I peeled off like a good boy and waited. I must have stood there for twenty minutes or more and during that time various individuals, both men and women, came and went with files and papers. A study in conscious humiliation.
When it had presumably been judged Id been punished enough, the doctor stood up abruptly and went to work. She gave me a thorough and competent examination, Ill say that for her, even to the extent of taking blood and urine samples.
Finally, she pulled forward a chair, sat down and proceeded to examine my genitals with scrupulous efficiency. It was the kind of free-from-infection check that soldiers the world over get every few months. That didnt make it any easier to take, especially with Madame Ny standing at her shoulder and following every move.
I squirmed, mainly at the old girls rough handling and Madame Ny said softly, You find this disturbing, is it not so, Mr Jackson? A basic, clinical examination carried out by a woman old enough to be your mother and yet you find it shameful.
Why dont you jump off? I told her.
Her eyes widened as if gaining sudden insight. Ah, but I see now. Not shameful, but frightening. You are afraid in such situations.
She turned, spoke to the old doctor who nodded and they walked out on me before I could say a word. I wasnt tired any more but I found it difficult to think straight. I felt as angry and frustrated as any schoolboy, humiliated before the class for no good reason.
I had just struggled back into my clothes when Madame Ny returned with the young officer. She had a paper in her hand which she placed on the desk.
She picked up a pen and offered it to me. You will sign this now, please.
There were five foolscap pages, closely typed and all in Chinese. Youll have to read the small print for me, I told her. I havent got my spectacles with me.
Your confession, the young officer cut in. A factual account of your time in Vietnam as an English mercenary lured by the Americans.
I told him what to do with the paper in an English phrase so vulgar that he obviously didnt understand. But Madame Ny did.
She smiled faintly. A physical impossibility, I fear, Mr Jackson. You will sign in the end, I assure you, but we have plenty of time. All the time in the world.
She left again and the young officer told me to follow him. We crossed the compound through the rain and entered the monastery itself, a place of endless passages and worn stone steps although, surprisingly, lit by electricity.
The passage we finally turned into was obviously at the highest level, so long it faded into darkness; and, quite plainly, I heard a guitar.
As we advanced, the sound became even plainer and then someone started to sing a slow blues in a deep, mellow voice that reached out to touch everything around.
Now gather round me people, Let me tell you the true facts. That tough luck has struck me And the rats is sleeping in my hat.
The door had two guards outside and was of heavy black oak. The young officer produced a key about twelve inches long to unlock it and it took both hands to turn.
The room was surprisingly large and lit by a single electric bulb. There was a rush mat on the stone floor and two wooden cots. St Claire sat on one of them a guitar across his knees.
He stopped playing. Welcome to Liberty Hall, Eton. It isnt much, but its the London Hilton compared to most of the accommodation around here.
I dont think Ive ever been happier to see anyone in my life.
He produced a pack of American cigarettes. You use these things?
Officers stock? I said.
He shook his head. Theyre being nice to me at the moment. They might give me a pack a day for a whole month, or simply cut off the supply from tomorrow morning.
Pavlovian conditioning?
Thats it exactly. They have one set idea and you better get used to it. To drive you to the edge of insanity, to tear you apart, then theyll put you together again in their image. Even their psychology is Marxian. They believe each of us has his thesis, his positive side and his antithesis, the dark side of his being. If they can find out what that is, they encourage its growth until it becomes the strongest part of your nature. Once that happens, you begin to doubt every moral or decent worthwhile thing youve been taught.
They dont seem to be getting very far with you.
You could say Im inclined to be set in my ways. He smiled. But theyre still trying and my instructor is the best. Chen-Kuen himself. Thats just another name for interrogator, by the way.
Ive already met mine, I said and told him about Madame Ny and what had happened at the medical centre.
He listened intently and shook his head when I was finished. Ive never come across her myself, but then you wont have contacts with many people at all. I havent met another prisoner face-to-face since Ive been here. Even the sessions in the Indoctrination Centre, where they feed you Chinese and Marxism by the hour, are all strictly private. You sit in an enclosed booth with headphones and a tape recorder.
I made the obvious point. If what youre saying is true, why have they put me in with you?
Search me. He shrugged. First I knew was when Chen-Kuen called me in, told me every last damn thing about you there was to know and said youd be joining me.
But there must be a purpose?
You can bet your sweet life there is. Could be he just wants to observe our reactions. Two rats in a cage. Thats all we are to him.
I kicked a chair out of the way, walked to one of the tiny windows and stared out into the rain.
St Claire said softly, Youre too up-tight, son. Youll need to cool it if youre going to survive round here. The state youre in now, youd crack at the first turn of the screw.
But not you, I said. Not Black Max.
He was off the bed and I was nailed to the wall. The face was devoid of all expression, carved from stone, the face of a man who would kill without the slightest qualm, had done so more times than he could probably remember.
He said very slowly in a voice like a cut-throat razor, They have a room down below here they call the Box. I could tell you what its like, but you wouldnt begin to understand. They locked the door on me for three weeks and I walked out. Three weeks of being back in the womb and I walked out.
He released me and spun around like a kid, arms outstretched, smiling like the sun breaking through after rain.
Jesus, boy, but you should have seen their faces.
How? I said. How did you do it?
He tossed me another cigarette. Youve got to be like the Rock of Gibraltar. So sure of yourself that nothing can touch you.
And how do you get like that?
He lay back, head pillowed on one arm. I did a little judo at Harvard when I was a student. After the war, when I was posted to Japan with the occupation army, I took it further, mainly for something to do. First I discovered karate, then a lethal little item called aikido. Im black belt in both.
It was said casually, a statement of fact, no particular pride in the voice at all.
And then a funny thing happened, he continued. I was taken to meet an old Zen priest, eighty or ninety years old and all of seven stone. The guy who took me was a judo black belt. In the demonstration that followed, the old man remained seated and he attacked him from the rear.
What happened?
The old man threw him time and time again. He told me afterwards that his power came from the seat of reflex control, what they call the tanden or second brain. Usually developed by long periods of meditation and special breathing exercises. Its all just a Japanese development of the ancient Chinese art of Shaolin Temple Boxing and even that was imported from India with Zen Buddhism.
He was beginning to lose me. Just how far did you go with all this stuff yourself?
Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism. Ive boned up on them all. Studied Chinese Boxing in every minute of my spare time for nearly four years at a Zen monastery about forty miles out of Tokyo in the mountains. I thought I knew it all when I started and found I knew nothing.
And whats it all come down to?
Ever read the Daw-Der-Jung by Lao Tzu, the Old Master? He shrugged. No, I guess you wouldnt. He says, amongst other things, that when one wishes to expand one must first contract. When one wishes to rise, one must first fall. When one wishes to take, one must first give. Meekness can overcome hardness and weakness can overcome strength.
And what in the hell is all that supposed to add up to?
Youve got to be able to relax completely, just like a cat. That way you develop chi. Its a kind of intrinsic energy. When its accumulated in the tan tien, a point just below the navel, it has an elemental force greater than any physical strength can hope to be. There are various breathing exercises which can help you along the way. A kind of self-hypnotism.
He proceeded to explain one in detail and the whole thing seemed so ridiculous that for the first time it occurred to me that his imprisonment might have affected him for the worst.
I suppose it must have shown on my face for he laughed out loud. You think Im crazy, dont you? Well, not yet, boy. Not by a mile and a half. You listen to me and maybe you stand a ten percent chance of getting through this place in one piece. And now Id get some sleep if I were you while youve got the chance.
He dismissed me by picking up a book, a paperback edition of The Thoughts of MaoTse-tung. By then, I was past caring about anything. Even the short walk to my bed was an effort.
But the straw mattress seemed softer than anything I had ever known, the sensation of easing aching limbs almost masochistic in the pleasure it gave. I closed my eyes, poised on the brink of sleep and started to slither into darkness, all tension draining out of me. A bell started to jangle somewhere inside my head, a hideous frightening clamour that touched the raw nerve endings like a series of electric shocks.
I was aware of St Claires warning cry and the door burst open and the young officer who had delivered me re-appeared, a dozen soldiers at his back and three of them with bayonets fixed to their AKs. They pinned St Claire to the wall, roaring like a caged tiger. The others were armed only with truncheons.
Remember what I told you, boy, St Claire called and then I was taken out through the door on the run and helped on the way by the young officers boot.
I was kicked and beaten all the way along the passage and down four flights of stone stairs, ending up in a corner against a wall, cowering like an animal, arms wrapped around my head as some protection against those flailing truncheons.
I was dragged to my feet, half-unconscious, the clothes stripped from my body. There was a confusion of voices then an iron door clanged shut and I was alone.
It was like those odd occasions when you awaken to utter darkness at half-past three in the morning and turn back fearfully to the warmth of the blankets, filled with a sense of dreadful unease, of some horror beyond the understanding crouched there on the other side of the room.
Only this was for always, or so it seemed. There were no blankets to turn into. Three weeks St Claire had survived in here. Three weeks. Eternity could not seem longer.
I took a hesitant step forward and blundered into a stone wall. I took two paces back, hand outstretched and touched the other side. Three cautious paces brought me to the rear wall. From there to the iron-plated door was four more.
A stone womb. And cold. Unbelievably cold. A trap at the bottom of the door opened, yellow light flooding in. Some sort of metal pan was pushed through and the trap closed again.
It was water, fresh and cold. I drank a little, then crouched there beside the door and waited.
I managed to sleep, probably for some considerable period, which wasnt surprising in view of what I had been through and awakened slowly to the same utter darkness as before.
I wanted to relieve myself badly, tried hammering on the door with no effect whatsoever and was finally compelled to use one of the corners which was hardly calculated to make things any more pleasant.
How long had it been? Five hours or ten? I sat there listening intently, straining my ears for a sound that would not come and suddenly it was three-thirty in the morning again and it was waiting for me over there in the darkness, some nameless horror that would end all things.
I felt like screaming. Instead, I started to fight back. First of all I tried poetry, reciting it out loud, but that didnt work too well because my voice seemed to belong to someone else which made me feel more alarmed than ever. Next, I tried working my way through books Id read. Good, solid items that took plenty of time. I did a fair job on Oliver Twist and could recite The Great Gatsby almost word-for-word anyway, but I lost out on David Copperfield half-way through.
It was about then that I found myself thinking about St Claire for he was already a kind of mythical hero figure as far as the American Airborne forces were concerned. St Claire and his history were as much a part of recruit training as practising P.L.F.s or learning how to take an M16 to pieces and putting it together again blindfold.
Brigadier-General James Maxwell St Claire, himself alone from the word go. Son of a Negro millionaire whod made his first million out of insurance and had never looked back. No silver spoon, just eighteen carat gold. Harvard only the best and then hed simply walked out and joined the paratroops as a recruit back in nineteen forty-one.
Captured in Italy in forty-three, as a sergeant, hed escaped to fight with Italian partisans in the Po marshes, ending up in command of a force of four hundred that fought a German infantry division to a standstill in three days. That earned him a field commission and within a year he was captain and dropping into Brittany a week before D-day with units of the British Special Air Service.
Hed earned his Medal of Honour in Korea in nineteen fifty-two. When a unit of Assault Engineers had failed to blow a bridge the enemy were about to cross in strength, St Claire had gone down and blown it up by hand, himself along with it. By then no one in the entire American Army was particularly surprised when he was fished out of the water alive.
And his appetite for life was so extraordinary. Women, liquor and food in that order, but looking back on it all now, I see that above all, it was action that his soul craved for and a big stage to act on.
God, but I was cold and shaking all over, my limbs trembling uncontrollably. I wrapped my arms around myself and hung on tight, not that that was going to do me much good. I think it was then that I remembered what St Claire had said, recalled even a line or two of some Taoist poem he had quoted. In motion, be like water, at rest like the mirror.