by Tan Twan Eng
“For a long moment I let myself be seduced by his dream. I allowed myself a brief moment of all the possibilities that were now opened to me, the life that I could now have. I remembered the herons we had once seen, flying off to some unreachable sanctuary. But I knew it was impossible. It was impossible. ‘If I do not carry out my orders, then my father’s death was in vain,’ I said, trying to find a way to explain my decision to him. ‘He accepted that I had to fly, and if I failed in doing that, then what was the point of his death?’ I stopped and hardened my resolve. ‘That is why I am asking you to let me have your airplane. The bomb carriage from mine can be attached to it.’
“Teruzen’s face aged, looking so similar to my father’s before he died that I felt as though the war had ruptured the structure of time itself. For the first time since I had known him, he broke down. ‘I should not have followed you here,’ he said. ‘I was selfish. I wanted to see you, just for the time you had left.’
“‘You knew my fate from the first day you taught me to fly,’ I said softly. I touched his shoulder. ‘Nothing can change it.’
“Teruzen’s plane was a two-seater Yoshikawa K41, one of my father’s earlier models. Painted on the fuselage was Teruzen’s family crest: a pair of herons, flying in a circle in eternal pursuit of one another. He spent a morning instructing me while it was modified to carry the bomb. He had not spoken much to me after that day on the beach, except to discuss the workings of his plane. Late one evening he said, ‘I want to take you up there and fly with you one more time. Let you get a feel for it.’
“In the cockpit, I handled the controls while he sat behind me. For the first time I truly understood why my father had been ashamed of the substandard aircraft he had been forced to build later in the war. Compared to mine, Teruzen’s airplane was smooth and powerful, an eagle to my sparrow. I remembered our first flight together in the training plane at the academy, and a great sadness overtook me.
“‘Go higher,’ Teruzen said. ‘As high as you can.’
“We climbed above the clouds, where the last rays of the sun still reddened the sky. We flew on and on as beneath us the earth rotated into night. Soon the stars appeared over our canopy. ‘Once, when I was on night patrol,’ I said, ‘I did not want to land. I had this urge to keep flying, I felt I would always remain safe in the darkness.’
“‘That would be wonderful, to remain forever in flight,’ he said, his voice soft but clear in our glass capsule. I felt his hand grip my shoulder and I reached out to cover it with mine. There may have been a million hearts beating together for a suicide pilot like me, but up here, on this night, all I could hear and feel were his and mine.
“Three times my orders came, and three times they had to be canceled due to bad weather. On the afternoon of August 5, 1945, I received my fourth set of orders. An American aircraft carrier had been sighted off the coast of Borneo, heading north. I would leave at eight the next morning. The weather was predicted to be fine and sunny.
“After the farewell dinner given by the remaining personnel of the base, Teruzen and I took a walk on the beach. The moon had come up over the sea. The waves were quiet. Teruzen was calm and resigned, offering tips and suggestions on how to get the best out of his plane.
“‘No more talk of the war,’ I said.
“He looked at me and nodded.
“‘Tell me what you will do after this is all over.’ I wanted to look into a part of his life that I would never be able to share.
“‘I will probably be classified as a war criminal and tried.’
“I shook my head. ‘Tell me what you will do,’ I said again.
“He looked out to the sea, understanding what I wanted from him. ‘I will come back here, to this island, and build a house . . . there.’ He pointed to a spot beneath a row of coconut trees. ‘Live out the remainder of my life here. I will take a boat out every morning, catch fish and watch the sun rise over the ocean.’
“‘It will be a good life,’ I assured him.
“‘I will think of you every day,’ he said, looking at me.
“‘I have written my death poem. Would you like to hear it?’
“‘Tell me tomorrow.’
“We resumed walking. I did not want to waste any time with sleep, but eventually he said, ‘You must get some rest. You will need your reactions sharp when you fly tomorrow.’
“‘I want to be here tonight, on this beach,’ I said.
“‘Go to sleep,’ he said. ‘I will wake you.’
“I lay down on the cool, damp sand. The stars above seemed close enough to grasp. All I had to do was reach out for them. Instead I took his hand and held it, not letting it go even when I drifted off to sleep.
“He was gone when I woke up. It was almost ten to eight, the sun already high. I ran all the way back to the base, cursing myself. The Yoshikawa K41 was standing on the runway, its engine pumping smoke into the air. My watch showed twelve minutes past eight. I stopped to catch my breath and then sped off toward it. There was no time now, the aircraft carrier would be out of range soon.
“The K41 began to move. I could not believe it. The throttle opened up and the plane began to taxi to the start of the runway. Through the canopy glass I saw Teruzen’s face. The K41 rolled to a stop. For an eternal moment he stared into my eyes. He blinked once and smiled. His hand came up, his palm open as though he could touch me from across the distance. I knew I was shouting at him, shouting till I was hoarse, even though at that moment I could hear nothing at all.
“He dropped his hand. The plane lurched forward, then gathered speed. I pushed every ounce of strength into my legs to catch up with him. I changed my direction, hoping to intercept it halfway down the runway, even as I knew it was impossible. The K41 rose from the ground. I fell and picked myself up, my eyes never leaving Teruzen as he made a low circuit over the airfield. I have no doubt that our eyes met one last time. He closed the circle and banked off into the direction of the sun.
“And it was at that moment that the sky changed color. It turned completely white, before breaking up into streaks of red and magenta and purple. I closed my eyes tight, but still the light came through, blinding me. It was only weeks later that I found out that the Americans had dropped their first atomic bomb on Japan. At that instant, as Teruzen flew off in my place to meet the ship, the war was effectively over.
“And so it came to be that I was the cherry blossom that never fell to earth, saved by the order of a silent emperor given voice by defeat. I was twenty-two years old when the war ended and Emperor Hirohito gave the first electronic broadcast ever made by a Divine Being to his people, exhorting us to accept defeat and to ‘endure the unendurable.’
“How correct he was. I endured.”
For a long while after Tatsuji stops talking, we sit there in silence. He has not touched his tea, and neither have I. His gaze returns to the ukiyo-e of the fishing village.
“I am an old man now, older than Teruzen was when he flew off that morning,” he says. “Once this book on Aritomo is finished, I am going back to Kampong Penyu. I have bought a piece of land there, the exact spot Teruzen talked about. And there I will build the house Teruzen had wanted for us. And this time,” he vows, “this time I am never going to leave again.”
“Were you interned when the war ended?”
“In Singapore. I was put to work with hundreds of others. We cleaned up the rubble in the streets, cleared the drains, fixed the fallen power lines. After I was shipped home, I left the navy.” He rises stiffly to his feet. “I never visited the Yasukuni Shrine again. I never went to the Kagoshima war museum, where it is possible to see and touch some of the planes used by the tokko pilots, planes they had salvaged from the sea. I never wanted to see them again,” he says. “To me, that beach, half an earth’s turn from Japan, is the only place Teruzen’s spirit can ever find a sense of peace.”
“What will you do there?” I ask, as he once asked the man he loved, and still loves.
&n
bsp; “Every morning, at dawn,” he replies, his eyes looking faraway, “I will row out to sea in a little boat. I will turn toward the spot where I last saw Teruzen’s plane, and I will wait for the sun to rise.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Aritomo did not change the way he treated me when we were in the presence of other people. There was a part of him that I knew I would never be allowed to enter. Occasionally, when we worked in the garden, I would find him staring at me, a contemplative look on his face. He never glanced away when I met his eyes, but continued to look at me.
Following a period of relative quiet, the CTs intensified their activities, killing over three hundred civilians in one month. And they seemed to be targeting women and children now. A two-year-old girl on a rubber estate was shot while playing with the family cook. A planter and his wife were ambushed on a trunk road; the terrorists killed the woman, but left her husband alone. Just a week before that, five CTs had entered the brownstone church in Tanah Rata during morning mass and killed the French priest leading the service. The wives of the planters and miners who had vowed to stay on in Malaya with their husbands were advised to pack up and leave with their children, and some European families in Cameron Highlands had already done so.
Templer had classified regions infested with CTs as “Black Areas,” tightening food rationing and imposing onerous curfews over them, intending to make life for the inhabitants so miserable they would withdraw their support for the communists. Despite these measures, the list of Black Areas increased sharply, outnumbering the White Areas that were completely free from infiltration by the CTs. It reminded me of the game of go with its black and white stones that Aritomo sometimes played with me, encircling my pieces to change them to his color.
Lying in my bed at night, I listened to the army shelling a CT camp in a valley nearby. Some nights I would go out and stand on the verandah. The sky throbbed from the detonations, lit up by these unnatural northern lights. “Aurora equatorialis,” Magnus called them.
Returning from Yugiri one night, I went around to the back of the bungalow. I had started to use the back door so as not to be silhouetted against the front doorway when I switched on the lights. I was about to go in when a figure emerged from behind the trees, pointing a pistol at me. “Inside!” he said. “Hurry up!”
The kitchen light was switched on. I blinked. The blinds had been pulled across the windows. There were three people already sitting at the small dining table. One of them was a woman a few years younger than me, with a hard thinness to her frame, her short hair badly cut. The men were in their twenties or early thirties. Their khaki uniforms were grimy, the three faded red stars marking their caps looking like drops of dried blood. The man with the pistol shoved me into a chair, my momentum nearly toppling me onto the floor.
“Take all the food you want,” I said. “There’s money in my purse.”
The woman stood up and came to me. “Deputy Public Prosecutor Teoh Yun Ling,” she said in English, each word coming out slowly.
“Not anymore,” I said. “You should keep up with the news.” She slapped me. It’s nothing, I told myself over the pain. You’ve suffered beatings before. The ringing in my ears died away after a minute and I could hear a moth flapping around the kitchen light. My eyes darted around the room, searching for a weapon, anything that would give me an advantage. A Planter’s Weekly lay on the table, but unlike Aritomo, I would not know how to make use of it.
The woman went to the countertop and switched on the wireless, turning the dial to a local Chinese station. A song filled the kitchen, a well-known ballad my mother had liked, although she could not understand the words: “Yue Lai Xiang.”
“Whenever I hear this, I think of my sister,” the woman said. “She used to sing it all the time. Her name is Liu Foong. Thanks to you, she was deported to China.”
“Don’t they do things just how you like them in China?”
One of the men moved toward me. I told myself to keep my body loose so the pain would be lessened. It was an old trick I had learned in the camp. But it still hurt anyway. He beat me until I was nearly unconscious as the song wailed to its end. Blood ran into my eyes and dripped down my chin. Dimly I heard them ransacking the kitchen cupboards, stuffing their bags with whatever they could find.
The woman returned and kicked my chair over. My left shoulder hit the floorboards. I cried out. She squatted down by my side. Through my swelling eyes I saw a knife in her hand. I tried to roll away but she caught me by the ankle and dragged me back to her. I kicked out frantically and connected with her chin. She grunted, raised her knife and stabbed me in my thigh. I screamed, even as I heard another voice from far away, a voice I recognized as also mine, screaming from a lifetime ago.
Thin, white curtains lapped at the windowsill. Everything was white, the walls, the ceiling, even the floorboards. I thought I was back in my old room in Majuba House. My vision was blurry, and my eyelids felt gummy. A woman in a bed at the other side of the room moaned softly to herself. Voices murmured in the corridor outside. The wheels of a passing trolley squeaked. Noticing that I was awake, the nurse went outside the room and returned with a doctor a few minutes later.
“You’re in the Tanah Rata Hospital,” the doctor told me. I knew him from one of Magnus’s braais or dinner parties. Teoh—no, that was my name. Yeoh. Dr. Yeoh. ”You’ve lost a lot of blood,” he went on. “The Jap gardener went looking for you when you didn’t show up for work. If he hadn’t . . .”
“How long have I been in here?” My voice sounded strange.
“Two days,” the nurse said, helping me sit up in my bed.
My face was mummified in bandages. I could tell it was swollen when I touched it. A dressing was wrapped around my thigh where the terrorist had stabbed me.
Sub-Inspector Lee from the Tanah Rata police station came later that morning, arriving the same time as Magnus and Emily. My hands were bare, and I looked frantically around for my gloves. Magnus reached into his pocket and handed them to me.
“The woman who stabbed you sounds like Wong Mei Hwa,” Sub-Inspector Lee said after I had described everything that had happened. “We heard she’s in the area. She’s in the MCP’s Lau Tong Tui.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Special Service Corps.” He glanced at Magnus and Emily. “Assassination squads. You’re lucky to escape with just your injuries.”
“She said her sister was a woman I prosecuted—Chan Liu Foong. She was deported.”
“Ah . . .” Lee studied his notes. “You helped some high-ranking CT surrender a few months ago—it’s possible that the MCP was taking revenge. Did Wong Mei Hwa mention anything about that?”
I shook my head.
“What the devil is he talking about?” Magnus broke in. “You helped some CTs surrender?”
I told them what had happened.
“I remember that!” Emily said. “It was in the Straits Times, I remember now. The man got a big reward. He said he was going to open a restaurant.”
“I didn’t want to say anything—you would have been worried,” I said.
“Blerrie right!” Magnus exploded. “You put all of us at great risk!”
“Not so loud-lah!” Emily said. Magnus pushed back his chair noisily and stalked off to the far end of the ward.
After the sub-inspector left, Emily opened the thermos flask she had brought and filled a bowl with chicken-essence soup. “Drink this. Can poh your body. I boiled it myself. There’s ginseng in it.”
It tasted vile, but I knew it would be easier to swallow it than refuse her. “We called your father,” she said, watching me to make sure I finished every oily drop in the bowl. “He wants you back in KL.”
I wiped my lips. “I’m not leaving.”
“Well, you can’t continue staying on your own!” Magnus said, returning to stand over the foot of my bed. A nurse silenced him from across the ward and Emily gave her an apologetic smile.
“I’m not a child,
Magnus,” I said.
“You heard Lee—that woman could have killed you. Go home to KL. You can always come back again once the Emergency is over.”
“And when will that be?” I said. “Perhaps you can tell me?”
Emily touched Magnus’s hand, and he swallowed his temper with visible effort. He sighed. “Come on, Lao Puo,” he said, pulling Emily to her feet. “Stop tiring her out with all your chatter—let the stupid girl get some rest.”
With the nurse’s reluctant assistance, I hobbled to Dr. Yeoh’s office to telephone my father. The office was a large, sunny room at the end of a long corridor and my brow was damp with perspiration when I got there. Dr. Yeoh was out and the nurse, after some fretting and some sharp words from me, left to do her rounds.
“Thank God you’re safe, Ling! I’ve been worried sick about you,” my father said. “I have to be in Singapore tomorrow. I don’t know how long I’ll be there, but I’ll send my driver to Majuba for you. Just let me know when you’ll be discharged.”
“I’m all right. It’s nothing serious.”
“Nothing serious? You were assaulted! And stabbed! I hold Magnus responsible for this.”
“I insisted Magnus let me have my own place, Father. I hope you didn’t tell Mother what happened.”
“I didn’t. But there’s no point anyway—she doesn’t recognize me or Hock anymore.” And you should be here, looking after her. He did not say it aloud, but I could hear his thoughts.
“Magnus offered us a safe place to hide out during the war,” I said. “You never told me that.”
“Under the protection of his Japanese friend? It was unacceptable,” my father said. “And you . . . to work for a Japanese! After what they did to us . . .”
