The Garden of Evening Mists (2 page)

‘When the war ended,’ the Chief Justice continued, ‘Judge Teoh worked as a research clerk in the War Crimes Tribunal while waiting for admission to read Law at Girton College, Cambridge. After being called to the Bar, she returned to Malaya in 1949 and worked as a Deputy Public Prosecutor for nearly two years…’

In the front row below me sat four elderly British advocates, their suits and ties almost as old as them. Along with a number of rubber planters and civil servants, they had chosen to stay on in Malaya after its independence, thirty years ago. These aged Englishmen had the forlorn air of pages torn from an old and forgotten book.

The Chief Justice cleared his throat and I looked at 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 stall selling cloudy bottles of wild honey and blow-pipes and bunches of foul-smelling
petai
beans. The road had been widened considerably since I last used it, the sharper turns smoothened out, but there were too many cars and tour buses, too many incontinent lorries leaking gravel and cement as they made their way to another construction site in the highlands.

It was the last week of September, the rainy season hovering around the mountains.

Entering Tanah Rata, the sight of the former Royal Army Hospital standing on a steep rise filled me with a sense of familiar disquiet; Frederik had told me some time ago that it was now a school. A new hotel, with the inevitable mock-Tudor facade, towered behind it. Tanah Rata was no longer a village but a little town, its main street taken over by steam-boat restaurants and tour agencies and souvenir shops. I was glad to leave them all behind me.

The guard was closing the wrought iron gates of Majuba Tea Estate when I drove past. I kept to the main road for half a mile before realising that I had missed the turn-off to Yugiri.

Annoyed with myself, I swung the car around, driving more slowly until I found the turning, hidden by advertisement boards. The laterite road ended a few minutes later at Yugiri’s entrance.

A Land Rover was parked by the road side. I stopped my car next to it and got out, kicking the stiffness from my legs.

The high wall protecting the garden was patched in moss and old water stains. Ferns grew from the cracks. Set into the wall was a door. Nailed by the doorpost was a wooden plaque, a pair of Japanese ideograms burned into it. Below these words was the garden’s name in English:
Evening Mists
. I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.

Looking above the top of the wall, my eyes followed the uneven treeline of the ridge rising behind the garden. I found the wooden viewing tower half hidden in the trees, like the crow’s nest of a galleon that had foundered among the branches, trapped by a tide of leaves. A path threaded up into the mountains and for a few moments I stared at it, as if I might glimpse Aritomo walking home. Shaking my head, I pushed the door open, entered the garden and closed it behind me.

The sounds of the world outside faded away, absorbed into the leaves. I stood there, not moving. For a moment I felt that nothing had changed since I was last here, almost thirty-five years before – the scent of pine resin sticking to the air, the bamboo creaking and knocking in the breeze, the broken mosaic of sunlight scattered over the ground.

Guided by memory’s compass, I began to walk into the garden. I made one or two wrong turns, but came eventually to the pond. I stopped, the twisting walk through the tunnel of trees heightening the effect of seeing the open sky over the water.

Six tall, narrow stones huddled into a miniature limestone mountain range in the centre of the pond. On the opposite bank stood the pavilion, duplicated in the water so that it appeared like a paper lantern hanging in mid-air. A willow grew a few feet away from the pavilion’s side, its branches sipping from the pond.

In the shallows, a grey heron cocked its head at me, one leg poised in the air, like the hand of a pianist who had forgotten the notes to his music. It dropped its leg a second later and speared its beak into the water. Was it a descendant of the one that had made its home here when I first came to Yugiri? Frederik had told me that there was always one in the garden – an unbroken chain of solitary birds. I knew it could not be the same bird from nearly forty years before but, as I watched it, I hoped that it was; I wanted to believe that by entering this sanctuary the heron had somehow managed to slip through the fingers of time.

To my right and at the top of an incline stood Aritomo’s house. Lights shone from the windows, the kitchen chimney scribbling smoke over the treetops. A man appeared at the front door and walked down the slope towards me. He stopped a few paces away, perhaps to create a space for us to study one another. We are like every single plant and stone and view in the garden, I thought, the distance between one another carefully measured.

‘I thought you’d changed your mind,’ he said, closing the space between us.

‘The drive was longer than I remembered.’

‘Places seem further apart, don’t they, the older we get.’

At sixty seven years old, Frederik Pretorius had the dignified air given off by an antique art work, secure in the knowledge of its own rarity and value. We had kept in touch over the years, meeting up for drinks or a meal whenever he came down to Kuala Lumpur, but I had always resisted his invitations to visit Cameron Highlands. In the last two or three years his trips to KL had tapered off. Long ago I had realised that he was the only close friend I would ever have.

‘The way you were watching that bird just now,’ he said, ‘I felt you were looking back to the past.’

I turned to look at the heron again. The bird had moved further out into the pond. Mist escaped from the water’s surface, whispers only the wind could catch. ‘I
was
thinking of the old days.’

‘For a second or two there I thought you were about to fade away.’ He stopped, then said,

‘I wanted to call out to you.’

‘I’ve retired from the Bench.’ It was the first time I had said it aloud to another person.