The Harmony Silk Factory

by Tash Aw

  “Don’t move,” he said, binoculars still held to his eyes. He spoke softly, in an even voice that compelled me strangely to obey without the faintest demurral. “Over there, in those trees,” he continued quietly in his tempered bass-baritone, “do you see?”

  “What?” I whispered.

  “A golden oriole. What a beautiful bird.”

  I peered hard at the canopy of leaves ahead of us, expecting the flash of unmistakable yellow-and-black plumage, but I could see nothing in the shadowy recesses. “Where?” I asked.

  “It’s gone now,” he said, lowering his binoculars and offering me his hand with an easy smile. “Mamoru Kunichika. Pleased to meet you.” I learnt that he had arrived in the Valley only that day; that he was staying at the rest house; that he was an academic with a position at Kyoto University.

  “How wonderful,” I said. “What is your field of study?”

  “Anthropology,” he said without a moment’s hesitation. “And linguistics,” he added, as if it was an afterthought.

  I studied him closely. Pressed white shirt, maroon-and-red tie, nicely fitting trousers. He was, I had to admit, an impressive-looking man. “I suppose the two go hand in hand,” I said, noticing that he was almost exactly my height. His hair, too, was combed in much the same way as mine, parted to the right—though his looked somewhat neater. He had much broader shoulders than mine and his frame suggested that the rest of his body bore similar musculature under his immaculate clothing. Nothing was out of place with him—everything in appallingly perfect proportion. Next to him, I suddenly felt very skinny and malnourished.

  Though our rooms were at opposite ends of the rest house, I expected that our paths would cross—over breakfast, say, or when taking tea on the verandah. Two educated gentlemen, each with a background that might interest the other: I certainly wasn’t inclined to avoid him the way I might have had he been European. But I rarely saw him. Often he remained in his room for long periods; other times he would slip away noiselessly, and it became impossible for me to tell if he was in or out. When I was certain that he was in his room, I would listen at my door for some clue as to the activities behind his firmly closed door. Nothing—not even the scrape of a chair on the floor or the closing of a cupboard door. We were the only two people at the rest house and yet we remained solidly encased in our separate cells.

  One morning I left the rest house to join Johnny on his continuing quest for a new house. I had bicycled some distance before I realised that I had forgotten my camera, a handsome Leica (stolen, no doubt, from some unsuspecting foreigner) I had bought “secondhand” for a few dollars from a rickshaw-puller in Singapore. As I approached the rest house I heard music. It was so perfect and so strange in this setting that it took me several moments to realise that it was really playing, that my imagination wasn’t running wild in this tropical heat. It was music I knew well and held very dear—I had in fact been humming the tune some days before—“Porgi, amor,” from Le Nozze di Figaro. I knew, as I entered the house, that it was coming from Kunichika’s room. I felt compelled to share my enthusiasm for this music with him, and so I went to his room and knocked on his door. The music stopped immediately, and after a few moments Kunichika opened the door, looking perfectly soigné and unruffled.

  “What marvellous music,” I said, “and how lovely to hear it played here. I haven’t heard that in a long while—except in my own head, of course, where it replays endlessly.”

  He stood squarely in the barely open doorway; behind him I could see only a low, empty set of bookshelves. “Thank you,” he said simply.

  “Do you have a gramophone? You must have taken some trouble to bring it here.”

  “Yes, it was slightly cumbersome.”

  “All the way from Japan?” I continued, feeling myself wilt slowly under the steadiness of his gaze. “I wouldn’t have associated the Japanese with opera—well, apart from Madama Butterfly of course and, oh, Turandot—no, that’s China, isn’t it? I take it you listen to a lot of opera?”

  “Only a little. I studied in Europe for a time.” His manner of speech was legato as legato can be, flowing effortlessly from the depth of his chest to his throat to his perfectly drawn lips. He lifted a hand to smooth his already smoothed hair, and I noticed the quiet gleam of his signet ring. Instinctively, I reached to feel my own ring; I could have sworn that his was, in shape, weight, and colour, identical to mine.

  “Well,” I said, shifting on my feet, “perhaps we might exchange views on Mozart sometime.”

  “Yes, perhaps,” he said, closing the door.

  I left the rest house and found Johnny waiting for me by the riverbank a few miles to the south. He was impatient to see a house we had glimpsed several days earlier; his eyes were narrowed in a frown and he did not seem to want to hear about my strange new neighbour. When we found the house, it was smaller than I had remembered it: a compact whitewashed cube, its only ornamentation a pair of pilasters on its façade. It appeared abandoned, and we did not have any trouble pushing the heavy wooden doors open. The space inside seemed far too large for the shell that contained it; it swelled up above us in the one enormous room that made up the front portion of the house. It contained no upper floors: when I lifted my head to look at the ceiling I could barely make out the rafters in the inky darkness above me. Beyond that initial cavern a door led into a small courtyard overlooked on all sides by a further building concealed behind the unprepossessing exterior we had frowned at from the street. Instantly I imagined that courtyard filled with heavy earthenware pots containing ferns and goldfish; I saw the shutters painted eau de Nil green; I heard the haphazard clanging of saucepans and smelled the aroma of pungent curries. We clambered up the steep narrow stairs and ran through each of the empty rooms, flinging open the shutters to let in the light. One of the smaller rooms reminded me of my bedroom at Hemscott, its low ceiling instantly recalling the lonely sanctuary of my childhood. I looked out the window. The great silty river meandered gently by, so slowly it barely appeared to move at all. An ancient tree, its massive trunk enrobed in a tangle of epiphytic roots, hung thickly over the water beside a frail pontoon that protruded into the river. Small cherubic children swung naked from the thick hanging vines and splashed into the water below; their laughter filled the still morning and made me inexplicably sad. When Johnny came into the room he found me standing at the window, blinking into the distance. He asked if I was alright.

  I nodded and said, “This is it. This is home for you.”

  ARTEMISIA ABSINTHIUM, commonly known as wormwood, is a hardy perennial with feathery silver-green leaves. It thrives in a variety of garden conditions, its fine foliage providing useful contrast to broader, darker leaves in mixed borders such as those we had at Hemscott. Even after the garden began its descent into dilapidation, the artemisia remained vigorous, its pale green glowing amidst the creeping, darkened tangle around it. It is also reputed to have hallucinogenic properties, and is a principal ingredient in the making of absinthe. One of its qualities stands out over the others: its bitterness. Simply crush a leaf and place it on your tongue and its acridity will be evident. The ill effects of wormwood have assumed legendary status, enshrined in no less a work than the Bible: the end of the world will, according to the simply divine St. John, be announced by seven angels. For those of you lucky enough to have escaped a religious education, you need only know that the third of these angels causes a great star to fall from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood, and the third part of the waters became wormwood and many men died of the waters because they were bitter.

  There. Repeated verbatim, after nearly seventy years. Brother Anthony was right: I would remember it for the rest of my life. I was nine when I first encountered that passage. I had allowed myself to become embroiled in an unseemly spat with a foulmouthed boy who had scrawled CUNT on my tuck box, and before long our feud deve
loped into a pathetic little fistfight—more shoving and kicking than actual grown-up punching, if truth be told. I was brought before the gigantic Brother Anthony, my housemaster, who, before he administered what was to be the first of the many thrashings I suffered at his hands, sneered at me and called me the work of the Devil. “Wormwood,” he said, as if tasting something odious on his brutish palate, “that says it all.” He opened his drawer and produced two things: a short cane and a Bible, bound in cheap black leather. He bent me over the edge of his desk and set the Bible in front of my face; with a thick nicotine-stained finger he tapped at a spot on the page and said, “Read that aloud.” I began to read the verse. He struck the first blow and I cried out. “I didn’t tell you to stop, you dirty troublemaker,” he said. I continued to read through choking breaths; my eyes clouded with hot tears. The name of the star is called Wormwood and many men died because the waters were bitter. “You’ll remember that for the rest of your life, Wormwood.” Every time I was punished I was made to read that passage, as if repeating it would rid me of the bitterness of my name, my self. After only a short while I could recite it by heart without recourse to the Bible, and the beatings, too, became bearable. I stopped hating the good Brother Anthony, but when I meet him in Purgatory I will have to tell him that it didn’t work: I remember the words, but all my bitterness is still there. Except for a few brief days in 1941, I have carried it inside me all my life.

  WHEN DID THE TIDE of wormwood begin to rise within me after I got to the Valley? I thought I had rid myself of it. On all my walks with Johnny I felt nothing but uninterrupted happiness. Even when I searched for some lingering trace of malevolence within myself, I found none. And then one evening I experienced the prick of discontent, a sickly tingle at the back of my throat that I had not felt since coming to the Valley. I had been invited by the Soongs to join them at the wayang kulit, or shadow theatre, which I understood was a kind of Oriental Punch-and-Judy accompanied by wind instruments with trenchant chords similar to those of a bagpipe. I dressed appropriately for a tropical evening—open-necked cream silk shirt and flannels—and dabbed some Essence of West Indian Limes on my jowls. I arrived at the Soong house feeling fresh and very lively. I was looking forward to seeing Snow again.

  She was not amongst the people gathered in the sitting room pleasantly sipping drinks. Someone else was there, though—my elusive neighbour, Kunichika.

  “What a surprise to see you here,” he said brightly, hiding what I took to be a mixture of displeasure and shock behind a charming smile and a little bow. For a few minutes he behaved with exuberant fake bonhomie, joking about various things—the diabolical food at the rest house, the envy with which he regarded my camera, the troop of monkeys that gathered in the trees every evening, begging for food from the kitchen. “Goodness knows how Mr. Wormwood gets any peace with all their chattering!” he said to T. K. Soong.

  I smiled politely and said, “I manage.”

  Snow did finally emerge, wearing a brocade blouse over loose-fitting, dark-coloured trousers. She looked very refined, just like an Imperial Manchu consort.

  “You are staring at something, Peter,” she said wearily. “Is something the matter with my dress?”

  “No, of course not—nothing at all. It’s marvellous,” I said, feeling myself blush.

  She greeted Kunichika with more warmth and familiarity—rather too much warmth and familiarity, I thought. He bowed low and she offered him her hand, which he accepted with one hand and clasped with the other. She smiled timidly, dangerously, and held his gaze. I looked at her parents, expecting their disapproving countenances, but I found none. They merely smiled vapidly, as they always did. Mrs. Soong turned to me and said, “Professor Kunichika is a marquis, you know.”

  I paid little attention to the show. Our seats were a row of tiny wooden chairs arranged in the middle of the clearing in front of the screen. All around us the rest of the audience sat cross-legged, or else squatted in that loose-limbed Oriental fashion, almost resting on their haunches. I felt very disconcerted; I could barely stretch my legs for fear of kicking some poor urchin in the back. I found myself seated next to Snow, who remained utterly still throughout. My eye was constantly drawn towards her pale, luminescent blouse, which matched the intensity of her skin. It was impossible to concentrate on the show; I could not understand the constant lunging of the bizarre spectral shapes. I leaned across to ask Snow to explain what was going on. She spoke somewhat curtly, as if displeased at being disturbed during the performance. Yet a few moments later I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that she was exchanging whispers with Kunichika. Quickly, I leaned over towards her again. “Who’s that character? There, that one,” I said, pointing. Kunichika answered for her, providing me with rather more information than I needed—I paid little attention to his tutorial on the philosophy of Eastern theatre. I was not effusive in my thanks, and spent the rest of the show trying to anticipate the next exchange between Snow and Kunichika. Every time I sensed she might be about to speak to him I quickly presented her with some spurious question about the characters, the story, the music, etc. I could not stop myself from doing this. I knew, of course, that there was a risk that my behaviour would be interpreted by Snow as being juvenile in the extreme, but the risk of not behaving thus felt even greater. Whenever Kunichika bent his nobly sculpted neck to whisper in Snow’s ear, the sense of panic that welled inside me was violent and painful. I had to do everything I could to stop it.

  As the performance ended I noticed Johnny looking at me with an expression of some concern. We had been separated throughout by Snow’s parents, who sat between us, unmoving and silent as boulders. “Is everything alright?” Johnny asked me later.

  “Oh yes,” I said. “I was on the edge of my seat. Utterly gripping.”

  Back at the Soong house Snow took her leave and retired to bed. She offered her hand once more to Kunichika, who did, this time, kiss it briefly as he bowed. To me she said, “Good night, Peter,” and then disappeared down the long, dim corridor to her bedroom.

  The bitter seed had been sown inside me. I tasted it at the back of my mouth and felt its dark, dirty tentacles creeping slowly inside my body, probing for where I was weakest. Johnny walked me home, chattering constantly about some poems—Shelley or some other nonsense—he had just read; about plans for his new house; about one day travelling to Europe. “Will you teach me to play the piano?” he said brightly.

  I grunted.

  “Is something wrong, Peter? Are you unwell?”

  “I’m tired,” I said. I left him standing at the steps to the rest house with a vague promise of meeting the next day. I went to the bathroom and retched with dry, painful heaves. I fell asleep after drinking half a bottle of neat gin I found in the communal drinks cabinet. My dreams were filled with a single repeating image, that of Kunichika violently ravishing Snow. Their bodies twisted and glistened and pursued me wherever I went. In my bedroom at Hemscott they copulated in a frenzy by the window, silhouetted against the winter sky; in the Bodleian they thrashed amongst the dusty bookshelves; here, in the rest house, they formed a single pure-white creature, thrusting and jerking and swooning before my eyes. I could not escape this monster. I ran into the jungle, but they were above me in the trees, shrieking, wailing, crying. They pointed at my limp penis, for I was naked. It hung miserably like a rag, turning a bilious green in colour as I tried furiously to resurrect it, pumping it with both fists. All this time that howling two-headed white animal laughed at me from the forest above. I could not escape it.

  Not once did I think of Johnny, my only friend in this world.

  A CHINESE SPARROW HAWK has begun visiting the woods behind the house. No one has seen it but me. It comes at the quietest times of the day, when I am the only person about. Just after dawn, when the last wisps of sea mist have faded away, it hovers against a pearl-grey sky, shivering tentatively in the chilled breeze. In the afternoons, when everyone else is ensconced in a geriatric siesta, I
watch it dart between the trees, wheeling furiously between the casuarinas, or flashing its wainscot-coloured wings as it speeds across the paddy fields. Sometimes I spot it perched silently on a bough, deep in the foliage, staring at me with huge yellow irises. I smile at it and nod a greeting. It knows I am an ally, and so it reveals itself only to me. For only I know that it is responsible for the recent and oh-so-terrible decimation of the local brown shrike population.

  “Do you think it could be a mongoose?” Gecko trilled anxiously. Speculation had been rife in the days following the initial discovery of a few brick-red shrike feathers lying on the patio where those annoying creatures feed on morsels of food left for them by Gecko and the others. A list of suspects was drawn up: civet cats, snakes, flying foxes, dogs, rats—even the cook’s cat, which was finally exonerated on the grounds that its age and girth prevented it from venturing past the kitchen doors.

  “Ah bollocks,” said Brother Rodney, a burly Australian who likes to think of himself as rather more worldly-wise than he is. “It’s a bloody shite hawk,” he said.

  “How charming,” I said. “What exactly is a ‘shite’ hawk?”

  “One that shits all over the place,” he said, as if it were perfectly obvious. “You get great big colonies of them this time of the year, out in those islands across the Straits. Yep, thousands of them, shit-ting all over the place. Bloody awful. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Some islands get turned into a huge shite pile, nothing but shite as far as the eye can see.”

  I stood watching flocks of birds winging their way wearily across the Straits. This is where they complete their long, lonely journey, all the way from Manchuria and Siberia. Some of them travel the extra distance across to Sumatra (where they will certainly not be bothered by the likes of Gecko), others remain here. Why? I don’t suppose anyone will ever know the mysteries of migration. I have always loved the idea of being a migrating bird, a hawk or some other raptor, riding the warm thermals across the vastness of continents, all of Asia under my wings. I would follow my prey south, ready, like my little shite hawk, to swoop at any moment. There would be no plan for my journey, no map, no coordinates. And yet I would find my way, guided by forces too powerful and ancient for me to discern; I would simply follow my destiny.