“You always seem to make me work late on the evenings I attend Endo-san’s class,” I said.
He was not unwilling to admit it. “I would prefer that you spend less time there. I’ve had comments made to me about the company you keep.”
“Whose comments?”
“People in town. Our associates.” He meant the members of the Chinese business community, with whom we had longstanding and extensive dealings.
“And what did you tell them?”
“That it was really none of their business,” he said.
Despite my anger with him, I was touched by his loyalty to me. “Is my friendship with a Japanese affecting the company?” I asked, softening my tone.
“Not at the moment,” he said. “But eventually you’ll have to choose between continuing your instruction with Mr. Endo and protecting our company’s face.”
“It’s not a choice I can make,” I said. “I promised him that I would learn as much as he can teach me, and as you have so often taught us, I can’t go back on my word.” I stood up. “I have to go. I have a class to attend.”
“It’s not just our company I’m worried about,” he said. “I’ve no wish to see you caught between two opposing sides and suffer in the process.”
I was already at the door of his office, but I stopped. “I’ll find a way to keep everything in balance,” I said, sounding more assured than I felt.
William, despite his initial reluctance to work in the family company, had settled into a dependable routine that satisfied our father. I knew he still chafed at having to capitulate to our father’s wishes but he kept his dissatisfaction well concealed.
In any case, he had discovered a new passion. One Sunday afternoon when it was raining too hard for me to visit Endo-san he brought a small box into my room and placed it on my bed. He opened it and lifted out a camera.
“Look at this,” he said. “I ordered it from Singapore and it’s finally here.” I took the Leica from him and examined it. Endo-san’s camera was an earlier but similar model. William was tearing the box apart.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“There’s no instruction booklet!”
He shook the box in frustration and I said, “Look at you, like one of the monkeys at the Botanical Gardens trying to tear open a packet of food.” He looked miserable and I felt sorry for him. My father’s words in the library more than a year before, when I was helping him unpack his books—You always pull away, try to make yourself not a part of us—suddenly jarred me again.
“Here,” I said. “I know how to use it.” He was doubtful, but as I showed him he soon found out that I was almost an expert. I was bound to be, after watching and helping Endo-san for so long.
“You’re good at this,” he allowed himself to admit.
“I must have learned something from all those times you made me help you with your toys and projects,” I said.
“Which you invariably slipped out of,” William replied. “You always preferred to spend time on your own on the beach.”
I understood what he did not say. William was fascinated by anything mechanical or complex. He would always show some new gadget of his to me, hoping I would share his enthusiasm. I never did, and the thought now came to me that it was not the objects in which he had tried to interest me but in the fostering of a stronger link between us. I wanted to tell him this, to let him know that I now understood; but the years of isolating myself had made me unable to breach the barricades I had erected. I felt like a prisoner, able to see far from my confines but unable to reach out beyond them.
And would William be able to sympathize with my situation anyway? He had been certain of his position in life, from the moment of his birth. He had never had to fight his classmates for his identity, never had to catch the glimpse of superiority in the eyes of the people around him, from the servants to our father’s friends and associates. He had never had to feel like an impostor in his own home.
I found that I was staring at William, who looked uncomfortable. I wanted to speak, to let him know his efforts had not gone unappreciated. But I could not at that time disclose to him how much Endo-san had transformed me through his lessons, which I knew were partially responsible for this growing insight into my relationship with my family. I felt William would not understand the sense of certainty my sensei had created in me. In strengthening my body Endo-san was also, as he had promised, fortifying my mind. It was a process that offered me the ability to bridge the conflicting elements of my life and to create a balance.
William went to the window. “The sky’s clearing. Come on, let’s go and see if this thing works. If you haven’t buggered it up for me.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden. The camera worked much better than Endo-san’s. As he took his photographs, William said he was happy I was working with our father as it meant that we could now go for lunch together in town. Edward was often away in Pahang or Selangor, or down in Kuala Lumpur. With the war in Europe, the demand for rubber and tin had risen and every one of us, including Isabel, was kept busy filling orders and organizing transport and shipment for our goods.
“It’s getting too dark, and I think I felt a drop of rain,” I said an hour later. We had finished his entire stock of film but at least William was now familiar with his camera. We walked up the driveway and, as we passed the fountain, I stopped and I told him about my visit to my grandfather.
“Remember that time when we—”
“Caught those dragonflies? Yes,” William said. “What a vile pair of brats we were.”
“I now know why my mother punished us so severely.”
He listened to my explanation and sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“So am I,” I said. “But it’s too late now.”
He hooked an arm around my shoulders and squeezed. For a moment I was a young boy again and he was the big brother who always got us into trouble, the one who always made our father ask, “What mischief have you two been up to now?”
I held up my palm and caught the start of another shower. “Your camera’s getting wet. Let’s go inside.”
Although we worked in the same building, William and I rarely saw each other during the course of the day. He suggested we make a habit of going for lunch together at the Chinese restaurant around the corner from our office. Invariably he paid. “I’m earning more than the peanuts Father pays you. No, don’t argue with me. I went through the same process.” And invariably I would order the restaurant’s famous banana pancakes. “You keep eating the same rubbish every day,” William complained.
We normally met at the restaurant just before lunch, to obtain a good table. One afternoon he was late, and I sat in the restaurant as the crowds started coming in. When he finally arrived I asked, “What kept you?”
He sat down and I could see he was excited about something. “You’ll have to find some way to tell the old man that I’ve enlisted in the navy.”
I knew William was still unhappy about his return from London, even though it was over a year ago now, and I had tried to make things easier for him at the office by absorbing most of the more mundane tasks normally assigned to him. Still, to hear his news disappointed me. I would miss him if he had to leave Penang.
“He’ll be bloody livid! Why me?” I asked.
“Well, because you’re the youngest and therefore I order you to, and er, also . . .well, because he has a soft spot for you.”
“It’s not me he has a soft spot for. That honor goes to Isabel,” I replied. “In fact, why don’t you ask—”
“We don’t think so,” William shot back. Clearly he had already discussed this with Isabel. “Anyway, I don’t think he’ll go completely up the wall. I won’t be sent to England. It’s just the navy here. You know ... in Singapore. In case the Japanese go mad and attack us. And I said I’d work here for a year, and I have. So I’ve kept my promise.”
He swept one hand around the restaurant. Despite its greasy tiled
floors, dirt-edged ceiling fans, and churlish waiters, it still served the best food in town. “Haven’t you noticed? There are only old people here now. All the young men’ve left to fight in the war.”
“Well, tell him yourself then. I suggest you just do it straight to his face and not waffle around. He hates that.”
“At least be there when I tell him.”
Although I already felt a sense of loss, I could not prevent a small grin from appearing. Here was a man courageous enough to go off to war, yet who was still afraid of his father. Seeing his pleading look, I agreed to William’s request.
“Really?” William asked. “You will?”
“Yes, yes. I will. Now let’s bugger off. We’ve all got work to do.”
That evening, as I watched my father walk in the garden feeding his carp, I thought of his life, how lonely he must have been after both of his wives died. I wondered whether a mistress who could fill the gap in his bed could also fill the void in his heart. For his sake I hoped she could. Since our conversation in the library, I knew now without a doubt that he had loved my mother, and that they had found, for a fleeting moment, their own place in the world.
I called out to William, “I think now’s a good time to tell him.” We went out into the dusk. Somewhere down the road the Hardwickes’ gardener was burning the leaves he had raked during the day and the smell of the smoke tinged the light with sweetness and sorrow. The gravel path sounded like ice being crunched as we walked past the fountain and the row of palm trees. I looked at the fountain and compared it again to the one in my grandfather’s garden. I hoped it had given my mother at least some solace.
I turned back to look at the house, comforted by its presence behind me. It loomed like a protective ancestor. I could feel its physical reach and, at a deeper level, its connection to me. I wondered then if William could feel it too, as we waved to our father.
A saffron haze covered everything as the sun set and the trees and the grass looked as if they had been dusted with powdered gold. The rows of lilies lining the driveway gave off a tender perfume. My father threw away the remaining pieces of bread into the pond, brushed his hands against each other and said, “What mischief have you two been up to now?”
So William told him, in a stuttering voice which gained assurance, a trickle growing into a stream, a stream into a river. I watched our father’s face as the river reached the sea. Anger changed to sadness and then sailed out to acceptance. He shook his head slowly, but William knew he was safe now.
“I suppose we all have to do what feels right,” he said, as he put his arms around us and we walked up to the house, now warm and lit up from within, glowing like a Chinese paper lantern, and suddenly appearing just as fragile.
As we entered he stopped us and said, “How about a party? It’s been such a long time since we had one. We’ll make it a going-away party for William. Something extravagant and irresponsible, for we may never see such days again.”
Something in his voice made me aware that he was beginning to see the signs, that the war would come to Malaya, that all the old ways would be washed away forever.
“All of you are growing up so quickly,” he went on, looking from me to William, and then to Isabel, who had come out to tell us that dinner would be ready soon. “So, who wants to help me arrange it?”
“I will,” I replied, as William said at the same time, looking and pointing at me, “He will.” I saw our father’s smile of pleasure that I was at last a part of my family.
I saw less of Endo-san, who seemed to be traveling more often. Whenever he returned he would make my training harder, but soon he was away too much, and so he arranged for me to train at the Japanese consulate with the consul’s bodyguards.
The consulate was some distance away from home, in the quiet suburb of Jesselton Heights, bordering the Penang Turf Club. I cycled there and the sentry waved me in, and I took the precaution not to meet Hiroshi, parking my bicycle behind a grove of mango trees. The dojo was in a separate building, away from the consulate and near the kitchen. As I approached, the smell of food made me hungry, but once I entered the dojo my appetite fled at the first sight of my training partners.
They looked tough and grim, and I soon discovered that they were a brutal bunch. All of them were from the military. From that first day, from the moment I bowed to them, I took a lot of punishment. I had to change my style and resort to fighting with my head, aiming for their pressure points as Kon had shown me, instead of punching them in their chests or faces. This effectively put me on an almost equal standing with them, although a few of them, from Okinawa Island, were extremely lethal in karate—the way of the empty hand. When Okinawa was subjugated by Japan a few centuries ago, the use of weapons was banned by the ruling Japanese, so the peasants had resorted to training using traditional farming implements like rice-flails and sickles. Their main weapons of choice were their hands, which were hard and callused from years of training. Getting hit by one of those hands was no laughing matter. I tumbled across the wooden floor when Goro, my principal sparring partner, broke through my defenses and drove his fist into my ribs. For a few seconds I was winded, my chest burning as pain spread through it like a toxic chemical. I knew I had to get up. In my head I heard Endo-san say, “One does not have the luxury of lying on the floor.”
Goro laughed. “A Chinese. Worse, a half-breed!” he said and walked away to train with his friends. I pulled myself up and sat on one of the benches. I bent over and tried to bottle up my nausea, so as not to shame myself further and, worse, shame Endo-san. Goro was a member of the consulate staff, though I was uncertain what his actual position was. He was a few years over thirty and there was a certain coarseness to his face that I disliked and distrusted. He was a true devotee of karate, and looked down on other forms of fighting.
On the island later that evening, Endo-san rubbed his camphor ointment on my chest. “You will meet all kinds of people. Some are good; some will be like Goro-san. You have to be prepared.”
I no longer asked what I had to be prepared for: I suppose, deep within me, I already knew the answer.
I watched him as he moved around preparing our evening meal. I thought of that day when he had walked from the sea into my life and transformed it completely. We had grown closer in that time, settling into a warm routine, although we were still extremely careful not to be seen in public together. Anti-Japanese feelings were running high, continually kept on a flame by the Aid China Campaign. There were, however, always social and commercial occasions when we were thrown together. Then we would make polite conversation that was loaded with guarded references to our life. We developed our own language to the extent we could ostensibly talk about the dock workers’ demands while actually referring to a class the night before.
There was more gray in his hair, and he looked fatigued. I thought back to the evenings I had spent with him and the things we had talked about. He had opened my mind, and set it ablaze with his. I thanked him for the ointment. “I like this smell,” I said.
“Do not grow accustomed to it,” he said. He put away the bottle and came back to sit with me by the hearth. “What is it?”
I wanted to ask him about the heavy presence of the military at the consulate. It came on top of all the other things that had been worrying me. Those rubber purchasers I had met in Kampong Pangkor—what were they really involved in? I recalled the questions Endo-san had often asked me and saw in my mind the boxes of photographs he had taken. I wondered about his frequent trips around the country. What was he actually doing?
But how did one ask? And—which made me more fearful— what would be the answers and their effect on my association with him?
He repeated his question and yet I knew my own queries and doubts would never be voiced. Even then, perhaps, I knew but I chose to ignore, to push away. Such was the strength of my bond to him that I needed and wanted no explanation for my acceptance. Even then I already loved him, although I did not realize it, ne
ver having loved before.
“Do you remember you told me how beautiful the sea looked, that first time we met?” I said softly. Through the shoji doors we could see a fragment of the night sky through a gap in the trees. It was crowded with stars. Far away the surf raced along the sand, hissing as it melted into the beach.
He smiled but his voice was subdued. “I remember. I saw your eyes soften. It was like seeing stone turning to honey.”
Thoughts floated by like intoxicated butterflies: of taking care of him, preparing his meals, spending the rest of my life learning under his guidance; thoughts which would always remain thoughts, never becoming real, when even to acknowledge him in public was fraught with risks. So many things most people take for granted.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked, as he yawned.
And I said, with not a small trace of sadness at the way of the world, “Butterflies.”
Chapter Seventeen
I increased the frequency of my visits to Kon’s home. I had never been close to the other boys at school and it was only with Kon that, for the first time in my life, I was made aware of the possibility of such a friendship.
I learned a lot from Kon. We spent evenings breaking down our techniques and trying out new ones. I found Tanaka-san’s aiki-jutsu much gentler than Endo-san’s, the movements much more circular than those I had been taught. Kon, in turn, found my near-linear motions effective and fast, so we found an equilibrium, a harmony between the circle and the line. I told him about my classes with the consulate staff and he said, “That’s nothing. You should try some of the illegal matches that take place every month.”
“What’re they?”
“The triads run a match every fortnight in one of the godowns in the harbor. Anyone may enter for a fee. There are no rules, no restrictions whatsoever. You can be eighteen, or younger or older, male, female, it does not matter.”