Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  The driver told them about the loyalty of the Pahang people. The Japanese had requisitioned a royal palace in the old state capital town of Pekan, and made it their headquarters. Their cruelty and ruthlessness were an offence to God. The Sultan himself had issued a secret decree to his people to help the British.

  ‘We are all of one blood,’ the driver shouted, hitting the steering wheel for emphasis.

  ‘Drive us through Pekan,’ Ibrahim asked him, ‘I want to see my enemy.’ The red dirt road ran straight and unwavering, like the Roman roads on Salisbury Plain which James’s governesses had shown him. At an orderly angle of 90 degrees, it gave on to an equally straight metalled highway which, after an hour’s driving, ran across a wide river and into the town of Pekan.

  ‘It’s like Cheltenham,’ James murmured to himself as they drove through the grid of spacious tree-lined streets along which stood graceful wooden villas washed ice-pink or lime yellow.

  Bill said nothing, but craned his neck to admire the immense, ancient trees which bordered the river banks; from each fork or crack in the grey bark sprouted stags’horn ferns. They passed the town mosque, a wooden building elaborately decorated with carvings and painted the cool turquoise-green shade that is considered most pleasing to Allah. Pekan impressed him as a modest, gracious, peaceful settlement, and he recognized its character as being more purely Malay than the striving multi-racial towns of Georgetown or K. L. The place was full of the enduring spirit of the people – simple, industrious and harmonizing with both spiritual and earthly authority; it spoke directly to his heart and strengthened his resolve.

  ‘Look there, Japanese HQ, formerly royal palace,’ the driver pointed to an imposing stone building in the heavy neo-Victorian style of Anglo-Malay architecture. Its bulk dominated the tranquil elegance of the rest of the town. Around it a fine garden had evidently been razed to deny cover to any attacker. The red-and-white rising sun flag flapped idly above the devastation, and a squad of soldiers, marching raggedly like marionettes, guarded the entrance.

  Their rendez-vous was at a coffee shop on the outskirts of the town, by a single-storey suburban mosque whose minaret, crescent and star were silhouetted against the failing evening light. With Bill seated far back in the shadows, they talked with the stall-owner, their driver, the man who owned the lumber company, a police inspector and a local lawyer. By the time the stall-owner judged it prudent to put out the lamp they had crystallized their plan.

  Bill left the next day with the driver and the lumber lorry, to hide out on a remote kampong at the apex of an inland lake three or four hours away. The Japanese had not even bothered to penetrate this poor rural area. He could operate a wireless without fear and train the volunteers the others recruited in safety.

  James and Ibrahim rented a small kampong house from an elderly widow in a village an hour’s drive away. It was the last of the houses which dotted a strip of fertile land between the river and the valley road. Their cover was driving trucks for the lumber company which dominated the area economically, an occupation which allowed them freely to ply the roads between Pekan, the port, Kuala Lumpur and the distant jungle tracts where the trees were felled.

  At once men began to seek them out. The first time a figure stepped out of the shadows of his balcony James hurled himself behind the single palm standing at the front of the house, expecting shots or an attack by jungle knife.

  The stranger hesitated, cleared his throat and called out, ‘I am late, the road has been flooded.’

  James paused in bewilderment for a moment, then recognized their own password, suggested by Ibrahim. Tentatively he called back, ‘The road will be clear again by morning.’

  There was an awkward, distrustful pause, then James boldly left the cover of the tree and walked forward. The youth waiting for him had been a student in peacetime and was now eager to fight the Japanese. James hid him in the house for two days, then drove him to Bill.

  ‘Our first recruit,’ he announced in exultation, ‘first of many, you’ll see.’

  They laundered their money a few hundred dollars at a time, exchanging the old bills issued under the British for the new ones printed by the Japanese. Bill sent a messenger to the house of the fat Chinese who had feasted and sheltered them on their journey to Perak. The house was a charred ruin and their former host and his family were dead; they had been betrayed to the Japanese very soon after the four men had left to find the Communists. By night, Bill’s emissary dug into the earth below the ashes where he had been told to search, and retrieved the precious but cumbersome wireless which they had buried before leaving. A few weeks later James discovered a battery in a palm-leaf bag, stuffed under a tarpaulin on his truck by an anonymous well-wisher.

  Bill assiduously practised Morse Code. They picked up weather forecasts from American warships and rejoiced. It was their first contact with the real war.

  By Christmas 1943, they had fifteen agents in training, and ten in the field. James appeared the picture of a cheery Malay truck-driver, with a smooth skin the colour of strong tea. He found he now needed to take only one Trisoralen tablet a day to maintain the colour, if he kept in the sun. He drove his loads of timber the length and breadth of the state with messages and supplies concealed in hollowed-out billets of wood.

  In the village, under Ibrahim’s direction, he had been accepted along with all the other disruptive features of the occupation. Kampong Kechil was a village which hardly merited the name, a widely-separated line of simple wooden houses, strung out along the valley road and distanced from each other by padi fields, open spaces or vegetable gardens. In consequence it lacked the intimate street life of villages where the houses were grouped closely around one or two wells.

  James and Ibrahim spoke Malay all the time, even when alone. When Ibrahim talked to the villagers he derided James as a soft-living, Westernized ‘town boy’, and made fun of his supposedly degenerate, irreligious ways.

  ‘That way they won’t care to get to know you,’ he laughed, ‘and if you forget your prayers no one will be surprised.’ He need not have worried. James’s mutable nature adapted to the village ways with a naturalness which astonished his companion; the only aspect of his new life which he could not master was the mechanics of the truck.

  ‘It’s good of Allah to spare me from punctures,’ he remarked, looking perplexedly at the grimy engine. ‘I’d never manage to change a wheel.’

  ‘Allah in his mercy has given you me for a mechanic.’ Ibrahim delicately picked up a loose electrical lead which he reconnected to the starter motor. ‘Try if it will start now.’

  Their house was a simple building of old wood weathered to a reddish grey, with a tin roof. It was built in the traditional style on piles about two feet high, with some ornamental carving decorating the steps and the shuttered window-openings. Bamboo guttering funnelled rainwater into a large earthenware jar by the entrance.

  A bridge, five planks wide, spanned the stream which flowed slowly between the house and the road. In the clear grassy space in front of the building their landlady, Maimunah, sometimes sent her cow to graze. Her house lay across the road, some twenty yards farther down, next to a long tin roof under which the villagers processed their latex. Every day Maimunah, a stately woman whose grey hair was bound up in a flower-printed, scarf-like turban, set off for her small plantation of trees, and returned in the late morning with two full tins of latex bouncing on a bamboo pole over her shoulder.

  She decanted the white sap into a rectangular trough and added formic acid to it, then sat in the shade for a quarter of an hour waiting for the mixture to harden. After that she tipped out the oblong of coagulated rubber on to a cloth and stamped on it to flatten it, before feeding it through an ancient iron mangle which still bore the gleaming brass plate of its manufacturer in Sheffield.

  The result of this procedure was a dirty, yellowish-white blanket of latex which was draped over the fence to dry. Every week a Chinese dealer would visit the kampong with his truc
k, to buy what they produced.

  Maimunah had one daughter living in the village with her husband, and their youngest child, a boy of about four years old, sometimes helped her tread the latex, jumping on the stinking mat of resin with excitement. He was a mischievous child whose other delight was to sit in the cab of James’s lorry pretending to drive it.

  Frequently Maimunah’s voice, calling, ‘Yusof! Yusof! Where are you? Stop teasing me! Come home now!’ would float into the sleepy air, and perhaps later the old woman herself would saunter over the plank bridge to the house to ask James or Ibrahim if they had seen her grandson.

  James was sitting on the steps one day when he saw the graceful form of a girl cross the bridge and approach him, hesitantly fumbling with her white scarf to veil her face. She was about fifteen years old. Few of the village women bothered with the traditional Moslem ideals of modesty. The young unmarried girls were the only ones who covered their heads, and in their shyness often made the business of hiding their faces from male eyes delightfully seductive.

  ‘Peace,’ she greeted him hesitantly.

  ‘Peace.’

  ‘I am looking for little Yusof. Is he in your truck? I know he likes playing there.’ She darted a quick look at James from wide, round eyes, then looked at the ground, embarrassed. As James walked to the truck she followed him a respectful few paces behind. There was no sign of the child.

  ‘I am sorry to disturb you.’ She turned to go.

  ‘Wait – I’ll see if he’s hiding round the back.’ James jumped down from the cab and walked round to the tailgate. He heard a splutter under one of the canvas sheets on the platform; he flipped it back and Yusof leapt happily out and ran away down the road. The girl smiled, the whole of her pale, heartshaped face relaxing with relief.

  ‘Khatijah is my oldest granddaughter,’ Maimunah told him a few days later. ‘She has been living in Malacca where the people have poor manners, I think.’ James realized that she was apologizing for the girl’s boldness. ‘Khatijah is a widow now,’ she added, as if in further mitigation. ‘The Japanese killed her husband before her own eyes because he was accused of helping the Communists. Less than a year, they had been married.’ She clicked her tongue as if reproving fate for its harshness. ‘But all young people must get used to hard times sooner or later.’

  In a few days, it became evident that Maimunah had more to be concerned about than her granddaughter’s over-familiar manner. The peace of the kampong was disrupted by savage argument between Maimunah and her daughter, an overweight woman with a perpetually self-satisfied smile above her double chins. The slight figure of Khatijah soon afterwards carried her small bag of belongings out of her mother’s house and walked with some defiance down the road to Maimunah’s home.

  The two men watched with interest as the girl passed in front of their house. Ibrahim had been ordered by Bill to move south and set up a new centre for the resistance; he finished crushing his clothes into a small, brown fibre suitcase and knotted a loop of string around it tightly, shaking his head as he thought about Khatijah. ‘A young widow is as headstrong as a horse which has thrown its rider,’ he said, quoting a familiar proverb. ‘There’ll be nothing but trouble on account of that girl, you’ll see.’

  ‘She seemed quiet enough to me.’ James was taking Ibrahim’s bicycle pump apart and preparing to hide the precious sheet of paper on which their codes were written out inside it.

  ‘The women won’t trust her; she won’t be able to do anything right now her own mother’s thrown her out.’

  James pulled the rusty spring out of the body of the pump. ‘What has she done?’

  ‘It isn’t a question of what she has done, my friend, but what she is. Women are the family’s honour, after all. Her husband is dead, so she’s come running back to her mother – that’s natural. Where else could she go? But it’s also natural that the village women will see her as a scarlet woman, all set to take away their own husbands now she has none of her own. She will bring shame on her family if they can’t get her married again soon.’

  ‘Hardly her fault that her husband’s dead, is it? She’s so young.’ James realized that his British ideas of fairness would betray him. If he questioned these customs publicly, but he felt sympathy for the persecuted girl and dislike for the villagers’ narrow-minded callousness towards her. ‘What about her father, shouldn’t he take care of her until she’s married again? That’s what the Koran says, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ah, there you have it, my friend. Her father was a foreigner, he ran off and left her mother. Already a stain on the family’s honour. And now her mother has a new husband and a new life and she doesn’t want any living reminders of the mistakes of her wild youth around – understand?’

  James nodded, folding up the code sheet and sliding it into the body of the bicycle pump. ‘Thank God we weren’t born women, eh?’ Ibrahim laughed to hear him use this colloquial platitude, giving James a playful punch in the ribs.

  ‘You’ll have no trouble without me around, I think.’

  ‘Except with the damn truck.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can service it before I leave. My father would weep if he saw me doing that, after paying so much for my education.’ Ibrahim’s father kept a garage the other side of the state, but had intended his son to become an engineer.

  ‘You’ll be building bridges again when the war’s over,’ James told him.

  After Ibrahim left, Maimunah became more friendly, taking a maternal interest in her lonely tenant. Khatijah appeared often to do James’s washing for him or bring gifts of food. Sometimes he ate with the two women. As Ibrahim had predicted, Khatijah was shunned by the other villagers; when she was not helping her grandmother she stayed indoors.

  Bill designated their force the Liberation Army of Malaya. They were almost a hundred strong, but still had no contact with the British Army commanders in Ceylon. Nevertheless, their optimism strengthened daily. When he was away from their headquarters at the head of the lake, James felt as if cast adrift. He missed the excitement of making plans, the sense of purpose and the companionship. Accustomed to having Bill to take decisions for him or to engage him in rigorous arguments over his actions, he had a sense of his own incompetence when he operated independently.

  Desire crept up on James so slowly he was taken by surprise. It was eighteen months since he had had a woman, but poor health and the sense of failure had lowered his libido. Now he was fit again, and lived in a state of periodic elation as the resistance operation gathered momentum. But there was, in truth, very little action he could take, beyond travelling around to recruit men and keeping those already trained in contact with headquarters. Most of his time was unstructured. He was a man ready for obsession.

  He began to anticipate the sight of Khatijah’s slender, tightly wrapped shape sauntering at the roadside as he approached the village. He saw her once at the riverbank, her wet sarong clinging to her body and accentuating every curve as she poured water over her bare shoulders; and afterwards he looked for her every time he passed the gap in the vegetation that gave him a view of the river.

  When James awoke sweating and aroused from a hectic dream of lips and breasts and cascading black hair, he could no longer deny his desire to himself. A few days later he made the seven-hour trip to Kuala Lumpur with a load of timber, and he went to Mary’s, anxious to slake this inconvenient appetite before it led him into danger. But Mary’s was crammed with Japanese officers, and he dared not enter. Instead he found a slatternly Chinese streetwalker, but as she squabbled over her price he was overcome with self-disgust and ran away.

  He took terrible risks at the kampong, talking openly to Khatijah as she worked and offering her rides down the road in his truck when she was loaded with latex. Then he took fright at his own rashness, and stayed away for days, prolonging a trip to Bill’s headquarters.

  ‘Marvellous news, Jim, bloody marvellous – Ceylon are sending men in at last.’ In the damp cool of the early morning, the tal
l Australian ducked out from under the low bamboo lintel of his hut. ‘They’ve dropped five blokes off the coast of Perak and they’ve met up with the Communists. It’s happening, mate, it’s happening at last.’ The Australian was also restored to fitness, and his jungle pallor again roasted to Anglo-Saxon ruddiness.

  ‘About bloody time.’ English came out of James’s mouth awkwardly now, and he had to struggle for the words. ‘Listen, do you need me in Kechil? Wouldn’t I be more use over the other side, back in Perak, now?’

  ‘I thought you loved the kampong life?’

  ‘There’s a problem.’

  ‘What kind of problem, for Christ’s sake? Are they on to you?’

  James shook his head. ‘There’s a girl.’

  ‘So what. There’s girls all over the place.’ Bill spoke with irritation.

  ‘Bloody hell, man, you know what I mean. I’m fucking dreaming about her.’ He smiled involuntarily at his choice of words. Bill did not smile.

  ‘I’m not going to blow this operation for the sake of your cock. Use a bit of self-control, can’t you?’

  ‘It’s not so easy, Bill.’ But he knew it was useless to go on. The Australian lived a life of cerebral pleasures that was virtually chaste. He had no understanding of the passion that was engulfing James’s entire being.

  ‘I’ve got to have a base near the Jap HQ, and you’re the only man who can do it. You’ve said so yourself.’

  James drove angrily back to the kampong, thinking through the situation with as much calmness as he could. If he took the girl, the village would turn against him, especially if she got pregnant. He was not at all confident that the villagers believed his native disguise; he sensed that they had rapidly recognized him as British but chose not to acknowledge it openly, partly from loyalty to their cause and partly from natural reticence. He was at least certain that they suspected that he and Ibrahim were involved in anti-Japanese activities. If the village people turned against him the whole operation would be in immediate danger of betrayal.