The Garden of Evening Mists (26 page)

‘Why did you come here to see him?’ Tatsuji asks.

‘I asked him to design a garden for my sister,’ I reply, ‘but he turned down my commission.’

‘Yet he accepted you as his apprentice.’

‘He said he would teach me to make the garden myself. He needed an extra pair of hands to work the garden, and to interpret his instructions to his workers. That’s what he told me.’

‘You do not sound convinced.’

‘I’ve always had the feeling that... ’ I hesitate, afraid of sounding foolish. ‘I’ve always felt he had other reasons for wanting to teach me. But he never told me,’ I add. ‘And I never asked him.’ I stopped wondering about it years ago, but since coming back to Yugiri the question has been floating just beneath the surface of my mind, its shape refracted by the water of time.

‘You met him in the first week of October of 1951,’ Tatsuji says.

Again, the depth of his knowledge both impresses and disturbs me. ‘It was the day after the communists killed the High Commissioner.’

‘I am reading Mr Pretorius’s book about the Emergency:
The Red Jungle
. Fascinating – I never knew that there were Japanese soldiers fighting with the communists.’

We resume our walk. Tatsuji stops at every view, examining every stone lantern and statue, and it is nearly an hour later when our walk brings us back to the pavilion. Vimalya’s workers have swept the leaves and cleaned the area around it. The lotus pads they hauled out from the pond are piled to one side. A shoal of carp swims out to us, a tattered orange and white banner pulling through the murky water. In my head I hear the echo of my voice from a long time ago, reciting the lines from a poem.
I am the daughter of Earth and Water...

Tatsuji is looking at me, and I realise I was mumbling to myself. ‘How is the work on the
ukiyo-e
coming along?’ I ask.

‘I’ve almost finished examining them and writing up my notes,’ Tatsuji says. ‘Do you speak or read Japanese?’

‘
Nihon-go
? I used to. I learned it when I was in the camp.’ The memory comes to me of an abandoned squatter village a few miles outside Kuala Lumpur I once visited to take photographs for a war crimes hearing. The villagers had been taken away by the Japanese to a nearby field and made to dig their own graves before they were shot. Through the broken doors and windows of the houses I glimpsed tables and chairs, a rocking horse lying on its side, a doll on the floor. Pasted on a wall in front of a ransacked provision shop was a poster in English, exhorting the villagers to use the Japanese language. Someone had crossed out the word ‘
Nihon-go
’ in red and scrawled ‘British Come!’ beneath it.

Tatsuji is speaking, and I bring my mind back to the present. ‘The first piece of the
ukiyo-e
was made in early 1940, according to Aritomo’s notes on the back,’ he says.

‘That was the year he came to Malaya.’

‘To put his disgrace behind him, perhaps?’

‘Disgrace?’ I look at him sharply.

‘There are not many people still alive who would have known about it,’ Tatsuji says.

‘Aritomo-sensei had been commissioned to build a garden for a member of the Imperial family–’

‘But he resigned. He told me so. He wasn’t willing to sacrifice his vision to accommodate the client’s needs.’

‘Is that what he told you?’

‘What happened exactly, Tatsuji?’

‘There were arguments. They turned vicious. He lost the commission before the work was even a third of the way completed. To make things worse, the Emperor sacked him.

Everyone heard about it. It was a tremendous loss of face for him. From that moment on, he could no longer call himself the Emperor’s gardener.’

‘He never told me that,’ I say, quietly.

‘In the last few years I have spoken to the few people still living who knew him... ’ He looks out over the water, to the lotus flowers nodding in the breeze.

‘What is it that you’re trying to say?’ He reminds me of some of the lawyers who cannot get straight to the point.

‘I think,’ he says, scratching at the peeling wood of the railing, ‘Aritomo-sensei played a small but important role in the war.’

A breeze disturbs the wind chime hanging beneath the eaves. It sounds brittle and out of tune. The rods, I notice, are cancerous with rust.

‘He protected a lot of people from the Kempeitai,’ I say. ‘He kept a lot of men and boys from being taken to the Burma Railway.’

‘I believe he was working for the Emperor when the Imperial Army attacked Malaya.’

‘You’ve just told me that the Emperor had sacked him.’ I realise that I must sound like I’m back in the courtroom, picking up on some inconsistency in a witness statement.

‘I have often wondered if this was his chance to redeem himself, to repair the damage to his reputation. It certainly gave him a strong reason to leave Japan.’

‘To do what? You think he was a spy?’ I give the historian a sceptical look. ‘I’ll admit that the possibility had occurred to me shortly after Aritomo went missing, but I dismissed it.’

‘People think he went missing only once in his life, but I disagree,’ Tatsuji says. ‘He did it twice. The first time was when he left Japan before the Pacific War started. No one knew where he went or what he did from that moment onwards, until he showed up in these mountains.’

‘Look, everyone knows now that there were Japanese spies everywhere in Malaya years before the war, working as tailors and photographers and running little businesses. But they were living in
towns
, Tatsuji,’ I say, ‘in places that had some strategic importance to your army.

Aritomo was here.
Here
.’ I rap my knuckles on the wooden railing. ‘He had hidden himself away in his garden. And, anyway,’ I add, ‘if he was still working for your country, why did he remain in Malaya, long after the war ended? Why did he never return home?’

Tatsuji is silent, the intent look in his eyes telling me he is studying my words from various angles.

‘What did you do in the war, Tatsuji?’

There is a moment’s hesitation. ‘I was in South East Asia.’

‘Where in South East Asia?’

He turns his gaze to the heron picking its way between the lotus pads. ‘Malaya.’

‘In the army?’ My voice hardens. ‘Or the Kempeitai?’

‘I was in the Imperial Navy’s air wing. I was a pilot.’ He leans slightly away from me, and I notice how rigidly he contains himself. ‘When the air raids over Tokyo began, my father moved to his villa in the countryside,’ he says. ‘I was still in the pilots’ training academy. I was an only child. My mother had died when I was a boy. I visited my father whenever I could get a few days’ leave.’

He closes his eyes and opens them again a moment later. ‘There was a labour camp a few miles away from our villa. Prisoners of war had been shipped from South East Asia to work in the coal mines outside the town. Every time some of them escaped, the men in the village would form search parties. One weekend when I was visiting my father, I saw them with their hunting dogs and their sticks and farming tools. They made wagers as to who would be the first to find the escaped prisoners. “Rabbit hunting”, they called it. When they were recaptured, the prisoners were taken to the square outside the village hall and beaten.’ He stops, then says: ‘Once I saw a group of boys club a prisoner to death.’

For a long time neither of us speaks. He turns to me and gives me a bow so deep I think he is going to topple over. Straightening up again, he says, ‘I am sorry, for what we did to you. I am deeply sorry.’

‘Your apology is meaningless,’ I say, taking a step back from him. ‘It’s worth nothing to me.’

His shoulders stiffen. I expect him to walk away from the pavilion. But he stands there, not moving.

‘We had no idea what my country did,’ he says. ‘We did not know about the massacres or the death camps, the medical experiments carried out on living prisoners, the women forced to serve in army brothels. When I returned home after the war, I found out everything I could about what we had done. That’s when I became interested in our crimes. I wanted to fill in the silence that was stifling every family of my generation.’

The chill in my bones leaches into my bloodstream; I restrain myself from rubbing my arms. Something he mentioned earlier is troubling me. ‘Those boys in the village,’ I say, plumbing the depths of his eyes, ‘you were with them when they punished the prisoners, weren’t you? You took part in the beatings.’

Tatsuji turns his back to me. His voice comes faintly over his shoulder a moment later.

‘Rabbit hunting.’

It begins to rain softly, raising goose-pimples on the pond’s skin. In the branches above the pavilion, a bird keeps repeating an ascending three-note cry. I want to be angry with Tatsuji. I want to ask him to leave Yugiri and never come back here again. To my surprise, I feel only sorrow for him.

Rain had prevented the clay on the pond’s bed from drying out properly, but then one morning, Aritomo announced that it was time to fill it.

We spread a final layer of pebbles and sand over the clay, the bed dipping towards the six standing stones we had set down in the centre. A week before we had diverted the stream into a catchment area beside the pond. Using a shovel I broke open the wall of the low dyke. Water flooded into the pond, gathering up the puddles already waiting there. As the swirls and ripples died away, a fragment of the sky was slowly recreated on earth, the clouds captured in water.

‘The level of the water must be just right,’ Aritomo said. ‘Too low or too high, and it will affect how the pavilion looks. It will not be in harmony with the height of the shrubs planted around the pond, or the trees behind the shrubs, or even the mountains.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

Aritomo’s gaze swept over the pond. ‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘I want you to listen to the garden. Breathe it in. Cut your mind from its constant noise.’

I obeyed him. Beneath my eyelids the captured light throbbed and gradually faded away.

The sounds of the water filling the pond quietened. I listened to the wind and imagined it passing from tree to tree, from leaf to leaf. In my mind I saw the wings of a bird stirring the air. I watched leaves spiralling from the highest branches to the mossy ground. I smelled the scents of the garden: a lily, newly opened; ferns heavy with dew; the bark of a tree crumbling beneath the voracious assault of termites, the smell powdery with an undertone of dampness and rot. Time did not exist; I had no idea of how many minutes had passed. And what was time but merely a wind that never stopped?

‘When you open your eyes again,’ Aritomo’s voice seemed to come from far away, ‘look at the world around you.’

My eyes skimmed over the water to the camellia hedges; to the trees rising to the mountains, the mountains entering the folds of clouds. I never allowed my gaze to rest too long on any particular object, but to see all things. In that one instant I understood what he wanted from me, what I would need to comprehend to be the gardener he had spent his lifetime becoming. For the first time I felt I was inside a living, three-dimensional painting. My thoughts took shape with difficulty, expressing only the thinnest layers of what my instincts had grasped and then let slip. A sigh, both of contentment and of sorrow, drained out from deep within me.

* * *

I checked the water level daily. When it was deep enough, we put in lotuses and planted reeds along the edge. Aritomo also stocked it with koi from a breeder in Ipoh. About a week after we started filling the pond, he ordered me to bring out the coil of copper wire from the tool shed. I carted it in a wheelbarrow and set it down by the pond. Using a pair of wire-cutters, he snipped the copper into short lengths and showed me how to form them into fist-sized balls, before leaving me to it.

‘What are they for?’ I asked when he returned and I had about forty of them in a pile.

They looked like the rattan
sepak takraw
balls played with in every kampong and school yard.

He picked one up and flung it far out into the water. It sank immediately, frightening the fish. ‘The copper stops the growth of algae.’

We circled the pond, throwing in the copper balls. We had almost finished when he stopped and lifted his face to the cloudless sky. He silenced me with a finger just as I was about to speak. I followed his gaze, but saw nothing at first. Then, far off in the sky, a bird peeled itself from the sheet of bright sunlight and descended rapidly, spiralling down closer and closer to earth until I could make out a heron, its plumage a smoky grey-blue. Drawing a halo over the pond, it dropped to skim across the water, racing with its own image, flying so low that I thought its reflection would break free of the surface.

Sweeping up its wings, it landed in the shallows, sending ripples radiating across the pond.

‘
Aosagi
,’ Aritomo said, a note of wonder in his voice. ‘I have never seen it here before.’

‘Where do you think it’s come from?’

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps from as far away as the steppes of Mongolia.’

‘Perhaps even Japan?’

He nodded slowly, almost to himself. ‘Yes, perhaps.’

* * *

Before going home that evening, I stopped at his house, entering through the back door. Ah Cheong was on his way out to his bicycle, and he smiled. He had been friendlier towards me ever since I helped his brother to surrender, occasionally even bringing me a flask of water when I was working on my own in the garden.

‘Kwai Hoon sent me this,’ he said, giving me a cutting from the
Straits Times
. It was over a fortnight old. ‘What does it say?’

A photograph accompanying the news article showed the bodies of the CTs the police had shot, laid out in a row in a jungle clearing in front of a helicopter. Kwai Hoon had refused to reveal the sum of the reward he had received when the journalist interviewed him, but the former political commissar of the Malayan Communist Party said that he would use the money to open a restaurant.

‘You tell your brother I expect to eat for free at his restaurant for the rest of my life,’ I added when I had read it to him. ‘And I only eat abalone and lobster and sharks’ fin.’