The Garden of Evening Mists. Tan Twan Eng

him. ‘. . . Judge Teoh was not due to retire for another two years, so you will no doubt imagine our surprise when, only two months ago, she told us she intended to leave the Bench. Her written judgments are known for their clarity and elegant turns-of-phrase. . .’ His words flowered, became more laudatory. I was far away in another time, thinking of Aritomo and his garden in the mountains.

      The speech ended. I brought my mind back to the courtroom, hoping that no one had noticed the potholes in my attention; it would not do to appear distracted at my own retirement ceremony.

      I gave a short, simple address to the audience and then Abdullah brought the ceremony to a close. I had invited a few well-wishers from the Bar Council, my colleagues and the senior partners in the city’s larger law firms for a small reception in my chambers. A reporter asked me a few questions and took photographs. After the guests left, Azizah went around the room, gathering up the cups and the paper plates of half eaten food.

      ‘Take those curry puffs with you,’ I said, ‘and that box of cakes. Don’t waste food.’

      ‘I know-lah. You always tell me that.’ She packed the food away and said, ‘Is there anything else you need?’

      ‘You can go home. I’ll lock up.’ It was what I usually said to her at the end of every court term. ‘And thank you, Azizah. For everything.’

      She shook the creases out of my black robe, hung it on the coat-stand and turned to look at me. ‘It wasn’t easy working for you all these years, Puan, but I’m glad I did.’ Tears gleamed in her eyes. ‘The lawyers – you were difficult with them, but they’ve always respected you. You listened to them.’

      ‘That’s the duty of a judge, Azizah. To listen. So many judges seem to forget that.’

      ‘Ah, but you weren’t listening earlier, when Tuan Mansor was going on and on. I was looking at you.’

      ‘He was talking about my life, Azizah.’ I smiled at her. ‘Hardly much there I don’t know about already, don’t you think?’

      ‘Did the orang Jepun do that to you?’ She pointed to my hands. ‘Maaf,’ she apologised, ‘but . . . I was always too scared to ask you. You know, I’ve never seen you without your gloves.’

      I rotated my left wrist slowly, turning an invisible doorknob. ‘One good thing about growing old,’ I said, looking at the part of the glove where two of its fingers had been cut off and stitched over. ‘Unless they look closely, people probably think I’m just a vain old woman, hiding my arthritis.’

      We stood there, both of us uncertain of how to conduct our partings. Then she reached out and grasped my other hand, pulling me into an embrace before I could react, enveloping me like dough around a stick. Then she let go of me, collected her handbag and left.

      I looked around. The bookshelves were bare. My things had already been packed away and sent to my house in Bukit Tunku, flotsam sucked back to sea by the departing tide. Boxes of Malayan Law Journals and All England Reports were stacked in a corner for donation to the Bar Library. Only a single shelf of MLJs remained, their spines stamped in gold with the year in which the cases were reported. Azizah had promised to come in tomorrow and pack them away.

      I went to a picture hanging on a wall, a watercolour of the home I had grown up in. My sister had painted it. It was the only work of hers I owned, the only one I had ever come across after the war. I lifted it off its hook and set it down by the door.

      The stacks of manila folders tied with pink ribbons that normally crowded my desk had been reassigned to the other judges; the table seemed larger than usual when I sat down in my chair. The wooden stick was still lying where I had left it. Beyond the half-opened windows, dusk was summoning the crows to their roosts. The birds thickened the foliage of the angsana trees lining the road, filling the streets with their babble. Lifting the telephone receiver, I began dialling and then stopped, unable to recall the rest of the numbers. I paged through my address book, rang the main house in Majuba Tea Estate and asked to speak to Frederik Pretorius when a maid answered. I did not have to wait long.

      ‘Yun Ling?’ he said when he came on the line, sounding slightly out of breath.

      ‘I’m coming to Yugiri.’

      Silence pressed down on the line. ‘When?’

      ‘This Friday.’ I paused. It had been seven months since we had last spoken to each other. ‘Will you tell Ah Cheong to have the house ready for me?’

      ‘He’s always kept it ready for you,’ Frederik replied. ‘But I’ll tell him. Stop by at the estate on the way. We can have some tea. I’ll drive you to Yugiri.’

      ‘I haven’t forgotten how to get there, Frederik.’

      Another stretch of silence connected us. ‘The monsoon’s over, but there’s still some rain. Drive carefully.’ He hung up.

      The call to prayer unwound from the minarets of the Jamek Mosque across the river to echo through the city. I listened to the courthouse empty itself. The sounds were so familiar to me that I had stopped paying attention to them years ago. The wheel of a trolley squeaked as someone – probably Rashid, the registrar’s clerk – pushed the day’s applications to the filing room. The telephone in another judge’s chambers rang for a minute then gave up. The slam of doors echoed through the corridors; I had never realised how loud they sounded.

      I picked up my briefcase and shook it once. It was lighter than usual. I packed my court robe into it. At the door I turned around to look at my chambers. I gripped the edge of the doorframe, realising that I would never again set foot in this room. The weakness passed. I switched off the lights but continued to stand there, gazing into the shadows. I picked up my sister’s watercolour and closed the door, working the handle a few times to make sure it was properly locked. Then I made my way along the dimly-lit corridor. On one wall a gallery of former judges stared down at me, their faces changing from European to Malay and Chinese and Indian, from monochrome to colour. I passed the empty space where my portrait would soon be added. At the end of the passageway I went down the stairs. Instead of turning left towards the judges’ exit to the car park, I went out to the courtyard garden.

      This was the part of the court buildings I loved most. I would often come here to sit, to think through the legal problems of a judgment I was writing. Few of the judges ever came here and I usually had the place all to myself. Sometimes, if Karim, the gardener, happened to be working, I would speak with him for a short while, giving him advice on what to plant and what ought to be taken out. This evening I was alone.

      The sprinklers came on, releasing the smell of the sun-roasted grass into the air. The leaves discarded by the guava tree in the centre of the garden had been raked into a pile. Behind the courts, the Gombak and Klang rivers plaited together, silting the air with the smell of earth scoured from the mountains in the Titiwangsa range up north. Most people in Kuala Lumpur couldn’t bear the stench, especially when the river was running low between the monsoon seasons, but I had never minded that, in the heart of the city, I could smell the mountains over a hundred miles away.

      I sat down on my usual bench and opened my senses to the stillness settling over the building, becoming a part of it.

      After a while I stood up. There was something missing from the garden. Walking over to the mound of leaves, I grabbed a few handfuls and scattered them randomly over the lawn. Brushing off the bits of leaves sticking to my hands, I stepped away from the grass. Yes, it looked better now. Much better.

      Swallows swooped from their nests in the eaves, the tips of their wings brushing past my head. I thought of a limestone cave I had once been to, high in the mountains. Carrying my briefcase and the watercolour, I walked out of the courtyard. In the sky above me, the last line of prayer from the mosque drifted away, leaving only silence where its echo had been.

      Yugiri lay seven miles west of Tanah Rata, the second of the three main villages on the road going up to Cameron Highlands. I arrived there after a four-hour drive from Kuala Lumpur. I was in no hurry, stopping at various places along the way. Every few miles I would pass a roadside