THE EMPIRE OF THE SUN
A HUMID MORNING SUN filled the stadium, reflected in the pools of water that covered the running track and in the chromium radiators of the American cars parked behind the goalposts at the northern end of the football pitch. Supporting himself against Mr. Maxted’s shoulder, Jim surveyed the hundreds of men and women lying on the warm grass. A few prisoners squatted on the ground, their sunburned but pallid faces like blanched leather from which the dye had run. They stared at the cars, suspicious of their bright grilles, with the wary eyes of the Hungjao peasants looking up from their rice planting at his parents’ Packard.
Jim brushed the flies from Mr. Maxted’s mouth and eyes. The architect lay without moving, his white ribs unclasped around his heart, but Jim could hear his faint breath.
“You’re feeling better, Mr. Maxted . . . I’ll bring you some water.” Jim squinted at the lines of cars. Even the small effort of focusing his eyes exhausted him. Trying to hold his head steady, he felt the ground sway, as if he and the hundreds of prisoners were about to be tipped out of the stadium.
Mr. Maxted turned to stare at Jim, who pointed to the cars. There were more than fifty of them—Buicks, Lincoln Zephyrs, two white Cadillacs side by side. Had they come to collect their British owners now that the war had ended? Jim stroked Mr. Maxted’s cheeks, then reached into the cavern below his ribs and tried to massage his heart. It would be a pity for Mr. Maxted to die just as his Studebaker arrived to take him back to the Shanghai nightclubs.
However, the Japanese soldiers sat on the concrete benches near the entrance tunnel, sipping tea beside a charcoal stove. Its smoke drifted between the hospital trucks. Two young soldiers were passing pails of water to a weary Dr. Ransome, but the security troops seemed no more interested in the thousand Lunghua prisoners who occupied the football field than they had been during the previous day’s march.
His legs trembling, Jim stood up and scanned the parked cars for his parents’ Packard. Where were the chauffeurs? They should have been waiting by their cars, as they always did outside the country club. Then a small rain cloud dimmed the sun, and a drab light settled over the stadium. Looking at their rusting chrome, Jim realized that these American cars had been parked here for years. Their windshields were caked with winter grime, and they sat on flattened tires, part of the booty looted by the Japanese from the Allied nationals.
Jim searched the stands on the north and west slopes of the stadium. The concrete tiers had been stripped of their seats, and sections of the stands were now used as an open-air warehouse. Dozens of black-wood cabinets and mahogany tables, their varnish still intact, and hundreds of dining-room chairs were packed together as if in the loft of a furniture depository. Bedsteads and wardrobes, refrigerators and air-conditioning units were stacked above each other, rising in a slope toward the sky. The immense presidential box, where Madame Chiang and the Generalissimo might once have saluted the world’s athletes, was now crammed with roulette wheels, cocktail bars and a jumble of gilded plaster nymphs holding gaudy lamps above their heads. Rolls of Persian and Turkish carpets, hastily wrapped in tarpaulins, lay on the concrete steps, water dripping through them as if from a pile of rotting pipes.
To Jim, these shabby trophies seized from the houses and nightclubs of Shanghai seemed to gleam with a show-window freshness, like the floors filled with furniture through which he and his mother had once wandered in the Sincere Company department store. He stared at the stands, almost expecting his mother to appear in a silk dress and run a gloved hand over these terraces of black lacquer.
Jim sat down and shielded his eyes from the glare. He massaged Mr. Maxted’s cheeks with his thumb and forefinger, pinching his lips and hooking out the flies trapped inside his mouth. Around them the inmates of Lunghua Camp lay on the damp grass, staring at this display of their former possessions, a mirage that grew more vivid in the steepening August sunlight.
Yet the mirage soon passed. Jim wiped his hands on Mr. Maxted’s shorts. The Japanese had frequently used the stadium as a transit camp, and the worn grass was covered with oily rags and the ash of small fires, strips of canvas tent and wooden crates. There were unmistakable human remains, bloodstains and pieces of excrement, on which feasted thousands of flies.
The engine of a hospital truck began to run noisily. The Japanese soldiers had come down from the stands and were forming themselves into a march party. Pairs of guards climbed the tailgates, cotton masks over their faces. Helped by three English prisoners, Dr. Ransome lifted down those patients either dead or too ill to continue the day’s journey. They lay in the tire ruts that scored the grass, as if trying to fold the soft earth around themselves.
Jim squatted beside Mr. Maxted, working his diaphragm like a bellows. He had seen Dr. Ransome bring his patients back from the dead, and it was important for Mr. Maxted to be well enough to join the march. Around them the prisoners were sitting upright, and a few men stood beside their huddled wives and children. Several of the older internees had died in the night—ten feet away Mrs. Wentworth, who had played the part of Lady Bracknell, lay in her faded cotton dress, staring at the sky. Others were surrounded by shallow pools of water formed by the pressure of their bodies on the soft grass.
Jim’s arms ached from the effort of pumping. He waited for Dr. Ransome to jump down from the hospital truck and look after Mr. Maxted. However, the three vehicles were already leaving the stadium. Dr. Ransome’s sandy head ducked as the truck lumbered through the tunnel. Jim was tempted to run after it, but he knew that he had decided to stay with Mr. Maxted. He had learned that having someone to care for was the same as being cared for by someone else.
Jim listened to the trucks crossing the parking lot, their gearboxes gasping as they gathered speed. Lunghua Camp was at last being dismantled. A marching party formed itself beside the tunnel. Some three hundred British prisoners, the younger men with their wives and children, had lined up on the running track and were being inspected by a sergeant of the gendarmerie. Beside them, on the football pitch, were those prisoners too exhausted to sit or stand. They lay on the grass like battlefield casualties. The Japanese soldiers strolled among them, as if searching for a lost ball, uninterested in these British nationals who had strayed into a cul-de-sac of the war.
An hour later the column moved off, the prisoners plodding through the tunnel without a backward glance. Six Japanese soldiers followed them, and the rest continued their casual patrol of the blackwood cabinets and refrigerators. The senior NCOs waited by the tunnel and watched the American reconnaissance planes that flew overhead, making no attempt to mobilize the prisoners in the stadium. Within fifteen minutes, however, a second group had begun to assemble, and the Japanese came forward to inspect them.
Jim wiped his hands on the damp grass and put his fingers into Mr. Maxted’s mouth. The architect’s lips trembled around his knuckles. But already the August sun was driving the moisture from the grass. Jim turned his attention to a pool of water lying on the cinder track. He waited for the sentry to pass, and then walked across the grass and drank from his cupped hands. The water ran down his throat like iced mercury, an electric current that almost stopped his heart. Before the Japanese could order him away, Jim quickly cupped his hands and carried the water to Mr. Maxted.
As he decanted the water into Mr. Maxted’s mouth, the flies scrambled from his gums. Beside him lay the elderly figure of Major Griffin, a retired Indian Army officer who had lectured in Lunghua on the infantry weapons of the Great War. Too weak to sit up, he pointed to Jim’s hands.
Jim pinched Mr. Maxted’s lips, relieved when his tongue shot forward in a spasm. Trying to encourage him, Jim said: “Mr. Maxted, our rations should be coming soon.”
“Good lad, Jamie—you hang on.”
Major Griffin beckoned to him. “Jim . . .”
“Coming, Major Griffin . . .” Jim crossed the cinder track and returned with a handful of water. As he squatted beside the major, patting his cheeks, he noticed that Mrs. Vincent was sitting on the grass twenty feet away. She had left her son and husband with a group of prisoners in the center of the football field. Too exhausted to move any further, she stared at Jim with the same desperate gaze to which she had treated him as he ate his weevils. The night’s rain had washed the last of the dye from her cotton dress, giving her the ashen pallor of the Chinese laborers at Lunghua Airfield. Mrs. Vincent would build a strange runway, Jim reflected.
“Jamie . . .”
She called him by his childhood name, which Mr. Maxted, without thinking, had summoned from some prewar memory. She wanted him to be a child again, to run the endless errands that had kept him alive in Lunghua.
As he scooped the cold water from the cinder track, he remembered how Mrs. Vincent had refused to help him when he was ill. Yet he had always been intrigued by the sight of her eating. He waited while she drank from his hands.
When she had finished he helped her to stand. “Mrs. Vincent, the war’s over now.”
With a grimace, she pushed his hands away, but Jim no longer cared. He watched her walk unsteadily between the seated prisoners. Jim squatted beside Mr. Maxted, brushing the flies from his face. He could still feel Mrs. Vincent’s tongue on his fingers.
“Jamie . . .”
Someone else was calling, as if he were a Chinese coolie running at the command of his European masters. Too light-headed even to sit, Jim lay beside Mr. Maxted. It was time to stop running his errands. His hands were frozen from the water on the cinder track. The war had lasted for too long. At the detention center, and in Lunghua, he had done all he could to stay alive, but now a part of him wanted to die. It was the one way in which he could end the war.
Jim looked at the hundreds of prisoners on the grass. He wanted them all to die, surrounded by their rotting carpets and cocktail cabinets. Many of them, he was glad to see, had already obliged him, and Jim felt angry at those prisoners still able to walk who were now forming a second march party. He guessed that they were being walked to death around the countryside, but he wanted them to stay in the stadium and die within sight of the white Cadillacs.
Fiercely, Jim wiped the flies from Mr. Maxted’s cheeks. Laughing at Mrs. Vincent, he began to rock on his knees, as he had done as a child, crooning to himself and monotonously beating the ground. “Jamie . . . Jamie . . .”
A Japanese soldier patrolled the cinder track nearby. He walked across the grass and stared down at Jim. Irritated by the noise, he was about to kick him with his ragged boot. But a flash of light filled the stadium, flaring over the stands in the southwest corner of the football field, as if an immense American bomb had exploded somewhere to the northeast of Shanghai. The sentry hesitated, looking over his shoulder as the light behind him grew more intense. It faded within a few seconds, but its pale sheen covered everything within the stadium: the looted furniture in the stands, the cars behind the goalposts, the prisoners on the grass. They were sitting on the floor of a furnace heated by a second sun.
Jim stared at his white hands and knees, and at the pinched face of the Japanese soldier, who seemed disconcerted by the light. Both of them were waiting for the rumble of sound that followed the bomb flashes, but an unbroken silence lay over the stadium and the surrounding land, as if the sun had blinked, losing heart for a few seconds. Jim smiled at the Japanese, wishing that he could tell him that the light was a premonition of his death, the sight of his small soul joining the larger soul of the dying world.
•
These games and hallucinations continued until the late afternoon, when an air raid at Hongkew again lit up the stadium. Jim lay in his dream-wake, feeling the earth spring below his back like the ballroom floor at the Shanghai country club. The flares of light moved from one section of the stands to another, transforming the looted furniture into a series of spotlit tableaux illustrating the lives of the colonial British.
At dusk the last march party assembled by the tunnel. Jim sat by Mr. Maxted, watching the fifty prisoners form themselves into a column. Where were they going? Many of the men and women could barely stand, and Jim doubted if they could get as far as the car park outside the stadium.
For the first time since leaving Lunghua, the Japanese had become impatient. Eager to be rid of the last prisoners still able to walk, the soldiers moved across the football field. They cuffed the prisoners and pulled their shoulders. A corporal with a cotton face mask shone his torch into the faces of the dead, then turned them onto their backs.
A Eurasian civilian in a white shirt moved behind the Japanese, eager to help those ordered to join the march, like the courier of an efficient travel company. At the edges of the field the Japanese guards were already stripping the bodies of the dead, pulling off the shoes and belts.
“Mr. Maxted . . .” In a last moment of lucidity Jim sat up, knowing that he must leave the dying architect and join the march party into the night. “I ought to go now, Mr. Maxted. It’s time for the war to be over . . . .”
He was trying to stand when he felt Mr. Maxted grasp his wrist. “Don’t go with them . . . Jim . . . stay here.”
Jim waited for Mr. Maxted to die. But he pressed Jim’s wrist to the grass, as if trying to bolt it to the earth. Jim watched the march party shuffle toward the tunnel. Unable to walk more than three paces, a man fell and was left on the cinder track. Jim listened to the voices of the Japanese draw nearer, muffled by the masks over their faces, and heard the sergeant gag and spit in the stench.
A soldier knelt beside Jim, his breath hoarse and exhausted behind his mask. Strong hands moved across Jim’s chest and hips, feeling his pockets. Brusquely they pulled Jim’s shoes from his feet, then flung them onto the cinder track. Jim lay without moving, as the fires from the burning oil depots at Hongkew played across the stands, lighting the doors of the looted refrigerators, the radiator grilles of the white Cadillacs and the lamps of the plaster nymphs in the box of the Generalissimo.