The War Crimes people gave parties that lasted all night. Opposite the cathedral, Japanese prisoners were kept in enclosures behind the barracks, waiting for the War Crimes to get to them. Their prisoners, our prisoners, it was catch as catch can. You walked past the wire, the prisoners were hanging about, suspended for the enactment of justice. In autumn they were let out on the road an hour or two each day to rake the leaves. They wore olive fatigues and were under guard of a sentry—who would be a boy of perhaps eighteen, with yellow hair and glasses, or dark hair and pimples, himself barely out of custody from home or school. The trees behind the barracks had great red flowers in spring: Flame of the Forest, Constantin said.

“How long were you in prison, Constantin?”

“One hundred and sixty-six days, all perishing cold.” The khaki shirt stuck wetly to his back, the black hair wetly to his head. “Also thirty days of prison hospital.” A swatch of flesh was missing from his leg, leaving a purple cavity along the shinbone. Once he had drawn a map for her, like an old soldier, marking in the north bank of the Rhine, a bridge, the Polish brigade, the First Airborne Division. He had told her that the colonel’s head was blown off while they stood together, and how he had lain for days untended in an upper bunk in a shed for captive wounded. All this was decently enclosed in war; it was like delivering a string of obscenities as polite conversation. The immense indecency of war he kept, a colossal secret, to himself. Folding the map he had laughed and said, “A thin red line of heroes,” sounding like Freddy. He had kept folding until the map was small, and made this joke and pressed it into her hand.

At Government House they were wearing braided uniforms and suits of white duck, and in the evening scarlet cummerbunds and decorations. They were wearing long kid gloves that buttoned back to expose the fingers, and hats with veiling stirred by ceiling fans. The girl stood there on platform soles holding a glass while Princess Elizabeth became engaged six thousand miles away, or India became a nation, or a viscount with protuberant eyes was passed from hand to hand. She sat on a gilt chair while a Georgian poet told a carefully selected audience about light in poetry, on his way to Japan; and was later unsuccessful in obtaining his book from Kelly & Walsh in Chater Road. A colonel of the Inniskillings in a saffron kilt had taken her aside—“I’d like to tell you my little jingle”—but her apprehensions were unjustified, as it was only about the typhoon season:

June, too soon;

July, stand by;

August, it must;

September, remember;

October, all over.