“What has happened?” he asked.
I described to him everything that had happened since William’s funeral. Then I told him how Aunt Mei had been executed by the Japanese and he sat down on a little clump of stone. I handed him the dented Huntley & Palmer’s biscuit tin which held Aunt Mei’s ashes. It was the only container I could find at short notice. He received it and cradled it in his arms, as he had his daughter once when she was still an infant.
“I appreciate you delivering this to me,” he said and I stroked his head softly. His hand came up and held mine. It felt so cool and soft; surely it was never the hand of a tin miner.
“It was Lim who betrayed her, wasn’t it?” he asked.
I nodded. “Because of me and what happened to his daughter. I’m so sorry,” I said, hating the vacuity of those words, knowing that they would never be sufficient to extinguish the pain of his loss.
And so I crumpled the fore and middle fingers of my hand onto the surface of the biscuit box, pressed them into the kneeling position and tapped them softly against the lid, wordlessly asking him for forgiveness.
He stared at the crooked fingers and then he reached over and covered my hand with both his own. He brought my hand up to his forehead and accepted my meager offering.
“Your aunt chose the manner of her life. There is nothing that could have been done.” He said this in a distracted manner and I saw the effort it took for him to keep from breaking down. I had loaded another weight onto his suffering and it hurt me to understand that while one person can never really share the pain of another, they can so easily and so heedlessly add to it. Whatever my grandfather had said about Aunt Mei’s choices, I was the link that had resulted in her death.
“You should not blame yourself,” my grandfather went on. “I told you once before, you have the ability to bring all of life’s disparate elements into a cohesive whole. Do you remember? At this moment, however, you must reject the heritage of your father’s people. Guilt is an invention of the Westerners and their religion.”
I shook my head. “Guilt is a human attribute.”
“We Chinese are more pragmatic. It was your aunt’s and your sister’s fate. Nothing more,” he said with great firmness.
I could have told him it was guilt that had made him reach out to me and invite me to his home for the first time. That and regret—which, after all, is another aspect of guilt. But what could I have achieved by arguing him around to my point of view? His belief gave him comfort and if I could not alleviate his burden then at least I would do nothing to intensify it now.
I said instead, “I went to your house but it was empty and locked up. Are you living here now, in this cave?”
“Yes. It reminds me of my youth in the monastery. There is magic here, as you may well be aware. Some nights I have visitors,” he said.
My skin crawled and the hairs on it stood on end; I hoped he was not growing senile.
He gave a snort. “Do not look at me as though I had taken leave of my senses. The spirits of the ancient sages and hermits visit me sometimes and we talk. Look, I found this because one of them showed it to me.”
I followed him to a rock face that appeared to have been recently chiseled away. Lines of writing, recognizably Chinese, were carved on it in a square of four characters by four. “I was told to remove the outer layer and this was what lay beneath,” he said.
He read and translated the sixteen ideograms to me:
I have journeyed the limits of this world,
Seen magical things
And met many people,
And I find that across the Four Oceans
All men are brothers.
“I know that. It’s well-known, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yes.”
“It must have been written before the poet realized what cruelties we can inflict on one another,” I said. The optimism of the poem seemed so incongruous now.
“It was written in one of the most turbulent periods of China’s history, thousands of years before Jesus Christ delivered almost the same message.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Grandfather?”
“Do not let hatred control your life. However hard the circumstances are now, do not turn into someone like Lim, or the Japanese. I can see it rising to the surface in you, ready to lash out.”
“But what can I do?”
“You had become lost but I think you are beginning to see the correct way again. You must be strong now, for your greatest trials are still ahead.” Somehow or other I knew those words were not his own, but transmitted through him from another source. I shivered, but his arms held me. I felt the strength of his age and wisdom reach out to find a home within myself and my fears subsided.
“There is nothing more I can tell you. And now you must go, off to what duty dictates. The bonds of friendship call to you,” he said.
“Are you certain that you are my grandfather and not one of the timeless sages roaming these hills?” I asked.
“Now wouldn’t that be a most wonderful fate? Walking these beautiful hills, free as time itself?”
“It would be,” I said.
He took out his jade pin, the pin that had once saved his life. “I want you to have this.”
I shook my head. “No. You must keep it, to test all the tea you’ll drink with me, when the war is over.”
The moment I spoke, I realized that he had stopped doing that ever since the night I had first met him and that, in all the time we had spent together, on every occasion when I had served him tea, I had never once seen him use the pin. He had always been certain of me.
“I have no further use for it,” he said. He placed the jade pin in my palm and folded my fingers over it.
I embraced him tightly, unwilling to let him go, and remembered the days we had spent in his house on Armenian Street. I rubbed his paunch. “You must eat properly. This is shrinking.”
“Leave my stomach alone,” he said sternly, and for one short moment we almost succeeded in smiling at each other.
* * *
I never saw him again, not even after the war when I searched all over Ipoh for him. The townsfolk heard that he had been captured by the Japanese in the final days of the war, so they informed me, for he had been an active supporter of anti-Japanese activities.
“My brother told me his only grandson betrayed him to the Japanese,” a pomelo merchant said to me with complete assurance.
But I felt sure, when I hiked those ageless hills, calling out his name, that the Japanese never found him. No, he had found something here and he had accepted it. And the strangest thing was that, in spite of the older monks in the various monasteries in the vicinity agreeing to its existence when I questioned them, I could never find my grandfather’s temple again.
Chapter Fourteen
I returned to the station hotel and went into the bar. Doors opened out onto a ten-foot-wide veranda that ran around the front of the station. Sunlight was kept to a minimum by large bamboo shades, and dusty ceiling fans spun around and around, casting shadows on the checkered tile floors. Low, cushioned rattan chairs surrounded the bar at the end of the veranda, where groups of Japanese soldiers were drinking, singing, and terrifying the waiters. Across the station, people were going in and out of the Ipoh municipal offices. It was windless, and the red sun flag of Nippon lay wrapped around the flagpole.
Kon’s father had instructed me to go down and walk around. I bundled my sword in a cloth and went across the main road and entered the busy streets. Heat and smells welcomed me. Stalls were selling the fried yams and taro which had become the staple food for so many of us. Most of the shoppers carried stacks of money in baskets just to make the smallest purchases. Like the women in Penang, the women here had made no effort to look attractive, a deliberate tactic in order not to catch the eyes of the
Jipunakui.
A girl stared deliberately into my eyes, turned around, and walked away.
I followed her. She walked on without increasing her pace. We turned around corners and into alleyways until I was lost and the sounds of the streets were reduced to a soft hum. The girl knocked on the wooden door of a shop, which was made of interconnecting panels of wood. A small rectangle was taken out and she stepped over and inside. I followed her in.
The wooden slat was slammed back into place and hands, several pairs of them, gripped me hard and pushed me around. I suppressed my natural instinct to fight back. We entered another room, then a hallway, until I was confused by the turns. We came out in a courtyard and I blinked at the sharp sunlight, my annoyance increasing.
A man my age sat on a wooden bench, picking his nose. My fists linked and formed the triad hand signal Towkay Yeap had shown me. I was pushed down onto the cemented floor.
“So it’s a half-breed,” he sneered, “come to warn us against the
Jipunakui.”
From the movements behind me I guessed there were three more I could not see. The nose-picker now came forward. “Tell us then.”
I shook my head. I had made it clear to Towkay Yeap that I would only tell it to Kon directly. There was no way of knowing who Saotome’s mole was. I sensed the sudden movement behind me and turned to block the blow, but for once I was too slow. It caught me at the side of my head—there was a loud explosion within my brain—and then the explosion turned to darkness.
* * *
A mosquito woke me. I opened my eyes and slapped it away. The air was humid and laden with unseen moisture and I felt I was drowning. I found I was being carried on a stretcher and I turned over and dropped onto wet earth. Pushing myself up, I faced four strangers, all Chinese, with that particular appearance of toughness which spoke of life on the streets. Their hands held rusted Sten guns and they waved them at me to continue on the almost invisible path we were taking. The nose-picker was holding on to my sword and I vowed I would get it back from him, even if I had to kill him.
We walked on in silence. The forest was quiet, broken only by the drilling of woodpeckers and the calling of birds. Shafts of sunlight—was it still the same day?—mottled the leaves and branches; I had never seen so many shades of green and brown. We pushed through spotted ferns taller than any of us, their stems swinging back to hide our passage. The ground was covered with leaves as large as dinner plates, which crunched under our feet.
We walked until the light in the trees weakened into late afternoon. The pain in my head where I had been clubbed began to lessen and I felt less dizzy. We had to stop every time the scout ahead put up his hand. Once we ducked into the wet undergrowth as a patrol of Japanese troops moved through the jungle. I was certain we were heading toward the drier limestone cliffs, for the growth began to thin and the ground started to rise. I was soaking wet and my breathing was ragged. We must have been walking for three hours, though I was by no means certain.
The path rose steeply and then dipped into a vale. Above us the interlacing branches of trees acted as a natural canopy and we were safely out of sight of the planes flying above. Our lead scout pursed his lips and a bird-cry fluttered out. We waited in the clearing as, all around us, guerrillas rose out from the bushes. We had arrived at the outer fringes of the White Tiger camp.
With the guerrillas escorting us, the going became faster. We dropped into the vale and then the ground started to rise again, taking us to the cliffs, where we reached the end of the path. “What now?” I muttered, swatting at the flies around my face.
Kon appeared out of solid stone. The cave’s entrance was concealed by a fold of rock, curved like the shell of a sea snail. He smiled when he saw me but, as I began to bow, he shook his head quickly.
“Don’t act like a Japanese here,” he warned me, his lips moving near my ear. My sword was returned to me and Kon grinned when he saw it. “You’ve come prepared.”
According to the intelligence reports I had read, the White Tiger camp had originally been led by Yong Kwan, but it had gained its fame due to Kon’s impressive guerrilla skills.
“Why did the camp adopt your name?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders and it pained me to see how bony they had become. “It was after one of the early raids. We’d burned down a military base and we had to run through the entire night. By dawn we were on the brink of collapse and we dug a hollow to hide. And then a tiger came, an albino. It was the most astonishing sight; none of us had ever dreamt such a thing existed. It just stood and looked at us before vanishing into the trees like a ghost. One of the men here had heard of my nickname and told the others. They took it as a good omen and, since then, the group has been called the White Tiger.”
We entered the cave. It was cold inside and the walls were damp. The sound of dripping water added depth to the darkness. A narrow passageway opened up and inside the cliff was a small circular opening which let the sky in, similar to my grandfather’s cave but smaller. “We cook whatever food we can find inside so the smoke doesn’t escape through this opening,” Kon said.