by Tan Twan Eng
Tatsuji turns his back to me. His voice comes faintly over his shoulder a moment later. “Rabbit hunting.”
It begins to rain softly, raising goose pimples on the pond’s skin. In the branches above the pavilion, a bird keeps repeating an ascending three-note cry. I want to be angry with Tatsuji. I want to ask him to leave Yugiri and never come back here again. To my surprise, I feel only sorrow for him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Rain had prevented the clay on the pond’s bed from drying out properly, but then one morning, Aritomo announced that it was time to fill it.
We spread a final layer of pebbles and sand over the clay, the bed dipping toward the six standing stones we had set down in the center. A week before we had diverted the stream into a catchment area beside the pond. Using a shovel I broke open the wall of the low dyke. Water flooded into the pond, gathering up the puddles already waiting there. As the swirls and ripples died away, a fragment of the sky was slowly re-created on earth, the clouds captured in water.
“The level of the water must be just right,” Aritomo said. “Too low or too high, and it will affect how the pavilion looks. It will not be in harmony with the height of the shrubs planted around the pond, or the trees behind the shrubs, or even the mountains.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
Aritomo’s gaze swept over the pond. “Close your eyes,” he said. “I want you to listen to the garden. Breathe it in. Cut your mind from its constant noise.”
I obeyed him. Beneath my eyelids the captured light throbbed and gradually faded away. The sounds of the water filling the pond quieted. I listened to the wind and imagined it passing from tree to tree, from leaf to leaf. In my mind I saw the wings of a bird stirring the air. I watched leaves spiraling from the highest branches to the mossy ground. I smelled the scents of the garden: a lily, newly opened; ferns heavy with dew; the bark of a tree crumbling beneath the voracious assault of termites, the smell powdery with an undertone of dampness and rot. Time did not exist; I had no idea of how many minutes had passed. And what was time but merely a wind that never stopped?
“When you open your eyes again”—Aritomo’s voice seemed to come from far away—“look at the world around you.”
My eyes skimmed over the water to the camellia hedges; to the trees rising to the mountains, the mountains entering the folds of clouds. I never allowed my gaze to rest too long on any particular object, but I let it see all things. In that one instant I understood what he wanted from me, what I would need to comprehend to be the gardener he had spent his lifetime becoming. For the first time I felt I was inside a living, three-dimensional painting. My thoughts took shape with difficulty, expressing only the thinnest layers of what my instincts had grasped and then let slip. A sigh, both of contentment and of sorrow, drained out from deep within me.
I checked the water level daily. When it was deep enough, we put in lotuses and planted reeds along the edge. Aritomo also stocked it with koi from a breeder in Ipoh. About a week after we started filling the pond, he ordered me to bring out the coil of copper wire from the tool shed. I carted it in a wheelbarrow and set it down by the pond. Using a pair of wire-cutters, he snipped the copper into short lengths and showed me how to form them into fist-sized balls, before leaving me to it.
“What are they for?” I asked when he returned and I had about forty of them in a pile. They looked like the rattan sepak takraw balls kicked about by children in every kampong and schoolyard.
He picked one up and flung it far out into the water. It sank immediately, frightening the fish. “The copper stops the growth of algae.”
We circled the pond, throwing in the copper balls. We had almost finished when he stopped and lifted his face to the cloudless sky. He silenced me with a finger just as I was about to speak. I followed his gaze, but saw nothing at first. Then, far off in the sky, a bird peeled itself from the sheet of bright sunlight and descended rapidly, spiraling down closer and closer to earth until I could make out a heron, its plumage a smoky gray-blue. Drawing a halo over the pond, it dropped to skim across the water, racing with its own image, flying so low that I thought its reflection would break free of the surface.
Sweeping up its wings, it landed in the shallows, sending ripples radiating across the pond.
“Aosagi,” Aritomo said, a note of wonder in his voice. “I have never seen it here before.”
“Where do you think it’s come from?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps from as far away as the steppes of Mongolia.”
“Perhaps even Japan?”
He nodded slowly, almost to himself. “Yes, perhaps.”
Before going home that evening, I stopped at his house, entering through the back door. Ah Cheong was on his way out to his bicycle, and he smiled. He had been friendlier toward me ever since I helped his brother to surrender, occasionally even bringing me a flask of water when I was working on my own in the garden.
“Kwai Hoon sent me this,” he said, giving me a cutting from the Straits Times. It was over a fortnight old. “What does it say?”
A photograph accompanying the news article showed the bodies of the CTs the police had shot, laid out in a row in a jungle clearing in front of a helicopter. Kwai Hoon had refused to reveal the sum of the reward he had received when the journalist interviewed him, but the former political commissar of the Malayan Communist Party said that he would use the money to open a restaurant.
“You tell your brother I expect to eat for free at his restaurant for the rest of my life,” I added when I had read it to him. “And I only eat abalone and lobster and shark’s fin.”
The housekeeper grinned. “Mr. Nakamura is waiting for you.”
The kore-sansui garden in front of the house had been completed a month before. I felt a sense of accomplishment whenever I saw it. I knew I would find Aritomo there, raking out parallel corrugations in the fine white gravel. He did that every few days, changing the patterns every time and asking me to guess what he was trying to create. Today he was drawing lines around the rocks with the sharpened end of a stick, walking backward to obliterate his footprints. The gap between each line was not uniform, narrowing here, bulging out there. When he finished he came to stand next to me.
“Waves surrounding a chain of islands.” I knew it was the wrong answer the instant I spoke.
“Nothing so poetic today,” he said, smiling. “Just the contour lines of hills on a map.”
“The heron is still at the pond. It seems to have made its home there.”
“It will continue its journey sooner or later.”
“What did you want to see me about?”
He put down the stick and asked me to follow him to his study. He bowed to his emperor’s portrait before going to the wall of paintings. He stood there, looking at each of them, his head turning slowly from left to right. Finally, he lifted my sister’s watercolor from its hook and held it out to me.
I looked at it and then swung my eyes back to him. “You said it was a gift.”
“You have been stealing little glances at it every time you come in here.”
Etiquette required that I decline his offering a few more times, in case he had changed his mind, but he was right—I had been coveting it ever since I failed to buy it. Extending both my hands, I took the painting from him. Then, surprising even myself, I bowed to him, pleating my body almost in half. When I raised my head again we were both aware that it had been made in complete sincerity.
Magnus was standing on the verandah when I got home, a photograph album clamped in his armpit. A tiffin carrier stood on the table. He noticed the painting in my hand before I could hide it from him. “He gave it to me,” I said.
“I’m glad it’s back with you.” His smile had just the faintest tinge of regret in it. “You haven’t been coming for dinner for a while now. I thought I’d better check on you.” He indicated the tiffin carrier. “Emily made chicken curry. And there’s rice.”
“Thank her for me. Gin pahi
t?”
“That sounds lekker.” He sat down in a rattan chair. I went inside and returned with our drinks. “Templer and his wife heard about Aritomo’s garden,” he said. “They’d like to see it.”
“He’s not keen on having visitors to his garden.”
“That’s why I’d like you to speak to him. And these aren’t just any visitors,” Magnus said. “Templer’s the most powerful man in Malaya.”
“You’re turning soft, Magnus, letting a British civil servant walk all over you. Are you taking down your flag too?” I taunted him with a grin.
“The flag stays.”
“Templer will have no qualms ordering you to remove it.”
Stories of the new high commissioner had circulated across the country from the first day of his appointment, brought up here to the highlands by government officials who recounted them in the NAAFI or at the Tanah Rata Golf Club. In the weeks after he took up his post in Kuala Lumpur, Templer had spared no one from a tongue-lashing if he found them to be inefficient, sacking those he deemed incompetent.
Magnus tapped his chest with his fist. “He’s never met anyone like me.”
“When is he coming?”
“We won’t know his itinerary until the very last minute,” Magnus said. “It’s part of his tour to ‘win the hearts and minds of the people,’ as he calls it. We haven’t told anyone else, of course. Not even the servants.”
“They’ll know some VIP is coming the moment Emily tells them to polish the silver.”
“Gats, you’re right.” He chuckled. “I’d better warn her.” He pushed the leather-bound photo album across the table to me. “I thought you might like to look at this.”
The photographs documented the stages of work in Yugiri, from its beginnings as a jungle to what it looked like before the Occupation. I turned a few more pages and then stopped. “When did you meet Aritomo?”
Magnus rubbed his eye-patch with a knuckle. “Summer of 1930—no, 1931. That’s right—it was the week after Japan invaded China. I was in Tokyo, trying to get the Japs to buy my tea. People were celebrating in the streets. There were banners and public demonstrations everywhere.” He took a long swallow from his glass. “I told the tea broker how much I had enjoyed the city’s temple gardens. I asked so many questions that the poor man was embarrassed when he couldn’t answer me. The next day he introduced me to Aritomo. The emperor’s gardener himself—I could hardly believe it! He gave me a private tour of the imperial gardens. They were magnificent.” He stopped and thought for a moment. “They’re efficient people, those Japs. It’s no surprise they almost won the war.”
“You admire them,” I said.
“And so do you, in your own way,” he replied. “Why else would you be here?”
“I’m only doing this for Yun Hong.”
Magnus gazed steadily at me. I resumed looking through the photographs. A few pages later I stopped and pointed to a photograph of Aritomo giving instructions to four shaven-headed young Japanese men. They were shirtless, their short, muscular bodies struggling with the burden of the waterwheel. The photographer had caught them in stark contrasts, as if casting them into statues commemorating some workers’ revolution.
“He brought his own people?” I asked.
“Five . . . maybe six of them. They stayed for a year to clear the land and train the local workers.”
“Strange, isn’t it, that he chose to come to Malaya . . . chose to make it his home.”
“Actually, I’m to blame for that,” Magnus said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well . . . I invited him to visit. I didn’t know he would fall in love with Camerons after staying here less than a week.” His eye roved around the verandah, looking for a suitable place to rest. “He stayed here—in this bungalow—when he first came to Majuba.”
“He never told me.” It was odd how Aritomo’s life seemed to glance off mine; we were like two leaves falling from a tree, touching each other now and again as they spiraled to the forest floor.
“Like you, he didn’t want to stay with us either. I’m beginning to wonder if Emily and I smell bad.” He scratched his chest distractedly, but stopped when he realized I was staring at him.
“Your tattoo,” I said, closing the album. “Did he do it for you?”
He rubbed his glass with his fingers, rupturing the beads of condensation on it. “You’ve never forgotten it?”
“How could I?” I said. “It was Aritomo, wasn’t it?” The suspicion had been growing in me ever since Aritomo showed me his copy of the Suikoden. Looking at the expression on Magnus’s face, I realized it was true. “Let me see it.”
He appeared not to have heard me. I was about to ask him again when he began unbuttoning his shirt. His movements were deliberate, as though he was prying out tacks in a corkboard. He stopped when his shirt was open a third of the way down his chest. The delta around his neck was tanned and crinkled; further below, the skin was pale and smooth and soft. Pinned above his heart was the tattoo, smaller than I had remembered it to be. It was a beautifully rendered eye, the blue of the iris nearly matching Magnus’s own. It was set against a rectangle of colors that I realized represented the Transvaal flag.
“It’s very detailed,” I said.
Magnus looked down at his chest, his voice congealing in his throat. “I told him I didn’t want something too Japanesey.”
The colors had remained vivid, glistening. “It looks as though he’s done it just a short while ago.”
“He mixes the inks himself.” Magnus stroked the tattoo with his fingers and then looked at their tips, as though expecting them to be stained with pigments.
“Was it painful?”
“Oh ja.” He winced at the memory. “He warned me, but it was worse than I had expected.”
“Why did you get it?”
“Vanity,” he replied. “It was like a medal, setting me apart from other people. I’d always felt incomplete, because of this.” He touched his eye-patch. “I was taken to a bathhouse in downtown Tokyo. Jislaik, what an experience! The men walking around completely kaalgat, tattoos on their entire bodies . . . dragons and flowers . . . warriors and beautiful women with long black hair. They were disturbing, those tattoos. But I found them beautiful too.”
“When was your tattoo done?”
“When he was visiting us, I told him about the tattoos I had seen in that bathhouse. He offered to do one on me, a small one, if I sold him the piece of land he wanted.” Magnus buttoned his shirt and smoothed the wrinkles. “He gave me a good price, even invested some money in my estate. It certainly made things easier for me—money was tight at that stage.”
In the trees, a nightjar called out. It was the first time I had heard one since moving into the bungalow. The locals called it the burung tok-tok; some of them would gamble on the number of times it made its distinctive knocking sound. The bird called again and out of habit I began to count off its cries against the number I had in my head; it was something I had done in the camp, when I lay in my bed, trying to distract myself from the mosquitoes and fleas feeding on me.
I became aware of Magnus’s eye on me. “Did you win?” he asked, smiling.
“I’ve never won a bet on the tok-toks.”
He stood up to leave. “Keep the album. Give it back to me when you’re done with it.”
I walked him down the verandah steps to his Land Rover. “That feeling of incompleteness—did it go away after you were tattooed?”
He stopped to look at me. An old sadness dimmed his eye. “It’ll never go away,” he said.
The tok-tok bird began calling out again after Magnus drove off and the noise from his car faded away. I stood there on the driveway, counting its cries. Once again I lost the wager with myself.
The past week had been more strenuous than usual and so, the next morning, I was happy to be lazing in my bed until I heard someone calling for me. The spill of the sun across the bedroom walls told me it was about half past
seven. I put on a dressing robe and looked at Yun Hong’s painting for a moment before going outside. Aritomo was on the verandah, a rucksack held loosely in his hand.
“There you are,” he said. “I have run out of birds’ nests.”
“The herbalist in Tanah Rata doesn’t stock them,” I reminded him. “And he won’t be open at this time, not on a Saturday.”
“Get dressed. Go on.” He clapped his hands. “And wear hiking shoes. We’re going up into the mountains.”
We set out on foot, heading for the hills north of Majuba estate. Far to the east, clouds ringed Mount Berembun. The tea fields soon gave way to uncultivated slopes. At the edge of the jungle Aritomo turned and looked back for a moment, his eyes scanning the way we had come. Satisfied, he pushed into the ferns. After a second’s hesitation, I followed him.
It is hard to describe what entering a rain forest is like. Conditioned to the recognizable lines and shapes one sees every day in towns and villages, the eye is overwhelmed by the limitless varieties of saplings, shrubs, trees, ferns and grass, all exploding into life without any apparent sense of order or restraint. The world appears uniform in color, almost monochromatic. Then, gradually, one begins to take in the gradations of green: emerald, khaki, celadon, lime, chartreuse, avocado, olive. As the eye recalibrates itself, other colors begin to emerge, pushing out to claim their place: tree trunks streaked with white; yellow liverworts and red sundew in shafts of sunlight; the pink flowers of a twisting climber garlanded around a tree trunk.
At times the animal track we took disappeared completely into the undergrowth, but Aritomo never hesitated, plunging into the vegetation to emerge onto another trail seconds later. The noise of insects sizzled in the air, like fat in a smoking wok. Birds cawed and whistled, disturbing the branches high above us, showering us with dew. Monkeys ululated, fell into a petulant silence and then picked up their cries again. Broad waxy leaves sealed off the way behind us. To my surprise I found that I had no trouble keeping up with Aritomo—my stamina had improved since I started working in Yugiri.