The Wind Cannot Read

by Richard Mason

When we reached the house Bahadur mixed us two long, cold drinks of lemonade, and we took them on to the terrace. It was still exciting to look down on to Bombay. The lights were like a million little jewels set in the blue, velvety darkness, and those in the distance were tremulous like stars. We sat and watched in silence for a long time, drinking through straws, and then we went inside and had a cool bath. Sabby poured in pine-needle extract so that the water was a brilliant green, and it really seemed to smell a little foresty. After I got out she ran in hot water until I could hardly put my hand in, because that was how she liked her baths, and she came out pink as a lobster and ran round draped in an enormous towel. When I chased her she fled through all the rooms, her tiny feet pattering on the bare floors. I caught her, and she was still warm and soft and flushed from the bath.

  We didn’t read in bed. But we left the light on because we were afraid of bringing the evening to an end, and we wanted to look at each other and remember every detail. We whispered as though somebody might hear if we spoke louder.

  “Darling, I don’t want to go back to teach at school when you are gone.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I didn’t tell you about letter I had this morning. It was from wireless people in Delhi.”

  “What did they write to you for?”

  “They say they want me for job. It is reading over the wireless in Japanese.”

  “Propaganda?”

  “It is only just news.”

  “Don’t you mind reading English news to Japan?”

  “Not if it is true. Darling, I want your side to win war.”

  “Our side,” I said. “It’s yours too.”

  “Do you think it would be a good thing to read news?”

  “It would be all right if you liked it better than teaching.”

  “But I couldn’t bear to go into classroom with a lot of strange faces when you are not there.”

  “I won’t be in Delhi, either.”

  “No, but in Bombay I have always been with you, and so it would be worse.”

  “You would have to give up this lovely house.”

  “I should give it up, anyhow, when you go, because it would be too sad.”

  “Darling, I shall come back and see you,” I said.

  “But almost all the time would be without you. Would you also come and see me in Delhi?”

  “Of course I would.”

  “Really, you would come?”

  “Darling, why do you think I wouldn’t?”

  “I don’t know if you can go on loving Sabby when you are seeing all kinds of new things and exciting people. You will remember a little black vulture who tried to eat you, and you will think good riddance.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I don’t know. Please, darling, how long more can you love me? Do you think another half year would be too long?”

  “Is that all you want?”

  “I should always be happy if you could love me that much, because I should have had more than I deserve. Could you promise to love me for half year?”

  “Let me see,” I said. “That’s up to next June. Yes, I think that could be arranged.”

  “Please say you promise.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “Thank you, darling, you are so sweet and kind to me. But please remember you don’t have to, even though you have promised.”

  “If I promised not to, I should still have to, because I can’t help it.”

  “Is it really true?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then I am so happy, darling. I am so terribly, terribly happy.”

  She lay perfectly still. She closed her eyes, and her lashes were long and black beneath the petal-smooth skin. The rich light of the bed-lamp fell softly on her face and picked out the faint auburn tints in her black hair. I brushed my lips lightly over her face and kissed her little squat nose. I thought she was asleep. I remembered tonight we had heard no drums, and I was glad, because it was a weird, ominous sound. And then suddenly, as I was still thinking this, they began. There was no other sound in the night, and the strong, insistent, primitive rhythm reverberated in the room as though it came from no farther than the road. I felt a kind of shudder run through me. I knew why Sabby had said she was afraid when she heard this drumming. It was savage, and full of death, and inexorable. It went on with fearful monotony, only occasionally rising to a triumphant flourish, and then falling back to the slow, hollow beat.

  I listened, staring at the ceiling. And then when I moved to turn off the light I saw that Sabby was not asleep. She was crying, quite silently and without grimace, and the huge tears were rolling one by one out of her brown eyes and making tracks across her face. She had not moved her head at all, and there was a wet patch on the pillow where they were being absorbed.

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter One

  We left Bombay two or three days after the course had ended, with tickets for Cawnpore in our pockets, and no idea at all what our lives held in store.

  It was December, and as we went north it became cooler. After a night in the train, we discarded our tropical clothes and put on our blue uniforms. It was the first time I had worn mine since the holiday in Jali Tal.

  We arrived at Cawnpore in the morning. We went into the station restaurant to drink coffee whilst Fenwick telephoned somewhere for a truck. After a time, when the truck arrived, we climbed in on top of our baggage and were whisked away through the bazaars of the town into open country. It was half an hour before we came upon the dark walls of a fort, rising in sombre magnificence above the arid and rocky land. It was one of the old Moghul forts that had once contained a whole town, but all that had stood up to the centuries were the thick outer walls and the huge tunnelled gateway, surmounted by cupolas and minarets.

  The dust and loose stones on the road spurted up from under the wheels of our truck as we passed through this gateway. Soon we came to a standstill by a barbed-wire compound where sentries were on duty; and inside I caught sight of a little figure in khaki who was under the escort of a guard. It was a Japanese prisoner—the first Japanese I had seen except for Sabby and the school instructors.

  We were interviewed in one of the bungalows in the compound by an affable major. “Well, here you are,” he said. “This is a prisoner-of-war camp. We’re going to keep you here for a bit and teach you a few things, and then off you’ll go forward.” We asked many questions, and afterwards we went to the mess and had lunch and fixed ourselves up in bungalows. These were inside the fort, a few hundred yards from the prisoners’ compound, and we felt almost like prisoners ourselves surrounded by these massive walls.

  I shared a bungalow with Peter. We took a new bearer because I had left Bahadur with Sabby, knowing that if I went forward he would not be able to accompany me. The new man was a Pathan, with both fire and humour in his eyes.

  In the afternoon I went a tour of the cells. They were lofty rooms built into one wall of the fort, furnished with Indian charpoy beds. In front there were exercising compounds shut off by straw matting.

  In the first cell that I entered the Japanese got up from his bed and stood at attention, his arms hanging from his shoulders like an ape’s. I said, “Good morning,” and he echoed the greeting, sucking in his breath and using the politest language. I said:

  “What is your name?”

  “It is Yamanaka.”

  “Your rank?”

  “First-class private.”

  “Sit down,” I said.

  He bowed and sucked in his breath and sat down on the bed. His legs were so short that his feet were off the ground. “Where were you captured?” I said.

  “Arakan.”

  “What happened?”

  “I lost my unit and went to sleep in the jungle. I woke up and saw your troops, and I trie
d to put a grenade to my stomach, but they caught me first.”

  “Why did you try to do that?”

  “For a Japanese it is a shameful thing to become a prisoner.”

  “Are you sorry you didn’t succeed in killing yourself?”

  “Saaa . . .” he said. “Now I don’t know what to think. I expected to be tortured, and I am grateful for kind treatment.”

  “And after the war?”

  “Saaa . . .”

  “You will go back to Japan?”

  “If I go back I shall be put to death. Prisoners can never return.”

  “But your family?”

  “They will have already received my ashes in a box. Ashes are always sent back to Japan. They will think I am dead.”

  He was laughing as though this had a funny side which was all he expected me to see and which he was seeing, too.

  “Don’t you dream about your home and long to return?” I said.

  “I see dreams sometimes. But there is nothing to be done. . . .”

  I went in to see the next man. He had a book and a cigarette. He stood up on his bed and bowed. I asked him the same kind of questions and he answered in exactly the same way, and in all the cells it was the same. Some of them were pleased to have company. They talked very rapidly and it was often difficult to stop them, and when they interspersed their sentences with breath-sucking and strings of little superfluous words I found it difficult to understand them. But I was not doing a real interrogation; only finding out what they sounded like and looked like, and something about their mentality.

  I looked at them and wondered whether it was any of these who had bayoneted my brother in Hong Kong. It was difficult to believe so. In their cells or when they were brought into an interrogation room by a guard, they were pathetic, lonely, philosophical little people. Of course they denied all knowledge of atrocities. They might have tried to destroy themselves on capture, but now they were not going out of their way to provoke us into ill-treating them. Japanese atrocities, they protested, existed only in Allied propaganda. British prisoners-of-war in Japan would be excellently treated . . . hadn’t the Emperor himself decreed that once the enemy had laid down arms, the Japanese soldiers should show their nobility by being clement?

  It was said there were three stages through which a Japanese prisoner passed. For the first twenty-four hours he was stunned by battle and the sudden unexpected fate that had befallen him. He had his own word for it, muchu—‘in the middle of a dream.’ After that he would begin to sit up and take notice, and remember he was still alive and that there was every prospect of his remaining so. There were no lash-weals on his flesh nor lighted tapers in his finger-nails—but a bowl of rice by his hospital bedside and a doctor patching his wounds. He would be touched by this—for there is no one more sentimental than a Japanese. He would write a poem or two to the nurse saying in thirty-one syllables that he had expected his limbs to be tortured, but the only torture he had received was from her eyes—kind eyes that made him think of his sweetheart in Fukuoka, whom he had unmanfully disgraced. Then when he had sufficiently wallowed in gratitude and sentiment, the third stage would set in—despising his captors for their weakness in thus regaling him. He would become, if not surly, at least stubborn and arrogant.

  Of course there were many different types. The officers were the most difficult to handle because they had a greater sense of responsibility, and the peasants were the easiest—the inakamonos, who knew more about earth than they did about warfare and politics. Then there were small shopkeepers and lorry-drivers and clerks. I spoke to one of the latter, who blinked in a nervous, owlish way behind thick-lensed spectacles. We had given him the spectacles ourselves because he had broken his others before being taken prisoner. I talked to him for a long time because I could understand him better than most, and he looked sad and lost and an abject victim of someone else’s war. The difficulty was not to prevent myself from being cruel to these people who had once been the embodiment of the enemy’s ruthlessness, but to be sparing with sympathy. And I had to force myself to recall terrible pictures I had seen and stories I had heard, and to think of my brother’s murder and allot to them some of the responsibility. It was not fair to do otherwise. The British guards knew it was not fair; they had come through Burma, closer to the Japs than I, and they knew what they would have done if they had had a free hand. They didn’t mince matters. But they kept their boots and their bayonets in their places, and we told them: “Two blacks don’t make a white.”

  The place was full of interest. It was a little world of its own there, in the barbed-wire compound and the brown walls of the fort. We talked a great deal about the warm Burma, and knew all about placenames and unit dispositions, but all that was another world. We seldom went out of the fort. In the evenings Peter and I strolled round the battlements, and sat talking in one of the pavilions that surmounted the gigantic gateway. We looked down over the endless plains to the Ganges, and saw the brown, compact villages and the peasants and the oxen who belonged to yet another world—a world I should never know anything about. We talked about our work and the Japs, and a lot about Sabby and the life we had left behind in Bombay—the Taj and Rosie and gin and lemons at the Cricket Club—and how life went on and always on, and how it was useless to try to go backwards or even stay where you were. “Cuncta fluunt,” Peter said. “Everything is in a state of flux . . .” But this was one of the most difficult truths in life to accept: that unless like Lala Vikrana you were to put yourself outside this world, there was no way of holding up the inexorable flow of time or prolonging happiness beyond its appointed end.

  “What do you think is going to happen to us?” Peter said.

  “More jungle, that’s all.”

  “Do you think we’ll get killed?”

  “Why should we? We shall be with Corps. Or at the worst with Division. We’re out of the real war.”

  “Something’ll happen. I can’t imagine going home.”

  “You’ll go home,” I said. “You’ll suddenly find yourself sitting at an office desk in Holborn, and this will all be a dream. It’ll also be something to talk about for the rest of your life.”

  “It’ll also be something to write about. You forget I’m a great novelist.”

  “Yes, I forgot that. Then of course you won’t be killed. Several bombs will explode under your jeep, but by a thousand to one chance you’ll get away with only a scratch.”

  “What’ll happen to you?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t imagine going home, either.”

  “What about your butler and the silver tea-service and afternoon tea on the lawn?”

  “That’s two reels ago,” I said.

  “It’s also the next reel but one.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Though I sometimes think I’d love to have tea on the lawn again, and listen to the rooks and watch an English sky . . .”

  “ ‘If I should die, think only this of me . . .’ My God, you’ve been reading too much Rupert Brooke. Sabby ought to have cured you of all that Grantchester-feeling.”

  “She’s cured me of a lot of things, but not that.”

  “How do you think she’d look in Grantchester?”

  “She’d suit the silver tea-service. And the oak beams too.”

  “And shopping in Tewkesbury with the county people?”

  “Tewkesbury isn’t very county. Anyway, she’s been in England before. Can’t you think of her amongst the Gloucestershire fruit blossoms!”

  “And what about the little Sabby-Michaels?”

  “We wouldn’t have any children—at least not of our own. Perhaps we’d adopt a little girl.”

  “You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?’’

  “I have,” I said. “But Sabby hasn’t.”

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  “I haven’t any ide
a. I’m not thinking about it any more. I’m just thinking about next week-end when I shall see Sabby again, and about going to the jungle and about all the little Nips down there eating rice in their cages. What are you thinking about?”

  “I’m thinking about those camels over there,” Peter said. “They can go such a wonderfully long time without water. Don’t you think it’s also wonderful how long human beings can go without things and not go mad?”

  (2)

  I saw Sabby three times during January and February. She had gone to Delhi a week after we left Bombay, to begin her new broadcasting work, and Delhi was only three hundred miles from Cawnpore. It took ten hours in the train. I went on Friday night when I could get the week-end off, and travelled back all night Sunday. There were bunks in the carriages, so that night travelling was no hardship; but I wished it had been two nights with Sabby instead of two in the train. Still, I had two days and one night with her, and we told ourselves we were lucky to be able to meet at all. She was living in an hotel in the residential part of Old Delhi beyond the bazaar. It was a good hotel, much better than her old Mayfair Hotel in Bombay, but full of old dowagers waiting for the signal—the first sign of perspiration—to betake themselves to the stations in the hills. There was a spate of staff-officers, too, who were collected by shooting-brakes and whisked backwards and forwards between the hotel and G.H.Q.

  Sabby worked in New Delhi. For a week or two she had been making voice tests and translating scripts, and now she was taking her turn in broadcasting the news in Japanese. The second weekend I was there I listened on the hotel wireless-set on the Saturday afternoon. It gave me an extraordinarily odd feeling to hear the voice that had whispered so many sweet things into my ear coming impersonally from the radio. I was somehow relieved to see her unchanged when half an hour later she came back gaily into the room, and we had the excitement of kissing as though she had been away for years. I wondered if any Japanese listeners would be trying to imagine the person behind the voice they had heard and I said to Sabby:

  “Aren’t you afraid of what might happen to you after the war if they find out who you are?”