Garden of Evening Mists

by Tan Twan Eng

“The servants. And Hock, of course.”

  “Is there any improvement?”

  “No. She’s still the same. You’ve moved back to Majuba House?” He sounded hopeful.

  “I’m keeping Emily company.”

  “I see. Tell her we’re all praying for Magnus’s safe return.”

  After we hung up, I realized he had not asked me to leave Cameron Highlands. For some reason his omission disappointed me. The ridgebacks were removed from the house and placed outside wrapped in a rubber sheet but Emily refused to allow them to be buried. The smell was awful, and Ah Yan, the oldest and most superstitious servant, begged me to do something.

  “Magnus will want to do it when he comes home,” Emily said when I spoke to her.

  I looked at her. “Of course, Emily.”

  The stench worsened. When Frederik drove up from Kuala Lumpur I got him to help me move Brolloks and Bittergal down to the lower terrace. In a far corner where the trees hid us from the house, we dug two holes in the ground and buried the dogs.

  “I’ve wanted to ask Magnus where he got their names from,” I said as I tamped the soil with my shovel.

  “The dogs? They’re from a fairy tale. My father told me about it when I was a boy. Brolloks and Bittergal, two monsters in the Karoo who ate children. He used them to scare me whenever I was naughty.” He touched the mound of earth with his foot. “Poor buggers.”

  It started to rain again. “Let’s go inside.”

  We were drying off in front of the fire in the living room when we heard the telephone in the study begin to ring. Someone answered it. I glanced at Frederik, and we went out to the corridor. The door to the study opened a few minutes later. Emily looked at us as though she had no idea who we were or what we were doing in her house. Slowly the confusion in her eyes cleared up.

  “They’ve found him,” she said.

  Coming around the bend in the path, I saw Aritomo kneeling by a hedge of cannas. I stopped and watched him. He plucked and pulled out the vegetation with a practiced hand, his fingers as nimble as the lips of a deer stripping away young leaves from a branch. I thought back to the first time I had seen him, at the archery range. He was the beating heart of the garden, I thought. Without him, the whole place would eventually fall to ruin.

  He looked up and struggled to his feet. I offered my hand to him, troubled by how much older he seemed. “Magnus is dead,” I said.

  His face, even his whole body, sagged. He dropped the crumpled cannas, brushing the bits of leaves and petals from his hands.

  I told him how a Chinese vegetable farmer returning from Ipoh had seen something lying in the grass by the side of the road. He did not stop his lorry, but drove directly to the police station in Tanah Rata. As I talked, the tears came, but I kept my eyes open. Aritomo put his arms around me and pulled me to him. We stood like that for a long time, among the stalks of flowers he had broken off and discarded.

  The funeral was held on a Saturday afternoon. The planters and their families, the workers, people in the highlands and across the country who had known him, all gathered on the terrace lawn where Magnus used to hold his braais. Messages of condolence came from all over Malaya, including one from the high commissioner and his wife. My father sent a telegram from London, asking me to give Emily pek khim, the white envelope of money for the family of the deceased. At the funeral service I stood next to Aritomo. Once or twice I reached out to touch his arm, but he was staring into the distance, his body rigid. I forced back my tears when “Und ob die wolke” was played for Magnus one last time. And if the clouds . . .

  Magnus was buried in the garden behind Majuba House, next to the grave of his daughter. Aritomo slipped away during the wake. From the corner of my eye I watched him leave, but I did not follow him.

  He returned to Majuba House with a large cardboard box later that evening, his eyes squinting with fatigue. Inside the box lay three of his paper lanterns, bigger than those he had made for Emily at the Mid-Autumn Festival, their tops covered and sealed. He explained what I had to do, then turned around and slowly walked home.

  Halfway through dinner, Emily got up from the table and left the dining room. I made to follow her but she shook her head, loosening the tears from her eyes to slide down her cheeks. Frederik touched my arm, and I sat back into my chair.

  We found her sitting at the piano later, her shoulders bent over it. Her fingers moved above the keys, as though she was trying to remember the notes to the piece of music she had been playing. She glanced at us when we came in, and then stared down to the keys again.

  “There’s something we’d like you to see,” I said, but she made no sign that she had heard me. She pressed the keys, the notes discordant in the silence.

  “Just for a few minutes, Emily,” Frederik said. “Please.”

  She stood up slowly and we walked her out to the terrace behind the house, all the way to the balustrade. The smell of dew was sharp and clean. There was no moon. The lights of the bungalows and cottages gave a vague sense of shape to the ridges and valleys far below us. I lit the lanterns Aritomo had given me, the candles illuminating the wrinkles in the rice paper. I chose one and raised it high, spilling its glow onto our faces.

  In the valleys more points of light pricked out from the darkness, clumped together like luminous seeds in some places, solitary or far apart in others, but taken together, there were so many that it was impossible to count them all.

  “What’s going on?” asked Emily.

  “They’re lanterns, like these,” I said. “Aritomo made them. For Magnus.”

  The lantern tugged at my hand. I gave it to her. Frederik took another lantern. I picked up the last one and looked at my watch. At precisely eight o’clock I said, “Let it go, Emily.”

  She closed her eyes briefly and released her lantern. It hovered in the air for a few seconds and then it began to rise, swaying upward like a phosphorescent jellyfish. Across the valleys, countless lanterns were being set free, light streaking up into the darkness. Frederik and I let go of ours at the same time, and I felt his hand close over mine. Above the dark, formless trees in Yugiri a single bubble of light drifted upward, leaning away from the high winds. Emily acknowledged it with a slight nod, tears shining on her cheeks.

  Some of the lanterns soon entered the clouds, flickering like distant lightning. Others sailed farther and farther away, herded by the wind into the far mountains. I made a silent wish that they would never fall to earth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In the last four days the words have refused to come to me when I call for them and I can only stare at the paper. When they do leak from my pen, I am unable to make sense of them. Only when I work at night am I untroubled by spells of word-blindness. So I go on, writing as much as I can before I fall asleep.

  Since midnight I have been sitting at the desk, working over the pages in which I had set down the events in the internment camp, making changes to my choice of words and the structure of my sentences. I am wearing my cardigan, but the study is cold, and my fingers hurt.

  I get up from my chair and walk around the room, massaging my neck. My body is sore, but it is a wonderful kind of soreness, resulting from hard, physical work: I have started practicing kyudo again. After a few sessions I can feel the old lessons I have learned returning to me.

  Going back to my desk, I turn a few pages and read over what I have written. Even monkeys fall from trees. Yes, I am quite certain that was what Fumio said to me, before he cut my fingers off.

  Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.

  There are moments when, remembering what happened, I am unable to continue writing. What troubles me more than anything, however, are the instances when I cannot recall with certainty what has taken place. I have spent most of my life trying to for
get, and now all I want is to remember. I cannot remember what my sister looked like; I do not even have a picture of her. And my conversation with Aritomo by Usugumo Pond, on that night of the meteor shower . . . did it take place on the day of Templer’s visit or did it occur on a different evening entirely? Time is eating away my memory. Time, and this illness, this trespasser in my brain.

  The bell at the front gate has been ringing through the house for some time. I am in the study, rearranging the books on the shelves. I call out to Ah Cheong, then remember that he has taken the day off. I wait, hoping that whoever it is will give up and leave. The sign at the entrance has not deterred anyone. The past week has seen an increase in the number of people coming to Yugiri, all of them hoping to be allowed in. A local film crew shooting a documentary on Aritomo’s life tried to see me but I turned them away.

  Setting down a pile of books on the floor, I massage the pain in my lower back and look around me. It was in this room that Aritomo asked to incise the tattoos on me. The bamboo birdcage is still here, and the same paintings still line the same wall. There is a discolored space where my sister’s painting used to hang before he gave it to me.

  Voices can be heard from outside, growing louder. I leave the study and go to the front door. Vimalya is talking to two Chinese women just below the verandah. One of them has a shaved head and is dressed in a faded gray robe. Perhaps she is a little younger than me; I find it difficult to tell. A woman stands next to her. Vimalya looks up at me when I come out. “They were at the gate when I got here.”

  “Thank you, Vimalya.”

  “Oh, one other thing, Judge Teoh—can you recommend me books on Japanese gardening?”

  “I’ll lend you some.”

  She leaves us, and I turn back to the women. In English, the nun says, “My name is Chin Lai Kew.” Three round scars in a vertical line mark her forehead, branded into her skin by a joss stick when she took her vows. “Mrs. Wong was kind enough to drive me here today.”

  “Emily told me about you,” I say. “Come and sit inside.”

  “No need-lah.” The nun turns to her companion and in Mandarin says, “Can you wait by the pond? I won’t take up too much of Judge Teoh’s time.” When the woman has left us, the nun says, “We’ve met before, you know, in the Temple of Clouds.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Mr. Aritomo asked me to say some prayers for his friend. You were with him that day.”

  Like a paper rubbing of the inscriptions on an old gravestone, the memory of the face I saw that morning almost forty years ago slowly takes shape, blurry and ill–defined. “You were—”

  “So young then?” The nun smiles, revealing a gap in her teeth. “So were you. But we didn’t feel young at all, did we?”

  “What do you mean?” An instant later I understand.

  The bracelet of jade beads on her wrist makes soft clicking noises as she rubs them. “I was jugan ianfu.”

  I glance back into the house, not certain if I want to hear what she has to say.

  “There were twelve of us, captured from all over the country,” the nun continues. “I was thirteen years old—the youngest there. The oldest was nineteen or twenty. The soldiers kept us in the convent in Tanah Rata—they had turned it into their base. I was there for two months. Then one day they let me go. Just like that. I went home to Ipoh. But everyone knew what the Japanese had done to me. What man would want me to be his wife? My father was so ashamed of me, he sold me to a brothel. But I ran away. I went to another town, but somehow people knew. They always knew. One day, I heard a woman talking about a temple in Cameron Highlands. The temple had taken in a few women like me. I went up there. I’ve never left.”

  Remembering how derelict and abandoned it had looked, I ask, “The temple—is it still there?”

  “We look after it as best we can,” she says, then falls silent for a while before explaining the reason for her visit. “A few years after Mr. Aritomo had gone, I found out that during the Occupation, he had been to see the regional commander to have all of the jugan ianfu in Tanah Rata released. The commander agreed to let four of the youngest girls go.”

  Aritomo never told me.

  “I wanted to tell you this when he disappeared,” the nun says, “but you had already left. And you never came back.”

  “I’m glad you decided to come to see me.”

  “I had another reason.”

  “You want to see the garden.”

  “Garden?” For a second she looks perplexed. “Oh! No-lah. No. But Mr. Aritomo once told me that he had a painting of Lao Tzu. I would like to see it, if it is still here.”

  “It’s still here. Like your temple.”

  I take her into the house, to the ink drawing painted by Aritomo’s father. The nun stands before the old sage. There is a tear in the middle of the drawing, but it has been so skillfully mended it is almost unnoticeable.

  “When the work is done, it is time to leave,” the nun says softly. “That is the Way of the Tao.”

  I have read the Tao Te Ching many times by now, and the words are familiar to me. “Aritomo’s work wasn’t done when he left.”

  The nun turns to me, and smiles—not at me, but at the world itself. “Ahhh . . . Can you be certain of that?”

  Tidying the study after I have walked the nun and her companion out of the garden, I think of what she told me. There are still so many things I did not know about Aritomo, so many things that I never will.

  Pulling out some books from a shelf, I discover a box behind them. Opening it, I find a pair of swiftlets’ nests, aged to a treacly yellow. They are the nests Aritomo gave me. I hold one up; it feels brittle when I press it. I do not remember keeping them in this box when we returned from the cave; I never made them into a soup as Aritomo suggested.

  “Judge Teoh?” Tatsuji appears at the door. I close the box and replace it on the shelf, then beckon him in. “I have finished my examination of the ukiyo-e,” he says.

  “Use all of them,” I tell him. “You have my permission.”

  It is more than he has expected. He bows to me. “My lawyer will send you the contract.”

  “There is one more piece of Aritomo’s work I want you to evaluate, Tatsuji.” I wonder if I should proceed with it; it is not too late to change my mind, but this is the reason I wanted to see him, the reason I called him to Yugiri. “Aritomo was a tattooist.”

  “So I was right all along. He was a horoshi.” The smile on his face broadens. “Do you have any photographs of the tattoos he created?”

  “He never took any photographs.”

  “Sketches?”

  I shake my head.

  “Did he leave you pieces of his tattoos?”

  “Only one.”

  Realization filters the murk of excitement from his face. “He tattooed you?”

  I nod, and Tatsuji’s eyes close briefly. Is he giving thanks to the god of tattoos? It would not surprise me if such a deity exists.

  “Where is it? On your arm? Shoulder?”

  “On my back.”

  “Where exactly?” he asks, growing impatient. I continue to look at him, and a sudden understanding floods into his face. “So, so, so. Not just a tattoo, but a horimono.” For a while he does not speak. “It would be one of the most important discoveries in the Japanese art world,” he says finally. “Imagine: Emperor Hirohito’s gardener, the creator of taboo artwork. On the skin of a Chinese woman, no less.”

  “There will be no mention of this, if you want to use Aritomo’s ukiyo-e.”

  “So why did you tell me about it?”

  “I want the horimono preserved after my death. I want you to handle this.”

  “That is easily done.”

  “How?”

  “A contract will be drawn up for you to bequeath your skin to me on your death, upon immediate payment now, if you wish,” Tatsuji says. His hand draws an elegant circle in the air. “We can discuss the details later. But first”—his hands come toge
ther in a silent clap—“ first I have to ascertain the quality and the texture of the work on your skin. We will do it with a female assistant present, of course. We can arrange to meet in Tokyo.”

  “No. We do it here. Right here. In this room. I’ll only show it to you, no one else,” I say. “There’s no need to look so embarrassed, Tatsuji. We’re both adults. We’ve seen our share of naked bodies.”

  “I would prefer to have another person present, so there can be no questions of . . . ahh . . .” His fingers rub his tie.

  “At our age? Surely not. Or should I be flattered that you think there’s even a possibility that I might . . . change your preferences?” I give a luxuriant, voluptuous sigh, enjoying his discomfort. “All right, Tatsuji. I’ll find someone. A chaperone.” I laugh; it feels good. “Such an old-fashioned word, chaperone, don’t you think?”

  “There were things that puzzled me when I was doing my research on Aritomo-sensei,” he says.

  “What sort of things?” My humorous mood flees, to be replaced by a sense of wariness. “Inconsistencies?”

  “No. Quite the opposite, in fact. Everything I discovered about his life felt natural yet . . . manufactured. It was like . . . well, it was like walking in a garden designed by a master niwashi. Take the feud between Tominaga Noburu and him, for instance,” he adds. “They had been good friends since they were boys.”

  “It’s quite common for childhood friends to quarrel when they grow up.”

  Tatsuji thinks for a moment. Telling me to wait, he leaves the study and returns a few minutes later with his satchel. He opens it and takes out a small black pouch. He loosens its drawstring and picks out a shiny, metallic object. For a second I imagined him removing a hook snagged in a fish’s mouth. He drops the object onto my palm. It is a silver brooch the size of a ten-cent coin, the quality of its craftsmanship understated and exquisite.

  “A flower?” I say, turning it over.

  “A chrysanthemum. These brooches were given out by the emperor to a select group of people during the Pacific War.”