The Harmony Silk Factory. Tash Aw
they went their separate ways, disappearing into the night and reappearing before daybreak for their communal breakfasts, always taken at 5.15. Johnny wondered what kind of things they did after they slipped out of the house at night. Attending passionate lectures, plotting attacks on administrative buildings across the valley, spying on VIPs in Ipoh, cleaning machine guns, setting booby traps deep in the jungle. Maybe they were even killing people. The thought made him shiver with excitement. He wanted to be with them.
Johnny himself had not yet experienced life as a true communist. Up to that point he had, of course, worked in many places run by people with communist leanings, but he had never yet been approached to do anything. Someone had given him a leaflet once. The words seemed cold on the thin paper, and did not arouse in him any feelings of duty. He tried reading some of the books on Tiger’s shelves. He reached, first of all, for Karl Marx, though he did not know why. Perhaps he had heard that name before, or perhaps the simple, strong sound of the words as he read them slowly to himself compelled him to take it into his room. Das. Ka-pi-tal. He said it several times in the privacy of his room. His lips felt strange when they spoke, and he felt curiously exhilarated. But he had not understood anything in the book. Even the Chinese version was beyond his comprehension. What the words said was plain enough, but the meaning behind them remained hidden from him. He grew to prefer the English version. Every night he would look at the book, reading a few lines in his poor English, hoping he would suddenly find a trapdoor into that vast world he knew lay beyond the page. Somehow it made him feel more important, more grown-up, as if he was part of a bigger place.
One Friday afternoon when all the shops were closed and the muezzin’s call drifted thinly across town, Johnny came across one of the other men in the garden. He was resting in the shade of a chiku tree, legs apart, sharpening a parang with smooth, strong strokes. His legs and bare torso were flecked with cut grass and his hands rough with dirt.
‘I need to light a bonfire,’ Johnny said, ‘to burn grass and old leaves. When will you be finished?’
‘I’m finished,’ the man (Gun was his name) said.
Johnny started for the far end of the garden beyond the fruit trees where he kept the tools. The steady metallic ring of the sharpening blade cut the hot afternoon air.
‘Hey,’ Gun said, ‘I heard about you.’
‘What about me?’ Johnny said, barely turning around.
‘The Darby mine. Everybody knows.’
‘So what? I can’t even remember that.’
Gun began to laugh – a high-pitched wail, like a wounded animal’s call in the middle of the jungle. ‘Hey, brother, don’t have that hard look on your face. You’re a real big-time hero, don’t you know that? Everyone talks about the guy who chopped that English bastard’s leg off.’
‘I didn’t chop his leg off.’
‘Sure, of course not,’ Gun continued, eyes squeezed shut with laughter. ‘Come, sit down.’
‘Who told you – Tiger?’ Johnny said, watching Gun carefully. The parang was balanced between Gun’s knees, glistening and hot.
‘No, everyone knows. Like I said, you’re famous, brother. Why do you think you’re still alive and healthy? Why do you think you’re always able to find work? Have you thought about that? It’s because we – our people – take care of each other here in the valley. In the whole damn bastard country, in fact. The whole bloody wide world. Do you agree?’
‘I suppose.’
‘OK, look. I’ll explain something to you. Come, sit down I said. You’re still new, fresh, as far as I can tell – even though you’re one goddam murderer already!’ Gun broke into laughter once more, baring his cigarette-stained teeth. ‘You have backsides for brains, you have no idea about the work we do.’
‘I know everything about the shop.’
Gun looked at him with narrowed eyes. ‘Not the shop, you goddam idiot, the army. The communist army. M – C – P,’ he said in a slow, under-the-breath voice. ‘Know what that stands for? Malayan Communist Party. That’s who we work for.’
‘I knew that, sure,’ Johnny said, kicking a clump of grass. ‘Where do you work?’
‘You think I’m going to tell you, you bloody dogshit? You’re not one of us. Not yet anyway. Trouble is, Tiger wants you in the shop, not out there doing what the rest of us do.’
‘What do you do?’
Gun lifted the parang and held its blade erect before Johnny’s face. He looked at it with cold black eyes and smiled with his yellow-brown teeth. With a single fluid swipe of his arm he brought the blade down on to the ground before them. It sliced sharply into the earth, clinking against the tiny pebbles in the soil. He smiled at Johnny, the corners of his upper lip curling back hard. ‘That’s what we do.’
Johnny’s face coloured, his blood ran hot. He had felt the rush of air against his cheek as the parang swept past him. He had seen the sun glinting off the blade. At last, he knew he was truly and irreversibly a communist.
‘What I think,’ Gun said, as he prised the parang from the soil and wiped it clean with his fingers, ‘is that anybody who can cut up and kill an English big shot, well, that person might be very useful to us.’
‘Will I fight for the liberation of man’s soul from the chains of bourgeoisie?’ Johnny said.
Gun stared at him blankly.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Johnny said.
Gun laughed. Johnny could not tell if it was in contempt or in friendship. ‘That’s up to Tiger,’ he said.
The only problem with being a communist – for Johnny and for Tiger – was that it interfered with business. It interfered with running the shop and serving customers and deciding which clothes to display in the glass cabinets. For Tiger, the problem was one he had faced for many years now. He had become accustomed to it all – the rotten, ever-present fear of exposure and arrest, the risk of betrayal. Sure, he was among his people; and yes, he knew he had their trust. All the same, he was careful not to make enemies. He never took advantage of suppliers or customers. People are people, he told himself. A single vengeful word whispered in the ear of the District Police Inspector would be sufficient for Tiger to be locked up in Tambun Prison for the rest of his life. For more than a decade, this fine gentleman had coordinated the activities of the Perak guerrillas from the genteel surroundings of his shop. Now, as the 1930s drew to a close, the strain of this duplicity weighed heavily on him. The knowledge that he was sending young men to be shot, maimed or imprisoned for life began to disturb his sleep. He wanted to close his doors to the world, to shut himself in his home with his books and furniture and fruit trees, but no: the call from China was becoming more urgent, more violent. The Japanese were in Manchuria now and Chinese all over the world were being called to arms. These were times for action, the party said, for the enemy was at the gate; but all Tiger longed for was to grow the perfect guava. He felt age in his bones and reluctance in his heart. In his sleepless nights he had the same thought over and over again: he had to stop, he could not go on.
He was glad he had Johnny.
Early one evening when the sun had calmed to a deep amber, an idea came into Tiger’s head which made him shiver gently with happiness. He had spent the day planting papaya seedlings he had grown from the seeds of his own fruit. Though the work was not heavy, it was enough to make a man of his age feel as if he had earned a rest. After dousing himself with cold water he sat in the cane armchair in his library with his supper of cold noodles. When he finished those he poured himself a small glass of cognac. He had not been to the shop at all that day. He thought of Johnny, he thought of the customers; he tried to fill his ears with the noise of the shop, the smooth-sharp sound of heavy scissors cutting through cloth, Johnny’s low mumbling voice, the clink of coins on the glass counter. He wondered how the shop looked without him in it, and the image of the Tigerless