The Devil's Garden (25 page)

* * * 

HK hoped to God no one would see him. He had been totally taken aback when Lily had said to him, quite casually, as she brushed her hair, ‘If you want to contact the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army I can fix it.' First, he had not realised that he had been so open, that she knew so much. And then, it had been as if his mother had suddenly offered to turn his banana money into American War Bonds with full loss indemnity overnight. He had avoided all further mention of it until the news of VE Day. The Japanese newspapers shrugged off the German surrender as the removal of an encumbrance, an act that brought new focus and efficiency to the war but no one was fooled. The British, Americans, Australians, Dutch, French were coming back as landlords and would not be pleased at what their tenants had been up to with the fixtures and fittings. There were rumours of coups and assassinations in Tokyo and some said the Americans had repeated their success with Yamamoto and shot down a plane full of high-ranking commanders. Everywhere was prevarication and faction, a sense of people waiting for the proper moment to switch loyalties. And, for the first time, he had been reading things, books, the naked power of ideas. They were intoxicating, like someone used to well-watered wine who encounters neat brandy for the first time. Abstract nouns did not just name things out there in the world. They actually had the power to conjure them into existence, to carve reality into different joints of meat so that, for the first time, it trembled on the edge of intelligibility. It had started as a necessary preparation for dealing with the MPAJA. He would master their arguments, refute them, convert them. But as he worked his way through the pamphlets and magazines supplied by a discontented cousin in the Penang motor trade, he began to relish the pungent phrases, the deliberately inverted view of all he had previously known and felt himself grow. Revolution was a revelation. Loh Ching was not his intellectual superior after all, but merely a stupid victim of false consciousness. He was not even a free man, simply a running-dog of imperialist capitalists, a lackey. It was deeply comforting.

They had set out in the constant, needling rain that stitched the days together as soon as the morning rush started up. Lily was very smart today, modern hairstyle, black and white print dress with puff sleeves, ivory makeup and red lipstick. As a lover of American movies, HK had known to cunningly splash his numberplates, divorcee-fashion, with mud to conceal them but now the same rain that made his windscreen dirty washed them clean again. There were patrols everywhere and, on the bridges, they did not just look at the number plates, they jotted the numbers down in notebooks, shielding them under their sodden raincapes. Overhead, thunder grumbled melodramatically in a sky that swirled like a bad oyster and, once they were clear of the city and heading northwest, they met battle-stained heavy artillery pieces rolling southward with hair-triggered, frightened troops astride them and had to show HK's special pass to get through. The wet road hissed suspicion under the worn tyres and in the grim military traffic, HK's flashy American saloon stuck out like a tutu on an elephant. He wanted to give up but Lilly soothed.

‘It's not far now, darling, but we shall have to walk from here. We daren't take the car. Pull in behind that bamboo.' She kicked off her elegant shoes into the well under the dashboard and was out of the door, even before he had put on the handbrake, barefoot, the mud squeezing up between her toes and laughing in the rain that tasted like stale sweat. HK had no choice but to follow, grabbing his hat and ditching jacket and tie onto the back seat and crackling clumsily through the scabby stems as Lily splashed, still giggling, up the track, like a child playing in a storm drain, oblivious to her wet hair. He panted after her, slipping and sliding on his smooth, leather soles and they went for some twenty minutes before she paused and grinned round at him, her soaked dress offering an X-ray of stylish underwear and he teetered up to her laughing and then realised the green bushes on either side were suddenly melting into men in olive uniforms with young, hard faces and that horrible, arrogant chink of loose metal that betokens armed force. Their eyes held a hunger that he thought, at first, might be lust inspired by Lily. Then he saw that it was just that. They were simply hungry. More men appeared behind and drove them, like silent sheepdogs, up the path, where finally an older man in civilian dress stepped out from the trees. Despite his shabby dress, he bore an unmistakable air of authority, like a senior consultant in a hospital who sloughs off the sad vanity of white coat, stethoscope and title to become plain ‘Mr' in a worn tweed suit. He held out his arms to Lily. She ran to him and they kissed with disconcerting passion on the lips. HK froze and watched, feeling the stale, fishy breath of the man behind him on his neck, making his hair stand on end, half in expectation of a blow.

‘Lily!' The man held her at arm's length and looked at her an enchanted smile on his face. HK moved up to them anxiously and the man eyed him, with a curl of the lip, over Lily's shoulder as HK held out his hand.

‘Introduce me, Lily. Is this your uncle? Your father? How do you do.'

She half-turned to look at him and laughed with a squeeze of bitterness in the sound.

‘Would I kiss my father like that? What are you thinking? That would be most improper.' She blushed. ‘HK this is my husband.'

HK gulped. His mouth gaped. On this journey, he had been taken for a ride. But wait. He considered himself a modern man. After all, had he not seen the plays of Noel Coward, at the Victoria Theatre, in the company of Erica and with gin and tonics served at the interval? And the embarrassment, surely, was entirely for the husband in a situation like this. Yet there was the man smiling at him with every appearance of triumphant friendliness. He set his shoulders and smiled back.

‘How do you do?' he repeated, suavely. ‘I should like to talk to you about workers' control of factories.'

* * * 

Above the clouds over the city of Kokura two silver B-29 aircraft circled peacefully. From 32,000 feet below they were silent and all but invisible in the thick cloud. Small groups of planes were usually for reconnaissance only and ignored by the ill-supplied Japanese air force to save fuel. Kokura did not know how lucky a city it was. Three days earlier, it had been designated an alternative target for the first atomic bomb, ‘Little Boy', should Hiroshima be overcast. But it was August and Horoshima's citizens were blessed with a bright and sunny day. At the central tram terminus, at the moment of detonation, a female employee was wrestling with the difficult electrical contacts as she turned the tram around. You were not supposed to do that on your own in case the power cables got snagged. As the entire city was vaporised about her, she emerged miraculously unscathed and assumed that this was something she had done through her disregard of tram regulations. When she learned that it was in fact a terrible secret weapon unleashed by the enemy, she felt nothing but the greatest possible relief. After all, she might have been disgraced and dismissed
.

Now, three days later, the residents of Kokura were still not feeling particularly lucky. Part of the cloud cover was the result of a huge pall of smoke from a recent incendiary raid by American bombers that had raged through the ancient wooden houses and torn the heart out of their city. But it saved them from receiving ‘Fat Man', a bomb of much improved design, on their heads, for the flight-commander, running short of fuel, diverted to nearby Nagasaki where his bombardier applied the aiming skills he had recently acquired over Singapore. It seemed, at first, that Nagasaki too was cloudy, preventing visual targeting of the bomb and various other packages of instruments, as well as a letter to a noted Japanese physicist who was urged to convince the authorities of the threat posed by the present weapon. This ensured that he would be promptly arrested and held incommunicado as a collaborator. A radar-guided attack was one alternative, or they might just ditch the weapon in the sea on the way back to their base on the Marianas Islands where it would make a fine splash. And then there came a sudden break in the cloud cover and the bomb was released, twirling, into a shaft of redemptive Old Testament sunlight. 43 seconds later, at a height of some 1500 feet, it exploded some two miles off target, above the Urakami Valley, destroying the cathedral and many of the Christians who lived around it, traditionally the people who acted as mediators between Japan and the dangerous outside. One man had survived the Hiroshima bomb and been evacuated to the hospital in Nagasaki, arriving just in time to meet the second atomic bomb. Owing to the unusual topography of the city, he survived that too, making him either the luckiest or unluckiest man on the face of the planet, while a small, residential valley, running north east, was shielded by high hills except where the blast waves, five in number, ricocheted off the slopes in walls of volcanic heat that melted rock back to lava. Worst hit was a little settlement with a river running through it and a large meadow in which little girls had practised to receive their invaders with bamboo spears
.

* * * 

‘It's time.' The string vest commando cracked his knuckles and worked his jaw. Other dark forms lurked at the back of the shelter, shouldering up bags, eyes gleaming out of blackened faces. Electricity crackled in the air. ‘The Nips are being kicked out of Burma. Our lads'll be back here any day. It's time even if it means missing the life-drawing classes just as I was getting interested.' Corporal Higgins knew he needed to be brave. He sat up straight and fought to keep the trembling out of his voice. He reached out and gripped Dong-ju's hand.

‘We've talked about it. You know he's Korean, not Japanese. He didn't volunteer. They conscripted him by force. He just wants to go home like us.' He was sweating too much. Dong-ju tried to smile but his face couldn't quite manage it and the mouth fell apart. String vest splayed a huge, gnarled hand over the top of his head and applied just enough pressure to be threatening, as if it were a melon he might choose to crush at any moment. The trio looked like some sort of old-fashioned mind-reading act in a music hall.

‘We're all agreed then. The Japs are getting jumpy. They could wipe the lot of us out at any time. We're not sitting here waiting to made into roadfill. We'll at least die for a worthwhile cause. Our best hope is to get across the strait to the mainland and join the MPAJA before the massacre starts. Your mate's job here is to cover our tracks for 24 hours to give us time to get clear and across the water. Like I say, all he has to do is not notice our absence when he does roll-call in our hut. After that, he can do whatever he has to do to save his own arse. Make sure he understands that.'

‘He understands.' Higgins worried at the end of a loose thought. ‘Why should you trust him—after you're gone? What's to stop him sounding the alarm anyway just to take no chances?' String vest smirked and grasped Dong-ju's head again, squeezed rhythmically as if appraising the skull for ripeness.

‘Oh. That's easy. Didn't I mention, Higgins? You're coming with us under the wire. If anything goes wrong, we make sure you're the first one to get it, sunshine, so you'd better hope he really likes you. No, I mean,
really
likes you. Right?' They all laughed. ‘You tell him that.' He bent and addressed the Korean with exaggerated mouthing as you would a dog, looking into the worried and confused eyes. ‘You comprendo?' and waggled his head in a forced doggy nod.

* * * 

Captain Oishi was dazed and baffled. Respectfully prostrate on the floor of his quarters, as was proper in the presence of divinity, he began to wonder how much longer the Emperor's broadcast would last. The odd, poetic palace language was difficult to understand, even for a graduate such as himself, and it was made worse by the hiss, showing it to be not the true Emperor but a phonograph recording that might be the Emperor, except that no one had ever heard his voice before, so how could you tell? It could all be some terrible trick by the enemy. He felt the air go out of him, like one of his wounded balloons, at the thought of such infamy. This must surely be some new exhortation to greater effort, stauncher resistance, acceptance of deeper suffering. His back was aching. He humbly accepted the pain for the nation.

‘…
Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilisation.'

With horror, he realized that this was something far worse. It must be an invitation to the Allies to negotiate a ceasefire. He had heard rumours of this new weapon, even more terrible than his own balloons. His friend in the radio room at headquarters had whispered that major cities had just gone off the air, suddenly, one by one, and no word could be got from them. Perhaps paratroops had already landed? Now his neck hurt.

‘…
Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects, or to atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of our Imperial Ancestors? This is the reason why we have ordered the acceptance of the conditions of the joint declaration of the powers …'

This was no mere ceasefire. This was surrender. He had no idea what these conditions might be but such a thing was unthinkable, unimaginable …

‘…
We are keenly aware of the inmost feelings of you all, our subjects. However, it is according to the dictates of time and fate and we have resolved to pave the way to a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable …'

He sat up. The world was at an end. Kneeling here like a fool, in deliberate pain, made no sense any more.