The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  I was well accustomed to not receiving a response to my relentless inquiring, but this time there was really no need for an answer – I was now in no doubt as to how Uncle Beng Woo felt about Toh Kei.

  The picturesque limestone hills that surround Ipoh make it one of the wettest places in Malaysia, so wet that only two weather forecasts are required: hot and wet, and hotter and wetter. It rains more in the monsoon season, but that still does little to affect the heat. I remember the rain cooling the air briefly, washing the streets and sweeping anything up to the size of a dead dog into monsoon drains, but as soon as it stopped it was hot again. Steam would rise from the waterlogged streets, and shirts again moistened and collars stuck to the necks of the European men who insisted on wearing jackets. My father always wore white drill suits, but I hardly ever saw him put on the jacket. He carried it over his arm and only wore it to conferences, which I was never allowed to see. He must have had a dozen of those suits, all exactly the same, because it did not take long in that climate for even a rarely used jacket to become grubby.

  The hottest time of day was just before the reliable afternoon downpour and sometimes, on days like that, Pa would say what he needed was an ice kachang and he would take us to a stall in Cowan Street. On one of those hot days that season when Mei and Li were busy with their own affairs, Pa said he was taking me for an ice kachang and we set off from home, just the two of us. Along the way he must have changed his mind, because instead of taking me to Cowan Street, he drove to the corner of Belfield Street, the corner where there were always a few armour-plated cars parked by the roadside, the kind with the steel windows that rubber planters favoured for the daily dash along lonely roads to their estates in the jungle. It was also the corner of the FMS Hotel and Bar.

  Pa once told me FMS stood for Father, Mother and Sister because the men who spent so much time there said it was their second home. But I was quite aware that FMS really meant Federated Malay States. For the first time in my life he took me right through the swing doors that, until then, had been the barrier to my understanding of just what the FMS was, and into a dark room where European men were standing around, gathered into a boisterous group. In the first of a row of curtained booths sat Uncle Hung Jeuk, fanning his face with a menu card, sucking on a cigarette and tugging at his frayed collar. We joined him and he quickly drew the curtain. And then, like it was an afterthought, he poked his head back out and called, ‘Nephew! Dua tiga!’ And I heard a young Chinese voice call back, ‘OK, boss.’

  As I had never been inside the swing doors before this entire situation was new to me, but nothing seemed more strange than calling out ‘Two three!’ to someone who sounded like he was a relative, and having that someone actually understand you. Here was a world that promised intrigue to a curious child.

  Uncle Hung Jeuk had a glass of beer in front of him and he took a sip and then looked at me with his blinking sleepy eyes and said, ‘What about pretty Su? Ice cream?’

  This was easy to understand. I had been expecting ice kachang, which was always good, but ice cream was something special. We both looked at Pa, and he nodded, and Uncle Hung Jeuk poked his head out through the curtain again.

  ‘Lagi satu banana split,’ he called.

  ‘OK, boss.’

  When I had been led to believe I was being treated to ice cream, it was a sudden disappointment to learn that merely a banana would be forthcoming, but Uncle Hung Jeuk winked at me and seemed to think that was just as special.

  He closed the curtain and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘What’s Davies’ response?’ he said to Pa. ‘Has he boned up on sedition?’

  ‘It would appear so,’ Pa said. ‘They won’t get their hanging with those charges, so they’ve got other plans.’

  ‘Well, that was only a matter of time. And it’s their own damn fault. If they’d called a spade a spade and not an emergency, they wouldn’t be in this fix.’

  ‘They had their reasons,’ Pa said.

  Uncle Hung Jeuk shrugged and took a long drink of his beer. It was noticeable that when he took a long drink his eyes stopped blinking. ‘They can still hang him if they want to. All they have to do is prove he had a gun.’

  ‘Well, Anna Thumboo made sure they didn’t find one,’ Pa said.

  A loud cheer came from outside and Uncle Hung Jeuk raised his voice. ‘That may be so, but you can bet any money you like the tuans will scare up enough witnesses among their captured CTs to swear our man was in possession of an entire arsenal of deadly weapons at some time or other, and hit him with regulation four-one-B. Let’s face it, you were lucky with young Kow. They won’t be so obliging this time. The silly thing is, take a look at all those planter wallahs around the bar right now and you’ll see service revolvers sticking out of their pants pocket and tommy guns behind the bar for safekeeping. I bet if I stuck my head out and yelled “bandits” I’d have a Webley up my nose before you could say hi-ho silver. Ipoh has turned into Dodge City, regulation four-one-B or not.’

  Another cheer erupted. ‘Bloody Wednesday club,’ he said, shaking his head with annoyance. ‘Why is the Wednesday club always the loudest?’ He lifted the curtain a little. ‘Can you blokes keep it down to a roar?’ he shouted, which only produced more cheering.

  He lit himself another cigarette and blew smoke into the air with a long sigh. ‘You know what all the racket’s about? They’re running a sweepstake on who’s next for an ambush. They’re sick, the ba …’ He stopped himself and glanced at me, momentarily shamefaced. ‘The buffoons.’

  The curtain was pulled back by a Chinese boy with a tray holding two bottles of Tiger beer. ‘Ah … dua tiga,’ Uncle Hung Jeuk said. ‘Terima kasih, Nephew.’ He quickly swallowed the last of his glass and put it on the tray. ‘This tiga habis. Kaput already.’

  Also on the tray was a bowl, and I soon understood why Uncle Hung Jeuk winked at me. There was the banana I was expecting, but it was sliced right down the middle and in between were two scoops of ice cream covered in chocolate syrup and chopped nuts.

  ‘There you go, pretty Su,’ Uncle Hung Jeuk said. ‘I bet you never had one of those before.’

  ‘Possession of a firearm won’t give them their grand statement,’ Pa said as he poured his beer. ‘They ignored that option with Ah Kow and they’ll ignore it again, take my word. Toh Kei is a prize catch. Don’t forget they labelled him public enemy number one. Ah Kow was only rank and file.’

  ‘I wonder if old Davies is just out of his depth on this one,’ Uncle Hung Jeuk said as he puffed nervously on his cigarette. ‘You know Gurney’s all over him, insinuating himself right up to his turkey neck. Taking a special interest, as they say. They’re not going to let another one get away like Kow. When it goes as far as that, all the way up to the High Commissioner, the tuan besar himself, Davies has his hands well and truly tied. Poor blighter. I’ll bet he didn’t count on all this when he made his escape from Nairobi, or wherever it was.’

  ‘How’s your ice cream?’ Pa said to me.

  ‘Cold,’ I said.

  ‘In my opinion they’ll charge him with murder,’ Pa said. ‘That’s the feeling I get from Davies.’

  ‘Whose murder?’

  ‘That I don’t know yet. But then they’ll have their big criminal trial and their hanging. And they’ll be happy to label him a common murderer.’

  Uncle Hung Jeuk had finished his beer. He stared into his empty glass and blew smoke out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Does Anna Thumboo know that?’

  ‘I won’t tell her until I know myself. Davies is under pressure to push ahead. We’ll find out soon enough.’

  ‘What was she thinking, getting involved with someone like him? Couldn’t she see there’s no future in it?’

  Pa shrugged. ‘She’s been on her own out there a long time. You haven’t met him, have you?’

  ‘Toh Kei? Never.’

  ‘Well, don’t judge her until you have. He’s not your everyday gun-toting terrorist.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t
doubt that.’ Uncle Hung Jeuk leaned out through the curtain. ‘Nephew! Dua tiga lagi!’ He upended the empty glass to his lips and drained the last few drops. ‘Speaking of toting guns, you know what they’ve done now? The bloody tuans. They’ve banned the gangster films.’ He shook his head. ‘They allow newspapers to print American gibberish like public enemy number one, and then they ban gangster films. White Heat was on at the Odeon and now they’ve banned it before I even had a chance to see it. Don’t they realise how ridiculous that is? Cagney’s in that one, too, the original public enemy. Don’t they understand irony? And where do they think we are anyway, Moscow? Banning films! It’s like the tuans have gone commo themselves. Now they’ve got some western on instead. Cowboys and Indians. What’s the difference? They’ve all got guns, they’re all shooting each other.’

  ‘Perhaps they think the westerns are more alien,’ Pa said.

  ‘Oh, and the streets of Chicago are not?’ Uncle Hung Jeuk shook his head again. ‘Sometimes I think the world’s gone mad. Everyone’s drinking too much toddy. What’s this war costing? A hundred million a year, five hundred million? All for a few commos running around in the jungle. They won’t tell us the real cost, of course. Thirty million, they say. Are we expected to believe that all these police, all these Malay Regiment wallahs, Royal Marines, SAS, Gurkhas, planes, gunboats, the lot for thirty million dollars? Not even thirty million pounds. They’re bringing in Rhodesians, Australians, Fijians … we’ll have the whole bloody empire here soon. Where’s it going to end? What if there’s another rubber slump? Do you know what else I heard? There’s twice as much going out of the treasury to pay for all this security malarky than they’ve got coming in. The country will be bankrupt soon. Maybe that’s what the commos really want.’ He sat back and laughed. ‘That’d be rich, wouldn’t it? The communists bankrupt the capitalists. The Whitehall warriors, hoist by their own petard!’

  Whenever he got into a state like this his eyes blinked so fast I couldn’t understand how they could be open long enough for him to actually see, but they slowed down when two new Tigers arrived.

  ‘So your ice cream’s cold, eh?’ he said to me.

  ‘I don’t think there’s been a war like this before,’ Pa said.

  ‘No, this one’s an emergency.’

  ‘What I mean is, they’re having to learn how to fight it as they go.’

  ‘Yeah, and I’ll tell you what they’re learning. They’re going to spray the jungle with chemicals, like giant crop dusters. There’s a lesson in that, no doubt. Where’s it going to lead? Bloody tuans and their bloody Whitehall warriors. Why not just spray petrol and be done with it? Burn the lot. Get rid of the jungle once and for all, and make more room for rubber.’

  Pa reached across the table and touched him on the arm. ‘Not so loud.’

  ‘Loud? Who’s going to hear me above that lot out there?’

  But it was true. Uncle Hung Jeuk’s voice was getting louder the more he had to say.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Casey,’ he said. ‘I’m getting worked up, I know. But it’s madness, the whole thing, on both sides. How can the comrades ever win? They’ll never win the Malays over. What do the Malays call the Communist Party? The Chinese Party! It’s not about politics to them, it’s about survival. Anyway, can you ever see the Malays giving up Islam for the brotherhood of the working class? For a start, they may have class but they don’t work, and the Chinese are certainly not their brothers. And after what the guerrillas did when the Japs surrendered, the same guerrillas out there in the jungle now, what they did to Malay collaborators then. Thousands scalped, sliced, cooked …’

  ‘Please,’ Pa said.

  Uncle Hung Jeuk looked at me. ‘I’m sorry, pretty Su. I do get carried away sometimes. Your mad old uncle is getting older and madder.’ He drained his glass. ‘But this whole business never stood a chance from the start. What sort of species are we?’

  Virtually everything he had said to that point meant little to me, but I knew the answer to this. ‘Human beings,’ I said.

  Uncle Hung Jeuk laughed and loosened his tie. ‘Sometimes I wonder. How are you getting along with Mr Ho?’

  ‘I’m past two hundred words,’ I said proudly. ‘Do you know Mr Ho?’

  ‘Can I tell her?’ he asked my father, who nodded. ‘I’ve known Mr Ho for many years. We worked together before the war. Before the real war, I mean.’

  ‘Were you a teacher, too?’ I asked, and wondered if he had actually taught in a Chinese school, perhaps taught Confucius to Chinese children.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘We worked for the government in Singapore. The only teaching we did then was trying to teach the people that having the British in charge was a good idea. It’s called propaganda. You ask your teacher what that means. The funny thing is, it wasn’t until they had the Japs in charge that the people finally believed us.’

  They both laughed and leaned back in their seats. ‘We were a good little unit then,’ Uncle Hung Jeuk said. ‘Tretchikoff, Wilmot and Ho. I always said we sounded like a cross-cultural law firm. Ho on Chinese, Wilmot on English and Tretchikoff on canvas and easel. Good old Vladimir. He survived all that better than any of us. Three years in a Jap prison camp didn’t slow him down. He’s in South Africa now, painting portraits – did you know that? Beats doing cartoons. Beats struggling with the law … and struggling even harder with the halfwit tuans.’

  This was the first time I had considered Mr Ho as anything other than a teacher. It surprised me he had a life beyond, and even more that he could have once been someone in trouble with the Japanese. ‘Was Mr Ho put in prison by the Japanese?’

  ‘Prison? Noooo,’ Uncle Hung Jeuk said with an elaborate shake of the head. ‘They wouldn’t have put him in any prison. If they’d caught him he would have lost his head. He went into the jungle with the guerrillas and didn’t come out until the Japs were gone. His spirit was certainly willing, but he was a bit old for all that. Fancied himself as one of his legendary warriors, I suppose, but that was a young man’s game. That’s why he retired early, and that’s why he’s your tutor. You should ask him about it some time. He’s got some good stories about those years. They made him some kind of medico, jungle remedies and all that. Makes a change from the old stories he likes to tell. Drags him into the twentieth century.’

  This was now utterly confusing. Was he joking with me? Did he expect me to believe that Mr Ho spent the Japanese Time in the jungle with gorillas? There were no gorillas in the Malayan jungle. The only gorillas in Malaya were the ones in Tarzan films. I thought I should ask Mr Ho about all this some time, but I knew I was unlikely to get an answer.

  ‘Mr Ho doesn’t like me to ask questions,’ I said.

  ‘That certainly sounds like old Ho. Ask Beng Woo. He’ll tell you.’

  My father got to his feet. ‘Don’t, Humphrey. She doesn’t need to …’

  Uncle Hung Jeuk held up both hands. ‘All right, I’m sorry. Like I say, older and madder. Too much toddy. Forget what I said. Don’t ask anybody anything.’

  I knew he wasn’t serious. I knew he didn’t want me to go back to the way it was, when I wasn’t to think for myself. I could perhaps get around to asking Mr Ho about his time in the jungle, but I was certainly grateful for the excuse not to have to ask Miss Mak about propaganda.

  15

  Ismail drove me into Ipoh in the big black saloon as though he were my chauffeur, with him in front behind the wheel and me having the great expanse of the back seat all to myself. I attempted a couple of times to engage him in conversation, inquiring after his health and other general pleasantries. He responded only with the briefest of answers. I then ventured to ask what I might expect at the Ipoh police station. To this he said nothing.

  I seemed to remember this car, a late American model, from before the war in Batu Gajah. I seemed to remember it belonging to one of the wealthy Tronoh tin miners. Ismail was in no hurry, and we were nearly half an hour ambling our way over the ten miles from Papan. A
gain, despite his silence, I was reassured that there was nothing to be really concerned about. I should have realised the car was an omen. A vehicle like that was not the customary transport for a humble Malay policeman. A vehicle like that was a privilege of rank, and only the Japanese really had rank now.

  Eventually we came to a stop under the portico of the Central Police Station building in Ipoh. Ismail jumped out and opened the door for me, then led me inside where I was required to register at the front desk. It seemed that I was something of a celebrity as a number of officers emerged to solemnly observe the proceedings. They were all Malay, many of whom I recognised. The desk officer, a Sikh whose family I remembered attending my clinic in Batu Gajah when my husband was still alive, began by apologising and asking for my watch and my handbag. I inquired if I might be told what I was there for. He did not lift his head when he replied. ‘Mem, pembesar saya ada sedikit pertanyaan, ya,’ he said. Madam, my superior has some questions for you. He even asked if that was all right with me.

  I said that as I probably had no choice in the matter, it would have to be all right. I was then taken out to the lock-up. It was dark, rank, and already occupied by three women, each huddled into a corner. I asked Ismail how long I would be here, as I had a baby to take care of back in Papan. He shrugged and locked the heavy grille.

  The women, all Chinese, made a point of not looking at me. It was difficult to determine their ages as they were so dirty and dishevelled. I tried to start up a conversation before one shooshed me. ‘Cannot talk,’ she snapped in English.

  I settled onto the floor as far from the commode, which was a bucket under a tap, as I could get. A few hours later I was fetched and led back upstairs into a small room and told to sit. A Japanese soon joined me, waiting at the door until I stood and bowed, and then taking my chair, which was the only seat in the room. I recognised him to be the same man who struck me with his pistol in my clinic. This time he began civilly enough, introducing himself as Sergeant Sato, although he was still not in uniform. He spoke in Malay, I answered in English. He said I must not speak English. I said that my Malay was not very good, but I was happy to speak in Tamil or Cantonese if he would prefer. He cursed at me in Japanese and then said, in English, that I was to be taken to see an officer. He said it was very important for me to answer any questions truthfully, otherwise ‘bad thing’ would befall me. I said I was always in the habit of telling the truth, which was not quite true itself as I had already lied to him about my grasp of the Malay tongue, but at the time I was rash enough to take a certain amount of pleasure in that small victory.