The Garden of Evening Mists (13 page)

‘That’s Aritomo’s,’ Magnus said.

Next to it was a box frame with a medal inside, the colours of its ribbon almost similar to those of the flag flying on the roof. ‘What does “
Oorlog
” mean?’ I said, reading from the medal.

He corrected my pronunciation and said, ‘It means
war
.’

I pointed to a sepia photograph of an old man wearing a top hat, his cheeks lathered in a thick white beard. ‘Your father?’ I said.

Magnus handed me a glass of wine. ‘Him?
Ag, nee
, that’s Paul Kruger, the president of the Transvaal Republic during the Second Boer War,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you heard of the Kruger Millions? No? Well, when the English occupied Pretoria they discovered that two million pounds worth of gold and silver were missing from the Transvaal mint. A lot of money fifty years ago – think what it would be worth now!’

‘Who had taken it?’

‘There are people who believe that Oom Paul had buried the gold and silver somewhere in the Lowveld, in the last days of the war.’

‘Like what the Japs are said to have done?’

He laughed, glancing at Emily. ‘
Lao Puo
, you’ve been complaining to this young lady about my weekend fun? Well, what the Japs in Tanah Rata buried is probably peanuts, compared to the Kruger Millions.’

‘They can’t be worth more than Yamashita’s gold,’ I said. ‘Have you heard of it?’

‘Who hasn’t?’

‘Strange, isn’t it, there are always stories like this, whenever there’s been a war,’ I said.

‘Has anyone found the gold Kruger buried?’

‘They’ve been searching for fifty years,’ Magnus said, ‘but no one ever has.’ At the low rumble of thunder he glanced up to the ceiling.

There was another photograph further along the wall. ‘That’s my brother Piet –

Frederik’s pa. Taken shortly before he died,’ Magnus said, coming to stand beside me. ‘I asked Frederik to bring it with him when he came here. It’s the only photograph I have of any of my family.’

‘Frederik looks a lot like his father.’

Emily put down her novel to look at Magnus.

‘We lost everything – my Oupa’s diaries, my Ouma’s recipe books, my stinkwood animal carvings,’ Magnus said. ‘Photographs of my parents and my sister. Everything.’

‘Do you still... ’ I stalled, then tried again, ‘Can you remember their faces?’

He looked at me for a long moment. In his eye I knew he understood my own fears. ‘I couldn’t for a long time,’ he said. ‘But in the last few years... well, they’ve come back to me again. As you get older, you start remembering the old things.’

‘It’s going to rain,’ Emily said.

She stood up and held out her hand to Magnus and together they went out to the verandah that looked onto the back garden. A gust of wind, moistened with rain from over the mountains swirled into the sitting room, lifting the curtains. After a moment’s hesitation I went out as well, standing apart from them.

‘
Nou lê die aarde nagtelang en week in die donker stil genade van die rëën
,’ Magnus said softly, putting his arm around Emily’s waist and pulling her to him.

For some reason the sounds of those words shifted something in me. ‘What does it mean?’ I asked.

‘Now lies the earth night-long and washed in the dark silent grace of the rain,’ Emily said. ‘It’s from his favourite poem.’ She turned away from me and leaned closer against Magnus.

Lightning convulsed over the mountains. The rain rushed in a minute later, blurring the night.

* * *

Just before six o’clock I switched on the bedside lamp and got dressed in an old yellow blouse and a pair of shorts that came to my knees. I pulled on a pair of old cotton gloves I had obtained from Emily. The servants were lighting the stoves in the kitchen when I went in. I ate two slices of bread and drank a cup of milk. I heard Magnus coughing and clearing his throat in his bathroom as I opened the front door and left Majuba House. The estate’s siren started up, but was soon filtered by the distance and the trees.

Daylight was nibbling the margins of the sky when I arrived at Yugiri. I was a few minutes early so I went around to the back. Ah Cheong was leaning his bicycle against a wall.

He nodded when I greeted him. Aritomo was at the archery range. I stood at the side and watched him. He finished his practice and told me to wait at the front of the house. When he came out again he had changed into a blue shirt and a pair of khaki trousers. He pointed to my writing pad. ‘I do not want you to make notes,’ he said, ‘not even when you go home at the end of the day.’

‘But I won’t be able to remember everything.’

‘The garden will remember it for you.’

I left the writing pad in the house and followed him into the garden, paying close attention as he listed out the work for the day.

The earliest gardeners in Japan had been monks, recreating the dream of heaven on earth in the monastery grounds. From the introduction to
Sakuteiki
, I knew that Aritomo’s family had been
niwashi
, gardeners, to the rulers of Japan since the sixteenth century, each eldest son carrying on from where his father had left off. There was a legend that the first Nakamura had been a Chinese monk in the Sung dynasty who had been banished from China. The monk had crossed the ocean to Japan, hoping to spread the teachings of the Buddha. But instead he had fallen in love with the daughter of a court official and had abandoned his vows, remaining in Japan for the rest of his life. Looking at Aritomo from the corner of my eye, I could almost believe that tale. There were aspects of a monk in his bearing, in the calm but single-minded focus of his approach, and in the slow and considered way he spoke.

‘Pay attention.’ Aritomo snapped his fingers in my face. ‘What kind of garden am I making here?’

Thinking back to the parts of the garden I had seen, the winding walks and the different views, I made a swift guess. ‘A strolling garden. No, wait – a combination of a strolling and a viewing garden.’

‘From which era?’

This completely stumped me. ‘I can’t pick out a particular one,’ I admitted. ‘It’s not Muramachi; it’s not entirely Momoyama or Edo.’

‘Quite so. When I designed Yugiri, I wanted to combine elements from the different periods.’

I skirted a puddle of rainwater. ‘It must have made it more difficult to achieve an overall harmony in your garden.’

‘Not all my ideas were workable. It is one of the reasons why I am making these changes.’

Walking in the garden I had heard about almost half a lifetime ago, I wished Yun Hong were here with me. She would have enjoyed it more than me. I wondered what I was doing here, living the life that should have been my sister’s.

At each turn in the path, Aritomo drew my attention to an arrangement of rocks, an unusual sculpture, or a stone lantern. They looked as if they had been lying there on the beds of moss and ferns for centuries. ‘These objects signal to the traveller that he is entering another layer of his journey,’ he said. ‘They tell him to stop and gather his thoughts, to savour the view.’

‘Has any woman ever been taught to be a gardener?’

‘None. That does not mean it is not permitted,’ he replied. ‘But physical strength is required to create a garden. A woman would not be able to last long as a gardener.’

‘What do you think the guards made us do?’ I said in a burst of anger. ‘They forced us to dig tunnels, the men
and
women. The men broke rocks and we dumped them in a gorge miles away.’ I took in a deep breath and blew it out slowly. ‘Yun Hong told me once that what’s required in creating a garden is mental, not physical strength.’

‘You obviously have both in abundance,’ he said.

The anger roiled up in me again, but before I could reply the sound of voices and laughter came to us. ‘The workers are here,’ Aritomo said. ‘Late, as usual.’

The men were barefoot, dressed in patched singlets and shorts, towels slung over their shoulders. Aritomo introduced them to me. Kannadasan, the one who could speak some English, was the leader. The other four knew only Tamil and Malay. White teeth flashed against dark skin when they heard that I would be joining them.

We followed Aritomo to the area behind the tool shed. Stones had been set down here, their dimensions varying from the size of coconuts to slabs that came up to my shoulders. ‘I found them around the caves near Ipoh during the Occupation,’ Aritomo said.

‘You were already planning to make changes to the garden then?’ I asked.

‘I had to have a good reason to keep the workers here,’ he said. ‘So I travelled around, searching for materials I could use.’

‘Then you would have seen and heard what the Kempeitai were doing to people.’

He looked at me, then turned and walked away, wedging a painful silence into the space between us. Sensing the palpable tension in the air, the workers averted their eyes from me.

Looking at Aritomo’s retreating figure, I realised that, however difficult it was for me, I had to put aside my prejudices if I wanted to learn from him.

I broke into a trot and caught up with him. ‘These rocks you found – all have unusual markings,’ I said.

For a long moment he did not reply. Finally, he said, ‘Garden designing is known as The Art of Setting Stones, which tells you how important they are.’

I was filled with relief, although I did not let him see it. We walked back to the rocks and he examined them, rubbing them with his hands. The larger ones were five to six feet high, narrow and sharp-edged, their surfaces covered in striations. Weeds crawled up their sides, as if trying to pull them back into the cool, damp earth.

‘Every stone has its own personality, its own needs.’ He selected five of them, touching them one after another. ‘Move these to the front.’

My breathing constricted. His orders brought me back to the time when I had been a slave for the Japanese army. My resolve started fraying, even as I sensed his curious gaze on me.

I looked around and remembered how, in the camp, I had forced myself to take the first steps in saving my life. That journey had not ended, I realised.

‘And take off your gloves,’ Aritomo added.

‘They’re washable. I’ll get a few more pairs.’

‘What kind of gardener will you be, if you do not feel the soil with your bare hands?’

We stared at each other for what felt like an endless moment. I held his gaze even as I pulled off my gloves and stuffed them into my pockets. His eyes dropped to my left hand. He did not flinch, but the workers muttered among themselves.

‘What are you all waiting for? The grass to grow?’ Aritomo clapped his hands. ‘Get to work!’

Two men lifted the first rock a few inches off the ground while Aritomo slid a jute-rope harness beneath it. The harness was connected to a windlass hanging from an eight-foot high wooden tripod. Lashed together at the top with coils of rope, each of the tripod’s legs could be adjusted to fit the contours of the terrain. Kannadasan cranked the windlass and the rock lifted heavily off the ground, a mountain shedding the moorings of gravity. When it was about three feet in the air Aritomo stopped him and handed me a brush with stiff bamboo bristles. I reached between the gaps of the harness and scraped the clumps of soil, roots and grubs from the rock.

When I finished we trussed it with ropes, tying it to the centre of a heavy pole. I lifted the front end of the pole onto my shoulder, but the weight crumpled me onto one knee. The workers scrambled around to help me, but I waved them away. Behind me I heard Kannadasan say,

‘Missee, too heavy for you-
lah
.’

Aritomo stood to one side, watching me. I felt a stab of hatred for him. It’s different now, I told myself as sweat rolled down the centre of my back. I’m no longer a prisoner of the Japs, I’m free, free. And I’m alive.

The nausea subsided, but left a sour coating at the back of my throat. I licked my lips and swallowed once, twice. ‘Wait, Kannadasan,
tunggu sekejap
.’ I adjusted the ropes and signalled to him. ‘
Satu, dua, tiga!
’ On the count of three we lifted the pole onto our shoulders again. The men whooped and shouted encouragement as, like a wounded animal, I staggered to my feet, fighting back the pain digging into my shoulder. 

‘
Jalan!
’ I shouted, leading the way.

The morning was spent cleaning the rocks and carrying them to the area by the front verandah. When the last rock was set down, Kannadasan and the workers squatted on the grass and passed around a packet of cigarettes, drying their faces with their towels. I followed Aritomo into his house, into the sitting room. The paper-screen doors were closed, and I discovered there was a set of sliding glass doors behind them. Aritomo indicated a spot where he told me to sit. I pointed to my dirt-stained clothes. ‘I’m filthy’.

‘Sit down.’ Waiting until I complied, he pulled back first the glass doors and then the paper screens, opening up the garden. Above the trees, the line of the mountains serrated the sky.

Aritomo knelt next to me and directed Kannadasan and the other workers with his hands, indicating where he wanted the first stone placed. Once he was satisfied with its position, the men pestled it into the ground. He went through the same process with the remaining four stones, fixing each of them a slight distance away from the previous one, adjusting the harmonics of a music only he could hear.

‘They look like a row of courtiers bowing and backing away from the Emperor,’ I said.

He grunted in approval. ‘We are composing a picture within this frame.’ He pointed to the lines of the roof, the posts and the floor, his finger drawing a rectangle in the air. ‘When you look at the garden, you are looking at a work of art.’

‘But the composition isn’t balanced,’ I pointed out. ‘The gap between the first and the second stones is too wide, and the last stone is set too close to the third one.’ I studied the scenery again. ‘They look like they’re about to topple into the emptiness.’

‘Yet there is a dynamic feel to the arrangement do you not agree?’ he said. ‘Look at our paintings – they have large tracts of emptiness, their composition is asymmetrical… they have a sense of uncertainty, of tension and possibility. That is what I want here.’