by Tan Twan Eng
I pulled his arm as he was about to leave. “Get in with me.”
He held up his hands. “Let me clean up first.”
Sinking lower into the tub, the stiffness in my body slowly dissolved away into the water, mingling with the ink and blood eddying from my skin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
With the monsoon’s arrival, Aritomo dismissed the workers, instructing them to return only when the rainy season was over. There remained only the two of us to look after the garden. In the breaks between the rains I pruned and cleaned up the damage left behind by the storms. Working side by side with Aritomo, I found our isolation from the world outside comforting.
He would tattoo me at night, with the rain beating on the roof. After completing the outline of the chrysanthemum flower on my shoulder, he worked his way down my back. I had a full-length mirror put in the room. The thin, black outlines of his tattoos soon covered my body like contour lines. In the same manner he constructed his garden, he engraved his designs on my skin without first putting them down on paper. He had to wait for the scabs to form and drop off before he proceeded with the tattooing. My back was constantly raw. More than once he warned me not to scratch the tattoos, fearing that I would damage them before the skin could heal.
After each session I would soak myself in the wooden tub, resting my chin on the water’s surface, steam drawing perspiration from my face. Standing in the bathroom after the end of a particularly long session, I studied my back in the mirror. He had begun to shade the tattoos in gray and light blue hues, and they appeared like clouds of smoke blown against my skin.
Once he saw that I could withstand the pain, he worked on the horimono for much longer, going on deep into the night until I thought the lamp in the room was the only light left burning in the mountains.
The temperature in the highlands frequently dropped to below ten degrees after sunset, and although the monsoon rains had made the nights colder, I often sat with Aritomo on the verandah after dinner, the bamboo blinds rolled up into the eaves. We never put the lights on, preferring to feel the garden.
As the tok-tok birds hammered out their calls, the kettle on the brazier by the table began to steam. Aritomo spooned some tea leaves into a clay teapot. He held the caddy in his hand, staring into it. “There is just enough for one last brew.”
“The Fragrance of the Lonely Tree? Don’t you have more in the kitchen?”
“No.” He closed the caddy, put it aside and filled the teapot with boiling water from the kettle. He swirled the water inside the teapot and threw it out over the edge of the verandah onto the grass, leaving a smudge of steam in the air. He filled the pot again and poured a cup for me.
“Why do you always do that?” I asked. It had always seemed such a waste to me, especially now.
“To remove dirt from the leaves, of course,” he replied. “We have a saying: The first brewing is fit only for your enemies.”
“You did that on my first visit here too,” I said, smiling.
“I did not know what you were,” he said. He did not smile.
“But you do now?”
“Your tea is getting cold.”
With each sip I felt I was also absorbing something melancholy that had been infused into the tea leaves. When the teapot was empty, I said, “I want to add another day to our sessions. We can make it three, maybe four times a week.”
“You have become addicted to it. No need to be embarrassed. It always happens.”
It was true what he said—I had begun to anticipate what he would put on my body, and I had even started to enjoy the pain, because for those hours when his needles tracked across my skin, the clamor in my mind was deadened. I worried about what would happen once the final cut was made, when the last open pore was tamped and sealed with ink.
“The horimono is progressing faster than I had planned,” Aritomo said. “I can start filling it with colors in a day or two. Hopefully we can finish before the monsoon is over.”
“You seem in a rush to finish it too.”
“The Emergency is coming to an end. Another White Area was declared today.”
“You almost sound disappointed.”
“Life has been suspended, somehow, during the Emergency,” Aritomo said. “I often feel I am on a ship, heading for a destination on the other side of the world. I imagine myself in that blank space, between the two points of a mapmaker’s calipers.”
“That empty space exists only on maps, Aritomo.”
“Maps, and also in memories.” He breathed into his cupped hands. “One of the odd things about tattooing: the hari draw out not only blood, but also the thoughts hidden inside that person.” He lifted his gaze to me. “What did you actually do in the camp?”
“I did whatever was required for me to live.”
“Did that include working for the Japanese?”
The night had become colder. A long moment of silence slid by before I felt I could speak. “I gave information to Fumio. I told him who was planning to escape. I told him who was constructing a radio, where it was hidden. I still received my share of beatings, but I got better rations. I got medicines. Yun Hong found out. She begged me to stop. I refused.”
An owl glided past the verandah, like a fragment of lost memory. “I left her,” I said. “I left Yun Hong there.”
Aritomo reached over to the brazier and opened its little door. He rested on his elbows and blew into it, sending sparks billowing out into the night.
At first I thought that the sounds of gunfire were memories trying to break into my dreams, but they continued when I opened my eyes, bursts of tiny detonations spaced unevenly apart. I sat up in bed. The milky light in the room told me it was about seven in the morning. Through the half-opened sliding doors I saw Aritomo below the engawa, looking toward Majuba estate. I got dressed and went out to join him. The clouds were ripe with rain and a strong wind was riling the leaves in the trees. Before I could speak four men in khaki uniforms appeared around the corner. The one in front pointed his rifle at us.
Aritomo moved past me to stand in front, obstructing me. The man drove the butt of his rifle into Aritomo’s cheek, whipping his head to one side.
They tore the house apart, pushing the cupboards over and breaking the crockery in the kitchen. I hoped they had not harmed Ah Cheong, then remembered that it was Sunday. Once they were satisfied that they had found all the food and money in the house, the CTs marched us over to Majuba, taking the path I had so often used. The jungle seethed with insect calls. Soon I saw the familiar tea-covered slopes between the trees. We emerged from the jungle a moment later and continued to the estate. The metal gates at the workers’ compound were open, the men and their families kneeling on the grass, watched over by armed CTs. The Malay Home Guard lay face down on the ground, not moving. Further down the dirt road, CTs were carrying out sacks of rice and boxes of tinned food from the co-op store. Passing the clinic, we saw more of them stuffing medicines and bandages into gunnysacks.
The security gate at Majuba House had been forced open. The walls and the front door of the house were pocked with bullet holes, the shutters splintered. Strelitzias were shredded over the lawn. Inside the house, glass and plaster and pieces of wood were strewn on the yellow wood floor, crunching beneath our feet. Light skewered in through the broken shutters and torn wire netting. The smell of gunpowder corroded the air, mixed with another stench; Brolloks and Bittergal were sprawled close together on the floor in the hallway, blood from their stomach wounds pooling around them, soaking into their feces. In the dining room we found Magnus and Emily kneeling on the floor. They looked up when we came in; blood ran down from a wound on Magnus’s face. Hands shoved us down to kneel next to them. From the kitchen at the end of the corridor I could hear the servants sobbing.
“I am Commander Yap,” a man with a gentle, studious face said. I wondered if he had been a teacher before he had taken up arms against the government.
“What the hell do you want?” M
agnus said. A CT rammed the butt of his rifle into the side of Magnus’s head. Magnus swayed on his knees, but remained upright. The CT was about to hit him again when Emily shouted, “Stop it! Stop it!”
“You two chau-chibai,” Yap said, his eyes moving from Emily and back to me. “One married to an ang-moh, another one fucking a Jap devil.”
He snapped his fingers. A female CT dragged a man to the front by his hair and kicked him onto his knees; his face was swollen and smeared with blood and dirt.
Yap turned to Aritomo. “One of your people. Inoki here has been fighting with us ever since his country lost the war. But now he wants to surrender, he wants to go home.” He squatted down and brought his face close to Aritomo’s. “In the jungle you hear many strange things. Many strange things. Inoki told us about the gold stolen by you Japs. It’s hidden in the hills here, he says. So we’re giving him a chance to find out where it is.”
“Things must be getting bad for you, if you have started believing in fairy tales,” said Aritomo.
Inoki shuffled on his knees toward Aritomo and spoke to him in Japanese. “The rumors, Nakamura-san, you must have heard them.” His words gushed out in a torrent of fear and hysteria. “If you know anything about the rumors, tell these people. Please.”
Aritomo looked away from him and lifted his head at Yap. “I am a gardener, not a soldier.”
“Yamashita gold.” Panic, and perhaps a desire to let the CTs know he was trying his best, made Inoki switch to English. “This we hear. Many time. The gold, Nakamura-san, the gold General Yamashita steal. Yamashita gold. Yes? Yes?”
“All nonsense,” Aritomo said. “Just rumors.”
Yap pointed his pistol at Inoki; the Japanese started keening, pulling at Aritomo’s shirtfront. Aritomo made no movement, but continued to hold Yap’s gaze. My eyes jumped from Aritomo to Yap, to Inoki, and back to Yap again. The CT commander’s expression was gentle. He shot Inoki in the head. Emily screamed. Blood and flesh and bits of bone splattered the chairs and the floorboards of the dining room. I felt something warm and wet sticking to my face, but I fought the urge to wipe it away. In the kitchen, the wailing of the servants became hysterical. Through the ringing in my ears, I heard a man shouting at them, followed by the sounds of hard slapping. The crying weakened to low moans.
Yap turned his pistol on me.
“I know the area where Japs hid the gold. I’ll take you there.” All of us stared at Magnus. Emily cried out softly, gripping his arm.
“Do not be stupid, Magnus,” Aritomo said.
“Where is it?” Yap asked.
“In the Blue Valley. A few miles north of the river.”
“How do you know this?”
“I heard it from Colonel Hayashi. I used to go hunting with him. He told me about the gold. Even pointed out the hill to me. They buried a stash of guns there too. I don’t know if it’s Yamashita’s gold or not.”
“You never looked for the gold yourself?” Yap asked.
“For god’s sake, the man was piss-drunk! He was always talking rubbish anyway.”
“Magnus . . . ,” said Aritomo.
A man ran into the kitchen and whispered into Yap’s ear. Yap listened, frowned and then said, “You . . .” He waved his pistol at Magnus. “Get up, old man!”
Moving with difficulty, Magnus pushed himself to his feet. Emily clung to him, moaning and shaking her head wildly. I grabbed her arm but she shook free of me, her elbow hitting my face as she flailed about. Magnus embraced her, murmuring to her, and she went limp in his arms. He kissed her, then pushed her away gently. He looked at Aritomo, then me. Emily stood there, her arms hanging down at her sides as the terrorists left the house, taking Magnus with them.
Emily ran out through the front door, Aritomo and I following behind her. The sickly whine of sirens came up the driveway about fifteen minutes after the CTs had gone. “They’ve taken Magnus,” she cried even before the police got out from their vans. “The Blue Valley, they’ve taken him there.”
A muscle in my leg erupted into spasms. A moment later I was shivering. Aritomo brought me back into the house and made me sit down in a chair in the hallway. “Breathe,” he said, rubbing my back with long, hard strokes. After a few minutes I stopped shaking. He dug out his handkerchief and wiped my face with it.
“Was Magnus—was he telling the truth about the gold?” I asked.
“Hayashi was a drunkard—that much is true. And he did go hunting with Magnus once or twice. But if the gold is there, hidden in the Blue Valley, it would be the last thing Hayashi would have revealed to Magnus, drunk or not. Magnus and his friends have been searching that area for years.”
The police came into the house and I recognized Sub-Inspector Lee. One of the workers had seen a group of terrorists entering Majuba, Lee told me. The man had run out to the main road and got a lift from a lorry into Tanah Rata. The police questioned every one of us who had been in the house during the attack. Two of the assistant managers and a tea picker had been hacked to death by the CTs. Harper’s bungalow had been ransacked, but he was spending the night with the wife of a tin miner in Tanah Rata. The Gurkha sentry was found tied to a tree with barbed wire, his kukri buried in his chest.
Emily’s fears and panic increased as the hours passed. “Why are you all still here?” she shouted at Lee. “What are you doing to find my husband?”
“KOYLI jungle patrols are already sweeping the hills around Majuba and the Blue Valley,” Lee replied, referring to the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. “We’re doing everything we can, Mrs. Pretorius.”
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 rumor.” 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 honorable man, Yun Ling. He always has been. He refused to even con
sider 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 dispatched 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?”
