Empire of the Sun. John Lanchester

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СКАЧАТЬ British schoolboy, and tried to have him released. The Japanese, however, had taken over a complete wing of the hospital, cleared out the Chinese patients and installed a guard on each floor. A young soldier was posted outside the children’s ward on the top floor, and passed the time asking the nuns for cigarettes and calling out the names of the aircraft overhead.

      A Chinese nun told Jim that his father was with the other civilians in a ward below, still recovering from the effects of heart strain and exposure, but would be ready to leave in a few days. Meanwhile, for reasons of their own, the Japanese High Command had begun to eulogize the bravery of Captain Polkinhorn and his men. On the second day the commander of the Idzumo sent a party of uniformed officers to the hospital, who paid tribute to the wounded sailors in the best traditions of bushido, bowing to each one of them. The English-language Shanghai Times, British-owned but long sympathetic to the Japanese, carried a photograph of the Petrel on its front page, and an article extolling the courage of its crew. The main headline described the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the bombing of Clark Field at Manila. Pencil drawings supplied by a neutral news agency showed apocalyptic scenes of smoke rising from the slumped American battleships.

      Now that the Japanese had won the war, Jim mused, perhaps life in Shanghai would return to normal. When the young soldier showed him the newspaper he carefully studied the photograph of fighter-bombers taking off from the Japanese carriers, scenes that he seemed to remember from his own dreams in his bedroom at the Palace Hotel on the eve of the war.

      Lounging on the bed beside him, the soldier pointed to the assault aircraft, keen to impress Jim with this staggering feat of arms.

      ‘… ah … ah …’

      ‘Nakajima,’ Jim said. ‘Nakajima Hayabusa.’

      ‘Nakajima …?’ The soldier sighed deeply, as if the subject of military aviation was far beyond the grasp of this small English boy. In fact Jim recognized almost all the Japanese aircraft. British newsreels of the Sino-Japanese War openly derided the Japanese planes and their pilots, but Jim’s father and Mr Maxted always spoke of them with respect.

      Jim was wondering how he could see his father when the guard corporal bellowed a command up the stairwell. The young private was terrified of this small and unpleasant corporal, clearly the most important rank in the Japanese Army. He put away his cigarette butt, picked up his rifle and dashed from the ward, waving a warning finger at Jim.

      Glad to be alone, Jim immediately climbed out of bed. Through the window he could see a group of convalescent Chinese orphans on the balcony of the adjacent wing. In their European dressing-gowns – like Jim’s, donated by a local French charity – they spent all day staring at him. A metal fire-escape linked the two wings, blocked by heaps of sandbags packed against the windows in 1937 to protect them from stray shells fired across the river.

      Bare-footed, Jim crossed the ward to its rear door. A narrow catwalk led between the sandbags, and the loose sand was littered with hundreds of cigarette ends thrown down by the bored French doctors. Picking his way through the pieces of broken glass, he set off along the fire-escape. A metal staircase ran to the opposite wing, linked by a rusting bridge to the ward below Jim’s.

      Jim moved swiftly down the steps and crossed the bridge. Somewhere on this floor were his father and the survivors of the Petrel. The windows of the wards overlooking the gangway had been painted with blackout tar. Watched by the wide-eyed orphans, he followed the gangway around the wing. The rear door into the ward was bolted, but as he pulled at the handle the Chinese children ducked below their balcony. An armed Japanese soldier stood on the roof, shouting down into the well between the wings. Soldiers with fixed bayonets ran across the courtyard of the hospital, and a motorcycle with armed side-car swung through the entrance. Jim could hear boots and rifle butts ringing on the stone stairways, and a French nun’s voice raised in protest.

      He crouched between the sandbags outside the locked door. Soldiers were moving along the gangway of the children’s ward, and sand poured through the rusting grilles. A klaxon sounded in the Avenue Foch, and Jim was convinced that the entire Japanese occupation forces in Shanghai were searching for him.

      A bolt clattered, and the door opened into the darkened ward. In the brief glare of sunlight Jim saw the cave-like room crowded with bandaged men, some lying on the floor between the beds, and the nuns being pushed aside by Japanese soldiers with rifles and canvas stretchers. As the blanched faces of young British sailors turned towards the sun, a stench of sickness and wounds emerged from the dark chamber and enveloped him.

      The Japanese corporal stared at Jim, crouching in his pyjamas among the cigarette ends. He slammed the door, and Jim heard him shout as he slapped one of the Japanese soldiers with his fist.

      An hour later they had all gone, leaving Jim alone in the children’s ward. As the klaxons sounded from the Avenue Foch, he watched a military truck reverse into the hospital compound. The crew of the Petrel and the eight British civilians who had helped to rescue them were bundled down the staircases and loaded into the truck. Wounded men on stretchers lay under the legs of others barely able to sit.

      Jim did not see his father, but the French sister told him that he had walked to the truck taking them to the military prison in Hongkew.

      ‘This morning one of your sailors escaped. It’s very bad for us.’ The sister stared at Jim with the disapproving gaze of the Japanese corporal. She was angry with him in that new way he had noticed in the past weeks, not for anything he had done but because of his inability to change the circumstances in which he found himself.

      ‘You live in Amherst Avenue? You must go home.’ The sister beckoned to a Chinese nun, who laid Jim’s freshly laundered clothes on the bed. He could see that they were eager to be rid of him. ‘Your mother will look after you.’

      Jim dressed himself, fastened his tie and carefully straightened his school cap. He wanted to thank the sister, but she had already left to look after her orphans.

       6

       The Youth with the Knife

      Wars always invigorated Shanghai, quickened the pulse of its congested streets. Even the corpses in the gutters seemed livelier. Throngs of peasant women packed the pavements of the Avenue Foch, outside the Cercle Sportif Français the vendors locked wheels as they jostled their carts against each other, lines of pedicabs and rickshaws ten abreast hemmed in the cars that edged forward behind a continuous blare of horns. Young Chinese gangsters in shiny American suits stood on the street corners, shouting the jai alai odds to each other. In the pedicabs outside the Regency Hotel the bar-girls sat in fur coats with their bodyguards beside them, like glamorous wives waiting to be taken for a ride. The entire city had come out into the streets, as if the population was celebrating the takeover of the International Settlement, its seizure from the Americans and Europeans by another Asian power.

      Yet when Jim reached the junction of the Avenue Pétain and the Avenue Haig a British police sergeant and two Sikh NCOs of the Shanghai police force still directed the traffic from their cantilever bridge above the crowd, watched by a single Japanese soldier standing behind them. Armed Japanese infantry sat like sightseers in the camouflaged trucks that moved along the streets. A party of officers stood outside the Radium Institute, adjusting their gloves. Pasted over the Coca-Cola and Caltex billboards were fresh posters of Wang Ching-Wei, the turncoat leader of the puppet regime. A column of Chinese soldiers overtook Jim in the Avenue Pétain, shouting slogans into the noisy air. They stamped away, СКАЧАТЬ