The Harmony Silk Factory

by Tash Aw

  I remember this moment because I have been toying with the idea of planting lily of the valley in this new garden. I think they might just thrive here. That summer in France was exceptionally hot, yet those delicate-looking perennials seemed undimmed in their vigour. In transplanting a foreign plant to these tropical climes, I shall also be following in the footsteps of those intrepid Victorian gardeners who brought exoticism to English gardens and made it part of the landscape there. Of course I shall be re-creating this process in reverse, but if I succeed, my deeds may have far-reaching consequences. Just think: fifty years from now, if lily of the valley does become naturalised in this country, a quintessential English flower will become a tropical plant. Will it then, sometime in the very distant future, be exported back to England, I wonder? Who will consider it exotic where? I tremble at the possibilities.

  And not just lily of the valley, but oxeye daisy, foxglove, cranes-bill, snake’s-head fritillary: I will plant them all in this hot earth. I want woodruff, too, so that I can dry its tiny star-shaped leaves and use them to infuse my linen with the scent of new-mown hay. And lavender—I must have lavender. There is a perfect spot for a long, slim bed of lavender, just outside my window, as it happens. Its perfume shall greet me when I wake and mollify me as I fall asleep. No longer will I have to wait for summer to enjoy its scent, for here it is summer all year long. Therein lies the genius of my garden. It captures the happiest months of the year, containing them in perpetual fecundity within its boundaries.

  My garden will not stop there. It will travel to China and Japan and other temperate Eastern climes, proudly displaying cloud-pruned Japanese holly, Chinese peonies, pink cherry blossom, bitter orange, tiny gnarled bonsai. Thus I will emulate not only Victorian gardeners but Oriental emperors too, the very ones who created the gardens that first inspired this endeavour. Like the Emperor Chenghua, I will create a microcosm of all that is beautiful here.

  Of course I have not told anyone about this idea. It would be entirely wasted on them, and I fear their lack of enthusiasm might escalate slowly into scepticism and eventually into a full-blown revolt. The locals are, I find, very sensitive nowadays to any perceived slight to their national pride. I made the mistake of intimating to Alvaro the nature of my planting scheme, and he looked instantly displeased. That same morning, he approached me after having consulted the sorry collection of books that form the House’s “library.” He said, “Your idea cannot work. It is unscientific.”

  “The Victorians achieved more implausible things,” I replied calmly.

  “Those plants cannot survive. Maybe you should have a look at the books downstairs.”

  “I will do no such thing. The Reader’s Digest Gardening Weekly didn’t create Sissinghurst,” I said, turning away. I did not want to become embroiled in a protracted discussion with a simple ignoramus.

  He sighed. Before leaving my room he said, “Will you really not use any local plants?”

  I didn’t answer. I merely smiled, as if to say, Perhaps I will, perhaps I won’t.

  “Crazy,” I heard him say as he closed the door.

  I shrugged, my eyes and face feeling hot with anger. He would never have understood. Images of the Forest of Compiègne fluttered in my head once more, the scent of lily of the valley filling my nostrils. I knew that even Alvaro was not truly a friend. Like Pritchard all those years before, he would never be close to me. I was never meant to have “friends.” What happened to Pritchard? He went up to Cam-bridge and then ventured to the Sudan with the Shell Exploration Company; he married a nice girl, I heard, and settled in Rye. He never spoke to me again after our holiday in France.

  No, I was destined never to have friends.

  WHEN, ON ONE OF OUR WALKS, Johnny divulged his great secret to me, I was not in the least bit perturbed. “A Communist?” I shrieked, feigning horror. I had, in truth, expected something far more shocking.

  “Quiet, please,” he urged, looking over his shoulder for phantom enemies. He began to tell me everything about himself—the meetings he organised deep in the jungle; the leaflets he wrote and distributed to rural communities; the funds he raised for the Party. He also told me of the so-called army. I thought they sounded nothing more than a band of rogue bandits who roamed the Valley with tinpot ammunition and canvas shoes coming apart at the seams.

  “I presume your capitalist father-in-law knows nothing about this,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “And Snow?”

  With his machete, he slashed at the foliage that fell across our path, but did not answer.

  “I see,” I said.

  We were climbing a small hill; the trees gave way to a stretch of long, prickly grass, and I believed we had reached the summit. It turned out to be a false peak, and we paused to catch our breath. Johnny had not spoken for a while.

  “If anyone finds out about me I would be finished,” he said eventually. I knew, from the flatness in his voice, that this was no exaggeration. “I would lose everything. My business, my wife . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Is it worth the risk?” I asked.

  He looked at me and smiled. “The Japanese will soon invade Malaya, you know. Look at what is happening in China. None of your countrymen seem to think this will happen. But it will. And when it does, I may lose everything anyway. So I think it is worth the risk, don’t you?”

  “Isn’t it difficult to live like this, though?” I pressed. The thought of this poor innocent child embroiled in a brutal war was beginning to induce a sense of panic in me. “I mean, constantly living in fear of betrayal.”

  He smiled, a picture of calm. “That is a danger we face all the time, every day of our lives, in one way or another. I myself do not fear it—if it happens, so be it. I would rather be betrayed than betray someone else. Wouldn’t you?”

  “But what about Snow? It must be torture, not being able to speak about it to her.”

  “No,” he said, with a hardened edge to his voice. “I don’t want her to know that about me.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged. “I just don’t want her to know about me.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You never know, she might, well—admire you more for it.”

  He laughed a hard, quiet laugh. “There are some things I would prefer to keep hidden from my wife. Besides, there are worse things than not having anyone to talk to.”

  “Are there?”

  He didn’t answer. I continued: “What do you think will happen if, as you say, the Japs invade? I don’t get the impression they’re terribly keen on Communists, do you? You have an awful lot to lose.”

  “No more than anyone else.”

  “Now you’re just being stupid. What about Snow?”

  “Am I stupid?” he said, sounding remarkably sanguine given the obvious perils of his situation. “And what will you do when the Imperial Army invades?”

  “Oh, I’ll be long gone. I’ll have taken the high road to the bonny banks of Loch bloody Lomond. Evacuated on some special ship with a lot of other ruddy-faced Englishmen and all the gin I can drink.”

  He did not respond for some time. After a while he said, looking away, “All my life I thought I would be alone, but now that is no longer true. I have Snow. As long as she is with me, there is little I fear.”

  I sipped some water before resuming the climb. “How lucky for you.”

  “Peter,” Johnny called after me, “I have never told anyone about this part of my life, no one except you.” The tawny, waist-high grass shimmered silkily in the breeze. In the golden sunlight he looked as if he were being washed by the waves of a fawn-coloured sea. “What I said earlier was wrong. I do have someone to talk to now.” His face was suffused with an unspoilt innocence that I had never seen in all my Occidental years. It was an expression I knew to be impossible to describe to those who had never travelled in these tropical climes; it spoke of instinctive trust, communicated by an intimacy that we in the cold West lost many ye
ars ago. I found myself curiously unable to respond. I began to say something, but stopped; my voice sounded stiff, cold, and mannered compared with his. The sun bore strongly on my forearms and knees. Beyond the shade of my Panama the landscape seemed tenuous, trembling in the afternoon heat.

  Many times I have analysed that strange moment, carefully un-weaving the richly twisted strands of emotion that ran through my nerves as I stood watching Johnny, poor wonderful Johnny, standing on the slope of that hill. As the fabric of that memory comes apart in my hands, I see that the answer is really very simple. For those few brief seconds, I found myself looking into the face of a friend, the first and only one I would ever have, the only one I would ever love. For it is true, isn’t it: greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. That is what I was taught at school. I always laughed at what seemed to me a perverse linking of love, friendship, and sacrifice—never would it apply to me, I thought. And yet it did, for a few fleeting moments, at least. Looking at Johnny then, I truly believed I would die for him. Now, in the cold light of old age, I can see I was merely fooling myself: I was never as noble as that.

  THERE IS A PAINTING ENTITLED Francesca da Rimini, which depicts the final moments of the eponymous heroine’s life as she lies dying in the arms of her lover Paolo. Like so many French paintings of the nineteenth century, it is voluptuous and exciting—the tragedy of the lovers’ story is somewhat lost in the sinuous display of brightly lit flesh against a darkened background. But make no mistake: Francesca’s is a sorry tale indeed. She was forced to marry the hideous Gianciotto Malatesta, but fell in love with his beautiful younger brother Paolo. One day, as the lovers lay together covertly reading Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, they were discovered by Gianciotto, who exacted terrible revenge by stabbing them both to death. Their wounds are clearly seen in the painting, thin dark cuts on otherwise unblemished alabaster skin. They are both naked, entwined in a white sheet; she clings weakly to him, her cheek pressed tenderly to his smooth, flat chest. After death they were condemned to wander the stormy darkness of Hell’s Second Circle together with all the other souls of the lustful. How wretched and unfair it is that the price of love is eternal damnation.

  This is what I found myself saying to an assembled audience at Johnny’s house the first time I was properly invited there. The occasion was the Autumn Festival, and T. K. Soong had thrown an “open house,” which in theory meant that anyone in the Valley could turn up unannounced—although the guests seemed too well mannered and nicely spoken to qualify as true Valley plebeians. Everything I said seemed to be greeted with smiling Oriental inscrutability, and my stories became increasingly desperate as I scratched around for conversation. To compound my discomfort, there were three other English people in attendance. One of them was a weak-chinned, pink-cheeked schoolmaster type with slowly thickening jowls, who might as a child have been considered cherubic. His name was Frederick Honey.

  “What a silly story,” he said prissily. “I don’t believe any of it.”

  “It isn’t a question of believing,” I said. “Why can’t you just accept it as a beautiful, tragic story of an ill-fated love affair?”

  “Well, what’s the moral of the story? Every story has to have a moral,” he said, as if irritated by my lack of logic.

  I remained civil, albeit with great difficulty. “I don’t know. What’s the moral of Romeo and Juliet?”

  “That’s Shakespeare,” he said, rolling his eyes and sighing heavily, letting his shoulders fall in a gesture that was meant to be disdainful; he had obviously affected it in imitation of some overbearing housemaster from his youth. “As I see it,” he said, swelling with self-importance with every passing second, “you’re trying to confuse the moral of the story by bringing in love and tragedy and all that romantic nonsense. The point is clear. She was married, he was her husband’s brother, they knew they were in the wrong. They got what they deserved.”

  “Q.E.D.,” I said. “Very good.”

  “I agree with Frederick,” one of his cohorts said. She was a young, plumpish woman named Una Madoc who spoke briskly in a businesslike manner, and with the faintest of Scottish accents. Of the tropics she had declared the heat unbearable and the sausages “strange, not at all like the ones back home.”

  “It isn’t that simple, darling,” her husband said. He was a quiet man with a full-prawn moustache that smothered his words. “What we know of Francesca comes from Dante, and he was plainly seduced by her. He was completely taken in by her story. We don’t actually know the whole truth about this woman.”

  “But weren’t you moved by her words?” I said. “Like Dante, I felt faint with pity when I read her story.”

  Honey grunted in derision.

  “Yes, it’s undeniably sad,” Gerald Madoc said, “but how do you know you can trust her? Is she above twisting the facts to her advantage, to gain your sympathy?”

  “I must say,” I said with some indignation, “that seems very cynical.”

  “Always remember what the monstrous Minos says to Dante: Be careful how you enter and who you trust. Did Paolo really seduce her, or was it the other way round? It isn’t so simple, that’s all I’m trying to say.” He beckoned to an ancient Chinese servant bearing some drinks and called, “Boy.” There was no response.

  “You still haven’t got the measure of it,” Honey said. He turned to face the room and bellowed, “Boy!”—which promptly secured him the attention of several servants. “Another stengah?” he said smugly. He and the Madocs proceeded to converse in a language I could barely comprehend. One half of their vocabulary consisted of abbreviations, the other of pidgin Malay. Madoc, for example, was APC. I took this to mean his employers, rather than his status. There were, I deduced, people who were employed by Guthries or Sime Darby. Una had lunched with Mrs. ADO in that ghastly PWD house. The makan was awful, and there was a scene because the syce hadn’t been given his gaji. Nowadays, it seemed, the chop of Socfin didn’t count for anything, not amongst the Malays at least, and if they weren’t careful, Bousteads would soon follow suit.

  “You must all come round for pahits,” said Una Madoc. “Our boy mixes a very passable gin pahit.”

  “Cocktails,” Madoc said, noticing my frown. “Pahit actually means ‘bitter,’ but that’s what Europeans call cocktails here in the FMS.”

  “Frederick says you’re an actor,” Una said to me, looking me up and down. “It’ll be marvellous to have one of those around.”

  I began to feel hot and very uncomfortable. My collar cut into my neck and I felt somewhat constricted. “I’m afraid Mr. Honey has been misinformed, but thank you anyway,” I said. I strode across the room, cape flowing magnificently in my wake, onto the verandah. I fumbled in my pocket for a cigarette, which I lit inexpertly on the third attempt. Then, as now, I abhorred nicotine, but I thought that a cigarette or two, properly mounted in an ebony holder, would suit the rest of my attire nicely.

  Let me explain. On hearing that I had been invited to the Soongs’ famous house, I decided that I should atone for the shabbiness of my appearance on my first visit, that unfortunate afternoon when I had limped, snakebitten and distinctly brutta figura, into their sitting room. I wanted to make up for my slurred speech and lack of conversation, so I resolved to dress as smartly as I could. When Johnny told me that this was one of the most important festivals after the Chinese New Year, and that he would be wearing his finest clothes, I instantly thought that it would be appropriate for me to wear something more extravagant than I might normally. After all, it was not a mere tropical fête champêtre that I was attending, but a rather more sumptuous affair altogether; I therefore thought that something spectacular was called for to mark this event. Johnny would be there, and so too would Snow. I had further understood from Johnny that this was very much a Chinese event, and I should expect to be the only Westerner present. This distinction in mind, I eventually settled upon my déguisement for the evening: a salmon-pink cape worn
over a dinner jacket, with a cigarette holder I had found in the general store in Kampar. My “cape” was not a proper one, but simply a length of satin Johnny had given me for this purpose. I thought it would suffice—after all, who in this part of the world, at a Chinese gathering, would be in a position to quibble over sartorial detail? My dismay at discovering not one but three other English people was, you can imagine, considerable.

  I stood on the verandah puffing at the noxious cigarette. The drone of men’s voices hung heavily in the air, punctuated by the staccato clinking of glasses and china. Someone was playing the piano—a pleasant, if somewhat heavy-handed, rendition of a Chopin nocturne. Its rich melody competed awkwardly with the song from the gramophone; I recognised the hard-edged voice and atrocious French accent as that of Josephine Baker, shrilly declaiming “Si J’étais Blanche.” All around the house, paper lanterns in the shape of fantastic animals hung from hooks, lit by candles inside their hollow bellies. There were dragons in various shapes—some chased after paper pearls, others stared wide-eyed at me as I passed, their concertina bodies quivering in the gentle nighttime breeze. There were rabbits and dogs and butterflies, all painted a riot of colours, all bizarre and deformed. Outside, beyond the pale sphere of light, men stood chatting in the shadows. Escaped from their wives, they muttered conspiratorially about things I could not discern; I merely watched the firefly glow of their cigarettes in the dark. Johnny approached me as I was undoing my tie. “Black tie,” I said, holding it before him like a dead animal. “You can have it.”