Читать книгу The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng - Страница 14

Following the High Commissioner’s murder, Magnus and Frederik went about supervising the workers as they repaired the fence protecting the house. They set up a pair of spotlights along the fence, facing them outwards. Having heard from someone at the Tanah Rata Golf Club about an incident in Ipoh where CTs had lobbed a hand grenade into the dining room of a rubber estate manager’s bungalow as his family was sitting down for lunch, Magnus decided to have the windows covered in a thin wire mesh.

‘Emily said you haven’t seen our clinic,’ Magnus said, while I helped him nail a sheet of wire netting over my bedroom windows. The netting made the room gloomy, and I switched on the light. Two days had passed since Aritomo had turned me down, but I was still resentful about it. ‘Go take a look,’ Magnus went on. ‘Our nurse quit last year – said it was too dangerous to work here. Emily decided to run it herself. She trained as a nurse, you know, before she saw the light and married me.’

I was reluctant to visit the clinic, but I knew I had to, if only to give Emily face. The whitewashed bungalow was a short walk from the workers’ houses. A Tamil man slouching on a chair grinned at me when I entered the waiting room. Emily sat behind a low counter, her lips moving soundlessly as she counted out pills into a bottle. Through an open doorway I saw a room with two beds behind a partition. The bare legs of a woman were sticking out from one of the beds.

‘That’s Letchumi,’ Emily said, glancing at me.

‘Bitten by a snake.’

Emily tilted her head to one side. ‘Oh, yes, it was the night you arrived. She’s doing fine now. Dr Yeoh gave her an injection. Maniam, eh, Maniam! Ambil ubat.’

The coolie in the chair stood up and came to collect the bottle of pills from her. She made him repeat her dosage instructions in Malay before she let him leave. Turning back to me, she pointed at the boxes of medicines stacked in a corner. ‘These came in today. I ordered more, in case the CTs attack us.’ She shook her head. ‘Ironic isn’t it, that Gurney was killed by them?’

‘In what way?’

‘That man sat on his ka-chooi for days after the CTs attacked that estate in Sungai Siput. He did nothing.’

‘He did declare a nationwide state of emergency.’

‘Only because the planters made him do it. Magnus got everyone here to sign a petition. You people living in the cities,’ she hawked a derisive noise up her throat, ‘I don’t think you even realise there’s a war going on.’ There was some truth in her allegations. ‘One thing I’m happy about,’ she went on, ‘at least Magnus no longer wastes his Sundays running around in the mountains with his friends.’

‘What do they do, hunt wild boar?’

‘Have you not heard the stories? They say that the Japs in Tanah Rata buried a pile of gold bars somewhere in these mountains before they surrendered.’

‘That’s just a rumour, surely.’

‘They’re like schoolboys-lah, looking for buried treasure. If you ask me, I think they just like being away from their wives.’ She opened a cupboard and began packing away boxes of sanitary napkins. Waving a box at me, she said, ‘I hope you don’t think I’m a busybody, because I’m not. But I’ve always been curious – how did you cope, when you were a prisoner?’

‘Many of us stopped menstruating.’

‘It happens. The terrible conditions, not enough food.’

‘Even after I was released, my blood didn’t flow for two, three months. And then one day when I was in my office, it came back, just like that.’ It had caught me unprepared and I had had to ask my secretary for something. But I remembered the relief I had felt afterwards. I could finally accept the fact that the war was truly over. My body was free to return to its own rhythms again.

The smell of disinfectants in the clinic raked up the beginnings of nausea in me; it must have been obvious because Emily looked concerned. ‘You want some Tiger Balm or not?’ she asked.

‘This place, the smells . . . they remind me of hospitals.’

‘Sayang,’ she said, shaking her head regretfully. ‘I was hoping you could help out here.’

‘I won’t be staying here for long.’

I left the clinic, glad to get out into the sun and fresh air again. Returning to Majuba House, I found a rolled-up bundle of papers on my dressing table: the maps and photographs I had left at Yugiri for Aritomo to look at.

The siren calling the workers to muster was sinking away when I left the house the next morning. I stood outside the garage, rubbing my hands. The world was grey and damp. The sound of steady crunching on the gravel came to me a minute later, and then Magnus emerged from the mist, the ridgebacks close behind. On the previous evening I had asked him to show me around the estate but he still looked surprised when he saw me. ‘I didn’t think you’d be able to wake up this early,’ he said, opening the back door of the Land Rover for his dogs. I caught the glimpse of a revolver in a holster under his jacket.

‘I don’t need much sleep,’ I replied.

On the short, rattling drive to the factory, he gave me a quick explanation of how the estate was run. ‘Geoff Harper’s my assistant manager,’ he said. ‘We have five European junior assistants watching over the keranis in the office.’

‘And out in the fields?’

‘The estate’s divided into thirty-five divisions. Each division’s supervised by a kangani – the conductor. Below him are the mandors – the foremen. They’re responsible for their work gang: the pickers, weeders, sweepers. Watchmen make sure there’s no thieving or idling. And I’ve posted Home Guards to watch over them.’

‘There were some children outside the factory when I went past it yesterday.’

‘The workers’ children,’ Magnus said. ‘We pay them twenty cents for every bag of caterpillars they catch in the tea bushes.’

The factory was the size of a wharf-side godown. The coolies were already lined up outside. Kretek cigarettes cloyed the air with the scent of cloves. Magnus greeted them and a senior kangani called out their names, marking them off against a list on a clip-board. It reminded me of roll-call in the camp.

Magnus consulted with the assistant manager Geoff Harper, a short, burly man in his fifties with a pair of rifles slung over his back. ‘All the workers showed up today?’ Magnus asked.

Harper nodded. ‘Rubber price was low.’

‘Let’s hope it stays that way.’

‘We had an ambush last night on the road going into Ringlet. A Chinese couple,’ Harper said. ‘The bastards – pardon me, Miss . . . the CTs – left their bodies hacked into bits all over the road.’

‘Anyone we know?’

‘They were visitors from Singapore. They were driving back from a wedding dinner.’

The tea-pickers marched off to the slopes. I trailed behind the workers entering the factory. ‘Grinders, rollers and roasters,’ Magnus said, pointing to the huge, silent machines lined up inside. The smell of roasting leaves dusted the air; I felt I had pried open a tea caddy. Workers wheeled out racks of tin trays covered with withered leaves curled up like insect larvae. The machines started up a second later, pounding the factory with their racket. Magnus beckoned me back outside.

We went onto a track between the tea bushes. The dogs trotted ahead, noses to the ground. ‘What has the price of rubber got to do with your workers?’ I asked.

‘Geoff checks it on the radio every evening. If it goes up, we know some of our workers will leave to work in the rubber plantations. Most of those who left before the Occupation have returned, but we’re always short-handed.’

‘You employed them again, after they deserted you?’

He turned to look at me, then resumed walking. ‘When the Japs came, I told my workers that they were free to leave. Their old jobs would be available to them once the war was over. I told them I’d keep my promise if I were still alive.’

The ground steepened sharply, straining my calves. Tendrils of steam uncurled off the tops of the bushes. Glancing behind at me, Magnus shortened his stride, which only made me push myself harder to keep up. I was breathing hard when we reached the top of the rise. He stopped and pointed to the mountains.

They had broken out of the earth three hundred miles away to the north, near the border with Thailand, and they stretched all the way to Johor in the south, forming a vertebration that divided Malaya in two. In the tender light of morning, the mountains had the softness of a scene on a silk painting.

‘This always reminds me of the week I spent in China, in Fujian province,’ Magnus said. ‘I visited Mount Li Wu. There was a temple there, a thousand years old – so the monks said. They grew their own tea, those monks. They told me that the original tea tree had been planted there by a god, can you believe it? The temple was famous for the flavour of its tea, a flavour not found anywhere else in the world.’

‘What sort of flavour?’

‘To preserve the innocence of the tea,’ he said, ‘only the monks who hadn’t reached puberty could pick the leaves. And for a month before they started picking, these boys were not allowed to eat chillies or pickled cabbage, no garlic or onions. They couldn’t touch even a drop of soy sauce otherwise their breath might have polluted the leaves. The boys picked the tea at sunrise, just about now. They wore gloves so their sweat wouldn’t taint the flavour of the tea. Once picked and packed it was sent as tribute to the Emperor.’

‘My father thought you were mad to go into tea planting.’

‘He wasn’t the only one who thought so.’ Magnus laughed, plucking a leaf from a bush and rolling it between his fingers under his nose.

Voices and singing floated from the tea-pickers in the valley. Most of them were women, their heads shaded beneath tattered straw hats. Large wicker baskets were strapped to their backs and secured by bands across their foreheads. They collected close to fifty pounds of leaves a day, returning to the factory to unload their sated baskets before heading back to the slopes, going through the same routine again and again until the day ended. Looking at them, it struck me how deceptive the advertisements were that I had grown up seeing pasted on the walls of musty provision stores next to the faded posters for Tiger Beer and Chesterfield cigarettes; they had depicted voluptuous tea-pickers in clean and brightly-coloured saris, their teeth gloriously white, their noses and ears glittering with gold rings and studs, golden bangles weighing down their wrists.

The workers I was looking at in the valley below were paid badly for doing one of the most mindless, exhausting labours ever devised. From my rambles around the estate, I knew that Magnus was a decent enough employer, providing houses for his workers and basic schooling for their children, but I realised that much of the women’s laughter and singing rising from the slopes was bitter with the harshness of their lives. These women would return every evening to their dirt-floored shacks, their eight or nine or ten children, and their toddy-pickled husbands.

‘A sergeant in the army told me that the day after Gurney was shot, security forces moved in and evicted everyone living in Tras,’ Magnus said.

‘Where’s that?’

‘A squatter village close to where Gurney was killed.’

‘They must have thought the villagers had been helping the CTs.’

‘At least the soldiers didn’t burn their homes to the ground.’ Magnus’s gaze seemed to be resting on another horizon drawn across a different, older world. ‘When I was on commando, I often rode past farmhouses torched by the rooinek soldiers. Sometimes the ruins still smouldered and smoke often plunged the whole veldt into a macabre twilight for days. There were dead sheep everywhere, thick with flies – the Khakis had tied them to horses and pulled them apart. Wherever we rode, the air always seemed to be vibrating with a low, constant humming. Flies made that sound.’ He stroked his chest in a distracted manner. ‘We were filled with such fury, such hatred for the English. . . it only made us more determined to fight them to the bitter end.’ His arm swept across the tea fields. ‘The first batch of seedlings came from the same estate in Ceylon where I had once worked as a prisoner of war. History is filled with ironies, don’t you think?’

Clouds streamed past the mountain peaks, spirits fleeing the rising sun. I imagined I could feel a stirring deep beneath the earth as it sensed the approaching light.

‘I’m going home tomorrow.’ I kicked a pebble and sent it skittering over the ledge. ‘Will you drive me to Tapah? I’ll catch a train from there.’

He glanced at me. ‘What will you do? Go back to your old job?’

‘After the things I said about the government?’

‘There are other gardeners you can get to design your garden, surely.’

‘Not in Malaya. There’s nobody of Aritomo’s reputation. And I don’t want to go to Japan,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I don’t think I ever can.’ The gardener’s refusal had felled a log over my path and I had no idea what to do. ‘Speak to him for me, Magnus. Ask him to reconsider,’ I said. ‘I’ve got money set aside. I’ll pay him well.’

‘I’ve known him for ten years, Yun Ling. Once he’s made up his mind, he never changes it.’

On a ridge not far from us, a pair of storks, their wings edged with a singe of grey, sprang off from the treetops and flew over a hill, heading for valleys hidden from our sight. It was so quiet I could almost hear every downward sweep of their wings, fanning the thin mists into tidal patterns.

Magnus had more divisions to inspect before breakfast, and I told him I would return to Majuba House on my own. I was walking on a footpath between the tea fields and the margin of the jungle when I stopped abruptly. My eyes searched the columns of trees, but I did not know what I was looking for. Turning back to the path, I gave a start. Less than ten feet away, a figure was standing in the shadows. It started to moved towards me. I took a step back, but it kept on coming. It entered a patch of sunlight, and I let out a breath of relief. It was a girl, about nine or ten years old, her face and clothes smeared with mud. She was an aboriginal, and she was crying.

‘Kakak saya,’ she said, her words shuddering out between her sobs. ‘Tolong mereka.’

‘Mana?’ I asked, kneeling to look into her face. I shook her shoulders gently. ‘Where?’

She pointed to the trees behind her. I felt the jungle press in closer. ‘We’ll call the police,’ I said, still speaking Malay. ‘The mata-mata will help your sister.’

I stood up and began walking back to the house, but the girl grabbed my hand and pulled me, trying to drag me to the trees. I resisted, suspecting a CT ambush. I shaded my eyes and squinted at the slopes, but the tea-pickers had not yet reached this section of the estate and there was no sign of any Home Guard. Crying more loudly, the girl yanked at my arm again. I followed her, but froze when we came to the jungle fringe.

For the first time since the war ended, I was about to re-enter the rainforest. I feared that if I went in I would never come out again. Before I could turn around, the girl tightened her grip on my hand and pulled me into the ferns.

Insects ground out metallic, clicking sounds. The cicadas wove a mesh of noise over everything. Birdcalls hammered sharp, shiny nails into the air. It was like walking into a busy ironmonger’s workshop in the back-alleys of Georgetown. Sunlight sifted down through the lattices of branches and leaves overhead, unable to sink far enough to dispel the soggy gloom at ground level. Vines hung from the branches in broad, sagging nooses. The girl took us along a narrow animal track, the stones greased with moss that threatened to send me sprawling at the slightest lapse in concentration. For fifteen, twenty minutes I followed her beneath tree ferns that spread their fronds over us, watering the light into a translucent green.

We emerged into a small clearing. The girl stopped and pointed to a bamboo shack beneath the trees, the roof covered in a balding thatch of nipah fronds. The door was half-open, but it was dark inside. We moved closer to the hut, making as little noise as possible. In the trees behind us, branches cracked and then something heavy dropped to the ground. I spun around on my heel and looked back. The trees were still. Perhaps it was only a ripened durian, its armour of thorns shredding the leaves as it fell. I became aware of another sound running beneath the noise of the jungle, a vibration pitched so low it was almost soothing. It was coming from inside the hut.

The door refused to move when I nudged it with my foot. I tried again, pushing harder this time. It swung open all the way. On the beaten-earth floor, three bodies lay in a moat of blood so dark and thick they seemed to be glued to it. Hundreds of flies crawled over their faces, distended bellies and loincloths. Their throats had been slit. The girl screamed and I clamped my palm over her mouth. She struggled, swinging her arms madly, but I held on to her tightly. The flies rose from the bodies and swarmed to the underside of the thatch roof, blackening it like an infestation of mould.

The smell of food assailed me as we approached the kitchen. Frederic and Emily were seated at the table. They stopped talking and looked up when I entered, the girl peering from behind me. Emily made us sit at the kitchen table, where a planter’s breakfast had been laid out – plates of crispy bacon, sausages and eggs, fried bread and strawberry jam. Frederik poured us tea, sweetening it heavily with condensed milk. I drank a few mouthfuls. The heat spread through my body and stilled my shivering. I told them quickly what had happened.

‘Where’s Magnus?’ Emily’s eyes gouged into mine.

‘Still out in the fields, I think. I don’t know.’

‘Get Geoff!’ she snapped at Frederik. ‘Tell him to find your uncle. And ring the police. And Toombs. Go!’

A maid brought out two blankets and Emily draped one over the girl’s shoulders, giving the other one to me. Frederik returned with Magnus a short while later, the dogs pushing past them to sniff at the girl’s legs. She screamed and shrank into her chair. Emily shouted at the dogs and they slunk off to a corner.

‘Damn it, Yun Ling,’ Magnus said, ‘you should have come home straightaway!’

The girl started crying again. ‘Don’t shout-lah, you’re scaring the poor thing,’ Emily said, frowning at Magnus.

‘She wanted me to follow her,’ I said.

‘Going into the jungle was blerrie stupid,’ he said. ‘Blerrie stupid! Your father would cut off my balls if anything had happened to you.’

‘Nothing happened to me.’

Glaring at me, he pulled out a chair and dropped into it heavily.

When Toombs arrived the girl climbed down from her seat and clung to his leg. The Protector of Aborigines got down on one knee and questioned her gently, his Malay much more fluent than mine. After a while he took her hand and brought her back to the table, telling her to finish her cup of tea. She drank a sip, then another, her eyes never leaving Toombs.

‘She wouldn’t tell us her name,’ Emily said.

‘It’s Rohana,’ Toombs said. He turned to me. ‘Those bodies you saw – they were her sister, brother and her cousin.’

‘What were they doing in the shack?’ I asked.

‘Not a shack, really. A hide. They were waiting for wild boars to come out at night. They left their village to go hunting two days ago. They took Rohana with them. She was playing not far from the hide yesterday evening when she heard shouting. She hid in the trees.’

‘She saw what happened?’ Magnus asked.

‘Four CTs, two of them women,’ Toombs replied, glancing at the girl. Her eyes, large and dark, stared at him over her cup. ‘They forced her siblings and cousin into the hide. She heard them shouting a moment later. Then screams. When the CTs came out again, they were carrying the boar her brother had shot. One of them saw her and they gave chase. Rohana ran into the jungle. She spent all night hiding.’

The police arrived an hour later, led by Sub-Inspector Lee Chun Ming. Rohana and I were questioned separately, Toombs sitting in with the girl when it came to her turn. Sub-Inspector Lee asked me to show the police the hide where we had found the bodies. We went in two cars, driving as near as we could to the spot where I had found the girl, before continuing on foot into the jungle.

Later, on our way back to Majuba House, we passed groups of tea-pickers squatting by the roadside, smoking kretek cigarettes and talking among themselves, their baskets by their feet. Their eyes followed us as we drove past. News of the killings had already spread swiftly through the estate.

It was evening when Sub-Inspector Lee and his men finished questioning the estate workers. I went to my room and packed my bag. When I had finished I lay down on my bed to rest, but my mind refused to settle. I went out to the terrace. A corner of the backyard was visible from where I stood. Emily emerged from the kitchen a moment later, three joss-sticks pressed between her palms. Standing in front of the red metal altar of the God of Heaven hanging on a wall, she lifted her face to the sky, raised her hands to her forehead and closed her eyes, her lips moving soundlessly. When she finished praying, she stood on her toes and inserted the joss-sticks into the incense holder between the two oranges and the three little cups of tea. Strands of smoke from the joss-sticks climbed up to the sky. The smell of the sandalwood incense drifted to me, lulling me into a brief moment of peace before it too dispersed with the smoke. I realised then what I had to do before I returned to Kuala Lumpur.

‘Eh, where are you going?’ Emily complained when she saw me walking out past the kitchen. ‘We’re eating dinner soon. I’m cooking char-siew tonight.’

‘I won’t be long.’

Once again I followed Ah Cheong through the house and, just like before, he did not speak a word to me. We passed the room where I had sat with Aritomo on the morning we had first met, nearly a week before. The housekeeper did not stop, but led me along a walkway that ran beside a small courtyard with a rock garden. He paused outside a room with a half-open sliding door and knocked softly on the doorframe. Aritomo was behind his desk, arranging a pile of documents into a wooden box. He looked up at me, surprised. ‘Come inside,’ he said.

Despite the bite in the air, the windows were open. In the distance, the mountains were receding into dusk. I looked around the room, searching for what I wanted. A bronze Buddha about a foot long reclined on the windowsill, the curve of his arm resting on his hip, gentle as the line of the mountains behind him. A black and white photograph of Emperor Hirohito in a military uniform hung on a wall; I looked away. The far end of the room was segmented by bookshelves lined with volumes of Malayan history and memoirs written by Stamford Raffles, Hugh Clifford, Frank A. Swettenham. A pair of bronze Chinese archers, about nine inches high, posed on the desk, pulling at bows that had no strings or arrows. A bamboo birdcage hung on the end of a thin rope from the ceiling, empty except for a stub of half-melted candle. The gardener appeared to be a collector of antique maps; there were framed charts of the Malay Archipelago and South East Asia, hand-drawn in detail by eighteenth-century Dutch, Portuguese and English explorers.

Hanging at the far end of the room was a painting of a mansion built in the Anglo-Indian style so popular in Penang. A broad verandah ran around three sides of the house, buckled into place by a portico in front. Stamped into the pediment in the centre of the roof: ‘Athelstane’ and below it ‘1899’. Behind the house, the green waters of the channel separated Penang from the mainland. I remembered how proud my sister had been when she had finished the painting.

Aritomo scraped back his chair and came to stand beside me. I continued to stare at the painting. ‘The police questioned me about the Semai,’ he said. ‘It must have been a terrible shock for you, discovering them like that.’

‘It’s not the first time I’ve seen dead bodies.’ I studied his reflection in the glass. ‘The smell. . . I thought I had forgotten the smell. But one never does.’

He reached out a hand to adjust the tilt of the frame. ‘Your home?’

‘My grandfather built it.’

The house had stood at the eastern end of Northam Road, a long stretch shaded by angsana trees and lined with the mansions of high-ranking colonial officials and wealthy Chinese. ‘Old Mr Ong was our neighbour,’ I said, no longer seeing the house in the painting but in my memory. ‘He had started out as a bicycle repairman before becoming one of the wealthiest men in Asia. And it all happened because he fell in love with a girl.’ I smiled, remembering what my mother had once told Yun Hong and me. ‘Old Mr Ong wanted to marry the girl, but her father refused to allow it. His was an old, wealthy family, and he looked down on the illiterate bicycle repairman. He told him to leave his home and never bother them again.’

Aritomo crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Did he?’

‘It took only four years for Ong to become a very rich man. He built his house directly across the road from the girl’s family home. It was the biggest house on Northam Road. And the ugliest as well, my mother always said.’ I looked at myself in the glass. My eyes were shadowed, sunken into my face. ‘Ong didn’t let anyone know he owned it. The afternoon after he moved in, he had his chauffeur drive him across the road in his silver Daimler. He spoke to the girl’s father again and asked for her hand in marriage once more. Her father, naturally, gave his permission. The wedding took place a month later. It was the most lavish the island had ever witnessed, so the old people used to say.’

‘One of the things I like about Malaya,’ Aritomo said, ‘it is full of stories like this.’

‘I often saw Old Mr Ong in his garden, dressed like a coolie in a tatty white vest and loose blue cotton shorts, carrying his songbird in a cage. He always spoke to the bird with more tenderness than I had ever seen him show any of his wives.’

Aritomo pointed to the pediment. ‘Athelstane. That was Swettenham’s middle name.’

I glanced at him in surprise, then remembered the first Resident General’s books on his shelf. ‘That’s what my grandfather called it. A silly, pretentious name for a house,’ I said. ‘I’m sure the neighbours laughed at my grandfather, and us.’

‘I will look for it, next time I am in Penang.’

‘It was destroyed when Jap planes bombed the island.’ Aritomo’s face showed no reaction. ‘We had moved out only a few days earlier. We left everything behind – all our photographs. All of Yun Hong’s paintings too.’

It unsettled me that I should see one of her paintings here; I felt she was still alive, about to appear at the door of my bedroom to tell me some gossip she had heard from her friends. I reached out my hand and touched the painting. The smudge of condensation I made on the glass disappeared a second later, as though it had found a way to enter the watercolour painting.