The Garden of Evening Mists. Tan Twan Eng

I remembered the promise I had made to the man, the promise that I would post his letter for him.

      Slowly, the pain in my hand subsided. But it would return. The servants’ voices came faintly from somewhere in the house. One of the peacocks called to its mate. I slotted the envelope back between the pages, closed the notebook and went out to the terrace.

      I stood there for a long time, looking towards Yugiri. I stood there until evening submerged the foothills of the valleys and Aritomo’s garden sank away from sight.

Chapter Six

      Following the High Commissioner’s murder, Magnus and Frederik went about supervising the workers as they repaired the fence protecting the house. They set up a pair of spotlights along the fence, facing them outwards. Having heard from someone at the Tanah Rata Golf Club about an incident in Ipoh where CTs had lobbed a hand grenade into the dining room of a rubber estate manager’s bungalow as his family was sitting down for lunch, Magnus decided to have the windows covered in a thin wire mesh.

      ‘Emily said you haven’t seen our clinic,’ Magnus said, while I helped him nail a sheet of wire netting over my bedroom windows. The netting made the room gloomy, and I switched on the light. Two days had passed since Aritomo had turned me down, but I was still resentful about it. ‘Go take a look,’ Magnus went on. ‘Our nurse quit last year – said it was too dangerous to work here. Emily decided to run it herself. She trained as a nurse, you know, before she saw the light and married me.’

      I was reluctant to visit the clinic, but I knew I had to, if only to give Emily face. The whitewashed bungalow was a short walk from the workers’ houses. A Tamil man slouching on a chair grinned at me when I entered the waiting room. Emily sat behind a low counter, her lips moving soundlessly as she counted out pills into a bottle. Through an open doorway I saw a room with two beds behind a partition. The bare legs of a woman were sticking out from one of the beds.

      ‘That’s Letchumi,’ Emily said, glancing at me.

      ‘Bitten by a snake.’

      Emily tilted her head to one side. ‘Oh, yes, it was the night you arrived. She’s doing fine now. Dr Yeoh gave her an injection. Maniam, eh, Maniam! Ambil ubat.’

      The coolie in the chair stood up and came to collect the bottle of pills from her. She made him repeat her dosage instructions in Malay before she let him leave. Turning back to me, she pointed at the boxes of medicines stacked in a corner. ‘These came in today. I ordered more, in case the CTs attack us.’ She shook her head. ‘Ironic isn’t it, that Gurney was killed by them?’

      ‘In what way?’

      ‘That man sat on his ka-chooi for days after the CTs attacked that estate in Sungai Siput. He did nothing.’

      ‘He did declare a nationwide state of emergency.’

      ‘Only because the planters made him do it. Magnus got everyone here to sign a petition. You people living in the cities,’ she hawked a derisive noise up her throat, ‘I don’t think you even realise there’s a war going on.’ There was some truth in her allegations. ‘One thing I’m happy about,’ she went on, ‘at least Magnus no longer wastes his Sundays running around in the mountains with his friends.’

      ‘What do they do, hunt wild boar?’

      ‘Have you not heard the stories? They say that the Japs in Tanah Rata buried a pile of gold bars somewhere in these mountains before they surrendered.’

      ‘That’s just a rumour, surely.’

      ‘They’re like schoolboys-lah, looking for buried treasure. If you ask me, I think they just like being away from their wives.’ She opened a cupboard and began packing away boxes of sanitary napkins. Waving a box at me, she said, ‘I hope you don’t think I’m a busybody, because I’m not. But I’ve always been curious – how did you cope, when you were a prisoner?’

      ‘Many of us stopped menstruating.’

      ‘It happens. The terrible conditions, not enough food.’

      ‘Even after I was released, my blood didn’t flow for two, three months. And then one day when I was in my office, it came back, just like that.’ It had caught me unprepared and I had had to ask my secretary for something. But I remembered the relief I had felt afterwards. I could finally accept the fact that the war was truly over. My body was free to return to its own rhythms again.

      The smell of disinfectants in the clinic raked up the beginnings of nausea in me; it must have been obvious because Emily looked concerned. ‘You want some Tiger Balm or not?’ she asked.

      ‘This place, the smells . . . they remind me of hospitals.’

      ‘Sayang,’ she said, shaking her head regretfully. ‘I was hoping you could help out here.’

      ‘I won’t be staying here for long.’

      I left the clinic, glad to get out into the sun and fresh air again. Returning to Majuba House, I found a rolled-up bundle of papers on my dressing table: the maps and photographs I had left at Yugiri for Aritomo to look at.

      The siren calling the workers to muster was sinking away when I left the house the next morning. I stood outside the garage, rubbing my hands. The world was grey and damp. The sound of steady crunching on the gravel came to me a minute later, and then Magnus emerged from the mist, the ridgebacks close behind. On the previous evening I had asked him to show me around the estate but he still looked surprised when he saw me. ‘I didn’t think you’d be able to wake up this early,’ he said, opening the back door of the Land Rover for his dogs. I caught the glimpse of a revolver in a holster under his jacket.

      ‘I don’t need much sleep,’ I replied.

      On the short, rattling drive to the factory, he gave me a quick explanation of how the estate was run. ‘Geoff Harper’s my assistant manager,’ he said. ‘We have five European junior assistants watching over the keranis in the office.’

      ‘And out in the fields?’

      ‘The estate’s divided into thirty-five divisions. Each division’s supervised by a kangani – the conductor. Below him are the mandors – the foremen. They’re responsible for their work gang: the pickers, weeders, sweepers. Watchmen make sure there’s no thieving or idling. And I’ve posted Home Guards to watch over them.’

      ‘There were some children outside the factory when I went past it yesterday.’

      ‘The workers’ children,’ Magnus said. ‘We pay them twenty cents for every bag of caterpillars they catch in the tea bushes.’

      The factory was the size of a wharf-side godown. The coolies were already lined up outside. Kretek cigarettes cloyed the air with the scent of cloves. Magnus greeted them and a senior kangani called out their names, marking them off against a list on a clip-board. It reminded me of roll-call in the camp.

      Magnus consulted with the assistant manager Geoff Harper, a short, burly man in his fifties with a pair of rifles slung over his back. ‘All the workers showed up today?’ Magnus asked.

      Harper nodded. ‘Rubber price was low.’

      ‘Let’s hope it stays that way.’

      ‘We had an ambush last night on the road going into Ringlet. A Chinese couple,’ Harper said. ‘The bastards – pardon me, Miss . . . the CTs – left their bodies hacked into bits all over the road.’

      ‘Anyone we know?’

      ‘They were visitors from Singapore. They were driving back from a wedding dinner.’

      The tea-pickers marched off to the slopes. I trailed behind the workers entering the factory. ‘Grinders, rollers and roasters,’ Magnus said, pointing to the huge, silent machines lined up inside. The smell of roasting leaves dusted the air; I felt I had pried open a tea caddy. Workers wheeled out racks of tin trays covered