THE CEMETERY CARDEN
WHEN THE ROLL CALL ENDED, Jim rested on the hospital steps. Dr. Ransome and Dr. Bowen returned from the commandant’s office and immediately shut themselves in the dispensary with the four missionary widows. Dr. Ransome seemed as nervous as the Japanese. The old scar below his eye was flushed with blood. Had Sergeant Nagata slapped him for protesting at a further cut in the food ration?
Hands in pockets, Jim sauntered down the cinder track behind the hospital. He surveyed the rows of tomatoes, beans and melons in the kitchen garden. The modest crop was meant to supplement the patients’ meager diet, though many of the vegetables found their way to the American seamen in E Block. Jim enjoyed his work with the plants. He knew each of them personally and could tell at a glance if the children had stolen a single tomato. Fortunately the long lines of graves in the adjacent cemetery kept them away. Apart from its nutritional benefits, botany was an intriguing subject. In the dispensary Dr. Ransome sliced and stained the slivers of plant stems and roots, mounted them under Dr. Bowen’s microscope and made Jim draw the hundreds of cells and nutrient vessels. Plant classification was an entire universe of words; every weed in the camp had a name. Names surrounded everything; invisible encyclopedias lay in every hedge and ditch.
The previous afternoon Jim had dug two fertilizer trenches for a new crop of tomato plants. Between the garden and the cemetery was a row of fifty-gallon drums which he and Dr. Ransome had buried in the ground, then filled with sewage from the overflowing septic tank in G Block. A party of prisoners in the block had decanted most of the sewage into one of the drained ponds, but Jim and Dr. Ransome made their own trips with bucket, rope and cart. As Dr. Ransome said, there was no point in wasting anything that could keep them alive for even a few days longer. The glowing tomatoes and puffed-up melons proved him right.
Jim moved the wooden hatch from one of the drums. He waited for the thousands of flies to have the first share, then picked up the bamboo ladle with its wooden cup and began to pour the manure into the shallow trenches. He worked with the slow but measured rhythm of the Chinese peasants he had watched as they fertilized their crops before the war.
An hour later, when he had covered the manure with a layer of soil, Jim rested on one of the graves in the nearby cemetery. Various people were visiting the hospital: the block leaders and their deputies, a party of Americans from E Block, the senior Dutch and Belgians. But Jim was too tired to pester them for news. It was peaceful in the kitchen garden with its green walls of beans and tomato plants. Often Jim visualized staying there forever, even after the war had ended.
He pushed this rustic fantasy to the back of his mind and listened to the drone of a Zero fighter warming up at the end of the runway. A single kamikaze plane was about to take off, all that the Japanese could muster as a reprisal for the American air raid. The young pilot, barely older than Jim, wore his ceremonial sashes, but the honor guard consisted only of a corporal and a junior private. Both turned away before the pilot had climbed into his cockpit and walked back to their repair work on the damaged hangars.
Jim watched the plane rise shakily from the runway. It climbed over the camp, engine laboring under the weight of the bomb, banked toward the river and set course for the open China Sea. Jim cupped his hands over his eyes and followed the plane until it vanished among the clouds. None of the Japanese at Lunghua Airfield had given the aircraft the briefest glance. Fires were still burning in the hangars by the pagoda, and a cloud of steam rose from the bombed engineering sheds. Already, though, the craters were being filled by the work gang of Chinese coolies, and the scrap dealers were scavenging the hulks of the derelict planes.
“Are you still interested in aeroplanes, Jim?” Mrs. Philips asked, as she and Mrs. Gilmour emerged from the hospital courtyard. “You’ll have to join the R. A. F.”
“I’m going to join the Japanese Air Force.”
“Oh? The Japanese?” The missionary widows tittered, still unsure of Jim’s sense of humor, and pushed their wooden cart. The iron wheels rang on the stony track, shaking the body that the two women were about to bury.
Jim polished the three tomatoes he had picked from the plants. None was larger than a marble, but Basie would appreciate them. Jim slipped them into his shirt pocket and watched Mrs. Philips and Mrs. Gilmour digging the grave. Soon exhausted, the two women sat on the cart and rested beside the corpse.
Jim walked over to them and took the spade from Mrs. Philips’ worn hands. The body was that of Mr. Radik, the former head chef at the Cathay Hotel. Jim had enjoyed his scholarly lectures on the Atlantic liner Berengaria and was glad to repay his debt. He dug the soft soil. In one of their few acts of foresight, when they were still strong enough to do so, the prisoners had part-excavated the narrow graves. But the effort of removing a further spade’s depth of damp soil was now too much for the missionary widows. The dead were buried above ground, the loose soil heaped around them. The heavy rains of the monsoon months softened the mounds so that they formed the outlines of the bodies within them, as if this small cemetery beside the military airfield was doing its best to resurrect a few of the millions who had died in the war. Here and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts. Rats had burrowed deep into the grave of Mrs. Hug, the Dutch woman who had arrived at Lunghua with Basie and Dr. Ransome, and the tunnels reminded Jim of the Maginot Line he had constructed behind the rockery at Amherst Avenue for his army of lead soldiers.
He dug away, deciding to sink Mr. Radik well below the ground so that the chef would not become an instant meal for the rats. Mrs. Gilmour and Mrs. Philips sat on the cart beside the corpse and watched without comment. Whenever he paused to rest they treated him to two identical smiles, as blanched as the flowers in the patterns of their tattered cotton dresses.
“Jim! Leave that and come over! I need you here!” Dr. Ransome was shouting from the dispensary window. He had always disliked Jim digging the graves.
Hundreds of flies buzzed around the cart and settled on Mr. Radik’s face. With the Berengaria in mind, Jim continued to spade the soil.
“Jim, the doctor’s calling . . . .”
“All right—it’s ready.”
The women pulled Mr. Radik from the cart. Although wearied by the effort, they handled him with the same care they had shown when he was alive. Was he still alive for these two Christian widows? Jim had always been impressed by strong religious beliefs. His mother and father were agnostics, and Jim respected devout Christians in the same way that he respected people who were members of the Graf Zeppelin Club or shopped at the Chinese department stores, for their mastery of an exotic foreign ritual. Besides, those who worked hardest for others, like Mrs. Philips and Mrs. Gilmour and Dr. Ransome, often held beliefs that turned out to be correct.
“Mrs. Philips,” he asked as they settled Mr. Radik into his grave, “when does the soul leave the body? Before it’s buried?”
“Yes, Jim.” Mrs. Philips knelt on the ground and began to scoop the earth over Mr. Radik’s face. “Mr. Radik’s soul has already left. Doctor’s calling again. I hope you’ve done your Latin prep.”
“Of course.” Jim reflected on this as he walked to the hospital. He often watched the eyes of the patients as they died, trying to detect a flash of light when the soul left. Once he had helped Dr. Ransome as he massaged the naked chest of a young Belgian woman wasted by dysentery. Dr. Bowen had said that she was dead, but Dr. Ransome squeezed her heart under her ribs and suddenly her eyes swiveled and looked at Jim. At first Jim thought that her soul had returned to her, but she was still dead. Mrs. Philips and Mrs. Gilmour took her away and buried her an hour later. Dr. Ransome explained that for a few seconds he had pumped the blood back into her brain.
Jim entered the dispensary and sat at the metal table facing Dr. Ransome. He would have liked to take up the matter of Mr. Radik’s soul, but the doctor was curiously reluctant to discuss religious topics with Jim, although he himself went to the church services on Sunday morning. The scar on his face was still flushed with blood, and he was ominously busy with his tray of melted wax. Whenever he was tired, or annoyed with Jim, Dr. Ransome would melt a few candles and immerse squares of old cloth in the hot liquid, then hang them up to cool. The previous winter he had made hundreds of these wax panels, which the prisoners had used to replace the broken window-panes. Although the hours of work had helped to keep out the freezing winds that swept down from northern China, few of the prisoners were grateful to Dr. Ransome. Still, as Jim observed, Dr. Ransome was not interested in their gratitude.
Jim dipped a finger in the hot wax, but Dr. Ransome brusquely waved him away. Clearly his conversation with the camp commandant had upset him—he was preparing for the winter as if trying to convince himself that they would all be there when it arrived.
Taking off his shoes, Jim began to buff the toe caps. After three years in clogs and cast-offs, he enjoyed impressing everyone with these expensive leather brogues.
“Jim, it’s admirable of you to look so smart, but try not to polish them all the time.” Dr. Ransome stared heavily at the wax squares. “They unsettle Sergeant Nagata.”
“I like them to look bright.”
“They’re very bright. Even the American pilots must have seen them. They probably think we have a golf course here and set their compasses to your toe caps.”
“That means I’m helping the war effort?”
“In a way . . .” Before Jim could put on his shoes, Dr. Ransome held his ankle. Most of the sores on Jim’s legs were infected and, given the poor diet, would never properly heal, but above the right ankle was an ulcer the size of a penny, engorged with pus. Dr. Ransome moved the tray of melted wax from the candle-lamp. He boiled a spoonful of water in a metal pail, then drained and cleaned the ulcer with a cotton swab.
Jim submitted without protest. He had formed his only close bond in Lunghua with Dr. Ransome, though he knew that in many ways the physician disapproved of him. He resented Jim for revealing an obvious truth about the war, that people were only too able to adapt to it. At times he even suspected that Jim enjoyed Latin for the wrong reasons. The brother of a games master at an English boarding school (one of those repressive institutions, so like Lunghua, for which Jim was apparently destined), he had been working up-country with Protestant missionaries. Dr. Ransome was rather like a school prefect and head of rugby, though Jim was unsure how far this manner was calculated. He had noticed that Dr. Ransome could be remarkably devious when it suited him.
“Now, Jim, I’m sure you’ve done your prep . . . .” Dr. Ransome opened the Latin primer. Although distracted by the prisoners who gathered outside the huts and dormitory blocks, he stared hard at the text. Hundreds of men and their wives, many with their children, were crossing the parade ground. He began to question Jim, who continued to polish his shoes under the table.
“They were being loved’?”
“Amabantur.”
“ ‘I shall be loved’?”
“Amabor.”
“ ‘You will have been loved’?”
“Amatus eris.”
“Right—I’ll set you an unseen. Mrs. Vincent will help you with the vocabulary. She doesn’t mind your asking?”
“Not now.” Jim reported her change of heart matter-of-factly. He guessed that Dr. Ransome had been useful with some special woman’s problem.
“Good. People need to be encouraged. She may not be much use with the trig.”
“I don’t need her to help me.” Jim enjoyed trigonometry. Unlike Latin or algebra, this branch of geometry was directly involved in a subject close to his heart—aerial warfare. “Dr. Ransome, the American bombers that flew with the Mustangs were going at three hundred and twenty miles an hour—I timed their shadows across the camp with my heartbeat. If they want to hit Lunghua Airfield, they have to drop their bombs about a thousand yards away.”
“Jim, you’re a war child. I imagine the Japanese gunners know that too.”
Jim sat back, thinking this over. “They might not.”
“Well, we can’t tell them—or can we? That would be unfair to the American pilots. As it is, the Japanese are shooting too many of them down.”
“But they’re shooting them down over the airfield,” Jim explained. “Then they’ve already dropped their bombs. If they want to stop them hitting the runway they should shoot them down more than a thousand yards away.” The prospect excited Jim—applied to the Japanese bases all over the Pacific area, this new tactic might turn the war against the Americans and so save Lunghua Camp. Jim drummed his fingers on the table, imitating the way in which he had played the white piano in the empty house in Amherst Avenue.
“Yes . . . .” Dr. Ransome reached out and gently pressed Jim’s hands to the table, trying to calm him. He submerged another cotton square in the wax tray. “Perhaps we’ll leave the trig, and I’ll mark up some algebra. We want the war to end, Jim.”
“Of course, Dr. Ransome.”
“Do you want the war to end, Jim?” Dr. Ransome often seemed doubtful about this. “A lot of the people here won’t last much longer. You’re keen to see your mother and father again?”
“Yes, I am. I think about them every day.”
“Good. Do you remember what they look like?”
“I do remember . . . .” Jim hated lying to Dr. Ransome, but in a sense he was thinking of the photograph of the unknown man and woman he had pinned to the wall of his cubicle. He had never divulged to Dr. Ransome that these were his surrogate parents. Jim knew that it was important to keep alive the memory of his mother and father, but their faces had become hazy. Dr. Ransome might not approve of the way in which he was tricking himself.
“I’m glad you remember them, Jim. They may have changed.”
“I know—they’ll be hungry.”
“More than hungry, Jim. When the war does end, everything is going to be very uncertain.”
“So we should stay in the camp?” Jim liked the sound of this. Too many of the prisoners talked about leaving the camp without any real idea of what would happen to them. “As long as we stay in Lunghua, the Japanese will look after us.”
“I’m not sure that they will. We’ve become an embarrassment to them. They can’t feed us any longer, Jim . . . .”
So this was what Dr. Ransome had been leading toward. Jim felt a quiet tiredness come over him. His long hours spent hauling the buckets of sewage, planting and watering the crops in the hospital garden, pulling the ration cart with Mr. Maxted had been part of his attempt to keep the camp going. Yet, as he had known all along, the supply of food depended on the whim of the Japanese. His own feelings, his determination to survive, counted for nothing in the end. The activity meant no more than the movement in the eyes of the Belgian woman who had seemed to come back from the dead.
“Is there going to be any more food, Dr. Ransome?”
“We hope some will come through. The Japanese can no longer feed themselves. The American submarines . . .”
Jim stared at the polished toe caps of his shoes. He wanted his mother and father to see them before they died. He rallied himself, trying to summon his old will to survive. Deliberately he thought of the curious pleasure the corpses in the hospital cemetery gave him, the guilty excitements of being alive at all. He knew why Dr. Ransome disliked him digging the graves.
Dr. Ransome marked the exercises in the algebra textbook and gave him two strips of rice-paper bandage on which to solve the simultaneous equations. As he stood up, Dr. Ransome removed the three tomatoes from Jim’s pocket. He laid them on the table by the wax tray.
“Did they come from the hospital garden?”
“Yes.” Jim gazed back frankly at Dr. Ransome. Recently he had begun to see him with a more adult eye. The long years of imprisonment, the constant disputes with the Japanese had made this young physician seem middle-aged. Dr. Ransome was often unsure of himself, as he was of Jim’s theft.
“I have to give Basie something whenever I see him.”
“I know. It’s a good thing that you’re friends with Basie. He’s a survivor, though survivors can be dangerous. Wars exist for people like Basie.” Dr. Ransome placed the tomatoes in Jim’s hand. “I want you to eat them, Jim. I’ll get you something for Basie.”
“Dr. Ransome . . .” Jim searched for some way of reassuring him. “If we told Sergeant Nagata about the thousand-yard range . . . the Japanese wouldn’t shoot down any more planes, but they might give us some food . . . .”
Dr. Ransome smiled for the first time. He unlocked the medicine cabinet and from a steel cash box he removed two rubber condoms.
“Jim, you’re a pragmatist. Give these to Basie, he’ll have something for you. Now eat your tomatoes and go.”