The Fan Tan Players, page 34
Eyelids fluttering, he began to stir. He emitted a long gurgle of pain then began to cough. When he finally opened his eyes, the corners of his mouth lifted in a grimace.
‘‘My feet,’’ he said with a rush of panic. ‘‘The rats were at my feet.’’
‘‘Your feet and legs look fine,’’ she replied, calming him. ‘‘There’re some cuts by your ankles, but nothing serious. Your toes are all intact.’’ She found a scalpel lying across the floor and used it to slice the rope around his ankles. ‘‘Iain,’’ she said. ‘‘You’ve lost an arm.’’
‘‘Lost an arm?’’ he said in baffled, faltering voice.
‘‘You’re also losing a great deal of blood. I have to get you out of here. Can you walk?’’
‘‘I can walk,’’ were the only three words he could manage.
He winced when he tried to move. Nadia rocked him to his left side and then to his right side, next with one arm around his waist and the other under his right armpit, she hauled him upright. He swore to himself then gave a stifled howl. Getting him to his feet was like lifting a heavy sack of rice; a deadweight.
‘‘You have to keep your left arm elevated above the heart. Can you do that for me?’’
He nodded.
Nadia looked at him. He was panting. The veins on his throat bulged. She gripped him possessively.
‘‘Christ, you’re strong for a wee lass,’’ he said, trying to make light of the pain that was racking his body.
‘‘My ancestors must have been muzhiks. Good peasant stock.’’
From outside, they heard the shouts of the Japanese guards. ‘‘How am I going to get you out of the camp?’’ she asked. ‘‘And how am I going to get past the sentries? I’m practically naked.’’
‘‘Over there,’’ he said, jutting his chin towards the fallen rubble. ‘‘I was in this room with Takashi and a guard when the roof fell in. He should be over there.’’
She propped Iain against one of the standing walls. Perspiration salted the corners of his mouth. As he rested there, bathed in sweat and blood, Nadia began to push and kick the fallen debris to one side. She came to a body and without hesitating, removed Takashi’s tunic, trousers and boots. Her hands fumbled with the buttons, ignoring the large blood-stained patch by his heart; she climbed into his clothes. The shoulders sagged on her and the shirt-tails fell to mid-thigh. She tucked the tunic into the trousers.
‘‘You need his hat to hide your face,’’ Iain said, his voice thinning.
Nadia disentangled the visor cap from Takashi’s head and pulled it over her eyes.
There was nobody in the corridor. The air was thick with insect-thrumming heat. Gripped with exquisite pain, Iain stumbled outside, leaning his weight on Nadia’s shoulder. Walking out into the open was like walking into a tropical maelstrom – they saw a hazy patchwork of destruction, a shallow trough of smoke and scorched dirt. ‘‘We don’t stop for anything,’’ she said. ‘‘Do you understand me? No matter how much pain you feel we don’t stop.’’ The dull thudding booms had ceased, the sputtering gunfire had stopped. Nadia waited for a pair of mustard-khaki uniforms to hurry past carrying buckets of sand. ‘‘Come on, come on,’’ she heard herself say.
Trembling from blood loss, Iain’s limbs felt soggy and weak. A pang shot up and down his left arm with every step. He lifted his face towards the sun, gasping air, wanting to howl out senselessly. The pain made him clumsy. He tripped, recovered. His vision blurred as dazzling white spots danced before his eyes. She held him close.
The chaos worked to their advantage; nobody stopped or looked at them. It took them a full twelve minutes to reach the entrance to the camp, but the time moved swiftly for them, shooting past like fast-moving images of a cine camera.
At the double gates, Nadia eyed the slouched heap that lay by the post. The dead Japanese sentry hadn’t been moved. She saw the gates ajar, left open by the fire-trucks. Both breathless now, they hurried through the opening and made their way down the road.
Moments later she spotted the Morris Cowley with Father Luke sitting anxiously at the wheel.
‘‘Is that your husband?’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘What’s happened to him?’’
‘‘An American bomb,’’ was all Nadia said as she eased Iain into and across the back seats.
‘‘What do you expect me to do with him?’’
‘‘Get him to a hospital, of course. He needs medical attention.’’
‘‘If you take him to a hospital, the Japanese will be onto us within hours.’’
‘‘Well, send for a doctor then! He’s going to die if we don’t – ’’
‘‘It is too risky!’’ He cut her off. He was playing with the joints of his fingers. ‘‘How can I bring a one-armed gweilo and a woman impersonating a Japanese officer into my house? There are neighbourhood watches who report anything out of the ordinary to the military police.’’
Nadia banged the bonnet of the car with her hand. She fixed him a ferocious look. ‘‘He will bleed to death if he’s not treated!’’
‘‘Get into the car,’’ he ordered. ‘‘I will think of something as we drive.’’ He paused and touched his chest as if in pain.
‘‘What is wrong? Are you hurt?’’
‘‘Just a twinge. Hurry we must go.’’
The Morris headed towards Repulse Bay. They travelled in a tense, inhospitable silence. From time to time, Nadia looked behind her, studying Iain’s condition. He looked drawn and pale with his teeth clenched between his lips. After several minutes she said, ‘‘What if we’re stopped at a checkpoint?’’
Father Luke did not reply. He was taking the long route around the island, heading towards Aberdeen. ‘‘Even if I took him back to my house, I wouldn’t be able to find a doctor. I have some medicines of my own, but I don’t know what I can really do to help him. He may not make it.’’
Nadia did not like the priest talking about Iain as if was not there.
‘‘And even if he does survive,’’ he went on, slightly out of breath now, ‘‘I can only shield him from the Japanese for a short while. They’ll be doing house-to-house searches. They’ll know by tonight that internees have gone missing.’’ His eyes were on the road. ‘‘When is your rendezvous with Costa?’’
‘‘In two days.’’
‘‘Too long.’’
‘‘We have to do something!’’ She tried to rein in her accelerating thoughts, her flying panic.
They came to Deep Water Bay, passing the derelict golf club. Father Luke’s shoulders stiffened, as if suddenly galvanized by an enlightening thought. ‘‘I have an idea,’’ he said.
‘‘What?’’
Father Luke said something that Nadia did not understand. ‘‘What did you say?’’
‘‘I said I will take you to Sai Kung by boat.’’
‘‘Where or what is Sai Kung?’’
‘‘It is across the water, in the New Territories. There’s a group of about a hundred Communist guerillas that have been camped out in the Sai Kung mountains for years. They claim to be part of the East River Column. They have an understanding with the Japanese in so much that they leave each other alone. Their leader was a former barman at the Peninsula Hotel. His name is Pang. We went to primary school together. Two of his men used to be surgeons at the Tung Wah Hospital.’’
‘‘How do you know?’’
‘‘How do I know what?’’
‘‘How do you know the surgeons are still there? If you’re wrong and the doctors have gone, Iain will die.’’
‘‘I know they are still there because some of the guerillas were in my district last week. Once or twice a month Pang orders them to come at night and hand out what they can to the poor. When I asked them about Chung, the surgeon, they said he was still living with them.’’
‘‘Are you sure you can get hold of a boat?’’
‘‘I can in Aberdeen harbour. A local junk maybe, but we will have to pay.’’
Nadia pulled off a shoe and extracted a roll of cash. ‘‘I have Japanese Military Yen.’’ She brightened. ‘‘But why must we go to Sai Kung? Why can’t the junk take us to Macao?’’
‘‘No, Nadia, these people in Aberdeen are fishermen. They will not risk leaving Hong Kong waters.’’
‘‘Then we have no choice but sail to Sai Kung.’’
11
The two Hakka women heaved and rocked on their long oar, steering through the narrow harbour. As they swayed to the knocking of the current, the sampan made its way silently through the blanket of morning haze. Below, underneath their bare feet, beneath some removable deck planks, Nadia, Iain and Father Luke lay flat on their backs, knees and arms folded across their bodies like unborn infants. Nadia knew they were entirely sealed off from prying Japanese eyes, yet still she felt more afraid than ever before.
‘‘How are you, Iain?’’ she whispered, mere inches from her husband’s face.
Iain nodded, his jaw set.
Nadia could feel his head resting on her chest; his breathing had grown protracted. She squeezed his right hand in encouragement. They were both drenched in perspiration.
The only noises she could make out were from bow waves as they slapped against the hull and the creaking of the oar on its rowlock fitting. Even through the wide planks of wood, Nadia could feel the winds begin to escalate. Little eddies of salt air whirled through the tiniest of cracks. She imagined they were leaving the outer harbour now, gliding into the choppy waters of the East Lamma Channel. Everything was black; there was no colour in anything.
Up above, the Hakka women’s loose trousers flapped erratically in the wind. Through the tiny opening Nadia saw their knees bending, straightening, bending again, heard the occasional splash of water. She could see the wrinkled leathery undersides of their bare feet.
The early summer currents carried the sampan out to sea, causing the stern to bob.
Tirelessly, the Hakka women guided the little craft onwards, arms pumping.
Somewhere in the remote distance, she heard a buoy’s bell toll and then there it was: she could see it clearly now – the six-sailed outline, the mastheads with the red pennants, even the bamboo battens. It was a small oceangoing junk.
The junk captain was a florid man with a pirate’s smile. Nadia followed Father Luke down into the galley by way of a series of rickety ladders where the air smelled of scorched tin and chaulmoogra oil. Everything creaked. She could hear a grinding of metal chains and assumed the anchors were being raised. High above, broad canvases flapped noiselessly in the shifting breeze. ‘‘This way,’’ Father Luke said to the two crewmen who were carrying Iain in their arms. The men found Iain hard to lift and harder yet to transport down the rope ladders. They descended, ferrying him on their shoulders, one hand under the other. Iain sucked air through his teeth as they placed him on a bunk.
‘‘How far are we from Sai Kung? How many hours of sailing?’’ Nadia inquired. Father Luke lit a candle, looking around at the bunks, at the tins of food, the sacks of sorghum and bladders of drinking water.
‘‘About three hours,’’ he replied. ‘‘I will make contact with the guerillas and leave you in their care. You have nothing to fear from them. They are good people.’’
Nadia thanked him. She was changing into a set of coolie clothes supplied by the captain Woo. ‘‘I feel like I’m backstage in a pantomime, tearing off this dress, pulling on that dress, pulling on trousers, tearing them off again.’’ She secured the string around her waist and went to boil some water. There was a wooden crate to sit on, beside it was a portable kerosene stove with a single hob.
The junk began quivering now just a little bit as it set sail. The canvases grew noisier, rustling like tall palms. Nadia caressed Iain’s forehead with her hand.
‘‘Will he make it?’’ asked Father Luke, who sat clutching the left side of his chest.
Nadia gave her husband a kiss on the cheek. Iain responded by raising his eyebrows, keeping his eyes shut. His breathing was slow, his voice leaden. ‘‘Of course he will,’’ she said. ‘‘He has to. His daughter is waiting for him.’’
Father Luke followed, falling behind with every step, growing more and more out of breath, until finally he had to stop.
Using a stretcher made out of sail-cloth and bamboo, the crewmen carried Iain through the countryside, across a stream, up a steep gradient dotted with trees which eventually thickened into a wood. A deep chasm separated the narrow path from the stream below. Small bedraggled huts formed from bamboo and wattle snaked along the side of the hill like a row of slumbering mice. When the dogs began to bark, the villagers came out and stared at them, curious to the identity of these peculiar strangers. They lay Iain down in the shade and then, later, transferred him into something that resembled a field hospital. After a while the crowd of people thinned.
‘‘Where is Father Luke?’’ Nadia asked. But nobody seemed to know. Unfazed, she sought out the surgeons and explained what had happened to Iain.
The surgeons, a man called Chung and a woman named Lee-Phua, did what they could for him. From a tiny medical supply they broke open vials of morphine and sulphur satchels. Suppressing the subclavian artery, they cleaned and redressed the wound, stitched up what they could. When they were sure that they had stemmed the bleeding, Chung pushed a long double-sided knife, through the muscle near the shoulder joint and cut away some flesh to make a flap. Once completed, they turned the flap onto itself and covered the exposed bone, sewing it tight, applying tea-tree and iodine to stave off infection. Finally, Lee-Phua padded and bound the stump with gauze and bandages soaked in garlic. He was transferred to a darkened hut.
The very next evening, the same evening that Father Luke’s body was discovered in the chasm by the footpath, Iain developed a high fever.
Being in the camp so long, Chung told Nadia, with the malnutrition, the privation, Iain’s body resistance was very weak.
He was given broth made of roots and certain grasses. But the fever grew worse. He shivered and sweated and when he opened his eyes, his look was far, far away.
They drained the arm of pus and made him drink a tea made from elder flower, opium and chamomile. They gave him lemon balm to help him perspire. His shivering lasted for hours making him delusional. Nadia sponged him with lukewarm water and forced him to take in liquid. Then in the middle of the night something terrible happened. He suffered a kind of febrile seizure. His legs began kicking uncontrollably, his throat cried out. Both Chung and Lee-Phua held him down. ‘‘Is he going to die?’’ Nadia heard herself scream. ‘‘Please don’t let him die!’’ They strapped his legs to the bed with twine. There was froth spilling from the corners of his mouth.
Nadia fell to her knees. The candlelight was a fragile glow. She prayed to Jesus. She prayed to Saint Nikolai Chudotvorets and to the Holy Mother of God. She prayed until the wick burnt down to the stub and guttered and the room turned black with her tears.
He grew deathly still.
Earlier that week Mamuchka, convinced that her daughter was in terrible danger, went to see the Governor of Macao. It was a mother’s instinct, she said. He had no news to tell her. As far as he knew there hadn’t been any fresh reports of Macanese citizens being harmed in Hong Kong or held as prisoners.
‘‘But she was due back yesterday. The plan was that she was to be back yesterday!’’
The Governor, mouth downturned and sympathetic, merely shrugged his shoulders.
After a further three days of agonized waiting, a letter arrived addressed to Mrs Nadia Sutherland. It was a Prisoner of War envelope, inscribed ‘Stanley Internee Camp’ on the reverse and franked with Japanese Occupation 2s stamps. Across the front, the words ‘Passed by Censor 3472’ were punched in black ink.
Mamuchka, hungry for any information concerning her daughter or son-in-law, left Valentina with her grandfather and went into the bedroom to be alone. The colour had already drained from her lips. She took a few deep breaths, steadied herself and opened the envelope.
Dear Mrs. Sutherland, she read aloud in her faltering voice. It troubles me greatly to have to inform you that your husband, Iain Sutherland, internee number 6177, has been reported missing, feared dead. This follows a series of USAAF air raids on Hong Kong resulting in bombs landing and exploding within Stanley peninsula. Up until now, a thorough investigation into the list of wounded in Tweed Bay hospital have been for naught. Please accept my deepest sympathies and may God walk by your side during these long dark hours.
The Reverend John Anderson
Chaplain, Stanley Internment Camp
Mamuchka stared at the words for several moments. Her first thoughts were for her daughter, and then a sudden cold stab to the heart told her that Nadia too was nowhere to be found – missing, dead … she did not know. Caged nightmares of every shape and size entered her soul. Something sharp and high-pitched escaped from her chest. Deliberately, she folded the letter back in half and returned it to its sleeve. Seconds later she pressed the envelope to her forehead and began to weep.
Nadia walked down the hill towards the set of Chinese tombstones. She knelt by the newly erected wooden cross. The yellow wildflowers clutched in her hand seemed to her so inadequate. She placed them on the soil. The sky had turned grey.
She trailed her fingertips across the name, so roughly and inexpertly carved into the wood, and felt a tear run down her face.
Behind her, one of the village children stared out across the valley. The little boy was watching a water buffalo as it pulled a plough through the rice fields; he had a small wooden boat in his hands. After a while Nadia took the path down to the hillside creek. The little boy handed her the small wooden boat and with a match she lit the incense stick.
‘‘Incense to purify souls,’’ she whispered, caressing the lucky glass charm around her neck. She lowered the boat into the water and let it go, watching it drift away, getting smaller and smaller. She closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around herself.
