Were those droplets of rain that strayed from my eyes, or were they the tears of an adult relinquishment of something that had become so essential in my life? I truly did not wish to know.
Endo-san got up from his seat and said without looking at me, “You should stay here for a while longer. I have to go back to work.”
The unusual tone in his voice made me agree. I leaned back and watched him walk away to his waiting car, watching until he was driven away.
I looked down at the bench and saw the brown file he had left behind, spotted with raindrops, looking like the hide of an animal. I glanced around behind me and, after making sure no one was interested in me, I opened it. He had removed most of the documents, for it was much thinner than the one Saotome had handed out in their meeting.
I read through the few pieces of paper. All had been pressed with the red seal of Saotome, like welts on skin. They confirmed what I had heard outside Hiroshi’s office but they told me more.
Fearing that Kon would not take the bait, Saotome had also captured Kon’s
sensei,
Tanaka. The convoy carrying Saotome back to Kuala Lumpur would also be carrying Tanaka to his execution for not reporting to them when they took over the country, and for working against the Japanese. It was a baseless charge, trumped up by Saotome, serving only to lure Kon out into the open to rescue his
sensei
—Tanaka, who had traveled so far from Japan because someone had asked him to look after Endo-san and because once, in their childhood, they had been friends.
* * *
That evening I took my boat out onto the ocean, watching the fishermen’s lights on their trawlers as they went out to sea. I let my thoughts drift like the nets they cast out, dragging in whatever was in their way.
I thought of my two brothers and of Isabel and knew that Edward’s suffering in the camps and William’s and Isabel’s deaths were in some way due to me and my association with the Japanese. I considered whether things would have been different had I not met Endo-san but I could find no answers there.
The events of the past weeks, against which I thought I had constructed an unbreakable barrier, now found their way in. I was exhausted and I knew it was time to stop fighting and so I surrendered myself fully to sorrow. At that moment I saw with perfect clarity what my future would hold for me, that however many lives I had saved and however hard I tried to redeem myself in the time to come, it would never be sufficient to restore my peace of mind. Isabel had spoken the truth: I would never be able to forget.
I spent that night on the beach on Endo-san’s island, unable to go in and face him. The house was silent when I entered at dawn. I called out his name but he had already left in his own boat. I felt a keen sense of loss but I pushed it aside. I rolled up my futon mattress which had not been slept on and placed it back in the cupboard. I looked around the house after packing all my clothes. The Nagamitsu sword Endo-san had given me was missing, but his own sword resting on its stand halted me. I looked at it, wondering how a work of such beauty could also bring about death so efficiently.
I walked quickly to the beach and got into my boat. The sun had risen from the sea to be absorbed into the heavy clouds that hung unmoving in the sky. The sea was unfriendly, drowning whatever faint light was shed onto its surface.
When I neared the shore I pointed the bow to Istana and allowed the waves and the will of the ocean to guide me home. I looked back at Endo-san’s island as I was taken farther away and I wondered if I would ever return to it again.
The boat sawed into the sand just a footstep away from where Isabel had fallen. I stopped there and said a quiet prayer for her. I looked up to the tree and saw my father against it, the tree and its planter. I went up the narrow steps and approached him, not bothering to conceal my shock. He looked so much older, his hair lifeless as discarded threads, his eyes a vortex surrounded by lines, sinking into his skull. My entire resolve seemed to collapse and I had to gather it whole again with an effort.
“I have to go away for a while,” I said. “To see Grandfather—and to set things right.”
“I know. Sooner or later everyone has to do that,” he said. “And I’m sorry.”
I told him I did not understand what he was trying to tell me.
“I promised to take you to the river, where your mother and I found the fireflies. And I never did.”
“It doesn’t matter. We can go after the war and you can show me then,” I said. “But now you must come with me. I can find a safe place for you to hide.”
He shook his head. “Do what must be done and come back. I’ll be here, waiting for you. And together we’ll go to the river.”
He bent down and I saw he had the cases of his butterfly collection, stacked on top of each other, all badly broken and cracked by Fujihara’s men. He had cleared away the broken glass covers and now scooped out a handful of desiccated wings.
“Time I set them free,” he said. He waited, studying the tops of the trees for the passage of wind. At the moment he judged correct he flung his arm out and the wind caught the weightless butterflies, lifting them in a stream up to the sky, where the early rays of the sun gave them color and life again, so they looked as though they were fluttering their delicate wings in search of the elusive scents of flowers.
I bent down with him and we both took out another handful, and another, and another, until there were none left and we watched as the ribbon of wings was pulled farther and farther out to sea by the wind until it faded from sight. In my heart I said a prayer that they would go on flying forever.
“One more left,” he said. In his palm lay the Rajah Brooke Birdwing, the butterfly he had been hunting just before my mother became ill. Bits of broken glass had shredded the edges of its immense black wings, but it still looked sleek and powerful, ready to soar again.
He opened my hand and placed it in my palm. “Do what you wish with it.”
I stroked its wings, which still felt smooth and silky. From the look in my father’s eyes, I knew what had to be done. So I launched it into the unseen currents of the air, where it seemed to stretch its long-unused wings with a yearning pleasure that was almost tangible. I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder as we tracked its resurrected flight. It rose higher and higher until it was lost in the brightness of the new day.
* * *
I had bribed the man in charge of the incinerators to cremate Aunt Mei separately, instead of collectively with the bodies of the other prisoners the Japanese regularly killed. It angered me that I could not have done the same for Isabel; her body had disappeared.
I entered Endo-san’s office and informed him that I was duty-bound to let my grandfather know of Aunt Mei’s death and to return her ashes to him for the proper rites to be performed.
“I understand,” he said. “Once again, I am sorry you have to go through this. It is an unbearable burden.”
The light of the morning entered his office from the garden, illuminating the flag of his homeland that hung behind him. I shivered, for he stood just off center from the red circle in the flag and I had the impression that blood was seeping out from him, pooling on the white sheet.
He placed his hands by his sides and gave a slow bow. I hesitated, and then bowed to him. As he stood straight again, the sun lingered on the incipient tears in his eyes and somehow we knew that the next time we met everything would be changed. These old days would have disappeared forever.
“I wish you good fortune on your journey,” he said. “May you accomplish what you set out to do.”
In the steadiest voice I could maintain I said, “Please take care of my father.”
“I will,” he answered.
We both stood for a moment, unable to move. I knew what I was waiting for, although it shamed me to admit it. If, at that very moment, he had asked me not to go, I would have obeyed him. He was about to speak, but then decided against it and so said nothing. I shook my head at my own weakness and turned to leave.
“Wait,” he said.
He went to a sideboard and said, “I almost forgot this.”
He took Kumo, my sword, out in the traditional manner, its length floating on air, with only the tip and the hilt supported on his open palms. “I sent it to be polished and oiled. You as the owner should actually do all of that but . . . think of it as a parting gift from me.”
I could do nothing else but receive it from him. “Thank you,” I said.
“Take it with you. It might come in useful. I’ve amended your travel documents so you now have the right to carry it. Like the old warriors of Japan,” he said slowly, the possibility of the sword’s usefulness hard for him to accept, he who had lived and taught me the ways of harmony.
“I shall keep it safe,” I said.
“I will not cease from mental fight; Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,” he whispered.
I could never hide anything from him. He knew he had failed me and that I had chosen to make my own way, free from the lessons that had been bequeathed to him by his
sensei
and then passed on to me.
I held the sword up in a salutatory form of farewell, nodded once and then left him.
354
Chapter Twelve
Michiko and I sat on a bench along Gurney Drive, which had once been the North Coastal Road, facing the narrow sea, doing what most people do along here,
makan angin
—eating the breeze. The promenade was a popular place. Young lovers were out taking their evening stroll. Hawkers lined the side of the road selling Indian
rojak,
fried noodles, rice, and sugar cane juice. Almost everyone who walked by was eating something or holding a packet of food.
We sat for a long time without speaking; we knew each other well enough for that by now.
Then Michiko said, “You do not use your grandfather’s family name, the one he combined with yours at the clan temple? Nor the name Arminius, which your mother gave you?”
“No, I’ve never used them. It seemed wrong to do so. They identified a person I felt I didn’t know,” I answered—and stopped, as a new thought occurred to me. “No, each name in its own way wanted to decree a future for me, a future in which I would have had no say.”
“But your mother’s wish was for you to live your own life.”
“Yet even in having such wishes, she was already imposing on me her idea of how I should live that life,” I said.
I had made a conscious decision when the war ended to slough off the two names, as though that act in itself could provide me with a different identity, and grant me freedom from both my mother’s dreams and from the life my grandfather was certain had been intended for me. I explained all this to Michiko.
“You’ve lived almost all your life without them now,” she said. “Do you think it has made any difference?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Yes, you do.” She pointed to my heart. “There is an emptiness here, am I right? As though something is lacking.”
I shifted on the bench, uncomfortable with her assessment of me. No one paid any attention to us; we were just two old people sitting on a bench, dreaming of our youth, sending away and greeting in turn the few days that were left to us.
“This is the exact spot where Endo-san and I sat, on the day I made up my mind to save Kon,” I said.
“How could you continue to live here, when so much of the island reminds you of the war?”
“Where else can I go? At least here I have these memories to keep me company. When it gets too much I can always go away and come back feeling better. Better this than to have your entire home wiped away, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that is true,” she said, and then became quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was cruel of me.”
“I cannot remember my home at all. There are days when I think the war not only reduced my home to ashes, but also all my memories of it. All turned to ashes now.”
The tide was coming in and curls of white streaked the flat, muddy surface as the wavelets folded upon themselves as they neared the shore. The shoreline reflected itself on the smooth, wet surface of the beach. Cries of the Indian mynahs and crows in the trees competed with the hawkers’ shouts. Michiko was drinking the juice from a large, young coconut and it lay heavily on her lap. Like a severed head, I thought, and then pushed that image away. She was growing weaker by the day and I was worried.
She stroked my hand gently. I liked the warmth of her touch. The wind played with her hair and she brushed it away from her face.
I twisted around and pointed to the row of bungalows fronting the road. “That house used to be owned by the Cheah family,” I said, directing her gaze to a run-down mansion fenced in with wire. “Their family owned the largest biscuit factory in Penang. And that other house has stood for a hundred and ten years. In a week’s time it will be torn down to make way for a twenty-storey apartment block.” I could not keep the bitterness in my voice from rising. “And that one too,” I said, pointing to another home, “My father’s friend lived there. His family owned a bank.”