Authors: Martin Booth
It was all lies. Sandingham knew that as well as the American. And the American knew he knew. But the idea was to get those released from the cells ‘rehabilitated’ to camp life as soon and yet as easily as possible.
‘I’m Hirohito’s mother,’ he declared. ‘The war is over.’
The attendant became serious.
‘You might not be too far off the target. A good bit’s happened while you were in the dark.’
‘I heard about increased bombing raids,’ Sandingham said. ‘I heard some Blondin singing it outside the block before he was moved on.’
‘He got a good beating fer that. No’ – the American lowered his voice – ‘it’s bigger ’n that.’
He wrung out the rag and rinsed it in a bucket. A film of slime floated on the surface: he skimmed this off with a piece of wood much as a milkmaid might whisk off cream.
‘Food’s shorter ’n ever. We guess Japan’s blockaded. On top o’ that, we gotten word.’
He dabbed the wounds again, dropping into them salt that had been obtained by evaporating sea water. Each pinch brought a wincing sigh to Sandingham’s lips and a tear to his eyes.
‘What word?’ he questioned.
‘Midway fell. Over eighteen months ago. The IJN got real thrashed. Yamamoto, the Nip admiral, accepted defeat and got the hell out. We heard four big ships sank. Now we got a rumour there was a helluva battle at an island called Truk. Seems the Jap supply fleet got fucked.’
‘Eighteen months?’ Sandingham was amazed. ‘Why haven’t they surrendered?’
‘Pride. They got too much goddam pride, I guess.’
‘And Europe?’
‘Allied landings in northern France last summer. The Krauts are on their last legs, we reckon.’
When Sandingham was clean, the attendant transferred him to another
tatame
that had been rubbed with salt as a precaution against lice and bedbugs. As such it was only partially effective, but any success was welcomed.
‘I’ll get yer soup. Back in five. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ Sandingham confirmed.
Eighteen months. If the Japanese were that badly off – the major part of their Navy on the bottom, plus the supply fleet – then the end could not be far off. An American landing would happen, and the war would be over.
* * *
It was more than a fortnight before Sandingham was returned to work in the timber yard. Even the
isha,
the Japanese camp medico, had excused him for that long. At the time he wondered if the man were softening or preparing for the end of the war as a loser in the hand of an occupying force, but the violence with which the medic later struck another patient with a backhand slap drove such considerations from his thoughts.
The first days back were physical and mental agony. The
hancho
and the other workers, prisoner and Japanese alike, made the tasks he had to do light ones. These required that he leave the sawing sheds (there were three now) from time to time and the sight of the papaya tree over the woodstack and the spot where Garry had died burned his eyes and caused a lump to rise in his throat until he thought it might choke him.
On his fourth day back Mr Mishima managed to have a long conversation with him.
It was made possible by a power cut. These had become increasingly frequent over the winter, and speculation was rife as to the cause. Some claimed partisan action, some Allied bombing raids and others fuel shortages. None knew, of course, if the cuts were of a local, regional or national nature.
Just before the midday rest period the lights dimmed, brightened, flickered, then faded completely. The circular saws slowed and the band saw jammed. The planers hovered into a low howl then screeched to a halt. The plywood laminator lost its hydraulic pressure. The
hancho
cursed volubly and the Japanese workers giggled at his impotent anger. He shared the joke before instructing all present to clear up the dust and shavings, pile the planks and switch off the machinery.
The light rain falling outside was spring-warm and the workforce was instructed to sit in the compound. To wait by the machinery was not in the
hancho’s
book of emergency procedures. Drinking water was distributed before the thin midday soup. Mr Mishima beckoned to Sandingham to join him under the wide eaves of the building, partially hidden by three barrels of tar that were used to waterproof some of the plywood.
‘How have you been?’ Mishima enquired.
As he came closer to his friend, Sandingham noticed how the lines on his face were more prominent, the colour of his skin more paled and his thin eyes somehow set more deeply. It was, he realised, how he must appear now, too.
‘In solitary confinement. I came out three weeks ago but was listed as sick. There is no food or light in the cells.’
‘You have been there since the…?’ He stopped just before adding ‘shooting’. The incident had obviously greatly affected him.
‘Yes.’
‘That is very cruel.’ He drank from his bowl. ‘It is not typical of Japanese peoples to be so cruel.’
‘Hasn’t your history been full of such violence? Like China’s? Life is not to be counted as important.’
‘Yes. There has been violence. The samurai fought terrible wars with each other and tortured many people. But they did not treat defenceless peoples so.’
‘People,’ Sandingham said. ‘A collective noun.’
Mishima smiled. ‘I need you to keep me correct,’ he admitted. ‘Without my pupils, I go rusty.’
A sentry was passing and they stopped speaking.
‘But,’ Mishima continued after the guard had disappeared around the back of the shed to check on those urinating at the buckets, ‘haven’t you, too, had violence in your history? In the Middle Ages of English history, did you not have an Iron Lady, a box whose nails embraced you with death? And a king who had two of his wives beheaded? Did you not drown innocent women who were said to be magicians?’
‘Witches. Yes,’ Sandingham agreed.
‘So. What difference?’
Sandingham made no reply.
‘In Japan, as well as warlike people and cruel people, there are good people. As in all countries. We have Buddhists who do not kill. Our religion is to keep life safe. How it is said?’ He rubbed his head in a sage-like manner, causing Sandingham to smile. ‘Sacred. Safe for the gods.’ Mishima knuckled his eyes before carrying on. He was tired, he explained; had not been sleeping well. ‘But throughout history it has always been the cruel ones who are in command. Who act. The peacemakers are never strong and so are overrun by the violence-lovers. We forget them. We must not. To forget the peaceful people is to forget the true centre of humans.’
‘Do you believe that?’ Sandingham asked.
‘Yes. We must not forget.’
‘I mean that peace is at the true core of the human being, the human soul?’
Mishima stared at the hazy horizon outside the compound. Even with the rain it was more humid than was normal for the time of year. Sitting motionless in the drizzle, they were perspiring.
‘I don’t know.’ His response was melancholic. ‘Yet if we do not hope for that, pray for that from our gods, then what chance is there for men to live together in the world?’
They fell into a meditative silence.
The sun broke weakly through and cheered them somewhat. The
hancho
walked between their groups, talking to the Japanese and curtly grunting to the prisoners, his nearest approximation to the English language. He was no longer concerned that camp inmates were speaking to his countrymen.
After a while, Sandingham interrupted Mishima’s thoughts.
‘How is your wife?’
‘She is well. She is working in the city hospital as a – an orderly?’
Sandingham nodded.
‘And your son? How is he?’
Mishima made no immediate reply to this enquiry. Then he said, ‘It is the duty of every Japanese to work for the success of his country in the war. It is right we should help others, but for the war effort? That is pig-wash. Japan cannot win the war. Nobody can.’
Sandingham did not correct his idiomatic error, nor did he find it in the least bit amusing. He knew Mishima was right.
‘Go for a leak,’ his friend ordered him out of the blue.
This slang phrase did make him chuckle.
‘Why?’
‘Go beyond the buckets to the old tool chests. Open the top one. Inside is a small paper box. In that is a dried fruit. It is a plum. Eat it. It will do you good.’
‘But if I get caught…’
‘If I see a guard coming I will distract him. And it will only take you a minute.’
‘That’s a risk to you.’
Mishima shrugged. ‘Do it.’
That night, lying on his
tatame
with the rain dripping steadily on to the ground outside, Sandingham re-counted all the tiny gifts Mishima had given him over the months, from the medicinal tea that killed cockroaches right up to the dried and salted plum which, he noticed, had a Chinese wrapper on it. That caused him to wonder. How on earth had it come to be in Mishima’s possession? He fell asleep at last puzzling over this pointless detail and using it as other men might count sheep jumping over a gate.
* * *
The summer gathered its skirts about itself. The days grew hot and the nights sticky. Food supplies dwindled and the prisoners became hungrier as the pangs of starvation began to wheedle into them. Most lost weight while several, whose metabolism could not stand the reduction in already meagre rations, simply died. Others, little more than skinned skeletons, hung tenaciously to life with a will that surprised even themselves.
‘Every night, when I shut my eyes,’ Townsend, a RAF officer taken captive at Kuala Lumpur, told Sandingham as they lay on their bunks in the twilight of a rest day, ‘I wonder if I’ll open them again. In the morning I open them again with sheer amazement,’
‘You shouldn’t think about it,’ Sandingham replied. ‘We’ve all surely learnt to accept whatever God throws at us.’
‘God? I doubt even he throws this.’
The lights went out.
‘You know something?’ Townsend’s quiet voice sounded in the semi-darkness: he was merely a shadowy piece of the blackness on his bunk shelf.
‘What?’
‘When I was in Singapore, just posted out in ’39, I went on the razzle with some of the lads. Junior officers from a couple of destroyers. We went to a bar, had a few beers and then took a couple of taxis to a whorehouse. Chinese girls, mostly. Hardly a Malay in sight. I’d fancied a Malay – my lay Malay, we used to say. It was a private joke in the mess.’ He made no effort to show humour at it now. ‘Anyway, the lads got the tarts lined up and chose them one by one. I was left with a choice of two. One was an old biddy, fat as a sow and filled with rice, no doubt. The other was a fine-skinned girl. “Girl” wasn’t far wrong. I took her by the hand, went up to the room. No messing about. Soon as the door was shut she was starkers. I looked at her. Little fuzzy crotch. Long black hair. Little tits with nipples like brown, unripe raspberries. Tired eyes. You know, I couldn’t shag her. She reminded me so much of my kid sister and I thought, “Someplace, you’ve got an older brother and if I was him…” So I paid her, kissed her and buggered off. She shouted something foul at me down the stairs. Thought I thought she wasn’t good enough. She threw the money after me, too.
‘After that, the lads up whoring in the rooms, I walked down the street. Stroll about until they were done. Came upon this Chinese fortune teller. “You want fortune?” he says. I gave him two dollars and he juggles with these sticks in a bamboo pot. They jump out one at a time. He looked them up in his almanac and sprinkled some sand in a tray. You know the sort of thing?’
Sandingham nodded, realised Townsend couldn’t see him and said, ‘Yes.’
‘He tells me I’ll get married to a yellow-haired girl and have two sons. Says I’ll have a hard time around my thirty-third birthday but I’ll get over it and live to be sixty-four.
‘You know something?’ he repeated. ‘I was thirty-three yesterday: that was right. I married Sylvia – strawberry blonde – in July ’39: that was right. She went back to Blighty – sailed from Port Swettenham on a latex carrier – in November of that year and I don’t know what since…’ He tried not to sound too worried. ‘I think she’ll wait. Then we’ll have two sons, I reckon. Funny, isn’t it? A Chinese fairground act right as rain.’
In the morning, Townsend was dead.
* * *
‘Can I show you this?’ Mishima asked him.
The
hancho
was assisting with the replacement of a band saw. Putting his hand out over the steel bed of the saw machine, Sandingham accepted a piece of crisp card slid over the shining surface. It was a photograph.
‘Who is this? Your wife?’
‘The lady on the left is my wife. Her name is Noriko. The other you know.’
‘Katsuo, your son.’
The lad had not been in the timber factory for nearly a month and after Mishima’s response to his earlier query Sandingham had not liked to ask where he was. Now he thought that perhaps the photograph, which was obviously a recent one, was meant to prompt him to enquire.
‘Where is Katsuo? He’s not been here for a while. I hope he’s not ill?’
Mishima’s eyes followed the next log that was being brought to them by the four prisoners on lumber roster. They were staggering under its weight, and having difficulty lifting it on to the saw bench.
‘He is dead.’
There was no sign of emotion on his face except for one tear that glistened on his cheek. His eyes saw little that was near at hand.
Sandingham could say nothing.
‘Like Mr Hoshigima’s son. He went to fly an airplane. A bomb airplane. The kamikaze. Two days ago…’
‘Christ! Mishima…’
‘It is done, that is all. No use crying over spilt milk, as you would say.’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ answered Sandingham. ‘I wouldn’t say that. I’d say what the fucking hell was it for?’
He felt the anger rising in him like bile. He wanted to hit someone, something. He picked up a spanner and smashed it against the electric motor casing. The tool clanged loudly and dented it badly but the
hancho
did not hear over the din of the working machines.
‘It was for Japan,’ Mishima reminded him. ‘For the Emperor.’