The Garden of Evening Mists (45 page)

‘The Japanese personnel were buried alive too, along with the prisoners,’ Tatsuji says.

‘The man I spoke to was one of the luckier ones – he had been blindfolded when he was brought to the camp. But all his life he was terrified, wondering if someone had made a mistake in letting him go.’

‘What has all this got to do with Aritomo?’

‘I was only interested in his
ukiyo-e
, but the more I found out about him, the more I think he played a role in Golden Lily. I have no evidence of this,’ he adds hurriedly, ‘just my own suspicions.’

‘He was a gardener, Tatsuji.’ I keep my voice firm so he will not realise how much his words have shaken me.

‘He might have come here to survey the topography. He had the necessary knowledge of landscaping and horticulture – remember, the locations had to be camouflaged or concealed. And who better than a master of
shakkei
to do it?’

‘But to be party to a thing like this... ’ My voice, even my strength, dwindles away.

‘We were heading into war, Judge Teoh. All of us had to play our part, to serve the Emperor.’

‘Even his friend, Tominaga Noburu?’

‘He was in charge of Golden Lily in South East Asia. Eyewitnesses I interviewed – old soldiers and military administrators – placed him in Malaya and Singapore in the years between 1938 and 1945.’

‘But Aritomo remained here – long after the war ended. He never went home.’

‘Have you forgotten what the situation in Malaya was like at that time?’ Tatsuji says.

‘According to what I have read in
The Red Jungle
, there was much lawlessness and unrest immediately after the surrender – communist guerrillas taking revenge on collaborators; Chinese and Malays killing each other. And British soldiers were coming back. Maybe Golden Lily thought it was not the right time to move the treasures, but someone had to be here to make sure they were not disturbed.’

‘So he stayed here, in his garden, waiting for things to settle down.’ I lay out the pieces in my head to see if I can discover a coherent pattern in the mosaic. ‘But then the communists started their war.’

‘If he was a part of Golden Lily, he would have known where the loot was hidden, at least in Malaya.’

The thought of the hordes of people that will inevitably come asking to speak to me again should it become known that Aritomo had been involved in something like this frightens me. ‘If he knew,’ I say firmly, ‘then he took that knowledge with him.’

‘It is not the sort of information he would have left lying around,’ concedes Tatsuji.

‘He didn’t tell me anything.’

Tatsuji laughs at me, rather unkindly. ‘A man of his upbringing, and with his background?’ he says. ‘He would have been obligated to carry out his duty properly. All the way to the end.’

* * *

The new teahouse at Majuba is at the summit of a steep hill and I am breathing hard when I arrive there after a long walk. It is a few minutes before lunchtime, but all the tables have already been taken by elderly tourists in water-repellent jackets and bulky hiking boots. Looking around the restaurant, I spot Frederik waving to me from the terrace outside.

‘You managed to get us the best table in the house,’ I remark, as he pulls a chair out for me.

‘It helps if you own the place,’ he replies. ‘I converted it from a bungalow a year ago. It used to be Geoff Harper’s. Remember him?’

Our table is at the end of a long, narrow terrace that extends over the valley like a pier, fenced in by chest-high plate glass that provides a vertiginous vista of the mountains and the tea-covered slopes. Wisteria froths down from the trellis overhead, sweetening the air. I close my eyes for a brief moment, going over again what Tatsuji told me about Golden Lily this morning.

On the face of it, it is a preposterous story – except that I know differently.

Frederik fills my cup with tea and slides it to me. ‘Something from our newest range.

We’re still testing it.’

Bringing the cup to my nose, I inhale the steam rising from it. I take a sip and hold the liquid in my mouth, allowing its flavour to bloom on my tongue. ‘I haven’t tasted any of Majuba’s teas in years.’

He looks insulted. ‘You don’t like them?’

‘It’s not that.’ I wonder how to explain it to him. ‘The tea grown here... it has its own distinct flavour... it brings back too many memories.’

‘Whenever I have to travel,’ Frederik says, ‘I always bring a box of my own tea with me.’

‘Magnus once told me about a temple in China he had visited –’

‘In Mount Li Wu,’ Frederik cuts in, a smile sprawling across his face. ‘I went there a few years ago. It’s all there, everything he ever told you – the monks picking the leaves at dawn, the special flavour of the tea. It’s still the most expensive tea in the world.’

Down in the valley, the brightly coloured headscarves of the tea-pickers are like the petals scattered over a lawn.

He indicates the people around us. ‘Quite a number of them are here for the anniversary of Aritomo’s death.’

‘I know. They’ve been pestering me. Some journalist wanted to film me for a documentary she’s doing on Aritomo. Another one tried to pin me down for an interview for a news channel.’

‘You should talk to them, tell them about Aritomo. You of all people knew him best.’

‘Did I?’

The food arrives and we eat it in silence. ‘Tatsuji’s finished working on the woodblock prints,’ I say when our plates have been removed. Slowly, working out the sequence of events even as I speak, I tell Frederik about Golden Lily. There is a long silence when I finish talking.

‘You think Aritomo was involved?’ he asks finally.

‘I don’t know. But after what Tatsuji told me, I’m sure that I was sent to one of Golden Lily’s slave-camps. A lot of things he said fit in with what I saw there.’

‘Did Aritomo know about the things the Japs did to you?’

‘I told him.’

‘But you never said anything to me.’ Inside his voice is an old hurt, still sharp after all these years. ‘I could never really understand why you left Yugiri.’

‘I couldn’t live here, Frederik. I couldn’t even bring myself to build the garden I wanted for my sister – everything about it would have reminded me of Aritomo. Law was the only thing I knew I was good at.’

‘You haven’t done too badly.’

‘Strange isn’t it? I never considered entering the judiciary when I returned to practice.

But I had the sort of credentials a newly independent nation was looking for – I’m not European and I had been so critical of our colonial masters, how they had sold us down the river.’

‘You’ve never recovered from being a prisoner.’

‘Do you know of anyone who has?’

‘I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.’

Behind Frederik, a hot-air balloon drifts into my sight, bright red and shaped like an inverted teardrop. Frederik follows my gaze, twisting around to look over his shoulder. ‘Some chap from KL brought it up here a week ago,’ he said. ‘He gives rides to tourists. I was told a popular route is the area around Yugiri.’

The balloon rotates slowly towards us. Wrapped around its side are the words MAJUBA TEA ESTATE and the estate’s logo, an outline of a Cape Dutch house. I groan with mock disgust when I see it.

‘Oh come on, it’s good advertising!’ Frederik says.

‘I’ll shoot it down if they dare fly over Yugiri.’

He laughs, causing several people around to look at us. ‘Remember that story about the Mid-Autumn Festival Emily used to tell every year?’ he says, wiping the tears from his eyes.

‘Hou Yi who shot down the suns with his bow and arrows? And his wife who swallowed the magic pill and became immortal?’

‘Poor, poor Hou Yi, yearning for the wife he had lost to the moon,’ I say. ‘He should have made himself forget her.’

‘Perhaps he couldn’t,’ replies Frederik. ‘Perhaps he didn’t want to.’

* * *

At five o’clock that evening I change into my walking clothes: a long-sleeved shirt, loose cotton slacks and hiking boots. Ah Cheong is already waiting at the front door. The housekeeper, having realised early on that I have taken up Aritomo’s habit of going for evening walks on the trails, never fails to appear with the walking stick for me whenever he hears me getting ready. I have never accepted the walking stick, but it has not deterred him from offering it to me every time.

There are thirteen official walking trails spreading out from the three villages in Cameron Highlands, varying in length and difficulty. There are also many more paths that do not appear on maps, known only to forest rangers and those who have spent their lives in the highlands. One of them winds past the edge of the property. It will take me less than an hour to complete the walk and, at this time of the year, I will be unlikely to come across anyone else.

The heaviness inside me lifts as I walk. Above my head, the overlapping leaves print their shadows on other leaves. The smell of mulch is softened by the fragrance of wild orchids.

Aerial roots sprout from the branches of banyan trees; some of the older roots have hardened into stalactites over the years to prop up the sagging branches. Except for the track beneath my feet, there are no other signs that anyone else has been here before me, and within minutes I feel myself being absorbed into the damp, decaying heart of the rainforest.

The path is steep and demanding. At a ridge looking down into the valleys, I stop to recover my breath. The old sense of injustice stings me again: I would have been a more robust woman if my health had not been damaged in the camp. When my neurosurgeon first informed me of the diagnosis, I asked him if it was caused by the deprivations I had suffered, a seed that had been sown forty years ago, slowly burrowing its poisoned roots deeper and deeper into my body. ‘We don’t know for sure,’ he said, ‘but it’s doubtful.’

A part of me cannot help but continue to wonder about it.
Aphasia
. Such a beautiful name, I think as I sit on the stump of a mahogany tree. It reminds me of a species of flower: Camellia perhaps. No: more like
Rafflesia,
attracting hordes of flies with the smell of rotting meat when it blooms.

My thoughts return to Tatsuji’s theories about Golden Lily. If he is correct and Tominaga Noburu was the head of Golden Lily in South East Asia, then I have no doubts that the camp I was sent to was part of it all. But where would that place Aritomo in the entire scheme of things?

Is Tatsuji right in thinking that Aritomo was sent here to lay the groundwork for Golden Lily’s plans?

A sudden fury against Aritomo grips me. My fingers claw into the sides of the mahogany trunk. The rage subsides after a moment.

I stand up and brush the dirt from the seat of my slacks. It is getting dark. In the low mists over the hills, an orange glow broods, as if the trees are on fire. Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly.

Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?

A garden is composed of a variety of clocks, Aritomo had once told me. Some of them run faster than the others, and some of them move slower than we can ever perceive. I only understood this fully long after I had been his apprentice. Every single plant and tree at Yugiri grew, flowered and died at its own rate. Yet there was also a feeling of timelessness wrapped around it. The trees from a colder world – the oaks, the maples and the cedars – had adjusted to the constant rains and mists, to the seasonless passing of time in the mountains. The turning of their colours was muted. Only the maple growing by the house remembered the changing seasons in the expanding circles of its memory; its leaves had turned completely red, flaking away from the branches to drift across the garden: I would often find the leaves plastered to the wet rocks on the banks of Usugumo Pond, like starfish stranded by the tide.

Whenever I left Yugiri to go into the village of Tanah Rata, I would be disorientated by how much time had passed. When I came to the Cameron Highlands, I had left the world behind, thinking it would only be for a short time, but one day it struck me that I had been apprenticed to Aritomo for over a year. I mentioned this to him.

‘It was Magnus who first told me the story of the Garden of Eden. I had great difficulty imagining it,’ he remarked. ‘A garden where nothing dies or decays, where no one grows old, and the seasons never change. How miserable.’

‘What’s so miserable about that?’

‘Think of the seasons as pieces of the finest, most translucent silk of different colours.

Individually, they are beautiful, but lay one on top of another, even if just along their edges, and something special is created. That narrow strip of time, when the start of one season overlaps the end of another, is like that.’

He was silent for a few moments. Then he asked, ‘What happened to the Garden of Eden after the man and woman were forced to leave? Did everything fall to ruin? The Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge? Or is it all still there, unchanged, waiting?’

I tried to recall what the nuns at my school had taught me. ‘I don’t know. It’s just a story.’

He looked at me. ‘When the First Man and First Woman were banished from their home, Time was also set loose upon the world.’

* * *

Kannadasan and his men appeared at Yugiri one morning, and I knew that the monsoon was over. There was much damage to clear up: tree branches had been amputated by storms; leaves and debris swept down from the mountains, clogging the stream and flooding its banks. I was happy to be able to channel my attention and energies into the garden again. Soon we were occupied with only the lesser tasks – cleaning up the paths, making slight adjustments to the alignments of rocks, trimming the branches, anything that Aritomo felt had been thrown out of harmony.

In the evenings he would collect his walking stick from Ah Cheong, and we would walk in the foothills behind the garden. I enjoyed those moments, when he showed me things I would have missed seeing on my own. ‘Nature is the best teacher,’ he said to me.