A short run beyond Kanburi brought us to the platform at the River Kwae Bridge; the train was longer than die platform, so we got down on to the track itself and walked beside it, next to the dried and oil-stained timber of the sleepers. The heat was ferocious and the smell of diesel rose up from the track. We came to a broad area in front of an open level-crossing which leads on to the bridge. The engine, its siren blasting, growled across the bridge, the seven coaches slowly moving through the girders of the eleven spans set on their concrete piers, and then the train disappeared westwards towards the mountains. Silence rose up, and was gradually drowned by the noise of lorries and motorcycles resuming their journeys as the level-crossing opened again. The bridge piers in the brown muddy water were cracked and pitted by the fragments of bombs dropped in 1944, when the US Army Air Force damaged the bridge. They looked as though they had not been touched for fifty years.
We booked into a hotel across the river from the town, and had lunch in the River Kwae Restaurant, where we met Tida Loha, its remarkable proprietor. She had had the generosity and imagination to give Nagase a plot of land next to the bridge so that he could build his temple of peace, and she is an astute and diplomatic woman. She has met many ex-POWs and Japanese ex-servicemen over the years, and knows a great deal about the fierce hatreds that were played out between strangers in her town during the war.
Time was now running out. Nagase and I had arranged to meet in the morning, on the opposite side of the bridge near the little museum devoted to the railway, and I could not bear to alter the arrangement even a little, so that when he and his wife arrived at his hotel at six in the evening instead of at midnight, as planned, there was a kind of panic. Ian Kerr, an associate of the Medical Foundation who had come to the meeting in case there was a crisis, saved me from having to stay in my own room, a prisoner once again in Kanburi, by taking Patti and me out for dinner, to a floating restaurant where I played with a friendly cat and tried to forget about the next day. It was late when we went to bed.
In the morning we crossed to the other side of the river and walked up the steps to a broad veranda overlooking the bridge. I sat down to watch and wait. I was dressed rather formally in a shirt and slacks, and wore a Sutherland tartan tie – surely the only tie for miles around. The sun was climbing and the air was oppressively hot, though it was not yet nine in the morning.
From about a hundred yards away I saw him walk out on to the bridge; he could not see me. It was important for me to have this last momentary advantage over him; it prepared me, even now that I no longer wanted to hurt him. I walked about a hundred yards to an open square, a kind of courtyard overlooking the river, where we had arranged to meet.
A huge smiling figure of Buddha dominated the courtyard and as I sat down I realized that there was another benign presence throwing a shadow on to the wide expanse of terrace: a carefully preserved locomotive, a veteran of the Royal Siamese Railway, built in Glasgow, I noticed, in the year of my birth. This exquisite relic could have come from a brightly-lit dream, with me sitting on an empty square, a silent steam engine close at hand, waiting for something to happen.
He came on to the terrace, walking past the engine. I had forgotten how small he was, a tiny man in an elegant straw hat, loose kimono-like jacket and trousers. From a distance he resembled an oriental carving, some benign wizened demon come to life. He carried a shapeless blue cotton shoulder bag. As he came closer I could see that he wore around his throat beads of dark red stone on a thick string. I remembered him saying to me again and again ‘Lomax, you will tell us’, other phrases he had recited in the voice I hated so much…
He began a formal bow, his face working and agitated, the small figure barely reaching my shoulder. I stepped forward, took his hand and said ‘ Ohayo gozaimasuj Nagase san, ogenkidesu ka.’ ‘Good morning, Mr Nagase, how are you?’
He looked up at me; he was trembling, in tears, saying over and over ‘I am very, very sorry…’ I somehow took command, led him out of the terrible heat to a bench in the shade; I was comforting him, for he was really overcome. At that moment my capacity for reserve and self-control helped me to help him, murmuring reassurances as we sat down. It was as though I was protecting him from the force of the emotions shaking his frail-seeming body. I think I said something like ‘That’s very kind of you to say so’ to his repeated expressions of sorrow.
He said to me ‘Fifty years is a long time, but for me it is a time of suffering. I never forgot you, I remember your face, especially your eyes.’ He looked deep into my eyes when he said this. His own face still looked like the one I remembered, rather fine-featured, with dark and slightly hidden eyes; his wide mouth was still noticeable beneath cheeks that had sunken inwards.
I told him that I could remember his very last words to me. He asked what they were and laughed when I said ‘Keep your chin up.’
He asked if he could touch my hand. My former interrogator held my arm, which was so much larger than his, stroking it quite unselfconsciously. I didn’t find it embarrassing. He gripped my wrist with both of his hands and told me that when I was being tortured – he used the word – he measured my pulse. I remembered he had written this in his memoir. Yet now that we were face to face, his grief seemed far more acute than mine. ‘I was a member of Imperial Japanese Army; we treated your countrymen very, very badly.’
‘We both survived’, I said encouragingly, really believing it now.
A little later, I’m sure he said: ‘Tor what purpose were you born in this world? I think I can die safely now.’
He asked me if I remembered the ‘bath house’ where I was tortured. I had to admit I couldn’t recall it; he said that there was an episode between the shouting in the room and the drowning with the hosepipe in the yard, when they took me into some sort of bathroom and filled a metal tub, and the Kempei Gunso held my head underneath the water. ‘You remember big can?’ Nagase asked, making a round shape with his hands. I had to take his word for it. I told him that I did certainly remember the Gunso’s wooden ruler banging on the desk, and that I didn’t like him very much. Nagase agreed that he was ‘a very rough man’.
It’s impossible to remember everything we talked about, but we sat there so long that the sun moved right around and we were no longer in the shade. (Patti told me later that she was having a sharp argument in the background with a journalist who spotted a story on the terrace and was trying to photograph us; I never heard a thing.) The content of our conversation hardly mattered. We laughed a lot, after a while, and were happy in each other’s company. I can recall snatches of what we said quite clearly, especially some of his quaint phrases, and have an impression of the rest.
At one point Nagase suddenly began talking about my map. He reminded me that I’d tried to tell him I had a sketch of the line ‘because you are mania of railway’, as he put it. ‘I tried to believe it,’ he said, ‘but at that time in Japan railway mania was not so popular.’ Then he said that he knew we had every kind of’mania’ in our country and had tried to persuade the Gunso that I was not the leader of the group. I pointed out that the Gunso hadn’t believed me anyway, and Nagase said that they had wanted a spy; they could not understand otherwise where we had found the makings of a radio, and were obsessed with preventing contacts between us and civilians. He himself had, as I suspected, searched prisoners’ belongings at Singapore when they were leaving for Ban Pong and the north.