The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  “Poor Robert,” said Crabbe, coming over to him and pressing his very thin shoulder. “Poor, poor Robert.”

  Robert Loo looked up at Crabbe, genuine bewilderment in his small lashless eyes.

  “But I don’t understand, Mr. Crabbe. I just don’t understand. I have everything I want. You must not feel sorry for me.”

  Maniam had missed the plane. Deliberately. He could have walked on to it without help, he could have survived the journey without undue nausea—despite the kick in the belly—but he was ashamed and angry about the spreading purple under his left eye and the big blubber upper lip. Now he lay on the spare bed in Dr. Sundralingam’s house, saying: “What would they say if I walked into the office like this? They might laugh. And the C.P.O. might be angry about it. He might think that I had been fighting.”

  “So you have been,” said Sundralingam, “in a way.”

  “I swear to God I never touched him. But he took unfair advantage. He got me against the wall under the Greenwich Mean Time. And there were all the instruments and radios and meters there. Supposing I had been responsible for breaking one of those things. And the aircraft was coming in too. He took very unfair advantage.” The words came out half-chewed, what with the swollen lips and the stiff jaw.

  “We fought for you,” squeaked Arumugam. “The first duty is to a friend.” He still had growling in his ears the noise of the Australian pilot asking for wind velocity and saying: “What the hell goes on there?” The fight had been broadcast, must have been heard in half the aircraft and airports of the peninsula.

  “I can’t remember the best treatment for a black eye,” said Sundralingam. “I have been on this yaws campaign for so long now that I’ve forgotten my general medicine. Some people recommend a beef-steak, but I don’t think that is quite right for a Hindu. Perhaps a pork chop?”

  “Not enough blood,” squealed Arumugam. “You’ve got to have blood.” He sounded like young Master Pavy playing Hieronimo.

  “Cold water compresses,” prescribed Dr. Sundralingam. “And stay in bed. I’ll send an official note to Pahang.”

  “Will I be safe here?” chewed Maniam fearfully. “Will I be safe alone here during the day?”

  “My servant’s here all the time,” soothed Sundralingam. “He’s a Malay, but he’s all right.” The Malay stood by the sick-room door, hunched, heavy-jawed, simian, the end-product of God knew what mingling of Achinese pirates, aboriginal bushmen, Bugis bandits, long-hut head-hunters. He took in Maniam’s broken face with relish, crooning to himself.

  “If he definitely loses his job,” quavered Maniam thickly, “if that happens, he may try to get me again. He may send axe-men. Perhaps I should have got the plane after all.” But he saw in vision the laughing office and heard the questioning C.P.O. “No, I couldn’t. I see that. I’ll have to stay here. But do spread it round that I’ve gone back. Say I’ve gone back by train.”

  “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “Vythilingam let us down,” shrilled Arumugam. “He was cruiser-weight champion at Calcutta University, you know. He would have made very short work of our Malay friend.”

  “Where was Vythilingam?” asked Maniam.

  Parameswaran, the schoolmaster, who had been sitting still and pipe-puffing at the foot of the bed, now removed his pipe. “I can guess where he was,” he said. “I will bet he was at the house of my colleague, Miss Rosemary Michael.”

  “But he took his black bag with him.”

  “That is a blind,” said Mr. Parameswaran. “He is ashamed of it being known that he goes there.” He put back his pipe and nodded several times. Middle-aged, grizzled, with a comfortable paunch, a golf-tee sticking like a nipple through his shirt-pocket, he was the photographic negative of any suburban Englishman. He was a Jaffna Tamil, but also a Rotarian. He knew lines from the Golden Treasury, apt for after-dinner speeches, and even a few Latin tags. He was not quite trustworthy, he trembled on the brink of a bigger world than Jaffna. Not that he had travelled very far. “A home-keeping youth,” he was fond of saying. Also he had a wife and family (the wife, disappointingly, above suspicion—pure red-blooded Jaffna) and he never came to the agapes. But he seemed to know about them and he seemed not to approve.

  “Are you sure of this?” asked Sundralingam. “It sounds quite unlike Vythilingam.”

  “No. It is only a guess. But she has mentioned his name in the staffroom to other ladies as being one of the innumerable men who have been seduced by her charms.”

  “Seduced?” echoed Arumugam in a squeal of horror.

  “Seduced by her charms. That is what she alleges. She alleges it about many men, however.”

  “I don’t know the lady,” munched Maniam. “I’ve never met her.”

  “Oh, she is, I suppose, not unattractive,” said Parameswaran. “She is not to my taste, however. She is also Christian and immodest.”

  “She’s of very low caste,” said Sundralingam. “I knew her parents in Kuala Hantu. She knows I knew them, but still she once told me that she was a Balinese princess. On another occasion she said she was partly English and partly Spanish. It was her Spanish blood, she said, that made her get brown so easily. In England, she said, she was quite pale. She despises her own race, you see.”

  “Of course,” admitted Maniam, “she must be ashamed of her caste.”

  “There is too much of all this,” said Sundralingam. “Too much despising of one’s own race and too much despising of other people’s races. That is going to be the big trouble of Malaya. You take this man Syed Omar. He has a mad hatred of Tamils. He imagines big Tamil conspiracies against him. Now he will nurse an even bigger hatred than before because of the thrashing he got to-day. But I personally did not want to thrash him, nor, I think, did Arumugam. You will believe me, perhaps, when I say that I felt sorry for him when he lay at the foot of the stairs. It was pathetic to see him with his poor cheap shirt on, all decorated with film stars, lying there in his blood.”

  Maniam protested through his sore mouth. “Look what he did to me. He deserved all he got.”

  “Yes, yes. But he should never conceive these hatreds. The trouble starts in his poor misguided brain.” There were glistening pin-points in Sundralingam’s large brown eyes.

  “There is no occasion to get sentimental,” said Parameswaran. “I know the family and the family is rotten. I’ve taught seven of Syed Omar’s children. The eldest, Hassan, is the lowest of the low. Lazy, truculent, dishonest, with his long hair and his American clothes, slouching round the town with companions equally low. There’s a core of shiftlessness about the Malays. They know they’re no good, but they try to bluster their way out of things. Look what they’re trying to do here. They’re trying to close the bars and the dance-halls and the Chinese pork-market, in the sacred name of Islam. But they’ve no real belief in Islam. They’re hypocrites, using Islam to assert themselves and lord it over people. They pretend to be the master-race, but the real work is done by others, as we know, and if Malaya were left to the Malays it wouldn’t survive for five minutes.”

  “True,” said Arumugam’s piccolo. “Without the Malays it would be a good country perhaps.”

  “The name Malaya is unfortunate,” said Sundralingam. “But it may yet get back its original Indian name of Langkasuka. That has already been proposed. Still,” he added, “if only people would get on with their work—the Malays in the kampongs and in the paddy-fields and the Indians in the professions and the Chinese in trade—I think all people could be quite happy together. It is the ambition of the Malays which is going to prove so tragic. For them,” he smiled, not without compassion.

  “Trouble is coming, certainly,” cried Arumugam. “But if we all stick together there will be no difficulty.”

  “That,” said Sundralingam, “is why we mustn’t have Vythilingam doing anything he should not do. I do hope there is nothing in this rumour of yours,” turning to Parameswaran.

  Parameswaran, intent on puffing, raised one eyebrow and grimaced non-c
ommittally.

  Maniam suddenly cried in terror. “I have just thought,” he said. The Malay servant lounged by the door, not yet sated of the innocent entertainment Maniam’s ruined face provided. “I have just thought,” he repeated. “This servant of yours will talk in the market about my being here. And perhaps Syed Omar will find out.” He tried to get out of bed, but Parameswaran immediately sat on his left foot, at the same time pushing him back to the pillow and saying: “Don’t be a coward, man.”

  “I think,” said Maniam, “I had better get back to Pahang after all. I can get the evening mail train. I can steal quietly to my house. Nobody will see.”

  “Don’t be a coward,” repeated Parameswaran. “Aren’t you ashamed? Fancy being frightened of a Malay.”

  “I am no coward,” declared Maniam from his ventriloquist’s mouth. “I just don’t want any more of his dirty tricks.”

  “There is no need to worry,” said Sundralingam. “If Syed Omar tries it again we will set Vythilingam on to him. If you worry you will make a slow recovery. Try to relax.”

  Arumugam called over the Malay servant. “Mari sini,” he piped. The Malay servant shambled over, mouth open. “Do not say this tuan is still here,” ordered Arumugam in bad Malay. The servant nodded, his eyes all animal wonder. “Keep quiet about it and you will get ten dollars.”

  “You see,” said Sundralingam. “Nobody will know.”

  “Your old man knocked that Tamil about so much that he can’t go back to Pahang.” Thus Idris bin Sudin, friend of Syed Hassan. “He’s staying at that doctor’s place.” Hassan guffawed.

  The four friends sat in a hot drinking-stall, drinking warm orange crush, beguiling the tedium of the long Sabbath afternoon. The stall was one of many in the Park of Happiness, a palisaded Venusberg set in mud. There was an open-air stage for ronggeng dancing, a fœtid cabaret with a beer-bar, two houses of ill-fame disguised as coffee-shops, and a tattered cinema-screen whereon was shown the endless epic of the Javanese shadow-play. The Sabbath would not end till sunset; till then these vessels of pleasure must lie becalmed. Only the wooden and attap huts were sleepily open for the thirsty, each Chinese towkay dozing over his abacus, the Malay waitress sulking over an old copy of Film.

  Of the four, only Azman wore full uniform. It was his turn to wear it. The drainpipe trousers, the serge jacket with the velvet collar, the string tie—they had bought these cheap from a hard-up private of the Special Air Service. Hamzah, Hassan and Idris were cooler, but far less smart, in jeans and shirt-sleeves rolled up to the armpits. This, however, was the authentic tropical dress. But a greater solidarity with their brothers of the West was the desire of all of them, and each was only too eager to sweat and stifle in these romantic garments, the armour of a new chivalry. But they were fair with each other: nobody ever tried to jump the roster. Soon each would have a suit of his own; in the meantime the common hair-style identified them as one tight cell of an international movement: it flowed down the neck, a congealed glossy stream, trickled over on to the cheeks in side-burns, and tousled lustrously on to the low brown forehead. Each had a pocket-knife, for whittling wood or carving cryptic signs on café tables, not yet used for any direr purpose, though the flash of the blade—shooting up from the handle at the touch of the spring—made a brave and intimidating show. They were boys who wished nobody any real harm, romantics who were distrustful of order, preferring colour to form. They liked to muddy the lake, the enemies of complacency, their music the siren of the police-car and their own hearts pounding up the dark alley.

  “He got him,” said Hassan. “He’s tried to get my dad thrown out of his job, see, and that’s why my dad bashed him. Beat him up, knocked his teeth out, kicked him in the guts, made him spew his liver up, smashed his nose.” He gleefully performed a pantomime of violence and his friends chortled.

  They spoke a vivid back-street Malay, unlike the new cold instrument of the Government, with odd splashes of film American to raise their fantasies to a more heroic level. So now Idris interjected cries of “Yer yeller! Yer chicken!” while two-fisting the edge of the table. Azman said: “He roughed your dad, though. Your dad was kicked down the stairs.”

  “He didn’t do it,” said Hassan. “It was the other two. That doctor and him with the girl’s voice.” He fluted a parody of Arumugam and then suddenly felt depressed. His dad shouldn’t have done it. It was old-fashioned, that business of punching and kicking, it was Wild West. And his dad was an old man, too. It was a bit undignified. Fish-hooks, knives, razors, bicycle-chains—that was different, that was modern. He felt ashamed of his dad and wanted to change the subject.

  “Move on,” he suggested. “Let’s move on. There’s nothing happening here.”

  “Ai, mek!” called Hamzah. The sulky girl came to their table. She was pretty and her low-cut baju showed a delicious expanse of warm milky-brown neck. The boys teased her, guffawing rawly. Hamzah said: “I gave you five dollars. I want some change.”

  “Not paid yet.”

  “Have paid. Gave five dollars.”

  “Correct, correct!” cried the others. The girl went over to the dozing towkay.

  “Eh, towkay, have paid five dollars. Want change!”

  “She say not paid. You pay one dollar.”

  “Have paid. Change!”

  The cameras whirred. Azman, teeth bared, frowning in menace, moved to the counter. Very slow, perfectly timed, only the pad of his feet on the sound-track. No music until, the knife slowly drawn, raised, pointed, the click and hiss of the shot-out blade down-beated furious chords. “All right, bub. We won’t argue. We don’t argue, see?” Menacing, caressing tones. “Keep your money. Chicken feed. But we don’t come here again, see?” On the last hissed word the knife-point flashed at the towkay’s throat. Cut. Put that in the can. Out they all went, jovial, happy laughing boys, waving a cheerful good-bye. Man, that was acting.

  Hands in pockets, they kicked odd stones along Ibrahim Avenue, singing in authentic American. Trishaw-drivers coasted up and down the long glaring road, looking for custom, but the Friday siesta still held. “Only you,” sang the boys, “can make my darkness bright.” Hassan saw, suspended before him from the hot blue sky, retreating from him as he walked, a microphone. With kissing lips he let the words trickle into it.

  “There he is,” said Azman, stopping in mid-song. “One crab leaving the house of another.” The Malays of this State called all Chinese ‘pincered crabs’, an allusion to their chopsticks.

  “The wonder boy,” said Hamzah. They stood, waiting for Robert Loo to approach. His father’s shop was near the Park of Happiness. He walked somewhat mincingly, thin, in soiled whites, his brief-case under his arm. They had been in the same English school together, all of them, but Robert Loo had left a year ago complete with certificate. The Malay boys plodded on, moustached in the Third Form, the gap to the Fourth just too wide for them to leap. They resented this, a slur on their adulthood. They resented the treachery of the examiners, obviously in the pay of the Chinese. They resented the Chinese, too rich and too bloody clever. They resented Robert Loo’s brief-case. They resented Robert Loo.

  “I know what you got in there,” said Idris. “You been robbing a bank. That’s the loot.” His Malay was too rapid and too colloquial for Robert Loo to follow. Robert Loo smiled urbanely.

  “It’s the documents,” said Hamzah. “He’s selling them to the enemy.”

  “Open up,” said Azman in American. “It’s de F.B.I.”

  “It’s only music,” said Robert Loo, smiling. “You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “I can’t hear anything,” said Hamzah. “I must be going deaf.” He put his hand-cupped ear to the case, dropping his jaw like a stage zany. Laughter.

  “Music on paper,” said Robert Loo. “Music has to be written, you know.” He spoke in Malay, and, having spoken, realised the absurdity of what he had been saying. The Malay word for ‘music’ was bunyi-bunyian, which just meant ‘sounds’. And of course, you couldn�
�t write sounds. “I must be getting along,” he said.

  “Let’s see,” said Hassan. He whisked the brief-case from under Robert Loo’s arm and, the straps not being fastened, plunged in his hand and pulled out the bulky score of the symphony.

  “Music,” he said. “So this is music.” Holding the score away from mock-long-sighted eyes, pushing out his belly, he began to sing:

  “Only yew-ew-ew-ew-ew

  Can make the darkness bright.”

  “All right,” said Crabbe’s voice. “Cut it out.” Robert Loo just stood there, showing neither anxiety nor relief, not even contempt. “Give it back,” said Crabbe. He was breathing angrily, his hands on his spreading hips. “Go on, give it back.” Sullen and puzzled, Hassan obeyed. All the boys were sullen and puzzled. What was all the fuss about anyway? After all, it was only a joke. And this was Friday anyway, and everybody was off duty, and Crabbe had no right to play the schoolmaster. A trishaw-driver hovered, interested. Crabbe called him. “Go on,” he said to Robert Loo. “Get up. He’ll take you home.” He gave the driver a fifty-cent piece, still seeming to suppress anger. Robert Loo climbed aboard, his restored briefcase under his arm, silent. “Go now,” said Crabbe to the driver. “Pergi, pergi.” The Malays watched, puzzled, as Robert Loo, without a backward glance, was borne jerkily away. Crabbe waited till the trishaw was a hundred yards down the road. He turned to the Malays, saying:

  “What sort of a country are you trying to make? You’ve got it in for everybody. For the Chinese and the Indians and the Eurasians and the white men. You can’t see a Chinese without wanting to persecute him. You want to knock the stuffing out of the Tamils. I suppose you’d like to have a go at me, wouldn’t you? For God’s sake, grow up. You’ve all got to live together here, you’ve got to … Oh, never mind.” He went back to his house.