The Garden of Evening Mists (7 page)

Magnus told me he was in KL to get money from the Chartered Bank for his workers’ payroll, which he did once a month. ‘I heard your parents are living in KL now,’ he said. ‘I never thought your father would ever consider leaving Penang. Your mother…’ Magnus had lowered his voice and looked at me intently. ‘How is she?’

‘She has good and bad days,’ I replied. ‘Unfortunately the bad days seem to be happening more often.’

‘I tried to visit her, you know. It was just after you went to England. But your father wouldn’t allow it. I don’t think he lets anyone see her.’

‘It upsets her too much when someone she doesn’t recognise speaks to her,’ I said. ‘And she has trouble recognising most people.’

‘I heard what happened to your sister. Terrible,’ he said. ‘I’ve only met her once. She was keen on gardening, I remember.’

‘She always dreamed of building her own Japanese garden,’ I said.

He studied me, his eye sweeping down to my hands before rising up to my face again.

‘Build it for her.’ His finger stroked the strap of his eye-patch. ‘You could make it a memorial for her. I’m not sure if you remember, but my neighbour’s a Japanese gardener. He was the
Emperor’s
gardener, would you believe? He might be willing to help you out. You could ask him to make a garden for – Yes, ask Aritomo to design a garden for your sister.’

‘He’s a
Jap
,’ I pointed out.

‘Well, if you want a Japanese garden...’ Magnus said. ‘Aritomo wasn’t involved in the war. And if it hadn’t been for him half my workers would have been rounded up and taken down to some mine or worked to death on the Railway.’

‘They’d have to hang their emperor first before I’d ask for help from any of them.’

His stare disconcerted me; it was as though the power of his lost eye had been transferred to his remaining one, doubling its acuity. ‘This hatred in you,’ he began a moment later, ‘you can’t let it affect your life.’

‘It’s not up to me, Magnus.’

The waiter returned with two frosted mugs of Tiger Beer. Magnus emptied half of his in one swallow and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He continued to stare at me. ‘My father was a sheep farmer. My mother died when I was a four. I was brought up by my sister, Petronella. My older brother, Pieter, was teaching at the Cape. When the war broke out – that’s the Boer War I’m talking about, the second one – I joined up. I had just turned twenty. I was captured by the English less than a year later and shipped out to a POW camp in Ceylon.’

He had brought his mug to his lips again but then, without drinking from it, put it down heavily on the table. ‘I was away fighting the English when Kitchener’s men showed up at our farm one morning,’ he said. ‘Pa was at home. He put up a fight. They shot him, then burned down our farmhouse.’

‘What happened to your sister?’

‘She was sent to a concentration camp in Bloemfontein. Pieter tried to get her out. He had an English wife, but even he wasn’t allowed to visit the camp. Petronella died of typhoid. Or perhaps not – survivors later said the English had mixed powdered glass into the prisoners’ food.’

He gazed across the
padang
; the grass was dry, the heat warping the air. ‘Coming home after the war to find out all this about my family... well, I couldn’t live in that part of the country again – not where I had grown up. I went to Cape Town. But still it wasn’t far enough for me.

One day – in the spring of 1905, I’d guess – I bought a ticket for Batavia. The ship was forced to dock in Malacca for repairs and we were told it would take a week to complete. I was walking in the town when I saw an abandoned church on a hill –’

‘St Paul’s.’

He gave a grunt. ‘
Ja, ja
. St Paul’s. In the church grounds, I came across gravestones three, four hundred years old. And what do I find there, but the grave of Jan Van Riebeeck.’

Seeing the blank expression my face, he shook his head. ‘The world is not made up of only English history, you know. Van Riebeeck founded the Cape. He became its governor.’

‘How did he end up in Malacca?’

‘The VOC – the Dutch East Indies Company – sent him there, as punishment for something he had done.’ Memory softened his face, seeming to age him at the same time.

‘Anyway, seeing his name there, carved into that block of stone, I felt I had found a place for myself here in Malaya. I never returned to my ship, never went on to Batavia. Instead I made my way to Kuala Lumpur.’ He laughed. ‘I ended up in a British territory after all. And I’ve lived here for – what...’ his lips moved soundlessly as he counted, ‘forty-six years. Forty-six!’ He sat up in his chair and looked around for the waiter. ‘That calls for champagne!’

‘You’ve forgiven the British?’

He subsided into his seat. For a while he was silent, his gaze turned inward. ‘They couldn’t kill me when we were at war. And they couldn’t kill me when I was in the camp,’ he said finally, his voice subdued. ‘But holding on to my hatred for forty-six years...
that
would have killed me.’ His eye became kindly as he looked at me. ‘You Chinese are supposed to respect the elderly, Yun Ling, that’s what that fellow Confucius said, isn’t it? That’s what my wife tells me anyway.’ He managed a sip of his beer at last. ‘So listen to me. Listen to an old man… Don’t despise all Japanese for what some of them did. Let it go, this hatred in you. Let it go.’

‘They did this to me.’ Slowly I raised my maimed hand, protected in its leather glove.

He pointed to his eye patch. ‘You think this fell out by itself?’

Three weeks after that meeting with Magnus at the club, I was sacked. His idea of building a garden for Yun Hong had stayed with me; in fact it had grown more insistent. In the camp, she had often talked to me about the garden she would build once the war was over and our lives were returned to us again.

On my last day at work, I sat down to clear my desk. Packing away my personal things, I stopped when I saw the news article I had clipped from the
Straits Times
. The photograph accompanying the article showed a group of Japanese men in tailcoats standing behind their Prime Minister, Yoshida, as he signed the Japan Security Treaty with the Americans. Staring at the photograph, I thought about the camp. And I thought about Nakamura Aritomo, recalling the first time I had heard about him, all those years ago. I had never forgotten his name; it had followed me wherever I went. It was time I visited him. Creating a garden was something I had to do for Yun Hong, something I owed her.

Taking out a blank sheet of paper, I uncapped my fountain pen and wrote a letter to Magnus, asking him to arrange a meeting with the gardener for me. When I had finished, I sealed it in an envelope and asked the clerk to post it for me as I left my office for the last time.

* * *

The world was growing brighter, bleaching away the moon and stars. Halfway down to the bottom of the valley, I found the path separating one division of tea bushes from another. The track was tramped hard by generations of tea-pickers. This shortcut would take me to Yugiri, Magnus had informed me at dinner the night before. ‘There’s no fence on this side,’ he had said,

‘but you’ll know where Yugiri starts when you come to it.’

The fir trees in the distance rose higher as I came nearer to Yugiri. The path wound between the trees and continued into a thicket of bamboo, their poles knocking gently against each other, as if transmitting the news of my arrival through the garden, passing the message from tree to tree.

It began to drizzle. Wiping the blisters of rain from my face, I walked beneath the bamboo and emerged into another realm.

* * *

The silence here had a different quality; I felt I had been plumbed with weighted fishing line into a deeper, denser level of the ocean. I stood there, allowing the stillness to seep into me. In the leaves, an unseen bird whistled, deepening the emptiness of the air between each note. Water dripped off the leaves. Not far away, the edge of a red-tiled roof could be seen through the treetops. Setting off towards it, I soon came to a long rectangle of round, white pebbles. I crouched and picked one up. It was about the size of one of the leatherback turtles’ eggs my mother had sometimes bought at the Pulau Tikus market.

About fifty feet away to my left stood two round targets. Set on low stilts to my right was a simple wooden one-storey structure with an attap roof. Putting down the stone, I went closer to it. The front of the structure was open, the bamboo chicks rolled up to the eaves. A man was standing at the edge of the platform, dressed in a white robe and a pair of grey pantaloons that just showed his white socks. He appeared to be in his early fifties, his hair just starting to turn grey. In his right hand he held a bow. He did not acknowledge my presence, but somehow I knew that he was aware of me.

I had not seen a Japanese nor spoken to one in nearly six years, but I would always be able to recognise them. It had been easy enough to write to Nakamura Aritomo, but I had been a fool to think I could just stroll in here and talk to him. I was not ready to do this; perhaps I never would be. The urge to turn around and leave the garden took hold of me. But when I looked at the roll of documents in my hand, I knew that I had to speak to the gardener, I had to tell him what I wanted from him. I would do it, and then I would leave. If he chose to accept my offer, we would communicate through the post. There would be no need for me to talk to him in person again.

Raising his bow, the man drew back the bowstring, his arms stretching in opposite directions until he reached a point where he seemed to be floating just above the floorboards. He stood there with his tautened bow, an expression of complete peace spreading across his face.

Time had stopped: there was no beginning, there was no end.

He released the arrow. The bowstring sliced a sharp sound from the air. The man remained unmoving, one arm still extended, keeping the centre of the bow where he gripped it level with his eyes. He looked at the target for a moment longer before lowering the bow. The arrow had struck well away from the centre.

I took the three low steps up to the platform, the gleaming cypress floorboards creaking beneath my feet. ‘Mr Nakamura?’ I said. ‘Nakamura Aritomo? We were supposed to meet later today– ’

‘Take off your shoes!’ he said. ‘You bring the problems of the world inside.’

Glancing behind, I saw sand and shreds of grass smeared across the floorboards. I stepped down from the range. The man returned the bow to its stand, his white socks leaving no mark on the floor. I waited as he put on his sandals.

‘Go around to the front of the house,’ he said. ‘Ah Cheong will take you to the sitting room.’

* * *

A Chinese manservant led me through the house, sliding open the doors that partitioned off each room and then closing them behind us. I had the impression of moving through a series of boxes, each one opening up to reveal another box, and then another. The servant left me in a sitting room. The doors were opened to the verandah where a low square table was positioned.

On the lawn below the verandah, string tied to four bamboo splints marked out a rectangle; the top layer of grass had been peeled away, exposing the moist, dark soil beneath.

Beyond the rectangle, the ground sloped gently away to the edge of a depression, wide and empty as a saltpan. Mounds of earth and gravel were piled up at its side.

The drizzle had stopped, but water continued to drip from the eaves, drops of congealed light falling to earth. The servant came out with a tray bearing two small celadon cups, a teapot and a small teakettle, its spout steaming weakly. The archer joined me a few minutes later. He had changed into a pair of beige coloured trousers and a white shirt, matched with a grey linen jacket. He sat in the traditional manner on one of the mats, his legs folded, the weight of his body pressing down on his heels. He indicated that I should sit on the other side of the table. I looked at him for a second and then followed his example, putting the roll of documents next to my knee.

‘I am Nakamura Aritomo,’ he said, placing an envelope on the table. I recognised my handwriting on the front, addressed to him. I told him my name and he said, ‘Write it out in Chinese,’ his fingers scribbling over the table.

‘I went to a convent school, Mr Nakamura. I was taught Latin, but not Chinese. I only picked up a little of it after the war.’

‘What does Yun Ling mean?’

‘Cloud Forest.’

He considered it for a moment. ‘A beautiful name. In Japanese you would be called –’

‘I know what I’d be called.’

For a few seconds he stared at me. Then he emptied the teapot into a bowl and threw the still steaming tea over the verandah. I thought it odd, but said nothing. He re-filled the teapot with hot water from the kettle. ‘I thought we had agreed to meet at nine thirty?’

‘If it’s inconvenient for you now, I’ll come back later.’

He shook his head. ‘How old are you? Thirty-three, thirty-four?’

‘I’m twenty-eight.’ I was aware that I had been aged beyond my years by the deprivations in the camp; I thought I had come to accept it but the sudden jab of shame surprised me. ‘You’re making a pond?’ I said, looking to the shallow pit at bottom of the slope.

‘I am merely changing its shape, making it bigger.’ Lifting the teapot, he filled the cups with a translucent green liquid and slid one towards me as if it was a piece on a chessboard. ‘You were a Guest of the Emperor.’

This time his arrow had found its mark. ‘I
was
a prisoner in a Japanese camp,’ I said, wondering how he had known.

‘When I was building this house, Magnus gave me a watercolour your sister had painted,’

Aritomo said. ‘He reminded me about it when he brought your letter.’

‘Yun Hong used to exhibit her paintings with some artists.’

‘That is not surprising. She has a lot of talent. Does she still paint?’

‘She was with me in the camp.’ I shifted my body, unknotting the pain in my ankles; it had been a long time since I had last sat like this. ‘She died there.’

Aritomo caught my left hand as I was reaching for my cup. A guarded look sheathed his face the instant his fingers closed around my wrist. I tried to pull away, but he tightened his grip, his eyes compelling me not to struggle. Like an exhausted animal caught in a trap, my hand stopped moving, became inert. He turned it over and touched the stitches where the last two fingers of the glove had been cut off. I withdrew my hand and placed it beneath the edge of the table.