The Gift of Rain: A Novel

by Tan Twan Eng

  Noel lifted the keris off its mounting, the expression of reverence on his face similar to the one on Endo-san’s whenever he examined his own Nagamitsu sword. Now that I had my own sword I could appreciate my father’s fascination. I took it from his hands, testing its craftsmanship with a few stabs and slashes. It was exquisitely made, the combination of iron, nickel, and steel making the blade itself dark and oily looking. Whorls resulting from the process of forging and folding the blade caught the light, looking like smoke rising to the tip of the blade when I held it up.

  “You look as though you know how to use it,” he said.

  I shrugged and returned the keris to him.

  “I did some research into it at the British Museum,” he said. “The old sultan wasn’t lying. This was forged for a king at the time of the Majapahit Empire, five hundred years ago,” he said. He placed it back on the wall and shook his head. “Among the creations of our modern world, what do you think will still exist and have historical and aesthetic value five hundred years from now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

  “You should, with your interest in history,” he said. “I grant that it’s not an easy question to answer so early in the morning.”

  He went to an open crate and said, “This is for you.”

  I took the heavy book from his hands. I had first read of H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History a year ago in the Straits Times and since then had been requesting a copy from the bookstores of Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, with no success.

  “How did you know—?” I began. I had never told him about the book.

  He enjoyed the look of surprise on my face. “I am your father, you know,” he said, the blitheness in his voice almost concealing the emotions contained within his simple declaration. But I sensed it, and modified my reply accordingly to let him know I had understood, and to avoid a loss of face on his side. We each knew what the other had meant, and that was enough.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Can I read it now?”

  “Not a chance. You’re going to help me shelve these first,” he said.

  We spent the morning cataloguing his recent purchases, with me making mock sneering remarks at some of them and my father putting up halfhearted defenses. One of the maids came in to dust, but when she saw us laughing and chattering she quietly left us.

  “Did you visit the temple with your aunt?” he asked.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Good. I asked her to make certain you went.” I could see that he was gratified that I had obeyed my aunt. “Your results were excellent. I wish William had done as well as you have.”

  “I did the best I could,” I said, a hot flash of embarrassed pride making me stammer slightly. He did not give praise easily.

  “Which university would you like to go to? With your results, you could have your pick of them.”

  “I really haven’t given it any thought,” I said. “But there’s still time.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “You’d have to wait until next October anyway, and at the moment it’s too dangerous to send you away.”

  One of the few drawbacks of going to a local school was that our academic terms were arranged differently from those in England and I would have to wait until the beginning of the next English school year to further my education. And who knew how long the war in Europe would last?

  At that moment I was satisfied with this state of affairs, for I did not wish to halt my lessons with Endo-san. Ours was a relationship that could not be put aside carelessly, as he had warned me, and I knew I was obliged to keep my side of the bargain. And there was still so much I wished to learn from him.

  “I don’t want you wasting your time as William’s been doing,” my father warned me. “Have you thought of what you want to do in the meantime?”

  “I’d like to work in the company for a while,” I said. “Join Edward and William. I want to know a lot more about our family.”

  The idea had been turned over in my head and considered for some time. It had also been strengthened by seeing how much importance my father placed on William’s presence in the company. The awareness of my heritage had been awakened by the visit to my grandfather, and from the unconcealed happiness on my father’s face I knew I had made the proper choice.

  “That’s wonderful,” he said. “We’ll find something for you.”

  Just before noon he said, “Well, that’s done. Let’s have a drink.” “I’ve something to tell you,” I said, making a quick decision. I sat down and told him about my lessons with Endo-san: he had insisted that I tell my father. It was one of the very few times my father lost his temper with me. The earlier warmth was now swept away by his anger.

  “He’s a bloody Japanese!” he said, his voice rising.

  “To whom you leased the island,” I replied, sending my mind out to where the sea and sky merged, maintaining my center. Before I had met Endo-san I would have shouted back at my father.

  “You know what they’re doing in China. What does he want with you?”

  “To teach me his culture, and some self-defense abilities.”

  “You don’t need that sort of skill. And I don’t trust him.”

  “I do.”

  He let out a sigh. “I know I haven’t been a good father. You’re running wild.”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t been running wild. Look at me. I’m fitter than I’ve ever been. My mind’s sharper, clearer. Look at me closely.”

  He sat down and looked into my eyes. I wanted to turn away, for there was so much despair in his own. “When you were born your mother made me promise that I would never control you the way she had been controlled by her father. But seeing how you associate with a Japanese makes me wonder if I should have.”

  “If you cared for her, then keep the promise you made,” I said, latching on to the small opening he had exposed and using it to my advantage. “The war isn’t going to be fought here. Nothing is going to happen. You’ve said so yourself.” In my head I heard Endo-san’s voice: Redirect your opponent’s momentum back into himself.

  My father remained silent, unsure of what to say, and I knew I had once again got my own way. “I met my grandfather,” I told him. Lead the mind, Endo-san had said. Now my father looked at me with greater interest, his thoughts for the moment taken where I wanted them to go.

  “How is the Old One?” he asked.

  “He’s still very strong,” I said. “I think we liked each other, and I’ve invited him to Penang. He seems sorry for the past, and for how he treated Mother.”

  “I did love your mother, you know,” he said. “People thought I had gone native, the way so many do. But they didn’t understand what she and I felt for each other.”

  “I know,” I said, trying to hold on to the fragile connection that had, unexpectedly, grown between us. He never spoke much to me about my mother and I could hear him struggle as he tried to tell me more. He returned his glance from the mounted butterflies but he was not quick enough to hide the look of pain in his eyes, as though he had unwittingly cut himself with one of his keris.

  “There was so much to overcome. I thought I could do it. But she knew, even from the start, how difficult it would be. Yet still she married me. Her father had his servants move her belongings out of the house the day she told him the date of our wedding. She never saw him again,” he said. I willed him to continue.

  “The local Europeans treated her badly, and she was never welcome among her own people. But she was so strong, so indomitable, and I drew my strength from her when she was alive. She wanted to prove everyone wrong.”

  His voice softened. “I never showed you the river near our house, did I?”

  “I think I know where it is,” I said. It was not one of my habitual solitary haunts though. I preferred the sea. My father now disclosed to me what a special place it was, what I had never known.

  “It was our secret hideaway, the quiet place we escaped to
when things became too much for us,” he said. “We always went at dusk, guided by the scent of the frangipani tree she planted there. We would row downstream, and she would lie in my arms, and we would wait in our boat for the fireflies to appear in the trees along the riverbank. There were thousands of them, lighting the darkness for us, showing us the way.”

  I saw a picture of them in my mind, two totally mismatched lovers trying to find their place in the world, surrounded by a protective barrier of light.

  “A few weeks after we were married, I came home late one night. The house was dark. I ran inside, convinced something terrible had happened.”

  “What had happened?” I asked. As far back as I could recall there had always been a light on at Istana at night and it was hard to imagine its massive structure indefinable against the night sky.

  “She was waiting for me, a candle in her hand. She put a finger to her lips and led me upstairs to our room. At the doorway she blew out the candle and pushed the door open. I couldn’t believe what I saw,” he said, his voice dipping into a whisper.

  “She had let the mosquito netting drop over the bed, covering it completely. And in the darkness, between the creases of the net were hundreds of fireflies she had collected from the river.”

  He stopped, feeling awkward, but he saw the look of understanding and curiosity in my face, and after a short silence he said, “We spent the night beneath a shower of light. That was the night you were conceived.”

  I leaned back into my seat and let out a long stream of breath, trying to hide from him the tears that, like the tide slipping unnoticed into a rock pool, had seeped into my eyes. But when I looked up at him I saw that the eyes which I had inherited were shining as well.

  “She caught all the fireflies the following morning and put them into jars and returned them to the river,” he said, his voice strained, but a forlorn smile that indicated he deeply missed my mother and her quirks appeared on his face.

  “I often think how hard it is for you; you always pull away, try to make yourself not a part of us. But you’re a Hutton too. You can never escape that fact. Do you know how much we have all missed you?” my father said.

  He ruffled my hair, which I had not let him do for a long time. He got up and walked away, leaving me in the library, surrounded by all his books. I walked along the shelves, looking at the titles: Herodotus’s The Histories, Plato’s Symposium, Maugham’s collected short stories. All the great books were here, ranging from literature to history and philosophy. I opened the book he had given me but found I could not read the print on the pages. His gentle words had unsettled me and told me I had hurt him all these years. He had always been an intensely private man and it had taken a great amount of surrender from him to let me know the details of my conception. Like the best of fathers he had endured my callousness with dignity and silence, and I could only sit down, close the book, and think of ways to make it up to him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I paused in my tale; Michiko was staring out into a sky lit by a pale moon. It was past midnight and it had been over a week since I had answered the door and let her into my house. We had settled into an unstated routine, with me telling her more and more of my history every night after our meal had been consumed.

  I took a sip of tea, watching her. She was quite beautiful, in the way only Japanese women can be—demure on the outside, yet with veins of steel within.

  “Our boat ride down the river ...” she whispered. “To think that your parents once were there too, and that we saw the same sights as they did. It makes me feel as though the lights from the hotaru we witnessed were the same ones your parents had lain under, almost like the light of the stars which has been shining for millions of years, illuminating everything on its voyage, and which has only just now reached us.”

  I had never thought of it before, but her observation made me feel that we had indeed been in the presence of the same source of radiance that had once brought comfort to my parents, and which a few nights ago also worked its wonder and imparted a similar, if weakened, sense of solace to me.

  “Would you like to rest?” I asked softly.

  She closed her eyes. When she opened them there was a liquid glitter in them. “I would like to hear more, but not tonight. I am tired.” I helped her to her feet and led her to her bedroom.

  Although I thought I would not require much sleep, I woke up late the following morning. Michiko was already on the terrace when I went outside.

  “Did you sleep well?” I asked, pouring her a cup of tea.

  She shook her head, wincing as she stretched herself. I thought she had grown thinner since the day she came, and that worried me.

  “The pills don’t work anymore, do they?”

  The cup rattled in the saucer as she took it from my hand and she set her mouth. “I despise them, but some days the pain is so complete I have no alternative. Not even zazen helps.”

  “You’ve seen all the doctors?”

  “All the doctors and experts money and influence can summon,” she replied. “How did you find out? No one knows.”

  “Your weight loss, the pills you take when you think no one can see. Your journey here to Penang. Little things,” I said. I wondered at the role I was now playing, that of a teller of tales to an old and ailing woman, taking her through one part of my past after another.

  “Do not worry, I can last until you come to the end.”

  “I’ll try to leave out more things,” I attempted a weak joke, but she shook her head.

  “No, please do not do that. I wish to hear all of it. Promise me that,” she said, and I did.

  I got up and said, “I’ll see you this evening?”

  “Yes, I look forward to that.” She too rose, and we bowed.

  “I was wondering ...” she said.

  “Yes?” I stopped at the door and turned back to face her.

  “I would like to see some of the other places you took Endo-san to in Penang. Do not worry, I will not insist on going to his little island. I see now it still hurts, after all this time.”

  I agreed to her request. I had gone back to many of those places in the days after the war, when in the silences of my life I missed him. I had gone hoping the places would still retain an echo of his presence, and of his passage, but I had only met with emptiness. The echoes were louder in my head, confined within the universe of my mind.

  Sitting behind my desk on Beach Street I wondered if, by telling Michiko about Endo-san, I could let the echoes in my mind expand beyond the boundaries of my memory, so that their strength would finally weaken and fade forever into silence. A part of me wished dearly for that, for him to finally leave me. But the part that would always love him balked at the possibility of such an irreplaceable loss. My grandfather’s words came to me so loudly that I turned involuntarily to look behind me, as though he were standing there. Next to a parent, a teacher is the most powerful person in one’s life. And Endo-san had been more than my parent, much more than my teacher.

  “Mr. Hutton?” Adele asked.

  I left the voice of my grandfather and returned to the present. “What is it?”

  “Miss Penelope Cheah is here to see you. The reporter as well.”

  “Oh yes, send Miss Cheah in first, please.”

  After the war, I had frequently found myself driving past houses abandoned by their owners, many of whom had died in the war, either in the camps, or at sea when their fleeing ships had been sunk by the Japanese fighter planes. When peace returned, many of these properties were bought by companies that tore them down to build modern shops. A sense of loss overflowed within me each time another house, surely the only one of its kind in the world, was destroyed and turned to unwanted rubble.

  “Well, why don’t you buy them?” Adele had said when I came into the office one morning, complaining bitterly of another demolition I had seen.

  “And do what with them?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Restore them. Open t
hem to the public or turn them into exclusive hotels.”

  I stared at her until she became uncomfortable. “Forget it. It was a silly thought,” she said.

  “No, it wasn’t. It’s a wonderful idea,” I said.

  So I established the Hutton Heritage Trust and over the years I saved countless buildings from disappearing, from the shop-houses of Georgetown to the mansions along Northam Road. Many were restored using craftsmen from China and England. I tried to obtain materials as close to the originals as I could, sometimes even traveling all over the hinterland of China to look for the proper tiles or to seek out a craftsman who had been trained in the ancient ways. Some people collect stamps; I collected old houses.

  Three years ago Towkay Yeap’s home, the house that the Manchu consul had built for one of his eight wives, came under the hammer. I never knew what happened to Kon’s father. Towkay Yeap seemed to have vanished after the war and his house became dilapidated, standing vacant until an Englishman tried to turn it into an art gallery. When the Englishman died the banks had moved in and I had to put in the highest bid ever recorded in Penang for a house. “I made many enemies at the auction,” I told Adele. “But I got it!”

  I searched for an architect to organize the project for Towkay Yeap’s house, for the design of the property was one that my usual team was quite unused to. After reading an interview with Penelope Cheah in an architectural magazine I had contacted her and invited her to my office. She was small, Chinese, and in her thirties, her eyes bright and sharp, her mind, like her hands, full of rolled-up plans ready to be opened and made real.

  She showed me what she had done for her own ancestral home in Leith Street, which had been similar to Towkay Yeap’s, and I liked it.

  She and I had traveled to Stoke-on-Trent to search for floor tiles, to MacFarlane & Co.’s foundry in Glasgow to find an ironmonger who could replicate the original wrought-iron grilles, and even to the Hokkien province in southern China to hire a master craftsman to repair and recreate the broken roof tiles.

  I had only one principle: every item had to be the original or as close to it as possible in this disposable age. For I always recalled my father’s question to me in the library when he had returned home from London, the one that I could not answer at that time: “What, among the creations of our modern world, do you think will still exist and have historical and aesthetic value five hundred years from now?”