The Fan Tan Players, page 29
British officers and soldiers! Surrender now! Why are you waiting for the Chungking army to save you? They will never come. The Malay Peninsula and the Philippine Islands are already under Japanese rule. Your comrades in Kowloon are in Shamchun and enjoying a happy, serene Christmas. Think of your families. This is your last chance to surrender.
Japanese Army. December 20, 1941
She found a brass plaque, mottled, muddy and scarred. Her thumb wiped away some of the dirt. Hanging on salt-rusted screws from a brick partition, near illegible from grime, it told her that she was in the grounds of the Deep Water Bay Golf Course. She looked over her shoulder and identified the three tall palm trees that Costa had mentioned.
The grass was as high as her knee. Whetted by hunger, Nadia walked around the fairway, which was lush and green and overgrown. She found herself a strip of shade under the Chinese pines and settled down in a spot where the road curved and began its climb up the hill. Here she sat and gazed at the sunlight on the water. She was still exhausted.
To keep her strength up she took a few swigs from her canteen of water and ate a biscuit and one of the tangerines. She wanted so much to jump into the sea and rinse away the previous night’s terror, but the risk of being seen was too great. Instead, she closed her eyes and angled her face towards the sun. Spots of red and orange formed behind her eyelids. The breeze on the surf, the scent of rain in the air, the thin-sounding birdsong in the trees, contrasted with the sensations of fear and hope mushrooming violently within her.
Nadia emerged from her daydream, snatched from her stupor by the shrill, rasping calls of a black-winged kite. She watched the bird wheel away over the ocean above Deep Water Bay, its small, precise head angled earthward, scrutinizing the wrinkled waters for any fish that might be embroidering the surface of the sea.
The sky had grown overcast. A few scattered rays of sunshine shot through the clouds like drizzles of honey, pouring golden rivers through the grey. Specks of rain wetted her cheek. She sat bolt upright the moment she heard a motorcar approaching in the distance. Scrambling, she hid in the thicket, lying flat on her tummy. The downpour started just as an ancient-looking Morris Cowley pulled up to the palm trees. The wooden-spoked wheels ground to a skid. When Nadia heard the deep, violent Ooogah of a car horn, she sprang to her feet and ran through the deluge, tripping amongst the weeds and the stones. A black figure was staring though the windscreen. The thundering rain closed in on her.
5
The interior of the 1932 Morris Cowley was humid and cramped, choking with the florid smells of dead animals. The seats were sticky, the windows ochre-yellow and grainy, and the door panel was covered in tattered chicken feathers. A white hen scratched about in the back seat, looking for grubs. The smell made Nadia want to gag.
She looked at Father Luke Chow for a few moments, studying his balding head and protruding ears. ‘‘Hello,’’ she said.
He did not reply and without so much as a nod began turning the car around, reversing the automobile so that its hind wheels bumped along the grassy verge. His was an ominous silence. Perhaps he was hard of hearing, she thought. Or perhaps he was shy and needed coaxing. She tried again, this time a little louder. ‘‘My name is – ’’
‘‘I know who you are!’’
The Morris lurched forward. Father Luke sat at the wheel with his back arched like a costumed monkey on an acrobat’s trapeze. A poorly preserved Eurasian of fifty, with the salty, rumpled skin of a land turtle, he sat with his shoulder muscles tensed, his jaw clamped hard and his elbows set at right angles. He was brusque and tragedy-hardened, inured by the human cataclysm that surrounded him. ‘‘Number one thing,’’ he said, speaking to Nadia as though she was a subordinate. ‘‘Take off your clothes.’’ His hands, elongated and knobbly, appeared from out of his black cassock. ‘‘And put on this,’’ he ordered, reaching back between the two seats and meting out a long, dark sottana with large brown buttons running all the way down its front.
‘‘What? You mean now?’’
‘‘Yes! Now! There is a roadblock ahead. But do not worry, I have blessed it!’’
‘‘What, the roadblock?’’
‘‘Of course not!’’ Both of his hands left the steering wheel. ‘‘Take the wax out of your ears.’’ He coughed, wincing and swallowing as if someone had run a scimitar through his lungs. ‘‘The cassock! I have blessed the cassock. Put it on!’’
Nadia strained away from him, turning her back to the priest. She removed her fisherman’s tunic, which was still damp from the wet grass she’d slept on, and slipped the double-breasted cassock over her head, buttoning it diagonally from the crest of her right shoulder to the point of her left shoe.
‘‘Pazhalsta, where are we going?’’
‘‘To the prayer house dedicated to St. Nicholas the miracle worker.’’ His voice bounced in tandem with the bumps in the road. ‘‘It is on Wing Lok Street in the Sheung Wan district. It will be your home for the next few days.’’
‘‘But why aren’t we going to the Cathedral on Caine Road, or St. Stephen’s?’’
‘‘The Cathedral was badly damaged by bombs and St. Stephens,’’ he gave a bitter laugh, his tone more cordial, ‘‘is now being used by the Japanese to keep their horses.’’
‘‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’’
Father Luke hunched his shoulders, made a gesture with his hands. The Morris Cowley clattered down the tar road, weaving one side and then the other to avoid the shell-craters. Nadia felt as though her insides were being rearranged as they thudded from one pothole into another.
‘‘You are a good driver,’’ she said, with a little sarcasm, gripping her seat with both hands. His elbows, still jutting out like wings, seemed to relax a little with her words. When Nadia’s knuckles returned from white back to pink she said, ‘‘Is this your car?’’
‘‘Yes, it is my car, but I am fortunate to keep it. The Japanese turned thousands of automobiles and trams into scrap and sent it to the Burmese and Bataan fronts. Because of my disability I managed to gain dispensation from Oda Takeo of the Foreign Affairs Department.’’ Nadia caught a glimpse of the twisted instep of his club foot. He shot a look back at her. ‘‘Does the cassock fit?’’
The sleeves fell down over her thumb joints, but that apart it fitted her fine. Nadia nodded.
‘‘Put on this too,’’ he said, handing her a black biretta, a stiff, square hat worn by the clergy. The biretta was too big for her head and fell over her eyes. ‘‘And jut your chin out! It will make you look more masculine.’’
Nadia pushed her lips out.
‘‘No, you are pouting! Do like this!’’ He stuck his chin out like a deranged tortoise.
She tried again, wrinkling her nose in the process.
‘‘Better!’’ He nodded. On his ridged face there appeared a hint of a smile. ‘‘Now, this is very important. Did Costa give you the new identification papers?’’
‘‘He did,’’ she said.
‘‘Have them at the ready. The Japanese remain suspicious of priests, so do not converse with the checkpoint guards. I’ll talk with them if necessary. When we stop, get out slowly, stand up straight and bow to the waist. I’ll do the same. Understood?’’
‘‘Yes,’’ she nodded.
The rain had stopped and the sun was shining through the clouds, reflecting off the wet ground like sheets of stainless steel. They passed the bombed-out police station and the Western Brigade Headquarters. Above the low hill range that was Mount Nicholson, a rainbow of equatorial colours hung in the sky. They came to the first roadblock on Stubbs Road, a little more than three hundred yards from the Catholic cemetery in Happy Valley. Nadia saw about half a dozen Japanese infantrymen milling around a machine gun nest that had sandbags stacked three feet high, as if against a flood. The soldiers were dressed in their distinctive khaki tunics and combat caps, their pantaloons fastened with puttees round the calf. One of them was slapping a Chinese man across the face for wearing sunglasses – his failure to remove them was deemed disparaging to the Army’s integrity.
Father Luke fixed his stare in front of him with the resigned expression of a person sitting in a doctor’s packed waiting room. An officer, with red passants indicating his rank, approached. He had the complexion of a taro that had been left out too long in the sun. When Father Luke nodded, Nadia climbed out of the car and stepped over the running board. She bowed as instructed, stuck out her chin and kept her eyes on the ground. The biretta fell over her ears. The officer studied the papers in Father Luke’s hand, grunted and let them though without even glancing at Nadia.
As the motorcar drove off, Father Luke crossed himself. The chicken in the backseat made a low clucking noise. Nadia said, ‘‘That was lucky. You’d think they saw white faces every day of the week.’’
‘‘They do. There are hundreds of us ‘third nationals’ living in Hong Kong – Portuguese, Eurasians, Russians. Germans and Italianos too.’’
‘‘What do they all do?’’
‘‘Some like to trade.’’ Father Luke stopped at a road junction and allowed an Imperial Army mini-tank to pass. As he waited, he pulled at his fingers in a nervous fashion until the joints cracked. His left leg was twitching and pumping up and down restlessly. ‘‘Some of them, together with the wealthy Chinese families, have formed close ties with the Japanese. Many of them …’’ He made a face, cringed, ‘‘ … are just a bunch of swindlers. They have no scruples and will do anything to make money. They mix crushed sand to rice, add bleached dirt to milk powder, then they sell it to the starving masses. With children dying every day, these are sins I cannot forgive. Pffsst! No matter what confession and prayer they make, I cannot forgive them.’’ He found his kindly, cleric’s voice now. ‘‘You know, I do what I can to help. I grow eggplants, kale, broccoli and give them where I can to the families living near the mission. Also there is a group of Communist guerillas who come once a month and distribute rice. They live in Sai Kung and sneak in by boat under the cover of night.’’
The Morris skirted past the sprawling Victorian pile that was the Wellington Barracks, currently the Imperial Navy’s administrative offices. Minutes later, the car circumnavigated the Murray Parade Ground. Indian troops were doing drills up and down the square. Apart from one army lorry, the streets were deserted of cars. Father Luke followed Nadia’s gaze.
‘‘You see over there?’’ he said. ‘‘These are former POWs from the Rajput and Punjabi regiments, they have switched sides. Now you’ll se a lot of Indian soldiers patrolling the streets because the Japanese troops are being called back to active service in the Pacific.’’
‘‘You mean they are traitors?’’
‘‘They prefer to see themselves as soldiers of the new Indian National Army.’’
Nadia exhaled and suddenly felt very tired again. She peered out of the grimy window at the general stagnation that blighted the city. Over three years had passed since the surrender of Hong Kong to the Japanese. During that time, Nadia would have expected some order to have been put in place, yet despite some haphazard cleaning-up of the colony’s main commercial sectors, the aftermath of the fighting remained all around her. In parts of Western district, where rows of three and four-storey castellated buildings resided, she saw shells had crushed into walls, torn off doors and blown off roofs. In Sheung Wan, smashed bed frames and rickshaws poked through hillocks of rubble, on Pottinger Street the stairs leading to an underground public convenience appeared split in half like the backbone of an old book, while in Queen’s Square the Imperial Army, with their insatiable appetite for scrap, had dismantled the bronze statues and transported them to Japan to be melted down.
Libraries, schools, restaurants, shops – most of these places remained closed. There were no cars or buses on the roads, only rickshaws and tricycles for transport. From out of an alley people pushed carts stacked with a strange assortment of merchandise – sacks of rice, wicker tables, cloth shoes, bales of wood, bicycle tyres, fur gloves, canned milk – all goods for barter. Along Shek Tong Tsui, the little restaurant she went to years before, the one specializing in braised beef was no more, replaced now with brothels, and she saw that all the road names had been changed. Everywhere Nadia looked there were the great red orbs of the Emperor’s standards, the Hinomaru, hanging from buildings and flagpoles; like a bride’s bed linen; discs of blood against a backdrop of virginal white.
‘‘Pazhalsta, what has happened to the street signs? They used to be in English?’’
‘‘The old signs are now firewood. These ones, you see? All replaced with Chinese and Japanese lettering. The Japanese want pan-Asia harmony and democracy. They say that the Westerners were armed thieves, that it is their duty to rescue Asians from colonialism. There has been a big anti-colonial reprisal from the Indian communities. The rich Chinese, too, have embraced the Japanese.’’
Further down the road, she saw a group of coolies rounding up chows and mongrels, beating those that struggled with long bamboo poles.
‘‘The locals believe the ones with black tongues are the most tasty,’’ said the curate, his eyes swimming with disapproval.
The dogs had ropes tied round their throats; when they reared up on their hind legs they were struck across the muzzle. Nadia blenched and hid her gaze. The dogs’ ugly, nightmarish howls pursued the car all the way through to Wing Lok Street, where Father Luke parked the Morris in a lock-up near the Sheung Wan post office. They tumbled out of the car. As soon as they reached the open street they were besieged by children, asking for food or money. Threadbare, soot-faced boys and girls, their filthy feet stippled with ringworm hoops, jogged at their sides, scrambling on top of one another. Father Luke handed each one a currant from his pocket.
Everywhere Nadia looked, she saw the hungry, frightened features of the impoverished, appearing as mutilated and broken as the architecture that surrounded them. Their scrawny faces, grimed in dirt, made her think of Iain, made her pray that he was faring better than these poor destitute creatures.
Ragged men, mouths agape, scavenged the streets for combustible material for fuel – anything from dried grass, to leaves. Aged women, their filthy hair full of nits, picked at the wens on their cheeks and spied from the windows of the low, desolate shophouses. Sparrows, twitching their heads, pirouetted on the shorn electric wires, doing a dance of death. The wires trembled lightly under their weight. Were they the same birds that were picking at the corpses on the beach, she wondered. Up until then Nadia thought that sparrows ate bugs and worms and crumbs from discarded bread, not the stomachs and lungs of human beings.
They approached a railed-in enclosure. The courtyard to the mission was marked by a tall metal fence. ‘‘Come,’’ Father Luke beckoned, undoing the security gate and removing the padlock from a heavy door.
They scaled a flight of tapering steps, Father Luke hobbling on his twisted shoe. Fat beads of perspiration were rolling down his balding head. ‘‘Sorry,’’ he panted, ‘‘my heart …’’ The walls were sliding with damp, crawling with flies. Once inside he lit a candle. Nadia blinked as her eyes adjusted to the curdled gloom. She saw a bed and little else. ‘‘My home,’’ he said, drawing his leathery lips back into a smile. He started pulling at the joints of his fingers again, waiting for each to crack.
Through the small window Nadia saw black clouds, with denser black clouds to come. Despite it being early in the day, the room was so dark it felt below ground. ‘‘The electric is kaput,’’ the priest said. ‘‘Take this.’’ In the rumpled light he reached for a carbide lamp. The lamp contained twin chambers, an upper and lower. The upper chamber was filled with water, while the lower one contained a square of carbide rock. Father Luke twisted a tiny valve that allowed droplets of water to fall into the lower chamber, onto the carbide. Soon the resulting acetylene gas was burning and adding colour to the room. ‘‘There is a bedroom upstairs,’’ he said, his turtle face glowing with unearthly yellow fluorescence. ‘‘You will find a cot. I suggest you get some rest.’’
Nadia lingered a moment. She took the lamp, and with two cotton sacks slung over her shoulders, she climbed the stairs.
Her room was stark; cluttered with cobwebs. One cot stood in the centre, its four bed legs immersed in bowls of water to keep ants, millipedes and cockroaches away. She dropped her sacks and shut the door. A rancid staleness filled the high, open interior. It was the smell of sunshine and rain and dust trapped for years until it turned sour with mildew.
The trapped air was stifling, like that of a boiler room. She set the lamp down on the floor and removed her cassock and biretta. Lying on the bed, she turned away from the glare of the lamp and stared out of the tiny window. She didn’t want to rest, didn’t want to sleep. She wanted to go to Iain. She wanted to go now. The yearning to see him was almost unbearable. Despite herself, she yawned and experienced the slight sensation of sinking. Something loosened inside her muscles. Her eyes wilted. Colours faded far away, disappeared. Within minutes she was asleep. A dead sleep.
Nadia woke up panicked. The sound of a gunshot, dull yet jarring, rolled down one street and into the next. Still caught in the folds of half-sleep, she couldn’t remember where she was. She felt slow and heavy, as if she’d been plunged under water, yet the blood was pounding in her head. In the near darkness she saw herself reflected in the underlip of the window – something white and silky and smudged, like a ghost. How long had she been out? She wondered. What had woken her? The carbide lamp had almost extinguished itself.
