The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  Today her betrothed had a case in court. The court, she knew, rose for tiffin at twelve-thirty, and soon it would be time for her to watch him come out, thin and very white, elegant enough in unpaid-for palm-beach suiting. (So many bills of his had to be paid; well, she would pay them.) She was prepared, until the marriage contract had actually been signed, to forgo her proleptic right to control his movements and associations. There was plenty of time. But, almost sentimentally, she wanted to rehearse the part of the doorstep-waiting wife, the hand waving at the approaching lean figure, the white boyish face perhaps breaking into a smile of greeting. Realistic like all Achinese, she knew that the greeting smile would not last for long, or, if it did last, it would become twisted. But she tried to retain this rare mood of sentimentality, even tried to intensify it by applying it to the past as well as the future, and so went for her photograph album and sat down, barefooted, on the step.

  Studio photographs: herself in rich Malay dress; in a frothy evening frock; a profile with bare brown shoulders. And the innumerable snapshots: herself and a Japanese girl-friend in pre-war Singapore; a group on the estate, her doomed Dutchman next to her; herself in bathing costume, leaning back provocatively in the sun; a Chinese dinner, with her second husband fumbling chopsticks to his mouth; Willem smiling vacantly, an arm about her. The sentimental mood did not last. Her eyes hardened.

  Soon she brought to the door-step a plate of cold curried beef, fiery pepper-choked fibres, and forked it in delicately. Then, unaware of irony, she hummed “One Fine Day” while picking her teeth. “A man, a little man, is approaching across the padang.” She did not know the words.

  Before twelve-thirty the court recessed. She saw her betrothed come out, talking to a white-suited Tamil, making forensic gestures, his brief under his arm. Then she saw him prepare to move off and then someone come on to the scene up left, and accost him gently.

  The storms began to stir in her eyes, for, despite everything, she was still a daughter of Islam, and the man thar Rupert Hardman was talking to was just the man he should not be talking to. She banged her fist on the empty curry plate and it cracked in two.

  5

  HAVING TELEPHONED HIS client, still waiting at the Club, to say that his case (breach of contract, brought by a servant) would not now come up till the afternoon, Rupert Hardman left the court-house, wiping irritably his face and the back of his neck, his brief under his arm, listening to the chatter of the Tamil interpreter whose name he had forgotten. Chinese cases are brisk, the litigants want to get back to business, but with Indians there is an unhealthy love of the law, and a petty case of the theft of ten dollars had evoked high drama—wailings, rendings of shirts already rent, flashing eyes and poetry, babies exhibited theatrically at moments of crisis. The case was likely to eat away a great deal of the afternoon—because of a certain dramaturgical rhythm its length could roughly be judged—and certainly the audience would not object. The law was a poor man’s circus and the public benches were crammed with aficionados of the short answer and the long answer, the crescendo and the climax, the thumping of breast and elevation of eyes, the tears and the hard-luck story.

  “Our worthy magistrate,” said the Tamil interpreter, “is too enamoured with the niceties of English idiom. He told the Chinese defendant that he would let him off this time but that henceforth he must paddle his own canoe. Our friend Wong translated this for him too literally, saying that the defendant must expiate his crime by taking a sampan up and down the river. Whereupon the defendant said he would take anything but a sampan, anything—a fine of a thousand dollars, a week’s gaol—but how could he now, at his age, forsake his business and become a sampan-man. You see thus the stupidity of the Malays. A Malay magistrate takes everything too far, including the English language, and our worthy ’Che Yunus is no exception to the rule.”

  Hardman nodded, remembering that ’Che Yunus had reviled a Tamil witness, a convert to Islam, because he gave his name as Abdullah bin Abdullah. Had he no imagination, did he think so little of the faith he had entered as to take the most obvious, the least inspiring name that came to hand? ’Che Yunus was ready to dismiss him from the witness-stand, as a man without a name, until counsel had gently intervened.

  ’Che Normah had decreed that Rupert Hardman’s new name should be Abdullah bin Abdullah.

  Hardman now became irritable and expressed impatience at the long waiting in the heat, the frivolous attitude of the East to the calm processes of Western Law. He waved his arm in a gesture of weariness. The Tamil nodded, saying: “It is the heat, Mr. Hardman. It is getting you down. How long since you have had leave?”

  “Leave? How can I afford leave?”

  “Soon, I hear, you will be able to afford it. But will you then be able to take it?”

  Hardman did not answer. There were obviously no secrets in this town. Haji Zainal Abidin had done his rounds, announcing loudly to the world that another infidel had seen the light, the terms of the contract, the size of the marriage settlement, Allah be praised, boy! another beer.

  “I hope I can take it,” grinned Hardman at length. The Tamil took his leave, his face gleaming in the sun like a polished door-knocker, strong arm raised in most cordial valediction.

  Hardman started off in the direction of the car-park. Then Georges Laforgue appeared from around the corner and accosted him in French.

  “It is true what I hear?”

  “What do you hear, Georges?” Hardman smiled with affection and embarrassment and shame.

  “You are to be married.”

  “Yes, Georges. I’m sorry.”

  “You had better come to my house. I can cook you a little lunch. Your car is here?”

  Father Laforgue was a missionary who had been ten years in China, four of them in prison, a year now in Dahaga and two years yet to come before leave. He was somewhat younger than Hardman but looked far younger than he should. The fair cropped head and glasses and innocent eyes suggested a Mid-Western campus; only the mouth was mobile, adult, French. His office was displayed frankly in a long white tropical soutane that spoke of the clinic more than the altar, and the sweeping aseptic dress made sense for Hardman out of the words of Finnegans Wake: “He does not believe in our psychous of the Real Absence, neither miracle wheat nor soul-surgery of P. P. Quemby.” Sooner or later everything in Finnegans Wake made sense: it was just a question of waiting.

  “You’re probably right,” said Hardman. “If we’re seen together in the street you’ll probably end by being thrown out of the State. Here it is.” They got into the worn dusty car, oven-like with a morning’s slow soaking of metallic heat, and Hardman started it and crept, with much horning, into the stream of lunch-time bicycles and trishaws. They clattered down Jalan Hang Tuah, turned into Jalan Rumah Jahat—chickens and children and mountainous rubbish on the road—and then, on Jalan China, came to Father Laforgue’s little house. Father Laforgue lived at the end of a row of shops, all of them carrying names in bold ideograms, and he himself had his name and his calling painted on a board in white Chinese characters. Thus he became one with his Chinese parishioners, announcing a trade as honest as that of the dentist, the seller of rice-wine, the brothel-keeper, the purveyor of quack rejuvenators and aphrodisiacs, or the vendor of shark’s-fin strips.

  The street-door was always open, for there was nothing to steal, and Hardman was led into the single large room, dark and airless. It was dirty too, for Father Laforgue kept no servant. Once he had tried, and the Parish Committee had granted eighty dollars a month as fair wages, but lubricious eyes had suspected and tongues eventually broadcast the worst: a Chinese boy had meant pederasty, an old woman gerontophily, an intelligent monkey would have meant bestiality. It was best to do for oneself and risk the charge of auto-erotic practices. Celibacy is not merely unknown to Islam, it is unintelligible.

  Hardman sat on one of the two hard chairs and saw on the table an open book which he knew to be the Analects of Confucius, row after falling row of ideogra
ms preserving—outside phonetic change and above dialectal differences—that eminently seductive and dangerous common sense of old China. There were other books on the single book-shelf, all Chinese—Shang Yang, Tzu Ssu, Hui Shih, Kung-sun Lung, Chuang Chou, Han Fei, Pan Ku, Wang Ch’ung. Nowhere to be seen was the work of a new slick Thomist, Maritain, von Hügel, even Augustine or Jerome or Liguori. Georges Laforgue knew the meaning of the term ‘seduction’.

  Shyly the priest said, “There is nothing to drink. No, wait. I have some rice-spirit. We could drink that with altar-wine.”

  “That’s all right, Georges.”

  Father Laforgue sat down, folded hands on lap, and waited.

  “You knew I had to do this,” said Hardman, “but it doesn’t mean anything. How could it?”

  “It must mean something. Why else do it?” Of the two Hardman spoke by far the better French. Diffidence smothered the knowledge of authority that rested beneath Father Laforgue’s equivocal Catholicism. In China he had spoken good Mandarin, and in ten years this had become his first tongue. Here he found himself with a parish of Hokkien and Cantonese speakers and a few English people whose language he could hardly talk. His French, severed from its sources of nourishment, grown coarse through lack of use, halted and wavered, searching for the right word which Mandarin was always ready to supply. He understood the confessions he heard only because he had compiled a sort of traveller’s guide to the chief sins, practising as a colonial doctor practises, the stock questions and descriptions of symptoms set out in polyglot lists to be learnt parrot-fashion.

  “You know I had to get money. I’m being quite honest with you. No other way suggested itself. But, you see, it can’t mean anything. I haven’t apostatised; I’m just pretending to be a Muslim.”

  “It isn’t just a question of what you believe but of what you do,” said Father Laforgue. “By the mere act of going to the mosque …”

  “But I shan’t go to the mosque.”

  “But you will not be able to receive the sacraments, go to mass. You’ll be under Islamic law, remember. Islam is mainly custom, mainly observance. There is very little real doctrine in it, only this belief in one God, which they think so original.”

  “I’d thought of that, but …”

  “And don’t you see, you’ll be living in sin. You’ll be cohabiting with this woman, outside a state of matrimony.”

  “And supposing I cohabit only in the strict literal sense?”

  “You mean?”

  “Supposing I merely live with her, in the same house, having no carnal knowledge?”

  Father Laforgue smiled, looking wise and bitter. “You know your own nature well enough. Human nature. And I think you must know the law of Islam on that point. She can claim divorce on the grounds of non-consummation. They have an Arabic term for it.”

  “Nusus.”

  “I think that is the word. And then she can demand the whole of her money back, the marriage money. There is a Malay word for that.”

  “The mas kahwin.”

  “Yes. You know it all.”

  “And you know it all.”

  “There was the case of a Tamil Catholic who changed his faith to marry a Malay. It was here, it happened while you were away. I was nearly thrown out of the State for trying to talk to him. I learned a lot about Islam at that time.”

  Hardman knew that they both knew that there was no compromise possible, no more façade, no stealing off to masses said in cellars, sacraments administered when the town was asleep, no avoiding the marriage-bed. “Look here, Georges,” he said. “I know what I’m doing, and what worries me most is your position. I don’t want you to feel you have to try and win me back, putting yourself in bad with the Islamic authorities. You can write me off. For the time being, that is. I’ll just have to take a chance. But you can’t afford to go back for the lost sheep, at least your parish can’t afford that you should do that.”

  Father Laforgue sighed. “You know my duty as far as that goes.”

  “It’s not as though I’m a real Catholic,” said Hardman. “I’m a convert, and a very recent one at that. People are always dubious about war-time marriages, and war-time conversions are sometimes just as shaky. If it hadn’t been for that wing-commander having visions and this other business of the crash, well, it just wouldn’t have happened.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “But the fact is that it did happen. Conversions are often a matter of sheer accident. You had better have some lunch.”

  “I can help you.”

  “There is not much to do. We can have some mee and a little fried pork. Or are you allowed to eat that now?”

  Hardman grinned. “In public, no.”

  “I like a man to be whole-hearted. If you are going to be a Muslim why not be a real one? It is better than being tepid. You remember it says: ‘Because thou art neither hot nor cold …’”

  “‘I shall vomit thee out of my mouth.’”

  “You stay there and rest. You will find some Chinese cigarettes somewhere. I will do the cooking.”

  Standing over the frying-pan Father Laforgue caught, in the smell of the mee and the pork, the smell of the hilly province where he had lived and worked for so long. Those ten years had impaired his orthodoxy. A soldier of Rome in a far outpost, he was cut off from orders, from new policies and definitions, and had to administer the law in terms of what was expedient. The doctor, curing diseases in a savage territory, may well have to meet the medicine-man half-way and submit to the intoning of spells and the sticking of talismans between the patients’ teeth before plunging his scalpel into the distempered part. And so Father Laforgue had been willing to falsify the doctrine of the Trinity in a polytheistic parish, had learned not to be outraged at meeting Chinese priests who had married. More and more he had discovered a sympathy for the charismatic churches against which St. Paul had fulminated. He had held fast to his main function, primarily a thaumaturgical one: he could forgive sins, he could turn the bread and wine into God, he could save a dying child from Limbo. Little else mattered.

  And he was so sick for China that he wondered whether anything mattered now except his returning there. The Chinese Government had become more moderate recently. They would permit priests to work there now, so long as they were careful not to allow their teaching to conflict with the official philosophy. A priest, of course, was essentially a crying witness against the Communist metaphysic; he was nothing if he was not that. But Georges Laforgue clung to a hope. He might yet find himself back in those cool hills with their incredible stars and that mad logical world of the Chinese villagers. France meant nothing to him. Europeans had sometimes invited him to dinner and given him stuffed aubergines and onion soup and Nuits St. Georges and what they said was good coffee. They had gushed about Normandy and the Côte d’Or and little places on the Left Bank. They had played him records of French cabaret music. They had evinced, in their curious French mixed with Malay (both were foreign languages, both occupied the same compartment, they were bound to get mixed), a nostalgia for France which amused him slightly, bored him much, flattered him not at all. He rarely received invitations now to the mass-produced houses of the Public Works Department. He dined with the Chinese and spoke with the children, many of whom were learning Mandarin at school. And he had this English friend, Rupert Hardman.

  “I suppose,” he said, as he laid the table and put down the soya sauce, “I suppose that I am not doing things at all in the right way. I should tell you that I am the voice of the Church, which is the voice of God, and tell you to get down on your knees and repent. And then you would feel a great deal happier.”

  “That’s perfectly true. I know I’m not going to be happy.”

  “And yet you do it.”

  “I have my function. I am a lawyer. I must fulfil that function. I cannot fulfil it with a background of debts and without an office. It’s as simple as that. If you had shown me a nice rich Chinese widow
it would have been easier, but … Well, I take what I can.”

  “I do not understand. You are a well-qualified man. You should be already rich. Lawyers make much money in this country.”

  “You can blame Redshaw and Tubb. They asked me to come and work in Singapore. They were crooks, as I found out too late. There were no repatriation terms. I had to leave, on a question of principle, and I had to stay in Malaya. There just wasn’t enough money for a passage home.”

  “That is, I suppose, amusing. You leave your firm because of a very high principle, and now you embrace very low principles yourself.”

  “But that was professional honour.”

  “And so you set professional honour above God.” Saying this, Georges Laforgue felt shame. The big words were beginning to sound empty in his mouth. Hardman had at least been seduced by honour; he himself only by hills and ridiculous impious peasants. St. Paul had been right there. Better not to have been born. But then he had been Saul. Or had he just quoted it from someone else? He ought to look that up, but he had nowhere to look it up in. He shrugged it away.

  “And I shall be rich,” said Hardman. “Then I shall give her all her money back. And then I shall pronounce the magic formula of divorce.”

  “Leaving one more divorcée abandoned to walk the streets.”