Читать книгу The Harmony Silk Factory - Tash Aw - Страница 9

In 1933, two things happened. The price of rubber fell to four cents per pound and Johnny killed a man. It was the first man he killed, and although rumour had it that he did it in self-defence, I believe that the terrible deed was just as likely to have been carried out coldly, with malice aforethought (which I have learned amounts to murder). In any case, the exact events are unclear, and the records from the Taiping Magistrates’ Court are somewhat muddled.

At this point in his life, Johnny was working in the Three Horses tin mine just off the Siput – Taiping road. Many young men (and women too) had begun to work in the mines. The price of rubber was now so low that many plantation owners – even English and French ones – were forced out of business. The plantations ceased to operate and were soon overwhelmed by the jungles which surrounded them. The morning bells which roused the workers ceased to toll, and the kerosene lamps which illuminated the scarred bark of the trees were no longer lit. There was no more work to be found in the plantations. So the young people began to drift further and further away from their villages in search of work, and most of them ended up in the mines.

By all accounts, Johnny was a well-regarded boy. He was quietly spoken, diligent and unimaginative, and was therefore perfect for working in the mines. Although barely in his teens, Johnny was no longer a manual labourer. He had risen above that. His work did not involve digging into the wet, heavy soil for twelve hours each day, nor carrying basketfuls of ore from the bottom of the open-cast pits to be stored, ready for melting. He did not have to do this because, in spite of his lack of intellect, Johnny had one other attribute: a gift for understanding machinery.

There is a story about how Johnny first discovered his in-built ability to assemble and operate machines. There are many different versions of this story, but the essence of it is as follows. Johnny was thirteen years old. He had been drinking palm-flower toddy with some other delinquents, and he had enjoyed it. The sensations were new to him, as fresh in his body as the morning sun that follows a monsoon night. He went to see an old Indian man who lived on the edge of a rubber plantation, who brewed toddy the old way – the only way they ever did (and many still do), illicitly, hushed-up in the half-dark of the jungle. The man collected the young flowers himself; he soaked them and bought the yeast from Cold Storage in Georgetown. He fermented the toddy just as he might have nurtured children. He remembered when each barrel was filled – born – down to the day, the hour even. He knew what the weather had been like at the time of each filling, and he knew how this would affect the taste of each vat of toddy. He knew which ones would be sweet or sour or just strong and tasteless. Whenever he produced something memorable, a toddy of remarkable clarity or distinctive taste, he would give it a special name – White Lakshmi, perhaps, or Nearly As Good As Mother’s Milk.

Johnny was fascinated by this. He visited the old man often, and drank often too. But all this time he was disturbed by the way the toddy was brewed. He didn’t like the old kerosene drums the old man used to ferment the toddy in. Some of them were rusty, and on others the lids didn’t fit properly. The old man said that this was the way things were done, that toddy had to be varied and different. Every sip had to provide you with the sensation of stepping off a cliff without knowing what lay beneath. Mad fool, Johnny thought; he did not accept this. He wanted every mouthful of toddy to be as good as the best toddy he had ever tasted. He didn’t enjoy discovering a bitter toddy, or a new and unusual one. He knew, too, that people sometimes fell sick after drinking toddy; they became blind, they died. On top of all this, one day when they had been filling bottles, they found a rat at the bottom of one of the barrels. It lay bobbing amid the sediment, curled up and peacefully preserved in the alcohol. Not even the cat touched it when they threw it out into the long grass.

So Johnny went away and thought for a long time. He drew pictures in the sand, idle mid-afternoon sketches of simple machines. He didn’t know what he would do, but he knew, instinctively, that he would do something.

People still talk about Johnny’s invention in the valley; they say nothing as magical has been seen since. Not even the revolving dining room at the Harmony Silk Factory, built when I was in my teens, could rival Johnny’s first, instinctive creation. This is high praise indeed, for the revolving dining room was itself a much-admired feature of our house. The entire floor would split in half and a partition wall would emerge from a vault beneath the floor, separating the one large room into two smaller ones. Hidden in the ceiling, behind the walls and under the floor was a simple but highly effective clockwork mechanism. Polished mahogany panelling adorned the room, drawing the attention of a visitor (more specifically, a policeman or a rival ‘businessman’) to the décor rather than the construction of the room. Fake European masterpieces, painted by artists in Penang, hung in gilded frames on the walls. (I looked them up in books when I was at school, and discovered that my two favourites were The Fall of Icarus by Bruegel and The Death of Actaeon by Titian.) One of the two rooms – the second, smaller one – was built into the thick rear wall of the factory, making it soundproof and totally secure. The purpose of this was originally to provide a hiding place in case of an emergency. It was conceived of at a time when we had a new police superintendent who arrived in the district determined to put an end to all crime, from the most petty thefts to the largest organised rackets. The new Sir was often seen striding down the main street of our little town, his bushy flamered moustache always immaculate, his waxen English skin still strangely unblemished by the sun. He never spoke to anyone, and people began to fear him. This was when our revolving dining room was built. Endless sketches were made, parts were ordered from Singapore, carpenters all over the country were put on notice, timber was felled in north Borneo. By the time the necessary machinery had been installed, however, the superintendent – Malcolm – was firmly in Johnny’s pocket. He came to the factory and drank Napoleon brandy late into the night, and he acquired a Chinese mistress called Wendy. When he visited our house, I noticed he had a gold wristwatch with an ebony face. It looked brand new.

But it was Johnny’s first creation, the Amazing Toddy Machine, which was the most famous and enduring. Although very few people actually saw it, its reputation was widespread, and its products enjoyed even farther afield. At the heart of this new invention was a large glass tank in which the various raw components were mixed. Everything could be seen clearly in this tank – the initial chemical reaction, the colour, the consistency – and regulating the process was made easier. Nothing was left to chance. The transparency of the machine allowed the brewer to intervene if he thought something was going wrong. The tank was sealed, so any impurities (not to mention animals) could not find their way in. As the system grew, Johnny found a way of increasing the output dramatically – more glass tubes were attached, linking more tanks to each other, all bubbling away at various stages of ferment. At some point a distillation mechanism was added, ensuring the final product was as clear and smooth as spring water. For a while, purely as a novelty, the toddy was filtered through layers of mangrove-wood charcoal, drip by slow drip. People were puzzled by the taste of this, but fascinated too, and soon even more glass tubes and tanks were added. At its height, the machine was said to have resembled a tiny crystal mountain, sparkling with a life of its own.

Johnny’s gift for machines has always been evident to me. Even as a young child, I knew that while other people could perhaps take apart a car engine and then reassemble it, not everyone could do it as Johnny could. It wasn’t so much what he did but how he did it – steadily and gently, with a rhythm all his own. The parts of the engine fell away into his hands like pieces of silk; he held greasy steel bolts the way you or I might hold a newborn chick. I used to watch him fixing things. Whenever he repaired a clock – that was my favourite – his short peasant’s fingers, clumsy in every other way, would suddenly move with all the delicacy of a silk-weaver’s. Where other men might have used tweezers or screwdrivers or other tools, Johnny seemed only to use his fingers, touching each part of the clockwork. I always pretended to be doing something else – passing through the room or reading a book. He never knew I was watching.

The Toddy Machine was the beginning of a particular episode in Johnny’s life that goes something like this:

Armed with this gift, this knowledge of machines, Johnny becomes well known. People all over the valley hear about the toddy, they hear about the young man who made it. The mines need people to work in them, but these are hard times for the Chinese mines. They have been in the valley for fifty, sixty years, long before the railway was built between Port Weld and Butterworth. They are big, open-cast mines with old-fashioned gravel pumps. But it is not good for them now because new mines have opened all over the valley. British mines.

What makes these British mines different is that they do not need many hundreds of coolies to work in them. This is because they have, at the heart of the mine, a mechanised colossus never seen before in these parts. It is called a Dredging Machine, and it does the work of a thousand coolies. It sits astride the mine as the goddess Guan Yin herself sat on a vast lake, floating for all eternity. The Chinese fear this machine for they do not possess one. The British do not need many men, they simply need a few good ones. Of all the Chinamen in the valley, only one will be able to understand the Dredging Machine, and it does not take long for the British to learn of his existence.

The first time Johnny sees the dredger he does not see the monstrous, angry machine everyone else sees. Instead, he sees a living creature. He understands it at once. He sees limbs – huge mechanical limbs – and a body; he senses organs buried deep within it, and a heart too. It is as if he has always known this thing. When he is shown the machine, the words of explanation are as familiar to his ears as the rising and falling of the damp November winds. He has heard them a thousand times before. Even on that first day, he wants to start working with the machine. The British man who is in charge stands behind him, watching as he works the levers which turn the cogs which run the pump which fires the pistons which bring the ore up to the surface from the depths of the mine. The five minutes – the test of Johnny’s understanding of the machine – turn quickly into ten, twenty, forty minutes, an hour. Johnny and the machine cannot be separated. The machine wants to be worked by Johnny. ‘Quite remarkable,’ the man in charge says. ‘The dredger loves this boy.’ They are like a mother and her child who, after a lengthy separation, fall into each other’s arms with relief. Johnny is then taken to the longhouse where the special workers are given lodgings. It is made of rough, unplaned wood, full of splinters which embed themselves in Johnny’s feet and hands. The rain drums loudly on the zinc roof, but the house is dry and secure. Johnny sleeps on a thin mattress laid out on the floor. At night he can hear the scratching of small animals, but they are outside and he is inside. He is also given a piece of paper saying that he is now an employee of the Darby Tin Mine. Everyone is smiling. They do not yet know of the bad things Johnny will do.

About two months after Johnny first begins working at the Darby mine, the dredger breaks down for the first time. At first no one knows what to do. In case of emergencies, the workers have been told that one of them is to run to the foghorn and sound it three times, long and hard. The meaning of an ‘emergency’ is unclear, though. Only twice before has the foghorn been sounded: once when the monsoon rains, heavier than usual, washed away an entire face of the mine; and another time when the Chief Engineer’s wife, the only Englishwoman in the area, appeared suddenly and without reason, in the middle of the afternoon. On other occasions, even when someone was badly hurt or even killed in an accident, no alarm was raised and work went on as usual.

For a long time, there is nothing but a huge, empty silence. The roar of the dredger, which usually drowns out every other sound, is not to be heard. The workers do not know what to do. When at last the foghorn blows, pathetically, three times in the mid-morning air, it barely carries to the cream-painted hut where the British Sirs sit, leafing through papers which no one else can understand. One by one the Sirs come out of the hut, each fixing his hat to his head. Their shirts are damp and stick to their skins. Their faces, the workers can see, are heavy with heat, fatigue and disgust.

‘Call for that Chinaman Johnny,’ No. 1 Sir barks as the Sirs stand assembled before the broken behemoth. Johnny is brought to them. His hands and forearms are covered with grease. His face is dirty and grey with dust and lack of sleep.

‘What’s the matter with this bloody machine?’ No. 1 Sir says.

‘I’m not sure. Sir.’

‘You’re not sure? What do you think we pay your wages for?’ No. 1 Sir screams.

‘Calm down. Wretched thing probably doesn’t understand you,’ Sirs Nos 2 and 3 say. ‘Look at him.’

Johnny stands there with black hands hanging loosely at his side.

‘All right. Do you know where the problem is?’ No. 1 Sir says, slowly this time.

Johnny nods.

‘Well then, take me to it, don’t just stand there like an imbecile.’

They go deep into the machine. On a clean blue canvas sheet laid on the floor, Johnny’s tools are neatly spread out, ready for use. Dozens and dozens of tools, all shiny and clean.

‘Here,’ Johnny says, pointing.

The Sirs walk around the part of the machine which Johnny has pointed at. No. 1 Sir has his hands in his pockets. No. 2 Sir checks his fingernails as he paces back and forth. No. 3 Sir rubs his brow. Sirs Nos 4 and 5 say and do nothing – they are young, and do not yet know anything.

‘It’s the belt,’ says No. 1 Sir.

‘It’s the rotator,’ says No. 2.

‘It’s the oil supply. The wiring, I mean,’ says No. 3.

Johnny says, ‘The parts in the gearbox are broken, I think. They are not moving.’

‘Well, fix it,’ No. 3 says.

‘The machine – it requires new parts,’ Johnny says. ‘Maybe.’

‘You bloody well fix it now,’ No. 3 Sir says. His face is red and shining with sweat.

They watch as Johnny goes back to the machine. He does not know what he is going to do, how he is going to fix this unfixable problem, but he knows that he will find a way. Somehow, he will.

Piece by piece, Johnny takes the gearbox apart. He brushes each piece with a wire brush, washes it in water, then wipes it with grease. He gives it new life. He feels no fear: his hands are calm and strong and his eyes are cool and level. Turning to pick up another tool, he catches the eye of No. 1 Sir, who is blinking to keep out the heat and dust of the afternoon. At last, Johnny turns to the Sirs and says, ‘It is ready.’

The Sirs look at each other. ‘About bloody time,’ No. 1 says.

Johnny walks to the control box and rests his hands on it. He trusts the machine, he trusts himself. The whirr of the dredger is uncertain at first, but soon it becomes a steady growl, and then the familiar roar fills the entire space, drifting out into the valley, singing in Johnny’s ears.

One by one the Sirs walk back to their cream-coloured hut. ‘Imagine – millions of tons of ore under our feet,’ No. 1 says, putting his wide-brimmed hat on. ‘That damned Chinaman will be the ruin of us all.’

‘Nearly twenty past four,’ says No. 2.

‘Just in time for tea,’ says No. 3.

Johnny packs up his tools, one by one, making sure he cleans the grime and grease from each one. He wraps them up in his blue canvas cloth and listens to the song of the machine.

Four days later, the machine breaks down again. Once more, Johnny is summoned to repair it, and again he succeeds. The next day it breaks down again. And the next day too. By now Johnny has taken to sleeping next to the faulty part of the machine. He can hear its heartbeat, feel its pulse. It is weak and failing.

By now the workers have become used to the great silence that has fallen over the mine. They know there will be no work for them. Without the machine, the tin remains buried deep under their feet. There is nothing to wash, nothing to grade, nothing to store or melt. So the workers sit around, placidly chewing tobacco or betel leaves, their lips and tongues becoming stained with the juice of this stupor-inducing nut. As the days go by, the dry earth around the longhouse becomes pock-marked with patches of red spittle.

At the start of the second week without the machine, the Sirs come to where Johnny is working. His tools are laid out on the mattress beside him. Some of his tools have had more rest than he has.

‘What on earth is this monkey doing?’ says No. 1.

‘I told you not to let a Chinaman loose on the dredger,’ says No. 2.

Johnny looks at them with young eyes made old by work.

‘So,’ says No. 1, ‘what do you have to say for yourself?’

Johnny blinks. Their suits are white and blinding in the sunlight. ‘I need new parts,’ he says, turning back to the machine.

‘How dare you answer back!’ No. 3 shouts.

‘Parts indeed.’

‘It’s his fault anyway.’

‘When,’ No. 1 says slowly. ‘Will. It. Be. Fixed?’

Johnny’s chest rises and falls heavily. He doesn’t know how to answer. ‘Soon,’ he says. But he knows it is useless. The machine is dying in his hands, like a sick child on its mother’s breast.

‘Soon?!’ No. 1 explodes.

‘Soon??!’ echoes No. 2.

‘What does that mean?’ say Nos 3, 4 and 5.

Later that morning the Sirs make an announcement at a specially arranged workers’ meeting outside the cream-painted hut. The workers are told that they will not be paid to sit around doing nothing. The mine cannot afford to pay their wages if no tin is being processed.

‘It is simply uneconomical for the Darby mine to continue like this,’ says No. 1, his voice rising above the angry murmur. ‘As long as the Dredging Machine is not working –’

‘But that is not our fault!’ someone shouts.

‘– as long as the Dredging Machine remains –’

‘That is none of our business! Get the damn machine working!’

‘Until the machine is fixed,’ says No. 1 with all the authority he can muster, ‘THERE WILL BE NO PAY. So go home, all of you.’

‘That’s the problem with coolies,’ says No. 2 as the Sirs back into their hut, locking the door.

‘Where’s that lazy dog-boy?!’ the men outside shout. ‘Where’s Johnny? It’s all that bastard’s fault!’

‘Let’s teach him a lesson!’

‘My children will go to sleep hungry!’

‘Damned son-of-a-whore!’

‘He’s doing this to kill us all!’

When they find him they are swift and brutal. They hit him with their bare fists and kick him with shoeless feet, again and again. Johnny closes his eyes as the first blow strikes him on the side of his face. He crashes on to the machine and feels it press against his body, cold and lifeless. Soon he can no longer feel pain. He does not see or hear the men set fire to his mattress. ‘That will teach him to sleep all the time, lazy animal. Now maybe he will work to fix this machine.’

By the time they leave him they are no longer angry. They walk slowly off the mine and go home, heads bowed, arms hanging limply by their sides.

When Johnny opens his eyes again it is night. He sees, through swollen eyelids, the grey bulk of the machine. Slowly, he moves his head so that his ear touches the dredger. He can hear nothing, and suddenly his arms and legs and head and chest start to hurt, and he collapses again.

‘You had it coming, I must say,’ No. 2’s voice says. ‘You’re not as clever as I thought.’

In the dark, Johnny can barely make out No. 2’s figure standing over him.

‘I told him,’ No. 2 says, pacing slowly before Johnny, ‘I told him not to do it, not to take on a dirty Chinaman like you. I told him a Chinaman’s place is IN the mines, loading and carrying, but no – he had to put you in charge of the machine. A Chinaman operating the biggest dredger in the valley? Well, that’s plainly ridiculous. And he fed you and clothed you and housed you. What foolishness.’

‘I need new parts,’ Johnny whispers.

‘Over my dead body,’ No. 2 says. ‘You are responsible for what’s happened, you cretin.’ He kicks Johnny’s tools into a pile. Many of them have been burned with the mattress, their shiny faces now blackened with soot.

‘Pack up,’ No. 2 says. ‘I never want to see you here again.’

Feebly, Johnny begins to gather his tools. They are still hot from the fire.

‘Don’t forget,’ No. 2 says, ‘that you are responsible for this machine. It’s your fault.’

Johnny raises his gaze to meet No. 2’s.

‘Don’t you dare look at me like that,’ No. 2 says. He kicks Johnny away with the tip of his shoe.

Johnny’s hand lands on his pile of tools. He finds that his hand has come to rest on a screwdriver. Its handle is smooth and fire-warm. Johnny grasps it and thrusts it deep into No. 2’s thigh.

The court case was short but complicated; there were many difficulties. First of all, no one was certain of Johnny’s age, not even Johnny himself. It was not unusual for children of lowly rural backgrounds to have no birth certificate – why was there need for one? – and as a result, the precise date and location of Johnny’s birth remained a mystery. Advocates acting for the Darby mine insisted that Johnny should stand trial for the most serious charge: attempted murder. His physical appearance alone, they argued, suggested that he was at least eighteen. But Charlie Gopalan, a local barrister who specialised in such criminal cases, convinced the magistrate that Johnny was merely fourteen, and should not, under the circumstances, go to prison, where he would surely fall under the influence of communist guerrillas. Mr Gopalan was a man who had earned the trust of the British. He had studied at the Inner Temple and his clothes were nicely tailored in Singapore. His round-rimmed glasses added to his serious, scholarly manner. In pictures from the newspaper archive in the Public Library, he appears a small, neat-looking man, often holding a briefcase and a hat. He is even said to have begun translating Homer’s Odyssey into Malay. His word, in any event, carried much influence.

There was also the matter of No. 2’s condition. Johnny had managed to stab him in the fleshy part of the thigh, in exactly the place where the artery is at its thickest. The blood loss was immense. It was reported in court that the two men were found nearly lifeless, writhing feebly as if swimming in a shallow pool of blood. For a month after the stabbing, No. 2 remained in the General Hospital in Ipoh. Though he was for some days on the brink of death, he improved steadily. Doctors praised his bravery and admired his ‘buffalo-like’ constitution, and his progress was such that by the time of the hearing, he was able to walk, albeit gingerly. The familiar rosy-pinkness of his complexion was by now fully restored to his cheeks.

Thus the case against Johnny was half-hearted, the lawyers becoming increasingly bored as the days wore on. In the face of Mr Gopalan’s persuasiveness, the magistrate decided that it was sufficient that Johnny received ten lashes of the rotan, ‘to teach boys like you to know and respect your position in society’. He was cleared of all charges.

What no one knew at the time was that gangrene or septicaemia or some other mysterious infection had worked its way into No. 2’s blood, unnoticed by the doctors who had tended to him. He collapsed, was rushed to hospital, but again made a near-miraculous recovery. Once more, doctors marvelled at his God-given strength, and when he collapsed a second time they knew he would pull through – and he did. Month after month this continued, until finally No. 2 died, exactly a year and a week after first being stabbed by Johnny.

The coroner had no choice but to record a ‘death by natural causes’ verdict.

I do not believe that Johnny would have been saddened by the news of No. 2’s death. I believe, in fact, that it was this first killing which hardened in him a certain resolve. Now he was a killer but he did not feel bad. He knew, for the first time in his life, the sensation which was to become familiar to him later in his life, that powerful feeling of committing a crime and then escaping its consequences. It was this incident which set him on the path to becoming the monster he ultimately turned into.

It was many years before he could find work easily. Ordinary people were fearful of a person such as Johnny. He might not have been a criminal in the eyes of the law, but the law didn’t understand human nature. The law couldn’t always tell good from evil, people said. For a long time Johnny moved from town to town, village to village, plantation to plantation, never knowing how long he would stay or what he would do next. Without the kindness of strangers he would surely have perished. It was during this period of his life that he experienced his first real contact with communists. It was inevitable. The valley was, at the time, teeming with them – guerrillas, sympathisers, political activists. An ill-humoured youth full of hatred (for the British, for the police, for life), Johnny was perfect communist material. Of the many journeyman jobs he was given during these years, I’m certain that all but a handful were communist-inspired in some form or another. This wasn’t surprising, given that every other shopkeeper, farmer or rubber-tapper was a communist. These people offered Johnny more than an ideology; they offered a safe place to sleep, simple food and a little money. That was all he cared for at that point in time.