‘Oh, but surely, Ouboet,’ he began to protest, but more out of habit than real feeling I was sure. So I interrupted him, begging him to listen and went on, without pause or evasion, to tell him the story of my betrayal as I saw it.
He listened without interruption and with growing intensity. A hush seemed to have fallen over the fast-approaching storm and not even a mutter of distant thunder broke through the stillness of the parched garden.
When I had finished he turned and stared at me and I saw that there were tears in his eyes.
‘Ouboet,’ he said in a voice I had not heard since one of our moments of reconciliation when we slept as children under the stars. ‘You mean, you – you’ve come all this way, spent the only leave you’ve ever taken since the war began, just to come and tell me this?’
I nodded, too upset to speak. Also suddenly I was now afraid that what I’d said seemed too little for so much. I looked away to where beyond the withered orchards the dark clouds were uncurling ponderously in the diminishing blue wondering what I would do if he, too, should find my words wanting.
Then I felt my hands taken in rough ploughman’s fingers. ‘Ouboet, you’ve done many fine things,’ he said gently, ‘but never a braver than you’ve done today.’ He paused. ‘I’ve been afraid of this all along, but I only knew it for certain that day when you shot Stompic.’
He broke off, and I stared at him.
‘You knew?’
He nodded. ‘But now we’re free of it all, thanks to you.’
I realized, with amazement, that further words were unnecessary between us. Then I heard my brother with characteristic solicitude saying quickly, ‘But you look dead beat. Let’s get back to the house. You go on ahead. I just want to turn off the water. Can’t afford to waste a drop.’
At his words physical fatigue flooded me and yet somehow became part of a new warmth produced by the release of the old tenderness between us.
My brother’s wife was waiting for me below the stoep, curiosity and anxiety joined in her tense expression. But before either she or I could speak I heard my brother begin to sing in the garden as I had not heard him sing since childhood. He sang the verse I knew which was of his own composition:
Ride, ride through the day,
Ride through the moonlight,
Ride, ride through the night,
For far in the distance burns the fire,
For someone who has waited long.
Then he started a second stanza, which was new to me:
I rode all through the day,
I rode through the moonlight,
I rode all through the night
To the fire in the distance burning
And beside the fire found
He who had waited for so long.
I was deeply moved by the song and the woman standing by my side also reacted almost violently. ‘Dear heaven,’ she exclaimed. ‘D’you know ever since we’ve been married he’s never sung a note? I’d never have believed he could ever sing like that again.’
At that moment the thunder rumbled deep and long from end to end of the hills in the great plain. It was as if heaven itself had spoken. When the sound died away in the silence that followed we could hear only the wind moaning in the distance. My brother’s wife looked at me, her face suddenly grown soft as a young girl’s. ‘I’m glad you came,’ she said quickly. ‘But come in and rest. I am so glad I happen to have got a rather nice meal today and I believe you’ve brought us luck. I believe it is going to rain at last.’
We turned and looked at the sky above the garden. There could be no more doubt. The cavalry of the great army of cloud was rounding up the last stray bits of blue. Thunder rang out again and again loud and long and the lonely hills at the end of the plain went white with the advance mist of the storm. Then we saw the rain itself come up fast, rushing with a sound like that of the great wind of the first spirit of life once more taking up its quest on the parched and long-rejected earth upon which we stood.
6 The Sowing of the Seed
‘THE QUESTIONS PUT in my mind by this disturbing document,’ Lawrence said to me when we were alone again in the afternoon, ‘come so fast that I hardly know where to begin. But the first one is: did Celliers go back to the war? I gather from this account that he felt bound not to overstay his leave. But surely such a – a revelation must have made a difference to him?’
‘It did and it didn’t,’ I told him. ‘In a way he seemed to go on as before.’
‘That surprises me. It suggests a compromise – can you explain it?’ Lawrence looked close to disappointment so I hastened to tell him what I could.
It was not much really. I felt convinced that Celliers had meant to write more about his life but was prevented from doing so for reasons which would soon be clear. I could not say for certain in what state he was on his return from leave because by the time he got back to North Africa, the Japanese had struck in South East Asia and I was on my way to a job in Burma. In fact I had not seen him again until the Kempeitai, the powerful Japanese secret police, had brought him, barely alive, into my prison in Java.
‘Was that the camp under the notorious Yonoi?’ Lawrence asked quickly.
Yes, I told him, it was. One afternoon I’d happened to be standing near the prison gates when the Japanese had pushed Celliers, barely alive, into the prison without ceremony or warning. I had known from the behaviour of the Korean sentries who, to our regret, had replaced the Japanese ones, that something unusual was going on. As Lawrence well knew this was an uncomfortable feeling to have anywhere in prison but never so bad as under the unpredictable Yonoi. I had no idea of course of the reason for it. But I’d been on the alert because I’d discovered that when one had feelings of that sort sometimes doing something quickly and at the right moment could help to ward off disaster.
‘I know. Timing was all important,’ Lawrence agreed with me quickly. ‘But how difficult it was to make some of our chaps see it.’
I went on to tell Lawrence that I’d been standing there at the gates on watch when suddenly they had opened. I’d half expected a company of infantry to come rushing in on one of their prison searches but it had been just a solitary, tall, broad-shouldered figure, which had been pushed in through the doors in a torn jungle-green uniform, with an untidy head of long hair which, after our cropped heads, looked lush to the point of obscenity. He carried an empty shoulder-pack dangling in one hand and a field flash on his hip, while he tried to walk upright without the help of two Kempeitai privates at his side. Even the sentries were surprised. They had seen comings and goings of secret police cars and concluded that something far bigger than the release of a prisoner from secret confinement was contemplated. And in a sense they had been right for I discovered afterwards that that day we were to have been summoned to attend Cellier’s execution but that largely due to Yonoi’s intervention he had been reprieved at the last moment.
‘Yonoi intervened!’ Lawrence exclaimed incredulously. He half-whistled and then asked what seemed the most inconsequent of questions: ‘Celliers was very fair in colouring, wasn’t he?’
‘I said “Yes” and then asked: “Why?”’
He smiled one of his grave smiles. ‘I’ll explain when the right moment comes,’ he assured me. ‘But I think you’ve given me the key to something that the enigmatic Yonoi once asked me to do. Yes. I saw Yonoi myself on a later occasion. But you’d left the island by then – Go on!’
I told him I hadn’t recognized Celliers at once, though he was greatly changed. The change of course was partly due to the fact that he had been tortured by his captors, kept starved in darkness for months, and inadequately doctored for acute dysentery and malaria. Indeed, knowing nothing of his inner history as we now knew it, I put the whole change down to that. However, I was wrong. But to return to that afternoon: Celliers, weak as he was, recognized me and called out my name. Before I could respond the corporal of the guard shook his hand imperiously at me and shouted rudely: ‘Kura! Lakas! You there! Quick, come here!’