The Orientalist and the Ghost

by Susan Barker

  I lifted the sturdy padlock from my bag and held it up. Evangeline swung the door wider and I stepped inside, shivering and dripping on the beaten-earth floor.

  ‘I’ll get you a towel,’ said Evangeline.

  The sisters lived in the most ascetic of huts. Bamboo-mat bedding and wooden crates were the only furniture, and the sewing machine dominated the room. As Evangeline rummaged about in a tea chest at the back of the hut, I said hello to Grace, who smiled and slurped on her thumb. Evangeline dug out a threadbare towel from the tea chest. She beckoned me closer and, instead of passing me the towel, flung it over my head and vigorously tousled my hair. I was embarrassed at first, my head fiercely rumpled by Evangeline’s strong and competent hands. And no sooner had I begun to enjoy the warm, domineering rub-down than Evangeline whipped the towel away and declared me dry.

  Kneeling by the door in mud-spattered trousers, I disembowelled my tool bag and selected a nail from the old tobacco tin. Striking the first hammer blow, I realized that the wood was very brittle and weak, and Grace could easily prise out the nails if she wanted (though I doubted she’d think of it). When the first bracket was secured, I took a little breather and asked Evangeline, who was standing, arms folded, a pace or two behind me, if she missed being a high-school teacher.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I have to look after Grace now, so I cannot go back to Kajang and teach English.’

  ‘What a pity,’ I said. ‘Who looked after Grace before?’

  ‘Our parents, but they are dead now.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  At a loss for what else to say I resumed the lock fitting. When I finished I showed Evangeline how to work the padlock and gave her two copies of the key. Evangeline thanked me and offered me a cup of water, which she poured from the lukewarm kettle. We stood awkwardly together as I took a copper-tasting sip. The austerity of the hut was troubling. There was no shrine or joss-sticks or knick-knacks to make the place look like home.

  ‘Do you like to read, Evangeline?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Resettlement Officer Dulwich has a terrific library in his bungalow. Austen, Conrad, Dickens … I can lay my hands on anything you want.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Evangeline. ‘I don’t want to read any of those books.’

  Those books … Her tone of voice was as if I’d suggested pornography. Babbling softly, Grace crawled off her beer crate and on to the bamboo matting. She yawned, revealing the stumpy teeth in her gums, and tilted her head to gaze ponderously at her sister and me.

  ‘How old is Grace?’ I asked.

  ‘Twenty-three.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her? If you don’t mind my asking …’

  ‘She drowned when she was a child. She died, then came back to life, but came back brain-damaged.’

  ‘You must have your work cut out caring for her. She seems to demand your constant attention …’

  Evangeline sighed and rubbed a dog-eared corner of her eye. ‘Sometimes she’s demanding, sometimes peaceful like this,’ she said. ‘She was worse when she was younger.’

  We were quiet for a moment. The percussion of rain on the zinc roof made it seem as though we were inside a kettledrum. Grace continued to gaze at us as she lay on the bamboo matting. She bent her legs, the pale scar on her knee like a little caterpillar wriggling to her shin. By then I’d heard of Grace’s infamous promiscuity, but there was nothing ‘come-hither’ about her lack of modesty. She moved unconsciously, her limbs seeking a more comfortable arrangement in the sticky heat. I never understood how men could take advantage of her the way they did. Though she encouraged her defilement, Grace had the mind of a child. And there is something very wrong with the conquest of an infant.

  ‘Does anyone ever help you with Grace?’

  ‘The Jesus People take her when I help the Red Cross.’

  ‘Are you and Grace Christians?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you have Christian names.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have Chinese names too?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s unusual.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I lifted the cup to my lips and found it dry. Everything about Evangeline, from her reticence to her barricaded arms, made me feel unwelcome. It occurred to me that she hadn’t even bothered to thank me for the night I’d rushed to the police hut to help her. The rain had slowed to a feeble pit-a-pat-pat and children ran out of a neighbouring hut, screaming after the morning cooped up indoors. I told Evangeline that I had to leave for tiffin. I told her that I was too busy to help in the medical hut that week, and would she pass on my regards to the Aussie nurses? Evangeline nodded, relieved, and I gathered up my tools and left.

  As the sun made its debut in the sky I was glad to be outside, away from strange Evangeline and the smoke-hued fascination of her eyes. I splashed in puddles and hoped that Winston Lau wasn’t dishing up fish-head curry for tiffin again.

  * * *

  Due to the coercive nature of the Briggs Plan, the Chinese community were very hostile to it. The belief that New Villages existed under police dictatorship was widespread, as was the misconception that the Chinese community were being persecuted by the British, as they had been persecuted by the Japanese during the Occupation. Such attitudes were unhelpful in the war against Communism.

  The government wanted the Chinese to play a more active role in their liberation. They wanted to show that the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, as advocated by the Reds, was nothing more than the dictatorship of the Malayan Communist Party central committee. The government wanted to give the Chinese what the Communists were out to deny them: democracy.

  Resettlement Officer Dulwich and I received a government directive stating that, as part of a pilot scheme to give the ex-squatters the power to manage their own affairs, The Village of Everlasting Peace was to elect a village council. The trouble was that, with the exception of the few ex-urban Chinese (such as my beloved Evangeline), most of the squatters had lived their whole lives in jungle settlements and were uneducated and ignorant of such political ideals. Therefore, before the village elections could be held, the Chinese had to be taught about democracy, so the need for a village council would be fully appreciated. With this objective in mind, thousands of dollars were spent on a brief documentary explaining the democratic process, which was to be shown in tandem with the Hollywood film Tarzan – the glamorous bait with which we were to draw a large audience to our village meeting.

  On the day the documentary was to be shown, an Indian projectionist drove his van of equipment up to the officers’ bungalow. The projectionist, whose name was Vorpal, had been hired by the government to tour the New Villages of Selangor with a Cantonese-dubbed version of Tarzan. Charles invited him to join us on the veranda for a stengah or two.

  Vorpal sipped his lemonade and joked about the behaviour of the elders in The Village of Eternal Prosperity, which he’d visited the night before. When a celluloid tiger had sauntered across the screen, some of the elders had wailed and run away, afraid the tiger would leap into the audience. We had a good laugh at this and I asked Vorpal if the village meeting had been a success. The projectionist shrugged and said he didn’t know. He couldn’t understand Cantonese and politics bored him. For a man at the forefront of such a pioneering democratic scheme Vorpal was very apathetic. It was a pity the 10th Independent Regiment of the Malayan Communist Party didn’t take his apathy into account when they ambushed his van outside Kajang three weeks later and slit his throat. Vorpal’s corpse was bound in ribbons of celluloid and dumped at the gates of the resettlement camp where a film screening was scheduled for that evening.

  By late afternoon preparations were under way in the village square. A crowd of spectators gathered as we hoisted up the cinema screen (the majestic sail of our maiden democratic voyage!) and Vorpal set up his projector. A police truck drove around the village, loud-hailing a reminder to everyone of the lifting of the c
urfew and the evening’s cinematic extravaganza. Tilly lamps were hung like fiery fruit from the tulang trees bordering the square, and as the event was a prime target for Communist saboteurs the home guard patrolled in force, rifles strapped on and eyes peeled for any monkey business.

  At six o’clock the invasion of the square began; first a hesitant trickle, then a human landslide, villagers spilling in as folk-ballads of the motherland plink-plonked from the cinema speakers. Children ran pell-mell, bouncing yo-yos, hitting the shins of antagonists with sticks, and ai-oooh-ing, awed by the vast screen. The elderly shuffled in on the arms of kindly neighbours, and mothers distributed blankets, woven mats, paper fans and other comforts of home. Friends and neighbours hailed each other (Hey! Third cousin, come and sit by me!) and I greeted the rowdy masses, smiling and crying Hello!, delighted to see the villagers brought together by something other than misfortune and unanimous loathing of the British administration.

  In the mass of bobbing heads and wagging tongues I spotted Evangeline and mad Grace. Grace was in a very animated state, eyes darting everywhere as she stood up to chase after whatever sparked her interest. Evangeline had her sister’s wrist in a tight grip and every few seconds yanked the wayward Grace back down in an unhappy tug-of-war that lasted all night. Near the front of the square the missionary Marina Tolbin stood in the midst of a sea of urchins, whose hands were thrust out like beggars’. The idolatry of Marina Tolbin confused me, until I saw she had a bag of sweets and was scattering the confectionery like birdseed. The little ones (and a few bigger ones bereft of dignity) dropped to their knees and scrabbled after the lemon fizzes and bonbons. It was such a lamentable show of greed that Marina put the bag away. The children who hadn’t managed to procure sweets for themselves pawed at the hem of her skirt and mewled like kittens. This must have caused Marina some distress, but she sat in the deckchair next to Blanche and pretended not to hear.

  When the square was full, Resettlement Officer Dulwich stood upon a beer-crate podium and read a speech to the crowd. The assembled villagers resembled a monster of a thousand heads, and a very ill-mannered monster at that, paying scant attention to Charles and the awkward stream of Cantonese issuing from his loudhailer. Even after the film started the audience refused to settle, chattering and commenting on everything that appeared on the screen. I stalked up and down, flashing my torch and shush-ing trouble spots like a militant usher.

  The film was a jolly caper in which Tarzan the beefcake and Jane the buxom belle fought war-mongering African tribes with the assistance of a troupe of well-trained chimpanzees. It was nothing like the Edgar Rice Burrows novels of my boyhood and failed to hold my interest for long. Voyeur of the shadows, I watched the villagers instead, the rows of Asiatic faces illuminated by the moving Technicolor images as the projector reels spun round. When the vine-swinging Tarzan crashed into a tree the thousand-headed monster laughed as one. When a tiger pounced across the screen the thousand-headed monster let out a gasp. The shadows of moths frolicking in the projector light interfered with the picture and Vorpal squirted them with repellent spray, so they flew off with poison-laden wings. And the moths weren’t the only pests, for the children discovered the joy of shadow puppetry. First there came a single rabbit, wagging its long ears and hopping up and down to everyone’s giggling amusement. Then a whole Noah’s Ark of shadowy animals. For every shadow puppet a dozen torch beams swooped upon the audience, for the home guard were enjoying the Cantonese-dubbed film as much as everyone else. They dealt with the matter severely, seizing the culprits by the ear and slinging them under the tulang trees.

  After Tarzan had conquered the African tribe and brought the film to its exciting climax, Charles requested that everyone remain sitting. The thousand-headed monster groaned. It was half past eight – bedtime for most, and bladders needed emptying. In this climate of discontent the documentary flickered into being. Whether it was any good or not, I don’t know. I was busy rereading my speech and jittering with nerves. I’d read the speech in English translation to Charles that afternoon, pacing back and forth in the sauna heat of the bungalow as he sat flaccid in his wicker chair. Charles shut his eyes as I read aloud, and when I paused between sentences my gaze would stray to the open lower buttons of his shirt and the pale blancmange of his paunch.

  ‘Forgive me, old chap,’ he said with a yawn, when I’d asked for his verdict, ‘it’s too damn sticky to applaud.’

  Encouraged thus, I climbed upon the wooden crate podium at the end of the documentary. Hey, there’s that big-nosed devil Christopher, villagers called. Hey, Christopher! Can we go home now? We’ve got to go to work in the morning. The night was humid as ever and the underarms of my shirt patched with damp. The projector lamp illuminated the screen still and my pupils flinched in the glare, the audience diminishing to an impenetrable mass of darkness and eyes. In the expectant hush, my speech began. I described the importance of the village council, and the process by which it was to be established. I declared it a momentous day for The Village of Everlasting Peace.

  ‘We need twelve nominations,’ I said. ‘Those who wish to nominate, please raise your hands. When we have twelve candidates you may go home.’

  I hadn’t used a loudhailer (believing such contraptions to distance the speaker from the audience) and with an aching throat I shaded my eyes and squinted into the darkness for a hand held aloft. The shadow-masked masses also peered to see who’d defy the People Inside and support the hare-brained Foreign Devil scheme. One brave and solitary hand went up as a villager called Timmy Lo made a self-nomination. I knew Timmy Lo well, for he was a good man – a stalwart digger of ditches and builder of huts, pulling the weight of two and a half men. Timmy and I were good chums and it always cheered me to see his affable, round-as-a-cantaloupe face. As Special Constable Tahir jotted down Timmy’s name there was a hissing in the audience, like air let stealthily out of a tyre, but to my relief no more objection after that.

  But I’d underestimated the ominous threat of that hiss. Timmy Lo was not the scree preceding the avalanche of nominations. He was the one and only candidate of the night. For another twenty minutes I paced before the villagers, calling for nominees and arguing the hypothetical good of democracy. And with the tick-tock of every minute my humiliation deepened. I felt as though I were pleading with a lover who wanted nothing more to do with me, a lover whom I repulsed (oh, bitter taste of things to come!). The villagers became bolder in their mutterings and curses. They may have been in the square against their will, but they still had the freedom to move their tongues.

  ‘Who is this impostor?’ a woman cried. ‘Where is Mr Christopher, our friend?’

  ‘Hah! That’ll teach you to befriend an Imperialist whore!’ heckled an unseen man.

  ‘My boy will piddle his pants in a minute!’ another voice piped up.

  Cheeks aflame, I searched the crowd for a lifted hand, desperate as a sailor lost at sea scanning the horizon for land. Who were my allies? Not the yawning home guard. Not Vorpal the projectionist, impatient to pack up his equipment and leave. Not Resettlement Officer Dulwich, flipping open his silver pocket watch to inspect the time. I knew why the villagers were scared. I could smell the rotting stench of the invisible bandits crouched in the crowd. I could see the red stars of their invisible berets as they pressed invisible blades to throats. Through their spidery network of minions and spies the Communists were omnipresent; the Min Yuen, the diseased heads of the thousand-headed monster, malignant and inseparable. The villagers were terrified, and though I understood why, I wanted to hurl my wooden crate podium at them in frustration.

  ‘You will all remain here until we have twelve nominations!’ I shouted. ‘Twelve! Not one less! No one is allowed to leave, not even to go to the toilet! Even if we have to sit here all night and all day tomorrow. This brave man here is your example!’ I pointed at a cringing Timmy Lo. ‘You must unite and stand up for yourselves against the Communists …!’

  When the ghost of Charles is i
n a malicious mood (is there any other kind?) he teases me about the failed village meeting, and my lapse into dictatorship.

  ‘What an appalling little tyrant you were!’ he says, laughing, from the upholstered throne of my armchair. ‘What a snotty-nosed little tantrum! What illogic possessed you? One cannot discipline a bank of butterflies by swinging a sledgehammer at it! And in the name of democracy no less! Ha, ha, ha! Democracy! As if the Chinese give a monkey’s about democracy. All the Chinese want is to be jolly well left alone.’

  His lazy-mindedness really gets my goat. How dare Charles dismiss a whole race of people? Once again, I make futile appeals to historical evidence to cure him of his prejudices.

  ‘Only a year or two after you died every New Village in Malaysia had a successful, democratically elected council. Including The Village of Everlasting Peace. The Chinese want political representation as much as anyone else. So much so they campaigned for it on the streets of Kuala Lumpur in the sixties …’

  And does Resettlement Officer Dulwich listen? Of course not. He smiles patronizingly as I speak, then continues to dishonour my motives for haranguing the villagers.

  ‘Oh, it was unbearable to watch you!’ declared Charles, with a glee implying the opposite. ‘How dark the recesses of your Nietzschean soul! Tell me, Christopher, was it really your passion for democracy that made you so tyrannical? Was it really the best interests of the villagers you had at heart? Or were you just determined that everyone yield to your megalomaniac will?’

  ‘Oh, do be quiet, Charles. I wasn’t nearly that bad!’

  ‘Well, we all know what happened next …’

  After I’d lost my temper and swung my sledgehammer (the herd of butterflies seething but uninjured), a hand came to rest on my shoulder.

  ‘C’mon, old chap,’ said Charles, ‘this is never going to work.’

  He was right. One only had to listen to the wails of dismay. I stepped aside as Charles announced in broken Cantonese that the villagers were free to go. The exodus was indignant. Gathering limp and drowsy children, the villagers left in a plague of fury, with much rancorous spitting, ten times quicker than they had arrived. I felt the departure of the angry hordes so keenly it was as though they were trampling me underfoot. Cheered by the sudden reversal in popularity, Charles waved the masses off. He came up to me and imparted some kind words. I did not hear them. I stared, crestfallen, as Timmy Lo petitioned Special Constable Tahir to remove his name as a nominee. In less than ten minutes the village square was empty, but for some peanut shells and a small forgotten child, bawling for its mother.