by Tan Twan Eng
Frederik’s eyes sweep the edges of the room. ‘Make your arrangements with Tatsuji to preserve the tattoos but, please, get yourself treated. There’s nothing shameful about a tattoo these days,’ he says. ‘So what if you’re a judge? You’ve retired. If people want to talk, then to hell with them! Go for treatment, and come back here to recuperate, to live. There’s a good nursing home in Tanah Rata you can go to, Yun Ling, people who can take care of you.’
‘Spend my declining days in an elephant’s graveyard?’ I say.
‘You can move into Majuba House.’ He attempts a smile, to make what he is going to say next sound irreverent, trivial, but he fails. ‘I’ll look after you.’
‘I didn’t come back here hoping that you’d offer to do that for me, Frederik,’ I say.
A tear slides down his cheek. I reach over and wipe it away with the back of my fingers.
‘The horimono is a part of what happened to me. It’s what Aritomo gave me. I have a duty to make sure it’s kept safe.’
As I walk out of Majuba House later, holding the unlit paper lantern in my hand, I hear the Larghetto from Chopin’s piano concerto.
Sometime during the night Emily died, Frederik informs me the following day. She went to sleep and never woke up, drifting away from the shore on the music Magnus used to play for her every night.
* * *
Ah Cheong is waiting when I step outside the house. He gives me the box of matches and the packet of joss-sticks I asked him to buy. As usual he holds up the walking stick to me. I hesitate, and then take it. If he is surprised, if he feels vindicated by his patience, he does not show it.
‘It’s late,’ I tell him. ‘Go home.’
The trees shading the path to Majuba hum with cicadas, like tuning forks that have been struck again and again. The air smells of the earth soothed by rain. At Majuba House a maid informs me that Frederik is still at his office.
I walk around to the back. I stop when I see the pair of statues, Mnemosyne and her nameless twin sister. The Goddess of Memory has remained unchanged but, to my dismay, her sister’s face is almost worn smooth, her features rubbed away. Perhaps it is caused by the difference in the quality of the stone the sculptor used, but it unsettles me nonetheless.
With the walking stick in my hand, I tread carefully down the slate-tiled steps to the formal gardens. Another sign of age, this fear of falling. How I hate it.
The slave-bell arch, white as chalk, draws me towards it. A starling perched on top of it cocks its head at me. I look up at the bell, into the black iris of its clapper. My body is stiff when I reach up to touch it. The metal feels cold through my gloves, the rust sticking to my fingertips like flakes of desiccated skin.
Vimalya’s workmen have been digging up the grounds and removing the exotics, but Emily’s rose garden is still there, a bowl in the earth; Frederik has decided to leave it untouched.
At the ornamental pond, the bronze sculpture of the girl is still gazing into the water, her face more weathered now. Going behind a stand of bougainvillea trees, I enter a bower of low-hanging branches. The area around the three gravestones is well tended. Wincing at the pain in my knees, I kneel at the oldest gravestone and light three joss-sticks for Magnus’s and Emily’s daughter, inserting them into the soil. Still on my knees, I turn to Emily’s grave and do the same for her. Moving over to the last gravestone, I light three more joss-sticks for Magnus. Somehow I know that he will not mind me doing this for him.
Levering myself to my feet with the walking stick, I notice a thin, vertical stone further back in the trees, concealed in the shadows. Strange, that I had not seen it when we buried Emily.
I go closer to it. The stone is covered in lichen, but what surprises me is the sight of Aritomo’s name carved in a vertical line of kanji, the calligraphy like a thin, shallow stream flowing its way down the barren side of a mountain. No one has told me about this stone, which marks not a grave but a void.
I light three more joss-sticks and plant them into the moist patch of soil in front of it, then watch the smoke rise into the trees.
The shadow of the slave-bell tower lengthens across the lawn as I climb the stairs to the house.
The first stars of the evening are blinking to life when I sit down on a stone bench. I look across the valleys and my thoughts return to everything Tatsuji has told me since he first arrived at Yugiri.
Frederik comes out from the kitchen a moment later. ‘There you are. Come on, old woman,’ he calls out, rubbing his arms. ‘Let’s go inside. I’ve made a lekker fire.’
In the sitting room Frederik throws more pine cones into the flames and I ask him about the gravestone with Aritomo’s name on it.
‘Emily put it up a few years ago,’ he replies.
‘You should have told me.’
He looks at me. ‘I did.’
‘I...’ My voice falters, and I do not know what I wanted to say. ‘I always thought she blamed Aritomo for Magnus’s death.’
‘I think the older she got, the less she felt that way. I remember she said to me one day, “I don’t care if his body was never found. It’s not right that the man doesn’t even have a proper grave.”’
Slowly, I describe to him what Tatsuji has shown me in his sketch of Yugiri’s layout. For a while after I have finished talking there is only the sound of the fire crackling in the hearth.
‘If he’s right, if it’s a map, I can use it to find where Yun Hong was buried,’ I say. ‘But what do I accomplish in the end – assuming that I do find all of Golden Lily’s hiding places in Malaysia – assuming I’m still capable of communicating, capable of being understood?’
For years after he got lost in the mountains, I felt Aritomo had abandoned me. The only way to deal with the hurt was to distance myself from everything I had learned from him. Now, I wonder if he left me more than just the garden. Did he also leave the answer to the one question I have been asking? Would I have eventually discovered the connection between the garden and the horimono if I had not stayed away from Yugiri?
That sense of abandonment was fading, like water draining from the pond, leaving behind only sorrow for Aritomo, for the way his life had been wasted, just as mine in its own way had been. I do not want to search for my camp or the mine anymore. Yun Hong has been dead for over forty years. Locating where she was buried will not ease my guilt or undo what has been done.
‘No one must be allowed to use the horimono, Frederik.’
‘Change the garden,’ he says. ‘Obliterate everything Aritomo created in it. That will render the tattoos useless. Vimalya will help you. And I’ll send my men in too.’
‘You really hate that garden, don’t you?’ I smile at him, and for just a moment the heaviness in my chest lightens.
‘Maybe it’s always been a symbol to me of why you will never return my feelings,’
Frederik replies lightly, but it gives me a pang to realise that he is earnest.
‘I made three promises to Yun Hong,’ I say. ‘I promised her I would escape from the camp if I had the chance. That was the only promise I kept. I never built the garden we had envisioned together. And I never freed her spirit from wherever she was buried.’
Thinking of what Tatsuji told me about Golden Lily and what it did to its slave-labourers, I see in my mind’s eye Yun Hong and all the prisoners, hardened to clay like the thousands of terracotta soldiers discovered in an emperor’s tomb in northern China, buried beneath the dust of two thousand years.
Frederik kneels on the carpet in front of me and takes my hands in his. I resist the urge to pull away. ‘You told me once that Aritomo named the pavilion by the pond after your sister’s favourite poem,’ he says.
‘The Pavilion of Heaven,’ I say, almost to myself.
‘The garden for her already exists, Yun Ling. It’s been there for nearly forty years.’
I stare at him. He releases my hands, but I hold on to his.
‘We’re the only ones left from those withered days,’
he says. ‘The last two leaves still clinging on the branch, waiting to fall. Waiting for the wind to sweep us into the sky.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
On his last day in Cameron Highlands, Tatsuji arrives at Yugiri earlier than usual, bringing with him materials to pack the woodblock prints. I give him the signed contract and help him cover each of the ukiyo-e in plastic wrapping before he places them flat in an airtight box.
‘The work in the garden seems to be going well,’ he says, when the last of the ukiyo-e has been packed away and the box sealed. ‘Coming in here this morning, I can see how it must have looked when Aritomo-sensei was alive.’
‘There’s still a lot to be done. But it will be restored to the way it used to be,’ I say, ‘the way I rememberƒ it.’
‘The horimono...’
‘I’ll let you know.’
Tatsuji takes out the book of Yeats’s poems from his satchel. He looks at it, then holds it out to me. I shake my head, but he says, ‘Please, I want you to have it.’
Extending my hands, I receive the book from him. I feel we have known each other for longer than the two weeks he has spent here. We are the same, I realise. The people we loved have left us and we have been trying ever since to go on with our lives. But the one thing we cannot do is forget.
I walk him out of the garden, going past the Pavilion of Heaven by the banks of Usugumo Pond. At the entrance he gives me a deep bow. ‘Come and visit me at Kampong Penyu, when my house is completed.’
I return his bow. ‘A house on the beach, and time eternal,’ I say, knowing I will never see him again.
It is while I am practising my shooting in the shajo that the mist comes into my eyes the first time. With no signs, no warning at all, my vision turns opaque, as though words are being murmured into an empty glass bottle. Locking my fingers on the bow, I fight off the fear spreading in my limbs. I want to shout to Ah Cheong, to call for help, but I do not want anyone to hear the panic in my voice.
Control your breathing, I hear Aritomo’s voice, so clearly that he could have been standing by my side.
I do as he had taught me, without any success at first. The span between each breath coaxed in and then expelled gradually lengthens, broad lowlands dividing one mountain range from the next. Slowly the panic recedes and I begin to breathe normally again. Wiping the perspiration from my forehead with the edge of my sleeve, I rest the lower end of the bow on the floor. The sound reassures me.
Complete the shot.
The trees rustle in the wind. The arrows in the quiver-stand behind me shake softly, and I hear the shifting pebbles in the bed in front of the shajo; it sounds like someone cracking their knuckles. In my blindness I fit the arrow against the bowstring and pull it, feeling my ribs expand. I see the target in my mind as I wait for the wind to drop. A feeling of tranquillity takes hold of me and I know I can stand there in that void forever.
I release the arrow, my mind guiding it all the way to the heart of the matto in one extended exhalation. From the song of the bowstring vibrating back into silence, strong and pure, I know it is the best shot I have ever made.
For a long time I stand there. I stand there until the emptiness in my eyes fills with shapeless objects again, coalescing into the familiar forms of trees and mountains and the long gravel bed in front. Lifting a hand to my eyes, I become visible to myself once more.
I return the bow to its stand and walk back to the house, leaving the arrow embedded in the centre of the target.
The rice paper lantern Emily gave me rests on a shelf in the study. Late that night, as I am about to sit down at the desk, I stop and look at it. Rummaging in the drawers, I find a piece of paper, cut out a circle and cover the top of the lantern, sealing it with a strip of cellophane tape from a roll Tatsuji left in his workroom.
The pond is a meadow of stars. The frogs’ croaking stops when they sense my presence, then resumes a few moments later. I light the candle in the lantern and hold it in my hands. I close my eyes and see Aritomo. A woman’s face appears beneath my eyelids and I realise it is Yun Hong. She does not smile. She is not angry; she is not sad. She is only a memory.
The lantern becomes less heavy, and then there is no weight at all. I let it go, and I feel I am releasing a bird from my grasp. There is no wind tonight, and the lantern flickers upwards, a buoy of light rising higher and higher. I watch it until it disappears somewhere above the clouds.
* * *
Dawn has come when the last line is finished. I have worked through the night, rewriting, but I do not feel tired at all. Holding the sheet of paper in my hand, my thoughts remain far away in that glade of ferns where I last saw Aritomo, almost forty years ago.
There have been times when I blamed myself for not calling out to him: perhaps he would have changed his mind, gone for his walk later or on another day, and not met with whatever had befallen him. Even after having set down the events of those brief years in writing, and reading them over again, I am still not entirely certain. But I know now that, whether it was an accident or if he had done it on purpose, there was nothing I could have said or done to have prevented it.
In the rafters, a gecko clicks. I place the sheet of paper beneath all the other pages I have written, knock them into a neat stack and tie it together with string.
Something is stirring in my memory, and I remain completely still in my chair, so whatever it is that is emerging from hiding will not be frightened off. It takes shape slowly, like clouds forming.
I remember how, for a long time after Aritomo disappeared, the same dream kept recurring to me, staining my waking moments like the faintest of watermarks. I stopped having it once I moved away from Yugiri, and I forgot all about it.
In the dream I watch Aritomo walk on a path in the rainforest, pushing aside the overhanging branches and vines. Here and there the path narrows or crumbles into the river. He is not far ahead of me and I have the feeling that I am pursuing him, quietly, stealthily. Several times he slows down, as though allowing me to keep him in sight. Not once does he look back.
The path ends in a clearing, and there he stops. Slowly he turns his entire body around to face me. He looks at me, not saying anything. It is at this point that I realise I am carrying a bow, his bow. I feel it stretch and strain as I take up the stance in preparation to shoot, the stance he had taught me to perfect. I raise the heavy bow, pull the bowstring and aim straight at him, my arms, chest and stomach quivering with the effort. Still he does not move or speak.
I release the bowstring. And even though there is no arrow, still he falls. Still he falls.
Leaving the study, I walk past the ink painting of Lao Tzu. Its emptiness glows in the shadows. I stop and look at it, this drawing made by Aritomo’s father.
Lao Tzu, the disillusioned philosopher from China, had gone to the West and was never seen or heard from again. Aritomo had also set down his thoughts and his teachings before he left: he had recorded them in his garden, and he had painted them on my body.
My decision to restore the garden is the correct one, the only one I can make. I will ensure that Yugiri will remain. For my sister. When the garden is ready, I will open it to the public. I will put up a plaque by the Pavilion of Heaven, describing Yun Hong’s life. The garden will also be a living memory of what Aritomo has made. I have told Tatsuji that Aritomo’s ukiyo-e must be returned to Yugiri. I will put them on permanent exhibition here. The house will have to be repaired as well. And I have to write down as many instructions as I can for Vimalya.
I must look for Aritomo’s Sakuteiki and give it to her. So many things to do. I will be kept busy in the coming weeks and months. I remind myself to ask my secretary – my former secretary – to go to my house in KL and send Yun Hong’s watercolour to me. It will be on display to the visitors who come to see the garden.
It is right that Yun Hong will be remembered as I gradually forget and, in time, become forgotten.
The garden must continue to exist. For that to happen
, the horimono has to be destroyed after my death. I cannot entrust that responsibility to anyone, not Tatsuji, and not Frederik. I will have to do it myself.
The darkness in the sky is thinning when I go out to Usugumo Pond. A bird flies across the sky, returning to the mountains. A memory comes to me of the cave where Aritomo had taken me to see the swiftlets. I wonder if the aborigines are still harvesting the nests there, if the bamboo scaffolding they had used is still pinned to the walls; I wonder if I can find the cave again.
Perhaps the blind old monk Aritomo spoke to on his walk across the countryside when he was a young man was correct: there is no wind; the flag does not move; it is only the hearts and minds of men that are restless. But I think that, slowly and surely, the turbulent heart will soon also come to a stillness, the quiet stillness it has been beating towards all its life.
Even as I am losing myself, the garden will come back to life again. I will work in the garden, and I will visit Frederik. We will talk and laugh and weep like only old friends can. And in the evenings I will walk in the hills. Ah Cheong will be waiting at the front door, holding out Aritomo’s walking stick to me. I will take it, of course. But I know there will come a day when I will tell him that I do not want it.
Before me lies a voyage of a million miles, and memory is the moonlight I will borrow to illuminate my way.
The lotus flowers are opening in the first rays of the sun. Tomorrow’s rain lies on the horizon, but high up in the sky something pale and small is descending, growing in size as it falls. I watch the heron circle the pond, a leaf spiralling down to the water, setting off silent ripples across the garden.
Author’s Notes
With the exception of the obvious historical figures, all characters in the novel sprang from my imagination. The visit of Sir Gerald Templer and his wife to Majuba Tea Estate and Yugiri is fictional.
