The Garden of Evening Mists

by Tan Twan Eng

  The moment the police left, Emily shut the door and turned to face Aritomo and me.

  ‘Magnus told me you’ve been paying the CTs to stay away from Yugiri,’ she said. ‘No, don’t you dare pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about! You hear me? Don’t you dare!’

  ‘Majuba was included in the deal,’ Aritomo said. ‘They’ve changed the rules, Emily. The agreement is broken.’

  She took a step closer to Aritomo. ‘I want... ’ fissures spread into her voice. She gripped the back of a chair, lifting her chin to Aritomo. ‘I want my husband back,’ she said carefully. ‘I’ll pay them whatever they want. Just tell them to bring Magnus back to me.’

  * * *

  At the western boundary of Yugiri, I watched Aritomo climb up the fern-covered slope and fade into the dappled shadows of the jungle. I wanted to follow, but he refused. I sat down on a tree root to wait.

  He returned about two hours later, his shirt dark with patches of perspiration, his arms and face bleeding from scratches. I stood and waited for him to speak, to tell me that Magnus was safe and was on his way home.

  ‘They have gone,’ he said. ‘The camp was abandoned.’

  Despair hollowed me. ‘You’ll have to tell Emily you couldn’t find him.’

  On our way back to Majuba we walked past his house. Pieces of broken furniture and vases and torn-up books were beached on the lawn outside. Was it only this morning that the CTs had come into Yugiri, into the house? Something half-buried among the litter caught my eye. I picked it up. The ink painting of Lao Tzu had been ripped from its frame and torn in half.

  Aritomo took it from me and gazed at it.

  ‘When Yap pointed his gun at me, what would you have said if Magnus had not spoken up?’ I said, keeping my eyes on the damaged painting.

  There was what felt to me like a long silence before Aritomo spoke again. ‘I would have told him the same thing I had already said – Yamashita’s gold is only a rumour.’ His attention, I saw, was also fixed on the painting. Perhaps we were even staring at the same spot on it.

  His reply disappointed me, but I accepted that it was the only thing he could have said.

  We were in the middle of a war, and logic and reason had no place in it.

  ‘Special Branch told me that Magnus had been paying the CTs to stay away from Majuba.’

  He screwed shut his eyes, rubbing them with his thumb and forefinger. ‘Magnus is an honourable man, Yun Ling. He always has been. He refused to even consider the idea of it when I raised it with him.’

  ‘But you paid those bastards –’

  ‘I could not let anyone disrupt my work in the garden,’ he said. ‘I could not.’

  ‘No garden is worth that.’

  ‘It also meant you were protected,’ he said. ‘They could have killed you when they came for you that night. Stay here. Clean up the house. I have to see Emily. ’ He handed the torn painting back to me. ‘And leave that on my desk.’

  * * *

  The KOYLI patrols found no signs of Magnus or the terrorists. More troops were despatched into the jungle, guided by Iban trackers from Sarawak. Planters and friends of Magnus formed search parties, but their efforts were hampered by the rains. Whenever the weather cleared momentarily, Dakota airplanes circled the mountains and skimmed over the treetops, the speakers mounted on their wings hailing out offers of amnesty and rewards in Mandarin and Malay for the safe return of Magnus. I tracked down Frederik and told him the news over the telephone.

  ‘I’ll try and get leave and come,’ he said.

  I hung up the telephone, then picked it up again and called my father. ‘Are you all right?’

  he asked. ‘I’ve been trying to ring you.’

  ‘You heard what happened?’

  ‘Your brother was told about it this morning.’

  ‘Can Hock do anything to find Magnus? I’m sure he has informers and contacts among the CTs’

  ‘I’ll ask him. Templer’s throwing everything he has at them.’ He paused for a moment.

  ‘By the way, I’m going to London with the Merdeka delegation. We’re leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘How long will you be gone?’

  ‘A month. Maybe longer. Depends on how the meetings go. They look promising. Don’t tell anyone yet, but we might be looking at independence within five years.’

  ‘Who’s taking care of Mother?’

  ‘The servants. And Hock, of course.’

  ‘Is there any improvement?’

  ‘No. She’s still the same. You’ve moved back to Majuba House?’ He sounded hopeful.

  ‘I’m keeping Emily company.’

  ‘I see. Tell her we’re all praying for Magnus’s safe return.’

  After we hung up, I realised he had not asked me to leave Cameron Highlands. For some reason his omission disappointed me.

  The ridgebacks were removed from the house and placed outside wrapped in a rubber sheet but Emily refused to allow them to be buried. The smell was awful, and Ah Yan, the oldest and most superstitious servant, begged me to do something.

  ‘Magnus will want to do it when he comes home,’ Emily said when I spoke to her.

  I looked at her. ‘Of course, Emily.’

  The stench worsened. When Frederik drove up from Kuala Lumpur I got him to help me move Brolloks and Bittergal down to the lower terrace. In a far corner where the trees hid us from the house, we dug two holes in the ground and buried the dogs.

  ‘I’ve wanted to ask Magnus where he got their names from,’ I said as I tamped the soil with my shovel.

  ‘The dogs? They’re from a fairy tale. My father told me about it when I was a boy.

  Brolloks and Bittergal, two monsters in the Karoo who ate children. He used them to scare me whenever I was naughty.’ He touched the mound of earth with his foot. ‘Poor buggers.’

  It started to rain again. ‘Let’s go inside.’

  We were drying off in front of the fire in the living room when we heard the telephone in the study begin to ring. Someone answered it. I glanced at Frederik, and we went out to the corridor. The door to the study opened a few minutes later. Emily looked at us as though she had no idea who we were or what we were doing in her house. Slowly the confusion in her eyes cleared up.

  ‘They’ve found him,’ she said.

  * * *

  Coming around the bend in the path, I saw Aritomo kneeling by a hedge of cannas. I stopped and watched him. He plucked and pulled out the vegetation with a practised hand, his fingers as nimble as the lips of a deer stripping away young leaves from a branch. I thought back to the first time I had seen him, at the archery range. He was the beating heart of the garden, I thought.

  Without him, the whole place would eventually fall to ruin.

  He looked up and struggled to his feet. I offered my hand to him, troubled by how much older he seemed. ‘Magnus is dead,’ I said.

  His face, even his whole body, sagged. He dropped the crumpled cannas, brushing the bits of leaves and petals from his hands.

  I told him how a Chinese vegetable farmer returning from Ipoh had seen something lying in the grass by the side of the road. He did not stop his lorry, but drove directly to the police station in Tanah Rata. As I talked, the tears came, but I kept my eyes open. Aritomo put his arms around me and pulled me to him. We stood like that for a long time, among the stalks of flowers he had broken off and discarded.

  The funeral was held on a Saturday afternoon. The planters and their families, the workers, people in the highlands and across the country who had known him, all gathered on the terrace lawn where Magnus used to hold his braais. Messages of condolence came from all over Malaya, including one from the High Commissioner and his wife. My father sent a telegram from London, asking me to give Emily pek khim, the white envelope of money for the family of the deceased. At the funeral service I stood next to Aritomo. Once or twice I reached out to touch his arm, but he was staring into the distance, his body rigid. I forced back my tears when


  ‘ Und ob die wolke’ was played for Magnus one last time. And if the clouds...

  Magnus was buried in the garden behind Majuba House, next to the grave of his daughter. Aritomo slipped away during the wake. From the corner of my eye I watched him leave, but I did not follow him.

  He returned to Majuba House with a large cardboard box later that evening, his eyes squinting with fatigue. Inside the box lay three of his paper lanterns, bigger than those he had made for Emily at the Mid-Autumn Festival, their tops covered and sealed. He explained what I had to do, then turned around and slowly walked home.

  Halfway through dinner, Emily got up from the table and left the dining room. I made to follow her but she shook her head, loosening the tears from her eyes to slide down her cheeks.

  Frederik touched my arm, and I sat back into my chair.

  We found her sitting at the piano later, her shoulders bent over it. Her fingers moved above the keys, as though she was trying to remember the notes to the piece of music she had been playing. She glanced at us when we came in, and then stared down to the keys again.

  ‘There’s something we’d like you to see,’ I said, but she made no sign that she had heard me. She pressed the keys, the notes discordant in the silence.

  ‘Just for a few minutes, Emily,’ Frederik said. ‘Please.’

  She stood up slowly and we walked her out to the terrace behind the house, all the way to the balustrade. The smell of dew was sharp and clean. There was no moon. The lights of the bungalows and cottages gave a vague sense of shape to the ridges and valleys far below us. I lit the lanterns Aritomo had given me, the candles illuminating the wrinkles in the rice paper. I chose one and raised it high, spilling its glow onto our faces.

  In the valleys more points of light pricked out from the darkness, clumped together like luminous seeds in some places, solitary or far apart in others but, taken together, there were so many that it was impossible to count them all.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Emily.

  ‘They’re lanterns, like these,’ I said. ‘Aritomo made them. For Magnus.’

  The lantern tugged at my hand. I gave it to her. Frederik took another lantern. I picked up the last one and looked at my watch. At precisely eight o’clock I said, ‘Let it go, Emily.’

  She closed her eyes briefly, and released her lantern. It hovered in the air for a few seconds and then it began to rise, swaying upwards like a phosphorescent jellyfish. Across the valleys, countless lanterns were being set free, light streaking up into the darkness. Frederik and I let go of ours at the same time, and I felt his hand close over mine. Above the dark, formless trees in Yugiri a single bubble of light drifted upwards, leaning away from the high winds. Emily acknowledged it with a slight nod, tears shining on her cheeks.

  Some of the lanterns soon entered the clouds, flickering like distant lightning. Others sailed further and further away, herded by the wind into the far mountains. I made a silent wish that they would never fall to earth.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  In the last four days the words have refused to come to me when I call for them and I can only stare at the paper. When they do leak from my pen, I am unable to make sense of them. Only when I work at night am I untroubled by spells of word-blindness. So I go on, writing as much as I can before I fall asleep.

  Since midnight I have been sitting at the desk, working over the pages in which I had set down the events in the internment camp, making changes to my choice of words and the structure of my sentences. I am wearing my cardigan, but the study is cold, and my fingers hurt.

  I get up from my chair and walk around the room, massaging my neck. My body is sore, but it is a wonderful kind of soreness, resulting from hard, physical work: I have started practising kyudo again. After a few sessions I can feel the old lessons I have learned returning to me.

  Going back to my desk, I turn a few pages and read over what I have written. Even monkeys fall from trees. Yes, I am quite certain that was what Fumio said to me, before he cut my fingers off.

  Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.

  There are moments when, remembering what happened, I am unable to continue writing.

  What troubles me more than anything, however, are the instances when I cannot recall with certainty what has taken place. I have spent most of my life trying to forget, and now all I want is to remember. I cannot remember what my sister looked like; I do not even have a picture of her.

  And my conversation with Aritomo by Usugumo Pond, on that night of the meteor shower... did it take place on the day of Templer’s visit or did it occur on a different evening entirely? Time is eating away my memory. Time, and this illness, this trespasser in my brain.

  * * *

  The bell at the front gate has been ringing through the house for some time. I am in the study, rearranging the books on the shelves. I call out to Ah Cheong, then remember that he has taken the day off. I wait, hoping that whoever it is will give up and leave. The sign at the entrance has not deterred anyone. The past week has seen an increase in the number of people coming to Yugiri, all of them hoping to be allowed in. A local film crew shooting a documentary on Aritomo’s life tried to see me but I turned them away.

  Setting down a pile of books on the floor, I massage the pain in my lower back and look around me. It was in this room that Aritomo asked to incise the tattoos on me. The bamboo birdcage is still here, and the same paintings still line the same wall. There is a discoloured space where my sister’s painting used to hang before he gave it to me.

  Voices can be heard from outside, growing louder. I leave the study and go to the front door. Vimalya is talking to two Chinese women just below the verandah. One of them is shaven headed and dressed in a faded grey robe. Perhaps she is a little younger than me; I find it difficult to tell. A woman stands next to her. Vimalya looks up at me when I come out. ‘They were at the gate when I got here.’

  ‘Thank you, Vimalya.’

  ‘Oh, one other thing, Judge Teoh – can you recommend me books on Japanese gardening?’

  ‘I’ll lend you some.’

  She leaves us, and I turn back to the women. In English, the nun says, ‘My name is Chin Lai Kew.’ Three round scars in a vertical line mark her forehead, branded into her skin by a joss-stick when she took her vows. ‘Mrs Wong was kind enough to drive me here today.’

  ‘Emily told me about you,’ I say. ‘Come and sit inside.’

  ‘No need- lah.’ The nun turns to her companion and in Mandarin says, ‘Can you wait by the pond? I won’t take up too much of Judge Teoh’s time.’ When the woman has left us, the nun says, ‘We’ve met before, you know, in the Temple of Clouds.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Mr Aritomo asked me to say some prayers for his friend. You were with him that day.’

  Like a paper rubbing of the inscriptions on an old gravestone, the memory of her face I saw that morning almost forty years ago slowly takes shape, blurry and ill-defined. ‘You were –’

  ‘So young then?’ The nun smiles, revealing a gap in her teeth. ‘So were you. But we didn’t feel young at all, did we?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ An instant later I understand.

  The bracelet of jade beads on her wrist makes soft clicking noises as she rubs them. ‘I was jugan ianfu.’

  I glance back into the house, not certain if I want to hear what she has to say.

  ‘There were twelve of us, captured from all over the country,’ the nun continues. ‘I was thirteen years old – the youngest there. The oldest was nineteen or twenty. The soldiers kept us in the convent in Tanah Rata – they had turned it into their base. I was there for two months.

  Then one day they let me go. Just like that. I went home to Ipoh. But everyone knew what the Japanese had done to me. What
man would want me to be his wife? My father was so ashamed of me, he sold me to a brothel. But I ran away. I went to another town, but somehow people knew. They always knew. One day, I heard a woman talking about a temple in Cameron Highlands. The temple had taken in a few women like me. I went up there. I’ve never left.’

  Remembering how derelict and abandoned it had looked, I ask, ‘The temple – is it still there?’

  ‘We look after it as best we can,’ she says, then falls silent for a while before explaining the reason for her visit. ‘A few years after Mr Aritomo had gone, I found out that during the Occupation, he had been to see the regional commander to have all of the jugan ianfu in Tanah Rata released. The commander agreed to let four of the youngest girls go.’

  Aritomo never told me.

  ‘I wanted to tell you this when he disappeared,’ the nun says, ‘but you had already left.

  And you never came back.’

  ‘I’m glad you decided to come to see me.’

  ‘I had another reason.’

  ‘You want to see the garden.’

  ‘Garden?’ For a second she looks perplexed. ‘Oh! No- lah. No. But Mr Aritomo once told me that he had a painting of Lao Tzu. I would like to see it, if it is still here.’

  ‘It’s still here. Like your temple.’

  I take her into the house, to the ink drawing painted by Aritomo’s father. The nun stands before the old sage. There is a tear in the middle of the drawing, but it has been so skilfully mended it is almost unnoticeable.

  ‘ When the work is done, it is time to leave,’ the nun says softly. ‘ That is the Way of the Tao.’

  I have read the Tao Te Ching many times by now, and the words are familiar to me.

  ‘Aritomo’s work wasn’t done when he left.’

  The nun turns to me, and smiles: not at me, but at the world itself. ‘Ahhh... Can you be certain of that?’