They had been the best days Cheong had had since he had been taken prisoner. They had given him a chance through willing labor to show the authorities that he was not at one with the sullen occupants of Compound C, and such a demonstration was important to him. For Cheong was a nationalist, a Korean separatist. He’d been given a Japanese name—Kagome—but he tried to insist other Korean prisoners call him by his real family name. Alice noticed how energetically the Koreans who came to the Hermans’ farm worked under Giancarlo’s supervision. These broad-faced men laughed genially at the Italian’s commands, which were uttered in a wild combination of Japanese and English. She was relieved for Duncan’s sake that over the previous weeks rain had not turned up to harm the crop, that the harvest was in, and in a good year, in a war market. Cheong was aware of the crinkled old farmer’s pleasure, and it enriched his own. The beautiful dark-headed woman—how sad if she were the old man’s wife—would bring them a lunch of bread and canned meat, delivering it by bike over rutty tracks.
