LUNGHUA CAMP
VOICES FRETTED along the murmuring wire, carried like stressed notes on the strings of a harp. Fifty feet from the perimeter fence, Jim lay in the deep grass beside the pheasant trap. He listened to the Japanese guards arguing with each other as they conducted their hourly patrol of the camp. Now that the American air attacks had become a daily event, the Japanese soldiers no longer slung their rifles over their shoulders. They clasped the long-barreled weapons in both hands and were so nervous that if they saw Jim outside the camp perimeter they would shoot at him without thinking.
Jim watched them through the netting of the pheasant trap. Only the previous day they had shot a Chinese coolie trying to steal into the camp. He recognized one of the guards as Private Kimura, a large-boned farmer’s son who had grown almost as much as Jim in his years at the camp. The private’s strong back had burst through his faded tunic, and only his ammunition webbing held the tattered garment together.
Before the war finally turned against the Japanese, Private Kimura often invited Jim to the bungalow he shared with three other guards and allowed him to wear his kendo armor. Jim could remember the elaborate ceremony as the Japanese soldiers dressed him in the metal and leather armor and the ripe smell of Private Kimura’s body that filled the helmet and shoulder guards. He remembered the burst of violence as Private Kimura attacked him with the two-handed sword, the whirlwind of blows that struck his helmet before he could fight back. Jim’s head had rung for days. Giving him his orders, Basie had been forced to shout until he woke the men’s dormitory in E block, and Dr. Ransome had called Jim into the camp hospital and examined his ears.
Remembering those powerful arms and the quickness of Private Kimura’s eyes, Jim lay flat in the long grass behind the trap. For once he was glad that the trap had failed to net a bird. The two Japanese had stopped by the wire fence and were scanning the group of abandoned buildings that lay outside the northwest perimeter of Lunghua Camp. Beside them, just within the camp, was the derelict hulk of the assembly hall, the curved balcony of its upper circle open to the sky. The camp occupied the site of a teacher-training college that had been bombed and overrun during the fighting around Lunghua Aerodrome in 1937. The damaged buildings nearest to the airfield had been excluded from the camp, and it was here, in the long grass quadrangles between the gutted residence halls, that Jim set his pheasant traps. After roll call that morning, he had slipped through the fence where it emerged from a bank of nettles surrounding a forgotten blockhouse on the airfield perimeter. Leaving his shoes on the blockhouse steps, he waded along a shallow canal and then crawled through the deep grass between the ruined buildings.
The first of the traps was only a few feet from the perimeter fence, a distance that had seemed enormous to Jim when he first crept through the barbed wire. He had looked back at the secure world of the camp, at the barrack huts and water tower, at the guardhouse and dormitory blocks, almost afraid that he had been banished from them forever. Dr. Ransome often called Jim a “free spirit,” as he roved across the camp, hunting down some new idea in his head. But here, in the deep grass between the ruined buildings, he felt weighted by an unfamiliar gravity.
For once making the most of this inertia, Jim lay behind the trap. An aircraft was taking off from Lunghua Airfield, clearly silhouetted against the yellow facades of the apartment houses in the French Concession, but Jim ignored the plane. The soldier beside Private Kimura shouted to the children playing in the balcony of the assembly hall. Kimura was walking back to the wire. He scanned the surface of the canal and the clumps of wild sugarcane. The poor rations of the past year—the Japanese guards were almost as badly fed as their British and American prisoners—had drawn the last of the adolescent fat from Kimura’s arms. After a recent attack of tuberculosis, his strong face was puffy and coolielike. Dr. Ransome had repeatedly warned Jim never to wear Private Kimura’s kendo armor. A fight between them would be less one-sided, even though Jim was only fourteen. But for the rifle, he would have liked to challenge Kimura . . . .
As if aware of the threat within the grass, Private Kimura called to his companion. He leaned his rifle against the pine fencing post, stepped through the wire and stood in the deep nettles. Flies rose from the shallow canal and settled on his lips, but Kimura ignored them and stared at the strip of water that separated him from Jim and the pheasant traps.
Could he see Jim’s footprints in the soft mud? Jim crawled away from the trap, but the clear outline of his body lay in the crushed grass. Kimura was rolling his tattered sleeves, ready to wrestle with his quarry. Jim watched him stride through the nettles. He was certain that he could outrun Kimura, but not the bullet in the second soldier’s rifle. How could he explain to Kimura that the pheasant traps had been Basie’s idea? It was Basie who had insisted on the elaborate camouflage of leaves and twigs, and who made Jim climb through the wire twice a day, even though they had never seen a bird, let alone caught one. It was important to keep in with Basie, who had small but reliable sources of food. He could tell Kimura that Basie knew about the secret camp radio, but then the extra food would cease.
What most worried Jim was the thought that, if Kimura struck him, he would fight back. Few boys of his own age dared to touch Jim, and in the last year, since the rations had failed, few men. However, if he fought back against Kimura he would be dead.
Jim calmed himself, calculating the best moment to stand up and surrender. He would bow to Kimura, show no emotion and hope that the hundreds of hours he had spent hanging around the guardhouse—albeit at Basie’s instigation—would count in his favor. He had once given English lessons to Kimura, but although they were clearly losing the war the Japanese had not been interested in learning English.
Jim waited for Kimura to climb the bank toward him. The soldier stood in the center of the canal, a bright black object gleaming in his hand. The creeks, ponds and disused wells within Lunghua Camp held an armory of rusting weapons and unstable ammunition abandoned during the 1937 hostilities. Jim peered through the grass at the pointed cylinder, assuming that the tidal water in the canal had uncovered an old artillery shell or mortar bomb.
Kimura shouted to the second soldier waiting by the barbed wire. He brushed the flies from his face and spoke to the object, as if murmuring to a baby. He raised it behind his head, in the position taken by Japanese soldiers before throwing a grenade. Jim waited for the explosion, and then realized that Private Kimura was holding a large freshwater turtle. The creature’s head emerged from its carapace, and Kimura began to laugh excitedly. His tubercular face resembled a small boy’s, reminding Jim that Private Kimura had once been a child, as he himself had been before the war.
•
After crossing the parade ground, the Japanese soldiers disappeared among the lines of ragged washing between the barrack huts. Jim emerged from the damp cavern of the blockhouse. Wearing the leather golfing shoes given to him by Dr. Ransome, he climbed through the wire. In his hand he carried Kimura’s turtle. The ancient creature contained at least a pound of meat, and Basie, almost certainly, would know a special recipe for turtle. Jim could imagine Basie tempting it out of its shell with a live caterpillar, then skewering its head with his jackknife . . . .
In front of Jim was Lunghua Camp, his home and universe for the past three years, the prison of nearly two thousand British and American civilians. The shabby barrack huts, the cement dormitory blocks, the worn parade ground and the guardhouse with its leaning watchtower lay together under the June sun, a rendezvous for every fly and mosquito in the Yangtze basin. But once he stepped through the wire, Jim felt the air steady around him. He ran along the cinder path, his tattered shirt flying from his bony shoulders like the tags of washing between the huts.
In his ceaseless journeys around the camp Jim had learned to recognize every stone and weed. A sun-bleached sign, crudely painted with the words “Regent Street,” was nailed to a bamboo pole beside the pathway. Jim ignored it, as he did the similar signs inscribed “Piccadilly,” “Knightsbridge” and “Petticoat Lane” which marked the main pathways within the camp. These relics of an imaginary London—which many of the Shanghai-born British prisoners had never seen—intrigued Jim but in some way annoyed him. With their constant talk about prewar London, the older British families in the camp claimed a special exclusiveness. Jim remembered a line from one of the poems that Dr. Ransome had made him memorize—“a foreign field that is forever England . . .” But this was Lunghua, not England. Naming the sewage-stained paths between the rotting huts after a vaguely remembered London allowed too many of the British prisoners to shut out the reality of the camp, another excuse to sit back when they should have been helping Dr. Ransome to clear the septic tanks. To their credit, in Jim’s eyes, neither the Americans nor the Dutch and Belgians in the camp wasted their time on nostalgia. The years in Lunghua had not given Jim a high opinion of the British.
And yet the London street signs fascinated Jim, part of the magic of names that he had discovered in the camp. What, conceivably, were Lords, the Serpentine and the Trocadero? There were so few books or magazines that an unfamiliar brand name had all the mystery of a message from the stars. According to Basie, who was always right, the American fighters with the ventral radiators that strafed Lunghua Airfield were called “Mustangs,” the name of a wild pony. Jim relished the name; to know that the planes were Mustangs was more important to him than the confirmation that Basie had his ear to the camp’s secret radio. Jim hungered for names.
Jim stumbled on the worn path, unable to control the golf shoes. Too often these days he became lightheaded. Dr. Ransome had warned him not to run, but the American air attacks and the imminent prospect of the war’s end made Jim too impatient to walk. Trying to protect the turtle, he grazed his left knee. He limped across the cinder track and sat on the steps of the derelict drinking-water station. Here brackish water taken from the ponds in the camp had once been boiled by the prisoners. There was still a small supply of coal in the camp storerooms, but the work gang of six Britons who stoked the fires had lost interest. Although Dr. Ransome remonstrated with them, they preferred to suffer from chronic dysentery rather than make the effort of boiling the water.
While Jim nursed his knee the members of the gang sat outside the nearby barrack hut, watching the sky as if they expected the war to end within the next ten minutes. Jim recognized Mr. Mulvaney, an accountant with the Shanghai Power Company who had often swum in the pool at Amherst Avenue. Beside him was the Reverend Pearce, a Methodist missionary whose Japanese-speaking wife openly collaborated with the guards, reporting to them each day on the prisoners’ activities.
No one criticized Mrs. Pearce for this, and in fact most of the prisoners in Lunghua were only too keen to collaborate. Jim vaguely disapproved but agreed that it was probably sensible to do anything to survive. After three years in the camp, the notion of patriotism meant nothing. The bravest prisoners—and collaboration was a risky matter—were those who bought their way into the favor of the Japanese and thereby helped their fellows with small supplies of food and bandages. Besides, there were few illicit activities to betray. No one in Lunghua would dream of trying to escape, and everyone rightly ratted on any fool about to step through the wire, for fear of the reprisals to come.
The water workers scraped their clogs on the steps and stared into the sun, moving only to pick the ticks from between their ribs. Although emaciated, the process of starvation had somehow stopped a skin’s depth from the skeleton below. Jim envied Mr. Mulvaney and the Reverend Pearce—he himself was still growing. The arithmetic that Dr. Ransome had taught him made it all too clear that the food supply to the camp was shrinking at a faster rate than that at which the prisoners were dying.
In the center of the parade ground a group of twelve-year-old boys was playing marbles on the baked earth. Seeing the turtle, they ran toward Jim. Each of them controlled a dragonfly tied to a length of cotton. The blue flames flicked to and fro above their heads.
“Jim! Can we touch it?”
“What is it?”
“Did Private Kimura give it to you?”
Jim smiled benignly. “It’s a bomb.” He held out the turtle and generously allowed everyone to inspect it. Despite the gap in years, several of the boys had been close friends in the days after his arrival in Lunghua, when he had needed every ally he could find. But he had outgrown them and made other friends—Dr. Ransome, Basie and the American seamen in E Block, with their ancient prewar copies of Reader’s Digest and Popular Mechanics that Jim devoured. Now and then, as if recapturing his lost childhood, Jim re-entered the world of boyish games and would play tops and marbles and hopscotch.
“Is it dead? It’s moving!”
“It’s bleeding!”
A smear of blood from Jim’s knee gave the turtle’s head a piratical flourish.
“Jim, you killed it!”
The largest of the boys, Richard Pearce, reached out to touch the reptile, but Jim tucked it under his arm. He disliked and slightly feared Richard Pearce, who was almost as big as himself. He envied Richard the extra Japanese rations which his mother fed to him. As well as the food, the Pearces had a small library of confiscated books which they guarded jealously.
“It’s a blood bond,” Jim explained grandly. By rights turtles belonged to the sea, to the open river visible a mile to the west of the camp, that broad tributary of the Yangtze down which he had once dreamed of sailing with his parents to the safety of a world without war.
“Watch out . . . .” He waved Richard aside. “I’ve trained it to attack!”
The boys backed away from him. There were times when Jim’s humor made them uneasy. Although he tried to stop himself, Jim resented their clothes—hand-me-downs stitched together by their mothers, but far superior to his own rags. More than this, Jim resented that they had mothers and fathers at all. During the past year Jim had gradually realized that he could no longer remember what his parents looked like. Their veiled figures still entered his dreams, but he had forgotten their faces.