‘But just look in his eyes,’ Lawrence had said: ‘there is nothing ignoble or insincere there: only an ancient light, refuelled, quickened and brightly burning. There is something about the fellow I rather like and respect.’
This last sentence was such heresy among us at the time that I protested at once. Nothing Lawrence could say or explain could wash our bête noire blanche or even jaune for that matter, and I would have none of it.
‘The troops do not call him “Rottang” for nothing,’ I had reminded him severely. ‘Rottang’ is the Malay for the kind of cane Hara was seldom without. The troops christened him that because he would at times, seemingly without cause, beat them over the head and face with it.
‘He can’t help himself,’ John Lawrence had said. ‘It is not he but an act of Japanese gods in him, don’t you see? You remember what the moon does to him!’
And indeed I remembered. The attraction, both the keen conscious and the deep, submerged attraction that all the Japanese feel for the moon seemed to come to a point in Hara. If ever there was a moon-swung, moon-haunted, moon-drawn soul it was he. As the moon waxed – and how it waxed in the soft, velvet sky of Insulinda, how it grew and seemed to swell to double its normal gold and mystically burning proportions in that soft, elastic air; how it swung calmly over the great volcanic valleys like a sacred lamp, while the ground mist, mingling with the smell of cloves, cinnamon and all the fragrant spices of Insulinda drifted among the soaring tree trunks like incense round the lacquered columns of a sequined temple – Yes! as this unbelievable moon expanded and spread its gold among the blacknesses of our jungle night, we saw it draw a far tide of mythological frenzy to the full in Hara’s blood. Seven days, three days before and three days after and on the day of the full moon itself, were always our days of greatest danger with Hara. Most of his worst beatings and all his killings took place then. But once the beating was over and the moon waning, he would be, for him, extraordinarily generous to us. It was as if the beating and killing had purged him of impurities of spirit, of madness and evil in some strange way and made him grateful to them. In fact, the morning after he had cut off the head of one of us, I remembered seeing him talking to Lawrence and being struck by the fact that he had an expression of purified, of youthful and almost springlike innocence on his face, as if the sacrifice of the life of an innocent British aircraftman the night before, had redeemed him from all original as well as private and personal sin, and appeased for the time the hungry bat-like gods of his race.
All this passed through my mind like a dream with the speed and colour of a dream and it was almost as a man half-asleep that I heard Lawrence continue: ‘Yes. It is curious that you too should think of him just then; for I have an anniversary of Hara in me today, that I am not allowed to forget, try as I may. Have I ever told you?’
He had not and, eager to consolidate any contact between us, even this grim, precarious bridge, I said quickly: ‘No! Please tell me.’
Well, it was exactly seven years ago, he said, seven years within an hour or so, allowing for differences of Insulinda and Greenwich mean time. He was lying in a dream beyond the deep, raw, physical pain in his bruised and outraged body, when far away, like a bird perched on the daylight rim of a deep well into which he might have been thrown, he heard the first chee-chak call. Yes, that was it: a chee-chak, one of those agile, translucent little lizards that lived in every hut, house and even deepest dungeons in Insulinda. There were two of them in his cell and he loved them dearly. They had shared his solitary confinement from the beginning and in his affection for them he fancied he could tell them apart, the male from the female, just by the sound of their voices. They were the only living things not Japanese or Korean, not an active, aggressive enemy that he had seen for many weeks. So real had they become to him that he christened them Patrick and Patricia. He knew instantly when he heard the sound, that the sound came from Patricia, and at once he was out of the dream that had consoled and drugged his pain, and back on the damp stone floor with his bruised, stiff, aching and tired body, so tired that it could hardly take note even of the dismay which clutched at his heart the moment Patricia called. For she called like that only when it was well and truly dark, only when the jungle outside had closed its ranks and fallen back on its own black shadows between the purple volcanoes, the better to withstand that sheer, utter obliteration of outline and shape brought about by the overwhelming invasion of the moonless tropical night in the valley outside. It was as if then Patricia herself was afraid and wanted Patrick quickly to rejoin and reassure her that this great black nothingness abolished only the vision of the nearness of her mate and not the nearness itself. There! Patrick had answered her, and Lawrence knew his fear was justified. For this was the hour at which the Japanese usually came for him; this was the time of night when they usually did their torturing. Yes, the details of it were not important, he said, but for weeks they had been torturing him, and the interesting thing was they did it always at night.
I might smile and think him fanciful as I did about his belief that Hara was an embodiment of a myth more than a conscious individual being, even though I had seen for myself how moon-swung Hara and his countrymen were. But that was by no means all there was to it. That was only the elementary beginning of it all. The more complete truth was: they were all still deeply submerged like animals, insects and plants in the succession of the hours, the movement of day into night and of the days into their lunar months and the months into their seasons. They were subject to cosmic rhythm and movement and ruled by cosmic forces beyond their control to an extent undreamt of in the European mind and philosophy. He would have more to say of that presently, but all he had to stress at the moment was this: it was only at night that people so submerged in the raw elements of nature could discover sufficiently the night within themselves – could go down far enough with sun and sunlight into that deep, deep pit of blackness in time and themselves to the bottom of their own unlit natures, where torture was not only natural but inevitable, like the tides of the sea. I may not recognize it, he said, but Patricia and Patrick knew in the nerves and very swish of their tidal tails that a moment of great and ancient dread in the movement of the spheres had come. And hardly had they called, when he heard the jack-booted steps, untidy and slurred as if the boots were mounted on an orang-utan and not a man, coming down the corridor towards his cell.
‘Our Father which art in heaven,’ his lips moved instinctively. ‘Once more please be thou my shepherd.’
As he said this prayer for the third time to himself, the door was unlocked and a Korean guard called out, in a mixture of the crudest Japanese and Malay and in the most arrogant and insolent tone: ‘Kura! You there, come here! Lakas! Quick!’
He got up slowly. He could not in his condition do otherwise, but it was too slow for the guard who jumped into the cell, pulled Lawrence angrily to his feet and pushed him out into the corridor, prodding him with the butt of his rifle and saying again and again: ‘Lakas! Lakas!’ and ‘Quick! Quick!’ as well as making other strange irritated abdominal noises at him. In a few minutes he was marched into the Commandant’s office and there sitting at the Commandant’s desk was not that girlish young subaltern, but Hara himself with a section of the guard, hat in hand and rifles at the side standing respectfully behind him. Lawrence, his eyes hurting as if stung by bees in that fierce electric light, looked round the room for the rest of the inquisition as he called them, that expert band from the Kempeitai, the headquarters of the secret-police, who did the real torturing, but there was not a sign of any of them.