J. Ballard - Empire of the Sun

Jim followed Sergeant Uchida to the gates. He could see that neither the sergeant nor the Japanese driver had any idea of the whereabouts of Woosung, an agricultural district at the mouth of the Yangtze that lay beyond the northern suburbs of Shanghai. The driver gestured towards the Bund and Nantao, and climbed into his cabin. He sat passively when Sergeant Uchida pushed through the bored guards and began to scream abuse at him.

Standing beside the guards, Jim waited for Sergeant Uchida to reach the climax of his tirade, when he would be forced to make a decision. Sure enough, the sergeant searched the crowded skyline of tenement buildings and godowns, then pointed at random to a cobbled street with a disused tramline. Unimpressed, the driver cleared his throat. Wearily he started his engine and spat a ball of phlegm into the road, where it lay at Jim’s feet.

‘Straight on…!’ Jim called up to him. ‘Woosung — it’s over there…!’ He pointed to the street with the rusty tramlines.

Sergeant Uchida cuffed Jim on the head, bruising both his ears. He cuffed him again, bringing blood from his mouth. At that moment a cloud of smoke billowed through the gates. The Annamese women had lit the stove with the rain-soaked firewood, and the smoke filled the open-air cinema, drifting across the benches as if the screen were ablaze.

Glad to be rid of Jim, Sergeant Uchida seized him in his strong hands. He swung him over the tail-gate of the truck, shouting to the Japanese guard who sat with the prisoners. The soldier dragged Jim across the laps of the Dutch woman and her father. As the truck pulled away from the detention centre, its wheels already locked in the tramlines, Jim clambered forward to the camouflaged driving cabin. He steadied himself against the pitching roof, and ignored the stream of oaths hurled at him by the driver. He raised his bloody mouth to the wind, letting the foul odours of Shanghai flush his lungs, happy to be on the way to his parents again.

Were they lost? For an hour, as they trundled through the industrial suburbs of northern Shanghai, Jim gripped the wooden bar behind the driving cabin, his head filled with a dozen compass bearings. He grinned to himself, forgetting his illness and the desperate weeks in the open-air cinema. His knees ached from the constant swaying, and at times he had to hold on to the leather belt of the Japanese soldier beside him. But at last he was moving towards the open countryside, and the welcoming world of the prison camps.

The endless streets of Chapei ran past, an area of tenements and derelict cotton mills, police barracks and shanty towns built on the banks of black canals. They drove below the overhead conveyors of a steel works decorated with dragon-festival hoardings, dreams of fire conjured from its silent furnaces. Shuttered pawnshops stood outside the abandoned radio and cigarette factories, and platoons of Chinese puppet troops patrolled the Del Monte brewery and the Dodge truck depot. Jim had never been to Chapei. Before the war a small English boy would have been killed for his shoes within minutes. Now he was safe, guarded by the Japanese soldiers — he laughed over this so much that the Dutch woman reached out a hand to calm him.

But Jim relished the foetid air, the smell of human fertilizer from the open sewage congs that signalled the approach of the countryside. Even the driver’s hostility failed to worry him. Whenever they stopped at a military checkpoint the driver would put his head out of the cabin and wave a warning finger at Jim, as if this eleven-year-old prisoner was responsible for the absurd expedition.

Watching the sun’s angle, as he had done for hours in the detention centre, Jim made certain that they were moving north. They passed the ruins of the Chapei ceramic works, its kilns shaped like the German forts at Tsingtao. Its trademark stood beside the gates, a Chinese teapot three storeys high built entirely from green bricks. During the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 it had been holed by shell-fire, and now resembled a punctured globe of the earth. Thousands of the bricks had migrated across the surrounding fields to the villages beside the works canal, incorporated in the huts and dwellings, a vision of a magical rural China.

These strange dislocations appealed to Jim. For the first time he felt able to enjoy the war. He gazed happily at the burnt-out trams and tenement blocks, at the thousands of doors open to the clouds, a deserted city invaded by the sky. It only disappointed him that his fellow prisoners failed to share his excitement. They sat glumly on the benches, staring at their feet. One of the missionary women lay on the floor, tended by another prisoner, a sandy-haired Britisher with a bruised cheek who held her wrist with one hand and pressed her diaphragm with the other. The two English boys, still barely aware of their mother’s death, sat between Basie and the Dutch couple.

Jim waited until Basie looked up, but the cabin steward seemed hardly to recognize him. His attention had turned to the two boys, and he had moved deftly into the vacuum in their lives. From the page of a Chinese newspaper he folded a series of paper animals, chuckling when the boys gave a weak laugh. Like a depraved conjuror, he slid his hands into the pockets of their school trousers and cardigans, searching for anything of use.

Jim watched him without resentment. He and Basie had collaborated at the detention centre in order to stay alive, but Basie, rightly, had dispensed with Jim as soon as he could leave for the camps.

The truck struck a deep gully in the cobbles, slewed across the road and came to a halt by the grass bank. They had left the northern outskirts of Shanghai and were entering an area of untilled fields and rice-paddies. Beyond a line of burial mounds two hundred yards away a canal ran towards a deserted village. The Japanese driver jumped from his cabin and bent over the front wheels of the truck. He began to talk to the steaming engine, now and then including Jim in his mutterings. He was only twenty years old, but had clearly suffered a lifetime of exasperation. Jim kept his head down, but the driver stepped on to the running board, levelled a finger at him and delivered a long harangue that sounded like a declaration of war.

The driver returned to his cabin, grumbling over his map, and Basie commented: ‘Add that up any way you like and we’re still lost.’ Already his attention had moved from the boys to whatever advantage could be gained from their situation. ‘Jim, do you know where you’re taking us?’

‘Woosung. I’ve been to the country club there, Basic’

Basie played with his paper animals. ‘We’re going to the country club,’ he told the boys. ‘If Jim can find it for us.’

‘As long as we reach the river, Basie. Then it’s either east or west.’

‘That’s a big help. East or west…’

The sandy-haired Briton beside the missionary woman rose from his knees. There was a large, leaking bruise on his forehead and left cheekbone, as if he had recently been struck in the face by a rifle stock. In some pain, he settled himself on the bench. Long freckled legs emerged from his khaki shorts and ended in a pair of thonged sandals. In his late twenties, he carried no luggage or possessions, but he had the self-assured manner of the Royal Navy officers who cut such a dash at the Shanghai garden parties, thrilling the mothers of Jim’s friends. He ignored the Japanese guard, talking across him as if he were a mess-boy who would soon be dismissed to his quarters. Jim assumed that he was one of those tiresome Englishmen who refused to grasp that they had been defeated.

The man touched the bruise on his face and turned to Jim, whose ragged figure he appraised without comment. ‘The Japanese have captured so much ground they’ve run out of maps,’ he remarked amiably. ‘Jim, does that mean they’re lost?’