Harry stepped onto the court. He listened. The place was completely silent, something that made him uneasy. Major Berystede cautiously peered around. He sheltered his eyes with his hand and squinted up at the house. He seemed lost and Harry knew what was running through his head: he couldn’t even keep track of men he’d lost and didn’t want to make any more decisions that would result in more death.
“I’ll go on ahead,” said Harry.
Harry’s heels sounded lightly on the clay court. Only recently, someone had swept it smooth, because the clay was even except for one disturbed path up through the center. Harry squatted down to look at the tracks — small men’s feet and, if he wasn’t mistaken, cloven, the toes separated, the prints wide.
“Lieutenant Gillen!”
Harry turned.
It was Sergeant Singh, standing not quite at attention, but not quite at ease.
“Come on then,” said Harry, “let’s go find this devil.” Harry got up and they approached the house together, walking in clear sight of whatever had silenced it. The sound of the major’s voice drifted across the court and lawn — soothing and low — as he organized search parties to the right and to the left of the garden. The heat was only just starting and Harry’s mind wandered from thoughts of battle and blood.
“I find it very strange,” said Sergeant Singh, “a lovely house like this in the middle of the infernal jungle.”
Harry nodded, then raised a hand to quiet him. Together, carefully, they mounted the steps. The door hung open on its hinges and when pushed, swung noiselessly inward. Harry followed the arc of it and found himself in a foyer with a parquet floor and a cathedral ceiling. At the top of the curving stairs was a rose window. A small brown sparrow was trapped there and beat itself against the brilliant panes. Beams of light splintered through the glass onto the landing in an exact rose pattern, disturbed only by the bird, whose desperate shadow marred the perfect symmetry. Harry continued to his right, where the sound of an electric fan and some rustling papers asserted itself against the quiet. Together, Harry and Sergeant Singh walked across the waxed floors and through the arch that marked off a library — a white-walled room with a large bay window fitted with velvet bench seats, floor to ceiling shelves with books bound in red leather and blue cloth, an old pukka once used to move air still on the ceiling, and a broad blackwood desk with the electric fan blowing the papers of a ledger to a desperate flutter. And at the desk, wearing the pocket jacket favored in Malaya, his pale hands still resting on the table, was the presumed owner of the house. Harry was surprisingly unmoved. The man was dead, clearly, because the neck terminated in a clean, fresh wound. The man’s head was nowhere in sight.
“I have heard of this,” said Sergeant Singh.
“Yes,” said Harry.
Then the spattering noise of gunfire reached them across the yard, the hearty shouts of men (like a football game), and the screech of a bird.
“Why weren’t you and the major captured together?” Smalls asked. He and Harry were again in line, this time for food. Harry had an old sardine can for a bowl, a spoon cut from beaten tin. The sun was still hot and high. Past the fence, the column of bearers carried out the daily dead, slung between them in sheets. Harry breathed deeply and raised a hand to his forehead.
“Well,” said Harry, “Sergeant Singh and I heard the shots. The Japanese didn’t know we were there. Sergeant Singh and I went out the back door.” Harry remembered the open pit by the clothesline, the little boy flung face up, his mother’s shoeless but stockinged foot. “We were outnumbered. I had an idea that later, when it was dark, the sergeant and I would free some men, create a disturbance.” There was Tunsdale again with his hands tied, towering over his Japanese captor. And there was Tunsdale crumpling, his intestines unraveling onto the wet earth, the bayonet greased with his blood. “We had no opportunity. I thought if we could find more men. .”
“Well,” said Smalls, “did you?”
“Yes,” said Harry. “And here we all are.”
Harry did not know what had compelled him to visit Major Berystede the last two days. He did not know what comforted him in their uneasy truce.
With the remnants of the 11th Indian struggling on the Malay Peninsula, the major had seen endless opportunities to rid himself of the embarrassment of Lieutenant Gillen and he had taken all of them. More than once Harry had caught the major eyeing him with a look somewhere between fear and guilt. Harry dryly noted that he was being singled out either for heroism or death. Only the hand of fate would make it clear which of these it was to be, so Harry was first at the mercy of a capricious man and, after that, an even more capricious God.
Harry had been ordered to lead a group of men up a slope to a makeshift bunker the Japanese had set into a hillside. The line of greenery broke abruptly to a smooth ascent. There wasn’t much on this side of the hill, but scouts had come back with descriptions of a series of fields on the other side, already strewn with their dead. The major had decided to take the bunker and he had decided that Harry would do it, just as yesterday he had decided that Harry was the best man to run a message to Lieutenant Colonel Lifkin, which involved a good two-hundred-meter sprint through a papaya grove, whose slim trunks and umbrella foliage offered little protection from snipers. Harry tried to control himself, but he hadn’t slept in days and had never been much good at anything but feigned deference. The men were checking their rifles, whispering requests to their respective deities. Harry approached Major Berystede and asked in a low voice, “Excuse me, sir, but I must ask you, are you trying to kill me?”
“Lieutenant Gillen. .”
“I apologize. A voice inside keeps telling me this is none of my business. But surely it is.”
Berystede was taken aback. “What kind of insubordination is this?”
“Some variety, but at this rate I’ll be dead by sundown, so the chances of my being court-martialed are very slim.”
The major was rattled. He inhaled deeply. “Are you refusing to execute the order?”
Harry thought about it for a minute. “No, sir.”
But despite the major’s best efforts, it hadn’t been Harry’s time. The bunker was empty, the battle already won by the Japanese, the field deserted.
• • •
From the look on the doctor’s face, Harry knew the major was close to death. Berystede’s eyes brightened when he saw Harry, as if all the troubles of the past were gone and Harry was still the handsome horseman, the major his eager patron, and the rumble of war an ugly rumor. Harry squatted by the cot and helped the major drink a little water, which was set on the crate along with the major’s belongings — a worn photo of Mrs. Berystede on a horse, carrying a rifle, and a set of keys, one of which unlocked the liquor cabinet back in the mess hall at camp.
“Harry,” said the major, “what are you going to do when you get home?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said.
“The English will all be gone.”
“I find that hard to believe, sir.”
“Please, call me Edgar.”
“Edgar,” Harry said, “you should probably sleep.”
“I will sleep and sleep and sleep.” The major smiled. His eyes were watering. Harry breathed deeply and took the major’s hand. He’d done this on impulse and once he was holding it, didn’t know how to put it down. The major’s hand was cool, despite the thick heat. The bones were thin and fragile, like the skeleton of a bird. His skin already had the look of death. When the major finally drifted off, Harry set the hand down on the cot. Mrs. Berystede stared bravely out of the photograph from atop her horse, in approval of Harry’s loyalty, or maybe deep disapproval of her husband’s succumbing to his limitations. Harry would survive. He had no doubt about that. He would return to see how India had been altered by the war, as he too had been altered.