by Tan Twan Eng
‘You look vexed. And I doubt it’s caused by the plight of poor old Chin Peng.’
‘Just some problems with the workers.’
‘Ah, yes. The television sets.’
‘The servants have been gossiping to Ah Cheong again, I see.’
‘What do you expect your workers to do after a day’s work, if you refuse to let them have TVs in their homes?’
‘Electronic transmission signals have an adverse effect on insect life in gardens.
Research done by universities has proven this,’ he says. ‘I can show it to you.’
‘You think that by prohibiting TVs in the estate, the signals will disappear and not come into your garden?’ I give a derisive laugh. ‘Consider the rain when it falls on Majuba. Whether you put a bucket outside to catch some of it or not,’ I rattle the ice cubes in my glass, ‘the rain still comes, still floods the earth.’
‘Laugh all you want, woman, but the butterflies have returned in greater numbers since I banned TV sets from the estate. So have the insects. And there are more birds in Majuba now.
Oh yes.’ He grew excited. ‘In fact, I saw a bulbul. Only yesterday. And a pair of green magpies this morning. We’re getting a lot of birdwatchers coming here.’
‘I thought Emily’s joining us?’
‘She’s getting dressed,’ Frederik says. ‘She moved into the guest room a few years ago.
Said she didn’t need such a big bedroom anymore.’ He smiles, lines crowding into his face. ‘You might remember that room – it was the one you stayed in when you first came here.’
We sit in silence for a while, nursing our drinks. He gives me a sheaf of papers when my glass is empty. ‘I wanted to take this to you, but the past few days have been mad.’
‘What is it?’
‘Your consent for me to use Aritomo’s drawing.’ The look in his eyes sharpens. ‘We spoke about it, remember?’
‘Of course I remember. I’m not senile yet. Give me your pen?’ I sign the papers and push them across the table, the momentum fanning them open like stepping-stones across a pond.
‘You should at least read them first,’ he chides me, gathering up the papers and knocking them into an orderly pile. The skin of his hands, I notice, is spotted with age. The joints of two of his fingers are clogged and swollen, like knobs on the branches of a bonsai tree.
‘You wouldn’t cheat an old woman.’
‘Don’t be too sure.’ His smile balances on the rim of his tumbler for a moment. ‘How long are you staying in Yugiri?’
‘I haven’t really decided – until Tatsuji completes his work here, at the very least.’
We both look to the door when Emily enters. Frederik puts down his glass and hurries over to her, guiding her by the elbow. I stand up. Emily’s hair, pulled back in the way I remember, has whitened completely. Dressed in a grey qipao and a cardigan around her shoulders, her body is thin and bowed. Lines pleat her face and her eyes have a smudge of feebleness in them.
‘ Wah... if only Magnus could be here today,’ she says, a smile floating to her lips, her voice arid with age.
‘Hello Emily.’ The thought occurs to me that I am now much older than she was when I met her the first time. Time seems to overlap, like the shadows of leaves pressing down on other leaves, layer upon layer. ‘You’re looking sprightly.’
‘ Choi! That word always makes me think of old men with skinny legs walking their noisy lap dogs.’
The smells of food leak from the kitchen; the scent of the coriander is familiar to me, even after nearly forty years, but the name eludes me and I have to hunt for it in my mind. I wonder if the decay is spreading faster than I have been warned it would, but I elbow that thought aside. I groan to cover my relief when I remember the name. ‘ Boerewors.’ It is a terrible feeling, being unable to tell if my forgetfulness is normal for my age, or if it’s indicative of the steepening of the slide. Boerewors. I tell myself I must include the name in what I have been writing when I get back to it later tonight.
‘I have them flown in from the Cape every six months,’ Frederik says. ‘Along with a box of Constantia red.’
A wine for exiles. It was something Aritomo once said.
* * *
Coming to the end of our dinner, Emily begins to drift in and out of our conversation, confusing the present with the past. Frederik catches my eye once or twice when it happens and I give him a small nod of sympathy. Now and then he corrects her gently, but mostly he plays along, letting her take pleasure in her memories.
‘A nightcap?’ Frederik asks her when we get up from the dining table to move to the living room.
Emily pats her hand over her mouth. ‘It’s past my bedtime already.’ She looks at me.
‘You’ll have to forgive an old woman for all the nonsense I talked- lah.’
‘I enjoyed it,’ I assure her.
‘We’ll have tea one of these mornings? Just the two of us.’
I promise her, and Frederik takes her back to her room. ‘Not one of her better nights,’ he says when he returns to the living room a few minutes later. ‘She’s usually sharper in the morning. But I know she’s really pleased to see you.’ He hands me a glass of sherry and sits across from me. ‘Has that historian of yours looked at the prints yet?’
‘He’ll be coming to Yugiri to catalogue them.’
‘What he said the other day, about Aritomo dabbling in tattoos? Magnus had a tattoo.
Here.’ He touches the area above his heart with his palm, as though he is about to swear an oath.
‘I had forgotten all about it until he mentioned it.’
Somewhere in the house a clock starts chiming. I wait until it has stopped and the house has settled into silence again. My chair creaks softly when I lean forward. ‘He showed it to you?’
‘We were hiking in the mountains one day – this was when I was a boy, visiting him. On our way home we stopped to cool off under a waterfall. That’s when I saw it.’ He nods in growing realisation when I do not respond. ‘You’ve seen it too?’
‘He never liked talking about it.’ I twist my body to look at the woodblock print on the wall behind me. ‘I’d like to borrow that to show it to Tatsuji.’
‘I’ll get one of my boys to send it over to Yugiri.’ He hesitates. ‘I spoke to some friends in Singapore and London. And Cape Town,’ he says. ‘I’ll have some names for you soon.’
I stare at him, wondering what he is talking about.
‘Specialists,’ he explains. ‘Neurosurgeons.’
‘You think I wouldn’t have known how to do that myself?’ My voice is loud in the stillness. ‘I don’t need any more experts to tell me what I already know. So stop doing whatever you think you’re doing for me. Just stop it.’
His eyes cool into stone. ‘Anyone ever tell you what a hard-arsed bitch you are?’
‘Many have thought it, I’m sure, but you’re the first man who’s had the balls to say it to my face,’ I reply. ‘I’ve seen all the experts I want to. Endured all their tests, their prodding. No more, Frederik. No more.’
‘You can’t just ignore –’ his hand rises and dies in the air.
‘Primary Progressive Aphasia. Caused by a demyelinating disease of my nervous system,’ I say. I have never spoken the name aloud to anyone else, except to the doctors who diagnosed me. A superstitious fear numbs me, the fear that the illness will now hasten its spread over me, bring me to the stage where I will not be able to speak its name coherently. That will be its goal, its victory, when I can no longer even curse it by its name.
‘I once read something about Borges,’ I say. ‘He was blind and very old, spending his last days in Geneva. He told someone, “I don’t want to die in a language I cannot understand.”’ I laugh bitterly. ‘That is what will happen to me.’
‘See a few more doctors. Get more tests done.’
‘The last time I stayed in a hospital was when the war ended,’ I say, keeping my voice level. ‘I’ll never put myself i
nside another one again. Never.’
‘You have anyone looking after you in KL? A live-in carer? A nurse?’
‘No.’
‘You can’t live alone,’ Frederik says.
‘Magnus said that to me once, you know.’ The memory makes me smile, yet it also saddens me. ‘I’ve lived on my own for most of my life. It’s too late for me to change my ways.’ I close my eyes for a moment. ‘While I’m here, I think I ought to restore the garden to the way it used to look, when Aritomo was alive.’ The idea came to me when I was looking at his print earlier in the evening.
‘You can’t do it by yourself. Especially now.’
‘That woman who’s doing your garden – what’s her name? She can help me.’
‘Vimalya?’ He makes a sound that is somewhere between a snort and a laugh. ‘Restoring a garden like Yugiri would go against all her principles.’
‘Speak to her, Frederik.’
‘The garden’s the last thing you should be worrying about, if you ask me.’
‘I have to do this now. Soon Yugiri will be the only thing that will still be able to speak to me.’
‘Oh, Yun Ling... ’ he says softly.
The music drifts through the house, a whisper from an older time. The melody is familiar but I cannot place it. I look at Frederik from the edge of my eye, wondering if I am the only one who is hearing it.
‘She listens to it every night, before she sleeps,’ he says, as though he knows what I am thinking. ‘Built up an extensive record collection of the same piece of music too, with different pianists – Gulda, Argerich, Zimerman, Ashkenazy, Pollini. Whenever I’m overseas I look for another version for her. But she only listens to the Larghetto. It’s never changed in all these years. Only the Larghetto.’
The loose skin of his neck pulls tight as he offers his face to the lights in the ceiling. ‘It’s the Yggdrasil Quartet in support again tonight,’ he says after a while. ‘I found it in Singapore some months ago. She’s been playing it very often.’
‘Yggdrasil? What’s that?’
‘It’s from the Norse myth.’
‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Yggdrasil is the Tree of Life,’ he says. ‘Its branches cover the world and stretch up to the sky. But it has only three roots. One is submerged in the waters of the Pool of Knowledge.
Another in fire. The last root is being devoured by a terrible creature. When two of its roots have been consumed by fire and beast, the tree will fall, and eternal darkness will spread across the world.’
‘So the Tree of Life is already doomed from the moment it is planted.’
Bringing his gaze to me, he says, quietly, ‘But it hasn’t fallen yet.’
I lean back into my chair, close my eyes and listen to the Larghetto. The piano is accompanied only by the quartet and the music has the bleak purity of a set of stones lying on the bed of a stream, a stream that dried up a long time ago.
Chapter Ten
The Art of Setting Stones was different from what I had thought it would be. I had walked through the gardens in Kyoto with Yun Hong when I was fifteen, but I had had no inkling of the amount of work required to construct and maintain them. And neither had Yun Hong, I suspected, feeling disloyal the instant the thought entered my head.
Aritomo kept me running about, and at first I suspected it was because he wanted me to fail, to give up in frustration and leave Yugiri. But I never saw any sign of resentment in him once he had taken me on as his apprentice. The work was exhausting but I began to enjoy it. The tools he used were old and specialised. I had to memorise their names and learn to clean and care for them. I thumbed the beads of their names in an endless loop as I went about my work: Kakezuchi. Nata. Kibasami. Shachi. Tebasami. Mallet. Hatchet. Hedge-trimming shears.
Windlass. Pruning shears. Kakezuchi. Nata. Kibasami. Shachi. Tebasami. The loop lengthened with each passing day, as more and more beads were added to it.
Some days if I was early, I would watch Aritomo at archery practice, making sure to stand outside his line of sight. A sense of calm entered as I observed his slow, deliberate movements.
In addition to carrying out the tasks Aritomo assigned me, I was required to interpret his instructions to the workers. Except for Kannadasan, they were all disinterested gardeners. From my first day I sensed Romesh would be the one to cause trouble. He was in his thirties with small, hard lumps of muscle on his body. When he began to turn up later and later for work, reeking of toddy fumes, Aritomo asked me to inform him not to bother coming anymore.
Romesh showed up at Yugiri the day after I conveyed Aritomo’s message to him. He stood outside the house and began shouting. For once he was not drunk. The rest of us were working nearby and stopped to watch, edging closer to get a better view.
‘Come out, you Jap sister-fucker!’ Romesh screamed in Malay, shifting back and forth on his feet. ‘I want my money! Come out! Come out!’
Aritomo emerged at the front door a moment later, the magazine he had been reading still in his hand. ‘What is he so upset about?’ he asked me.
‘He wants you to pay him.’
‘Is that all he said? Well, he has been paid.’
‘Not in full,’ I interpreted Romesh’s reply for Aritomo.
‘It would not be fair to the others if I paid him in full, would it? He has not done as much work,’ Aritomo said, twisting his magazine into a tube
Romesh snatched the parang from Kannadasan’s hand before I had finished translating.
Too shocked to move – to think – I watched as he swung the machete towards the side of Aritomo’s neck. Instead of backing away, Aritomo slid into the attack in a smooth movement and jabbed the end of his rolled-up magazine into the worker’s windpipe. Romesh choked, making gurgling sounds, his hand scrabbling at his throat. Tightening the magazine with a quick twist and holding it like a chisel, Aritomo stabbed at a point on Romesh’s wrist. The man’s fingers went dead, the parang dropping to the ground. Still struggling for air, Romesh swung a punch at Aritomo with his other hand. Aritomo deflected it, turning it into a wrist lock and forcing Romesh to his knees. Romesh screamed in pain.
‘I will break this as easily as a twig,’ Aritomo said, his face close to Romesh’s. There was no need for me to translate. Romesh’s body sagged. Aritomo released his lock on the man’s wrist and carefully backed away.
Time resumed. The wind moved again. The fight had lasted ten, perhaps fifteen seconds, but it felt much longer. The workers rushed forward to help Romesh up. He pushed them away, crawling off before staggering to his feet. He walked unsteadily out of the garden, rubbing his wrist. He did not look back.
I turned around to say something to Aritomo – although I had no idea what – only to discover that he had already returned inside. I picked up the parang in the grass and gave it back to Kannadasan.
* * *
Leaving Yugiri that evening, I waved to Ah Cheong as he waited outside the house for Aritomo to appear. The servant held the gardener’s walking stick in his hand, his last duty for the day before he cycled home to Tanah Rata.
I chose a track that followed the hemline of the jungle before curving back to my bungalow. I was in no hurry to return home. In spite of my fatigue, I still had problems falling asleep, sometimes lying awake in my bed until the early hours of dawn. There were so many voices in the dark: the moans of the prisoners, the shouts of the guards, my sister’s crying.
Watching Aritomo fight off Romesh – even if it was to protect himself – had shaken me more badly than I had realised. There had been a cold, detached air to him when he was disarming Romesh, and I suspected he would have done more than break the man’s arm if he had not conceded defeat. There was so much about the Japanese gardener I did not know, could not even guess at.
The lights of the farmhouses and bungalows sprinkled themselves across the valleys.
Tea-pickers hurrying home waved to me. The tearful smell of woodsmoke from cooking fires fanned across the twilight, c
arrying with it the faint barking of dogs. In the camp we had looked forward to this moment of the day, when we were finally allowed to return to our huts, each one of us glancing around to see who had not survived, too numb to feel anything when we missed a friend or a familiar face.
The track divided in two. Instead of going straight home I took the path to Majuba House and called to the Gurkha to let me through the gate. Going around to the back of the house, I passed Mnemosyne and her twin-sister, then went down the steps to the lower terrace garden.
Magnus had left most of the chengal trees untouched when he cleared the jungle. The formal lines of the gardens were breached by the beds of the plants he had transported over from South Africa – cycads with sharp-edged leaves pushing out of the ground like the tops of oversized, prehistoric carrots; strelitzias and blue agapanthus; aloes with their menorahs of red flowers struggling in the unfamiliar terrain.
Rising from the centre of the lawn was a stone arch, plastered in white, a bell hanging from it. Magnus had told me it had once been rung to announce the end of the working day for the Javanese slaves on a vineyard in the Cape. Long after I had first seen it, this pale monolith still had the power to draw me towards it; I felt I had stumbled upon the last remnant of a forgotten civilisation. Passing beneath the arch now, I reached up on my toes to knock the lip of the bell, calling up a faint echo from its rusted muteness.
Emily was standing by an ornamental pond, her eyes closed. I kept quiet as she breathed in and lifted her right foot away from her left. She moved with such slowness that I felt I was watching time being stretched out, the world around us sucked in by her energy as she went through a series of motions, one flowing seamlessly into another, water pouring into water, air merging with air. She executed the moves with such grace and controlled power that she seemed to be gliding inside spheres of reduced gravity.
She returned to her original position a few moments later, her arms coming to rest against her hips. I called out to her softly and she spun around to face me, her hands rising into a protective movement. ‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘That was beautiful. It’s taijichuan isn’t it?’ I used to watch the old people doing it on the esplanade.’
