Hodson was asleep beside his truck. His saki bottle followed the corpses down the canal. After throwing a few stones at it, I passed the next hour watching the vapour trails of the American aircraft and thinking with increasing optimism about the future, and about seeing my parents and sister later that afternoon. We would move back to our house in the French concession. My father would re-open his brokerage business, and no doubt train me as his assistant. After years of war and privation, Shanghai would be a boom city again… everything would once again return to normal.
This pleasant reverie sustained me, when Hodson had woken blearily and clambered back into his cabin, as we set off in our lightened trucks. I was beginning to feel hungry again, and regretted eating all my rice, particularly as Hodson had thrown his into the canal. But then I heard Hodson shout something back to me. He was pointing to the sluicebridge a hundred yards in front of us.
When we reached it we found that we were not the only ones hoping to make the crossing.
Parked on the approaches to the bridge, its light machine-gun unguarded, was a camouflaged Japanese patrol car. As we stopped, the three-man crew had climbed on to the bridge and were trying to close the gates that would carry us across. Seeing us arrive, the sergeant in charge walked over to us, scanning the few stickers Hodson had not torn from our trucks. We stepped down from the cabins, waiting as the sergeant inspected our cargoes without comment. He spoke a few words in Japanese to Hodson, and beckoned us over to the bridge.
As we looked down at the sluices, we could see immediately what had blocked the bridges and prevented the gates from closing. Humped together against the vents were well over a dozen of the corpses that Hodson and I had pitched into the canal an hour earlier. They lay together like mattresses, arms and legs across each other, some face down, others staring at the sky.
To my shock I realized that I recognized each of them. That presentiment of death — though not my own nor of these drowned creatures — which I had felt so often during the past days returned to me, and I looked round at Hodson and the three Japanese as if expecting them immediately to fulfil this unconscious need.
‘Well, what do they want?’ Hodson was arguing aggressively with the Japanese sergeant, who for some reason was shouting at me in a suddenly high-pitched voice. Perhaps he realized that I might respond to his instructions for reasons of my own. I looked at his face and angular shoulders, wrists that were little more than sticks, well aware that he was as hungry as myself.
‘I think they want us to get them out,’ I said to Hodson. ‘Otherwise, we can’t get across. They know we threw them into the water.’
‘For God’s sake…’ Exasperated, Hodson pushed past the Japanese and clambered down the bank of the canal. Waistdeep among the corpses, he began to sort them out with his strong arms. ‘Aren’t they going to help?’ he called up in an aggrieved way when the Japanese made no effort to move.
Needless to say, Hodson and I were obliged to lift the bodies out ourselves. They lay on the bank like a party of exhausted bathers, in a strange way almost refreshed by their journey down the canal. The blood had been washed from the jaw-wound of the elderly woman, and I could see for the first time the image of a distinct personality. The sunlight lit the line of moist faces, illuminating the exposed hands and ankles.
‘Well, we can get across now.’ Looking down at his drenched trousers as the Japanese closed the sluice-gates, Hodson said to me ‘Let’s get on with it. We’ll leave them here.’
I was staring at the face of the elderly woman, visualizing her talking to me, perhaps about her childhood in England or her long missionary years in Tientsin. Beside her the washed robes of the young nun had an almost spectral blackness, which gave her white hands and face an extraordinary glow. I was about to join Hodson when I noticed that the Japanese were also gazing at the bodies. All I could see was their intense hunger, as if they were eager to become my passengers.
‘I think we should put them back on the trucks,’ I said to Hodson. Fortunately, before he could remonstrate with me the sergeant had come over to us, beckoning us to work with his pistol.
Hodson helped me to load the first ten bodies on to the back of my truck. Then, unable to contain his anger any more, he seized the bottle of saki from the cabin, pushed past the Japanese and climbed into his truck. Shouting something at me, he drove on to the bridge and set off along the opposite bank of the canal.
