Empire of the Sun. John Lanchester

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ then ran on past the greyhound stadium, a coolie army in pale orange uniforms and American-style sneakers.

      Outside the tram station in the Avenue Haig the hundreds of passengers were briefly silent as they watched a public beheading. The bodies of a man and woman in quilted peasant clothes, perhaps pickpockets or Kuomintang spies, lay by the boarding platform. The Chinese NCOs wiped their boots as the blood ran into the metal grooves of the steel rails. A tram crowded with passengers approached, its bell forcing the execution party aside. It clanked along, connector rod hissing and throwing sparks from the overhead power line, its front wheels a moist scarlet as if painted for the annual labour union parade.

      Usually Jim would have paused to observe the crowd. On the way home from school Yang would often drive by the Old City. The public stranglings were held in a miniature stadium with a scrubbed wooden floor and rows of circular benches around the teak execution posts, and always attracted a thoughtful audience. The Chinese enjoyed the spectacle of death, Jim had decided, as a way of reminding themselves of how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the same reason, to remind themselves of the vanity of thinking that the world was anything else.

      Jim watched the coolies and peasant women staring at the headless bodies. Already the press of tram passengers was pushing them aside, submerging this small death. He turned away, tripping over the charcoal brazier in which a pavement vendor was frying pieces of battered snake. Drops of fat splashed into the wooden bucket, where a single snake swam, thrashing itself as it leapt at the hissing oil. The vendor lunged at Jim with his hot ladle, trying to cuff his head, but he slipped between the parked rickshaws. He ran along the blood-smeared tramlines towards the entrance of the depot.

      He pushed through the waiting passengers and squeezed himself on to a concrete bench with a group of peasant women carrying chickens in wicker baskets. The women’s bodies reeked of sweat and fatigue, but Jim was too exhausted to move. He had walked over two miles along the crowded pavements. He knew that he was being followed by a young Chinese, probably a pedicab tout or a runner for one of Shanghai’s tens of thousands of small-time gangsters. A tall youth with a dead, boneless face, oily black hair and leather jacket, he had noticed Jim outside the greyhound stadium. Kidnappings were commonplace in Shanghai – before his parents learned to trust Yang, they insisted that Jim always drove to school with the governess. He guessed that the youth was interested in his blazer and leather shoes, in his aviator’s watch and the American fountain pen clipped to his breast pocket.

      The youth stepped through the crowd and walked up to Jim, his yellow hands like ferrets. ‘American boy?’

      ‘English. I’m waiting for my chauffeur.’

      ‘English … boy. You come now.’

      ‘No – he’s over there.’

      The youth reached forward, swearing in Chinese, and seized Jim’s wrist. His fingers fumbled at the metal strap, trying to release the watch-clasp. The peasant women ignored him, chickens asleep on their laps. Jim knocked away the youth’s hand, and felt fingers grip his forearm. Inside his leather jacket he had drawn a knife, and was about to sever Jim’s hand at the wrist.

      Jim wrenched his arm away. Before the youth could seize him again, Jim hurled the wicker basket from the knees of the peasant woman on his right. The youth fell back, flailing with his heels at the squawking bird. The women jumped to their feet and began to scream at him. He ignored them and put away his knife. He followed as Jim ran through the queues of tram passengers, trying to show them his bruised wrist.

      A hundred yards from the depot Jim reached the Avenue Joffre. He rested in the padlocked entrance to the Nanking Theatre, where Gone with the Wind had been playing for the past year in a pirated Chinese version. The partly dismantled faces of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh rose on their scaffolding above an almost life-size replica of burning Atlanta. Chinese carpenters were cutting down the panels of painted smoke that rose high into the Shanghai sky, barely distinguishable from the fires still lifting above the tenements of the Old City, where Kuomintang irregulars had resisted the Japanese invasion.

      The youth with the knife was still behind him, skipping and side-stepping through the crowd in his cheap sneakers. In the centre of the Avenue Joffre was the police checkpoint, its sandbagged emplacement marking the western perimeter of the French Concession. Jim knew that neither the Vichy police nor the Japanese soldiers would do anything to help him. They were watching a single-engined bomber that flew low above the racecourse.

      As the plane’s shadow flashed across the road Jim felt the Chinese youth snatch his cap and grip his shoulders. Jim pulled himself away, and ran across the crowded street towards the checkpoint, ducking in and out of the pedicabs and shouting: ‘Nakajima …! Nakajima …!’

      A Chinese auxiliary in a Vichy uniform tried to strike him with his stave, but one of the Japanese sentries paused to glance at Jim. His eye had caught the Japanese characters on the metal tag that Jim had taken from the derelict fighter at Hungjao Aerodrome and was now holding in front of him. Briefly tolerating this small boy, he continued his patrol and waved him away with the butt of his rifle.

      ‘Nakajima …!’

      Jim joined the crowd of pedestrians moving through the checkpoint. As he guessed, his pursuer had vanished among the beggars and loitering rickshaw coolies on the French side of the barbed wire. Not for the first time Jim realized that the Japanese, officially his enemies, offered his only protection in Shanghai.

      Nursing his bruised arm, and angry with himself for having lost his school cap, Jim at last reached Amherst Avenue. He pulled his shirt-sleeve over the dark weals that marked his wrist. His mother worried constantly about the danger and violence in the streets of Shanghai, and knew nothing of his long cycle rides around the city.

      Amherst Avenue was deserted. The throngs of beggars and refugees had vanished. Even the old man with his Craven A tin had gone. Jim ran up the drive, looking forward to seeing his mother, sitting on the sofa in her bedroom and talking about Christmas. Already he assumed that they would never discuss the war.

      A long scroll covered with Japanese characters had been nailed to the front door, the white cloth stamped with seals and registration numbers. Jim pressed the bell, waiting for Number Two Boy to open the door. He felt exhausted, as worn down as his scuffed shoes, and noticed that the sleeve of his blazer had been slashed from the elbow by the thief’s knife.

      ‘Boy, hurry …!’ He began to say: ‘I’ll kill you …’ but checked himself.

      The house was silent. There was no sound of the amahs arguing over the laundry vat in the servants’ quarters, or the clip-clip of the gardener trimming the lawn around the flower-beds. Someone had switched off the swimming-pool motor, though his father made a point of running the filter all winter. Looking up at the windows of his bedroom, he saw that the shutters of the air-conditioner had been closed.

      Jim listened to the bell drill through the empty house. Too tired to reach again for the button, he sat on the polished steps and blew on his bruised knees. It was difficult to imagine how his parents, Vera, the nine servants, chauffeur and gardener could all have gone out together.

      There was a muffled explosion from the bottom of the drive, the coughing exhaust box of a heavy engine. A Japanese half-track had entered Amherst Avenue, its crew standing among their radio aerials. They moved along the centre of the road, forcing a Mercedes limousine from the German estate to climb the pavement.

      Jim jumped from the porch and hid behind a pillar. A high wall faced with terracotta tiles ran around the house, topped with broken glass. Gripping the tiles with his fingertips, he climbed the wall below the barred cloakroom СКАЧАТЬ