The Fan Tan Players, page 32
Within a minute she’d passed the watchtower and reached the crag of shelly rock bordering the wired enclosure. With her back to the distant guard post, pretending to piss like a man, she studied the terrain in the dwindling light. She saw a long, snaking line of Burma reed; a thin, yellowing track on the outer seafront side of the fence; followed by a steep drop of 100 feet, at the bottom of which was a swirling suckhole of tidewater which caused the seas to erupt and crash against the rocks.
The skin of her cheeks tightened as she imagined herself negotiating the narrow trail in pitch-blackness. ‘Opposite the flame tree,’ Iain had said, his face as tight as she’d ever seen it, ‘that’s where I’ll meet you. At 4 a.m. opposite the tall flame tree on the Stanley Bay side of the camp. And for goodness sake, be careful.’
She strained her eyes – it was only then that it occurred to her that she had no idea what a flame tree looked like. She looked down the twin lines of wire and crisscrossed metal, plucked at her sweaty collar. She saw two parallel railings running down the channel with curls of barbed wire in between. About a hundred yards away, the edge of a red-hued branch flopped against the bend in the fence. She made a mental note, tried to calculate the distances between the places offering visual cover, then she turned and made her way back to the waiting lorry.
8
Creepers and vines hung like giant cobwebs from the trees. Hidden like a trapdoor spider, Nadia counted off the hours, the minutes. Consulting the luminous hands of her wristwatch, she held off until 3.a.m., waiting for the whispers and isolated conversations to subside. Then, convinced that the Formosan sentries had dropped off to sleep, she inched forward.
Smoke from the guards’ canteen drifted over the moonlight. The smell of boiled rice and dried fish hung in the air. A hot, stuttering breeze threaded through the stodgy trees, soundlessly. Leaves yielded. Bamboo thickets shuddered. The fogged air was stifling.
Couched in an opaque mist which folded itself over her, Nadia kept herself small and tight. She had to be alert and very careful. Avoiding the dry twigs and branches that laced the boundary floor, she edged into the damp darkness using quick elastic steps, holding on to the shadows. As she moved, she winced; the heavy cloth bags thumped lightly against her ribs; the shoulder straps were biting into her shoulder blades. The weight of the bags made her perspire and the salt sweat trickled into her eyes. She wiped it away – in the darkness she could see perhaps five yards ahead, no more. A leaf crackled as she placed her foot down. She froze, waited, waited some more. Her eyes raked the smothered landscape.
She became so preoccupied in trying to cushion the sound of her footfalls that she almost lost sight of the watchtower high above her, its brass and thick glass glinting weakly in the spotlight’s shadow. Sitting alone, she saw the lookout engrossed in a book of sorts, his head bowed, preoccupied. A minute later, when she looked back, he was gone, swallowed by the mist and crushed shadows.
Heart trembling like a candleflame, she counted to ten and held her breath, then proceeded along the fence-line as quick as she dared. Not even a few moments had passed when she paused in mid-step, leg and knee suspended in the air, to listen to the surrounding night noise, the mulch of maple fronds fumbling underfoot, the scuffling of squirrels in the conifers. It took her about forty minutes to negotiate the hundred odd yards to the meeting point. By the time she got to the tree with the red branches and fringe-fingered leaves, she was exhausted and quivering from adrenaline. The waves came smashing into the rocks below.
She fingered the lucky glass charm around her neck. The ground was coated with fern pins, which pricked her arms and elbows, forming crisscross cross-hatch patterns on her flesh. Chock, chock, chock, went the song of the tree frogs. She lay behind a line of tall grass, a long drop of a hundred-feet lay behind her, her ears intercepting the voices of the patrolling guards, wise to the rustle of night animals, the Ooo-oo-ooo call of the horned owl, the sultry fizz of the whispered wind lifting off the trees, the crashing waters below. She concentrated on separating these sounds, compartmentalizing them, so that she might recognize the sounds of danger when they came.
She pressed her face against the grass; the heat wrapping her up like a fist. Surrounded by the smells of seawrack and damp earth, the sweat trickled down her back, down her neck. She listened to the sound of the night crickets and remembered that Uncle Yugevny had once taught her how to measure the air temperature by counting the chirrs. ‘Count the number of cricket chirrs in 15 seconds then add 39,’ he’d said. Within a minute she’d worked out that it was 86 degrees F.
Time passed slowly. A procession of dark-bodied ants shuffled past her nose, carrying a wasp in segments. She watched the black cortege make its way into a hole like shiny-hatted undertakers. Again, her skin crawled as her thoughts turned to death.
She peered into the night, lifting her eyes, not her head. Her mind waited, extracting the fugitive sounds from the natural. Chock, chock, chock, went the song of the tree frogs. Weren’t there wild dogs here, she wondered? Silent hunters? Tigers even? A bat scraped overhead, filling the night with excited squeaks, its wrinkly wings thrumming the air. A branch tilted and yielded a clump of heavy, dry plumage. And then, suddenly some boots appeared before her. Two men, Formosans, were talking into the electric silence. They approached the wire and stopped. She could not tell whether they had seen her. Separated by twin fences, three feet apart, Nadia smelled their sweet tobacco burning, saw the red tips of their cigarettes, the sockets of their eyes, their gargoyle silhouettes.
The cigarettes were handed from black hand to black hand.
The guards cleared the phlegm from their throats and hawked, the sound of bones rattling in a sack.
‘‘Hoi!’’ one of them shouted. He seemed to be staring straight at Nadia. She stiffened. Fear, dark and metastasized, came rushing down at her; it spread through her like ganglion roots. It ran up the bones of her back.
The guard picked up a stone and threw it so that the stone went crashing into the thicket to her left. There was a thrump of noise. A vast stretch of silence followed. As Nadia waited, muscles cocked, a disturbed lizard raced over her legs. Its claws caught on the underside of her knees, sharp tail snaking, shooting through the grass. Shrivelling, she remained death-like. Her crisscrossed flesh turned to goose pimples. She felt her fingers dig into the dirt, straining to get away. Seconds later, the guards were gone, dissolved in the great swells of darkness. Chock, chock, chock, went the song of the tree frogs.
She had watched him dance towards her, moving through the degrees of light and shadow, darting like a black crow through the curtain of stippled fog.
He crawled the last few metres to the fence.
Lying flat to the ground, they looked at each other. His shirt was ragged and unbuttoned to his chest. She noticed that his neck was long and skinny; his eyes huge against his face. ‘‘How do you feel?’’ she said in a whisper, her mouth shutting with a snap.
‘‘Like a sucked lemon,’’ said Iain, his face agleam with moisture. ‘‘Dry, wasted, and sour at the edges.’’
‘‘I’m glad you still have a sense of humour.’’ They were separated by over three feet of wire. ‘‘This is a Red Maple, by the way, not a flame tree.’’
‘‘I’m from Sutherland. We don’t have trees in Sutherland, only thistles.’’ He smiled. It was a smile as welcome as an umbrella going up in the rain. He turned his face towards the sky and wrinkled his eyes. It began to drizzle. ‘‘Your hair looks nice,’’ he said. There were no traces of his earlier resentment. ‘‘A little shorter than I remember it. Reminds me of your flapper days.’’ For a moment he stared at her. Then, as if short of breath, he said, ‘‘You must have had quite a journey.’’ Barely audible. ‘‘How are you?’’
The past throbbed inside her like an engorged muscle. Nadia wanted to reach for his hand, run her fingers against his cheeks; a lightsome, delicate touch. Instead, she stretched her arm through the fencing and began to pass Iain cartons of cigarettes, parcels of dried meats and wrappings of preserved fruits. ‘‘I’m fine.’’ Her eyes, a promise of softness, skimmed over his face. ‘‘Eat this now.’’ It was a tangerine.
He put the tangerine to his mouth, bit into the skin, giving it a long suck. ‘‘What about Mamuchka, how is she?’’ he asked.
‘‘She’s well. She says why couldn’t I be like Maria Carvalho who lives next door. She married a doctor not a Scottish civil servant.’’
Iain grinned. ‘‘And Papashka?’’
‘‘Getting increasingly forgetful, but as good as can be expected given he’ll be eighty this year. He spends most of the day playing chess or Chinese chequers with Yugevny. Poor Mamuchka can’t find half the things in the house because he keeps hiding things.’’
‘‘Hiding things?’’
‘‘In case the Japanese take over the Tabacaria.’’ The corners of her mouth rose fractionally. She had a tin of Pall Mall in her hand. ‘‘These aren’t for smoking, they’re to be used as currency.’’
‘‘Do you have a plan?’’
‘‘There’s a boat that will take us to Macao.’’
‘‘A boat? It’ll be too dangerous escaping by boat. The shipping lanes must be littered with magnetic mines and the Japanese launches are fast and heavily armed. We’ll never outrun them.’’
Nadia ignored his concerns. ‘‘It will be here in three days. You have to tell me where is the best place for me to cut through the wire and when?’’
‘‘You have a wire cutter?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Let me have it.’’
‘‘No, Iain, if you’re caught with it, they’ll behead you.’’
He looked at her. ‘‘The problem with cutting through the wire is that it’ll make a God forsaken racket. Listen to this.’’ He flicked the fence with his wrist and the thin sound reverberated down the channel. ‘‘It’s a big gamble …’’
‘‘I was always a good fan tan player.’’
‘‘If you start snipping through it, the guards are bound to hear.’’
‘‘In that case, someone will have to distract them. Give the guards the food and the tobacco. The same goes for the naughty postcards.’’
‘‘Alright. Meet me here tomorrow night. Same time. We’ll do it then.’’ She nodded, handed him another carton of cigarettes, careful not to snag her arm on the barbed wire. His fingers crossed the threshold. He put his hand on her wrist and she stopped. She felt as though there was little air entering her lungs.
A lengthy moment passed; a long, damp, cocooned silence. Then Iain bundled his loot into a blanket and folded it over the goods, corner-to-corner, twisting the top into a knotted loop to form a handle. ‘‘Now go,’’ he said, ‘‘before anyone sees you.’’ He made to leave.
‘‘Wait.’’
Her heart was surging like a pump.
Under a shudder of moonlight she passed him something more, a manila envelope.
He gave Nadia a look. ‘‘What’s this?’’ he said, pushing his face against the fence, separating shadows from light. Inside was a rectangle of sheeny paper.
‘‘It’s a photograph,’’ she said.
The black and white portrait was a close-up of a child. He squinted, bending the image towards the light. ‘‘Who’s the little girl?’’
A pleading look stretched across her face. Her cheeks turned hot. ‘‘Her name is Valentina. She will be 3 years old in September.’’ A silence. ‘‘I named her after your mother. She’s your daughter, Iain.’’
9
‘‘But I thought you couldn’t have children?’’ he spluttered. ‘‘I don’t understand.’’ His eyes were wide. ‘‘How … at your age …?’’
‘‘I was forty when she was conceived.’’
‘‘How …?’’
I don’t know how, Iain. It just happened.’’ She looked at her husband. It was hard to believe how much of his face she had forgotten – the shape of his mouth and lips, the freckles by his nose. ‘‘Do you remember that night in December? Three days before I left Hong Kong for Macao? Well, she was born on September 22nd.’’
He stared at her, stunned.
‘‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say in your letters?’’
‘‘I was scared.’’
‘‘Of what?’’
‘‘Scared you’d risk escape in order to be with us. Scared that you’d get caught trying …’’ She had to stop herself from sounding apologetic.
He remained silent for a long time.
‘‘She looks like me, don’t you think?’’ he eventually said, peering at the photograph.
‘‘The spitting image. I used to cry all the time when I was breastfeeding her because she reminded me so much of you. It must have been my hormones or something.’’ She had been – as Mamuchka had often pointed out – an unfailingly anxious first-time mother.
‘‘You’ve got to go back!’’ he demanded.
‘‘I’m not going anywhere without you,’’ she hissed. ‘‘I’m going to get you out of her. You can’t stay in camp with Takashi in charge. Do you want your daughter to grow up fatherless?’’
‘‘I don’t want her to become an orphan!’’
‘‘Keep your voice down.’’
‘‘Who on earth is taking care of her? How can you leave her by herself?’’
‘‘She’s not by herself. She’s with Mamuchka and Izabel, Anna, Mrs. Lo – she’s surrounded by people I love and trust.’’
An image formed in Nadia’s mind, burning into her: the rickshaw pulling away from the Tabacaria, seeing Valentina at the window, her head small and pig-tailed, the rickshaw continuing down the street as she watched, mouth crumpling. Seconds later she was gone.
‘‘And if you think I wanted to leave her behind then you’re mad. It kills me not to be with her.’’
‘‘But – ’’
‘‘No, buts Iain, you’re going to do as I say. I have this under control. I’m going to get you out of here tomorrow night and afterwards we’ll take refuge at Father Luke’s. If you trust me and if you trust Costa then you must do as I say.’’ She stared hard at his face; the taste of desperation in her mouth. She could see from his eyes that he was fighting with himself. ‘‘Takashi’s going to hurt you if you stay. Are you listening to me? He will hurt you.’’ Iain remained silent for a long time. He closed his eyes, as if he was making a wish. Nadia knew that in a few seconds he would either nod his head in assent or get up to leave. Holding her breath, she awaited his decision.
‘‘How did you ever get so tough?’’ he finally said.
‘‘By being a single mother for three years.’’
‘‘Valentina,’’ he repeated the name two, three, four times. ‘‘Tell me about her.’’
Nadia told him about Valentina’s infectious laughter, her first words, how she’d learned to walk by holding onto Mamuchka’s thumbs, the way she chewed on her comfort blanket before falling asleep, the way she ran around the house with Uncle Yugevny’s drawers on her head and made doll houses out of cigar boxes.
Then turning serious, she said, ‘‘Tomorrow night at three o’clock, I want someone to distract the guards. It will take me about an hour to cut through this wire. I want you ready at four sharp. Don’t bring anyone with you. We can’t have anything slow us down. Father Luke will be waiting a half-mile up the road, at the Tai Tam junction. I’ll get you to the bottom of the hill and into his car. And stop looking at me like that. Your eyes might pop out.’’
Iain nodded, gave a quiet chuckle. He slid the photograph carefully back into the manila envelope and gave it a little pat. He levered himself up, rose to his knees, then up to a half-crouch. He looked at her. She watched him edge backwards towards the enfolding darkness and retreat into the shadows.
Nadia waited ten minutes. Waited for the luminous hands of her watch to reach the four thirty mark. Then she started walking, silently, in the direction from which she came, past the creepers and vines. Dead leaves and fern pins yielded beneath her tread. She moved cautiously. In the near distance she spied the guards’ canteen – the smell of boiled rice was less strong now. Her mind should have been more focused and alert, but it wasn’t; she was thinking about Iain.
And then she saw something. A dark shadow, half-concealed, was leaning against the long, pale walls of the watchtower. A figure of a man, dirty and broken, was watching her from behind the fence like a pie-dog. He was regarding her without emotion. She noted that he had a beard, that he had Caucasian features. She froze. They eyed each other for several seconds before the man stepped backwards and out of the dim light.
When she blinked again, he was gone.
When Iain returned to his small dormitory, he immediately noticed that Hoarde’s bunk was empty. Stepney was on his back snoring, with Mr. Yorkie curled on his shoulder, and Friendly lay asleep on his side. But where was Hoarde? Had he been in bed when he left to meet Nadia, he wondered? He couldn’t recall. Iain sat on his cot; in his chest a mixture of curiosity and trepidation brewed. He stepped out into the night once more and looked about. When he saw no sign of Hoarde he went back to bed.
After much tossing and turning, Iain concluded that he wasn’t going to get any sleep. He waved the flies away from his mouth and lay in bed thinking about everything Nadia had told him. For long moments, in the darkness, he stared at the photograph of his daughter, making out the shape of her mouth, her eyes. Nadia had said they were going to escape by boat to Macao. That wasn’t going to be easy, he decided, especially with the Imperial Navy policing the harbour and military patrols guarding the southern shores of the island. That was how the Japanese had caught him in the first place.
He was struck by a sudden image of being at sea. It was the day after Christmas 1941; he was in a police launch commandeered from the naval dockyard. Days before, the British had offered him an escape route out of Hong Kong, together with members of the Indian Intelligence Bureau. He declined. Instead, Iain piloted the launch himself and dropped the men off in Mirs Bay where they could flee on foot into Free China. He calculated that he had enough petrol to take him as far as Macao, but on the way back from Mirs Bay, three Japanese Military Torpedo Boats intercepted him, opening fire with their guns. He had no choice but to surrender.
