Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [104]
The column of prisoners crossed the silent car park. Dozens of bomb craters had torn the tarmac surface, but the white marker lines still stretched through the darkness. Damaged army vehicles were parked in neat rows – shrapnel -torn trucks and fuel wagons, treadless tanks and armoured half-tracks each pulling two artillery guns. Jim stared at the pock-marked façade of the stadium. Bomb fragments had dislodged sections of the white plaster, and the original Chinese characters proclaiming the power of the Kuomintang had emerged once again, threatening slogans that hung over the darkness like the hoardings above the Chinese cinemas in pre-war Shanghai.
They entered a concrete tunnel that led into the darkened arena. With its curved stands it reminded Jim of the detention centre in Shanghai, all its dangers magnified a hundredfold by the war. The Japanese soldiers formed a cordon around the running track. The rain dripped from their capes, and lit the bayonets and breeches of their rifles. Already the first prisoners were sitting down on the wet grass. Mr Maxted dropped to the ground at Jim’s feet, as if released from a harness. Jim squatted beside him, waving away the mosquitoes that had followed them into the stadium.
The three trucks emerged from the tunnel and stopped on the cinder track. Dr Ransome climbed across his patients and lowered himself from the tail-gate. Mrs Pearce stepped from the cabin of the second truck, leaving her husband and son beside the Japanese driver. Through the rain Jim could hear Dr Ransome arguing with the Japanese. Hidden under his cape, the senior sergeant of the gendarmerie watched him without expression, then lit a cigarette and strolled away to the stands, where he sat in the front row as if about to observe a display of midnight acrobatics.
Jim was glad when Mrs Pearce returned to the cabin of her truck. Dr Ransome’s complaining voice, in the tones he had used so often when remonstrating with Jim over his games in the hospital cemetery, was out of place in Nantao stadium. Within a few minutes of their arrival a complete silence had come over the twelve hundred prisoners. They huddled together on the grass, watched by the guards in the stands. Dr Ransome moved through the women and children, still trying to carry out his Lunghua inspections. Jim waited until he stumbled in the dark, prompting a surly shout from a group of men.
The rain fell across the stadium, and Jim lay back and let it run across his face, warming his cold cheeks. Despite the rain, thousands of flies settled on the prisoners. Jim wiped the flies from Mr Maxted’s mouth, and tried to wash his face with the rain, but they festered on his lips, picking at his gums.
Jim watched the faint breath from Mr Maxted’s mouth. He wondered what he could do for him, and regretted throwing away his suitcase. Pushing the wooden box into the river had been a sentimental but pointless gesture, his first adult act. He might have bartered his possessions and obtained a little food for Mr Maxted. A few of the Japanese soldiers were Catholics, and used the Latin Mass. One of the guards in his rain-soaked cape might have valued the Kennedy Primer, and Jim could perhaps have arranged to give him Latin lessons…
But Mr Maxted slept peacefully. A grey breath emerged through the flies on his lips, and from the other prisoners nearby. An hour later, when the rain had stopped, the flashes of an American air raid lit up the stadium, like the sheet lightning of the monsoon season. As a child, safe in his bedroom at Amherst Avenue, Jim had watched the sudden glares that exposed the rats caught in the centre of the tennis court and on the verges of the swimming-pool. God, Vera agreed, was taking photographs of the wickedness of Shanghai. The noiseless glimmer of the