The Garden of Evening Mists. Tan Twan EngЧитать онлайн книгу.
soon, how swiftly that moment had arrived.
I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void.
Once I lose all ability to communicate with the world outside myself, nothing will be left but what I remember. My memories will be like a sandbar, cut off from the shore by the incoming tide. In time they will become submerged, inaccessible to me. The prospect terrifies me. For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.
Frederik’s suggestion that I write down the things I do not want to forget has rooted itself into the crevices of my mind. It is futile, I know, but a part of me wants to make sure that, when the time comes, I will still have something that gives me the possibility, however meagre, to orient myself, to help me determine what is real.
Sitting at Aritomo’s desk, I realise that there are fragments of my life that I do not want to lose, if only because I still have not found the knot to tie them up with.
When I have forgotten everything else, will I finally have the clarity to see what Aritomo and I have been to each other? If I can still read my own words by then, with no knowledge of who had set them down onto the page, will the answers come to me?
Outside, the mountains have been drawn into the garden, becoming a part of it. Aritomo had been a master of shakkei, the art of Borrowed Scenery, taking elements and views from outside a garden and making them integral to his creation.
A memory drifts by. I reach for it, as if I am snatching at a leaf spiralling down from a high branch. I have to. Who knows if it will ever come back to me again?
During the Emergency, some of the people who were given a private tour of Majuba Tea Estate would also ask to see Yugiri. And sometimes Aritomo allowed it. On such occasions, I would be waiting for them at the main entrance. Most of the visitors were senior government officials taking a holiday with their wives in Cameron Highlands before going back to waging war on the communist-terrorists hiding in the jungles. They had heard about the garden in the mountains and wanted to see it for themselves, to boast to their friends that they had been one of the privileged few to have walked in it. Murmurs of anticipation would warm the air as I welcomed the group. ‘What does Yugiri mean?’ someone – usually one of the wives – would ask, and I would answer them, ‘Evening Mists.’
And if the hour was right and the light willing, they might even catch a glimpse of Aritomo, dressed in his grey yukata and hakama, raking out lines on white gravel, moving as if he were practising calligraphy on stone. Observing the expressions on the visitors’ faces, I knew that some, if not all of them, were wondering if their eyes had made a mistake, if they were seeing something that should not have been there. That same notion had entered my mind the first time I saw Aritomo.
He never accompanied these people on the tour of his garden, preferring that I entertain them. But he would stop what he was doing and talk to the visitors when I introduced him to them. I was certain that the questions had all been asked before, over the long years since he had first come to these mountains. Nevertheless, he would answer them patiently, with no hint of weariness that I could detect. ‘That is correct,’ he would tell them, prefacing his answers with a slight bow. ‘I was the Emperor’s gardener. But that was in a different lifetime.’
Invariably, someone would enquire as to why he had given it all up to come to Malaya. A puzzled look would spread across Aritomo’s face, as though he had never been asked that particular question before. I would catch the flit of pain in his eyes and, for a few moments, we would hear nothing except the birds calling out in the trees. Then he would give a short laugh and say, ‘Perhaps someday, before I cross the floating bridge of dreams, I will discover the reason. I will tell you then.’
On a few occasions one of the visitors – usually someone who had fought in the war, or, like me, had been imprisoned in one of the Japanese camps – would grow belligerent; I could always tell who these would be, even before they opened their mouths to speak. Aritomo’s eyes would become arctic, the ends of his mouth curving downwards. But he would always remain polite, bracketing all his answers with a bow before walking away from us.
Despite the intrusive questions, I had always felt there were times when Aritomo liked to think that he, too, was one of the reasons people came to visit Yugiri; that they hoped for a sight of him, as though he were a rare and unusual wild orchid not to be found anywhere else in Malaya. Perhaps that was why, in spite of his dislike of them, Aritomo had never stopped me from introducing the visitors to him, and why he was always dressed in his traditional clothes whenever he knew a group would be coming to see his garden.
Ah Cheong has already gone home. The house is still. Leaning back in the chair, I close my eyes. Images fly across my vision. A flag flutters in the wind. A water wheel turns. A pair of cranes takes off over a lake, hauling themselves with beating wings higher and higher into the sky, heading into the sun.
The world seems different, somehow, when I open my eyes again. Clearer, more defined, but also smaller.
It will not be very much different from writing a judgment, I tell myself. I will find the words I require; they are nothing more than the tools that I have used all of my life. From the chambers of my memory I will draw out and set down all recollections of the time I spent with Aritomo. I will dance to the music of words, for one more time.
Through the windows I watch the mists thicken, wiping away the mountains borrowed by the garden. Are the mists, too, an element of shakkei incorporated by Aritomo? I wonder. To use not only the mountains, but the wind, the clouds, the ever changing light? Did he borrow from heaven itself?
Chapter Three
My name is Teoh Yun Ling. I was born in 1923 in Penang, an island on the north-west coast of Malaya. Being Straits Chinese, my parents spoke mainly English, and they had asked a family friend who was a poet to choose a name for me. Teoh is my surname, my family name. As in life, the family must come first. That was what I had always been taught. I had never changed the order of my name, not even when I studied in England, and I had never taken on an English name just to make it easier for anyone.
I came to Majuba Tea Estate on the 6th of October, 1951. My train was two hours late pulling into the Tapah Road station, so I was relieved when I glimpsed Magnus Pretorius from the window of my carriage. He was sitting on a bench, a newspaper folded on his lap, and he stood up as the train came to a stop. He was the only man on the platform with an eye-patch. I stepped down from the carriage and waved to him. I walked past the Wickham Trolley carrying the two soldiers manning the machine guns mounted on it; the armoured wagon had escorted the train from the moment we had left Kuala Lumpur. Sweat plastered my cotton blouse to my back as I pushed through the crowd of young Australian soldiers in khaki uniforms, ignoring their whistles and the looks they gave me.
Magnus scattered the Tamil porters mobbing me. ‘Yun Ling,’ he said, taking my bag. ‘Is this all your barang?’
‘I’m only staying a week.’
He was in his late sixties, although he looked ten years younger. Taller than me by half a foot, he carried the excess weight so common in men his age well. He was balding, the hair around the sides of his head white, his remaining eye mired in wrinkles, but startlingly blue.
‘Sorry you had to wait, Magnus,’ I said. ‘We had to stop for endless checks. I think the police were tipped off about an ambush.’
‘Ag, I knew you’d be late.’ His accent – the vowels flattened and truncated – was distinct even after forty odd years in Malaya. ‘The station-master made an announcement. Lucky there wasn’t an attack, hey?’ I followed him through a gate in the barbed-wire fence surrounding the train station, to an olive-green Land Rover parked under a stand of mango trees. Magnus swung my bag into the backseat; we climbed in and drove off.
Above the limestone hills in the distance, heavy clouds were gathering to hammer the earth with rain later in the evening. The main street of Tapah was quiet, and the wooden blinds of the Chinese shophouses – painted with advertisements for Poh