Suddenly at Singapore

by Gavin Black

  There was a light somewhere and the quiet man’s voice saying:

  “If you move, Mr. Harris, I’ll let you have every bullet in this gun.”

  I didn’t move, not until they were ready that I should, four of them standing over me looking down. I got up then and limped down the ditch feeling the anger that comes to a fool.

  I don’t know where Kate was when they marched me past the car, I looked for her behind the wheel but she wasn’t there. In the plane they tied me into a seat by a window and ten minutes later we took off in the lights from Kate’s Ford shining down over the cracked surface of the landing-strip.

  CHAPTER VI

  IN THE PLANE there was plenty of time to think, too much. I thought about Jeff and de Vorwooerd and Booney and Ruth, diving back into my life, but beyond that point which let Kate in. Kate mustn’t come in again. There wasn’t anything about her left, not even the anger. I had the feeling that in what was to come I wasn’t to care much about anything, just keep it all pushed away. That way they could only really get at your body, which was what I was expecting now. You could hope to keep the mind not its slave. A thin hope sometimes.

  I was well trussed up, my feet and hands bound, with a simple padlock fastening the safety belt which held me into the seat. My seat was up front in the cabin, near the pilot’s door, and behind me were four men playing cards. It sounded like poker, a game apparently not repudiated for all its Western origins.

  We bumbled along at about a hundred and sixty, up over the main range and then into moonlight over the plain beyond, with a pewtercoloured sea waiting for us. There were junks moving on that sea, as innocent looking as mine. Sumatra came slowly up at us, a huge island a thousand miles long. We went over the flat lands behind the coast towards mountains, as far as I could estimate in the direction of the great Toba lake.

  The plane had never been up more than about six thousand, but when we started to drop from this the poker game stopped. Talk stopped, too. I got the feeling of tension in the cabin and turned my head to see four men all at windows looking down.

  It was easy to understand why when you saw the field. It was an oblong patch cut out of jungle, and clearly not long ago. The cracked tarmac at Kuantan offered reasonable landing compared with this strip.

  The selling line for these planes was that they could land on any reasonable grassy bit of padang, but there wasn’t any grass waiting for us down there, just the raw red earth which looked to me still strewn with only half burned out tree roots. The pilot circled twice, banking horribly on sharp turns, then he ran in to it, as though he knew exactly what he was doing, but it seemed far too fast to me for a job with a low landing speed. Perhaps he had learned that he needed power to take off again if the third bounce was too violent.

  We certainly knew when we had touched down. It was like being driven in a bus at speed straight into a road excavation. Every rivet in the machine screamed. I tried to hold my head against the seat back and nearly got my neck broken. For a moment or two, half stunned, I was only conscious of the vibration. Then a man screamed, thin and high, pure terror.

  Sparks were streaming past my window. I looked out in time to see a wing tip touch, and crumple. The whole plane seemed to lift again, then slew round, with that noise of ripping metal which could so easily mean jagged pieces coming straight at you.

  I shut my eyes and dropped my head on to my chest, as far down as I could get it, feeling another lift, the weight of my body suddenly thrust forward against the seat belt. There was a hideous, shattering jolt which loosened some of the chairs at the back, one of them occupied, from the howling that started up quite near me.

  Then only small things went on falling and I knew we were down, even if you couldn’t call it a satisfactory landing. A sudden quick settling silence was broken by a miserable whimpering. Someone said, in Malay:

  “Fire!”

  At the back of the cabin they began battering at the door and my whimperer joined them, crawling past me up the aisle, which had a gradient like a mountain path.

  “Get me out of this!” I shouted in Malay.

  The whimperer looked at me. He was dragging one leg, using his hands, sweating. He shook his head, almost politely, excusing himself.

  I have a fair line in Malay invective. I used it. But none of the four were listening. I heard them getting clear, while I waited. I remembered what a petrol tank going off sounded like, a crack like a mortar bomb, then the roaring. I waited for that.

  For what seemed a long time there were no voices about the plane, just the occasional clank of a piece of metal falling from the fabric, but beyond this a stillness so deep I heard a bird call in the jungle. They must all be waiting for the big bang, standing off at a safe distance.

  I began to shout, getting rid of an anger that had been bottled up for what seemed a long time, hanging in my seat shouting. There was a kind of relief in what I was doing, and I found the thought of Kate in my mind behind the sweating fear.

  It was the quiet man who came finally and cut me free, the perspiration running off him, but he still managed to look remarkably composed.

  “You’re lucky, Mr. Harris. The fire went out.”

  General Sorumbai surprised me. I’d known of him as the hatchet man for his government, the kind of military figure who tends to emerge during the establishment of a people’s democracy, still young, with an interesting record of atrocities to mark his climb to high command. I knew that he was also politically dangerous, and that the central government liked him away as much as possible. I knew, too, that when out suppressing rebellion he established a kind of autonomous rule in the area of his activity, quite likely to disregard any orders which didn’t appeal to him.

  In a sense, a minor one, of course, I had long been his enemy, working against him by what I did in areas as far apart as two thousand miles. He had, it seemed, wanted to meet me.

  And our meeting was almost social. This atmosphere might have been fostered more completely if I hadn’t been wearing handcuffs, but the general didn’t suggest that these be removed, he just ignored the fact that I was slightly handicapped. I was comfortable enough, in a nice chair, with a bottle of whisky within reach of my two hands. The general, a Mohammedan who had made his pilgrimage, drank pop out of a frosted glass.

  He was a big man for this part of the world, running a little to fat now but not lost in it. He wore a starched, short-sleeved shirt with no insignias, and a revolver slung from a belt about his middle. His dark hair came low on his forehead and was worn rather long, giving his head a massive, solid look. He had a small nose and almost negroid lips, and he laughed a great deal, showing perfect white teeth. The general used English, not well, but stubbornly, putting what he had to say across in his own time and at his own pace, rather in the tradition of British officialdom making use of a foreign language.

  “So! You are greatly feared, eh, Mr. Harris? The plane go grump, goom! You think death, eh?”

  He waited for my reaction and I nodded.

  “Now I have no plane,” the general said.

  This was vastly amusing. He shook with laughter. It was probably a considerable disaster to a military commander who liked to be mobile, but there was also something infinitely comic in the thought of a personage of his stature being deprived of a convenience. He met this kind of irritation with the same good humour he maintained on those occasions when it was necessary to order the massacre of the people in a rebel village. It was an incident in the huge pattern of which the general was the centre.

  “You okay now? I give order much foods. You get? Also whisky.”

  “I’m enjoying the whisky.”

  “So. Pour. Make plenty.”

  The general was hoping that the whisky would assist his purpose and I thought I could use it to serve mine. It seemed to me fairly certain that it wouldn’t be very long before Sorumbai got bored with playing the perfect host. He looked like a man who demanded a continuous variety in the things happening about him. I
wanted a slight anæsthetic against what had to come. I poured, it wasn’t at all difficult, I could even hold the glass to sip from it.

  Watching me made the general thirsty. He emptied his glass and found another bottle in the cooler by the side of his chair. He had a long drink from this and then got up to move a fan which had been stirring the air towards me, but he now beamed it directly at himself. He smiled again as he settled, pulling the gun around a bit on his belt.

  He then heaved a sudden and surprising sigh, and began to deliver a little sermon, his face briefly jellied in a mould of seriousness. It was a dull sermon, mostly about me being an imperialist agent and an enemy of democracy. He took his time, too, fumbling for words, looking at them and throwing them away for others nearer his needs. There were tears in his eyes now, as he bellowed about what was sacred to him.

  I sat there hoping he would never get the complete power for which he was so clearly aiming. He saw himself as a kind of plain man’s Messiah, above politicians, and the little squirming men who fought each other for position in a new society. Sorumbai meant to sweep them aside when the time came, and something gave me the feeling that he thought the time to make his move was very near.

  He pointed a finger at me. Flesh under the set skin of his face shivered a little. I was the horned enemy, the thing of evil, and he was the knight on crusade.

  And then that was all wiped away. He said something to amuse himself, only half translated from his mind into the weird English, but it caused him to sit back with laughter again, looking like Jizo, the merry god of children. You could see him as the family man, romping on the floor, roaring. He had a vast thirst and found more pop, pouring it out, then watching me as he drank.

  “You are finish! You are all finish!”

  I didn’t know whether he meant me, or the things I was supposed to represent as a gun runner. Probably both. It seemed to me highly probable that I was finished. The thing Sorumbai had started to do with the killing of my brother would be continued with me, only in my case it was going to take a little longer.

  I’d had time to think about the pattern on the plane flight when I was left severely alone. It seemed then that there were no accidents in the pattern, they had killed Jeff when they wanted to and had taken me prisoner just when they intended. I was to be used, and I could guess how, particularly clearly since my social hour with the general.

  Sorumbai was the slayer of imperialist dragons, but he had caught one alive to take it back and show it to his people. Already his popularity was that of the man of action, the strong man who has bashed down a succession of opponents, and he probably meant to return to the capital very soon and very suddenly, with me as a kind of trump card.

  A staged trial would be very quickly set up, around a figure of villainy, a tropic version of a thing which had been put to good political use a thousand times elsewhere. I would confess, the usual voluntary confession of the repentant sinner who only needed to be able to mutter a few words and to sit propped up in a chair. I felt quite certain then that Sorumbai had been behind my brother’s murder and my own capture, probably without any knowledge or assistance from the central government.

  He leaned forward a little in his chair.

  “Drink whisky.”

  “I’ve had enough, thank you.”

  “More.”

  “You want me to sleep well to-night?”

  He liked that.

  “Yes, yes. I want you to sleep good. So! All right? Now you speak to me? All you do in Malaya. I have man who write it.”

  “I’ll write it myself.”

  He seemed astonished. He kept looking at me for some time, then got up and went to a desk. He took up some sheets of paper, a ledger to write on, a pencil and brought them over. It wasn’t easy to write with a manacled hand, but I did it, slowly, with the sense of putting in time, the first step in a long delaying action that would probably see Sorumbai the winner in the end, but not yet.

  The general, standing there watching me, must be thinking how soft we were really, how ready to crumple under any pressure. He might even be toying with the idea of keeping me alive, of a great demonstration of the new mercy. I looked up once and he was smiling.

  I wrote for about twenty minutes, a statement of the legitimate business of Harris and Company, a list of our junks and where they were deployed and a few statistics on the carrying of copra, palm oil and the birds’ nests.

  He took the sheets over to the light which hung above the desk, standing to read them, a solid man with his feet slightly apart, the fingers of one hand thrust into the belt which held the gun. He read slowly, his lips forming over some of the words, the glow of white light on his face. He finished and put the sheets on the desk.

  “So?” he said quietly.

  He came over and hit me across the face, three times hard. The third time the blood came out of my nose. Then he shouted, not at me. Three soldiers came into the room at the double, with a clattering. What happened after that was obviously routine, not something in which Sorumbai had to interest himself personally for the moment.

  I was tied back into the chair and the soldiers yanked off my trousers. The three soldiers then lit cigarettes. They started to work first on the soles of my feet, then on my thighs, not making many burns, just a few, which they continued to use over and over again.

  I made a great deal of noise after a very little time. There was some relief in this. There was also the fact that I knew it would give them a sense of achievement. And I was putting something off, holding it away in making that noise. I kept on telling myself that, over and over.

  After a time I wasn’t making the sort of sounds that would come from a sensible man at all. And suddenly, on an order from Sorumbai, the soldiers didn’t light up new cigarettes.

  I lay waiting for the tropic dawn in a hut where the wind ruffled the attap roof. I was on my stomach, my manacled hands under me. They had tied my ankles, too.

  The reaction to torture and the recovery from it is something in the mind. It isn’t the continuing pain that matters, it’s the sense of outrage, of barriers lowered which in your heart you never expected to see lowered. To hear about, yes, but not to experience yourself, not to see the sweating faces of men bending over you, carrying out an assignment with a real or developed immunity to the thing they are doing. They hadn’t been brutal faces, either, not selected toughs, quite young. One of the men had rather childish eyebrows, thin and fine, and small delicate hands, not a soldier’s hands at all. They had watched me all the time, a kind of professional interest, as though assessing my reaction to pain and that smell which became quite strong.

  I went on seeing their faces long after they had dumped me into the hut and gone.

  At dawn there was movement outside, voices, the sound of shouting, military noises, even a bugle. When the light was solid and the heat coming again someone thumped into the hut and looked at me. I didn’t turn my head. The man hawked in his throat and spat.

  I wasn’t brought any food, and I couldn’t have eaten it, but my thirst was horrible, the inside of my mouth parchment. The one blessing was being alone, not having to muster a kind of minimum defence against everything beyond me. I could just lie there, using this respite to assess my position and my chances.

  They weren’t too promising. Even if I could contrive to escape, the coast of Sumatra, facing Malaya, was at least a hundred miles away, and most of that jungle. The only allies I could count on would be the rebels, fighting against Sorumbai in small pockets up and down an island a thousand miles long and two hundred across in places. I didn’t really know where any of those pockets were, it hadn’t been part of my job to know.

  It must have have been well on in the day when four men came in and carried me out of the hut. The sudden glare outside was blinding and I couldn’t see where I was being taken. They slid me along the floor in the back of a big car. I was wearing now my shirt as a kind of loin cloth tied around my middle, and nothing else, and they made
me raise my legs to get the door shut. I lay and looked at the car ceiling, not wanting to see my legs, but in a moment or two I found a way I could lean them against the back of the driver’s seat.

  Later a man climbed in beside me and sat down with a grunt. He was plump and wearing civilian clothes, and had a paper and bamboo fan which he kept using. I watched him for a long time but he never looked down. He muttered a little to himself as though in protest at the delay.

  When we did move off I knew from the sounds that we were in some kind of convoy. Car horns blared into the hot air and dust came in through the windows. The passenger in his corner flapped the fan and pouted out at what he saw.

  Later it was cooler and I could see the thick green of jungle. The ride was smoother, too, as though we were on a surfaced road. I shut my eyes and tried to withdraw into that little private immunity of self which can be a kind of shelter and which I had used long ago often enough. But this time it wouldn’t work, I couldn’t isolate little given moments into a kind of peace, though I knew it was a habit I must get into again for the days ahead. I had to work to keep some little thing intact as long as possible, some fraction of self free from the invasions of terror and pain.

  This was probably all I’d be able to do and I mightn’t be able to do it to the end. It didn’t even have to be something they would recognise, as long as I could go on recognising it myself.

  The man in the corner began to eat a papaya which he must have had on the seat beside him. He did it noisily, cutting the long fruit into quarters and sucking.

  “Give me a piece,” I said in Malay.

  He looked at me, grunted, and went on eating. I was beyond any possible concern of his, something on the floor. I wondered who he was, and was still trying to force my mind to the effort of working that out when the firing began.

  I’ve never heard firing quite like it, so near it seemed to be at point blank range. The car shivered and slewed about. The half-opened windows shattered all along one side and then the other. The driver screamed. The man with the papaya dropped his piece. He had his face half-turned to the window, podgy with surprise and unbelief. Then he toppled forward, over me. I cried out.