Читать книгу The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng - Страница 10

The historian has arrived precisely at the appointed time, and I wonder if he has heard of how I dealt with advocates who appeared late in my court. Ah Cheong shows him to the verandah a few minutes later.

‘Professor Yoshikawa,’ I greet him in English.

‘Please call me Tatsuji,’ he says, giving me a deep bow, which I do not return. I nod towards Frederik. ‘Mr Pretorius is a friend of mine.’

‘Ah! From Majuba Tea Estate,’ Tatsuji says, glancing at me before bowing to Frederik.

I indicate Tatsuji to the customary seat for an honoured guest, giving him the best view of the garden. He is in his mid-sixties, dressed in a light grey linen suit, a white cotton shirt and a pale blue tie. Old enough to have fought in the war, I think; an almost subconscious assessment I apply to every Japanese man I have met. His eyes roam the low ceiling and the walls and the wooden posts before looking to the garden. ‘Yugiri,’ he murmurs.

Ah Cheong appears with a tray of tea and a small brass bell. I pour the tea into our cups. Tatsuji looks away when I catch him staring at my hands. ‘Your reputation for refusing to talk to anyone in our circles is well known, Judge Teoh,’ he says when I place a teacup before him. ‘To be honest, I was not surprised when you refused to see me, but I was taken aback when you changed your mind.’

‘I have since discovered your impressive reputation.’

‘Notorious would be a better description,’ Tatsuji replies, looking pleased nonetheless.

‘Professor Yoshikawa has the habit of airing unpopular subjects in public,’ I explain to Frederik.

‘Every time there is a movement to change our history textbooks, to remove any reference to the crimes committed by our troops, every time a government minister visits the Yasukuni shrine,’ Tatsuji says, ‘I write letters to the newspapers objecting to it.’

‘Your own people. . .’ Frederik says, ‘how have they reacted to that?’

For a few moments Tatsuji does not speak. ‘I have been assaulted four times in the last ten years,’ he replies at last. ‘I have received death threats. But still I go on radio shows and television programmes. I tell everyone that we cannot deny our past. We have to make amends. We have to.’

I bring us back to the reason for our meeting. ‘Nakamura Aritomo has been unfashionable for so long. Even when he was still alive,’ I say. ‘Why would you want to write about him now?’

‘When I was younger, I had a friend,’ Tatsuji says. ‘He owned a few pieces of Aritomo-sensei’s ukiyo-e. He always enjoyed telling people that they were made by the Emperor’s gardener.’ The historian kisses the rim of his cup and makes an appreciative noise. ‘Excellent tea.’

‘From Majuba estate,’ I tell him.

‘I must remember to buy some,’ Tatsuji tells Frederik.

‘Ooky what? The stuff Aritomo made?’ Frederik says.

‘Woodblock prints,’ Tatsuji replies.

‘Did you bring them?’ I interrupt him. ‘Those prints your friend owned?’

‘They were destroyed in an air-raid, along with his house.’ He waits, and when I do not say anything he continues, ‘Because of my friend, I became interested in Nakamura Aritomo. There is nothing authoritative written on his artworks, or his life after he left Japan; I decided to write something.’

‘Yun Ling doesn’t just give anyone permission to use Aritomo’s artworks, you know,’ Frederik says.

‘I’m aware that Aritomo-sensei left everything he owned to you, Judge Teoh,’ Tatsuji says.

‘You sent this to me.’ I place the wooden stick on the table.

‘You know what it is?’ he asks.

‘It’s the handle of a tattooing needle,’ I reply, ‘used before tattooists switched to electric needles.’

‘Aritomo-sensei produced a completely different type of artwork, one he never disclosed to the public.’ Tatsuji reaches across the table and picks up the handle. His fingers are slender and his nails, I notice, manicured. ‘He was a horimono artist.’

‘A what?’ Frederik says, his cup halted halfway to his lips. His hand has a slight tremor. When was it that I began noticing these little signs of age in people around me?

‘Aritomo-sensei was more than the Emperor’s gardener.’ Tatsuji shapes the knot of his tie with his thumb. ‘He was also a horoshi, a tattoo artist.’

I straighten my back.

‘There has always been a close link between the woodblock artist and the horimono master,’ Tatsuji continues. ‘They dip their buckets into the same well for inspiration.’

‘And what well is that?’ I ask.

‘A book,’ he says. ‘A novel from China, translated into Japanese in the eighteenth century. Suikoden. It became wildly popular when it was published.’

‘Like one of those fads that regularly drives your schoolgirls into a frenzy,’ Frederik remarks.

‘It was much more than that,’ Tatsuji says, raising a forefinger at Frederik before turning to me. ‘I prefer that we speak in private, Judge Teoh. If we can arrange to meet another time. . .’

Frederik moves to get up, but I shake my head at him. ‘What makes you so certain that Aritomo was a tattoo artist, Tatsuji?’ I say.

The historian glances at Frederik then looks at me. ‘A man I once knew had a tattoo on his body.’ He stops for a few seconds, gazing at emptiness. ‘He told me it had been done by Aritomo-sensei.’

‘And you believed him.’

Tatsuji stares into my eyes and I am struck by the pain in them. ‘He was my friend.’

‘The same friend who had the collection of Aritomo’s woodblock prints?’ I ask. Tatsuji nods. ‘Then you should have brought him here with you today.’

‘He passed away . . . some years ago.’

For an instant I see Aritomo’s reflection on the surface of the table. I have to restrain from turning around to see if he is standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. I blink once, and he is gone. ‘I agreed to see you on the matter of Aritomo’s woodblock prints,’ I remind Tatsuji. ‘Are you still interested in them?’

‘You will let me use his ukiyo-e?’

‘We’ll discuss which of his prints will go into your book once you’ve finished examining them. But there will be no mention of tattoos supposedly created by him.’ I hold up my hand as Tatsuji is about to interrupt. ‘If you breach any of my terms – any of them – I will make sure all copies of your book are pulped.’

‘The Japanese people have a right to appreciate Aritomo-sensei’s works.’

I point to my chest. ‘I will decide what the Japanese people have a right to.’ I get to my feet, wincing at my rusting joints. The historian stands up to assist me, but I brush his hand away. ‘I’ll get all the prints together. We’ll meet again in a few days’ time for you to look through them.’

‘How many pieces are there?’

‘I have no idea. Twenty or thirty perhaps.’

‘You have never looked at them?’

‘Only a few.’

‘I am staying at the Smokehouse Hotel.’ The historian writes down the telephone number on a piece of paper and gives it to me. ‘May I see the garden?’

‘It hasn’t been properly looked after.’ I ring the brass bell on the tray. ‘My housekeeper will show you out.’

The day is turning out to be cloudless, with a strong, clear light pouring into the garden. The leaves of the maple tree by the side of the house have begun to turn, soon to become heavy with red. For some inexplicable reason this maple has always defied the lack of changing seasons in the highlands. I lean against a wooden post, my knuckles kneading the pain in my hip. It will take me a while to get used to sitting in the Japanese style again. From the corner of my eye I catch Frederik watching me.

‘I don’t trust that man, whatever his reputation,’ he says. ‘You should let other experts look at the prints as well.’

‘I don’t have much time here.’

‘But I’d hoped you’d stay for a while,’ he says. ‘There’s our new tea-room I want to show you. The views are magnificent. You can’t leave again so soon.’ He looks at me and a slow realisation slackens his face. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘Something in my brain, something that shouldn’t be there.’ I pull my cardigan tighter over my body. I sense him waiting for me to explain. ‘I’ve been having problems with names. There were occasions when I couldn’t think of the words I wanted to use.’

His hand brushes the air. ‘I have those moments too. That’s just age catching up with us.’

‘This is different,’ I say. He looks at me, and I wonder if I should have kept quiet about it. ‘Sitting in court one afternoon, all of a sudden I couldn’t make head or tail of what I had written.’

‘The doctors, what did they say?’

‘The neurosurgeons ran their tests. They told me what I had suspected. I’m losing my ability to read and write, to understand language, any language. In a year – perhaps more, probably less – I won’t be able to express my thoughts. I’ll be spouting gibberish. And what people say, and the words I see – on the page, on street signs, everywhere – will be unintelligible to me.’ For a few seconds I am silent. ‘My mental competence will deteriorate. Dementia will shortly follow, unhinging my mind.’

Frederik stares at me. ‘Doctors can cure anything these days.’

‘I don’t want to discuss this, Frederik. And keep this to yourself.’ My palm stops him, my palm with its two stubs. A moment later I close my three fingers and draw them back, holding them tight in a bud. I feel as though they have captured something intangible from the air. ‘The time will come when I lose all my faculties . . . perhaps even my memories,’ I say, keeping my voice calm with an effort.

‘Write it down,’ he says. ‘Write it all down, the memories that are most important to you. It shouldn’t be difficult – it’ll be like writing one of your judgments.’

I glance sidelong at him. ‘What do you know about my judgments?’

He gives me an embarrassed smile. ‘My lawyers have instructions to send a copy to me, every time the Law Reports publish them. You write well – your judgements are clear and engaging. I can still remember the case about the cabinet minister who used black magic to murder his mistress. You really should compile them into a book.’ The lines on his forehead deepen. ‘You once quoted an English judge. Didn’t he say that words are the tools of a lawyer’s trade?’

‘Soon I won’t be able to use those tools anymore.’

‘I’ll read them to you,’ he says. ‘Whenever you want to hear your own words again, I’ll read them aloud to you.’

‘Don’t you understand what I’ve been trying to tell you? By then I won’t be able to know what anyone says to me!’ He doesn’t flinch from my anger, but the sorrow in his eyes is unbearable to look at. ‘You’d better go,’ I say, pushing myself away from the post. My movements feel slow, heavy. ‘I’ve already made you late.’

He glances at his watch. ‘It’s not important. Just some journalists I have to show around the estate, charm them into writing something complimentary.’

‘That shouldn’t be too difficult.’

A smile skims across his face, capsizing an instant later. He wants to say something more, but I shake my head. He takes the three low steps down from the verandah, then slowly turns around to face me. All of sudden he looks like an old, old man. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I am going for a walk.’

Ah Cheong hands a walking stick to me at the front door of the house. I shake my head, then take it from him. The stick has a comfortable heft. I look at it for a moment and then return it to him. Three or four steps later I stop and glance back over my shoulder. He is still standing there in the doorway, looking at me. I feel his eyes pinned on me all the way until I reach the opposite side of the pond. When I look back across the water, he has gone back inside the house.

The air is clean, as if it has never been breathed by any living thing. After the clammy heat of Kuala Lumpur, the change is welcome. It is almost noon, but the sun has slunk behind the clouds.

Lotus pads tile the surface of the pond. There are too many of them; I had not noticed it the previous evening when I arrived. The hedges on the opposite side of the pond had originally been shaped to resemble the waves of an ocean surging to the shore, but they have not been properly clipped and their lines are blurred. The pavilion’s roof beams are sagging. The entire structure seems to be melting, losing the memory of its shape. Leaves and dead insects and bark peelings cover the floor. Something slithers among them and I step back.

The track leading into the garden is paved with rings of slate cut from drill cores discarded from the gold mines of Raub. Each turn in the path reveals a different view; at no point is the entire garden revealed, making it appear more extensive than it actually is. Ornaments lie half-hidden among the overgrown lallang grass: a granite torso; a sandstone Buddha’s head with his features smoothened by mist and rain; rocks with unusual shapes and striations. Stone lanterns, their eaves curtained with tattered spider webs, squat among the curling ferns. Yugiri was designed to look old from the first stone Aritomo set down, and the illusion of age he had created has been transformed into reality.

Frederik’s workers have been looking after the place, following the instructions I have given them. The garden has been maintained by untrained hands: branches that should have been left to grow pruned away; a view that should have been obscured opened up; a path widened without consideration to the overall harmony of the garden. Even the wind streaming through the shrubs sounds wrong because the undergrowth has been allowed to grow too densely and too high.

The omissions and errors are like the noise generated by a collection of badly tuned musical instruments. Aritomo once told me that of all the gardens he created, this one meant the most to him.

Halfway in my walk through the garden, I stop, turn around and head back to the house.

The fourteenth-century bronze Buddha in the study has not grown older; his face is unmarked by the cares of the world. Ah Cheong has opened the windows to air the room all day, but the smell of mildew from the books on the shelves ages the twilight filling up the house.

The feeling that something was wrong with me surfaced five or six months ago. I was often awakened by headaches in the night, and I began to tire easily. There were days when I could not summon up any interest in my work. My concerns sharpened into fear when I began to forget names and words. It was not merely the unfolding of age, I suspected, but something more. I was frail when I had emerged from the slave-labour camp, and my health had never recovered completely. I had forced myself to pick up the life I had known before the war. Being an advocate, and later on, a judge, had given me solace; I had found enjoyment in working with words, in applying the law. For over forty years I had succeeded in staving off this exhaustion of the body, but I had always feared that a day would come when there was nothing left to be depleted from me. What I had not expected was how soon, how swiftly that moment had arrived.

I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void.

Once I lose all ability to communicate with the world outside myself, nothing will be left but what I remember. My memories will be like a sandbar, cut off from the shore by the incoming tide. In time they will become submerged, inaccessible to me. The prospect terrifies me. For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.

Frederik’s suggestion that I write down the things I do not want to forget has rooted itself into the crevices of my mind. It is futile, I know, but a part of me wants to make sure that, when the time comes, I will still have something that gives me the possibility, however meagre, to orient myself, to help me determine what is real.

Sitting at Aritomo’s desk, I realise that there are fragments of my life that I do not want to lose, if only because I still have not found the knot to tie them up with.

When I have forgotten everything else, will I finally have the clarity to see what Aritomo and I have been to each other? If I can still read my own words by then, with no knowledge of who had set them down onto the page, will the answers come to me?

Outside, the mountains have been drawn into the garden, becoming a part of it. Aritomo had been a master of shakkei, the art of Borrowed Scenery, taking elements and views from outside a garden and making them integral to his creation.

A memory drifts by. I reach for it, as if I am snatching at a leaf spiralling down from a high branch. I have to. Who knows if it will ever come back to me again?

During the Emergency, some of the people who were given a private tour of Majuba Tea Estate would also ask to see Yugiri. And sometimes Aritomo allowed it. On such occasions, I would be waiting for them at the main entrance. Most of the visitors were senior government officials taking a holiday with their wives in Cameron Highlands before going back to waging war on the communist-terrorists hiding in the jungles. They had heard about the garden in the mountains and wanted to see it for themselves, to boast to their friends that they had been one of the privileged few to have walked in it. Murmurs of anticipation would warm the air as I welcomed the group. ‘What does Yugiri mean?’ someone – usually one of the wives – would ask, and I would answer them, ‘Evening Mists.’

And if the hour was right and the light willing, they might even catch a glimpse of Aritomo, dressed in his grey yukata and hakama, raking out lines on white gravel, moving as if he were practising calligraphy on stone. Observing the expressions on the visitors’ faces, I knew that some, if not all of them, were wondering if their eyes had made a mistake, if they were seeing something that should not have been there. That same notion had entered my mind the first time I saw Aritomo.

He never accompanied these people on the tour of his garden, preferring that I entertain them. But he would stop what he was doing and talk to the visitors when I introduced him to them. I was certain that the questions had all been asked before, over the long years since he had first come to these mountains. Nevertheless, he would answer them patiently, with no hint of weariness that I could detect. ‘That is correct,’ he would tell them, prefacing his answers with a slight bow. ‘I was the Emperor’s gardener. But that was in a different lifetime.’

Invariably, someone would enquire as to why he had given it all up to come to Malaya. A puzzled look would spread across Aritomo’s face, as though he had never been asked that particular question before. I would catch the flit of pain in his eyes and, for a few moments, we would hear nothing except the birds calling out in the trees. Then he would give a short laugh and say, ‘Perhaps someday, before I cross the floating bridge of dreams, I will discover the reason. I will tell you then.’

On a few occasions one of the visitors – usually someone who had fought in the war, or, like me, had been imprisoned in one of the Japanese camps – would grow belligerent; I could always tell who these would be, even before they opened their mouths to speak. Aritomo’s eyes would become arctic, the ends of his mouth curving downwards. But he would always remain polite, bracketing all his answers with a bow before walking away from us.

Despite the intrusive questions, I had always felt there were times when Aritomo liked to think that he, too, was one of the reasons people came to visit Yugiri; that they hoped for a sight of him, as though he were a rare and unusual wild orchid not to be found anywhere else in Malaya. Perhaps that was why, in spite of his dislike of them, Aritomo had never stopped me from introducing the visitors to him, and why he was always dressed in his traditional clothes whenever he knew a group would be coming to see his garden.

Ah Cheong has already gone home. The house is still. Leaning back in the chair, I close my eyes. Images fly across my vision. A flag flutters in the wind. A water wheel turns. A pair of cranes takes off over a lake, hauling themselves with beating wings higher and higher into the sky, heading into the sun.

The world seems different, somehow, when I open my eyes again. Clearer, more defined, but also smaller.

It will not be very much different from writing a judgment, I tell myself. I will find the words I require; they are nothing more than the tools that I have used all of my life. From the chambers of my memory I will draw out and set down all recollections of the time I spent with Aritomo. I will dance to the music of words, for one more time.

Through the windows I watch the mists thicken, wiping away the mountains borrowed by the garden. Are the mists, too, an element of shakkei incorporated by Aritomo? I wonder. To use not only the mountains, but the wind, the clouds, the ever changing light? Did he borrow from heaven itself?