The Fan Tan Players, page 30
Another gunshot jolted her, punctuating the room with fits of shapeless noise. Its forceful report echoed like a thunderclap. She heard raised voices outside, and from somewhere below, in the torrent-gloom of the street, came the sound of running. Then a woman screamed. Two buildings down, a dog began to bark clamorously. Nadia went to her window, saw nothing but the rain. The woman screamed again and again, after which came an ominous hush.
Nadia opened the tiny window, pressing her head against the metal bars to peer out. Rust and paint chippings fell from the frame and spilled onto her hair. She averted her face. Then there came a new sound. At first she did not recognize it: the beating of gongs and saucepans, followed by more shrieks, this time so high-pitched they resembled the squeals of baby mice being dropped into woks of sizzling hot oil. The gongs and pan-beating grew louder and louder. Nadia stepped away from the widow. She heard banging coming from below, a deep, menacing thudding, as if a crowd was trying to smash through a wall. Then a crashing noise from the stairwell beyond her door shook her to the core. She paled from the noise. She heard someone call from behind the partition; the voice catarrhal and strained. She looked beyond the small bed and saw the doorknob twisting. She stared at the blackness, the way a blind person stares at the world.
‘‘Nadia!’’ she heard again. Father Luke was standing straight in front of her. ‘‘You must come immediately!’’ he said. ‘‘The Japanese Military Police are downstairs.’’
6
Nadia’s expression was wide. Sleep marks from the hard pillow scarred her cheek. The screams had made her think back to her childhood, to Svetlina, the servant-girl, being assaulted. ‘‘That horrible screaming, that yelling, what was it?’’ she asked in a slumberous voice.
‘‘Two men were trying to steal a pig,’’ replied Father Luke whose gaze cut to the floor to contemplate his twisted left shoe, as though suddenly aware he was in a woman’s bedroom. ‘‘The people of the neighbourhood came out and beat their gongs and pans, making a big noise to scare off the criminals.’’
‘‘What about the gunshot?’’
‘‘Military police. They shot one of the men. A coolie. He climbed over the fence and ran into our building.’’ Father Luke began smirking, then laughing, which caused him to start coughing. ‘‘The bullet struck him in an unfortunate place, in his backside.’’
‘‘And the Kempeitai are downstairs?’’
‘‘Three Military Policemen. Two officers. They want to know why he ran in here. They want to talk to everybody in the building. They are doing room-to-room search. You must come now!’’
‘‘Yes, of course’’ she said. ‘‘Wh-what time is it?’’
‘‘Afternoon, it is almost one o’clock. You were asleep for a long time. You really must come now!’’ He limped away down the staircase.
Moments later, having pulled the cassock over her head, Nadia reached into her bag and brought out one of the tangerines. It was soft, ripening quickly in the humidity. She stuffed it into the front of her trousers, under her cassock. She also pulled out a roll of money and stuffed it into her shoe before taking the stairs down.
In Father Luke’s apartment the mood was tense. Nadia was confronted by a Japanese man seated at a desk, filling out a log with a Chinese brush rather than pen and ink. He was young, about twenty, and was wearing the standard M1938 field uniform. The other two men were older, dressed in cavalry uniform, sporting high leather boots and black chevrons on their sleeves. All three of them were soaked from the rain. The officers stood by the window; streaks of condensation ran down the glass. Nadia could tell they were both Junior NCOs as they carried shinai (bamboo Kendo swords) rather than the prestigious Samurai swords worn by their superiors. By their boots, she saw a Chinese coolie sitting on a low stool, like a child-sized seat, his head bowed. A small pool of blood gathered on the timber floor by the washstand. Stripped to his underwear, his clothes had been torn into swathes and wrapped tight around his left hip.
One of the officers began asking Father Luke a string of questions in Japanese. Father Luke cocked his eyebrows and spread his hands, suggesting bewilderment. The officer made a face, puckering his lips into a sphincter. Then, fixing Nadia a suspicious, querulous look, he marched up to her and said something incomprehensible. Nadia shook her head. He looked her up and down. ‘‘You,’’ he said, falling into pidgin English. ‘‘You boy or geuul.’’ His voice knelled like the jangling of bells.
‘‘I am a boy,’’ she said confidently.
The man puckered his lips again into the shape of a cat’s arse-hole. ‘‘Boy?’’ he repeated. The air went still. He leant forward as if to share something in confidence. His hand reached out and grabbed her between the legs. She gave a stifled yelp. A moment later Nadia felt tangerine juice spill onto her inner thigh, trickling down to her knee.
‘‘Boy,’’ she said firmly, defiantly.
‘‘Ha, ha! Kono yaro,’’ he said in a gruff voice, flashing a gnarl of teeth. A minute later the Kempeitai frogmarched the coolie down the steps and out of the building.
Nadia and Father Luke listened to the sounds of their boots receding, for the front gate to clang shut.
‘‘For stealing a pig, they will cut his head off,’’ he said. ‘‘The Kempeitai are animals.’’ Nadia remembered the beheadings she’d witnessed on the beach. ‘‘But how did you … the bump … how did you make … like a man?’’ the priest asked, scratching his bald scalp.
‘‘It’s a simple trick.’’ She removed the tangerine and held it, noting the sureness of her own hand, surprised by its steadiness. With the Japanese officer staring her down, she had half expected her hand to be trembling, yet it wasn’t at all. She was bolder than she realized. ‘‘I heard what happened in Nanking,’’ she said, looking up, ‘‘with the thousands who were raped and the competitions that were held to see how many babies could be bayoneted in one day. I’m not taking any chances.’’
‘‘You are resourceful.’’
Nadia shrugged. ‘‘What do we do now?’’
‘‘Now? Now we clean up the blood on the floor. There is a mop behind the door. Afterwards, we do rosary and share some food, then we go to Queen’s Pier. The Owa Maru docked today right on schedule. We will pick up the Red Cross relief supplies and deliver them to camp.’’
‘‘And I’ll get to see Iain?’’
‘‘Yes, you will see your husband.’’
The Owa Maru was painted mint-lozenge green and had white Red Cross markings painted on its sides and funnels. Rusting, heavily veined, its belly crusted with barnacles, it was an 8000 tonne cargo ship that picked up relief parcels from the stockpile in Vladivostok, distributing them to camps from as far afield as Burma, Formosa and Japan.
Nadia and Father Luke stood by the docks, amongst the yammer of strained voices and the rickshaws lined up on the quay. Vendors of dried this-and-thats spread out their wares on soiled doilies. Nadia saw the lizards spreadeagled on sticks, the seahorses, the black mushrooms and salted bug-eyed squids. A middle-aged man unrolled a rattan mat onto which he scattered what looked like all that he had left in the world – an ancient turnip, a graveyard banana, a church candle and three sets of leering false teeth. ‘‘Sun seen lor bak!’’ shouted the middle-aged vendor. ‘‘Ho sun seen!’’
Loiterers and skulkers joined them, together with a few fidgety cats, descending like famished seabirds, crowding around, filling the air with sour, conflicting smells. Women lined the landing stages, squatting on their haunches, shelling shrimps. Dry old men, their skin salted from the harbour breeze, watched the shirtless, cropped-haired labourers come off the small barges, lifting crates of milk powder and boxes full of tinned goods on their shoulders. They loaded the merchandise into the back of relief trucks, under the watchful gaze of the stevedores. Nadia saw other items being removed from the ship – great blocks of Manchurian ice, packed in saw dust, which were immediately transported to the cold storage depot on Ice House Street, together with aircraft parts, propellers, all kinds of munitions which were transferred separately onto military lorries.
‘‘I thought it was a Red Cross ship,’’ she said. ‘‘Are they allowed to transport weapons?’’
‘‘Pah! They cheat. Because of an agreement signed between the Japanese and American governments these ships are allowed safe passage. Of course, the Japanese load the ships with everything from guns to railway ties to crude oil. Any other ship would get torpedoed by submarines.’’ He paused to hack his lungs out. ‘‘But the Japanese politicians have a history of cheating. They even cheat their own people, hiding the truth from them. They say they are winning every battle, which is plainly not true. What happened at Midway?’’ He started making lightning strikes with his hands. ‘‘Changsha? Guadalcanal? What about the American air raids we see here every other day? They do not tell their people at home about the losses, only the victories.
‘‘And now, in Hong Kong, they come as an invading army, but tell the Chinese they are not colonialists, not an occupying force, but a liberating force; liberating the Chinese from Western oppression. Offering them pan-Asian harmony and democracy. It is all lies!
‘‘Do you know that in Tokyo and Osaka, they say there is no food shortage? Yet they cannot feed their people. There is rice rationing, sake rationing, no eggs, no vegetables. Even Tokyo Zoo is affected. They cannot feed the elephants, the lions, the bears, so they have poisoned them.’’ He washed his hands in the air. ‘‘All the animals dead. No food shortage? – Pah!’’
In the middle distance, near the Kowloon wharves, fishermen slapped the water with their oars, driving fish into their nets, while their children, dressed in dark rags, waved and hollered at passing boats. Nadia saw a Japanese ship being towed back to port, its hull strafed with bullets, part of its main deck shelled with American bombs.
Behind Nadia, looking out from the Victoria seafront, the untidy roads shimmered with monsoon heat; spirals of yellow leaves dragged about by the gentle wind, leaving trawl marks along the muddied streets. Here, the fossilized Italianate exteriors of the Court House, the Post Office, the trading houses, long-ago ransacked, were now bulging with squatters and the indigent. Elsewhere, across the tramlines, buildings stood abandoned, their inlaid tiles torn up, baize-covered tables smashed, doorknobs and fixtures and other metal fittings ripped out. Even the rugged mountain behind, casting its huge afternoon shadow, was like a black cowl looming against the dusk.
It made Nadia think of the street procession she’d seen earlier, of a family, clad in white robes for grief, their heads hooded like Klu Klux Klansmen, walking behind a casket carriage being pulled by a man with hawsers. The air had been thick with incense to mask the dead man’s rancid-rot smell. Whenever she saw a funeral cortege these days, she thought of Iain. She couldn’t say why she thought this, but she did, and the imagery seared her soul; it turned her mind into a terrifying, claustrophobic room.
Not for the first time that day she felt overrun, bereft even, as if she was pitching helplessly into the unknown. More and more often now she experienced feelings of self-doubt. Was it because she stood on the edge of darkness, over the abyss, with her destiny shifting quickly beneath her feet? Was it because her gamble in coming here might get herself killed, or worse, her husband killed? She had lain awake every night for a month, thinking about how she was going to get to Hong Kong, how she was going to help Iain. It took weeks of planning. Now she was here, in this crestfallen land, she felt like a little girl bathing at the beach who had drifted out too far with the current and was now struggling to swim back to shore; it was a recurring daydream for her. One that refused to go away.
‘‘Are you all right, senhora?’’
Nadia steadied herself and glanced into the priest’s eyes. On first meeting, he had been surly and bullying; now his attitude seemed to have moderated; his tone more benign. ‘‘Yes, of course,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m fine.’’ She was tempted to ask him how many people had died in the camps, but then quickly changed her mind. She wasn’t going to let this feeling, nor the acid burn in her stomach, defeat her, she decided. She would not let it fester. She took a deep breath and looked up into the sky, felt her heart grow quiet. The cupreous sun was out again. Its fierce rays began to redden the flesh on Father Luke’s bare scalp. ‘‘Do you believe in fate, Father?’’
‘‘As a man of the church, I trust in God’s will.’’
‘‘I believe in fate. Not in so much that our lives are entirely preordained but that a map has been drawn for us to follow. How we read the map and what we decide when we come to a crossroad is up to us.’’
‘‘You are, perhaps, thinking about your husband? Whether you are doing the right thing by coming here?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Are you a devout person?’’
‘‘I was brought up following the orthodox faith.’’
‘‘What about the ways of the Catholic Church?’’
‘‘I save my soul by eating fish on Fridays, if that’s what you mean?’’
Father Luke’s mouth curled into a smile. ‘‘The Lord will look after you, senhora. You have courage. You are brave.’’
‘‘Me? Brave? I don’t think so. Desperate maybe, terrified certainly, but not brave. Anyway I read that courage is the other half of fear. Without one you don’t have the other.’’
‘‘Trust that voice inside your head. You must follow your conscience, so long as your heart is selfless.’’
‘‘I sometimes think I’m the complete opposite of selflessness. I couldn’t live another day without seeing Iain. I’ve left my family behind to fend for themselves so that I can help the man I love – isn’t that an act of selfishness? My greatest terror is that I will never see him again, that I cannot live without him. The truth is, I couldn’t bear waiting, waiting for that one letter to arrive from a stranger saying, ‘I regret to inform you that your husband …’
‘‘I often fantasize about him coming home, carrying me up the flight of steps, filling the house with laughter and flowers. It seems that when I attach myself to someone I hold on for dear life.’’
Father Luke nodded and glanced up to the heavens. Crossing himself, he mentioned something about the book of Saint Mark, but Nadia wasn’t listening. Her troubled mind was elsewhere. She was trying to work out what Iain would say when he saw her. Would she look different to him? Would she seem changed? How different was she now from the woman he’d last seen over three years before? And what about him, had the horrors of camp transformed him?
A few minutes later Father Luke tapped her on the shoulder. ‘‘Ration trucks are full,’’ he said. ‘‘Time we go to your husband. But I must warn you, senhora, you may not like what you find.’’
7
The malodorous room was small and square, hidden behind the kitchen quarters of Block C, with a solitary window that looked onto the communal shithouse. The walls, once a light shade of cream, had darkened with mould, and parts of the ceiling were falling in from where the rain had poured through. Over the window, Stepney threw a scratchy cotton blanket to shield himself and his friends from prying eyes. ‘‘All set,’’ he said. Mr. Yorkie, perched on his shoulder, bobbed his head in agreement.
Iain hunkered over the schoolmaster’s chalk, using Stepney’s eyeglasses as a surrogate magnifying lens. He looked up and fixed his gaze on the naked, spluttering bulb that dangled from the ceiling. It buzzed like a Zero with a shot engine.
‘‘I can’t see what I’m doing,’’ he said.
Stepney hobbled over on his gammy legs and handed Friendly a long line of metal pipe. Friendly extended his arms to the ceiling and sheathed the light bulb in the piping. Almost immediately, Iain’s hands were submerged in luminescence.
‘‘Better?’’ asked Friendly, angling the beam over his shoulder.
‘‘Better.’’
Using the edge of a specially-serrated razor blade, Iain peered through Stepney’s eyeglasses and sliced into the schoolmaster’s chalk, fashioning little white discs that resembled miniature ice hockey pucks. Next, with the aid of a metal ruler, he scored a line right across the centre of the pill, and carved the legend M&B 693 above it.
As he laboured, he breathed in deeply, trying to clear his mind of the effulgent heat in the room, the tickles of perspiration dripping down his neck, the raw light that now stung his eyes. He had to press down hard with his thumb and forefinger, but not so hard that the chalk would split and crumble. Sweat dripped from his brow.
Twenty minutes later Iain had made a total of thirteen pills, despite his trembling hands. He rubbed the knuckle of his right thumb, the joints were tingling.
‘‘What’s the matter?’’ Stepney asked.
‘‘My fingers are cramping up. Can you take over?’’
‘‘I don’t think my hands are steady enough.’’
They were making tablets that were to be peddled to the Japanese as sulphapyridine, a medication produced by May & Baker Ltd in London as an antidote for the venereal disorders the soldiers caught from their caravans of jugun ianfu, the comfort women in their travelling brothels.
There had been no discussion of the American victory over the Japanese in the Bismark Sea, nor of the talk of a Fuso class battleship, armed with twin turret guns, patrolling the Hong Kong harbour, not even of the rumour that U.S. cipher breakers had cracked Admiral Yamamoto’s five-digit number code. Instead, they worked in complete silence, with Iain’s eyes, like his knife, cutting through the chalk.
A bead of perspiration flicked off his forehead and dropped onto the chalk. ‘‘Shit!’’ said Iain.
Iain pushed his hands away in frustration and the metal ruler clattered to the floor. He let out a staggered breath and kneaded the back of his neck. His face felt puffy and tense; there was a thick, gritty sensation in his mouth. He could feel it creeping up on him, brewing behind his eyelids. A migraine was coming. He scraped his chair back and plunged his arms between his legs, hunching his shoulders. He suddenly felt hopelessly exhausted. He pressed the pads of his hands to his temples and felt the muscles of his jaw tighten. Five days had passed since his release from the cooler; his strength was regenerating and his wounds healing, albeit slowly. Seconds later the bell for afternoon roll-call sounded.
