* * *
The two-storey townhouse on Armenian Street was high and narrow, with a plain iron gate. It had never been allowed to fall into neglect, even though my grandfather had long ceased to live there. He had the caretaker quickly put it in good order again. We both knew, without words having to be said, that he was doing it to be closer to me and I was grateful to him.
“It’s not as grand as your house in Ipoh,” I told him the first time I visited him.
“I do not need a big house. The older one gets, the more one wishes to simplify one’s life,” he said. “This suits me well now.” He looked around the small garden. We sat beneath a mango tree whose ripening fruit attracted lines of ants on its branches and scented the air with fresh clean sweetness. “In fact, it feels good to come back here again, to where I started. Your mother loved to play on the lawn here.”
It had become a ritual to visit him when I finished work, to sit with him and hear the sounds of the streets quiet, as though they too were adepts of
zazen,
preparing for evening meditation, filtering out the cacophony of the day. I enjoyed feeling the evening fade away into night. On my first visit I had sat across the table from him as etiquette decreed but he had said, very irritably, “No, no. Come and sit next to me.” And so after that I always sat by his side without being asked. He would then inquire about the activities of my family, and if I had received any news from William. Then I would pour tea for him. The first time I had done so he had watched me fill the cup, rapping the second joints of the fore and middle fingers of his right hand softly on the table. It happened whenever I served him and eventually I asked him the significance of it.
“That is how we thank the person serving us,” he replied. “All Chinese people are familiar with it.”
“I’m not aware of it,” I said.
“No one knows precisely where and when the practice originated,” he explained. “Legend has it that an emperor in China once decided to walk in the streets like a commoner to see how his people lived their daily lives. There was no need to put on a disguise, since none of the common folk had ever seen the emperor. He was accompanied by a faithful courtier and, at a tea house, when their tea came, the emperor said he wished to experience the novelty of serving his courtier.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said, but he wagged a finger at me.
“This was a grave reversal of the heavenly order and the courtier protested strongly. But he was forced to give way to his emperor, who proceeded to pour them tea. Unable to perform the proper manner of obeisance by getting onto his knees, the courtier resorted to bending his two fingers and tapping them on the table to represent the act of kneeling.”
I knocked the joints of my two fingers on the table. The folded digits did appear like a man kneeling.
“Or it could also be a convenient way of letting you know that you have poured enough into my cup,” my grandfather said.
“Now I don’t know whether to believe you or not,” I said.
He looked pensive. “On the few occasions when Wen Zu and I stole out of the palace and visited a teahouse, he too asked to serve and this was the way I thanked him. We both used to laugh about how history repeats itself.”
We sipped our tea quietly for a while and then he asked, “Do you know the story of the house next door?”
“No,” I said. I filled his cup with tea once more. He gave a mischievous laugh and I was glad to see that his somber mood had left him. “It used to be the headquarters of the Malayan branch of Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Chinese Nationalist party, the Tung Ming Hui,” he said. I saw the rich irony of the joke history had played on us. There was my grandfather, once a tutor to the heir to the Dragon Throne, living next door to the base of the man who had played a substantial role in destroying it all.
“This was where he planned the Canton Uprising in the spring of 1911. I think that must have been the main reason why I bought this place,” he said, breaking into unrestrained laughter now.
“You must invite him over,” I said, enjoying his humor. He became serious again.
“I do not know if he is still alive. He returned to China to lead the government. But the country has erupted into civil war, making it so much easier for the Japanese to conquer it.”
“Do you miss it, China?”
“Yes. But I miss the old China. The new one will have no place for me. Perhaps I shall pay a visit once the war is over. Would you like to accompany me?”
“Yes. I would also like to visit Japan.”
“And how is Mr. Endo these days?”
“I hardly ever see him. He’s away very often. And when he’s in town, then he’s constantly working.”
He looked at me with eyes that had seen so much. “And you miss him.”
I nodded. “I haven’t been taught by him for some time. I think my level of skills is deteriorating. I do practice at the consulate though.”
“But it is not the same.”
“No.”
He shook his head. “What will you do, when the Japanese attack?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it won’t happen.”
“Since meeting you I have considered you to be a highly intelligent boy. You have to be, since you have all our blood—mine, your mother’s, your father’s. It would pain me deeply if such a potent combination produced an imbecile. And you have managed to learn a great deal from Mr. Endo, a man whom I respect, whatever his intentions.” He leaned closer to me. “So open your eyes now. Open them as wide as the insane monk who cut off his own eyelids. And see, once and for all.”
I was taken aback by his vehemence. He had grasped clearly what I had been trying to ignore, that deep inside I knew the Japanese would launch an invasion. All the signs had been there from the first moment I met Endo-san. And I remembered too what Endo-san had said that night when we had sat beneath the vipers at the hotel in Penang Hill:
the great human capacity for choosing not to see.
What made it more painful was Endo-san’s admission to me, on the night of the party.
And so, because I respected my grandfather and, more, because I had come to love him, I knew it was time to accept the truth. I told him about Endo-san’s revelations about the imminent invasion. However, acknowledging it did not mean I had the solution. “I don’t know what to do,” I said.
“You will have to make a stand soon. Every person must, at some point in his life. But I truly feel for you,” the old man said.
“Why?”
“Whatever choices you make will never be the completely correct ones,” he said. “That is your tragedy.”
“You’re very helpful,” I said, hiding my anxiety at his words behind a sardonic tone of voice. It did not deceive him.
“You’ll survive,” he said. “You’ve had to all your life. I am certain it has never been easy, growing up as a child of mixed parentage in this place. But that is your strength. Accept the fact that you are different, that you are of two worlds. And I wish you to remember this when you feel you cannot go on: you are used to the duality of life. You have the ability to bring all of life’s disparate elements into a cohesive whole. So use it.”
I looked at him in wonder. He had explained the circumstances of my entire life in a manner I had never even considered. I thought he had oversimplified many of its aspects but for a moment I felt that the course of my life, my very existence, finally made sense.
“You were of the view that your mother named you after the street she grew up in,” he said. “I do not think so. I have always felt there was another reason.”
I waited for him to explain.
“After I left China I spent, as I have told you, three years in Hong Kong. I found refuge in a missionary school and there I learned all about the Western God and his son. The son who brought salvation to the world.
“There was a Dutchman there, an old theologian, Father Martinus, who told me about the teachings of another Dutchman called Jacobus Harmensz, who lived in the middle of the sixteenth century.
“Jacobus Harmensz was considered a heretic by the orthodox Christians of his time because he propounded the view that a person’s salvation lay in the exercise of his own free will, and not through the grace of God. He was against the idea that man’s life, his eternal salvation or damnation, had already been decided before his birth.”
I began to shift restlessly in my seat. My grandfather gave me a reproving stare, and then he continued, “I must admit that I never fully understood what the aged theologian was trying to tell me. The concept of free will intrigued me, however, even if I did not believe in Harmensz’s theories. The course and the salvation of one’s life, I felt, were predestined. I often discussed it with your mother, after I told her of the fortune-teller’s words, when she was old enough to understand. She disagreed strongly.”
“What has this Harmensz got to do with me?”
“Jacobus Harmensz’s name was eventually translated into Latin as Jacobus Arminius. His teachings are now known as Arminianism. Your mother was trying to prove the fortuneteller—and me—wrong, when she chose your name.”
“We always have a choice. Nothing is fixed or permanent,” I said.
“Those are almost the exact words your mother said to me. The fact that only certain choices are presented to us, does that not indicate that our options have already been limited by some other power?”
“Then what is the point of life itself?” I asked, unable to accept what he was telling me.
“I shall tell you when I find out myself,” he said. He took my hand and held it. “Your mother was a remarkable and strong-willed woman. She may have been right. I do feel very certain that she would never have named you after a mere street.” He took a last sip of his tea. “I talk too much,” he said. “Now I am hungry. Come, I want to eat at the food stalls. It
is
true what they say: Penang has the best hawker food in all of Malaya.”
Through our almost daily meetings, we had arrived at a greater familiarity with one another, breaking forever the fetters of formality. I stood up and rubbed his stomach in feigned disgust. “That’s getting bigger. That’s all you do here—sit, talk, and eat.”
“Leave my stomach alone,” he said, his voice a low growl but his eyes amused at my impertinence.
* * *
It had become our custom to sit at the front of the house and spend some time there before going to bed. It was cooler out on the veranda, which had been built to surround the house and to provide a belt of cool air. The bamboo blinds had been pulled up, like a woman’s rolled-up hair, and coils had been lit and placed around our feet to repel the mosquitoes.
It was about three weeks after William’s departure. I was leaning against the marble balustrade, listening to Isabel tell us about Peter MacAllister. Our father was reading the newspapers, his attention apparently not on her. I could see she was very much in love with the barrister from Kuala Lumpur. He had taken her dancing the night before at the Penang Swimming Club and had not brought her back until this morning, much to our father’s fury. One only had to look at her to know that the beauty of the night still remained in her, fermenting her thoughts and emotions. Noel Hutton remained, like all fathers, unconvinced of the suitability of the man his daughter was seeing.
“Peter says he’s going to take me sailing up the coast in his yacht,” Isabel said. Beneath her gaiety, I could tell she was worried about what our father would say. “And I intend to go with him.”
But before he could reply, we heard Uncle Lim’s voice.
“Mr. Hutton?” he said. He stood on the steps and my father invited him in. I could tell Isabel was relieved by the interruption.
“Saved,”
I mouthed silently at her and although she winked at me I sensed an uncharacteristic nervousness in her.
Uncle Lim handed my father an envelope. “It’s an invitation to my daughter’s wedding on the first day of December. We hope you can honor us by attending.”
“All of us?” I asked with a skewed smile. Uncle Lim nodded.
“We’d be honored,” my father said, passing the card to me.
Like all Chinese wedding invitations, the card and the envelope were red, the color of joy and luck and fortune. There was a faint smell of sandalwood on the card and my hands became scented when I touched it. So the soothsayer had finally found a date to suit the horoscopes of the engaged couple. I smiled to Uncle Lim, feeling happy for him. “We’ll be glad to come,” I said.
After he had left I saw Isabel take a deep breath, and I knew what her next words would be.
“Peter wants to marry me.”
“He’s too old for you,” our father replied. “And I’ve heard of his reputation with women, so you can forget about going sailing with him.”
They began to throw words back and forth. I left them and walked down to the beach. On Endo-san’s island a small gleam of light broke through the trees. I had not seen him for a while and I felt the sudden urge to spend a moment with him.
I brought my boat out from the boathouse and crossed over to the island. The sea was thick beneath me, shining with phosphorescence that clung to my oars with each pull. I felt as if I were rowing on a skin of elastic light.