Читать книгу The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng - Страница 13

Every child longs for a larger-than-life uncle and, because I had none, Magnus Pretorius became a figure of fascination to me, although he was hardly anything more than a vague presence in my life when I was growing up. What I knew of him I heard from my parents and from the things they left unsaid, the broken-off twigs of conversations I picked up whenever I walked in on them, and from what Magnus told me after I got to know him better.

Arriving in Kuala Lumpur from Cape Town in 1905, Magnus worked as an assistant manager in one of Guthries’s rubber estates in Ipoh. He liked to tell people that he had been employed only because the interviewer discovered he could play rugger. It was during this period that he became friendly with my father. They went into business together, buying up a rubber estate, acquiring a few more over the years.

Outstation planters lived in isolation among the rubber, with the nearest European neighbour usually twenty miles or more away. Growing up in Penang, I had heard stories of planters drinking themselves to death, or dying from snakebite or malaria or a variety of other tropical diseases. Hemmed in by the neat, unending lines of rubber trees, Magnus came to hate the life and began searching for better prospects. Drinking at the FMS Bar in Ipoh one weekend, he overheard a government official talking about a plateau three thousand feet high on the Titiwangsa mountain range. The man spoke of plans to turn it into an administrative centre of government and a hill station resort for senior officials of the Malayan Civil Service.

Magnus, who had once hiked up one of the mountains in that region, saw the potential of the plans immediately. A week later he obtained a concession of six hundred acres in the highlands from the government. He sold off his shares in the rubber plantations to my father just before the Great Slump, an act which my father would always hold against him.

A government surveyor, William Cameron, had mapped out the highlands in 1885. He had come upon the endlessly unfolding misty mountains and valleys while traversing the ranges on his elephants, charting the borders of Pahang and Perak. ‘Like Hannibal crossing the Alps,’ I would often hear Magnus tell visitors during my stay in Majuba.

Magnus brought in seeds and tea plants from the hills of Ceylon. Labourers were shipped in from Southern India to clear the jungle. In the space of four, five years, the slopes and hillsides in his estate were covered with tea bushes. The tea trees eventually became stunted from the workers’ constant picking, like the bonsai trees maintained by generations of Japanese nobility. A few years after he started planting, two other rival tea estates were also established in Cameron Highlands, but by that time the Majuba label had taken root in Malaya.

It was the only brand of tea my father prohibited in our home.

Frederik tried to engage me in conversation on the short drive back to Majuba House, but my thoughts were on Aritomo and on my failure to convince him to design a garden for me. Staring out of the window, I paid scant attention to the terraced slopes of the vegetable farms outside Majuba, or the occasional bungalow we passed. It was only when the Gurkha at Majuba House opened the gates for us that I noticed the cars parked in the driveway.

‘What’s happening here?’

‘Magnus’s braai. He has one every Sunday,’ Frederik said. ‘Starts at eleven in the morning and usually goes on till seven, eight at night. You’ll love it.’ I vaguely recalled Magnus telling me about the braai the night before, but I had forgotten all about it.

In the passageway outside the kitchen, we nearly collided into Emily scurrying out with a tray of strange-looking tubes. ‘Aiyoh, we were so worried about you-lah,’ she scolded me. ‘Everyone’s outside already.’ She nudged her chin at the back of the house. ‘Go and join them. No, not you, Frederik! You come and help me. Take these out to Magnus.’ She pushed the tray to me. The glistening tubes, I saw, were coils of uncooked sausages, each one about an inch thick and one and a half feet long.

Fifteen to twenty people were gathered on the terrace garden behind the house, a mix of Chinese, Malays and Europeans. Some lounged in rattan chairs while others stood talking in small groups, a drink in their hands. The day was bright and windless, but the atmosphere was sombre. A woman laughed, then stopped abruptly and glanced around. Plates and cutlery and casseroles of food took up a long table at one end of the terrace. Curries simmered over charcoal stoves and sunlight winked off the tuberous bottles of Tiger beer planted in a tub of ice. In the shade of a camphor tree, Magnus watched over a barbecue grill that had been made from an old oil drum cut in half lengthways and laid on a trestle. The ridgebacks lazed at his feet, scratching themselves and looking up at me as I approached.

‘Ah, You’ve been found!’ Magnus said. ‘Knew you’d be at Yugiri when you didn’t show up for breakfast.’

‘I’ve never seen these at the Cold Storage,’ I said, handing the tray of sausages to him.

‘Boerewors. Made them myself.’

‘They look like something Brolloks and Bittergal might leave behind,’ I said. The dogs glanced up at the sound of the names, their tails flattening the grass.

‘Sies!’ Magnus grimaced. ‘Put them on the braai. You’ll soon see how lekker they taste.’

The sausages were flecked with coriander seeds and other spices Magnus refused to divulge. ‘It’s my Ouma’s recipe,’ was all he would say. They gave off the most wonderful aroma when they began cooking over the coals and I realised suddenly that, except for the tea I had drunk with Aritomo, I had consumed nothing all morning.

‘Before you think I’m being disrespectful,’ Magnus tilted his bottle of Tiger Beer at the people scattered across the lawn, ‘by the time we heard about Gurney’s death, it was too late to cancel.’ He took another swig from his bottle. ‘You get what you wanted from Aritomo?’

‘He turned me down.’

‘Ag, shame. But stay here. For as long as you want. The air will do you a world of good.’ His eye searched the crowd. ‘Didn’t Frederik remind him about the braai?’

‘He has work to do,’ I said. Magnus picked up a pair of metal tongs. ‘Were there reprisals against him when the Occupation ended?’

‘By the anti-Japanese guerrillas?’ He wiped his lips with his hand. ‘Of course not.’

‘He told me he was arrested.’

‘Well, the Brits couldn’t charge him with anything,’ Magnus replied. ‘And I vouched for him.’ He turned the boerewors over and fat dripped into the coals, sending up a cloud of fragrant smoke. ‘He made sure we weren’t sent to the camps. At one point in the war he had more than thirty people working for him. All of them – and their families – survived the war.’

‘We should have come here to wait out the war.’

He stopped rearranging the sausages on the grill and looked at me. ‘Weeks before the Japs attacked, I told your father to bring all of you here.’

I stared at him. ‘He never said anything about it.’

‘He should have listened to me. I wish he had.’

The noise of the party behind me seemed to recede into the distance. I felt a sudden fury at my father’s obdurate pride. Magnus was right – things would have turned out differently: I would be unharmed, my mother would not be lost inside her mind, and Yun Hong would still be alive.

‘You knew early on that the Japanese would attack us?’ I asked, watching him carefully.

‘Anyone with half a brain looking at a map would have realised that,’ Magnus replied. ‘China was too big for Japan to swallow – all it could do was nibble at the edges. But these smaller territories in the southern seas were easier meat.’

Frederik came out with another tray, this one filled with lamb chops. ‘Buy a donkey,’ Magnus said to him.

‘Buy a what?’ I wondered if I had heard him correctly.

‘I’m trying to make this young man here speak more Afrikaans,’ Magnus said. ‘He’s been mixing with the English for so long he’s forgotten his own language. Tell her what it means.’

‘Baie dankie,’ Frederik said, and I asked him to spell it out for me. ‘It means “Thank you”. I’ve been taking lessons in Malay too,’ he added. ‘It’s funny, how many words they both share: pisang, piring . . . pondok.’

‘It’s because of the slaves taken from Java to the Cape,’ said Magnus. He poured his beer into the coals and asked the two of us to follow him. He introduced us to the guests. In spite of the chill in the air, I was the only one wearing gloves.

‘Meet Malcolm,’ Magnus announced. ‘He’s the Protector of Aborigines. Be careful of what you say when he’s around – this man speaks Malay and Cantonese and Mandarin and Hokkien.’

‘Malcolm Toombs,’ the man said with a warm smile. He was in his late forties, with a guileless face I immediately took to. It probably helped in his work, looking after the welfare of the Orang Asli.

‘Not a grave person, in spite of his name,’ Frederik whispered to me.

We piled our plates with food from the buffet table and were about to start eating when Toombs asked us to stand in a loose circle. Magnus’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing. We closed our eyes in a minute’s silence in memory of the High Commissioner. Only now did the full import of Gurney’s death strike me. Despite what the government had been telling us, things were getting worse.

‘How’s the boerewors?’ Magnus asked once everyone had sat down and begun eating.

‘They taste much better than they look.’ I chewed, swallowed and said, ‘How did Gurney die?’

‘Terrorists ambushed his car and shot him. Happened yesterday afternoon on the road up to Fraser’s Hill,’ Magnus said. ‘They were going on holiday, apparently – he and his wife. Travelling in an armed convoy.’

‘And yet they managed to kill him,’ said Jaafar Hamid, the owner of the Lakeview Hotel at Tanah Rata. He pulled his chair closer to us.

‘Why was the bloody news kept back until today?’ Magnus asked.

‘Everything’s censored these days,’ I said. ‘But, by now, there’ll hardly be a wireless anywhere in the world that isn’t broadcasting what has happened. They must have already killed him when you were bringing me here from the station. That’s why there were so many army vehicles on the road.’

‘That’s possible. . .’ Toombs said, quietly. ‘It’s quite a coup for the Reds. They’ll be dancing and singing in the jungles tonight, I’m afraid.’

‘Gurney’s wife?’ I said, looking at Magnus.

‘The wireless said the CTs fired at the vehicle in front first. When they started shooting at his Rolls, Gurney got out from the car and walked away from it.’

‘That was reckless of him,’ one of the European women spoke up.

Magnus corrected her immediately. ‘He was drawing fire away from her, Sarah.’

‘Poor woman. . .’ said Emily.

Magnus squeezed his wife’s shoulder. ‘I think it’ll be good for us to look at our security measures again, come up with some suggestions to improve them.’

‘There’s not much more we can do, is there?’ a middle-aged man said. Earlier he had introduced himself to me as Paul Crawford, telling me that he owned a strawberry farm in Tanah Rata, and that he was a childless widower. ‘We’ve put up fences around our homes, trained our workers to be sentries, and formed a Home Guard in the kampongs. But we’re still waiting for the Special Constables we asked for.’

When the war ended, I had hoped I would never have to experience something like that again. But here I was, in the heart of another war.

‘Those few weeks after the Japs surrendered,’ Emily said, ‘we kept hearing about the communists killing the Malays in their kampongs, and the Malays taking their revenge on the Chinese. It was frightening.’

‘The Chinese squatters I’ve spoken to still believe that it was the communists who defeated the Japs,’ Toombs remarked.

‘My first week in Malaya,’ Frederik said, ‘a soldier told me he had been with the first batch of troops coming back to take control of the country. He thought the communists had won the war. Every town his regiment drove through had buntings and posters celebrating the communists’ victory against the Japs.’

‘Malaya, Malaya,’ Hamid grumbled. ‘None of you find it strange that what you English so carelessly named ‘Malaya’ – my tanah-air, my home – didn’t officially exist until only recently?’

‘This is my home too, Enchik Hamid,’ I said.

‘You orang China, you’re all descendants of immigrants,’ Hamid retorted. ‘Your loyalty will always lie with China.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ I replied.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. You’re a Straits Chinese aren’t you? Even worse! The whole lot of you think home is England – a place few of you have ever seen.’ Hamid rapped his chest with his fist. ‘We Malays, we are the true sons of the soil, the bumiputera.’ He looked around at us. ‘Not one of you here can be called that.’

‘Please-lah, Hamid,’ Emily said.

‘Old countries are dying, Hamid,’ I said, keeping a grip on my anger, ‘and new ones are being born. It doesn’t matter where one’s ancestors came from. Can you say – with absolute certainty – that one of your forebears did not sail from Siam, from Java, or Aceh, or from the islands in the Sunda Straits?’

‘What do you mean, that Malaya didn’t exist until recently?’ This was Peter Boyd, the assistant manager of a rubber estate; he had only arrived from London a few weeks before to take over from his predecessor who had been killed by the CTs.

‘It’s always been a convenient name for the rag-tag collection of territories the British had obtained control of,’ I explained before Hamid could reply. ‘First there were the Federated Malay States, each one headed by a governor and situated on the west coast.’ It shocked me that such ignorance among the Europeans sent out to administer Malaya was still common; no wonder the Malays had had enough and wanted the Mat Sallehs out. ‘Then there were the Non-Federated Malay States,’ I continued, ‘ruled by their sultans with assistance from British advisers. And then there were the Straits Settlements – Malacca, Penang and Singapore.’

‘And all stolen from us Malays,’ Hamid said.

‘Who were too lazy to have done anything with it,’ Emily cut in. ‘You know very well, Hamid, that we Chinese built up the tin industry. We established towns, and we brought in commerce. Kuala Lumpur was founded by a Chinese! Don’t pretend you didn’t know.’

‘Hah! We were far too clever to want to spend our days slaving for the Mat Salleh in the tin mines, unlike you orang China.’ Hamid leaned forward with his plate. ‘Eh, Emily, some more of your belachan please.’

The discovery of tin in the Kinta Valley in the eighteenth century had compelled the British to ship indentured coolies from southern China to work the mines, as the Malays preferred to remain in their kampongs and till their own fields. The Chinese immigrants came with the intention of returning to their homeland after making their fortune. Many had stayed on, however, preferring the stability of life in a British colony to the wars and upheavals in China. They established families and fortunes in Penang, Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur, and opened the way for more of their countrymen from the southern ports of China. These immigrants soon became part of Malaya. I never wondered about it, just as I never thought it strange that I should also have been born beneath the monsoon skies of the equator, that with my first breath I would inhale the humid, heated air of the tropics and feel immediately and forever at home.

Magnus rubbed his one good eye with his knuckles. ‘I remember a couple of years ago I was sitting in my study, listening to the evening news,’ he said. ‘What I heard made me despair.’ He turned to Crawford and Toombs. ‘Your Mr Attlee, giving official recognition to that fellow Mao’s government in China, while the communists were killing hundreds of us in Malaya every month.’

‘Don’t forget there’s an election in a couple of weeks,’ Crawford said. ‘We might get Winston back.’ Magnus simply grimaced, looking singularly uninspired by the prospect.

‘If you do,’ said Frederik, ‘he’ll inherit Mao on this side of the world, and Mau Mau in Africa.’

‘You’re terrible-lah,’ said Emily, covering her laugh behind her hand.

‘What Yun Ling mentioned just now, about old countries dying – well, she’s right,’ Magnus said. ‘There isn’t one that’s older than China, and look at it now. A new name, and a new emperor.’

‘Emperor Mao?’ said Frederik.

‘In all but name.’

‘For goodness’ sake,’ Emily cut in. ‘Let’s talk about something else, can we not? Has anyone here read that new book by that Han Suyin? She came here for a visit last year, you know. Eh, Molly, is it true, they’re going to make a film of it? With William Holden?’

Lunch was winding down when one of the servants came out from the house and whispered to Magnus. He got up from his seat and went in through the kitchen, the ridgebacks padding after him. He looked troubled when he returned to join us a few minutes later.

‘That was one of my assistant managers on the telephone, he said, looking around at all of us. ‘CTs torched a squatter village in Tanah Rata an hour ago. Chopped the headman up with a parang. They forced his wife and daughters to watch. I’m not trying to get rid of you lot, but a six o’clock curfew’s been put into place.’

Enchik Hamid sprang to his feet, crumbs scattering from his lap. ‘Alamak! My wife is alone at home.’

The others got up too, and I realised that the High Commissioner’s murder had frightened them more than they cared to admit. Magnus and Emily showed the guests out while I remained in the garden. I walked past the statues of the two sisters and stopped at the low stone balustrade, leaning over it. On the terrace below lay a formal garden where oak leaves were scattered on the lawn like pieces of an uncompleted jigsaw puzzle. A peacock chased its mate across the grass and their tail feathers raked over the leaves. To one side of the lawn was a rose garden, the bushes planted in a spiral pattern.

At first I thought the noise was coming from a lorry struggling up a steep road somewhere over the next ridge. It grew louder within seconds, exploding into a bone-penetrating rumble as an aeroplane flew over Majuba House, circling the tea fields.

‘A Dakota,’ Frederik said, coming out from the house to join me.

The door near the plane’s tail opened and a brown cloud spilled out from it, breaking into pieces an instant later. For a second I thought the aircraft was disintegrating, its body flaking away. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Safe conduct passes and notices, urging the CTs to surrender,’ Frederik said. ‘Hell of a mess to clean up when the wind blows them over the tea, Magnus says. The coolies complain bitterly.’

The Dakota banked around a hill, the noise of its passage gradually sputtering away. Sheets of paper eddied towards the house. I went to the far end of the lawn and plucked one from the air. I had heard about these notices issued by the Psychological Warfare Department, but I had never seen one till now. Printed on it was a pair of photographs, placed side by side. The first showed a bandit at the moment of his surrender, scrawny and malnourished and dressed in rags, his face all cheekbones and buckteeth. ‘Comrades, my name is Chong Ka Heng. I was once a member of the Fourth Johor Regiment,’ I read aloud. The other photograph was of the same man, grinning and well-fed, looking like an office clerk in a smart white shirt and black pressed trousers, his arm around the waist of a plain but smiling young Chinese woman. ‘The Government has treated me well since I surrendered. I urge you to think of your family, of your mother and father, who all miss you. Give up your struggle, and return to the people who miss you.’ The offers of amnesty and rewards were repeated in Malay, Chinese and Tamil. The paper was thin and light brown in colour, as though it had been soaked overnight in the dregs of tea. ‘Odd choice of colour to use,’ I said.

‘It’s deliberate. Makes it less conspicuous for a bandit to pick it up.’ Frederik cleared his throat. ‘Magnus lets me use one of the bungalows. It’s on the other side of the estate.’ He added, after a pause, ‘Come and have a drink?’

‘The curfew’s on.’

‘We’re already inside the estate.’

‘Not today, Frederik,’ I said, crumpling up the notice. ‘But thank you, for driving me back this morning.’

Pain started up in my left hand when I returned to my bedroom, throbbing in time to my pulse. My fury at Aritomo, which had abated during the party, resurfaced. The nerve of the man, making me come all the way from KL only to turn down my offer so quickly and with hardly any serious thought given to it. Bloody Jap. Bloody, bloody Jap!

Opening the bedside drawer, I took out my notebook. It was heavy, thickened by the newspaper clippings I had pasted in it. I turned the pages without really looking at them; I knew their contents by heart. When I had worked as a research assistant in the war crimes trials, I had collected newspaper reports about the trials in Tokyo and other countries the Japanese had occupied. I knew intimately the offences the Japanese officers were charged with, but I still read the clippings regularly, even though I had long ago accepted that there wasn’t a name that I recognised or a familiar face in a photograph. There was never any mention of the camp where I had been imprisoned.

Inserted between the pages at the back of the notebook was a pale blue envelope, the address written in Japanese and English. It was light as a leaf when I held it up. The envelope marked the page where I had recorded the last conversation I had had with a convicted war criminal, a week before I left for Cambridge. I remembered the promise I had made to the man, the promise that I would post his letter for him.

Slowly, the pain in my hand subsided. But it would return. The servants’ voices came faintly from somewhere in the house. One of the peacocks called to its mate. I slotted the envelope back between the pages, closed the notebook and went out to the terrace.

I stood there for a long time, looking towards Yugiri. I stood there until evening submerged the foothills of the valleys and Aritomo’s garden sank away from sight.