Instead he persisted in ignorance. He did not know. He could not say. He hesitated, or remained silent. He angered the judge, the prosecutor, the interpreter, and the police; even the assessors became impatient. Everyone in court was angry with Neo except Big Dog Tsou, whose eyes stared at him like clenched fists raised in utmost fear and begging, not hoping for mercy. And Neo, confronted with the wordless begging of these eyes, could not bring himself to betray a neighbour, and thus betrayed himself.

Pointedly, then, the judge referred to Neo’s ‘lack of cooperation with Justice’. Big Dog Tsou was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging, and knowing the end, with no return to the Resurrection Tailor shop and to the child-wife with the small baby son in her arms, suddenly became a comrade again, a member of the Organization, and spat at the judge, and was taken away struggling and shouting slogans.

But Neo had merely added a deeper blackness to his black record. Non-cooperative, no extenuating circumstances, a hopeless case, incapable of reform, to be deported, with another two hundred and fifty-eight hardened cases from the camp.

The death of Neo Saw roused no grief in Neo. For grief was a word, an emotion worn-out and erased in his long passive waiting in camp. He went on board ship as a stone dreaming, and Son who was there knew him despite the years apart.

He stood by his side, saying politely: ‘Tolong, please, this is my father,’ when the police officer told him to keep in line. And never left Neo again.

Son knew that his father was a child fast in a fixed dream without word or shape. He looked after Neo, made him wash his face and hands, comb his hair, fed him, both hands holding out the bowl of rice to him, with devotion and love doing all things as he had seen Neo Saw do when he was a child among her children.

Son did not see the stinging bright sea on which their ship rode. There was only darkness and faces to stare at in the hold. Long ago he had ceased to look at the sky and to find shapes in the clouds. He was now geared to survival only, all else withered save the strong inflexible will to go on living. Yet he did not know why he lived.

Often in the darkness of the hold a question carefully unworded, kept secret, came to him:

‘When we get to the ancestors’ country, shall we be again
behind wire?’

Round him he heard the hot exclamations of men promising Paradise on landing, freedom and happiness and revenge one day for all the wrongs they had endured.

Round him he heard, in whispers, the small fears of the older men at night, fearful that they were going to another bondage.