The Gift of Rain: A Novel

by Tan Twan Eng

  This knowledge, like all great and worthwhile enlightenment relating to the human condition, was bittersweet and came too late.

  “I appreciate what you are doing. I know it is hard for you,” Michiko said, her gentle tone breaking into my thoughts like the passage of a bird’s low flight across the face of a pond.

  I swept her words away with my hand. “It took great courage and strength for you to make the journey here too. I’m glad you came.”

  “I took a long time to decide. It was not an act of impulse to come and upset the tranquillity of your life here.” She asked me to help her to her feet. “I shall show you where your father concealed his blades tomorrow morning.”

  She was waiting for me when I finished my morning practice session, her Panama hat shading her face, holding a spade in her hand. I had asked her to train with me daily, and at first she had, but as her strength began to wane she preferred to walk on the beach instead and watch each day arrive.

  She took me to the river where we had watched the fireflies, using the spade as a walking stick. Although the sun was shaded by the clouds and we walked beneath the shadows of the overhanging trees, it was a warm morning. Only as we approached the river did the air become cooler. At the frangipani tree my mother had planted she stopped. “Dig around here,” she said.

  “How can you be so certain?” I was doubtful, but willing to indulge her.

  “The clues were all in what you have been telling me.”

  I dug deep into the ground around the tree, taking care not to damage its roots. About four feet down I hit something that sounded metallic. I dropped the spade and scrabbled with my hands and finally loosened a rusted box from the grip of the earth.

  It was heavy and it took all my strength to prise the lid open. Inside, wrapped in layers of stiffened oilcloth, were the eight keris my father had collected. They were all in good condition, except for a light dusting of rust on their blades. I picked up the keris that Noel had purchased from the deposed sultan and dipped it into a bar of sunlight. The diamonds on the hilt fractured the light into the trees and it was as though fireflies were moving through them, competing with the glare of the day. One scale of light danced on Michiko’s cheek.

  “I can understand your father’s interest in them,” she said. “They are magnificent. What are you going to do with them?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.” I shoveled the mound of earth back into the hole. My arms were aching by the time I finished. We sat on the banks, the box between us. There grew in me an inexplicable sadness, which she sensed.

  Michiko’s arrival with Endo-san’s katana that I had long thought lost, the discovery of my father’s keris, all these seemed only to underline to me the inescapable fact that I had never had any choice in the direction of my life. Everything had already been planned for me, long before I was born. My mother’s hopes for me, in her choice of my abandoned name, had not been borne out.

  I told Michiko all this and she said, “If it is true, then you are a very blessed man.”

  She saw that I did not understand her and she tried to clarify. “To have the awareness that there is a greater power directing our destinies must give great comfort. It would give a sense of meaning to our lives, knowing that we are not running around vainly like mice in a maze. It would soothe me to know that all these,” she tapped her chest, “my illness, my pain and loss, and yes, my meeting you, all have a reason.”

  She saw the stubborn set of my face. “I’ve never felt blessed,” I said. “There must be free will to choose. Do you know the poem about the two roads, and the one not taken?”

  “Yes. That has always amused me, because who created the two roads in the first place?”

  It was a question I had never considered.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Endo-san once said, “All fights revolve around the interplay of forces,” and these words, I began to realize, could also be applied to wars. The balance had shifted and the Allied forces, wearied but stubborn, were advancing steadily against the Japanese. The Halifaxes now visited us daily, alternating bombs with pamphlets that told us of Allied victories. We heard about the kamikaze pilots, warriors of the Divine Wind, but even they could not stop the Allies. Although isolated in Istana, I still caught snippets of news. I could tell how the war was going just by the faces of the servants.

  I entered the kitchen and spoke to Ah Jin, the cook. “Go into town and get me a few cans of paint on the black market,” I said, handing her a basket of banana notes and telling her which colors I wanted.

  She returned a few hours later. “Aiyah, sir, the town going crazy, everyone spend, spend, spend. Fifty thousand Japanese dollars for a loaf of stale bread.” She handed me six tins of paint but I told her to leave them on the landing beneath the attic stairs, along with some brushes.

  “Everyone’s getting rid of their banana notes,” I said. “Do you know what that means?”

  She looked out of the kitchen windows to where Endo-san, who had moved into Istana, stood peering through a pair of binoculars, sweeping the sky and the sea.

  “Ya-lah, the Jipunakui will be chased out very soon,” she said.

  I went into the study and returned with more banana notes. “Take this and give it to the others. Spend it all, as fast as you wish.” She beamed and went to the kitchen, where I soon heard her excited voice calling the rest of the servants.

  Early the next morning I left my room and checked that Endo-san was still sleeping. I carried the six cans of paint up into the attic, moving carefully through the unused furniture and wrinkled leather trunks, many still bearing P&O Liner labels, all large enough for me to lie inside. My footfalls raised only silent dust. I opened a small window and climbed out onto the ledge. The wind breathed softly and the sun seemed undecided about rising.

  I crawled up the steep clay tiles of the roof. My fear of heights was gone. I had learned that there were other, greater things to fear. I opened one of the cans and dipped my brush in it.

  I had to make many trips and each time the climb made me breathless. As the sun floated up I started to perspire. By the time I was finished I had cracked eighteen of the tiles with my weight. But at last I stood on the ledge, satisfied with my efforts.

  On the sloping roof, facing the sea, facing the direction from which the planes often flew in, a rather rudimentary Union Jack, with its rough red, blue and white lines, shone bright and welcoming in the rising sun.

  There was nothing much for me to do now. I could not leave Istana and so I spent my days on the beach, staring out to sea. An eerie sense of anticipation hovered like a hungry ghost in the air and, although people would later say it was a figment of my imagination, I was certain of what I saw that day.

  The light in the eastern sky throbbed, intensified, as though the wick of an oil lamp had been suddenly turned up. It burned with a terrible sheen of pure brightness and pulsed into red, violet, and shades never seen before. On Endo-san’s island, birds in the trees clattered out in a panic-stricken flapping of wings. A numbing coldness spread out from the very center of my being; I had to choke for air, as I had not breathed in those seconds. A silence so oppressive halted the world that even the waves seemed to pause in their march to the shore.

  The moment lengthened and then passed, and left me quiet. The world sounded different, less sure of itself.

  News of the Hiroshima bombing reached us that evening. I was certain the servants had a radio hidden in the house, for the mood in Istana changed subtly, and the dark moods of the previous weeks perceptibly lifted.

  I waited for Endo-san on the lawn and we drank his bitter tea as he told me the full extent of the destruction to that city. His entire home on the outskirts of Hiroshima was gone. “It is as though my family had never existed, as though I had never existed. You are talking to a ghost. There is no past now, no living ties left.” He had been written out of history.

  I tried to imagine Penang obliterated, its roads and buildings turned to san
d, the sand melted to glass, then dissolved further by the heat, and finally scattered by the terrible wind, a wind that was not divine, the toxic air killing me with every shallow breath.

  “We have our Divine Wind, and now the Americans have theirs,” he said. The war was over that day and we both knew it.

  This time it was I who went to him, I who held him as he wept. How strangely comforting it was to feel his tears. My thumb wiped them gently from his eyes, yet still they came. A lifetime’s sorrow flowed from him that day. I licked my thumb and tasted his tears, and I was not at all surprised to discover that there was nothing unfamiliar about them. I had tasted them before, a long, long time ago.

  Endo-san accepted the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki without emotion. I knew he slept with difficulty. I saw him often on the balcony, looking homeward like a yearning sailor. I did not have to wonder what weighed down his thoughts and kept him from rest.

  The emperor of Japan, once a boy who crouched over a tidal pool near Endo-san’s father’s estate, fishing for samples for his marine biology collection, surrendered three days later.

  I held the scroll in my hands and unrolled it. It had only been recently written and I could trace the smell of ink. It came from Fujihara, and my first impulse was to tear it up and burn it. Instead I let one edge of it curl back tightly to meet its opposite end.

  I had not heard from him since leaving Penang to warn Kon. He had not been at my sentencing and I could not recall if he was present when my father had been executed. Now he was asking a favor of me and I felt a bright burst of rage. But I opened the scroll again and tried to think.

  I was at his house in Scott Road at the time he had requested.

  Through the open windows I heard him playing one of his habitual Bach pieces on the piano, the Bechstein piano that I had been ordered to obtain for him. The music was full of horror, part of the terrible things I had been forced to witness, and I wanted to turn around and leave. But I knew I could not weaken now. I called out to him from the veranda.

  “Come in,” he said without stopping his playing.

  I entered and found him in the drawing room, bare of all furniture except the piano. To one side was a reed mat, and two swords, one short and one long, lay on the mat like fish caught on a line.

  He finished the piece and a serene look came over his face. He lifted his hands from the keys and closed the piano softly. “Thank you for coming,” he said.

  He was dressed in a white cotton robe and as he knelt on the mat I asked, “Why have you chosen me to assist you in your suicide?”

  “I wanted someone who would be willing to see me die. And you are Endo-san’s pupil, so your abilities must be formidable.”

  I moved toward him and picked up the two swords. He would use the shorter one to pierce his abdomen and then slice it open while I would stand behind him with the long sword, ready to finish the ritual if he wavered, or lost his resolve.

  He smiled at me. “Now is your opportunity to appease the spirits of your sister and your aunt.” He opened his palm for the short sword.

  I held the swords in my hand and said, “I am not going to assist you. Outside are a group of men from the anti-Japanese societies. They will make sure that each and every spirit you have made suffer will be appeased.”

  He backed away from me, stunned, his eyes taking in the men who now appeared behind me. “You lost the war, Fujihara. But what was worse, you lost your humanity. I will not let your death be an honorable one.” I placed the swords on the piano and said to the leader of the group, “Do what you like with him.”

  The men set about tying up Fujihara and I knew, from their grim but delighted faces that he would suffer much and suffer long.

  I paused in the doorway as I left—there was something else. “Burn the piano when you are done,” I said to the leader. I knew then that I could never listen to the music of Bach again.

  It was bedlam in the consulate offices. I felt only pity as the staff ran about destroying letters, documents, and all incriminating evidence. Endo-san stood away from it all and Hiroshi snapped at him, “What are you doing, standing around? Help us burn these papers.”

  “What will damn us will not be papers, but the memories of men, Hiroshi-san. And those you can never destroy,” Endo-san told him.

  Hiroshi, his face made lifeless by his illness, coughed and sat down. “This is all a waste of time, is it not? Is this what we have become, a nation of paper destroyers?”

  He got up and leaned heavily on the desk. He opened his drawer and Endo-san said, “Hiroshi-san, you still have your duty. We all have.”

  But Hiroshi ignored him and put his gun to his temple. The clerks stopped their work. A typist dropped a bundle of documents, which scattered, lining the floor with tiles of arcane patterns.

  I turned away and so did not see what happened, but the report of the shot cracked inside my skull and the unexpected smell of blood and death thickened the air in the room.

  That night many of the staff followed Hiroshi’s example. The rest waited to surrender themselves to the British.

  “Do not follow Hiroshi,” I said to Endo-san. “Don’t do it, please.” In his eyes I could see that he wished to, but his strong sense of duty, the necessity of completing his task by handing over the administration of Penang to the returning British, restrained him. But once that was done, what then? What then?

  Once again my abilities were required, when the time came to return Penang to the British. The roads were festooned with whatever scraps of decoration the people of Penang could find, and banners trailed from lampposts and street signs. All the trappings of the Japanese Occupation were taken down, burned in pyres that scorched the roads, heat shimmering in the air like departing spirits. The British troops returned to Georgetown and were greeted with shouts of gladness and affection.

  I was at the door of the former home of the resident councilor when a small army convoy, three trucks, and what I later learned was a jeep, rumbled up the driveway. A red-faced, hawk-nosed officer jumped out of the jeep and looked at me with suspicion.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked. I did not reply but led him to Endo-san. As we stepped up to the veranda I heard the slam of tailgates and the crunching of boots on gravel. I turned to see a company of British soldiers, bayonets fixed, spilling around the sides of the trucks and then forming into lines on the lawn. These were not at all like the men who had abandoned Penang four years earlier. They wore neat new olive uniforms tailored for the jungle and wide brimmed hats topped with red and white-feathered hackles. Something else was different about them too, and it was not just that they looked fit and healthy and were grinning in triumph. Then it struck me: most of them were younger than I was. I suddenly felt the loss of those four years more keenly than ever before.

  “Lieutenant-Colonel Milburn. Fourth Battalion. Royal Northumberland Fusiliers,” the officer introduced himself. “We’re here to make sure you don’t kill the remaining prisoners in your care. General Erskine will sail into Penang harbor in two days’ time. You will then formally surrender to him. In the meantime, a guard will stand watch to make sure you don’t escape.”

  “We have no intention of it,” Endo-san said in English. “Would you like some tea?”

  On the appointed day we waited at the harbor. I looked at the people crowding around us, their faces sapped by the war. A few smiled at me. I felt a lightening gladness and wished my father could have been here.

  General Arthur Erskine stepped onto the wooden platform built by the army to replace the destroyed jetty. I studied his well-fed body, his healthy hair and skin, and wondered what he must make of this group of scrawny Japanese who had overrun a British colony.

  Endo-san walked up to him and, speaking through me for the benefit of the other Japanese, said, “On behalf of the Emperor of Japan I, Hayato Endo, surrender myself, my people, and the island of Penang to you. And I also hereby release a prisoner of Japan, Mr. Philip Hutton.”

  I was i
nterpreting his words when I saw Goro push out from the crowd of Japanese. He moved toward us calmly as Endo-san leaned over and signed the document of surrender. I saw him raise his gun and aim it at Endo-san.

  “You have brought disgrace to us by surrendering,” he said, his small eyes narrowed in rage, almost disappearing into his face.

  I leaped toward Goro as he fired and I saw the shots puncture the ground, sending up little puffs of dust. One shot hit Endo-san in his thigh and he grunted in pain. I slammed into Goro and twisted his arm away, but he was faster. He dropped the gun and pulled a knife from his boot. He came in with quick slashing motions and I felt a light sting on my stomach. My shirt had been opened and my skin bled a delicate line.

  General Erskine pushed away the troops who had converged to shield him. Lifting a restraining palm, I said, “Please tell your men not to fire.”

  The next stab happened before I could finish speaking. But I was ready: I allowed the blade to enter my circle and, using my hands in a shearing move, I hit the nerves on the sides of Goro’s wrist. His hand went numb and the blade fell away like a rotten twig from a tree. I kicked it out of his reach and grasped Goro’s wrist, ready to break it in a kote-gaeshi lock. He kicked out sideways and caught me on the hip. I gritted my teeth and battened down the pain. My hands traveled up his arms like a snake after its prey on a branch and wrenched his elbow, bringing him forward to drive my knee into his face.

  He broke away and punched me, catching me twice. The earth spun for a few precious seconds and I staggered drunkenly. I knew I could not afford to let him touch me again but he was relentless. Dust rose up around us as we shuffled our feet, changing stances, adjusting balance, shifting, constantly moving. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Endo-san close his eyes and realized what he was trying to impart to me.