For the first time a feeling of hope so keen and unnerving that his conscious mind would not allow it, assailed him fiercely. True, Hara was one of the band but not the worst. He joined in too but only when that deep sense of an almost mystical necessity to participate in all that a group or herd of his countrymen did, forced him to identify himself with what was going on. It was as if they all were incapable of experiencing anything individually; as if a thought or deed in one was instantly contagion to the rest and the fated plague of cruel-doing like a black or yellow death killed their individual resistance in an instant. Hara, after all, was the Japanese of the Japanese among them and he too would have to join in the torturing. But he never started it and Lawrence knew somehow that he would have preferred killing outright to protracted torture. With all this in his mind he looked at Hara more closely and noticed that his eyes were unusually bright and his cheeks flushed.
‘He has been drinking,’ he thought, for there was no mistaking in Hara’s cheeks the tell-tale pink that drink brings so easily to the Japanese face. ‘And that accounts for the glitter in his eye. I had better watch out.’
He was right about the flush in Hara’s cheeks but wrong about the light in his eye, for suddenly Hara said, with a curl of the lip that might have been a smile strangled at birth: ‘Rorensu-san: do you know Fazeru Kurīsumasu?’
The unexpected use of the polite ‘san’ to his name so nearly unnerved Lawrence that he could hardly concentrate on the mysterious ‘Fazeru Kurīsumasu’ in Hara’s question, until he saw the clouds of incomprehension at his slowness, which usually preluded frenzy, gathering over Hara’s impatient brow. Then, he got it.
‘Yes, Hara-san,’ he said slowly. ‘I know of Father Christmas.’
‘Heh-to!’ Hara exclaimed, hissing with polite gratification between his teeth, a gleam of gold sparkling for a moment between his long lips. Then sitting far back in his chair, he announced: ‘Tonight I am Fazeru Kurīsumasu!’ Three or four times he made this astonishing statement, roaring with laughter.
Lawrence joined in politely without any idea what it really meant. He had been lying there in his cell alone, under sentence of death, for so long that he hardly knew the hour of the night beyond the fact that it was normal torture hour, and he had no idea of the date or month; he certainly had no idea that it was Christmas.
Hara enjoyed his announcement and Lawrence’s obvious perplexity so much that he would have gone on prolonging his moment of privileged and one-sided merriment, had not a guard presented himself at that moment in the doorway and ushered in a tall, bearded Englishman, in the faded uniform of a Group-Captain in the R.A.F.
Hara stopped laughing instantly and an expression of reserve, almost of hostility came over his features at the sight of Hicksley-Ellis’s elongated frame in the doorway.
I could see Hara clearly, as Lawrence spoke; could see him stiffen at the R.A.F. officer’s entrance, for of all of us he hated the tall, lisping Hicksley-Ellis, I think, by far the most.
‘This Air-Force Colonel,’ he told Lawrence in Japanese, waving his hand disdainfully at the Group-Captain, ‘is Commander of the prisoners in my camp; you can go with him now.’
Lawrence hesitated, not believing his ears, and Hara, confirmed in his own sense of the magnanimity of his gesture by the unwilled expression of disbelief on Lawrence’s face, sat back and laughed all the more. Seeing him laugh like that again, Lawrence at last believed him and walked over to join the Group-Captain. Together, without a word, they started to go but as they got to the door, Hara in his fiercest parade voice called: ‘Rorensu!’
Lawrence turned round with a resigned despair. He might have known it, known that this transition was too sudden, too good to be true; this was but part of the torture; some psychologist among the secret police must have put the simple Hara up to it. But one look at Hara’s face reassured him. He was still beaming benevolently, a strange twisted smile, between a quick, curling lip and yellow teeth framed in gold on his twilight face. With an immense, hissing effort, as he caught Lawrence’s eye, he called out, ‘Rorensu: Merry Kurīsumasu!’
‘Merry’ and ‘Fazeru Kurīsumasu’ were the only English words Lawrence ever heard him use and he believed Hara knew no others. Hara went pinker still with the effort of getting them out, before he relaxed, purring almost like a cat, in the Commandant’s chair.
‘But he knew something about Christmas, all the same,’ I interrupted Lawrence. ‘It was most extraordinary, you know. When the Padre, Hicksley-Ellis and I, thought of organizing some celebration of our first Christmas in gaol, we never thought for a moment a thug like Hara would allow it. But the curious thing was when we asked him, he exclaimed at once, so our interpreter said: “The feast of Fazeru Kurīsumasu!” When the interpreter answered “Yes”, Hara agreed at once. No argument or special plea was needed. He said “Yes” firmly, and his orders went out accordingly. In fact, he was himself so taken by the idea that he went to the other camps that were also in his officer’s command, camps with non-Christian Chinese, animistic Menadonese and Moslem Javanese in them and forced them all to celebrate Christmas whether they liked it or not. The interpreter told us, in fact, that Hara even beat up the Chinese commandant. When Hara asked him who Fazeru Kurīsumasu was, the unsuspecting man quite truthfully said he had no idea. Whereupon Hara called him a liar, a crime in his code equal to “wrong thinking” and “wilfulness”, said all the world knew who “Fazeru Kurīsumasu” was, and at once flew into one of his frenzies. It was odd, very odd, the value he attached to Christmas; we never found out where he got it from. Did you?’
‘I am afraid not,’ Lawrence answered, ‘but odder still it saved my life.’
‘You never told us!’ I exclaimed, amazed.
‘No, I did not, for I didn’t know it myself at the time, though I expected it of course from my own sentence. But I saw my papers after the war and they were actually going to kill me on December 27. But your putting the idea of Christmas into Hara’s head saved me. He substituted a Chinaman for me and let me out as a gesture to “Fazeru Kurīsumasu.” But to continue . . .’
He had followed Hicksley-Ellis out of Hara’s office and joined up with me again in the common prison. Suddenly he smiled at me, a gentle, reminiscent and tenderly grateful smile as the relief of his release came back to him. Did I remember the moment? He could not but be amused in his recollection, for although we were all incarcerated in a Dutch colonial gaol for murderers and desperate criminals, so relative had our concept of freedom become, that we rushed up to him and congratulated him on his liberation without a trace on our part, or a suspicion on his, of the irony implicit in it.
Then not long afterwards Hara suddenly left us. He was put in charge of a draft of R.A.F. officers and men under Hicksley-Ellis, and sent to build aerodromes in the outer islands. We did not see him again until near the end, when he returned with only one-fifth of the original draft left alive. Our men looked like ghosts or drought-stricken cattle when they arrived back. We could see their shoulder-blades and ribs through their threadbare tunics. They were so weak that we had to carry most of them in stretchers from the cattle-trucks wherein they had travelled, trucks which stank of urine and diseased excretions. For not only were they so starved that just a faint pulse of life fluttering with a rapidly regressive spirit was left in them, but also they all had either dysentery, malignant malaria or both. One-fifth was all that remained; the rest were dead and Hicksley-Ellis had terrible things to tell of their treatment by the Japanese officers and N.C.O.s and their Korean underlings, and above all about Hara. Again, Hara was at the centre, the primordial Japanese core of this weird inspiration of distorted circumstances. It was he who was again de facto if not de jure ruler of their world; he who beat dying men saying there was nothing wrong with them except their ‘spirit’, their ‘evil thinking’, their ‘wayward wilfulness of heart’ which made them deliberately ill in order to retard the Japanese war effort. It was he, Hara, who cut off the heads of three Aircraftmen because they had crept through a fence at night to buy food in a village, and after each head rolled on the ground brought his sword to his lips thanking it for having done its work so cleanly. It was he who day after day in the tropical sun drove a horde of men ailing and only half alive to scrape an aerodrome out of coral rock with inadequate tools until they were dying and being thrown to the sharks in the sea at the rate of twenty or thirty a day. But Hara himself appeared untouched by his experience, as if he had foreseen and presuffered it all in his mother’s womb, as if life could neither add to nor diminish the stark wine in his legendary cup. He came back to us burnt black by the sun; that was all. For the rest he naturally took up the steely thread of command where he left it as if he had never been away, and drove us again with the same iron hand.