We went through it, and started the climb up Penang Hill.
“How high is it?” Endo-san asked.
“A little over two thousand feet. It’ll take about three hours to reach the top. Nothing like the world’s highest mountain.”
We could have taken the funicular railway, which had been in operation since 1923, but Endo-san had refused. He wanted to feel the climb, he said. We would take the funicular on our way down.
Within an hour I was soaking wet. My bag felt heavy and despite my daily training my breathing became labored. “Come, keep moving,” Endo-san said, hitting my bare calves with his stick. He moved in front of me and set the pace. Rainwater streamed down the path to soak our boots. My hands were muddy from gripping wet branches and pushing myself up from the ground. Roots, many as thick as my wrists, reached out from the earth and made our progress difficult.
We stopped at a wooden tea shack at the halfway point, greeting the other early-morning hikers.
“Look at them,” Endo-san said. “They do not look as tired as you. And some of them are not young anymore.”
“These are people who climb The Hill every morning. I’m quite certain they’re already used to it,” I replied, a touch defensively.
Endo-san took out his camera and photographed me sitting on a wooden bench as I drank a steaming cup of tea. Around me birds in bamboo cages brought up by the hikers twittered and hopped on their perches, sensing the approach of dawn.
“Let us go on, you have rested enough,” Endo-san said.
We resumed our climb. The sun spread through the canopy of leaves and warmed the air. Tendrils of steam curled up from the ground, as though someone had lit joss sticks and stuck them into the watered earth. Monkeys whooped as they crossed from branch to branch, showering us with heavy droplets of water and damp twigs. Occasionally we caught sight of them, big brown furry creatures that disappeared quickly into the trees, leaving only the trembling leaves to betray their passage.
Just before noon we reached the summit, emerging from a lane behind the Bellevue Hotel. The air was cool at this height and the wind was blowing in banks of mist. We bought crushed sugarcane juice from a hawker and I drank it hurriedly, as though afraid it would disappear. We went past the hotel and went down a narrow road. There were no cars up here, just bicycles and a few army trucks.
“The Hill is always crowded with
ang-mohs,”
I said.
He looked puzzled.
“Red Hairs,” I explained. The phrase was used to describe the Europeans, many of whom were avoiding the worst of the hot season in Georgetown by coming up to The Hill. Endo-san laughed.
We turned left at a stone fountain set in a circle of flowering plants and entered the gates to Istana Kechil, the Small Palace. I took out the key and opened the front door. There was no one inside. My father came to shoot snipe, birds from Siberia which chose to winter here, and he never allowed anyone to use the house, even when we were not staying there. It had been a long time since we last visited.
The house was musty and cold with the silence of desertion. We opened the windows and doors and went out into the garden, where the bougainvillaea and hibiscus trees were in full bloom, moving in the wind.
Endo-san climbed onto the low wall of granite blocks that bounded our property to prevent people from falling into the ravine below. It was turning out to be a clear day and all of Georgetown lay spread out beneath us. We could even see across the channel to the mountains of Kedah. Turned into shades of blue by the distance, they lay beneath a layer of clouds. Surrounding the mountains were flatlands, cut up into quilted squares of rice fields. Narrow threads of white stitched the smooth surface of the sea: ferries carrying cargo to the mainland; steamships heading for Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, India, and the world beyond; navy boats patrolling for pirates from Sumatra and the Straits of Sunda.
He set up his tripod and began to take photographs: east, west, all directions, shifting his camera with precision, as though he had marked out a grid on the ground. The camera clicked and clicked, like a gecko in mating season.
I remembered the photographs in his house and wondered why he was never shown in them. Was it because he had always been traveling on his own? “Let me take some pictures for you, so you can be in them as well,” I offered.
He declined. “My face would only spoil the pictures.”
* * *
From experience, I knew the night would be cold on The Hill, so we had come prepared. We walked to the Bellevue Hotel for dinner in our black dinner jackets. The headwaiter seated us on the verandah, giving us a view of the lights of the town below, which flowed inland like a tide of white phosphorescence from the water’s edge at Weld Quay. The seas enclosing Penang were unseen in the darkness, and only granules of light indicated where the boats were.
Endo-san said with an appreciative tone, “Thank you, for bringing me up here. That sight is worth the climb, is it not?”
“Yes it is, Endo-san,” I said, knowing somehow that this would be a night I would always remember.
He narrowed his eyes when he studied the vines in the trellises above us. Something among them made a slight movement. “Are those snakes I see, curled around the vines?”
“Pit vipers,” I said. “One of the hotel’s claims to fame. There’s no need to worry—no one’s ever been bitten here. You can hardly see them, they’re so well camouflaged.”
“But you know they are lying in wait just above, ready to fall on you.”
“I ignore them, as does everyone eating here.”
“The great human capacity for choosing not to see,” he said.
“It makes life easier,” I said.
The waiter placed a stove and a pot on our table. On a large plate were some eggs, lettuces, chicken, fish balls, and noodles. As the pot boiled we started to throw everything on the plate into the pot.
“What is this called?” he asked. “Looks like our
shabu shabu.”
“Steam Boat. Perfect for a night like this.”
“When is your family returning from London?” he asked, as he placed a cooked egg on my dish.
“Near the end of the year.” I burned my tongue as I bit into the
egg.
“Tell me about them.”
I thought for a while. One takes one’s family so much for granted, I never really thought about describing mine to anyone. I took a sip of tea to cool my tongue and said, “My father’s forty-nine years old. He has gray—almost white—hair, but a lot of women think he’s very good-looking. He keeps fit by swimming and sailing. He works extremely hard. He used to spend more time with us, but after my mother died . . . That’s what Isabel tells me. I was too young then ...” I shrugged, unsure how to explain my father’s detachment from his children after my mother’s death.
“Yes, I met him, when I signed the lease for the island.”
“I have two brothers. Edward’s twenty-six and William is twenty-three. They’re very much like my father, I think. Edward read law—like my father, he’s a qualified barrister but he’s chosen to work in the family business. William left university last year and my father wants him to work for the family as well.”
“As all fathers do,” Endo-san said.
“Edward—well, I’m not close to Edward. He’s cold, and we seldom talk. Isabel is twenty-one, and I think she is stronger than my two brothers in many ways. At least she always gets her way. She wasn’t very pleased with me when I told her I would prefer to stay at home than go with them to London.”
“And you, where do you fit in?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “The half-Chinese, youngest child in an English family? I don’t think I fit in anywhere at all.”
Endo-san remained silent, and suddenly I found myself saying all the things I was never able to say to my father. “What makes it worse is that I go to the same school my brothers attended. Many of my teachers used to teach them and everyone knows who my brothers are. But instead of making me feel closer to them, it has only widened the differences between us.”
“You are not what everyone expected,” Endo-san said softly. “And young people are often oblivious to the hurt they can cause.”
“Yes,” I replied, feeling relieved that he had not belittled my circumstances, but had in fact understood them so thoroughly.
I wrapped my hands around a cup of tea to keep warm. There was only a small crowd tonight, mostly senior British Army officers in their uniforms and with their wives. I recognized some of them. Their voices were loud, happy, and carefree. I pointed them out to Endo-san, and he studied them, almost as if placing them in his mind. A six-piece band started to play and a few of the men led their women onto the dance floor.
“A popular place with the army,” he remarked.
“Oh yes. They maintain a small garrison here. Like a lookout point. It makes sense because from here they can see the whole island and the surrounding seas.”
“All the way to India,” he said.
“Yes, all the way there. Perhaps even all the way to Japan.”
He laughed. “Then I shall come up here more often.”
* * *
We woke up early and greeted the sun as it rose over the rim of the sea. We left the house and climbed down a track to the edge of the cliff, where we sat on a cold, narrow ledge, and began
zazen.
In the vegetable farms below us I heard the roosters crowing. Mongrel dogs barked and wooden gates slammed. Mist wreathed the valleys in thick patches, like frost on moss-covered boulders.
I gripped the edge and felt faint from fear. It was only six inches wide and there was a sixty-foot drop to the tops of the trees below. In my mind the drop lengthened to abysmal depths and I wanted to open my eyes. I imagined the ledge giving way, heard it crumble as the stones broke beneath our weight. To the west, clouds sailed in with the rain and I thought the wind would blow us off. I held on harder and wished the exercise were over and complete. My eyes could not help but drop down to the pointed tops of the trees, spears waiting eagerly in a pit.
“Let go,” he said. “You will not fall.”
“What if I do?”
“I will catch you.”
I glanced up to find him looking at me, not a smile on his mouth, just a nod, and then he closed his eyes again. I thought about his words, words uttered softly, without any faltering, words that would mark a change in my life.
At that moment, I knew I would trust him completely, whatever the consequences to me. I closed my eyes and loosened my fingers and the euphoria of release rushed through me. The sun came out from the clouds and joined us like an old acquaintance. Soon my eyelids burned red beneath as the light filled the world. I no longer felt I was on the cold hard ledge but as if I were floating high above the land, close to the heat of the sun, whose light I could see inside my head, illuminating an expanse that seemed wider than the universe.
* * *
After a light breakfast, we went out onto the lawn. We bowed and he kicked me, aiming for my kidneys. I was not fast enough—I was staring at his eyes, at his hands, still thinking of the ledge and his words to me. The pain flared like red ink splashed on paper and I dropped to my knees. I saw his other leg start to move and knew it would go for my head. I rolled along my back and came up standing. The kick missed me and for that split-second he was mine. I lifted his leg, using its upward swing, and kicked the inside of his shin. He grunted and I pushed him off balance, onto the grass. He rolled up onto his feet and sent another kick to my side. I jammed it by moving into it, stopping it from extending fully, but I went right into his fist. It slammed into my cheek and I saw white. I fell backward, and blacked out for long seconds.
“You are improving. But you are still looking at my hands, my feet, and my eyes,” he said. He pulled me up and examined my eyes and my cheeks, his fingers stroking my face. “Nothing serious,” he said.
“How can I not look at them?”
“You must get rid of your fear. Your eyes dart from my hands to my legs because you are afraid, unsure of yourself. Let go of your worry about getting hit and it will not happen.”
I shook my head to clear the fog and to understand what he said.
“Get up. We shall do it again.”
I sighed, stood up and went into a fighting stance again.
By the time the lesson ended the storm clouds had come in low, scraping the tops of the range of hills like a dragon’s underbelly moving over rocks. We stood by the wall to watch them.
“I always like your clouds here,” Endo-san said. “They fly so low.”
“On days like these, when the clouds are thick, heaven seems closer, and I almost feel I can touch it.”
He looked at me, hearing the wistful tone of my words. “You can touch heaven any time you wish. Let me show you.”
He called it
tenchi-nage,
the heaven-earth throw. He gripped both my arms forcefully and asked me to separate them, to raise one arm into the sky, as though to reach into the heart of heaven itself. I lowered my other hand as if to connect with the center of the earth. I felt the weakening of his attack immediately. His strength was divided, torn between the earth and the sky. I entered into his sphere of balance and threw him off his feet easily.
