The Harmony Silk Factory

by Tash Aw

  Later

  WHEN I ARRIVED at dinner, I found Honey in the middle of telling a story. He was facing Kunichika as he spoke, but he had assumed his Public Speaking voice, so I deduced that his intention was to impress.

  “. . . my men had to quell a veritable uprising. The whole thing was most unpleasant.”

  “Not the ‘Murder at the Mine’ story again, Frederick,” I said as I approached.

  Peter got up from his chair, but as he did so he managed to nudge the table with his thigh. The small vase of drooping, nearly dead orchids toppled over, spilling its contents onto Honey’s part of the table. The smell of stale flower water filled the air. “Clumsy fool,” Honey muttered under his breath, not looking at Peter.

  “Good evening,” Kunichika said, smiling as he pulled my chair back for me. “This is the effect you have on men, you see.”

  “Effect? Rubbish. The man’s an idiot, that’s all,” Honey grumbled.

  “Sorry,” Peter said in a tone which suggested he was anything but.

  “Continue with your story, Frederick,” I said, even though I had heard it several times before. The life of a tin miner, even one of Honey’s grandeur, is hardly filled with excitement, and their few noteworthy stories tend to become repetitive.

  “Thank you—I was nearly finished anyway. As you may have guessed,” he said, turning once more to Kunichika, “our man died. A year and a week after he was stabbed by the Chinaman. Well, plainly, it was murder. However: English Law is a strange creature. I’m not sure if you can understand this, but . . .”

  “. . . the accused could not be convicted of murder because the length of time between actus reus and death was greater than a year and a day,” said Kunichika.

  “Well, yes,” said Honey, eyeing Kunichika with a faint frown. “So they let him off. We have one dead manager on our hands and a homicidal Chinaman on the run.”

  “It was such a long time ago, Frederick, long before your time. People aren’t still talking about that, are they?” I said.

  “When I took over as the head of Darby Mines a year ago, I found that many people were still fascinated by this story. It had become a legend. What is it, now, eight years since it happened? Thing is, no one knew who this guy was. His name was probably an alias, he had no family, no home—nothing. And then he simply vanished into the jungle. He’s still out there, this murderer.”

  “Except he isn’t a murderer in the eyes of the law,” Kunichika said.

  “Ha!” said Honey, lighting a cigarette.

  Johnny cleared his throat. He had remained silent throughout Honey’s story—I must say I do not blame him, for these stories are not the most riveting. “I have heard,” he said in an awkward and self-consciously bored manner (learnt, no doubt, from Peter), “that the so-called murderer was a mere boy.”

  “Even children can be murderers, you know. Look at the Chinamen in the villages. Most of them are Commies by the time they’re thirteen—nasty little buggers.”

  “Are you sure this isn’t some myth, like the ghosts that are meant to haunt Kellie’s Castle or whatever that place is not far from here?” said Peter. “Because it doesn’t sound very plausible to me. Nameless man-child emerges from nowhere, chops leg off sixteen-stone Angus McHefty, gets freed by Lord Justice Snooty, and then vanishes into the jungle, never to be seen again. Perhaps he’s hiding in Shangri-la.”

  I found myself smiling at Honey’s bristling silence.

  Kunichika said, “It’s always the case that details are lost in the retelling of stories. Sometimes things are forgotten, sometimes things are added. The tale of history is most unreliable. It is, after all, reconstructed by human beings.”

  We found that hardly anything on the menu was available. “What on earth can we have, then?” demanded Honey in his VIP’s voice. The old Indian waiter seemed not to understand. In the end, we had mulligatawny soup, devilled chicken with boiled potatoes, and cold English rice pudding.

  “Ah, the taste of the Orient,” said Peter.

  11th October 1941

  A LITTLE MORE about last night. (It is raining heavily today so we are confined to our rooms for a while.) There was a string quartet playing while we had our dinner. As we were the only guests in the dining room, we wondered if the hotel had arranged the quartet especially for us.

  “We’re a long way from anywhere,” Peter said. “Where on earth would they have found four viol-playing fossils at such short notice? Look at them. . . .”

  They were very old Chinese men with bent spines. Their dinner jackets had a greenish hue and were badly frayed.

  “To think that the Formosa was, just a few years ago, the place everyone wanted to come to,” Honey said, lighting another cigarette. “Look at it now.”

  It was true, the hotel was decaying. In the dining room the chequerboard tiles on the floor were chipped in many places, and a thick trail of dust ran along the windowsills. The palms in their enormous pots were nearly dead. Up above the wide stone staircase leading to the rooms, the great crystal chandelier had long since ceased to work, and the hall was now dimly lit by a few old lamps.

  I left the table to go back to my room. I tried to excuse myself with as little fuss as possible, choosing a moment when all four of the men were involved in a mildly heated discussion about the role of the sultan in the affairs of state. I merely wanted to check that my diary was safe. The writing desk in my room (at which I sit writing this) is vast, but its leather surface is dry and scratched—more evidence of the Formosa’s faded glory. More importantly, the lock on its drawer does not work, so I have been forced to hide this diary amongst the clothes in my travelling case. This is not ideal, but I have been careful to make sure that I am never far from it for too long.

  All was in order. The diary was just as I had left it, tucked into the folds of a camisole, and I returned to the dining room. At the last minute I decided not to rejoin the men, and made my way instead to the colonnaded verandah at the rear of the hotel. The urge to be on my own was too great to resist. The Chinese lamps suspended from the ceiling no longer worked, of course, and darkness hung heavily over the place. Bats darted uncertainly over my head as I walked to the balustrade and placed my hands on the mossy stone. My eyes became accustomed to the night light and I could make out the outlines of a few objects: an old gazebo here, a small folly there; a small bridge over a dried-out pond, flower beds now reclaimed by the jungle. Things moved in the dark. Indistinct shapes snaking their way into the undergrowth, into the trees.

  And then I heard footsteps approach from behind, the careful tread of feet that did not want to be heard. Two or three steps; pause; another three steps; pause. I remained facing the garden, my hands tightening slowly on the balustrade. Nothing to fear, I told myself, those footsteps are Kunichika’s. Slowly, they came closer, until I swore I could feel his white breath on my hair. In a flash, I turned around.

  “Oh, hello,” Peter called out brightly. “What are you doing here? I was looking for the, ah, lavatory, but I seem to have got lost. Awfully dark out here, isn’t it?”

  “Peter,” I said, “why are you creeping around in the dark?” I think I sounded cross, for he seemed taken aback.

  “I’m most certainly not creeping around,” he said. “Creeping is-n’t my style. One might ask the same of you, my dear. What on earth are you doing out here?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just looking at the garden.”

  He stood next to me and peered out into the dark. “Can’t see anything. Are you sure there’s a garden out there?”

  “The remains of one, yes. Father says that in its heyday, this was the most famous garden in the country. The man who built it went on to run the botanical gardens in Penang.”

  “How extraordinary. I didn’t know you took an interest in matters horticultural.”

  He leapt up to sit on the balustrade—a sudden explosion of arms, elbows, and knees. I resisted the urge to comment on his lack of coordination. He pulled at his trousers, stra
ightening their legs, and, in doing so, managed to catch me with an elbow.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Good night, Peter,” I said, and I walked back to my room, leaving him sitting on his own.

  I checked on my diary again and went to bed. When Johnny eventually crawled in next to me I pretended to be asleep. He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead, and I sighed hazily. “Sleep, sleep,” he said. His lips were thick and dry. He fell asleep quickly, mumbling and breathing heavily.

  Above his gentle snoring I heard the scratching of rats out in the corridor.

  12th October 1941

  WE WERE ALL GLAD to leave the Formosa, I think. Yesterday’s confinement due to the rain had made us restless, and we waited anxiously to see if the sun would burn its way through the early-morning cloud.

  “Rough night?” Honey said, with, I thought, the slightest hint of lasciviousness in his voice. “You’re looking tired.”

  I ignored the remark and began to drag my case across the forecourt to the car.

  “Let me help you,” Kunichika said, taking my things from me. He strode powerfully into the sun, descending a small flight of stone stairs in two quick steps.

  The previous day’s rain had washed thin rivers of mud onto many of the smaller roads, but we drove on regardless. This was the only way to Tanjong Acheh, the point on the coast where we will catch a boat to the Seven Maidens. That was Johnny’s opinion. Even I was surprised at how certain he sounded. We are now a long way from Kampar—farther, surely, than any boy can cycle. Perhaps this was where he was born, where he grew up; perhaps he did not, as we all believe, spend his youth as a labourer in Tiger Tan’s famous shop. His knowledge of this place seemed to come from some deep recess, something locked away so safely that even he may have forgotten its origin.

  It was at that moment that I realised, with absolute clarity, that I did not know him at all. But then again I think I have always known that intimacy between us was impossible. That was why I wanted him: he would always be alien to me. And worse, it was I who pretended otherwise. I said things I now know were untrue. “We are kindred spirits,” I told him as we held hands by the river, not a hundred yards from my parents’ disapproving gaze. He looked at me with innocent eyes and believed every word I said. Then, as now, there lies an unfordable divide between us. Even Mother, in her own bizarre way, is at one with Father. She understands what he wants of her, and vice versa. They each supply what the other needs. That is marriage.

  At around midday Honey stopped the car in the shade of a large mangosteen tree whose branches hung thinly over the road. We got out and leant against the car while eating the tiffins we had brought with us from the hotel. There were boiled eggs, luncheon meat, fried bread, and rice with sambal belacan. Peter let out a large yelp, as if something had startled him, and began rummaging in his rust-coloured satchel.

  “I’ve just remembered something,” he said, and he pulled out a camera. It was sleek and black and looked brand-new. In his uneven, loping gallop, he ran a short distance away and turned to face us. He examined the top of the camera, uncertain of the buttons, while we continued to pick at our food.

  “The fool doesn’t know how to use the camera,” Honey said.

  Johnny began to walk towards Peter to offer his help, but just then Peter raised the camera to his face and called out, “Look wonderful, everyone.”

  I tried to smile but the sun made me squint.

  Peter beamed brightly and began to walk back to the car. Suddenly he stopped and raised his hand to his brow, shielding his eyes from the light. “Hello,” he said, “there’s something further up the road. Someone, I think. A woman. Selling fruit, it seems to me. Come and have a look.”

  We trudged out into the middle of the mud-streaked road. Sure enough, in the distance, we saw an old Malay woman with baskets of fruit set out on either side of her. She sat perfectly still, and looked as if she had been there for a very long time.

  “How strange,” said Honey. “ We didn’t spot her before, did we?”

  None of us had.

  “Where on earth do you think she’s appeared from?” Peter said. “And what is she doing here anyway? This road is hardly what you might call a highway.”

  He was right. We had not seen another car since leaving the Formosa.

  “She might have walked out of the jungle,” Johnny said, pointing vaguely at the thickly forested expanse around her. “There are many hidden villages, even where you least expect to find them.”

  Kunichika turned to Johnny and said, “Are you sure?”

  “I’m not convinced,” Honey said. “Look at the undergrowth—no one could have walked through that carrying baskets of fruit.”

  “Let’s go and talk to her,” Peter said, like a child asking to be taken to the seaside.

  She was several hundred yards away, and when we approached we saw that her baskets were filled with all kinds of fruit: jackfruit, rambutan, chiku, guava, mangosteen. We bought as much as we could and immediately began to eat. We had not realised how hungry we were from the driving.

  Peter whispered in my ear. “Snow, is she blind?”

  I had not noticed her eyes—pale and cloudy with cataracts. Speaking in Malay, I asked her where she had come from—had she walked far?

  Her reply was in a dialect so strange, so rural I could not understand it. I looked at Johnny, but he shrugged his shoulders.

  “What did she say?” Peter whispered with mounting excitement.

  I paraphrased my questions in the hope of getting a more lucid response. Again, the same mumble. It did not even sound like Malay. I exchanged a quizzical look with Johnny. “I can’t understand either,” he said.

  “I believe,” Kunichika said, “that Johnny’s hunch was right after all. She has come from a settlement a few miles from here. She says that her daughters helped her carry the baskets and will return later to help her home.”

  “Well, tell her she’ll be waiting a long time for her next customer,” Honey said.

  I looked at Kunichika as he spoke, his thin lips widening into a smile. His voice sounded as if it belonged to a different person.

  The old woman muttered something.

  “What did she say?” Peter said as we began to walk back to the car.

  Kunichika smiled and said, “I’m not certain. Something beyond translation.”

  I caught his eye as we climbed back into the car. He smiled and said, “I did tell you I was a jack-of-all-trades.”

  We set off with renewed vigour, it seemed. Kunichika turned to Honey and said, “We should not stay on this road for too long.”

  I fell into a thin sleep with my head resting on Johnny’s shoulder. In my sleep I felt the rolling and swaying of the car. I did not dream; my head was filled instead with the voices of the people around me, yet, curiously, I remained asleep. I did not wake until we reached the grounds of the rest house.

  13th October 1941

  THIS REST HOUSE is exceedingly comfortable, and I am reluctant to leave it—yet we must if we are to catch our boat this evening. I have often glimpsed these rest houses, and have always wanted to stay in one, to be a foreign traveller, stopping en route at these simple inns that punctuate the journey to the far North. When we arrived late yesterday afternoon, I went immediately to my room to enjoy the view. The house is situated on a hill, nestled among ancient shade-giving trees. Beyond the flame of the forest outside my window the land falls away and then undulates gently towards the coast. The Hainanese couple who run this place say that on a clear day the sea is easily visible; sometimes it appears so near that some guests have attempted to walk to it. But there has been so much cloud in the sky that I have not glimpsed the ocean; rain seems close at hand.

  Let me describe this room and why it appeals to me so much. It is large, with a smooth concrete floor painted the colour of clay. The furnishings are sparse—a bed, a dressing table, and a small writing desk. The windows are so large that wherever I am in the room I am
able to take in the view. After Johnny went down for breakfast this morning, I pulled the mosquito net aside and lay in bed gazing outside. The air was cool and the light soft. That was when it struck me: this is the first time I have been on a trip on my own—that is to say, unaccompanied by my parents. Even the most timid of my excursions have always been chaperoned. I do not know why I have not realised the significance of this trip before, or why I have been allowed to venture forth in this manner. Perhaps they believe—justifiably—that marriage makes a woman so undesirable that she will be safe from the murky dangers of men.

  “You seem in high spirits today,” Kunichika said when I ran into him on the landing.

  “Do I?” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I had dressed hastily, eager to go outside, and the sleeves of my blouse had gathered uncomfortably at my shoulders. I pulled at them inelegantly.

  “Would you care for a stroll?” he asked.

  The others were nowhere to be seen; the breakfast room seemed empty. I nodded.

  It was the most glorious morning I could recall. Everything was perfectly still, the air touched with the faint crispness of dawn. The light appeared to my eyes like syrup. I had never noticed such a thing before. I wanted to swim in it.

  “The light is remarkable,” Kunichika said. “It illuminates everything.” It was as if he had read my mind.

  “One can see everything with utter clarity,” I said. “There are no shadows, nothing is hidden.”

  “Is it too sentimental a thing to say,” he said, and then paused.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He smiled, blushing a little.

  I stopped walking and turned to him. His hesitant smile induced me to smile too. “What were you going to say?”

  “No, please—I am embarrassed to say it. I am embarrassed even to think it.” He walked a few paces ahead of me and paused under the boughs of a giant fig tree. On the perfectly clipped lawn, he looked like an ornamental statue.