come as a surprise to me to discover that men found me attractive. Once I had recovered from my injuries, and to convince myself that I was still physically attractive, I had slept with a number of men. The fact that I never took my gloves off when I made love only seemed to intrigue them more. Looking back on that period of time, I wondered if all I had been trying to do was to assert my influence over another person, after having been powerless for so long.
Despite my fears of a CT attack, I enjoyed living on my own again, in these mountains where the breath of trees turned to mists, where the mists entered the clouds and fell to earth again as rain, where the rain was absorbed by the roots deep in the earth and drawn out as vapor again by leaves a hundred feet above the ground. The days here opened from beyond one set of mountains and ended behind another, and I came to think of Yugiri as a place lodged somewhere in a crease between daybreak and sunset.
One morning, as the workers were laying down their tools to take their tea break, Aritomo took me to a section of the garden I had never been to before. He pointed to a neatly trimmed lawn in front of us. “Notice anything unusual about it?”
I squatted down for a closer look. “Something about it looks odd.” I grazed my palm over the tips of the grass, half hoping I could extract the answer from them; they tickled but told me nothing. I stood up. “What’s so unusual about it?”
He beckoned for me to follow him on a track going up a slope. The sound of rushing water came from behind the trees. Maple leaves lapped above our
heads, their shadows silk-screened onto our arms, onto the track. The effort of keeping up with him left me breathless.
“This is the highest point of Yugiri,” he said when we reached the crest.
The foothills began here, rising into mountains tonsured in clouds. Spread out below was the garden, his house placed somewhere in the center. A corner of its red terra-cotta-tiled roof was wedged among the branches, like a kite abandoned by the wind.
We resumed walking and came to a pool fed by a meager waterfall. Tall reedlike plants grew along the banks. “Calamus,” he said, breaking off a few leaves. “My wife loved their fragrance.” He crushed the leaves and offered them up to my nose, filling my head with their sweet perfume.
“Where is she now?”
“Asuka died years ago.”
We sat down on a stone bench and I lifted my face to the sun for a moment. “That wheel looks old,” I said.
The waterwheel, about fifteen feet in diameter, was perched on the far edge of the pool beneath the waterfall. It was turning slowly, frothing the water over a weir and down along a narrow stream fringed with ferns and rocks wrapped in moss.
“Soldiers looted it from a Buddhist temple in the mountains outside Kyoto two centuries ago. The abbot had angered one of the Tokugawa shoguns by supporting a group of rebels. It was a present from Emperor Hirohito.”
The sharp intake of my own breath sounded loud to my ears. I sat very still. Aritomo had rested his right foot on a rock by the edge of the pool and appeared to be absorbed in adjusting his shoelace. Somewhere behind us a bird called out. Hearing the emperor’s name always took me back to the camp: it had been run on Japanese time; each day at dawn we had had to bow in the direction of the emperor. At that time of the morning he would have been sitting down for his breakfast in his palace, the officers told us. Yun Hong had once remarked that we were fortunate that Tokyo was only an hour ahead of Malaya.
“I often sit here, listening to the wheel turn.” Aritomo closed his eyes. “Even now, as it rotates slowly in the water, it seems to sing a mournful sutra,” he murmured. “It reminds me of an old monk, the last one remaining in an abandoned temple, chanting till the day he dies.”
“There are inscriptions on the undersides of the paddles,” I said.
“Not many people would have noticed them.” He opened his eyes. “Prayers carved by monks. With every turn of the wheel, the paddles press into the water, imprinting the holy words onto its surface,” he said. “Just think—once, these prayers were carried from the temple in the mountains all the way to the sea, blessing all those they floated past.”
In my mind I saw the stream winding down these mountains, leaving Yugiri, to be pulled into a river. I saw the prayers steam off the water in the morning sun as the river flowed through the rain forest, past a tiger and a mouse-deer drinking from it, past Malay kampongs and aboriginal longhouses and Chinese squatter settlements. I saw a farmer in his paddy field by the river’s edge uncrook his back and gaze upward to the sky, feeling a cool breeze on his face and a long moment of unexplained contentment.
“These prayers,” I said, “you believe they’re effective?”
“My garden was left undamaged in the Occupation.”
“That’s probably more because of who you are, because the wheel was the emperor’s gift,” I said. “No looting or uncivilized behavior from the emperor’s troops, not this time. It didn’t help you at all, did it, when our soldiers returned.”
He stood up in one abrupt movement and walked to the ledge overlooking the garden. He curled a palm at me to join him. “There is the lawn I showed you earlier,” he said. “You could not tell me what was unusual about it.”
From where I stood, the Taoist symbol of harmony was visible on the clearing between the trees, the two teardrops of its positive and negative elements forming a perfect circle. “You cut the grass to different levels,” I said. It was so simple; I should have seen it immediately. “You played with light and shadow.”
“Appearances,” he said.
The clouds knitted close. The yin-yang symbols embossed on the lawn by shadow and light disappeared, and the grass was only grass once more.
In my free time on weekends I explored the tea estate. Vast areas of Majuba were still covered in jungle. The trees, hundreds, thousands of years old, merged into the rain forest draped over Malaya. The estate had its own provision store, a toddy shop, a mosque and an Indian temple. The workers were housed inside a fenced compound guarded by sentries Magnus had trained. On Saturdays the estate bus would take the workers into Tanah Rata for a day’s outing. Sometimes I’d stop and watch the men playing sepak takraw, using every part of their body except their hands to keep the woven-rattan ball in the air for as long as they could.
To build up my physical endurance, I went on regular hikes. One Sunday morning, not long after I moved into Magersfontein Cottage, I climbed up the lower slopes behind it. The trail was well marked, curving around the hill toward Yugiri. I reached the top of the escarpment forty, fifty minutes later. The mountains hovered in the air, severed from the earth by a buffer of low fog. I could see all the way to Pangkor Island, dreaming in the Straits of Malacca. To the east, the mountains went on for as far as my eyes could see, and it was easy to convince myself that the thin, shining strip laminating the horizon was the gleam of the South China Sea.
Parts of Yugiri were visible through the tree cover, like glimpses of a landscape beneath a field of clouds. I searched for the landmarks in the garden, buoyed by a sense of discovery when I recognized them. From the waterwheel dialing away tirelessly on its high ridge, I followed the stream as it stitched its way downhill beneath the tree canopy. My eyes leaped over to Aritomo’s house. A figure was standing outside the back door. Even across this distance I knew that it was not Aritomo. The wind thickened, numbing my face. Another man appeared a few minutes later, and I thought I recognized Aritomo.
He stopped and raised his face to the mountains. After a minute or two he turned back to the other man, and they walked to the path that would take them out of Yugiri and into the jungle. Through the breaks in the trees I caught glimpses of Aritomo. The other man was harder to spot, his khaki clothes blending into the surroundings. The canopy soon closed over the path, like the ocean sealing over the wake of a passing ship, and I lost sight of them both.
CHAPTER NINE
Three days after the meeting with Tatsuji, I wake up with no knowledge of who I am, no memory of who I have been. It frightens me, and yet at the same time I feel a sense of release. My doctors assured me that memory loss is not a symptom of my condition, but of late these episodes have been happening more and more frequently. The moment passes, but I continue to lie in bed. Reaching across the sheets I pick up the writing pad next to me, reading through it at random. You make it sound as though they have souls. It takes a few seconds before I remember that I wrote this. I scan through a few more pages, jarred by each word I think is not quite right. I stop at the mention of Chan Liu Foong, the woman I prosecuted just before being sacked; I wonder what happened to her and where her daughter is now.
It is more difficult than I have imagined, setting down things that happened so long ago. I question the accuracy of my memory. That afternoon at Magnus’s braai, after Frederik drove me back from Yugiri—it stands out with such clarity in my mind that I wonder if it actually took place, if the people there actually said what I think I remember. But does it matter? Nearly all of them are dead.
But Frederik was right—I feel I am writing one of my judgments, experiencing the familiar sensations as the words snare me in their lines until I lose all awareness of time and the world beyond the page. It is a feeling in which I have always taken pleasure. It provides me with more than that now: it gives me some control over what is happening to me. But for how long this will last, I have no idea at all.
The reclining Buddha lies in a pool of sun on the windowsill. Tatsuji pokes around the study while I bring out the woodblock prints. T
hey are kept in an airtight camphorwood chest. I lay them on the desk. Tatsuji is admiring a pewter tea caddy he found on one of the shelves, his fingers stroking the bamboo leaves carved on its surface. He puts it down carefully and hurries over to my side.
I lift the corners of the first sheet; dust and the smell of camphor the papers have absorbed over the years swirl up and taunt my nose. Tatsuji turns away and compresses a succession of sneezes into his handkerchief. Regaining his composure, he takes out a pair of white cotton gloves from an old but well-preserved leather satchel and puts them on. One by one he moves the sheets from the stack to another pile, counting as he goes along. The paper on which each ukiyo-e has been printed is approximately the size of a serving tray. Each print is contained inside a rectangular or circular border and every piece of the ukiyo-e appears to have a different design.
“Thirty-six pieces,” he says.
He skims a large magnifying glass over the first print, distorting the shapes and the colors beneath like the lights of a city skyline seen through a rain-spattered window. “Remarkable,” he murmurs. “As good as The Fragrance of Mists and Tea.”
He is referring to a well-known ukiyo-e of Aritomo’s: a vista of the tea fields of Majuba estate. Aritomo had donated that particular woodblock print to the Tokyo National Museum before I met him, and its iconic status has increased over the decades, surpassed only by Hokusai’s The Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave. I suspect the reference to The Fragrance of Mists and Tea is Tatsuji’s unsubtle way of reminding me that I have allowed it to be reproduced in a number of art books. I have even seen the print on the T-shirts sold in the souvenir shops in Tanah Rata.