The Garden of Evening Mists (8 page)

‘You want me to design a garden for you.’

From the moment I had sent my letter off to the gardener, I had been going over what I would say when I met him. ‘Yun Hong... my sister... she heard about you eleven years ago,’ I said, searching for the right words. ‘You had just moved to Malaya. This was sometime in 1940.’

‘Eleven years.’ He turned to stare at the empty pond, his face barren. ‘Hard to believe that I have been living here for so long.’

‘Yun Hong was fascinated by Japanese gardens even before we heard about you. Before you came to Malaya,’ I said.

‘How did she know about our gardens?’ he said. ‘I doubt there were any in Penang in those days, or in the whole of Malaya. Even today, mine is the only one.’

‘My father took all of us to Japan for a month. In 1938. Your government wanted to buy rubber from him. He was busy with his meetings, but the officials’ wives showed us around the city. We visited a few of the temples and the gardens. We even took the train to Kyoto.’ The memory of that holiday – the only time I had been overseas till then – made me smile. ‘I’ll never forget how excited Yun Hong was. I was fifteen, and she was three years older than me. But on that holiday... on that holiday she was like a little girl, and I felt I was the elder sister.’

‘Ah... Kyoto...’ murmured Aritomo. ‘Which temples did you see?’

‘Joju-in, Tofuku-ji, and the Temple of the Golden Pavilion,’ I said. ‘When we returned home, Yun Hong read all the books she could find on Japanese gardens. She wanted to know – she was obsessed to know – how they were created.’

‘You cannot learn gardening from books.’

‘We soon found that out,’ I said. ‘She tried to make a rock garden behind our house. I helped her, but it was a failure. My mother was furious that we had ruined the lawn.’ I paused.

‘When Yun Hong heard about you living here, she wanted to see your garden.’

‘There would have been nothing to see. Yugiri was not completed at that point.’

‘Yun Hong’s love of gardens kept us alive when we were in the camp,’ I said.

‘How did it keep you alive?’

‘We escaped into make-believe worlds,’ I said. ‘Some imagined themselves building the house of their dreams, or constructing a yacht. The more details they could include, the better they were insulated from the horrors around them. One Eurasian woman – the wife of a Dutch engineer at Shell – this woman wanted to look at her stamp collection again. It gave her the will to go on living. Another man recited the titles of all of Shakespeare’s plays again and again, in the order they had been written, when he was being tortured.’ My throat dried up and I took a swallow of tea. ‘Yun Hong kept our spirits up by talking about the gardens we had visited in Kyoto, describing even the smallest details to me. “This is how we’ll survive,” she told me, “this is how we’ll walk out of this camp.”’

The sun was breaking free of the mountains. Over the distant treetops, a flock of birds unspooled into a black wavering thread, pulling across the sky.

‘One day, a guard beat me for not bowing properly. He wouldn’t stop, but just kept hitting me. I found myself in a garden. There were flowering trees everywhere, the smell of water…’ I paused. ‘I realised that where I had been was a combination of all the gardens I had visited in Kyoto. I told Yun Hong about it. That was the moment we started to create our own garden, in here,’ I said, tapping a finger on the side of my head. ‘Day by day we added details to it. The garden became our refuge. Inside our minds, we were free.’

He touched the envelope on the table. ‘You mentioned that you worked as a researcher for the War Crimes Tribunal.’

‘I wanted to ensure that those who were responsible were punished. I wanted to see that justice was done.’

‘You think I am a fool? It was not all about justice.’

‘It was the only way that I would be allowed to examine the court documents and official records,’ I said. ‘I was searching for information about my camp. I wanted to find where my sister was buried.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘You didn’t know where your camp was located?’

‘We were blindfolded when the Japs – when the Japanese – transported us there. It was somewhere deep in the jungle. That was all we knew.’

‘The other survivors from your camp, what happened to them?’

A butterfly trembled over the cannas by the verandah. It finally alighted on a leaf, its wings closing together in prayer. ‘There were no other survivors.’

‘You were the only one?’ He looked at me as though I was trying to deceive him.

I held his stare, not swerving away from it. ‘I was the only one.’

For a while we did not speak. Pushing the tray to one side, I untied the twine around the tube of papers I had brought with me and unrolled it on the table, weighing down the edges with our cups. ‘My grandmother left a piece of land in KL to Yun Hong and me. It’s about six acres.’

I pointed to the first document, a map from the Land Office. ‘It’s a short walk up the hill from the Lake Gardens. The climate is too hot and humid for an authentic Japanese garden, I know,’ I added quickly, ‘but perhaps we can use the local flora instead. Here, I’ve taken photographs of the place. You can have some idea of what the terrain looks like, what needs to be done.’

He gave only a cursory glance at the map and the photographs. ‘Your sister was the one who dreamed of creating gardens, not you.’

‘Yun Hong lies in an unmarked grave, Mr Nakamura. This is for her, a garden in her memory.’ I foraged among my thoughts for the words to persuade him, but found none. ‘This is the only thing I can do for her.’

‘It makes me uncomfortable – the fact that you are asking me to do this because of what happened to your sister – and to you.’

‘It shouldn’t, if you weren’t involved in the Occupation.’ I spoke more sharply than I had intended.

The line of his jaw became accentuated. ‘If I had, would I not have been hanged? Perhaps by you even?’

‘Not every guilty Japanese was charged, much less punished.’

Some element in the air between us changed, as though a wind that had been blowing gently had been come to an abrupt stillness.

‘British soldiers came here one day, not long after the surrender,’ he said. ‘They dragged me out of my house and made me kneel on the ground, there. Just there.’ He pointed to a patch of grass. ‘They clubbed me. When I fell over and tried to get up, they kicked me, again and again. Then they took me away.’

‘Where to?’

‘The prison in Ipoh. They locked me in a cell. They never charged me with anything.’ He stroked his cheek with the back of his hand. ‘There were other prisoners there, Japanese officers, waiting for their sentences to be carried out. Some of them wept when they went to their execution. One by one they were taken away, until I was the only one left. And then, one evening, the guards came for me.’ He stopped stroking his cheek. ‘They took me out of my cell. I thought I was going to be hanged. But they let me go. Magnus was waiting for me at the prison gates. I had been inside for two months.’

The butterfly flew off, its wings flashing black and yellow semaphores. The gardener drummed the table with his fingers. Eventually he rose to his feet. ‘Come, I will show you part of the garden.’

‘Our tea will get cold.’ I had hoped to get a decision from him and he had not given me any indication whether he would accept my offer.

‘We are not likely to run out of tea in this part of the world,’ he said, ‘are we?’

* * *

He collected an old solar topi from a hat-stand by the front door and led me outside. We skirted the edge of the unfilled pond; I noticed that the bottom was already lined with hardened clay.

Further into the garden, a Tamil coolie was stacking rocks coated in a batter of mud and broken-off roots into a wheelbarrow. ‘
Selamat pagi, Tuan,
’ he greeted Aritomo. The gardener examined the man’s work and shook his head, his irritation obvious. The Tamil spoke barely any English and Aritomo was unable to tell him exactly what he wanted done. I stepped between them and translated his instructions into Malay. Aritomo gave me more detailed directions to convey to the man, interrogating him until he was satisfied that he was understood precisely.

‘He will still make a mess of things,’ Aritomo said as the Tamil pushed the wheelbarrow away.

‘How many workers do you have here?’

‘I used to have nine,’ Aritomo replied. ‘When the war ended they went to Kuala Lumpur.

Now I have only five of them working for me. They have no interest or ability in gardening. And as you have seen, they cannot understand my instructions.’

‘You’ve been here eleven years,’ I said, gazing around us. ‘I would have thought that the garden would’ve been completed by now.’

‘I am making some changes to it,’ he replied. ‘The soldiers who came for me took pleasure in wrecking my garden. For a long time I wondered if there was a point to my restoring it. I did not want another group of soldiers to destroy it again. I put off the repairs until a few months ago.’

‘These changes, how long will it take to finish them?’

‘Probably another year.’ He stopped to examine a row of heliconia flowers. ‘There are some new ideas I want to realise.’

‘That seems a long time just to finish a garden.’

‘Then it is clear that you know very little. Rocks have to be dug up and moved. Trees have to be taken out and replanted. Everything has to be done by hand –
everything
.’ Aritomo snapped off the twigs of some low-hanging branches. ‘So you see, I cannot accept your commission.’

I was wracked by bitter disappointment. ‘I’m willing to wait a year,’ I said eventually.

‘Even two years, if that’s what you need.’

‘I am not interested in your proposal.’ He strode to a large boulder hulking by a hedge; I followed him a second later. The stone came up to my hips. Set into its flat surface was a hollow the size of a small washbasin. Water trickled from a bamboo flume, filling the hollow before overflowing down the sides. A bamboo dipper lay beside the natural basin. Aritomo scooped it into the water and drank from it, passing it to me when he was done. I hesitated, then took it from him.

The water was icy, tasting of moss and minerals, of rain and mist. Bending to replace the dipper, my eyes were drawn across the water’s surface to a gap in the hedge, through which a solitary mountain peak in the distance could be seen. The sight of it was so unexpected, so perfectly framed by the leaves, that my mind was momentarily stilled. The tranquillity in me drained away when I straightened up, leaving me with a sense of loss.

‘A tea master horrified his pupils by planting a hedge in his garden, blocking the view of the Inland Sea for which his school was famous,’ I said, half to myself. ‘He left only a gap in the hedge and set a basin before it. Anyone drinking from it would have to bend down and look at the sea through the hole.’

‘Where did you hear that story?’

For a moment I considered telling him that Yun Hong had read about the tea master in a book, but somehow I knew he would not believe me. ‘A Jap told me,’ I said. ‘In the camp.’

‘A soldier?’

‘He wasn’t in the army. At least I never saw him in uniform. I never knew what he was.

His name was Tominaga. Tominaga Noburu. He told me that story.’

Something flickered in Aritomo’s eyes, fleeting as a moth risking a candle flame; it was the first time I had seen any hint of uncertainty in him. ‘I have not heard his name in years,’ he said.

‘You know him?’

‘That tea master was his great-uncle,’ he said. ‘Why do you think he planted the hedge to block out the famous view?’

‘Tominaga explained it to me,’ I said. ‘But I’ve only just really understood it now – the effect of seeing the view is much more powerful than if the sea has not been obstructed.’

He observed me for a few moments, then nodded.

We were approaching his house when the housekeeper came out with a tall, sandy-haired European. ‘Afternoon, Mr Nakamura,’ the man said. He turned to look at me. ‘And you must be Yun Ling. I’m Frederik.’ His accent was unlike his uncle’s, more English. I guessed him to be about two or three years older than me. ‘Uncle Magnus sent me to drive you home. He’s worried there might be trouble.’

‘Has something happened?’ asked Aritomo.

‘You haven’t heard? It’s been on the news all morning – the High Commissioner’s dead.

The CTs killed him.’

Aritomo glanced at me. ‘You must go.’

At the weathered door of the front entrance Frederik stopped and said, ‘Oh, Mr Nakamura – Magnus asked me to remind you about his party. Why don’t you come with us?

We’ll wait for you.’

‘I have work I must finish,’ Aritomo said.

He unlatched and opened the door. I hung back, letting Frederik squeeze past me to his Land Rover parked across the road. Aritomo bowed to me but I did not return it: it brought back too many memories of the times when I had been forced to do it, how I was slapped when I did not bow quickly or low enough.

I opened my mouth to speak, but Aritomo shook his head. I stepped through the doorway and then turned to look at him. He bowed to me one more time and shut the wooden door. I stood there for a moment longer, staring at it. I heard the latch drop and the key turn in the lock.

Every child longs for a larger-than-life uncle and, because I had none, Magnus Pretorius became a figure of fascination to me, although he was hardly anything more than a vague presence in my life when I was growing up. What I knew of him I heard from my parents and from the things they left unsaid, the broken-off twigs of conversations I picked up whenever I walked in on them, and from what Magnus told me after I got to know him better.

Arriving in Kuala Lumpur from Cape Town in 1905, Magnus worked as an assistant manager in one of Guthries’s rubber estates in Ipoh. He liked to tell people that he had been employed only because the interviewer discovered he could play rugger. It was during this period that he became friendly with my father. They went into business together, buying up a rubber estate, acquiring a few more over the years.

Outstation planters lived in isolation among the rubber, with the nearest European neighbour usually twenty miles or more away. Growing up in Penang, I had heard stories of planters drinking themselves to death, or dying from snakebite or malaria or a variety of other tropical diseases. Hemmed in by the neat, unending lines of rubber trees, Magnus came to hate the life and began searching for better prospects. Drinking at the FMS Bar in Ipoh one weekend, he overheard a government official talking about a plateau three thousand feet high on the Titiwangsa mountain range. The man spoke of plans to turn it into an administrative centre of government and a hill station resort for senior officials of the Malayan Civil Service.