Chapter Fifteen
I paused in my tale; Michiko was staring out into a sky lit by a pale moon. It was past midnight and it had been over a week since I had answered the door and let her into my house. We had settled into an unstated routine, with me telling her more and more of my history every night after our meal had been consumed.
I took a sip of tea, watching her. She was quite beautiful, in the way only Japanese women can be—demure on the outside, yet with veins of steel within.
“Our boat ride down the river ...” she whispered. “To think that your parents once were there too, and that we saw the same sights as they did. It makes me feel as though the lights from the
hotaru
we witnessed were the same ones your parents had lain under, almost like the light of the stars which has been shining for millions of years, illuminating everything on its voyage, and which has only just now reached us.”
I had never thought of it before, but her observation made me feel that we had indeed been in the presence of the same source of radiance that had once brought comfort to my parents, and which a few nights ago also worked its wonder and imparted a similar, if weakened, sense of solace to me.
“Would you like to rest?” I asked softly.
She closed her eyes. When she opened them there was a liquid glitter in them. “I would like to hear more, but not tonight. I am tired.” I helped her to her feet and led her to her bedroom.
* * *
Although I thought I would not require much sleep, I woke up late the following morning. Michiko was already on the terrace when I went outside.
“Did you sleep well?” I asked, pouring her a cup of tea.
She shook her head, wincing as she stretched herself. I thought she had grown thinner since the day she came, and that worried me.
“The pills don’t work anymore, do they?”
The cup rattled in the saucer as she took it from my hand and she set her mouth. “I despise them, but some days the pain is so complete I have no alternative. Not even
zazen
helps.”
“You’ve seen all the doctors?”
“All the doctors and experts money and influence can summon,” she replied. “How did you find out? No one knows.”
“Your weight loss, the pills you take when you think no one can see. Your journey here to Penang. Little things,” I said. I wondered at the role I was now playing, that of a teller of tales to an old and ailing woman, taking her through one part of my past after another.
“Do not worry, I can last until you come to the end.”
“I’ll try to leave out more things,” I attempted a weak joke, but she shook her head.
“No, please do not do that. I wish to hear all of it. Promise me that,” she said, and I did.
I got up and said, “I’ll see you this evening?”
“Yes, I look forward to that.” She too rose, and we bowed.
“I was wondering ...” she said.
“Yes?” I stopped at the door and turned back to face her.
“I would like to see some of the other places you took Endo-san to in Penang. Do not worry, I will not insist on going to his little island. I see now it still hurts, after all this time.”
I agreed to her request. I had gone back to many of those places in the days after the war, when in the silences of my life I missed him. I had gone hoping the places would still retain an echo of his presence, and of his passage, but I had only met with emptiness. The echoes were louder in my head, confined within the universe of my mind.
Sitting behind my desk on Beach Street I wondered if, by telling Michiko about Endo-san, I could let the echoes in my mind expand beyond the boundaries of my memory, so that their strength would finally weaken and fade forever into silence. A part of me wished dearly for that, for him to finally leave me. But the part that would always love him balked at the possibility of such an irreplaceable loss. My grandfather’s words came to me so loudly that I turned involuntarily to look behind me, as though he were standing there.
Next to a parent, a teacher is the most powerful person in one’s life.
And Endo-san had been more than my parent, much more than my teacher.
“Mr. Hutton?” Adele asked.
I left the voice of my grandfather and returned to the present. “What is it?”
“Miss Penelope Cheah is here to see you. The reporter as well.”
“Oh yes, send Miss Cheah in first, please.”
After the war, I had frequently found myself driving past houses abandoned by their owners, many of whom had died in the war, either in the camps, or at sea when their fleeing ships had been sunk by the Japanese fighter planes. When peace returned, many of these properties were bought by companies that tore them down to build modern shops. A sense of loss overflowed within me each time another house, surely the only one of its kind in the world, was destroyed and turned to unwanted rubble.
“Well, why don’t you buy them?” Adele had said when I came into the office one morning, complaining bitterly of another demolition I had seen.
“And do what with them?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Restore them. Open them to the public or turn them into exclusive hotels.”
I stared at her until she became uncomfortable. “Forget it. It was a silly thought,” she said.
“No, it wasn’t. It’s a wonderful idea,” I said.
So I established the Hutton Heritage Trust and over the years I saved countless buildings from disappearing, from the shop-houses of Georgetown to the mansions along Northam Road. Many were restored using craftsmen from China and England. I tried to obtain materials as close to the originals as I could, sometimes even traveling all over the hinterland of China to look for the proper tiles or to seek out a craftsman who had been trained in the ancient ways. Some people collect stamps; I collected old houses.
Three years ago Towkay Yeap’s home, the house that the Manchu consul had built for one of his eight wives, came under the hammer. I never knew what happened to Kon’s father. Towkay Yeap seemed to have vanished after the war and his house became dilapidated, standing vacant until an Englishman tried to turn it into an art gallery. When the Englishman died the banks had moved in and I had to put in the highest bid ever recorded in Penang for a house. “I made many enemies at the auction,” I told Adele. “But I got it!”
I searched for an architect to organize the project for Towkay Yeap’s house, for the design of the property was one that my usual team was quite unused to. After reading an interview with Penelope Cheah in an architectural magazine I had contacted her and invited her to my office. She was small, Chinese, and in her thirties, her eyes bright and sharp, her mind, like her hands, full of rolled-up plans ready to be opened and made real.
She showed me what she had done for her own ancestral home in Leith Street, which had been similar to Towkay Yeap’s, and I liked it.
She and I had traveled to Stoke-on-Trent to search for floor tiles, to MacFarlane & Co.’s foundry in Glasgow to find an ironmonger who could replicate the original wrought-iron grilles, and even to the Hokkien province in southern China to hire a master craftsman to repair and recreate the broken roof tiles.
I had only one principle: every item had to be the original or as close to it as possible in this disposable age. For I always recalled my father’s question to me in the library when he had returned home from London, the one that I could not answer at that time: “What, among the creations of our modern world, do you think will still exist and have historical and aesthetic value five hundred years from now?”
Some days I shake my head when I think how many architects and consultants have resigned while working for the Trust. But Penelope Cheah, in addition to her architectural qualifications, had a love for the old colonial buildings of Penang. We shared that love, and it sustained her whenever I was impatient, demanding, and unreasonable.
Adele now showed her into my office, and her smile was as usual cheerful and indefatigable. She alone had lasted longer than any of the other architects.
“How’s progress?” I asked.
“It’s almost complete. And it’ll be the best restoration ever undertaken by the Trust. There’s talk that UNESCO may give us the top award for heritage conservation.”
“That’s wonderful. It’ll also be the last restoration I’ll ever do.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m growing old, and tired. I wanted to stop a long time ago, but this one—this one has special memories.”
“You’ve done so much to conserve the history of this island. It would be a terrible shame to stop,” she said.
“Lately I’ve been wondering, how much can one hold on to history?” I said. “I’ve been trying to stop time from going forward and perhaps that’s misguided and foolish.”
“Do you remember the first few times we went inside the house after you bought it?” she asked, her attempt to pull me away from my melancholic mood obvious.
“Yes. It was awful,” I answered, humoring her and touched by her concern.
A week after the paperwork for the sale was completed I went and stood outside the wooden gates of Towkay Yeap’s home. It was as though the years had never come and gone. The light was the same and, as I reached out my hand to touch the square wooden knob, I heard the cries of a hawker and the
tok tok
sound as he knocked on wooden clappers while pedaling his pushcart past the house, selling wonton noodles. The hawker went past me and his sounds faded away.
I went into the garden and, although I had seen many derelict homes, its neglected—no,
abused
—state shocked me. The roof was half gone and pieces of tile, broken into shards like the eggshells of a mythical bird, littered the bare, sandy lawn. The rosewood doors had been removed, used as firewood by squatters, and the Art Deco stained-glass windows were shattered.
It was worse inside. Where the beautiful gold-leafed screen had not been axed, smoke from the squatters’ cooking fires had destroyed it. The fittings were all gone and only nubs of them remained embedded in the walls, buds doomed never to bloom.
I shook my head now as I recalled that day. Penelope smiled in shared memory. “It looks different now,” she said, unable to subdue the pride in her voice.
“I’d like to show it to a friend of mine. When can you have it ready?”
“End of this week?”
“That’s a good time,” I said. Adele came in and reminded me of my interview with a journalist from the local newspaper. I had been reluctant to grant it, but the editor had been interested in doing an article on the Hutton Heritage Trust.
“Don’t go yet,” I said to Penelope. “You’re part of this as well.”
The journalist was a young and courteous Chinese man and we talked for a while of the preservation of history and the collective memory of the island. But I realized he had another reason for the interview as its direction changed.
“This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Japanese Occupation,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “How would you justify the role you played in the Occupation?”
“That’s all in the past,” I said.
“Is it? Among some people you are known as a war criminal who somehow managed to escape justice. Is that perception true?”
Penelope protested. “That has nothing to do with the Trust.”
I silenced her with a look. I rode on my anger for a while, knowing how formidable I could appear when I wanted to, and then let it burn away. “How old are you?”
He had been expecting an attack from me, and he looked wary. “Thirty-four.”
“Then you weren’t there. You didn’t know. And it never affected you directly. Get your facts right first.”
“The problem, Mr. Hutton, is that in your case there are just too many facts. All of them conflicting.”
“Therein lies the truth you seek,” I said, seeing him appear even more confused. I stood up. “You must leave, now. Please.”
At the door the young journalist stopped. “I’m sorry, sir. I was instructed by my editor to ask those questions.”
I sympathized with him. The editor, a woman my age, had suffered immensely under the Japanese during those years and she had always hated my role in the war. She had accused me of standing by and watching when her grandfather was attacked and murdered, while I was requisitioning a piano from their home.
The journalist held out his hand. “My father’s bedridden now and his end is near. But when he heard I was going to meet you, he begged me to convey his gratitude to you for saving his life and my mother’s from the Japanese death squads.”
“What were their names?”
He told me, but I said, “I don’t remember them. I’m sorry.” I took his hand in mine, as though trying to establish through him a link to his parents.
“It doesn’t matter. There were so many. And you were wrong. I was directly affected. If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t be here talking to you today.”