The Garden of Evening Mists (18 page)

‘I’ll get one of my boys to send it over to Yugiri.’ He hesitates. ‘I spoke to some friends in Singapore and London. And Cape Town,’ he says. ‘I’ll have some names for you soon.’

I stare at him, wondering what he is talking about.

‘Specialists,’ he explains. ‘Neurosurgeons.’

‘You think I wouldn’t have known how to do that myself?’ My voice is loud in the stillness. ‘I don’t need any more experts to tell me what I already know. So stop doing whatever you think you’re doing for me. Just stop it.’

His eyes cool into stone. ‘Anyone ever tell you what a hard-arsed bitch you are?’

‘Many have thought it, I’m sure, but you’re the first man who’s had the balls to say it to my face,’ I reply. ‘I’ve seen all the experts I want to. Endured all their tests, their prodding. No more, Frederik. No more.’

‘You can’t just ignore –’ his hand rises and dies in the air.

‘Primary Progressive Aphasia. Caused by a demyelinating disease of my nervous system,’ I say. I have never spoken the name aloud to anyone else, except to the doctors who diagnosed me. A superstitious fear numbs me, the fear that the illness will now hasten its spread over me, bring me to the stage where I will not be able to speak its name coherently. That will be its goal, its victory, when I can no longer even curse it by its name.

‘I once read something about Borges,’ I say. ‘He was blind and very old, spending his last days in Geneva. He told someone, “I don’t want to die in a language I cannot understand.”’ I laugh bitterly. ‘That is what will happen to me.’

‘See a few more doctors. Get more tests done.’

‘The last time I stayed in a hospital was when the war ended,’ I say, keeping my voice level. ‘I’ll never put myself inside another one again. Never.’

‘You have anyone looking after you in KL? A live-in carer? A nurse?’

‘No.’

‘You can’t live alone,’ Frederik says.

‘Magnus said that to me once, you know.’ The memory makes me smile, yet it also saddens me. ‘I’ve lived on my own for most of my life. It’s too late for me to change my ways.’ I close my eyes for a moment. ‘While I’m here, I think I ought to restore the garden to the way it used to look, when Aritomo was alive.’ The idea came to me when I was looking at his print earlier in the evening.

‘You can’t do it by yourself. Especially now.’

‘That woman who’s doing your garden – what’s her name? She can help me.’

‘Vimalya?’ He makes a sound that is somewhere between a snort and a laugh. ‘Restoring a garden like Yugiri would go against all her principles.’

‘Speak to her, Frederik.’

‘The garden’s the last thing you should be worrying about, if you ask me.’

‘I have to do this now. Soon Yugiri will be the only thing that will still be able to speak to me.’

‘Oh, Yun Ling... ’ he says softly.

The music drifts through the house, a whisper from an older time. The melody is familiar but I cannot place it. I look at Frederik from the edge of my eye, wondering if I am the only one who is hearing it.

‘She listens to it every night, before she sleeps,’ he says, as though he knows what I am thinking. ‘Built up an extensive record collection of the same piece of music too, with different pianists – Gulda, Argerich, Zimerman, Ashkenazy, Pollini. Whenever I’m overseas I look for another version for her. But she only listens to the Larghetto. It’s never changed in all these years. Only the Larghetto.’

The loose skin of his neck pulls tight as he offers his face to the lights in the ceiling. ‘It’s the Yggdrasil Quartet in support again tonight,’ he says after a while. ‘I found it in Singapore some months ago. She’s been playing it very often.’

‘Yggdrasil? What’s that?’

‘It’s from the Norse myth.’

‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘Yggdrasil is the Tree of Life,’ he says. ‘Its branches cover the world and stretch up to the sky. But it has only three roots. One is submerged in the waters of the Pool of Knowledge.

Another in fire. The last root is being devoured by a terrible creature. When two of its roots have been consumed by fire and beast, the tree will fall, and eternal darkness will spread across the world.’

‘So the Tree of Life is already doomed from the moment it is planted.’

Bringing his gaze to me, he says, quietly, ‘But it hasn’t fallen yet.’

I lean back into my chair, close my eyes and listen to the Larghetto. The piano is accompanied only by the quartet and the music has the bleak purity of a set of stones lying on the bed of a stream, a stream that dried up a long time ago.

The Art of Setting Stones was different from what I had thought it would be. I had walked through the gardens in Kyoto with Yun Hong when I was fifteen, but I had had no inkling of the amount of work required to construct and maintain them. And neither had Yun Hong, I suspected, feeling disloyal the instant the thought entered my head.

Aritomo kept me running about, and at first I suspected it was because he wanted me to fail, to give up in frustration and leave Yugiri. But I never saw any sign of resentment in him once he had taken me on as his apprentice. The work was exhausting but I began to enjoy it. The tools he used were old and specialised. I had to memorise their names and learn to clean and care for them. I thumbed the beads of their names in an endless loop as I went about my work:
Kakezuchi. Nata. Kibasami. Shachi. Tebasami
. Mallet. Hatchet. Hedge-trimming shears.

Windlass. Pruning shears.
Kakezuchi. Nata. Kibasami. Shachi. Tebasami
. The loop lengthened with each passing day, as more and more beads were added to it.

Some days if I was early, I would watch Aritomo at archery practice, making sure to stand outside his line of sight. A sense of calm entered as I observed his slow, deliberate movements.

In addition to carrying out the tasks Aritomo assigned me, I was required to interpret his instructions to the workers. Except for Kannadasan, they were all disinterested gardeners. From my first day I sensed Romesh would be the one to cause trouble. He was in his thirties with small, hard lumps of muscle on his body. When he began to turn up later and later for work, reeking of toddy fumes, Aritomo asked me to inform him not to bother coming anymore.

Romesh showed up at Yugiri the day after I conveyed Aritomo’s message to him. He stood outside the house and began shouting. For once he was not drunk. The rest of us were working nearby and stopped to watch, edging closer to get a better view.

‘Come out, you Jap sister-fucker!’ Romesh screamed in Malay, shifting back and forth on his feet. ‘I want my money! Come out! Come out!’

Aritomo emerged at the front door a moment later, the magazine he had been reading still in his hand. ‘What is he so upset about?’ he asked me.

‘He wants you to pay him.’

‘Is that all he said? Well, he
has
been paid.’

‘Not in full,’ I interpreted Romesh’s reply for Aritomo.

‘It would not be fair to the others if I paid him in full, would it? He has not done as much work,’ Aritomo said, twisting his magazine into a tube

Romesh snatched the
parang
from Kannadasan’s hand before I had finished translating.

Too shocked to move – to think – I watched as he swung the machete towards the side of Aritomo’s neck. Instead of backing away, Aritomo slid
into
the attack in a smooth movement and jabbed the end of his rolled-up magazine into the worker’s windpipe. Romesh choked, making gurgling sounds, his hand scrabbling at his throat. Tightening the magazine with a quick twist and holding it like a chisel, Aritomo stabbed at a point on Romesh’s wrist. The man’s fingers went dead, the
parang
dropping to the ground. Still struggling for air, Romesh swung a punch at Aritomo with his other hand. Aritomo deflected it, turning it into a wrist lock and forcing Romesh to his knees. Romesh screamed in pain.

‘I will break this as easily as a twig,’ Aritomo said, his face close to Romesh’s. There was no need for me to translate. Romesh’s body sagged. Aritomo released his lock on the man’s wrist and carefully backed away.

Time resumed. The wind moved again. The fight had lasted ten, perhaps fifteen seconds, but it felt much longer. The workers rushed forward to help Romesh up. He pushed them away, crawling off before staggering to his feet. He walked unsteadily out of the garden, rubbing his wrist. He did not look back.

I turned around to say something to Aritomo – although I had no idea what – only to discover that he had already returned inside. I picked up the
parang
in the grass and gave it back to Kannadasan.

* * *

Leaving Yugiri that evening, I waved to Ah Cheong as he waited outside the house for Aritomo to appear. The servant held the gardener’s walking stick in his hand, his last duty for the day before he cycled home to Tanah Rata.

I chose a track that followed the hemline of the jungle before curving back to my bungalow. I was in no hurry to return home. In spite of my fatigue, I still had problems falling asleep, sometimes lying awake in my bed until the early hours of dawn. There were so many voices in the dark: the moans of the prisoners, the shouts of the guards, my sister’s crying.

Watching Aritomo fight off Romesh – even if it was to protect himself – had shaken me more badly than I had realised. There had been a cold, detached air to him when he was disarming Romesh, and I suspected he would have done more than break the man’s arm if he had not conceded defeat. There was so much about the Japanese gardener I did not know, could not even guess at.

The lights of the farmhouses and bungalows sprinkled themselves across the valleys.

Tea-pickers hurrying home waved to me. The tearful smell of woodsmoke from cooking fires fanned across the twilight, carrying with it the faint barking of dogs. In the camp we had looked forward to this moment of the day, when we were finally allowed to return to our huts, each one of us glancing around to see who had not survived, too numb to feel anything when we missed a friend or a familiar face.

The track divided in two. Instead of going straight home I took the path to Majuba House and called to the Gurkha to let me through the gate. Going around to the back of the house, I passed Mnemosyne and her twin-sister, then went down the steps to the lower terrace garden.

Magnus had left most of the chengal trees untouched when he cleared the jungle. The formal lines of the gardens were breached by the beds of the plants he had transported over from South Africa – cycads with sharp-edged leaves pushing out of the ground like the tops of oversized, prehistoric carrots; strelitzias and blue agapanthus; aloes with their menorahs of red flowers struggling in the unfamiliar terrain.

Rising from the centre of the lawn was a stone arch, plastered in white, a bell hanging from it. Magnus had told me it had once been rung to announce the end of the working day for the Javanese slaves on a vineyard in the Cape. Long after I had first seen it, this pale monolith still had the power to draw me towards it; I felt I had stumbled upon the last remnant of a forgotten civilisation. Passing beneath the arch now, I reached up on my toes to knock the lip of the bell, calling up a faint echo from its rusted muteness.

Emily was standing by an ornamental pond, her eyes closed. I kept quiet as she breathed in and lifted her right foot away from her left. She moved with such slowness that I felt I was watching time being stretched out, the world around us sucked in by her energy as she went through a series of motions, one flowing seamlessly into another, water pouring into water, air merging with air. She executed the moves with such grace and controlled power that she seemed to be gliding inside spheres of reduced gravity.

She returned to her original position a few moments later, her arms coming to rest against her hips. I called out to her softly and she spun around to face me, her hands rising into a protective movement. ‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘That was beautiful. It’s
taijichuan
isn’t it?’ I used to watch the old people doing it on the esplanade.’

Wariness receded from her face, but its stain remained there for a moment longer.

The light of the stars chilled the air. A bronze sculpture of a young girl knelt on a block of granite among the reeds at the edge of the pool. Her eyes had a cold, innocent wonder as she peered eternally into the water. Emily noticed me looking at it. ‘We had her cast after we buried our daughter here.’

‘I didn’t know you and Magnus had had a daughter.’

‘Petronella lived for only a few days after she was born.’ An old sorrow shaded Emily’s eyes as she contemplated the sculpture. ‘I never met your mother. Am I a lot like her?’

At that moment I understood why my father had never liked Magnus, and why Emily had been so wary of me. I felt sure she was not enquiring about the physical similarities between her and my mother. ‘You’re both very determined people,’ I said, picking my words with the same care I took when choosing the stones for Aritomo’s garden.

Emily looked satisfied – even happy – with my reply. ‘Magnus wanted to marry her, you know, but as the only daughter of the great Khaw family, she couldn’t see herself with a lowly
ang moh
planter.’

‘But you could.’ Emily, I recalled, came from a well-off family too, although not as prominent as my mother’s.

‘Living here made things a lot easier, I suppose,’ Emily said. ‘Camerons is a world by itself. I’m sure you’ve already realised that by now. There were quite a lot of mixed-raced couples here before the war. I used to think that we had all come here to get away from the disapproval of the world.’

‘How did you meet Magnus?’

‘Beng Geok, my cousin. She invited me for a tiger-hunt up at Penang Hill. Magnus was one of the guests,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t stop looking at him when Beng Geok introduced us. That eye-patch! I felt it hid something deep inside him. I wanted to find out what it was. I just had to.’

She smiled. ‘You know how he lost his eye?’

‘In the Boer War.’

She looked at me. ‘I’m sorry about your mother.’

I moved a few steps away, pretending to be interested in a bird alighting on the arch. ‘I’m sure you haven’t cooked dinner,’ Emily said. ‘Come and eat with me.’