Empire of the Sun

by J. G. Ballard

  Jim dipped a finger in the hot wax, but Dr Ransome brusquely waved him away. Clearly his conversation with the camp commandant had upset him – he was preparing for the winter as if trying to convince himself that they would all be there when it arrived.

  Taking off his shoes, Jim began to buff the toecaps. After three years in clogs and cast-offs, he enjoyed impressing everyone with these expensive leather brogues.

  ‘Jim, it’s admirable of you to look so smart, but try not to polish them all the time.’ Dr Ransome stared heavily at the wax square. ‘They unsettle Sergeant Nagata.’

  ‘I like them to look bright.’

  ‘They’re very bright. Even the American pilots must have seen them. They probably think we have a golf course here and set their compasses to your toecaps.’

  ‘That means I’m helping the war effort?’

  ‘In a way…’ Before Jim could put on his shoes Dr Ransome held his ankle. Most of the sores on Jim’s legs were infected, and given the poor diet would never properly heal, but above the right ankle was an ulcer the size of a penny, engorged with pus. Dr Ransome moved the tray of melted wax from the candle-lamp. He boiled a spoonful of water in a metal pail, then drained and cleaned the ulcer with a cotton swab.

  Jim submitted without protest. He had formed his only close bond in Lunghua with Dr Ransome, though he knew that in many ways the physician disapproved of him. He resented Jim for revealing an obvious truth about the war, that people were only too able to adapt to it. At times he even suspected that Jim enjoyed Latin for the wrong reasons. The brother of a games master at an English boarding school (one of those repressive institutions, so like Lunghua, for which Jim was apparently destined), he had been working up-country with Protestant missionaries. Dr Ransome was rather like a school prefect and head of rugby, though Jim was unsure how far this manner was calculated. He had noticed that the doctor could be remarkably devious when it suited him.

  ‘Now, Jim, I’m sure you’ve done your prep…’ Dr Ransome opened the Latin primer. Although distracted by the prisoners who gathered outside the huts and dormitory blocks, he stared hard at the text. Hundreds of men and their wives, many with their children, were crossing the parade ground. He began to question Jim, who continued to polish his shoes under the table.

  ‘“They were being loved”…?’

  ‘Amabantur.’

  ‘“I shall be loved”…?’

  ‘Amabor.’

  ‘“You will have been loved”…?’

  ‘Amatus eris.’

  ‘Right – I’ll set you an unseen. Mrs Vincent will help you with the vocabulary. She doesn’t mind your asking?’

  ‘Not now.’ Jim reported her change of heart matter-of-factly. He guessed that Dr Ransome had been useful with some special woman’s problem.

  ‘Good. People need to be encouraged. She may not be much use with the trig.’

  ‘I don’t need her to help me.’ Jim enjoyed trigonometry. Unlike Latin or algebra, this branch of geometry was directly involved in a subject close to his heart – aerial warfare. ‘Dr Ransome, the American bombers that flew with the Mustangs were going at 320 miles an hour – I timed their shadows across the camp with my heart-beat. If they want to hit Lunghua Airfield they have to drop their bombs about a thousand yards away.’

  ‘Jim, you’re a war-child. I imagine the Japanese gunners know that too.’

  Jim sat back thinking this over. ‘They might not.’

  ‘Well, we can’t tell them – or can we? That would be unfair to the American pilots. As it is, the Japanese are shooting too many of them down.’

  ‘But they’re shooting them down over the airfield,’ Jim explained. ‘Then they’ve already dropped their bombs. If they want to stop them hitting the runway they should shoot them down more than a thousand yards away.’ The prospect excited Jim – applied to the Japanese bases all over the Pacific area this new tactic might turn the war against the Americans and so save Lunghua Camp. He drummed his fingers on the table, imitating the way in which he had played the white piano in the empty house in Amherst Avenue.

  ‘Yes…’ Dr Ransome reached out and gently pressed Jim’s hands to the table, trying to calm him. He submerged another cotton square in the wax tray. ‘Perhaps we’ll leave the trig, and I’ll mark up some algebra. We want the war to end, Jim.’

  ‘Of course, Dr Ransome.’

  ‘Do you want the war to end, Jim?’ Dr Ransome often seemed doubtful about this. ‘A lot of the people here won’t last much longer. You’re keen to see your mother and father again?’

  ‘Yes, I am. I think about them every day.’

  ‘Good. Do you remember what they look like?’

  ‘I do remember…’ Jim hated lying to Dr Ransome, but in a sense he was thinking of the photograph of the unknown man and woman he had pinned to the wall of his cubicle. He had never divulged to the physician that these were his surrogate parents. Jim knew that it was important to keep alive the memory of his mother and father, in order to sustain his confidence in the future, but their faces had become hazy. Dr Ransome might not approve of the way in which he was tricking himself.

  ‘I’m glad you remember them, Jim. They may have changed.’

  ‘I know – they’ll be hungry.’

  ‘More than hungry, Jim. When the war does end everything is going to be very uncertain.’

  ‘So we should stay in the camp?’ Jim liked the sound of this. Too many of the prisoners talked about leaving the camp without any real idea of what would happen to them. ‘As long as we stay in Lunghua the Japanese will look after us.’

  ‘I’m not sure that they will. We’ve become an embarrassment to them. They can’t feed us any longer, Jim…’

  So this was what Dr Ransome had been leading towards. Jim felt a quiet tiredness come over him. His long hours spent hauling the buckets of sewage, planting and watering the crops in the hospital garden, pulling the ration cart with Mr Maxted, had been part of his attempt to keep the camp going. Yet, as he had known all along, the supply of food depended on the whim of the Japanese. His own feelings, his determination to survive, counted for nothing in the end. The activity meant no more than the movement in the eyes of the Belgian woman who had seemed to come back from the dead.

  ‘Is there going to be any more food, Dr Ransome?’

  ‘We hope some will come through. The Japanese can no longer feed themselves. The American submarines…’

  Jim stared at the polished toecaps of his shoes. He wanted his mother and father to see them before they died. He rallied himself, trying to summon his old will to survive. Deliberately he thought of the curious pleasure the corpses in the hospital cemetery gave him, the guilty excitement of being alive at all. He knew why Dr Ransome disliked him digging the graves.

  Dr Ransome marked the exercises in the algebra textbook, and gave him two strips of rice-paper bandage on which to solve the simultaneous equations. As he stood up Dr Ransome removed the three tomatoes from Jim’s pocket. He laid them on the table by the wax tray.

  ‘Did they come from the hospital garden?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jim gazed frankly at Dr Ransome. Recently he had begun to see him with a more adult eye. The long years of imprisonment, the constant disputes with the Japanese, had made this young physician seem middle-aged. Dr Ransome was often unsure of himself, as he was of Jim’s theft.

  ‘I have to give Basie something whenever I see him.’

  ‘I know. It’s a good thing that you’re friends with Basie. He’s a survivor, though survivors can be dangerous. Wars exist for people like Basie.’ Dr Ransome placed the tomatoes in Jim’s hand. ‘I want you to eat them, Jim. I’ll get you something for Basie.’

  ‘Dr Ransome…’ Jim searched for some way of reassuring him. ‘If we told Sergeant Nagata about the thousand-yard range…the Japanese wouldn’t shoot down any more planes, but they might give us some food…?’

  Dr Ransome smiled for the first time. He unlocked the medicine cabinet and from a steel c
ash box he removed two rubber condoms.

  ‘Jim, you’re a pragmatist. Give these to Basie, he’ll have something for you. Now eat your tomatoes and go.’

  26

  The Lunghua Sophomores

  ‘We’re the Lunghua Sophomores,

  We’re the girls every boy adores,

  C.A.C. don’t mean a thing to me,

  For every Tuesday evening we go on a spree…’

  As he crossed the parade ground towards E Block, Jim paused to watch the Lunghua Players rehearsing their next concert party on the steps of Hut 6. The leader of the troupe was Mr Wentworth, the manager of the Cathay Bank, whose exaggerated and theatrical manner fascinated Jim. He enjoyed the amateur dramatics, when everyone involved was at the centre of public attention. Jim had played a page in Henry V, a role he relished. The costume which Mrs Wentworth had run up for him out of purple velvet was the only decent garment he had worn for three years. He had offered to wear it in the Lunghua Players’ next production, The Importance of Being Earnest, but Mr Wentworth had declined to cast him.

  ‘…We’ve debates and lectures too, And concerts just for you…’

  The rehearsal was not a success. The four chorus girls in their pierrot costumes stood on the makeshift stage of packing cases, trying to remember the song. Upset by the air raid, the women ignored Mr Wentworth and listened to the sky. Despite the hot sunlight, they rubbed their arms to keep warm.

  The audience of bored internees wandered away, and Jim decided to leave the actors to it. The Lunghua Players recruited their members from the snootiest of the English families, and there was something absurd about their high-pitched voices – as affected as the rugby match which Dr Ransome, in a rare lapse from common sense, had arranged the previous winter. The teams of starving prisoners (husbands of the Lunghua Sophomores) had tottered around the parade ground in a grotesque parody of a rugby game, too exhausted to pass the ball and jeered at by a crowd of fellow-prisoners excluded from the game because they had never learned the rules.

  Jim passed the guardhouse, carrying but a quick survey of the camp. A group of prisoners had gathered by the gates, waiting for the military truck which brought the daily rations from Shanghai. No official announcement had been made that the ration was to be cut, but the news had already spread through the camp.

  Significantly, there were fewer Chinese beggars outside the gates. A dead peasant woman lay on the grass verge, but the disbanded puppet soldiers and out-of-work rickshaw coolies had gone, leaving behind a circle of squatting old men and a few wan-faced children.

  Jim entered E Block, the men’s dormitory building, and climbed the stairway to the third floor. Regardless of the weather, the British prisoners in E Block spent almost all their time in their bunks. A few were too ill with malaria to move, and lay stretched out on straw mats soaked with sweat and urine. But others still strong enough to walk lounged beside them, examining their hands for hours or staring at the walls.

  The sight of so many adult men unwilling to cope with the reality of the camp always puzzled Jim, but he recovered as soon as he reached the American dormitory. He liked the Americans and approved of them in every way. Whenever he entered this enclave of irony and good humour his spirits rose.

  Two of the former classrooms were occupied by the American merchant seamen. The partition doors had been removed, and the high-ceilinged chamber was filled by some sixty men. Jim surveyed the maze of cubicles. The Britons in E Block lived in open dormitories, but each of the American seamen had constructed a small cubicle from whatever materials he could scavenge – threadbare sheets, wooden planks, straw mats and woven bamboo. Now and then a party of Americans would emerge from E Block and play a relaxed game of soft ball, but usually they remained in their cubicles. There they lay on their bunks and entertained a steady stream of adolescent girls, single British women and even a few wives drawn to them for reasons not very different from Jim’s.

  By some mechanism that Jim had never understood, the sexual activity seemed to generate an endless supply of those items that most fascinated him. This treasure had been brought into the camp by the American sailors and now circulated like a second currency – comic books and copies of Life, Reader’s Digest and Saturday Evening Post, novelty pens, lipsticks and powder compacts, gaudy tie-pins, cigarette lighters and celluloid belts, fairground cufflinks and wild west buckles – a collection of gewgaws that in Jim’s eyes had the style and magic of the Mustang fighters.

  ‘Say, it’s Shanghai Jim…’

  ‘Kid, Basie’s mad at you…’

  ‘You want to play chess, son?’

  ‘Jim, I need hot water and a shave.’

  ‘Jim, bring me a left-handed screwdriver and a bucket of steam…’

  ‘Why’s Basie mad at Jim?’

  Jim exchanged greetings with the Americans – Cohen, the softball wizard and chess fanatic; Tiptree, the large, kindly stoker who was the comic-book king; Hinton, yet another cabin steward and philosopher: Dainty, the telegraphist and premier cocksman of Lunghua – amiable men whose rôles they played for Jim’s benefit and constantly guyed. When they noticed him, most of them liked Jim, who in return, and out of respect for America, ran endless errands for them. Several of the cubicles were closed as the merchant seamen entertained their visitors, but the others had their curtains raised so that the sailors could he on their bunks and observe the passing world. Two of the older seamen were racked by malaria, but they made little fuss about being ill. All in all, Jim felt, the Americans were the best company, not as strange and challenging as the Japanese, but far superior to the morose and complicated British.

  Why was Basie angry with him? Jim stepped down the narrow corridor between the suspended sheets. He could hear an English woman from Hut 5 complaining about her husband, and two Belgian girls who lived with their widowed father in G Block giggled over some object they were being shown.

  Basie’s cubicle was in the north-east corner of the room, with two windows that gave him a clear view of the entire camp. As always he was sitting on his bunk, keeping an eye on the Japanese soldiers outside the guardhouse as he received the latest report from Demarest, his cubicle neighbour and chief henchman. His long-sleeved cotton shirt was faded but neatly creased – after Jim had washed and dried the shirts Basie would fold them in a complex, origami-like package and slide them under his sleeping mat, from which they emerged with a department-store sharpness. Since Basie rarely moved from his bunk he seemed even cooler and crisper in Jim’s eyes than Mr Sekura, and in most respects the years in Lunghua had been less of a strain for Basie than for the Japanese commandant. His hands and cheeks were still soft and unworn, though with a pallor like that of an unhealthy woman. Moving around his cubicle, as if in his pantry on the SS Aurora, he regarded Lunghua Camp in the same way he had viewed the world beyond it, a suite of cabins to be kept ready for a succession of unwary passengers.

  ‘Come in, kid. Stop breathing so much, you’re making Basie all hot.’ Demarest, a former bar steward, spoke without moving his lips – either, as Jim believed, he had spent an earlier career as a ventriloquist or, as Mr Maxted maintained, he had passed long terms in prison.

  ‘The boy’s all right…’ Basie beckoned Jim to sit down, as Demarest returned to his cubicle. ‘There just isn’t enough air for him in the whole of Lunghua. Isn’t that it, Jim?’

  Jim tried to control his panting – not enough red cells, according to Dr Ransome, but often he and Basie meant the same thing.

  ‘You’re right, Basie. The Mustangs took it all with them. Did you see the air raid?’

  ‘I heard it, Jim…’ Basie glanced darkly at Jim, as if holding him responsible for the noise. ‘Those Filipino pilots must have gone to flight school at Coney Island.’

  ‘Filipino?’ Jim at last mastered his lungs. ‘Were they really Filipino pilots?’

  ‘Some of them, Jim. There are a couple of wings operating with MacArthur’s outfit. The rest are old Flying Tigers based at Chungking.’ Bas
ie nodded sagely, watching Jim to make sure he appreciated his superior savvy.

  ‘Chungking…’ Jim was agog. This was the kind of information on which his mind feasted, even though he knew that Basie embroidered the reports for his benefit. Somewhere in the camp was a concealed radio, which had never been discovered, not because it was well hidden, but because the Japanese were confused by the false tips given by prisoners eager to collaborate. Despite all his efforts, Jim had been unable to track down the radio, which was inactive for long periods. Then Basie would supply him with news bulletins of his own describing a parallel war. Jim always pretended to be impressed, though he could rarely separate rumour from outright fiction. It was an important way of keeping them close together.

  Also, there was Basie’s interest in Jim’s expanding vocabulary.

  ‘You did your schoolwork today, Jim? You learned all your words?’

  ‘I did, Basie. A lot of Latin words.’ Basie was intrigued by Jim’s command of Latin, but easily bored, so he decided not to recite the whole passive tense of Amo. ‘And some new English words. “Pragmatist”,’ he suggested, which Basie greeted with gloom, ‘and “survivor”.’

  ‘“Survivor”?’ Basie chuckled at this. ‘That’s a useful word. Are you a survivor, Jim?’

  ‘Well…’ Dr Ransome had not meant the term as a compliment. Jim tried to remember another word of interest. Basie never used the words, but seemed to store them away, keeping them in reserve for a better day, as if preparing himself for a life of elaborate formality.

  ‘Is there any more news, Basie? When are the Americans going to land at Woosung?’

  But Basie was preoccupied. He rested his head against the pillow and stared at the contents of the cubicle, as if burdened by all his possessions. At first sight the cubicle seemed to be filled with old rags and wicker baskets, but it actually contained a complete general store. There were aluminium pots and pans, an assortment of women’s slacks and blouses, a mah-jong set, several tennis racquets, half a dozen unmatched shoes and a king’s ransom of old copies of the Reader’s Digest and Popular Mechanics. All these had been obtained by barter, though Jim had never understood what Basie gave in return – like Dr Ransome, he had come into the camp with nothing.