The Harmony Silk Factory

by Tash Aw

  Alvaro set up a rota to keep watch over the bird feed. The idea was firstly to identify the culprit and secondly to prevent the repetition of such terrible crimes that we all hate, you know.

  “I’m not volunteering,” I said. “I have other—better—things to do. The garden, in case you’ve all forgotten, is still in the making. There’s plenty of work for me. Why don’t you people just accept the workings of nature? Some things die, other things live. Predators and prey—it’s a long-standing arrangement. Man needs to establish a rapprochement with Mother Nature.” The plan, of course, did not work. No one could stay awake for the duration of the watch, and nothing was seen. Once, Gecko thought he saw a python at the end of the garden. But the monsoons are upon us now, and the rain, when it comes, falls in sheets, blurring the vision and turning every shape into a ghostly spectre. He could not be sure.

  Erring on the side of caution, I crept into the kitchen and stole little pieces of raw chicken from the refrigerator. I took these to the woods and laid them out on the highest bough I could reach. I wanted to make sure that the sparrow hawk does not go away.

  JOHNNY WAS ILL-TEMPERED and sullen from the very start of the journey. He would not be cheered up, not even by me. By the time we reached the Formosa Hotel he was entombed in his own silence.

  “Is he ill?” Snow asked me after he had gone ahead to their room. For a brief moment, I found myself alone with her in the gloomy foyer. We stood apart from each other like two chess pieces marooned on their own tiny squares of the chequerboard floor. “I don’t know,” I said, lowering my voice to match her hushed tones. The whispering hid the slight tremor that had crept into my voice. Perhaps she trusted me at last. She looked at me with a faint smile of conspiratorial concern. Before I could prolong this moment of intimacy, however, Kunichika appeared. “May I take your things upstairs?” he asked her, lifting her case before she had time to acquiesce.

  I went up to my room and had a long soak in the cavernous roll-top bath. One of its claw-and-ball feet was missing, replaced by a sturdy block of wood. As I reclined in the lukewarm water I looked at the flakes of peeling paint on the ceiling and the glossy green-black moss forming on the cornices. The rugs on the floor were threadbare, patched and tufted like mange on a feral Malayan dog. Nonetheless, my bath seemed transcendentally luxurious after an arduous day on the road; it brought relief to my aching muscles and washed away the red dust that had formed a film on my skin. I made a quick mental note: not even Rolls-Royces are immune to the forces of nature.

  At the bottom of the sweeping, dimly lit stairs, I paused to straighten my tie. I wanted to make sure that Snow saw me in the best possible light: freshly scrubbed and shaved, immaculately dressed, fully revived, and bursting with joie de vivre. The voices from the dining room drifted into the foyer, muffled and inarticulate but audible nonetheless. I listened for Snow’s voice but heard only those of Kunichika and Honey. They spoke softly but firmly, forming each word carefully and with great deliberation. One or two words were emphasised heavily, but their voices were never raised.

  “Ah, Wormwood,” Honey said breezily when I walked into the room. “What will you have—whisky? Always take it neat in the tropics. Kills the germs, you see.”

  “I know, you’ve already told me that. How kind,” I said, accepting the cigarette he offered me. I looked at Johnny. He wore an ivory-coloured shirt of mine, which I had given to him some days earlier. I had noticed him looking at it longingly, and told him it had been made for me in Paris (I had in fact bought it in Tunbridge Wells). When I gave it to him he said, “That is the kind of thing I want to sell in my new shop.” This evening he was wearing it for the first time, and he looked awful. The yoke was too tight across his shoulders, the sleeves were too long, and the colour was too pale for his complexion. His face looked flushed and damp with perspiration, and he stared resolutely at the melting cubes of ice in his drink. With his forefinger he drew shapes in the moisture on the glass, his eyes hollow and unblinking.

  For the rest of dinner, Honey held court like a schoolmaster lecturing a group of fifth-form boys. His stories of petty tin-mining heroics failed to impress anyone. He filled his chair magisterially, speaking with an air of studied superiority, frequently exhaling plumes of cigarette smoke. In every respect he resembled a young child imitating the mannerisms of an adult. He looked at Johnny as he spoke—singling out the easiest target, as it were: no one else seemed interested.

  “Nonsense,” I said, challenging every assertion he made. I spoke with as much sang-froid as possible. Snow had now joined us, and it was important to pitch my voice in exactly the right manner: clever but not cynical, involved but not aggressive. I cast a quick glance at her. I was not surprised to see she was looking at Kunichika, and he at her.

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” I said at the end of Honey’s long and implausible story about the killing of an English tin miner by a Chinaman coolie. Whatever control I had had over my voice seemed suddenly to have vanished, and I was aware of the sharpness of my words: waspish, acidic, adolescent. It was too late now, and I lashed out at the inconsistencies of his story. To my surprise, this unseemly little rant raised a smile from Snow—though I could not decide whether the subject of her mirth was me or Honey.

  We had an execrable meal of réchauffé leftovers—bacterial soup of an unidentifiable variety (though mutton was clearly an important component), bland chicken, and lumpy rice pudding. “I think this presages the end of the Empire, don’t you?” I said. A string quartet sat under the dry, drooping leaves of an enormous potted palm. Like the plant, the members of the quartet seemed near death. They moved their bows feebly and played out of tune, turning every piece into a sad, funereal farewell. Even the most recent songs were somehow transformed into antique death marches—“J’attendrais,” for example, a blithe and simplistic song (learnt, no doubt, from an itinerant French planter), was executed with moaning top notes which begged to be accompanied by the tolling of an Orthodox funeral bell. Over this horrific continuo, Honey sounded off on every conceivable topic. He was a soi-disant expert on everything relating to the tropics, from fungal infections to the politics of the Malay sultanate. The cacophony was so distracting that I barely noticed Snow slip away from the table. I waited a minute before following her, making the appropriate excuses as I left. I thought I might catch her before she got to her room—I would use Johnny’s “illness” as an excuse to engage her in conversation.

  I hurried up the stairs but saw no sign of her. I ran along the darkened hallways, pausing every so often to listen for her footsteps: nothing. With an air of mild deflation I made my way back to the foyer, quietly humming the insidious, sickly-sweet tune to “J’attendrais.” It was then that I saw her, slipping quietly into the shadows out on the balustraded verandah. I walked on tiptoe to stop my shoes from clicking loudly on the floor, and made my way towards her. I hid behind a screen and then shielded myself with a pillar, waiting for the right moment to approach her. In half-profile her features seemed finer than before, yet touched by a gentle muscularity. Her short hair revealed the smoothness of her neck; every time she turned her head the skin stretched to reveal a flash of white amidst the dark. She moved with slow, certain movements, utterly in control of every part of her body. Crouched in the shadows I felt clumsy and foolish. I straightened my posture and began to walk towards her, lifting my feet so that they did not crash awkwardly on the cold tiled floor. I had barely progressed beyond the pillar when she turned around and stared at me with hot, dark eyes.

  “Hello,” I said gently, assuming as quiet and masculine a demeanour as possible. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Looking at the garden,” she said.

  My ears pricked. “Garden?” I said. “Where?” What luck. I was in my element now. I could engage her in conversation all night on the subject of gardens. Fate had presented me with a perfect entrée into her world. All her likes and dislikes, her sense of aesthetics, her memories of childhood�
��everything was there for me to discover now. I peered into the darkness beyond the faint circle of light cast from the hotel, but I could see nothing except the amorphous shapes of the jungle that surrounded us. The sharp angles of a ruined structure protruded from this shapeless mass, silhouetted against the night sky, but otherwise there was nothing—nothing I could identify as a garden. My hopes of finding my Eden were dashed.

  “Aren’t there any beds or borders?” I said. “There is at least an ornamental pond somewhere, surely?”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “This was once the most famous garden in the Federated Malay States. It had a European-style garden, whatever that means. It’s all still there—though now it’s part of the jungle, I suppose.” She stood with her hands resting on the balustrade. Her face was clear and untroubled.

  “What a shame,” I said, leaping up to sit on the wide stone ledge. I had not even settled properly when she bade me an abrupt “Good night,” leaving me stranded on the balustrade. I sat there for a long while, listening to the call of cicadas. The nebulous remains of that once-fabulous garden lay before me, but still I could see nothing.

  The dining room was empty by the time I made my way back to my room. The quartet had disbanded and the tables had been stripped of their linen. The lights, too, had been turned off, and the shadows of the palm leaves cast tiger stripes across the floor. I had just begun to walk up the stairs when I realised there was someone standing on the landing, leaning against the wall with a drink in his hand. I knew, of course, it was Honey.

  “You went missing for some time, Wormwood,” he said.

  “Yes, I thought I’d lurk in the shadows for a while, rather like you’re doing now.” I continued walking without looking at him.

  “Here’s some advice,” he said as I went past him. “Watch your step. You think you can just breeze into the Valley to the sound of trumpets? Think again. No one appreciates your behaviour. There are things an Englishman can do and things he can’t do—that’s just the way it is. I told you before. The same rules don’t apply out here. We have to behave in a certain way, otherwise everything falls apart. You think you’re special? You’re not. No one is. Let me tell you one thing: nobody likes you. Take this as a gentle warning from someone who knows.”

  “Thank you—sahib is most kind,” I said, and I continued on my way. My face felt hot with anger and shame. I kept on walking, closing my eyes to the harsh prick of tears. I took a deep breath, then another, then another, until finally I reached the top of the stairs. “That tin miner of yours, the one who was murdered,” I said, turning around. “He got what he deserved. He had it coming.”

  I proceeded slowly to my room. In the end, we all get what we deserve, I thought.

  THE RAIN LASTED ALL DAY and into the night. It washed mud down from the hills onto the flagstones beneath my window and turned the open drains into angry red rivers. Here in the tropics the rain dominates the landscape, turning everything into strange images of itself. Its pale haziness becomes opaque, even mirrored, and blurs every shape that falls within its shroud, so that you can never be certain where something begins and ends. If you stare hard enough at it, you might even see a reflection of yourself a mere ten paces away. These tropical storms do not leave room for indifference; they wring apathy from your body, electrifying your thoughts. It is often said that the sun makes the white man go mad, but I do not agree. It is the rain that does it. It turns you into a different person.

  Solitude, I decided, was the most fitting state for me, and by the time we reached the rest house I had resolved to isolate myself in dignified silence. I barricaded myself in my room, or else strolled through the expansive, attractive grounds of the house, singing to myself in perfect pitch. “Ich habe genug,” I sang molto espressivo, surprising myself with a sustained low B: I did not think my voice was still capable of such things. Encouraged by this unexpected treat, I moved on to some Mozart arias, and found that the words came back to me easily. I thought I’d lost them when I travelled the seas to these hot lands; where I kept them all this time I do not know, but they must have found a hiding place inside me, for I had never made any attempt to keep them safe. Alone under the damp whispering trees, my voice did not sound at all foreign; it reached out and danced amidst the foliage, as much a part of the jungle as the vines that reached down and brushed my face with faint caresses. My natural singing voice was, of course, a baritone—everyone used to tell me so at Oxford. But why stick with what’s natural, I thought? I always wanted to be a countertenor. I wanted to be able to sing all the roles—Julius Caesar, Tamberlaine, Orfeo; I wanted to be the Count as well as the Countess, to be Cherubino, that amorphous, ardent little creature. I wanted to sing all things to all men—and all women too.

  I was about to lift my voice in a violently sentimental rendition of “Porgi, amor,” when I saw a figure disappear into a thicket of trees some distance away. I dropped my body and crept slowly into the bushes, smelling the pungent odour of wet mud under my feet. The person—it was a man, that much I could tell—moved stealthily and with the litheness of a young animal, appearing and disappearing amongst the trees, touching them gently as if he knew each one by name. He kept to the shadows, never venturing into the pools of dappled light that filtered through the foliage onto the forest floor. Out of the corner of my eye I spied another two figures walking slowly across open ground, heading towards a small cream-coloured gazebo that stood on the shoulder of a hill. It was Snow and Kunichika. I looked for the creeping figure in the adjacent woods—nothing. I moved slightly to gain a better view of Snow and Kunichika. He was quite the model of unhurried elegance, leaning against the poles of the gazebo with his hands resting on the frail little banister that encircled them, utterly relaxed in his expensively tailored clothes. He chatted softly, his head dropping and rising in a display of empathy and understanding, his entire body looking soft and accommodating—not at all the man I knew from our humble Kampar rest house. Throughout this time Snow sat facing him; I could not see her face. The strains of my Handelian heroes and Mozartian heroines filled my head in a riotous polyphony, and I became aware of the quickening of my breath. The morning sun was gaining in intensity, and I began to feel dizzy. I leaned back against a tree stump to catch my breath. I pressed my palms to my eyes, and saw, imprinted in phosphorescent hues, the image of Snow and Kunichika laughing in the gazebo. When I opened my eyes, they had left the gazebo and were walking briskly back to the house.

  I ran into Johnny as we were preparing to leave the rest house. “Hello, stranger, where have you been?” I said.

  “Out walking,” he said, taking his things to the car. His movements were leaden and wrung of enthusiasm, and when he looked at me he did not do so with his usual fondness.

  “Is something the matter, Johnny?” I said, grabbing him by the elbow as he shuffled across the porch.

  “Of course not,” he said, shrugging. Although he had put on a new shirt, he still looked shabby and tired.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I said. “Just look at the state you’re in. You’ve got mud all over your shoes.”

  He briefly caught my eye as he squinted into the light. “So do you,” he said.

  WHEN, SOME YEARS AGO, I began to feel the ravages of middle age, I roused myself from the stupor that had settled over me and began to travel. I gathered my slowly ossifying limbs for one final, tentative peek at the country I had made my home. My spirit of adventure had petrified in the years since the war, and the thought of boarding a bus or a train with a horde of jostling bodies frightened me. Instead, I acquired a car and drove around the country. In the deep north I saw the jewel-green expanses of paddy fields in Kedah and the husks of abandoned villages, emptied by a gathering exodus to the great, growing cities of the newly independent nation. I drove across the mountainous spine that splits the peninsula in two and stayed for some time in Kota Baru, in a motel called the New Tokyo Inn. I wandered through the teeming market, looking at the silversmiths at work with t
heir primitive, intricate tools. The shiny silver boxes they produced were laid out on straw mats on the dirt floor. Massed together in the sunlight, they glinted like beds of crushed glass. I went to the padang where the men threw their giant spinning tops, releasing them violently from coiled ropes as thick as pythons. The tops spun for hours, their painted surfaces a blur of colour on the dry, mouse-brown soil.

  As I stood watching the local kite-flying competition, I was befriended by an aged Englishman who was older then than I am now, but alarmingly full of panache. The huge kites trembled in the air; they were tethered to the earth by ropes decorated with small pieces of cloth that fluttered in the wind. Galsworth (that was his name, I think) could tell which kite would win the contest. He pointed it out with a wizened forefinger as it swooned gently in a shallow arc over our heads, the two sickle moons of its body outlined proudly against the ultramarine sky. It came to a rest directly above us, hovering untroubled by the breeze. I had never seen such a thing before.

  Afterwards, Galsworth invited me back to his house for a drink. We were attended by houseboys and -girls, all dressed in the gold-woven songket of the North. They waited tremulously as we reclined with our drinks; their smiling presence made me uncomfortable. I asked Galsworth how he came to live there. “I was the sultan’s personal adviser,” he replied simply, smoothing the gilded uniform of one of his androgynous youths with a reptilian hand. He showed me his house, every room sparsely decorated with beautiful things: a bedroom with nothing in it but a mattress on a carved divan and a leopard-pelt rug on the floor; a long shadowed corridor with a single Buddha head in an alcove. Through a window I glimpsed his garden, planted with a single rosebush. It bore no flowers, its branches were spindly, its leaves sparse. It had not taken to the hot winds of the seaside; I knew it would never survive this climate. Galsworth mumbled something about “memory” and “England,” and hurried me along. I smiled as I was meant to, complimented him on his house, and praised his servants. He said, “How nice it is to have one’s things appreciated by someone civilised.” When he smiled, his teeth revealed themselves: sharp and small, whittled away by age and discoloured by cigarettes.