Below me the fresh mortar marked the outline of a secret door into an interior world. Far from wanting to escape from the camp, I had been trying to burrow ever more deeply into its heart.

The Japanese Soldiers

3

THE JAPANESE SOLDIERS

Everyone was shouting that the war had ended. Prisoners leaned from their windows, waving to each other across the parade ground and pointing to the sky. Peggy Gardner and a delegation of missionary women gathered outside the guardhouse and peered through the door at Sergeant Nagata’s ransacked desk. I stood by the open gates of the camp, looking at the dusty road that followed the long arm of the Whangpoo River towards the south. The August sky was veiled by layers of haze that enclosed the empty landscape like an immense mosquito net. Threads of cloud ran through the pearly light, stitching the sky together. Vapour trails left by the American reconnaissance planes dissolved over my head, the debris perhaps of gigantic letters spelling out an apocalyptic message.

“What do they say, Jamie?” Peggy called to me. “Is the war really over?”

“Ask Sergeant Nagata. I’m going to the river.”

“Sergeant Nagata’s not here anymore. You can go back to Shanghai now.” She plucked at the patches on her dress, sorry to see me leave but not yet sure that I had the necessary nerve. “If you want to…”

“I’ll come back tonight. Wait for me at the hut.”

For all the excitement, no one was in any hurry to evacuate the camp, as Peggy had noticed. For days we had listened to rumours that the Americans had dropped a new super-bomb on Japan, destroying the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Some of the prisoners even claimed to have seen the bomb flash. The squadrons of B-29s had broken off their attacks on Lunghua airfield, but armed Japanese soldiers still waited by the antiaircraft guns. One morning we woke to find that Mr. Hyashi and the guards had vanished, slipping away under the cover of the night curfew. We stood by the perimeter wire, like children abandoned by their teachers and unsure whether to leave the classroom.

All day we watched the Shanghai road, expecting a convoy of American vehicles to speed towards us out of the dust, though everyone knew that the nearest Americans were hundreds of miles away on the island of Okinawa. Bored by this stalemate, a few men from E Block stepped through the wire and stood in the deep grass. Staring at the silent air, they seemed oddly self-conscious, as if they had forgotten who they were.