Empire of the Sun. John Lanchester

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      A hand to her bruised face, his mother was pulling at the warped rear door. The tank stopped, before making a second pass at the Lincoln. Japanese marines moved between the cars and rickshaws, lunging with their bayonets at the crowd. Jim climbed on to the front seat and opened the driver’s door. He jumped into the road and ducked below the shafts of a rickshaw laden with rice bags. The tank moved forward, smoke throbbing from its engine vents. Jim saw his mother pushed into the throng of Chinese and Europeans whom the marines were forcing across the Bund. A second tank followed the first, then a line of camouflaged trucks packed with Japanese soldiers.

      A final rifle shot rang out from the USS Wake. The last of the wounded British sailors were pulled on to the mud-flat below the Bund. Oil leaking from the swamped Petrel lay in an elongated slick across the river, calming this place of battle. The British civilians who had helped to rescue the sailors sat in their greasy shirt-sleeves beside the wounded men. Jim’s father was dragging the injured petty officer on to the mud-flat. Exhausted, he lost his grip and collapsed in a shallow stream that ran through the oily bank from a sewer vent below the pier.

      The Japanese soldiers on the Bund were driving the crowd away from the quay, forcing the Chinese and Europeans to step from their cars and rickshaws. Jim’s mother had disappeared, cut off from him by the column of military trucks. A wounded British sailor, a sandy-haired youth no more than eighteen years old, climbed the steps from the landing stage, hands outstretched like bloody ping-pong bats.

      Straightening his school cap, Jim darted past him and the watching sampan coolies. He ran down the steps and jumped from the landing stage on to the spongy surface of the mud-flat. Sinking to his knees, he waded through the damp soil towards his father.

      ‘We brought them out – good lad, Jamie.’ His father sat in the stream, the body of the petty officer beside him. He had lost his spectacles and one of his shoes, and the trousers of his business suit were black with oil, but he still wore his white collar and tie. In one hand he held a yellow silk glove like those Jim had seen his mother carrying to the formal receptions at the British Embassy. Looking at the glove, Jim realized that it was the complete skin from one of the petty officer’s hands, boiled off the flesh in an engine-room fire.

      ‘She’s going …’ His father flicked the glove into the water like the hand of a tiresome beggar. A hoarse, throttling explosion sounded across the river from the capsized hull of the Petrel. There was a violent rush of steam from the risen decks, and the gunboat slipped below the waves. A cloud of frantic smoke seethed across the water, surging about as if hunting for the vanished craft.

      Jim’s father lay back against the mud. Jim squatted beside him. The noise of the tanks’ engines on the Bund, the shouted commands of the Japanese NCOs and the drone of the circling aircraft seemed far away. The first debris from the Petrel was reaching them, life jackets and pieces of planking, a section of canvas awning with its trailing ropes, that resembled an enormous jellyfish, dislodged from the deep by the sinking gunboat.

      A flicker of light ran along the quays like silent gunfire. Jim lay down beside his father. Drawn up above them on the Bund were hundreds of Japanese soldiers. Their bayonets formed a palisade of swords that answered the sun.

       5

       Escape from the Hospital

      ‘Mitsubishi … Zero-Sen … ah … Nakajima … ah …’

      Jim lay in his cot in the children’s ward, and listened to the young Japanese soldier call out the names of the aircraft flying over the hospital. The skies above Shanghai were filled with aircraft. Although the soldier knew the names of only two types of plane he found it difficult to keep up with the endless aerial activity.

      For three days Jim had rested peacefully in the ward on the top floor of St Marie’s Hospital in the French Concession, disturbed only by the young soldier’s furtive smoking and his amateur plane-spotting. Alone in the ward, he thought about his mother and father, and hoped that they would soon come to visit him. He listened to the seaplanes flying from the Naval Air Base at Nantao.

      ‘… ah … ah …’ The soldier shook his head, stumped again, and searched the immaculate floor for a cigarette end. In the corridor below the landing Jim could hear the French missionary sisters arguing with the Japanese military police who now occupied this wing of the hospital. Despite the hard mattress, the whitewashed walls with their unpleasant icons above each bed – the crucified infant Jesus surrounded by Chinese disciples – and the ominous chemical smell (something to do, he surmised, with intense religious feelings), Jim found it difficult to believe that the war had at last begun. Walls of strangeness separated everything, every face that looked at him was odd.

      He could remember Dr Lockwood’s party at Hungjao, and the Chinese conjurors who turned themselves into birds. But the bombardment of the Petrel, the tank that had crushed the Packard, the huge guns of the Idzumo all belonged to a make-believe realm. He almost expected Yang to saunter into the ward and tell him that they were part of a technicolour epic being staged at the Shanghai film studios.

      What was real, without any doubt, was the mud-flat to which his father had helped to drag the wounded sailors, and where they had sat for six hours beside the dead petty officer. It was as if the Japanese had been so surprised by the speed of their assault that they had been forced to wait before they fully grasped any sense of their victory. Within a few hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor the Japanese armies which encircled Shanghai had seized the International Settlement. The marines who captured the USS Wake and occupied the Bund celebrated by parading in force in front of the hotels and banking houses.

      Meanwhile, the wounded survivors of the Petrel and the British civilians who had helped to rescue them remained on the mud-flat beside the sewer. An armed party of military police stepped from the landing stage and walked among them. Captain Polkinhorn, wounded in the head, and his first officer were taken away, but the others were left to sit under the sun. A Japanese officer in full uniform, scabbard held in his gloved hand, moved among the injured and exhausted men, peering at each in turn. He stared at Jim as he sat in his blazer and school cap beside his exhausted father, obviously puzzled by the elaborate badges of the Cathedral School and assuming that Jim was an unusually junior midshipman in the Royal Navy.

      An hour later Captain Polkinhorn was taken in a motor-launch to the site of the sunken Petrel. Before abandoning ship the captain had been able to destroy his codes, and for days afterwards the Japanese sent divers down to the wreck in an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve the code-boxes.

      Soon after ten o’clock the Japanese reopened the Bund, and thousands of uneasy Chinese and European neutrals were ushered along the quay. They looked down at the wounded crew of the Petrel, and stood silently as the Rising Sun was ceremonially hoisted to the mast of the USS Wake. Shivering beside his father in the cold December sun, Jim gazed up at the expressionless eyes of the Chinese packed together on the quay. They were witnessing the complete humiliation of the Allied powers by the empire of Japan, an object lesson to all those reluctant to enter the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Fortunately, some hours later a party of officials from the Vichy French and German embassies forced their way through the crowd. They protested volubly about the treatment of the wounded British. Impelled by one of their abrupt changes of mood, the Japanese relented and the prisoners were on their way to St Marie’s Hospital.

      Once there, Jim’s sole thought was to leave the hospital and return to his mother at Amherst Avenue. The French doctor who mercurichromed his knees СКАЧАТЬ