by Tan Twan Eng
“He wasn’t the only one who thought so.” Magnus laughed, plucking a leaf from a bush and rolling it between his fingers under his nose.
Voices and singing floated from the tea pickers in the valley. Most of them were women, their heads shaded beneath tattered straw hats. Large wicker baskets were strapped to their backs and secured by bands across their foreheads. They collected close to fifty pounds of leaves a day, returning to the factory to unload their baskets before heading back to the slopes, going through the same routine again and again until the day ended. Looking at them, it struck me how deceptive the advertisements were that I had grown up seeing pasted on the walls of musty provision stores next to the faded posters for Tiger Beer and Chesterfield cigarettes; they had depicted voluptuous tea pickers in clean and brightly colored saris, their teeth gloriously white, their noses and ears glittering with gold rings and studs, golden bangles weighing down their wrists.
The workers I was looking at in the valley below were paid badly for doing one of the most mindless, exhausting labors ever devised. From my rambles around the estate, I knew that Magnus was a decent enough employer, providing houses for his workers and basic schooling for their children, but I realized that much of the women’s laughter and singing rising from the slopes was bitter with the harshness of their lives. These women would return every evening to their dirt-floored shacks, their eight or nine or ten children and their toddy-pickled husbands.
“A sergeant in the army told me that the day after Gurney was shot, security forces moved in and evicted everyone living in Tras,” Magnus said.
“Where’s that?”
“A squatter village close to where Gurney was killed.”
“They must have thought the villagers had been helping the CTs.”
“At least the soldiers didn’t burn their homes to the ground.” Magnus’s gaze seemed to be resting on another horizon drawn across a different, older world. “When I was on commando, I often rode past farmhouses torched by the rooinek soldiers. Sometimes the ruins still smoldered and smoke often plunged the whole veldt into a macabre twilight for days. There were dead sheep everywhere, thick with flies—the Khakis had tied them to horses and pulled them apart. Wherever we rode, the air always seemed to be vibrating with a low, constant humming. Flies made that sound.” He stroked his chest in a distracted manner. “We were filled with such fury, such hatred for the English . . . it only made us more determined to fight them to the bitter end.” His arm swept across the tea fields. “The first batch of seedlings came from the same estate in Ceylon where I had once worked as a prisoner of war. History is filled with ironies, don’t you think?”
Clouds streamed past the mountain peaks, spirits fleeing the rising sun. I imagined I could feel a stirring deep beneath the earth as it sensed the approaching light.
“I’m going home tomorrow.” I kicked a pebble and sent it skittering over the ledge. “Will you drive me to Tapah? I’ll catch a train from there.”
He glanced at me. “What will you do? Go back to your old job?”
“After the things I said about the government?”
“There are other gardeners you can get to design your garden, surely.”
“Not in Malaya. There’s nobody of Aritomo’s reputation. And I don’t want to go to Japan,” I said. “I can’t. I don’t think I ever can.” The gardener’s refusal had felled a log over my path and I had no idea what to do. “Speak to him for me, Magnus. Ask him to reconsider,” I said. “I’ve got money set aside. I’ll pay him well.”
“I’ve known him for ten years, Yun Ling. Once he’s made up his mind, he never changes it.”
On a ridge not far from us, a pair of storks, their wings edged with a singe of gray, sprang off from the treetops and flew over a hill, heading for valleys hidden from our sight. It was so quiet I could almost hear every downward sweep of their wings, fanning the thin mists into tidal patterns.
Magnus had more divisions to inspect before breakfast, and I told him I would return to Majuba House on my own. I was walking on a footpath between the tea fields and the margin of the jungle when I stopped abruptly. My eyes searched the columns of trees, but I did not know what I was looking for. Turning back to the path, I gave a start. Less than ten feet away, a figure was standing in the shadows. It started to move toward me. I took a step back, but it kept on coming. It entered a patch of sunlight, and I let out a breath of relief. It was a girl, about nine or ten years old, her face and clothes smeared with mud. She was an aboriginal, and she was crying.
“Kakak saya,” she said, her words shuddering out between her sobs. “Tolong mereka.”
“Mana?” I asked, kneeling to look into her face. I shook her shoulders gently. “Where?”
She pointed to the trees behind her. I felt the jungle press in closer. “We’ll call the police,” I said, still speaking Malay. “The mata-mata will help your sister.”
I stood up and began walking back to the house, but the girl grabbed my hand and pulled me, trying to drag me to the trees. I resisted, suspecting a CT ambush. I shaded my eyes and squinted at the slopes, but the tea pickers had not yet reached this section of the estate and there was no sign of any Home Guard. Crying more loudly, the girl yanked at my arm again. I followed her but froze when we came to the jungle fringe.
For the first time since the war ended, I was about to reenter the rain forest. I feared that if I went in I would never come out again. Before I could turn around, the girl tightened her grip on my hand and pulled me into the ferns.
Insects ground out metallic clicking sounds. The cicadas wove a mesh of noise over everything. Birdcalls hammered sharp, shiny nails into the air. It was like walking into a busy ironmonger’s workshop in the back alleys of Georgetown. Sunlight sifted down through the lattices of branches and leaves overhead, unable to sink far enough to dispel the soggy gloom at ground level. Vines hung from the branches in broad, sagging nooses. The girl took us along a narrow animal track, the stones greased with moss that threatened to send me sprawling at the slightest lapse in concentration. For fifteen, twenty minutes I followed her beneath tree ferns that spread their fronds over us, watering the light into a translucent green.
We emerged into a small clearing. The girl stopped and pointed to a bamboo shack beneath the trees, the roof covered in a balding thatch of nipah fronds. The door was half-open, but it was dark inside. We moved closer to the hut, making as little noise as possible. In the trees behind us, branches cracked and then something heavy dropped to the ground. I spun around on my heel and looked back. The trees were still. Perhaps it was only a ripened durian, its armor of thorns shredding the leaves as it fell. I became aware of another sound running beneath the noise of the jungle, a vibration pitched so low it was almost soothing. It was coming from inside the hut.
The door refused to move when I nudged it with my foot. I tried again, pushing harder this time. It swung open all the way. On the beaten-earth floor, three bodies lay in a moat of blood so dark and thick they seemed to be glued to it. Hundreds of flies crawled over their faces, distended bellies and loincloths. Their throats had been slit. The girl screamed and I clamped my palm over her mouth. She struggled, swinging her arms madly, but I held on to her tightly. The flies rose from the bodies and swarmed to the underside of the thatch roof, blackening it like an infestation of mold.
The smell of food assailed me as we approached the kitchen. Frederic and Emily were seated at the table. They stopped talking and looked up when I entered, the girl peering from behind me. Emily made us sit at the kitchen table, where a planter’s breakfast had been laid out—plates of crispy bacon, sausages and eggs, fried bread and strawberry jam. Frederik poured us tea, sweetening it heavily with condensed milk. I drank a few mouthfuls. The heat spread through my body and stilled my shivering. I told them quickly what had happened.
“Where’s Magnus?” Emily’s eyes gouged into mine.
“Still out in the fields, I think. I don’t know.”
“G
et Geoff!” she snapped at Frederik. “Tell him to find your uncle. And ring the police. And Toombs. Go!”
A maid brought out two blankets and Emily draped one over the girl’s shoulders, giving the other one to me. Frederik returned with Magnus a short while later, the dogs pushing past them to sniff at the girl’s legs. She screamed and shrank into her chair. Emily shouted at the dogs and they slunk off to a corner.
“Damn it, Yun Ling,” Magnus said, “you should have come home straightaway!”
The girl started crying again. “Don’t shout-lah, you’re scaring the poor thing,” Emily said, frowning at Magnus.
“She wanted me to follow her,” I said.
“Going into the jungle was blerrie stupid,” he said. “Blerrie stupid! Your father would cut off my balls if anything had happened to you.”
“Nothing happened to me.”
Glaring at me, he pulled out a chair and dropped into it heavily.
When Toombs arrived the girl climbed down from her seat and clung to his leg. The Protector of Aborigines got down on one knee and questioned her gently, his Malay much more fluent than mine. After a while he took her hand and brought her back to the table, telling her to finish her cup of tea. She drank a sip, then another, her eyes never leaving Toombs.
“She wouldn’t tell us her name,” Emily said.
“It’s Rohana,” Toombs said. He turned to me. “Those bodies you saw—they were her sister, brother and cousin.”
“What were they doing in the shack?” I asked.
“Not a shack, really. A hide. They were waiting for wild boars to come out at night. They left their village to go hunting two days ago. They took Rohana with them. She was playing not far from the hide yesterday evening when she heard shouting. She hid in the trees.”
“She saw what happened?” Magnus asked.
“Four CTs, two of them women,” Toombs replied, glancing at the girl. Her eyes, large and dark, stared at him over her cup. “They forced her siblings and cousin into the hide. She heard them shouting a moment later. Then screams. When the CTs came out again, they were carrying the boar her brother had shot. One of them saw her and they gave chase. Rohana ran into the jungle. She spent all night hiding.”
The police arrived an hour later, led by Sub-Inspector Lee Chun Ming. Rohana and I were questioned separately, Toombs sitting in with the girl when it came to her turn. Sub-Inspector Lee asked me to show the police the hide where we had found the bodies. We went in two cars, driving as near as we could to the spot where I had found the girl, before continuing on foot into the jungle.
Later, on our way back to Majuba House, we passed groups of tea pickers squatting by the roadside, smoking kretek cigarettes and talking among themselves, their baskets by their feet. Their eyes followed us as we drove past. News of the killings had already spread swiftly through the estate.
It was evening when Sub-Inspector Lee and his men finished questioning the estate workers. I went to my room and packed my bag. When I had finished I lay down on my bed to rest, but my mind refused to settle. I went out to the terrace. A corner of the backyard was visible from where I stood. Emily emerged from the kitchen a moment later, three joss sticks pressed between her palms. Standing in front of the red metal altar of the God of Heaven hanging on a wall, she lifted her face to the sky, raised her hands to her forehead and closed her eyes, her lips moving soundlessly. When she finished praying, she stood on her toes and inserted the joss sticks into the incense holder between the two oranges and the three little cups of tea. Strands of smoke from the joss sticks climbed up to the sky. The smell of the sandalwood incense drifted to me, lulling me into a brief moment of peace before it too dispersed with the smoke. I realized then what I had to do before I returned to Kuala Lumpur.
“Eh, where are you going?” Emily complained when she saw me walking out past the kitchen. “We’re eating dinner soon. I’m cooking char-siew tonight.”
“I won’t be long.”
Once again I followed Ah Cheong through the house, and just like before, he did not speak a word to me. We passed the room where I had sat with Aritomo on the morning we had first met, nearly a week before. The housekeeper did not stop but led me along a walkway that ran beside a small courtyard with a rock garden. He paused outside a room with a half-open sliding door and knocked softly on the door frame. Aritomo was behind his desk, arranging a pile of documents in a wooden box. He looked up at me, surprised. “Come inside,” he said.
Despite the bite in the air, the windows were open. In the distance, the mountains were receding into dusk. I looked around the room, searching for what I wanted. A bronze Buddha about a foot long reclined on the windowsill, the curve of his arm resting on his hip, gentle as the line of the mountains behind him. A black and white photograph of Emperor Hirohito in a military uniform hung on a wall; I looked away. The far end of the room was segmented by bookshelves lined with volumes of Malayan history and memoirs written by Stamford Raffles, Hugh Clifford, Frank A. Swettenham. A pair of bronze Chinese archers, about nine inches high, posed on the desk, pulling at bows that had no strings or arrows. A bamboo birdcage hung on the end of a thin rope from the ceiling, empty except for a stub of half-melted candle. The gardener appeared to be a collector of antique maps; there were framed charts of the Malay Archipelago and Southeast Asia, hand-drawn in detail by eighteenth-century Dutch, Portuguese and English explorers.
Hanging at the far end of the room was a painting of a mansion built in the Anglo-Indian style so popular in Penang. A broad verandah ran around three sides of the house, buckled into place by a portico in front. Stamped into the pediment in the center of the roof: ATHELSTANE, and below it 1899. Behind the house, the green waters of the channel separated Penang from the mainland. I remembered how proud my sister had been when she had finished the painting.
Aritomo scraped back his chair and came to stand beside me. I continued to stare at the painting. “The police questioned me about the Semai,” he said. “It must have been a terrible shock for you, discovering them like that.”
“It’s not the first time I’ve seen dead bodies.” I studied his reflection in the glass. “The smell . . . I thought I had forgotten the smell. But one never does.”
He reached out a hand to adjust the tilt of the frame. “Your home?”
“My grandfather built it.”
The house had stood at the eastern end of Northam Road, a long stretch shaded by angsana trees and lined with the mansions of high-ranking colonial officials and wealthy Chinese. “Old Mr. Ong was our neighbor,” I said, no longer seeing the house in the painting but in my memory. “He had started out as a bicycle repairman before becoming one of the wealthiest men in Asia. And it all happened because he fell in love with a girl.” I smiled, remembering what my mother had once told Yun Hong and me. “Old Mr. Ong wanted to marry the girl, but her father refused to allow it. His was an old, wealthy family, and he looked down on the illiterate bicycle repairman. He told him to leave his home and never bother them again.”
Aritomo crossed his arms over his chest. “Did he?”
“It took only four years for Ong to become a very rich man. He built his house directly across the road from the girl’s family home. It was the biggest house on Northam Road. And the ugliest as well, my mother always said.” I looked at myself in the glass. My eyes were shadowed, sunken into my face. “Ong didn’t let anyone know he owned it. The afternoon after he moved in, he had his chauffeur drive him across the road in his silver Daimler. He spoke to the girl’s father again and asked for her hand in marriage once more. Her father, naturally, gave his permission. The wedding took place a month later. It was the most lavish the island had ever witnessed, so the old people used to say.”
“One of the things I like about Malaya,” Aritomo said, “it is full of stories like this.”
“I often saw Old Mr. Ong in his garden, dressed like a coolie in a tatty white vest and loose blue cotton shorts, carrying his songbird in a cage. He always spoke to
the bird with more tenderness than I had ever seen him show any of his wives.”
Aritomo pointed to the pediment. “Athelstane. That was Swettenham’s middle name.”
I glanced at him in surprise, then remembered the first resident general’s books on his shelf. “That’s what my grandfather called it. A silly, pretentious name for a house,” I said. “I’m sure the neighbors laughed at my grandfather, and us.”
“I will look for it, next time I am in Penang.”
“It was destroyed when Jap planes bombed the island.” Aritomo’s face showed no reaction. “We had moved out only a few days earlier. We left everything behind—all our photographs. All of Yun Hong’s paintings too.”
It unsettled me that I should see one of her paintings here; I felt she was still alive, about to appear at the door of my bedroom to tell me some gossip she had heard from her friends. I reached out my hand and touched the painting. The smudge of condensation I made on the glass disappeared a second later, as though it had found a way to enter the watercolor painting.
“I want to buy this from you.”
Aritomo shook his head. “It was a gift.”
“This painting means nothing to you.” I turned to face him. “I’m asking you to sell it to me. You owe that to me, at the very least.”
“Why? Because of what my country did to you?”
“Sell it to me.”
He smoothed the air with his hands. “I have being thinking over your offer since your visit.”
I tensed up, wondering what he was about to tell me. “You’ll design and build my garden?”
He shook his head. “You can learn to do it yourself.”
It took me a moment or two to grasp the nature of his proposal. “You’re asking me to be . . . apprenticed . . . to you?” It was not what I had wanted from him at all. “That’s ridiculous.”
“I will teach you the skills to build your own garden,” he said. “A simple, basic garden.”
