by Tan Twan Eng
“If he’s right, if it’s a map, I can use it to find where Yun Hong was buried,” I say. “But what do I accomplish in the end—assuming that I do find all of Golden Lily’s hiding places in Malaysia, assuming I’m still capable of communicating, capable of being understood?”
For years after he got lost in the mountains, I felt Aritomo had abandoned me. The only way to deal with the hurt was to distance myself from everything I had learned from him. Now, I wonder if he left me more than just the garden. Did he also leave the answer to the one question I have been asking? Would I have eventually discovered the connection between the garden and the horimono if I had not stayed away from Yugiri?
That sense of abandonment is fading, like water draining from the pond, leaving behind only sorrow for Aritomo, for the way his life was wasted, just as mine in its own way was. I do not want to search for my camp or the mine anymore. Yun Hong has been dead for over forty years. Locating where she was buried will not ease my guilt or undo what has been done.
“No one must be allowed to use the horimono, Frederik.”
“Change the garden,” he says. “Obliterate everything Aritomo created in it. That will render the tattoos useless. Vimalya will help you. And I’ll send my men in too.”
“You really hate that garden, don’t you?” I smile at him, and for just a moment the heaviness in my chest lightens.
“Maybe it’s always been a symbol to me of why you will never return my feelings,” Frederik replies lightly, but it gives me a pang to realize that he is earnest.
“I made three promises to Yun Hong,” I say. “I promised her I would escape from the camp if I had the chance. That was the only promise I kept. I never built the garden we had envisioned together. And I never freed her spirit from wherever she was buried.”
Thinking of what Tatsuji told me about Golden Lily and what it did to its slave laborers, I see in my mind’s eye Yun Hong and all the prisoners, hardened to clay like the thousands of terra-cotta soldiers discovered in an emperor’s tomb in northern China, buried beneath the dust of two thousand years.
Frederik kneels on the carpet in front of me and takes my hands in his. I resist the urge to pull away. “You told me once that Aritomo named the pavilion by the pond after your sister’s favorite poem,” he says.
“The Pavilion of Heaven,” I say, almost to myself.
“The garden for her already exists, Yun Ling. It’s been there for nearly forty years.”
I stare at him. He releases my hands, but I hold on to his.
“We’re the only ones left from those withered days,” he says. “The last two leaves still clinging on the branch, waiting to fall. Waiting for the wind to sweep us into the sky.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
On his last day in Cameron Highlands, Tatsuji arrives at Yugiri earlier than usual, bringing with him materials to pack the woodblock prints. I give him the signed contract and help him cover each of the ukiyo-e in plastic wrapping before he places them flat in an airtight box.
“The work in the garden seems to be going well,” he says, when the last of the ukiyo-e has been packed away and the box sealed. “Coming in here this morning, I can see how it must have looked when Aritomo-sensei was alive.”
“There’s still a lot to be done. But it will be restored to the way it used to be,” I say, “the way I remember it.”
“The horimono . . .”
“I’ll let you know.”
Tatsuji takes out the book of Yeats’s poems from his satchel. He looks at it, then holds it out to me. I shake my head, but he says, “Please, I want you to have it.”
Extending my hands, I receive the book from him. I feel we have known each other for longer than the two weeks he has spent here. We are the same, I realize. The people we loved have left us and we have been trying ever since to go on with our lives. But the one thing we cannot do is forget.
I walk him out of the garden, going past the Pavilion of Heaven by the banks of Usugumo Pond. At the entrance he gives me a deep bow. “Come and visit me at Kampong Penyu, when my house is completed.”
I return his bow. “A house on the beach, and time eternal,” I say, knowing I will never see him again.
It is while I am practicing my shooting in the shajo that the mist comes into my eyes the first time. With no signs, no warning at all, my vision turns opaque, as though words are being murmured into an empty glass bottle. Locking my fingers on the bow, I fight off the fear spreading in my limbs. I want to shout to Ah Cheong, to call for help, but I do not want anyone to hear the panic in my voice.
Control your breathing. I hear Aritomo’s voice, so clearly that he could be standing by my side.
I do as he taught me, without any success at first. The span between each breath coaxed in and then expelled gradually lengthens, broad lowlands dividing one mountain range from the next. Slowly the panic recedes and I begin to breathe normally again. Wiping the perspiration from my forehead with the edge of my sleeve, I rest the lower end of the bow on the floor. The sound reassures me.
Complete the shot.
The trees rustle in the wind. The arrows in the quiver-stand behind me shake softly, and I hear the shifting pebbles in the bed in front of the shajo; it sounds like someone cracking their knuckles. In my blindness I fit the arrow against the bowstring and pull it, feeling my ribs expand. I see the target in my mind as I wait for the wind to drop. A feeling of tranquility takes hold of me and I know I can stand there in that void forever.
I release the arrow, my mind guiding it all the way to the heart of the matto in one extended exhalation. From the song of the bowstring vibrating back into silence, strong and pure, I know it is the best shot I have ever made.
For a long time I stand there. I stand there until the emptiness in my eyes fills with shapeless objects again, coalescing into the familiar forms of trees and mountains and the long gravel bed in front. Lifting a hand to my eyes, I become visible to myself once more.
I return the bow to its stand and walk back to the house, leaving the arrow embedded in the center of the target.
The rice paper lantern Emily gave me rests on a shelf in the study. Late that night, as I am about to sit down at the desk, I stop and look at it. Rummaging in the drawers, I find a piece of paper, cut out a circle and cover the top of the lantern, sealing it with a strip of cellophane tape from a roll Tatsuji left in his workroom.
The pond is a meadow of stars. The frogs’ croaking stops when they sense my presence, then resumes a few moments later. I light the candle in the lantern and hold it in my hands. I close my eyes and see Aritomo. A woman’s face appears beneath my eyelids and I realize it is Yun Hong. She does not smile. She is not angry; she is not sad. She is only a memory.
The lantern becomes less heavy, and then there is no weight at all. I let it go, and I feel I am releasing a bird from my grasp. There is no wind tonight, and the lantern flickers upward, a buoy of light rising higher and higher. I watch it until it disappears somewhere above the clouds.
Dawn has come when the last line is finished. I have worked through the night, rewriting, but I do not feel tired at all. Holding the sheet of paper in my hand, my thoughts remain far away in that glade of ferns where I last saw Aritomo, almost forty years ago.
There have been times when I blamed myself for not calling out to him: perhaps he would have changed his mind, gone for his walk later or on another day, and not met with whatever befell him. Even after having set down the events of those brief years in writing, and reading them over again, I am still not entirely certain. But I know now, that whether it was an accident or if he did it on purpose, there was nothing I could have said or done to have prevented it.
In the rafters, a gecko clicks. I place the sheet of paper beneath all the other pages I have written, knock them into a neat stack and tie it together with string.
Something is stirring in my memory, and I remain completely still in my chair, so whatever it is that is emerging from hiding will not be fri
ghtened off. It takes shape slowly, like clouds forming.
I remember how, for a long time after Aritomo disappeared, the same dream kept recurring to me, staining my waking moments like the faintest of watermarks. I stopped having it once I moved away from Yugiri, and I forgot all about it.
In the dream I watch Aritomo walk on a path in the rain forest, pushing aside the overhanging branches and vines. Here and there the path narrows or crumbles into the river. He is not far ahead of me and I have the feeling that I am pursuing him, quietly, stealthily. Several times he slows down, as though allowing me to keep him in sight. Not once does he look back. The path ends in a clearing, and there he stops. Slowly he turns his entire body around to face me. He looks at me, not saying anything. It is at this point that I realize I am carrying a bow, his bow. I feel it stretch and strain as I take up the stance in preparation to shoot, the stance he taught me to perfect. I raise the heavy bow, pull the bowstring and aim straight at him, my arms, chest and stomach quivering with the effort. Still he does not move or speak.
I release the bowstring. And even though there is no arrow, still he falls. Still he falls.
Leaving the study, I walk past the ink painting of Lao Tzu. Its emptiness glows in the shadows. I stop and look at it, this drawing made by Aritomo’s father.
Lao Tzu, the disillusioned philosopher from China, had gone to the west and was never seen or heard from again. Aritomo also set down his thoughts and his teachings before he left: he had recorded them in his garden, and he had painted them on my body.
My decision to restore the garden is the correct one, the only one I can make. I will ensure that Yugiri will remain. For my sister. When the garden is ready, I will open it to the public. I will put up a plaque by the Pavilion of Heaven, describing Yun Hong’s life. The garden will also be a living memory of what Aritomo has made. I have told Tatsuji that Aritomo’s ukiyo-e must be returned to Yugiri. I will put them on permanent exhibition here. The house will have to be repaired as well. And I have to write down as many instructions as I can for Vimalya. I must look for Aritomo’s Sakuteiki and give it to her. So many things to do. I will be kept busy in the coming weeks and months. I remind myself to ask my secretary—my former secretary—to go to my house in KL and send Yun Hong’s watercolor to me. It will be on display to the visitors who come to see the garden.
It is right that Yun Hong will be remembered as I gradually forget and, in time, become forgotten.
The garden must continue to exist. For that to happen, the horimono has to be destroyed after my death. I cannot entrust that responsibility to anyone, not Tatsuji, and not Frederik. I will have to do it myself.
The darkness in the sky is thinning when I go out to Usugumo Pond. A bird flies across the sky, returning to the mountains. A memory comes to me of the cave where Aritomo took me to see the swiftlets. I wonder if the aborigines are still harvesting the nests there, if the bamboo scaffolding they used is still pinned to the walls; I wonder if I can find the cave again.
Perhaps the blind old monk Aritomo spoke to on his walk across the countryside when he was a young man was correct: there is no wind; the flag does not move; it is only the hearts and minds of men that are restless. But I think that, slowly and surely, the turbulent heart will soon also come to a stillness, the quiet stillness it has been beating toward all its life.
Even as I am losing myself, the garden will come back to life again. I will work in the garden, and I will visit Frederik. We will talk and laugh and weep like only old friends can. And in the evenings I will walk in the hills. Ah Cheong will be waiting at the front door, holding out Aritomo’s walking stick to me. I will take it, of course. But I know there will come a day when I will tell him that I do not want it.
Before me lies a voyage of a million miles, and memory is the moonlight I will borrow to illuminate my way.
The lotus flowers are opening in the first rays of the sun. Tomorrow’s rain lies on the horizon, but high up in the sky something pale and small is descending, growing in size as it falls. I watch the heron circle the pond, a leaf spiraling down to the water, setting off silent ripples across the garden.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
With the exception of the obvious historical figures, all characters in the novel sprang from my imagination. The visit of Sir Gerald Templer and his wife to Majuba Tea Estate and Yugiri is fictional.
The Malayan Emergency ended in July 1960, twelve years after it began. With the combined efforts of local security forces, civilians and troops from the Commonwealth, Malaya was one of the few countries in the world to defeat a communist insurgency. Noel Barber in his book The War of the Running Dogs called it “the world’s first struggle against guerrilla Communism.”
Professor Tatsuji’s experience as a kamikaze pilot originally appeared (in a different and longer form) in the Asian Literary Review, Autumn 2007, Volume 5.
The chamber versions of Chopin’s Piano Concertos, Nos. 1 and 2 were recorded by the Yggdrasil Quartet in 1997.
The following books were of assistance to me in the writing of The Garden of Evening Mists:
The War of the Running Dogs: Malaya 1948–1960, by Noel Barber
In Pursuit of Mountain Rats: The Communist Insurgency in Malaya, by Anthony Short
Prisoners of the Japanese: POWS of World War II in the Pacific, by Gavan Daws
The Journey Back from Hell, by Anton Gill
The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War, by George Hicks
Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze, by Mordecai G. Sheftall
Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden, by Jirō Takei and Marc P. Keane
The Japanese Tattoo, by Donald Richie and Ian Buruma
Gold Warriors, by Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave
I am grateful to Tristan Beauchamp Russell for describing to me what life on his tea estate in Cameron Highlands was like during the Malayan Emergency.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, Malaysia. His debut novel, The Gift of Rain, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2007 and has been widely translated. He divides his time between Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town.
www.tantwaneng.com
Reprint excerpts from the following printed material are used with permission.
“Winter” by N.P. Van Wyk Louw, anthologized in the three-volume Groot Verseboek, edited by Andre P Brink and published in 2008 by NB Publishing, Cape Town, South Africa
Richard Holmes’ A Meander through Memory and Forgetting from Memory: An Anthology, edited by Harriet Harvey Wood and A.S. Byatt and published in 2009 by Vintage Publishing, a division of Random House.
Japanese Death Poems, compiled by Yoel Hoffmann and published in 1998 by Tuttle Publishing, North Clarendon, Vermont.
Copyright © Tan Twan Eng 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. For information address Weinstein Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107
eISBN : 978-1-602-86181-7
First U.S. Edition
