The Garden of Evening Mists (12 page)

‘
Eh
, where are you going?’ Emily complained when she saw me walking out past the kitchen. ‘We’re eating dinner soon. I’m cooking
char-siew
tonight.’

‘I won’t be long.’

* * *

Once again I followed Ah Cheong through the house and, just like before, he did not speak a word to me. We passed the room where I had sat with Aritomo on the morning we had first met, nearly a week before. The housekeeper did not stop, but led me along a walkway that ran beside a small courtyard with a rock garden. He paused outside a room with a half-open sliding door and knocked softly on the doorframe. Aritomo was behind his desk, arranging a pile of documents into a wooden box. He looked up at me, surprised. ‘Come inside,’ he said.

Despite the bite in the air, the windows were open. In the distance, the mountains were receding into dusk. I looked around the room, searching for what I wanted. A bronze Buddha about a foot long reclined on the windowsill, the curve of his arm resting on his hip, gentle as the line of the mountains behind him. A black and white photograph of Emperor Hirohito in a military uniform hung on a wall; I looked away. The far end of the room was segmented by bookshelves lined with volumes of Malayan history and memoirs written by Stamford Raffles, Hugh Clifford, Frank A. Swettenham. A pair of bronze Chinese archers, about nine inches high, posed on the desk, pulling at bows that had no strings or arrows. A bamboo birdcage hung on the end of a thin rope from the ceiling, empty except for a stub of half-melted candle. The gardener appeared to be a collector of antique maps; there were framed charts of the Malay Archipelago and South East Asia, hand-drawn in detail by eighteenth-century Dutch, Portuguese and English explorers.

Hanging at the far end of the room was a painting of a mansion built in the Anglo-Indian style so popular in Penang. A broad verandah ran around three sides of the house, buckled into place by a portico in front. Stamped into the pediment in the centre of the roof: ‘Athelstane’ and below it ‘1899’. Behind the house, the green waters of the channel separated Penang from the mainland. I remembered how proud she had been when she had finished it.

Aritomo scraped back his chair and came to stand beside me. I continued to stare at the painting. ‘The police questioned me about the Semai,’ he said. ‘It must have been a terrible shock for you, discovering them like that.’

‘It’s not the first time I’ve seen dead bodies.’ I studied his reflection in the glass. ‘The smell... I thought I had forgotten the smell. But one never does.’

He reached out a hand to adjust the tilt of the frame. ‘Your home?’

‘My grandfather built it.’

The house had stood at the eastern end of Northam Road, a long stretch shaded by angsana trees and lined with the mansions of high-ranking colonial officials and wealthy Chinese. ‘Old Mr Ong was our neighbour,’ I said, no longer seeing the house in the painting but in my memory. ‘He had started out as a bicycle repairman before becoming one of the wealthiest men in Asia. And it all happened because he fell in love with a girl.’ I smiled, remembering what my mother had once told Yun Hong and me. ‘Old Mr Ong wanted to marry the girl, but her father refused to allow it. His was an old, wealthy family, and he looked down on the illiterate bicycle repairman. He told him to leave his home and never bother them again.’

Aritomo crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Did he?’

‘It took only four years for Ong to become a very rich man. He built his house directly across the road from the girl’s family home. It was the biggest house on Northam Road. And the ugliest as well, my mother always said.’ I looked at myself in the glass. My eyes were shadowed, sunken into my face. ‘Ong didn’t let anyone know he owned it. The afternoon after he moved in, he had his chauffeur drive him across the road in his silver Daimler. He spoke to the girl’s father again and asked for her hand in marriage once more. Her father, naturally, gave his permission.

The wedding took place a month later. It was the most lavish the island had ever witnessed, so the old people used to say.’

‘One of the things I like about Malaya,’ Aritomo said, ‘it is full of stories like this.’

‘I often saw Old Mr Ong in his garden, dressed like a coolie in a tatty white vest and loose blue cotton shorts, carrying his songbird in a cage. He always spoke to the bird with more tenderness than I had ever seen him show any of his wives.’

Aritomo pointed to the pediment. ‘Athelstane. That was Swettenham’s middle name.’

I glanced at him in surprise, then remembered the first Resident General’s books on his shelf. ‘That’s what my grandfather called it. A silly, pretentious name for a house,’ I said. ‘I’m sure the neighbours laughed at my grandfather, and us.’

‘I will look for it, next time I am in Penang.’

‘It was destroyed when Jap planes bombed the island.’ Aritomo’s face showed no reaction. ‘We had moved out only a few days earlier. We left everything behind – all our photographs. All of Yun Hong’s paintings too.’

It unsettled me that I should see one of her paintings here; I felt she was still alive, about to appear at the door of my bedroom to tell me some gossip she had heard from her friends. I reached out my hand and touched the painting. The smudge of condensation I made on the glass disappeared a second later, as though it had found a way to enter the watercolour painting.

‘I want to buy this from you.’

Aritomo shook his head. ‘It was a gift.’

‘This painting means nothing to you.’ I turned to face him. ‘I’m asking you to sell it to me. You owe that to me, at the very least.’

‘Why? Because of what my country did to you?'

‘Sell it to me.’

He smoothed the air with his hands. ‘I have being thinking over your offer since your visit.’

I tensed up, wondering what he was about to tell me. ‘You’ll design and build my garden?’

He shook his head. ‘You can learn to do it yourself.’

It took me a moment or two to grasp the nature of his proposal. ‘You’re asking me to be...
apprenticed
... to you?’ It was not what I had wanted from him at all. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘I will teach you the skills to build your own garden,’ he said. ‘A simple, basic garden.’

‘A half-hearted Japanese garden isn’t good enough for Yun Hong.’

‘That is all I can give you,’ he said. ‘I do not have the time – or the desire – to create a garden for you. Or for anyone else. The last commission I undertook taught me never to accept another.’

‘Why would you want to do this? Why did you change your mind?’

‘I need someone to help me.’

The idea of being his apprentice, at his beck and call, did not appeal to me in the slightest. When I was recovering in the hospital after my imprisonment. I had vowed to myself that no one would ever control my life again.

‘For how long will you teach me?’ I asked.

‘Until the monsoon.’

The rainy season, I calculated, would return in six or seven months’ time. I walked slowly around the room considering his proposal. I was unemployed, but I had saved enough money not to have to work for a while. And I had the time. Aritomo’s offer was the only way I could give my sister a Japanese garden. It was only for six months, I told myself. I had endured worse. I stopped moving and looked at him. ‘Until the monsoon.’

‘Taking on an apprentice, especially a woman, is not a small matter,’ he raised a warning finger. ‘The obligations imposed on me are heavy.’

‘I’m aware that it won’t be a weekend hobby.’

Frowning, he went to a shelf and pulled out a book. ‘This will help you understand what I am doing.’

The thin volume was bound in a grey cloth cover, its title printed in English beneath a line of Japanese calligraphy. ‘
Sakuteiki,
’ I said.

‘The oldest collection of writings on Japanese gardening. The original scrolls were written in the eleventh century.’

‘But garden designers didn’t exist at that time,’ I said. Aritomo’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Yun Hong told me,’ I added. ‘One of her gardening books mentioned it, I remember.’

‘She was right. Tachibana Toshitsuna, the man who compiled
Sakuteiki,
was a member of the court nobility. He was said to be highly skilled with trees and plants.’

‘My Japanese isn’t good enough to read it.’

‘That copy in your hands is a version I translated into English and published years ago. It is yours. Now, to your lessons,’ he cut me short as I started to thank him. ‘In your first month, you will be working at the various sites of the garden still under renovation. We will start at half past seven. The work will end at half-past four, five, even later if we have to. You will have an hour’s rest for lunch at one o’clock. We work Mondays to Fridays. You will come in on weekends if I ask you to.’

I had known that it would not be easy to convince him to design and create a garden for me. But now I realised that the hardest part was about to begin. All of a sudden I felt unsure of myself and of what I had agreed to.

‘The girl who had once walked in the gardens of Kyoto with her sister,’ Aritomo said, peering into my eyes as though searching for a pebble he had dropped into the bottom of a pond, ‘that girl, is she still there?’

It was some time before I could speak. Even then my voice sounded small and dry to me.

‘So much has happened to her.’

His gaze did not shift away from my eyes. ‘She is there,’ he said, answering his own question. ‘Deep inside, she is still there.’

Sunrise was still an hour away, but I could feel it coming as I lay in my bed, feel the light curving around the earth. In the internment camp I had dreaded its arrival; it meant another day of unpredictable cruelties. As a prisoner, I had been afraid to open my eyes in the morning; now, when I was no longer in the camp, now when I was free, I was frightened of closing my eyes when I went to sleep at night, fearful of the dreams that were waiting for me.

Reading Aritomo’s translation of
Sakuteiki
through the night, I remembered some of the fundamentals of Japanese gardening that Yun Hong had told me. Aritomo’s commentary on the origins of gardening in Japan made me realise that my knowledge of it was only the thin rakings of the topsoil.

The practice of designing gardens had originated in the temples of China, where the work was done by monks. Gardens were created to approximate the idea of a paradise in the afterlife.

Mount Sumeru, the centre of the Buddhist universe, was referred to more than once in
Sakuteiki
and I began to appreciate why so many of the gardens I had seen in Japan had a distinctive rock formation as their central feature. Mountains loomed large in the geographical and emotional landscapes of Japan and, over the centuries, their presence had permeated into its poetry, folklore and literature.

Perhaps that was the reason Aritomo had come to the mountains here, I thought. Perhaps it was why he had made his home among the clouds.

The earliest reference to designing gardens in Japan had been recorded in the Heian Period, about a thousand years ago, which had emphasised
mono no aware,
the sensitivity to the sublime, and was marked by an obsession with all aspects of Chinese culture. The gardens created in this period, none of which still existed, had been designed to replicate the extensive pleasure gardens of the Chinese aristocrats living across the Sea of Japan. They had been built around lakes to facilitate boating activities, literary parties and poetry competitions, occasions when songs were sung and words were floated on water.

In time, the influence of China was eroded by the aesthetics of the subsequent Muromachi, Momoyama and Edo eras, when Japanese gardeners established their own principles of composition and construction. The designs of gardens in Japan were no longer influenced by the fashions of the antique continent across the sea, but by the landscapes of Japan’s own countryside. The growth of Zen Buddhism steered the move towards a stricter asceticism, the excesses of the previous eras raked away as monks reflected on their faith by creating less cluttered gardens, paring down their designs almost to the point of emptiness.

I put the book down and closed my eyes. Emptiness: it appealed to me, the possibility of ridding myself of everything I had seen and heard and lived through.

Earlier that evening before going to bed, I had informed Magnus that I would not be leaving Cameron Highlands. He was delighted, but his lips pressed together when I told him that I was looking to lease a bungalow in the area. ‘You can’t live alone,’ he said.

‘It’s not safe, Yun Ling,’ Emily said from her armchair on the other side of the living room, looking up from the novel she was reading.

‘The hills are crawling with CTs,’ Magnus said, his voice rising. ‘Look what they did to those young Semai!’

‘I lived on my own in KL,’ I said. As a prisoner, I had been surrounded by hundreds of people; now, I protected my privacy. ‘And anyway,’ I pointed out, ‘Frederik has his own bungalow.’

‘He’s a
man
, Yun Ling, and a soldier,’ Magnus said. ‘And he’s living inside the estate.

Look, I’ve already told you – you’re welcome to stay with us for as long as you like.’

‘It’s not fair to impose on you.’

He glanced at Emily before turning to me again. His chest rose and fell as he took in a long breath and let it out. ‘We’ve got a few vacant bungalows in the estate. My assistant managers used to stay there. I’ll speak to Harper, see which bungalow’s suitable for you.’

‘I’m not fussy, but it has to be near to Yugiri. And I insist on paying you rent.’

‘In return,’ Emily said, ‘you must have dinner with us – once a week, at the very least. I don’t want you to hide yourself away.’

‘She’s right,’ Magnus said. ‘And another thing: I’ll get a worker to escort you to Yugiri every morning. And he’ll walk you home when you’ve finished in the evening.’

‘Pour me a glass of wine and we’ll drink to that.’ I was glad of his offer of the guard. I
had
been worried about having to walk to Yugiri in the half-light of dawn.

While he uncorked a bottle of wine, I went around the living room, admiring the fever trees in the Pierneef lithographs. At the end of the row was a woodblock print of a leaf. Peering at it, I discovered Majuba House concealed in the lines of the leaf.