Garden of Evening Mists

by Tan Twan Eng

  I look into his eyes.

  “You?” He gives me a skeptical smile.

  “I wanted Tatsuji to look at my tattoo. That’s why I invited him here.”

  “So it was never about those woodblock prints at all.”

  “It was.” I close the book and place it back in its box. “But I have to arrange to have the tattoo preserved, before . . .” I swallow once.

  “This whole business is repugnant. You’re not some kind of animal to be skinned after your death.”

  “A tattoo created by the emperor’s gardener is a rare work of art. It should be preserved.”

  “But you hate the bloody Japs!”

  “That’s another matter entirely.”

  “Well . . . have it photographed if you want to preserve it.”

  “That would be like taking a photograph of a Rembrandt and then destroying the original,” I say. “Tatsuji feels he’d be more comfortable if there was another person with us when I show it to him.” I take in a deep breath. “I’d like you to be there.”

  He is silent. “How large is this . . . this tattoo?”

  “I want you to look at it,” I say. Frederik saw me naked decades ago and I now feel some trepidation at the prospect of showing him my aging body.

  He is taken aback. “What, here? Now?”

  “When Tatsuji arrives.” I look at my watch. “He should be here soon.”

  “I don’t want to see what he did to you,” he says, taking a step back.

  “There is no one else I can ask, Frederik. No one.”

  The room I gave Tatsuji to work in is the same one where Aritomo tattooed me, night after night. For a moment I imagine I can smell the faintest odor of ink and blood, sealed into the walls by the sandalwood incense he always burned when he was working on me.

  “Close the shutters.” The words sound familiar, and I remember that I had once spoken them, in this room. Or were they just an echo, curving back from across the canyon of time?

  For a long moment Frederik looks at me, not moving. Then he goes to the windows and pulls in the shutters, latching them. Tatsuji switches on the desk lamp.

  Watching myself in the mirror I placed there this morning, I remove my cardigan and fold it neatly over the back of a chair. I struggle with the pearl buttons of my silk blouse and Frederik reaches over to assist me, but I shake my head. I remove my brassiere, bunch my blouse against my breasts and turn my back to the mirror, peering over my right shoulder.

  A glow emanates from my skin, seeming to push back the shadows and open out the space to beyond the walls. Even after all this time, looking at the tattoos gives me a twinge of uneasiness, an uneasiness mixed with pride. I am familiar with every line and curve of his design, but I remember the times when something new would catch my eye, something Aritomo had woven artfully into the patterns.

  Frederik has a transfixed expression on his face, a mixture of excitement, awe, and yes, even a hint of the fear I felt a moment ago. “They’re . . . they look grotesque,” he says in a hoarse voice. “Awful.”

  On my back stands a gray heron. A temple emerges from the clouds. Exquisite drawings of flowers and trees seen only in the forests of the equator climb up from my hip. Arcane, inexplicable symbols have been sewn in the tattoos, symbols I have never been able to decipher: triangles, circles, hexagons, their strokes primitive as the earliest Chinese writing burned into tortoise shells.

  Tatsuji stares at me, like a tree waiting for the wind to stir its leaves.

  “Do you want me to catch a chill, Tatsuji?”

  He gives a start and apologizes. Swinging the lampshade toward me, he bends over my back, holding a magnifying glass close to my skin. The thought crosses my mind that the light passing through the glass will burn my back. I tell myself I am being idiotic and twist my neck to see what he is doing.

  His shadow drowns the patches of horimono, the tattoos emerging again when he moves, like coral reefs regaining their colors the moment the clouds peel away from the sun. The cold metal frame of his magnifying glass touches me and I flinch.

  “Sorry,” he mumbles. “Lift your arms, please.”

  I obey, staring ahead. The motes of dust floating between the layers of light and shadows are like krill drifting in the sea, and I think of the whales I had seen when I was a girl, standing on the beach below Old Mr. Ong’s durian plantation.

  “Remarkable,” Tatsuji says, his voice breaking into my reverie. “The style is Japanese but the designs are not. The horimono could almost be considered a companion piece to his ukiyo-e. Did you choose the designs?”

  “We agreed to use Sakuteiki as the source. But in the end I left it all up to him.”

  “I recognize the house at Majuba,” he says, and Frederik murmurs in agreement. “But what is this tattoo, here?” He touches an area on the hollow of my back. There is no need for me to twist around to see what it is.

  “The camp where I was imprisoned,” I say.

  “And this?” Tatsuji’s fingers move an inch to the left, to what I know is a square the size of a postage stamp, almost completely black. “What are these white lines?”

  “A meteor shower,” I say, half to myself.

  His fingers press into a spot an inch from my hip. Tattooed there is an archer, shown moments after he has shot his arrow into the sun, set against a completely white square of sky.

  “The legend of Hou Yi,” I say, glancing at Frederik. “It’s a Chinese myth.”

  “I know of it. In that story Hou Yi left one sun to shine,” Tatsuji replies. “But here, it looks like the archer has shot down the last sun in the sky. And he’s dressed not in Chinese clothes, but Japanese. Look at the hakama.”

  “And the sun—it looks just like your flag, Tatsuji,” Frederik says.

  Tatsuji’s fingers glide over my skin again, grazing a temple. The memory of that morning’s climb up the mountain with Aritomo returns to me. I am glad that the nun told me the temple is still standing, still wafting incense into the clouds.

  “He didn’t finish it,” Frederik says. “There’s a blank rectangle.”

  “A horimono must have an empty area inside it,” says Tatsuji. He puts down his magnifying glass. Frederik collects my garments from the chair and hands them to me. The two men move away to the far side of the room.

  In the mirror, I see the etchings of age on my face, lines that have never appeared on my back. Turning around, I look over my shoulder at the reflection of the tattoos. Dusk has soaked up the last light from the study, but the lines and colors on my skin continue to give off a glow. One of the figures in the horimono appears to move, but it is only a trick of the eye.

  Tatsuji comes to speak to me in Yugiri the following afternoon. We sit on the engawa. He has brought the contract for the ukiyo-e with him. I glance through it: the terms are as we have agreed and I find nothing to which I can object. Nevertheless, I ask him to give me a day or two to study it.

  “I spent the morning in the garden,” he says.

  “I saw you.”

  He unfolds a large piece of graph paper and lays it out on the table. The paper is covered in his neat handwriting and diagrams. “I made a sketch of Yugiri’s plan, with all its major points of interest—the house, the waterwheel, the pond, the Taoist symbols cut into the grass, the Stone Atlas.”

  It is the first time I have ever seen Yugiri laid out like this, and I take my time studying it. “Aritomo-sensei liked to use the principles of Borrowed Scenery in his garden designs,” Tatsuji says. “Now, a person in his garden will always be looking outward. I have been studying his ukiyo-e for so many days. It made me wonder what I would see, if I were to view his garden in the same way: to stand outside it and look in.”

  “And what did you see?”

  “I have marked out the stone lanterns, the statues, the collection of rocks and the various sites where Aritomo placed the most distinctive views,” he says, his finger pointing to various points on the paper. “They are all situated on bends or turns in
a path.”

  “He designed it that way, to make the garden feel larger than it actually is.”

  “I am aware of that. I have walked through the entire garden many times, but I had no clear idea of how those objects are actually positioned, in relation to each other. Until now.”

  Taking a fountain pen from his pocket, he circles the symbol of a lantern, then draws a line connecting it to the other objects, to the places where the garden’s views are situated, until he comes to the last item, a stone Buddha in a bed of ferns. A rectangle appears, fixed inside the boundaries of Yugiri.

  I sit there, looking at it.

  “If drawn to the scale matching your horimono, I suspect this”—Tatsuji indicates the shape he has created on the graph paper—“would fit into the untattooed space on your back. The lines of your horimono would probably join up with the markers and the paths in Yugiri here, on this paper.”

  I put on my reading glasses and study the graph paper. Since Tatsuji first came to see me—almost two weeks ago, now—I have been thinking about everything he has told me. It has made me reexamine what I know of Aritomo, made me consider what he has said and done in an altered light. This is something I had not expected.

  The following night I have dinner with Frederik and Emily at Majuba House. She is animated and alert, chatting with us in the sitting room after we have eaten. It is late when she asks me to help her to her bedroom. I look around the room, trying to remember it from the time when I slept here. The walls are no longer white but a soft blue. A photograph of Magnus in a silver frame, decorated with the spotted feather of a guinea fowl, stands on the bedside table, a shrine among the supplicant bottles of medicine.

  Emily lets out a moan of pain as she lowers herself onto her bed. She closes her eyes for so long that I think she has drifted off to sleep. I am about slip out quietly when her eyes open again, brighter than they have been all evening. She sits up and points to a shelf without looking at it.

  “That box,” she says. “Take it down.”

  “This one?”

  “Yes. Open it.”

  A rice paper lantern lies on a bed of tissue inside the box. The lantern is old, the woodblock print of ferns on its shade brittle when I give it to her. There is still a half-melted candle stub fixed inside it.

  “I thought Aritomo destroyed all of them,” I say.

  “Oh, I kept this one. It was from one of my Chong Qiu parties, long before you met him,” she says, gazing at the lantern. “Remember those lanterns he made for Magnus? What a sight that was, when we set them free into the sky that night. The old people here still talk about it, you know.” She empties out a sigh from deep within her. “My memory is like the moon tonight, full and bright, so bright you can see all its scars.”

  She turns the lantern slowly in her palm, then gives it back to me. I am about to replace it in its box, but she stops me. “No, no. It’s for you. I want you to have it.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Frederik glances at the lantern when I return to the living room. He gives me a whisky and says, “How’s Vimalya? Are you happy with her?”

  “She’s intelligent, and she listens to instructions. Yugiri is starting to fascinate her.”

  He sits down across from me. “Your tattoos—you’ve kept them hidden all these years?”

  “Apart from my doctors—and my neurosurgeons—I’ve never shown them to anyone else.”

  I recall the expression on my own doctor’s face the first time he saw the horimono, years ago. Over the decades I have suffered from a variety of illnesses, but they have all been minor and have never required surgery. Some days I wonder if the horimono does actually contain talismanic powers, as Aritomo claimed. If it does, I am no longer under its protection.

  “Your . . . your lovers?” Frederik asks. “What did they say when they saw your tattoos?”

  “Aritomo was the last.”

  He hears what I have left unspoken. “Oh, Yun Ling,” he says softly.

  I think of the years of solitude, the care I have had to take in my dressing so that no one could ever see what lay on my skin.

  “Aritomo gave them to me, and I never wanted anyone else to see them. And I was rising up the ranks of the judiciary—just a rumor of something like this would have ruined my career.” I move away from him. “And to be honest, after Aritomo, I never met anyone who interested me.”

  “Are they the reason you don’t want to get treatment?” Frederik says. “You have to. You must.”

  “Whatever procedures I have to undergo, whatever drugs I take, they won’t save me in the end,” I reply. The prospect of being locked inside my own mind terrifies me. “I have to ensure that the horimono is preserved.”

  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 toward 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 sa
me 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.