one every Sunday,’ Frederik said. ‘Starts at eleven in the morning and usually goes on till seven, eight at night. You’ll love it.’ I vaguely recalled Magnus telling me about the braai the night before, but I had forgotten all about it.
In the passageway outside the kitchen, we nearly collided into Emily scurrying out with a tray of strange-looking tubes. ‘Aiyoh, we were so worried about you-lah,’ she scolded me. ‘Everyone’s outside already.’ She nudged her chin at the back of the house. ‘Go and join them. No, not you, Frederik! You come and help me. Take these out to Magnus.’ She pushed the tray to me. The glistening tubes, I saw, were coils of uncooked sausages, each one about an inch thick and one and a half feet long.
Fifteen to twenty people were gathered on the terrace garden behind the house, a mix of Chinese, Malays and Europeans. Some lounged in rattan chairs while others stood talking in small groups, a drink in their hands. The day was bright and windless, but the atmosphere was sombre. A woman laughed, then stopped abruptly and glanced around. Plates and cutlery and casseroles of food took up a long table at one end of the terrace. Curries simmered over charcoal stoves and sunlight winked off the tuberous bottles of Tiger beer planted in a tub of ice. In the shade of a camphor tree, Magnus watched over a barbecue grill that had been made from an old oil drum cut in half lengthways and laid on a trestle. The ridgebacks lazed at his feet, scratching themselves and looking up at me as I approached.
‘Ah, You’ve been found!’ Magnus said. ‘Knew you’d be at Yugiri when you didn’t show up for breakfast.’
‘I’ve never seen these at the Cold Storage,’ I said, handing the tray of sausages to him.
‘Boerewors. Made them myself.’
‘They look like something Brolloks and Bittergal might leave behind,’ I said. The dogs glanced up at the sound of the names, their tails flattening the grass.
‘Sies!’ Magnus grimaced. ‘Put them on the braai. You’ll soon see how lekker they taste.’
The sausages were flecked with coriander seeds and other spices Magnus refused to divulge. ‘It’s my Ouma’s recipe,’ was all he would say. They gave off the most wonderful aroma when they began cooking over the coals and I realised suddenly that, except for the tea I had drunk with Aritomo, I had consumed nothing all morning.
‘Before you think I’m being disrespectful,’ Magnus tilted his bottle of Tiger Beer at the people scattered across the lawn, ‘by the time we heard about Gurney’s death, it was too late to cancel.’ He took another swig from his bottle. ‘You get what you wanted from Aritomo?’
‘He turned me down.’
‘Ag, shame. But stay here. For as long as you want. The air will do you a world of good.’ His eye searched the crowd. ‘Didn’t Frederik remind him about the braai?’
‘He has work to do,’ I said. Magnus picked up a pair of metal tongs. ‘Were there reprisals against him when the Occupation ended?’
‘By the anti-Japanese guerrillas?’ He wiped his lips with his hand. ‘Of course not.’
‘He told me he was arrested.’
‘Well, the Brits couldn’t charge him with anything,’ Magnus replied. ‘And I vouched for him.’ He turned the boerewors over and fat dripped into the coals, sending up a cloud of fragrant smoke. ‘He made sure we weren’t sent to the camps. At one point in the war he had more than thirty people working for him. All of them – and their families – survived the war.’
‘We should have come here to wait out the war.’
He stopped rearranging the sausages on the grill and looked at me. ‘Weeks before the Japs attacked, I told your father to bring all of you here.’
I stared at him. ‘He never said anything about it.’
‘He should have listened to me. I wish he had.’
The noise of the party behind me seemed to recede into the distance. I felt a sudden fury at my father’s obdurate pride. Magnus was right – things would have turned out differently: I would be unharmed, my mother would not be lost inside her mind, and Yun Hong would still be alive.
‘You knew early on that the Japanese would attack us?’ I asked, watching him carefully.
‘Anyone with half a brain looking at a map would have realised that,’ Magnus replied. ‘China was too big for Japan to swallow – all it could do was nibble at the edges. But these smaller territories in the southern seas were easier meat.’
Frederik came out with another tray, this one filled with lamb chops. ‘Buy a donkey,’ Magnus said to him.
‘Buy a what?’ I wondered if I had heard him correctly.
‘I’m trying to make this young man here speak more Afrikaans,’ Magnus said. ‘He’s been mixing with the English for so long he’s forgotten his own language. Tell her what it means.’
‘Baie dankie,’ Frederik said, and I asked him to spell it out for me. ‘It means “Thank you”. I’ve been taking lessons in Malay too,’ he added. ‘It’s funny, how many words they both share: pisang, piring . . . pondok.’
‘It’s because of the slaves taken from Java to the Cape,’ said Magnus. He poured his beer into the coals and asked the two of us to follow him. He introduced us to the guests. In spite of the chill in the air, I was the only one wearing gloves.
‘Meet Malcolm,’ Magnus announced. ‘He’s the Protector of Aborigines. Be careful of what you say when he’s around – this man speaks Malay and Cantonese and Mandarin and Hokkien.’
‘Malcolm Toombs,’ the man said with a warm smile. He was in his late forties, with a guileless face I immediately took to. It probably helped in his work, looking after the welfare of the Orang Asli.
‘Not a grave person, in spite of his name,’ Frederik whispered to me.
We piled our plates with food from the buffet table and were about to start eating when Toombs asked us to stand in a loose circle. Magnus’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing. We closed our eyes in a minute’s silence in memory of the High Commissioner. Only now did the full import of Gurney’s death strike me. Despite what the government had been telling us, things were getting worse.
‘How’s the boerewors?’ Magnus asked once everyone had sat down and begun eating.
‘They taste much better than they look.’ I chewed, swallowed and said, ‘How did Gurney die?’
‘Terrorists ambushed his car and shot him. Happened yesterday afternoon on the road up to Fraser’s Hill,’ Magnus said. ‘They were going on holiday, apparently – he and his wife. Travelling in an armed convoy.’
‘And yet they managed to kill him,’ said Jaafar Hamid, the owner of the Lakeview Hotel at Tanah Rata. He pulled his chair closer to us.
‘Why was the bloody news kept back until today?’ Magnus asked.
‘Everything’s censored these days,’ I said. ‘But, by now, there’ll hardly be a wireless anywhere in the world that isn’t broadcasting what has happened.
