Here Lawrence pressed me hard to recall everything I could of the conversation, and I became rather embarrassed. At the time when Celliers was talking to me there was a lot that I hadn’t understood as I felt I did now. But to try and explain it all to Lawrence made me feel extremely uncomfortable. My whole upbringing and tradition were against so naked a conversation. I think, towards the end, Celliers himself had sensed something of my unspoken reservations, for he had concluded rather abruptly by saying that, as he saw it, he felt the first necessity in life was to make the universal specific, the general particular, the collective individual, and what was unconscious in us conscious.
He had then returned to the progression of his story. He told me that it was just at that moment, on that evening on the mountain when he had felt himself to be striding across the frontiers of his own understanding, that he had heard the Ambonese singing suddenly break off.
The Ambonese had rushed for their carbines as a man from the valley below appeared cringing and terrified on the edge of their clearing covered with giant-ferns. He was one of a group of simple peasants who had never been out of their valley and who had sold some of their rice to Celliers some days before. He was now in a terrible state, for he had been badly beaten up. His chest was heaving so that he could hardly speak, and sweat mingled with the blood that ran down his coffee-coloured skin from wounds reopened by his exertions. He fell at Celliers’s feet sobbing in broken Malay over and over again: ‘Tuan besar, Great Lord, please do not shoot me. Tuan Lord, I could not help it. Tuan, please do not kill me!’ Only then did he dare deliver a letter that he carried in his hand.
The Ambonese surrounded them in a tight ring to listen intently while Celliers read the letter aloud. It was from the Japanese Colonel commanding the troops in the valleys below. It told Celliers curtly that the Japanese gave him until noon the next day to surrender. If he had not done so by then the entire village at the foot of the mountain would be shot for their treachery in supplying him and his men with rice. But if he surrendered the village would be pardoned and he would stand his trial before a military court. That was all. But Celliers knew enough about the enemy to realize they were not bluffing.
To his relief he found the decision at once: here was at least one universal he could make specific. He told the Ambonese as gently as he could that he would have to go down with the man of the valley to surrender. Some of them, in tears, begged him not to go. But he stood firm in his decision, asking them moreover to shed their uniforms, bury their arms and mingle with the indigenous population as they easily could, without discovery, until the end of the war. At that, Celliers told me, they looked terribly disillusioned. He said the hardest thing to endure that evening was the look of reproach in the eyes of his staunch little band of yellow soldiers. However, he collected his few belongings and turned to go down the mountain and into the valley below, already filled with enemy troops and brimming over with the shadows of the night.
After he had left the Ambonese, they started their hymn-singing again with even greater ardour than ever before, no doubt to overcome the feeling of loss and abandonment. He said there was a note of despair in the last strains of the hymn pursuing him down the slopes as if not only the night but the whole imposing structure of a proud epoch were crashing down on the peaks above. So deep was this impression that when the singing finally was overcome by distance and the silence taken over by the hysterical chatter of nervous apes in the lofty tree-tops around him, this new noise sounded like a welcome of devils to some newcomer in hell.
After that, there was little to tell about his capture. The peasants were not massacred and he was carried off to prison.
His Japanese captors were convinced that he was the forerunner of a greater invasion and knew its time and place, so for weeks before the trial he was tortured for information which, fortunately, he did not possess. Finally he was brought up for trial on the charge of ‘Wagamamma’ – Lawrence would recognize the charge as the worst crime of which a soldier could be guilty in Japanese eyes – ‘the spirit of wilfulness’. And there in court among Celliers’s five judges sat Yonoi.
The moment Yonoi’s eyes fell on him, Celliers noticed a look of interest, quickly transformed into something akin to alarm, appearing on his handsome face. The other judges too, stared at him hard and long though not so strangely as Yonoi. Celliers was certain they had formed a picture of him in their minds which he contradicted. They had already condemned him in their minds from the Kempeitai record of his behaviour in jungle and prison as a foreign devil, evil enough to show a spirit of wilfulness and disobedience to the army of their Exalted Descendant of a Sun-goddess. But from the start Yonoi in particular and the judges in general were disconcerted because his appearance instantly predisposed them into liking him.
‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Lawrence broke in here. ‘In dealing with peoples whose language one cannot speak one’s physical appearance can be all important. And the Japanese have a natural eye for beauty of all kinds. I can see clearly how a fellow of” Straffer’s” looks would have set their imaginations in motion.’
As the day went on Celliers saw the signs of the conflict in the minds of his judges become more apparent. After that first hard stare they tried not to look at him again. They put their questions and listened to his answers with their eyes focused on some point just over his shoulders. All day long he watched this intangible struggle between seeing and not seeing struggling for mastery in their imaginations.
This was something I understood fully directly Celliers told me of it. I had learnt from bitter experience that immediately the Japanese showed a sudden reluctance to meet our eyes in the course of our daily contacts we knew that they were taking precautions to ensure that not a single glimpse of one’s obvious and defenceless humanity should slip through their defences and contradict the caricature some demoniac a priori image had made of us within them. The nearer the storm came the more intense the working of this mechanism became. I had seen its most striking manifestation in the eyes of a Japanese officer who, with a condemned Ambonese soldier before him, had had to lean forward and brush the long black hair from the back of the neck over the head and eyes of the condemned man before he could draw his sword and cut off the man’s head. Before the blow fell he had been compelled to look straight ahead over the doomed head seeing neither it nor us who stood, raggedly, in a long line in front of him. But the blow having fallen he was then free, if one could use such a word for so enslaved a state, to look us all once more in the face without danger of seeing us for what we were and certain only of finding in us confirmation of the terrible image which had provoked him from within.
All the same I was amazed that Celliers, whose first experience of the Japanese this was, could be so alive to such a subtle point. But when I told him this his answer immediately satisfied me. He had been a lawyer himself for many years in Africa, he informed me, and had often noticed, particularly when dealing with a black offender who was probably abysmally ignorant of the code, customs, laws and languages of the court, how often the judges would stare past such a man with exactly the same look as if to concentrate on the cold concept of justice entrusted to their keeping rather than on the frail flesh and blood arguing with such dumb eloquence against the sentence they were about to pronounce. Oh yes, Celliers assured me, he knew the look well! Ironically he had never really understood it until that day when it was he who was standing on trial for his life. He said that it was then too that for the first time he realized the significance of a greeting that many primitive black people in Africa give each other in passing. A stranger will call out: ‘I see you, child of a black mother, I see you.’ The other will reply: ‘Aye, I see you too, son of a black father, I see you.’ He realized then, that they greeted one another in that way because instinct told them there was reassurance for flesh and blood in truly seeing and being seen as such. The mere recollection of the greeting for him, on that fateful day, was so sweet that his eyes had smarted with it.