After Darkness

by Christine Piper

  ‘Usually we’d take you on a tour immediately after your arrival, but as it’s very late we’ll show you your tent and the latrines and ablutions block tonight, and the rest of camp tomorrow. Your group is being spread across eight tents. Could the men from Menaro come with me? The men from Batavia follow Mr Hoshi. And the one late arrival from Harvey Camp—from Broome, yes?’ I nodded. ‘Please follow Mr Yamada.’

  Mr Yamada stepped forward and greeted me. ‘You’re Ibaraki-sensei, from Broome? Harada told me all about you. Here, let me take one of your bags. The tent’s this way.’ Before I had a chance to protest he took one of the suitcases out of my hand.

  ‘Harada? Harada Yasutaro’s here?’ I asked, relieved to know I had a friend among the camp population. Harada was the vice-president of Broome’s Japanese Association. When we’d said goodbye at Harvey Camp, I wasn’t sure whether we’d see each other again.

  ‘Yes, but he’s in a different row of tents. I’ll show you tomorrow. We were going to put you with him and some of the divers from Broome, but when we found out you were a doctor . . .’ Yamada smiled. ‘We thought you might prefer to stay in my tent. You’ll like everyone in there. It’s a shame you didn’t arrive two weeks ago with all the others. We appointed the executive committee last week. We could have done with another educated man such as you.’

  We walked along the lines of tents, then stopped near the middle of a row.

  ‘This is our tent: row eight, number twelve,’ Yamada whispered, so as not to wake the others. ‘I’ve already made your bed. Drop your luggage and change your clothes if you’d like, then I’ll show you the latrines. I’ll wait for you at the end of the row.’

  I set down my suitcases and sorted through my belongings, feeling for my nightclothes and toothbrush. I winced as my blistered hands knocked against something hard. I heard the sigh of breath from inside the tent. A rustle as somebody stirred. I was touched by Yamada’s kindness in welcoming me to his tent, especially since I was a stranger to him. I looked up at the heavens and silently said a prayer of thanks. The stars were faint pinpricks beyond the glare of lights.

  The next morning I woke early. Light filtered through the canvas opening. It must have been no later than six, but the day was already full of the promise of heat. A warm breeze teased the edges of the tent. A fly circled above me in lazy arcs. My neck and back were damp against the bedsheets. The rise and fall of the breath of the men around me grew louder, filling my ears. I raised my head and sweat trickled down my neck. My six companions slept on, apparently unconcerned by the gathering heat.

  In Broome, on Sundays, I would rise at five o’clock and walk for two hours along the shore of the bay, weaving between the pink-red sand and the spiky fringe of grass that skirted it. The sun would burst from the horizon in an orange haze, slowly bringing the sand, the grass and the sea into sharp definition. Those walks always cleared my head and provided me with a calmness with which to begin the week.

  I crept to the doorway of the tent and looked out. In the bleak morning light, the landscape appeared completely different to the previous night. Rows and rows of khaki tents stretched away from me. Beyond them, the iron roofs of the mess halls were clustered next to the internal road we’d walked down last night. Stepping out of the tent, I turned to face the outer fence. Between the last line of tents and the perimeter fence was a dusty expanse, littered with pebbles and clumps of stubborn grass. Beyond the barbed-wire fence, dirt, grass and scrub continued in flat eternity.

  I walked towards the latrines in the northwest corner of the compound, passing a small galvanised-iron shed with padlocked shutters. Yamada had pointed it out to me last night. ‘You can buy cigarettes, razors and other supplies here,’ he’d said.

  I reached the concrete latrines and ablutions blocks, easily identifiable by their stench. Following the path that hugged the fence, I wandered past two mess halls and a kitchen. The air was alive with the clink of metal pots and bowls as breakfast was being prepared. The rich smell of fried butter greeted me. I looked at my watch. It was just past six. Breakfast wouldn’t be served for another hour.

  I slipped back in between the rows of tents, catching sight of the men inside, still prostrate on their mattresses, sheets crumpled beside them. I continued until I’d reached the fence that faced the world beyond the camp. From what I’d gathered, our camp formed one section of a roughly circular larger camp that had been divided into quadrants. As well as the Japanese in 14B and 14C, there were Italians and Germans in the other two compounds. A fenced-off divide separated each of the four camps, so although we could see each other, we had limited contact.

  The barbed-wire fence stood before me, steel tips dull against the brightening sky. A stretch of cleared land surrounded the camp like a moat. At one spot near the edge of the clearing a stand of tall red gums stood like sentinels. Bark peeled from their trunks like blistered skin.

  I’d received a letter from my mother the week before I’d left Harvey. In the months before my arrest she had urged me to return to Japan. But I told her I had to stay in Broome to honour my contract. In truth, the contract had already expired—I wasn’t ready to go back to Japan.

  ‘Dear Tomokazu,’ my mother’s letter had begun. ‘Snow has fallen steadily this week. Although the days are getting longer, the ice on the awnings grows heavier each day. Have you been well? I am in good health.’

  Mother informed me she saw my sister, Megumi, and her two children almost every day. She’d visited the family graves early in the new year and said everything was in order.

  ‘Your younger brother, Nobuhiro,’ began the next sentence, but the rest of the paragraph had been neatly cut from the paper by the censors, forming a rectangle of empty space. The void seemed to have a force of its own, drawing the meaning of the words into it.

  The letter ended with: ‘Please take good care of yourself. I will write again when I have more time. From, Mother.’

  I was anxious to know what had become of my brother, who was in the navy and, when I’d last heard, had been sent to China. Although there were ten years between us, we were close. I often played with him in the fields at the back of our house. He’d planned to study medicine like me, but that changed when the war began. The letter didn’t mention my wife. My mother used to see the Sasakis from time to time, but I’d heard nothing of them in the past year.

  Trying to calm my mind, I continued walking along the fence. I was surprised to discover a Buddhist altar in the space between the last row of tents and the outside fence. It was a simple structure, no more than shoulder high. It was made from unpainted timber; the roof was cracked and faded from the elements. Two rough-hewn doors splayed open, revealing a miniature scroll with the words ‘Eternal Happiness’.

  In Japan, I would have lit a stick of incense at such a time. But here, so many miles from home, all I could do was kneel before the altar and close my eyes.

  I sensed a movement to my left and saw a figure come to stillness about thirty feet away. As I stared at him, I realised he was half-caste. The eyes were too round and the nose too broad for a Japanese. The young man had a towel folded over his shoulder, soap in one hand—straight-backed and passive-faced, like a soldier on parade. Our eyes met and he nodded almost imperceptibly before continuing on his way.

  I stepped into the mess hall and was assaulted by a barrage of voices, clangs and scrapes. The room thrummed with the sound of several hundred men eating breakfast. I longed for the silence of the early morning, when hardly a soul had been awake.

  ‘Meat?’ Yamada offered me a tray piled high with thick slices of something dark brown. ‘I think it’s mutton. Always mutton. Not to my taste, but it keeps me going till lunch.’

  The smell of mutton in the morning made me feel weak, but I took a sliver, not wanting to appear ungrateful. Yamada poured me a cup of tea and offered me the first helping of oatmeal, toast, butter and jam. He introduced me to the other people at our table, who were also in our tent. I discovered that thr
ee of them had worked with Yamada at a rubber production company in Sumatra. Yamada was the director. He had been sent there from Japan eight years earlier to start up the business. Watanabe, the fifty-something, thick-set man who sat opposite me, was Yamada’s deputy. Next to him was the accountant, Ishikawa, and next to Yamada was a man named Maeda, who was the operations manager. At the other end of the table was a dentist who was a few years older than me and also from Sumatra, and an elderly man from Borneo whose name I didn’t catch. Yamada leaned towards me.

  ‘We worked hard, but business was tough. Especially after the Dutch froze our assets—those bastards. I’ll never forgive them for what they did to us.’ As he recalled the Dutch embargo on Japanese trade, his face darkened. For a moment I was worried he would become enraged. I wondered if something had happened on the ship to make him so bitter, but just as quickly, he brightened. ‘What about you, sensei? Which university did you go to? Tokyo or Kyoto?’

  ‘Tokyo.’

  ‘Ah, the very best.’ He turned to the man on his other side. ‘Did you hear? He went to Tokyo.’

  In between mouthfuls, I glanced at nearby tables, looking for my friend Harada. Raised voices cut through the din in the hall. I paused, knife and fork raised, trying to make out a conversation behind me. I caught the long, flat vowels of a native English speaker.

  ‘. . . took two pieces—same as everybody else. If you’ve got a problem with it, why don’t you ask that fella over there. Seen him take more than his fair share.’

  The second speaker’s voice was muffled, but the few words I heard were enough to tell me that English was not his first language.

  I turned around in my seat. It took me a few moments to locate the men. The first was sitting at a table two rows behind me. He had a tanned complexion typical of many of the divers I’d known in Broome, but there was something distinctly un-Japanese about his person. He had a strong jaw and powerful, sloping shoulders that seemed to dwarf the rest of his body. I sensed he was a living portrait of someone I knew—the photographic ghost-image of a friend.

  He leaned forward in his chair, addressing the man opposite him whose face I couldn’t see. ‘You’re telling me I took two big pieces? Jesus Christ. Hey, Charlie, would you listen to this?’ His companion was similarly broad and muscular, but had fair skin and wavy hair that fell over one eye. I recognised him as the half-caste I’d seen on my morning walk. As I glanced at the others on the table, I noticed several who appeared to be mixed race.

  ‘He reckons I took more than my fair share because I took two big pieces. As if counting how many pieces I take isn’t enough, they’ve also got an eye on the size of the meat we take. Next they’ll be counting how many pieces of toilet paper we use.’

  Charlie shook his head. ‘Not worth getting worked up about it, Johnny. Can’t win this one.’ His voice was flat.

  I realised who the first speaker was: Johnny Chang. He’d been a well-known personality in Broome, a young businessman who’d run a noodle shop in Japtown then started up a taxi business, the first of its kind in town. I had a clear mental picture of him standing on the corner of Short Street and Dampier Terrace, one arm draped over the open door of his parked car and the other fanning his face with a folded paper while he chatted to people in the street. He was known to everybody and moved among the Japanese, Chinese, native and even white population with ease. His father was a Chinese immigrant who’d made a modest fortune on the goldfields and moved to Broome to start a restaurant, eventually marrying the Japanese daughter of a laundry owner.

  It was strange I hadn’t recognised Johnny straight away. Perhaps it was the difference in his attitude; in Broome, he’d always been easygoing, but here it was as if he were another man.

  ‘What right have you got to tell us what to do, anyway? Acting like you own the place, with your so-called mayor who doesn’t even follow his own bloody rules.’ Johnny’s voice filled the crowded hall. ‘Yeah, that’s right, him . . .’ Johnny jabbed a finger towards Mayor Mori, who was sitting a few tables away. ‘He gets all sorts of special treatment. Two or three helpings of food, first in line to use the showers, no cleaning duties. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.’

  Mori continued to eat, delicately spearing a piece of mutton with his fork and bringing it to his mouth. His expression was difficult to read.

  Yamada hissed to Watanabe across the table, ‘That half-caste—what’s his name? Chang? The troublemaker. He needs to watch himself. He’s an embarrassment to our compound. He’s upset many people already.’

  I wondered whether I should mention to Yamada my Broome connection to Johnny Chang. But we’d never been intimately acquainted, so I kept quiet.

  Yamada turned to me. ‘He thinks he’s better than everyone else. When I rostered his tent to clean the latrines, he initially refused to do it. Last week he forced his way into the executive meeting when we were in session. Said he’d been waiting to use the recreation tent. We told him the meeting was more important, but even then he wouldn’t leave. He has no respect for authority—no respect for our ways. None of them do.’ Yamada flicked his hand towards Johnny’s table with an expression of disgust.

  I was surprised by the news of Johnny’s antisocial behaviour. As far as I knew, Johnny had had little trouble with the authorities in Broome. He was friendly with the constables, some of whom he’d known for years.

  ‘You haafu fools don’t deserve the Japanese blood in you!’ said an old man at the mayor’s table, speaking in Japanese.

  Johnny thumped the table and stood up. ‘You bloody racist! I know what you just said. Think I don’t know what haafu means? You fucking Emperor-worshipping pig—’

  Charlie put his hand on Johnny’s shoulder, trying to quieten him. It’s not worth it, he kept saying, but Johnny shrugged off his friend.‘Don’t tell me what to do like the rest of these arseholes,’ he said.

  ‘Chinese bastard!’ someone cried. The remark sparked rage within Johnny. He knocked back his chair and began shouting profanity. I couldn’t hear much of what he said because others were calling for him to get out. ‘Dete ike!’ ‘Usero!’ Yamada was one of the loudest, bellowing in my ear. Johnny shoved his table so hard he jolted the people on the other side. I heard gasps. Someone at a nearby table stood up.

  ‘Enough!’ I realised it was the mayor who was standing. The room fell silent. ‘You go now. Or I report you to Major Locke. You get detention one week.’ Mori spoke in clear English.

  ‘You want me to leave? You’re a bunch of stinking racists, you know that? I can’t get far enough away from you.’

  No one said a word as he stormed out of the room, kicking an empty seat at the mayor’s table. I heard the sigh of my own breath. My heartbeat filled my ears. But only a few seconds later, the cloud of noise rose again. The screech of cutlery. Shrill voices. The banging of plates.

  I looked at the food in front of me. White specks of lard flecked the meat on my plate. The mutton had turned cold.

  After breakfast, Yamada led me to my old friend Harada’s tent. Inside the tent, figures ducked and weaved as the inhabitants folded bedding, sorted through belongings and swept the ground.

  Although I’d rarely socialised with the divers in Broome, when the men saw me, they stopped what they were doing and bowed in greeting. ‘Doctor, you made it! I’m so glad to see you,’ said one young diver from Wakayama whose name escaped me. I was moved by his warmth. I’d treated him in the hospital once, although I couldn’t recall what for. Sister Bernice would know.

  ‘Ibaraki-sensei, is that you?’ Harada was crouched next to an open suitcase on the floor. Seeing his face, shiny with perspiration, brought to mind those nights in Broome we’d spent drinking, playing mahjong, faces gleaming above steaming bowls of soup. But when Harada stood up, I was shocked to see how thin he’d become in the few weeks since I’d last seen him.

  He walked towards me and gripped my shoulder in an awkward embrace. ‘When did you arrive?’

  ‘Just last night,’ I
said.

  ‘You came from Harvey?’

  ‘Yes. Another military doctor arrived last week, so they sent me here. But look at you; you’ve lost so much weight.’ His collarbones felt like they could snap beneath the pressure of my hand. His skin was hot.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, pushing away my arm. ‘I don’t like the food here.’

  ‘Has the doctor seen you?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Me and five hundred other men.’

  Behind him, one of the divers who’d been listening to our conversation looked at me and shook his head. I wondered what he meant by that gesture, but I didn’t have a chance to find out as someone shouted nearby, a repeated word, taken up by a chorus of people as it was passed from tent to tent. ‘Headcount!’

  ‘We have to go,’ Harada said. ‘Headcount near the fence. Come, I’ll show you.’ He packed the last of his belongings into his suitcase and closed the lid.

  We followed the stream of people walking towards the fence that faced the internal road. The strength of the sun seemed to have doubled in the short time I’d been inside the tent. Even the air was hot, burning my throat whenever I took a breath.

  ‘It’s not like Broome, is it?’ I said, one hand shielding my eyes.

  ‘No. It’s a long way from Broome,’ Harada said, gazing at the rows of canvas tents, the wire fence and the flat, dusty expanse beyond. He coughed. ‘Think this is hot? It was worse two weeks ago. Forty-three degrees. Even hotter in the tents. Felt like hell on earth.’ He gasped between every few words, as if the effort of talking and walking was too much.

  When we neared the fence, Harada and I separated to join our respective rows. Yamada beckoned for me to stand in line next to him. I regretted not having had the foresight to bring a hat as many of the men around me had done. We sweltered in the gathering heat as a procession of four army personnel entered the camp from the gate to our right.