Empire of the Sun (2 page)

An open truck packed with professional executioners swerved in front of them, on its way to the public stranglings in the Old City. Seizing his chance, a barefoot beggar-boy ran beside the Packard. He drummed his fists on the doors and held out his palm to Jim, shouting the street cry of all Shanghai:

‘No mama! No papa! No whisky soda!’

Yang lashed at him, and the boy fell to the ground, picked himself up between the front wheels of an oncoming Chrysler and ran beside it.

‘No mama, no papa…’

Jim hated the riding crop, but he was glad of the Packard’s horn. At least it drowned the roar of the eight-gun fighters, the wail of air-raid sirens in London and Warsaw. He had had more than enough of the European war. Jim stared at the garish façade of the Sincere Company’s department store, which was dominated by an immense portrait of Chiang Kai-Shek exhorting the Chinese people to ever greater sacrifices in their struggle against the Japanese. A faint light, reflected from a faulty neon tube, trembled over the Generalissimo’s soft mouth, the same flicker that Jim had seen in his dreams. The whole of Shanghai was turning into a newsreel leaking from inside his head.

Had his brain been damaged by too many war films? Jim had tried to tell his mother about his dreams, but like all the adults in Shanghai that winter she was too preoccupied to listen to him. Perhaps she had bad dreams of her own. In an eerie way, these shuffled images of tanks and dive-bombers were completely silent, as if his sleeping mind was trying to separate the real war from the make-believe conflicts invented by Pathé and British Movietone.

Jim had no doubt which was real. The real war was everything he had seen for himself since the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, the old battlegrounds at Hungjao and Lunghua where the bones of the unburied dead rose to the surface of the paddy fields each spring. Real war was the thousands of Chinese refugees dying of cholera in the sealed stockades at Pootung, and the bloody heads of communist soldiers mounted on pikes along the Bund. In a real war no one knew which side he was on, and there were no flags or commentators or winners. In a real war there were no enemies.

By contrast, the coming conflict between Britain and Japan, which everyone in Shanghai expected to break out in the summer of 1942, belonged to a realm of rumour. The supply ship attached to the German raider in the China Sea now openly visited Shanghai and moored in the river, where it took on fuel from a dozen lighters – many of them, Jim’s father noted wryly, owned by American oil companies. Almost all the American women and children had been evacuated from Shanghai. In his class at the Cathedral School, Jim was surrounded by empty desks. Most of his friends and their mothers had left for the safety of Hong Kong and Singapore, while the fathers closed their houses and moved into the hotels along the Bund.

At the beginning of December, when school ended for the day, Jim joined his father on the roof of his office block in Szechwan Road and helped him to set fire to the crates of records which the Chinese clerks brought up in the elevator. The trail of charred paper lifted across the Bund and mingled with the smoke from the impatient funnels of the last steamers to leave Shanghai. Passengers crowded the gangways, Eurasians, Chinese and Europeans fighting to get aboard with their bundles and suitcases, ready to risk the German submarines waiting in the Yangtze estuary. Fires rose from the roofs of the office buildings in the financial district, watched through field-glasses by the Japanese officers standing on their concrete blockhouses across the river at Pootung. It was not the anger of the Japanese that most disturbed Jim, but their patience.

As soon as they reached the house in Amherst Avenue he ran upstairs to change. Jim liked the Persian slippers, embroidered silk shirt and blue velvet trousers in which he resembled a film extra from
The Thief of Bagdad,
and he was eager to leave for Dr Lockwood’s party. He would endure the conjurors and newsreels, and then set off for the secret rendezvous which the rumours of war had prevented him from keeping for so many months.

By way of a happy bonus, Sunday was Vera’s free afternoon, when she visited her parents in the ghetto at Hongkew. This bored young woman, little more than a child herself, usually followed Jim everywhere like a guard dog. Once Yang had driven him home – his parents were to stay on for dinner at the Lockwoods’ – he would be free to roam alone through the empty house, his keenest pleasure. The nine Chinese servants would be there, but in Jim’s mind, and in those of the other British children, they remained as passive and unseeing as the furniture. He would finish doping his balsa-wood aircraft, and complete another chapter of the manual entitled
How to Play Contract Bridge
that he was writing in a school exercise book. After years spent listening to his mother’s bridge parties, trying to extract any kind of logic from the calls of ‘One diamond’, ‘Pass’, ‘Three Hearts’, ‘Three No Trumps’, ‘Double’, ‘Redouble’, he had prevailed on her to teach him the rules and had even mastered the conventions, a code within a code of a type that always intrigued Jim. With the help of an Ely Culberston guide, he was about to embark on the most difficult chapter of all, on psychic bidding – all this and he had yet to play a single hand.

However, if the task proved too exhausting he would set off on a bicycle tour of the French Concession, taking his airgun in case he ran into the group of French twelve-year-olds who formed the Avenue Foch gang. When he returned home it would be time for the Flash Gordon radio serial on station XMHA, followed by the record programme when he and his friends telephoned requests under their latest pseudonyms – ‘Batman’, ‘Buck Rogers’, and (Jim’s) ‘Ace’, which he liked to hear read out by the announcer though it always made him cringe with embarrassment.

As he flung his cassock to the amah and changed into his party costume he found that all this was threatened. Her head muddled by the rumours of war, Vera had decided not to visit her parents.

‘You will go to the party, James,’ Vera informed him as she buttoned his silk shirt. ‘And I will telephone my parents and tell them all about you.’

‘But, Vera – they want to see you. I know they do. You’ve got to think of them, Vera…’ Baffled, Jim hesitated to complain. His mother had told him to be kind to Vera, and not to tease her as he had done the previous governess. This moody White Russian had terrified him as he recovered from measles by telling him that she could hear the voice of God in Amherst Avenue, warning them from their ways. Soon afterwards Jim had impressed his school friends by announcing that he was an atheist. By contrast, Vera Frankel was a calm girl who never smiled and found everything strange about Jim and his parents, as strange as Shanghai itself, this violent and hostile city a world away from Cracow. She and her parents had escaped on one of the last boats from Hitler’s Europe and now lived with thousands of Jewish refugees in Hongkew, a gloomy district of tenements and faded apartment blocks behind the port area of Shanghai. To Jim’s amazement, Herr Frankel and Vera’s mother existed in one room.

‘Vera, where do your parents live?’ Jim knew the answer, but decided to risk the ruse. ‘Do they live in a house?’

‘They live in one room, James.’

‘One room!’ To Jim this was inconceivable, far more bizarre than anything in the Superman and Batman comics. ‘How big is the room? As big as my bedroom? As big as this house?’

‘As big as your dressing-room. James, some people are not so lucky as you.’

Awed by this, Jim closed the door of the dressing-room and changed into his velvet trousers. His eyes measured the little chamber. How two people could survive in so small a space was as difficult to grasp as the conventions in contract bridge. Perhaps there was some simple key which would solve the problem, and he would have the subject of another book.

Fortunately, Vera’s pride made her rise to the bait. When she had left for her parents’, setting off on the long walk to the tram terminus in the Avenue Joffre, Jim found himself still pondering the mystery of this extraordinary room. He decided to raise the matter with his mother and father, but as always they were too distracted by news of the war even to notice him. Dressed for the party, they were in his father’s study, listening to the short-wave radio bulletins from England. His father knelt by the radiogram in his pirate costume, leather patch pushed on to his forehead and spectacles over his tired eyes, like some scholarly buccaneer. He stared at the yellow dial embedded like a gold tooth in the mahogany face of the radiogram. On a map of Russia spread across the carpet he marked the new defensive line to which the Red Army had retreated. He stared at it hopelessly, as mystified by the vastness of Russia as Jim had been by the Frankels’ minute room.

‘Hitler will be in Moscow by Christmas. The Germans are still moving forward.’

His mother stood in her pierrot suit by the window, staring at the steely December sky. The long train of a Chinese funeral kite undulated along the street, head nodding as it bestowed its ferocious smile on the European houses. ‘It must be snowing in Moscow. Perhaps the weather will stop them…’

‘Once every century? Even that might be too much to ask. Churchill must bring the Americans into the war.’

‘Daddy, who is General Mud?’

His father looked up as Jim waited in the doorway, the amah carrying his airgun like a bearer, this member of a volunteer infantry in velvet blue ready to aid the Russian war effort.

‘Not the BB gun, Jamie. Not today. Take your aeroplane instead.’

‘Amah, don’t touch it! I’ll kill you!’

‘Jamie!’

His father turned from the radiogram, ready to strike him. Jim stood quietly by his mother, waiting to see what happened. Although he liked to roam Shanghai on his bicycle, at home Jim always remained close to his mother, a gentle and clever woman whose main purposes in life, he had decided, were to go to parties and help him with his Latin homework. When she was away he spent many peaceful hours in her bedroom, mixing her perfumes together and idling through the photograph albums of herself before her marriage, stills from an enchanted film in which she played the part of his older sister.

‘Jamie! Never say that…You aren’t going to kill Amah or anyone else.’ His father unclenched his hands, and Jim realized how exhausted he was. Often it seemed to Jim that his father was trying to remain too calm, burdened by the threats to his firm from the communist labour unions, by his work for the British Residents’ Association, and by his fears for Jim and his mother. As he listened to the war news he became almost lightheaded. A fierce affection had sprung up between his parents, which he had never seen before. His father could be angry with him, while taking a keen interest in the smallest doings of Jim’s life, as if he believed that helping his son to build his model aircraft was more important than the war. For the first time he was totally uninterested in school-work. He pressed all kinds of odd information on Jim – about the chemistry of modern dyestuffs, his company’s welfare scheme for the Chinese mill-hands, the school and university in England to which Jim would go after the war, and how, if he wished, he could become a doctor. All these were elements of an adolescence which his father seemed to assume would never take place.

Sensibly, Jim decided not to provoke his father, nor to mention the Frankels’ mysterious room in the Hongkew ghetto, the problems of psychic bidding and the missing soundtrack inside his head. He would never threaten Amah again. They were going to a party, and he would try to cheer his father and think of some way of stopping the Germans at the gates of Moscow.

Remembering the artificial snow that Yang had described in the Shanghai film studios, Jim took his seat in the Packard. He was glad to see that Amherst Avenue was filled with the cars of Europeans leaving for their Christmas parties. All over the western suburbs people were wearing fancy dress, as if Shanghai had become a city of clowns.

2
Beggars and Acrobats

Pierrot and pirate, his parents sat silently as they set off for Hungjao, a country district five miles to the west of Shanghai. Usually his mother would caution Yang to avoid the old beggar who lay at the end of the drive. But as Yang swung the heavy car through the gates, barely pausing before he accelerated along Amherst Avenue, Jim saw that the front wheel had crushed the man’s foot. This beggar had arrived two months earlier, a bundle of living rags whose only possessions were a frayed paper mat and an empty Craven A tin which he shook at passers-by. He never moved from the mat, but ferociously defended his plot outside the taipan’s gates. Even Boy and Number One Coolie, the houseboy and the chief scullion, had been unable to shift him.

However, the position had brought the old man little benefit. There were hard times in Shanghai that winter, and after a week-long cold spell he was too tired to raise his tin. Jim worried about the beggar, and his mother told him that Coolie had taken a bowl of rice to him. After a heavy snowfall one night in early December the snow formed a thick quilt from which the old man’s face emerged like a sleeping child’s above an eiderdown. Jim told himself that he never moved because he was warm under the snow.

There were so many beggars in Shanghai. Along Amherst Avenue they sat outside the gates of the houses, shaking their Craven A tins like reformed smokers. Many displayed lurid wounds and deformities, but no one noticed them that afternoon. Refugees from the towns and villages around Shanghai were pouring into the city. Wooden carts and rickshaws crowded Amherst Avenue, each loaded with a peasant family’s entire possessions. Adults and children bent under the bales strapped to their backs, forcing the wheels with their hands. Rickshaw coolies hauled at their shafts, chanting and spitting, veins as thick as fingers clenched into the meat of their swollen calves. Petty clerks pushed bicycles loaded with mattresses, charcoal stoves and sacks of rice. A legless beggar, his thorax strapped into a huge leather shoe, swung himself along the road through the maze of wheels, a wooden dumb-bell in each hand. He spat and swiped at the Packard when Yang tried to force him out of the car’s way, and then vanished among the wheels of the pedicabs and rickshaws, confident in his kingdom of saliva and dust.