The Kindness of Women. J. G. Ballard
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The assets of the Axis powers, the Japanese cotton mills and the German engineering works, were swiftly appropriated and put to use. The great trading houses opened their doors. The port of Shanghai was crammed with freighters unloading merchandise for the department stores of the Nanking Road. Thousands of bars and nightclubs lit the afternoon sky. American servicemen swarmed ashore, an army of war embraced by an even more disciplined army of peace, the Chinese pimps and their massed ranks of White Russian, Chinese and Eurasian prostitutes, who welcomed them eagerly as they stepped on to the Bund.
But from all this activity I felt set apart, as if I had landed in an unfamiliar future. So much had happened that I had not yet been able to remember or forget. There were too many memories of Lunghua that were difficult to share with my parents. Over breakfast my father and I talked about our experiences, as if we were describing scenes from the films showing in the Shanghai theatres. My sense of myself had changed, and I had mislaid part of my mind somewhere between Lunghua and Shanghai.
Strangest of all, Japanese soldiers were still patrolling the streets of Shanghai. As Yang and I drove in the puppet general’s Buick to a garden party at the British Consulate I pointed to the Japanese sentries in faded uniforms, standing with their long rifles on the steps of the Mayoral Office. Yang sounded his horn, forcing the Buick through the pedicab drivers, beggars and office clerks, shouting to the Japanese to clear the way. I stared at the faces hidden under their peaked caps, hoping to recognise the first-class private and the corporal I had left behind on the railway platform.
Other Japanese sentries, at the request of the American and Kuomintang authorities, guarded key government buildings around the city. My father told me that the Free French occupying Indo-China had recruited units of the Japanese army in their fight against the communist Viet Minh. For all this, whenever I saw the armed Japanese I thought of the isolated railway station in the countryside south of Shanghai. I almost believed that the Japanese soldiers guarding the city were preparing the bar-keepers, prostitutes and American servicemen for a longer journey that would soon set out from that rural platform.
The first of a long series of war crimes trials were held in October, and the senior Japanese generals who had ruled Shanghai during the war were charged with an endless catalogue of atrocities against the Chinese civilian population. Almost in passing, we heard that the Japanese had planned to close Lunghua and march us up-country, far from the eyes of the neutral community in Shanghai. But for the sudden end of the war, they would have been free to dispose of us, and only the atomic bombs had saved our lives. The pearly light that hung over Lunghua reminded me for ever of the saving miracle of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Once a week I visited the camp, where several hundred of the British internees were still housed. They survived on the rations parachuted by B-29 Superfortresses identical to those that had bombed Nagasaki. The dead and the living had begun to interbreed. As Yang drove south along the Lunghua road I searched the paddy fields for any sign of the railway station, expecting to see its platform crowded with new arrivals.
I tried to explain all this to Peggy, while she waited for her parents to sail from Tsingtao. I gave her the presents of clothes that I had bought at Sincere’s, the latest American lipsticks, nylon stockings and a box of Swiss chocolates. I was happy to be with her again in the children’s hut, watching her try on her new make-up. Through the rouge and lipstick a vivid woman’s face appeared, more beautiful than all the prostitutes at the Park Hotel. I wanted to embrace her and thank her for everything she had done for me, but we knew each other too well. Already I felt that she had begun to free herself from the camp, and that we would soon grow apart.
Casually, I described the death of the young Chinese. When I finished, hiding my feelings behind a liqueur chocolate, I realised that I had made him sound like myself.
‘Jamie, you should never have gone.’ Peggy settled a small child into its cot. ‘We did try to stop you.’
‘I had to go back to Shanghai. You know, I was really looking for Sergeant Nagata …’
‘Those soldiers might have killed you.’
‘They didn’t need to – I wasn’t ready for them.’
‘Jamie, they didn’t touch you! You walked away from them.’
‘I suppose I did – I keep thinking I should have stayed. Peggy, they wouldn’t have hurt me.’
Already she could see that I was disappointed.
At the end of October, as I left the Cathay Hotel after lunch with my mother, I shared a taxi with two American navy pilots who were trying to find the Del Monte Casino. I guided the Chinese driver to the Avenue Haig, only to find that the casino had been ransacked by the Japanese in the last days of the war. As we left the taxi, looking at the shattered windows and the broken glass on the steps, I noticed David Hunter hailing the driver from the lobby of Imperial Mansions, a run-down apartment building across the street in which several brothels operated.
David, like me, was dressed in a pale grey suit and tie, which he wore in the faintly shifty way shared by all the former Lunghua boys, as if we had been released after serving a sentence at a corrective institution. At times we would meet every day, but often I would do my best to avoid him. He had recovered from Sergeant Nagata’s slaps on the evening he tried to escape, but his swerves of dangerous humour exhausted me. Often I saw him on the steps of the Park Hotel, staring in a strained, smiling way at the Eurasian women waiting for the Americans. Once he lured a suspicious 14-year-old Chinese prostitute into his father’s Studebaker, which he borrowed to take us to the jai alai stadium. In the car park she squatted expertly across David’s lap, embroidered gown around her waist, shouting over her shoulder at the Chinese chauffeur. Dazed by her energy and nakedness, I let David order me into the night air, but twenty minutes later, when the chauffeur and I returned, she was kicking David in a fury of Chinese obscenities and trying to escape through the passenger window. David was laughing generously, his hands on her waist, but under his ruffled pale hair the flush of his cheeks resembled the bruises left by Sergeant Nagata’s hand.
I listened to my feet cracking the broken glass outside the Del Monte. Deciding to give David the slip, I left the American pilots with their taxi and stepped into the entrance of the casino. Gilt chairs lay heaped against the walls of the foyer, and the red plush curtains had been torn from the windows. Like chambers in an exposed dream, the gaming rooms were flooded with sunlight that turned the dance floor into the scene of a traffic accident. A roulette table lay on its side, gaming chips scattered around it, and the gilded statue of a naked woman with upraised arms that supported the canopy of the bar had fallen across a collapsed chandelier, a princess frozen in a jewelled bower.
A Chinese waiter and a young European woman were straightening the overturned chairs and brushing up the plaster that had fallen from the ceiling. As I walked past them the woman turned and followed me, pulling my arm.
‘James! They said you were back! You remember your Olga?’
Olga Ulianova, my pre-war nanny, pinched my cheeks with her sharp fingers. Unsure whether she had recognised me, she felt my shoulders, running her brightly varnished nails over the lapels of my suit.
‘Olga, you really scared me. You haven’t changed.’ I was glad to see her, though time seemed to be running in all directions. If I was three years older, Olga was both in her early twenties and late thirties. A procession of faces had been let into the bones of her face, layers of paint and experience through which gleamed a pair of pointed and hungry eyes. I guessed that she spent her days fighting off American sailors in the backs of the Nanking road pedicabs. Her silk suit was torn around the armpit, exposing a large bruise under her shoulder blade, and a smear of lipstick marked the strap of her brassiere. As she looked me up and down I knew that she had already dismissed my own experiences of the war.
‘So … such a smart suit. Mr Sangster said you had a good time in Lunghua. I guess you miss it.’
‘Well … a little. I’ll take you there, Olga.’
‘No, thanks. I heard enough about those camps. All those dances and concerts. Here it’s been real hell, I can tell you. The things my mother had to do, James. We didn’t have the Japanese