The Garden of Evening Mists (25 page)

Unfolding a letter from an envelope, I gradually become aware that the paper in my hand is filled with unrecognisable scribbles. The world becomes so quiet that I seem to be able to hear the flow of my bloodstream. After a while – perhaps no longer than a minute or two – I pick up another sheet of paper. My hands are trembling. The writing on it is also illegible. Lifting my gaze to a pile of books on the desk, I find the titles on their spines to be indecipherable. I reach for a writing pad and write something on it, but my hand is shaking too much. I breathe in and out a few times until I feel I am ready, and then I print out my name slowly. Even though my hand’s memory tells me I am writing it correctly, what appears on the paper is a line of hieroglyphs.

A surge of panic sends me out of the study. The passageways confuse me; I feel I am trapped in a maze. Tatsuji calls out to me as I rush past him. Hearing the faint sound of knocking, I follow it to the back of the house. Ah Cheong is cutting vegetables in the kitchen, his cleaver beating out a rhythm on the thick chopping board. He looks up, startled by my appearance. He puts down his cleaver, wipes his hands on a towel and brings me a glass of water. Tatsuji has followed me into the kitchen and is staring at me. I take the glass from Ah Cheong, relieved to see that the trembling in my hand is less obvious now. I drink the water slowly, and when I finish I realise I am still holding something in my hand. I open my fingers to find a wrinkled piece of paper. Smoothing it out, I see my name, looking just a bit wobbly and uncertain, but recognisable.

I fold up the paper and instruct Ah Cheong to put up a sign at the entrance to discourage those who show up hoping to be allowed in. But I know that they will still come.

* * *

The Smokehouse Hotel appears not to have changed much in the last forty years. The purple bougainvillaea is still there, larger now, flowering up the mock-Tudor walls all the way to the roof. The prints of fox-hunting scenes still hang inside. The lobby is busy with tourists. As is my habit, I am early. A waiter shows me to a table on the rose garden terrace. Elderly Europeans sit in the sun, enjoying their tea and scones. The air is powdered with the fragrance of roses.

The tranquillity of my surroundings fails to calm me. I am still unsettled,
frightened
if I am to be honest – and I must be, I have to be – by what happened this morning. The neurosurgeons have warned me that these episodes will start occurring more and more frequently, their durations lengthening every time. They could not find the reason for this rapid degeneration of my brain. I do not have a brain tumour; I am not suffering from dementia nor have I been afflicted by a stroke. ‘You’re one of the luckier ones,’ the last of the many neurosurgeons I consulted had said to me. ‘There are cases where the aphasia is immediate and total.’

Emily arrives a few minutes later, helped into her chair by her driver, who looks almost as old as she is. I offered to pick her up from Majuba House when she invited me for tea, but she prefers to have her own man drive her. After what happened this morning, I am glad that she refused my offer. Driving here from Yugiri, I was fearful that the road signs would suddenly become incomprehensible to me.

‘You’re still doing
taiji
,’ I say. ‘I can tell – you walk like someone ten years younger.’

She dismisses her driver and smiles. ‘I try to do a short session every morning-
lah
. I used to teach once a week, but I’m too old to do it now.’

Our tea arrives a few minutes later. Emily bites into a scone and I look away as strawberry jam bloodies the corner of her lips. She wipes her mouth, chews slowly and swallows. ‘How’s your family?’

She has already asked me this at our dinner in Majuba House a few nights ago. ‘My father died a year after
Merdeka
. Hock – my elder brother – moved to Australia with his family.

He was killed in a car accident a few years ago. I’m not close to his wife and sons.’

An old Chinese couple being shown to their table waves to Emily. ‘They were in my
taiji
class,’ she says, leaning closer to the table. ‘You should go to the class. There’s a new teacher.

She’s very good – I taught her myself.’

‘It’s a bit too late for me.’

She looks into my eyes. ‘You’re sick, aren’t you?’

I put down my knife on the plate, silently cursing Frederik’s loose lips.

‘I’m not blind-
lah
,’ Emily goes on. ‘Coming back here so suddenly, and after all these years, when you’ve never visited us.’ She leans forward, her neck stretching out. ‘So, what is it?

Cancer? Don’t look so angry-
lah
– old people are allowed to be tactless. Otherwise where’s the fun in growing old?’

I point to my head with a finger. I am in no mood to give her the details of my condition; it seems easier to let her think what she wants.

She touches my wrist lightly. ‘We might be suffering from different illnesses, but it means the same thing in the end, doesn’t it? Our memories are dying.’ We do not speak for a few moments. Then she says, ‘At my age, you know what I wish for? That I should die while I can still remember who I am, who I used to be.’

‘Most people would just ask for a peaceful, painless death. Preferably going to sleep and never waking up again.’

‘We’re not
most people
,’ she retorts. ‘At least I hope
I’m
not.’ She takes a small bite of her scone. ‘Does Frederik know?’

‘I’ve told him.’ I make a mental apology to Frederik for questioning his discretion earlier.

‘If there’s anything we can do, you must let us know.’ She waits for me to agree, and then says, ‘Did you ever find out where your sister was buried?’

‘I put up a soul tablet for her in the Kuan Yin temple in Penang.’

‘That’s good enough.’

‘The tablet is nothing more than a piece of wood.’

‘You never made that garden for her?’

‘I tried. But I was never happy with the results. I wasn’t good enough to do it on my own.’

Emily takes another scone from the dish. ‘You could have hired somebody from Japan.’

‘Building a garden for Yun Hong was not going to ease my pain, nor would anything that I did. I realised that.’

‘Remember when you came to stay with us, all those years ago?’ She smiles. ‘There was so much anger in you. Of course you had good reasons. But I still see it in you, that anger. Oh, you’ve hidden it well. And maybe it’s not the same as it used to be. Not as strong. But it’s there.’

Later, as we are leaving the Smokehouse, she stops me. ‘
Aiyah
, I almost forgot – one of my friends is the head nun in a temple. She wants to see you.’

‘See me, or see the garden?’ I say.

‘She wants to talk to you about Aritomo.’

‘In relation to?’

‘How should I know? Ask her yourself-
lah
.’

I consider it for a moment. ‘Fine. Tell her to come.’

* * *

Returning to Yugiri an hour later, I find Tatsuji at the
katsunigi-ishi
, the stone where guests are required to remove their shoes before entering the house. He is tying his shoelaces, and he looks up when he senses my presence. ‘I was just going back to my hotel. I need to talk to you about the
ukiyo-e
.’

‘What is that book you’re always reading?’

Straightening up, he hesitates, then removes the book from the pocket of his linen jacket and gives it to me. I look at an anthology of Yeats’s poems, surprised.

‘You were expecting something else?’ he asks.

I shrug and return the book to him.

‘A friend read me one of Yeats’s poems when I was a young man,’ he says. The sense of loss in his voice is old, as though it has been a part of him for most of his life, and for some reason I am struck by its similarity to my own.

‘Come with me,’ I say.

His face brightens when he realises I am taking him into the garden. The leaves on the maple by the house are rusting, the branches pushing out from behind the thinning foliage. I lead him deeper into the trees, following the path to the water wheel. Red bromeliads straining to 169

bloom spike the slope. Since coming back to Yugiri I have not gone to look at the water wheel. I am relieved to see it is still there. But it no longer turns, no longer grinds the water with the patience of a monk. Lichen daubs the sides of the wheel and two of its paddles are missing. The waterfall is now a trickle, and the pool is choked with algae and drowned leaves and broken off branches.

If Tatsuji is appalled by the state of neglect, he does not show it. ‘The Emperor’s gift,’ he announces. From the rigid way he holds himself I suspect he would have bowed to it if I were not present. ‘How many turns has this wheel made since it was built, I wonder?’

‘As many as the earth has made around the sun,’ I say, humouring him.

‘Emperors and gardeners.’ Tatsuji shakes his head. ‘Do you know what happened to the Chinese emperor after the communists took over? They rehabilitated him. He ended his days as a gardener.’

The inscriptions beneath the remaining paddles are grouted with moss; the writing is fragmented, the prayers garbled and weakened, and I realise that a day will come when they will be silenced completely.

‘
Shobu
,’ Tatsuji says, pointing to the plants along the banks. He breaks off a leaf and holds it up. ‘They are a symbol of courage for us because they are shaped like swords.’ He crushes it and the burst of scent flings me back to the first time Aritomo brought me here. I take the broken leaf from Tatsuji and inhale deeply. I can see it all so clearly in my mind, that morning. I must remember to add it to what I have written down.

‘I was chatting to some hikers in the hotel lobby this morning,’ Tatsuji says. ‘They were waiting for their guide to show them the trail Aritomo had taken on that last day.’

‘You’ll see a lot more of them in the coming days,’ I say. ‘In a month’s time it’ll be thirty-four years to the day Aritomo got lost in the jungle. And there’ll be tourists hoping to see the garden.’

The search for Aritomo was only reported as a minor item in the newspapers, but it soon generated sufficient interest for journalists from Singapore, Australia and Japan to flock to the highlands. The reporters were followed closely by Buddhist and Taoist monks, Chinese and Indian mediums and travellers of the spirit world, all of them trying to convince me they knew where Aritomo had gone, into which ravine he had fallen, or who had abducted him. They had come from all over: Ipoh, Penang, Singapore – even from Bangkok and Sumatra – and all claimed to have knowledge of where Aritomo was or of what happened to him. Some were well-meaning but most were charlatans, hoping to collect the reward of ten thousand Straits Dollars I had posted. The police followed up on the more plausible leads, but with no success.

For years after his death, I continued to receive interview requests for me to talk about Aritomo. Then came the enquiries asking for permission to visit Yugiri. I turned away every one of them. Interest in Aritomo did not die off completely, but I was relieved when it waned over time. The periodic flashes of curiosity over the decades usually occurred during the reissues of his translation of
Sakuteiki
, or when one of his early
ukiyo-e
prints went on sale in an auction in Tokyo. Over the decades the story of his disappearance had obscured him, like mists blurring the outlines of a mountain range, transforming it into whatever shapes people wanted to see.

‘Since coming here I’ve discovered an entire cottage industry centred just on Aritomo-sensei,’ Tatsuji says, shaking his head, half in admiration, half in disbelief. ‘Walking tours and talks, beer mugs and books and postcards and maps.’

‘I wouldn’t waste any money on those books if I were you. They’re rubbish, every one of them. Written by people who never knew him.’

‘Some of the theories
are
quite credible,’ Tatsuji says.

‘Which?’ I throw a few of them at him: ‘The one which says he had been kidnapped by the communists? Or that a tiger had mauled and eaten him? Some even think that he was a spy and had been recalled home to Japan.’

‘If he did return to Japan, no one ever saw him.’

‘You know which theory was my favourite?’ I ask. ‘The story a
bomoh
– that’s a Malay witchdoctor – told me: that an aboriginal sorceress had fallen in love with Aritomo and had bewitched him to live with her in the jungle.’

‘I remember the morning when I read about Aritomo-sensei’s disappearance in the news,’

Tatsuji says. ‘That was the moment he became a real person to me, and not just a name. Strange, is it not, that a man should become real only when he vanishes?’

Elephant-ear ferns between the rocks flap gently, and I fancy for a moment that they are straining to eavesdrop on our conversation.

‘What do you think really happened to him?’ Tatsuji asks.

‘Look around you.’ My hand draws a circle in the air, throwing a lasso over the mountains. ‘Do you know how easy it is to lose your way in the jungle? Just one wrong turn and suddenly you wouldn’t know where you were.’ I point to a ridge behind us, a crack running up its side. ‘See that viewing tower jutting out there, among the trees? His favourite walk goes past that. You think you would be able to find your way out from the jungle if you went off the path there?’

‘Probably not.’

‘People get lost in the jungles up here. It happens quite often, although the papers don’t report it. And forty years ago the highlands weren’t as developed as they are today. This place was wilder then.’

Tatsuji’s eyes take in the hills in a long, slow sweep. Going to the edge of the slope, I tell him about the Taoist symbols Aritomo had etched with light and shadows on the lawn below. He shades his eyes with his hand and peers down. ‘I do not see them.’

‘Too much cloud-shadow,’ I reply.

But when we walk past the area later I realise it is not the clouds that have rubbed away the symbols but the grass growing wild. The boundary between positive and negative, male and female, darkness and light, has been lost. Like so many other features in Yugiri, the positive and negative elements created by Aritomo are based on illusion, visible only when the right conditions are present.