House of Trembling Leaves, The (23 page)

‘‘Would you like me to prepare a shepherd's pie?'' she asked him now. ‘‘Or your favourite bread-and-butter pudding?

He gazed at the
Katana
sword mounted on the wall and then studied his hands, looking inward like a grieving father. ‘‘Soba noodles,'' he said, through gritted teeth. ‘‘I have grown tired of British food. Make me something from home. Soba noodles with tofu and pickles.''

Yes, of course, o-colonel-sama.'' She turned on her heels.

‘‘And Teoh-san …'' His voice sounded as soft as the rain. Their eyes met. They stood under the slowly revolving fan for several seconds. ‘‘Thank you.''

 

Prior to the outbreak of war, Tamarind Hill was a fine sprawling residence that sat on the outskirts of a vast rubber plantation.

It was perched on a rise with views of the Juru River and embraced both Eastern and Western architectural influences. The grand Entrance Hall had floors made from Italian marble, the Chinese-style doors and staircases were constructed with Rain Tree wood and the elaborate cast iron bathtubs were shipped over from Shropshire.

There was an ample verandah at the rear that overlooked a coconut grove, a library stocked with English and Chinese literature, a billiard room, a mahjong studio and a gallery that housed a rare collection of blackwood chairs inlaid with mother-of-pearl. What's more, when the patriarch, Lu See's father, was in residence the major-domo raised the flag of St. George at dawn to alert the Woos of his presence.

But all that was gone now. Now there were nothing but hollow, cobwebbed rooms full of flies dozing on windowsills and mildew curdling in the heat.

On September 13th, the commander of the Japanese 29th Army, Lt. Gen. Ishiguro, surrendered to Lt. Gen. Ouvry Roberts, Commander of XXXIV Indian Corps at the Victoria Institiution in Kuala Lumpur. Chaos followed.

‘‘All requisitioned homes to be returned to their owners,'' read Lu See. ‘‘By decree of the Imperial War Office.'' She stood in the village square and turned from the poster to her fellow onlookers. ‘‘Finally a sense of order!'' they cried. But there was no sense of order to it; vigilante gangs roamed the streets, black marketeers were set upon and villagers clashed over food. Violence erupted with pepper-shaker randomness. The police had lost control; some of them even threw away their uniforms.

Colonel Tozawa left the big house soon after. A civilian car waited for him in the drive, parked under the shade of a tamarind tree. The car flew a white flag and was marked with ‘surrender crosses'.

He bowed and offered his hand to Lu See. ‘‘It is not safe for you here, Teoh-san. I recommend that you do not return to Tamarind Hill for some time.''

As soon as Colonel Tozawa withdrew from the house looters stripped the house clean. The marble floors were dug up and the metal gates torn from the earth, even the giant cast iron bathtubs were taken, leaving only the dust-shadows of their clawed feet.

When the looters left, Lu See paused at the entrance to her old home with her daughter Mabel and Uncle Big Jowl. Despite the hardships of occupation Lu See's uncle appeared only slightly diminished. ‘‘Me?'' he said when asked about his continued corpulence, pressing a set of podgy fingers to his breast. ‘‘I'm turning hollow-chested in my thinness, no?'' He would beam: ‘‘No, lah, truth is I eat coconut meat. Five coconuts each morning. And I don't have to pay a banana dollah. Comes free from the tree, aahh!' Dressed in long shorts, an open neck shirt and white plimsolls, he resembled a pygmy hippopotamus in tennis attire. He was little changed except that he'd grown prone to offering advice in the middle of conversations that seemed completely out of context.

‘‘How long do you think we will have to wait before the British return in force?'' Lu See asked him.

‘‘May take two-tree weeks, lah. There is a small British presence here already to ensure capitulation terms are observed. In the meantime expect more of this sort of thing. There are armed gangs in Kedah and Pahang ransacking, taking what they can.'' They stepped over the charred remains of a Rising Sun flag. Lu See picked through the splintered glass, with a sick feeling lodged in her throat, as if she'd been forced to swallow a tar ball. Uncle Big Jowl swayed from side to side as he walked. ‘‘You think maybe they haven't seen enough bloodshed, hnnn?''

‘‘Are all the big houses ruined?'' Mabel said aloud.

‘‘Not all.'' He made a face. ‘‘The Woo house was untouched. The bloody-crafty-buggers hired a team of armed guards to protect it.''

Lu See stretched her face toward the sun. The day, with its clear, clean sunshine, seemed to echo her hopeful mood. She recalled Second-aunty Doris's words:
Remember, keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps the trembling leaves will stay away.
‘‘Well, at least now we can make a fresh start.''

‘‘Fresh start is like a kite with the cord broken. We are at the mercy of fortune, meh?''

‘‘I'll plant cabbages and leeks and sweet potatoes. Mabel can help.''

‘‘Be careful of eating too many sweet things, aahh. Bad for teeth and general health.''

Lu See took her daughter's hand, cushioning the girlish fingers in her own and led her inside. She felt Mabel grip her palm tight. She gave it a precious squeeze.

‘‘It's so empty, Mama.''

‘‘My friend, aahh, Chan Yee, the man with hair like a porcupine, remember? He died of too much sugar. Heart could not take it. Salt very bad too – look what happened to your Ah-Ba's ankles.''

Mottled light shafted through the grey windows.

Uncle Big Jowl fanned himself with a banana leaf, winced and then started complaining about his arthritic knees. There was a smell of damp coming from the walls. ‘‘Not much left of it, hnn?''

‘‘They've taken everything, even the door handles,'' said Lu See. Her voice echoed in the emptiness.

‘‘Not so,'' Uncle Big Jowl boomed. ‘‘I found a crate of your father's old English books.''

‘‘All the encyclopaedia books?'' When she was a little girl her father used to balance her on his knee and read from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. ‘‘Is his copy of
The Household Physician
there too?''

‘‘I'm sure so.'' He nodded. ‘‘I also discovered the old ancestral portraits stacked in a room at the back, aahh.''

‘‘What do you mean, not the portraits of Grand-aunty Ying?'' Lu See contorted her face to look like a witch.

Uncle Big Jowl started sniggering. ‘‘The original bride of Frankenstein.''

‘‘Must've scared the hell out of the Japs when they first set eyes on her, she's about as good looking as a basket of crabs.''

‘‘
Ai-yooo!
Don't be cruel to the crabs.''

They laughed, clapping the air with their hands.

‘‘And what about those poor looters? Can you imagine what they must have thought, breaking in here in the dead of night and seeing those beady eyes staring down at them!''

‘‘Must have pee-peed in their sarongs.''

‘‘And turned to stone.'' Uncle Big Jowl's guffaw was rich and rolling.

As they bent double with laughter, the gloom retreated for an instant.

 

For the last three years Lu See had forced herself to be stoic. She'd closed her mind to the sleepless nights, the stories of Kempeitai arrests, the talk of raided homes and vanishing friends. Instead, she'd tried to make her home life as normal as possible; she made sure nobody missed a birthday, a dumpling ceremony or a Chinese New Year dinner, even if the shortage of sugar and eggs made the cakes less sweet and the dumplings less rich.

‘‘Your birthday's not far away,'' she said tousling her daughter's hair. ‘‘Maybe we can clean up the house in time.''

‘‘When is it
your
birthday, Mama? You never say and we never celebrate.''

‘‘That's because I don't like being reminded of it.''

‘‘Why?''

‘‘Because I don't!'' Lu See cringed at the harshness of her own voice. She immediately smuggled the image of Adrian grappling up King's Chapel roof to the back of her mind. ‘‘I'm sorry, I didn't mean to shout.''

‘‘That's okay, Mama.'' Lu See smiled into Mabel's eyes. When Mabel smiled back she really lit up. Lu See called her ‘my brave little
pendekar
warrior' and she'd done everything possible to protect her from the horrors inflicted by the Japanese.

‘‘Children aren't scared of a thorn bush until they get one snagged on their leg,'' she said to Uncle Big Jowl at the height of the terror. ‘‘As long as I keep her out of sight, she'll be fine.''

‘‘But she has eyes; you can't hide the ugliness from her. When two buffaloes fight it is the grass that gets trampled, aahh.''

Her daughter was almost nine years old and throughout the entire war Lu See had seen her cry only once and it wasn't even the day her grandfather died. It was the day they'd been forced from their home; the day Mabel's childhood innocence ended.

Uncle Big Jowl used to say that what he loved most about Tamarind Hill was that it was so calming. But in 1942 the Japanese shattered that peace. They swarmed in from the north, from near the Thai border. They came overland, but rather than slink through the jungle they pushed down the north-south road on lorries and bicycles. And as they swept through villages and towns they frisked whomever they came across and relieved them of their cash and wristwatches. When they reached Tamarind Hill the soldiers told everyone to form a line and pulled the youngest female servants to one side and bundled them into the back of a truck. Lu See came dashing out to protest and immediately saw that it was a hopeless cause; the Japanese had fixed their bayonets in anticipation of trouble; there were already 18 to 20 village girls huddled together in the rear of the truck, all frozen stiff with fear. Some had bloodied noses and mouths. They would have seized Lu See too if Colonel Tozawa had not appeared on the scene soon after.

The Colonel stood on the seat of his open top scout car and to the ululating cries of the victims declared that only three girls per village would be acquired. ‘‘Staff sergeants, I want to make this clear. Keep a rein on your men. Any breach of this order and the culprits will answer to me personally. Three per village, no more, no less. We must maintain discipline!''

‘‘Mama, they're taking Ah Ling away!'' bawled Mabel.

‘‘I know,'' Lu See replied, trying to block out the wailing. White-faced, she wrapped her hands round Mabel's shoulders and shielded her with her own body. ‘‘Look at the ground Mabel, look at the ground, don't look up,'' she said, struggling to keep the hysteria from her own voice.

From that day on, through to the end of the war, both Mabel and Lu See flinched each time they heard a truck pull up, their hearts skipping a beat or two.

Ah Ling was the kitchen maid; a young cheerful provincial girl. She was 23 years old. Lu See never saw her again.

 

With Tamarind Hill back in her possession Lu See worked from dawn til dusk; she ploughed the land, dug up the spent stalks of lemongrass and the last of the onions and sewed fresh seeds into the soil – easy crops like tapioca and sweet potato. Bit by bit she put the house back together. She aired the rooms, swept the floors of shattered glass, fixed up the bedrooms, put fresh sheets on the beds, set out rat traps and boarded up the broken windows. She also began bringing back items from the village tip which had been abandoned by looters, things like a dressmaker's mannequin, old umbrellas and walking sticks, even a badly damaged sewing machine. They were things she hoped she could barter one day; trade for food perhaps? If anything, the Japanese occupation had taught her to be frugal.

Meanwhile, Peter and James used their carpentry skills to replace the damaged floorboards and door handles and erected a swing in the garden out of an old bicycle wheel. Mother made clothes from old curtains and cut slippers from ruined rubber tyres; the dresses Mother sewed for Mabel often even had pleats on them, like a window blind.

They were long, exhausting days and at night, streaked with dust, with the sun setting, Lu See would slip Adrian's old wristwatch off her wrist and slump on a chair. The wristwatch had stopped ticking long ago but Lu See could not bear to dispose of it – not just yet. It was as if Adrian were still with her as long as she kept the watch close to her pulse.

For these brief moments, with the wristwatch loosened, Mabel rubbed palm oil into her mother's rough hands to soothe the calluses and moisten the cracked skin. After which Lu See ran a comb through Mabel's hair, teasing the knots out, before arranging it into a long plait.

 

Several weeks had passed since the Japanese surrender. Behind the big house, in the old vegetable garden, Mabel found Peter and James picking through the weeds as they pulled lemon grass shoots from the earth. Both wore oversize civil service shorts. As usual they were squabbling.

‘‘Certainly not. No, I won't do it,'' said James, eyes protruding like marbles. He started to perform jumping jacks and recite the book of Ruth.

Peter folded his arms across his chest and threw him a dark glance. ‘‘Well, I'm telling you the meeting is at nine tomorrow morning and you're expected to explain what happened.''

‘‘Are you deaf? I said I'm not doing it.''

‘‘Well somebody has to account for why five hundred sheets were issued with the wrong overprint.''

‘‘They'll just have to classify it as printer's waste.''

‘‘Even so, somebody has to take responsibility.''

‘‘I'm not doing it!'' With a violent yank James jerked a handful of lemongrass over his head. Bits of soil and earth dribbled down his collar and the back of his neck.