The Great Fire Page 7

  Here, through mornings and long afternoons, Peter Exley explored a heap of files and despaired of justice. His office had access to a terrace paved in big red tiles, undulated by the rains. The terrace, rarely used, looked towards the harbour. Seagulls wheeled there, and a cormorant at times alighted. On fair days, Exley would go out and lean awhile on the wide ledge. Would look at the war memorial on its patch of lawn, and at the parked cars and parked palm trees, and the sea beyond. The heat soon drove him indoors. Even so, he got a name for mooning.

  That first summer, in the steaming evenings, he would leave the barracks and walk east or west until the long streets became entirely, incontrovertibly Chinese. He would stroll past the hundred thousand stalls and tiny shops of food, of clothes, of soap and pots and bamboo baskets; past the minuscule dens hung with lanterns and braying out harsh music, where the soft smell of opium exuded into fumes of the street. From what would once have enthralled him he would bring away only a flare of alien colour and raucous sound, a stench of crowds and cooking; and that scent, sickly as boredom.

  Having walked in this way an hour or two, he would then return by some divergent route, perhaps along the docks—ignoring appeals from vendors or beggars and the offers from women whose negligible bodies seemed weighted with gold teeth and platform shoes. It was difficult to invest those meagre frames with sensuality, or to covet the lean shanks displayed by the flowered dress slit to the thigh. In these districts, Roy Rysom claimed to cut his swath almost nightly. Yet at the end of his own excursions Exley would often discover Rysom having dinner tamely enough—tame hardly describing Rysom’s way with chopsticks—at the King Fu in Des Voeux Road, where a scattering of officers was always to be found. Sometimes Exley sat down with Rysom’s group, giving himself over to the uproar of loud companions, the clam-our of Chinese diners and of waiters yelling to the kitchen. From the gallery above there was the incessant clack and crash of the mah-jongg pieces, the spitting and shouting of the players.

  His fellow soldiers repeated the stale anecdotes of lonely men. If anyone told a joke against himself, Rysom laughed too loud—his need for advantage vigilant as fear. If they walked back together to the barracks, Rysom, turning oracular, would caution Exley against his expeditions in the Chinese town: “Filth.”

  Filth was in fact on Peter Exley’s mind in those first weeks: the accretion filming the Orient, the shimmer of sweat or excrement. A railing or handle one’s fingers would not willingly grasp; walls and objects grimed with existence; the limp, soiled colonial money, little notes curled and withered, like shavings from some discoloured central lode. Ammoniac reek, or worse, in paved alleys and under stuccoed arcades. Shaved heads of children, blotched with sores; grey polls of infants lolling from the swag that bound them to the mother’s back. And the great clots and blobs of tubercular spittle shot with blood, unavoidable underfoot: what Rysom called “poached eggs.” In such uncleanness, nothing could appear innocent, not the infants themselves or even diseased chow dogs roaming the Chinese streets, or scrawny chickens pecking at street dirt.

  What had not harrowed Exley as a soldier in Egypt or South Italy now brought revulsion. He longed for a measure of cleanliness with which he had somehow associated peace. Returning to the barracks with Rysom, he said, “I realise now that I came out here to be well fed and housed and to have people wait on me. I see now that was in my mind.”

  Rysom kicked open the door of their room. “Well, this is it, mate—the life of luxury.”

  The greater thing was heat. In North Africa, the sun had been neutral, an impartial horror of war. Now, with cessation of hostilities, heat came out in its true colours as the enemy. The privileged of the colony clung to the mountainside. The rest took refuge in any merciful shadow or flutter of the humid air. The town never cooled: streets and street stalls broiled all night in the glare of naked electricity or paraffin lamps. A dry skin was an ultimate luxury, even for the privileged, even on a soft white body. Lust, if there was energy for it, must be consummated in a lather of sweat. And it was the same thing, no doubt, with love.

  EXLEY’S TYPIST, the Portuguese Miss Xavier, was thin and possibly thirty. Skin like an apricot, with an apricot’s minute brown flecks; straight black hair, not abundant, curved on shoulders. At her throat, in the soft hollow disclosed by a Western dress, a small gold crucifix quivered like a heart. Convent schooldays lingered about remote Miss Xavier. Someone—Brenda or Monica—told Exley that her four sisters were nuns.

  “Eurasians,” Brenda told him, “maintain a caste system of their own. It’s no good mixing up in that.”

  It would have been pleasant to refute dogmatic Brenda. But in truth Miss Xavier of good family held aloof from Mr. da Silva, chief of the translators. Da Silva in turn condescended to his colleagues. All dealt brusquely with the Chinese.

  Peter Exley wrote in his notebook: “There is a community of mixed races here claiming Portuguese descent through the Jesuit settlements at Macao. They interpret the British to the Chinese, and vice versa. I don’t refer only to language, though that is their essential service. I mean that they form a bridge by which business is rationally done and power exercised. Disdained by both factions, ill paid, indispensable, and far too obliging.” If he wrote this to his parents in Sydney, his mother would write back, “So interesting, pet,” and put his letter with all the others in a cardboard box. She would tell some crony, “Peter always feels for the underdog.”

  She could not quite suggest, but pervasively implied, that some cheerful young woman would redeem her son’s restlessness—not perceiving that the son, whose wanderings were far from wayward, was in some respects overredeemed already. Her husband, if appealed to, would turn another page of The Sun, remarking, “She’ll be right”—habitual invocation of Destiny whereby the Australian male quelled speculation. He had given up expecting sense from this only son, whose bookishness led nowhere and who frittered the last of his youth scrambling round crammed little countries and learning dead inimical languages like Italian and Japanese.

  Peter’s unaffected impressions were meanwhile sent to Leith, whose letters at this time comforted him, supplying a companionable measure of intelligence, and testifying, within Exley’s isolation, to a previous sharing. He saw how Leith, more reticent than he, nevertheless responded to new circumstances as to fresh existence, experiencing antipathy or charm as the essential matter of finite days; accessible, even so, to dreams engendered. Out of their mutual reprieve, Leith had salvaged immediacy; had kept faith with the fugitive vow of every man in battle: If I get through this, the hours will be made to count.

  Leith now hoped to pass through Hong Kong in the autumn. With cautious warmth, Exley looked to the exchange they then might have, not all at once, but over gradual days. He wondered about women in Leith’s life. He had noted the little girl who was a changeling—aware that men will display love when they cannot help themselves.

  IN AUGUST, Peter Exley was assigned to the interrogation of a Japanese officer charged with atrocities to prisoners of war. He had already noticed the man in the exercise cages behind the barracks, on a private road that led through trees to the general’s house. The prisoner was listless, slight, still young; short limbs, cropped dark head. Sometimes the inexpressive eyes met Exley’s. It was difficult to say, then, who was the accused.

  Among those who gave evidence was the skipper of a Dutch merchantman on the Surabaya—Kobe run. Exley’s letter reached this Dutch captain on his way north, at Singapore or Penang, and ten days later, landing in the colony, he came to make his deposition. He was something over fifty, Hendriks by name: dark eyes unmoist in dry face, soft knob of nose. His body itself, short and tough, announced taciturnity. He gave his evidence in brief, competent assertions, and in correct, peremptory English.

  He had been taken prisoner at Tanjungpriok, the port of Jakarta, early in 1942.

  In Exley’s little office at the Bank, Hendriks told his appalling story with detachment. When the documents had been pr
epared and signed, the Dutchman said, “We are in port some days. You shall lunch on board.”

  On a Sunday of inhuman heat, Exley found himself on the Kowloon docks, following the shadow of the godowns until forced out on an asphalt wasteland where coolies hauled cargo for hoisting. The Dutch ship, squat and shabby white, had a short white superstructure cramped amidships. With driblets of rust on her hull and at the outlet of the anchor cable, she recalled the smirched bathtub of some old hotel. Exley was shown to a dim saloon, well enough kept up in its dark old way, with panelling and polished brasses and heavy chairs that had defied typhoons. On a long table, a snow-white cloth was set with the dishes of the rijsttafel.

  Hendriks came in at once, his seamed flesh emerging, at collar and cuffs, from a uniform white as the table.

  Bols was brought in a crock of ice, along with the circular baked patties that, according to Roy Rysom, contained dog. As the indoor contrast passed off, the heat in the saloon became terrific. Condensation slid from cold glasses and formed a puddle of white starch around the ice bucket.

  At table they were served, in silence, by a Malay and two Chinese.

  The elaborate ordeal of drink, heavy food, and blazing sauces slowly consumed the afternoon. It seemed easier to loll there than to cut the thing short, Hendriks being clearly unprepared for any abrupt departure. Exley disliked his blunt manner with the servants, the orders rapped without a glance; and his unquestioning assumption of a right to bore. Drink settled in at eyes and temples, pulsating in purple rings. There were extended silences into which the ice collapsed with sharp sounds in crock and glasses and both men softly mopped at eyes and jowls as if quietly weeping.

  Exley realised that Hendriks was getting ready to talk.

  Hot towels were brought, scented with sandalwood. Hendriks offered cigars from Havana and maraschino in a pudgy bottle: “You shall have a glass.” His hair, mouse-brown perhaps on a cool day, was dark with sweat and from some shiny unguent.

  He said, “This Jap,” pronouncing it “chap”—“This Jap of ours looks normal enough, would you say? Yes. Has been a cadet, privileged. So he goes to war, he ties prisoners to trees for bayonet practice, he eats human flesh, by preference the liver. Touch a nerve, the primitive is there.” Hendriks chose a cigar and, with a small blade, clipped the tip. “You’ve been at war yourself, you’ve seen that.”

  Exley said, “I make a distinction between combat and perversion. Between soldiering and sadism. You may think that naïf.”

  “No, of course, I too wish to do so. There is cruelty beyond even that of battle. You look the man in the eye, then coolly kill him. You drop a bomb and dissociate yourself from the consequences. Is it murder or is it war? Is war in any case murder? That is what your commission pretends to decide.”

  “You think it mere pretence, then?”

  “Excuse me, I use the word prétendre, ‘to claim.’” The Dutchman sucked on his cigar, crossed foot over knee. “Yes. I was in a freighter, off the coast of France, when Holland was overrun. Mid-May, that was, of 1940. We were unarmed. Our captain was a small man, smaller than I, bow-legged. Ugly. We were bound for Rotterdam, when we had the news on our radio.” Long wheeze of cigar. “The next morning, a U-boat surfaced across our bows.

  “The captain of the U-boat—they are young in the submarines—the young captain stood out on deck with the megaphone. Two sailors at his side with the machine gun. We would be taken prisoner. This was the decent German, young man but old school. Unless we resisted, we would not be sunk. No. He would force us to an occupied port—perhaps to Rotterdam itself—turn us over, and take our ship and cargo as his prize.”

  Hendriks pressed the towel to mouth, to eyes, and sighed.

  “Well, we had our lives to save, we had families. Our skipper had four children. He stood on the bridge talking terms, reasonable, while the U-boat drifted closer. When she was right under our bows, he suddenly gave the order: Full speed ahead. And we ploughed through the U-boat, we ripped her in two, the submarine and the young man, and all the rest of them. They went down like skittles—you know how that is. We kept going, we didn’t look back for survivors, we didn’t stop until we reached Plymouth with the gash in our bow. At Plymouth we drank up, we laughed, we were proud.” From his chair, Hendriks turned his soft-nosed profile towards Exley. “I suppose that’s all right?”

  “Not all right, how could it be? But it was war, you defended yourselves.”

  “So we said, exactly. And our Jap—would he not also produce his justification: reprisal for horrors witnessed or undergone? You say he took pleasure in the cruelty. And we too, we rejoiced in it, I assure you. Never so happy, perhaps, before or again. That mild, pious, ugly man of ours turned murderer in a second, and was overjoyed with the result. Of course we were happy that our skins were saved, and happy with our victory. But we were happy those men were dead and that we had killed them.”

  Hendriks knocked away a block of ash. “In any case, I took ship again, got to Portland, went on to Jakarta, and ended up in prison all the same. Prisoner of war—that was a Western concept Japan wished to follow. In their emulation of the West, they allowed some of us to survive. Had they known my parentage, they might have despatched me at the start.” Peering into Peter Exley’s eyes. “I’m part Javanese. You realised it?”

  Exley stared.

  “Yes. Grandmother East Indian. You didn’t guess it? The tiny feet, the hands, the nose.” Dispassionately indicating these, gesturing to the white shoe cocked on his knee as if it were disembodied. “In Holland they know it, or in Java. With us it was not as with the British. We Dutch—you notice I say that—we Dutch bred with the indigènes, we sometimes married them. And there are many such as I.” Relapsed in his chair, presenting the undulant profile. “One day it will all mean nothing.”

  “I don’t know that it means anything now.”

  “Ah—caste remains a useful advantage. To defy it, one still must suffer. Tolerance, the relaxation—that is far off. Too remote for you and me.

  The revelation had made it impossible to get up and go. Some interlude was required in tribute, there could be no hastening away. Hendriks, having ceased pronouncing, fell into a silence in its own way oracular. Exley hung on half an hour, the ship melting round him. The two men took leave of one another at last, with assurances of a reunion when Hendriks next came to port. It was evident to both that this would not occur.

  IN SEPTEMBER there were cooler evenings and, at the barracks, an issue of winter-weight blankets. At a Chinese tailor in Queen’s Road, Peter Exley was measured for a suit in grey worsted. The tailor’s shop, upstairs, was called Old Bond’s Treat. The tailor himself, dreaming with open eyes, continually deferred the fittings.

  Rysom said, “The bugger takes opium.”

  At the bank, refrigerated vapours mingled visibly with pipe tobacco. Miss Rita Xavier now draped a linen jacket on her shoulders as she typed and filed, and wore nylon stockings on her slender legs. With autumn, her virginal aspect was on the turn for spinsterhood.

  In the adjoining room, hefty Norah thumped her thighs and shouted, “God, I’m getting porkers.” And shaggy dark Brenda scowled with unplucked brows—as she had scowled one evening at a shipboard dance while returning Peter Exley’s tipsy kiss. Rita Xavier’s face, by contrast, was very nearly impassive. If Westerners had contributed shades of expression to the human face, Peter wondered, were they to be praised or blamed? Was responsiveness in itself something to be proud of?

  In his notebook, Exley wrote: “Miss Xavier dislikes speaking Chinese in front of us ‘Europeans.’ I hear her at it, directing the office cleaners—a pastiche of Mandarin, Cantonese, and even Hakka, learned in childhood from her amahs. She has good French, taught by the nuns. Some Portuguese, presumably. English excellent, cultivated—a better enunciation than my own. A fine vocabulary, curiously unrelated to any literary knowledge whatever: she chooses good words as they do in Latin countries, from having no alternative. Tells me she had an Engli
sh governess, a young woman married to a non-commissioned officer stationed in Hong Kong between the wars.”

  Exley closed his notebook on the governess. Some educated girl of good family, condemned by injudicious love to isolation in the colonial lower ranks. The colony was a backwater then, overshadowed by Shanghai. Shanghai was the place to be. The loneliness of such a life, the unfairness. The wilting pink-and-white, the ailments, the wretched economies. The unforgiving good family: “She has made her bed and must lie in it.” And the bed itself losing its magic. Some Amanda or Cassandra, fallen between two stools, between two wars.

  The everlasting question of women, the absence of women, of pink-and-white women. Even the glowering Brendas were in demand, let alone the pretty Camillas, the English roses. In this respect, the racial lines were quietly and implacably drawn. Hendriks, the oracle in his rusted bathtub, was perfectly right: to flout the agreement, you could not be casual; for you would be made, by both sides, to suffer.

  “How terrible,” said Monica or Norah, “when there are children of mixed race.”

  When Monica, Brenda, or Norah said this, Peter Exley was walking with all three of them on a late afternoon to the Helena May Hostel. He had been invited to tea, for his birthday. They had gone up through the park and passed above the barracks. It was cool as they climbed. Simply to cease sweating was an inducement to thought, and Exley had forgotten his companions.

  Monica gave him his cue: “Tragic, don’t you think?”

  They suspected Exley of harbouring large ideas which he would not have the gumption to assert.

  He said, “Well, it happens.”

  Giggles, as if at something audacious. There are women, he thought, who can paralyse a man’s best instincts.