THE EXECUTION
TWO JAPANESE SOLDIERS with fixed bayonets stood behind the driving cabin of the truck, their thighs lost among the sacks of potatoes and cracked wheat. However, as he leaned from Basie’s window, Jim could see that the ration had been halved. He was glad that some food had come, but at the same time he felt almost disappointed. A crowd of several hundred prisoners followed the truck toward the kitchens, hands in the pockets of their ragged shorts, their clogs clattering. How would they have behaved if the truck had been empty? None of the prisoners, not even Dr. Ransome, seemed able to rally themselves for the last stages of the war. Jim almost welcomed the hunger, when he would see again the curious light the Mustangs had brought with them . . . .
Around him the Americans were leaving their cubicles and pressing against the windows. Demarest pointed to the columns of smoke that rose from the dockyard districts of northern Shanghai. Although they were more than ten miles away, Jim could hear a hard rumble across the deserted paddy fields, a forgotten thunder that reverberated over the land long after the bombs had exploded. The sounds drummed at the windows, a vague ultimatum to the listless prisoners of Lunghua.
Jim searched the smoke clouds for any signs of American aircraft. None of the dozen serviceable Zeros at Lunghua Airfield had taken off to intercept them.
“That’s it, Jim. Superfortress bombers, what we call a hemisphere defense weapon. All the way from Guam.”
“From Guam, Basie . . .” Jim was impressed by the thought of these four-engined bombers making the long journey across the Pacific, in order to attack the Shanghai dockyards where he had spent so many happy hours playing hide-and-seek. The B-29s awed Jim. The huge, streamlined bombers summed up all the power and grace of America. Usually the B-29s flew above the Japanese antiaircraft fire, but two days earlier Jim had seen a single Superfortress cross the paddy fields to the west of the camp, only five hundred feet above the ground. Two of its engines were on fire, but the sight of this immense bomber with its high, curving tail convinced Jim that the Japanese had lost the war. Jim had seen captured American air crews who were held for a few hours in the Lunghua guardhouse. What impressed him so much was that these complex machines were flown by men such as Cohen and Tiptree and Dainty. That was America.
Jim thought intently about the B-29s. He wanted to embrace their silver fuselages, caress the nacelles of their engines. The Mustang was a beautiful plane, but the Superfortress belonged to a different order of beauty . . . .
“Take it easy, kid.” Basie put an arm around his shaking chest.
“They’re a long way from Lunghua. You’re going to mess yourself.”
“I’m all right, Basie. The war’s nearly over, isn’t it?”
“That’s it. Not too soon for you, Jim. Tell me, did you ever see the Hell Drivers in Shanghai?”
“Sure I did, Basie! I saw them crash right through a burning wall!”
“Okay, then. Let’s calm down and get on with our jobs.”
For the next hour Jim was busy with the tasks that Basie had assigned him. First, there was water to be collected from the pond behind the guardhouse. When he had carried the bucket back to E Block, Jim set about gathering fuel for the stove. Basie still insisted on boiling his drinking water, but the shortage of fuel made this difficult. After rounding up a few sticks and shreds of straw mats, Jim searched the pathways around E Block, hunting for fragments of coke embedded in the cinder track. Even the cinders gave off a surprising heat.
Having lit his stove, Jim blew on the lazy flames. He placed the pieces of coke at the neck of the clay venturi, where, as Dr. Ransome had explained, the air moved most swiftly. As soon as the drinking water had boiled, he decanted some gray fluid into the mess tin, which he carried upstairs and left to cool on Basie’s window ledge. He collected Basie’s clothes and washed the dirty shirts in the remaining water. These could be left for an hour, while he queued for Basie’s rations. The male prisoners in E Block were the last to be fed each day, and the men queued at the kitchens. Jim always enjoyed the long wait for Basie’s ration of cracked wheat and sweet potato, and felt himself a growing man in the company of men. The lines of sweating prisoners, covered with ulcers and mosquito bites, gave off a heady odor of aggression, and Jim could understand the Japanese guards being wary of them. Much of their foul language was above his head, their brutally crude talk of women’s bodies and private parts, as if these emaciated males were trying to provoke themselves by describing what they could no longer perform. But there were always phrases to be catalogued away and savored as he lay in his cubicle.
By the time Jim returned to E Block with Basie’s shirts and food ration, he felt entitled to push past Demarest and sit at the foot of the bunk. He watched Basie eat the cracked wheat, flicking the weevils to and fro like a Chinese shopkeeper with his abacus.
“We worked hard today, Jim. Your dad would be proud of us. Which camp did you say he was in?”
“Soochow Central. And my mother. You can meet them soon.” Jim wanted Basie to be present at their reunion, so that the cabin steward could identify him if his parents failed to recognize Jim.
“I’d like to meet with them, Jim. If they’re not moved up-country . . .”
Jim noticed the odd inflection in Basie’s voice. “Up-country?”
“Well, it’s possible, Jim. Maybe the Japs will move people from the camps near Shanghai.”
“We’ll be out of the war, then?”
“Yes, you’ll be out of the war, all right . . . .” Basie hid the sweet potato among the saucepans under his bunk. He rummaged among the shoes and tennis rackets and then produced a copy of Reader’s Digest. He flipped through the grimy pages, which had been read a dozen times by every resident of E Block. Layers of greasy tape, stained with dried blood and pus, held the cover to the threadbare spine.
“Jim, are you still reading the Digest? August ’41, it has some good things in it . . . .”
Basie relished every moment of Jim’s excitement. This elaborate teasing was part of the ritual. Jim waited patiently, well aware that Basie exploited him, setting him to work each day in return for the old magazines. These bored merchant seamen could see that Jim was obsessed by everything American, and in their good-natured way they kept him dangling, rationing the ancient copies of Life and Collier’s that Jim needed as much as the extra sweet potatoes. The magazines fed a desperate imagination.
This unequal exchange, jobs for magazines, was also part of Jim’s conscious attempt to keep the camp going, whatever the cost. The activity screened his mind from certain fears that he had tried to repress, that the years in Lunghua would come to an end, and he would find himself building the runway again. The light that emerged from the burning body of the Mustang pilot had been a warning to him. As long as he ran his errands for Basie and Demarest and Cohen, to and from the kitchens, carrying water and playing chess, Jim could sustain the illusion that the war would last forever.
•
Reader’s Digest in hand, Jim sat on the steps outside E Block. He squinted at the sunlight, forcing himself not to glance through the pages. Groups of prisoners lounged on the balconies after their meal. The shade between the pillars was reserved for the sick internees, who squatted together like the families of beggars in the entrances to the office blocks behind the Shanghai Bund.
Next to Jim was a young man who had been a floor manager in the Sincere Company department. store and was now suffering from the last stages of malaria. His body rattling with fever, he sat naked on the cement steps and watched the Lunghua Players rehearsing their concert party. His white lips, from which all iron had long been leached, repeated an inaudible phrase.
Jim wondered how to help this skeletal figure. He offered him the Reader’s Digest, a gesture he instantly regretted. The man clasped the magazine in his hands and crushed the pages, as if the printed words inflamed his memories. He began to sing, in a harsh but barely audible voice.
. . . we’re the girls every boy adores,
C. A. C. don’t mean a thing to me . . .
A stream of colorless urine ran down his legs and trickled down the steps. He dropped the magazine, which Jim quickly retrieved before the pages could be soaked. As Jim straightened the spine, he heard the air-raid siren sound from the guardhouse. After a few seconds, before the prisoners could run for shelter, it stopped abruptly. Everyone stared at the empty sky, expecting the Mustangs to roar in from the paddy fields.
However, the siren blast signaled an altogether different display. Four Japanese soldiers, among them Private Kimura, emerged from the guardhouse. They surrounded a Chinese coolie who pulled a rickshaw which had brought one of their officers from Shanghai. Still exhausted by the long run, the coolie plodded in his straw sandals across the bare earth of the parade ground. His head was lowered as he pulled at the shafts, and he tittered in the strained way of frightened Chinese.
The Japanese soldiers strode briskly on either side of him. None of them was armed, but they carried wooden staves which they struck at the wheels of the rickshaw and at the shoulders of the coolie. Private Kimura walked behind the rickshaw and kicked the wooden seat, hurling the vehicle against the coolie’s legs. At the center of the parade ground Kimura and another soldier seized the rickshaw and propelled it forward, pitching the coolie onto the ground.
The soldiers began to saunter around the upended rickshaw. Private Kimura kicked its wheels, shattering the spokes. The others stamped on the wooden handles and snapped the shafts. Together they threw the vehicle onto its back, scattering the cushions.
The coolie knelt on the ground, laughing to himself. In the silence Jim could hear the strange singsong that the Chinese made when they knew they were about to be killed. Around the parade ground the hundreds of prisoners watched without moving. Men and women sat in the makeshift deck chairs outside the barrack huts, or stood on the steps of the dormitory blocks. The Lunghua Players paused in their rehearsal. None of them spoke as the Japanese soldiers strolled around the rickshaw, kicking its seats and framework into matchwood. From the locker below the seat fell a bundle of rags, a tin pail, a cotton bag filled with rice and a Chinese newspaper, the entire worldly possessions of this illiterate coolie. He sat among the grains of rice scattered on the ground and began to sing at a higher note, raising his face to the sky.
Jim smoothed the pages of the Reader’s Digest, wondering whether to read an article about Winston Churchill. He would have liked to leave, but all around him the prisoners were motionless as they watched the parade ground. The Japanese turned their attention to the coolie. Raising their staves, they each struck him a blow on the head, then strolled away as if deep in thought. Breathlessly now, the coolie sang to himself as the blood ran from his back and formed a pool around his knees.
The Japanese soldiers, Jim knew, would take ten minutes to kill the coolie. Although they had been confused by the bombing and the prospect of the imminent end of the war, they were now calm. The whole display, like their lack of weapons, was intended to show the British prisoners that the Japanese despised them, first for being prisoners, and then for not daring to move an inch to save this Chinese coolie.
Jim realized that the Japanese were right. None of the British internees would raise a finger, even if every coolie in China were beaten to death in front of them. Jim listened to the blows from the staves and to the muffled cries as the coolie choked on his blood. Dr. Ransome would probably have tried to stop the Japanese. But Dr. Ransome was careful never to go near the parade ground.
Jim thought about his algebra prep, part of which he had already done inside his head. Ten minutes later, when the Japanese returned to the guardhouse, the hundreds of prisoners moved away from the parade ground. The Lunghua Players continued their rehearsal. Slipping the Reader’s Digest inside his shirt, Jim returned to G Block by another route.
Later that evening, when he had finished Basie’s potato skin, Jim lay on his bunk and at last opened the magazine. There were no advertisements in the Reader’s Digest, which was a shame, but Jim looked at the reassuring picture of the Packard limousine pinned to the wall of his cubicle. He listened to the Vincents talking in their low voices, and to the faint whoops of their son’s cough. On Jim’s return from E Block he had found the boy playing on the floor with the turtle. There had been a brief confrontation between Jim and Mr. Vincent, who had tried to stop him replacing the turtle in the wooden case under his bunk. But Jim had stood his ground, confident that Mr. Vincent would not try to wrestle with him. Mrs. Vincent watched without expression as her husband sat on his bed, staring in his desperate way at Jim’s raised fists.