The Harmony Silk Factory

by Tash Aw

  I went to him and said, “Now, Professor, you must tell me.”

  He hesitated and frowned. “Only if you call me by my name.”

  I laughed and cleared my throat theatrically. “Please tell me what you were going to say—Mamoru.”

  He turned away and gazed at the valley before us. I could not see his face, but he seemed lost in contemplation. In a quiet voice, he said, “On such mornings one feels as if life is—that life begins again. You feel—one feels—that whatever else one has previously done in one’s life ceases to matter. All you have done wrong can be put right, all you have lost can be regained. Your slate is wiped clean. It’s as if someone says to you,‘Here is a new beginning.’ ” He turned around and caught my eye. He shrugged and looked at his feet, laughing awkwardly. “I’m sorry—it’s silly sentimentalism, I know. Please, ignore what I said. Academics are prone to such emotional lapses!”

  “It isn’t silly at all,” I said. “Not in the least.” For the briefest moment I was seized by an urge to speak endlessly—what of, I do not know. A sudden wave of unbounded optimism swelled in me, and for a second I thought I would reach out to touch him. But the moment passed, and I fell silent once more. Finally, I said, “If only it could be so.”

  “If only what could be so?”

  “If only life could be like that—if only we could begin again. Wouldn’t that be nice? If only mornings like these weren’t just an illusion.”

  He took my hand and pressed it firmly between his palms. “Snow, it can happen. Life is a palimpsest. You must believe it.”

  We continued our stroll and talked about the Valley, about the trees, the rivers, and people. I spoke about my childhood—I saw all these things from afar, but my parents never allowed me to venture close to them. I knew the names of all the trees, I knew what they looked like, yet I never knew the smell of their sap or how their leaves felt to the touch. Lying awake at night, I came to recognise the calls of certain animals, and many times I saw wild boar and rusa bucks—but only dead ones tribal hunters brought to the house to sell for meat. I was familiar, of course, with the people of the Valley—they spoke to me respectfully when they visited the house, and I replied with equal propriety. I never knew, of course, what they ate when they were at home, or what they said to their children at night, or how they loved their wives in the morning. I spent my whole life, it seems, observing the world from my window. And then Johnny appeared on that rain-sodden day.

  “You must have been very in love with him,” Mamoru said.

  I did not answer.

  “Has he changed much since you married?” he continued. “It is often said that nothing changes a man more than marriage.”

  I laughed. “On the contrary. He hasn’t changed at all.”

  “And is that . . . a bad thing?”

  Again I did not answer.

  “Your husband is an interesting man,” he said as we walked down a slope towards a cream-painted shelter.

  “Johnny? In what way?”

  “In many ways. He is a very successful man, considering his background.”

  “I suppose so. But being a merchant is hardly an unusual occupation for a Chinese.” I laughed.

  “He is an exceptionally influential one.”

  “A shop and a bit of money doesn’t amount to influence.”

  “Do you believe that money is all that he has?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mamoru shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. He seems somewhat mysterious. Not to you, of course, you’re his wife!”

  “He is inscrutable, that is for sure.”

  “No one seems to know about his childhood, for example.”

  I sat down on the wooden seat in the shelter, watching him lean languidly against the posts, his head nearly touching the eaves of the low roof. “What about your childhood, Mamoru?”

  “Unremarkable.”

  “Liar.”

  We laughed.

  “Are you really a nobleman as everyone says you are?” I asked.

  He looked sad. “In a manner of speaking. My family are—Well, let me just say that I understood everything you spoke of. You talked about growing up in a gilded cage, and it hurt me—because I know how it feels.”

  “Tell me more.”

  He seemed to be looking at something in the distance, his eyes narrowing slightly.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “There’s something in that thicket of trees over there,” he said, fixing his gaze on a dense patch of scrub and undergrowth about a hundred yards away.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “I think we should go back now,” he said. His voice had fallen and he seemed very determined. I knew it was no use arguing.

  “What did you see in the trees?” I asked again.

  “I don’t know. Perhaps nothing.” Suddenly he did not seem open to conversation.

  “Just as well we’re heading back now,” I said. “The sun’s getting very hot. My skin is not used to being out in this heat.”

  “Yes, you should go back inside.”

  We walked in silence; the sun felt uncomfortable on my face and hands.

  Honey was waiting for us when we got to the house. He had brought the car round and seemed very impatient to get going. “You’d better hurry up and have some breakfast,” he said, looking at his watch.

  “I do not think there is any need to hurry,” Mamoru said.

  Honey seemed uncertain. “We agreed to leave by ten. It’s nearly quarter to nine.”

  “We are on schedule.”

  Honey frowned. “If you insist.” In silent protest, however, he remained by the car, examining various parts of it (spuriously, it seemed to me) whilst we breakfasted and packed. I think he is still there now. I cannot understand why he is so keen to leave; I am perfectly content to stay at this little desk in this marvellous airy room. I shall not move until I hear Mamoru taking his things downstairs. Johnny and Peter are exploring the grounds, I presume. Just now I saw Johnny expertly scaling the boughs of a tree, and earlier I noticed that Peter’s shoes were thickly muddied. “I’ve been tramping o’er hill and dale,” he cried.

  16th October 1941

  A DIFFICULT FEW DAYS.

  We left the rest house in reasonable cheer. Everyone had slept well and I was feeling particularly optimistic. “This feels like a school expedition,” Peter said brightly, but before long a row developed.

  Honey had been taciturn and somewhat irritable from the start. We drove over a series of potholes in the road which seemed perfectly aligned: we went up and down, up and down—so evenly I could have counted the beats on a sheet of music to it. This of course caused great hilarity in the back seat. “Just like riding a hobbled donkey,” Peter said.

  “Bloody awful roads,” Honey snapped.

  “Language,” Peter said with exaggerated severity.

  “Bloody tinpot country,” said Honey.

  “I shouldn’t complain,” said Peter. “We created it, after all.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Honey snapped. I wanted to point out that those were the first words he had addressed to Peter directly, but it was not the right moment, so I kept counsel.

  “We—the British. Pax Britannica. You and I,” Peter said blithely, almost singing the words.

  “I am not responsible for the well-being of these roads, and nor is the British government. I am not to blame for the weather, the floods, the wet rot, the dry rot, the bloody fungus that creeps into every damned thing here. I’m not accountable for the cheating, lying, untrustworthy natives who lurk in every corner, or for the fact that every Englishman, every civilised person in this place, has to sleep with a pistol by his bed and a Bren gun in the sitting room. It isn’t my fault that pet dogs get eaten by snakes the size of a train or that children get beriberi. It isn’t my fault.”

  “Of course not. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just an awful mess and that’s why we’re all here, trying to get a piece of it for oursel
ves.”

  “Look here, Wormwood, I’ve had enough of this Bolshevik nonsense. If you want to pick up a gun and fight with those Chinaman Commies in the jungle, then you just go ahead. It’s hard enough to do our jobs without having to listen to your drivel.”

  To my surprise, Peter did not back down. “I’d sooner fight with the Communists than with you.”

  “This is treasonable insolence. It’s people like you who are tearing the world apart.”

  “Treason? Not against this country. What jobs do you have to do anyway? Deciding how much gin to order for the club?”

  “I run an enterprise that encompasses nearly two dozen mines across the country,” Honey said, as if that was the end of the discussion.

  Peter did not respond immediately. After a while he said, “How nice for you.”

  Honey snorted. “It’s the sun, that’s what it is. I’ve seen it before. Poor bugger comes out here and his head gets cooked by the sun. Goes crazy. Consorts with natives, thinks he’s one of them.”

  Beads of rain began to fill the sky, sparkling in the still-dazzling sunlight.

  Johnny said, “Look, a rainbow.” There it was, across an expanse of paddy fields, arched against a black backdrop of rain clouds. We drove through this curious drizzle for a while, the rainbow poised uncertainly in the distance. The heat waves rising from the road, the rain, the light—they all combined to make our eyes swim. Honey blinked hard and peered intently through the windscreen.

  “There is a woman,” Johnny said, “again.”

  “Where?” I asked. I could see nothing from where I sat.

  “Just there,” Mamoru said. “The same one as before.”

  We passed her slowly in silence. She sat impassively by the road, surrounded by her baskets of fruit. She watched us go by with glassy eyes.

  After a while Honey said, “I don’t think that was the same woman.”

  “We must be miles—miles—away from where we last saw her,” said Peter.

  “Yes,” said Johnny as she receded into the distance.

  I began to doze as the rain grew heavier and drummed on the roof of the car. I remembered the touch of Mamoru’s hands on mine in the garden of the rest house. I imagined him as a young boy, alone with only himself for company. For a while, Johnny’s peculiar odour (earth and perspiration) kept me from deep sleep, but soon I managed to shut myself off in my own universe.

  I am not sure how much time elapsed before I awoke with a sore neck, my head lolling uncomfortably to one side. The rain clouds had closed in on us and it was very dark. I could hardly make out the shapes of the foliage on the edge of the road. No one was speaking, and we were moving extremely slowly.

  “Christ,” Honey said softly.

  Peter leaned close to me and whispered in my ear. “We’re lost.”

  Ahead of us, I could see that the rain had turned the road into a shallow stream of mud.

  “Our road became completely impassable,” Peter explained, “so we had to turn off onto another one. We haven’t the foggiest idea where we are.” The way he said it, whispering breathlessly, made our situation seem an adventure. I could tell, though, that Honey was worried.

  I turned to Johnny and asked if he knew where we were. He frowned and shook his head slowly.

  “Keep going,” said Mamoru. “We’re doing fine.” He spoke clearly and firmly.

  I wondered what would happen if we did have to spend the night in the car. Would I choose such a moment to speak to Johnny? If we perished here in the jungle I might never need to confront the subject, and he would die without ever knowing that I was prepared to leave him.

  “Wait,” Johnny said, leaning forward. “Up ahead. I think there is another road.”

  “Are you sure? I can’t see anything. We need a bigger road than this, not a smaller one.”

  “Johnny?” said Mamoru.

  “I don’t know. I think there is one.”

  “We’ll keep going until we find it,” said Mamoru.

  “There it is,” cried Peter. “I can see it, just beyond that clump of palms!”

  Honey hurried the car along, and we saw the curve of a road previously obscured by trees. This road seemed wider and firmer than the one we had been on earlier, and we made better progress. We drove in silence—we were too relieved to speak, I think—with only Johnny’s occasional directions puncturing the dark. In our retreat from the jungle, we had tacitly given up hope of catching the ferry that evening. I did not know where Johnny’s directions would eventually take us, but I hoped that they would lead us back to the rest house from which we had set off. It was as if there was a wordless agreement amongst us that we should seek refuge in a place we knew could offer us comfort.

  At last, we found our way back to the rest house.

  That night I experienced the strangest sensation, a feeling of deepest sleep and perfect lucidity. I did not dream, yet I knew—I saw—with complete clarity that I would soon walk out of Johnny’s life.

  The next morning I was the last to emerge. I found the others packed and ready to go. A map was spread out on the vast bonnet of the car. Mamoru was pointing at it; he drew his finger across it in a slow, smooth arc, tapping it now and then. Honey and Johnny stood with him, nodding and muttering in agreement; Peter was nearby, throwing pebbles at a tree trunk.

  “Isn’t this exciting,” Peter said to me as he picked up a stone, “it feels as if we’re on a quest for Tutankhamen’s tomb.” He did not smile. His brow remained locked in a frown.

  The mood, it seemed to me, was different today. Honey was civil to Peter, who was almost monosyllabic by his standards. I looked at Peter to try to discern the possible onset of illness, but his eyes and complexion were clear. Apart from a strangely vacant expression, he seemed in decent health.

  “You wear a troubled face,” I ventured quietly.

  “How preposterous, my dear,” he protested, his face pulling into a broad smile. “I expect it’s the heat.” Immediately he fell silent again and looked out the window.

  We travelled swiftly. The roads had dried up a little and afforded us smoother passage than before. “We have to keep up our momentum before the rains come again,” Mamoru said.

  Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, I noticed, the air was beginning to change. It felt softer on my face and I tasted a faint tinge of salt. We were nearing the sea, I knew. I was not sure if anyone else sensed the change in the winds around us. I looked at each of the men in turn, but their faces showed only a stony blankness. What was this look that I had seen before so often on the faces of men? I do not know what emotions this façade protects, nor may I ever find out. I am locked away from that world.

  Our conversation was polite, flitting from one insubstantial subject to another—I scarcely recall the things we touched on. Nor can I recall how this aimless chat turned so quickly into another row. This one again involved Honey, but this time—to my surprise—Johnny was his antagonist.

  “It is simply ignorant,” Honey said, “to believe that Communism can solve the woes of China. The Communists are no less beastly than anyone else who came before them.”

  With speed of response that seemed surprising, Johnny said, “The ordinary people of China would not agree with you.”

  “Wouldn’t they?” Honey seemed taken aback by this. “You mean they’d surrender to a band of thugs who are trying to pull apart an ancient civilisation?”

  “It is not the Communists who have trampled on China and pulled it apart.” The end of his sentence created a huge, awful silence in the car. Honey did not reply. Immediately, I felt for Mamoru. Johnny’s words felt strangely condemning of us all, but particularly of Mamoru. Everyone has heard stories of what the Japanese are doing in China at the moment. I wanted to say that it was not fair to include Mamoru in this, but I could not. Do not ever forget: Johnny is the one you chose, he is your husband. Mother’s admonishment rang in my head. Besides, how could I defend Mamoru when no accusation had been made? I waited for him to respo
nd, and prayed a row would not ensue.

  “Johnny is quite right,” Mamoru said. “For the last century, many foreign powers have imposed their might on China. It is a sad thing to witness. The path of history is cruel and terrible. Historical texts contain tragedies greater than any written in ancient Greece or Elizabethan England. As an academic, I can tell you that history books do not make for pleasant entertainment.”

  Johnny waited awhile. “The Chinese people believe Communism is the only thing that will save them from oppression, and they are right.”

  “Johnny,” I whispered.

  “Well, I wish they wouldn’t try and export it to jolly old places like Malaya,” said Honey.

  I saw Johnny gathering himself to reply. He had an expression I had come to recognise, his broad face set in nearly cross-eyed determination. There was something else in his posture too, something I had never noticed before. His shoulders straightened, making him look stouter. His neck had shortened, it seemed, and he looked old. I wondered why Peter had remained so silent—I found his reticence frustrating, and in desperation I nudged him with my right elbow. I hoped he would see the futility of this argument—he was the only one who could persuade Johnny to stop. I knew, even as I did it, however, that there was every possibility that Peter would encourage rather than prevent an unpleasant scene. It was a risk I had to take.

  “This is so booooring,” Peter said, stretching his arms sleepily. “Please do stop, Johnny, you really are beginning to sound like my old housemaster. Besides, my pretty little head just can’t keep up with all this.” He looked at Johnny and smiled, raising his eyes to the heavens.

  Johnny settled back in his seat. Instantly, his demeanour changed. His face, neck, and shoulders seemed to unlock, and he looked like a loose-limbed child once more. Nonetheless, he seemed sullen and withdrawn. I felt the need to provide him comfort, so I rested my hand lightly on his knee. Almost immediately he drew away, leaving my hand to fall limply. At first I thought that his leg had merely moved when the car went over a bumpy stretch of road, but he made no attempt to come back to me, and instead shifted his seating position so that he could rest against the door. All I could see was the back of his right shoulder.