Glorious Boy, page 32
Now Mr. Holcomb pulls a handful of peppermints from one pocket and two whips of goat jerky from the other. The dogs go into a frenzy over the dried meat, but he holds it over their heads and delivers the candy to Ty before demonstrating how young Bibi and Billy must be trained to sit and lie down before receiving their reward.
The adults applaud, but Ty stands with his peppermints, scowling.
“What is it, Ty?” Colonel Hastings asks.
“It’s not fair.”
“What isn’t?”
Ty lifts his cupped hands, the red and white candy. “You don’t make me do tricks.”
Mr. Holcomb bends from the waist. “I beg your pardon, Ty, but I watch you do the most extraordinary tricks every time we’re together.”
Ty’s not convinced, but Roger squeezes his shoulder, the dogs get their treats, and the tension of injustice ebbs as everyone moves inside.
Claire composes a hostess voice. “When everyone’s got a drink, what say we go straight to presents? Ty, would you hand them out?”
She points. “Start with that one. The tag will tell you who it’s for.”
He gets up from the dogs a little grumpily. Two years without Christmas, and he’s lost the taste for it. “But it says Ty.”
Laughter circles the room. He eyes the package with suspicion, and Claire reads his mind. He can tell it’s not a book, which he would enjoy, and the size and weight of the box are just about right for a new pair of leather shoes, which he’ll refuse to wear.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Viv cries in exasperation. “Open it, Ty!”
But suddenly the dogs raise their heads and spring for the front door. A second later Maikel van Dulm appears, cap in hand.
“Any room at the inn?” he jokes.
Claire sets down her glass. “But how—”
“Top secret!” The captain turns with a bow to the others. To Ty he extends his hand.
Instead of shaking it, Ty gives him the present.
“Shall we open it together?” The captain folds himself down on a footstool while Ty drops cross-legged beside him.
“You didn’t!” Viv exclaims as the tissue falls away, and the circular red and white emblem on the box presents itself. “You extravagant mother, you!”
Viv is the only one who recognizes the logo, though. “Isn’t Leitz a German name?” Colonel Hastings muses.
Ty still hasn’t reacted. He’s studying the curled script, the skaterly swoop of the lower stroke of the L inside the white circle. Nothing happens in a hurry for Ty. Not if he can help it.
“It’s a 1937,” Claire reassures the officials in the room. “From Biswas in Crawford’s Market. You know how things are there, never used and never new.”
“It’s all right, Claire,” Roger assures her. “Even if it was smuggled yesterday, it’s not strictly c-c-contraband if it’s coming out of Germany.”
“And like it or not,” Viv says, “the Germans have no equals when it comes to cameras.”
Ty swivels to stare at his aunt, and Viv claps her fingers to her mouth. “Oops!” She hoists her eyebrows like a silent film star. “Did I give it away?”
Ty gets down to business now with considerably more enthusiasm. Claire has watched him watching his aunt crank her Rolleiflex, adjust the dials, and finger the shutter button. The expression on his face last month, the first time he stared down into the aqueous images playing across the viewfinder, reminded her of the way he gravitated all those centuries ago to the lion and the lamb in the library on Ross Island.
Unfortunately, Viv apologized, the prohibitive cost of film stock and development took photography out of the realm of child’s play. But Claire decided in that moment, rationing be damned.
Ty takes the streamlined Leica from the box and palms the leather and metal framework, studies the glass eye.
“It’s more your size than a Rollei,” Claire says. “It’ll fit in your pocket. You can carry it with you.”
“Is it loaded?” Viv asks. “There’s still enough light out, if we go quickly.”
“A group portrait!”
“Capital idea!”
“Your first photo, Ty! Just think!”
The kindness these people shower on her son.
Viewfinder glued to his eye now, Ty lets Maikel raise him up and Roger guide him out the front door like a blindfolded birthday boy toward his surprise. But he has his prize in sight the whole time: The marbled pink clouds above the treeline; the shadow-striped lawn. A full moon, like a wafer of bone, suspended high in a china blue sky.
“Nebu and Prana,” he calls out, suddenly in command. “You too.”
Viv reminds the boy about shutter speed and resolution, helps him correct the f-stop and adjust the lens as the others arrange themselves facing west.
“But he won’t be in the picture,” Roger suddenly realizes, and Viv tells him to hush.
The captain steps from Ty to Claire. He smells of shaving soap and wool, and she lets herself lean into him. “It’s perfect,” Maikel whispers. “You know him so well.”
She shakes her head. “If only.” But she’s smiling.
Ty stands, eye to camera, elbows out like wings. His mouth opens, tongue unconsciously probing incisors as the party of adults arrange themselves, and the dogs flop down in front.
“All right, Ty,” Viv calls out. “Quick now, light’s fading.”
But in that moment a cloud shifts, like a curtain being drawn back. The garden is bathed in sudden, incandescent gold. The air quickens, electric with such a mystical concentration of life that they all look up, bedazzled.
And that is how Ty captures them, grinning at the unseen director just above his head.
XI
October 1945
Code name ‘Popcorn’ offers a deceptively upbeat label for reoccupation, like a postwar reference to innocuous pleasures: a mission in a wish. Unfortunately, the flagship SS Dilawara’s departure was delayed for nearly two months after armistice, following by a full two weeks the mercy ship sent to Port Blair in September. As frustrated as Claire was by this postponement, which officials blamed on monsoon conditions and the priority given to reclamation of Burma, Indonesia, and the Malay Peninsula, Roger and Maikel credit it, along with the invisible influence of Colonel Hastings, for their success in slipping Claire and Ty onto the passenger manifest.
From the start, Operation Popcorn included Roger in the delegation of government and military brass assigned to witness Port Blair’s official handover. The ship would also carry reoccupation forces, plus a host of press and newsreel photographers, Viv among them, to cover the belated ceremony. In fact, it was Viv who devised the winning case that Colonel Hastings passed up the chain of command: the power of the press depends on the power of narrative, and what better story could there possibly be to dramatize the human toll of war—and the moral superiority of the victors—than the return of the last civilians to escape from the islands, a war widow and her son embodying the restoration of peace.
“We laid it on a little thick,” Viv admits as she and Claire stand on deck watching the Indian mainland shrink. “You’ll forgive me.”
Claire thumbs the gold wedding band, which she’s resumed wearing for a whole web of reasons, not the least of which is a recurring dream in which Shep stands on Phoenix Bay Jetty to welcome her home.
“Claire?”
“I know this is the right thing to do. I owe it to Ty and to Shep, and maybe especially to Naila. But I’m terrified.”
It sounds idiotic even to her own ears, after all they’ve been through, but Shep’s sister seems to understand. “That’s why we’re doing it together.”
“There you are!” Roger and Ty come at them, race walking down the aft deck. Roger has stride in his favor, but Ty beats him with velocity, arms pumping as if the camera permanently attached to his left hand were pulling him forward.
“Whew!” Roger pretends to wipe the sweat from his brow. “You p-put an old man to shame, lad.”
“There’s a darkroom on board! Come see, Mum. They said I can help!”
“Play your cards right,” Viv says as she bends in a conspiratorial whisper, “and I bet they’ll let you make some prints of your own.”
Claire recalls her son’s wonder the first time they stood together in the dark room in Barrackpore watching her face resolve beneath the surface of developer. It’s you, Mum, look! And just like that another barrier fell.
“Excuse us.” Claire leans back and kisses Viv’s cheek. “Yes, I do forgive you.”
They were also in the darkroom seven weeks ago, their third summer at Make Believe, when Nebu shouted the news outside.
“Memsaab! Ty Babu! War is over! War is over!”
She stood inside that Martian glow, unable to move. They’d been expecting, of course. Hoping. Hitler had been dead since April, the war in Europe over since May, but in Asia the fighting seemed to have spiraled beyond anyone’s control, island to island, sea to sea, the geography of battle incalculable. Yet Nebu kept shouting, soon joined by Prana’s interrogation, their excitement whirling into Hindi.
Imperturbable, Ty pulled from the fixer the last print of a series he’d shot of light and bird formations at sunrise and sunset over the Teesta Valley. Tears coated Claire’s face as she scanned the majestic images.
War is over! War is over! Ty would not be rushed or distracted, but when they’d finished clipping the print to the drying line, the first words out of his mouth were, “Can we go home, now the war’s over?”
The days that followed confronted them all with the horror of the particulars. Incineration. Vaporization. Erasure. Human beings reduced to featureless negatives in pavement and stone.
In India, Japan’s ghastly defeat only intensified the drumbeat for independence, the white race’s use of the “cruel bomb” against their Asian brethren adding moral gravity to the perceived heroism of Indian National Army leaders who’d sided with Japan and now sweltered in prison under the British authorities in Delhi.
Inquilab Zindabad! Do or Die! Quit India! As the firestorms of resentment escalated throughout the country, foreign civilians and military personnel schemed, fought, and bribed their way onto any seaworthy vessel out.
Come home, Claire’s parents’ now frequent and unstoppable letters pled. But America never was Ty’s home.
The cameras begin rolling with their first glimpse of land. The sun has just risen, and its dimpled shafts hit the eastern coast of the Andamans lengthwise, giving the beaches and forest the appearance of a long empty stage flat.
The shoreline doesn’t stay empty for long, however. Shabby thatched villages and encampments appear every few miles, and though most look abandoned, Ty points his lens at each new cluster asking, “Is that it?”
Claire shakes her head, no. Not Behalla. Not Port Blair, either. All of these structures have been built in the two and a half years since they left.
She has to remind herself over and over that Ty has no memory of this vista. The O-boat didn’t surface until the islands were long out of view. It’s this approach today that he’ll remember for the rest of his life—a sequence of impressions scarred unmistakably and irrevocably by war.
The morning light lands hard on the low square bunkers that guard every significant harbor. Around these inlets much of the terrain has either been denuded of timber or cratered by Allied bombs, or both. They also pass the beached wrecks of minesweepers and picket boats, and as they near Port Blair, they begin to see ghostly figures of survivors wandering the shore.
The prow of Mount Harriet has just risen in the distance when the Dilawara is met by a flotilla of small blue boats rowed by cadaverous men dressed in tatters. Their chests and cheeks are sunken, arms like switches.
“How could they starve?” Viv asks. “These waters must be teeming with fish.”
“Mines,” Roger says. “No petrol for the outboards. And I’ll w-wager the Japanese had a zero-tolerance policy for any local who kept his cacatch for himself.”
“But the Japanese were defeated two months ago.”
“You think these fellows know that?”
The haggard faces turn up to them, fingers to lips in the universal gesture of hunger. They’re rewarded with a rain of cellophaned sweets and compo rations pitched from the stern of the ship. The men swarm and dive, elbowing each other out of the way in competitive frenzy.
Ty laughs at the spectacle. Of course. To him it looks like a game.
“They’re mainlanders,” Claire says. “Former convicts. They’ve no idea how to hunt or forage, or fish, for that matter, without manufactured equipment.”
Silent in this remark is her prayer that the native Andamanese have escaped the fate of these villagers.
Beneath her hands, Ty’s shoulders twitch in anticipation, but the clouds to the south are darkening. The air grows thick and heavy, and distant lightning etches the sky.
The shoreline, too, begins to change. The beaches, gray with dead coral, look as if they’ve born the brunt of successive meteor showers. The bunkers multiply, and larger concrete fortifications mark strategic cliffs. The North Point lighthouse appears unscathed, if lightless, but virtually every other visible structure has been destroyed. Roofs gape open. Walls lean sideways. Dense black plumes of smoke rise from beachfront pyres.
Then Ross Island appears portside, green and wild on the rising tide, not a soul in sight. Claire looks away, grateful that Ty has his camera trained on the harbor ahead.
A hush descends as the Dilawara nears Phoenix Bay. The crown of the prison has held its shape atop Atlanta Point, but like the boatmen, the populace crowding the jetty and foreshore hardly look human. The whitish gray light only adds to the ghoulish effect of eyes sunk back in their sockets. Arms and legs poke like twigs through faded rags. A few children wave, but they too look shell-shocked, their skin drumtight over stunted bones.
Claire draws Ty against her.
“What?” he asks looking up and out, but the scene, for her, defies description.
Thunder cracks and the light turns electric as the square in front of Phoenix Bay Jetty fills with uniformed men in surreal formation. They wear either tan khaki drill or dark blue sailor uniforms and stare straight ahead with robotic discipline. On the jetty, apart from the others, two Japanese officers stand at attention, arms raised in salute, their white gloves bright as flags.
Claire turns the band on her finger round and round and round. Ty has the enemy commanders in his viewfinder. Her impulse to stop him wars with his clear desire to shoot and capture them. Finally, she untethers her arms from his neck and steps back.
The men on the jetty represent the enemy, but according to Roger these commanders have been here only since ’44.
Brigadier General Salomons, in his own full-dress regalia, receives the officers’ salute from the bow of the SS Dilawara. As commander of Operation Popcorn, Salomons is charged with officiating over tomorrow’s formal surrender and, more broadly, with rounding up the Japanese troops and collaborators who remain throughout the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The cameras follow his martial strut as he makes his way down the jetty to receive his prisoners.
The civilians on board, whose presence the General has done his best to ignore, are instructed to wait to disembark until he and his men have interned the Japanese outside of town. It’s mid-afternoon and raining hard by the time Roger helps Claire and Ty off the tender.
Instantly, they’re mobbed. Hands reach out to shake and touch them. Voices cry in recognition. “Doctor Memsaab!”
Faces made alien by shock and deprivation appear and disappear, many weeping. Mister Dass Pati Pandit Ali Nabi Bux Appalswamy Mister Chengappa Dahwood Jan . . . The names wash over, eyes and mouths moving in and out, blurred to gray by the downpour, streaming with need, insistent and desperately strange.
Claire grips Ty’s hand and pulls him close under their umbrella. Viv already is out among the survivors, talking and listening, inhaling their stories.
For Claire it’s too much, too fast, but Ty’s excitement matches his aunt’s. Eight now and strong, he strains against her with a ferocity she hasn’t felt since he was four.
She thinks of Kim, whose story they’ve read together twice in the past year, the story Shep loved as a boy. If she let go of Ty in this moment, he’d fly out like Kim among these people, into this world, and he’d find his way. She knows that now about her son, but what he can’t know, has no possible way of comprehending, even with his extraordinary mind, is that these people are in no condition to receive him.
“Stay close, Ty,” she says. “We need to get out of the rain. As soon as it stops, we’ll go out and explore.” She squeezes his hand, their signal a vow.
He looks up, and she registers his impatience.
She squeezes again. Trust me.
He has his father’s quiet regard then. He nods, and as they continue through the tattered, fetid crowd she tries to imagine his experience of this homecoming. The smells of abject poverty and hopelessness are new here. Piles of raw sewage line the streets, and the stink of rotting garbage mingles with the pervasive odor of sickness and death. She quails against the stench, but Ty sniffs the air as if the malignance were a minor irritant.
And then she smells what he’s after, that still familiar mist of brine and forest, irrepressible life overlapping decay. He inhales and closes his eyes.
A jeep, just off the ship, pulls up, Viv already inside, and they pile in for the bone-clattering ride up through Aberdeen Bazaar, which has become a miserable caricature of its former self. More than half the street’s paving stones are gone. The shop fronts sag, crumbling and faded, broken windows of the surrounding buildings not even papered over—where would anyone find a luxury like paper?
But then, just ahead, the cool broad edifice of the Browning Club appears through the mist, and the jeep makes a herky-jerky beeline for it.
