The Garden of Evening Mists (22 page)

‘
The Passage to the West
,’ Aritomo said. ‘My father painted it. He gave it to me before he died.’

‘Who’s the man with the buffalo?’

‘Lao Tzu. He was a philosopher in the Chinese court, two and a half thousand years ago.

Disillusioned by its excesses, he wanted to have nothing more to do with that life. You see him at the Hanku Pass, about to leave the borders of the kingdom, to ride out into the unknown lands in the west.’

My hand hovered over the two figures. ‘He’s being stopped by the guard.’

‘The gatekeeper of the pass. He recognises the sage, and he begs him to stop for the night, to reconsider.’ Aritomo’s face was in shadow and I saw only the glint of an eye, the plane of a cheek, a line curved around one end of his lips. ‘Lao-Tzu agrees. That night he sets down on paper the principles and beliefs that had guided him all his life, the
Tao Te Ching
.’ Aritomo paused for a second.
‘Heaven’s way is like the pulling of a bow, bringing down the high and
raising up the low. It takes from what is excessive, and gives to what is lacking. The way of Man
is the opposite.’

‘After he had finished writing it,’ I said, ‘did he turn around and head back home?’

‘At daybreak, the old sage gave everything he had written to the young man. Pulling his buffalo by its rope, he went through the gate and out into the wilderness. No one ever saw him again.’ He stopped. ‘Some people think he never existed, that he was just a myth.’

‘But here he is, fixed in water and paper for eternity.’

‘
The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of men
, my father once said to me.’

Studying the drawing again, it seemed to me that the gatekeeper no longer appeared to be stopping the old man from going through the gate, but was, instead, bidding him a sad farewell.

The murder of the High Commissioner continued to weigh on our thoughts as the year came to its end. Morale among the planters and miners across the country had plummeted further, and an increasing number of European families were packing up and leaving Malaya for good.

Christmas at Majuba was a subdued affair. I turned down most of the invitations to the parties I was invited to. People continued to drop in at Majuba House for Magnus’s weekend
braais
. The visitors were varied: retired barristers from KL who tried to talk law with me, engineers from the Public Works Department, doctors, Indian Anglican priests, senior police officers, Malay civil servants. In my first few weeks at Majuba I had felt obligated to show up at these events, but I soon stopped going. Ever since I had come out from the camp, I could not tolerate being in crowds for long.

Magnus had allowed the security forces to bivouac on his property. Sometimes I’d walk past a meadow and see tents being put up by men from the 1st Gordon Highlanders or the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, who patrolled the jungle and the hills. Most were around my age; many of them younger.

Five months after Gurney’s death, General Gerald Templer flew into Kuala Lumpur to take up the post of High Commissioner. Magnus kept me informed whenever I dined at Majuba House, but the bits of news were like a caravanserai on a desert horizon, spirits in the mirage, irrelevant to me. All my energies were directed towards my lessons in Yugiri.

I enjoyed my archery practice with Aritomo. There was more to the Way of the Bow than hitting the target. The central purpose of
kyudo
was to train the mind, Aritomo said, to strengthen our focus through every ritualised movement we made in the
shajo
. ‘From the moment you walk to the shooting line, your breathing must be regular,’ he said. ‘Your breaths must match every move you make, until the arrow has left not just your hands, but also your mind.’

Each session began with us sitting quietly for a few minutes, purging our thoughts of all distractions. I discovered how much clutter bounced around in my head. It was difficult for me to sit there and not think of anything at all. Even with my eyes closed, I was conscious of everything around me: the rustle of the wind, a bird picking its way across the roof tiles, the itching on my leg.

‘Your mind is just like a strip of flypaper hanging from the ceiling,’ Aritomo complained.

‘Every thought, however fleeting and inconsequential, sticks to it.’

Every detail of the eight formal steps in the process of shooting was prescribed, even down to the sequence of breathing, and I felt a satisfaction in conforming to the precise and ritualised movements. I practised the pattern of regulated breathing on my own, and I felt my mind and body slide gradually closer into harmony. In time I came to understand that, in decreeing the way I had to breathe,
kyudo
was showing me how to live. In the space between releasing the bowstring and the arrow hitting the target, I discovered a quiet place I could escape into, a slit in time in which I could hide.

The two of us would stand at the shooting line, I imagined us looking like the pair of bronze archers on his desk. I enjoyed seeing the arrows fly from my bow. It had been difficult at first, when they too often veered to the sides or fell short of the
matto
.

‘You let go of your connection with the arrow too early,’ Aritomo said. ‘Hold it with your mind, tell it where you want it to go, and guide it all the way to the
matto
. And when it strikes, hold on to it for a moment longer.’

‘It’s not alive,’ I said. ‘It obeys no one.’

Motioning me to step aside, he raised his
kyu
and nocked an arrow into the bowstring. He drew the bow to its limit, the stiff bindings releasing little clouds of fine dust into the air as the bow flexed. He aimed the arrow at the
matto
and closed his eyes. I heard his breaths come out in longer, quieter segments, softer and softer until it seemed as though he had stopped breathing altogether.

Let it go
, in my mind I urged him.
Let it go
.

A smile hovered around his lips.
Not yet
.

I was certain that I had not seen his lips move, and yet the voice in my head was unmistakeable.

Keeping his eyes shut, Aritomo released the bowstring. Almost immediately I heard the arrow hit the
matto
. Aritomo opened his eyes and we both turned to look at the target sixty feet away. The fletched end of the arrow stuck out of it
,
drawing a line of shadow across its surface and transforming it into a sundial. Even from where I was standing, I could see that he had sent the arrow right into the dead centre of the target.

* * *

On the days when it rained too heavily for work in the garden, Aritomo would conduct the lessons in his study. He would bow to the Emperor’s portrait as he entered the room, ignoring me as I looked away in my resentment. He described in detail the history of gardening, matching his lessons to what we had been working on before the weather drove us inside. He taught me the finer points, explaining the concepts and techniques passed on to him by his father. He would pin a large sheet of paper on a corkboard, crowding it with pencil sketches to illustrate his teaching. He never allowed me to keep those drawings, tearing them up when he had finished.

Coming to the end of one of these lessons, I noticed a sheet of paper trapped beneath a stone on his desk. I pulled it out and held it up to the light. It was a print of irises, the paper flecked with mould, like the rusty spores on a fern. ‘Yours?’ I asked, remembering the lanterns we had burnt on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival a few months ago.

‘Something I made a while back. A collector in Tokyo wants to buy it.’

‘Do you have any other pieces? I’d like to look at them.’

He took out a few prints from a box. These were not of flowers, as I had expected, but demons, warriors and enraged gods brandishing swords and halberds over their heads. I returned them after a cursory look, not concealing my distaste.

‘Characters from our myths and folktales,’ he said. ‘The warriors and thieves are from 
Suikoden
– the Japanese translation of the Chinese novel,
Sui Hu Chuan
.’

The name was an arrow fired from my youth. ‘
The Legend of the Water Margin
,’ I said.

The book, a classic of Chinese literature, was known to most Chinese, even those who, like me, were mute in our own language. ‘I read it when I was fifteen. Waley’s translation. I didn’t finish it, but I don’t think it had drawings like these.’

‘Older
ukiyo-e
prints often depicted characters from the novel,’ Aritomo said. He thought for a moment, then took out a small sandalwood box from a cupboard and placed it on his desk. I was wearing my leather gloves, which I did when was not working in the garden.

Now I watched him pulling a pair of cotton gloves over his hands; I searched his expression for any hint of mockery, but there was none.

He unlocked the box and carefully lifted out a book. ‘This is a copy of
Suikoden
. It is two centuries old,’ he said. ‘The illustrations were hand-printed by Hokusai himself.’ Seeing that I had no idea who he was talking about, he sighed. ‘You must have seen the picture of a big wave, frozen into stillness as it is about to crash back into the sea,’ he said. ‘There is a small boat caught in the hollow of the wave, and in the distance, Mount Fuji.’

‘Of course I’ve seen it. It’s famous.’

‘Well, that was made by Hokusai.’ He wagged a cotton-white finger at me. ‘Most people think they know him, if only because of
The Hollow of the Deep Sea Wave
. But he was much more than that.’

He slid the book towards me. A vertical line of Japanese writing in red ink climbed down one side of the ash-grey cover. The book opened from right to left, and the first
ukiyo-e
print was of a view of a narrow mountain, with a miniscule temple clinging to its side. The room became completely still as I paged through the book.

‘They’re very detailed,’ I said.

‘Depending on the colours he wanted to have and the effects he wanted to achieve, he would have had to carve more than one wooden block.’

‘They look like Japanese tattoos,’ I said. ‘
Irezumi,
aren’t they called?’

‘That,’ he glanced at me, ‘is an unrefined word. Do not use it. Ever. Tattoo artists refer to them as
horimono
– things that are incised.’

‘
Horimono
,’ I repeated the word. It was so foreign, my tongue so unused to its shape, like how his name had once sounded to me. ‘During the War Crimes trials in KL,’ I said. ‘I had to record the interrogation of a Japanese prisoner of war. The guards had removed his shirt and his chest, arms and back were tattooed with birds and flowers, and even a demon with bared teeth.

One of the guards later told me that the man’s tattoos covered his entire body – his thighs, buttocks, legs.’

‘That is unusual for someone in the army,’ Aritomo said. ‘Full body tattoos are seen only on criminals and the outcasts of society.’

‘The tattoos seemed... alive.’

‘He must have had a good
horoshi
– a tattoo master.’

‘Magnus has a tattoo,’ I said. ‘Did you know that?’

‘You have seen it?’ Aritomo looked at me.

‘He came to Penang for a weekend. I was sixteen or seventeen then,’ I said. ‘He invited us to tea at the E & O.’

The gardener crossed his arms over his chest, waiting for me to explain.

* * *

The ceiling fans in the hotel lobby fought a permanent losing battle with the humid air, the brass tips of their wooden blades volleying shards of light onto the walls and the marble floor. Dressed in a linen jacket over a white cotton shirt, a maroon tie and sharply creased grey trousers, Magnus was quite unlike the image of a planter I had in my head. The black silk eye-patch over his right eye gave him a roguish charm, and I could not help but notice how it drew glances from the other hotel guests, particularly the women.

‘Only the four of you?’ he said to my mother. ‘Where’s Kian Hock?’

‘Up in Batu Ferringhi,’ she replied. ‘Camping on the beach with the scouts.’

A waiter showed us to a table on the terrace by the sea, among the Europeans and wealthy Chinese and Malay families. Magnus hung his jacket over the back of his chair. My parents nodded at a number of people who recognised them. A pair of Chinese boys, about five or six years old, chased each other around the tables, much to the obvious disapproval of the European
mems
. In the narrow stretch of water between Penang and mainland Malaya, liners and steamers and tramps sailed past the hotel, some coming in from the Indian Ocean, others from the Andaman Sea, all of their passengers, I was certain, rejoicing at entering the Straits of Malacca after weeks and months out in the open water.

‘How’s your estate?’ my father asked. My parents seemed uncomfortable with Magnus, and this made me even more sensitive to the tension in the air.

‘Doing rather well, Boon Hau,’ Magnus replied. ‘You should come and see.’

‘We should,’ my mother said. I recognised the tone in her voice which she used with my father, when she was making promises she had no intention of keeping.

‘What happened to your eye?’ The question had been troubling me from the moment I had first seen him.

‘Don’t be rude, Yun Ling,’ said my mother.

Magnus waved away her reprimand. ‘I lost it fighting in the Boer War.’

‘That was in Africa,’ my sister said.

‘
Ja
,’ Magnus said. ‘The Brits tried to take our land. We fought back, but they burned our farms and put our women and children in concentration camps.’

‘Look here,’ my father cut in before I could ask Magnus what a concentration camp was.

‘I don’t want you talking any of that rubbish to my girls. You Boers were a bunch of thugs. You lost the war. Naming your tea estate “Majuba” isn’t going to change history.’

‘It’s my small way of honouring the battle where the Brits were soundly thrashed,’

Magnus said in a silky voice. ‘And it gives me great pleasure to know that in Malaya and all over the East they’re taking in a bit of Majuba every time they have their tea.’