The Empire Trilogy

by J. G. Farrell

  Until Manchukuo had bought the Chinese Eastern Railway from the Soviet Government the year before the Major’s visit, there had at least been a large contingent of Soviet railway employees in Harbin to patronize the Russian shops and cafés, but by the time he had arrived even this flimsy economic support had been pulled from under the refugees. The railwaymen had returned to Russia, leaving the refugees to destitution. At one time there had been 80,000 of them; by the time the Major had arrived this number had dwindled by half. Those young and strong enough had gone south to look for some means of support in a China which was itself ravaged by famine and bandit armies. Those who stayed in Harbin very often starved. The Major himself had seen ragged white men pulling rickshaws in Harbin.

  Vera Chiang had spent her childhood and adolescence in Harbin: that much was certainly true for when the Major had questioned her about it she had known every corner of the city. Her mother had died there, ‘of a broken heart’, she said sometimes; ‘of TB’ she said at others. She had only been a child then. Her father had gone south to try to establish another business to replace the one he had lost in the Revolution in Russia, leaving her in a school run by American missionaries. Thus she had learned to speak English. How sad and lonely she had been! she had told the Major with a tear sparkling in her eye, while the Major murmured comfortingly; he had never been able to resist a woman in distress. But how much worse her life had become when a message, long-delayed, had reached her from her father. He was lying ill, broken by poverty, in Canton. ‘Selling the last of my mother’s rings I set out …’ Easily affected by feminine distress though he was, the Major had been assailed by misgivings at this point … But still, one never knew. One thing was certain: you had to account for Vera Chiang somehow! Her Russian recollections were not very convincing, though. Furs, and icicles on window-panes, and snow on the rooftops, steam hanging in the ‘biting air’ from the horse’s nostrils, and jewels winking at the throat of the noblewomen who had leaned over her cot, for she had been a baby at the time of the Revolution, of course, the sleigh’s runners hissing in the snow as they glided east to escape the Bolsheviks, her own little black almond-shaped eyes completely surrounded by fur, gazing out over the interminable, frozen wastes of Russia. That sort of thing. It was not impossible, of course. Above all, it was the mother’s rings that made the Major uneasy. The reason was this. In a Shanghai nightclub the Major had found himself talking to one of the hostesses, a beautiful Russian girl, also a princess, who after one or two decorous waltzes had confessed her predicament to him: the following morning, as soon as the pawnbroker’s shop opened for business, she would have to pawn her mother’s wedding ring in order to prevent her younger sister from selling herself as a prostitute. Good gracious! What a business! What could the Major do but try to help avert this calamity? Well, you see, the Major’s dilemma was that sometimes these stories were true. Not very often, perhaps, but sometimes.

  The Major had frozen into an attitude of despair, staring unseeing at the sparking-plug in his hand. Perhaps sensing that his thoughts had taken a bleak turn, The Human Condition left its perilous couch under the wheel of the Lagonda and crept over to lean its chin on his shoe, revolving its bulging eyeballs upwards to scan the Major’s gloomy features. Could it be that the Major was brooding over the best way to have a dog done away with? But no, the Major was still thinking of refugees, this time of those who had managed to escape from Harbin, moving south to where there were other cities with foreign concessions, to Tientsin and farther, to Shanghai. But even in Shanghai there were many Russians who found themselves starving side by side with the most wretched of Chinese coolies, obliged to sleep on the streets or in the parks through the bitter Chinese winter, candidates to join the grim regiment of ‘exposed corpses’. These gaunt scarecrows for a few years had haunted the foreign concessions. But time is cruel: people get shaken down into a society or shaken out. History moves on and the problem gets solved, one way or another, without regard to our finer feelings.

  And Vera? Her father, she said, had had a stroke and was half paralysed. She had gone to Canton to support him as best she could (the Major had tactfully refrained from asking how). They were in destitution. Presently he had died and she had moved on to Shanghai. She had lived there for a couple of years until there had been some trouble with a Japanese officer. Then, with the help of some friends, she had come here to Singapore.

  Well, was she indeed the daughter of a Russian princess and a Chinese tea-merchant? Was it likely that a Russian princess would marry a Chinese tea-merchant? No, but many strange alliances had been bonded in the bubbling retort of the Revolution in its early years. Vera, now in her early twenties, would be just about the right age, certainly, to be the product of such a desperate union. In Harbin, he recalled, it had been a common sight to see young women of noble blood sweeping out the Russian shops on Novogorodnaya Street or waiting at café tables beneath the inevitable, gradually yellowing portrait of the last Tsar. In such desperate circumstances people will do whatever is necessary to survive. Moreover, as the circumstances grew more desperate it had turned out, like it or not, that an attractive Russian girl, princess or dairy-maid, had at least something to sell … if only herself. In Harbin, he had heard, British and American visitors were sometimes approached by destitute Russians inviting them to abscond with the wives they could no longer support. The Major himself had been approached in that nightmare city by a young Russian girl in rags, anxious to exchange the use of her body for a meal. He sighed. Sometimes in Harbin he had wished he had never left London; if this was what finding out about ‘life’ entailed he would rather have remained in ignorance.

  In Shanghai things had not been quite so bad. Attractive Russian girls could do better there, it transpired, because white taxi-girls were very popular with wealthy Chinese and could earn a reasonable living in the city’s dance-halls and cabarets. They earned, he had been told, two Chinese dollars commission on every bottle of champagne they sold. Moreover, in the brothels of Shanghai, while a Chinese girl was available from one Chinese dollar upwards, the minimum price for a white girl had been ten dollars. And for the princely sum of fifty dollars, so the Major had been informed on good authority, you could have a nude dance performed in the privacy of your own home or hotel room, by six Russian girls. The Major, despite the urgings of his informant, had not been tempted: it was not that he had been daunted by the expense; it was simply that he could not visualize himself cloistered in his hotel room with six naked White Russian ladies … perhaps even unclothed members of Russia’s fallen aristocracy. Besides (he found himself calculating providently), even for the libidinous it did not seem such very good value since, for another ten dollars, you could have enjoyed the six girls severally at the going rates.

  Now in turn the nightclubs of Shanghai grew blurred and were replaced by a sparking-plug lying in a wrinkled palm and by a pair of bleary, anxious eyes. The Major turned the palm over to look at the watch on his wrist. The light was beginning to fade and it was a little cooler. Matthew, still looking weary, was struggling out of the Lagonda. With a sigh the Major replaced the plug in the pump and went to wash his hands. He had accepted an invitation to eat with Mr Wu, the Chinese businessman who had joined the Mayfair AFS unit. As he climbed the steps to the verandah he paused for a moment to look up while a single Blenheim bomber droned acros the opal sky in the direction of Kallang aerodrome. Later, he picked up the Straits Times, while waiting for Mr Wu, to read about how black things were looking for the Japanese.

  34

  From the beginning the Major and Mr Wu had conceived a great liking for each other. Each, indeed, recognized in the other a person so much after his own heart that it swiftly became clear to Mr Wu that the Major was simply an English Mr Wu, and to the Major that Mr Wu was nothing less than a Chinese Major. Mr Wu had even, some ten years earlier, served in what the Major supposed must have been the Kuomintang Air Force in China, for on one occasion he had given the Major a card on which,
beneath a sprinkling of Chinese characters, one could read in English: ‘Captain Wu. Number 5 Pursuiting Squadron.’ The Major, in any case, since his arrival in the East had realized that there was no other race or culture on earth that he admired so much as the Chinese, for their tact, for their politeness, their good nature, their industry and their sense of humour. And Mr Wu combined all these virtues with a great warmth of character. He and the Major got on like a house on fire, a friendship conducted as much with smiles as with words because while Mr Wu’s grasp of English was loose the Major, for his part, could get no purchase on Cantonese at all.

  Now they were sitting together smiling in a companionable silence in the back of Mr Wu’s elderly Buick on the way to some restaurant. Meanwhile, the Major was once more pondering the question of whether the Chinese community would remain loyal. If all the Chinese were like Mr Wu they would certainly help defend Malaya against the Japanese as staunchly as if it were their own country. For the Straits-born Chinese, of course, it really was their own country, but did they regard it as such? For the Major, no less than Walter, was worried about the prospects for Malaya’s plural society when faced with the homogeneity of Japan. What chance would muddled, divided Malaya have against the efficiency and discipline he had seen everywhere on his visit to Manchukuo and to Japan itself?

  After several months in the Far East the Major had been amazed to find trains running more regularly than they did in Europe: on his way to Harbin from Dairen he had taken the Asia, the 60-m.p.h. luxury express that was the pride of the South Manchuria Railway Company. Why, it had even had a library of books in English for the delectation of its Anglo-Saxon passengers! But you should not, for all that, think that you were in an imitation Western country: if, as the train began to pull out of the station, you happened to look out at the people on the platform who had come to see their friends off, you would see no emotional waving or shouting: you would see instead that they folded themselves to the ground and bowed low to the departing train, all together like a cornfield in a sudden gale. The Major had received a little shock when he had seen that; he had allowed himself to forget just how different the Japanese were from Europeans.

  Yes, the Japanese, thought the Major beaming at his friend, Mr Wu (where were they going, by the way?), were an astonishingly determined and disciplined people. They believed in doing things properly, even in Manchukuo. In the barbers’ shops there they even went so far as to wash clients’ ears in eau de Cologne! You only had to see what they had accomplished … the rebuilding of Changchun, for instance, formerly a mere collection of hovels, into a modern city with electric light, drains, parks, hospitals, libraries and even a zoo. There was, besides, that which no civilized modern city could possibly do without: a golf course!

  Some young Japanese officers, seeing that the Major, from force of habit, was travelling with his ancient wooden golf clubs in his luggage, had invited him to play a few holes with them at the golf links on the outskirts of the city. He had declined the opportunity to play but had gone along to watch. For half the year, the officers explained, one was obliged to drive off into the teeth of the Siberian winter, for the other half into a Mongolian dust-storm. The Major had watched from the club-house, intrigued, as his new friends, wearing respirators, vanished gamely into the clouds of dust, driven here for hundreds of miles over the plains by the never-ceasing wind. Here and there the Major could see a patch of snow but not a single blade of grass (grass had been imported, he was told, but had not survived). Certainly, the Japanese were determined to do things properly!

  In due course the young officers had returned, having surrendered a prodigious number of golf balls to the Mongolian plain, true, but with the obligations to civilized modern living thoroughly satisfied. Next they had whisked the Major, whom they had now identified not only as golfer and gentleman but as a brother officer into the bargain, off to a nearby inn for a meal of raw fish and eggs washed down by gallons of warm saké. With the utmost sincerity and good fellowship they explained to the Major as best they could in a mixture of English, French and German, how distressed they had been by certain apparently anti-Japanese démarches taken by the British in their China policy. They themselves, they explained, did not feel the ill-will towards the British that many of their young comrades felt. No, they felt more sorrow than anger that Britain should support the Nanking Government in its anti-Japanese behaviour and believed it was because the respected British people were so far away that they did not fully understand what the bandit war-lords of the Kuomintang were up to.

  The Major, at the best of times, had trouble making up his mind about these perplexing international issues; but squatting on the floor of the inn with his new friends, some of whom wore military uniform, others kimonos, he soon found that the saké had stolen clean away with even those few elements of the situation which he believed he had grasped. To make matters worse, just as he felt he was beginning at last to get his teeth into the problem, a geisha girl dressed and painted like a charming little doll suddenly appeared and sang a song like that of a lonely wading-bird in a remote Siberian river, so charming, so melancholy, on and on it went, reedy, lyrical, moving, and sad … the Major was transfixed by its sadness and beauty and could have gone on listening for hours, but wait, what was it he had been about to say about the Nanking Government?

  ‘It is sincere wish, Major Archer,’ declared one of his more articulate companions, throwing off yet another thimbleful of saké, ‘that when we have cleared away bad China policy Japan and England co-operate in friendship for economic develop of China.’

  ‘Well, I must say …’ the Major agreed affably, while someone else was saying that they were not interesting in helping Osaka merchants attack Lancashire merchants (‘Well, that’s splendid!’ declared the Major heartily). They were against Big Business and their only desire was to spread Japanese National Spirit, although for the moment they might be obliged to make use of Big Business for their own ends such as develop of Manchuko. Yes, it was the Japanese National Spirit which was the important thing!

  ‘I must say I thoroughly approve of your Japanese National Spirit,’ said the Major holding his thimble of saké aloft and smiling.

  ‘Ah so?’ His companions looked surprised and gratified by this remark. The Major, who had merely been attempting a pleasantry, was a little disconcerted but thought it best not to explain. It was not the first time that one of his jokes had failed to find its mark.

  Encouraged by the Major’s approval, his friends now began to enlarge on National Spirit though this was not easy to define. There were many aspects of it: Loyalty to Emperor: the Major had perhaps visited Tokyo and seen ordinary citizens stand beside the huge moat surrounding the Imperial Palace and bow towards the gate which the Emperor sometimes used? Then there were Morals, too: not long ago a group of patriotic young students had burst into a dance being held at a fashionable Tokyo hotel and obliged all Japanese couples to leave the floor as ‘a disgrace to the country’ … (‘I say, that’s a bit steep, isn’t it?’ murmured the Major) … but, of course, foreigners were not molested. It was, the Major should understand, to protect national ideals and national customs against the taint of foreign influence that such action was necessary. In schools, too, it was most important that national purity and loyalty to Emperor should be maintained. An officer on the Major’s right, who took a particular interest in education, now withdrew a book from the folds of his kimono and began to talk with great emphasis, his dark eyes burning.

  The Major had noticed this particular fellow earlier because he had made a bit of a scene out at the golf club. While his comrades had been teeing up their balls and peering at them through the windows of their respirators before driving off into the swirling dust-clouds on a compass bearing for the first green, this man had begun shouting at them from a distance and waving his arms, making quite a din despite the howling of the wind. Since they paid no great attention to him he came, presently, to stand directly in front of where they
were shifting their feet and waggling their wrists over their golf balls, in the very direction in which they were about to drive off. Not content with that, he even unbuttoned the tunic of his uniform to expose his naked chest to the bitter wind. And he had gone on standing there, still shouting, until two or three of the golfers had thrown down their clubs and led him gently aside. He had watched them morosely then from a distance while they began their ritual once more, shouting at them from time to time.

  ‘Ah Scotland tradition bad Japan tradition,’ muttered the officer who had stayed behind in the club-house to keep the Major company, and he had looked quite upset about something or other.

  This man who had tried to stand in the way of the golf balls was the fellow who had now launched into a passionate discourse. Although, his companions explained, he had mastered several Western languages ‘as a mental discipline’ and spoke them fluently, he declined to use them, even speaking with a foreigner … so one of his brother-officers was obliged to interpret for the Major as best he could. This book in his hand was, he explained, a text book used in schools: he began to translate what the Major supposed must be chapter headings: Tea Raising, Our Town, The Emperor, Healthy Body, Persimmons, Great Japan, Cherry Blossom, Getting Up Early, The Sun and the Wind, Loyal Behaviour … and so on. (‘Charming,’ said the Major, ‘but I don’t think I quite …’) These subjects in book were designed to make good loyal Japanese citizen working hard for good of Japanese nation!

  The officer at the Major’s elbow, his eyes (no doubt refuelled by the saké) smouldering more fiercely than ever, was now reading excitedly from the chapter on Military Loyalty, only pausing occasionally to aim a look of hatred and loathing at the Major. ‘The object of lesson is to arouse Loyalty-feeling and foster purpose of self-sacrificing for Emperor. He tells story of how in war with China our soldiers fall into ambush at dead of night and enemy fire on them at close range. Instead of cowardly retreating they are full of Self-Sacrifice-feeling and rush on and Bugler Kikuchi, who badly wounded, keep bugle to lips and sound bugle with dying breath …’ (‘Well, upon my word …’ said the Major.)