Читать книгу The Kindness of Women - J. G. Ballard, John Lanchester, Robert MacFarlane - Страница 10

Everyone was shouting that the war had ended. Prisoners leaned from their windows, waving to each other across the parade ground and pointing to the sky. Peggy Gardner and a delegation of missionary women gathered outside the guard-house and peered through the door at Sergeant Nagata’s ransacked desk. I stood by the open gates of the camp, looking at the dusty road that followed the long arm of the Whangpoo river towards the south. The August sky was veiled by layers of haze that enclosed the empty landscape like an immense mosquito net. Threads of cloud ran through the pearly light, stitching the sky together. Vapour trails left by the American reconnaissance planes dissolved over my head, the debris perhaps of gigantic letters spelling out an apocalyptic message.

‘What do they say, Jamie?’ Peggy called to me. ‘Is the war really over?’

‘Ask Sergeant Nagata. I’m going to the river.’

‘Sergeant Nagata’s not here any more. You can go back to Shanghai now.’ She plucked at the patches on her dress, sorry to see me leave but not yet sure that I had the necessary nerve. ‘If you want to …’

‘I’ll come back tonight. Wait for me at the hut.’

For all the excitement, no one was in any hurry to evacuate the camp, as Peggy had noticed. For days we had listened to rumours that the Americans had dropped a new super-bomb on Japan, destroying the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Some of the prisoners even claimed to have seen the bomb-flash. The squadrons of B-29s had broken off their attacks on Lunghua airfield, but armed Japanese soldiers still waited by the anti-aircraft guns. One morning we woke to find that Mr Hyashi and the guards had vanished, slipping away under the cover of the night curfew. We stood by the perimeter wire, like children abandoned by their teachers and unsure whether to leave the classroom.

All day we watched the Shanghai road, expecting a convoy of American vehicles to speed towards us out of the dust, though everyone knew that the nearest Americans were hundreds of miles away on the island of Okinawa. Bored by this stalemate, a few men from E Block stepped through the wire and stood in the deep grass. Staring at the silent air, they seemed oddly self-conscious, as if they had forgotten who they were.

Showing off to Peggy, I climbed through the fence behind G Block and walked towards a burial mound two hundred yards from the camp. I mounted the stairway of rotting coffins, with their small skeletons asleep under quilts of silky mud. Standing in the overbright air, I signalled to Peggy as she pressed against the wire, breathlessly waiting for me to be shot. I could see the burnt-out hangars and cratered runways of Lunghua airfield, surrounded by the wrecks of fighter aircraft, and the unchanged skyline of Shanghai that had formed the horizon of my mind for the past three years. Despite myself I kept glancing over my shoulder at the camp, seeing the cement buildings and wooden huts for the first time from this strange perspective.

By leaving the camp I had stepped outside my own head. Had the atom bombs in some way split the sky, and reversed the direction of everything? I felt uneasy in the open air, a tempting target for some brooding Japanese sentry. I jumped down from the coffins, leaving my ragged footprints in the soft quilts, and ran to the safety of the wire. Ignoring Peggy’s angry eyes, I went back to G Block and lay behind the curtain of my cubicle, glad for once to hear Mr Vincent’s voice, complaining to his wife about the failure of the allied authorities to notify us properly of the war’s end.

But did I want the war to end? The next day, when the Japanese guards returned to Lunghua, I felt secretly relieved. Already there were signs that life in the camp was breaking down. Led by the Ralston brothers, a gang of men had tried to break into the kitchens, while others had looted the guard-house. The food-stocks were almost exhausted, and our daily ration was down to a bowl of congee. The American bombing raids had imposed a kind of order, which both the prisoners and their guards had respected. Now the sky was empty and exposed, a house without its roof.

Fortunately, the Japanese commandeered the guard-house and posted sentries outside the kitchens. But the soldiers were pale and uneasy, and Private Kimura avoided my eyes, aware now that he would never see his family again. Even Sergeant Nagata was subdued, waving me away when I hovered around the guard-house, trying to think of something to encourage him. He sat stiffly at his rifled desk, and ignored the English and Belgian women who stood outside his window in their tattered cotton dresses, screaming abuse at him until necklaces of spit glistened on their breasts.

At last came the Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast, calling on his armies to lay down their weapons. At the time I laughed aloud at this. No Japanese would ever surrender. As long as he had a bayonet and grenade, or a rifle with a single round, he would fight to the end. Like everyone else, I took for granted that the Japanese forces in China would make their last stand against Chiang Kai-shek and the Americans at the mouth of the Yangtse, well within sight of Lunghua.

But the first American reconnaissance planes appeared in the sky, cruising a few hundred feet above the camp, and the anti-aircraft guns at the airfield remained silent. Sergeant Nagata and his men, who had only returned to Lunghua in the hope of finding food, once again abandoned us, marching off into the night. The next day at noon, the two Shanghai Water Company engineers who had operated the clandestine radio throughout the war placed the battered bakelite set on the balcony above the entrance to F Block. Then at last we heard the recorded victory speeches of Truman and MacArthur.

So, I told myself, the war had ended. But as I stood by the open gates I was still not convinced. The missionary women had wandered away, and Peggy gave a last hopeless shrug and went back to the children’s hut, leaving me to hover between the rotting posts. Everything within the camp was unchanged, but beyond the fence lay a different world. The wild rice growing by the roadside, the blades of sugar cane and the yellow mud of the abandoned paddy fields were touched by the same eerie light, as if they had been irradiated by the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, 400 miles across the China Sea. The drowned canals and the grave-mounds, the forgotten ceramics works by the river, looked like an elaborate stage-set. I stepped forward, but the curving ruts which the supply truck had cut into the earth steered me back into the camp.

I knew, though, that it was time to leave. My mother and father would soon return to our house in Shanghai, and I wanted to meet them while there was still a faint chance that they remembered me. Shanghai was eight miles away, across a silent terrain of rice fields and deserted villages. In my pockets were a bottle of water that Peggy had boiled for me and a sweet potato I had saved. Settling them into my khaki shorts, I stepped through the gates on to the open road.

I set off along the dusty verge, trying to fix my eyes on the Shanghai skyline. Within the barbed wire another day in Lunghua was unfolding. The war might have ended, but the women worked over their washing and the men lounged on the entrance steps to the dormitory blocks. David Hunter and a group of younger children played one of their hour-long skipping games, jumping together as David whipped the ground under their feet, as always carried away by his wild humour.

Outside the children’s hut Peggy sat with one of the four-year-olds, teaching him to read. I called to her, but she was too engrossed in the book to hear me. Peggy’s parents would take weeks to travel from Tsingtao, and I would be back to look after her. If Lunghua was my real home, Peggy was my closest friend, far closer now than my mother and father could ever be, however hard the missionary women tried to keep us apart. We often quarrelled, but in the dark times Peggy had learned to rely on me and control my leaping imagination.

I passed the kitchen garden behind the hospital, with its rows of beans and tomatoes. Peggy and I had grown them to eke out our rations, fertilising the ground with buckets of nightsoil that we hoisted from the G Block septic tank, the only useful product of the Vincents’ existence. Mrs Dwight stood on the hospital steps, lecturing a young Eurasian whose father had been chauffeur to the Dean of Shanghai Cathedral. A reluctant orderly at the hospital, he would once have deferred meekly to Mrs Dwight, but I could see from his bored stare that he was no longer impressed by her moralising talk. British power had waned, sinking like the torpedoed hulks of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, and he could choose to become a Chinese again. As David’s father often reflected during our chess games, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had marked the first revolt by the colonised nations of the east against the imperial west. Shanghai, which had endured throughout the war, might have changed more than I realised.

Leaving the road, I turned my back on the camp and stepped into the deep grass that ran towards the canal marking the southern perimeter of the airfield. A cloud of mosquitoes rose from the stagnant water, greeting me as if I were the first person to enter this empty world. Dragonflies hunted the lacquered air, swerves of electric blue reflected in the oil leaking from a bombed freighter at Nantao.

A sunken Japanese patrol-boat lay in the canal, its machine-gun pointing skywards from the armour-plated turret. Already sections of the wooden decking had been chopped into firewood by the returning Chinese villagers. Strafed by the American Mustangs before the crew could take cover, the craft was dissolving into the soft mud of the canal bottom. Only the Japanese soldier lying face down in the shallow water was still himself, the brass buckles of his canvas webbing polished by the stream. I stood on the bank above him and watched the water lift the hairs from his scalp. I could see each of the ulcers on his neck, and the swollen stitching of his coarsely woven shirt. Water-beetles raced between his fingers, sending shimmers of light into the air, as if this dead soldier was tapping the underside of the surface and sending out some last message.

The canal turned to join the Whangpoo half a mile away. I left the bank and strode through the waist-high grass towards the circular rim of a flooded bomb crater. A white snake swam through the milky water, exploring this new realm. Beyond the crater was the boundary road of the airfield, roofless hangars standing beside the bombed engineering sheds.

Caught by the last of the American air-raids, a Chinese puppet soldier lay by the embankment of a single-track railway line. Bandits had looted his body, stripping his pockets and ammunition pouches, and he was surrounded by scraps of paper, pages from his pass-book, letters and small photographs, the documentation of a life he might have laid out beside himself as he waited to die.

Envying him all these possessions, I climbed the earth embankment, a spur of the Hangchow–Shanghai railway which ran towards the north-west, losing itself in the misty light. I strode between the polished rails as they hummed faintly in the heat, adjusting my step to the wooden sleepers. I searched for Lunghua camp, but its familiar roof-lines had vanished. An intense light, more electric than solar, lay over the derelict fields, as if the air had been charged by the energy radiated by that sombre weapon exploded across the China Sea. I stared at my hands, wondering if I had been affected, and tasted the tepid water in my bottle. For the first time it occurred to me that everyone in the world outside Lunghua might be dead, and that this was why the war was over.

Half an hour later, when I had walked a further mile into the haze, I approached a small wayside railway station. It stood beside the track with a modest waiting room and ticket office, faded time-tables hanging in the air. Sitting on the concrete platform were four Japanese soldiers. They were fully armed, rifles beside them, and wore canvas webbing and ammunition pouches over their shabby uniforms. A unit of field infantry, they were perhaps waiting for their orders at this rural station, orders that would now never come. They had cooked a simple meal on a makeshift stove, using strips of wood torn from the walls of the waiting room, and were resting in the mid-day heat.

Smoking their handmade cigarettes, they watched me walk towards them between the rails. I slowed my step, unsure whether to make a detour around the Japanese. Below the embankment was an anti-tank ditch partly filled with water, in which lay a dead water-buffalo. The carcase of this docile beast was somehow reassuring, and I stopped to catch my breath before sliding down the embankment.

Then I noticed that one of the Japanese had raised his hand. I stared back at him, my feet slipping in the soft earth. I decided not to make a run for it – there was nowhere to go, and the Japanese would shoot me without a moment’s thought. Walking up to the platform, I stopped by the private soldier who had beckoned to me. Grunting to himself over the last of his meal, he squatted beside his rifle. With his heavy workman’s hands he was coiling the telephone wire which he had cut from the wooden pole above the station.

Sitting with his back to the telephone pole, hands tied behind him, was a Chinese youth in a white shirt and dark trousers. Bands of wire circled his chest, and he breathed in empty gasps. His quick mouth and composed eyes reminded me of the clerks who had worked for my father before the war. He seemed out of place on this rural railway platform, unlike the soldiers and myself. The Japanese corporal lashing him to the telephone pole tightened the cords as if to anchor him firmly to this desolate terrain.

The Chinese choked, his throat knotting while he fought for air. Trying to ignore him, I faced the soldier coiling the wire. All my experi- ence of the Japanese had taught me never to comment on anything they were doing, nor to take sides in any dispute involving them. I told myself that the Chinese was an important prisoner, and that they had tied him up before taking their afternoon sleep.

One of the older soldiers was already dozing in the shade of the waiting room, head on his knapsack. The other sat by the stove, carefully reaming out the mess-tins. Their faces were empty of all feeling, as if they were aware that the war had ended but knew that, for them, this meant nothing.

Only the first-class private coiling the wire showed any interest in me. I guessed that they had been up-country, fighting the Kuomintang armies, and had seen few Europeans. Their food rations would have been as meagre as those in Lunghua, but the private’s broad temples were still fleshy, his cheekbones swollen like a boxer’s at the end of a hard-fought bout. He flicked his lips with a blackened finger and cleared his throat in a forced way, as if releasing to the air a stream of thoughts that no longer concerned him.

Exhausted by the long walk, I leaned against the platform, unsure whether to risk eating my sweet potato. The corporal securing the Chinese youth to the telephone pole was a short, starved man with a war-hardened face. As soon as I touched my pockets he began to watch me in a hungry way. The smells of burnt fat from the stove made my head swim, and I drew the water bottle from my trousers.

With a brief grunt, the private put out his hand. I released the cap, took a quick gulp and handed the bottle to him. He drank noisily, spoke to the corporal and passed the bottle back to me, disappointed that it contained nothing stronger than water. He tossed the coil of wire on to the platform beside the prisoner, and then turned his attention to me. A wistful smile appeared on his roughened lips, and he pointed to the sun and to the sweat staining my cotton shirt.

‘Hot?’ I said. ‘Yes, it’s the atom bombs … you know the war’s over? The Emperor—’

I spoke without thinking. The only sound in the silent landscape, marooned in its haze, came from the Chinese. As another coil of telephone wire encircled his chest he tried not to breathe, and then began to pant rapidly, his head striking the wooden pole. His eyes were loosening themselves from his face. The corporal knotted the wire and tightened the noose with a wristy jerk. Drops of bloody saliva fell from the youth’s lips, staining his white shirt. He looked at me, and gasped a word of Chinese, like a warning shout to a dog.

The first-class private scowled knowingly at the sun, urging me to drink. He appeared to be busy with his own thoughts, but every few seconds his eyes fixed on a different point in the surrounding fields. He was watching the drained paddy beside the embankment, the burial mound at its north-west corner, the stone footbridge across a canal. Did he know that the war was over, that his Emperor had called on him to surrender? Among the canvas packs and ammunition boxes piled against the waiting room was a field radio only issued to specialist troops. Perhaps they had heard that the war was over, but this simple statement, so meaningful to civilians far from the front line, meant nothing to them. Within a few weeks the American forces would reach Shanghai, and the Chinese armies they had fought for so many years would take control of this derelict realm in which they waited, their minds already far beyond any future in store for them.

I decided to eat my sweet potato while I still had the chance. The private watched me approvingly, brushing a fly from my shoulder. His ragged uniform was a collection of tatters held together by the straps of his webbing, from which the smell of sweat emerged in almost intact layers. While I ate the potato skin he pointed to a piece of pith that clung to the back of my hand, and waited until I returned it to my mouth.

As he smiled at me in his simple way I felt an uneasy sense of pride. Despite myself, I admired this Japanese soldier, with his swollen temples and bruised face. He was no more than a labourer, but in his way he had risen to the challenge of the war. His heavy shoulders, marked by patches of eczema and scores of flea-bites, were bursting through the fabric of his shirt, his chest restrained like an animal by the canvas webbing. He was one of the few strong men I had met, completely unlike the officers in the British forces and most of the adults in Lunghua. Only Mariner and the Ralston brothers would have been a match for this Japanese warrior.

I finished the potato and wiped my fingers on my lips, watching the sweat running from his neck into the hollows of his collar bones. I wished that I had learned enough Japanese from Private Kimura to explain that the war was over. The Chinese prisoner on the platform was now scarcely able to breathe, his ribs crushed by the coils of telephone wire. Bruises filled with congested blood stared from his forehead. Tired by the effort of knotting the heavy wire, the corporal tossed the cable on to the concrete floor and strolled stiffly along the platform.

The private’s fingers flicked at his lips, tapping a message to himself. He grimaced over some memory bothering him like a mosquito. Deciding to take the risk, I slid my clasp knife from my hip pocket. With the blade closed, I offered it to the private, hoping that he would want to test the blade, and might cut the telephone wire binding the Chinese prisoner.

But the blade was of no interest to him. He cut away a canvas flap that hung from his ragged boot, and turned his attention to the clasp. He smiled at the cowboy motif carved into the mother-of-pearl handle. His thick fingers traced out the ranch-hand in stetson and high-heeled boots, and the twirling lasso that resembled the telephone wire he had been coiling at his feet.

The railway lines hummed in the heat, a sound like pain. The Chinese slumped against the pole, his neck so flushed that it was almost blue. He raised his head and looked at me in a fevered way, as if we were fellow passengers who had missed our connection. He was four or five years older than I was, his hair cut neatly in a way that Mrs Dwight had always urged on me. Was he a Kuomintang agent, one of the thousands in Shanghai, or an office clerk working for the Japanese occupation authority who had fallen foul of the kempetai?

The corporal stepped on to the track and gathered sticks for the fire. I searched the railway line, hoping that an American patrol might be approaching. From the moment I left Lunghua all the clocks had stopped. Time had suspended itself, and only the faraway drone of an American aircraft reminded me of a world on the other side of the pearly light.

The private gestured to me to empty my pockets. The corporal stood at the end of the platform, relieving himself on to the track. The drops of urine hissed as they struck the rail, sending up a fierce cloud of yellow steam. The corporal walked back wide-legged to the Chinese prisoner. He had cut his hands on the wire, and shook his head ruefully as he bent down and picked up the coil, ready to return to his work.

Hurriedly I dug into my pockets and handed my tie-pin to the private, hoping that the silver buckle might distract the corporal. The private’s gaze brightened again as he examined the worn image of a long-horn cow. With his thumb-nail he cleared away the flaking chrome, then placed the pin against the brass clip of his ammunition pouch. Keen to display his new insignia, he shouted over his shoulder, puffing up his chest. The corporal nodded without expression, too busy with his cumbersome knots. He wrenched at the wire, spreading his legs like a rancher trussing a steer.

The private returned the tie-pin to me, catching sight for the first time of the transparent celluloid belt looped through the waist-band of my cotton shorts. This belt, which I had nagged out of one of the American sailors, was my proudest possession. In pre-war Shanghai it would have been a rarity eagerly sought after by young Chinese gangsters.

As I released the buckle the private stared at me cannily. I guessed that he was weighing in his mind the small duplicity represented by this transparent belt, virtually invisible against my khaki shorts. He inspected the belt, holding it up to the light like the skin of a rare snake, and tested the plastic between his strong hands. He blew through the crude holes that I had gouged, shaking his head over my poor workmanship.

‘Look, you keep the belt,’ I told him. ‘The war’s over, you know. We can all go home now.’

By the telephone pole the Chinese had ceased to breathe and I knew that he would soon be dead. The corporal worked swiftly, coiling lengths of wire around the Chinese and knotting them with efficient snatches of his wrists. The youth’s arms were pinned back by the wire, but his hands tore at the seat of his trousers, as if he were trying to strip himself for his death. When the last air left his crushed chest he stared with wild eyes at the corporal, as though seeing him for the first time.

‘Listen, Sergeant Nagata …’

The belt snapped in the private’s hands. He passed the pieces to me, well aware from my trembling that I had willed myself not to run away. His eyes followed mine to the second telephone pole at the western end of the platform, and the wire that looped along the embankment. The resting soldiers lay against their packs, watching me as I rolled up the celluloid belt. One of them moved his mess-tin from the stream of urine crossing the concrete from the heels of the Chinese. None of them had been touched by the youth’s death, as if they knew that they too were dead, and were matter-of-factly preparing themselves for whatever end would arrive out of the afternoon sun.

A hooded rat was swimming around the carcase of the water buffalo in the anti-tank ditch. Despite the sweet potato, I felt light-headed with hunger. The haze had cleared, and I could see everything in the surrounding fields with sudden clarity. The world had drawn close to the railway station and was presenting itself to me. For the first time it seemed obvious that this remote country platform was the depot from which all the dead of the war had been despatched to the creeks and burial mounds of Lunghua. The four Japanese soldiers were preparing us for our journey. I and the Chinese whom they had suffocated were the last arrivals, and when we had gone they would close the station and set out themselves.

The corporal tidied the loose coils of wire, watching me as I steadied myself against the platform. I waited for him to call me, but none of the Japanese moved. Did they think that I was already dead, and would continue my journey without their help?

An hour later they let me go. Why they allowed a 15-year-old boy to witness their murder of the Chinese I never understood. I set off along the track, too exhausted to stride between the sleepers, waiting for a rifle shot to ring out against the steel rails. When I looked back, the station had faded into the sunlit paddy fields.

The railway line turned towards the north, joining the embankment of the Shanghai–Hangchow railway. I slid down the shingle slope, walked through a deserted village and set off towards the silent fact- ories on the western outskirts of the city. As I neared Amherst Avenue I recognised the cathedral at Siccawei and the campus of Chiao Tung University, the wartime headquarters of the puppet army raised by the Japanese.

I pressed on through the quiet suburban roads, past the tree-lined avenues of European houses, with their half-timbered gables and ocean-liner facades. Groups of Chinese sat on the steps, waiting for their owners to return from the camps, like extras ready to be called to the set of an interrupted film production. Time was about to get off its knees. But for a few moments Shanghai, which I had waited so patiently to revisit, had lost its hold on me.

On the next day, August 14, I at last saw my parents again. Throughout the war our house had been occupied by a general of the Chinese puppet armies. A single unarmed soldier was standing guard when I reached the front steps after the long walk from Lunghua. He made no attempt to resist as I pushed past him, and vanished half an hour later. I wandered stiffly around the silent house, with its strange smells and musty air. There were Chinese newspapers on my father’s desk, and a Chinese dance record on the turntable of the gramophone, but otherwise not a carpet or piece of furniture had been disturbed, as if the house had been preserved in a quiet bypass of the war. Even my toys lay at the bottom of the playroom cupboard, my papier mâché fort and Great War artillery guns. Holding them in my hands, I could hardly believe that I had ever played with them, and felt vaguely sorry for the small boy who had taken them so seriously.

The refrigerator was filled with bowls of boiled rice and the remains of the last meal which the puppet general had interrupted before he discarded his uniform and disappeared into the alleys of the Old City. I helped myself to the cold noodles and pickled pork, startled by the taste of animal fat, and drank the dregs of rice wine in the stone jars. Exhausted, I sat on the verandah and stared at the jungle of the garden and the drained swimming-pool, which had been used as a garbage tip.

Slightly drunk, and with my stomach painfully stretched by this huge banquet, I roved around the house. I lay on my mother’s mattress, smelling the general’s sweet hair oil, and stared at the imposing bathrooms, like white cathedrals, that I had forgotten how to use. I was trying out my past self, but it seemed too small and confined for me, like the toys in the playroom cupboard. I fell asleep in my father’s armchair in the panelled study. The heavy leather furniture and dark walls reminded me of the food-store at Lunghua which I had dreamed of sharing with Peggy.

At noon the next day my parents arrived, in a taxi covered with the yellow dust of the Lunghua road. They had driven to the camp hoping to collect me. Smiling cheerfully, they embraced me as if we had been separated for no more than a few days. Did they really recognise me? I was happy to be with them, but we were like actors playing parts presented to us at short notice. We played the roles of parents and son, and in a few days were word-perfect and genuinely glad to be together. I remembered my mother’s voice, and her mouth and cheeks, but her eyes belonged to an older woman who had never known me.

Meanwhile, life in Shanghai resumed without a pause, as if the war had never occurred. Yang, the chauffeur, and most of the servants reappeared, and I almost expected Olga to arrive and tell me that it was time for bed. Sitting in my uneasy new clothes at my parents’ dinner parties, I began to remember the Shanghai of my childhood. My parents entertained their old French friends, rich Chinese businessmen and officers of the American occupation army. I listened to the talk of the latest London and Broadway plays, real estate values in Hong Kong and California, and the flood of antiquities which impoverished Chinese families were releasing on to the market.

The war had already been absorbed into the extraordinary history of Shanghai, along with the Avenue Edward VII bomb, the Japanese attack on the city and the years of brutal occupation. The assets of the Axis powers, the Japanese cotton mills and the German engineering works, were swiftly appropriated and put to use. The great trading houses opened their doors. The port of Shanghai was crammed with freighters unloading merchandise for the department stores of the Nanking Road. Thousands of bars and nightclubs lit the afternoon sky. American servicemen swarmed ashore, an army of war embraced by an even more disciplined army of peace, the Chinese pimps and their massed ranks of White Russian, Chinese and Eurasian prostitutes, who welcomed them eagerly as they stepped on to the Bund.

But from all this activity I felt set apart, as if I had landed in an unfamiliar future. So much had happened that I had not yet been able to remember or forget. There were too many memories of Lunghua that were difficult to share with my parents. Over breakfast my father and I talked about our experiences, as if we were describing scenes from the films showing in the Shanghai theatres. My sense of myself had changed, and I had mislaid part of my mind somewhere between Lunghua and Shanghai.

Strangest of all, Japanese soldiers were still patrolling the streets of Shanghai. As Yang and I drove in the puppet general’s Buick to a garden party at the British Consulate I pointed to the Japanese sentries in faded uniforms, standing with their long rifles on the steps of the Mayoral Office. Yang sounded his horn, forcing the Buick through the pedicab drivers, beggars and office clerks, shouting to the Japanese to clear the way. I stared at the faces hidden under their peaked caps, hoping to recognise the first-class private and the corporal I had left behind on the railway platform.

Other Japanese sentries, at the request of the American and Kuomintang authorities, guarded key government buildings around the city. My father told me that the Free French occupying Indo-China had recruited units of the Japanese army in their fight against the communist Viet Minh. For all this, whenever I saw the armed Japanese I thought of the isolated railway station in the countryside south of Shanghai. I almost believed that the Japanese soldiers guarding the city were preparing the bar-keepers, prostitutes and American servicemen for a longer journey that would soon set out from that rural platform.

The first of a long series of war crimes trials were held in October, and the senior Japanese generals who had ruled Shanghai during the war were charged with an endless catalogue of atrocities against the Chinese civilian population. Almost in passing, we heard that the Japanese had planned to close Lunghua and march us up-country, far from the eyes of the neutral community in Shanghai. But for the sudden end of the war, they would have been free to dispose of us, and only the atomic bombs had saved our lives. The pearly light that hung over Lunghua reminded me for ever of the saving miracle of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Once a week I visited the camp, where several hundred of the British internees were still housed. They survived on the rations parachuted by B-29 Superfortresses identical to those that had bombed Nagasaki. The dead and the living had begun to interbreed. As Yang drove south along the Lunghua road I searched the paddy fields for any sign of the railway station, expecting to see its platform crowded with new arrivals.

I tried to explain all this to Peggy, while she waited for her parents to sail from Tsingtao. I gave her the presents of clothes that I had bought at Sincere’s, the latest American lipsticks, nylon stockings and a box of Swiss chocolates. I was happy to be with her again in the children’s hut, watching her try on her new make-up. Through the rouge and lipstick a vivid woman’s face appeared, more beautiful than all the prostitutes at the Park Hotel. I wanted to embrace her and thank her for everything she had done for me, but we knew each other too well. Already I felt that she had begun to free herself from the camp, and that we would soon grow apart.

Casually, I described the death of the young Chinese. When I finished, hiding my feelings behind a liqueur chocolate, I realised that I had made him sound like myself.

‘Jamie, you should never have gone.’ Peggy settled a small child into its cot. ‘We did try to stop you.’

‘I had to go back to Shanghai. You know, I was really looking for Sergeant Nagata …’

‘Those soldiers might have killed you.’

‘They didn’t need to – I wasn’t ready for them.’

‘Jamie, they didn’t touch you! You walked away from them.’

‘I suppose I did – I keep thinking I should have stayed. Peggy, they wouldn’t have hurt me.’

Already she could see that I was disappointed.

At the end of October, as I left the Cathay Hotel after lunch with my mother, I shared a taxi with two American navy pilots who were trying to find the Del Monte Casino. I guided the Chinese driver to the Avenue Haig, only to find that the casino had been ransacked by the Japanese in the last days of the war. As we left the taxi, looking at the shattered windows and the broken glass on the steps, I noticed David Hunter hailing the driver from the lobby of Imperial Mansions, a run-down apartment building across the street in which several brothels operated.

David, like me, was dressed in a pale grey suit and tie, which he wore in the faintly shifty way shared by all the former Lunghua boys, as if we had been released after serving a sentence at a corrective institution. At times we would meet every day, but often I would do my best to avoid him. He had recovered from Sergeant Nagata’s slaps on the evening he tried to escape, but his swerves of dangerous humour exhausted me. Often I saw him on the steps of the Park Hotel, staring in a strained, smiling way at the Eurasian women waiting for the Americans. Once he lured a suspicious 14-year-old Chinese prostitute into his father’s Studebaker, which he borrowed to take us to the jai alai stadium. In the car park she squatted expertly across David’s lap, embroidered gown around her waist, shouting over her shoulder at the Chinese chauffeur. Dazed by her energy and nakedness, I let David order me into the night air, but twenty minutes later, when the chauffeur and I returned, she was kicking David in a fury of Chinese obscenities and trying to escape through the passenger window. David was laughing generously, his hands on her waist, but under his ruffled pale hair the flush of his cheeks resembled the bruises left by Sergeant Nagata’s hand.

I listened to my feet cracking the broken glass outside the Del Monte. Deciding to give David the slip, I left the American pilots with their taxi and stepped into the entrance of the casino. Gilt chairs lay heaped against the walls of the foyer, and the red plush curtains had been torn from the windows. Like chambers in an exposed dream, the gaming rooms were flooded with sunlight that turned the dance floor into the scene of a traffic accident. A roulette table lay on its side, gaming chips scattered around it, and the gilded statue of a naked woman with upraised arms that supported the canopy of the bar had fallen across a collapsed chandelier, a princess frozen in a jewelled bower.

A Chinese waiter and a young European woman were straightening the overturned chairs and brushing up the plaster that had fallen from the ceiling. As I walked past them the woman turned and followed me, pulling my arm.

‘James! They said you were back! You remember your Olga?’

Olga Ulianova, my pre-war nanny, pinched my cheeks with her sharp fingers. Unsure whether she had recognised me, she felt my shoulders, running her brightly varnished nails over the lapels of my suit.

‘Olga, you really scared me. You haven’t changed.’ I was glad to see her, though time seemed to be running in all directions. If I was three years older, Olga was both in her early twenties and late thirties. A procession of faces had been let into the bones of her face, layers of paint and experience through which gleamed a pair of pointed and hungry eyes. I guessed that she spent her days fighting off American sailors in the backs of the Nanking road pedicabs. Her silk suit was torn around the armpit, exposing a large bruise under her shoulder blade, and a smear of lipstick marked the strap of her brassiere. As she looked me up and down I knew that she had already dismissed my own experiences of the war.

‘So … such a smart suit. Mr Sangster said you had a good time in Lunghua. I guess you miss it.’

‘Well … a little. I’ll take you there, Olga.’

‘No, thanks. I heard enough about those camps. All those dances and concerts. Here it’s been real hell, I can tell you. The things my mother had to do, James. We didn’t have the Japanese looking after us.’ She sighed headily, swayed by the memory. She was sober, but I guessed that for the past three years she had been slightly drunk.

‘Do you work here, Olga? Are you the owner?’

‘One day. Bars, hotels, sing song parlours, everywhere. Believe me, James, these American boys have more money than Madame Chiang …’

‘I hope they give you plenty, Olga.’

‘What? Well, we won the war, didn’t we? Tell me, James, is your father still rich?’

‘He definitely isn’t.’ The thought of money had rekindled her waning interest in me. ‘He’s been in Soochow camp all through the war.’

‘He can still be rich. Take it from me, you can find money anywhere. Just look hard enough and give a big pull.’

She wiped the lipstick from her teeth, appraising me anew. Already I felt aroused by Olga, as confused as ever by her changes of temper. In every sense she was more wayward and exciting than the women in Lunghua. Before the war, when I undressed, she had glanced at my naked body with the off-hand curiosity of a zoo-keeper being shown a rare but uninteresting mammal. I took for granted now that no male body would rouse even a flicker of interest. Yet her eyes were sizing me up as if she were about to place a large physical burden on my shoulders.

‘I can see that you’re still a dreamer, James. I’m thinking about your father. He can make a good investment right now, while the Americans are here. There’s a small restaurant in the Avenue Joffre, only six tables …’

She stepped forward on her high heels, stumbling across the cut-glass pendants of the chandelier. She steadied herself, holding my arm in a strong grip. Her hip pressed against mine, trying to remind me of something I had forgotten. A potent scent of sweat and powder rose from her shabby dress, a quickening odour that I had noticed in the women’s huts at Lunghua.

I let her lean against me as we walked across the dance floor, our shoes breaking the glass. A rush of ideas filled my head as she worked her thigh into my leg. The war had accelerated everything, and I felt that I was surrounded by moving trains all beyond my reach. I wanted to have sex with Olga, but I had no idea how to approach her, and I knew that she would enjoy laughing at my gaucheness.

At the same time, something more than shyness held me away. Part of her attraction was the thought of going back to my childhood, but if I was certain of anything it was that I was no longer a child, and that the games of hide-and-seek through the streets of pre-war Shanghai were over for ever. Being brought up by servants, supposedly the gift of privilege, in fact exposed a child to the most ruthless manipulation, and I had no wish to be manipulated again, by sex or hunger or fear. When I made love for the first time it would be with Peggy Gardner.

I listened to the pendulum-like motion of the waiter’s broom. Olga’s free hand had slipped under my jacket and was pressed against my abdomen. She was hesitating, as if aware that she might find herself cast again as my governess, reminded of her parents’ penury in their pre-war tenement and the boring hours she had spent looking after this little English boy with his cycle and free-wheeling imagination.

From the hollows of Olga’s neck and the enlarged veins in the skin of her breasts I guessed that she had eaten as little as I had in the past three years. I put my arm around her shoulder, suddenly liking this tough young woman with her rackety ideas. Only the first-class private at the railway station had looked at me so intently. I wanted to tell Olga about the dead Chinese, but already the lost Japanese patrol was moving into the rear of my mind.

‘Are you going back to England, James?’

‘After Christmas – I’m sailing on the Arrawa with my mother.’ This troopship, a former refrigerated meat carrier, would repatriate the British nationals in Shanghai. ‘My father’s staying on here.’

‘He’ll stay? That’s good. I’ll talk to him about my restaurant. Will you study in England?’

‘If I have to.’ On an impulse, I said: ‘I’m going to be a doctor.’

‘A doctor? That’s very good. When I’m sick you can look after me. It’s your turn now.’

As I left, promising to introduce her to my father, Olga said: ‘Now you can play hide-and-seek in the whole world.’

A week after Christmas I left Shanghai for ever. Some six hundred former internees, mostly women and children, sailed for England in the converted meat carrier. My father and the other Britons staying behind in Shanghai stood on the pier at Hongkew, waving to us as the Arrawa drew away from them across the slow brown tide. When we reached the middle of the channel, working our way through scores of American destroyers and landing craft, I left my mother and walked to the stern of the ship. The relatives on the pier were still waving to us, and my father saw me and raised his arm, but I found it impossible to wave back to him, something I regretted for many years. Perhaps I blamed him for sending me away from this mysterious and exhilarating city.

When the last of the banks and hotels faded into the clouds above the Bund I carried my suitcase to one of the men’s mess rooms. At night we slung our hammocks across the open decks where the refrigerated carcases of New Zealand meat had hung. In the darkness the hundreds of sleeping bodies swayed together like sides of lamb packed in canvas.

After our evening meal I returned to the stern rail, almost alone on the deck as the Arrawa neared the entrance to the Yangtse. Shanghai had vanished, a dream city that had decided to close itself to the world. The rice fields and villages of the estuary stretched to the horizon, with only the sea to separate them from the nearest landfall at Nagasaki.

The Arrawa paused at Woosung, readying itself to join the great tide of the Yangtse as it flowed into the China Sea. As we waited on the swell, edging closer to the eastern bank of the Whangpoo, we drifted past a large American landing craft beached on the shore. A tank-landing vessel scarcely smaller than the Arrawa, its flat prow lay high on the streaming mud-flat, as if it had been deliberately beached on this isolated coast. The Arrawa was in no danger of striking the craft, but a signal lamp flashed from its bridge. American military police patrolled its decks, their weapons levelled as they waved us away.

A fetid stench floated on the air, as if vented from an exposed sewer filled with blood. Leaning from the stern rail, I saw that the hold of the landing craft was filled with hundreds of Japanese soldiers. They sat packed together in rows, knees pressed against each other’s backs. All were in a bad way, and many lay down, crushed by the mass of bodies. They ignored the Arrawa, and only a group of handcuffed NCOs turned their eyes towards the ship.

A loudspeaker barked from the bridge of the landing craft, and the American guards shouted at the British officers in the wheel-house. Clearly the Arrawa had appeared at an inconvenient moment. The Japanese armies in China were being repatriated, but I wondered how this large body of men, almost a brigade in strength, would ever survive the three-day voyage to the Japanese mainland.

Then, on a cliff above the mud-flats, another group of armed soldiers caught my eye. Hundreds of Kuomintang infantry, in their peaked caps and leggings, bayonets fixed to their rifles, stood on the grass-covered slopes, waiting for the Arrawa to move away.

A siren thundered over my head, almost splitting the funnel. Its echoes hunted the vast brown swells of the Yangtse. We steered ahead, the single propeller churning the water and sending its spray into my face. The forward ramp of the landing craft was being lowered from the prow, and the first Japanese soldiers were stumbling on to the mud-flat.