‘What happened here, Sofiah? You must tell me.’
Very slowly she mumbled the reply. First the Kempeitai, the Japanese secret police, who were already more feared than all the ghosts of the jungle together, had come and taken her father. Then the soldiers had come and killed everyone in the house her mother, her grandmother, and her sister. They had found her brother hiding under the house, tied him to a tree and gathered all the neighbours to watch as they hacked him to death. Then the Japanese took the cans of kerosene in the store, poured them over the building, and set fire to it.
‘They did not find me because I was in my cousin’s house,’ the girl finished, proud of the good luck which had saved her from the tragedy which was too big for her to understand. ‘The Japanese said it was because we helped the white men. They said the time of the white men was finished now and they would be killed like rats and so will anyone who helps them.’
James looked carefully at the quiet houses of the hamlet. Curtains of flowered cotton wavered in the breeze at the empty windows. A brown cow, tethered under a group of palm trees, raised its head and looked at them, flicking flies away with its tall. The stillness and silence of the scene were unnatural; he realized that at his approach the villagers had disappeared into their homes.
‘Can you go to your cousin’s house now, Sofiah?’ She nodded, her lower lip wavering. ‘Go on then, and don’t tell anyone I was here. You’re a brave girl, I won’t forget you.’
She looked up at him with coy curiosity. ‘What will you do, tuan?’
‘I don’t know. Something. We will take revenge for the death of your family.’
She released her hold on him and shook her head, then ran up the dirt road and vanished into the last dwelling.
As James turned to go a stone fell beside him, then another hit him in the back. He heard angry adult voices raised indoors to stop the stone-throwers. He walked steadily onwards, suddenly feeling a stranger to himself inside his brown skin. His instincts told him that this was the end of their heroic career as saboteurs, but his conscious mind rejected the knowledge and searched desperately for absolution for the death of the storekeeper and his clan.
At the camp, Ibrahim brought the news that the Japanese had done more than massacre one family. They had executed the dockyard foreman and decimated the labour-gangs for failing to inform on the saboteurs. They had launched a senseless attack on a settlement of Chinese smallholders, killing more than a hundred people; the innocent farmers were made to dig their own mass grave, then the entire community was lined up on the edge of the excavation and machine-gunned.
Bill at once ordered the camp to be struck and the traces of it hidden as far as possible. ‘We must move out as fast as we can. The Japs will be looking for us with every man they can spare now.’
‘Animals! They’ll pay for this, we’ll make them pay,’ James was almost shaking with rage as he began to dig the soft red earth. ‘When we do the K. L. road we’ll take out half their bloody army.’
‘Have you gone raving mad?’ The Australian’s tone was malevolent. James looked at him with surprise, and saw fury in his friend’s light-blue eyes.
‘We are going to strike back, Bill. For Christ’s sake, we can’t let them get away with a bloody massacre.’
‘Use your head, Jim. Or are you thinking with your dick now you’ve taken off your trousers?’
‘What the hell do you mean?’
‘God save us – you really don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?’ He paused as Ibrahim approached them.
‘Shall we leave the stores, sir?’ He pointed aloft, to the cache of supplies suspended a hundred feet above the forest floor.
‘Get them down and break out all the quinine we’ve got, but leave the food,’ Bill ordered, and then resumed talking to James in a low, fierce voice, not wanting the Malay to hear. ‘Now listen, I’m speaking as your commanding officer. There can be no question of us endangering the civilian population by any further activities – right? If we attack the K. L. road, the Japs will torch the town, it’s as simple as that.’
‘Then what the hell are we doing here?’
‘We’re doing nothing more, nothing. The mere fact that we’re at large in the country is a danger to the Malayan people. My orders in this situation are to escape, and make our way to Ceylon if we can.’
‘Run away? Like all the rest? I won’t do it. I won’t betray this country.’ James was flinging spadesful of earth aside in fury.
‘For Christ’s sake, if we stay now we might as well bayonet their children ourselves.’ Bill ran his hands through his hair with exasperation. ‘Why can’t you see that? Which would you rather do – “betray” the people as you call it or fucking murder them?’
James remained silent, standing in the shallow excavation, his eyes cast down. Bill continued in an even lower voice, ‘What’s the matter with you, James? We’re fucked, you can see that. We can’t fight any more. The party’s over. Our orders are to quit.’
‘I know, but …’ James did not dare continue. He sensed that the lives lost on their account did not weigh as heavily as they should have done with him, and that Bill was outraged by his lack of concern. ‘… It seems too damned cowardly,’ he finished.
‘Ever heard that discretion was the better part of valour?’ Bill stood up, relieved the discussion was over. ‘We’ll live to fight another day, that’s for sure.’
Lee Kuang Leong, their radio operator, finished sweeping the fire’s ashes into a banana leaf and tipped the debris into the hole dug by James.
‘We take the wireless?’ he asked Bill.
‘We can’t leave it. I grant you it’ll slow us down.’
‘Can make in two parts, I think.’
‘Do it then – good idea.’
In half an hour every trace of their habitation was gone and the ground covered in an innocent mantle of dead leaves and fallen branches. Bill fastened the leather moneybelt which contained their funds – several thousand dollars – around his waist, rolling his sarong over it to hide it.
‘OK. Now my orders are to disband this unit in the event of reprisals against the civilian population. James and I will make our way to Port Swettenham and try to get off the peninsula and away to Ceylon. Any ideas, you two?’
‘Better I go to Perak, join the Communist army.’ Leong spoke without hesitation. ‘Many camps in jungle. We can impede the Japanese by peaceful ways, just as we attack imperialists before invasion.’ He smiled, testing their tolerance. The Communists’ commitment to controlling the country themselves was something he had frequently explained to the whites.
‘Fair enough. Ibrahim?’
The Malay seemed undecided. ‘I go with him.’ he said at last. ‘If I go home, it will be bad for my family. Better to stay in the jungle.’
‘Right. We’ll be going the same road for a few days. Best get started then.’
James walked at the rear of the small column, full of resentful anger. As they marched westwards, James and Bill barely spoke to each other. The Australian was racked with remorse that their adventure had brought tragedy on innocent people. He remembered their schoolboy excitement with a flood of shame, which quenched his spirit and left him vulnerable to a formless despair.
Their physical condition, already debilitated, degenerated further with fearful speed. Within two weeks it was an effort to walk for more than an hour and the thorn-scratches which cross-hatched their arms and legs healed more and more slowly. Bill, with the weakest constitution, began to develop sores on his shins. They all grew thin and their bones seemed to stick through their skin. Lee Kuang Leong was the most distressed by this decline, and began to avoid wounds from the savage jungle foliage with almost girlish hysteria.
The wireless, useless now that the batteries had died, slowed them down considerably but Bill would not sanction its abandonment.
‘The one thing we can do, the only function we’ve got left – is intelligence,’ he said. ‘As soon as we’re among friends we must
get a generator rigged somehow.’
At first they avoided the villages, making temporary camps in the jungle at night, which only increased their misery. Day after day there was rain, which soaked their clothes, their equipment and every piece of fire material they found. Soon they were lightheaded with hunger, and risked sending Ibrahim into a kampong to buy cooked rice. They stood at the roadside in the lashing rain and ate the food hastily from its wrapping of folded banana leaves, too famished to conceal themselves or seek shelter; they had scarcely swallowed more than a handful of grains when a jeep loaded with Malay police roared past, splattering them with mud. With crazy bravado born of physical weakness, James shouted curses after the vehicle.
‘The villagers must have called them,’ Ibrahim said with disgust. ‘Next time we must choose a kampong with no telephone. They were driving too fast to get a close look at us, thanks to God.’
They turned back into the jungle and travelled away from the danger as fast as they could until nightfall, when they halted, rigged a shelter from a waterproof groundsheet and spread another on the sodden earth below it. The rain seemed to be falling harder and faster; since their clothes and packs were already saturated, the shelter was small comfort.
‘Do you suppose we can eat the rest of the rice?’ James asked Bill, looking hungrily at the squashed parcel of food he had taken from his pack.
‘Survival training says never keep cooked food in this climate,’ the Australian replied, curling up his long legs as he sat down. His tone was uncertain.
Lee Kuang Leong screwed up his face and spat into the downpour. ‘The rice is only cooked a few hours – what harm can it do? I’m going to eat mine.’ With deft fingers he unfolded the creased leaf and began to gobble the food. James and Ibrahim copied him at once. Bill paused, silently considering the bad feeling he would engender if he refused to eat and weighing it against the theoretical possibility that the stale food would give him a bellyache. Finally he, too, finished his rice.
In the dead of night they all vomited and lay groaning on the muddy ground while their guts writhed in rejection of the tainted rice. It had begun to ferment during the few hours they had carried it.
‘God, it stinks.’ James scented the acrid, half-digested mess amid the warm, humus smells of the jungle. ‘If the Japs had dogs they could sniff us ten miles away.’
‘At least it’s stopped bloody raining.’
‘That’s right, old man, keep looking on the bright side.’ James pulled himself shakily upright on the stump of a fallen tree, then sat down hurriedly as his weak knees buckled.
‘One more mistake like that and the Japs won’t need to look for us any more.’ Bill picked his spectacles out of the mud, where they had fallen from his shirt pocket. Now he only wore them to look at the map, and lived in terror that he would lose or break them.
The four men slumped shivering on the wet ground in the darkness, and followed their own thoughts. Bill tried to plan the next day’s march from what he remembered of the map, but every train of thought broke like a rotten thread and left his head full of meaningless information. James comforted himself with a reverie of his bed at Bourton, crisp and white with freshly laundered fine, linen sheets and cosy from the warming-pan. Lee thought of a feast he had enjoyed with his comrades when they heard the news of the Japanese invasion, of the sizzling morsels of pork and duck, the fragrant soups and the mounds of sweet, clean rice. Ibrahim dreamed of his home and the young wife he had married only a few months earlier, and the pleasure of sitting on the steps of his house in the cool of the evening with his father-in-law, discussing his new job in the district engineer’s department while the women cooked the evening meal.
The strident calls of the night insects faded, and they heard nothing but the drips and trickles of water for a while, until the mournful gibbon whoops announced the dawn. Daylight brought new despair. Ibrahim was too weak to take more than a few steps, and James was hardly stronger. Bill ordered a morning’s rest and sat apart from the others, desperately trying to order his thoughts. I’m getting too weak to think, he acknowledged to himself. But if I can’t get us out of this, we’ll just lie down and die right here.
Steam began to rise from the sticky ground and its thick mantle of vegetation as the heat of the day grew stronger. The Chinese, least affected by the rotten rice, paced slowly to and fro under the tree canopy, craning his neck with its prominent Adam’s apple as he searched the foliage in vain for a bird, a squirrel, or even a frog – anything that could be killed for food.
Suddenly he halted in front of Bill. ‘What was the name of that village?’ he asked. Bill shook his head to clear it and picked the damp map from his pack. Lee looked intently over his shoulder as he unfolded the tattered document and traced their pitiful progress. The Australian’s stained brown finger and the Chinese’s spatulate thumb traversed the plan slowly together, then Lee identified a name he evidently knew, and joyfully muttered a stream of curses in his own language.
‘Maybe we will be OK,’ he announced with total certainty. ‘Here is a house I know.’ He pointed to a town a few miles further down the road. ‘Very rich man, very good comrade. We can ask him for help – I think at least he will give us food, maybe he can give us somewhere dry to sleep.’
‘It’ll take you half a day to get there,’ Bill spoke with dawning hope. ‘If you leave now you’ll make it by the evening.’
‘I can go?’ The Chinese, bred to total obedience to authority, looked enquiringly at his commander. Bill nodded. ‘Get moving, Lee. I want you back here with all the dry food you can carry by this time tomorrow.’
As Lee’s squelching footsteps receded into the background noises of the jungle, James glanced weakly at the Australian, who stood gazing pointlessly in the direction of the Chinese’s departure.
‘He’ll clear off,’ James predicted in a peevish voice. ‘You’re nuts, Bill. We won’t see hide or hair of him again.’
Bill shrugged his shoulders, the sharp edges of his shoulder blades clearly visible under his clammy green shirt. ‘So what? He was fit, if he saves himself, so much the better for him. No sense him sticking with us now; you won’t do the war effort any more good if an able man dies alongside you, eh?’
The three of them sat in silence, too feeble to argue. Ibrahim was feverish and rolled his head weakly from side to side, muttering to himself. James again conjured up the vibrant dream of his childhood home, and slipped away into the world of his imagination. Bill slept fretfully, fighting the desire to give in and resign himself to the hopelessness of their situation.
In the full heat of the next day they heard crashing footsteps approach; James, now a little stronger, stood up and promptly sat down in surprise when he saw Lee tramping towards them, followed by three young Chinese, and with a metal tiffin-carrier in his hand.
‘Ha-hah!’ the Chinese shouted, his long, hollow-cheeked face radiant with a smile. ‘You think you not see Lee any more, hen? Happy to be wrong, sir? We will be all safe now, you see. Our friend makes you all welcome in his house.’
The three-tiered lunch carrier was full of sticky cakes and dry biscuits, and there were bottles of warm fizzy lemonade to wash them down. Half-carrying Ibrahim, they set off for the friendly house, a square mansion full of high-ceilinged rooms and heavy, dark furniture. Their host was a fat Chinese in a brown suit which creased around his spherical belly and strained at its shiny seams.
The man insisted that they sleep in his house, assured them that they would never be betrayed under his roof, and had his servants conduct them to two enormous box-beds of carved black wood with embroidered curtains.
When they had washed, slept and regained their strength, he gave them a feast so rich and elaborate that they were stuffed after the first three courses and sat, fighting sleep and feeling uncomfortably bloated, while their host made long speeches reviling the Japanese and praising the valiant Communists and the coming revolution.
‘And our allies,’ Lee Kuang Leong a
dded, raising his bottle of beer to Bill and James, ‘who fight with us and share our struggle.’
Later, when Ibrahim had fallen asleep and their host was swaying slowly and belching to himself, Lee leaned towards them again. ‘You are surprised I came back for you, heh? You know, we Communists will help you now, and you will help us, but when the Japanese are gone we will be enemies again. Our ambitions are not the same.’ He took a slow pull at the bottle. ‘But for this moment we want the same thing, to get the Japanese out.’
The food and comfort revived their spirits, and with optimism came a sense of purpose. Their host had a great deal of information. The Japanese had interned thousands of aliens in prison camps all over the country, Indians as well as Europeans.
‘I wonder if Gerald got away before the Japs took over Singa pore.’ James stretched out a lazy hand for his half-finished bowl of soup.
‘I can’t see him going if he had the chance.’ Awkwardly, Bill picked up a few grains of rice with his unaccustomed chopsticks. ‘He’ll be behind the wire now, if he’s still alive. What about undercover groups like us?’ He turned enquiringly back to their host, who shook his head. Many Europeans who had been left behind the Japanese lines had given up and escaped by boat in the hope of reaching Ceylon, but a few remained. In the north, an Englishman was living with the Temiar aborigines: in the east three English soldiers were hiding in the house of a Malay Christian missionary; two English planters were living at the main Communist camp in Perak supervising weapon-training.
‘Are they attacking the Japanese?’ Bill asked, mentally noting everything the fat man said. He kept a journal of their operations, but took care to record nothing in it that would be of use to the Japanese if he were captured.
‘No, I think, no. We have no news. Only the bandits attack the Japanese.’
‘What bandits?’ Eager for action once more, James and Bill heard him with concentrated attention.
‘In the hills, at Pulai. Hakka bandits, sons of Kuan-Yin. Very bad men for women, gambling, everything like that, but they are still fighting.’
Pearls Page 37