by Tan Twan Eng
The rainy season came, but still we had to trudge to the mine every morning in the unending downpour. The Japanese guards seemed to know only one English word, and everything had to be done “Speedo! Speedo!” Prisoners weakened and died, but there was always a new batch of men and women transported in to replace the dead.
Bribing the kitchen sentry with cigarettes to turn a blind eye, I sneaked away to see Yun Hong whenever an opportunity arose. I stole what little food I could for her: a piece of moldy bread, a banana, a handful of rice. We never spoke about what the Japanese were making her do. She would distract herself—and me—by talking about the gardens in Kyoto we had visited, describing them in detail in a dreamy voice.
“This is how we’ll survive,” she said once. “This is how we’ll walk out of here alive.”
“You still admire their gardens after all this?”
“Their gardens are beautiful,” she replied.
She tried, once or twice, to talk about our parents, wondering aloud what had happened to them since we last saw them. I cut her off. I did not want to think about them; it would have driven me mad. Better to pretend that they were well and safe.
One of the girls in Yun Hong’s hut hanged herself from the rafters. I saw them bring out the body. She was fifteen years old. Captain Fumio chose a Dutch girl from my hut to replace her. It gave me an idea.
“I’ll tell Fumio that I want to take your place,” I said to Yun Hong, when I saw her later that evening before another batch of men came to her hut.
“Don’t you dare,” she answered, her face pressing closer to the window bars. “Do you hear me, Ling?” She crushed my hand in hers. “Don’t you ever dare do that!”
Looking at her, I realized it was the only thing that had kept her going all these months, the fact that I had not been made to service the Japanese in the camp. Later I found out from one of the friendlier guards that Yun Hong had tried to hang herself early on, but the officer waiting outside her cubicle, waiting for his turn with her, had stopped her before she could succeed. Fumio had warned her, “Kill yourself, and your sister will take your place.”
Life in the camp became easier to endure, or perhaps I just grew used to it. The guards still slapped me for the slightest offenses: not bowing deeply or quickly enough, or taking too much time over my work. And I could not fail to see the men lined up outside Yun Hong’s quarters. At least those women were given better rations than the other prisoners. A medical officer inspected them every fortnight to ensure that they were clean. Dr. Kanazawa would come to the officers’ mess after every examination and sit there by himself, not saying a word to anyone.
“Those girls are the fortunate ones,” he said to me one day, after turning around to make sure that we were the only people in the mess hall. “Jugan ianfu in the big towns serve fifty, sixty soldiers a day. Hai, hai, our girls are the lucky ones.” I thought he said it more to convince himself than anyone else. I found out later that one of his duties included carrying out abortions.
Our Japanese masters ate well, so it was easy to pilfer scraps from the kitchen, sharing them with Yun Ling and the women in my hut. I had become such a familiar sight around the camp that no one bothered to stop and search me. I became careless.
As I was leaving the kitchen one night, Captain Fumio stepped out from the shadows and stopped me. He slid his hands under my clothes and ran his fingers over my body, his badly cut nails scraping my nipples. I flinched, as he would have wanted me to.
“Soh, soh, soh,” he whispered when his fingers grazed the pair of chicken feet I had tied with a string around my waist and concealed between my thighs.
In the interrogation hut, a guard held me down, forcing me to watch as Fumio placed the chicken feet on the table in front of me. He unsheathed his knife from his belt and, in one swift movement, cut off its claws, severing skin, flesh and bone. Another guard pinned my left hand on the tabletop and splayed my fingers. I was sobbing, begging Fumio to let me go. He brought his knife up again. I was struggling madly now. I kicked the guards, I stamped on their feet, but their grip never loosened.
“Fucking Chinese cunt,” Fumio said in English, before switching back to Japanese, “Think you’re so clever, stealing our food? Let me teach you one of our sayings: Even monkeys fall from trees.”
I screamed and screamed as he brought the blade down and chopped the two last fingers off my hand. The screaming seemed to go on and on. In the seconds before I blacked out, I found myself walking in a garden in Kyoto. And then I lost consciousness, and the pain was gone.
My injuries took a long time to heal. I was delirious and in constant agony, but Fumio sent me back to work in the kitchen before the week was out. The other prisoners did their best to look after me. Dr. Kanazawa had stitched up the stumps of my two fingers. He slipped me vials of morphine from the camp’s dwindling supply, strictly reserved for the Japanese. I withdrew from the other prisoners, preferring to lose myself in my own thoughts. To distract myself I created a garden in my mind, calling it up from nothing more than memory. I did not see Yun Hong for weeks, although I asked Dr. Kanazawa to tell her I was suffering from malaria. But she found out what happened anyway. Fumio told her.
“I’ll kill him,” she said, when I had recovered sufficiently to steal away to see her. She reached between the bars for my hands, but I kept them at my sides. “Let me see,” she demanded. I lifted my maimed hand, wrapped in a bandage. “Oh, Ling . . . ,” she whispered. “The bastard . . .”
“It’s healing.” I told her about the garden I had found myself in, just before Fumio severed my fingers.
“We’ll create our own garden,” she said. “It’ll be a place no one can take us away from.”
Later that night, lying on my pallet, I thought again of what she had said to me before I left her. “If you ever get a chance to escape, Ling, I want you to take it. No, don’t argue. Promise me you’ll run. Don’t think. Don’t look back. Just run.”
I had promised her. What other choice did I have?
Malaria took Father Kampfer, and Fumio appointed me as the prisoners’ interpreter. One day, about two and a half years after I had arrived at the camp, the prisoners were ordered to build a hut. When it was completed Fumio ordered me to present myself there. He had another man with him, someone I had never seen before. From the deference Fumio showed him, I knew that he was somebody important. He was in his early forties, his hair cropped short, his face lean and narrow. He was dressed in white trousers and a white tunic with a mandarin collar. I wondered how he kept his clothes so spotless in the jungle. His name, he told me, was Tominaga Noburu, and he needed someone to translate documents in English into Japanese for him. “Father Kampfer used to do it for me,” he complained.
“He’d still be alive if your men had given him the medicine he needed,” I replied.
Fumio’s hand pulled back in a movement that had become familiar to us all. Tominaga stopped him with a look. “Please leave us, Captain Fumio.”
The captain’s palm closed into a fist and then dropped back to his side. He bowed low to Tominaga and walked out of the hut. Tominaga indicated a pair of chairs to me and went to a portable stove to prepare a pot of tea. Diagrams and documents and maps covered his desk in the corner, and a portrait of Hirohito in military uniform gazed down from one wall. Pinned to another wall was a framed charcoal sketch.
“A kore-sansui garden,” I said, recalling what Yun Hong had once told me, another lifetime ago.
“A dry rock garden, yes,” Tominaga said, looking at me, the teapot in his hand forgotten for the moment.
“Where is it?”
He glanced at my hand, still wrapped in a stained dressing, although the injuries were healing. “You know something about our gardens?”
“There was a Japanese gardener living in Malaya, in Cameron Highlands,” I said. “I don’t know if he’s still here.” I thought for a few seconds. “Nakamura . . . something or other. That was his name.”
“Y
ou mean Nakamura Aritomo? He was one of the emperor’s gardeners.”
“You’ve met him?” I grasped this thread from the life I had once known.
“Nakamura-sensei is a highly respected gardener,” Tominaga replied, sitting down in the rattan chair across from me. “How is it that you know of him?”
I hesitated for just a fraction of a second. “The Art of Setting Stones has always fascinated me.”
“What happened?” He pointed to the stumps on my hand. A weight pressed into his face when I did not reply. “Fumio,” he said.
I lifted the cup to my nose. I had not tasted any tea since entering the camp. I had forgotten what it smelled like. Closing my eyes, I lost myself in its fragrance.
Tominaga realized very quickly that the standard of my Japanese was not as good as Father Kampfer’s, but he did not dismiss me as I had feared he would. “But you are a subject of Japan now,” he said, “and you should have a Japanese name.” He insisted that I should be called Kumomori. I thought it wiser not to object to it, and in fact I think it was good for me in some ways: it was easier to pretend that the things I did were being carried out by a different person, a woman who did not have my name.
He loved to talk about gardening with me and I discovered that, in his spare time, he designed gardens for his friends. He studied his maps constantly, making copious notes. He inspected the mine five, six times a day. I had to follow him down the tunnels, interpreting his instructions to the prisoners. The guards sounded a warning to the prisoners whenever he was approaching. Everyone—even the guards—had to bow and look at the ground. I had not been inside the mine since I started working in the officers’ mess. I was astonished by the extent to which it had been enlarged, how deep it now spread beneath the earth. Metal shelves had been riveted into the cave walls and packed full of steel boxes.
The months passed. The monsoons came and left. I envied their freedom. Each time I spoke to Yun Hong, I would ask her to tell me more about Japanese gardens so I could use the knowledge whenever I talked to Tominaga. I asked Tominaga to release Yun Hong, but he refused. “I cannot free one and leave the others. It is not right.”
“But it’s quite all right to let her be raped again and again? I don’t care what’s right or wrong, Tominaga-san,” I pressed on when he said nothing. “All I want is for my sister not to suffer.” I wondered if he had also forced himself on her. Even though I knew my sister would never forgive me, I said, “I’ll take her place. Just get her out of that hut.”
“You are too useful to me, Kumomori,” Tominaga said.
Rumors that Japan was losing the war began to spread through the camp. The guards, sensing the change in the prisoners’ attitudes, beat them with increased savagery. No, not “them,” but “us.” Us. There were times when I forgot that, however kindly Tominaga treated me, however much I was exempted from the guards’ cruelty because of my friendship with him, I was still a prisoner, a slave of the Japanese. When I told Yun Hong about the impending defeat of the Japanese, she fell silent.
“They’ll have to release us very soon,” I said, wondering why she did not share my jubilation. “We’ll be free to go home.”
“And what will people say about me?”
“No one will know what happened here. I promise you.”
“It’ll come out eventually. Someone will talk.” She looked away from me. “And you know.”
“We’ll never talk about this again when we get out of this place. No one will ever know,” I repeated.
“Even if we never talk about it, it’ll be there in your eyes, every time I look at you.” Coarse laughter and men’s voices came from the front. “You better go.” She stepped away from the window, the gloom closing behind her.
At this stage, boxes were now being brought in every week. By now the number of prisoners in the camp had fallen below a hundred. The last batch of POWs had been transported to the camp four months before, and since then no other prisoners had arrived. Every two weeks Tominaga would leave the camp, driving away in a Red Cross van. On his return a few days later he would be morose and distracted.
I never asked where he had gone or even what he was doing in the war. He seemed to be happiest when he was discussing his theories of garden design with me. Sometimes he would draw on the sandy ground with a stick to illustrate an idea or a concept I had difficulty grasping. I never failed to question him about the smallest details. I was interested in what he said, but I also did it to prolong the time I spent with him, to delay my inevitable return to the realities of the camp.
“When the war is over, you must go to see Nakamura Aritomo’s garden,” he said to me one day.
“Will the war be over soon?”
He glanced at me, then turned away to look at the two waterfalls high up in the mountains above the camp. He had lost so much weight that his eyes appeared elongated and misshapen, as though they were melting down his face.
Tominaga had been absent from the camp for three weeks, the longest he had been away since I met him, and I thought I would not see him again. One afternoon, a guard whispered to me that he had returned. I waited for Tominaga to summon me as he had always done, but when night fell and I still had heard nothing from him, I sneaked out from my hut and went to his quarters. The hut was in darkness when I got there. I saw him a short distance away, walking between the trees, a paraffin lamp lighting his path. Silently I followed him toward the jugan ianfu’s hut. I hid behind a tree and watched him. The men waiting outside the hut stood to attention, bowing to him as he walked past them and went inside.
I was furious with him, but more so with myself. What had I expected from him? He was just like all of them.
He summoned me the next morning after we had sung the “Kimi-gayo” and bowed to the emperor in Japan. The guards seemed nervous and tense as they moved about the camp. Fumio was barking orders to some of them; I hurried away to avoid him. Tominaga was pacing back and forth outside his hut. He stopped when he saw me. “Come with me,” he said. I refused to look at him. He grabbed my hand and pulled me behind his hut to where his Red Cross van was parked. He removed a strip of black cotton from his pocket, stretching it out between his hands. “Put this on!”
I stared at him, still wondering which of the women he had used the previous night. Despite our friendship, I was terrified that he was going to shoot me after he had blindfolded me. Perhaps it was because of our friendship that he was granting me this courtesy, this mercy.
“I had your sister reserved for me last night,” he said. “I told her that I would get you out. My English is not good but she understood what I was telling her.” Digging his hand into his pocket again, he removed a piece of paper, folded into a small square. “She asked me to give this to you.” He pushed the note into my palm. “We do not have much time, Kumomori.”
I recognized Yun Hong’s neat, elegant handwriting when I unfolded the paper. “Remember your promise: Don’t think. Don’t look back. Run.”
I glanced up from the paper at Tominaga, then looked behind me to the row of huts hidden among the trees. In the darkness of early dawn it was difficult to make them out.
He stepped toward me and I let him blindfold me. I felt him tying my wrists together with a length of twine. Gripping my elbow, he helped me into the back of the van. “Do not make a sound,” he said before closing the doors. I heard him climb into the driver’s seat and a second later the engine rumbled to life. The van lurched and began to move. At the gates he stopped to speak to the guards. I held my breath, straining to hear his words. And then we were on the move again. It was the first time I had left the camp since Yun Hong and I were brought here, almost three years before. I’ll come back to get you, I vowed to her silently. I’ll find the camp again. I’ll come back for you.
The road—if there was a road at all—was bad. Now and again a sharp turn slammed me against the sides of the van. Branches clawed the roof. About forty-five minutes to an hour passed before the van swerved to a sudden stop
. I heard him get out, walk around to the back and unlock the doors. He helped me out from the van, pulled off my blindfold and untied my hands.
We were in a small clearing. The moon was just sinking behind the mountains. I breathed in long and hard. He handed me a satchel with a bottle of water and pieces of steamed tapioca wrapped in pandanus leaves. Pointing to a track going downhill and into the trees, he said, “You will come to a river at the bottom. Follow it out of the jungle. Go. Forget everything you saw.”
“Where are we? Tell me where the camp is.”
He bowed low to me. “The war is over. In a few days the emperor will announce our surrender.”
Joy and relief made me light-headed. “That means we’ll be freed.”
“None of the prisoners will be released, Yun Ling.”
Hearing my own name uttered from his lips confused me. For a brief moment I did not know who he was addressing. Then I understood what he had said.
“Take me back to the camp!” I turned toward the van. “Take me back!”
He spun me around and slapped me, twice. He shoved me, and I fell facedown to the ground. I heard him climbing back into his van. The engine started, the van reversed, and then he drove off.
Silence returned to the jungle. I got to my feet, picked up the satchel and ran in the direction in which he had driven off. I slipped on patches of moss, I tripped over stones and roots. I had to stop frequently to catch my breath. Eventually I slowed to a walk. I got lost twice and wasted precious time trying to get back to my trail. In the end I had no idea if I was still going in the right direction. I wanted to give up, but I kept walking. I had to get back to the camp.
The sun was high when I came to the edge of a ravine. The sky was clear to the east but, behind me, storm clouds were moving in over the mountains. I drank the last mouthful of water from the flask and then threw it away. My eyes swept the valleys for the two waterfalls I had often seen from the camp. Using them as a marker, I searched for the mine, finding it a minute later below the shoulder of a limestone cliff. Hope revived me.