‘Geoff checks it on the radio every evening. If it goes up, we know some of our workers will leave to work in the rubber plantations. Most of those who left before the Occupation have returned, but we’re always short-handed.’
‘You employed them again, after they deserted you?’
He turned to look at me, then resumed walking. ‘When the Japs came, I told my workers that they were free to leave. Their old jobs would be available to them once the war was over. I told them I’d keep my promise if I were still alive.’
The ground steepened sharply, straining my calves. Tendrils of steam uncurled off the tops of the bushes. Glancing behind at me, Magnus shortened his stride, which only made me push myself harder to keep up. I was breathing hard when we reached the top of the rise. He stopped and pointed to the mountains.
They had broken out of the earth three hundred miles away to the north, near the border with Thailand, and they stretched all the way to Johor in the south, forming a vertebration that divided Malaya in two. In the tender light of morning, the mountains had the softness of a scene on a silk painting.
‘This always reminds me of the week I spent in China, in Fujian province,’ Magnus said. ‘I visited Mount Li Wu. There was a temple there, a thousand years old – so the monks said. They grew their own tea, those monks. They told me that the original tea tree had been planted there by a god, can you believe it? The temple was famous for the flavour of its tea, a flavour not found anywhere else in the world.’
‘What sort of flavour?’
‘To preserve the innocence of the tea,’ he said, ‘only the monks who hadn’t reached puberty could pick the leaves. And for a month before they started picking, these boys were not allowed to eat chillies or pickled cabbage, no garlic or onions. They couldn’t touch even a drop of soy sauce otherwise their breath might have polluted the leaves. The boys picked the tea at sunrise, just about now. They wore gloves so their sweat wouldn’t taint the flavour of the tea. Once picked and packed it was sent as tribute to the Emperor.’
‘My father thought you were mad to go into tea planting.’
‘He wasn’t the only one who thought so.’ Magnus laughed, plucking a leaf from a bush and rolling it between his fingers under his nose.
Voices and singing floated from the tea-pickers in the valley. Most of them were women, their heads shaded beneath tattered straw hats. Large wicker baskets were strapped to their backs and secured by bands across their foreheads. They collected close to fifty pounds of leaves a day, returning to the factory to unload their sated baskets before heading back to the slopes, going through the same routine again and again until the day ended. Looking at them, it struck me how deceptive the advertisements were that I had grown up seeing pasted on the walls of musty provision stores next to the faded posters for Tiger Beer and Chesterfield cigarettes; they had depicted voluptuous tea-pickers in clean and brightly-coloured saris, their teeth gloriously white, their noses and ears glittering with gold rings and studs, golden bangles weighing down their wrists.
The workers I was looking at in the valley below were paid badly for doing one of the most mindless, exhausting labours ever devised. From my rambles around the estate, I knew that Magnus was a decent enough employer, providing houses for his workers and basic schooling for their children, but I realised that much of the women’s laughter and singing rising from the slopes was bitter with the harshness of their lives. These women would return every evening to their dirt-floored shacks, their eight or nine or ten children, and their toddy-pickled husbands.
‘A sergeant in the army told me that the day after Gurney was shot, security forces moved in and evicted everyone living in Tras,’ Magnus said.
‘Where’s that?’
‘A squatter village close to where Gurney was killed.’
‘They must have thought the villagers had been helping the CTs.’
‘At least the soldiers didn’t burn their homes to the ground.’ Magnus’s gaze seemed to be resting on another horizon drawn across a different, older world. ‘When I was on commando, I often rode past farmhouses torched by the rooinek soldiers. Sometimes the ruins still smouldered and smoke often plunged the whole veldt into a macabre twilight for days. There were dead sheep everywhere, thick with flies – the Khakis had tied them to horses and pulled them apart. Wherever we rode, the air always seemed to be vibrating with a low, constant humming. Flies made that sound.’ He stroked his chest in a distracted manner. ‘We were filled with such fury, such hatred for the English. . . it only made us more determined to fight them to the bitter end.’ His arm swept across the tea fields. ‘The first batch of seedlings came from the same estate in Ceylon where I had once worked as a prisoner of war. History is filled with ironies, don’t you think?’
Clouds streamed past the mountain peaks, spirits fleeing the rising sun. I imagined I could feel a stirring deep beneath the earth as it sensed the approaching light.
‘I’m going home tomorrow.’ I kicked a pebble and sent it skittering over the ledge. ‘Will you drive me to Tapah? I’ll catch a train from there.’
He glanced at me. ‘What will you do? Go back to your old job?’
‘After the things I said about the government?’
‘There are other gardeners you can get to design your garden, surely.’
‘Not in Malaya. There’s nobody of Aritomo’s reputation. And I don’t want to go to Japan,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I don’t think I ever can.’ The gardener’s refusal had felled a log over my path and I had no idea what to do. ‘Speak to him for me, Magnus. Ask him to reconsider,’ I said. ‘I’ve got money set aside. I’ll pay him well.’
‘I’ve known him for ten years, Yun Ling. Once he’s made up his mind, he never changes it.’
On a ridge not far from us, a pair of storks, their wings edged with a singe of grey, sprang off from the treetops and flew over a hill, heading for valleys hidden from our sight. It was so quiet I could almost hear every downward sweep of their wings, fanning the thin mists into tidal patterns.
Magnus had more divisions to inspect before breakfast, and I told him I would return to Majuba House on my own. I was walking on a footpath between the tea fields and the margin of the jungle when I stopped abruptly. My eyes searched the columns of trees, but I did not know what I was looking for. Turning back to the path, I gave a start. Less than ten feet away, a figure was standing in the shadows. It started to moved towards me. I took a step back, but it kept on coming. It entered a patch of sunlight, and I let out a breath of relief. It was a girl, about nine or ten years old, her face and clothes smeared with mud. She was an aboriginal, and she was crying.
‘Kakak saya,’ she said, her words shuddering out between her sobs. ‘Tolong mereka.’
‘Mana?’ I asked, kneeling to look into her face. I shook her shoulders gently. ‘Where?’
She pointed to the trees behind her. I felt the jungle press in closer. ‘We’ll call the police,’ I said, still speaking Malay. ‘The mata-mata will help your sister.’
I stood up and began walking back to the house, but the girl grabbed my hand and pulled me, trying to drag me to the trees. I resisted, suspecting a CT ambush. I shaded my eyes and squinted at the slopes, but the tea-pickers had not yet reached this section of the estate and there was no sign of any Home Guard. Crying more loudly, the girl yanked at my arm again. I followed her, but froze when we came to the jungle fringe.
For the first time since the war ended, I was about to re-enter the rainforest. I feared that if I went in I would never come out again. Before I could turn around, the girl tightened her grip on my hand and pulled me into the ferns.
Insects ground out metallic, clicking sounds. The cicadas wove a mesh of noise over everything.