The Garden of Evening Mists

by Tan Twan Eng

  ‘And take off your gloves,’ Aritomo added.

  ‘They’re washable. I’ll get a few more pairs.’

  ‘What kind of gardener will you be, if you do not feel the soil with your bare hands?’

  We stared at each other for what felt like an endless moment. I held his gaze even as I pulled off my gloves and stuffed them into my pockets. His eyes dropped to my left hand. He did not flinch, but the workers muttered among themselves.

  ‘What are you all waiting for? The grass to grow?’ Aritomo clapped his hands. ‘Get to work!’

  Two men lifted the first rock a few inches off the ground while Aritomo slid a jute-rope harness beneath it. The harness was connected to a windlass hanging from an eight-foot high wooden tripod. Lashed together at the top with coils of rope, each of the tripod’s legs could be adjusted to fit the contours of the terrain. Kannadasan cranked the windlass and the rock lifted heavily off the ground, a mountain shedding the moorings of gravity. When it was about three feet in the air Aritomo stopped him and handed me a brush with stiff bamboo bristles. I reached between the gaps of the harness and scraped the clumps of soil, roots and grubs from the rock.

  When I finished we trussed it with ropes, tying it to the centre of a heavy pole. I lifted the front end of the pole onto my shoulder, but the weight crumpled me onto one knee. The workers scrambled around to help me, but I waved them away. Behind me I heard Kannadasan say,

  ‘Missee, too heavy for you- lah.’

  Aritomo stood to one side, watching me. I felt a stab of hatred for him. It’s different now, I told myself as sweat rolled down the centre of my back. I’m no longer a prisoner of the Japs, I’m free, free. And I’m alive.

  The nausea subsided, but left a sour coating at the back of my throat. I licked my lips and swallowed once, twice. ‘Wait, Kannadasan, tunggu sekejap.’ I adjusted the ropes and signalled to him. ‘ Satu, dua, tiga! ’ On the count of three we lifted the pole onto our shoulders again. The men whooped and shouted encouragement as, like a wounded animal, I staggered to my feet, fighting back the pain digging into my shoulder.

  ‘ Jalan! ’ I shouted, leading the way.

  The morning was spent cleaning the rocks and carrying them to the area by the front verandah. When the last rock was set down, Kannadasan and the workers squatted on the grass and passed around a packet of cigarettes, drying their faces with their towels. I followed Aritomo into his house, into the sitting room. The paper-screen doors were closed, and I discovered there was a set of sliding glass doors behind them. Aritomo indicated a spot where he told me to sit. I pointed to my dirt-stained clothes. ‘I’m filthy’.

  ‘Sit down.’ Waiting until I complied, he pulled back first the glass doors and then the paper screens, opening up the garden. Above the trees, the line of the mountains serrated the sky.

  Aritomo knelt next to me and directed Kannadasan and the other workers with his hands, indicating where he wanted the first stone placed. Once he was satisfied with its position, the men pestled it into the ground. He went through the same process with the remaining four stones, fixing each of them a slight distance away from the previous one, adjusting the harmonics of a music only he could hear.

  ‘They look like a row of courtiers bowing and backing away from the Emperor,’ I said.

  He grunted in approval. ‘We are composing a picture within this frame.’ He pointed to the lines of the roof, the posts and the floor, his finger drawing a rectangle in the air. ‘When you look at the garden, you are looking at a work of art.’

  ‘But the composition isn’t balanced,’ I pointed out. ‘The gap between the first and the second stones is too wide, and the last stone is set too close to the third one.’ I studied the scenery again. ‘They look like they’re about to topple into the emptiness.’

  ‘Yet there is a dynamic feel to the arrangement do you not agree?’ he said. ‘Look at our paintings – they have large tracts of emptiness, their composition is asymmetrical… they have a sense of uncertainty, of tension and possibility. That is what I want here.’

  ‘How will I know where to place the stones?’

  ‘What is the first piece of advice given in Sakuteiki?’

  I thought for a second. ‘ Obey the request of the stone.’

  ‘The opening words of the book,’ he said, nodding. ‘This spot where you sit, this is the starting point. This is where the guest views the garden. Everything planted and created in Yugiri has its distance, scale and space calculated in relation to what you see from here. This is the place where the first pebble breaks the surface of the water. Place the first stone properly and the others will follow its request. The effect expands through the whole garden. If you follow the stones’ wishes, they will be happy.’

  ‘You make it sound as though they have souls.’

  ‘Of course they do,’ he said.

  We stepped down from the verandah and joined the workers. ‘Only a third of each stone should be seen above the ground,’ he said, handing me a spade. ‘So dig deep.’

  He left us to our work. The handle of the spade blistered my bare palms. The ground was not hard, but I was perspiring within minutes. It had been years since I last did any form of strenuous physical work and I had to stop and rest often. Aritomo returned two hours later when we had buried all five rocks up to the level he wanted. He knelt down and packed the soil tightly around the base of the rocks, telling me to do the same.

  I dug my fingers into the loosened ground; the soil felt cool and moist on my skin, soothing the pain in my left hand. Such a simple, basic act, to touch the earth we walked on with our bare hands, but I could not remember the last time I had done it.

  By evening, my body was stiff and aching. Before going home, I went past the section where we had planted the rocks earlier that day. Gunnysacks of gravel stood on one side, ready to be spread over the area. I touched the rounded peak of one of the rocks, giving it a push. It was solid, unmoveable, as though it was a protrusion from the bedrock rising up from leagues beneath us, and not something we had set there just that morning.

  Aritomo came out from the house, a big chocolate Burmese cat padding behind him. He saw me looking at it.

  ‘This is Kerneels,’ he announced. ‘Magnus gave him to me.’

  For a few moments we watched the shadows of the rocks pull across the ground. ‘Where are the plans and drawings for the garden?’ I asked. ‘I’d like to look at them.’

  He turned to me, touching the side of his head lightly. At that moment it struck me that he was similar to the boulders on which we had spent the entire morning working. Only a small portion was revealed to the world, the rest was buried deep within, hidden from view.

  Chapter Eight

  The bungalow I had leased from Magnus was ready for me to move into at the end of the first week of my apprenticeship with Aritomo. Frederik, who had been coming to Majuba House every evening, offered to help me move my things when we were having dinner on the Friday.

  ‘Tomorrow morning suit you?’ he said. ‘Say around nine?’

  ‘Better say yes,’ Magnus said from the other side of the dining table. ‘The young man is leaving us soon.’

  ‘Nine o’clock is fine,’ I said. My body was sore from working in Yugiri all week long, and I welcomed the thought of having someone to help me.

  Before going to bed that night, I spent a few minutes by the terrace balustrade, between the shadows cast by the marble statues. The imminent rain in the air smelt crisp and metallic, as though it had been seared by the lightning buried in the clouds. The scent reminded me of my time in the camp, when my mind had latched onto the smallest, most inconsequential thing to distract myself: a butterfly wafting from a patch of scrub, a spider-web tethered to twigs by strands of silk, sieving the wind for insects.

  The opening strains of ‘ Und ob die wolke’ stretched languidly out from the sitting room’s open windows. Magnus was playing his Cecilia Wessels records again. Down in the valley, a bead of light appeared in the tr
ees around Yugiri. I stared at it, wondering what Aritomo was doing in his house.

  The aria ended. I waited, knowing what would follow. Tentative music from a piano started up a moment later, assembling into the shape of a Chopin nocturne. It was Magnus’s habit to play the Bechstein every night before he put out the lights. The first nocturne gave way to another, and soon I heard the opening sighs of the Larghetto from Chopin’s first piano concerto. Magnus had had it transcribed for a solo piano. He always played it as his last piece for the night. It was Emily’s favourite, he had told me. She would be lying in her bed at this moment, falling asleep to the music he was playing for her.

  I closed my eyes and yielded to the music as it floated into the darkness of the mountains.

  The last few notes, when they came, hovered in the air, vanishing into the stillness a moment later. I knew I would miss this nightly ritual of Magnus’s when I moved into my own bungalow.

  Just before going back inside, my eyes turned towards Yugiri again. I searched for the light among the trees, but could not find it; it had been extinguished while I was looking elsewhere.

  * * *

  Magersfontein Cottage sat on four stubby concrete piles tacked into a hillside a quarter of a mile from Majuba House, built in the typical Anglo-Indian style. Rust patched the corrugated tin roof, and the chimney’s plaster had fallen away, exposing the red bricks beneath. A broad verandah looked out to the tea-felted slopes. A raintree bent towards a window on one side of the bungalow, eavesdropping on the conversations that had taken place inside over the years.

  ‘The servants have cleaned it up as best as they could,’ Frederik said as he carried my bag inside from his Austin. ‘You’ve got running water and electricity, but no telephone. And don’t expect it to be the E&O –’ he laughed ‘– or even the Coliseum Hotel.’

  The house smelled of damp and the rattan chairs and tables were rickety and mismatched.

  The sagging bookshelves contained some mildewed copies of Punch and Malayan Planters’ Weekly. A fireplace with a crate of wood by the hearth took up one side of the small living room.

  It gave me a childlike pleasure that I could have a fire on cold evenings; some days I even forgot that I was in the tropics, with the line of the equator just missing the Malayan peninsula by a fraction of an inch on the map.

  ‘It’s good enough for me,’ I said.

  ‘You should put something on that.’ Frederik pointed to the wound crusting my elbow.

  ‘Get some gentian violet from Emily.’

  ‘It’s just a scrape.’ I pulled my sleeve down over it.

  ‘I’m going to Tanah Rata,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘I really should unpack.’

  ‘You need to stock up on food, don’t you?’

  He was right. I had to start cooking for myself from now on. ‘Come on,’ he said, sensing my resolve weakening. ‘I’ll buy you breakfast at Ah Huat’s kopitiam – people drive in from miles around for his roti bakar.’

  * * *

  Set in a plateau from which it took its name, Tanah Rata was surrounded by low hills. Here and there a bungalow could be seen on the crests of wooded ridges; these houses were owned by the European rubber companies and made available as holiday homes to their senior and, more often than not, European staff.

  ‘The first time I came here,’ Frederik said, slowing down the Austin as we entered the village. ‘I thought there was a law requiring the homes here to have these awful mock-Tudor facades. At least Magnus showed some originality when he built his house.’

  We parked in a vacant lot by the pasar pagi. The open-air morning market was already crowded, the air heavy with the smells of freshly spilled blood and innards from chickens slaughtered at the request of customers. Meat hung on thick hooks; fish, prawns and milky-white squid were piled on beds of melting ice-chips, the water dripping onto the ground and forcing everyone to skirt around puddles. Old Malay women squatted beside earthenware pots of curry.

  We squeezed our way between the Chinese and Indian housewives who thought nothing of stopping in the middle of the thoroughfare to gossip, unconcerned that they were obstructing everyone behind them.

  The shops along the main street were quieter, the crowd mostly Europeans – one of the more polite words we used to describe anyone who was white, regardless of where they came from. We gave the shopkeepers a list of things we wanted, showing them the permit from the District Officer and instructing them to deliver our shopping to Majuba.

  ‘There’s Ah Huat’s,’ Frederik said, pointing to the shop at the end of the row. ‘Come on.

  I hope we can get a table.’

  The kopitiam was of the type found in every town and village, a place where old men in singlets and flappy cotton shorts spent their mornings chatting and drinking coffee from saucers.

  Felicitations in red Chinese calligraphy streaked down a large and unframed mirror on one wall.

  The marble tabletops were yellowing, stained with tidal layers of old coffee spills. On the radio a woman was singing a Mandarin song. Behind the counter and just below the mirror sat a fat, middle-aged Chinese man, his surprisingly elegant fingers clacking away on an abacus as he shouted out orders to the kitchen. He dug the long nail of his little finger into his ear and then peered at what it had excavated. ‘Ah, Mister Fledlik! Cho san!’ he shouted when he saw us.

  ‘ Wah, your gur-fen?’

  ‘Morning, Ah Huat. Cho san.’ Frederik darted a half apologetic, half embarrassed glance at me. ‘And, no, she’s not my girlfriend.’

  Our half-boiled eggs, coffee and roti bakar came a few minutes later. The slabs of crusty, toasted white bread covered in butter and coconut jam tasted as good as Frederik had promised.

  Following the example of the old men in the shop, Frederik poured his coffee into a saucer and blew on it.

  ‘My mother used to scold us if we did that,’ I said. ‘Low class, she called it.’

  ‘But it tastes so much better like this.’ He picked up the saucer and slurped noisily from it. ‘Try it.’

  I stirred my cup, churning up the sludge of condensed milk lying at the bottom. Glancing around quickly, I poured the coffee into my saucer and held it up to my mouth. But I put it down again immediately – it reminded me too much of the way I had eaten my meals as a prisoner.

  ‘Did you grow up in the Cape too?’ I said. ‘You don’t sound like Magnus at all.’

  ‘My mother would have beamed with joy to hear that,’ Frederik said. ‘She looked down on the Boers. Oh, how she looked down on them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She was English, born in Rhodesia. God only knows why she married my father – he wasn’t wealthy or a joy to be with. Even as a young boy I could see that they weren’t happy together. After he died, we moved back to Bulawayo.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Eight or nine. My father had always sided with the British, much to Magnus’s disgust.

  It’s why they didn’t get along, I think.’ He explained how he had always been fascinated by his uncle in Malaya, the uncle who owned a tea estate in the mountains. ‘When I was fifteen I took a P&O ship from Cape Town to spend Christmas here,’ he said. ‘It was so different from what I had read, all those Maugham stories my mother wouldn’t let me touch.’

  ‘My parents wouldn’t let me read them either,’ I said, smiling. ‘But my sister would borrow them from her friend and then pass them on to me.’

  ‘Magnus told me what happened to your sister. I’m sorry.’

  I looked away from him. More people were coming into the kopitiam. Frederik cracked his half-boiled eggs against his saucer and scraped out the insides of the shells with a teaspoon.

  He added a few shakes of white pepper and a generous amount of soy-sauce into the watery eggs before bringing the bowl to his lips.

  ‘You’ve certainly picked up our habits,’ I said. ‘How long did you stay, on your first visit here?’

  ‘Just for a month,’ Frede
rik said, wiping his lips with his handkerchief. ‘I knew I wanted to come back again one day. There was no other place in the world I wanted to be.’ The memory of his happiness lit up his eyes; the light was dulled a few seconds later, perhaps by the awareness of his lost childhood. In that fleeting moment I saw the boy he had once been, and I was given a glimpse of the old man he would one day become.

  ‘You came back, in the end,’ I said.

  ‘My mother died four years ago. I wrote to Magnus. He asked me to move here, help him run the estate,’ Frederik said. ‘I couldn’t take him up on his offer – I wanted to finish my studies. You’re going to eat that?’ He eyed the last piece of toast on my plate. I pushed it to him.

  ‘The Rhodesian African Rifles was disbanded after the war, but it was re-established last year,’

  he said. ‘When I heard my old regiment would be sent to Malaya to fight the Reds. I signed up again.’ He paused to look around the shop. ‘I thought it’d be an easy campaign – hunting communists. But it hasn’t been like that at all.’

  ‘Where were you during the war?’

  ‘Burma. Saw some real horrors there... ’ He hesitated. ‘So how do you do it? How do you face a Jap, day after day, after what they did to you?’

  I took a few moments to consider my answer. ‘There’s so much to do, so really there isn’t time for me to think about anything else when we’re working,’ I said. Frederik looked disbelieving, and I decided to be frank with him. ‘But now and then, something he says – a word or a phrase – spikes into a memory I thought I had buried away.’

  I recalled the incident that had occurred the previous evening. Aritomo had brought me to a stack of trees he had had felled a month earlier. They had been trimmed. ‘Get one of the men to saw these maruta into smaller pieces and take them away,’ he ordered. Instead of carrying out his instructions, I had turned around and hurried away. I heard him calling out to me, but I did not stop. I walked faster, heading deeper into the garden. I tripped, got up and continued walking, going up the slope until I came to the edge of a high drop, with only the mountains and the sky before me. I did not know how long I stood there. After a while I sensed Aritomo coming up to my side. ‘ Maruta, ’ I said, staring ahead. ‘That was how the officers in the camp referred to us: logs. We were just logs to them. To be cut up, incinerated.’ For a few moments the gardener was silent. Then I felt him take my arm. ‘You’re bleeding.’ He gripped my elbow and pressed his handkerchief against my wound.