Son armed himself with fortitude, and with no speculation, knowing all preconception futile, expecting and demanding nothing, but waiting for what would have to be endured, never believing, never any more believing in anyone or anything at all.

Son knew himself strong with his empty heart, his careful mind, his ruthless will to live, with no dreams to eat away the solid boundaries of the ship carrying him and his father from the known and tasted terrors to the unknown land, the land of his ancestors, China.

11

THE CLOVEN KIND

When Todak New Village went under clampdown for the murder of its Resettlement Officer, Ah Mei and other S.E.P.s were taken there in closed vans and through the canvas slits peered and pointed out the people they thought they recognized as having to do with the Organization of the People Inside.

Then Ah Mei went to prison for a day and a half with one of the suspects to interrogate, and when she returned she had a bath as usual, and washed her hair, and changed her clothes, before writing her report. Always, lifting her smiling pink face as she settled down with her fountain pen poised above the school copy book she used, she said to me:

‘Aiyah, doctor, it is so dirty in the cells.’

The weeks ambled unperceived, forgotten because unchanging heat blurs, enduring greenness stupefies the alert counting of days. Only clouds, growing and then overswollen bursting; only night and day, for ever. And I had ceased to wonder that at the hospital the Malay women and a good few of the Chinese (usually so calendar conscious) did not know how old they were, nor how old their children. How difficult to remember, when January is as July will ever be. British expatriates, the name given now to British officials, found their memory slipping from them, a tropical disease which they mentioned easily, in that half-pleased manner of people who suffer in a good cause. They told time by another apparatus than the usual feast days on calendars, another precise measure: the tours and the furlough. ‘This is our third tour’ meant twice a spell of two and a half years in Malaya, with two six months’ home leave between. Time for them was set by its recession from the last furlough and the approach towards the next home leave, counted first in months, then in weeks, and finally in days.