by Tan Twan Eng
‘Do you know of anyone who has?’
‘I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.’
Behind Frederik, a hot-air balloon drifts into my sight, bright red and shaped like an inverted teardrop. Frederik follows my gaze, twisting around to look over his shoulder. ‘Some chap from KL brought it up here a week ago,’ he said. ‘He gives rides to tourists. I was told a popular route is the area around Yugiri.’
The balloon rotates slowly towards us. Wrapped around its side are the words MAJUBA TEA ESTATE and the estate’s logo, an outline of a Cape Dutch house. I groan with mock disgust when I see it.
‘Oh come on, it’s good advertising!’ Frederik says.
‘I’ll shoot it down if they dare fly over Yugiri.’
He laughs, causing several people around to look at us. ‘Remember that story about the Mid-Autumn Festival Emily used to tell every year?’ he says, wiping the tears from his eyes.
‘Hou Yi who shot down the suns with his bow and arrows? And his wife who swallowed the magic pill and became immortal?’
‘Poor, poor Hou Yi, yearning for the wife he had lost to the moon,’ I say. ‘He should have made himself forget her.’
‘Perhaps he couldn’t,’ replies Frederik. ‘Perhaps he didn’t want to.’
* * *
At five o’clock that evening I change into my walking clothes: a long-sleeved shirt, loose cotton slacks and hiking boots. Ah Cheong is already waiting at the front door. The housekeeper, having realised early on that I have taken up Aritomo’s habit of going for evening walks on the trails, never fails to appear with the walking stick for me whenever he hears me getting ready. I have never accepted the walking stick, but it has not deterred him from offering it to me every time.
There are thirteen official walking trails spreading out from the three villages in Cameron Highlands, varying in length and difficulty. There are also many more paths that do not appear on maps, known only to forest rangers and those who have spent their lives in the highlands. One of them winds past the edge of the property. It will take me less than an hour to complete the walk and, at this time of the year, I will be unlikely to come across anyone else.
The heaviness inside me lifts as I walk. Above my head, the overlapping leaves print their shadows on other leaves. The smell of mulch is softened by the fragrance of wild orchids.
Aerial roots sprout from the branches of banyan trees; some of the older roots have hardened into stalactites over the years to prop up the sagging branches. Except for the track beneath my feet, there are no other signs that anyone else has been here before me, and within minutes I feel myself being absorbed into the damp, decaying heart of the rainforest.
The path is steep and demanding. At a ridge looking down into the valleys, I stop to recover my breath. The old sense of injustice stings me again: I would have been a more robust woman if my health had not been damaged in the camp. When my neurosurgeon first informed me of the diagnosis, I asked him if it was caused by the deprivations I had suffered, a seed that had been sown forty years ago, slowly burrowing its poisoned roots deeper and deeper into my body. ‘We don’t know for sure,’ he said, ‘but it’s doubtful.’
A part of me cannot help but continue to wonder about it. Aphasia. Such a beautiful name, I think as I sit on the stump of a mahogany tree. It reminds me of a species of flower: Camellia perhaps. No: more like Rafflesia, attracting hordes of flies with the smell of rotting meat when it blooms.
My thoughts return to Tatsuji’s theories about Golden Lily. If he is correct and Tominaga Noburu was the head of Golden Lily in South East Asia, then I have no doubts that the camp I was sent to was part of it all. But where would that place Aritomo in the entire scheme of things?
Is Tatsuji right in thinking that Aritomo was sent here to lay the groundwork for Golden Lily’s plans?
A sudden fury against Aritomo grips me. My fingers claw into the sides of the mahogany trunk. The rage subsides after a moment.
I stand up and brush the dirt from the seat of my slacks. It is getting dark. In the low mists over the hills, an orange glow broods, as if the trees are on fire. Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly.
Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?
Chapter Twenty-Four
A garden is composed of a variety of clocks, Aritomo had once told me. Some of them run faster than the others, and some of them move slower than we can ever perceive. I only understood this fully long after I had been his apprentice. Every single plant and tree at Yugiri grew, flowered and died at its own rate. Yet there was also a feeling of timelessness wrapped around it. The trees from a colder world – the oaks, the maples and the cedars – had adjusted to the constant rains and mists, to the seasonless passing of time in the mountains. The turning of their colours was muted. Only the maple growing by the house remembered the changing seasons in the expanding circles of its memory; its leaves had turned completely red, flaking away from the branches to drift across the garden: I would often find the leaves plastered to the wet rocks on the banks of Usugumo Pond, like starfish stranded by the tide.
Whenever I left Yugiri to go into the village of Tanah Rata, I would be disorientated by how much time had passed. When I came to the Cameron Highlands, I had left the world behind, thinking it would only be for a short time, but one day it struck me that I had been apprenticed to Aritomo for over a year. I mentioned this to him.
‘It was Magnus who first told me the story of the Garden of Eden. I had great difficulty imagining it,’ he remarked. ‘A garden where nothing dies or decays, where no one grows old, and the seasons never change. How miserable.’
‘What’s so miserable about that?’
‘Think of the seasons as pieces of the finest, most translucent silk of different colours.
Individually, they are beautiful, but lay one on top of another, even if just along their edges, and something special is created. That narrow strip of time, when the start of one season overlaps the end of another, is like that.’
He was silent for a few moments. Then he asked, ‘What happened to the Garden of Eden after the man and woman were forced to leave? Did everything fall to ruin? The Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge? Or is it all still there, unchanged, waiting?’
I tried to recall what the nuns at my school had taught me. ‘I don’t know. It’s just a story.’
He looked at me. ‘When the First Man and First Woman were banished from their home, Time was also set loose upon the world.’
* * *
Kannadasan and his men appeared at Yugiri one morning, and I knew that the monsoon was over. There was much damage to clear up: tree branches had been amputated by storms; leaves and debris swept down from the mountains, clogging the stream and flooding its banks. I was happy to be able to channel my attention and energies into the garden again. Soon we were occupied with only the lesser tasks – cleaning up the paths, making slight adjustments to the alignments of rocks, trimming the branches, anything that Aritomo felt had been thrown out of harmony.
In the evenings he would collect his walking stick from Ah Cheong, and we would walk in the foothills behind the garden. I enjoyed those moments, when he showed me things I would have missed seeing on my own. ‘Nature is the best teacher,’ he said to me.
Requests began to come from senior civil servants and high-ranking military officials, asking to be given a tour of Yugiri. To my surprise, Aritomo agreed to most of them, although he always asked me to lead these tours and show the visitors around. By now my knowledge of garden design was sufficient, but I knew I would require many more years of study with Aritomo.
I was raking the lawn in front of his house one afternoon when I sense
d him coming up to me. For a few minutes he observed me silently. I continued with my task; I was no longer nervous when he scrutinised my work.
‘How does Yugiri compare to your other gardens?’ I asked.
‘They have probably been ruined by coarse, unskilled hands,’ he said. ‘This one here’ –
he looked around us – ‘this is the only one that is still truly mine.’
‘You can design more gardens here in Malaya. Adapt the principles of the Art of Setting Stones to our climate,’ I said. ‘We’ll work together, you and I. We can start by creating the garden I want for Yun Hong.’
‘I had a letter from Sekigawa today,’ he said. ‘The Bureau has sent him to see me.’
I swept the leaves into a gunnysack and laid the rake on the ground. ‘What will you tell him?’
He looked at me with the steadiness of the sun contemplating its own reflection in the sea. ‘I will tell him that my home is here, in these mountains.’
For a long moment we merely gazed at each other. Then I held up the gunnysack to him.
‘The garden is now perfect.’
Taking the sack from me, he reached inside it and pulled out a handful of brown, withered leaves. He stepped onto the lawn and scattered them, as though he was a gust of wind.
When the last leaf had fallen from his hand, he returned the sack to me and stood back to look at what he had made.
That night, when he tattooed me, his hands felt slower, heavier. Once or twice his fingers would rest on my back, like a dragonfly poised on a leaf. It was past midnight when he stopped and sat back on his heels. Outside, frogs belched in the grass. A moment later I felt him touching me lightly on my shoulder.
‘It is done,’ he said.
My eyes took a second or two to focus. I pushed myself off the tatami mat and got to my feet. I looked over my shoulder and examined my body in the mirror, searching for the last tattoo he had coloured in: the rounded shape of Majuba House, an ark floating on the green swells of tea. The horimono faded away into the bare skin around my neck, my upper arms, the sides of my body and just above the swell of my buttocks.
I turned my body until I could see my entire back in the mirror. I looked as though I was wearing an overly tight batik shirt. I moved one shoulder, causing the figures on it to elongate.
All of a sudden I was frightened.
‘You have a new skin now.’ He circled me, as he had once done almost a year before, when his fingers had examined my blank skin.
‘But it’s not complete – there’s still this bit here.’ I touched a rectangle the size of two cigarette packs above my left hip. The emptiness looked unnatural, sickly.
‘A horoshi will always leave a section of the horimono empty, as a symbol that it is never finished, never perfect,’ said Aritomo, wiping his hands on a towel.
‘Like the leaves you scattered on the lawn,’ I said.
* * *
Even though the garden in Yugiri was completed, there was always some maintenance work to be done. Aritomo delegated most of the chores to me, telling me what he wanted done by the gardeners, elaborating on the reasons for each instruction.
Walking past the archery hall one evening after the workers had left, I saw him there, dressed in his kyudo clothes. Since I had known him he had never practised archery this late in the day; there was also something strange in the way he stood that made me stop and watch. My puzzlement increased when I saw him pretend to nock an arrow in the bowstring. He drew the bowstring back, and then released it. There was no arrow, but still I thought I heard the faint sound of paper being ripped, as though something forceful had pierced the target.
He remained unmoving, one arm still stretched out, holding the bow level with his eyes.
Finally, he lowered it, bringing a note of completion to the entire movement. He continued to stare at the target, and then he nodded his head once in satisfaction, as though he had hit its exact centre.
I walked along the edge of the gravel bed to stand below him. ‘Did you hit the bulls-eye?’
I asked.
He looked back at the target. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘It couldn’t have been too difficult, since you didn’t use an arrow,’ I said, masking my confusion in a gently mocking tone.
‘But you are wrong. It takes years of practice. When I first started, I always missed,’ he said. ‘And there was an arrow.’
‘There was no arrow,’ I replied, restraining myself from turning to look at the target to be certain.
‘There was.’ He touched the side of his head. ‘In here.’
He began to spend more of his time in the shajo, shooting invisible arrows. And every night he would ask me to let him look at the horimono. I lay on the sheets as he studied my skin, his fingers stroking the pictures he had painted on my back: the temple in the mountains, the cave of the swiftlets, the archer shooting down the sun. After a few minutes of this I would turn around and pull him towards me.
* * *
It was late in the evening, and Aritomo and I were the only people left in the garden. A silence welled up from deep inside the earth. I remained completely still, hoping that this caul of tranquillity would never be pulled away from the world. Then the clouds started moving again, and the mists sagged and squandered themselves over the foothills.
I cleaned my tools and hung them up in the shed. I went past the shajo. It was empty. At the front door of the house I found Ah Cheong, the chengal walking stick in his hand. Kerneels sat on a step, licking his paw. Aritomo came out presently. He hesitated for a moment before taking the stick from the housekeeper.
We strolled to the edge of Usugumo Pond, the cat following us, his tail high in the air.
Aritomo stopped and stared out over the water. In the shallows the grey heron stood on one leg, trapped by its reflection. Behind us I heard the faint clatter of gravel as Ah Cheong pushed his bicycle out of the garden, one of its wheels squeaking.
The path Aritomo normally took to go up into the hills went past the western perimeter of the garden. At the access to the trail, concealed by the thick wall of ferns and long grass, Aritomo stopped. He bent down and rubbed Kerneels’s head. ‘I think,’ he said when he stood up, ‘I would like to be on my own this evening.’
He held out his walking stick to me. We looked at each other, and in the end I took it from him.
‘I’ll leave it in your study,’ I said.
He nodded and moved past me, touching me once, lightly, on my hand. I watched him climb up the slope, the air tinctured green by the light reflecting off the ferns. At the top of the rise he turned back to look at his garden. Perhaps he was smiling at me, but the spokes of sunlight behind him made it difficult for me to be certain. I lifted my hand to my chest. Was I waving to him? Or was I summoning him to come back?
* * *
The best chance of finding Aritomo was within the first twenty-four hours of his disappearance, Sub-Inspector Lee advised me the next morning when I drove to the station in Tanah Rata. He questioned me about Aritomo’s state of mind and asked me what he was wearing. He requested a photograph of him, and it was only then that I realised I did not have one.
The police used Yugiri as their base of operations. One wall of Aritomo’s study was pinned with maps provided by the army. Ah Cheong was kept occupied with preparing food for the men who tramped in and out of the house at all hours of the day.
‘I found this on his desk,’ I said handing a bottle to Lee. ‘His pills. For his blood pressure.’
The large number of people who joined the search parties surprised me. I mentioned this to Lee, and he said, ‘They are people he saved from torture by the Kempeitai or from being taken to the Burma Railway.’
Our hopes weakened when days passed without the search parties coming across any signs of Aritomo. ‘The rains haven’t helped – our dogs can’t pick up any trace of his scent,’ Sub-Inspector Lee said, ‘and the Ibans have had no success tracking him.’
The local newspa
pers ignored Aritomo’s disappearance at first; it was just another hiker who had got lost in the jungle, after all. But after a Japanese journalist writing about the communists in the mountains filed a report with his newspaper in Tokyo, the reporters began to flock to Tanah Rata. They made much of the fact that I was the last person to have seen Aritomo.
My experience as a prisoner of the Japanese was brought up, as was my relationship with Aritomo. My father ordered me to leave Cameron Highlands immediately before I damaged our family name beyond repair, but I ignored him.
A week after the search for Aritomo had begun, Sekigawa showed up. I was on the verandah, paging through my notebook when Ah Cheong brought him to me. I recalled that we had met on the same spot over a year before – just before Aritomo started my horimono.
‘You must let me know if there is any way I can help,’ he said. ‘I will be at the Smokehouse Hotel for as long as is required.’
‘What was it you wished to see Aritomo about?’
‘It would be better for me to speak to him personally,’ he replied. ‘I am sure he will be found soon.’
‘Of course he will.’
Sekigawa’s gaze swept across the garden in front of the verandah, and then back into the interior of the house. ‘Did he leave a note, a letter? For me, or for anyone else?’
‘He didn’t know that he was going to get himself lost in the jungle, Mr Sekigawa,’ I said.
‘Anyway, as you have said, he’ll be found soon.’
He did not stay long. I opened my notebook again after he left, turning to the page where I had placed the thin blue envelope. Kerneels came out and rubbed against me. I held up the envelope and looked at it, this letter written by a Japanese war criminal to his son. I set it down on the table, making a mental note to get Ah Cheong to post it the next morning.
My tea had cooled. I threw it over the verandah and poured a fresh cup. Still sitting in the seiza position, I shifted my body and turned towards the garden and the trees, to the mountains and the clouds. I lifted the cup, dipped my head once, and drank.
