The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  “She’ll never need to walk the streets.”

  “Right and wrong are so terribly mixed up,” said Georges Laforgue. “I find it better not to think about them. I prefer to think of Confucius and human-heartedness. Now sit down and eat. I am afraid you will have to drink tepid water. I have no refrigerator.”

  “We shall still go on seeing each other,” said Hardman. “We shall still be friends.”

  “Yes,” said Father Laforgue, “we shall still be friends. How could we be otherwise?” He pincered into his mouth a fragment of fried pork. “But friends must meet, and it seems to me that we shall never be able to meet.”

  “Oh, there are places. There’s the Bijou Cabaret, for example. Police officers go there to pick up their nightly whores. We can meet there and talk philosophy, under cover of girls and beer. It will be quite easy.”

  “You know,” said Father Laforgue, probing with his chopsticks, “my reactions are most unorthodox. I feel less hurt about your entering Islam than I would if you were to become a Protestant. That is wrong, for Protestantism is a disreputable younger brother but still of the family. Whereas Islam is the old enemy.”

  “The fact is,” said Hardman. Waspish red peppers bit his tongue. “The fact ith that Catholithithm and Ithlam have more to thay to each other …” (He drank some water)” … than have orthodox and heterodox Christianity. It was a quarrel between men when all is said and done, and there was a healthy mutual respect. Both claimed Aristotle as master of them that know, and Dante put Averroes in a very mild place. What I mean is that you can’t take Luther or Calvin or Wesley very seriously, and hence they don’t count. But you can take Islam very seriously and you can compare wounds and swop photographs, and you can say: ‘We’re old enemies, and old enemies are more than new friends.’ It’s like bull-fighting and the moment of truth, when the toreador and the bull become one.”

  “You will come back,” said Father Laforgue, nodding. “I know that. But it is important that you do not come back too late. Anyway,” he added, with little conviction, “prayer may help.”

  “I must go back to the Law,” said Hardman. “And before that I have to give some money to a parishioner of yours, a man called Hung.”

  “Hung is a good man.”

  “He’s certainly wealthy enough to be able to afford to be good. And today he’s going to be wealthier by two thousand dollars. More than thirty pieces of silver,” he added, grinning.

  “Be very careful in traffic,” said Father Laforgue. “Death awaits in a pinprick. And we shall see each other soon.”

  “As friends.”

  “As friends.”

  When Hardman had gone, Farher Laforgue, leaving the plates on the table to gather grease, turned with relief to the Analects. He picked out, as on a guitar-string, the notes of monosyllabic wisdom: “If a man be really bent on human-heartedness then he cannot be wicked …” But neither the words nor the meaning brought tears to his eyes. “…A wise man is not perplexed, nor is a human-hearted man unhappy, and a courageous man is never frightened.” He felt hopeless at being neither wise, courageous nor human-hearted.

  For Hardman the afternoon went well. The premises on Jalan Laksamana were secured, Hung counting the limp notes greedily, and Auntie’s bill was paid. Then in court Hardman demolished the Chinese cook who demanded two months’ pay from his ex-employer, alleging that he had not been given the statutory month’s notice but had been summarily dismissed with harsh words. Hardman left the plaintiff a quivering sniveller, his treacheries and villainies open to the world, defeated and rebuked, ordered by the magistrate to pay costs at the rate of five dollars a month. Hardman’s client, a paunched planter, was pleased—“Wasn’t going to let that fat Chinese sod get away with it”—and he cordially invited Hardman to drink victorious whisky with him in the Club. Hardman drank quite a lot of whisky, listening to the planter’s bellyaches and gripes: he was wealthy but rejected of women; even his wife, pinched, raw-boned and big-nosed, had left him for another man, a man with whom she now lived in sin in the Australian outback. Hardman was attentive and courteous, anticipating an eventual divorce suit.

  When Hardman left the Club he was happy and somewhat amorous, warm images flushing his pineal gland, his marriage presented to him as an adventure, and a line from Antony and Cleopatra ringing clear: “The beds i’ the East are soft.” He drove jerkily to his fiancée’s house and was met by a monsoon of abuse. ’Che Normah flashed the twin blades of her Achmese eyes and daggered him with metallic-clattering Malay. There was a lot of reduplication, and from the swirling pot of her anger he picked out chakap-chakap and orang-orang Nasrani as the main ingredients. He was accused of chatting-chatting with man-man Christian. His pale eyes glittering with whisky, he tried to take her hand, saying aloud:

  “When thy mistress some rich anger shows,

  Imprison her soft hand and let her rave.”

  She would have none of this, reiterating: “Christian men not good. Japanese Christian and Germans Christian and all bad men who have come to Malaya Christian. Christians believe in three Gods, contrary to Muslim teaching.” Her Japanese girl-friend, she argued, had been Christian, and look what the Japanese had done in Malaya. And now the Chinese Communists were killing and torturing, and they too were Christian …

  “On a point of factual accuracy,” Hardman kept trying to say, “on a mere point of accuracy …”

  Hardman was thin but he was wiry. He put his arms round her ample body and kissed her heavily. She struggled in vain, only once freeing her mouth to forbid him any contact with the padre. Then the energy of her anger was converted to a passion of submission to his caresses, and soon, among the cushions on the floor, he anticipated the consummation of his marriage.

  Convalescent, sweating, almost sober, he said: “Is it true what you told me about not being able to have children?”

  “Allah has denied me that blessing.”

  “Are you sure it’s only Allah?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He lay back in cigarette-smoking languor, with the silks and perfumes of the Arabian Nights all about him. Soon a girl would bring coffee. Minarets rose in frail spires of smoke, and the camel-bells of the robed traders thinned into the distance as the caravan passed through the gateway. It was an acceptable world.

  “You must promise me that,” said ’Che Normah. “Not to see that padre again.”

  “But he’s my friend.”

  “You will have new friends.”

  “All right,” lied Hardman. “I promise.”

  She embraced him with undiminished ardour and he began to feel a reluctant admiration for those Muslims who could not get along with fewer than four wives. Perhaps the West was really effete.

  Next day the marriage contract was signed.

  6

  THE THERMOMETER IN Crabbe’s office read one hundred and six degrees.

  It was not really the office, it was a book-store. The real office had become a class-room, housing the twelfth stream of the third standard, and soon—the kampongs milling out children in strict Malthusian geometrical progression—the store itself would become yet another class-room. Then Crabbe would have to take his telephone and typewriter into the lavatory. He went to the lavatory now, without typewriter or telephone, to pull off his shirt, wipe down his body with a towel already damp, and drink thirstily of the tap-water, brownish and sun-warm. For a fortnight now he had intended to buy a large thermos jug and a table-fan. His prodigious dryness was due to the heat, to too much smoking, and to a great salty breakfast.

  The excessive smoking was the fault of Haji Ali College; the Pantagruelian breakfast was Ah Wing’s regular notion of what an expatriate officer should eat before going off to work. Crabbe had consumed grape-fruit, iced papaya, porridge, kippers, eggs and bacon with sausages and a mutton chop, and toast and honey. At least, these things had been set before him, and Ah Wing had watched intently from the kitchen door. Crabbe now saw that he would have to beg Ah Wing t
o go and work for Talbot, a man who would meet his challenge gladly, might even call for second helpings and more bread. But perhaps Ah Wing would cunningly recognise Talbot’s greed as pathological and despise him more than he despised Crabbe, deliberately burning his steaks and under-boiling his potatoes. Somewhere in Ah Wing’s past was a frock-coated whiskered law-bringer who had established the pattern of square meals and substantial beavers. Perhaps Ah Wing was to be seen on some historical photograph of the eighteen-seventies, grinning behind a solid row of thick-limbed pioneers, all of whom had given their names to ports, hills and city streets. Certainly, in the gravy soups, turbot, hare, roast saddles, cabinet puddings, boiled eggs at tea-time and bread and butter and meat paste with the morning tray, one tasted one’s own decadence: a tradition had been preserved in order to humiliate. Perhaps it really was time the British limped out of Malaya.

  Ah Wing was a fantastic model of Chinese conservatism. He had not at first been willing to recognise that Crabbe was a married man and had set only one place at table. At length, grudgingly, he had obeyed his master’s sign-language. And habits of long-repatriated officers seemed fossilised in certain rituals: a large bottle of beer was brought to the bedside on the morning of the Sabbath; twice Ah Wing had entered Crabbe’s unlocked bathroom and started to scrub his back; once Fenella had been rudely shaken from her dawn sleep and told, in rough gestures, to go.

  But Ah Wing’s private life—in so far as it showed chinks of light in Crabbe’s kitchen-dealings with him—exhibited a much more formidable conservatism, dizzying Crabbe with vistas of ancient China. He had once caught Ah Wing eating a live mouse. A day later he was proposing to send a black cat after it (black cats were said to be tastier than tabbies). Then there was Ah Wing’s store of medicines—tiger’s teeth in vinegar, a large lizard in brandy, compounds of lead and horrible egg-nogs. Crabbe discovered that his cook had a great reputation with the local Malays, with whom he did a roaring trade in—eventually lethal—aphrodisiacs. The village bomoh was jealous of Ah Wing and called him an infidel. And indeed Ah Wing’s religion, though not quite animistic, was too complex and obscure for inquiry.

  The local Malays were a problem. They squatted on Crabbe’s veranda every night, waiting for tales of distant lands and Western marvels. Crabbe had now established the routine of reading them love pantuns—mysterious four-line poems he had found in a Malay anthology—and discovered that a few verses went a long way, producing ecstatic cries, grunts of deep approval, profound nods and writhings of bodies. Here at least was a healthy literary tradition. It was Fenella who suffered most. The Malays were fascinated by her fair hair, and children were brought along to clutch it stickily, as against the King’s Evil. The women asked her about her underwear, begged for discarded brassieres, and went round the lounge, handling the ornaments and wanting to know how much they cost. It had taken Crabbe some time to become accustomed to Malay elders squatting on the dining-room floor and using the second bedroom for reciting their prayers. His predecessor had been decidedly too chummy. And Fenella was still scared of taking a bath, for a spirit of sincere inquiry sent serious Malay youths to the bathroom window to find out if white women differed materially from brown ones. It was not easy, and Fenella talked more and more about going back to England.

  “Take it easy, darling,” he would say. “We’ve got to be absorbed into these customs. We’re still too tough to be ingested quickly, but we’ve got to try and soften ourselves to a bolus, we’ve got to yield.”

  “What lovely metaphors you choose.”

  “I mean what I say. If we’re going to live in Malaya, work for Malaya, we must shed a great deal of our Western-ness. We’re too ready to be shocked, and we’re too reserved.”

  “I’ve tried. You know I’ve tried. I thought I’d succeeded in fitting into Malaya, but now I know I never shall. I’ve got to go home.”

  “But we’ve nothing to go back to.”

  “Are you so blind? Don’t you see the beginning of the end already? They don’t want us here. They’re talking about Malaya for the Malayans. There’s no room for Europeans any more.”

  “That’s what they think. But who’s to do the work if we don’t? They’re not ready to take over yet. In their hearts they know it.”

  Did they know it? Crabbe was having trouble with his senior master, Jaganathan. Jaganathan was quite sure of his own competence to take over from the white man. In the oven of an office he and Crabbe had occasionally raised their voices, and the Malay clerks had looked up with interest. Jaganathan was a black tub of a man, with a jutting rice-round belly and black trunks of legs below his white shorts. But his head was angular and carven like a huge piece of coal, polished with sweat and reflecting light in all its facets, the steel-rimmed spectacles always flashing tiny crystal moons of impatience or irritation. His middle-aged voice whined and crooned and sometimes grew husky and panting when he was deeply moved—as now, this morning, with Crabbe coming out of the lavatory, adjusting his shirt, feeling sweat rill down the hollow of his back.

  “I am telling you, Mr. Crabbe, these peoples are very angry that you will not admit their children. They are good peoples, they want to give education to their children, and they are angry that the white man will not allow them education. Then they see that two white children, the children of white men, are allowed in the school and they are not. They will be very angry to you, they will injure your car, they will throw stones at your windows.”

  “Look here, Mr. Jaganathan, that decision isn’t mine, and you damn well know it isn’t. These two expatriate officers were promised places in this school for their kids. That promise was one of the conditions of their consenting to be posted here. It was a promise made at high level, some time ago. What do you want? Do you want to deny education to the children of expatriates?”

  “They should make their own arrangements for education. They have money and they should start private schools. They should not take the bread of learning from the mouths of Asians.” Crabbe guessed that Jaganathan had been making a speech somewhere; the metaphor came out too glibly.

  “And I wish you’d see sense about this money business,” said Crabbe. “I’m sick to death of being told that I’m bloated with the blood of the down-trodden Asian. Your salary is a good deal higher than mine.”

  “Look at my experience. I have been teaching for many, many more years than you, Mr. Crabbe.”

  “Look at my qualifications,” said Crabbe with heat. “Those had to be worked for, you know, and paid for. You’d better start realising that some of us are out here to work for Malaya, and that the work we do requires some sort of specialist knowledge, and that we don’t regard our white skin as any qualification at all. Sometimes I wish to God I weren’t white, so that I could get people to stop looking at my face as if it were either that of a leper or a jackbooted tyrant and start thinking of what I am, what I’m trying to do, not of a mere accident of pigmentation.”

  Jaganathan wheezed a queer chuckle which joggled his belly. “You sometimes become very angry man, Mr. Crabbe. It is not a good thing to become angry in a hot climate. The white man is not used to this climate, he is not born to it. It is better to be calm.” Then his voice took on a peculiar sing-song quality, and he seemed to be soothing Crabbe, repeating the words, “Be calm, be calm, be calm,” smiling and throwing the crystal lights of his glasses on to Crabbe’s eyes. For a moment Crabbe had a strange conviction that Jaganathan was trying to hypnotise him. Certainly he felt spent and he tasted the fish-course of his breakfast in a wave of nausea and got a distant view, as on a radar-screen, of an approaching headache.

  “All right,” said Crabbe. “I’m sorry.” He felt a certain shame. He could not hope to help Malaya if he made enemies, lost his temper with the influential, lashed out at his henchmen. He sat down behind his desk, wiped the back of his neck with a soaked handkerchief.

  “You are not looking very well, Mr. Crabbe,” said Jaganathan. “The work is very hard here. Why do you no
t take a little time off, lie down for a little while? There is no reason why you should not go home now.”

  “I’m all right,” said Crabbe. “Thanks for your solicitude.”

  “I think perhaps you have a headache.”

  Crabbe looked up at him sharply. “I’ve no headache,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a walk round the school. I want to see some of the teaching.”

  “They will not like that, Mr. Crabbe. They will resent it. They are all qualified teachers here.”

  “There are quite a few probationers. It’s one of my jobs to see how they are getting on.”

  “I will come with you, Mr. Crabbe.”

  The headache was taking shape, firming. “Thank you, Mr. Jaganathan. I believe you yourself have a class now. If you’ll excuse me.” He pushed past, went out.

  Crabbe got his biggest shocks from two of the experienced teachers. A shrill Tamil woman in a bright sari was giving a history lesson. Crabbe stood outside the classroom and, unseen, listened to an account of British tyranny in India.

  “…And the British hate the Indians so much they build a prison called the Black Hole of Calcutta and they put thousands of Indians in this very small dark room where there was no air and the Indians died …” He gulped, wondering whether to laugh or cry, and passed on down the stone corridor to the class-room of ’Che Abdul Kadir. Kadir was evidently in the throes of a hangover and was throwing around, like stink-bombs, ripe pellets of lower deck invective.

  “…For fuck’s sake, if you are going to speak this bloody language, take your finger out. Any work I give you you do not bloody well do. I stand here in great pain because I am a sick man, and I see you little bastards doing no bloody work at all grinning at me like fucking apes as if it did not matter. But …” He slapped the desk and contorted his Dutch-Chinese face anew. “…It does bloody matter. There is the future of the fucking country at stake. If you little bastards do not work then there is chaos.” Suddenly his expression changed and with a sort of pedantic eagerness he wrote, in large capitals, the word CHAOS on the blackboard. Then he stood back and looked at it, the corners of his mouth lifting in a vapid smile. “Look at that word,” he said. “It is going to be an important word soon. See how it is spelt.” He admired the word, licking his lips and at one point sticking out a bilious tongue. “Write it down in your books.” The word seemed to cure his hangover, for he became vigorous and friendly, patting children on the back, running horny fingers through their hair, striding up and down in good humour. Meanwhile the children, looking up at each several letter with open mouths, wrote. Then Crabbe, who had been standing unseen, peering in through the glass door, entered the class-room.