Tash Aw – We, The Survivors (страница 9)

The boss wasn’t interested in all that. As long as the farm kept running well, and no one stole any money or machinery, he didn’t care who worked there, how long they stayed, whether they were happy. Ah Hock, that’s why I have you! He used to joke that I was half-foreign – that maybe my dad had been with a prostitute, and that’s why I got along with the workers so well, because I had Indon blood in me. ‘Don’t know how, but you actually understand these guys,’ he used to say. Sometimes, when clients came to visit and remarked on how smoothly things ran, the boss would tell them that it was down to me. ‘My foreman does everything, makes sure the boys work well – village boy, easier for him to communicate with them, hor.’

I was proud that he boasted about me like that. Although I grumbled from time to time about his absences, it secretly felt good to be trusted like that. I’d been working on the farm for nearly ten years, and I’d got to that point in time when one year began to resemble the next, changing in ways I could anticipate, in ways that I wished for. My salary was going up only slightly, but it was increasing all the same. I’d got used to small surprises – a nice angpow at Chinese New Year from clients or machinery suppliers, sometimes a present when the boss came back from holiday, like that box of special Hokkaido wafers when he went to Japan one time.

When life evolves like that, one small gift coming on top of another, you start to feel strong. Your salary, which surprises you at the beginning – because its regularity is astonishing, because it keeps coming to you even when you think it might stop abruptly at any moment – starts to feel as if it has always been there. An unshakeable part of the universe, like atoms or the cells in your body. You receive it month after month, one year, two years, four, eight – it can never end. You start to feel complacent, though it doesn’t strike you as complacency, but a sensation of solidity that surrounds you, so thick that sometimes you wake up in the night and believe that you can reach out and touch it.

Put it another way: I was thankful. I’d left home a few years before that – moved away from the village and drifted through a number of jobs in KL before returning to the area. I worked in a hardware store in Klang for a couple of months, then a shop that sold small agricultural tools and equipment just opposite the train station. I was loading some bags of fertiliser onto a customer’s truck one day when I saw he had a big watch, a Rolex. This was the kind of thing that my time in KL had taught me to notice – shiny, expensive objects worn by their owners as a sort of challenge. Look at me, resist me. Covet me, reject me. I kept loading the bags, flipping each one up onto my shoulder and carrying it from the shop to the truck, fifty pounds a time, and all I could see out of the corner of my eye was the watch on the man’s wrist as he stood there, hands on his hips. He checked the time. It was noon. It was hot.

When I finished he reached into his pocket and I thought he was going to give me a tip, maybe two–three ringgit, something like that, but instead he gave me his business card. ‘Ever need a job, just ring me,’ he said. He was called Mr Lai, and he owned a few vegetable farms near Sekinchan, some orchards, a goat farm. Plus, he was the middleman, the one who employed the groups of migrant workers to harvest the rice for the Malays who owned the biggest ricefields in the area. He arranged everything for them, got the groups of Bangladeshis and Indonesians in for the season, paid them their wages in cash, then sold the rice for the land-owners. Of course he took a cut from everything – not much, a bit here, a bit there, enough to end up a wealthy man. People make job offers all the time, but when you call them, the work isn’t there any more. I’d got used to that way of living. A promise isn’t a promise. Still, I kept the card.

A few months later, when I had a problem with my employers – they accused me of stealing, which wasn’t true, not at that job, anyway – I just turned around and walked out. The boss-lady was sitting at the desk, the cash register open, scolding me, her voice as harsh as a drill into concrete. You want the money for what, buy drugs is it? Owe money to a loan shark? What? Her husband stood behind her, his arms folded across the top of his paunch. Above them the clock showed nine o’clock. I could feel the sentences forming in my head, explaining that it was a mistake, that if they looked at the books again, the numbers would add up, that I wasn’t the only one in charge of receiving the money. Or maybe I’d made a mistake, hadn’t counted the notes properly when a big payment came in – who knows? But she was shouting too loudly, one question layered on top of another, and I couldn’t keep up, the sentences in my brain never stitched together to form a clear line of defence. I wanted to scream all kinds of swear words, smash the glass cabinet in front of me with my bare fists, kick down the shelves of paint and screws and weighing scales, see all that cheap shit fall to the ground. But instead I grinned. I didn’t even know I was pulling a silly cheerful face until the boss-lady said, ‘Smile what? Crazy boy. Where you going? Come back! Why you smiling?’

‘Hei.’ I shook my head. Pok kai. I turned and walked out of the shop. I’d never liked her. She was always prying, always asking me questions about my family, where I came from – things I didn’t want to talk about. Sei pat por. In my memory I actually called her these things to her face, told her exactly what I thought of her, but maybe I didn’t. The way I’m talking now, you won’t believe me, but I’ve never been one for saying much, especially in situations like that. She was still shouting as I left and walked out. I crossed the street and had some bak kut teh at Seng Huat, just under the iron bridge by the river. Even in the shade of the huge rusty columns and the trees that stood next to them I could feel the heat of the morning sun gathering in strength, making my shirt stick to my back. All around me, office workers and old retired couples were having a quick snack before heading off to more important matters – they ate quickly, slurping their soup, not looking up at the people around them. I shared a table with a young family, a mother and two children, a boy playing his Nintendo and a small girl who looked at me and smiled as her mother read a novel. I smiled back and made a face, a big happy clown face with bulging eyes and a wide smile. Her laugh was so clear, so weightless and free, and in those few seconds I believed that I could live life exactly as I wanted, that no harm would ever come to me, not on that morning or ever after. Her mother looked up and scowled at me. She put her arm around her daughter and said, ‘Don’t stare at the man. Finish your food, we have to go see ah-ma and ah-gong.’

When they were gone, I thought, Here I am again, no job, kaput, habis, finished. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. I knew I’d find another job soon enough. If you’re willing to do anything, you’ll get something. But there’s always that moment when you feel stuck, one door closes and all the others disappear. You can’t even see them, never mind think about how to open them.

I hadn’t forgotten Mr Lai’s card. It was still in my pocket, floppy and dog-eared from the sweat that seeped through my clothes. I found a phone booth and rang him. On the plastic dome over the telephone someone had scratched some graffiti, like some rare and delicate artwork carved in glass – the prime minister’s name, followed by the word ‘PANTAT’. The words had been written on the outside, and it took me some time to make out the letters in reverse. I started to laugh. Who takes the time to stand outside a phone booth and call the prime minister a cunt? That was exactly when Mr Lai answered. I tried to explain who I was, and why I was calling, but it was difficult because I was still chuckling. ‘You’re in a good mood,’ he said. ‘I like cheerful people.’ A week later I was working at his fish farm near Tanjung Karang.

At first I worked as a farm hand – a labourer – repairing, lifting, transporting. There were only two cages to start with, but more were already being built, and I was soon joined by two Indonesians, Halim and Adi, then Rio, Indra, Yudianto, Satria, Bayu, Adit, Rendy, Adra, Eka. [Pauses.] Rama, Hanif, Abdi, Firman, Leo, Dimas, Denny, Fariz, Endang – they came later. After all this time I can remember all their names. Very few of them stayed for long. Six months, one year – that wasn’t uncommon; a year was good, two years was unusual. Even after all the agencies started making big bucks by bringing in workers and tying them to three-year contracts, and deducting a whole year’s salary from their pay packages before they even started their jobs, they’d still go missing. When you saw how hard they worked, you’d understand why. It wasn’t that their spirits could not accept the wages – four, five hundred bucks a month – it was that their bodies could not tolerate the work.