The Garden of Evening Mists (21 page)

‘The Stone Atlas,’ murmured Aritomo.

I glanced at him, this collector of ancient maps.

* * *

Just after midday I stopped working to return to my bungalow. I went past the empty pond.

Aritomo was checking its clay-bed.

‘It should be hard enough for us to fill it soon,’ he said, looking up at me. I continued on my way, but he called out to me. ‘You waste time going back for lunch. Eat here with me.’

Noticing my hesitation, he added, ‘Ah Cheong is a good cook, I assure you.’

‘All right.’

The pavilion’s roof was taking shape. Mahmood, the carpenter and his son Rizal were unrolling their rugs on the grass next to a stack of planks. Side by side, father and son knelt to perform their prayers, prostrating themselves towards the west.

‘Sometimes I wonder if they will fly away on their magic carpets when the pavilion is completed,’ Aritomo said. He glanced at me. ‘Think of a name for it – the pavilion.’

Taken by surprise, nothing came to me. I stared at the half-finished structure, thinking furiously. ‘The Pavilion of Heaven,’ I said finally.

Aritomo grimaced, as if I had waved a putrefying object beneath his nose. ‘That is the sort of phrase ignorant Europeans come up with when they think of…
the East
.’

‘Actually, it’s from one of Shelley’s poems.
The Cloud
.’

‘Really? I have not heard of it.’

‘It was one of Yun Hong’s favourite poems.’ I closed my eyes and opened them again a moment later.

‘I am the daughter of Earth and Water,

And the nursling of the Sky;

I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;

I change, but I cannot die.’

Remembering how Yun Hong had so often spoken these lines, I stopped; I felt I was stealing something from her, something which she had treasured.

‘I have heard nothing about a pavilion,’ Aritomo said.

‘For after the rain, when with never a stain

The pavilion of Heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise, and unbuild it again.’

My voice wandered off into the trees. By the half-finished pavilion the carpenter and his son touched their heads to the ground one last time and then began rolling up their rugs.

‘The Pavilion of Heaven…’ Aritomo looked even more doubtful about my choice of name than before. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Lunch should be ready.’

* * *

He gave me a full tour of his house before we ate. It was constructed in the style of a traditional Japanese dwelling, with a broad verandah – which he called
engawa
– running around the front and sides. The room where he received his guests was located in the front of the house. The bedrooms were in the eastern wing, while his study lay in the western wing. In the centre of the house was a courtyard with a rock garden. Walkways, covered but open at the sides, connected these different sections. The twists and turns made the house feel larger than it actually was. It was the same technique he had used when he designed his garden. All the rooms opened onto a verandah, and the only concessions he had made to the mountain climate were the glass sliding doors he had put in; one could sit warmly inside the house and view the garden on even the coldest of days. The stark decoration heightened the gleaming emptiness of its cedar-wood flooring. In the sitting room stood a folding screen decorated with a field of tulips, the flowers covered in gold leaf gleaming in the shadows. A seventh-century pale limestone torso of the Buddha, its arms and head broken off, glowed in one corner.

We finished our meal with a pot of green tea on the verandah. It was the end of the week and I could tell that he was feeling lazy, in no hurry to get back to the garden. Thunder rumbled from far off. Kerneels came and rubbed against Aritomo. Stroking him, he started telling me about the temple gardens his ancestors had worked on and how, by helping to maintain them, he had upheld the traditions his family had begun.

‘You must go and see them,’ he said.

‘The temple gardens? I’d like to.’

His gaze became distant, and for a moment I almost thought he was losing his sight.

‘Todaiji. Tofukuji. And the pond garden at Joju-inji,’ he said. ‘And of course Tenryuji, Temple of the Sky Dragon, the first garden to ever use the techniques of
shakkei
.’

‘
Shakkei
?’

‘Borrowed Scenery.’

‘Borrowed? I don’t understand.’

There were four ways of doing it, he explained:
Enshaku
– distant borrowing – took in the mountains and the hills;
Rinshaku
used the features from a neighbour’s property;
Fushaku
took from the terrain; and
Gyoshaku
brought in the clouds, the wind and the rain.

I turned his words over in my head. ‘It’s nothing more than a form of deception.’

‘Every aspect of gardening is a form of deception,’ he replied, the hollowness in his voice echoed in his eyes.

We were quiet for a minute or two. Then he picked up the pewter tea caddy and spooned some more leaves into the pot. ‘That’s beautiful’ I said, pointing to the caddy. It was the size of a mug, with a long elegant neck. Bamboo leaves were engraved all along its sides.

‘A gift from Magnus.’ He replaced the cap and it slid back into place without a sound, pressing out all the air inside the caddy. ‘What do you think of the tea?’

‘It’s bitter,’ I replied. ‘But I like the way it clenches my tongue.’

‘The Fragrance of the Lonely Tree. Grown in a small plantation outside Tokyo, high in the mountains. Cameron Highlands reminds me of it.’ His eyes gazed inwards. ‘When I was young we would go there in the summer, when it got too hot and humid for my mother. My father was friends with the owner.’

I cut a slice from Emily’s moon cake and gave it to him. ‘That night at Majuba, just as we were going home,’ I said, ‘you mentioned something about
borrowing the moonlight
...’

He looked blank for a second. ‘Ah!
Hai
, it was something a poet wrote before he passed away. His death poem.’

It began to rain. Ah Cheong appeared and set two bowls of bird’s nest soup on the table.

Aritomo had a fondness for swiftlet’s nests, eating them once a week. They were either cooked in a broth or, more to my tastes, served chilled in bowls of rock-sugar syrup and herbs. He believed, like many Chinese, that the nests were good for his health, cooling his internal body temperature and alleviating his arthritis. Formed from strands of the swiftlets’ saliva that had hardened in the air, these nests were found only in the high reaches of limestone caves. They were a delicacy few people could afford to consume frequently.

He shook out a pill from a bottle and swallowed it with a spoonful of soup.

‘What’s that for?’

‘Blood pressure. The bird’s nest is supposed to help too.’

I did not think there would be much to stress him, living here, but I said nothing and finished the soup. ‘How long does it take to become a skilled garden designer in Japan?’

‘Fifteen years. At least.’ He smiled. ‘You look shocked. That was in the old days.

Apprenticeship is usually only four to five years these days.’ He shook his head. ‘Standards have dropped, like for everything else.’

‘Still... it’s a long time, five years.’

A memory wisped across his face, like rain drifting over a mountain. ‘My father began teaching me when I was five,’ he said. ‘On my eighteenth birthday he gave me a satchel filled with sketchbooks and just enough money to walk for six months across Honshu. “The best way to learn is to look at nature. Draw what you see, what moves you. Return only when the winter snows begin to fall,” he told me.’

‘That was harsh of him.’

‘Oh, I thought so too, at first,’ Aritomo said. ‘But those six months became the happiest time of my life. I had no duties to anyone, no obligations. I was free.’

He stayed with rice farmers and woodcutters at night. He took shelter in grass huts when it rained, and begged at temples for a bed to sleep in, for a bowl of rice, a cup of tea. Day by day he saw the countryside with changing eyes. ‘The smallest things made me stop to look, to draw, to feel: the light coming through the furry flowers of wild grass in a meadow; a cricket springing off a stone; the heart-shaped flower of a banana tree nestling among the leaves,’ he said. ‘Even the silence of the road would halt me. But how does one capture stillness on paper?’

On some parts of his journey he was on the same path the poet, Bashō, had taken two hundred years before, when he had walked alone on his narrow road to the interior. ‘I felt I was seeing the same views he had recorded in his journals. There were days when I would not meet another person on the road. I took long, arduous detours just to see a famous valley, or to visit a monastery on a mountain peak. I lived in the seasons and, like the grass and the trees, I changed with them – summer to autumn. When the year came to its end, I made my way home, following the clouds that were carrying the first of the winter snows. Matsu, our gatekeeper did not recognise me at first. I had run out of money weeks earlier. I looked like a beggar, but I went immediately to my father’s study. I took out my sketchbooks from my travel-worn satchel and placed them on his desk. He glanced at the first few pages, closed the sketchbook and looked at me for a long moment. I felt I had disappointed him. “I do not need to see the rest,” he said, looking straight into my eyes. “When spring comes, you will start as a junior gardener in the palace gardens.”’

Aritomo gazed at me for a while. ‘It was the longest winter I had ever endured. I could not wait for it to end. I was nineteen when I became one of the Emperor’s gardeners,’ he said. ‘I used to see his son, Crown Prince Hirohito, in the palace gardens. I was just a year older than him.’

‘Did you ever talk to him?’

‘He was very keen on marine biology. He asked me once if I knew anything about it. I told him I was just a gardener.’

I looked at my hands, and I thought of how Aritomo had spoken to the man who had caused me so much pain, who had brought me so much loss.

‘Hirohito was twenty five when he became Emperor,’ Aritomo continued. ‘By then my views on gardening had become fixed. I knew what I wanted, what was right for a garden. Some of the older gardeners did not like me, but they could not do anything to me. I was very talented.

I am not boasting – I
was
talented. And the Emperor liked me, liked my designs. I rose through the ranks of the palace gardeners quickly. I married Asuka.’ He pointed to my cup. ‘That tea comes from her father’s plantation.’

‘You’ve told me that she died. Was it from an illness?’

‘In the Year of the Tiger, in 1938 when I myself was thirty eight, my life changed. Asuka became pregnant.’ He stopped, his eyes blurred by memory. ‘It would have been our first child.’

Our faces, I saw, were glazed into the surface of the table. ‘What happened?’

‘She was too frail. She died in childbirth; she and the baby. My son.’ He rubbed at an old water stain on the table with his thumb. I knew I ought to tell him how sorry I was to hear about that, but I had never liked people using that word with me.

‘Why did you come to Malaya?’ I asked. ‘Why did you choose this place?’

Kerneels climbed on Aritomo’s knee and settled down on his lap. ‘We could accept commissions from clients outside the palace, subject to the approval of the Imperial Bureau of Gardens. Our clients were from the aristocracy. Empress Nagako had a cousin who wanted me to design a garden for him. So, not long after Asuka died, I returned to work – it was the only way I could go on,’ Aritomo said. ‘What a disaster! From the very first day he and I fought over my designs. He thought he was an expert gardener. He imposed his own ideas. A month into the project, he demanded I make changes to my designs. Extensive changes.’

‘And did you?’

‘The Emperor spoke to me. He asked me to apologise and make the changes. I refused.

No one was going to change my designs just so they could put in a tennis court.’ Aritomo winced. ‘A tennis court! So I resigned. For a year I did not know what to do. I did not accept any more commissions. I visited the Floating World, drank too much and made a fool of myself with the women there. One day I remembered the tea planter from Malaya I had met a few years before. I had never taken up his offer to visit. Yes, I said to myself. I will write to him. I will go to Malaya. Do some travelling.’

‘Have you ever gone home since then?’

‘It is not my home anymore. My parents are dead. What I know, what I remember, all the friends I once had, all have been swept away in the storm.’ He gaze lowered to his palms lying on the table. ‘All I hold now are memories.’

I looked at him, this man who had made his home in these highlands, who watched over his garden as one vague season replaced another, as years passed and he grew older.

‘A garden borrows from the earth, the sky, and everything around it, but you borrow from time,’ I said slowly. ‘Your memories are a form of
shakkei
too. You bring them in to make your life here feel less empty. Like the mountains and the clouds over your garden, you can see them, but they will always be out of reach.’

His eyes turned bleak. I had overstepped the bounds between us. ‘It is the same with you,’ he said, a moment later. ‘Your old life, too, is gone. You are here, borrowing from your sister’s dreams, searching for what you have lost.’

We sat there on the verandah, each of us adrift in our own memories, our tea slowly relinquishing its heat into the mountain air.

* * *

The rain stopped, and I got up to leave. In the main corridor leading to his front door, I paused to look at a horizontal scroll about two feet long. Painted in black ink and water on a plain white background, the scroll showed a frail old man leading a craggy-backed water buffalo by a rope tied to a ring in the beast’s nostrils. The man was about to pass through a moon-shaped gateway set into a high wall but was halted by a guard’s raised hand. Beyond the entrance lay a grey-wash, sinking into the grainy emptiness of the rice-paper.