Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [114]
As he climbed the embankment the last of the parachutes had fallen into the fields to the west of Lunghua Camp. The murmur of the B-29s engines faded over the Yangtze. Jim approached the scarlet canopy, large enough to cover a house, which lay across the embankment. He gazed at the lustrous material, more luxurious than any fabric he had ever seen, at the immaculate stitching and seams, at the white cords that trailed into the culvert beside the canal.
The canister had burst on impact. Jim lowered himself down the slope of sun-baked earth, and squatted by the open mouth of the cylinder. Around him, on the floor of the culvert, was a ransom in canned food and cigarette packets. The canister was crammed with cardboard cartons, and one had broken loose from the nose cone and scattered its contents over the ground. Jim crawled among the cans, wiping his eyes so that he could read the labels. There were tins of Spam, Klim and Nescafe, bars of chocolate and cellophaned packs of Lucky Strike and Chesterfield cigarettes, bundles of Reader’s Digest and Life magazines, Time and Saturday Evening Post.
The sight of so much food confused Jim, forcing on him a notion of choice that he had not known for years. The cans and packets were frozen, as if they had just emerged from an American refrigerator. He began to fill the broken box with canned meat, powdered milk, chocolate bars and a bundle of Reader’s Digests. Then, thinking ahead for the first time in several days, he added a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes.
When he climbed from the culvert the scarlet canopy of the parachute was billowing gently in the air that moved along the canal. Holding the cold treasure to his chest, Jim left the embankment and waded across the paddy field. He was following the ridge of the bomb crater towards the perimeter of the airfield when he heard the leisurely drumming of a B-29’s engines. He stopped to search for the plane, already wondering how he could cope with all this treasure falling from the sky.
Almost at once, a rifle shot rang out. A hundred yards away, separated from Jim by the open paddy, a Japanese soldier was running along the embankment of the canal. Bare-footed in his ragged uniform, he raced past the parachute canopy, leapt down the weed-covered slope and sprinted across the paddy field. Lost in the spray kicked up by his frantic heels, he disappeared among the grave mounds and clumps of sugar-cane.
Jim crouched by the ridge of the bomb crater, biding in the few blades of wild rice. A second Japanese soldier appeared. He was unarmed, but still wore his webbing and ammunition pouches. He sprinted along the canal embankment, and stopped to recover his breath beside the scarlet canopy of the parachute. He turned to look over his shoulder, and Jim recognized the puffy, tubercular face of Private Kimura.
A group of European men were following him along the embankment, clubs of weighted bamboo in their hands. One of the men carried a rifle, but Kimura ignored him and straightened his webbing around his tattered uniform. He kicked one of his rotting boots into the water, and then walked down the slope to the flooded paddy field. He had covered ten paces when there was a second rifle shot.
Private Kimura lay face down in the shallow water. Jim waited in the wild rice as the four Europeans approached the parachute canopy. He listened to their nervous quarrelling. All were former British prisoners, barefoot and in ragged shorts, though none had been inmates of Lunghua. Their leader was an agitated young Englishman whose fists were wrapped in a pair of grimy bandages. Jim guessed that he had been imprisoned for years in an underground cell. His white skin flinched in the sunlight like the exposed flesh of a snail teased from its shell. He waved his bandages in the air, bloody pennants that signalled some special kind of anger to himself.
The four men began to roll up the parachute canopy. Despite the starvation of the past months, they worked swiftly and had