Earthly Powers (45 page)

       "Noon train to Kuala Lumpur. Then Malacca."

       "How long, do you think?"

       "Well, look at it this way. I've written the novel pretty well backwards, one way of doing it. I have to have a couple of chapters with Raffles lamenting the silting up of the Malacca harbour and the general decay of the town. I need some Malaccan Portuguese phrases. I want the feel of the place. A week, no more."

       "Watch out for those rains. The railway lines get flooded." He spat out pomelo seeds and said, "I have to confess it's a bit of a relief. About this lad of Mahalingam's, I mean."

       "I know what your worry was," I said. "Mahalingam could be a very nasty customer. Nasty in a very Eastern way."

       "Five dollars for a quiet assassination. The orang kapak kechil, you know, Malays with little axes. They'll do anybody in and ask no questions. Lies and no witnesses. Though it would probably be that eldest of his, the zombie. I'm damned sure he's permanently drugged with something. The Old Man of the Mountains and the hashish eaters. Assassinus, assassin. Speech centres not working, acute motor responses, great speed. Could be some other narcotic. We'll never get to the bottom of the blasted East." Yusof came to say telefon, tuan. "That'll be the man himself, oozing with gratitude, slobbering down the mouthpiece so I'll get my ear wet." He went off. By the time I had finished my first cigarette of the morning he was back grimacing. "He wants to give me a big dinner. He's going to fill the whole rumah sakit with flowers. He's kissing my photograph, he says. I don't think I want you to go, Ken. My enemies are his enemies, he says, and who would I like to be seen off first."

       "The District Officer."

       "Oh, be serious. He scares me, blast him. I tried to get out of the dinner invitation, but he said it was no mark of a friend to wish to repudiate gratitude, or something."

       "I won't go."

       "He knows you're going, I told him. He proposes taking you to the station in a hired Daimler with the KL Police Band playing. Flowers, flowers and flowers."

       "Be serious."

       "He thinks your benign presence has been as much a help as my scientific skill. Oh, he'll cool down as the day warms. Perhaps I ought to lend him one of your books and tell him you'll give him an oral examination on it when you get back. That may quieten him a bit. Of course you must go. I can easily put off that dinner till next week. I was only joking."

       At twenty minutes to noon Philip took time off from the hospital to drive me to the station. Mahalingam had arranged no enflowered Daimler. When the train for Kuala Lumpur came in, Philip and I realised that there was no repertoire of valedictory gestures that accorded with our relationship. No handshake, no Italjanate embrace in the manner of Domenico Campanati. Just friendly cool banalities. Don't work too hard, take it easy, enjoy yourself, I'll be back. Waves 2 as the train moved, waves and waves. The sky boiled and writhed over the jungle. A jungle reek wafted in on no discernible wind. I rang the compartment bell until a white-coated Chinese came. I ordered whisky and water. A departed passenger had left a copy of yesterday's Straits Times. Bridge column by Philip le Bel. Who was that? Father Chan, Chang. Ruffed and loses his trump trick. Make contact by telephone perhaps, anticipatory greetings to Carlo Campanati. No hurry. There was a curious story from Negri Sembilan in the middle pages. A Malay, Mohamed Noor, had fallen in love with a certain Aminah binte Lot. She rejected him for another, Haji Redzwan. Mohamed Noor sought revenge through services of local pawang or sorcerer. He employed sympathetic magic. Mohamed Noor made a crude drawing of the girl's face. This was hung from a clothesline in a scrub clearing. Spells were directed at the portrait and hand drums were beaten, scents of noxious herbs alight arose to inspissate the air beneath the hanging image. The girl took sick, wasted. Haji Redzwan discovered the sorcery but, despite the grace (which, reporter said, his name meant) bestowed by pilgrimage to Mecca, felt himself powerless to oppose Muslim cantrips to pagan spells. Nevertheless he intervened during eighth night of sorcery, gained possession of portrait, drew the incantations by a most heroic act of will onto himself. The girl recovered and he wasted. His uncle called in the police. No action could be taken against the pawang or the spurned lover, no crime being provable under prosaic secular laws which took no cognizance of attempted homicide by witchcraft. When the Muslim authorities stepped in, a plethora of suborned witnesses swore that this man was no pawang and the girl merely needed a course of Iron Jelloids and Brand's Chicken Essence, green sickness or something like. All ended happily, recovered haji now married to his love and living in her kampong, following Negri Sembilan matriarchal law or adat perpatuan, he teaching Koran in village school. I would use that story. I would write it up, with suitable literary embroidery, when I got back to Philip. Money for jam or old rope.

       Alone in the Straits Settlement of Malacca (which, like Singapore and Penang, came directly under the British crown in those days, while the other, federated, states enjoyed a simulacrum of autonomy under British-advised native rulers), I saw clearly how much I needed Philip, and I marvelled at the mystery of a particular nonphysical love apparently driving out generalised physical desire. The thought of embracing Philipan abomination. But I had assumed that, like bowel movements and thirst, which are irrelevant to the soul, the libido would stir impersonally as the cells protected by the tunica albuginea would inexorably produce seed. But when, each morning, beautifully made halfnaked Yusof performed his balletic act of raising and stowing the mosquito net, I felt no distracted urge, no waking chordee rose. Perhaps the sight of yaws had traumatised me. Here in Malacca the atmosphere of prolonged convalescence 2 after the illness of a turbulent history conduced to the maintenance of sexual calm.

       Wandering the town, crossing the bridge over the Malacca river which separated the native and the European quarters, or halves, surveying the ruins of the ancient cathedral, reading in the graveyard HIC JACET DOMINUS PETRUS SOCIETATIS JESU SECUNDUS EPISCOPUS JAPONENSIS OBIJT AD FRETUM SINGAPURAE MENSE FEBRUARIS ANNO 1598, made drowsy by the drowsiness of the Malayo. Portuguese, I knew that, if Philip had been with me, he would have illuminated nothing with briskness of wit or aptness of image. There was no scintillancy in his brain or speech. I could remember no occasion in Kuala Kangsar, sitting at dinner or after, lazing through the bazaar, walking by the riverbank, or on motor trips to Ipoh or Sungei Siput or Taiping, or venturing timidly into the suburbs of the jungle, when he was able to enclose an image or happening within the filigree cage of temperament or individual vision. There was nothing remarkable in Philip's body or brain; I had to resurrect and dust off a concept long discarded by the humanists whom I believed I had joined, namely the spiritus of the theologians, the entity you could define only negatively and yet love positively, more, love ardently, with and to the final fire. So, however reluctantly, a man may be brought back to God. There is no free will, we must accept, with love, the imposed pattern.

       "Stay at the rest house, I need to know exactly where you are." So the telephone could link us, the clumsy crackling colonial trunk lines of those days, singsong Chinese operatrix in Kuala Kangsar calling to Ipoh sister, KL sister, then sister in the Malacca exchange? Not really, since there would be nothing to say except "I miss you," which would redden us both with its sentimentality. It was enough for Philip to picture me in a known setting, even though unvisited by him, since all rest houses were the same, tea from blue cups in the morning, the ghostly overdarned mosquito net at night. And I, following in memory his daily routine, could see him more clearly than he me. But one night I tried to call him at home and was told by the singsong voice that the line was down outside Ipoh, winds and heavy rain, that men were with difficulty trying to heal the cut and it might be two days. I was thus rebuked for my sentimentality by the monsoon itself, which was now on its way to Malacca.

       I had, after five days, my Stamford Raffles surveying the silted harbour and dreaming of a new port. He read the tombstone of Father Peter, S.J., second bishop of Japan, dead in Singapore Straits in 1598. Singapore, what was that? A mangrove island that nobody wanted. He noted, with his characteristic scholar's interest, the Portuguese showing the Malays how to number, not name, the days of the week, except for Sunday, domingo, han minggu. He meditated on Saint Francis Xaxier, who turned half-baked Muslims into half-baked Catholics but personally directed the firing of the fleet of the Achinese invaders. A sense 2 of the Malayan past was what the novel needed, and it was all here in the sleepy Malacca which Chinese millionaires chose for their retirement.

       I awoke in the middle of the night to the first heavy rains and knew I had better get back. I awoke to a watery dawn and a single thump of the heart that bounced me on the comfortless mattress. Philip speaking loudly the name Ken. There was trouble. There was very large trouble. Before breakfast I asked the number one boy to get me the Kuala Kangsar number. He tried. No can do. Line still down. I chafed, packing, at the thought of the long journey ahead, the furious sky, tree trunks blocking the line, the line itself drowned. In the rest house jam ban there was the odour of something other than the last occupant's gases, worse than faecal, inorganic and malevolent. Someone had, since my last use of it, pencilled on the whitewashed wall a crude picture of an animal head sprouting human toes and fingers. The effluvium rose to it. I tried to shake my head clear of visions. A hotbed of vice, intolerance and ignorance, also superstition. The doctor here will tell you so. Saint Francis Xavier fired the Achinese raiding ships. I saw him in white robe and rosary girdle, superhumanly high, alone on the summit of Mount Ophir, his arms out as though blessing but really ready to drop on the agreed signal to fire.

       I was mostly alone in my compartment travelling to Kuala Lumpur. At brief stops named for rivers which were themselves named for animals, quacking Chinese with ducks in baskets, Bengalis in dhotis with portable strongboxes, Malays with nothing but a mouthful of sireh got on, got off. A ginger Englishman in his twenties, a junior government official from his disdain, shared the last miles with me, saying nothing, making no gesture of kinship in a strange land, reading The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace. The rain raved and the train rocked in tempest but, cleaving an unending sheet of water like a ship, it ploughed on to the federal capital. Kuala Lumpur station was coloured with all the faces of the East but always the same pair of feet sandaled or bare in multiplicate, the platform a grey stone shore of these scuttling crabs, their reek of damp rising to the burnt smell of soaked tar hair. I entered the long crowded refreshment room that was steamily rank and pushed my way to the counter. The rain slanting to the southwest was mercilessly deafening on the roof. The telephone, local calls free, was at the end of the bar under a tradesman's calendar showing a smirking geisha, the Chinese year and the Islamic year and their unreadable lunar months and, staunch and shaky as reason, December 1924. I ordered brandy and asked for the telephone directory. Two sallow planters drank Tiger and talked of cricket at the Oval. Cut to square leg and damn near put out the square-leg umpire's eye for him. So many Changs in the book. I looked up St. Francis Xavier's Church, Batu Road. There was a presbytery number. One moment please. "Father Chang?"

       "This is Father Chang speaking." There was nothing Chinese in the voice, which had the slack falling disdainful tune of an Anglican rector's.

       "My name is Toomey. I am a friend, well, more of a relative really, by marriage that is, of—"

       "Your name is? This rain, you know, is very discouraging."

       On the train north I was alone as far as Kampar. My message had gone some way toward purging a lover's apprehension. Wordsworth riding to Lucy. I got out the typescript of the first third of Lion City and made ink corrections and improvements, though the Bakelite barrel slid on sweat. That Penang dinner party, candles flapping sometimes to extinction in the wind of the punkahs. Miss Drury's pale lips reddened with curry sauce. A rill of perspiration starting at Miss Denham's left ear and coursing toward her décolletage. Directoire dresses. I inked in a wart on the cheek of wheezing Major Farquhar and pencilled a few lines under the eyes of old Mrs Saunderson who knew Sanskrit. Candlelight drowned in the rummers of watered claret. Live, you swine, come to life. "I observe from the recently arrived Times, and stap my vitals what a time, ha, it takes to get here, that Mr Raffles's friend Tom Moore has published a new volume."—"Some tale of the fabled East? Oh, how I adored Lalla Rookh!" At Kampar a Scotch mining engineer got on, very garrulous. More than twenty years in the country and ye canna get to the bottom of the mentality of the folk. He was beautifully and brownly bald. Soothingly rational for a time with his Calvinistic engines, he ended with the mystery of divine election, the inscrutability of God's will. Aye, I've seen things here I'd not credit were possible. I lost ma faith here in mechanical cause and effect. A Malay mechanic will first pray to the semangat or divine soul of an unfunctioning engine, then threaten it, only at the last bring out the spanner. First things first. Well, here's Ipoh but our true location is the rain, the rain's the reality, the rest but a shadow. Good night, it was pleasant conversing with ye.

       Kuala Kangsar was a lake that swilled into the compartment when I opened the door, but there was a rehabilitation or temporary remission in the heavens, the clouds not oppressive and a full moon underfoot. I splashed to a Malay rowboat and for one Straits dollar was pulled to rising land where the keel ground on a new shore. There were no trishaws about, I had to sweat on soaked feet up Bukit Chandan. Philip's Ford was in the porch, and foolishly I thanked God. Yusof came out, knotting his sarong. Twin sakit, titan. Titan di.rumah sakit. I could not breathe, my heart knocked thrice to be let out. Yusof was grave and this was a sign of hope. Had he been laughing I would have known the worst, for laughter is the wise Eastern response to the inhumanity of death. I changed socks, shoes and trousers and, when I came back to the living room, Yusof had a whisky and water ready for me. I rested and drank and smoked a cigarette. I gave Yusof one and he puffed it with grace. I did not have enough Malay to elicit anything like a story. Anak orang Tamil mati? Yes, mati, the child of the Tamil man was dead. Tahi Adam, Yusof sneered, emboldened by h15 cigarette, but he looked swiftly behind him as though the obscenity could 2 perhaps just possibly conjure its referent. Adam's shit, the brown man despising the black. And titan? Titan, so far as I could make out, was very tired and was sleeping at the hospital. The death of the child had struck him to the hati or liver. Things might not yet after all be so bad. Titan has been working too hard. Tuan is a good man. True, Yusof. I was ready to walk to the hospital.