by Tham Cheng-E
One of them, a handsome young man with ginger hair and a moustache, habitually pinched an unlit pipe between his lips as he flipped a page of a novel. He had a leg wound near the ankle, where the dressing bulged with copious layers of gauze. It took Anton a moment to realise that it had been an amputation.
“Hi, Anton,” a voice sang.
He looked: it was a nurse dressed in the white drill and red-blue armband of the Medical Auxiliary Service. A white headdress adorned her pincurls. A sense of recognition, though vague, rendered him speechless. “Hey, I…” he fumbled and wagged his forefinger at her. “I know you…”
The nurse put a hand to her hip and gave a teasing chuckle, her eyes arching into half-moons. “Have you really forgotten me? It’s been what, two years?”
He went on wagging his forefinger, failing miserably in his attempt to recollect.
The nurse couldn’t wait. “Vivian,” she said.
“Vivian!” Anton declaimed like an operatic paramour on stage. He gestured at her uniform with open hands, shrugging. “Were you doing this before?”
Vivian frowned in disbelief. “Taxi-dancing? Bootlegging? Remember?”
“Vaguely,” Anton lied, but his blank countenance gave it away.
“Good morning, lovely,” said the handsome man with the ginger-coloured moustache. He removed his pipe and rested it on his belly.
Anton saw Vivian roll her eyes, not from annoyance but amusement, as if she was enjoying the attention. “Good morning, Monty.”
“Oh, Vivian,” Moustache Monty moaned like a jilted lover, his arms falling limply to the sides. “Is that all you could say? I’d gladly lose a leg to acquire a lifetime of you.”
More like an ankle, Anton thought.
Vivian had her attention on the clipboard and did not look at him. “For that you’d have to lose more than a leg, Monty.”
“Anything for you, love,” said Moustache Monty, deliberately souring his face. “Come,” he patted out a spot on his mattress. “Surely you could afford a morning chat?”
Vivian looked cheekily at him over a shoulder. “Later, Monty.”
A streak of jealousy wormed its way into Anton when he saw the kind of glances they exchanged. “You know him?” said he.
“He’s been here longer than you think,” Vivian reached over and retrieved a few tin spools of adhesive plaster from a cabinet. Anton leaned aside for her. “They’re all the same: expecting some wheedling from anything female, plus a kiss or two.” She checked her clipboard and resumed looking at Anton. “You really don’t remember how we left things off?”
“No,” said Anton. “I supposed you—went away?”
“Goodness, did you see a doctor?”
Anton gave a shrug of disinterest. “You’ll have to fill me in.”
“I was dancing at Great World until the requisition order came.” Vivian held the clipboard to her chest. “Then I heard they needed people for the MAS and I signed up.”
“As a nurse?”
“I helped at the mobile canteens,” said Vivian. “Then they gave me some training and registered me as a nurse about a month ago. They were rather desperate for nurses once the wounded started pouring in.”
“Must be hard.”
“Only when someone dies on you.” She turned to the window when a thump of artillery was heard. “You know what’s the best way to observe Death?”
The question took Anton by surprise. “No.”
“Poison a house gecko with insecticide from a spray pump.” Vivian gave a smile that didn’t match her words. “Death comes slowly enough for you to appreciate its presence.”
Anton, dumbfounded, chuckles uncomfortably. “Well, I—”
The sight of a scrawny Kling halted his speech. The Kling passed by the doorway, and having seen Anton, floundered into the ward. He was carrying a small wicker basket and looking a little flustered.
“Amal!” cried Anton. “How’d you find me?”
The Kling ran his fingers through his oiled, curly locks. “Can’t find you in your house lah.” He made little wavering movements of his head as he spoke. “Got people say bomb kena somebody near your place and the ARP ambulance brought him here. So just come and check out lah. Sekali you really here! So what happened?”
“Shrapnel. Nothing serious.” Anton gestured at Vivian. “Amal, meet Vivian.”
Amal looked astonished. “Hey!” he cried, taking Vivian’s hand. “You? A nurse?”
“Long story, Amal.”
Anton shifted his gaze from one to the other. “You knew each other?”
Someone along the corridor shouted for a nurse, and Vivian’s flight couldn’t have been timelier. She took the opportunity to gainfully excuse herself. “I’m so sorry. We’ll speak again.” She gave an apologetic frown and flitted out of the ward, much to Anton’s and Moustache Monty’s dismay.
“Excellent timing, Amal,” said Anton.
Amal wiggled his head. “So your flirting habis lah?”
“You knew her?”
“She help us with the liquor, remember?” said Amal. “She help open the backdoor and transfer the payment as a buffer mah. At the cabaret where we sell the goods, remember? You even danced with her.”
“I did?”
Amal retrieved a cracker from its thin, filmy wrapping, popped it into his mouth and dusted off the crumbs on his shirt. “Drink my syrup and you will remember better.”
Anton rejected a cracker. “I don’t think the syrup’s working, Amal.”
Their conversation was interrupted by a series of three successive thuds—the third having rattled the window louvers. Everyone fell silent and turned their eyes to the windows but quickly lost interest and resumed their activities. There were two more heavier-sounding thuds, then they started coming farther and fewer in between.
“Cannons,” said Amal. He meant artillery. “Don’t know Japs or ours.” He seemed to have recovered from a reverie and resumed his speech in earnest, “Yes, drink the syrup. You know I always bring you good stuff. Remember, don’t see a doctor.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“I tell you many times the ang moh medicine no good for your body lah. Last time you see doctor your memory got better? No? So try mine lah.”
/ / /
Amal spent the rest of the time before lunch nattering about the benefits of an emerging black market and how they could profit from it, if only they could get their wits around obtaining raw supplies from merchants with a war going on. He said that with Anton’s mixed looks they could even run businesses for the Japanese if they occupied this country. Strictly business, he was fond of saying. It’s about serving one master or the other, and that their ethnicities could be advantageous since the Japanese were known to be more tolerant towards Indians and Malays than the Chinese.
Lunch was watered-down rice, tapioca and cabbages. A large Caucasian nurse with a bright, rosy smile ladled the food on metal dishes while a glum-looking lady followed behind and dropped off little tapioca buns.
The shelling resumed. This time the rounds landed closer though they did not sound as large as the earlier ones. Moustache Monty told everyone that they were likely mortar rounds. One of them almost struck the Sisters’ Quarters and probably did some damage because they heard glass shattering. It turned the mood sombre. Moustache Monty tried to read but ended up slipping into a reverie propped up on his bed. Amal was the only one who nattered on.
It was almost one pm when the corridor outside began to stir with a little more activity than usual. A doctor hurried in and conferred with a group of nurses and a superintendent who wore a white blouse with three pips on the shoulders. Vivian however, wasn’t with them.
Amal at last fell silent when the nurses began evacuating the patients on the ground-floor wards, wheeling them out one after another depending on the severity of their wounds. Those on the floor abandoned their litters and shambled after them. Moustache Monty held a brief conference with a few patients and seemed to h
ave decided to stay, contrary to the counsel of the hospital administration.
The sound of gunfire got Amal leaping to his feet and rushing out of the ward.
Moustache Monty tracked him with condescension in his gaze. “I say it’s safer to stay put,” said he. “We’re protected by the Geneva Convention and the Red Cross. Follow my lead and you’ll live. For a start—” more gunfire drew his attention briefly to the corridor— ”bow to them. Show them reverence and they’ll leave you alone. If you run they’ll shoot you.”
No sooner had Moustache Monty spoken Amal returned, his face gloomy. “They’re fighting in the balconies,” he reported. “No good running to the tunnels because Indian soldiers also hiding there. Japs will shoot them all.”
“My point, exactly,” said Moustache Monty.
As it turned out a regiment of the Indian Division had retreated from Ayer Rajah Road and taken cover at the Military Hospital with Japanese troops in pursuit. Amal led them through the western set of windows for their escape. Then they were in the hospital’s backyard—a forested bluff that offered excellent concealment. But from where he stood Anton could see squads of Japanese soldiers crouching behind trees and shrubs along the incline, waiting to execute any escapees.
Somehow he had to find a way.
“Don’t get jumpy or you’ll get us killed,” Moustache Monty told Amal warningly. “Follow my lead and you’ll be fine.”
But Amal appeared not to have heard him. He moistened his drying lips, crouched beside Anton and leaned over to him. “No one is allowed to leave the hospital,” he said in a grim whisper. “They’re killing anyone who can’t walk.”
There was nothing Anton could say to it. He was watching the doorway just as Vivian entered, looking anxious but not frightened. Their gazes met briefly and Anton was surprised when she pulled Amal away.
/ / /
They got into an adjacent room and she pressed an object of considerable weight into Amal’s hands. It was a Nambu pistol— the standard sidearm of a Japanese officer. She pointed at a film of transparent tape attached to the weapon’s butt and Amal realised with a start that it was a neuro-transmitter.
“You’re CODEX,” Amal whispered.
Vivian did not reply. She took out a palm-sized touchpad and remotely programmed the neuro-transmitter in a series of taps. She showed the readings to Amal and then stowed it.
“That’s all I can do for you.” She also gave him a toy cricket clicker. “Keep him alive and destroy it when it’s over.”
They left the room. Vivian clapped briskly down the corridor and disappeared around a corner. Bizarre as it seemed there was little time to ponder. Amal tucked the weapon in his trousers and returned to the ward. He stood by the doorway and peeked down the corridor, now alive with shouting and cracks of gunfire. Against the daylight he saw Japanese soldiers in steel helmets, their silhouettes bristling with the leaves and branches they’d stuck on as camouflage. He could make out the long, spindly tips of their bayonets.
A doctor, hoisting a white flag and a Red Cross armband high, rushed to meet them. A Japanese soldier uttered some kind of war cry and speared him through the thorax. The doctor crumpled to the ground and there he lay unmoving.
“What’s happening?” asked Anton.
Amal raised a hand to silence him. With remarkable composure he went on observing the marauding soldiers skewering a patient hobbling with a leg cast. Screams coursed down the corridor. Even Moustache Monty was turning white; the sheets drawn up to his chest, his opened book lying upside down on his belly.
Amal watched a soldier emerge from one of the rooms along the corridor. He wasn’t wearing camouflage like the others, and carried only a pistol strung to his belt. From the same belt hung a samurai sword. Anticipation sent Amal’s heart into a flutter. It was exactly what he needed—a Japanese captain with a sidearm.
The acrid odour of gunpower wafted in, reeking of an undignified death. Amal hoisted Anton up by the armpits and led him to another bed at the far end of the ward.
“Stay here and pretend you are very scared.”
“I am very scared!” wailed Anton.
“Good.” Amal grinned and tucked him into bed and pulled up the sheets for him. “You must fall and lie very still when he shoot you, okay? Don’t blink!”
“Of course I’ll fall when he shoots me! What are you talking about, Amal?”
Amal did not elaborate. He returned to his place by the doorway and waited until the captain entered the next ward before diving under the bed of the first patient who lay nearest to the doorway.
The gambit, however ludicrous it seemed, might just work.
/ / /
Pistol shots rang out from behind the wall, and true enough the Japanese captain came tramping in a moment later. He had an weathered face framed in a light beard. In the shadow of his netted helmet his eyes darted about in a frenzied sort of manner, as if livid over something.
Without warning he turned and, having failed to notice Amal hiding under the bed, shot the first patient between the eyes. He then turned his attention upon Moustache Monty, who lifted his arms and held up the Red Cross armband. Moustache Monty was midway through the word “Geneva” when a pistol shot cracked open his skull. He slumped across the bed and whatever remained of his head fell into Amal’s view. A thin stream of blood pelted onto the linoleum.
After the Japanese captain executed the two other Caucasian patients in a similar fashion he began marching towards Anton like the Reaper himself. Just then Amal emerged and stole up to him from behind, brandishing a steel pipe that had once been a section of a bedpost. With a well-placed blow he knocked the pistol from the captain’s hand. The weapon clattered to the floor, still stringed to the belt. A slash from his pocket knife cut the pistol free.
He then feigned an accidental kick and sent the pistol skittering to the edge of Anton’s bed and followed up with a punch to the side of the captain’s face, deliberately holding back such that the blow did not knock him out. The captain staggered, and seizing the opportunity Amal dived for the weapon and deliberately slid it under the bed while pulling out the one he kept hidden in his trousers. When he turned around the Japanese captain was upon him like a feral beast, teeth gnashing, utterly oblivious to an important detail: the Nambu pistol in Amal’s hand wasn’t strung like his.
The captain grasped Amal’s wrists in the wrestle. Amal led him away from Anton’s bed and deliberately gave in, allowing the captain to wrench the weapon from his hand with convincing effort. Amal pushed himself away, as if in fear of the coming execution. The Japanese captain, his face tightened into a look of dark triumph, lifted the weapon to a spot between the eyes and pulled the trigger.
/ / /
The Japanese captain took pleasure in observing how the blast had ejected Amal’s left eyeball from its socket and taken out a piece of skull from the back of his head. He appreciated the backward jerk of head and the spray of blood. They were all very familiar to him—signs of Death to a single twitch of his finger. He watched Amal fall, and was pleased.
/ / /
Anton anticipated the sorrow as he watched his friend fall. But it didn’t come because he saw no blood, no wound whatsoever. Amal had fallen like a victim in a children’s play. He lay on the floor unmoving, perhaps even unbreathing. He is only sleeping, Anton told himself. But it all made no sense.
Before Anton could grasp what was going on he found the Japanese captain before him. He was staring down the muzzle of the pistol when a great flash and a tremendous bang sent him reeling back onto the bed. There he lay in shock, mouth agape and eyes unblinking. He was profoundly astounded by the fact that he lived despite the shot. More surprisingly however, was the fact that the Japanese captain, having sated his murderous hunger, strode away as if Anton had truly been executed to his fullest satisfaction.
The captain left the ward and hollered off a series of commands, telling his soldiers that its occupants were dead. Groups of them rushed past the w
ard bearing their bayonet-tipped rifles. From neighbouring wards came the cracks of rifle shots. It went on for a good while before they began to thin and then stopped altogether.
/ / /
Back in the first ward, Amal stole forward and peeked over the window sill. The soldiers who had been guarding the western façade of the hospital had been called away. In the wake of the carnage, they must have reasoned that the occupants of the wards were either rounded up or dead.
He went over to Anton and tapped him on the foot, making him jerk with a start. “That window, ah,” he pointed. “Not high, about four feet. You jump down and crawl your way out. You will see an old path. Follow it up the slope, okay?”
Anton clawed frightfully at Amal’s arm. “I don’t understand any of this. How’d you—”
“No time to explain, lah. You better go before they find us alive.”
He helped Anton to his feet and ushered him, hobbling, over to the window. He pressed the toy cricket clicker into Anton’s hand. “Count to thirty after you reach the path and then press this hard.”
Anton threw a leg over the ledge. “You’ll come with me?”
“Right behind you.”
Just as Anton was about to leap off the window he grasped the sill and turned back. “Where’s Vivian?”
“She okay, lah! Don’t worry.” Amal slid his arms beneath Anton’s armpits and lowered him. “Quickly go! And don’t forget what I tell you, ah!”
/ / /
Anton slid down the wall and found himself in a backyard thick with foliage. Beyond a narrow, mossy drain a bluff led up into the forest along a trail worn out by frequent use. Anton took a backward glance and did not see Amal. Cautiously he hobbled forth as sporadic gunfire erupted from some part of the hospital grounds he could not see.
/ / /
The Japanese captain returned.