by Tan Twan Eng
He blackened the needles by rubbing them against the ink-soaked calligraphy brush gripped between the last two fingers of his left hand. Then he stretched the skin on my shoulder and pushed the needles into me.
He had warned me, but still I could not help myself. I cried out at the first of a million cuts, my fingers clawing the sheet beneath me.
‘Keep still,’ he said. I attempted to get up, but he pressed me down with his palm, repeating the incisions. I fought back the grunts of pain. I clamped my eyelids against the tears, but still they leaked through. My body flinched each time his needles bit into me; I felt my skin was being taken apart, line by line, stitch by stitch.
‘Stop fidgeting.’ He wiped my back again and I turned my body to look. The white towel was covered in moist, red blotches.
‘There was a Japanese engineer in the camp – Morokuma. He collected tattoos.’ My voice sounded hoarse, and I cleared my throat. ‘Prisoners who were tattooed would show them to him in exchange for cigarettes.’ Aritomo pressed the needles into my skin again, and I forced back a cry. ‘He’d photograph them. Later, when he ran out of film, he’d draw them in a sketchbook. He once asked me to translate the words in a man’s tattoo. I made the mistake of doing it correctly.’
Aritomo’s hands ceased moving over my back. ‘What happened?’
‘The man was a rubber planter. Tim Osborne. He had “God Save The King” tattooed above a bayonet on his arm. Morokuma copied it into his book. Then he informed the camp commander. Tim was fifty seven years old, but they gave him a beating anyway.’ I paused for a moment. ‘They cut the tattooed portion of his skin from his arm and burned it in front of all us.
He died two days later.’
Outside, a passing breeze nudged the brass rods of the wind chime hanging under the eaves. The candle flame shivered, tilting the walls around us. For an instant I smelled burning skin again.
Aritomo worked for about an hour without speaking. The agony did not settle into a dull sensation, as I had hoped it would. Every subsequent prick of his needles hurt as much as the first. Finally he sat back on his heels and let out a long breath. He put his tools down on the tray and began to clean my back, dabbing the towel here and there. His touch was gentle, but the cloth was abrasive. ‘That is enough for tonight,’ he said.
Getting up unsteadily, I walked around the room, shaking out the stiffness in my arms and legs. Aritomo’s fingers, palms and wrists were smeared with black ink. He fingers were rigid, and I realised they were causing him pain.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked
‘It will go away in a few minutes,’ he said.
I picked up the mirror and angled it above my back, letting out a cry when I saw the reflection. ‘It looks awful,’ I said. He had cleaned away the mess of smudged ink and bloodstains, but my skin was raw and bruised, already beginning to swell. A meshwork of lines overlaid my back, and even as I looked, a cluster of blood droplets beaded up from beneath my wounds, collecting on the skin before sliding down the curve of my back in a viscous crimson trail. It looked nothing like any tattoos I had seen, nor did it resemble anything from his woodblock prints, and I wondered if he had lied to me about his tattooing abilities.
‘Until it is finished, this is how it will appear.’ He pulled my hand away. ‘Stop scratching it. Let it heal.’
He helped me into a light cotton robe; the cloth stuck to my back, stinging me. ‘I thought there would be more blood,’ I said.
‘Only unskilled horoshi inflict excessive pain or draw an unnecessary amount of blood.’
He looked at me for a moment, but I knew he was thinking of something else.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I forgot how addictive it can be, not only for the person being tattooed, but also for the artist.’
‘I wouldn’t describe it as addictive.’
‘You will feel differently after a few more sessions.’
The corridor was in darkness when I stepped outside. I felt disoriented as I followed Aritomo to the bathroom at the back of the house. The water in the upright cedar soaking tub had been heated, filling the bathroom with steam and a clean fragrance. Aritomo tested the water and, taking my hand, helped me into the tub.
‘Stay in there until the water cools,’ he said. ‘Your skin will heal faster. Sit straight – do not lean back.’
I pulled his arm as he was about to leave. ‘Get in with me.’
He held up his hands. ‘Let me clean up first.’
Sinking lower into the tub, the stiffness in my body slowly dissolved away into the water, mingling with the ink and blood eddying from my skin.
Chapter Twenty-Two
With the monsoon’s arrival, Aritomo dismissed the workers, instructing them to return only when the rainy season was over. There remained only the two of us to look after the garden. In the breaks between the rains I pruned and cleaned up the damage left behind by the storms.
Working side by side with Aritomo, I found our isolation from the world outside comforting.
He would tattoo me at night, with the rain beating on the roof. After completing the outline of the chrysanthemum flower on my shoulder, he worked his way down my back. I had a full-length mirror put in the room. The thin, black outlines of his tattoos soon covered my body like contour lines. In the same manner he constructed his garden, he engraved his designs on my skin without first putting them down on paper. He had to wait for the scabs to form and drop off before he proceeded with the tattooing. My back was constantly raw. More than once he warned me not to scratch the tattoos, fearing that I would damage them before the skin could heal.
After each session I would soak myself in the wooden tub, resting my chin on the water’s surface, steam drawing perspiration from my face. Standing in the bathroom after the end of a particularly long session, I studied my back in the mirror. He had begun to shade the tattoos in grey and light blue hues, and they appeared like clouds of smoke blown against my skin.
Once he saw that I could withstand the pain, he worked on the horimono for much longer, going on deep into the night until I thought the lamp in the room was the only light left burning in the mountains.
The temperature in the highlands often dropped to below ten degrees after sunset and, although the monsoon rains had made the nights colder, I often sat with Aritomo on the verandah after dinner, the bamboo blinds rolled up into the eaves. We never put the lights on, preferring to feel the garden.
As the tok-tok birds hammered out their calls, the kettle on the brazier by the table began to steam. Aritomo spooned some tea leaves into a clay teapot. He held the caddy in his hand, staring into it. ‘There is just enough for one last brew.’
‘The Fragrance of the Lonely Tree? Don’t you have more in the kitchen?’
‘No.’ He closed the caddy, put it aside and filled the teapot with boiling water from the kettle. He swirled the water inside the teapot and threw it out over the edge of the verandah onto the grass, leaving a smudge of steam in the air. He filled the pot again and poured a cup for me.
‘Why do you always do that?’ I asked. It had always seemed such a waste to me, especially now.
‘To remove dirt from the leaves, of course,’ he replied. ‘We have a saying: The first brewing is fit only for your enemies. ’
‘You did that on my first visit here too,’ I said, smiling.
‘I did not know what you were,’ he said. He did not smile.
‘But you do now?’
‘Your tea is getting cold.’
With each sip I felt I was also absorbing something melancholy that had been infused into the tea leaves. When the teapot was empty, I said, ‘I want to add another day to our sessions.
We can make it three, maybe four times a week.’
‘You have become addicted to it. No need to be embarrassed. It always happens.’
It was true what he said – I had begun to anticipate what he would put on my body, and I had even started to enjoy the pain because, for tho
se hours when his needles tracked across my skin, the clamour in my mind was deadened. I worried about what would happen once the final cut was made, when the last open pore was tamped and sealed with ink.
‘The horimono is progressing faster than I had planned,’ Aritomo said. ‘I can start filling it with colours in a day or two. Hopefully we can finish before the monsoon is over.’
‘You seem in a rush to finish it too.’
‘The Emergency is coming to an end. Another White Area was declared today.’
‘You almost sound disappointed.’
‘Life has been suspended, somehow, during the Emergency,’ Aritomo said. ‘I often feel I am on a ship, heading for a destination on the other side of the world. I imagine myself in that blank space, between the two points of a mapmaker’s callipers.’
‘That empty space exists only on maps, Aritomo.’
‘Maps, and also in memories.’ He breathed into his cupped hands. ‘One of the odd things about tattooing: the hari draw out not only blood, but also the thoughts hidden inside that person.’ He lifted his gaze to me. ‘What did you actually do in the camp?’
‘I did whatever was required for me to live.’
‘Did that include working for the Japanese?’
The night had become colder. A long moment of silence slid by before I felt I could speak. ‘I gave information to Fumio. I told him who was planning to escape. I told him who was constructing a radio, where it was hidden. I still received my share of beatings, but I got better rations. I got medicines. Yun Hong found out. She begged me to stop. I refused.’
An owl glided past the verandah, like a fragment of lost memory. ‘I left her,’ I said. I left Yun Hong there.’
Aritomo reached over to the brazier and opened its little door. He rested on his elbows and blew into it, sending sparks billowing out into the night.
* * *
At first I thought that the sounds of gunfire were memories trying to break into my dreams, but they continued when I opened my eyes, bursts of tiny detonations, spaced unevenly apart. I sat up in bed. The milky light in the room told me it was about seven in the morning. Through the half-opened sliding doors I saw Aritomo below the engawa, looking towards Majuba estate. I got dressed and went out to join him. The clouds were ripe with rain and a strong wind was riling the leaves in the trees. Before I could speak four men in khaki uniforms appeared around the corner.
The one in front pointed his rifle at us.
Aritomo moved past me to stand in front, obstructing me. The man drove the butt of his rifle into Aritomo’s cheek, whipping his head to one side.
They tore the house apart, pushing the cupboards over and breaking the crockery in the kitchen. I hoped they had not harmed Ah Cheong, then remembered that it was Sunday. Once they were satisfied that they had found all the food and money in the house, the CTs marched us over to Majuba, taking the path I had so often used. The jungle seethed with insect calls. Soon I saw the familiar tea-covered slopes between the trees. We emerged from the jungle a moment later and continued to the estate. The metal gates at the workers’ compound were open, the men and their families kneeling on the grass, watched over by armed CTs. The Malay Home Guard lay face down on the ground, not moving. Further down the dirt road, CTs were carrying out sacks of rice and boxes of tinned food from the co-op store. Passing the clinic, we saw more of them stuffing medicines and bandages into gunnysacks.
The security gate at Majuba House had been forced open. The walls and the front door of the house were pocked with bullet holes, the shutters splintered. Strelitzias were shredded over the lawn. Inside the house, glass and plaster and pieces of wood were strewn on the yellow wood floor, crunching beneath our feet. Light skewered in through the broken shutters and torn wire netting. The smell of gunpowder corroded the air, mixed with another stench; Brolloks and Bittergal were sprawled close together on the floor in the hallway, blood from their stomach wounds pooling around them, soaking into their faeces. In the dining room we found Magnus and Emily kneeling on the floor. They looked up when we came in; blood ran down from a wound on Magnus’s face. Hands shoved us down to kneel next to them. From the kitchen at the end of the corridor I could hear the servants sobbing.
‘I am Commander Yap,’ a man with a gentle, studious face said. I wondered if he had been a teacher before he had taken up arms against the government.
‘What the hell do you want?’ Magnus said. A CT rammed the butt of his rifle into the side of Magnus’s head. Magnus swayed on his knees, but remained upright. The CT was about to hit him again when Emily shouted, ‘Stop it! Stop it!’
‘You two chau-chibai,’ Yap said, his eyes moving from Emily and back to me. ‘One married to an ang-moh, another one fucking a Jap devil.’
He snapped his fingers. A female CT dragged a man to the front by his hair and kicked him onto his knees; his face was swollen and smeared with blood and dirt.
Yap turned to Aritomo. ‘One of your people. Inoki here has been fighting with us ever since his country lost the war. But now he wants to surrender, he wants to go home.’ He squatted down and brought his face close to Aritomo’s. ‘In the jungle you hear many strange things.
Many strange things. Inoki told us about the gold stolen by you Japs. It’s hidden in the hills here, he says. So we’re giving him a chance to find out where it is.’
‘Things must be getting bad for you, if you have started believing in fairy tales,’ said Aritomo.
Inoki shuffled on his knees towards Aritomo and spoke to him in Japanese. ‘The rumours, Nakamura-san, you must have heard them.’ His words gushed out in a torrent of fear and hysteria. ‘If you know anything about the rumours, tell these people. Please.’
Aritomo looked away from him and lifted his head at Yap. ‘I am a gardener, not a soldier.’
‘Yamashita gold.’ Panic, and perhaps a desire to let the CTs know he was trying his best, made Inoki switch to English. ‘This we hear. Many time. The gold, Nakamura-san, the gold General Yamashita steal. Yamashita gold. Yes? Yes?’
‘All nonsense,’ Aritomo said. ‘Just rumours.’
Yap pointed his pistol at Inoki; the Japanese started keening, pulling at Aritomo’s shirtfront. Aritomo made no movement, but continued to hold Yap’s gaze. My eyes jumped from Aritomo to Yap, to Inoki, and back to Yap again. The CT commander’s expression was gentle.
He shot Inoki in the head. Emily screamed. Blood and flesh and bits of bone splattered the chairs and the floorboards of the dining room. I felt something warm and wet sticking to my face, but I fought the urge to wipe it away. In the kitchen, the wailing of the servants became hysterical.
Through the ringing in my ears, I heard a man shouting at them, followed by the sounds of hard slapping. The crying weakened to low moans.
Yap turned his pistol on me.
‘I know the area where Japs hid the gold. I’ll take you there.’ All of us stared at Magnus.
Emily cried out softly, gripping his arm.
‘Do not be stupid, Magnus,’ Aritomo said.
‘Where is it?’ Yap asked.
‘In the Blue Valley. A few miles north of the river.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘I heard it from Colonel Hayashi. I used to go hunting with him. He told me about the gold. Even pointed out the hill to me. They buried a stash of guns there too. I don’t know if it’s Yamashita’s gold or not.’
‘You never looked for the gold yourself?’ Yap asked.
‘For god’s sake, the man was piss-drunk! He was always talking rubbish anyway.’
‘Magnus... ’ said Aritomo.
A man ran into the kitchen and whispered into Yap’s ear. Yap listened, frowned and then said, ‘You... ’ he waved his pistol at Magnus. ‘Get up, old man!’
Moving with difficulty, Magnus pushed himself to his feet. Emily clung to him, moaning and shaking her head wildly. I grabbed her arm but she shook free of me, her elbow hitting my face as she flailed about. Magnus embraced her, murmuring
to her, and she went limp in his arms. He kissed her, then pushed her away gently. He looked at Aritomo, then me. Emily stood there, her arms hanging down her sides as the terrorists left the house, taking Magnus with them.
* * *
Emily ran out through the front door, Aritomo and I following behind her. The sickly whine of sirens came up the driveway about fifteen minutes after the CTs had gone. ‘They’ve taken Magnus,’ she cried even before the police got out from their vans. ‘The Blue Valley, they’ve taken him there.’
A muscle in my leg erupted into spasms. A moment later I was shivering. Aritomo brought me back into the house and made me sit down in a chair in the hallway. ‘Breathe,’ he said, rubbing my back with long, hard strokes. After a few minutes I stopped shaking. He dug out his handkerchief and wiped my face with it.
‘Was Magnus – was he telling the truth about the gold?’ I asked.
‘Hayashi was a drunkard – that much is true. And he did go hunting with Magnus once or twice. But if the gold is there, hidden in the Blue Valley, it would be the last thing Hayashi would have revealed to Magnus, drunk or not. Magnus and his friends have been searching that area for years.’
The police came into the house and I recognised Sub-Inspector Lee. One of the workers had seen a group of terrorists entering Majuba, Lee told me. The man had run out to the main road and got a lift from a lorry into Tanah Rata. The police questioned every one of us who had been in the house during the attack. Two of the assistant managers and a tea picker had been hacked to death by the CTs. Harper’s bungalow had been ransacked, but he was spending the night with the wife of a tin miner in Tanah Rata. The Gurkha sentry was found tied to a tree with barbed wire, his kukri buried in his chest.
Emily’s fears and panic increased as the hours passed. ‘Why are you all still here?’ she shouted at Lee. ‘What are you doing to find my husband?’
‘KOYLI jungle patrols are already sweeping the hills around Majuba and the Blue Valley,’ Lee replied, referring to the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. ‘We’re doing everything we can, Mrs Pretorius.’
