by Tan Twan Eng
He stopped to look at me. An old sadness dimmed his eye. ‘It’ll never go away,’ he said.
The tok-tok bird began calling out again after Magnus drove off and the noise from his car faded away. I stood there on the driveway, counting its cries. Once again I lost the wager with myself.
* * *
The past week had been more strenuous than usual and so, the next morning, I was happy to be lazing in my bed until I heard someone calling for me. The spill of the sun across the bedroom walls told me it was about half-past seven. I put on a dressing robe and looked at Yun Hong’s painting for a moment before going outside. Aritomo was on the verandah, a rucksack held loosely in his hand.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘I have run out of birds’ nests.’
‘The herbalist in Tanah Rata doesn’t stock them,’ I reminded him. ‘And he won’t be open at this time, not on a Saturday.’
‘Get dressed. Go on.’ He clapped his hands. ‘And wear hiking shoes. We’re going up into the mountains.’
We set out on foot, heading for the hills north of Majuba estate. Far to the east, clouds ringed Mount Berembun. The tea fields soon gave way to uncultivated slopes. At the edge of the jungle Aritomo turned and looked back for a moment, his eyes scanning the way we had come.
Satisfied, he pushed into the ferns. After a second’s hesitation, I followed him.
It is hard to describe what entering a rainforest is like. Conditioned to the recognisable lines and shapes one sees every day in towns and villages, the eye is overwhelmed by the limitless varieties of saplings, shrubs, trees, ferns and grass, all exploding into life without any apparent sense of order or restraint. The world appears uniform in colour, almost monochromatic. Then, gradually, one begins to take in the gradations of green: emerald, khaki, celadon, lime, chartreuse, avocado, olive. As the eye recalibrates itself, other colours begin to emerge, pushing out to claim their place: tree trunks streaked with white; yellow liverworts and red sundew in shafts of sunlight; the pink flowers of a twisting climber garlanded around a tree trunk.
At times the animal track we took disappeared completely into the undergrowth, but Aritomo never hesitated, plunging into the vegetation to emerge onto another trail seconds later.
The noise of insects sizzled in the air, like fat in a smoking wok. Birds cawed and whistled, disturbing the branches high above us, showering us with dew. Monkeys ululated, fell into a petulant silence, and then picked up their cries again. Broad waxy leaves sealed off the way behind us. To my surprise I found that I had no trouble keeping up with Aritomo – my stamina had improved since I started working in Yugiri.
‘Where are we going to get the nests?’
‘The Semai,’ he replied, his eyes fixed on the track ahead, not slowing down his pace.
‘Much cheaper than buying it from those cutthroat Chinese.’
I had seen the nests in Chinese medicine shops, displayed inside finely crafted wooden boxes, next to jars of dried tigers’ penises and ginseng roots resting on red velvet. ‘Why would the Semai sell to you?’
‘They had some trouble with the authorities during the Occupation,’ he said. ‘Magnus asked me to help them. Since then they have always given me a good price for the nests.’
Trees leaned in at odd angles, as if they were being pulled to the ground by the vines manacled around their branches. An emerald sunbird flitted past, a barb of light still glowing from the sun it had absorbed before it flew into the jungle. Aritomo drew my attention to the plants in the undergrowth as we climbed. Once he stopped to stroke the pale trunk of a tree. ‘The tualang,’ he said. ‘They grow to two hundred feet. And this,’ he stooped over a low, unremarkable-looking shrub and tapped it with his stick, giving me a mischievous look, ‘is what the Malays call Tongkat Ali. Its roots, they tell me, can revive a man’s wilting libido.’
If he was hoping to fluster me, then he failed; before the war, such direct references to sex would have embarrassed me, but not anymore. ‘We should harvest and sell it,’ I said. ‘Think of the fortune we’ll make.’
The sun was high up when we emerged from the trees onto a rocky slope, the ground bare except for a few scraggly clumps of lallang. All along I had assumed that we were going to an aboriginal village so I pulled up short when I saw the cave ahead, gouged into the side of a sheer limestone cliff, its mouth guarded by stalactites.
Aritomo took a pair of flashlights from his rucksack and offered one to me, but I shook my head. ‘I’ll wait here for you,’ I said.
‘There is nothing to be frightened of,’ he said, switching his flashlight on and off a few times. ‘I will be right in front of you, all the time.’
The moist, ripe stench of bird droppings hit us the moment we entered the cave. I switched on my flashlight immediately, even though there was enough sunlight from outside to illuminate our way for the first six, seven paces. My breathing sounded loud to me, jagged. We rounded a bend and entered the second chamber. Aritomo offered his hand to me. After a moment’s hesitation, I took it. We were on a raised walkway hammered together from cast-off plywood planks, the boards flexing beneath our weight. Darting wings and clicking sounds criss-crossed the darkness of the cavern.
‘What’s that?’ I whispered.
‘Echolocation,’ Aritomo replied, just as softly. ‘The birds use it to find their way in the dark.’
Sweeping the flashlight around my feet, I let out a cry of disgust. Mounds of guano lay beneath the planks, rippling with thousands of cockroaches. Sweeping my flashlight up, the outer edge of the fan of light picked up what seemed to be a network of cracks in the walls; pointing the light higher, I saw that they were centipedes, each one about ten inches long, their legs sticking out from thin, tubular bodies. They reminded me of the skeletons of a shoal of prehistoric fish, pressed into rock by time. Disturbed by the light, they came alive, scuttling off into the gloom.
The passage widened the deeper we went into the mountain, the ceiling rising higher. The ground dropped and rose, occasionally levelling out. My anxieties fell away, but I continued to hold on to Aritomo’s hand. The air improved when we came to another cavern, larger than the two we had already passed through. Sunlight broke in through the roof a hundred, two hundred feet above, illuminating the rocky floor. Swiftlets darted through poles of light, and the echoes of dripping water corroded into the mineral silence.
Voices came from the back of the cave. Lit by the weak glow of a hurricane lamp, a pair of Orang Asli men stood below a bamboo scaffolding, staring upwards into the gloom. Both were in their thirties, thin and dressed only in loose-fitting shorts. They seemed unaware of us until Aritomo whistled to them, dislodging a flock of swiftlets into flight.
The two men looked unhappy when they saw me. ‘You no bring people,’ one of them said to Aritomo.
‘She will not tell anyone, Perang,’ Aritomo said.
‘I won’t even know how to find my way back here,’ I assured Perang in Malay.
He turned to the man beside him, his chest and arms covered in watery black tattoos that had lost their shape, spilling across his skin. The tattooed man shrugged. ‘One time only,’ Perang warned me. ‘You no come again, faham?’
‘ Faham,’ I said, nodding.
They returned their attention to the darkness above us. I followed their gaze, feeling the ground drop away from me. At first I could see nothing. Gradually I made out movement along the wall of the cave. A boy of about eleven was shimmying up a bamboo pole, like an ant on a reed. He was about seventy, eighty feet up, unsecured to any rope. Now and again he stopped and hung from a ledge with one arm; with his other hand he cut the nests from the rock, dropping them into a bag tied around his waist.
‘What about the eggs?’ I asked, staring at the boy, my voice cowed by the immensity of the cavern.
‘They steal the nests before the birds lay them,’ Aritomo said. ‘When the female discovers her nest is gone, she will make another. They will leave that nest for her to lay her eggs. They do not
take any nest if there is a chick in it.’
My neck grew stiff from craning my head upwards, and I had already forgotten my own fears of the cave when the boy climbed down the scaffolding. Perang took the bag from him and squatted by a low, flat rock beneath a fall of sunlight. He shook the bag’s contents out onto the rock. Specks of dust swirled and eddied in the light. The nests, a number of them covered in feathers, varied from reddish brown to a faint yellow-white. Their shape reminded me of human ears.
Aritomo picked only the whiter ones. The dark-coloured nests, he whispered to me, had absorbed the iron and magnesium in the cave walls. He paid for them, and as we left the swiftlets’ cave I heard Perang shouting from behind us, ‘You no come again!’
* * *
We rested on a broad ledge looking into a deep ravine. I was relieved to be out of the cave. I breathed in deeply, letting the cold, damp air scour all residue of the cave’s sticky stench from my lungs. Opposite us, a cataract poured off an outcrop, the water broadening into a white feather as it fell, to be swept away by the wind before it could reach the earth.
Aritomo filled two cups with tea from a thermos flask and gave one to me. I remembered what Magnus had asked me on the previous evening. ‘The High Commissioner and his wife want to visit Yugiri,’ I said.
‘The work is not finished.’
‘You can let them see the sections that have been completed.’
He considered my suggestion. ‘You have worked very hard in the last five months. Why don’t you show them around?’
It was the first bit of praise I had received from him since I became his apprentice. I was surprised at how good it made me feel. ‘Will I ever become a competent garden designer?’
‘If you continue to work at it,’ he said. ‘You do not have a natural talent for it, but you have shown me you are determined enough.’
Uncertain as to how I should respond to that, I kept quiet. We were like two moths around a candle, I thought, circling closer and closer to the flame, waiting to see whose wings would catch fire first.
‘That first day when you came to see me,’ he said, a moment later, ‘you mentioned that you had become friends with Tominaga Noburu.’ He was looking towards the mountains, his back straight, his body still. ‘What was he doing in your camp?’
‘Working us to death,’ I replied. ‘He worked all of us to death.’
He looked at me. ‘Yet you are here, Yun Ling. The only one who survived.’
‘I was lucky.’ I met his stare for a second, then turned away.
From his rucksack he took a pair of nests and placed them in my palm. They had the brittle lightness of biscuits. It felt strange holding them so soon after they had been torn from a crease in a rock high up in a cave. I thought of the swiftlets, hurrying back to the cave after their hunt, relying on the echoes they made, those sparks of sound to light their way in the dark, only to be met with a returning, shapeless silence where their nests had once been. I thought of the swiftlets, and sadness clogged my chest, hardening like the strands of the birds’ saliva.
Aritomo pointed to the sky in the east. A wall of clouds was pushing up behind Mount Berembun. ‘Tomorrow’s rain lies on the horizon.’
My eyes wandered from one end of the mountains to the other. ‘Do you think they go on forever?’
‘The mountains?’ Aritomo said, as though he had been asked that question before. ‘They fade away. Like all things.’
Chapter Fifteen
At a few minutes before ten on a Friday morning, two weeks after Aritomo and I climbed to the swiftlets’ cave, a black Rolls-Royce pressed between two Land Rovers stopped in front of Majuba House. Magnus and Emily were waiting on the driveway to welcome the High Commissioner and I went to join them, closing the door before the dogs could get out. The Gurkha was standing at attention. Eight Malay policemen got out from the Land Rovers and formed up by the entrance to the house. Sir Gerald Templer emerged from the Rolls and then helped his wife out. The High Commissioner was a thin man of medium height in his fifties, dressed in a khaki bush-jacket and sharply-creased trousers of the same shade. His eyes pounced on the flag draped around the pole on the roof before darting to Magnus, his trim moustache flexing down the corners of his mouth. I caught the gleam in Magnus’s eye; he was enjoying the irony of Templer’s presence in Majuba. ‘We really should have more British officials coming to pay their respects,’ he whispered to me as we stepped forward to greet the Templers. Emily jabbed her elbow into his side.
‘Welcome to Majuba,’ he said, shaking Templer’s hand.
The High Commissioner turned to the woman standing next to him. ‘My wife, Peggy.’
‘We heard that your estate was worth a visit,’ Lady Templer said.
Magnus started the tour immediately; Templer’s lack of patience was already legendary.
We followed him to the Twelfth Division, a section chosen because the slope was not too steep but which would nonetheless give us the best views of the tea-covered valleys. A tall, middle-aged police officer fell back from the group to walk beside me. ‘Thomas Aldrich – Chief Inspector,’ he introduced himself. ‘You’re Teoh Boon Hau’s daughter, aren’t you? I was told you’re showing us the Jap’s garden. You’re here on holiday?’
‘I live here,’ I said, quite certain that Special Branch had opened dossiers for every one of us in Majuba before the High Commissioner’s visit.
The skies were cloudless, the clear air polishing the light to a high sheen. A breeze rose intermittently from the valley floor, skimming over the treetops. The High Commissioner and his wife walked easily on the rutted lane to the workers’ homes. A ten-foot high fence, topped with barbed wire surrounded the compound. Two members of the Malay Home Guard, trained by Magnus, stood to attention and saluted Templer. Faded washing flapped on clotheslines. Hens trailing lines of yolky chicks scuttled away at our approach. An old woman squatting outside her home waved at us, the rolls of fat squeezing out between the layers of her sari. Unseen hands kneaded her doughy face as she chewed her sirih in a slow, unthinking rhythm. Now and again she spat out a jet of blood-red betel-nut juice onto the ground in front of her.
‘Your father’s been extremely helpful in the Merdeka talks,’ said Aldrich. ‘I think there’s a good chance Malaya will be independent within a few years.’
‘You sound enthusiastic,’ I said. ‘Independence could mean the end of your job.’
‘You Chinese are more terrified of Merdeka than we whites,’ he said with a lopsided grin.
What he said was true, especially among the English-educated Straits Chinese – the King’s Chinese, as we called ourselves. We had seen how the movements for independence had turned violent in India and Burma and the Dutch East Indies, and there were fears that a similar kind of communal violence would also tear Malaya apart. Uncertain of how we would fare under the rule of the Malays, we preferred the British to run the country until Malaya was ready for independence. When that would be, no one was willing to say.
‘The CTs say they’re fighting for independence too,’ I said. ‘Ironic isn’t it? If you gave Merdeka to Malaya, they’d have their legs kicked out from under them in no time.’
Aldrich nodded towards Templer. ‘That’s why he’s keen for Malaya to be independent as soon as possible. It’ll be a fatal blow to the communists. Anyway, after the way we abandoned you all to the Japs, do we really still have any right to rule?’
* * *
Magnus gave the Templers a quick history of the highlands as they walked, telling them how William Cameron had surveyed the mountains by riding on elephants. ‘Like Hannibal crossing the Alps,’ he said, and Emily’s eyeballs rolled over like a pair of fish sunning their bellies.
‘People thought I was mad when I started the estate,’ Magnus threw a quick smile at me.
‘And they were right. I fell under the spell of this magnificent plant from the very beginning.’ He plucked a bright green shoot from a bush, rolled it between his fingers under his no
se and gave it to the High Commissioner’s wife. ‘These evolved from plants first discovered in the eastern Himalayas. An age before Christ was born, a Chinese emperor already knew about them. He called it the froth of the liquid jade.’
‘The emperor who discovered tea after some leaves dropped into a pot of water he was boiling?’ Aldrich said. ‘That’s just a myth.’
‘Well, I believe it,’ Magnus retorted. ‘What other beverage has been drunk in so many different forms, by so many various races, over two thousand years? Tibetans, Mongolians and the tribes of the Central Asian steppes; the Siamese and the Burmese; the Chinese and the Japanese; the Indians and, finally, us Europeans.’ He paused, lost in his dream of tea. ‘It’s been drunk by everyone, from thieves and beggars, to writers and poets; from farmers, soldiers and painters to generals and emperors. And if you enter any temple and look at the offerings on the altars, you’ll see that even the gods drink tea.’
He looked at each of us in turn. ‘When the English took their first cup of tea, they were really drinking to the eventual fall of the Chinese Empire.’
Templer’s face reddened, and his wife touched him lightly on his arm. Aldrich said, ‘Well, you can’t deny that China made immense profits selling tea to the world.’ For some reason the thin, sharp smile that barbed his words gave me the feeling that he was goading Magnus intentionally.
‘True, at first,’ Magnus replied. ‘But the flow of silver into China in exchange for tea became a cause for concern. So the English found a way to reverse the flow. You know how they did it?’
‘ Lao-kung... ’ Emily warned her husband. She shot a beseeching look at me to silence him, but I shrugged helplessly.
‘Opium,’ Magnus answered his own question. ‘Opium from the East India Company’s fields in Patna and Benares. Sold to China to counter the loss of silver from England’s treasury.
And so the Celestial Kingdom became a nation of opium addicts, all because of our desire for tea.’
