The Garden of Evening Mists (30 page)

A Sikh guard brought me to Hideyoshi’s cell. The Japanese was curled up on a wooden pallet. He sat up when saw me come nearer to the metal bars. I waved the Sikh away.

‘You seem calm, unlike some of the others,’ I said to Hideyoshi.

‘Do not be fooled, Miss Teoh,’ he replied in fluent English – I recalled from his file that he had spent part of his military training in England. He was a slender man in his forties, made thinner by the deprivations of the war, like every one of us. ‘I am frightened, oh yes, very much.

But I have had enough time to prepare myself. You want to know why?’

‘Why?’

‘From the first day I saw you walking into the courtroom, I knew you would do your duty thoroughly. I knew I would be hung.’

‘Hanged,’ I said. ‘Not hung.’

‘No difference to me,’ he said. ‘You were in one of our camps,
neh
?’

‘I
was
in a Japanese camp.’ They were the exact words I had used on the other men I had helped deliver to the hangman. By now I knew what Hideyoshi’s next question would be. Every one of the prisoners I had spoken to had invariably asked the same question when they discovered that I had been interned. Hideyoshi did not disappoint me.

‘So where were you sent?’ he asked. ‘Changi? Java?’

‘It was in Malaya, somewhere in the jungle.’

Hideyoshi got up from his pallet and shuffled to the bars. ‘The camp was hidden?’

Though he reeked of stale perspiration I still took a step closer to him. ‘All the other prisoners were killed, yes?’ he went on. ‘How could it be that you are the only one who lived?’

‘You’ve heard of that camp?’ I whispered.

‘Only rumours – how do the Malays describe them?’

‘
Khabar angin
.’

‘News scribbled on the wind.’ He nodded. ‘I
did
hear of those camps, yes.’

‘Tell me more about them.’ It was difficult to keep my voice steady.

‘What can you do for me in return?’

‘I can speak to someone higher-up, perhaps get your case reviewed.’

‘And what reasons will you give?’ Hideyoshi asked. ‘The evidence against me was brilliantly presented to the court. Brilliantly.’

He was correct: it would appear highly suspicious if I were to intercede on his behalf. I looked around the passageway; I had to find out more about what he knew. I had to. It was the only scrap of information I had come across after all this time.

‘If I write a letter to my son,’ he said, ‘will you post it to him for me? Intact. Not censored?’

‘If I’m satisfied that what you tell me is true.’

‘They were only rumours,’ he repeated, as though worried that he had promised too much. I stared at him. ‘
Kin no yuri
,’ he said, and then translated it for me even though I understood what it meant. ‘Golden Lily.’

‘That tells me nothing,’ I said, raising my voice. From the other end of the corridor the Sikh guard looked at me. I signalled that everything was fine.

‘It is the name given to the kind of place you were sent to.’ Hideyoshi said. ‘You would know more about it than me if you had been taken there.’

It was all he knew, I realised; all he could tell me. The sense of hope that had fired me up a short while before, the hope that someone else knew of the camp I had been sent to, disappeared. I backed away from the bars.

‘You are not going to keep to our agreement,’ he said, ‘are you?’

I spun around and walked away from him. I returned to his cell half an hour later. He opened his eyes and looked up when I called his name. I passed him some writing materials between the bars and went to lean against a wall, watching him write. A short while later he came to the bars and handed me a letter sealed inside a light blue envelope. He looked at my hand, the hand with the missing fingers. ‘You should forget all that’s happened to you,’ he said.

The address on the envelope was written in English and Japanese. ‘How old is your son?’

‘Eleven. Eiji was three, almost four when I last saw him. He will not remember me.’

I weighed the envelope on my palm. ‘I thought it would be heavier.’

‘How much paper do you need to tell your son you love him?’ he replied.

Staring at him, this man who had ordered an entire village to be killed, I felt a profound sadness for him, for us.

When the guards came to take Hideyoshi, he asked me to walk with him. I hesitated, then I nodded. Walking along the passageway, we passed the other prisoners in their cells. A few of them stood to attention, saluting him from behind the bars. Hideyoshi kept his eyes straight ahead, his lips moving soundlessly.

The sky was streaked with the carnage of sunset when we came out to the yard at the back of the prison. Hideyoshi stopped and turned his face upwards, breathing in the light from the first stars of the evening. The guards pushed him up a flight of steps to the hanging platform and positioned him beneath the noose. They looped the rope around his neck and tightened it. He stumbled, but regained his balance. One of the guards held up a blindfold. Hideyoshi shook his head.

A Buddhist monk, appointed to conduct the rites for these executions, began to pray, thumbing the string of beads twined around his fingers as line after line of prayers unreeled from his throat. The droning washed over me. Hideyoshi and I looked at one another until the trapdoor cracked open and he dropped into an abyss only he could see.

* * *

The siren announcing the end of the working day whined through the air, pulling me from the thicket of my memories. Returning the notebook to my room, I spent a few minutes looking at Yun Hong’s watercolour. I recognised the restlessness taking hold of me, a forewarning of the periods of despair that used to swamp me before I came to the highlands. I knew when these moods were imminent, when they would loom over the horizon of my mind.

I put on a cardigan, wound a scarf around my neck and walked to Yugiri. Banks of clouds were trapped in the hollows between the ridges. At Usugumo Pond I stopped and lingered. The garden felt larger, now that the pond was filled, and I realised that this liquid mirror was another form of
shakkei
, borrowing from emptiness to create more emptiness. The stones and pebbles with which we had lined the pond were now submerged in water. It gave me a deep feeling of satisfaction to know that we had done everything properly, even if the results of our efforts were not visible. The drowned stones imparted a different character to the water, made it seem older, denser, its secrets hidden away.

In the shallows, the grey heron stood on one leg, grooming itself. It stopped and eyed me, then returned to contemplating itself in the water. For some reason it had remained here, always returning to the pond after it had been absent for a day or two.

The rusty screeching of crickets filled the air. On the opposite bank, movement in the tree ferns caught my attention. I tensed up, preparing to run if I had to. Aritomo slipped out from behind the ferns a second later. I sighed, relief loosening my limbs. Like the heron, Aritomo paused, staring at me from across the water. Then he walked towards me.

Twilight dampened the air with a watery haze, weighing down every leaf in the garden with the sadness of another day ended. Aritomo stopped beside me and leaned on his walking stick, gazing at the heron. For the first time since I knew him, it struck me that he was no longer young.

‘
A pond guarded over by waterfowl will bring peace to the house
,’ I murmured, recalling a line of advice from
Sakuteiki.

Creases flared out from the corners of his smile. For a timeless moment I looked straight into his eyes, and he stared at me with the same concentration he had shown when he was studying the target, just before he released his arrow.

Above the highest mountains, the last of the day evaporated from the sky. ‘The Pavilion of Heaven… Yun Hong would have been delighted.’

‘I am glad.’

The heron flapped its wings once, twice, beating the stiffness out of them, the sounds echoing away into the trees. Droplets of water fell from the bird’s legs as it flew off, blooming into overlapping bracelets on the pond’s surface.

Movement high above us, higher than the heron, caught our attention. We both raised our faces to the sky at the same time. Aritomo pointed with the handle of his walking stick, looking like a prophet in an ancient land. In the furthest reaches of the eastern sky, where it had already turned to night, streaks of light were fanning out. I did not know what they were at first, but when I realised what I was looking at, a sigh misted from between my lips.

It was a storm of meteors, arrows of light shot by archers from the far side of the universe, igniting and burning up as they pierced the atmospheric shield. Hundreds of them burned out halfway, flaring their brightest just before they died.

Standing there with our heads tilted back to the sky, our faces lit by ancient starlight and the dying fires of those fragments of a planet broken up long ago, I forgot where I was, what I had gone through, what I had lost.

‘My grandfather taught me the names of the planets and stars,’ Aritomo said. ‘We often sat in his garden at night, studying the scatterings of light in the sky through his telescope. He was very proud of it, that telescope of his.’

‘Tell me their names,’ I said. ‘Point them out to me.’

‘The stars are different here.’ His eyes swept across the sky again, and I wondered whether the loss I caught in his voice would accompany him for the rest of his life.

‘In one of the gardens he made,’ he went on a moment later, still looking up into the sky,

‘my grandfather used only white stones. Completely white, almost luminous. He set them in patterns that mirrored the positions of the constellations he loved most: the Winnowing Basket; the Sculptor’s Tool; the Purple Forbidden Enclosure.’ The names from his lips sounded like offerings to the dome above us. ‘He wanted the people visiting that garden to feel as though they were walking amongst the night sky.’

The torrent of falling stars dried up, but the sky continued to exhale a luminance, as though it had retained the light from the meteors. Perhaps the illumination was trapped not in the sky but in our eyes, in our memory.

‘My
amah
used to warn me that they’re bad omens, these meteors,’ I said. ‘
Soh pa sing
, she called them – broomstick stars, sweeping away all of one’s good luck. I’ve always disagreed with her – how can something so beautiful be unlucky?’

‘They remind me of our
kamikaze
pilots,’ Aritomo said. ‘My brother was one of them.’

A few seconds floated past before I spoke. ‘Did he survive the war?’

‘He was among the first batch of pilots to volunteer.’

‘What made him do that?’

‘Family honour,’ Aritomo replied. That justification, so often uttered by the Japanese prisoners I had met, had always repelled me. ‘It is not what you think,’ he continued. ‘Our father passed away shortly before I left Japan. Shizuo blamed his death on the troubles I had caused our family.’

He scratched at the pebbles on the bank with the tip of his walking stick. ‘Before I met you, before you came here, I never knew anyone personally who had lost friends or family in the Occupation. Oh, I knew of those here who had been brutalized by my people – the men and women in the villages, the workers here, even Magnus and Emily. But I kept myself above all of that. I kept out everything that was unpleasant. I attended only to my garden.’

The first stars of the evening were just appearing, faint and timid, as though overwhelmed by the deluge of light a few minutes before. Staring into the void, I felt I could stand there until dawn came, turning with the earth, watching the stars stencil their cryptic patterns across the sky.

Aritomo reached out his hand and touched my cheek once, lightly. I caught his fingers, pulled him to me and kissed him. He broke away first. He stepped back and slipped past me, merging into the shadows spilling out from the trees. I turned to watch him as he headed back to his house. He slowed down, then stopped walking.

For a few moments I did nothing, keeping just as still. Then I went towards him, and together, in silence, we walked back to his house, our breaths nothing more than clouds burned away by the light of the stars.

Two hours after midnight, I stop writing. I do not want to face what I have remembered, among all those pages and pages of words. But they are there, crouching behind a stone in my mind, waiting to come out again. Putting down my pen on the desk and pushing back my chair, I slide open the door and walk along the darkened verandah to the front of the house.

The world is frosted in moonlight. A nightjar calls out, then stops. I wait for it to resume, but it disappoints me. Rubbing the circulation into my wrists, I remember how, after that evening with Aritomo by the pond, I would often look up if I happened to be outside at night. But I never saw anything like that again, that monsoon of falling stars teeming across the sky.

I had forgotten about Captain Hideyoshi Mamoru. The memory of my conversation with him had come back to me as I was writing. I wanted to stop, but instead allowed it to unfold from my pen. Thinking about my own words again, I am appalled. Had I been so unfeeling as to correct a man’s grammar a short while before he was to be hanged? Hung, hanged – what did it matter?

As a judge I have sat in civil and criminal cases. I have sentenced people to death for murder, drug-trafficking and armed robbery. I have always taken pride in my detachment, my objectivity, but now I wonder if these are merely the attributes of a deadened heart.

Before going back inside, I look to the sky again. The stars are still, unmoving. Not a single marker has been dislodged from its position on the eternal map.

* * *

For the past few days, our Professor Tatsuji has been spending more time in the garden. We have not spoken much since our conversation in the Pavilion of Heaven a week ago. I have given him permission to explore Yugiri, but he doesn’t seem to wander far from the house. Some days I see him by the pavilion, just standing there, hands behind his back. I want him to examine the prints as quickly as he can but, for some reason, the sight of him gazing out to the water fills me with a reluctance to rush him. More than once I have caught him staring at the sky, as though searching for something behind the clouds.