The Harmony Silk Factory (43 page)

“You mean would I forget a person once he’s passed on?”

“Exactly. Their face—their image—would stay with you, of course. You’d remember what they looked like. The details may become vague, but you’d still remember. Just like a photograph. In your mind’s eye, you’d be able to re-create all their habits—the way they slept, how they ate: everything. But would you remember how you felt about them? And how they felt about you?”

I returned her gaze and tried not to blink. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Nor would I,” she said. “Death, I believe, erases everything. It erases all traces of the life that once existed, completely and forever. Of course we help it in its task—we’re the ones who do the forgetting.”

“I couldn’t argue with you.”

Her notebook rested on her knee. She tapped it with her pen as she gazed into the distance.

“You write every day, don’t you?” I said. “You’re religious about it.”

“Just aimless scribbles, nothing much. A woman’s frivolity.” She laughed. Although she sat casually on the sand, her head and neck were held with such poise that I felt round-shouldered and shabby, a dirty schoolboy dressed for games. “Besides,” she added, “it passes the time.” With that, she picked up her pen and opened her book.

I was almost out of earshot when I heard her call my name. “I meant to ask: How’s Johnny?”

“Fine,” I said. “He’s fine.”

I walked the length of the beach, heading towards a rocky head-land in the distance. By the time I sat down on the barnacle-clad rocks I already knew that I would steal her diary.

 

 

 

 

ON MY WAY BACK from my wondrous ruin I ran into Johnny and Honey. “Hello,” said Johnny. “I’ve been looking for you. Where have you been?” His voice was flat and bare of inflection, and his question hardly sounded like one.

“I’ve been at the ruin,” I said. “You?”

“Just chatting,” said Honey. “We were both out searching for some food for dinner this evening—I’m tired of tinned stew—and we literally bumped into each other. All the paths in this place seem to intersect a dozen times. I was just saying to Johnny that I’m sure they all lead to the same place. You agreed, didn’t you, Johnny?”

“Yes.”

“I’d never have thought of you as a hunter-gatherer, Honey,” I said. “What have you found?”

“Nothing yet, but I’m sure something will turn up. Johnny was going to teach me how to set snares for birds.”

“You seem very bloodthirsty, Honey,” I said. “Won’t fish do for dinner?”

“Fish and rice may do nicely for those of you who
go native,
” he said, “but I have a craving for a decent cut of meat. Anyway, I must be off. Hunting and gathering, you know.” He crashed through the narrow path heading back to the camp.

“Come on,” I said to Johnny. “I want to show you something. At the ruin.”

“Some other time, maybe,” he said. “I’m a bit tired.”

“You weren’t too tired to go off a-hunting with Frederick Honey.”

He remained silent. He blinked several times but his eyes stared vacantly as if incapable of focusing.

“Come on,” I urged, taking him by his arm. “A gentle walk will do you no harm. There’s something I’d like you to see. No one else knows about it yet—I want to keep it a secret, but I want
you
to see it.”

He nodded and tried to smile, but it seemed as if the faint frown that had settled on his face held his features in too tight a grip; his brow remained locked, his eyes were dead and dark, his mouth drawn thinly as if smirking. No laugh could break through that cladding; fatigue had imprinted itself on his face. He trailed after me without saying a word until we reached the ruin.

“I don’t see what’s so interesting about this place,” he said.

“I seem to be the only one on this island to appreciate the beauty of abandoned buildings. A ruin resonates with the lives of the people who once lived there. Just shut up and follow me, will you?”

“But it’s just a pile of rocks. Why do you spend so much time here?” he said as I scrambled down a bank to a clearing on the edge of the forest behind the ruin. He remained standing above me, hands obstinately on hips.

Containing my impatience, I said, “Being an aesthete, I am always hungry for beauty. You wouldn’t understand this.”

“I’ve noticed this hunger.”

“So has everyone. I don’t hide it.”

“But maybe there’s something else they haven’t seen about you?”

“
Something else?
What—like that something you were sharing with Honey just now?”

He made his way down the bank and fell in step with me as I headed for the trees; we did not speak until we were in the broken shade. “This is it,” I said. My earlier enthusiasm had dissolved into the afternoon heat. We stood in the middle of the irregular-shaped clearing I had made—created—over the past few afternoons. I had brought down saplings with a machete, slashed away the shrubby undergrowth, and broken off the lower branches, cutting a view towards the ruin and the dirty brook that ran beside it. I worked vigorously, singing as I heaved and perspired in the jungle’s hot hammam, but now it seemed that love’s labour was lost. The clearing no longer seemed as clean and virginal as it had when I left it: its boundaries were obscure, encroached upon by plants that seemed to have crept into its confines overnight. Outlines of dead logs I hauled away remained impressed on the damp earth, scarring the ground with their funereal shapes. Broken branches littered the place I had worked so hard to cleanse, and above us the canopy of leaves suddenly seemed more opaque than ever.

“What’s that?” Johnny said, pointing at a shady corner.

“A few things I brought with me,” I said, shuffling over to the small parcel I had left under a bush. “Some wine, knives and forks, one or two dishes. Most of them were broken in the storm.”

“Peter,” he said, fixing me with a squinting look of incomprehension. “Why did you bring this here? And your luggage—you must have had no room for your clothes. What’s this, you brought
wine
?”

I shrugged and surveyed the sorry assembly of dull silver and cracked china. Against the dark foliage and muddy soil they looked silly, a still life long abandoned by its painter.

Johnny said, “Peter, this is wonderful.”

“It seems a waste of effort, doesn’t it?”

“No, it’s magnificent,” he said, placing great stress on the second syllable. When he did so, I recognised that it was the way I pronounced the word. “Why did you do it?”

“I really don’t know. It seemed a good idea at the time. I had visions of a rather romantic holiday—a backdrop of steaming tropical forest, beautiful servants waiting at the table, crystal glasses, laughter and merriment, music. I wanted a celebration. Instead we have this,” I said, looking around me, “this abject failure. Rather fitting, I think. You see, it’s my birthday tomorrow. Or the day after—I’ve lost count. It doesn’t seem to matter now.”

We remained silent for some time, fatigued, I think, by the intense afternoon heat. Then Johnnny said, “I want to tell you something. I don’t care if you repeat it or not—as you say, nothing seems to matter now. But all the same I want you to know it. It’s about Kunichika. He has given me a choice. He knows, Peter, he knows. He knows everything about me—what I do away from the shop. He knows about the people I meet, the places I go to, the things I say. He knows what I believe in.”

“How?” I said weakly.

“I don’t know. Someone must have told him. I have been betrayed. You were right, Peter—I will never know who my friends are in this Valley. It must have been someone who wants something from Kunichika. Who? I don’t know. Could be anyone. Kunichika can give anyone anything they want. To me, he has given a simple choice. It is more than anyone will ever get from him. If I choose correctly, if I help the Japanese, I will have everything I desire. They will protect me. I will be richer than T. K. Soong, richer than anyone in the Valley, more powerful. If. But if not, then I lose everything I have. My shop, certainly, but also my wife.”

“And you already know what you are going to do.”

He sat down on the ground, resting his back against a tree stump. “There is no way ahead for me.” He smiled.

I said, “Principles are one thing, survival is another.”

“Survival,” he said, chuckling as if chancing upon a novel idea. “Do you know what will happen to me if I collaborate with the Japanese?”

“No one need ever know.”

“I will always know, Peter,” he said, a thin smile settling on his features. “And you will always know.”

I looked at him and tried to recall the face I had first seen in Singapore. It was still there, obscured by the lines of doubt and fear, but there nonetheless. “Listen,” I said. “When we get back to the Valley we shall sit tight and let Kunichika make the first move. If it looks as if the Japanese will invade, you shall come with me to Singapore. There we shall ensconce ourselves in the disgusting opulence of the Raffles Hotel, where we shall sit listening to the firing of British guns whilst sipping pink gins.”

He laughed and shook his head. “That may work for you but not for me.”

“Why on earth not—don’t you like pink gin?”

“I’ve never had one. Is it nice?” he said, his face breaking into a broad smile. “Do you think Chinese people are allowed to drink it too?”

“You were made for pink gin. I’ve never been so certain of anything in my whole life.”

“It’ll be your fault if I don’t like it.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll adore it.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m serious, Johnny. I shall take you with me, wherever I go. You’ll be safe with me. God knows there are some privileges of being British.”

He laughed and shook his head.

“You poor bastard,” I said. “You really have been sick, haven’t you?”

He didn’t reply, but leaned forward and rested his forehead on his arm. I could not see his face.

“Don’t think about it, Johnny. Kunichika’s nothing.”

He was breathing very heavily, and when he spoke his voice was quiet. “I’m not afraid of that. It’s Snow I’m worried about.”

“What?”

“I’m resigned to losing her.”

“You silly creature,” I said. “I told you to forget about Kunichika—he’ll move on. You won’t lose her to him.”

“Not to him,” he said,
diminuendo.
“To you.”

I did not answer. I sat on the moist soil next to him, legs crossed uncomfortably.

“At first I was angry,” he said, without bitterness. “I saw you talking to her. You spoke so freely, and she to you. I knew I would never be able to speak to her like that. But now I think—perhaps it’s better for her. Who wants to be the wife of a Communist? When the Japanese invade, it’ll be the end for me, however I choose. If she is not with me, at least with you she will be safe.”

“Please don’t speak like this.”

“Just promise me, Peter. Whatever I choose to do, you know that I am finished. Please look after her.”

“You aren’t finished. Nothing will happen to either of you. You will both be with me in Singapore.”

“Look after her. Promise. Swear it to me.”

I did. We sat staring up at the impenetrable forest.

After a while he said, “This is a nice spot for a party.”

“You don’t think it’s too small, do you?”

“No, but it could do with a tidy-up.”

“That’s easy enough.”

“I don’t mind that you love her,” he said calmly.

I paused and looked him in the eye. “Johnny, Johnny,” I said. “I’m very fond of Snow but I don’t love her.” I don’t know why I lied.

He put his hands over his face and began to cry. There was nothing I could do to console him. I put my arm around his shuddering shoulders but he would not stop. He cried in a thin wail that cut my insides to shreds; it ran through the trees, filling the jungle with its noise. To this day I can hear its shrill soliloquy, reciting in my head. It comes to me at night, when all is quiet and I can feel nothing but pain.

THE BEST THING ABOUT THE TROPICS,” I said as I watered the orchids, “is that the seasons never change. There are the monsoons, of course, but there’s never a time when the garden becomes a frozen graveyard. We don’t have to worry about dead leaves littering our perfect lawns or the ornamental ponds freezing over.”

“I think autumn in England is very beautiful,” said Gecko without looking up from his newspaper. “I’ve seen pictures of it, the mountains all covered in red leaves. Very nice.”

“I think you mean
New
England,” I said, knowing that the latest issue of the
National Geographic
contained a photographic feature on the people of Vermont and their ghastly faux-naïve clapboard houses. “That’s in America.”

Alvaro put down his paper and took off his glasses to look at me. I was hanging the last of the orchids on the ceiling of the verandah. I had bought them from the market early that morning—ten little clay pots, each bearing a different specimen. Hanging from the low eaves, they formed a half-curtain that ameliorated the view of the as-yet barren lawn. “I must confess,” he said, with none of the contrition of a confessional, “that I have always wanted to go to England in the winter. There’s something about the cold weather that’s always fascinated me. Frosty air seems so mysterious. Sometimes it gets too hot here, you know, just too damn bloody hot, and I wish I could just fly away to somewhere cold. People are nicer in cold countries, aren’t they? More civilised.”

“I shan’t disabuse you of that notion,” I said. “If you’re ever unlucky enough to find yourself in an English winter, you will quickly learn the truth for yourself.”

“Oh look,” Gecko trilled, straightening his newspaper for emphasis. “That man has died, the one everyone said was a gangster. Johnny Lim—look, there’s an obituary and a little article too.”

“Don’t slander him—he was a war hero, you know. Where’s the article?” Alvaro said, flicking through the pages of his own paper. “Ah, here. ‘The famous business tycoon and community figure Johnny Lim passed away yesterday aged seventy-seven. Mr. Lim was a highly respected member of the community in Ipoh and the Kinta Valley. His trading company, the Harmony Silk Factory, became well known throughout the country, but although its interests became diversified, it remained faithful to its roots. In the fifty years that Mr. Lim ran the company, it never left its original site on the banks of the River Perak, where it was once the centre of commercial activity in the Kinta Valley. Mr. Lim set up the Harmony Silk Factory towards the end of the Second World War, defying the Japanese authorities to establish what would quickly become the most prominent privately owned business concern in the Valley. No other company flourished as the Harmony Silk Factory did under the Japanese. Most observers attribute its success to Mr. Lim’s bravery in facing the Japanese, particularly the chief administrator of the Kempeitai, or secret police, Kunichika Mamoru, the so-called Demon of Kampar. The two men had numerous meetings, during which it is believed Kunichika attempted to coerce the respected community leader to aid in Japanese military efforts. These meetings were fruitless, and the two men established an uncomfortable respect for each other, one that saved the Harmony Silk Factory and its many workers from the fate that befell many other Chinese businesses during the war. Rumours of Mr. Lim’s collaboration with the Kempeitai were rife but never substantiated.