The collected stories (49 page)

'You could have knocked me over with a feather,' Squibb said. He spat in disgust and went on to say how dirty she was; her sarong was in tatters, her hands filthy. Apparently he went over to her, but she ignored him. Finally, she spoke.

'Can't you see I'm busy?' She went on heaving the pestle.

Squibb was persistent. She said (and this was the sentence I heard Squibb repeating in the club lounge for days afterward): 'We don't want you here.'

There were other stories, but most of them seemed to originate with Squibb: the Ministry of Tourism was angry that the Laruts had stopped selling butterflies on the road; the missionaries in the area, Catholic fathers from Canada, were livid because the Larut children had stopped going to the mission school, and for the first time in many years the mission's dispensary - previously filled with snakebite victims and Laruts with appendicitis and strangulated hernias - was nearly empty. There was more: the Laruts had started to move their kampong, putting up huts in the heavily forested portion of jungle that adjoined Squibb's timber estate.

'She's a menace,' Squibb said.

He came to me at the Consulate and sat, refusing to leave until I listened to the last of his stories.

'There's nothing I can do,' I said.

'She's an American - you can send her home.'

'I don't see any evidence of treachery here,' I said.

'She's sticking her nose in where she's not wanted!'

'That's a matter for the Malaysians to decide.'

'They're as browned-off as I am,' Squibb said. He became solicitous about the Laruts; odd - he had always spoken of them as a nuisance, interrupting the smooth operation of his lumber mills with their poaching and thieving.

A day or two later, the District Commissioner dropped in. He was a dapper, soft-spoken Malay named Azhari, educated in

THE BUTTERFLY OF THE LARUTS

London; he had a reputation as a sport, and his adventures with various women at the Club were well known. There were 'Azhari stories/ He informed me politely that he was serving a deportation order on Dr Smith.

'What for?'

'Interfering in the internal affairs of our country,' he said. I wondered if she had turned him down.

'You've been talking to Squibb,' I said. He smiled; he didn't deny it.

It was Azhari's assistant who cycled to the village with the deportation order; it was he who brought us the news of the marriage.

At the Club, people said to me, 'You Americans,' and this was the only time in all my years at the Consulate there that Ayer Hitam was ever mentioned in the world's press. It was so unusual, seeing the town in the paper, mentions of the Club, City Bar, the kedai where Dr Smith had stayed, each one shabbily hallowed to a shrine by the coarse prose of journalists. They attempted a description of our heat, our trees, our roads, our way of life; struggling to make us unique they only succeeded in making us ridiculous (I was the 'youthful American Consul'). They spelled all our names wrong.

There were photographs of Dr Smith and the chief. She wore a printed scarf across her breasts in a makeshift halter, her hair knotted, and around her neck a great wooden necklace. He had headgear of parrot feathers, leather armlets on his biceps, and heavy earrings; he was a small man of perhaps fifty, with a worried furrowed face and tiny ears. In the photographs he looked crosseyed, but that might have been his worry distorted in the strong light. She towered over him, triumphant, wistful. His arm was awkwardly crooked in hers. Around them were many blurred grinning faces of Larut wellwishers.

'We are very much in love,' she was reported to have said. 'We plan to have lots of children. I know my duties as a Larut wife.'

It was not simple. The Laruts, idle and good-hearted, were polygamous. The chief had eight wives. Dr Smith was the ninth.

This was the last we heard of her for several months.

Father Lefever from the mission came to see me one afternoon. He was circumspect; he asked permission to smoke and then set fire to a stinking cheroot. In the middle of casual remarks about

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (i): THE CONSUL'S FILE

the late monsoon he said, 'You must do something about that woman.'

'So what Squibb said about the dispensary is true.'

'I don't know what he said, but I think this woman could do a great deal of harm. The Laruts are a simple people - like children. They are not used to this attention.'

'I haven't heard anything lately, though Squibb said they're treating themselves with native medicine - they've stopped coming to your dispensary.'

The priest looked down. 'And to church.'

'That's their choice, one would guess.'

'No, it's her. I know it. Not the Laruts.'

'But she's a Larut,' I said.

Azhari was firmer. He came demanding information on her background, by which he meant her past. I guessed his motive to be resentment: a man he regarded as a savage had become his sexual competitor. But the whole affair was beginning to annoy me. I told him it was none of my business, her marriage had given her Malaysian citizenship, and as far as I was concerned she was no longer an American subject. I said, 'I don't see what all the fuss is about.'

'You don't know these chaps,' said Azhari. 'They are special people in this country. They don't pay taxes, they don't vote, they can go anywhere they wish. And since that woman came there's been a lot of loose talk.'

'Of what sort?'

'She's stirring them up,' he said. But he didn't elaborate. 'If you won't help me I'll go over your head to the Ambassador.'

'Nothing would please me more.'

All this interest in the Laruts, who until then had only sold butterflies, and were famous because they did not use violence.

Late one night, there was a loud rapping at the front door. Ah Wing answered it and seeing the visitors, said 'Sakais^ with undisguised contempt.

A boy and an old man, obviously the chief. They came in and sat on the floor, the old man quite close, the boy - who was about twelve or thirteen - some distance away. They must have walked all the way from the village; their legs were wet and they had bits of broken leaf in their hair. They had brought the smell of the jungle into the room. The chief looked troubled; he nodded to the boy.

THE BUTTERFLY OF THE LARUTS

The boy said, 'He wants you to take her away.'

'His wife?' The boy jerked his head forward. 'I can't do that. Only he can do that. Tell him he is her husband.'

This was translated. The old man winced, and the scars beside his eyes bunched to tiny florets. He said something quickly, a signaling grunt. They had rehearsed this.

'He has money,' the boy said. 'He will pay you.'

'Money doesn't matter,' I said. I felt sorry for the old man: what had happened? Bullying, I imagined, threats of violence from Dr Smith; what pacifist tribe could contain an American academic, a woman with a camera? I said, 'There's a way. It's very simple -but he must be absolutely sure he never wants to see her again.'

'He is sure.' The boy didn't bother to translate. He knew his orders. He listened to what I said.

And it was so strange, the boy translating into the Larut language the process of divorce, the old man shaking his head, and the word for which there could not have been a Larut equivalent, recurring in the explanation as vuss . . . vuss. The old chief looked slightly shocked, and I was embarrassed; he was having this new glimpse of us, a revelation of a private cruelty of ours, a secret ritual that was available to him. At the end he wanted to give me money. I told him to save it for the lawyer.

The newspapers were interested; there was another influx of journalists from Singapore, but Dr Smith left as soon as the chief engaged a lawyer, and this time she didn't pass through Ayer Hitam. The journalists caught up with her in Tokyo - or was it Los Angeles? I forget. The pity of it was that they took no notice of what followed, the Laruts' new village (and prosperity for the chief) in the remotest part of the state, the closing of the mission, and Squibb's timber operation, which, it was said, made that little bush track into a road wide enough for huge timber trucks to collect the trees that were felled in and around the derelict village.

THE TENNIS COURT

made him seem four-legged. He played a hard darting game with a towel wound around his neck like a scarf; he barked loudly when he hit the ball.

He always arrived late in the afternoon, and before dinner played several sets with anyone who happened to be around. Alec had played him, so had Eliot and Strang; he had won every match. Evans, the best player in the Club, refused to meet him on the tennis court. If there was no one to play, Shimura hit balls against the wooden backboard, barking at the hard ones, and he practiced with such determination you could hear his grunts as far as the reading room. He ate alone and went to bed early. He spoke to no one; he didn't drink. I sometimes used to think that if he had spent some time in the bar, like the other temporary members who passed through Ayer Hitam, Shimura would have no difficulty.

Alec said, 'Not very clubbable.'

'Ten to one he's fiddling his expenses,' said Squibb.

Evans criticized his lob.

He could not have been hated more. His nationality, his size, his stinginess, his laugh, his choice of tennis partners (once he had played Eliot's sexually browsing wife) - everything told against him. He was aloof, one of the worst social crimes in Malaysia; he was identified as a parasite, and worst of all he seemed to hold everyone in contempt. Offenses were invented: he bullied the ball-boys, he parked his car the wrong way, he made noises when he ate.

It may be hard to be an American - I sometimes thought so when I remembered our beleaguered Peace Corps teachers - but I believe it was even harder to be a Japanese in that place. They had lost the war and gained the world; they were unreadable, impossible to know; more courtly than the Chinese, they used this courtliness to conceal. The Chinese were secretive bumblers and their silences could be hysterical; the Japanese gave nothing away; they never betrayed their frenzy. This contempt they were supposed to have: it wasn't contempt, it was a total absence of trust in anyone who was not Japanese. And what was perhaps more to the point, they were the opposite to the English in every way I could name.

The war did not destroy the English - it fixed them in fatal attitudes. The Japanese were destroyed and out of that destruction came different men; only the loyalties were old - the rest was new. Shimura, who could not have been much more than thirty, was one

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (i): THE CONSUL'S FILE

of these new men, a postwar instrument, the perfectly calibrated Japanese. In spite of what everyone said, Shimura was an excellent tennis player.

So was Evans, and it was he who organized the club game: How to get rid of Shimura?

Squibb had a sentimental tolerance for Malays and a grudging respect for the Chinese, but like the rest of the club members he had an absolute loathing for the Japanese. When Alec said, 'I suppose we could always debag him,' Squibb replied fiercely, 'I'd like to stick a kukri in his guts.'

'We could get him for an infraction,' said Strang.

'That's the trouble with the obnoxious little sod,' said Squibb. 'He doesn't break the rules. We're lumbered with him for life.'

The hatred was old. The word 'Changi' was associated with Shimura. Changi was the jail in Singapore where the British were imprisoned during the war, after the fall of the city, and Shimura was held personally responsible for what had gone on there: the water torture, the rotan floggings, the bamboo rack, the starvation and casual violence the Japanese inflicted on people they despised because they had surrendered.

'I know what we ought to do,' said Alec. 'He wants his tennis. We won't give him his tennis. If we kept him off the courts we'd never see his face here again.'

'That's a rather low trick,' said Evans.

'Have you got a better one?' said Squibb.

'Yes,' said Evans. 'Play him.'

'I wouldn't play him for anything,' said Squibb.

'He'd beat you in any case,' said Alec.

Squibb said, 'But he wouldn't beat Tony.'

'Not me - I'm not playing him. I suggest we get someone else to beat him,' said Evans. 'These Japs can't stand humiliation. If he was really beaten badly we'd be well rid of him.'

I said, 'This is despicable. You don't know Shimura - you have no reason to dislike that man. I want no part of this.'

'Then bugger off!' shouted Squibb, turning his red face on me. 'We don't need a bloody Yank to tell us-'

'Calm yourself,' said Alec. 'There's ladies in the bar.'

'Listen,' I said to Squibb, 'I'm a member of this Club. I'm staying right here.'

'What about Shimura?' said Alec.

THE TENNIS COURT

'It's just as I say, if he was beaten badly he'd be humiliated,' said Evans.

Squibb was looking at me as he said, 'There are some little fuckers you can't humiliate.'

But Evans was smiling.

The following week Shimura showed up late one afternoon, full of beans. He changed, had tea alone, and then appeared on the court with the towel around his neck and holding his racket like a sword. He chopped the air with it and looked around for a partner.

The court was still except for Shimura's busy shadow, and at the far end two ball-boys crouched with their sarongs folded between their knees. Shimura hit a few practice shots on the backboard.

We watched him from the rear verandah, sitting well back from the railing: Evans, Strang, Alec, Squibb, and myself. Shimura glanced up and bounced the racket against his palm. A ball-boy stood and yawned and drew out a battered racket. He walked toward Shimura, and though Shimura could not possibly have heard it there were four grunts of approval from the verandah.

Raziah, the ball-boy, was slender; his flapping blue sports shirt and faded wax-print sarong made him look careless and almost comic. He was taller than Shimura and, as Shimura turned and walked to the net to meet him, the contrast was marked - the loose-limbed gait of the Malay in his rubber flip-flops, the compact movements of the Japanese who made his prowl forward into a swift bow of salutation.