The Piano Teacher

by Janice Y. K. Lee

  At dinnertime, they gather in the dining hall, where the separation of countries is again evident. A tall, rangy American businessman, Bill Schott, has been elected camp representative to the Japanese, by the Japanese, and he stands up to address the whole camp.

  “The Japanese have decided that we are to man the kitchens and cook our own meals. These will be coveted jobs, so we are going to rotate them so that everyone gets a chance to serve.” He doesn’t say why the jobs will be so desirable, but everyone can see that proximity to food is only a positive thing. “We will also be assigned what I’ll call housekeeping duties, not only our private rooms, which should be kept clean and which will be inspected on a regular basis, but also sweeping the courtyard and other duties as they see fit. I have been assured that these tasks and our conditions will be in keeping with the Geneva Convention, although, technically, Japan is not under its auspices, as they signed the agreement but never ratified it. They say they are agreeing to it for goodwill. We will be given adequate food, as per the Convention, which I believe is some twenty-four hundred calories a day. I have inquired as to mail and contact with the outside world and we are to receive letters and packages on set days of the week. Obviously we will not know whether that is reliable, but they have said they are willing to do it. Our governments are to be notified of our presence here and of the living conditions and we are to have Red Cross representatives come periodically and make inspections. In the best case, of course, there will be arrangements for repatriation and there will be some sort of swap of citizens between countries.” He pauses. “Obviously it is unclear when all this will come to pass. We are, it is important to remember, in a war that is still very much going on. It could be weeks, it could be months. In the meantime, I hope we can all live together in harmony and try to help each other as much as possible while the situation is like this. If anyone has any complaints or comments, please come to me and I will try to make our views known to the camp supervisors, but I’m afraid we are not operating from a position of great power. At any rate, I wish everyone well as we go forth from here. Let’s make our countries proud.”

  He sits down. There is an exhalation of air, as everyone digests what he has said. And then hands pop up in the air. Schott stands up again to take questions.

  “Do we have any idea how long we’re to stay here? ”

  “None at all, unfortunately.”

  “Are we allowed to have money? Or can we get money from the outside?” asks a Dutchman.

  Schott laughs. He is very rich himself and has already acquired a great many comforts for the American faction, which have all been diligently and enviously noted by the other groups.

  “I imagine you’re allowed to have whatever you want, if you can keep it a secret, or if you want to share it with them. I don’t know. This is one of those murky areas you don’t really want to get into officially. Just use your common sense.”

  “Can we write letters to the outside? ” Hugh Trotter asks.

  “I don’t think so. Or if we did, I think the people we wrote them to would never receive them or get such censored letters that they would be rendered useless—an exercise in futility, I suspect. I will certainly ask, but it seems unlikely. I’ll try to get Ohta, that’s the head of the camp, in a good mood, and ask him then.”

  The questions fly fast and furious, mostly routine matters, prisoners worried about their daily comforts. Will starts to eat.

  “What about me?” Ned says suddenly to the table. It’s the first time he’s spoken all day.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m registered as British, but there’s no British Ned Young. It’s going to be all messed up. No one at home is going to know I’m here. Where are all the Canadians? ”

  “I think your compatriots are at the POW internment camp at Sham Shui Po. It is odd there are no other Canadian civilians, but perhaps they went home before all this erupted. I think you’re better off here than with the troops. And I’m sure Britain has enough Ned Youngs or Edward Youngs—it’s a common enough name—that they’ll take you in first, and then you can sort it out when you’re in. It will be asking for trouble to get you back with your colleagues.”

  “No, no,” he says. “It’s all messed up. It’s all messed up now. I’ve done it for myself, haven’t I? No one knows I’m here. Nobody. My mum won’t know I’m alive or anything.”

  “It’s all right. You’re here and you’re alive. That’s the important thing. Don’t worry too much about registration and things like that.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” the young Canadian snaps. “You’re all proper and accounted for. I’m alone here.” He stands up and walks out.

  “He needs to have a moment,” Johnnie says. “Leave him alone. He’ll be all right.”

  Will looks after Ned’s receding body. “It’s hard for him. I don’t think he’s eighteen yet. He’s here, halfway across the world, all by himself, with no hope.”

  “Join the club,” Johnnie says. “It’s misery all around here at Camp Stanley. And it’s only the second day.”

  After dinner, he and Johnnie go back to their room. On Will’s bed is a neatly wrapped package, with a note. It’s unsigned but it’s apparent that it’s from Ned.

  “I wish you the best. Don’t worry and thank you for everything.” He has left the majority of his borrowed clothing.

  “How on earth does he think he’s going to get out of here? ” Johnnie sits down on the bed.

  “Lord knows. He didn’t want to incriminate himself or us, I suppose, with this rather cryptic note. I’m thinking the worst. He has no idea of the terrain out here, or even in town, no friends, no Chinese language, nothing. Even if he gets out of the camp boundaries, he’s a blind man. And he’s left all his clothes . . .” His voice trails off.

  “Not the sign of a sane man, certainly,” Johnnie offers.

  “No.” Will crumples up the note and puts it in his pocket.

  In the morning, some internees are talking over breakfast about how they heard gunshots in the middle of the night, toward the southern wall of the camp.

  February dawns the next week and it is cold. Hong Kong has a subtropical clime so there is no heating infrastructure and the winter is always an insidious, creeping cold that surprises you in the middle of the night or when outside too long. No sign of Trudy. It’s now been more than three weeks since he’s seen her. It’s getting to be more than disheartening—it’s embarrassing now as people inquire as to how she’s doing. Amahs, houseboys, local girlfriends, and spouses who are still on the outside for one reason or another come to try to see the internees, but the camp is still working out the visitation rules and they are turned away with their packages. Still, their visitors are allowed to leave word that they’ve been there.

  Will concentrates instead on winterizing the buildings as much as he can. Beds have been provided, with some semblance of bed linens, but the temperature plummets at night. He’s never thought of the cold in Hong Kong as anything more than brisk, but he realizes now that that was with a proper winter coat and well-insulated walls. Everyone is hunched over, trying to conserve body heat, sleeping with all their clothes on, shivering in the bathrooms, not taking baths. When Will brushes his teeth, the silver water feels like ice. He puts in an official request for more blankets and winter coats, especially for the children, who are running around in their parents’ extra clothing, hems and sleeves trailing the floor. He organizes a patching team that goes around plugging any holes in the wall with a crude mix of mud and leaves. All this does little to alleviate the creeping misery of unrelenting discomfort that clouds their days.

  Trudy, when she comes, is unexpected. A guard plucks Will from the lunch queue and takes him to the office of Ohta, the head of the camp.

  Expecting a response to his blankets-and-coats request, Will is taken aback when he is told he has a visitor. They have not been allowed yet. But, of course, rules have never really applied to Trudy.

  Ohta, a
portly man with greasy skin and smudged wire spectacles, gestures that Will is to sit down. He is attired in a Japanese version of a safari suit, but one with long sleeves and pant legs.

  “You have a visitor.”

  “Is that so? ”

  “We have not yet allowed any visitors.”

  “I’m aware of that. But I don’t know anything about it.”

  Ohta eyes Will over his desk.

  “You want drink?”

  “Please.” Will knows to accept.

  He gestures to the soldier by the door and barks out something in Japanese. Whiskey is poured into small, dusty glasses.

  “Kampai!” He lifts up his glass with one pink, porcine hand, and drains it, tossing his head back with a grunt. Will follows suit, with less vigor. Ohta shakes his head as if to throw off cobwebs. “Good!” He pours another.

  “Your visitor, your wife?”

  “I have no idea who my visitor is.”

  “Woman, Chinese?”

  “Trudy Liang?”

  “Yes. Miss Liang is here to see you.”

  “Oh, good.” Will’s heart is beating fast. “Thank you very much.”

  “I told her only one time she can come on no visitors’ day. Special for her.”

  “Well, she is special, isn’t she? ”

  Ohta stares at him.

  “No one special now. Everyone same, prisoner or not Japanese. Same!”

  “Yes, of course.” Mercurial, he thinks. “Well, I think she’s special because she is to me.” Lame finish.

  Ohta gets up. “Wait in room here.”

  After a few minutes, during which Will sips at his whiskey, enjoying the warm burn in his throat, trying to calm his nerves, the guard gestures for him to come. They go into a small room with a table and five chairs, where Trudy is sitting, looking uncomfortable. She is thin, her clothes serviceable. Her hair is pulled back into a chignon, face colorless without any sort of makeup. Still, somehow, she radiates privilege.

  “Darling,” she says. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  He doesn’t say anything about her absence, just asks her what she’s been doing, forfeiting the right to rebuke her for her neglect.

  “Frederick is dead, so I’ve been with Angeline, but she hasn’t really spoken for weeks. I keep telling her she has to cope for Giles’s sake, but she doesn’t seem to listen. She wants to bring him back here but what kind of place is this to be responsible for a child? She doesn’t want to go to England where she doesn’t have any family but Frederick’s, not that she could go right now, and his family was against the marriage in the first place, so it’s a rather difficult situation. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Besides trying to get a foothold in the new world out there.”

  “You’re all right for food and all that? Dominick is taking care of you? ”

  “The Japanese are so odd,” she says, ignoring him. “They have this extraordinary custom of defecating in every room of every house they loot. Isn’t that awful? Marjorie Winter’s house was completely soiled—she found it when she went up to get some supplies. The odor! The whole city smells of waste. That’s one Japanese custom I’m not too enthralled by. So extraordinary. They have that beautiful tea ceremony and all that lovely gardening, and then they go and do something like that. And of course, all the women are in a tizzy about rape. You’re not supposed to go anywhere alone. I brought a driver.”

  “Ned is gone. I think he tried to escape but I’m quite sure he was shot in the attempt. He was going rather mad.”

  Trudy’s face falls. “Don’t tell me such awful things, darling. I can’t stand it as it is. Can we talk about something else? Something else entirely, something quite trivial in comparison. Like how I’m scrabbling all the time. It’s terribly unbecoming. At least here, you don’t have to do that. You just stand in a line and get food handed to you.”

  “You have quite a good idea of what goes on here, have you?” It’s the first time he’s been sharp with her and she takes note.

  “Is there anything you need that you think I might be able to procure outside?”

  “It’s scant hunting out there too, isn’t it? ”

  “Yes, but I could get Dommie on it. We have food but it’s rather dear. I could weep when I think of the Japanese bombing the godowns. There was so much food in there, and they just incinerated it all. They said you could smell the food burning miles away. Makes me ravenous just thinking of it. At least there’s no chance I’ll get plump if this goes on. You don’t like plump women, do you, Will? No chance of me getting that way.” She chatters on. “Conditions in Sham Shui Po and Argyle are supposed to be hideous,” she says. “They’re coming down very hard on the uniformed. You’re lucky you’re here. That Jane woman at the hospital really saved you, I think. Very clever of her.”

  “Do you think I should be there?” he asks, hard. “Do you think I’m a coward for being here? ”

  “Are you mad? ” she says with genuine astonishment. “Of course I don’t.”

  How quickly he has lost the ability to gauge what she thinks, he realizes. She is off to something else entirely.

  “Do you remember what it was like just three months ago?” she asks. “Conder’s Bar, the Gloucester, the Gripps, the parties. Can you believe it was just a few lousy months ago?”

  “No,” he says. “Have you any news of what’s going on out there? We’ve no way of getting any reliable information and it’s driving us mad.”

  “Carole Lombard died in a plane crash, that’s the biggest news.” She winces at his reaction. “Sorry, irreverence not appropriate? All right, reality, then. It’s grim all around, darling. I don’t know much but I’ll try to find out for you. The paper now is all Japanese propaganda and says everything is going swimmingly. We can get rice at one of fourteen depots, so that’s usually our main task, getting food. We send the maids to one, and we go to another, and hope one of us gets lucky. But that’s not so grand in the way of news, is it? What else. In the days right after you left, they were in a democratic mood so they were encouraging one and all to go to the old colonial bastions, so you would walk into the Pen and see laborers squatting on the chairs, having tea! They came with the cash they made from looting, to try to see how the other half lived. It was just beyond! It’s difficult to get reliable information—the paper just says that the Japanese are conquering everything in sight and it’s hard to read between the lines.” She pauses. “Dommie’s doing fine, fraternizing with the Japanese. He seems to think he’s one of them. He’s in business with Victor now, a bit shady, but what isn’t these days? When I go to visit him in his offices—he has offices in Central—he always opens up a bottle of champagne. The whole thing makes me quite ill but I drink it anyway. And I see some of Victor. He’s the one who got me in here. Had a word with someone he does some business with.”

  “Dommie’s never had a job before and now he’s a businessman?”

  “War does strange things to people. I think this might be the best thing to happen to him. He’s rather found himself.” She laughs, an odd laugh.

  “He should be careful. At the end of all this, he’s going to have to account for himself. And Victor too.”

  “Dommie doesn’t think that way. He’s always lived in the present—you know him. Victor is another story. I’m sure he’s covering his tracks well.”

  “But you should warn Dommie that he should think ahead this time. And tell him to be careful of Victor.”

  She waves her hand impatiently. “So I’ve been summoned by a Japanese,” she says. “A man named Otsubo who lives in the Regent Suite and is in the gendarmerie, which I’m told is a good thing to have on your side. They’re the military police. He wears a special chrysanthemum pin on his collar, which signifies gendarme-ness. I think he might want me to teach him English. Do you think I should do it?”

  “Not you too,” Will says. “Are you going to be best friends with the enemy? ”

  “I resent that,” she says. “You know me.” />
  “I do, darling, and I love you despite it.”

  “Very funny, my idiot.”

  How are they back to this already? This needling, their sophisticated parrying, from a time when such things mattered.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” he says after a moment.

  “Well, I’m bringing Angeline with me. She’ll be a chaperone, so don’t worry.” She pauses. “It’s the funniest thing . . . I’ve had a phrase running through my head all week—plutocrats and oligarchs—and I haven’t the slightest idea what it means. It must have been something I heard somewhere. You’re clever—what does it mean exactly?”

  “Plutocrats are the ruling class,” he says. “And oligarchs are governments ruled by a few. I suppose they mean the same thing, really. Why do you think you’ve had that on your mind?”

  “Haven’t a clue,” she says, dismissing it as quickly as she brought it up. “So I’ll be a tutor. He’s very important, apparently, head of the gendarmerie. And he lives at the Matsubara—I mean the Hong Kong Hotel. They’ve renamed everything, you know. The Peninsula’s the Toa now. Maybe I’ll get some special privileges and then we’ll be on easy street.”

  “Yes, maybe,” he says. He notices, but is not suitably appreciative of, the “we.” He wishes she would go. He is tired. But when she gets up to leave, he feels bereft.

  “I’ll see you again?”

  “Of course. I’ll bring things too, what I’m able to scrape together, if you think it would be helpful. Maybe next week if they’re less irritating about the visiting hours.” And she’s out the door, elegant even in her reduced circumstances. He smells her jasmine perfume in the sweep of air she’s left behind.

  There are five guards assigned to their building. They patrol the adjacent grounds, do random inspections, and make their presence felt. Most leave the prisoners alone, but one, Fujimoto, a skinny fellow who smells like rancid fish, is particularly cruel and delights in making the men sweep the yard or do one hundred jumping jacks when they are so tired and weak they can barely stand up. Fujimoto has it in for Johnnie, for some reason, and whenever he sees him, he will stop him and have him clean the latrines or dig up holes in the garden—senseless tasks that just reveal the hardness of the man. But he is mild compared with the men who are assigned to investigate covert activities. Word of a shortwave radio gets out and the three men who are supposed to have the components are dragged off to a distant room. Only one comes back, and he is barely alive, bones broken and one eye almost gouged out. He dies later in the makeshift infirmary. “They let him come back alive as a warning,” says Trotter. “That much is clear.”