With that the soldiers turned and walked quickly away, out through the scrubby bushes towards the gate at the far end of the field. The two girls stared at their retreating forms, stunned. Relief coursed through Sirinya. She thought her knees might give way. She heard the engine of a lorry choke into life, the roar of it revving up and then drawing away down the metalled road, which led towards the nearest river bridge at Tambon Lat Ya, a few kilometres north.
The girls clung to each other, sobbing, in a mixture of relief that the soldiers had gone, and shock at what had happened.
‘I wonder what they want with Father. I wish there was a way of warning him,’ said Malee.
‘I know. If only we could get across the river. We could get into town more quickly. It’s almost opposite here.’
‘We could try swimming,’ said Malee.
Sirinya stared out across the wide, fast-flowing water.
‘We’d never make it. We’d get swept away. Remember that poor young boy last rainy season?’
Malee was silent for a moment, then she said, ‘Perhaps they only want to talk to Father. They seem to be interested in the land. It would be good to warn him they are coming, though. Tell him what they are like.’
‘Yes. We should let him know that they wouldn’t hesitate to use their guns. Come on, let’s get back as quickly as we can. We can take the Bamboo Road. They’ll have to go the long way round. We’ll probably beat them to it even if they do have a lorry.’
Sirinya still remembers that frantic run back along the old Bamboo Road beside the river. It seemed to take forever. On and on they ran, retracing their steps between interminable bamboo clumps, which leaned over the little track in places, barring their way, slapping against their faces as they passed. The tall bright green stems seemed to mock their progress, like sentinels. Sirinya’s breath came in painful gasps. It was still unbearably hot even though the shadows were now lengthening and the sun was rapidly dipping behind the far-off hills. But she ran on, sweat pouring from her, pushing the bamboo aside, fighting the urge to stop and catch her breath, to rest her aching limbs.
‘Come on, Siri,’ Malee shouted over her shoulder, racing ahead. She had always been the fitter of the two.
At last the bamboo thinned out, giving way to scrubby grassland beside the river. They had finally reached Tha Maa Kham, where an aged boatman waited during daylight hours to ferry locals across. When they arrived at the crossing, he was on the other side, sitting on the bank, gossiping to a passing farmer, his little boat moored up beside him. Malee cupped her hands together and shouted. At first he didn’t hear and carried on with his conversation. Sirinya joined in and they shouted together, bellowing at the tops of their voices. Eventually his companion noticed their shouts, and pointed to where the girls stood on the other bank. The old man shaded his eyes and peered across. Seeing them he waved and hurried into his little boat, casting off from the shore with an oar. It felt like an age before he reached them. They watched him row frantically, battling against the strong current with frail arms. Sirinya held her breath, willing him to make it.
Once they were safely aboard, the journey back to the other side only took a few minutes. The boatman let the little boat drift downstream so he could drop them nearer the centre of town. The girls thanked him as they got out and handed him five ticals each. He thanked them with a toothless smile, putting his hands together to ‘wai’ and bowing deeply.
Dusk was fast approaching as they entered the main street where Malee’s family shophouse was. Shopkeepers were closing up for the day, taking down stalls from the pavement, carrying goods inside. But still the food sellers worked on the pavement, preparing evening meals, frying in woks over flickering gas flames, the smell of lemongrass and galangal floating on the air. Exhausted now, the two girls half walked, half ran the final few yards. But as they drew closer, Sirinya stopped and grabbed Malee’s arm.
‘Look! They’ve got there already,’ she said pointing. The army truck was parked directly outside the shophouse. The four soldiers were trooping towards the building, guns slung over their shoulders.
‘I hope they won’t harm Father,’ said Malee, tears welling in her eyes.
‘Don’t worry. They have no reason to do that.’
‘But you know what he’s like,’ said Malee, twisting her hands in anguish.
Sirinya bit her lip. She did know what he was like. Her uncle was stubborn, idealistic, a man of principles. Even though he was a humble shopkeeper he was also prominent in the local commune or tambon. He was known throughout the community for taking a strong stand against exploitation, corruption, or unfairness of any kind.
Sirinya and Malee approached the shophouse with trepidation. They walked past the empty lorry. Heat radiated from it as if from a stove, its metal chassis ticking as it cooled. A small crowd of onlookers had gathered to stand and wonder at it. Mechanical vehicles were still fairly rare in Kanchanaburi in 1942.
The shop was closed, the shutters down and the outside stalls empty. The girls let themselves in quietly through the front door. As soon as they entered they heard the sound of raised voices coming from the apartment above. They exchanged anguished glances, imagining how Chalong would be reacting to the bullying tactics of the Japanese officers, dreading that any moment they would hear a gunshot.
The door to the apartment opened at the top of the stairs and Malee’s mother, Piak, appeared. She was clutching her sabai shawl close to her chest and her face was drawn with anxiety.
‘Mother!’ said Malee, rushing up the steps to her and throwing her arms around her. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Japanese soldiers are here speaking to your father. They said something about wanting to buy the river meadow from him. Your father asked me to leave them to speak alone.’
‘We were swimming down there earlier and the soldiers came into the field. We tried to get back to warn him they were coming.’
‘They seem very aggressive,’ whispered Piak, twisting her shawl. ‘They have guns.’
She looked ashen-faced, her slender frame huddled with anxiety. How different she was from her own mother, Sirinya thought. Bold and stout and full of humour. It was sometimes difficult to imagine that they were sisters.
Malee took her mother’s hand and the three of them went upstairs to the apartment above the shop. They stood outside the door of the living room and put their ears to the wooden panel. At first Sirinya could not make out what was being said. There was a lot of rapid conversation in Japanese, then she recognised the translator’s stumbling Thai.
‘We need that land. You will agree to our price, or things will get very bad for you.’
Chalong laughed. ‘It’s not the price I care about, can’t you see that? I don’t want to sell it to you at any price. You shouldn’t be in this country at all. If our government had any backbone …’
There was a shuffling of feet and scraping of chairs. Piak closed her eyes.
‘You don’t frighten me,’ Chalong said. ‘I don’t want my land to be owned by a foreign power.’
‘It is not for you to say! You don’t have choice. If you don’t sell land we will take it anyway. We come first to offer you money out of courtesy.’
‘But why do you need it? What do you want with my land?’
‘We need it to land supplies there from river, and build camp for prisoners.’
‘Prisoners?’
‘From Singapore. We have many British men, Australian, Dutch men in camps there. We bring them here.’
‘Why on earth here?’
‘They will work for us here. Build railway. Railway into Burma.’
Chalong laughed again. ‘Now I know you’re joking. That is impossible. It’s dense jungle and a mountain range of limestone and granite all the way. People have talked about that before. Engineers have done surveys. But it will never happen. Nobody can work in that jungle either. It’s full of malarial mosquitoes.’
‘It is not impossible! Japanese engineers are the best in the world. They say it can be done. We have manpower. We have determination. It will be done by Imperial Japanese Army.’
There was another hasty conversation in Japanese and then the interpreter’s voice cut in once again.
‘Here is money. It is good price. We are fair to you. Sign this paper please and the land will be ours.’
‘I told you before I don’t want your money.’
‘You will take, or we take you prisoner. You have no choice. Now please sign paper.’
There was a short silence. Sirinya exchanged anguished glances with Malee and Piak. They held their breath. Was Chalong signing the document?
‘You will sign the paper. If you do not we take your wife and daughter to prison in Bangkok. They will suffer. We see your wife. She not look well. Prison conditions are harsh. It will not be good for them to be in Japanese prison. We will do this … Now sign the paper.’
‘You give me no choice. You … you …’
Then, after a pause. ‘Thank you, Mr Chalong. Imperial Japanese Army very grateful to you. Now you not go on land any more. Land belong to great Imperial Japanese Army now.’
‘Just go now, please. Get out of my house.’
‘One more thing before we go. We see you have vegetable and rice store. Do you deal wholesale?’
‘I don’t see that it’s any of your business,’ came the muttered reply, ‘but yes, I bring in vegetables and rice on the river for distribution.’
‘I thought so. You could be very useful to us. When prisoners are brought here to work we will need supplies. We will be back to discuss.’
The three women exchanged anxious looks again. But then they heard movement in the room and footsteps behind the door. Before they had time to move away, the door flew open and the soldiers burst out and clattered down the stairs, pushing them aside. As soon as they had gone, Piak ran inside the room to her husband. Malee and Sirinya stood staring after the soldiers, not knowing what to do or say.
Chalong sat at the table in the centre of the room, his head in his hands. Piak stood behind him, her arms wrapped tightly around him. When the girls entered the room he turned and looked at them. On his face was an expression Sirinya had never seen before. His usual genial smile had vanished. He looked haggard and weary, defeated even. But there was something else in the way he dropped his gaze as they approached. She realised with shock that it was shame.
* * *
Sirinya stares out at the old familiar countryside as she remembers those days. Beyond the wide flat plane covered in rice paddies, the faint shape of blue hills begins to smudge the horizon. It is odd, she reflects, that those years are more vivid and more immediate to her than all the time she spent abroad. Coming back has brought them into sharp focus. Johnny, her husband, had known that would happen. How wise he had been. He had known her better than she knew herself.
‘What will you do when I’m gone?’ he’d asked her from his hospital bed during his last days. He had already suffered one heart attack and the doctors had warned that his heart was so weak it was quite possible he could have another one. Sirinya had spent those days by his bedside, hardly leaving the room, dozing in the chair beside the bed at night, doing her best to ensure he was as comfortable as possible during the day.
‘Please don’t talk like that, Johnny,’ she’d said.
‘I’m just being practical,’ he said, with a weak smile. ‘Just thinking of you, Siri.’
‘Well, please don’t,’ she repeated, squeezing his hand, such a lump in her throat that she couldn’t say more.
‘You’ll go home, won’t you?’
‘Home?’ she asked, dropping her eyes to the floor.
‘You know what I mean. To your real home. Back to your own country. What would there be to keep you here?’
‘My home is here now,’ she said lifting her eyes and looking at his face, drained of colour and drawn with pain.
‘Only because of me. I know you’ve never really felt settled here although you’ve never once complained. You’ve been so wonderful to me, Siri. You’ve never shown it, but I know that deep down your heart has always been back there. Back there in the jungle, beside that great river. Back in the place you grew up.’
Her eyes filled with tears at the thought that this good, kind man who had given her so much and with whom she had shared more than half her life, might soon be taken from her.
‘I know you’ve never truly loved me, Siri,’ he held up his frail hand to stop her as she tried to protest. ‘No, let me speak. I’ve got to say this. It didn’t stop you from being the most caring, loyal and devoted wife I could ever have wished for. And far more than I deserve, I know that.’
‘Please, Johnny. How can you say that? Of course I love you.’
‘Oh, I’m not a fool. You love me like an old friend. We’re comfortable together. But I know very well who you still hold a torch for. And I’ve always known I could never come close to that. But I’ve never really minded. Just having you with me through the years has been enough for me.’
‘Oh, Johnny,’ she couldn’t say any more, she was so overwhelmed.
He had never spoken like that to her before. Not in all the twenty-five years they had been together. She realised that he was only saying these things now because he knew he was dying.
It was the last conversation they’d had. He had drifted off to sleep still holding her hand. She didn’t like to move away or disturb him by taking her hand away, so she sat there beside him, watching the rise and fall of his chest as he slept, too uncomfortable to sleep herself. But she must have dozed off because a few hours later she awoke with a start, his grip on her hand had tightened and he was thrashing about on the bed, his face contorted with pain, his lips blue. The machines around him were all bleeping and buzzing at once. Sirinya pressed the bell and within seconds the bed was surrounded by white-coated medical staff, who brushed her aside in their haste to help him. But one nurse noticed her there, took her hand and guided her out of the room.
She sat in the echoing corridor, with its smells of disinfectant, on a hard plastic chair and waited, numb with shock, knowing that the frenzied efforts of the medics inside the room would not make any difference.
They’d been very kind, the doctors and nurses. Someone brought her a hot, strong cup of tea and, later, someone else called her a taxi. She could not cry, she felt so raw and empty. As soon as she got back to the cold, empty house that she and Johnny had shared throughout their married life, she knew that he’d been right and that she couldn’t survive here without him. But it was not until she sat down alone at the kitchen table that the tears came. Tears of gratitude for his love and protection, tears of loss and tears of loneliness.
The train has stopped now at a tiny village station. She stares out at the platform, where locals wait patiently in the sunlight with boxes and bags, caged hens and baskets of vegetables to board the train. A hawker approaches the window. He has a tray hung from a rope around his neck, filled with cups made from thick green bamboo sticks.
‘Shall I buy you a drink?’ asks her neighbour. ‘You look very hot.’
She turns and smiles at him again. He clearly hasn’t taken the hint that she wants to be left alone with her own thoughts.
‘Yes, please,’ she says, relenting, ‘that’s very kind of you. It is hot in here.’
‘The fans never work properly on these old trains,’ he says. ‘Would you like some sugarcane juice? I think that’s what he’s got in those makeshift cups.’
‘Oh, yes, please. I haven’t tasted that for so long.’
The man stands up and pulls down the window. After a brief but heated bargaining session with the hawker, he gives him a few coins and turns back into the carriage holding two short tubes of wide green bamboo. Sirinya takes one from him, puts it to her lips and drinks. The cloying, sugary taste takes her straight back to her childhood. It is the drink that her mother would buy for her from roadside stalls when they were on their way to see her grandmother in the village deep in the Tenasserim hills. The taste reminds her of the dust rising in clouds from the unmade roads, the sun beating down on them as they sat on the back of the songthaew, the open-backed vehicle which took them as far as the road would go, the slight feeling of nausea mounting in her stomach as the vehicle switched back and forth on the mountain bends.
‘Do you have family in Kanchanaburi?’ asks the man.
‘Just my cousin now. The rest of them have passed away. My cousin is about my age. She runs a vegetable shop in the centre of town.’
‘Have you kept in touch with her over the years?’
Sirinya shakes her head. ‘Not really. We tried at first, but neither of us is a good letter writer. After a few years it was only on birthdays. We were close once though … very close …’