J. Ballard - Empire of the Sun

Basie’s sallow face withdrew behind the collar of his jacket. He peered warily at the Japanese beside the railway tracks, as if suspicious of what was in store for them in these naked fields. ‘I’ll meet your folks, Jim.’ To Dr Ransome he added, without any enthusiasm: ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on the boy.’

‘You kept an eye on me. Basie tried to sell me in Shanghai.’

‘Did he? That sounds like a good idea.’

‘To the Hongkew merchants. But I wasn’t worth anything. He looked after me as well.’

‘He’s done a good job.’ Dr Ransome patted Jim’s shoulder. He slipped a hand around Jim’s waist and felt his swollen liver, then raised his upper Up and glanced at his teeth.

‘It’s all right, Jim. I was trying to guess what you’ve been eating. We’ll all have to take up gardening at Woosung. Perhaps the Japanese will sell us a goat.’

‘A goat?’ Jim had never seen a goat, an exotic beast of great moodiness and independence, qualities he admired.

‘Are you interested in animals, Jim?’

‘Yes… not much. What I’m really interested in is aviation.’

‘Aviation? Aeroplanes, you mean?’

‘Not exactly.’ Casually, Jim added: ‘I sat in the cockpit of a Japanese fighter.’

‘You admire Japanese pilots?’

‘They’re brave…’

‘And that’s important?’

‘It’s a good idea if you want to win a war.’ Jim listened to the drone of a distant aircraft. He was suspicious of the physician, of his long legs and his English manner and his interest in teeth. Perhaps he and Basie would team up as corpse-robbers? Jim thought about the goat which Dr Ransome wanted to buy from the Japanese. Everything he had read about goats confirmed that they were difficult and wayward creatures, and this suggested that there was something impractical about Dr Ransome. Few Europeans had gold teeth, and the only dead people the doctor was likely to see for a long time would be Europeans.

Jim decided to ignore Dr Ransome. He stood next to the Japanese guard, his hands warmed by the camouflaged roof of the driving cabin. As they set off towards the highway the soldiers were walking along the railway tracks, unwinding lengths of telephone wire. Were they about to launch a man-carrying kite? The furthest soldier was already lost in the haze of white dust, and his blurred figure seemed to rise from the ground. Jim laughed to himself, thinking that the soldier might suddenly soar into the sky over their heads. Helped by his father, Jim had flown dozens of kites from the garden at Amherst Avenue. He was fascinated by the dragon kites that floated behind the Chinese wedding and funeral parties, and by the fighting kites flown from the quays at Pootung, diving across each other with razor-sharp lines coated in powdered glass. But best of all were the man-flying kites which his father had seen in northern China, with a dozen lines held by hundreds of men. One day Jim would fly in a man-flying kite, and stand on the shoulder of the wind…

The air rushed into his watering eyes as the truck sped along the open road. Confident of his bearings, the driver was eager to deliver his prisoners to Woosung and return to Shanghai before nightfall. Jim held tight to the cabin roof, while the prisoners huddled on the seats behind him. The two missionary husbands were already sitting on the floor, and Dr Ransome helped Mrs Hug to lie under the bench.

But Jim had lost interest in them. They were now entering an area of military airfields. These former Chinese bases, which once guarded the Yangtze estuary, were being occupied by the Japanese Army and Navy Air Forces. They passed a bomb-damaged fighter base where Japanese engineers were welding a new roof on to the steel shell of a hangar. A line of Zero pursuit planes stood on the grass field, and a pilot in full flying gear strode between the wings. Without thinking, Jim waved to him, but the pilot was lost among the propellers.

Two miles ahead, beyond an empty village and its burnt-out pagoda, they were delayed by a convoy of trucks carrying the wings and fuselages of two-engined bombers. A squadron of the machines faced the afternoon sun, ready to take off and attack the Chinese armies to the west. All this activity excited Jim. When they stopped at the military checkpoint on the Soochow Road he was impatient to move on. He sat next to Basie, kicking his heels as a sergeant in the kempetai checked the list of prisoners and Dr Ransome protested about the condition of the missionary women.

Soon after, they left the highway and joined an unpaved secondary road that ran beside an industrial canal. Japanese tanks moved past, lashed to the decks of motorized lighters, while their gun crews slept on the canvas hatches. Usually Jim’s imagination would have feasted on these battle vehicles, but by now he was only interested in aircraft. He wished he had flown with the Japanese pilots as they attacked Pearl Harbor and destroyed the US Pacific Fleet, or ridden in the torpedo bombers that had sunk the Repulse and the Prince of Wales. Perhaps, when the war ended, he would join the Japanese Air Force and wear the Rising Sun stitched to his shoulders, like the American pilots who had flown with the Flying Tigers and worn the flag of Nationalist China on their leather jackets.

Although his legs were exhausted, Jim was still standing behind the driver’s cabin as they sped towards the gates of the internment camp at Woosung. In his mind, he had identified the Japanese aircraft of the Yangtze plain with his confidence that he would soon see his parents again. A single-engined fighter overtook them and climbed into the late afternoon sky, lifted by the golden glaze on the under-surface of its wings. Jim raised his arms and let the sun fell on the camouflage paint that stained his hands and wrists, imagining that he too was an aircraft. Behind him the Dutch woman had collapsed on the floor of the truck. She lay at the feet of her elderly father as Dr Ransome and the Japanese soldier tried to lift her on to the seat.

They crossed a wooden bridge over the arm of an artificial lake, and passed the burnt-out shell of the country club whose mock-Tudor timbers of painted cement had alone failed to catch fire. The hull of a pleasure launch lay in the shallows, its decks penetrated by reeds that advanced up the beach to the embers of the hotel.

Ahead of them a military truck was turning through the gates of a disused stockyard, through which an even greater fire had recently swept. Bored Japanese soldiers lounged outside the guardhouse, and watched a gang of Chinese labourers nailing lengths of barbed wire to a line of pine posts. Behind the guardhouse was the building contractor’s store, surrounded by piles of planks and fencing timber, and a bamboo shelter where a second group of coolies dozed on their mats beside a charcoal brazier.

The truck stopped by the guardhouse, where the driver and his prisoners together gazed at this desolate site. The former stockyard was being converted into a civilian camp, but no prisoners would be interned here for months. Jim sat between Basie and Dr Ransome, annoyed with himself for assuming that his mother and father would be at the first camp they visited.

A prolonged argument began between the Japanese driver and the sergeant in charge of the camp’s construction. It was clear that the sergeant had already decided that this truck and its consignment of Allied prisoners did not exist. He ignored the driver’s protests and waved his cigarette in a thoughtful manner as he paced across the wooden porch of the guardhouse. At last he pointed to a patch of nettle-covered ground inside the gates, which he had apparently deemed to be a no man’s land between the camp and the outside world.

Dr Ransome peered at the acres of fire-gutted stalls, a burnt-out maze through which cattle had once been steered. ‘This can’t be the camp. Unless they want us to build it.’