by Tash Aw
“Is that all? What about the rest of it?”
Mamoru translated as Peter sang: “‘There you will say yes. Look, it’s not far from here. Let’s leave this place, my dear.’ ”
“Oh,” I said. “It doesn’t make much sense to me.”
“It’s not very interesting,” he replied. “Peter, why are you singing Zerlina’s part too?”
“Who’s Zerlina?” I whispered as Peter kept singing.
“The woman,” Mamoru replied, “a bride about to be stolen from her husband.”
“I sing all the parts,” Peter said, barely drawing breath before continuing to sing. His voice, though, was tiring. The notes no longer stretched as they had and the words seemed rushed. He seemed out of breath. He stopped singing and looked at Mamoru.
“You sing the next line,” he said.
“What?” Mamoru replied, setting his glass down on the table.
“It’s your line next. Actually the whole thing is yours to sing, isn’t it? But you might as well start with the next line.”
“Peter,” I said, “what on earth are you talking about? I think you have had too much wine.” I could not stop laughing even though my head hurt.
“Right,” Peter said. “I’ll sing a line by Zerlina to help prompt you. You then come in with your line, Giovanni. Molto espressivo. Do be a sport.”
Peter sang something in a screeching falsetto. “Come on, you know what to sing, Professor. You know all the bloody words. It’s my birthday—sing, damn you!”
Mamoru spoke some words in Italian.
Peter screeched again—different words this time.
I laughed.
Mamoru spoke again.
“And together now,” Peter shouted, standing up and waving his arms. He screamed the tuneless words up into the trees above us, his throat heaving with the effort. He walked away from the table, stumbling towards the house. It was dark now but the moon was very bright. He sat down on some broken stone steps with his head in his arms.
“Leave him,” Mamoru said. I was not sure to whom that command was directed.
We started to walk back to the camp, Mamoru leading the way. My head felt heavy, my vision untrustworthy. I had to stare hard at fallen trees before stepping over them—I could not tell how high they were or what lay on the other side. The shadows swam amongst the trees, chased by the moonlight. I noticed, though, that Johnny had taken the unfinished bottles of wine with him. I knew that tonight was the perfect time to speak to him, to tell him all that lay in my heart, but I knew, too, that I would not.
I am beginning to doubt if I ever will. In this place, perhaps I will never need to.
5th November 1941
THE WAILING LASTED all night, shriller than ever. I fell into a heavy yet disturbed sleep—I had never experienced anything like it. My body felt shot through with poison; my veins were pregnant with it. My sleep was all-embracing yet unreal. In my sleep, things happened to me—to my body—that I could not discern. I saw everything so clearly, yet I knew they could not have been real. I saw Mamoru with my diary. I saw Johnny with my diary. I saw Mamoru and Johnny together. I saw them speaking, touching each other, their foreheads brought together in intimate conversation. Each of them approached me and spoke in languages I did not understand. The wailing burnt through my sleep, never allowing me to escape. Sometimes it sang Peter’s song, screeching his words into the depths of the jungle and the fathomless sea.
I awoke when it was light. Mamoru was already up, collecting wood for the fire. I ran as far as I could, towards the sea. I had made it halfway down to the water when I collapsed to my knees and began to vomit. I knelt on the beach, my insides streaming down the sides of my mouth onto the hot sand. I had never felt anything so painful.
As I fell back into bed I noticed that Peter was asleep, as was Johnny. Only Honey was not there.
I woke again—properly—at midday. Mamoru had left some food and water, but I did not feel like eating. Johnny was sitting some way along the beach under a tree; Peter was swimming in the sea. He saw me step gingerly onto the sand and walked towards me.
“What a party,” he said. “I feel awful. What about you?”
“Worse than death,” I said, and he laughed. When I laughed my whole body hurt.
“Poor thing,” he said. “First time is always the worst. Trust me, next time you have a glass of wine, you’ll adore it.”
I smiled. “Where’s Mamoru?”
“Not sure. He said he was off to find Honey. I’m keeping my head firmly below the parapet, though—I’m certainly not his favourite person.”
“Where’s Honey?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“Didn’t he come back for you last night? I thought I heard him say he was going back to keep an eye on you.”
“Darling, that was the wine speaking to you. I saw him go back to the camp with you and that was it. I passed out on the steps and didn’t wake up until it was nearly dawn. God only knows how I found my way back to the camp.”
“Oh,” I said. “My head really hurts.”
7th November 1941
STILL NO SIGN OF HONEY. Mamoru is getting very worried.
“I can’t understand what the fuss is about,” Peter said
when he returned from another fruitless search of the island. “He’ll turn up eventually.”
“He’s always running off on his own,” Johnny said.
Mamoru remained silent. He has hardly spoken since Peter’s party, not even to me.
8th November 1941
MY DIARY IS BEING DISTRURBED. I know this for certain. I do not know who is reading it, but someone is. This morning I began to write but after a few minutes I felt a stabbing pain in my abdomen. (I have not felt right since the day of Peter’s party.) I closed my diary and placed a stone on top of it before walking up the beach to relieve myself. I do not know how long I was away—not more than ten minutes, at most. When I came back the diary was open, its pages fanning gently in the breeze. I must have startled the ghostly reader. Yet I knew for sure that Mamoru, Johnny, and Peter had all been engaged in one activity or another. As I stood there I could see, with my own eyes, Peter splashing in the shallows dressed in his shirtsleeves as always. Johnny was building a small house from shells. They had both been doing that when I left. Mamoru was on the other side of the island searching for Honey (who is still missing). Mamoru’s expeditions last for hours; often he does not return till dark. I did not know which phantom had been reading my diary.
My hands trembled as I sat down. The nightly wailing may continue but this cannot.
10th November 1941
IT WAS JOHNNY who woke us up. He took us half a mile up the beach in the pale dawn and showed us what he had found.
There, left stranded on the shore by the retreating tide, lay Honey. The occasional wave licked at his body as it faded into the sand. He was still fully clothed, his wristwatch glinting softly as it caught the light. His neck appeared black, badly bruised, and his shirt was torn in several places. Nothing remained of his face.
“It’s been eaten by fish,” Peter said quietly.
Mamoru dug a grave at the top of the beach, under the trees beyond reach of the tide. We buried Honey, and Peter said a few words of Christian prayer.
We went back to the camp but none of us was hungry for breakfast.
11th November 1941
MAMORU SAYS HONEY must have been so intoxicated with wine that he must have somehow fallen into the sea. We have not spoken about Honey much, though I know that we are all thinking of how Honey could have died. Mamoru’s explanation is convincing, but the truth of it is that no one really knows what happened. No one knows anything anymore.
15th November 1941
I FORCE MYSELF TO RECORD THIS.
Circumstances left me with no choice. I could not stop myself.
Finally, I accept my fate.
Last night I decided I could no longer bear this emptiness. I saw Mamoru disappear in
to the darkened woods. He has taken to doing this every evening, after we eat our supper in terrible silence. Each time he leaves I long to follow him, yet I have been afraid to incur his wrath. What do I have to lose? I don’t know. It feels as if I have lost everything, and yet when I look at Mamoru I still feel the faint pulse of hope, the scent of something new.
In the end I could contain myself no longer. I saw him melt into the trees and I followed him.
I remained twenty yards behind him, treading gently in the dark. It was not a clear night. Clouds drifted thickly over the moon and it was difficult to see where I was going. It was only because of Mamoru’s intense whiteness that I was able to keep sight of him. I could not remember if he was wearing white clothes; I was only aware of the purity of his colour, a strange quality that seemed to absorb what little light there was and make it his own. He walked slowly, picking his way smoothly between the trees as if following an ancient, predetermined path. Not once did he pause or turn around.
Several times I stumbled, catching my foot on tree roots and rocks; each time I had to hurry to catch up with him. Invisible branches slashed at my face and neck and arms like whips. I tasted the saltiness of blood on my lips but still I continued, drawn by the glowing white light ahead of me. I do not know how long or in which direction I had been walking, but suddenly I found myself in a clearing by the house of antlers. Mamoru had disappeared.
I walked slowly around the house, pausing now and again to listen for movement: nothing. I came to the back of the house, and there he was, standing in the moonlight on a stone parapet, hands in pockets, silent as the night that had fallen upon us. He looked like a carved figure, part of that dead house. It was only when he moved and his whiteness shifted with him that I knew for certain that it was him. He became human again, walking until he was at the base of the steps, not ten yards from me.
I came out of the dark, into his light. “Mamoru,” I said.
He turned to face me. “Snow,” he said simply and without surprise, breathing out as if in relief. He had been waiting for me.
I went to him and touched his hand. We sat down on the steps and I put my head on his chest. I closed my eyes. His marble-cool body brought relief to my burning head. We did not speak for a very long time.
“I know you are troubled, Mamoru,” I said after a while. “But Honey’s death was not your fault. You cannot be responsible for everything.”
He put his hand on my brow. “Am I not responsible for the horror of it?”
“What do you mean? You are not responsible for Honey’s death, or the deaths of anyone else. We’ve talked about this before, Mamoru. I know you carry with you what you saw in China, but that was not your doing.”
“Wasn’t it?” he laughed a strange laugh. I could not decipher it.
“No,” I said, sitting up and facing him. “It wasn’t.”
Again he laughed. “How little you know.” His voice sounded hard and bitter.
“I know what you have told me,” I said. “I have no need to know anything else.”
I reached for him in the dark and drew him close to me. I held his head in my hands and kissed it. I kissed it and kissed it some more.
He pushed me away. “Listen,” he said, “you know nothing. You do not know me.”
“But Mamoru,” I said, brushing his neck slowly with the back of my hand, “you have told me everything. I have seen your life through your own eyes. I have told no one about it, nor have you. Only you and I know what has happened in your life.” I tasted blood on my tongue again.
He put his hand on the back of my neck and pulled me to him. He kissed me on my lips, pressing his mouth hard on mine. His coldness stunned my nerves and I could not breathe. I could not even move. He drew away and I gasped for breath.
“Do you really want to see all the things I have seen?” he whispered in my ear.
“Mamoru.”
He gripped my wrists tightly. “I have seen evil inflicted on men, things that you, Snow, could not possibly imagine. I have seen things happen to women too, things that would make you wish the whole world could be destroyed. How could you possibly want to see those things?”
“Mamoru,” I said, “you’re hurting me.”
He was pressing against me, his hard cold body over me. “I have been part of those things, Snow. Nothing can save me from that.”
When he forced his lips upon mine I tasted blood again, flooding into my mouth, choking me. I wanted to die.
I do not know how I finally broke free. I struggled like a wild creature, kicking and spitting and clawing and wailing. I cannot recall how it happened, but suddenly Mamoru had disappeared and I began to run. I was running and Peter was there, calling my name, chasing after me in the darkness. I ran from him as hard as I could but I did not get far. My body was bruised and cut, I could feel every mark on my skin. Peter caught up with me and grabbed hold of my waist. I screamed at him, tearing at his shirt, ripping it from his body. Clouds shifted in the sky, and in the new moonlight I saw that my fingernails made harsh red scratches on his milk-white chest. I stopped kicking and held him like a child clings to its mother, tightly, unquestioningly. His skin was wet.
“There now,” he said softly, stroking my hair.
“Oh God, Peter.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” he said, chuckling.
We stood in a glade, the space around us cleared of thorny shrubs and dead trees and dark undergrowth. I swallowed and coughed spittle and blood, and in my short breaths I caught the soapy scent of wild frangipani. I gazed upwards and saw a white-filled sky.
“We’re in your garden,” I said.
He started to sing his song. I pressed my ear to his chest and heard the song hum softly. It spread itself out to sea, drifting thinly over the waves.
· Part Three ·
PETER
THIS PLACE IS the end. Twenty-two rooms occupied by twenty-two near-fossils, little more than a halfway house in the short journey to the cemetery down the road. The constant stench of frying shrimp paste—which, after all these years, I still abhor—wafts through the corridors, mingling with the ever-present bouquet of old-man’s piss. I keep my windows open, even at night. The mosquitoes may suck the life out of me, but when I die I refuse to do so in squalor. The way this place is run, my beautifully dressed corpse would probably remain undiscovered for several days, by which time the aroma of decaying flesh, stale urine, and rancid seafood would be somewhat unappealing in an enclosed space. Naturally, having the shutters open does have its drawbacks—chiefly, that I am exposed to the most horrific of all the crimes ever committed in the long and unpleasant history of this house: the garden. I gasp every time I look at this abomination of nature; even thinking about it makes me shudder. It consists solely of a large, uneven lawn—utterly jejune—bounded by a wire fence, unadorned except for a single, sorry group of sealing-wax palms whose stems have given up the fight to remain red and instead lapsed into a shade of grey, battered into submission by the relentless briny winds. Why are they there? They serve only to obscure the view of the sea from the verandah.
Every morning I wake up with sunlight pouring in through the floor-length shutters. I look out at this barren waste and I weep.
This is the price I have to pay.
Of course the other old boys think I’m completely eccentric in exposing myself to the elements. Sometimes, even the most senile idiot will try, patronisingly, to convince me that it is better to close the windows, as this will keep out the rain and the insects—as if I’ve lost my marbles (hah!) and don’t know what I’m doing. Obviously, I’m not remotely perturbed by this, seeing as I’m already known as the Mad English Devil, an epithet from which I am unlikely to be disassociated even if I do concede the issue of the shutters. As a brief aside, I’ve never been entirely certain of the accuracy of the translation of my nickname from the Chinese—I suspect that Alvaro politely edited the fruitier connotations from the original phrase when he translated it for
me. He has this poorly conceived notion that I am to be pitied, being the lone foreigner in this place. And so he tells me things which I know to be untrue—compliments people supposedly pay me, words of admiration, always in Chinese, or Malay, or Tamil. Of course, one must take everything he says cum grano salis.
It’s only reasonable to expect, I hear you cry, that I should have some knowledge of Chinese after all these years, but I don’t. Not a bit. I have always detested the language; I find it so trenchant. And superfluous too, seeing as everyone speaks English—or some form of it—anyway. No, after sixty years of living here, the process of linguistic osmosis hasn’t worked in the way you’d assume. In fact, quite the reverse has happened: I have remained wonderfully impervious to Malay and Chinese, but my English, dear God, has been leached out of me. Some days I can hardly speak. The words don’t follow the sentiments, and recently I have developed the habit of stopping in midsentence. And as for writing, well—this current project is proving to be a real grind, not at all the thrilling adventure I had envisaged.
Still, I persevere.
I do wonder, though, who will thank me when this is finished? Nobody here, certainly, except possibly Alvaro, whose idea it was in the first place—not the idea that the garden should be rearranged (that was undoubtedly mine), but the idea that we, the residents, should ask the Church to make collections in aid of our garden, and that I should be the one to present the new design.
“Oh my dear goodness me,” Alvaro had cried as the idea popped into his thin little head. We had been sitting in the dining room discussing the nonexistent view of the sea, of the grounds, of the spire of St. Francis Xavier through the casuarinas in the distance. Everything was obscured by something, I said, launching into my usual tirade.