The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  “Keep off,” warned Syed Hassan, “keep off, keep off.” He was cornered between the radio and a flimsy dresser that held blue crockery. Almost above him was the poster of the Chief Minister and his loving silk-clad arms, the legend ‘Peace.’

  “Come here and take your punishment,” said Syed Omar. “Come and be hit.”

  “No! No!” As the breathing bulk of his father advanced, Syed Hassan downed with his head and butted. No great harm was done: Syed Omar nearly lost balance, saved himself by clutching at the dresser; only one blue plate rolled on to the floor, and it did not break. But Syed Hassan stood now in the room’s centre, crying out: “I’m going! I’m leaving! You’ll never see me again!”

  He was at once peppered with hot Malay and snaked about with women’s arms. His father for some reason spoke violent English at him:

  “Don’t be a bloody fool! If you jump bail you’ll be in big trouble!”

  “I’m going,” said Syed Hassan in Malay. “I go now,” he said in English. He hacked away at the lianas of brown flesh that wreathed him about. A few strides took him to the door. Here he paused before his exit, waiting for some great exit-line to come, but nothing came. The dramatic instinct of both father and son was stronger than their dramatic talent. He said, in Malay: “You have ruined my life, all of you! May God forgive you!” Then he leapt the house steps into the night. He hurried down the soggy path, reached the road, and began walking at a great pace towards Crabbe’s house. When he was satisfied that nobody was following him he slowed down, wiping the sweat from his neck and face and chest with a large soiled handkerchief.

  In the town there was harsh light, and loud soothing music sang all about him. He was cooled by a new sense of freedom, heartened by the knowledge that Crabbe would help him to get away, willingly (for he was a rich man) forfeiting the bail-money, efficiently calling up cars and lorries, consulting rail time-tables, devising disguises. It was the job of the British to help the Malays. That was well known, that was in the history books. And if Crabbe was slow in helping, there was always blackmail. How would Crabbe like his pederastic activities reported to K.L., eh? He wouldn’t like that, would he? But, essentially, it was as a friend that he would approach him, one glad to help, knowing it was the duty he had travelled eight thousand miles to fulfil.

  Turning into the avenue where the school-teachers’ houses lay, Syed Hassan was surprised to meet Robert Loo; surprised, anyway, to meet him at this hour. He should be in his dad’s shop, cringing at the rich music of the jukebox and dealing with the cash sales. At the end of the avenue and round the corner was Crabbe’s house. Robert Loo had undoubtedly been there. Kaum nabi Lot: the tribe of the prophet Lot. Syed Hassan smacked the phrase on his lips, thinking of Sodom and its destruction and the prophet’s salty wife. “Hello,” he said. “It’s you, is it?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  The Chinese boy hesitated. “To see Mr. Crabbe. But he wasn’t in. So I’m going home.”

  Syed Hassan smiled with contempt. “I,” he said, “have left home.” Robert Loo looked at him with interest. The two youths, the brown and the yellow, faced each other at the cross-roads, under a dim street-lamp. “So Crabbe’s not in,” said Syed Hassan. “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

  “Why did you leave home?” asked Robert Loo.

  “My father tried to hit me. But nobody hits me, nobody, not even my father.”

  “That’s strange,” said Robert Loo. “That happened to me too.”

  “Your dad tried to hit you?”

  “He did hit me. Before the customers. And I walked out. It’s my music, you see, I’ve got to go on with my music.” Robert Loo spoke with sudden passion, and Syed Hassan smiled again, saying: “But you haven’t left home. You Chinese are frightened of leaving home, you’re frightened of your fathers.”

  “I did leave home,” said Robert Loo, “but I’m going back again. Just perhaps for a night. Or two nights. I’ve got to think, you see, I’ve a lot to think about.”

  “And he’ll hit you again. He’ll beat you till you scream blue murder.” Syed Hassan spoke the words with satisfaction. “But nobody’s going to beat me.”

  “Over there,” said Robert Loo, “there’s a little stall. They sell coffee and orange crush. Perhaps we’d better go over there and talk.”

  “Talk,” said Syed Hassan. “Talk’s never enough. That’s all my father does—talk, talk, talk. Yes,” he said, “we’ll drink some coffee. If you’ll pay.”

  “I’ll pay.”

  Syed Hassan felt somewhat ashamed of his brusqueness, his rudeness, his boasting. “All I meant,” he said, “was that I’ve no money. That’s all I meant.”

  “All right. I’ve two dollars.”

  “It’s very kind of you,” said Syed Hassan with stiff courtesy. “Thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome.” They almost bowed each other over to the ramshackle stall, lit by a kerosene lamp, over whose cracked cups a thin Tamil presided.

  “It’s difficult to say these things in Malay,” said Robert Loo. “And in Chinese, too.” He sucked the lip of the brimming coffee-cup. “Some things the British brought with them. Along with their language.” His brow let the kerosene lamp etch out the puzzle. “Love,” he said. “Do you know that word? Love, love. I love you. In Mandarin we say: ‘Wo ai ni.’ But it’s not the same.”

  “I know that,” said Syed Hassan. “I love you. It’s on the films. Then they kiss.” He used the English word; the Malay word chium meant to plough the beloved’s face with one’s nose: it was not the same thing, despite the dictionaries.

  “I’m in love,” said Robert Loo in English. He burst out with it; he had to tell someone. “That’s why I’ve got to go back home, you see. I’m in love. Everything …” He paused, juggling in his mind with Malay and English; the English words fell into his hand. “Everything feels different. If my father hits me again, even that will feel different. This coffee tastes different from any coffee I’ve had before.”

  “It’s not very good coffee,” said Syed Hassan.

  “I don’t mean that,” said Robert Loo. “It’s a different world. It’s hard to explain …”

  “In love,” mused Syed Hassan. “Who are you in love with?”

  “I can’t say.” Robert Loo blushed. “It’s a secret.”

  “And you’ve …”

  “Yes, yes. I never knew it would be like that. Everything becomes different. I feel older …”

  He felt older. Syed Hassan felt envy. That was an experience he still had not had; he felt bitter because the whole thing seemed so typical: the Chinese cutting out the Malays even in that particular business. But, in the act of formulating the words of resentment, he remembered his father. Race, race, race—his father’s dinner-table theme. The Tamils had done this to him, and the Sikhs had done that, and the Chinese were pig-guzzling infidels, and as for the British. …

  “Is she Chinese?” he asked.

  “No,” said Robert Loo. He said it almost fearfully, startled on the brink of confidences he must not make. “No, she’s not. She’s …” Yet he wanted Syed Hassan to know and envy. Only the beloved’s name must not steal forth into air which, where she was not, was rank, polluted, slave’s air. “Do not show your body to the moon, my darling, for fear that even her silver beams may smirch it.” From where did that come, where had he heard that? Was it some old Chinese poem? He thought not; it had come, like his symphonic themes, from nowhere. “She’s not Chinese,” he said at length. “Nor Malay. She’s …” Then he recollected that he did not really know what she was: the external world had meant so little that its great abstractions had never quite registered. Trying to assign her to the correct column of some bureaucratic form, he only became aware of her warmth and smoothness and the various scents of her—secondary attributes which nevertheless. had power, in sheer memory, at this moment of savouring the enhanced taste of coffee and trying to finish the sentence he was uttering, to a
ttack his knee-joints like monstrous rubber hammers.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Syed Hassan. “I don’t really want to know.” Then, with an eagerness that was new to him, he said: “I’d nothing against that Tamil really. What I mean is, it wasn’t because he was a Tamil. My father’s a fool. He doesn’t know that he lost his job because one of his friends has been trying to get it for his daughter. One of his friends that was at the house tonight. ’Che Yusof it was. At least, I’m pretty sure it was. You learn a lot going round the town. More than you learn at school.”

  “But,” said Robert Loo, “they say that if you hadn’t done that … What I mean is that those Malays wouldn’t have come into our shop and tried to steal. And then my father wouldn’t have hit me for not seeing them. And then …” And then, of course, he would have spent the evening as usual, a drudge thinking about the music he wanted to write, chafing under the blows of the juke-box. Tonight he seemed incapable of finishing any sentence. Curiously, now in the silence, the remembered noises of the juke-box did not seem so terrible. The mere sensuous impact of trumpet or saxophone, whatever it happened to be playing, was an echo, even though a faint echo, of that excitement and abandon. He wanted to taste, smell, hear: his senses were terribly alive.

  “We ought to go to some dance-hall,” he said. “We ought to go and drink beer and listen to music and watch the women dancing. After all, we are men.”

  “There’s nowhere now,” said Syed Hassan. “We could go to your shop, of course. But the Park’s been closed down by the authorities. We can’t go to the Park any more.”

  “And we haven’t much money.”

  “I’ve no money.”

  “I suppose I’d better go home,” said Robert Loo. “I’m not really frightened of my father. Not any more.”

  “Fathers,” said Syed Hassan. “They don’t know much really. They’re stupid, like kids. Ignorant. You’ve just got to put up with them.”

  “You’re going home too?”

  Syed Hassan grimaced, shrugged. “I suppose so. We’ve got to remember our tanggongan. Tanggongan. What’s that word in English?”

  “Responsibilities.”

  “Responsibilities. A good long word. We’ve got to remember our responsibilities.”

  6

  ‘WAS IT,’ WONDERED Crabbe, ‘intended for him?’ The poem was called Lines for Early Middle Age, and it was signed Fenella Crabbe, but it was impossible that Fenella—twenty-eight or twenty-nine—should think of herself as middle-aged, or even, being a woman and a good-looking woman although a poet, have a proleptic Eliotian image of an aged eagle with tired wings demanding to be released from the dressing-mirror. Besides, there was nothing of the nobility of the eagle here. It was himself, the hanging flesh on cheeks and chest dancing as he ran up the stairs: it was the kind of farewell he had not expected:

  “The afternoon hour has struck for you to

  Enter, become your body, pay

  The forced grin of affection due to

  What is now you. That is to say:

  You are this pate and mouth of missing teeth …”

  “Pouring in, old boy,” said the man opposite. “Just pouring in. Money in oil. As one door shuts, another door closes. Ha ha. But nowhere for anybody to live. Government servants sleeping in the monsoon drains. Wives going home after a month. Ha ha. Still, that’s where you ought to go when you’ve left Malaya. Borneo. Borneo. I’ve just come back.” He thrust his head into the aisle. “Boy!” A Chinese in a white coat responded listlessly. “What will you have? Beer?”

  “Not Malayan beer,” said Crabbe. “It doesn’t agree with me any more. Gin and tonic, I think.”

  “You heard that,” said the man to the boy. “And beer for me. A small Polar.”

  “You are these sagging bulbs and bags beneath,

  And the leering social face in that far mirror

  Recognised with shock (but no, no error) —

  That is you, too.”

  “But you ought to drink beer,” said the man reproachfully. “That’s my line. I sell beer all over the East. Thirty years on the job. Three thousand a month and a car allowance and welcome wherever I go. Jones. You must know me. Everybody knows Tommy Jones. They may get rid of you, but they’ll never get rid of old Tommy.”

  “No,” said Crabbe. But the second stanza was more encouraging:

  “Youth was a knife and lakes and air,

  Metal and glass; you could bestow

  Your body as a gift of swords to spare.

  It was different then. It was not you …”

  “All the way along the line,” said the man. “Last night I was given a dinner in Anjing. The towkays always do their best for old Tommy. Almost as though I was doing them a favour selling them the stuff. And the night before in Kuala Musang. And then Tikus tonight. And Ular tomorrow night. Drunk as a lord. Where do you get off?”

  “Be patient. It will learn to be concise

  Again, the hot room shrink to austere ice.

  The silver will evoke a salmon’s leap,

  And bone-rungs strong enough for a single step

  Will make a one-way stair.”

  “Needn’t answer if you don’t want to,” said the man huffily. “I was only trying to make conversation, pass the time a bit.” He was thin, long-faced, domed and grey-moustached and carried a tidy paunch.

  “Sorry,” said Crabbe. “I get off at Mawas. Then I go to Durian Estate by launch. I’m sorry. I was reading this, you see. Something written by my wife. It was a bit of a shock finding it here.”

  “Your missus writes for the papers, does she? Well, well. I never did like brainy women myself. No offence. Everyone to his own taste.”

  “That’s one brainy woman who didn’t like me much. She went home,” said Crabbe.

  The man had taken the paper from Crabbe and he handled it as though it were a rag that had wiped vomit. “You buy this sort of thing? Never have much time for reading, myself.”

  “No,” said Crabbe. “An army major got off at Pelandok and left it on the seat. I haven’t seen a copy for a long time. It’s a very progressive review.”

  “Eh?” The man looked at Crabbe with suspicion. Then he flicked over the pages gingerly. “The New Presbyter, it’s called,” he said. “And then, written very small, it says: ‘Formerly The Old Priest.’ That sounds a damn silly name for a paper.”

  “It’s a kind of pulpit,” said Crabbe. “It tells us what we’ve got to believe. And it has a sort of funny column. There, just next to my wife’s poem. Called ‘Dear, Dear Isle.’”

  “I don’t see anything funny in that.”

  Crabbe sipped his gin and tonic. The tonic, manufactured by a Singapore firm with a monopoly, had a curious musty taste which disturbingly evoked the smell of the old Manchester Free Trade Hall. Crabbe heard the heavy brass at the end of the Tannhäuser Overture. His first wife, in skirt and blue jumper, stood next to him with a score. Would they never let him alone? Even on Malayan Railways, chugging through jungle, they were there. Both of them.

  “That’s not funny,” said the man. “A bloke here gets a prize for sending in a cutting about a woman who put flowers on her dog’s grave. That seems a very reasonable thing to do. I’m fond of dogs myself. Are you sure this is meant to be funny?”

  “I think so,” said Crabbe. “But one gets so out of touch.”

  “That’s it.” With vigour and eagerness the man put down the periodical. The air-mail paper rustled like thin sheets of metal. “Out of touch, and a bloody good job too. They’re all crackers back there. It stands to reason. Paying five bob for a packet of twenty. And four bob for a gin. You’d hardly believe that, would you? But it’s true. I’ve got a sister back there. She writes to me now and again. You’d hardly believe the things they put up with back in England. I’ve not been back for thirty years. And I’m buggered if I’m going back. But,” he said in triumph, “you’ve got to, haven’t you? They’re kicking you lot out. But not old Tommy. Beer’s much too import
ant.”

  “It binds the races together,” said Crabbe.

  “Eh? What’s that?” The man listened narrowly, half incredulous. “Say that again. By God, that’s clever. That’d make a damn good advert. I’ll write that down.” He searched in vain for a note-book. “Ah, never mind, I’ll remember it.” He looked at Crabbe with more favour. “That your line, eh? Slogans and so on? Information Department and what not?”

  “Education,” said Crabbe.

  “You’ll never educate them,” said the man with finality. He looked at space, sneering, leaning back comfortably. “You ought to get into oil. Money there, over the water. It’s a good job your lot are going. You won’t never do any good.”

  “You know,” said Crabbe, “I don’t think I am going. It’s a funny thing, it’s just suddenly come over me. There was a man, a Ceylonese, back in Kuala Hantu, and he said I’d never go. He said I’d end my days up-river. Funny. I just can’t see myself getting on the boat. Or the plane. I just can’t see any future beyond being here.”

  “You’ll go home,” said the man, “leaving your black bastards like the rest of them. Kids all over the place with no fathers, crying out for food.”

  “You ought to write for The New Presbyter.”

  “Women,” said the man. “I’ve had my pick.” He sucked his teeth. “But I’ve always provided. One of the kids is in the Free School, Kenching. You’d hardly believe that, would you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s true.” Dreamily he said: “There’s always somebody waiting for me. Last night in Anjing. And in Tikus tonight. There’s always somebody waiting for old Tommy. And you too, I expect. I’ve known some of you school-teacher bastards before. Think butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. But she’ll be there in wherever-you’re-going, Eh? That’s true, isn’t it?” He showed black teeth and tweaked Crabbe’s right knee. “A woman waiting for the old bastard.”

  “Probably.”