The Complete Short Stories (148 page)

Ahead of me, above the fields of uncropped sugar-cane, I could see the poles and straggling telegraph wire that marked one of the main roads to Shanghai. I pressed on towards it, the vehicle rolling from side to side on the earth track. Behind me the bodies were sliding about as if in some huge scrimmage, their heads banging the sides of the truck. It was now a short period after noon, and a potent but not altogether unpleasant stench had filled the cabin. In spite of its obvious source, it seemed in some way to be refracted and amplified by the odours of my own body, almost as if my hunger and exhaustion were acting as the catalyst for the process of putrefaction. A plague of flies had descended on the truck, and covered the outer surface of the rear window behind my head, so that I was unable to see if the Japanese were following me in their scout car. I could still see the profound sense of loss in their eyes as they had watched me leave, and I almost regretted that I had not taken them with me. Far from my being their prisoner, it was they who in some way belonged to the bodies lying behind me.

Before I could reach the main Shanghai road the radiator of the engine had boiled, and I wasted a full half an hour waiting for it to cool. In order to lighten the load on the engine, I decided to throw off Hodson's corpses. There was now no chance whatever of catching up with him, and he was almost certainly speeding through the suburbs of Shanghai for a first look at his garage. Somehow I would find my own way to my parents' camp.

I climbed on to the back of--the truck, and clambered among the bodies piled together. Gazing down at the yellowing faces between my feet, I realized that I recognized almost all of them - the nuns and the Chinese couple, the elderly woman and the three children, a slim young man of my own age with an amputated left hand, a pregnant woman in her early twenties who vaguely resembled my sister. These belonged to my flock, whereas Hodson's intruders were as distinct and separate as the members of a rival clan. Their leader was clearly a small, elderly man with a barechested body like a grey monkey's, whose sharp eyes had seemed to follow me all day as I lifted him on and off the trucks.

I bent down to seize him by the shoulders, but for some reason my hands were unable to touch him. Once again I felt that presentiment of death I had sensed so many times, surrounding me on all sides, in the canal beside the road, in the fields of sugar-cane and the distant telegraph wires, even in the drone of an American aircraft crossing far overhead. Only I and the passengers aboard this truck were immune.

I tried to pick up another of the corpses, but again my hands froze, and again I felt the same presentiment, an enclosing wall that enveloped us like the wire fence around our camp. I watched the flies swarm across my hands and over the faces of the bodies between my feet, relieved now that I would never again be forced to distinguish between us. I hurled the tarpaulin into the canal, so that the air could play over their faces as we sped along. When the engine of the truck had cooled I refilled the radiator with water from the canal, and set off towards the west.

It was without surprise, an hour later, that I came across Hodson's truck, and was able to make up the full complement of my passengers.

Where Hodson himself had gone I never discovered. Five miles down the Shanghai road, after two further delays to rest the engine, I found the truck abandoned by a Japanese road-block. In the afternoon haze the surface of the road seemed to be speckled with gold, nodes of bright light reflected from hundreds of spent cartridge cases. The Japanese here had fought a vigorous engagement, perhaps with some intruding patrol of Kuomintang troops. Webbing and empty ammunition boxes lay in the tank ditch dug across the road. Unable to drive around this obstacle, Hodson had presumably set off on foot.

I stopped beside his abandoned truck, listening to the harsh beat of my engine in the deserted air. A hundred yards behind me a narrow lane led across a field of sugar-cane in a westerly direction, and with luck would carry me a little further on my circuit of Shanghai.

First, however, I had to take on my additional passengers. At the time, as I carried the dozen corpses from Hodson's truck and lifted them on to my own, it occurred to me more than once to give up the entire enterprise and set off on foot myself after Hodson. But as we turned off the road and rolled down the lane between the fields of sugarcane I felt a curious kind of comfort that we were all together, almost a sense of security at the presence of my 'family'. At the same time the urge to rid myself of them still remained, and given the opportunity - a lift, perhaps, in a passing Kuomintang vehicle - I would have left them at the first chance. But within this empty landscape they did at least provide an element of security, particularly if a hostile Japanese patrol came across me. Also, for the first time I had begun to feel a sense of loyalty towards them, and the feeling that they, the dead, were more living than the living who had deserted me.

The afternoon sun had begun to set. I woke in the cabin of the truck to find that I had fallen asleep beside a broad canal whose brown surface had turned almost carmine in the fading light. In front of me were the approaches to an empty village, the single-storey dwellings concealed by the dark fronds of the wild sugar-cane. All afternoon I had been lost in a golden world, following the sun as it moved away from me across the drowned paddies and silent villages. I was certain that I had covered some twenty miles - the apartment houses of the French concession were no longer visible along the horizon.

My last attempt to free myself from the corpses took place that night. At dusk I stepped from the cabin of the truck and walked through the sugar-cane, breaking the stems and sucking the sweet pith. From the back of the truck the corpses watched me like a hostile chorus, their inclined heads slyly confiding in each other. I too at first resented this nourishment flowing through me, meagre though it was. As I revived, however, leaning against the radiator grille of the truck, I was suddenly tempted to release the handbrake and roll the vehicle forward into the blood-stained canal. As a result of committing myself to this lunatic troupe of passengers, ferrying them from the football stadium to some destination they had never agreed upon, I had lost the chance of seeing my parents that day.

Under the cover of darkness - for I would not have dared to commit this act by daylight - I returned to the truck and began to remove the bodies one by one, throwing them down on to the road. Clouds of flies festered around me, as if trying to warn me of the insanity of what I was doing. Exhausted, I pulled the bodies down like damp sacks, ruthlessly avoiding the faces of the nuns and the children, the young amputee and the elderly woman.

At this point, when I had nearly destroyed everything I had been allowed by circumstances to achieve, I was saved by the arrival of a party of bandits. Armed American merchant seamen, renegade Kuomintang and quisling auxiliaries of the Japanese, they arrived by sampans and rapidly occupied the village. Too tired to run from them, I crouched behind the truck, watching these heavily armed men move towards me. For some reason, although I knew they would kill me, I had no sense whatever of that presentiment of death.

At the last moment, when they were only twenty feet away, I lay down in the darkness among the circle of corpses, taking my position between the young nun and the elderly woman. The ferocious flight of the thousand flies came to a stop, and I could hear the heavy step of the bandits and the sounds of their weapons. Lying there in the darkness in the circle of the dead, I watched them halt and peer into the truck, arms raised across their mouths. Unable to approach us, they waited for a few minutes and then returned to the village. All night, as they roamed from house to house, kicking down the doors and breaking the furniture, I lay in the circle of corpses. Towards dawn two of the Kuomintang soldiers came and began to search the pockets of the dead. Staring at the sky, I listened to them panting beside me, and felt their hands on my thighs and buttocks.

At dawn, when they left in their motorized sampans, the flies returned. I stood up and watched the sun rising through the dark forests of sugar-cane. Waiting for its disc to touch me, I summoned my companions to their feet.

From this time onwards, during the confused days of my journey to my parents' camp, I was completely identified with my companions. I no longer attempted to escape them. As we drove together through that landscape of war and its aftermath, past the endless canals and deserted villages, I was uncertain whether the events taking place spanned a few hours or many weeks. I was almost sure that by now the war should have been over, but the countryside remained empty, disturbed only by the sounds of the American aircraft overhead.

For much of the time I followed the westerly course of the river, a distant presence which provided my only compass bearing. I drove carefully along the broken roads that divided the paddy-fields, anxious not to disturb my passengers lying together behind me. It was they who had saved me from the bandits. I knew that in a sense I was their representative, the instrument of the new order which I had been delegated by them to bring to the world. I knew that I now had to teach the living that my companions were not merely the dead, but the last of the dead, and that soon the whole planet would share in the new life which they had earned for us.

One small example of this understanding was that I no longer wished for food. I looked out from the cabin of the truck at the wide fields of sugar-cane beside the river, knowing that their harvest would no longer be needed, and that the land could be turned over to the demands of my companions.

One afternoon, after a brief thunderstorm had driven the American aircraft from the sky, I reached the bank of the river. At some time a battle had been fought here among the wharfs and quays of a small Japanese naval air base. In the village behind the base there were shallow wells filled with rifles, and a pagoda housing a still intact anti-aircraft gun. All the villagers had fled, but to my amazement I found that I was not alone.

Seated side by side in a rickshaw that had been abandoned in the central square of the village were an elderly Chinese and a child of ten or so whom I took to be his granddaughter. At first glance they looked as if they had hired the rickshaw a few hours beforehand and ridden out here to view this small battlefield that I too was now visiting. I stopped my truck, stepped down from the cabin and walked over to them, looking around to see if their coolie was present.

As I approached, the child climbed from the rickshaw and stood passively beside it. I could see now that, far from being a spectator, her grandfather had been seriously wounded in the battle. A large piece of shrapnel had driven through the side of the rickshaw into his hip.

In Chinese I said to him, 'I'm making my way to the Soochow road. If you wish, you and your granddaughter are welcome to ride with my companions.'

He made no reply, but I knew from his eyes that despite his injuries he had immediately recognized me, and understood that I was the harbinger of all that lay before him. For the first time I realized why I had seen so few Chinese during the past days. They had not gone away for ever, but were waiting for my return. I alone could repopulate their land.

Together the child and I walked down to the concrete ramp of the naval air base. In the deep water below the wharf lay the drowned forms of hundreds of cars rounded up from the allied nationals in Shanghai and dumped here by the Japanese. They rested on the river bed twenty feet below the surface, the elements of a past world that would never be able to reconstitute itself now that I and my companions, this child and her grandfather had taken possession of the land.

Two days later we at last reached the approaches to my parents' camp. During our journey the child sat beside me in the cabin of the truck, while her grandfather rode comfortably with my companions. Although she complained of hunger to begin with, I patiently taught her that food was no longer necessary to us. Fortunately I was able to distract her by pointing out the different marks of American aircraft that crossed the sky.

After we reached the Soochow road the landscape was to change. Close to the Yangtse we had entered an area of old battlegrounds. On all sides the Chinese had emerged from their hiding places and were waiting for my arrival. They lay in the fields around their houses, legs stirring in the water that seeped across the paddy-fields. They watched from the embankments of the tank-ditches, from their burial mounds and from the doors of their ruined houses.

Beside me the child slept fitfully on the seat. Free of any fear of embarrassing her, I stopped the truck and took off my ragged clothes, leaving only a crude bandage on my arm that covered a small wound.

Naked, I knelt in front of the vehicle, raising my arms to my congregation in the fields around me, like a king assuming his crown at his coronation. Although still a virgin, I exposed my loins to the Chinese watching me as they lay quietly in the fields. With those loins I would seed the dead.

Every fifty yards, as I approached the distant water-tower of my parents' camp, I stopped the truck and knelt naked in front of its boiling radiator. There was no sign of movement from the camp compound, and I was sure now what I would find there.

The child lay motionlessly in my arms. As I knelt with her in the centre of the road, wondering if it were time for her to join my companions, I noticed that her lips still moved. Without thinking, giving way to what then seemed a meaningless impulse, I tore a small shred of flesh from the wound on my arm and pressed it between her lips.

Feeding her in this way, I walked with her towards the camp a few hundred yards away. The child stirred in my arms. Looking down I saw that her eyes had partly opened. Although unable to see me, she seemed aware of the movement of my stride.