Crammed in at Singapore, vomited out in Ban Pong. Despicable Europeans who had not fought to the death. The Japanese were not fond of survivors. Thailand, April, 1943. He had imagined his thirtieth birthday differently. They would march to the Kwai, two hundred and fifty kilometres through crushing heat and torrential rain. A handful of rice, filthy water, from hunger-hole to malaria camp.
[…]
The march […] began and ended in the dark. At night they dragged themselves down elephant paths through a leeching jungle. During the day they slept fitfully, swarmed upon by mosquitoes, hollow with hunger. Already at Bandung he and Guus had devised a survival strategy. They began to unravel each other’s lives and pasts, threaded together the beads of stories. Related countless details that struck them during the day. They collected little incidents, swapped absurdities, observed minimal shifts in the tone of the camp. The number of lashes meted out, the distance between forehead and ground when bowing to the Japanese sergeant. They counted the grains of rice in their scoop of rations, how long the sun shone on their sleeping mats, the sores on their comrades’ feet. Anything was allowed, every new discovery was checked and weighed. Their life depended, it seemed, on a stream of concoctions and memories.
[…]
The jungle had the hospitality of a bloodsucker. A sickening curtain of trees and bushes seemed to offer escape, yet whoever fled was lost. During night marches of twenty, twenty-five kilometres through the tumult of age-old forests, men fell by every wayside. Too tired, too sick to go on. Numbed, utterly indifferent to death. He and Guus beat time with everything they had taught themselves at Bandung. To not have to think about the next day, or the next night. Ten days the knockout race lasted. They had left with a thousand, arrived at the Kwai with scarcely seven hundred, three hundred of whom could not lift a finger. Sometimes he hallucinated with fatigue. Little Yoshua bending over him with a pack of cigarettes. Sometimes, seeing a man who had fallen beside the stumbling cavalcade, he would mumble ‘Kunjani, Boss?’
The monsoons were probably the worst. The fatal downpours that flogged their ribs. Sleeping in a puddle of rainwater, rising from a bed of mud. Wetness was next of kin to illness, swamp the father of malaria.
The River Kwai, soft-yellow, almost brown moving water. The camp thrown up on its banks would be the casino of their lives in the months to come. The chances of getting out alive they put at 40 per cent. Three hundred men dead on the journey, three hundred ill. How soon would the sick die, and when would the rest become ill? It was roulette. The croupiers raked in the winnings. The field in which the dead were buried spread to the edge of the forest.
Roll call, before work, after work. Sometimes they stood for hours, most often after work. Heads counted and counted again. Screaming when the numbers did not tally. Recount. Their world stretched from the soles of their feet to their backs, through the pain in between. They were in Thailand, building a railway to Burma, hundreds of kilometres along the river. Building and sabotaging, two steps forward, one step back. […]
Roll call, a case for punishment, someone caught outside the camp and accused of running away. He stood no more than five sleepers from the runaway. To attention, all night. The condemned man was on his knees, his head bowed. He heard the night forest, the shrieking of monkeys and unknown birds, there was hissing and whispering and crackling. Men fell over left and right and were beaten to their feet, or dragged off. In his mind he was playing chess with Guus. The king was the emperor, the castle was carved of bamboo, the queen had gone to England. It all spun together. Half sleep, half night, half life, half human. When the sun came up the Jap blindfolded the kneeling man. So he did not see the sword come near, did not hear it strike.
‘Kunjani, Boss?’
He was ordered to drag away the body, along with two other ghosts, confused after standing in numb silence. Behind them, roll call came to an end and the working day began. They brought the dead man to the burying field, grey in the early morning, and improvised a wooden cross. Blood on their feet.
Days and nights like this. He and Guus refused to succumb. Stubborn and drugged by the sun, they marched behind the Jap. Through Thailand, until close to the Three Pagodas Pass. Their survival strategies were wearing thin. Their eyes saw nothing new. Every fresh discovery became a threat, every surprise eating away at their stamina. If there was more than standing, hacking, walking and sleeping, they did not want to know. The train was their obsession, the railway their anchor, the Jap their demon. They lived like tortoises, withdrawing at any moment beneath their protective domes. They believed that this way they did not see, feel, hope. They endured the dead bodies, the atrocities, their total powerlessness. He and Guus. Or rather: Guus. And he. Each for their own, and the emperor for all. Their twofoldness was temporarily broken. What first had been their strength now became their weakness, although the unspoken bond remained - for when it was badly needed.
Death without end, time without meaning. After the monsoons, the wind. By day an inescapable sun shimmered, the nights were freezing cold. And the day came when the very last rocks were hacked out, the very last sleepers laid. The train would roll, the prisoners would be cast aside. The work was done, the emperor could be pleased with his army of crushed Europeans, trash of his realm.
As in Bandung, the waiting began. Until somewhere a clerk passed down the orders from above: Disband camps on the Kwai, transport prisoners to the fatherland. Destination Japan then, the infernal island, the distant pit of evil. They walked back the way they had come. But more despondent now, serfs who believed in nothing any more, displaced and re-displaced. Afoot or carried off in trains, even weaker, more apathetic, less useful to the Jap than before.
They were embarked at Singapore. He found Guus in the hold of the Bungu Maru. They had not seen each other since their return journey from the inlands of Thailand. The camps around the harbour were overcrowded, those who had survived the railway were packed into them without any system. But the bureaucrats were regaining ground and assigned adequate troops. Course set for Kyushu, the large, southernmost Japanese island. He thought of the Cape Town and the Tegelberg, the ships he had known, one bound for freedom, the other steaming towards defeat. And this Bungu Maru, no doubt heading for the end. Descending steep ladders into the guts of the troop carrier, he saw him. Skinny, still wearing his parting through the middle of virtually snow-white hair.
‘Guus!’
They hugged briefly, with almost no visible emotion, as they hurried to find a place. They settled next to a ladder, nowhere to lie down. Guus had insisted on a space near an escape to the upper deck. He had heard the rumours of torpedoed Japanese transport ships, laden with prisoners of war. The Americans and the Brits hunted down every boat.
And indeed their veering course proved no salvation. A shattering blast brought the sea in immediately. Amidst the immeasurable chaos they were onto the ladder in a few steps. There was a fight above their heads. Two bodies came flailing downwards, the Jap had kicked them off the ladder. But they did not have to wait for long. The ship was screaming and began to gain water. He would never forget the moment Guus jumped. Thirty seconds perhaps before he himself pushed off the rail and smacked onto the water beside a raft. The sea was hard as rock and he screamed with pain. Clutching the life raft, he shouted Guus’ name. But in the throng of swimmers all around, he did not discover him. He shouted until at last he had no voice.
