THE LUNGHUA SOPHOMORES
We’re the Lunghua Sophomores,
We’re the girls every boy adores,
C.A.C. don’t mean a thing to me,
For every Tuesday evening we go on a spree . . . .
As he crossed the parade ground toward E Block, Jim paused to watch the Lunghua Players rehearsing their next concert party on the steps of Hut 6. The leader of the troupe was Mr. Wentworth, the manager of the Cathay Bank, whose exaggerated and theatrical manner fascinated Jim. He enjoyed the amateur dramatics, when everyone involved was at the center of public attention. Jim had played a page in Henry V, a role he relished. The costume that Mrs. Wentworth had run up for him out of purple velvet was the only decent garment Jim had worn for three years. He had offered to wear it in the Lunghua Players’ next production, The Importance of Being Earnest, but Mr. Wentworth had declined to cast him.
. . . We’ve debates and lectures too,
And concerts just for you . . . .
The rehearsal was not a success. The four chorus girls in their Pierrot costumes stood on the makeshift stage of packing cases, trying to remember the song. Upset by the air raid, the women ignored Mr. Wentworth and listened to the sky. Despite the hot sunlight, they rubbed their arms to keep warm.
The audience of bored internees wandered away, and Jim decided to leave the actors to it. The Lunghua Players recruited their members from the snootiest of the English families, and there was something absurd about their high-pitched voices—as affected as the rugby match which Dr. Ransome, in a rare lapse from common sense, had arranged the previous winter. The teams of starving prisoners (husbands of the Lunghua Sophomores) had tottered around the parade ground in a grotesque parody of a rugby game, too exhausted to pass the ball and jeered at by a crowd of fellow prisoners excluded from the game because they had never learned the rules.
Jim passed the guardhouse, carrying out a quick survey of the camp. A group of prisoners had gathered by the gates, waiting for the military truck that brought the daily rations from Shanghai. No official announcement had been made that the ration was to be cut, but the news had already spread through the camp.
Significantly, there were fewer Chinese beggars outside the gates. A dead peasant woman lay on the grass verge, but the disbanded puppet soldiers and out-of-work rickshaw coolies had gone, leaving behind a circle of squatting old men and a few wan-faced children.
Jim entered E Block, the men’s dormitory building, and climbed the stairway to the third floor.
Regardless of the weather, the British prisoners in E Block spent almost all their time in their bunks. A few were too ill with malaria to move and lay stretched out on straw mats soaked with sweat and urine. But others still strong enough to walk lounged beside them, examining their hands for hours or staring at the walls.
The sight of so many adult men unwilling to cope with the reality of the camp always puzzled Jim, but he recovered as soon as he reached the American dormitory. Jim liked the Americans and approved of them in every way. Whenever he entered this enclave of irony and good humor, his spirits rose.
Jim surveyed the maze of cubicles. The Britons in E Block lived in open dormitories, but each of the American seamen had constructed a small cubicle from whatever materials he could scavenge—threadbare sheets, wooden planks, straw mats and woven bamboo. Two of the former classrooms were occupied by the American merchant seamen. The partition doors had been removed, and the high-ceilinged chamber was filled by some sixty men, each in a makeshift cubicle. Now and then a party of Americans would emerge from E Block and play a relaxed game of softball, but usually they remained in their cubicles. There they lay on their bunks and entertained a steady stream of adolescent girls, single British women and even a few wives drawn to them for reasons not very different from Jim’s.
By some mechanism that Jim had never understood, the sexual activity seemed to generate an endless supply of those items that most fascinated Jim. This treasure had been brought into the camp by the American sailors and now circulated like a second currency—comic books and copies of Life, Reader’s Digest and Saturday Evening Post; novelty pens, lipsticks and powder compacts; gaudy tiepins, cigarette lighters and celluloid belts; fairground cufflinks and Wild West buckles—a collection of geegaws that in Jim’s eyes had the style and magic of the Mustang fighters.
“Say, it’s Shanghai Jim . . . .”
“Kid, Basie’s mad at you . . . .”
“You want to play chess, son?”
“Jim, I need hot water and a shave.”
“Jim, bring me a left-handed screwdriver and a bucket of steam . . . .”
“Why’s Basie mad at Jim?”
Jim exchanged greetings with the Americans—Cohen, the softball wizard and chess fanatic; Tiptree, the large, kindly stoker who was the comic-book king; Hinton, yet another cabin steward and philosopher; Dainty, the telegraphist and premier cocksman of Lunghua—amiable men whose roles they played for Jim’s benefit and constantly teased. When they noticed him, most of them liked Jim, who in return, and out of respect for America, ran endless errands for them. Several of the cubicles were closed as the merchant seamen entertained their visitors, but the others had their curtains raised so that the sailors could lie on their bunks and observe the passing world. Two of the older seamen were wracked by malaria, but they made little fuss about being ill. All in all, Jim felt, the Americans were the best company, not as strange and challenging as the Japanese, but far superior to the morose and complicated British.
Why was Basie angry with him? Jim stepped down the narrow corridor between the suspended sheets. He could hear an Englishwoman from Hut 5 complaining about her husband, and two Belgian girls who lived with their widowed father in G Block giggled over some object they were being shown.
Basie’s cubicle was in the northeast corner of the room, with two windows that gave him a clear view of the entire camp. As always he was sitting on his bunk, keeping an eye on the Japanese soldiers outside the guardhouse as he received the latest report from Demarest, his cubicle neighbor and chief henchman. His long-sleeved cotton shirt was faded but neatly creased—after Jim had washed and dried the shirts, Basie would fold them in a complex, origamilike package and slide them under his sleeping mat, from which they emerged with a department-store sharpness. Since Basie rarely moved from his bunk, he seemed even cooler and crisper in Jim’s eyes than Mr. Sekura, and in most respects the years in Lunghua had been less of a strain for Basie than for the Japanese commandant. His hands and cheeks were still soft and unworn, though with a pallor like that of an unhealthy woman. Moving around his cubicle, as if in his pantry on the S.S. Aurora, he regarded Lunghua Camp in the same way that he had viewed the world beyond it, a suite of cabins to be kept ready for a succession of unwary passengers.
“Come in, kid. Stop breathing so much, you’re making Basie all hot.” Demarest, a former bar steward, spoke without moving his lips—either, as Jim believed, he had spent an earlier career as a ventriloquist or, as Mr. Maxted maintained, he had passed long terms in prison.
“The boy’s all right . . . .” Basie beckoned Jim to sit down as Demarest returned to his cubicle. “There just isn’t enough air for him in the whole of Lunghua. Isn’t that it, Jim?”
Jim tried to control his panting—not enough red cells, according to Dr. Ransome, but often he and Basie meant the same thing.
“You’re right, Basie. The Mustangs took it all with them. Did you see the air raid?”
“I heard it, Jim . . . .” Basie glanced darkly at Jim, as if holding him responsible for the noise. “Those Philippino pilots must have gone to flight school at Coney Island.”
“Philippino?” Jim at last mastered his lungs. “Were they really Philippino pilots?”
“Some of them, Jim. There are a couple of wings operating with MacArthur’s outfit. The rest are old Flying Tigers based at Chungking.” Basie nodded sagely, watching Jim to make sure he appreciated his superior savvy.
“Chungking . . .” Jim was agog. This was the kind of information on which his mind feasted, even though he knew that Basie embroidered the reports for his benefit. Somewhere in the camp was a concealed radio which had never been discovered, not because it was well hidden but because the Japanese were confused by the false tips given by prisoners eager to collaborate. Despite all his efforts, Jim had been unable to track down the radio, which was inactive for long periods. Then Basie would supply Jim with news bulletins of his own, describing a parallel war. Jim always pretended to be impressed, though he could rarely separate rumor from outright fiction. It was an important way of keeping them close together.
Also, there was Basie’s interest in Jim’s expanding vocabulary.
“You did your schoolwork today, Jim? You learned all your words?”
“I did, Basie. A lot of Latin words.” Basie was intrigued by Jim’s command of Latin, but easily bored, so he decided not to recite the whole passive tense of amo. “And some new English words. ‘Pragmatist,’ ” he suggested, which Basie greeted with gloom, “and ‘survivor.’”
“ ‘Survivor’?” Basie chuckled at this. “That’s a useful word. Are you a survivor, Jim?”
“Well . . .” Dr. Ransome had not meant the term as a compliment. Jim tried to remember another word of interest. Basie never used the words but seemed to store them away, keeping them in reserve for a better day, as if preparing himself for a life of elaborate formality.
“Is there any more news, Basie? When are the Americans going to land at Woosung?”
But Basie was preoccupied. He rested his head against the pillow and stared at the contents of the cubicle, as if burdened by all his possessions. At first sight the cubicle seemed to be filled with old rags and wicker baskets, but it actually contained a complete general store. There were aluminum pots and pans, an assortment of women’s slacks and blouses, a Mah-Jongg set, several tennis rackets, half a dozen unmatched shoes and a king’s ransom of old copies of Reader’s Digest and Popular Mechanics. All these had been obtained by barter, though Jim had never understood what Basie gave in return—like Dr. Ransome, he had come into the camp with nothing.
On the other hand, it had occurred to Jim that much of this equipment was useless. No one was strong enough to play tennis, the shoes were full of holes and there was nothing to cook in the saucepans. The cabin steward, for all his guile, was the same limited man whom Jim had first met at the Nantao shipyards, with the same clear but small view of the world. Basie’s talents expanded to fill only the most modest possibilities of petty thievery around him. Jim worried about what would happen to Basie when the war was over.
“Jobs, Jim,” Basie announced. “You set out the traps? How far did you go? Across the creek?”
“Right across the creek, Basie. I went as far as the old drill hall.”
“Good.”
“I didn’t see any pheasants, Basie. I don’t think there are any pheasants. It’s too close to the airfield.”
“There are pheasants, Jim. But we need to move the traps to the Shanghai road.” He peered shrewdly at Jim. “Then we’ll have to set up a decoy.”
“We could set up a decoy, Basie.” Jim guessed that there already was a decoy—himself. The whole enterprise of setting the traps had nothing to do with catching pheasants. Perhaps one of the Americans was planning to visit Shanghai, and Jim was being used to test the escape route. Alternatively, these bored sailors might be playing a game, betting among each other on how far Jim could push the traps before being shot by the Japanese sentry in the watchtower. Although they liked Jim, they were quite capable of gambling with his life. That was American humor of a most special kind.
Jim swayed with fatigue, wishing he could lie across the foot of the bunk. Basie was watching him in an expectant way. From his window he would have seen Jim at work in the hospital garden, and he was waiting for a few beans or tomatoes. Basie always demanded these tidbits, though he was generous in his own way. When Jim was younger Basie spent hours making toys for him out of copper wire and cotton reels, sewing exquisite fish flies that hung from free-floating buoys. On Jim’s birthdays it was only Basie who gave him a present.
“Basie, I bought something for you . . . .” Jim took the two condoms from his pocket. Basie pulled a rusty biscuit tin from below his bunk. As he removed the lid Jim saw that the tin was packed with hundreds of the prophylactics, as the Americans called them. Once the original stock of cigarettes was exhausted, these grubby rubbers formed Lunghua Camp’s main unit of currency. The number in circulation had barely fallen in three years, not because there was little sexual intercourse at Lunghua, but for the reason that the contraceptives were too valuable as units of exchange to be used for idle purposes. Playing poker, the American sailors used stacks of the condoms as chips. It was doubly ironic, as Jim had heard Dr. Ransome remark, that their value continued to rise even though almost all the prisoners in the camp were either impotent or infertile.
Basie inspected the condoms, suspicious of their pristine condition.
“Where did you get these, Jim?”
“They’re good ones, Basie. That’s the best type.”
“Is that so?” Basie often accepted Jim’s expertise in unlikely areas. “Perhaps you were looking inside Dr. Ransome’s medical cabinet?”
“There weren’t any tomatoes, Basie. The air raid spoiled them.”
“Those Philippino pilots . . . Never mind. Tell me about Dr. Ransome’s cabinet. There were medicines there, I imagine.”
“Basie, there were a lot of medicines. Iodine, Mercurochrome . . .” In fact, the cupboard was bare. Jim tried to remember the medicine chest in his father’s bathroom and the strange names that summed up the mysterious world of the adult body. “ . . . pessaries, linctus, suppositories . . .”
“Suppositories? Lie down, Jim. You’re getting tired.” Basie put an arm around Jim’s shoulders. Together they gazed through the window at the crowd of prisoners waiting for the overdue ration truck from Shanghai. “Don’t worry, Jim, there’ll be plenty to eat soon. Forget all this talk about the Japs cutting our rations.”
“They might do it, Basie. We’re an embarrassment to them.”
“An embarrassment? Dr. Ransome is worrying you with all these words. Believe me, Jim, it’s going to take more than us to embarrass the Japs.” He reached under his pillow and brought out a small sweet potato. “You eat this while I work out our jobs. When you’ve finished, I’ll give you a Reader’s Digest you can take back to G Block.”
“Say, thanks, Basie!” Jim devoured the potato. He liked Basie’s cubicle. The abundance of objects, even if they were useless, was reassuring, like the abundance of words around Dr. Ransome. The Latin vocabulary and the algebraic terms were useless too, but they helped to make up a world. Basie’s confidence in the future encouraged him.
Sure enough, as he licked the last pith from his fingers, saving the skin for the evening, the military truck arrived from Shanghai with the prisoners’ food ration.