Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

As soon as the waiter passed me, I followed him. His silver tray bobbed pleasantly in time with the tune he was whistling, now and then catching the glare of a ceiling light. He repeated the melody of The Thieving Magpie over and over like a magic spell. What kind of opera was The Thieving Magpie? I wondered. All I knew about it was the monotonous melody of its overture and its mysterious title. We had had a recording of the overture in the house when I was a boy. It had been conducted by Toscanini. Compared with Claudio Abbado's youthful, fluid, contemporary performance, Toscaninis had had a blood-stirring intensity to it, like the slow strangulation of a powerful foe who has been downed after a violent battle. But was The Thieving Magpie really the story of a magpie that engaged in thievery? If things ever settled down, I would have to go to the library and look it up in an encyclopedia of music. I might even buy a complete recording of the opera if it was available. Or maybe not. I might not care to know the answers to these questions by then.

The whistling waiter continued walking straight ahead, with all the mechanical regularity of a robot, and I followed him at a fixed distance. I knew where he was going without even having to think about it. He was delivering the fresh bottle of Cutty Sark and the ice and glasses to Room 208. And indeed, he came to a stop in front of Room 208. He shifted the tray to his left hand, checked the room number, drew himself up, and gave the door a perfunctory knock. Three knocks, then another three.

I couldn't tell whether there was any answer from within. I was hiding behind the vase, watching the waiter. Time passed, but the waiter went on standing at attention, as though planning to challenge the limits of endurance. He did not knock again but waited for the door to open. Eventually, as if in answer to a prayer, the door began to open inward.

Boris kept his promise. We Japanese war prisoners were given partial autonomy and allowed to form a representative committee. The colonel was the committee chairman. From then on, the Russian guards, both civil and military, were ordered to cease their violent behavior, and the committee became responsible for keeping order in the camp. As long as we caused no trouble and met our production quotas, they would leave us alone. That was the ostensible policy of the new politburo member (which is to say, the policy of Boris). These reforms, at first glance so democratic, should have been great news for us prisoners of war.

But things were not as simple as they seemed. Taken up with welcoming the new reforms, we were too stupid to see the cunning trap that Boris had set for us. Supported by the secret police, Boris was in a far more powerful position than the new politburo member, and he proceeded to make over the camp and the town as he saw fit. Intrigue and terrorism became the order of the day. Boris chose the strongest and most vicious men from among the prisoners and the civilian guards (of which there was no small supply), trained them, and made them into his own personal bodyguards. Armed with guns and knives and clubs, this handpicked contingent would take care of anyone who resisted Boris, threatening and physically abusing them, sometimes even beating them to death on Boris' orders. No one could lay a hand on them. The soldiers sent out on an individual basis from regular army units to guard the mine would pretend not to see what was happening under their noses. By then, not even the army could touch Boris. Soldiers stayed in the background, keeping watch over the train station and their own barracks, opting an attitude of indifference with regard to what went on in the mine and the camp.

Boris' favorite among his handpicked guard was a prisoner known as The Tartar, who had supposedly been a Mongolian wrestling champion. The man stuck to Boris like a shadow.

He had a big burn scar on his right cheek, which people said he had gotten from torture.

Boris no longer wore prison clothes, and he moved into a neat little cottage that was kept clean for him by a woman inmate.

According to Nikolai (who was becoming increasingly reluctant to talk about anything), several Russians he knew had simply disappeared in the night. Officially, they were listed as missing or having been involved in accidents, but there /as no doubt they had been taken care of by Boris' henchmen. Peoples lives sere now in danger if they failed to follow Boris' orders or if they merely failed to please him. A few men tried to complain directly to Party Central about the abuses going on in camp, but that was the last anyone ever saw of them. I heard they even killed a little kid-a seven-year-old-to keep his parents in line. Beat him to death while they watched, Nikolai whispered to me, pale-faced.

At first Boris did nothing so crude as that in the Japanese zone. He concentrated his energies instead on gaining complete control over the Russian guards in the area and solidifying his foothold there. He seemed willing for the moment to leave the Japanese prisoners in charge of their own affairs. And so, for the first few months after the reform, we were able to enjoy a brief interval of peace. Those were tranquil days for us, a period of genuine calm. The committee was able to obtain some reduction in the harshness of the labor, however slight, and we no longer had to fear the violence of the guards. For the first time since our arrival, we were able to feel something like hope. People believed that things were going to get better.

Not that Boris was ignoring us during those few honeymoon months. He was quietly arranging his pieces to gain the greatest strategic advantage. He worked on the Japanese committee members individually, behind the scenes, using bribes or threats to bring them under his control. He avoided overt violence, proceeding with the utmost caution, and so no one noticed what he was doing. When we did finally notice, it was too late. Under the guise of granting us autonomy, he was throwing us off our guard while he fashioned a still more efficient system of control. There was an icy, diabolical precision to his calculations. He succeeded in eliminating random violence from our lives, only to replace it with a new kind of coldly calculated violence.

After six months of firming up his control structure, he changed direction and began applying pressure on us. His first victim was the man who had been the central figure on the committee: the colonel. He had confronted Boris directly to represent the interests of the Japanese prisoners of war on several issues, as a result of which he was eliminated. By that time, the colonel and a few of his cohorts were the only members of the committee who did not belong to Boris. They suffocated him one night, holding him down while one of them pressed a wet towel to his face. Boris ordered the job done, of course, though he never dirtied his own hands when it came to killing Japanese. He issued orders to the committee and had other Japanese do it. The colonels death was written off simply as the result of illness. We all knew who had killed him, but no one could talk about it. We knew that Boris had spies among us, and we had to be careful what we said in front of anyone. After the colonel was murdered, the committee voted for Boris' handpicked candidate to fill his chair.

The work environment steadily deteriorated as a result of the change in the makeup of the committee, until finally things were as bad as they had ever been. In exchange for our autonomy, we made arrangements with Boris on our production quotas, the setting of which became increasingly burdensome for us. The quota was raised in stages, under one pretext or another, until finally the work forced upon us became harsher than ever. The number of accidents also escalated, and many Japanese soldiers lent their bones to the soil of a foreign land, victims of reckless mining practices. Autonomy meant only that we Japanese now had to oversee our own labor in place of the Russians who had once done it.