Читать книгу The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng - Страница 11

My name is Teoh Yun Ling. I was born in 1923 in Penang, an island on the north-west coast of Malaya. Being Straits Chinese, my parents spoke mainly English, and they had asked a family friend who was a poet to choose a name for me. Teoh is my surname, my family name. As in life, the family must come first. That was what I had always been taught. I had never changed the order of my name, not even when I studied in England, and I had never taken on an English name just to make it easier for anyone.

I came to Majuba Tea Estate on the 6th of October, 1951. My train was two hours late pulling into the Tapah Road station, so I was relieved when I glimpsed Magnus Pretorius from the window of my carriage. He was sitting on a bench, a newspaper folded on his lap, and he stood up as the train came to a stop. He was the only man on the platform with an eye-patch. I stepped down from the carriage and waved to him. I walked past the Wickham Trolley carrying the two soldiers manning the machine guns mounted on it; the armoured wagon had escorted the train from the moment we had left Kuala Lumpur. Sweat plastered my cotton blouse to my back as I pushed through the crowd of young Australian soldiers in khaki uniforms, ignoring their whistles and the looks they gave me.

Magnus scattered the Tamil porters mobbing me. ‘Yun Ling,’ he said, taking my bag. ‘Is this all your barang?’

‘I’m only staying a week.’

He was in his late sixties, although he looked ten years younger. Taller than me by half a foot, he carried the excess weight so common in men his age well. He was balding, the hair around the sides of his head white, his remaining eye mired in wrinkles, but startlingly blue.

‘Sorry you had to wait, Magnus,’ I said. ‘We had to stop for endless checks. I think the police were tipped off about an ambush.’

‘Ag, I knew you’d be late.’ His accent – the vowels flattened and truncated – was distinct even after forty odd years in Malaya. ‘The station-master made an announcement. Lucky there wasn’t an attack, hey?’ I followed him through a gate in the barbed-wire fence surrounding the train station, to an olive-green Land Rover parked under a stand of mango trees. Magnus swung my bag into the backseat; we climbed in and drove off.

Above the limestone hills in the distance, heavy clouds were gathering to hammer the earth with rain later in the evening. The main street of Tapah was quiet, and the wooden blinds of the Chinese shophouses – painted with advertisements for Poh Chai indigestion pills and Tiger Balm ointment – were lowered against the afternoon sun. At the junction turning into the trunk road, Magnus stopped for military vehicles speeding past: scout cars with gun turrets, boxy armoured personnel carriers and lorries packed with soldiers. They were heading south, towards Kuala Lumpur.

‘Something’s happened,’ I said.

‘No doubt we’ll hear about it on the evening news.’

At a security checkpoint just before the road tipped upwards to the mountains, a Malay Special Constable lowered the metal barrier and ordered us out of the car. Another constable behind an embankment trained a Bren gun on us, while a third searched our car and pushed a wheeled mirror under it. The constable who had stopped us asked to see our identity cards. I felt a spurt of anger when he searched me but left Magnus alone. I suspected that his hands were less intrusive than they usually were as they patted my body: I was not the typical Chinese peasant they were used to, and the presence of Magnus, a white man, was probably a deterrent.

Behind us, an old Chinese woman was ordered off her bicycle. A conical straw hat shaded her face and her black cotton trousers were stiff with dried rubber latex. An SC rooted around inside her rattan basket and held up a pineapple. ‘Tolong lah, tolong lah,’ the woman pleaded in Malay. The policeman pulled the top and bottom sections of the pineapple and the fruit came apart in half. Uncooked rice concealed in the hollowed-out fruit streamed to the ground. The old woman’s wails became louder as the constables dragged her into a hut by the roadside.

‘Clever,’ Magnus remarked, nodding at the mound of rice on the road.

‘The police once caught a rubber-tapper smuggling sugar out of his village,’ I said.

‘In a pineapple?’

‘He mixed it in the water in his canteen. It was one of the first cases I prosecuted.’

‘You’ve done a lot of cases like that?’ he said, as the SC raised the barrier and waved us through.

‘Enough to receive death threats,’ I said. ‘One of the reasons I resigned.’

Less than half a mile further we stopped behind a line of lorries, their tarpaulins peeled back. Scrawny Chinese attendants sat on gunnysacks of rice, cooling themselves with tattered bamboo fans. ‘Good. I was worried we had missed the convoy,’ Magnus said, switching off the engine.

‘We’ll be crawling up the mountain,’ I said, looking at the vehicles.

‘Can’t be helped, meisiekind. But at least we’ll be escorted,’ Magnus said, pointing to two armoured scout cars at the head of the line.

‘Any recent attacks in Cameron Highlands?’

Three years had passed since the Malayan Communist Party had launched its guerrilla war against the government, forcing the High Commissioner to declare a State of Emergency. The war showed no signs of ending, with the communist-terrorists – which the government referred to as ‘CTs’ or, more commonly, ‘bandits’ – keeping up regular attacks on rubber estates and tin mines.

‘They’ve been ambushing buses and army vehicles. But last week they showed up at a vegetable farm. Torched the buildings and killed the manager,’ Magnus said. ‘You haven’t exactly picked the best of times to visit us.’

The sun reflected off the vehicles in front. I wound down my window but that only let in a rush of heat shimmering off the road. More cars had stopped behind us while we were waiting. Fifteen minutes later we were moving again. For security reasons, the undergrowth along the road had been hacked away and the trees felled, leaving only a narrow field of stumps. Far back from the road, beneath what had once been the cool shadows of trees, an aboriginal longhouse stood high on stilts, like an ark that had been washed up by a flood. An old woman in a sarong squatted on a tree stump and watched us, her breasts exposed, her lips painted bright red.

Groves of bamboo leaned into the road, filtering the light into weak yellow patches. A lorry, overloaded with cabbages, careened down from the opposite direction, pushing us against the rock face on the side of the road; I could have reached out and pulled a clump of ferns growing on it. The temperature continued to drop, the air warmed only in the short stretches where the road dozed in the sun. At the Lata Iskandar waterfall, the sprays opened its net of whispers over us, rinsing the air with moisture that had travelled all the way from the mountain peaks, carrying with it the tang of trees and mulch and earth.

We arrived in Tanah Rata an hour later, the road entering the village watched over by a red-bricked building perched on a rise. ‘You might want to explore the area,’ Magnus said, ‘but remember the village gates close at six.’

Mist washed the lorries in front of us into grey, shapeless hulks. Magnus switched on his headlights, turning the world into a jaundiced murk. Visibility improved once we left the main street. ‘There’s The Green Cow,’ Magnus said. ‘We’ll go there for drinks one evening.’ We picked up speed, passing the Tanah Rata Golf Club. Looking at Magnus from the corner of my eye, I wondered how he and his wife had coped in the Japanese Occupation. Unlike so many of the Europeans living in Malaya, they had not evacuated when the Japanese soldiers came, but had remained in their home.

‘Here we are,’ he said, slowing down the car as we approached the entrance into Majuba Tea Estate. The granite gateposts were gouged with empty sockets where the hinges had once been set, like teeth that had been pulled out. ‘The Japs took the gates. I haven’t been able to replace them.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘The war’s been over for, what, six years already? But we’re still short of materials.’

Tea bushes clad the hillsides, shaped into box hedges by decades of picking. Moving between the waist-high bushes, workers plucked the leaves with voracious fingers, throwing fistfuls of them over their shoulders into rattan baskets strapped to their backs. The air had a herbal undertone, more a flavour than a scent.

‘It’s the tea, isn’t it?’ I said, inhaling deeply.

‘The fragrance of the mountains,’ Magnus replied. ‘That’s what I miss most, whenever I’m away.’

‘The place doesn’t look as if it suffered too much damage in the Occupation.’

Hearing the bitterness in my voice, Magnus’s face tightened. ‘We had to put in a lot of work to rebuild after the war. We were lucky. The Japs needed us to keep production running.’

‘They didn’t intern you and your wife?’

‘Ja, they did, in a way,’ he replied with a touch of defensiveness. ‘The senior army officers moved into our home. We lived in a fenced-off compound on the estate.’ He sounded his horn, sending a tea picker who had strayed onto the road skipping back onto the grassy verge. ‘Every morning we were marched to the slopes to work alongside our coolies. But I have to say, the Japs were kinder to us than the English were to my people.’

‘So now you’ve been a prisoner twice,’ I said, recalling that he had fought in the Boer War. He would have been only about seventeen or eighteen then. Almost the same age I had been when I was interned.

‘And now I’m in the middle of another war.’ He shook his head. ‘Seems to be my fate, doesn’t it?’

The road took us further into the estate, winding uphill until we came to a long driveway lined with eucalyptus trees. The driveway funnelled open at a circular ornamental pond, a line of ducklings on the water smearing the reflection of the house. The barbed wire fence protecting the grounds reminded me of my internment camp.

‘It’s a Cape Dutch house,’ Magnus said, misreading the uneasiness on my face. ‘Very common where I came from.’

A Gurkha hurried out from the guard post to open the gates. A pair of large brown dogs loped alongside the car as Magnus drove around the house to the garage behind. ‘Don’t worry, they won’t bite.’ He pointed to the darker strip of hair along their spine. ‘Rhodesian ridgebacks. That one’s Brolloks; the smaller one’s Bittergal.’

The two dogs looked equally big to me, their cold, wet noses sniffing at my shins as I got out of the Land Rover. ‘Come, come,’ Magnus said, hefting my bag. At the front lawn he stopped, swept out an arm and said, ‘Majuba House.’

The walls of the one-storey house were plastered in white, setting off the black thatch of river reeds combed down the roof. Four wide windows, spaced generously apart, took up each flank of the front door. The wooden shutters and the frames were the green of algae. A holbol gable with a plasterwork of leaves and grapes capped the porch. Tall stalks of flowers which I later found out were called strelitzias grew by the windows, their red and orange and yellow flowers reminding me of the origami birds a Japanese guard in my camp had so loved to fold. I pushed the memory away.

On the roof, the wind pulled at a flag, the broad stripes of orange, white, blue and green unfamiliar to me. ‘The Vierkleur,’ Magnus said, following my gaze. ‘The Transvaal flag.’

‘You’re not taking it down?’ The hoisting of foreign national flags had been prohibited the year before, to prevent the flying of the Chinese flag by supporters of the Malayan Communist Party.

‘They’ll have to shoot me first.’

He did not remove his shoes before going inside, and I followed his example. The walls in the hallway were painted white, the yellow wood floorboards buttered by the evening sun through the windows. In the living room, a row of paintings on a wall caught my attention, and I went in for a closer look. They were scenes of a mountainous landscape, barren and stretching to the horizon. ‘Thomas Baines. And those lithographs there of the fever trees – they’re Pierneef,’ Magnus said, looking pleased at my interest. ‘From the Cape.’

A reflection spilled into the frame; I turned around to face a Chinese woman in her late forties, her greying hair pulled back into a bun. ‘My Lao Puo, Emily,’ Magnus said, giving his wife a kiss on her cheek.

‘We’re so happy you’re here, Yun Ling,’ she said. A loose beige skirt softened the lines of her thin figure, and a red cardigan was caped over her shoulders.

‘Where’s Frederik?’ Magnus said.

‘Don’t know. Probably in his bungalow,’ Emily said. ‘Our guest looks tired, Lao Kung. It’s been a long day for her. Stop showing off your house and take her to her room. I’m off to the clinic – Muthu’s wife was bitten by a snake.’

‘Have you called Dr Yeoh?’ Magnus asked.

‘Of course-lah. He’s on his way. Yun Ling, we’ll talk later?’ She nodded to me and left us.

Magnus led me down the hallway. ‘Frederik’s your son?’ I asked; I could not recall having heard anything about him.

‘My nephew. He’s a captain in the Rhodesian African Rifles.’

The house was filled with reminders of Magnus’s homeland – ochre-coloured rugs woven by some African tribe, porcupine quills sticking out of a crystal vase, a two-foot-long bronze sculpture of a leopard in pursuit of an unseen prey. We passed a little room in the eastern wing at the back of the house, not much larger than a linen closet. A radio set took up half of a narrow table. ‘That’s how we stay in touch with the other farms. We got them after the CTs cut down our phone lines too many times for our liking.’

My room was the last one in the passageway. The walls – and even the Bakelite switches – were painted white, and for a few seconds I thought I was back in the Ipoh General Hospital again. On a table stood a vase of flowers I had never seen in the tropics before, creamy white and trumpet-shaped. I rubbed my wrist against one of the flowers; it had the texture of velvet. ‘What are these?’

‘Arum lilies. I had bulbs sent over from the Cape,’ Magnus said. ‘They grow well here.’ He set my bag down by a teak cupboard and said, ‘How’s your mother? Any improvements?’

‘She’s lost in her own world. Completely. She doesn’t even ask me about Yun Hong anymore.’ I was glad in a way, but I did not tell him that.

‘You should have come here to recuperate, after the war.’

‘I was waiting for a reply from the university.’

‘But to work for the War Crimes Tribunal – after what had happened to you?’ He shook his head. ‘I’m surprised your father allowed it.’

‘It was only for three months.’ I stopped, then said, ‘He had heard no news of me or Yun Hong all through the war. He didn’t know what to make of me when he saw me. I was a ghost to him.’

It was the only time in my life that I had seen my father cry. He had aged so much. But then, I suppose, so had I. My parents had left Penang and moved to Kuala Lumpur. In the new house he took me upstairs to my mother’s room, walking with a limp that he had never had before the war. My mother had not recognised me, and she had turned her back to me. After a few days she remembered I was her daughter, but each time she saw me she began asking about Yun Hong – where she was, when she was coming home, why she had not returned yet. After a while I began to dread visiting her.

‘It was better for me to be out of the house, to keep myself occupied,’ I said. ‘He didn’t say it, but my father felt the same way.’

It had not been difficult to be hired as an assistant researcher – a position that was nothing more than a clerk, really – at the War Crimes Tribunal in Kuala Lumpur. So many people had been killed or wounded in the war that the British Military Administration had faced a shortage of staff when the Japanese surrendered. Recording the testimonies of the victims of the Imperial Japanese Army affected me more badly than I had anticipated, however. Watching the victims break down as they related the brutalities they had endured, I was made aware that I had yet to recover from my own experience. I was glad when I received my letter of admission from Girton.

‘How many war criminals did they actually get in the end?’ asked Magnus.

‘In Singapore and Malaya together, a hundred and ninety-nine were sentenced to death – but only a hundred were eventually hanged.’ I said, looking into the bathroom. It was bright and airy, the floor a cold chessboard of black and white tiles. A claw-footed bathtub stood by the wall. ‘I attended only nine of the hangings before I left for Girton.’

‘My magtig.’ Magnus looked appalled.

For a while we were silent. Then he opened a door next to the cupboard and asked me to follow him outside the room. A gravel path ran behind the house, taking us past the kitchen until we came to a broad terrace with a well-tended lawn. A pair of marble statues stood on their own plinths in the centre of the lawn, facing one another. On my first glance they appeared to be identical, down to the folds of their robes spilling over the plinths.

‘Bought them ridiculously cheap from an old planter’s wife after the planter ran off with his fifteen-year-old lover,’ said Magnus. ‘The one on the right is Mnemosyne. You’ve heard of her?’

‘The goddess of Memory,’ I said. ‘Who’s the other woman?’

‘Her twin sister, of course. The goddess of Forgetting.’

I looked at him, wondering if he was pulling my leg. ‘I don’t recall there’s a goddess for that.’

‘Ah, doesn’t the fact of your not recalling prove her existence?’ He grinned. ‘Maybe she exists, but it’s just that we have forgotten.’

‘So, what’s her name?’

He shrugged, showing me his empty palms. ‘You see, we don’t even remember her name anymore.’

‘They’re not completely identical,’ I said, going closer to them. Mnemosyne’s features were defined, her nose and cheekbones prominent, her lips full. Her sister’s face looked almost blurred; even the creases of her robe were not as clearly delineated as Mnemosyne’s.

‘Which one would you say is the older twin?’ asked Magnus.

‘Mnemosyne, of course.’

‘Really? She looks younger, don’t you think?’

‘Memory must exist before there’s Forgetting.’ I smiled at him. ‘Or have you forgotten that?’

He laughed. ‘Come on. Let me show you something.’ He stopped at the low wall running along the edge of the terrace. Pinned to the highest plateau in the estate, Majuba House had an unimpeded view of the countryside. He pointed to a row of fir trees about three-quarters of the way down a hill. ‘That’s where Aritomo’s property starts.’

‘It doesn’t look far to walk.’ I guessed it would take me about twenty minutes to get there.

‘Don’t be fooled. It’s further than it looks. When are you meeting him?’

‘Half past nine tomorrow morning.’

‘Frederik or one of my clerks will drive you there.’

‘I’ll walk.’

The determination in my face silenced him for a moment. ‘Your letter took Aritomo by surprise . . . I don’t think he was at all happy to receive it.’

‘It was your idea for me to ask him, Magnus. You didn’t tell him that I had been interned in a Japanese camp, I hope?’

‘You asked me not to,’ he said. ‘I’m glad he’s agreed to design your garden.’

‘He hasn’t. He’ll only decide after he’s spoken to me.’

Magnus adjusted the strap of his eye-patch. ‘You resigned even before he’s made up his mind? Rather irresponsible isn’t it? Didn’t you like prosecuting?’

‘I did, at first. But in the last few months I’ve started to feel hollow . . . I felt I was wasting my time.’ I paused. ‘And I was furious when the Japan Peace Treaty was signed.’

Magnus cocked his head at me; his black silk eye-patch had the texture of a cat’s ear. ‘What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?’

‘One of the articles in the treaty states that the Allied Powers recognise that Japan should pay reparations for the damage and suffering caused during the war. However, because Japan could not afford to pay, the Allied Powers would waive all reparation claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals. And their nationals.’ I realised that I was near to ranting, but I was unable to stop myself. It was a relief to uncork myself and let my frustrations spill out. ‘So you see, Magnus, the British made certain that no one – not a single man or woman or child who had been tortured and imprisoned or massacred by the Japs – none of them or their families can demand any form of financial reparation from the Japanese. Our government betrayed us!’

‘You sound surprised.’ He snorted. ‘Well, now you know what the fokken Engelse are capable of. Excuse me,’ he added.

‘I lost interest in my work. I insulted my superiors. I quarrelled with my colleagues. I made disparaging remarks about the government to anyone who would listen. One of them who heard me was a reporter for the Straits Times.’ Thinking about it brought back a flood of bitterness. ‘I didn’t resign, Magnus. I was sacked.’

‘That must have upset your father,’ he said. Was there a mischievous – even malicious – glint in his eye?

‘He called me an ungrateful daughter. He had pulled so many strings to get me that job, and I had made him lose face.’

Magnus clasped his hands behind his back. ‘Well, whatever Aritomo decides, I hope you’ll stay with us for a while. A week’s too short. And it’s your first time here. There are plenty of nice places to see. Come to the sitting room later, say in an hour’s time. We have drinks before dinner,’ he said, before returning into the house through the kitchen.

The air became colder, but I remained out there. The mountains swallowed up the sun, and night seeped into the valleys. Bats squeaked, hunting invisible insects. A group of prisoners in my camp once caught a bat; the ravenous men had stretched its wings over a meagre fire, the glow showing up the thin bones beneath its skin.

On the edge of Nakamura Aritomo’s property, the failing light transformed the firs into pagodas, sentinels protecting the garden behind them.