“You are, of course, right, my dear,” Hugh says, ending the conversation.
The next day, Mickey Wallace comes into the lobby where some of them are sitting listlessly. He is bleeding from the ears, his eyes already starting to swell blue and shut. He had been on the roof, looking down, when some Japanese soldiers saw him. They stormed up to him and beat him bloody because nobody is to look down on the Japanese. Only they are allowed to look down on others. This, their enemies’ peculiar preoccupation with placement and particularly with height, because of their generally smaller stature, becomes ingrained in all of the prisoners until many years after the war is over, when they automatically check who is standing where, on what step or from what position.
And the random cruelty makes them all wary. A soldier, drunk and angry about his gambling losses, strikes a small child on the way to his post. The little boy has a fractured nose and loses three teeth. A higher-up Jap spirits him away with his mother, and they are never seen again. Evidence gone. On his way up the stairs, Will looks down at the alley between the hotel and the adjacent building. He sees a body covered by a blanket, a shock of fair hair, too high up to see who it is. When he goes down, the body is gone. He wonders if he imagined it, knows he did not. Another day Trotter comes to him, says sotto voce, “I wonder if I’m going mad. I was on the balcony having a smoke, and in an alley between buildings, I could have sworn I saw a man beheaded by two others.” His voice trembles but his face is calm. “I saw the spurt of blood, the man falling down from his knees, hands tied behind his back. I could have sworn I saw it.” How can one stand it? “And then I left. I didn’t want to see the cleanup.” How does one stay sane?
There are small insults in addition to the large. A plague of the most enormous mosquitoes Will has ever seen, caused by inadequate drainage. His body is spotted with their bites, red, raised, and angry. When he swats at them, they explode into red bursts of blood, gorged on their many victims. Pests crawl into their thin mattresses, which they try, unsuccessfully, to combat by immersing the iron bed legs in bowls filled with camphor and water. Weevils in the rice. Stinky, warm water they have to hold their noses to drink. The attendant diarrhea that comes from drinking the water, until they gather together some tins and boil it first. Then the burned tongues from drinking the newly sterilized water as fast as it comes off the flame, because they are so thirsty a burned tongue seems small penance.
And then they can look outside the dirty windows to the sight of Japanese soldiers, drunk and vomiting on the sidewalks, being held up by Chinese prostitutes, as they celebrate their victory. Sometimes an unfortunate coolie is dragged in to clean up the mess, but more often it is left to rot in the street. Will thanks God it is not high summer, when the odor would intensify ten times as quickly.
He does not remember what it is like to smell fresh air. Instead, urine, feces, the thick, cloying smell of human waste, clings to the very insides of his nostrils. His skin, his hair, his fingers, they are all infused with the smell of shit, no matter how hard he washes. His hands have known the slick inside of a toilet bowl, trying to get the foul mixture of vomit, urine, and shit to flush through its own thickness. The drainage systems are no match for five hundred rapidly sickening refugees-and that is what they are, regardless of whether they were bankers or barristers before-fed with pest-ridden rice and tainted water. The guards are cruel, save one. He is a young boy dressed in a soldier’s uniform with a wide, placid face, and he smiles constantly, apologetically. He turns down his eyes when his colleagues hit the prisoners or poke at them with their bayonets. He speaks a halting English, but only when there are none of his compatriots nearby.
Trudy never comes, although others’ loved ones find a way to come, leave messages. He finds himself mentioning her to everyone, including her in the conversations, as if the mere incantation of her name will keep her real, keep her alive. Her jasmine scent becomes further and further away, a mere memory; the olfactory sense doesn’t keep well. He shifts constantly in bed, unused to the tight, narrow quarters of a space without a companion, her slight warmth. He is not angry with her, yet. Who knows what is going on outside.
Ned is going mad. The young soldier is far from home, far from any love or comfort he might know, and he has stopped talking and eats very little. His face is wan and swollen. Will tries to get him to move around a bit every day but he withdraws a little more every day.
And yet for most, life settles down amazingly quickly. Human beings tend toward routine. It is as if they have been displaced refugees for months, although it has only been a week. Businessmen shuffle around with undershirts falling out of their trousers, their natty suits packed away. Socialites do the wash alongside schoolteachers and shop proprietors. A black market springs up. As some have a lot of money, Arbogast and Trotter arrange a fund so that everyone will get some food. People contribute what they want and then they arrange to buy Russian black bread for six Hong Kong dollars a half-pound, powdered milk, soybeans, carrots, sometimes butter, which they spread sparingly on their bread and eat slowly, savoring the precious fat in their mouths. Young Chinese boys smuggle in the food, but must get past the Japanese guards, who know what’s going on, but take what they want from the meager supplies. “Tax,” says one every time, laughing at his inane joke. That guard takes almost half.
“I do think,” Trotter’s wife says fretfully to Will, “that it is so spread out that no one gets to enjoy it. Don’t you think it would be a better idea to have a lottery of some sort so that one person could enjoy a full stomach for once?”
Will shrugs. He’s not about to get into it with her. He does note, though, that she is as plump as ever. Some women volunteer to do the cooking-one is Mary, the woman with Tobias, the mute child, who hasn’t seen her husband. She is sweet and quiet, and does not take the opportunity of being in the kitchen to take more food for herself and her son, although Will would not have blamed her if she had. The cook girls, as they call themselves, come up with startling dishes: broccoli black bread sandwiches with oyster sauce, watered-down condensed milk stews with plums bobbing about, eggy greens. They have managed to get a cooker from the outside, and in the evenings, they huddle around the blue flame, where their dinner is cooking.
Surprisingly, it settles into normal. If they steer clear of the guards, they are generally left alone, as the guards are too busy drinking and finding women or things to steal. There are always rumors about where they are to be relocated. Some think they will be repatriated immediately. Others, more realistic, hope for a more comfortable place to wait out the war. But they too think it will be over in a matter of weeks or days.