A Different Sky (44 page)

‘Give us the names of your communist friends.' The question was repeated endlessly.

‘I know nothing,' she answered and was slapped about for such upstart determination. Captain Nakamura stood in the background at these initial sessions held in a bare, concrete-floored room with barred windows, a table and a chair and a large hook in the middle of the ceiling. Behind the roars and iron-like hands of her tormentors, Nakamura stood impassively, arms crossed, booted legs apart, watching silently. A short square man with a thick neck, protruding eyes and rough umber skin, his bandy legs forced him to walk with the roll of a drunken man.

They began to come for her every day. She was made to kneel on rough logs, unmoving for hours at a time, a block of wood between her legs to keep her knees apart. Her legs lost all feeling, pain burned through her body. Every time she toppled over she was viciously hit. Then came the beatings with a long bamboo cane, usually on those soft parts of the torso where there would be bruising but no internal injury – the calves, the buttocks, thighs, inner arms. She screamed for them to stop. Usually, there were two of them but more and more the one in charge was Nakamura. From silent detachment, he now stepped forward as her chief tormentor. He bent over her and she caught the rancid odour of him, saw his wide teeth, yellow like those of an old horse.

‘Tell us the names of the communists you help. Where is their hideout, where is their camp? How many men are there? What are their names? Tell us and everything can stop in a moment.' Nakamura flexed the cane, stroking it tenderly, bending it between his fingers.

She was stripped, and the shame of her nakedness preoccupied her even when the beating began. Her hands were tied and the rope slung over the ceiling hook. Nakamura brought the cane down again and again, lashing into her flesh, and the agony of it ripped her apart. Soon she was ready to say any name, say anything, Cynthia's name, Howard's name; she held them back by screaming. Screaming brought relief, stopped the names from falling out of her. Tears streamed down her face, her nose ran, she felt her bladder open and the warmth of urine spill down her legs. Still Nakamura went on, stopping now and then to grip her by the hair and shout into her face.
Tell us.
When she collapsed in a faint they threw water on her face and started their work again.

‘This is nothing,' Nakamura said when he had done with her. She was dragged into an adjoining room where the water treatments took place. He showed her the tap with the hose that would be pushed down her throat to bloat her innards before they jumped on her belly. Water ran over the floor from the leaking tap; blood stained a corner near the wall.

‘Two or three treatments and your stomach will burst,' Nakamura told her.

Her body was broken; her flesh became a bloody pulp. She heard Nakamura clear his throat, saw him flex his fingers, cracking his joints
for relief. She wanted to wipe her nose and the tears on her face; the discomfort of having no handkerchief filtered through as a further torture before blackness swept mercifully through her.

A middle-aged Eurasian man arrived in the cell but did not last a week. Each day he was taken away for hours, to be returned dazed and bloody and semi-conscious. The little medical knowledge she had was useless; all she could do was to hold a filthy wet rag to his brow, offer him words of comfort. When he was unable to walk, he was taken away on a rattan chair and later tipped back through the door like a lump of carrion. When the man died in the night his body was left in the hot, airless cell until the end of the following afternoon, when the stench of the corpse was unbearable even to the patrolling guards. By the time they came to remove him, rigor mortis had set in and to pull him through the tiny cell door his arms must both be broken.

She lost count of the days, and lay staring up at the small barred window near the ceiling. A patch of sky, and a branch of green leaves glowed luminously, like a light beyond the cell. At night she sometimes saw the moon through this keyhole, gliding translucent across the dark sky and knew the beauty of the world she had left. Once she heard a golden oriole sing, saw the brief flash of its molten wing. She struggled in an ocean of torment and terror, no sight of shore to guide her. In this place of nightmare she remembered the phoenix, its strong wings, its great beak, its fabulous tail, its undying resolve across time. Then, in the blackness of the cell, the moon through the window was but the luminous eye of the phoenix. Strange hallucinations carried her up until she floated freely between life and death and knew that whichever claimed her in the end was but a guardian of the same essence. Then, as one breath ran out of her and another filled her, she knew that life and death were not opposite forces but different sides of a single thought; death gave birth to life.

There was no day; there was no night. There was no past or future. She lived only in the present. The lamps glared down and even if the tiny window with its blaze of sun or dark moon sky showed her the passing of days, all that mattered was that one moment she stood poised upon, compressed by fear and pain: no yesterday, no tomorrow. No comb, no toothbrush; she rubbed her teeth with a finger, straightened her hair with her hands and then gave up as it knotted with sweat
and filth; her clothes hung upon her, rank and torn, she stank of blood and pus and urine. Inside her and outside, Nakamura invaded her, lived in the deepest corner of her being, in unspeakable intimacy. She had become his object and he called for her now each day. The beatings had ceased, he was the inflictor now of a new agony. She knew the vile scent of his breath, every pore and pit on his face, the spittle on his rubbery lips, the feel of his hands and his body upon her. Dreams of the man possessed her even if she did not sleep. There was no space now between her thoughts and the looming shadow of Nakamura; he had ripped the skin of her mind away.

Then, one morning, she was released. The guards pulled her out of the cell and she shrank from them, paralysed by the sick terror of what must wait for her that day. Instead, they took her to an office on the ground floor and returned to her a purse of coins, a handkerchief and the watch she had worn the night of her arrest. An officer came to see her to explain the conditions of her release. The donation of $50 million to be made to the Imperial Army by the Chinese community was slowly being collected. A sum based on her grandfather's estimated wealth must be produced by her on his behalf. The figure quoted made her gasp. They left her to find her way home. The sun was hot and unreal, the world a raucous cacophony of unbearable colour and sound. It was an effort just to lift an arm to stop a rickshaw and, the words rusty now in her mouth, she gave the directions that would take her back to Little Sparrow's house. She had been away for nearly three months.

Even in his tormented dreams Wilfred seemed to be digging, or hacking his way through virgin jungle. For part of its excavation the railway ran alongside the river, Kwei Noi, and the camps with their POW labourers were on the muddy riverbank, camps were strung out through virgin jungle below the craggy granite mountain peaks. Each camp was responsible for completing its own stretch of railway that would later be linked to the others so that it would stretch eventually from Thailand to Burma, carrying troops and goods across the Japanese Empire. Here, deep cuttings must be hacked out with crude tools and the rock dynamited; often the falling debris killed men. Wilfred lay in the hut too sick to move yet knew they would come for him. The Japanese took no notice of illness; those shaking with malaria were
beaten for slacking. The shivering took hold of him again, knocking his bones and teeth together, splintering through him in an unbearable ache, splitting his head apart. Consumed by the shaking and pain he did not hear the guards enter the hut. They set about him with bamboo canes so that, standing, collapsing and standing again, he was prodded like an animal out of the hut to join the waiting work gang.

They called this camp Wampo after a village some distance away, and there were almost two thousand of them here, mostly Australian and British POWs. From Singapore they had been transported to the place like cattle, in metal goods carriages that heated to boiling point under the glare of the sun. Against orders they kept the sliding door open, not only for air but also so that those with dysentery could relieve themselves by sticking their backsides out of the carriage while their arms and legs were held. No water, no food. Then the march to the transit camp, twenty miles a day with constant savage punishment for supposed insubordination. When they finally reached Wampo many of the men were already dead, left on the roadside for scavenger dogs.

Wilfred remembered the internment kit he had packed with Cynthia, the smart jacket and polished shoes and sets of underwear, and wondered at the innocence of that far off time. At Wampo everyone had been forced in the end to cut up their shirts and trousers and make Japanese style loincloths,
fundoshi
, for comfort and because the steaming heat and the acidity of sweat quickly rotted clothes or produced raw rashes that rubbed painfully under shirt seams on their undernourished, overworked bodies. Sweating also caused loss of salt that brought on agonising muscular cramps. Everyone without exception was blotched all over with septic sores. Everyone without exception had malaria.

When they arrived they were ordered to build themselves bamboo huts. Scorpions were found, fourteen inches from pinchers to tail. Hastily dug latrines with no roof quickly filled up and overflowed with the monsoon rain. A man had coughed his dentures into a latrine pit and when they were retrieved he boiled them for hours in his tin tea mug. As ever, beatings and other punishments were freely meted out. Wilfred did not know how long he had been at work on the railway: time was meaningless, daylight and darkness and exhaustion was all anyone ever registered.

The Wampo work site was below a high tree-covered ridge. All day
was spent shovelling earth from the digging pits, carrying it on rice sacks stretched across bamboo poles up the embankment to where it must be dumped, then levelled. They must bring supplies up to this site on their backs, climbing the steep incline on their wasted legs. If they put the loads down to rest they were too heavy to lift on to their shoulders again. As he trudged uphill holding one end of the heavy stretcher, Wilfred thought of those other stretchers with wounded soldiers that he had carried into the General Hospital to Cynthia. He remembered her face on the pillow beside him, the scented silk of her hair. He wondered if he would be able to stay alive for however long was needed to survive this hell. Men were flogged to death, worked to death, starved to death and, if they still survived, disease waited to do its worst. Death swatted men like flies each day.

A
S THE
O
CCUPATION PROCEEDED
, the war began to turn against the Japanese. Oceans were heavily mined and bombed by the Allies, and supplies coming by sea to Singapore often failed to arrive. Food became so scarce that the military authorities began to think of ways to dispatch large numbers of people. A decision was made to somehow reduce the population of the island. This was a new worry for Mr Shinozaki. A similar plan had been implemented by the Japanese military government in Hong Kong; there, it was rumoured, people had been loaded on to boats that were sunk far out at sea.

‘We cannot let something like that happen here,' Shinozaki confided to Raj one morning, handing him some documents to take to the Mayor's office on the floor below. Shinozaki's appearance was dishevelled by anxiety. The small room was smoky and a growing pile of cigarette stubs accumulated in the ashtray as he wrestled with the population problem. When Raj returned after ten minutes, Shinozaki's expression was miraculously changed. Greeting Raj enthusiastically, he displayed a face now creased in smiles.

‘I know exactly what we must do.' Shinozaki said excitedly, pointing to a notepad on which he had been scribbling hard. The cigarette in his mouth drooped a long string of ash and his eyes were bright.

‘When I was in Changi I read a book from the prison library about an Italian settlement in the Libyan desert. Apparently, Italy had a similar problem to us. They sent specialists to Libya to dig wells and build houses. When everything was ready, five huge ships transported ten thousand settlers from Naples. This is what
we
must do. We must clear the jungle, establish settlements on the peninsula and invite people from Syonan to go there.' Shinozaki's voice rose to a feverish pitch.

One of the reasons Shinozaki could dream this dream was because so many people in the Military Administration had moved on to other conquered Japanese colonies. The occupation of Singapore was now,
for the larger part, steered by minds that were other than military. Mr Odake, who had first recruited Shinozaki to the Mayor's office, had returned to Japan and the new Mayor, Mr Naito, had been a university professor in Tokyo before the war. He was all for Shinozaki's idea.

‘You say they will grow their own food and be entirely self-supporting? How many people do you want ordered there?' Mayor Naito enquired.

‘Oh, we cannot force them,' Shinozaki hastily replied, a faraway look in his eye. ‘Instead, we must give them a dream.'

Mr Shinozaki went straight to Dr Lim Boon Keng, the white-bearded elder of the Chinese community that Shinozaki called Papa, and who had helped him run the Chinese Overseas Association before Colonel Watanabe stepped in. ‘It will be a Chinese settlement, run by Chinese people for Chinese people. Until the time that you are self-supporting I guarantee to send you rice. No Japanese laws or regulations will govern the settlement, and you will be safe from the reach of the
kempetai
,' Shinozaki promised the old man.

Shinozaki sent inspectors upcountry to study the soil of different Malayan states, and at last a site was chosen beside the Endau River in Johore. Two hundred young woodcutters set to work and Mr Shinozaki himself went into the jungle to direct operations, sometimes forced to find his way through the rainforest with no more than a compass.