J. Ballard - Empire of the Sun

Jim straightened his blazer as a Japanese corporal climbed over the tail-gate. An angry man with wet boots, he shouted commands to the soldiers pushing the truck across the bridge. When they reached the opposite bank the soldiers walked along the water’s edge to their work on the railway bridge. The corporal began to abuse the driver, clearly disgusted by the condition of the prisoners. He drew his Mauser pistol and gestured to an anti-tank ditch on the bank they had left behind.

Jim was relieved when the corporal strode back to his bridge. However ill they were, he did not want them to rest in the tank ditch. It was an effort to sit on the bench, and he was tempted to lie on the floor next to Dr Ransome, so that he could stare straight at the sky. The landscape of paddy fields, creeks and deserted villages moved past, emerging from a white haze like the milled bones of all the dead of China. The dust cloaked the cabin and bonnet of the truck, camouflaging it for the realm it was about to enter. How long had they been on the road? The lines of burial mounds were trying to trick Jim’s eyes, they moved in waves towards the lumbering vehicle, a sea of the dead. The open coffins lay empty, ready to catch the American pilots who would soon fall from the air. There were thousands of coffins, enough to take Dr Ransome and Basie, his mother and father and Vera, Number Two Coolie and himself…

The truck had stopped, the cabin striking Jim’s head. A group of huts with tar-paper roofs stood beside the road, set back from a barbed-wire fence that separated them from the embankment of a canal. Idly, Jim gazed at this small internment camp built in the compound of a ceramics factory. A pair of metal lighters had capsized at their moorings, and miniature railcars still loaded with ceramic tiles stood in the yard beside the kilns. Two of the brick warehouses had been incorporated into the camp by the barbed-wire fence that divided the factory site. Men and women sunned themselves on the steps of the wooden huts, lines of washing fluttered between the windows, a cheerful spring semaphore.

Jim rested his chin on the side panel of the truck. Below him Dr Ransome was trying to sit up. The guard jumped from the tail-gate and walked towards the entrance, where a Shanghai University bus was surrounded by Japanese soldiers. The passengers stared through the dust-stained windows. There were two nuns in black wimples, several children of Jim’s age, and some twenty British men and women. Already a crowd of prisoners had gathered at the wire. Hands in the pockets of their ragged shorts, they stared silently as a Japanese sergeant boarded the bus to inspect the prisoners.

Dr Ransome was kneeling at the rear of the truck, the wound on his face hidden behind his hand. Jim stared at an Englishwoman in a frayed cotton dress who stood by the fence, her hands clasping the wire. She looked at him with the same expression that he had seen on the face of the German mother in the Columbia Road.

The bus was moving into the camp through the open gates. The Japanese sergeant stood in the passenger door, pistol in hand, waving back the crowd of prisoners. From their sullen faces it was clear that they greeted these new arrivals with little enthusiasm, more mouths to be fed from their meagre rations. Jim sat up as the truck lumbered forward to the gates. Dr Ransome fell to the floor, and was helped on to a seat by the English couple with the wicker suitcase.

Jim smiled at the woman walking along the wire. When she stretched a hand to him he wondered if she were a friend of his mother. The camp was filled with families, and somewhere among the strolling couples might be his parents. He peered at the English faces, at the gangs of boys laughing behind the Japanese sentries. To his surprise he felt a moment of regret, of sadness that his quest for his mother and father would soon be over. As long as he searched for them he was prepared to be hungry and ill, but now that the search had ended he felt saddened by the memory of all he had been through, and of how much he had changed. He was closer now to the ruined battlefields and this fly-infested truck, to the nine sweet potatoes in the sack below the driver’s seat, even in a sense to the detention centre, than he would ever be again to his house in Amherst Avenue.

The truck stopped by the gates. The Japanese sergeant peered over the tail-gate at the prisoners lying on the floor. He pushed Dr Ransome back with his Mauser, but the injured physician lowered himself to the ground, where he knelt at the sergeant’s feet, catching his breath. Already the crowd of internees had begun to disperse. Hands in their pockets, the men strolled back to the huts and sat with the women on the steps.

Flies swarmed over the truck and settled on the damp pools that covered the floor. They hovered around Jim’s mouth, feeding at the sores on his gums. For ten minutes the Japanese soldiers argued with each other, while the driver waited with Dr Ransome. Two senior British prisoners stepped through the gates and joined the discussion.

‘Woosung Camp?’

‘No, no, no…’

‘Who sent them? In this condition?’

Avoiding Dr Ransome, they approached the truck and stared at the prisoners through the cloud of flies. As Jim kicked his heels and whistled to himself they watched him without expression. The Japanese sentries opened the barbed-wire gates, but the British prisoners immediately closed them and began to shout at the Japanese sergeant. When Dr Ransome stepped forward to remonstrate with them the British waved him away.

‘Get back, man…’

‘We can’t take you, doctor. There are children here.’

Dr Ransome climbed into the truck and sat on the floor beside Jim. The effort of standing had exhausted him, and he lay back with his hand over his wound as the flies fought between his fingers.

Mrs Hug and the English couple with the wicker suitcase had waited silently through the arguments. As the Japanese soldiers returned to the camp and locked the gates Mrs Hug said: ‘They won’t take us. The British camp leaders…’

Jim gazed at the prisoners wandering across the compound. Groups of boys played football in the brick yard of the ceramics works. Were his mother and father hiding among the kilns? Perhaps, like the British camp leaders, they wanted Jim to go away, frightened of the flies and the sickness that he had brought with him from Shanghai.

Jim helped Basie and Dr Ransome to drink, and then sat on the opposite bench. He turned his back on the camp, on the British prisoners and their children. All his hopes rested in the landscape around him, in its past and future wars. He felt a strange lightness in his head, not because his parents had rejected him, but because he expected them to do so, and no longer cared.

In the hour before dusk they entered an area of abandoned battlefields nine miles to the south of Shanghai. The afternoon light rose into the air, as if returning to the sun a small part of the strength it had cast to the indifferent fields. The terrain of trenches and blockhouses seemed to have sprung fully armed from Jim’s head. A tank sat like a wheeled shack at the junction of the Shanghai and Hang-chow roads, the sun’s spotlights shining through its open hatches. The trenches hunted among the burial mounds, a maze lost within itself.

Beyond the crossroads a wooden bridge spanned a canal. Its white piles, from which the rain had leached all trace of resin, were as soft as pumice. The driver folded his map, and fanned himself with the canvas wallet, reluctant to risk his wheels on the worn timbers. Mrs Hug and the English couple sat at the back of the truck, their shadows reaching across the white beds of the drained paddy fields. Jim brushed the flies from Dr Ransome’s face and patted his head. He imagined that he was one of the shadows, a black carpet lying across the tired land. A mile to the south, between the burial mounds, he could see the tailplanes of a row of parked aircraft, feathers of bone against the darkening air. Jim studied the aircraft, recognizing the plump fuselages and radial engines. They were Brewster Buffaloes, a type of American fighter that had been no match for the Japanese.