The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  Again I was driven out of town, this time in the back of a lorry with an armed guard, a squat Japanese soldier who did not take his eyes from me for a second. We stopped at a house along the Gopeng Road, a large mansion with a gravel drive lined by frangipani trees. I was taken to a room at the back overlooking a vast garden of fruit trees, such a pleasant room that I thought nothing sinister could possibly befall me here, despite the reputation of the Japanese, despite the warning from Sergeant Sato.

  I was left on my own to enjoy the view for some time before eventually being joined by the officer. He was as polite as the Malay policemen, as far as a Japanese can be, that is, and allowed me to sit. He even addressed me in excellent English. He said he was Major Tomasu and that he was the head of the Kempeitai for the state of Perak. He asked me if I knew what that meant. I wanted to say what everyone thought of these people, that they were no better than the notorious Nazi Gestapo in Germany; however, all I said was that it meant he was someone of importance. He acknowledged with a haughty nod of the head and then explained that the Kempeitai was the military police corps of the Japanese army and, yes, he was important.

  He asked me where I had done my medical training. I decided I could be haughty as well. I tilted my head back so that I could look at him down my nose, and told him the King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore and the Leiden Academic Hospital in the Netherlands, and saw with satisfaction that it impressed him. His easy manner and a few other innocuous questions prompted me to drop my guard further, until out of the blue and without relaxing the smile on his lips he asked me the name of the leader of the bandits I had been treating.

  At first it did not register. ‘Bandits’ was a term only the Japanese used for the men in the hills. I said I did not understand. What is the location of their camp, he said. I continued to feign ignorance, and he continued to smile. What is their strength? How are they supplied? How many British are with them?

  This last question must have caused a spontaneous reaction to pass across my face, because the smile promptly vanished as he leaned forward. How many British are with them, he repeated. For this I had no need to feign ignorance. The thought that there might be British in the hills with the guerrillas was about as unlikely to me as men on the moon.

  The moment of tension passed. He lounged back in his seat and smiled at me. ‘You will answer these questions sooner or later,’ he said. ‘It is inevitable. It will be better for you to answer them sooner. If you answer them here and now, where it is comfortable, things will go much better for you.’ I told him that I would like to help him, but I simply had no idea what he was talking about. He nodded, got to his feet and left the room.

  When he returned he showed me a bottle of quinine and asked me if I recognised it. I said it looked like any other bottle, but it was like some that I had in my clinic. He said it was found in my clinic and asked me how I came by it. There was no point lying about this as he held the evidence in his hand, and by now I knew that the matter of dealing in the black market in medicine was not an offence that would have brought me before the head of the Kempeitai. I told him that the bottle was traded for fresh vegetables in Ipoh, along with many other medicines such as iodine and mercurochrome, all of which were necessary for my clinic to function. He then produced another bottle and asked me about that one. I said they all looked the same.

  ‘Precisely,’ he said. ‘They are from the same batch. Would you care to inspect the serial numbers?’

  I did not understand what he was driving at. They must have taken a second bottle from my medicine cupboard that Ah Ming had not noticed. He made me repeat the batch numbers on the labels, and they did indeed match. He said that they must both be from my clinic. I shrugged and said it was impossible to tell. I had no idea how many bottles Burroughs Wellcome might produce in a batch. For all I knew every bottle in Malaya might carry the same number.

  He nodded, apparently appreciating my logic, and relieved me of the two bottles. He placed them carefully on a table. And then he slapped me so hard across the face with the back of his hand that I fell out of my chair onto the floor.

  ‘You had your opportunity,’ he said coldly. ‘Now it will not be so comfortable.’

  Before I realised what had happened, two soldiers came into the room and dragged me through the house, one by the arm, the other by the hair. They lifted me bodily from the ground and hurled me into the back of the lorry. I must have passed out, whether from the intense pain of being pulled by the hair, or striking my head, because the next thing I remember is bouncing around the floor of that lorry with a Japanese army boot planted on my chest. It stayed there, pressing me into the floor, until we arrived at St Michael’s.

  16

  PARIS

  The car and driver Su-Lin had placed at my disposal delivered me to what appeared to be an industrial estate with high grey walls and sterile expanses of pavement. It was not until I saw a direction sign that I realised it was in fact a prison. The court was opposite, and not at all what I expected; certainly nothing like what I had seen of stone edifices and heavily timbered rooms in films or on television. This was more New Industrial than Old Bailey, perched across the road from high prison walls, all brushed metal and glass. By the time I determined which court I needed (‘Regina v Tariq and two others’) and found my way to a congested public gallery, the proceedings had begun without me.

  I had not set foot in a court for more than fifty years, and only now because it had been so long that I expected the memory of that last traumatic experience to have grown dim. The minute I took my seat I found it was merely awaiting a spark to ignite it again. The imperious judge under his absurd wig, the rows of barristers lined up against him like hungry blackbirds with their own equally risible hairpieces, the solemn tenor of the place – how easily it all returned, charging through the years and filling me once again with dread.

  The judge was delivering a stern lecture; to whom I could not yet discern. There were three young men sitting nervously in what I took to be the dock. They appeared to be Pakistani, with the full beards and shaved upper lips of the righteous. It was not to them the judge addressed himself, but the rows of barristers. There had been a two month adjournment due to some legal complication, a situation that evidently vexed the judge. From what I could glean the trial was to do with national security and terrorism, hence the packed gallery. It was then I understood just where I was.

  The Tariq case had even made the papers in Malaysia, as does every case in the West concerning the question of alleged Islamic terrorism. As the judge pressed on in his measured tones, I tried to recall what I had read.

  Three young men from an ethnic minority group in Pakistan had been arrested outside the Pakistan embassy in London and charged with inciting terrorism in their home country. Their defence was that they were peaceful demonstrators, human rights campaigners handing out protest leaflets. It came down to what they had written in their leaflets. There was a hue and cry when it was claimed in court that the Pakistani and British governments had colluded over the arrests, which led to questions about British arms supply to Pakistan, arms that were turned on minority groups within their own borders. It now appeared that the adjournment had been to seek disclosure of that cooperation. No wonder Su-Lin thought I may find it ‘intriguing’. The British government was on trial. I wondered what her role was in all this.

  Apparently a national security order had been slapped on the whole matter, which sent it back to the courts. The judge was now addressing himself to the question of abuse of power, which he duly rejected. An argument about abuse of process was also rejected. An argument about self-defence, that the defendants had so acted to prevent human rights abuses of their minority people, was rejected. Yes, they were members of an oppressed minority, the judge said, and their people had been victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He even went on to list such crimes – indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations, extra-judicial killings, disappearances, torture,
detention without trial, collective punishments. All of these were illegal acts under British law. However, he declared, the minority people did not have the right to use violence to defend themselves against the authority of the state, and any person who supported and condoned such violence was endorsing terrorism, which was a criminal offence according to both British and international law.

  He raised his eyebrows and looked down his nose at all the barristers, and I almost expected him to say ‘QED, gentlemen’, so convinced was he by his own argument.

  However, some of the ‘gentlemen’ were not in fact men at all. A woman barrister got to her feet, thanked his lordship, and then begged his indulgence. Already I could hear another voice in her words, a man’s voice hurtling through time. Her own father’s voice.

  According to this argument, she said, and the anti-terrorism laws of Great Britain, those millions who supported the anti-apartheid struggle of the African National Congress in South Africa were criminal supporters of terrorism. From this argument, she said, she assumed that the court would also find the heroic men and women of the underground resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, not to mention Japanese-occupied Asia, during World War Two to be in fact terrorists. If anti-Nazi resistance was occurring now, she said, under British law the Special Operations Executive, ‘Winston Churchill’s pride and joy, the lot of them, officers and men, agents and operatives, heroes and heroines, this court would have them all banged up across the road with my client in HM Prison Belmarsh’.

  When Su-Lin sat down, you could hear a pin drop.

  17

  SU-LIN

  I shared the car back into town with Professor Thumboo. I was none too popular with my learned friends for the moment and preferred to avoid them and their contrived piety while I could. He was full of questions about what he had witnessed, and said that it transported him back to ‘the trial’. He did not have to say which trial. I have sat in hundreds over the years, but he did not have to say which one he was referring to now. It was ‘the trial’ for us all back then.

  He was eager to know what I thought the outcome might be. I told him that it was a jury trial, and therefore completely unpredictable.

  ‘In the lap of the gods, as some would have it,’ I said. ‘But there’s no room for supreme beings in a court of law, especially when a jury is involved. The closest thing to God in that room is old Hooray Henry, sitting up high on his bench, and he is not pleased with me currently.’

  Paris pressed me further, and I advised that national security cases were difficult to prosecute. ‘The very term is not specifically defined by British law,’ I said. ‘An offence against the Crown? Not defined. An offence against the system of government? Oh, don’t they wish! A danger to the electoral prospects of the current government? Now we are finally getting to the truth.’

  He presented as an interested spectator, as eager as if he had just seen a good film and wanted to compare views.

  ‘Tariq and his two friends have been fitted up by the Pakistani security agency,’ I explained. ‘Everyone knows it. But of course, proving it is the issue. The leaflets at the centre of the case are no more provocative than a run-of-the-mill issue of the Socialist Worker. The rest of the evidence came courtesy of the regime in Pakistan, who cut a deal with the Foreign Office and the Home Office. If Tariq and his friends were not arrested the British government would find itself without cooperation from Pakistan in the war on terror that so occupies the attention of the PM and cabinet, and their so-called special relationship with the current regime in the United States, not that they are prepared to disclose any of that. Tariq is from a distinguished family, most of whom have been wiped out, some of the three thousand or so of his country men who have suffered a similar fate, not to mention the hundreds of thousands displaced …’

  I stopped because he was smiling at me. I failed to see what there was to smile at.

  ‘There is a lot of your father in you,’ he said.

  I couldn’t say anything after that. They were the exact words Uncle Raja said to me during ‘the trial’. The exact words that had once had me bursting out of my eight-year-old skin. Had he heard it? Was he there that day? I couldn’t remember. It was so easy to overlook his presence in those days.

  ‘You will get him off,’ he said, like it was a foregone conclusion, in spite of what I had just told him.

  ‘Thank you for your vote of confidence,’ I said. ‘But there are three defendants, and three teams of barristers. I am just one.’

  ‘But you will get him off,’ he repeated, this time with that all-embracing Indian head bobble that suggested the matter was beyond doubt. It was ridiculous, but I had to ask why.

  ‘Because of what I just said. There is a lot of your father in you.’

  I quickly changed the subject to avoid an awkward emotional display. ‘That house,’ I said hesitantly, ‘the one along Gopeng Road, the one they took your mother to.’

  ‘The Kempeitai house, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, the one where she met that Japanese major. We lived next door to it.’

  ‘You lived next door to the Kempeitai?’

  ‘Well, hardly,’ I said. ‘I might sometimes feel that old, but we only moved there quite a few years after the war. I remember the big garden of fruit trees she talks of. I remember it very well, in fact. It was quite notorious, that house.’

  ‘Yes, you could certainly say that about the Kempeitai – they were definitely notorious.’

  ‘Actually, we didn’t even know about that at the time,’ I said. ‘We were only children. There were other grounds for notoriety for us. I’m sure if my mother had known about your own mother’s experience there she would have had us moving house again quick smart.’

  Paris settled back into the leather upholstery and sighed deeply. ‘I went to that school, you know.’

  ‘What school?’

  ‘St Michael’s,’ he said.

  I don’t know whether I was more astounded or intrigued. In any event, I was speechless for a moment.

  ‘Only for the last couple of years of secondary school,’ he said, almost apologetically. ‘I won a scholarship to board there. But I never did find out where that house was, exactly. I often used to wonder. Is it still there, do you know?’

  ‘Oh, it was demolished quite a while back. One of the mining millionaires bought it, as well as our old house – although we were all long gone by then – and a couple of others to boot, knocked them all down and built … well, I suppose it can only be described as a palace. I used to think that Mr Yew’s house was a palace, but the new one could have used it for servants’ quarters … and ours for a gatehouse!’

  He gazed out the window at the traffic, apparently lost in his thoughts.

  ‘How did you …?’ I thought better of my question and chose to take a less direct approach. ‘That school … it must have been …’ I was still unsure how to ask, but thankfully did not have to.

  ‘The dormitory where they kept her had been pulled down by the time I got there,’ he said pensively, his gaze settled on the passing scenery. ‘The science lab was still there. I didn’t take science, which I doubt comes as a surprise. I elected to take the humanities stream.’ Finally he turned to face me again. ‘Funny, isn’t it?’

  ‘Funny?’

  ‘How the past continues to shape our lives so directly.’

  ‘Oh, well, yours is a rather remarkable past. What happened to your mother was …’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that, not as such,’ he said. ‘I was rather keen on science before I went to that school. But that lab, and what transpired there … that was the reason I ended up a historian.’

  The four years age difference between my second sister, Li, and myself represented fifty per cent of my life in 1951, and so no insignificant thing. It was also obvious to me that being twelve gave one some advantages, and such advantages tended to manifest daily. We had two bathrooms in our house; that is, if the one for the servants at the back of the house was no
t included. For us there was a Chinese-style bathroom downstairs off the kitchen, and another upstairs, which was in the English style. A Chinese bathroom offered only cold water from a single tap positioned over a large clay dragon pot, the sort of bath that the English used to call a Shanghai jar. Our father, who had once lived in Shanghai, said it was the sort of bath that the Chinese used wherever they were, not just in that city, and I think he regarded its use as some sort of cultural rite of passage for a growing Chinese. The pot was always left topped up with cold water, which one scooped with a kind of ladle and poured over the head to wash. For a long time this is what I thought was meant by the term ‘Chinese water torture’.

  Our English bathroom, however, was blessed with a long bath as well as an American shower and, most important of all, the only actual hot water taps in the entire house. Mei and Li were allowed to use the upstairs bathroom to have a hot shower in both the morning and the evening, presumably having passed through the necessary rites. In the morning, however, because everyone was in a hurry and there wasn’t time for all of us to linger under a hot shower, I was required to use the dreaded Shanghai jar. In reality, that meant my morning wash was not a wash at all, as all I did was splash the cold water over the tiled floor so that to anyone listening outside it sounded like I was bathing myself. As long as I came out with my hair wet no one was any the wiser, and I survived the torture of the Shanghai jar.