by Tash Aw
“Okay, look. I’ll explain something to you. Come, sit down, I said. You’re still new, fresh, as far as I can tell—even though you’re one goddam murderer already!” Gun broke into laughter once more, baring his cigarette-stained teeth. “You have backsides for brains. You have no idea about the work we do.”
“I know everything about the shop.”
Gun looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Not the shop, you goddam idiot, the army. The Communist army. M—C—P,” he said in a slow, under-the-breath voice. “Know what that stands for? Malayan Communist Party. That’s who we work for.”
“I knew that, sure,” Johnny said, kicking a clump of grass. “Where do you work?”
“You think I’m going to tell you, you bloody dogshit? You’re not one of us. Not yet, anyway. Trouble is, Tiger wants you in the shop, not out there doing what the rest of us do.”
“What do you do?”
Gun lifted the parang and held its blade erect before Johnny’s face. He looked at it with cold black eyes and smiled, showing his yellow-brown teeth. With a single fluid swipe of his arm he brought the blade down onto the ground before them. It sliced sharply into the earth, clinking against the tiny pebbles in the soil. He smiled at Johnny, the corners of his upper lip curling back hard. “That’s what we do.”
Johnny’s face coloured. His blood ran hot. He had felt the rush of air against his cheek as the parang swept past him. He had seen the sun glinting off the blade. At last, he knew he was truly and irreversibly a Communist.
“What I think,” Gun said, as he prised the parang from the soil and wiped it clean with his fingers, “is that anybody who can cut up and kill an English big shot, well, that person might be very useful to us.”
“Will I fight for the liberation of man’s soul from the chains of the bourgeoisie?” Johnny said.
Gun stared at him blankly.
“What do you want me to do?” Johnny said.
Gun laughed. Johnny could not tell if it was in contempt or in friendship. “That’s up to Tiger,” he said.
The only problem with being a Communist—for Johnny and for Tiger—was that it interfered with business. It interfered with running the shop and serving customers and deciding which clothes to display in the glass cabinets. For Tiger, the problem was one he had faced for many years now. He had become accustomed to it all—the rotten, ever-present fear of exposure and arrest, the risk of betrayal. Sure, he was among his people; and yes, he knew he had their trust. All the same, he was careful not to make enemies. He never took advantage of suppliers or customers. People are people, he told himself. A single vengeful word whispered in the ear of the district police inspector would be sufficient for Tiger to be locked up in Tambun Prison for the rest of his life. For more than a decade, this fine gentleman had coordinated the activities of the Perak guerillas from the genteel surroundings of his shop. Now, as the 1930s drew to a close, the strain of this duplicity weighed heavily on him. The knowledge that he was sending young men to be shot, maimed, or imprisoned for life began to disturb his sleep. He wanted to close his doors to the world, to shut himself in his home with his books and furniture and fruit trees, but no: the call from China was becoming more urgent, more violent. The Japanese were in Manchuria now and Chinese all over the world were being called to arms. These were times for action, the Party said, for the enemy was at the gate; but all Tiger longed for was to grow the perfect guava. He felt age in his bones and reluctance in his heart. In his sleepless nights he had the same thought over and over again: he had to stop, he could not go on.
He was glad he had Johnny.
Early one evening when the sun had calmed to a deep amber, a thought came into Tiger’s head which made him shiver gently with happiness. He had spent the day planting papaya seedlings he had grown from the seeds of his own fruit. Though the work was not heavy, it was enough to make a man of his age feel as if he had earned a rest. After dousing himself with cold water he sat in the cane armchair in his library with his supper of cold noodles. When he finished those he poured himself a small glass of cognac. He had not been to the shop at all that day. He thought of Johnny, he thought of the customers; he tried to fill his ears with the noise of the shop, the smooth-sharp sound of heavy scissors cutting through cloth, Johnny’s low mumbling voice, the clink of coins on the glass counter. He wondered how the shop looked without him in it, and the image of the Tigerless place did not trouble him. He knew then that the Tiger Brand Trading Company would survive his death and, more than that, would flourish. His whole world—which he had created—would grow unendingly. That thought was cemented when, at that moment, he saw Johnny running up the stairs at the front of the house, leaping two steps at a time. Elation mixed with relief, that is what Tiger felt. Now he knew there was no more reason for him to continue the struggle.
“Johnny,” he called, no longer able to keep his thoughts to himself.
“What’s the matter, Tiger? Are you alright?” Johnny’s brow creased with uncertainty.
“I want you to sit down with me,” Tiger said.
Johnny sat perched on the edge of a chair facing Tiger. He could feel the frame of the chair pushing through the thin upholstery, cutting into his buttocks.
“Corvoossier?” Tiger said, holding up the bottle of cognac.
“No, thank you.”
“It is said,” Tiger said, his face glowing and puce-coloured, “that tending to your garden is good for your soul. I can certainly testify to that. After a day’s work I feel cleansed. Funny, isn’t it?” He chuckled gently.
Johnny looked mystified.
“I don’t know how to explain this feeling to you. It is as if the work I put into looking after my plants makes me a better man. It makes me feel that I am a good person—”
“You are a good person.”
“—and for those few hours that I am in the garden, none of the bad things I have done in my life matter very much; they do not exist in my garden.”
“You have never done any bad things.”
Tiger smiled. “Don’t speak. Listen. You know I have worried about the shop. You know I am an old man now. That does not mean I do not care about the future of the shop, the future of everyone who works there, everyone who depends on the shop. I care. But I am old and tired, and soon I will die. I have spent much time in my garden lately, I know, but I feel no harm can come from this. Why? Because I have you, and you are ready for greater things.”
“Greater things,” Johnny repeated in his blank monotone.
“Yes, greater things! Tell me—what would happen to the shop if I was dead?”
“Do not say that.”
“But what if? What if? What would you do then?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.” Johnny’s face was stubborn and dull.
“Do you think the shop would survive?”
“Yes.” Johnny’s reply was instinctive.
“Why do you think it will survive?”
Johnny did not answer.
“Because of you. All that is mine will be yours upon my death.”
Johnny did not protest but remained expressionless as before.
The following weeks saw a small revolution in the textile business in the Valley. Following the example set by the larger companies in KL and Penang, Johnny introduced village-to-village selling. It had always occurred to him that there were many people who might have wanted to visit the shop but for one reason or another were not able to. In many parts of the Valley, the roads were little more than dirt tracks twisting through the jungle. When the rains came they washed mud onto the roads, and in the hot season the dust was so heavy and the sun so strong that a traveller could barely open his eyes. If these people could not come to the shop, Johnny thought, the shop would go to them.
Every Tuesday Johnny would cycle out into the jungle, taking with him a selection of cloths, heading for small villages beyond the reaches of the single tarred road running between Kampar and Ipoh. Each journey would last two full days and ni
ghts, and on the morning of the third day Johnny would reappear at the shop with no merchandise left on his bicycle. He built a little wooden platform on the back of his bicycle, fashioned from an old piece of teak which had once been the seat of a chair, worn smooth through years of use. Johnny lashed this tightly to his bicycle, and then tied the bales of cloth to it so that they stuck out at right angles. He soon became a familiar sight in the smaller villages of the Valley—a stern-faced man riding a funny contraption which seemed less like a bicycle than a moving pile of textiles. The children looked forward to hearing the ring of his bell every few weeks, for he always brought with him a large bag of boiled sweets, which he would distribute generously.
But sweets were not all Johnny brought. In each of the villages, he would seek out the people known to have Communist sympathies. He brought news, from Tiger, of what the Party was doing in the rest of the Valley. He told them about secret lectures and campaigns to raise funds for the movement in China. He gathered information too, and soon he knew which farmers had sons who wanted to join the Party, which villages were not sympathetic to the Cause, which people could be relied upon to provide donations. He knew the villages as he knew people—some were friends, some reluctant allies, others plain enemies. There were beautiful ones, ugly ones, dull ones, naughty ones. Soon he knew everything. More than Tiger himself.
On these trips Johnny began to feel a swelling sense of duty. Not only was he working to cement the future of the shop, he was imparting the word of the Party. True, this wasn’t quite the same as hand-to-hand combat in the jungle, but representing the Party in his way was surely more noble and demanding. His way required cunning beyond that of a simple soldier. It required charisma and intelligence and, above all, the ability to read and write. In this respect Johnny had became superior to the other men, for he was now armed with literacy. On each journey to the outlying villages he took with him The Communist Manifesto in English, together with a pocket dictionary he had found in Tiger’s library. He also took an exercise book in which he wrote out all the words he did not understand. Fraternity. Absolutism. Antagonistic. Jurisprudence. He wrote these down on one side of the page, and on the other he wrote out the meanings of the words in Chinese, simplifying and paraphrasing them to facilitate the memorising process (Proletariat : Me). Then he simply looked at the lists of words, learning them by heart. As he cycled along the uneven tracks, veering to avoid the rocks and the potholes and craters carved out by the floods and the droughts, he spoke the English words aloud, letting the Chinese translations echo silently in his head. At first they sounded strange and fascinating. Sometimes his voice seemed not to belong to him—he did not recognise the person who made these wonderful noises. But soon he grew to love these sounds. He loved feeling the words form at the base of his throat and then well up in his mouth before dancing in the quiet jungle air.
When at home, he began to creep more frequently into Tiger’s library. For a long time, this was a place which had intimidated and mystified him, but now it began to feel warmer. Its allure became stronger and less forbidding. But which ones should he read? They were still indistinguishable from one another. He could by now read most of the words on the spines, but the names—they were names, weren’t they?—remained shadowy and foreign. Once, he ran his fingers along the spines of a row of guava-coloured books, feeling the indented gold letters with his fingertips. Perhaps the touch of his flesh against the printed letters would suddenly reveal all kinds of hidden secrets. He came away, breathlessly, with A Choice of Shelley’s Verse and something by Dornford Yates. Those two books kept him busy for many weeks. He filled three whole exercise books with lists of new words which would stay with him for the rest of his life. As an old man he would often quote Shelley, muttering under his breath if he thought no one was listening. The fitful alternations of the rain this, the Deep’s untrampled floor that. I don’t think he ever fully understood the meaning of it all.
From time to time, though, he still felt a shiver of excitement when he thought about the dark, rough life of a soldier like Gun. He had once visited the home of a small-village Communist lieutenant and spied, through a half-open door, a rifle propped up against the wall. It leant brazenly on the wooden slats like a household implement to be picked up and used casually at any time. That night Johnny slept in the next room, not ten feet from the gun. He dreamt he was walking barefoot through the night-clad jungle holding that same rifle. He walked into a clearing lit by a fire. It smelt of meat and mud. The men were laughing, their heads thrown back, their throats open wide. The gun was light in his hands as he shot each one of them in the head. When he woke he looked at his hands. They were strong and calm, but his pulse was throbbing heavily.
6. Three Stars
SOME PEOPLE ARE BORN with a streak of malice running through them. It poisons their blood forever, swimming in their veins like a mysterious virus. It may lurk unnoticed for many years, surfacing only occasionally. Good times may temporarily suppress these instincts, and the person may even appear well intentioned and honest. Sooner or later, however, the cold hatred wins over. It is an incurable condition.
I can pinpoint the exact moment when I knew for certain that my father was afflicted with this terrible disease. I had just left school and announced my intention never to return to the Valley. I was eighteen. I did not want to see the Harmony Silk Factory again. Father did not flinch at my words; he merely nodded and said, “I will take you to your destination.” It was raining heavily as we drove through Taiping, where he was to drop me off at the bus station. We drove through the Lake Gardens, along avenues lined with umbrellas of drooping jacaranda. Raindrops found their way through the gaps in the barely opened windows and fell lightly on my arms. Without warning, Father slowed to a halt and got out of the car. He walked onto the grass and stood in the rain, gazing out at the silvery lakes. I had no desire to get wet, so I remained resolutely in the car; I had no idea what he was doing. At last I could bear it no longer and, holding a spare shirt over my head, ran towards him. I stood at his side for a while and suggested that we move on.
He had a curious expression on his face, as if concentrating on something in the distance. “Do you know,” he said quietly as if speaking to himself, “the word ‘paradise’ comes from the ancient Persian word for ‘garden.’ ” I did not reply; I tried to remember if there had been an article on this subject in the latest Reader’s Digest. “The Persians had beautiful gardens. They filled them with lakes, fountains, flowers. They wanted to re-create heaven on earth.” His eyes blinked as the wind blew fine raindrops into his eyes. I looked into the distance, trying to locate what he was looking at. I thought, Perhaps my father is capable of appreciating beauty; perhaps he is not completely black-hearted and mean after all. In the midst of the downpour I began to feel guilty that I had judged him harshly all these years. I was scared, too—scared of discovering someone I had never known, a different father from the one I had grown up with. But then I heard a sharp slap, and saw that he had swatted a mosquito on his neck. A small black-and-red smudge appeared below his jowl where he had caught the insect. “Bastard,” he spat as he walked back to the car. His voice was as hard and cold as it always had been, and his eyes were set in anger. As we drove away I knew that I had been mistaken. That tender moment had been a mere aberration; it changed nothing. My father was born with an illness, something that had eaten to the core of him; it had infected him forever, erasing all that was good inside him.
Why I did not inherit his sickness I do not know. Someone told me at Father’s funeral that sons never resemble their fathers. What passes from elder to younger lies far beneath the surface, never to be seen or even felt. Perhaps this is true, but if the inheritance remains undiscovered, how are we to know it exists at all? I am merely thankful that I have never known any of my father’s traits in myself. I could not, in a thousand years, comprehend the crimes he committed.
It did not take Johnny long to become known across the Valley. As Tiger
’s right-hand man he automatically gained the respect of the people he met, and as Tiger became more withdrawn, Johnny’s presence was felt more keenly than ever. People even began to seek Johnny before Tiger if they had any information to share or money to give. It was during this flowering of confidence that Johnny went to Tiger with a proposal.
“I want to give a lecture,” Johnny said. “The kind you used to give, open to all. I have been reading, you see. Books.”
Tiger’s eyes shone with pride. This boy was now truly a man.
“Nothing too big,” Johnny continued. “I want to tell them about the books I have read. About idealogy.”
“Yes, I-de-o-logy. Good. Tell me, son, what has made you want to do this?”
“I want to help people—just as you have helped me.”
“How are our people these days? You have stopped bringing me news. I guess everything must be fine.”
“Everything is fine. One or two small things. Nothing bothersome. I don’t want to trouble you with anything but the most serious.”
“I see. . . . Thank you. Is there anything on your mind?”
“No.”
“If there is something, you must tell me. You are a fine, capable man but you are not yet ready for the whole world.”
“Am I not?”
OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS Johnny spread the word that he would, under Tiger’s auspices, be holding a lecture in Kuah. Things were not going well in the Party, he said. He had discovered this during his travels. There was a worm eating its way to the heart of the Party and its awful progress had to be halted.
“A lecture? What kind of thing is that?” some people said.
“A big meeting,” said Johnny, “with free beer for all.”
The lecture was held in a large wooden shack on the western fringes of the Lee Rubber plantation near Jeram. The unruly shrubs of the jungle had crept in amongst the rows of rubber trees, and it was difficult to see the paths leading to the shack. It was not a comfortable place. Many years ago it had been used to store processed rubber sheets, but it was too far from the administrative heart of the plantation, and long abandoned by the owners of the estate. It was now used as a not-so-secret place for local young men to meet and drink toddy and samsu.