The Harbour

by Francesca Brill

  ‘You are Major Field?’

  He couldn’t see who was asking this question but he nodded, relieved to hear a cultured Japanese voice.

  ‘You know what this is?’

  The officer leaned down and held a small coil of metal in front of Harry’s good eye.

  He shook his head, trying to speak. ‘I can’t see very well.’

  The officer pulled him up so that he was sitting. More pain. He cried out.

  The officer offered him the piece of metal to look at again.

  Harry peered at it, making a supreme effort to be helpful. ‘Maybe a mechanical part?’

  The officer spoke low and clearly. ‘This is a variable capacitor, a crucial item for building a radio transmitter, and it was smuggled into the camp for you in a tin of lard. Who sent it?’

  Harry was genuinely perplexed. ‘For me? I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never seen it before.’

  The officer sat back on his heels. ‘Where did you learn Japanese?’

  ‘Kyoto.’

  ‘I thought so. I can hear the accent.’

  ‘And you are from Tokyo?’

  ‘From the suburbs, yes.’ He regarded Harry for a moment. ‘You can help us, Major. It will be good for everybody.’

  Soon Harry was lying on a mattress on a truckle bed. He was wearing a clean cotton shirt and trousers. His wounds had been cleaned and bandaged. His broken bones were bound into splints. He still could not see very well. One eye had closed up completely and the other gave him only a blurred window on to the room. He felt like a human being again. So when the officer came to see him and afforded him respectful greetings before he sat close by his bed, Harry was filled with hope. His faith in the essential decency of the Japanese was reignited.

  ‘So, Major Field, maybe you can tell me something more about the radio part.’

  ‘I really have no idea, sir.’

  The officer leaned towards him and, laying his hand on Harry’s broken fingers, he squeezed. Harry yelled, caught by surprise.

  ‘I think you understand, Major, that some information would be most welcome.’

  ‘I don’t have any information.’ The officer released his fingers and Harry composed himself. ‘Look here, it can’t have been unexpected that there would be some form of resistance to your occupation. I suspect there are many people who will do everything they can to try and subvert your control. It’s only natural. But I am an officer in the British Army and I am here under your jurisdiction. I have no knowledge of the details of any such resistance.’

  The officer waited a moment before going on. ‘Why would such a thing be sent to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I am a senior officer. People would know that.’

  The officer stood up brusquely, scraping his chair across the dirt floor. He nodded a curt farewell.

  Harry raised his voice after him. ‘Thank you.’

  Moments later two guards stomped in and seized Harry, pulling him roughly to his feet. They dragged him to the door of the hut, from where he had a clear view of the parade ground.

  A line of young British and Canadian officers knelt on the parched grass, their hands tied behind their backs. The officer walked towards them and, raising his sword, he sliced the head off one of the boys. The young body stayed upright where it was for a second before keeling slowly to the right. Another boy, red-haired and skinny, screamed as the head rolled across the bumpy ground. A stream of blood spread across the arid earth. The others, brutalised, knew better than to draw attention to themselves and kept their eyes down. None of them looked up at the severed head. One man swayed and fell forward in a faint.

  The officer glanced over his shoulder at Harry and then raised his sword again. Harry yelled ‘No,’ and began to run towards the kneeling men. The row of eyes watched him with surprise and hope as he propelled himself towards them. But his bruised and weakened legs buckled and he stumbled and fell. The officer lowered his sword and walked back towards him.

  He spoke in Japanese. ‘You have something to tell me?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. Just please stop.’

  Pale under his freckles, the red-haired boy heard Harry reply in Japanese and, rigid with fear, he watched as the British major was raised to his feet by the Japanese officer and, with a Japanese arm around his shoulders, was helped back to the hut. The young soldier could not control his shaking even though the crisis seemed to be over. Orders came from one of the Japs. They were to pick up his mate’s body. His mate’s head.

  He yelled without thinking, ‘Fuck off, you fucking animals.’ Alarmed, one of the other men, older, more weary, put his hand on his shoulder.

  ‘It’s all right, Hopkins, leave it to us.’

  Nothing in Frank Hopkins’ nineteen years had allowed for the possibility of this experience.

  For Harry in the stifling hut the insistent voice of the Japanese interrogator was drowned out by the other voices in his head. Stevie comforted him with whispers from their lovemaking and then moments later she was challenging, afraid. ‘It’s all bullshit, you’re all the same. What’s the difference between you and them? Between us and them? Nothing – except that they have better boots.’

  ‘We’re defending a civilian population not killing them.’ Harry’s words were loud in his head but came out only as a murmur. The Japanese officer leaned towards him.

  ‘What was that? You must speak Japanese.’

  The man’s face came briefly into focus. Harry shook his head. ‘It’s not just the boots.’

  He was rewarded with another slap across the face.

  ‘I am a reasonable man, Major Field, and I don’t understand why you are insisting on the death of more of your colleagues.’

  Harry saw the blurry figure of his interrogator walk towards the door. The voices in his head became a cacophony: Hal’s screams, Stevie’s whispers, Takeda’s soft Japanese, and he felt his sense of self slip out of reach, and over it all he heard his own voice, acrid with resignation. ‘All right.’

  ‘You have something to say?’

  Harry, bent over on himself, began to talk.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It was Jishang who saw the first glimmer of lights on the coastal path. He and Chen were trying to collate their lists of the killed, wounded and missing.

  ‘Chun Lei-ming?’

  Chen shook his head. ‘No sign since she went to see the silk merchant in Shek-O.’

  ‘He was a new recruit?’

  ‘I haven’t met him. He came to us through reliable channels, though. Lei-ming is very canny.’

  Jishang raised his eyebrows. ‘She is also very young.’

  Chen was defensive. ‘Are you questioning our methods?’

  ‘No. But would you say she was missing? It’s been a week.’

  Chen reluctantly put her name in the missing column. It was a long one. The piece of paper was covered with spidery characters. Jishang had stood up from where he was squatting on the sandy floor and had moved to the door. Beyond the dark sand the moon lit a path over the waves. And then he had caught the glint of light somewhere far above them in the dense overgrowth of the cliff.

  His voice was low. ‘Why would Ping Wei come overland?’

  ‘He wouldn’t.’

  Chen joined Jishang at the door. There was another glimmer of light, moving along the path high above. It took them moments to extinguish the oil lamp and, slipping out of the hut, move soundlessly under the overhanging rock towards the small waterfall that gushed down the rock face. Stealthy and fast, first Chen and then Jishang disappeared behind the flowing water, pulling themselves up the sheer cliff with practised speed.

  They were far out of view and hidden in the curves of the neighbouring bay by the time the Japanese squadron swarmed into the hut. They did not see Ping Wei’s little boat chug to shore. They did not hear his screams. But the flames from the burning hut cast a glow into the sky which could be seen for some miles.

  Ping Wei’s torture and death were not offici
ally recorded anywhere.

  Harry’s horizons shrank to wrap him in a befuddled, slow-motion series of actions – breathe, eat, shuffle to and from the latrines. His injuries had healed enough to allow him to queue for food with the other men. He habitually kept his eyes on the ground so he could not see who was talking. But he could hear the loathing in the words.

  ‘If that fucking traitor Limey thinks he can come in here and lord it over us he has another think coming.’ Frank Hopkins’ freckles blazed in his sunburned face as he muttered to the Toronto man next to him.

  ‘He’s been kept separate since he got here, what’s that about? Special treatment doesn’t come for nothing.’

  The two young men considered this fact in silence. Frank eyed Harry’s stooped form as he waited in line a few paces ahead.

  ‘I saw him that day. The Jap bastard was giving him water. Looking after him, all fucking smirking and friendly. What do you think about that?’ A shrug from the other boy. ‘I’ll kill him if they don’t. I’ve twisted the necks of any number of creatures on the farm.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What happened to watching each other’s backs?’ He gave the ground a particularly vicious kick. ‘Well, from now on he’d better watch his.’

  Harry didn’t see Frank gather himself, he only saw the gobbet of spit as it landed in the thin stew in his bowl. He glanced up and caught the young Canadian man’s eyes and saw the fierce, unadulterated contempt. He looked away again instantly. What he saw in Frank’s eyes confirmed exactly what he felt for himself. He had no argument with it.

  Harry took his tainted bowl and sat on the ground, his back against the whitewashed barracks building. Those men closest to him made a point of shuffling further away. Harry ate the stew. He considered Frank’s saliva to be no more than he was due.

  The same thoughts played out in his clouded mind in a loop he could not escape. He grasped only at the faint hope that the fisherman’s hut had been found empty, though the fact that he had been allowed out among the other men implied that the Japanese had been satisfied with what, and whom, his betrayal had led them to. He welcomed his ostracism. He was not the man he had thought himself to be. For him there was no escape.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  March 1942

  Stevie did not have time to dwell on the assault in the Supreme Court. The news of Ping Wei’s death dismayed them all, as did the clear fact that they must have been betrayed. Amid much fevered and inconclusive speculation as to the source of the betrayal, the group had disbanded and Chen only very rarely slipped into, and quickly out of, the compound. Jishang had not reappeared; Chen claimed not to know where he was. There was no sign of Declan and she chose to take this as good news.

  Pressing concerns of day-to-day survival occupied Stevie’s waking hours. Even during a war and under a hostile occupation one still needed money and Stevie and Lily’s family had come to the end of their resources. Her overriding obsession was still finding powdered milk for Hal; she could not rest unless she had two reserve tins in her possession. There was, however, enough of her reporter’s instinct intact to ensure that she made notes of everything she heard and saw. The Chinese population was dying of starvation. The food supplies the British authorities had stockpiled for use during the expected months of siege were shipped to Japan. As were one thousand cows belonging to the Hong Kong Dairy Farm – leaving only five hundred on the island. Most of the Chinese members of the British Legislative Council were prevailed upon to join the Japanese ‘Rehabilitation Committee’, a committee that had no actual voice and was unable to do anything to prevent the systematic bleeding of the island’s resources. Supplies of all kinds diminished. Stevie had smiled when she saw a woman dressed in a perfectly cut cotton frock made out of mattress ticking. And Lily reported seeing two old school friends of hers in chic shorts made from Australian flour bags.

  One day she was in Cat Street, a steep, stepped alley lined with booths selling books. There were first editions, gold-embossed leather-bound books from the finest libraries of Hong Kong; medical and engineering encyclopaedias, rare, precious, beautiful and in every language known to man. They were being sold by the weight to be used as fuel. For a few yuen she bought a nineteenth-century copy of Milton, inscribed to a Chinese man from a fellow student at Cambridge University. As she carried it home, Paradise Lost weighed heavy in her hands.

  There were occasions in the night when an image or two would slip back into her mind: the scratched red leather on the desk, the highly polished wooden floor, his hand smoothing his hair, and she would choke on her panic and disgust. A shout from across a street in Japanese could render her paralysed and drowning in shame.

  Lily developed a fever. Stevie stayed in the compound, providing cold compresses for her forehead and changing her damp sheets. She didn’t resent it as such but she wasn’t exactly a born nurse. She bore it stoically but the added strain of not being able to go and get more supplies of milk while at the same time watching the current tin dwindle, drove her half-mad. On levering open the final tin she found that the powder in it had been replaced with flour by some unscrupulous market trader. She picked up her wallet and discovered to her dismay that she only had a few coins left. Something had to be done.

  The next day Lily was well enough to swallow a little soup and Stevie had formulated a plan.

  It was early evening by the time she got there. She stood for a few minutes on the road a little way from the main gate to calm herself after the exertion of climbing the hill. Her chest ached and her legs felt heavy. She knew she looked awful. When she was getting ready she had brushed her hair and been quietly distraught at the handfuls that had come out on to the brush. Applying the stub of her carefully rationed Revlon lipstick, she had stood back and, narrowing her eyes, thought that maybe despite everything she might pass muster, as long as he didn’t look too closely. She had put on her navy-blue dress with the white polka dots and puffed sleeves, tucked her thinning hair into a French plait and bound some of the sweetest-smelling jasmine she could find in the courtyard into a small posy tied with the last of her ribbons.

  The posy had wilted slightly during the journey, as had she, but she held it firmly as she approached the gate. Previously, she had only ever been here in a car and had not thought about how one might actually get in if arriving on foot. She searched for a moment or two before she saw a door bell half-hidden by wisteria. She watched the white-uniformed servant walk along the gravel drive towards her as if she were watching a scene from a movie, something familiar but imagined. It did not seem possible that this groomed and quiet existence was real whilst in the alleys and streets of the city far below people were scrabbling to survive on their wits against all the odds. She announced herself and was admitted.

  She followed the man through the lush, tropical simulation of an English country garden. It felt like a holiday to smell the delicate, fresh scents of grass and lavender. She had grown used to the reek of the destroyed city and she barely noticed it any more, except occasionally when a particularly foul stench, a mixture of decomposing bodies and human excrement, wound through the streets. She slowed her pace and inhaled the memory of happier times.

  Takeda was standing at the edge of the perfect grass carpet surrounded by blooming roses. He aimed a bow and arrow at the archery target at the far end of the lawn. The string vibrated with tension. Then the arrow was released and with a thud it hit the target.

  Stevie walked a few steps behind the manservant. She was transfixed by the whiteness of his gloves against the green, green grass. As they approached, Takeda squinted at them before he recognised her. Then he dropped the bow and held out his arms as if to a long-lost relative.

  ‘Miss Steiber!’ He seemed genuinely delighted, moved, even. ‘My goodness, what a pleasure.’ He came forward, stepping over the abandoned archery equipment.

  Stevie held out her hand and discovered that she too felt moved by the sight of him. Her voice was not as firm as she would have l
iked it to be.

  ‘Mr Takeda. I hope you don’t mind.’ She glanced over her shoulder at the impassive servant and lowered her voice further. ‘I don’t know if you remember but you said that if I ever needed help.’

  Takeda kept his voice level and his smile warm as he shook her hand vigorously,

  ‘Of course. Of course. May I offer you a drink of some kind?’ And he lay a solicitous hand on the small of her back as he led the way towards the open French windows. He felt her flinch at his touch and let his hand fall.

  She relished the comfort of the soft sofa as she waited for the tea to be poured. The Japanese ceremony was almost as convoluted as the English. There were cakes and pastries laid out on a tray and almost before she realised it she was eating one. And then another. The buttery sweetness was overwhelming and while she ate she surreptitiously felt the smooth cotton chintz of the sofa with her other hand and enjoyed the miraculous cool of the lovely room. The curtains hung in an elegant sweep and the parquet floor gleamed with polish. For a moment the image of Madame Kung gliding over that very floor flashed into her mind. It was two and a half years since that first decisive encounter. Two and a half years and a lifetime ago. She glanced up and looked around the room again. There wasn’t a hint of dust on the gilt frame of the old-fashioned hunting painting hanging above the fireplace. Silver-framed photographs on the closed lid of the baby grand piano were reflected in the glossy black wood. Madame Kung would have approved. But the photos were of other people. Other smiles in other places.