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 Chai indigestion pills and Tiger Balm ointment – were lowered against the afternoon sun. At the junction turning into the trunk road, Magnus stopped for military vehicles speeding past: scout cars with gun turrets, boxy armoured personnel carriers and lorries packed with soldiers. They were heading south, towards Kuala Lumpur.
‘Something’s happened,’ I said.
‘No doubt we’ll hear about it on the evening news.’
At a security checkpoint just before the road tipped upwards to the mountains, a Malay Special Constable lowered the metal barrier and ordered us out of the car. Another constable behind an embankment trained a Bren gun on us, while a third searched our car and pushed a wheeled mirror under it. The constable who had stopped us asked to see our identity cards. I felt a spurt of anger when he searched me but left Magnus alone. I suspected that his hands were less intrusive than they usually were as they patted my body: I was not the typical Chinese peasant they were used to, and the presence of Magnus, a white man, was probably a deterrent.
Behind us, an old Chinese woman was ordered off her bicycle. A conical straw hat shaded her face and her black cotton trousers were stiff with dried rubber latex. An SC rooted around inside her rattan basket and held up a pineapple. ‘Tolong lah, tolong lah,’ the woman pleaded in Malay. The policeman pulled the top and bottom sections of the pineapple and the fruit came apart in half. Uncooked rice concealed in the hollowed-out fruit streamed to the ground. The old woman’s wails became louder as the constables dragged her into a hut by the roadside.
‘Clever,’ Magnus remarked, nodding at the mound of rice on the road.
‘The police once caught a rubber-tapper smuggling sugar out of his village,’ I said.
‘In a pineapple?’
‘He mixed it in the water in his canteen. It was one of the first cases I prosecuted.’
‘You’ve done a lot of
