The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  Taking silk comes down to an interview, she said, an audience with the stuffed shirts. You are sent for training to prepare for the interview – not professional law training, but professional interview training – and one of the most important aspects, she was told, was to be able to confidently articulate one’s reasons for wanting the appointment in eight words. Eight words, she repeated incredulously. The aspirations of a lifetime condensed into eight words, like some kind of politician’s doorstop for the afternoon tabloids and the six o’clock news. The age of spin, she sneered with a shake of the head. She said she found the whole idea so contemptible she withdrew her application.

  I thought perhaps it was wise to avoid the subject of the law. I asked if she was married. It seemed safe ground, a conventional social inquiry, but the contempt was still in her voice when she told me that she had once been, but not for quite a while, ‘thank God’. No more for her the inexorable descent of ‘dwindling into a wife’. The cause of the dwindling was a banker, she said, and too good at what he did for her liking. He did well for himself during the Thatcher years, but fortunately she was no longer married to him for the worst of it. Pigs at the trough, she said; most unseemly. She liked to say ‘unseemly’, stretching the vowels with clear satisfaction and a wrinkling of the nose that was quite fetching.

  Would children be safer ground? I asked her if there were any. Gracious no, she said. Not with ‘the accountant’. She shuddered to think how they would have turned out. Did I know when he upped and left, she asked. The fifth of April. It didn’t mean anything to me. The last day of the tax year, she explained, and burst into laughter. Her laugh was more than fetching.

  20

  SU-LIN

  First, he asked if the baked beans were made on the premises or came out of a can. When assured that they were prepared in the kitchen he proceeded to order two slices of wholemeal toast, today’s bread, not yesterday’s, plain, no butter or margarine, one with the baked beans, the other with sliced field mushrooms, no butter in the mushrooms, although ghee was acceptable, as was some herb or other, prefer ably parsley, light on the salt, and could it please be brought to the table promptly so that the toast did not become soggy. I had to have champagne after witnessing that!

  He was polite through it all, and who wouldn’t be with the accommodating staff at the Punch? Which is more than I can say for his suggestion that I was ‘of an age’. If he was going to say something like that, he deserved to get the facetious reply I gave him. From the look on his face when I mentioned Herodotus you could be forgiven for thinking he didn’t know what I was talking about. I was beginning to wonder just what kind of professor of history he was.

  Now that I was sitting directly opposite I could see that he had a bit of a goitre. Class two, I would have thought, like an oversized Adam’s apple. I understood now why he had a loose collar and tie, which he did indeed have for the third or fourth day in a row. Had he only one suit and one tie? I expected it was an iodine deficiency, and if he rationed himself with salt as he just did, it was hardly surprising. My sister Li, who has an infinitely greater understanding of the metaphysical world than I, would no doubt say that his condition was a result of an inability to speak, to express feelings. I thought I would probably agree with her, if asked.

  He caught me studying the lump. ‘You have a very strong chin,’ I quickly said, although I was sure it was unconvincing, so I was compelled to elaborate. ‘We are the only species with a chin. Why is that, do you think? Something to do with speech? We are the only species that speak, so could that be it? Or is it to do with sexual attraction, to balance the face, offer an indication of the calibre of a mate?’

  ‘It must be the latter,’ he said. ‘After all, you have already admitted to the attraction of mine.’

  So there was a pulse after all. He said it with such a deadpan expression that at first I thought he was serious, but then his mouth twitched.

  I wasn’t prepared to be bested in this little contest, so I raised the stakes by introducing the evidence of Rodin’s statue of the Thinker, and blithely asked if it could be that the chin was simply to enable us to cogitate.

  ‘Perhaps so,’ he said. ‘Did you know that the Thinker is supposed to be Dante himself at the gates of hell?’

  There is an old saying among members of the Bar that you should never ask a question to which you do not already know the answer, and the professor was proving to be a decent advocate. He certainly appeared to know more about Rodin than I. Now I found myself reconsidering his reaction to Herodotus.

  Before I even had a chance to demonstrate my ignorance, he looked me straight in the eye, not a trace of shiftiness, and said: ‘Actually, we have a chin so we can fold the towels.’

  Now I was starting to appreciate that the still waters of Paris Thumboo ran deep after all, and ordered a second glass. I had worked until the early hours of the morning on the Tariq case the night before, and I deserved it.

  I asked him how many others had read his mother’s paper.

  ‘You are the only one,’ he said to my surprise.

  ‘The only one in nearly fifty years?’

  ‘Yes, the only one.’

  ‘Well, I have to say I’m flattered. But why?’

  ‘Too much controversy,’ he said.

  ‘But surely, after fifty years, who remembers?’

  ‘Oh, you would be surprised. I’m afraid my country is not as ready to forget the past as some people assume. Over here, what happened over there in the nineteen-fifties is thousands of miles away, as well as fifty years. It can be good to get away.’

  I was now beginning to appreciate the depth of feeling in the professor’s use of the term ‘junk history’.

  ‘Have you talked to anyone about this situation?’ I asked. ‘Professionally, perhaps?’

  He fingered his collar one minute and a thin gold chain around his wrist the next, and I thought there might be something to my sister’s metaphysical theory after all.

  ‘Would you like to talk about it?’ I said, perhaps jumping in with two left feet, but I was concerned. ‘I’m no professional, of course. At least, not in that sense, but in my line of work, the human rights field, you have to be reasonably accomplished.’ The chain appeared to be getting called into more active service. ‘Alternatively, I know some excellent counsellors and can recommend …’

  It was obvious he was getting increasingly uneasy with this line of discussion. He had hardly touched his champagne, taking a few tentative sips up to this, but now he gulped down the rest of the glass.

  The first bandit I ever knew was Uncle Raja’s driver, Ah Kow. I knew he was once a bandit because he was put on trial for his life and, with my father representing him, he was acquitted. My father always said that Ah Kow’s case exposed British hubris, which was a difficult word to say, let alone understand, so I had to get Pa to explain to me what happened to Ah Kow.

  He was captured after a British ambush on a CT patrol in the jungle. This was a rather rare event during the Emergency. It was generally the CTs who did the ambushing and the government troops on the receiving end. On this particular day, however, the CTs were said to have abandoned their customary stealthy tactics and it was claimed by the soldiers that they heard them ‘charging through the bush like wild elephants’, as one put it on the witness stand.

  All the CTs were killed in the engagement, except Ah Kow, who was found unconscious by a stream nearby with a wound to his head. When he recovered they charged him with being a captured CT. As Ah Kow described it, however, on that day he was actually coming in to surrender; in fact, was on his way. The CTs had sent a patrol out after him when they ran into the soldiers. Ah Kow was running away from the CTs when they shot him. Pa said the authorities were so sure of themselves that they did not even charge him with carrying a gun which, under the emergency regulations, would have meant the death penalty regardless of any other matter. Certainly they wanted the death penalty for Ah Kow, but they wanted it for a more seriou
s crime than simply being caught with a gun. The Emergency wasn’t going too well for the colonial administration and they needed to make a point to convince the public that they were on top of the situation.

  During the trial my father encouraged Ah Kow to tell his story to the judge, and when the prosecution put their side of it, the judge asked them for evidence that it was their soldiers who had shot Ah Kow and not the CTs. The only way to prove it was by the bullet, but that was still in his head. Doctors said removing it would almost certainly kill Ah Kow and the judge was not about to order that he be put to death in any manner until the trial was over and he was found guilty, which was all now difficult for him to do. And so Ah Kow was released, and that was how I came to understand British hubris.

  My father often said to me that I should always look for the best in other people, and I thought that the Ah Kow story was a good example. If Pa had not looked for the best in Ah Kow he would have been hanged and his life wasted. And as it happened, so would Uncle Raja’s life have been similarly squandered.

  When Ah Kow first joined the CTs he had given up everything. After the trial, on being set free, he had nothing to go home to, and Pa convinced Uncle Raja to give him a job as his driver. One day as they were driving between towns on a lonely road, Ah Kow stopped the car and said that he did not like the look of the road ahead and turned it around. Later that day a car was ambushed and two people killed on that very stretch of road, and it would almost certainly have been Uncle Raja if Ah Kow had not been experienced in the ways of the CTs.

  Ah Kow was the only bandit, CT, communist or mountain rat – whatever people chose to call them – that I knew until then because they rarely left the safety of their camps deep in the jungle, where people said they lived like wild animals. When they did it was usually to attack remote targets such as rubber estates at the end of a road or tin mines at the foot of a mountain, or even isolated police stations. On one occasion Li and I listened as Mei read a horrifying story in the paper about hundreds of bandits attacking a police station in Johore, killing twenty-five people and burning the balai, the police building, to the ground. They threw the policemen’s wives and children into the flames, Mei read to us before Ma snatched the paper from her hands and told us never to speak of such things in her house.

  The second CT I ever saw was on the way home from Penang after visiting Ma for Hungry Ghosts. As we got closer to Sungai Siput that day, Pa said that he had to visit Essex Estate. Those were two words charged with unspeakable horror in those days, and I think not another one was uttered in our car until we reached the first roadblock approaching the town. Essex Estate was where there was cold blood, where all the trouble had begun. Where there were certainly ghosts.

  Each roadblock we encountered was surrounded by army lorries, Land Rovers and scout cars, with soldiers and police milling about, and lines of people waiting to be searched. At one we watched an old woman standing by the road at the end of a soldier’s rifle, her hands on her head and the ends of her wide samfoo pants hitched up to the waist. Strapped to her legs we could see bags stuffed with rice. Lying all over the ground were smashed pineapples that had been hollowed out and packed with more rice. She was such an old woman, and I couldn’t help reflecting on her fate. Was she to spend the rest of her days in prison?

  At Sungai Siput, Pa turned off the trunk road and we stopped at another roadblock in a village called Kampong Kerdas. Just beyond it a burned-out bus smouldered on the side of the road. Pa got out and spoke to the English soldiers, and when he returned he said we were going back. This can wait for another time, he said, and turned the car around. Just as we drove slowly back through the shophouses of Kampong Kerdas, loud explosions cracked through the air and Pa stopped right there in the middle of the street.

  ‘Get out!’ he said. ‘Quickly! That barber shop!’

  Firecrackers were now going off all around us, and I thought that was strange. So many firecrackers and it wasn’t even New Year time. Pa grabbed me by the arm and we ran into the only open door in the street. He pushed the three of us behind a counter where a man was lying all curled up on the floor, sheltering under bags of hair ready for the fertiliser collector. Pa crouched behind the barber’s chair and told us to put our heads on the floor. Outside I could hear shouts and people running and firecrackers up the street, down the street, behind the shops. And then I realised these were not fire crackers at all. Firecrackers were for happy times, for celebrations and scaring off evil spirits, but there was no laughter to be heard here. Here we were the ones who were scared.

  I started to cry and Mei covered my mouth with her hand. ‘No noise,’ she whispered.

  All I could think of was the burning police station in Johore and the children pitched into the flames, like my imagination had invented for me a brand new court in the Chinese hell – the Balai of Fire.

  I couldn’t resist lifting my head a little to see if such a place might actually be taking shape here on earth. I was relieved to see that there was no fire. In fact, from my view framed by the shop’s window, the street appeared quite normal. If not for our car sitting in the middle of it with all its doors wide open, and of course for the noise, nothing was out of the ordinary.

  On a balcony above a shop across the street was a young woman. She was crouching behind the wall, peering confidently over it for a better look. For an instant our eyes met. Mine must have been filled with fear, but hers were calm. She smiled at me before ducking below the wall. Her smile and her serenity drove the scene of hell from my mind, and suddenly I was not so afraid. Even when the window cracked and puffs of dust flew from the wall behind us, and Pa yelled ‘Stay down!’

  And then the firecrackers stopped. There was an eerie silence for a minute or two, and then the curled-up man shrugged off the bags of hair and, as though we were not even there, carefully looked out the window. Above him I saw two neat little holes in the glass, like a couple of silver spiders. Land Rovers sped through the street and I heard them skid to avoid our abandoned car. Pa ran outside and jumped behind the wheel.

  ‘Pa!’ I screamed. I was terrified he would be shot, leaving us to face the Balai of Fire on our own.

  ‘Quiet!’ Mei said.

  Curled-up man stepped over us and went out onto the street. Others slowly emerged from behind closed doors, and Pa pulled the car over to the side as a scout car sped past. Mei released her grip on my mouth. The three of us crept out of the barber shop. People gathered in the street, talking and pointing, laughing with relief. I looked up to the balcony and the curious young woman. I couldn’t see her, but from a drain hole I saw a trickle of red on mouldy white paint. I pointed it out to Pa. He ran into the shop and appeared on the balcony.

  ‘Get a doctor!’ he shouted.

  The roads around Sungai Siput were closed for the rest of the day and all that night there was a curfew. We were so close to home but the police would not let anyone through except the wounded woman, who was rushed to hospital in the back of a Land Rover. The scout car prowled up and down through town and out along the road to Essex Estate until dark. We were allowed to go only as far as Sungai Siput where we stayed the night in a small Chinese hotel, the three of us insisting on squeezing into the same bed with our father. Peace Hotel, it said on a big wooden sign across the front, but that night there was little of it. All night I could hear Whoomp! Whoomp! Whoomp! and the grimy windows shook and rattled. They’re dropping bombs on the CT camp in the jungle, Pa said, and then I heard the drone of airplane engines as they passed overhead, rattling the windows again.

  Next morning the drone returned, but instead of bombs the sky was filled with paper. Small leaflets fluttered down and littered the streets of Sungai Siput. I picked one up. In five languages it promised the bearer safe conduct if he wished to surrender. He would be given food, cigarettes and medical attention, it said, if he took the leaflet to the nearest police station. There was another type with drawings and just the one language – Chinese. One drawing showed a sa
d Chinese mother and two crying children looking out through a dark window to a moonlit sky. The other was the same family, now with the father happily playing with his laughing children, through the window a bright sun in the sky. You were not required to read Chinese to understand what this one promised.

  I wondered why Toh Kei was not now with his own happy family. Why was he locked up in prison and not given safe conduct and cigarettes?

  I showed my leaflets to my father as we finally drove out of Sungai Siput. ‘That’s propaganda again,’ he said.

  He took the leaflets from me and folded them into his pocket. And now I knew what propaganda meant. I would not have to ask Miss Mak after all. I knew that propaganda meant lies.

  21

  My baby was whisked away by Sergeant Sato, who left me in that den of iniquity to contemplate my – and my little boy’s – fate. I must have been there for hours, tied fast to that chair, whimpering uncontrollably.

  I will never know for certain, but I believe that Major Tomasu intervened in my case. I had been held now for a matter of months and they either had what they wanted from me, or had finally concluded there was no more to get. In the end I had confessed to everything I had actually done bar the treating of Bintang’s gunshot wound, although I was certainly less than truthful about my motives. As for all their other questions, they may as well have asked them in Japanese for all I could answer. I could but hope that the Major had also intervened in my baby’s case.