What no one knew at the time was that gangrene or septicemia or some other mysterious infection had worked its way into No. 2s blood, unnoticed by the doctors who had tended to him. He collapsed, was rushed to hospital, but again made a near-miraculous recovery. Once more, doctors marvelled at his God-given strength, and when he collapsed a second time they knew he would pull through and he did. Month after month, this continued, until finally No. 2 died, exactly a year and a week after first being stabbed by Johnny.
The coroner had no choice but to record a death by natural causes verdict.
I do not believe that Johnny would have been saddened by the news of No. 2s death. I believe, in fact, that it was this first killing which hardened in him a certain resolve. Now he was a killer but he did not feel bad. He knew, for the first time in his life, the sensation which was to become familiar to him later in his life, that powerful feeling of committing a crime and then escaping its consequences. It was this first incident which set him on the path to becoming the monster he ultimately turned into.
IT WAS MANY YEARS before he could find work easily. Ordinary people were fearful of a person such as Johnny. He might not have been a criminal in the eyes of the law, but the law didnt understand human nature. The law couldnt always tell good from evil, people said. For a long time Johnny moved from town to town, village to village, plantation to plantation, never knowing how long he would stay or what he would do next. Without the kindness of strangers he would surely have perished. It was inevitable that he would experience his first real contact with Communists during this period of his life. The Valley was, during this time, teeming with them guerillas, sympathisers, political activists. An ill-humoured youth full of hatred (for the British, for the police, for life), Johnny was perfect Communist material. Of the many journeyman jobs he was given during these years, Im certain that all but a handful were Communist-inspired in some form or another. This wasnt surprising, given that every other shopkeeper, farmer, or rubber-tapper was a Communist. These people offered Johnny more than an ideology; they offered a safe place to sleep, simple food, and a little money. That was all he cared for at that point in time.
5. Johnny and the Tiger
I LIKE TO THINK of those years which Johnny spent wandering from job to lousy job as his lost years, the years which became erased from his life, the years during which he vanished into the countryside. I see him disappearing into the forest as a boy and emerging as a man. That is certainly what seems, extraordinarily, to have happened. Who knows? Perhaps something terrible happened to him during those years in the wilderness, something which turned him into a monster. Or maybe it was the irresistible force of fate which led him down this path; maybe he was simply destined, from the day he was born, to jump off the back of a lorry onto the dusty, treeless main street in Kampar, in front of the biggest textile trading company in the Valley. No one knows about the small odyssey which led Johnny to Kampar. All anyone can be sure of is that one day he turned up and got a job, his first regular employment since the Darby Mine incident, at the famous shop run by Tiger Tan.
The reasons behind Tigers name were a mystery. By all accounts, he was a gentle, soft-mannered, home-loving man who, on account of his devout Buddhism, never ate meat, even though he was one of the few people in the Valley who could afford to eat it every day. He had plump arms which hung loosely by his sides when he walked. His movements were slow and unhurried, as if he had all the time in the world. He looked every bit the prosperous merchant that he was.
You would never have guessed that in his spare time he was also the commander of the Communist Army for the whole of the Valley.
By the time Johnny came under his employ at the Tiger Brand Trading Company, Tiger Tans life seemed, in every respect, a settled state of affairs. He appeared, after many years, to have laid to rest the unfortunate events relating to his short, sad marriage. His wife had left him very soon after they had married. She took their baby daughter with her and converted to Islam in order to become the third wife of the fourth son of the prince regent of Perak. She went to live in the teak palace on the gentle slopes of Maxwell Hill, and it was there that the child was raised, amidst the splendour only royalty can provide. The child was given an Arabic name, Zahara, meaning shining flower, though neither her name nor her hardy peasant-Chinese blood could save her from dying of typhoid when she was seven years old. After her death, her mother was sometimes glimpsed at the great shuttered windows of the palace singing old Chinese love songs at the top of her voice. She sang with perfect pitch, her tongue capturing the words and releasing them across the Valley like grass seeds in the wind. If you strolled along the path which ran along the grounds of the palace you could sometimes hear these songs:
A traveller came from far away,
He brought me a letter.
At the top it says Ill always love you,
At the bottom it says Long must we part.
I put the letter in my bosom sleeve.
Three years no word has faded.
My single heart that keeps true to itself
I fear youll never know.
It took Tiger a full twenty years, perhaps more, to forget the pain of his wifes desertion. At first, he spent every waking hour trying to convince himself that both his wife and child had died; he told himself over and over again that they had travelled to distant lands and perished on their journey. As the months went by he began to believe it. All his friends, all the people who came to his shop none of them mentioned the fate of his young family. They could see his suffering and did not wish to add to it. They understood that the human mind is a strange creature. Unless it is reminded of something regularly, it gradually forgets about that thing. In that way we may forget about the most terrible things that happen in our world. Little by little, Tigers memory began to lose its imprint of his wife and baby daughter until, truly, they ceased to exist in his world.
All that had happened a long time before Johnny showed up at his shop. Tigers life had long since become settled. His business had been flourishing for many years, and now he began to sink more and more into the comfort of his home, a modestly sized but comparatively luxurious stone-and-teak house on the outskirts of the little town. He filled it with exotic furniture Portuguese chairs from Melaka, English pine tables treated with wax to protect against the humidity, painted chests of drawers from Northern Europe. He had a formidable collection of books too. Marxist texts in Chinese, mainly, but also a number of English-language books, including a small collection of Dornford Yates novels.
In his spacious garden there was a small orchard. He tended to his fruit trees with great care. He especially loved the mango trees for their dark tongue-shaped leaves, which kept a thick shade all year round, even when the fruit was in season. Of all the fruits, however, he loved the rambutan best, and the ones he grew were considered particularly fine: deep red in colour and not too hairy. He took these down to the market, where he sold them wholesale. The few cents he made from this gave him as much pleasure as the hundreds of dollars he made each month from trading textiles and clothing, and so he began to devote more time to his garden. He pruned the trees so that their shapes would become more attractive and their new branches more sturdy; he agonised over which trees to use for grafting new stock; he tied paper bags over the best fruit to protect it from flying foxes and insects.
For Tiger, it turned out to be perfect timing that, just then, a strong, hungry-looking young man came asking for work at the Tiger Brand Trading Company.
When Johnny first arrived in town, he did what he always did. He drifted into the nearest coffee shop and had a glass of iced coffee and a slice of bread with condensed milk. He asked the shopkeeper for work there wasnt any. Coffee shops were usually poor sources of work, for they were almost always small enough to be run by the members of a single family. Out on the street, he stopped a few people and asked them where they thought he might find work. All of them echoed what the coffee shop keeper had told him: Tiger Tans well-known shop, they said, pointing at a large shop house in the middle of a terrace on the main street. It was a busy-looking place which seemed to be full of expensive, high-quality merchandise. He realised, as he approached the shop, that fine red dust had settled all over his clothes during his three-hour journey from Tanjung Malim.
Im looking for work, he said to a girl unloading fat bales of cotton from a lorry.
The girl jerked her chin in the direction of the shop. Ask boss, she said.
Johnny hesitated before going in. The shop smelled clean and dustless. There were many customers inside, and there was laughter and a rich hum of voices, punctuated with the click-clack of an abacus.
Yellow shirt, over there, the girl said as she pushed past Johnny.
Johnny looked over to a darkened corner. A neatly dressed man sat quietly in front of a pile of papers and a small money box. He had kicked off his shoes and was sitting with one ankle resting on the knee of the other leg. Every few seconds he lifted his chin and fanned himself with a sheaf of papers. His hair was combed and brilliantined.
I want work, Johnny said simply. I am a labourer.
Tiger looked at him hard, assessing him quickly. After all these years he had become a sharp judge of character. It was well known that Tiger could see things in you that you might not have realised yourself.
Whats your name? he asked Johnny.
Lim.
Where are you from?
Nowhere.
What do you mean, nowhere? Everyone comes from somewhere.
I mean, I dont know.
Okay where have you just arrived from?
Tanjung Malim.