The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  “What sort of a thing is it?” asked Nik Hassan suspiciously. “Is it modem—you know, Gershwin stuff? Has it got a good tune? Do you really think it’s any good?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s good. I’ve not heard it, but I’ve read it. Whether it’s good or not is not really the point, anyway. It’s a work of art, it’s extremely competent, it’s probably highly original. But don’t expect sound-track slush. It’s not got a good tune anywhere in it, but it’s terrifically organised, tremendously concentrated. That boy’s a genius.”

  “Chinese, isn’t he? Pity about that.” Nik Hassan made a sour gangster’s face. “Pity he’s not a Malay. Though, of course, he could use a what-you-call …”

  “Pseudonym?”

  “That’s right, a Malay pseudonym. It might carry a bit more weight. After all, everybody knows the Chinese are clever. We’re a bit sick of hearing it. We’re just dying for a Malay genius to turn up.”

  “Well, here’s a Malayan genius for you. I’m pretty sure about that.”

  “If,” said Nik Hassan, “if it’s any good, they might think about playing it as part of the Independence celebrations. There’s no harm in trying. It shows that we’re alive in this State, anyway. Do you think he’d object to having a Malay what-you-call? You know, something like Abdullah bin Abdullah? It would make quite a bit of difference up in Kuala Lumpur.”

  “He,” said Crabbe, “wouldn’t mind in the slightest. He’s quite devoid of ambition. But, frankly, I should mind very much. Why should he hide his real name, when he’s got as much right to the country as you people have? Damn it all, the Chinese have done as much as anybody, if not more, to, to …”

  “All right, all right,” said Nik Hassan. “I know. My dear fellow, I know. But it’s a question of the line, you see. It’s a line we’ve got to try and follow. I mean, to be honest, the line of the Chinese is supposed to be trade, isn’t it? Money in the bank and a fleet of Cadillacs. The Malays have got nothing. The time’s come to give them something. And, now I come to think of it, a little thing like this …”

  “Not so little.”

  “It could be a boost. A boost. Is there any singing in it? You know, patriotic Malay words. That would help a good deal.”

  “There’s no singing. But,” said Crabbe, “yes. Yes. It’s an idea. A choral finale. Beethoven did it; why not Loo? It might sell the work to the public.”

  “And if you could get the orchestra to stand up at intervals and shout ‘Merdeka!’ Now that really would sell it. That really would make it political. That would get it performed.”

  “But,” said Crabbe, “it’s a kind of desecration. You can’t do that to a serious piece of music.”

  “You’re keen on getting it performed, aren’t you? You said it was a political thing. Well, make it really political and it might bring the house down. But,” said Nik Hassan, “is it good? Really good? I don’t want to look a bloody fool, sending off a lot of tripe to K.L. I mean, we’ve only got your word for it.”

  “You can take my word.”

  “Well …” Nik Hassan handed Crabbe a small Dutch cigar and lit it for him. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  “Oh, yes, Nicky, of course we’re friends.”

  “If I were you, Vicky, I’d stop seeing that boy.”

  “So people are talking, are they?”

  “What did you expect? It was a godsend to the gossips. What with your wife going back to U.K. and you not knocking about with women these days and then your always having this lad around at your place.”

  “Not so often.”

  “Often enough. Anyway, they’re talking. And, you see, it puts me in a funny position when I do this job for you …”

  “I’ll send the damned thing off myself.”

  “And then, if it’s any good, they’ll want to know how I came to miss it. All I want is for you to tell me, quite honestly …”

  “You can go to hell, Nicky. Why should I have to go round denying rumours? If people want to think what they presumably are thinking, I can’t stop them. I’d be a fool to try and stop them. And you think it, too, don’t you?”

  “No, not really. I mean, it’s a bit queer you’re not bothering with women – that Rosemary girl’s after you all the time; I’ve seen it – and, damn it all, I’m broad-minded enough, there’s a lot of it goes on, but, I mean, it’s your own affair, isn’t it? You don’t want to start bringing anybody else into it. It makes it awkward for other people, you see.”

  “My dear, dear Nik …”

  “Nicky. They’re talking about giving me the big Australian job. Have you heard that?”

  “No. Congratulations.”

  Nik Hassan did not seem really pleased. “They’re watching me, that’s the trouble. Watching me all the time, seeing if I’m up to it. And you’re never sure whether you’re doing the right thing. If you drink, you’re going against Islam, and if you don’t drink you’ve got no social talents. If you’ve got more than one wife, they say that won’t go down well in a Christian country. But, damn it.” He turned, face wrinkled and arms wide in perplexity. “Look at my wife, just look at her. A woman like her was all right in the old days. You know, no drink in the house and chewing sireh after meals and belching in public. And not a word of English. And not a damn word of decent Malay conversation for that matter. How am I going to get on, running a big department in Canberra? How are we all going to get on?”

  “You’ll get on all right, Nicky. You worry too much.”

  “Perhaps I do. But supposing somebody here starts telling K.L. that I’m helping—Sorry, I won’t say that. And supposing somebody says that I’m not helping to cultivate local talent. Where am I? Oh, Vicky, won’t you tell me the truth?”

  “There’s nothing in it, Nicky. Nothing at all. You can trust me.”

  “I used to. Now I don’t think I can trust anybody. We’re starting our independence in an atmosphere of mistrust.”

  “But I’ve no stake in the country, not any more. It’s only people like me who can really help. And it’s that very mistrust I want to do something about. I want to try and cultivate better inter-racial understanding, for one thing. I had an idea last night, in bed. Why can’t we have meetings, say, once a week, to try and mix up the races a bit more? We could discuss things, we could have dances, we could encourage young people of different races to go about together. We need a headquarters of some kind, of course. You know, a sort of club-house.”

  “Where’s the money coming from?”

  “Well, how about the Residency? The British Adviser’s finished here. That place isn’t doing anything any more. We could have a subscription, we could make money on dances and shows. A caretaker and a couple of gardeners wouldn’t cost much. Of course, there’s the electric light bill …”

  Nik Hassan shook his head. “Nothing doing. The Sultan’s taking that place over.”

  “But, damn it, he’s got three palaces already.”

  “Now he’s got four. That’s out. There’s one thing though. I just thought of it. You remember Wigmore, the planter?”

  “Yes, poor old Wigmore.” Wigmore had been shot by Communist terrorists on his own estate. A fat harmless man, thirty years in the country.

  “His will has been proved. He left twenty thousand dollars to that Tamil girl he’d been living with. He also left twenty thousand dollars to the state.”

  “What for?”

  “God knows he’d got enough out of the state in his lifetime. It’s a vague sort of bequest. It just says: ‘for the improvement of the lot of the people’. He was a vague sort of chap. Drank too much, of course. If only he’d left it to a dogs’ home or the hospital, or something. Now there’s got to be a committee to decide how the money’s to be used.”

  “Who’s on the committee?”

  “Oh, we’ll all be on it. We’ll argue about it for a year, I suppose. And then the Sultan will claim the money for a new car. Of course, it’s not a lot.”

  It wasn’t a lot, but i
t was enough. Enough to send Robert Loo to Europe. Enough to buy a building of some sort. Enough for both?

  “Vague, as you say,” said Crabbe.

  “Very vague. The Sultan could interpret a new car as improving the lot of the people, I suppose. The people are happy seeing their Sultan happy. I wonder if I could do the same thing about getting an honourable divorce? Buy my wife off, marry a new one—soignée, educated, a drinker, somebody who’d go down well in Australia.”

  “There’s always Rosemary.”

  “Oh God, man, she’s too bloody dark. Black as the ace of spades. I can’t stand the touch of a black skin.”

  Robert Loo was wishing he had more practical knowledge of the violin. The muse had told him peremptorily to start writing a violin concerto; that is to say, she had hurled themes at him, fully orchestrated, with a solo violin soaring and plunging in the foreground, and this solo part insisted on being rich in harmonics and intricate multiple stoppings. Behind these sharp images was a bigger, duller image which would only be fully realised when the work was complete, for it was the image of the work itself. Robert Loo sat in his father’s shop, neatly sketching first and second subjects for the first movement, the music-paper next to the abacus, occasionally laying down his pen to move his fingers—with the grace of one playing an instrument—over the wire-threaded wooden balls with which the amounts of bills were calculated.

  His father’s shop had started by selling provisions; then it had seemed a natural transition to install tables and chairs and turn the place into an unambitious restaurant; later a first-class licence brought in a scant drinking clientèle allowed by law to sit over their spirits till midnight. It meant a long day for everybody in the family, but nobody really minded: a Chinese towkay’s children will, with the thriftiness of the race, find fulfilment and diversion where they can. Life does not go on in some place remote from the coffee-urn and the cash-till; life is where you live.

  Robert Loo sat, quite content, behind the counter, against a cyclorama of tins of milk and corned beef. The shop was bright with sunlight, trade calendars, drink posters, the yapping of two younger brothers who made up orders for delivery. A solitary Malay blew into a saucer of black coffee. Outside were all the colours of the East and all the languages. But Robert Loo gazed on a world more real and shot with sounds and colours more intense than any the shop or the street could show. Two flutes in counterpoint, the sudden citrous tang of the oboe—the auditory images were so vivid, the thrill of creating them so deliriously pungent, that the outside world was burned up. Only when he heard a faint snatch of whistled song outside, or when a younger brother shouted in Cantonese—making a tone-pattern that was on the edge of music—did Robert Loo frown. It annoyed him that the sounds that impinged on the outer ear could get so much in the way. He was not yet perfect; only when he was like Beethoven, deaf, would he have final control. But he could feel satisfied with the conquest and the grinding into the dirt of the last four or five years. The small library of musical text-books in his bedroom, the help from Crabbe, the original spark when that other Englishman, Ennis, had shown him music for the first time and saturated him in the sound of his records and his piano—he could look back tolerantly on all this. He was free now, or nearly free. He was on his own.

  But something about this violin concerto disturbed him. It was a visual image of the soloist that kept obtruding. He could see the concerto being performed, and, though the orchestra was shadowy, the soloist’s fingers, the soloist’s arm were terrifyingly vivid, as in a dream of fever. The fingers were strong and long, the arm was bare, and a kind of technicolor blue quivered behind. The bowing arm, the fingers on the strings, and then the violin itself, polished brown, and the soloist’s chin pillowed on it. Startled, he saw it was a woman. Who? Was this some memory of a film, of a photograph in a book on musical celebrities? Open-mouthed, he stared at the big luminous mirror opposite. It was set too high to reflect him, it carried only a shelf of looking-glass beer and the moving blades of the ceiling-fan. But this letting-in of the three-dimensional world exorcised the vision. He returned to his manuscript paper, sketched a passage of solo treble-stopping, and then suddenly the long fingers were on his, showing him that this was impracticable, that you could not, see, stretch the little finger so far when, see, the first finger had to be down here …

  His father, Loo Kam Fatt, walked in from the street. “It comes now,” he said. He spoke no English, he had no Christian name. He did not object to his eldest son’s speaking English—that helped trade—nor did he mind that some of his children had become Christian—that could do trade no harm. Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally—that was a man’s life. He had just won forty dollars on a bet that the fever-bird in the tree opposite Ng’s shop would, this time, sing a passage of four notes, not three. There were thus, in him, the rudiments of a concern with music. This morning’s win was a good omen for a new enterprise of his, an enterprise he had kept secret, for, coming as a surprise, it might give his eldest son all the more pleasure, because this too was to do with music, and he knew that his eldest son liked music, or certainly had used to like it. Loo Kam Fatt beamed, rubbed his towkay’s paunch, and said again: “It comes now.”

  Robert Loo’s three younger brothers were at the doorway, quacking with interest. The railway van had drawn up. Four men in the back of the van—Malays in shorts and torn vests—began easing out the crate, shouting instructions, counter-instructions and warnings in glottal monosyllables.

  “Is what?” asked Robert Loo. But he knew what it was and felt slightly sick. One just doesn’t think, doesn’t expect. He should have known this would happen. He watched the crate dumped beside the counter.

  “Will see now,” smiled his father. “Will like.”

  Half the street seemed anxious to help. Hashim, the idiot boy from the barber-shop next door, was pulling out nails with a crowbar. Grindingly, laths of wood yielded to brown and yellow hands, a wrenching and screaming of twisted nails fanfared the discovery of the treasure beneath. This coyly revealed itself in a growing flank of red metal as the wood came away, the shavings and masses of packing paper. Soon it stood naked and shining in sunlight, stripped of its crude cerements, a portent and a god. “Ah,” breathed the crowd.

  “Lift to corner,” said Loo Kam Fatt. To corner was pushed with happy groans and sighs, with padding of splay feet. Scavengers appeared, shining eyes darting swiftly and slyly about, to take off the wood that strewed the floor. The workers stood back to survey with awe the glass and metal music-god, whose name indeed, sprawled on its belly in flowing chrome, was APOLLO. A hundred black plates behind heavy glass, as if draining into the mysterious hidden viscera below, stood firmly on their edges. Loo Kam Fatt uncoiled the omphalic flex, saying, in tiny frustration: “This plug not right size. Must change.” Out of air appeared a smaller plug and a screwdriver. “Man come from Singapore,” said Loo Kam Fatt, “after six month. Change all records. This very good.”

  “Ah!” The god had begun to breathe, to glower with a glowing blue eye. This was the moment. Loo Kam Fatt, like a priest with a host, reverently put into the creature’s tiny mouth a ten-cent piece. “Now must choose.” He turned benignly to his eldest son. “You choose. Number one son must choose. Son who like music must choose.” With gentle smiles, with the sense of an occasion, the crowd made way for the number one son. This was ceremony. This was religion. Robert Loo, his heart like a heavy breakfast, came forward to greet the god, to command it, to be sacrificed to it. Blindly he pressed a button. Inside, a turntable in a staff-car, moving slowly up the rank of records, searched, failed to find, moved down again. Silently it ordered a record to come forward. The record obeyed as silently. Then it fell flat on the turntable, transfixed, and the tone-arm came down. What had been a military formation became a harem. And now …

  Joy lit all the Asiatic faces as noise filled shop and street. Drums and red-hot brass, a wedge of saxophones burst from the god. The god gave greeting. “Will bring
trade here,” shouted Loo Kam Fatt in his deafened happiness. “Park now closed down. No Muslim girls allowed dance now. No beer to be sold there. People here all the time. Come to hear music. Music very good thing.”

  Ten-cent pieces shone everywhere in eager waiting fingers. What was rice, what was coffee compared to the solace of art? The solo violinist waited, her bow at the ready, smiling patiently but clearly puzzled at the delay.

  This music crept by Syed Omar in Police Headquarters, sitting puzzled while others were going out to lunch. He had just typed out orders to the police, instructing them that, on high religious authority, they must arrest any Muslim found drinking intoxicants, any Muslim woman plying the trade of dance-hostess, café-waitress or lady-of-the-town, any Muslim—man or woman—found in the act of committing or being about to commit or having committed adultery. They must also report any Malayan of any race or religion whatsoever found assisting or encouraging any Muslim to commit these crimes. A good morning’s work, and he felt he deserved a small beer in Loo’s kedai round the corner. But he was puzzled by a letter, a copy of which had just been given to him by the C.P.O. This letter was addressed from Police Headquarters, Kuala Beruang, Pahang; it was a glowing eulogy of Syed Omar, and it was clearly signed by Maniam. What puzzled Syed Omar was not the eulogy but the address. Why should a letter from Maniam be addressed from Pahang when Maniam was still living, convalescent, in the house of Dr. Sundralingam? He pondered for a while and then concluded that Maniam must be afraid of further vengeance from Syed Omar and thus pretended to be many miles away. The insincerity of the eulogy, of course, was to be taken for granted. It had done Syed Omar no good, for the C.P.O. had rightly divined that it was insincere and that Syed Omar must have behaved to Maniam very badly for Maniam to have written of Syed Omar in such a way. But Maniam’s attempt at convincing Syed Omar that he was already back in Pahang must signify that Maniam feared that to write such a letter would cut no ice (that was the expression) with Syed Omar, and that Syed Omar was still expected to nurse hatred for Maniam and even to express that hatred in the usual manner. Probably this woman Neelambigai was now waggling her bottom in some better job than the one Syed Omar still held. So Maniam was making no sacrifice, not even humiliating himself—for it was well known that Tamils would sell their mothers, their honour, their souls to save their skins or to advance themselves. They did not know the meaning of the word humiliation, except when it applied to others, such as humble and deserving Malays like Syed Omar. Syed Omar read the letter through again: