The Garden of Evening Mists (35 page)

‘Well, maybe I can help you.’ I said. ‘I’ll show you where the Kempeitai tortured their prisoners. The buildings around the government rest-house in Tanah Rata are still unoccupied today. The locals say that on some nights they can hear the screams of the victims.’ I pressed on, relentless as a jungle guide hacking through the undergrowth with my
parang
. ‘The villagers speak about a mass grave somewhere in the Blue Valley, a few miles from here. Hundreds of Chinese squatters were taken there in trucks and bayoneted by your soldiers. I’d be happy to make enquiries about it for you. In fact, I could probably find fifty, a hundred, probably even two hundred, of these places for you, all across Malaya and Singapore.’

‘Such…
regrettable
… incidents are not within the scope of our organisation’s purpose,’

Mrs Maruki said.

I turned towards Matsumoto, pointing at his robes. ‘You’re a Shinto priest, aren’t you?’

He tipped his head. ‘I took my vows a year after the surrender. I have no reservations about conducting a blessing ceremony for these places. Sometimes that is all we can do – help the souls of the dead find some peace, be they Japanese or British, Chinese or Malay or Indian.’

‘They’re dead, Matsumoto-san,’ I said. ‘It’s the living you should be helping – those who were brutalised by your countrymen, those who were denied compensation from your government.’

‘This does not concern you,’ Ishiro said.

‘Yun Ling is my apprentice,’ Aritomo said before I could reply. ‘Treat her with courtesy.’

‘Your apprentice?’ Ishiro said. ‘A woman? A
Chinese
woman? Is that permitted by the Bureau of Imperial Gardens?’

‘The Bureau ceased to have any hold over me years ago, Ishiro-san,’ Aritomo replied.

‘Ah, the Bureau… ’ Sekigawa interceded, ‘…that brings us to another reason we came to see you, Nakamura-sensei.’ He took a cream-coloured envelope from his briefcase. ‘We were asked to deliver this to you.’ He held it in both hands, treating it with the reverence shown to an ancestral tablet. Embossed in gold in the centre of the envelope was an emblem of a chrysanthemum flower. Aritomo received the envelope with both hands and placed it on the table. Sekigawa glanced at it, then looked to Aritomo again. ‘We are to wait for your answer.’

Aritomo sat there, completely still. All of us were looking at him. No one said anything, no one moved. Finally he picked up the envelope again and broke the seal with his thumbnail.

He removed a piece of paper that he unfolded and began reading. The paper was so thin that the black brush strokes written on it appeared like the veins of a leaf held up to the sun. At length he refolded the document, his thumb pressing hard into each crease. He sheathed the letter into the envelope and carefully set it down on the table.

‘We understand that you are to be reappointed with immediate effect to your former position in the palace,’ Sekigawa said. ‘Please accept our congratulations.’

‘My work at Yugiri is not finished.’

‘But surely the letter makes it clear that the Bureau has forgiven you for what happened between you and Tominaga Noburu,’ Sekigawa said.

The sound of that name jolted me. I was grateful that the Japanese were looking at Aritomo and not me.

‘You have heard what happened to Tominaga-san?’ Ishiro said in the silence.

‘I have not kept up with events in Japan,’ Aritomo replied.

‘He served in the war. He returned to his grandfather’s home after the Emperor announced the surrender,’ Ishiro said. ‘The servants reported that a few days later he went out to the tennis court in his garden and committed
seppuku
.’

Learning of Tominaga’s death stunned me; he had been the last link to my camp, the only other person I knew who had been there, who had I suspected was still alive. And now he too was gone.

‘Did he leave a note?’ Aritomo finally spoke again, the hollowness in his voice the only indication that Ishiro’s words had affected him.

‘None was found,’ said Ishiro. ‘The servants said that, the day before he killed himself, Tominaga-san burned all his papers – his documents, his notebooks, his diaries. Everything.’

‘Perhaps he was afraid that the Americans would put him on trial,’ Aritomo said.

‘His name was never mentioned in any of the hearings,’ Sekigawa said, ‘not by any of the witnesses or any of our people who were charged. I am sure that Tominaga-san, like so many of us, simply could not bear to see our country occupied by foreigners.’

A familiar, half-forgotten fear seeped slowly through me as I studied the priest, Matsumoto; I should have been able to recognise a former Kempeitai officer from the first moment I saw him, but he had learned to camouflage himself well. ‘And how about you, Matsumoto-san? Was your name ever mentioned in any the war crimes hearings?’

The Shinto priest did not look away, but his companions leaned back into a wary, watchful silence. ‘I should have realised earlier that we were speaking to a former Guest of the Emperor,’ he said.

‘
Former?
We will
always
be guests of your emperor.’

Sekigawa attempted to lighten the heaviness in the air. ‘Ah! In a month’s time the American Occupation will end. We will be free again. ‘Seven years under the Americans. It feels so much longer!’

‘If you like, we will extend our stay here for a few more days, to give you more time to reconsider your reply,’ said Ishiro.

‘That is not necessary.’ Aritomo stood up in a fluid movement that allowed no argument.

The other three looked at Sekigawa. He nodded and all of them got up at the same time, Matsumoto helping Mrs Maruki to her feet.

‘We have heard so much about your garden,’ said Sekigawa. ‘May we see it?’

‘Oh, and the water wheel too,’ Mrs Maruki added. ‘It was a great honour, I am sure, to be presented with such a gift by the Emperor.’

‘I am making some renovations in that section,’ Aritomo said, with just sufficient regret for the lie to almost convince me too. ‘Another time, perhaps, when all the work here has been completed.’

‘You must inform us when it is possible to visit,’ Sekigawa said.

‘Come back when the Emergency is over. It will be safer to resume your search then,’

Aritomo said. ‘The countryside is not a safe place to be at this moment.’

‘We
have
had problems from the authorities,’ Ishiro agreed. ‘They refused to let us visit quite a lot of places.’

‘How long will the Emergency last?’ Mrs Maruki asked. She was, I recognised, the type of woman who was unwilling to leave until she obtained something, however insignificant.

‘Years, I would think,’ Aritomo replied. ‘Years and years.’

* * *

The envelope was still lying on the table, the chrysanthemum crest gleaming like the sun’s distorted reflection on the surface of Usugumo Pond. Aritomo poured himself a cup of tea and held out the teapot to me. I shook my head.

‘Is it true, that you’ve been asked to go home?’ I was worried by the possibility that he might.

He set the teapot on the brazier. ‘Apparently there is a shortage of us now – the younger gardeners have been killed or wounded in the war and the older ones can no longer keep up with the work.’ He swirled the tea in his cup a few times, squinting into it. I wondered if he was thinking of the tea plantation his wife had grown up in. ‘I have been away from Japan for so many years,’ he said. ‘So many years.’

‘Why haven’t you gone home? Even for a visit?’

‘Not while it was occupied by the Americans. I cannot bear the idea of it, all those foreign soldiers in our cities.’

‘It wasn’t too unbearable for you living here when Malaya was occupied by foreign soldiers!’

‘Go back to your old life in Kuala Lumpur,’ he snapped. ‘You will never become a well-regarded gardener if you carry such anger with you.’

For a while we said nothing to each other. ‘You were friends with Tominaga, weren’t you?’ I asked. ‘What happened between the two of you?’

‘There is a temple up in the mountains. I want to ask the nuns to say prayers for Tominaga. Will you come with me? Tell the workers they can have the day off tomorrow.’

Thunder grumbled in the clouds. My thoughts kept circling around the conversation with the Japanese visitors. There was another reason for their presence in Malaya, I thought, something of which I suspected Aritomo was aware, but would not reveal to me.

Drawing back his right sleeve with his left hand, Aritomo picked up the teapot and filled his cup almost to the brim. He put the teapot down in the exact spot from where he had lifted it and pivoted on his knees to face the mountains in the east. He remained in that position for what seemed like a long time. Then, like a flower drooping to touch the earth, he brought his head low to the floor. Straightening his body a moment later, he held the cup in his hands and touched it to his forehead.

I left him there, giving one last farewell to the man he had once known, a man who had already travelled past the mountains and journeyed beyond the mists and the clouds.

The road going higher into the mountains was muffled in a thick mist. It was cold inside Aritomo’s Land Rover, our breaths coating the windscreen in a milky cataract. Now and then he would wipe it clean to see ahead. In the terraced fields of the vegetable smallholdings, roosters bugled for the sun. Just before reaching the village of Brinchang, Aritomo swung into a narrow dirt road, following it uphill until it ended in a small clearing. We parked and got out of the car.

‘There are two trails to the top,’ Aritomo said, hitching a rucksack onto his back. ‘We’ll take this one here, the more difficult one.’

He forced his way into the ant-ferns and lallang grass. I kept close to him. A narrow track lay behind the foliage. I walked carefully, trying not to slip on the patches of moss. To my right, the ground sheared away into a river about twenty feet below, the water shredded white by half-submerged boulders. The jungle was a monochromatic wash. The vague shapes of trees solidified when we passed them, only to disappear behind us. Birds called out, impossible to spot in the dense foliage. Thick, half-exposed tree roots terraced the path into loamy steps that dipped beneath my weight. At an escarpment we stopped to watch the sun come up. Aritomo pointed to a scattering of low buildings on the far end of the valley as a rip opened in the mist cover.

‘Majuba.’ It was the only word he had uttered since we entered the jungle. I recalled the previous occasion when we had hiked to the swiftlets’ cave, how talkative he had been, revealing the secrets of plants and trees to me.

‘There’s the house,’ I said, catching a glimpse of the flickering flame of the Transvaal flag. Remembering Templer’s displeasure when he had seen it, I told Aritomo about it. I had hoped to make him laugh, instead a thoughtful look descended over his face.

‘Do you remember me telling you of my walk across Honshu, when I was eighteen?’ he said, ‘I spent a night in a temple. It was falling to pieces, and there was only a solitary monk still living there. He was old, very old. And he was blind. The next morning, before I left, I chopped some firewood for him. As I was leaving he stood in the centre of the courtyard and pointed above us. On the edge of the roof a faded and tattered prayer-flag was flapping away. “Young man,” the old monk said, “tell me: is it the wind that is in motion, or is it only the flag that is moving?”’

‘What did you say?’ I asked.

‘I said, “Both are moving, Holy One.”

‘The monk shook his head, clearly disappointed by my ignorance. “One day you will realise that there is no wind, and the flag does not move,” he said. “It is only the hearts and minds of men that are restless.”’

For a while we did not speak, but stood there, looking into the valleys. ‘Come on,’ he said eventually. ‘There is still a long way to go.’

A shower had soaked the jungle, and we had to leap over puddles of water on the track.

Aritomo pulled himself lightly over the roots, moving with a determined ease, responding to a call only he could hear. Branches, riven down by previous storms, obstructed the track, smearing our hands and thighs with lichen and shreds of sodden bark when we clambered over them.

‘How much further, this Temple of Clouds?’ I asked after we had been climbing for an hour.

‘Three-quarters of the way up the mountain,’ Aritomo replied over his shoulder. ‘Only the very devoted ever go there.’

‘I’m not surprised.’ We had not met anyone else on the path. Gazing around us, I imagined that we had moved back millions of years to a time when the jungle was still young.

‘There it is.’

The temple was a collection of low, drab buildings barnacled to the side of the mountain; I was disappointed, having expected more after the arduous climb. A stream ran past the temple, draining into a narrow gorge. In the sprays steaming over the drop, a small rainbow formed and wavered. Aritomo pointed to the rocks on the opposite bank. They seemed to be trembling. A second later I realised that they were covered with thousands of butterflies. I watched them for a moment, but was impatient to move on.

‘Wait,’ Aritomo said, glancing up to the sky.

The sun hatched out from behind the clouds, transforming the surface of the rocks into a shimmer of turquoise and yellow and red and purple and green, as though the light had been passed through a prism. The wings of the butterflies twitched and then beat faster. In small clusters they lifted off from the rocks, hanging in the light for a few moments before dispersing into the jungle, like postage stamps scattered by the wind. A handful of the butterflies flew through the rainbow above the gorge, and it seemed to me that they came out looking more vibrant, their wings revived by the colours in that arc formed by light and water.

We walked up to the temple’s entrance. A pair of cloth lanterns, once white, hung from the eaves, like cocoons discarded by silkworms. Blackened by decades of soot and incense smoke, the red calligraphy painted on them had ruptured and bled into the tattered cloth, words turned to wounds.

No one was there to greet us when we entered and went up a flight of broken stone steps.