We, the Survivors

by Tash Aw

  I can’t explain to you how it happened – how my hands reached out suddenly, violently, to push him sharply in the chest. It was both a surprise and not a surprise to me. In my head, I was registering the fact that I’d reached a dead end with Uzzal, and that he wasn’t going to help me in any way. I’d even begun to imagine how angry Mr Lai would be when he came back to discover his farm without any workers – without me. I’d begun to imagine Keong sulking for a few days before disappearing back to KL with his ego hurt.

  That should have been the end of it. I should have been walking away by then. So I don’t know why I struck him like that. It was just a push, not even very hard, but it caught us both by surprise, and he stumbled backwards, just a couple of steps, not enough to fall over, but enough to unbalance him. The tea from my mug splashed onto the concrete floor, and we both stared at the stain, as if that was the most important thing in the world at that moment. Outside, the children were still playing, counting out numbers in a sing-song manner. Tu-juh-be-las-la-pan-be-las …

  I turned to leave, but as I reached the doorway Uzzal called out.

  ‘I can give you his number,’ he said. ‘The man you’re looking for. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t want to know. Take his number, but don’t say who gave it to you.’

  I forwarded the number to Keong, but didn’t get a reply. Later, lying on the sofa at home, I heard my phone buzz and vibrate on the dining table. I didn’t bother to get up and look at it; I just continued to flick through the channels on TV, not watching anything in particular. When I finally listened to my messages, Keong’s voice sounded unusually flat and calm. You’re my brother. You’re the best.

  But it’s illegal, she says.

  So? Just because something’s illegal doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

  We have laws against that sort of thing. I mean, the kind of abuse you’re talking about. We have rules against exploitation and brutality. Child labour. We do have regulations.

  I laugh. Do you know which country you’re living in? You think you’re in Switzerland or Singapore? Miss, this is the real world. Even in New York or wherever you did your studies, you think illegal stuff doesn’t happen?

  I know, I’m not naïve. But even so.

  You don’t believe me?

  No, it’s not that. It’s just that some of what you describe is … pretty difficult to take in.

  I look at her and shrug. Sometimes I can’t help it. When I talk about things that are unpleasant, I know that I should choose my words more carefully, try to make the story more pleasant and acceptable to her. I look at the phone that is recording my voice, and her pen scribbling in her notebook. I want her to think, I like this story. I know I should be more measured and tell a nice story, but I end up doing the opposite. I tell her every terrible detail, I can’t stop myself. Hold back, hold back, I think, but it all tumbles out despite myself. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t interrupt, and that makes me talk even more. Today when I told her about the stories I’d heard from foreign workers who’d travelled from Bangladesh, I’d had a simple line prepared in my head. It was a very difficult journey, people died. But instead I told her exactly what I’d heard from the foreign worker I met. The smugglers slashing the stomach of his dead wife so her body wouldn’t balloon and she’d sink quickly when thrown overboard. Migrants who were so weak they were dying, and still they had to dig graves. Their own graves. So when they died the smugglers could just push them in. No strength to fight, just enough strength to die. People seeing the gangrene set into their wounds, feeling that their legs were being gnawed at by an animal.

  She would look up, her face pale as the moon, her eyes wide and confused like a child’s when they hear bad news. At first I wanted to protect her from these stories, but as I was talking I realised that I wanted her to be a part of that pain, to make sure that it seeped into her world, her clean, happy world. I wanted it to be a cloud that hung over her everywhere she went, just as it does over me, all the time, and that’s why I didn’t stop talking. But each time I finish, the inevitable happens. I feel ashamed for having introduced this bitterness into her life, and then I feel like scrubbing it all away, except I can’t, I can’t repent in any way. I can’t even say sorry. (What for, anyway?) I feel completely powerless. So I just sit there.

  Hmm, she says after a pause. That’s very hard to digest.

  IV

  JANUARY

  January 2nd

  The day before I was supposed to meet Keong and the man I’d later know to be Mohammad Ashadul, I called in at the farm for the first time in a while. In truth it hadn’t been so long, maybe only four or five days, but it felt like a month. As I drove down the track towards it, it seemed as though I was revisiting a scene from a past life, a place I’d once known but had left behind. The vines hung lower from the trees than I remembered, the lalang had grown so thick and tall that it was spilling from the verges and narrowing the lane to half its former width. We’d planted it just six months before, to hold the banks of earth in place and stop landslides in the rainy season, but it had grown thick and lush in that time. We were meaning to cut it the previous week, before the men fell sick; now it no longer resembled long grass but the folds of waves on a bright-green sea.

  There must have been strong winds in the night, because the parking area was strewn with broken branches and fresh leaves ripped from the trees. Jezmine’s car was in the yard, but I could tell at once that things weren’t right – the hum of the engines that ran the pumps was lower and rougher than usual. In the distance, the neat squares of the ponds looked calm and silvery, but that too was a bad sign. The stillness of the water bothered me; everything else in the world seemed to be shifting.

  Jezmine came out of the office to meet me. Mr Lai had called several times, and on each occasion she’d said that everything was under control. What did he expect would happen? A tsunami in the Straits of Melaka or something? Stop being so paranoid. Everything’s fine.

  I could just imagine their conversation. I’d heard her speak on the phone hundreds of times. She could put anyone in their place, make men like Mr Lai feel like primary school boys with her directness and flat tone of voice, as if she was slightly bored and waiting for them to keep up with her. Her lies had bought us an extra day or two – Mr Lai had decided he wouldn’t rush home from Penang, that he’d stay another couple of days, take it easy, go out for a few meals with his wife. Good idea, Jezmine had said.

  ‘Do you smell that?’ I said. We were standing in the yard, neither of us daring to ask the next question: What do we do now?

  ‘Smell what?’

  We started walking towards the ponds, and had just reached the first of the enclosures when I figured out the source of the sharp, sour odour hanging in the air, growing stronger all the time. Ammonium and decaying flesh.

  ‘Ugh.’ Jezmine had her hand over her nose.

  At the halfway point on the wooden walkway, I began to notice that the pumps at the far end of the farm weren’t working. Fish had gathered close to the surface, sometimes breaking the water with a flash of their tails. As we walked along, it occurred to me that most people wouldn’t have sensed the panic around us. If you were an outsider, someone unconnected to our farm, you wouldn’t have seen anything but still, green-grey water, the darting of fish. You wouldn’t have sensed the disturbance below the surface, the agitation of the fish, the way some were swimming frantically in tight circles, others drifting so slowly they seemed suspended in the water, as lifeless as a painting. Without the soft jets of water from the pumps, you would have remarked upon the flatness of the water, so natural and peaceful. We, Jezmine and I, saw only the stagnation that preceded death. Where you saw calm, we saw chaos. You saw the beautiful order of things, we saw decay.

  I knew that many of the fish would have been suffocating, that they weren’t getting enough fresh moving water, that their feeding had been interrupted. Maybe something had got into the water, some chemicals from up the coast. W
e didn’t need to walk all the way to the furthest ponds to see the damage, but we did anyway, staring at the silvery carpet of fish, the sun glinting on the scales of their upturned bellies. The wind had died, and if no one had told you that you were looking at dead fish, you could easily have thought it was a trick of the light caused by the sea and the small shifts in the cloud that change the way the world appears. But the stench made the truth clear; the acidic chemical smell burned the insides of our nostrils and made us choke.

  Jezmine was still covering her mouth and nose with her hand. She muttered something, almost a whisper. Cham lor. She might have said the same thing when she couldn’t find a parking space in town on a busy Saturday afternoon, or if she was late in paying her mobile phone bill, or realised she’d forgotten her purse – the minor incidents of modern daily life. But in this instance it seemed particularly apt. Just one hushed little observation. We were screwed.

  By the time we reached the office it was clear that even Jezmine couldn’t think of a solution. ‘What are you going to tell Mr Lai?’ she asked. ‘Maybe you can just blame it on the men. Say they all disappeared without warning, tell him the truth.’

  I shook my head. I was still trying to figure out how much money we would lose with two ponds full of dead fish, trying to equate each carcass to a sum of money. If we could get some new workers, cheaper ones, how quickly could we make the money back? It wasn’t as though we paid the Indonesians a lot anyway, but from what Keong and Uzzal had told me about the others, I was sure we could pay them even less, to start with anyway. When someone is desperate for work, they’re not going to ask for permits and insurance. They wouldn’t even know about that sort of thing. I couldn’t work out exactly how much we’d save, but surely quite a lot over the long run. If I could have them in place in the next couple of days, working hard by the time Mr Lai returned, it would soften the blow of losing so much money. I knew what he was like. He wouldn’t care about losing the workers, he’d only care about what that would mean for his profits. It didn’t make any difference who worked for him. As long as they kept his business running smoothly, he didn’t mind. All those years, he barely knew the workers’ names. Maybe he wouldn’t even notice that I’d taken on completely new people.

  ‘I have some men lined up,’ I said. ‘Almost ready to work. Tomorrow or the day after.’ In my head, I was convinced this was true. All the rules and routines I’d known up to that moment had changed, the world I inhabited no longer seemed to belong to me, and in this new land, whole groups of men and women could disappear from their homes and appear in an entirely foreign country without knowing where they were, or how exactly they got there. They could be alive one minute, dead the next, just from the same water they’d been drinking for months.

  The normal order of life no longer applied. When you leave your old home you’re a child; when you reach your new one, you’re an adult. You don’t even know how it happened. You get a job. You get sick. You get married. You get high. You get sacked. You get a break. You get screwed. You get nothing. You get everything. There was no longer any logic in this world; things happened in random order. I couldn’t figure out how one event led to another, so why was it so ridiculous to think that by the next day I would have found twelve new workers? I’d lost the old ones without any warning, I’d get new ones just as quickly.

  ‘You kidding?’

  I shook my head. ‘I have a meeting with someone tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll have the workers.’

  Even in the messy sequence of my thinking, I knew that failure was a far greater possibility than success. But in spite of this – or perhaps precisely because of it – I felt free to imagine what would happen if I did succeed in finding new workers that evening. They’d arrive the following day, tired and maybe a bit sick. I’d feed them, buy them new clothes, make them shower and get clean. I’d give them a bit of cash from my own pocket to show them we were serious employers, maybe give them half a day’s rest. By the next day they’d be fully at work, and by the time Mr Lai got back it would seem as though nothing had changed.

  * * *

  When I met Keong at the layby that night the darkness meant that I couldn’t make out the expression on his face – couldn’t tell if he was nervous or scared or angry.

  ‘You eaten yet?’ he asked. Even though it was a standard greeting, I found it odd that he’d say it at that particular moment. It was way past dinner time, nearly ten o’clock, so of course I’d eaten. I was waiting for him to tell me about how he’d got in touch with Ashadul – what they’d discussed on the phone, what they’d agreed – but instead he started describing what he’d had for dinner. He’d been very hungry, he said, he hadn’t had lunch, or very little, too early in the day, so at about six o’clock he’d gone to a seafood place and ordered enough food for a whole family. He had steamed prawns, a kilo of crab, some Marmite ribs, a big bowl of soup. He didn’t know why he was so hungry, but he couldn’t stop eating – it felt like he hadn’t eaten in days, and had never tasted food so good. Everything seemed so new and delicious, and of course all that food had made him thirsty. Maybe they used ajinomoto in the cooking to make it tastier, and those sorts of chemicals always made his throat dry, so he’d washed it down with three big bottles of beer. He was thinking, This might be a long night, better eat well.

  ‘Why a long night? We’re just going to talk to the guy, right? Confirm what time he’ll deliver the workers. We don’t need all night for that.’

  Keong shrugged. ‘You never know with these people. He said he’d call me when he’s ready, but the bastard hasn’t called.’ He checked his phone, its green glow making his face look shapeless and flat, but I still couldn’t make out his expression. When the light went out and his face blended into the darkness again, he said, ‘Want a drink?’ He went around to the passenger seat and reached into the glovebox. He handed me a plastic cup and unscrewed a bottle. When he poured from it into my cup I could smell the strong, sweet odour of XO cognac. ‘I don’t have any Coca-Cola to mix it with,’ he said. ‘It’s OK just as it is.’

  We leaned against the bonnet, staring at the headlamps of the cars going past in the distance. At this time of night there was hardly any traffic, and I started to count the seconds between each car. Five, nine, twelve.

  ‘What did you say when you called him earlier?’ I asked. ‘Does he have the men?’

  ‘Aiya.’ He laughed. ‘You’re always worried. Relax. It’ll be fine. He’s got the men, we just need to agree the price.’

  We had another drink while Keong checked his phone. He dialled a number, and I could hear the ringtone clearly, even though I was standing a good few feet from him. I can remember how still it was that night – I remember the total absence of wind, because I could hear each long beep of the ringtone as clearly as if someone was shaking a bell in my ear.

  ‘I’m feeling sleepy,’ Keong said. He reached into his pocket and produced a small plastic bag, the kind with a Ziploc top. He held it up against the night sky, but I couldn’t see its contents. He emptied it into the palm of his hand, and manoeuvred his phone to shine a light on the small pills that lay there. I noticed how worn and creased his hands were – rough hands that seemed to belong to a much older man. ‘Take one,’ he said. ‘It’ll make sure you’re wide awake.’

  ‘I’m not tired,’ I lied. It felt as though the previous fifteen years had disappeared, collapsed into another realm, and that we were acting out one of our Friday nights in KL, when we were barely out of our teens and trying to get started in life. The cheap pills of dubious quality, the long nights – the rituals of our youth. I took one, without knowing what it was, and without believing it would really help me stay awake and alert, and in the minutes and hours that followed, I can’t honestly say that my mental state was affected, in a good way or a bad way. That was something else I remember from the trial: my lawyer trying to argue that I’d acted under the influence of drugs, even though I’d told her the pill had made no difference to my behaviou
r. Four, maybe five cups of XO, one amphetamine tablet, or something similar – it would have changed nothing. In the end, her defence failed, the jury didn’t consider the alcohol and the drugs to be relevant factors. And neither do I. Looking back at that evening, as I’ve done many times in the years since, I agree with them.

  Keong’s phone rang, and I could hear a man’s voice on the other end. Keong grunted a single syllable in agreement, and put his phone away. He threw his cup into the long grass and said, ‘We’ll take my car.’ When we were inside he reached under his seat and pulled out a long, thin object wrapped in a cloth. He handed it to me and said, ‘Hang on to this. Just in case.’

  ‘You’re fucking kidding me,’ I said. I didn’t have to undo his little parcel to know that it was a knife. ‘We’re just going to have a talk. Why would we need that?’

  ‘Like I said, you never know with these guys.’

  ‘You take it,’ I said. ‘I’m not touching it.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  It didn’t take us long to drive back into town. At that time the traffic is always light, but that night it seemed quieter than usual. Who knows – maybe the port business was slow, and fewer container ships were docking, so all the lorries ferrying goods up to KL had called it quits. Sometimes work at the port slowed down and you’d see migrants drifting into town looking for a few days’ casual work here and there, from whoever would employ them. During these periods the town appeared to function normally, which is to say that a visitor like you wouldn’t notice anything unusual. You’d see the buses and the markets, shopkeepers sweeping the pavements outside their doors, people sitting down at roadside food stalls – but you’d miss the feeling of anxiety, the knowledge that the entire town depended on trade from faraway places, goods being bought and sold by people we would never know. Some politician in America decides that they can’t buy Malaysian rubber gloves; suddenly ten factories in the area have to shut down. The Europeans want to save the fucking planet so they ban the use of palm oil in food; within a month the entire port is on its knees. Life continues, but you feel it slipping quietly away, and you worry that it’ll never return. And because of that fear, you feel caught in a suspended state. On the outside, life seems normal, but inside it’s drawn to a standstill.