Читать книгу We, The Survivors - Tash Aw - Страница 11

October 10th

The dispute was about money, as it always is. That’s why the man died. It wasn’t because of a woman, as some of the papers suggested. People like us don’t fight over love, we fight over houses, land, sometimes cars, mostly money – things that make a difference to the way we live.

About five, six weeks before the night in question, I got a call at work. Hendro, one of the Indonesians who’d been working for us for some time, came running up to the edge of the water, shouting, Boss, boss, telephone. His head was wrapped in his usual blue-and-white bandana, his hands blackened with grease as he signalled for me to go to the office. From a distance, he looked like a superhero cartoon toy, stout and smiling, even though he’d been working since daybreak, tarring the dirt yard in front of the small office building with a few of the other guys, transforming it into a proper car park with a tarmac surface so the cars and scooters wouldn’t churn up the mud in the rainy season. We were getting more and more visitors then, people coming up from KL and as far as Alor Setar to inspect the farm and witness for themselves the quality of our produce, our new filtration systems, the freshness of the water, the hygiene levels. They needed to be sure of these things before they signed supply contracts with us, so we had to impress them. We couldn’t have their cars sinking into the red mud or arriving back in town looking as if they’d driven to the Sahara and back. My boss had money then, business was good.

I started to make my way across the walkways, back towards the shore. I’d been supervising the release of the newest batch of hatchlings. Sea bass, that’s what we were concentrating on that year, we knew the price of it would be high. There’d always been demand from Chinese restaurants, but then the upscale Western places started serving it too. A couple of our customers, who ran a neighbourhood restaurant somewhere in Petaling Jaya, showed us their menu – our fish might be selling at the same price as fancy imported produce like salmon and cod. ‘You kidding me?’ I said. ‘Local people really paying these kinds of prices for sea bass – you sure it’s not Westerners?’ They assured my boss it was easy. Their clients preferred fresh local produce, they didn’t want stuff that was frozen and flown all the way from Australia or Alaska. Their restaurant was just a café, it didn’t look anything special, but it was selling sea bass fillets at fifty, sixty ringgit a serving. I thought of that money as I watched the tiny fish swim slowly out of the plastic bags, shimmering against the dark water like a bright silver cloud. A hundred bucks each on someone’s plate in the city.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the value of those fragile little fish as I walked along the wooden planks lashed to the floating oil drums. The farm had grown in recent times, and each year we added another few pens to the existing ones – floating cages framed by timber squares on the surface that served as walkways, the nets suspended in the water below. That year, the twelfth of the farm’s existence, we had grown to twenty enclosures, five of them added in the last few months alone. I liked the neatness of the grid, knew my way around it, was quick on my feet, never losing my balance even if I had to run along the narrow decks in bad weather, when the water was choppy and the wind was up. I’d stand and look down at the fish thrashing at the surface of the water as the men threw in the feed, feeling the platform bob gently under my feet as the fish disturbed the water. And I’d be happy that I no longer had to jump in to repair the netting or retrieve plastic bags and bottles and other debris that got blown in by the storms. I’d grown up by the sea, but it remained unpredictable to me, always capable of change and destruction.

It took me a while to get back to the jetty, and I thought that the caller would have hung up by then. People get fed up of waiting, especially young people – everyone is in a hurry all the time. Hendro walked to the office with me, complaining about all the work they had to do. It was just him and two other Indonesians resurfacing the car park – Budi and Joyo, who were newer, who didn’t know how to operate the machinery. They were slow, he had to show them how to do everything. Hendro had to deal with one of the generators too, which had blown up the previous night and needed to be fixed by the end of the day. A cage had been ripped and needed to be mended. One of the jetties had to be repaired. Then there was the maintenance of the pens, checking the water filters, doing the feeding rounds – he was having to do it all. They stupid, boss, they stupid. I laughed. When I started out here at the farm, I did all that work myself. And I never complained, I just did what needed to be done. ‘Aiya, people these days,’ I told him, ‘they just like to complain about everything. Damn migrant worker also complain, how can?’ We laughed. ‘Get the tarmac done first, the other jobs can wait until later.’

He knew that if he did everything well and didn’t cause any trouble, with all the new work we were getting, I’d make sure Mr Lai gave him some extra cash at the end of the month to send back to his wife and daughter in Java – nothing much, fifty, a hundred ringgit maybe, two hundred at Hari Raya. Sometimes, if I felt that he’d done a lot of work that month, or if we’d had a particularly difficult time with the weather or supplies, and the boss only gave him a small tip, I’d give him some extra cash from my own pocket. He’d been with us for four years, and I thought he deserved something good – it was unusual for a worker to stay that long.

The boss didn’t notice all that – the physical work we did on the farm, or the men who did it. He’d started spending more and more time on the road, searching for bigger clients farther afield – his latest obsession back then was the big supermarket chains in the Klang Valley, Tesco and Carrefour and suchlike. Some weeks he didn’t even show up at the farm one single day. Most days it was just me keeping an eye on the place, supervising twelve workers. It was always difficult to find good Indonesians, men who’d stick at the job and didn’t steal or cheat or gamble their earnings away – that was what the boss always said, and I think that’s why he could never remember their names. He didn’t want to know about their lives, didn’t want to think of them as real people – it was easier that way when one of them suddenly didn’t turn up for work. You lose a man like that, of course you wonder what’s happened to him. Maybe he’d been hit by a bus in the night while coming back from one of the brothels down near the port, or he’d died in a fight or got picked up by the police, or just decided enough was enough and headed back to Kalimantan without bothering to collect his wages.

Stay in the business long enough, you hear all kinds of stories about what happens to these foreign workers. Just that week, three workers from the sheet metal factory down the road went missing and were found two days later, in a shack on the edge of a plantation, their eyes bulging and bloody, their mouths gone – no more lips or tongue, just a mess of bone and blood, dissolved by acid. That’s what happens with paraquat poisoning, it burns a hole in your throat – this bit here [touches throat, makes gurgling noise] – and all the blood and whatnot comes bubbling up. One of them was a woman, a girl really, not even twenty-five years old. Who knows why they decided to commit suicide together. Workers kill themselves all the time here, and I can’t say I’m surprised. I know it’s wrong, it’s a sin. Everyone knows that. When I started going to church that was one of the first things people told me – I guess they were concerned about my mental state, afraid I might try something stupid once I started to repent and realised what I had done, as if I hadn’t realised before. God will punish you if you commit suicide! Churchgoers told me that all the time. But sometimes, when you see the way these Indons and Bangladeshis live, it makes sense. [Pause.] What I mean is, if there’s no ceremony or leisure in your life, why would there be in death? If I worked eighteen hours a day and only had two rest days a month, and hadn’t seen my family for seven years, I wouldn’t be thinking of a luxury funeral with all my friends and huge bouquets of flowers and black cars the way you sometimes see in town, when some big boss dies. I wouldn’t be thinking about whether my family will take out a full-page ad in the papers to announce my passing, like those Chinese tycoons do. I wouldn’t be thinking about a portrait of myself dressed in a suit and tie. I’d think: it’s time to go. And I’d go. No messing about.

The boss wasn’t interested in all that. As long as the farm kept running well, and no one stole any money or machinery, he didn’t care who worked there, how long they stayed, whether they were happy. Ah Hock, that’s why I have you! He used to joke that I was half-foreign – that maybe my dad had been with a prostitute, and that’s why I got along with the workers so well, because I had Indon blood in me. ‘Don’t know how, but you actually understand these guys,’ he used to say. Sometimes, when clients came to visit and remarked on how smoothly things ran, the boss would tell them that it was down to me. ‘My foreman does everything, makes sure the boys work well – village boy, easier for him to communicate with them, hor.’

I was proud that he boasted about me like that. Although I grumbled from time to time about his absences, it secretly felt good to be trusted like that. I’d been working on the farm for nearly ten years, and I’d got to that point in time when one year began to resemble the next, changing in ways I could anticipate, in ways that I wished for. My salary was going up only slightly, but it was increasing all the same. I’d got used to small surprises – a nice angpow at Chinese New Year from clients or machinery suppliers, sometimes a present when the boss came back from holiday, like that box of special Hokkaido wafers when he went to Japan one time.

When life evolves like that, one small gift coming on top of another, you start to feel strong. Your salary, which surprises you at the beginning – because its regularity is astonishing, because it keeps coming to you even when you think it might stop abruptly at any moment – starts to feel as if it has always been there. An unshakeable part of the universe, like atoms or the cells in your body. You receive it month after month, one year, two years, four, eight – it can never end. You start to feel complacent, though it doesn’t strike you as complacency, but a sensation of solidity that surrounds you, so thick that sometimes you wake up in the night and believe that you can reach out and touch it.

Put it another way: I was thankful. I’d left home a few years before that – moved away from the village and drifted through a number of jobs in KL before returning to the area. I worked in a hardware store in Klang for a couple of months, then a shop that sold small agricultural tools and equipment just opposite the train station. I was loading some bags of fertiliser onto a customer’s truck one day when I saw he had a big watch, a Rolex. This was the kind of thing that my time in KL had taught me to notice – shiny, expensive objects worn by their owners as a sort of challenge. Look at me, resist me. Covet me, reject me. I kept loading the bags, flipping each one up onto my shoulder and carrying it from the shop to the truck, fifty pounds a time, and all I could see out of the corner of my eye was the watch on the man’s wrist as he stood there, hands on his hips. He checked the time. It was noon. It was hot.

When I finished he reached into his pocket and I thought he was going to give me a tip, maybe two–three ringgit, something like that, but instead he gave me his business card. ‘Ever need a job, just ring me,’ he said. He was called Mr Lai, and he owned a few vegetable farms near Sekinchan, some orchards, a goat farm. Plus, he was the middleman, the one who employed the groups of migrant workers to harvest the rice for the Malays who owned the biggest ricefields in the area. He arranged everything for them, got the groups of Bangladeshis and Indonesians in for the season, paid them their wages in cash, then sold the rice for the land-owners. Of course he took a cut from everything – not much, a bit here, a bit there, enough to end up a wealthy man. People make job offers all the time, but when you call them, the work isn’t there any more. I’d got used to that way of living. A promise isn’t a promise. Still, I kept the card.

A few months later, when I had a problem with my employers – they accused me of stealing, which wasn’t true, not at that job, anyway – I just turned around and walked out. The boss-lady was sitting at the desk, the cash register open, scolding me, her voice as harsh as a drill into concrete. You want the money for what, buy drugs is it? Owe money to a loan shark? What? Her husband stood behind her, his arms folded across the top of his paunch. Above them the clock showed nine o’clock. I could feel the sentences forming in my head, explaining that it was a mistake, that if they looked at the books again, the numbers would add up, that I wasn’t the only one in charge of receiving the money. Or maybe I’d made a mistake, hadn’t counted the notes properly when a big payment came in – who knows? But she was shouting too loudly, one question layered on top of another, and I couldn’t keep up, the sentences in my brain never stitched together to form a clear line of defence. I wanted to scream all kinds of swear words, smash the glass cabinet in front of me with my bare fists, kick down the shelves of paint and screws and weighing scales, see all that cheap shit fall to the ground. But instead I grinned. I didn’t even know I was pulling a silly cheerful face until the boss-lady said, ‘Smile what? Crazy boy. Where you going? Come back! Why you smiling?’

‘Hei.’ I shook my head. Pok kai. I turned and walked out of the shop. I’d never liked her. She was always prying, always asking me questions about my family, where I came from – things I didn’t want to talk about. Sei pat por. In my memory I actually called her these things to her face, told her exactly what I thought of her, but maybe I didn’t. The way I’m talking now, you won’t believe me, but I’ve never been one for saying much, especially in situations like that. She was still shouting as I left and walked out. I crossed the street and had some bak kut teh at Seng Huat, just under the iron bridge by the river. Even in the shade of the huge rusty columns and the trees that stood next to them I could feel the heat of the morning sun gathering in strength, making my shirt stick to my back. All around me, office workers and old retired couples were having a quick snack before heading off to more important matters – they ate quickly, slurping their soup, not looking up at the people around them. I shared a table with a young family, a mother and two children, a boy playing his Nintendo and a small girl who looked at me and smiled as her mother read a novel. I smiled back and made a face, a big happy clown face with bulging eyes and a wide smile. Her laugh was so clear, so weightless and free, and in those few seconds I believed that I could live life exactly as I wanted, that no harm would ever come to me, not on that morning or ever after. Her mother looked up and scowled at me. She put her arm around her daughter and said, ‘Don’t stare at the man. Finish your food, we have to go see ah-ma and ah-gong.’

When they were gone, I thought, Here I am again, no job, kaput, habis, finished. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. I knew I’d find another job soon enough. If you’re willing to do anything, you’ll get something. But there’s always that moment when you feel stuck, one door closes and all the others disappear. You can’t even see them, never mind think about how to open them.

I hadn’t forgotten Mr Lai’s card. It was still in my pocket, floppy and dog-eared from the sweat that seeped through my clothes. I found a phone booth and rang him. On the plastic dome over the telephone someone had scratched some graffiti, like some rare and delicate artwork carved in glass – the prime minister’s name, followed by the word ‘PANTAT’. The words had been written on the outside, and it took me some time to make out the letters in reverse. I started to laugh. Who takes the time to stand outside a phone booth and call the prime minister a cunt? That was exactly when Mr Lai answered. I tried to explain who I was, and why I was calling, but it was difficult because I was still chuckling. ‘You’re in a good mood,’ he said. ‘I like cheerful people.’ A week later I was working at his fish farm near Tanjung Karang.

At first I worked as a farm hand – a labourer – repairing, lifting, transporting. There were only two cages to start with, but more were already being built, and I was soon joined by two Indonesians, Halim and Adi, then Rio, Indra, Yudianto, Satria, Bayu, Adit, Rendy, Adra, Eka. [Pauses.] Rama, Hanif, Abdi, Firman, Leo, Dimas, Denny, Fariz, Endang – they came later. After all this time I can remember all their names. Very few of them stayed for long. Six months, one year – that wasn’t uncommon; a year was good, two years was unusual. Even after all the agencies started making big bucks by bringing in workers and tying them to three-year contracts, and deducting a whole year’s salary from their pay packages before they even started their jobs, they’d still go missing. When you saw how hard they worked, you’d understand why. It wasn’t that their spirits could not accept the wages – four, five hundred bucks a month – it was that their bodies could not tolerate the work.

Not long ago I read something on Facebook that talked about minimum wages for migrant workers. I don’t know how it came up on my Facebook – usually it’s a lot of links to Joel Osteen videos or other devotional stuff, or badminton or soccer – but this time it was an article about how some people in KL, a human rights group or something, were trying to establish basic rights for the millions of foreigners working here. Of course they were going to fail! Even I could have told them that. They kept complaining about the lack of political will – government this, government that. What struck me and made me shake my head was all the nonsense they said about money. Migrant wages are degrading, they humiliate the soul. They didn’t understand that it wasn’t the pay that destroyed the spirits of these men and women, it was the work – the way it broke their bodies before they could even contemplate the question of salaries. The way it turned them from children to withered old creatures in the space of a few years. Anyone can work with their body like that for a year, two years, maybe even more. But when those years stretch out before you like the sea on a calm hot day, waveless, with no change or variety – when that kind of life becomes your only future, that’s when you flee. Even if someone pays you ten thousand a month, your body won’t accept it. Your mind tells you to stay, to earn money for your kids back home, your old parents who need help. But your body says: Run.

The first few months, I worked with the foreigners, sometimes even getting into the water to fix the cages with them, or carrying ten tons of sand from one end of the land to the other in wheelbarrows when we were constructing the office and other farm buildings. We wore loose-fitting shirts to protect us from the sun, but later, when the sun had gone down and we were bathing, I could see how our bodies were marked by the sun – the skin on our faces, necks and hands was three shades darker than the rest of ourselves, as if it belonged to someone else, a person less fortunate than us. I took to tying a small towel around my neck to keep the sun from burning me. I knotted it at the front, so that I could untie it easily to wipe the sweat from my face, and the men started to make fun of me. Hey Mr Cowboy, they joked. John Wayne just came to work!

One day Mr Lai arrived and found me mixing concrete with the Indonesian labourers. I heard him shouting even before he stopped the car. He rolled down the window. ‘Why you waste your time doing this kind of work? Go check the generators, check the inventory – something useful.’ I stared at him, blinking. Sweat was dripping into my eyes and suddenly I felt very hot. ‘Stare what? Foreman also do this dirty work? Give them instructions already can, no need to join in.’ The word foreman stayed in my head as I washed myself in the makeshift shower we’d built in the shade of some trees. The newness of the word spun gently in my head, as clear as the sunlight that was filtering through the thin canopy of leaves above, falling around me like shards of splintered glass. Maybe there was something wrong with my eyes that day, maybe I’d been working too long in the sun.

I understood that I would hold power over other human beings – that it was possible for me to impose my will on the actions of men who were just like me, whose bodies worked like mine, whose desperation and joy I not only recognised but shared. Were we friends? Of course not. I never went to their lodgings, they never came to mine. In the evenings they disappeared into the night, and I withdrew to my own space. We understood that we would never be buddies, but somehow that drew us together. Friendship is not a requirement for closeness. During the day, those long, long days under the sun and rain, we experienced pain in the same way, and satisfaction and laughter too, but mostly hardship, and that is what bound us.

Now, someone had given me the right to tell these men what to do. In the space of a few seconds, we were no longer the same – perhaps we never had been, and I had been a fool to think otherwise. It sounds stupid, but all at once I did feel different from them. As I walked back to the grey concrete box that housed the office, I looked at the men shovelling sand and cement, wheeling barrowloads of hardcore, carrying sacks of grit on their shoulders. Not one of them looked up at me – they just continued in exactly the same way. It was as if they knew that something had changed, that I had detached from their world, and no longer belonged to it. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like calling out to them, making a joke about Adi’s permanent limp or how Bayu couldn’t stop talking while he worked – the usual bad jokes that we made all the time. But it didn’t feel right. A space had opened up between us, and they recognised it as much as I did. Mr Lai was nearby, walking down to the jetty, and if I’d called out to the men and joked with them, he’d have heard and said something nasty. I had no choice but to walk on.

I tucked my shirt into my trousers and went into the office. All around me there were piles of papers and files containing bills, invoices. I opened a folder and stared at the words and numbers that meant nothing to me. Soon, in just a few months’ time, I’d learn how to decipher what was going on, but I never completely forgot the panic that I experienced that first day. You won’t understand that feeling – being powerless in front of a sheet of paper. I told myself, It’s just a stupid piece of paper. The last time I saw so many pages of numbers or words I was at school, and that had been years ago. Even then, I’d been defeated by them – more or less flunked my SPM, even got a D in Chinese and mathematics. Only got one good grade, in history – C4 – which was a joke, because the past means nothing to me. Nothing. All across the country, probably no one failed as badly as I did. Seventeen years old, couldn’t wait to leave school. Already, back then, I’d thought: damn waste of time, thank God I won’t have to bother with reading and writing ever again. How would I know that I’d have to learn it all over again?

I looked out at the men working in the yard, listened to the sound of the shovels against grit, the soft rumble of the cement mixer – all of it was like the rhythm of a strange music, lulling me to sleep as I sat in front of the files. The table fan was blowing in my face and making me drowsy. Wake up. Wake up. I knew that if I truly wanted to become the person I was supposed to be, I would have to make sense of those papers in front of me.

I heard Mr Lai approaching, and pretended to be examining the files as he walked in. ‘We have to get some parts for the generator,’ I said. ‘Nothing major, just one small fitting that will help us save money in the long run.’ I don’t know how I knew that, but I did – must have picked it up in a previous job. Mr Lai hesitated, then nodded. ‘I’ll give you some cash.’ He was almost out of the room when he turned back and said, ‘Tell you what, I’ll buy a safe for the office. I’ll bring over a few thousand bucks to keep in it – you can look after it for the time being.’

After he left I sat at the desk and watched the men work. Their arms rising and falling, their legs planted deep in mounds of earth and sand, trousers rolled up to their knees. Rio was wearing a pair of fake Real Madrid shorts that were too big for him, tightened with a belt and hanging past his knees. He and Halim were hauling some bags of cement towards the mixer, walking swiftly with small steps, their bare feet making tracks in the earth. Their knees buckled slightly now and then, and I remembered that same sensation in my own legs just a couple of hours before – that feeling of forcing your body to do what it didn’t want to do, until it became so familiar that you no longer knew how not to force your body, and simple acts like lifting a cup of tea or a bowl of rice to your lips felt strange and lifeless. Overhead the sky was turning dark. Soon, when the afternoon rain showers arrived and turned the yard to mud, it would be more difficult to walk, and the men knew this, which is why they were pushing themselves now. Run, lift, throw. Anticipating the rain, Bayu had taken off his shirt, and I could see the dark scar on his back from his last job on a construction site in Seremban – a long curved line, the width of a finger, that looked barely healed. As he emptied a wheelbarrow full of rocks, he slipped and fell to the ground. His head hit the handle of the barrow with a dull thud, and he fell awkwardly on an outstretched hand – the kind of fall that shocks the wrist and collarbone. Aiiiiie. His cry was like a small child’s, high-pitched and weak – it didn’t match the width of his shoulders, the stockiness of his legs. The others laughed. If I’d been out there I’d have done the same – laughed and teased him for being clumsy. He rubbed his head, dusted his arm and started running with the empty wheelbarrow, ready to collect a new load. Of course he would cry out like a child. He was not even twenty years old.

I sat in my chair and looked at my hands, turning them over a few times. The backs were much lighter in colour than the palms. I closed my eyes. All of a sudden, I was tired. I lay down and went to sleep, cooled by the table fan.

With each year I distanced myself a little more from the physical work on the farm. On a few occasions early on, when I was supervising a group of workers in the construction of a brick storehouse or a new net-cage, I’d get frustrated if I thought they were too slow, or weren’t carrying out the task correctly – I felt the urge to jump into the boat and drag the nets up from the water to untangle them, as I’d done throughout my childhood, or to spread the mortar evenly and align the bricks myself. As I stood watching the men at work, my body felt as though it was trying to escape my control. Now, as before, I had to force it, but in a different way – this time to remain still, because it was not used to being so. The more my inaction frustrated me, the louder I shouted at the workers.

Still, the body can unlearn the lessons of a lifetime, and soon the idea of taking off my shirt and working in the sun felt so foreign to me that it became distasteful. Why would I do it? I spent my time doing the rounds, making sure the fish were healthy, that the pumps and filters and generators were functioning. I also supervised all the building and repair work. The farm expanded, and after a few years we had a sales manager and a secretary.

I started saving money and having a life outside of work – the kind of evenings and weekends that I’d always imagined normal people had. I got married and bought a house. We started going out of town – an overnight drive to Penang, a five-day tour of Bangkok. Even when I took time off, I drew my salary – I got used to the idea of receiving money even though I wasn’t working. In August that year, I remember going to the bank and checking my account, and not even feeling any great pleasure in seeing that my pay had been safely deposited – 1,900 ringgit. I had no way of knowing that it would be the last time.

When I think back to that day when Hendro came running to tell me there was a phone call for me, I sometimes wonder how things might have been if the line had gone dead, which sometimes happened, because our connection wasn’t very reliable. I know it’s God’s will, and that things turned out the way they did because He intended it. But still. I sometimes imagine Hendro saying, ‘Someone called but said, “Forget it, don’t worry if Ah Hock is busy right now.”’ Instead, I remember his breathlessness as he walked briskly beside me, peeling off to rejoin the other men in our soon-to-be car park. In the office, the phone’s receiver was lying face-down on the table, away from its cradle – I didn’t know if the caller had hung up since Hendro answered it.

‘Hello?’

‘Wai, little brother! It’s me.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Heyyy … it’s Keong.’