The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

  You can go back, Bonox.

  Bonox Baker said nothing.

  Back to the main camp. You’ve done your share. More than your share.

  I think I’d rather stay.

  Bonox Baker halted at the tent entrance, and Dorrigo Evans with him.

  Sir.

  Dorrigo Evans noticed he had lifted his head and was for the first time looking directly at him.

  I’d rather that.

  Why, Bonox?

  Some bloke has to.

  He raised a crumbling canvas flap and Dorrigo Evans followed him through the flared nostril of the tent into a stench, redolent of anchovy paste and shit, so astringent it burnt in their mouths. The slimy red flame of a kerosene lantern seemed to Dorrigo Evans to make the blackness leap and twist in a strange, vaporous dance, as if the cholera bacillus was a creature within whose bowels they lived and moved. At the far end of the shelter, a particularly wretched-looking skeleton sat up and smiled.

  I’m heading back to the Mallee, fellas.

  His smile was wide and gentle, and served to make even more grotesque his monkey-like face.

  Time to see the old dears, the Mallee boy said, flower-stem arms waving, yellow-ulcered mouth blossoming. Bugger me! Won’t there be some laughs and tears when they see their Lenny’s come home!

  That kid started out half a larrikin and ended up not quite the full quid, Bonox Baker said to Dorrigo Evans.

  Won’t there just? Eh?

  No one answered the monkey-faced Mallee boy with the moony smile, or if they did, it was with low moans and soft cries.

  Them Vics took any bugger, Bonox Baker said. How he conned ’em into taking him into the army I don’t know.

  The Mallee boy lay back down as happily as if he were being put to bed by his mother.

  He turns sixteen next month, Bonox Baker said.

  Amidst the slurry of mud and shit was a long bamboo platform on which lay forty-eight other men in various stages of agony. Or so it seemed. One by one, Dorrigo Evans examined the strangely aged and shrivelled husks, the barked skin, mud-toned and black-shadowed, clutching twisted bones. Bodies, Dorrigo Evans thought, like mangrove roots. And for a moment the whole cholera tent swam in the kerosene flame before him. All he could see was a stinking mangrove swamp full of writhing, moaning mangrove roots seeking mud forever after to live in. Dorrigo Evans blinked once, twice, worried it might be a hallucination brought on in the early stages of dengue fever. He wiped his running nose with the back of his hand, and got on with it.

  The first man seemed to be recovering; the second was dead. They rolled him up in his filthy blanket and left him for the funeral detail to take away and burn. The third, Ray Hale, had made such a recovery that Dorrigo told him he could leave that night and go onto light duties the following day. The fourth and the fifth Dorrigo Evans also pronounced dead, and he and Bonox Baker similarly furled their corpses in their reeking blankets. Death was nothing here. There was, Dorrigo thought—though he battled the sentiment as a treacherous form of pity—a sort of relief in it. To live was to struggle in terror and pain, but, he told himself, one had to live.

  To make sure there was no pulse here either, he reached down and picked up the wrinkled wrist of the next curled-up skeleton, a still pile of bones and stinking sores, when a jolt ran through the skeleton and its cadaverous head turned. Strange, half-blind eyes, bulging glassily and only dimly seeing, seemed to fix themselves on Dorrigo Evans. The voice was slightly shrill, the voice of a boy lost somewhere in the body of a dying old man.

  Sorry, doc. Not this morning. Hate letting you down.

  Dorrigo Evans gently placed the wrist back on the dirty skin of a chest that sagged over its protruding ribs as if pegged out to dry.

  That’s the way, Corporal, he said softly.

  But Dorrigo’s eyes had momentarily looked up and been caught by Bonox Baker’s gaze. In his fearless superior’s eyes the orderly thought he could see a strange helplessness that for a moment approached fear. Abruptly, Evans looked back down.

  Don’t say yes, he said to the dying man.

  The skeleton slowly rolled his head back around and returned to his strange stillness. The few words had emptied him. With the tips of his fingers Dorrigo Evans traced the lank, wet hair on his wrinkled forehead, combing it away from his eyes.

  Not to me or any bugger.

  And so the skeletal pair continued on—the tall doctor, his short offsider, both nearly naked—the orderly with the absurd pair of oversized brogues and army slouch hat, its brim outrageously wide on his pinched face; the doctor with his greasy red bandana and his slanting officer’s cap looking as though he were about to hit the town in search of women. Everything about their procession felt to the doctor an immense charade, with his the cruellest character: the man who proffered hope where there was none, in this hospital that was no hospital but a leaking shelter made up of rags hung over bamboo, the beds that were no beds but vermin-infested bamboo slats, the floor that was filth, and him the doctor with almost none of the necessities a doctor needed to cure his patients. He had a greasy red bandana, a cap on an angle and a dubious authority with which to heal.

  And yet he also knew that to not continue, to not do his daily rounds, to not continue to find some desperate way to help was worse. For no reason, the image of the sickly Jack Rainbow playing Vivien Leigh meeting her lover on a bridge after a lifetime separation came to his mind. He thought how the shows the men had formerly put on—for which, with great ingenuity, they had made up sets and costumes out of bamboo and old rice bags to resemble movies and musicals—were not half so absurd a representation of reality as his hospitals and doctoring. And yet, like the theatre, it was somehow real. Like the theatre, it helped. And sometimes people did not die. He refused to stop trying to help them live. He was not a good surgeon, he was not a good doctor; he was not, he believed in his heart, a good man. But he refused to stop trying.

  An orderly was battling to set up a new camp drip—a crude catheter cut out of green bamboo connected to some rubber tubing stolen by Darky Gardiner from the Japanese truck the night before—which ran up to an old bottle filled with a saline solution made from water sterilised in stills fashioned out of kerosene tins and bamboo. His name was Major John Menadue and technically he was third-in-command of the camp’s POWs. He coupled the looks of a screen idol with the conversation of a Trappist monk, and when compelled to speak it was mostly to stammer. He was happiest as an orderly, being told what to do.

  The Japanese, with their respect for hierarchy, while compelling all the lower ranks to work, made no such demands on the officers, who stayed in camp and, bizarrely, were paid by the IJA a minuscule salary. Evans had no respect for hierarchy except when its theatre was of help. In addition to levying the officers’ pay, he compelled them to work around the camp, helping with the sick and sanitation, building new toilets, drainage and water-carrying systems, as well as looking after general camp maintenance.

  John Menadue was trying to find a vein in the ankle to insert the bamboo catheter. For a scalpel he used a sharpened Joseph Rodgers pocket knife. The ankle was little more than bone, and the orderly was tracing a line back and forth on the drawn skin.

  Don’t be frightened of hurting him, Dorrigo Evans said. Here.

  He took the knife and mimicked a precise and definite cut, then repeated the movement deftly, slicing down into the flesh just above the knob of the bone, opening the vein. He quickly inserted the home-made catheter. The cholera flinched, but the speed and sureness meant it was over almost as soon as it began.

  He’ll hang in now, Dorrigo Evans said.

  The rehydration had, other than his firm insistence on hygiene, been his greatest success. It had saved several lives in the last two days alone, and a few men were now walking out of the cholera compound alive, rather than being carried off to the funeral pyres. That, he felt, was hope for all.

  Here you’re either dead or hanging in, whispered another digger.

&n
bsp; I ain’t fucking dead, croaked the man who had just had the drip inserted.

  The choleras seemed to shrink away from them as they continued down the side of the bamboo sleeping platform, inspecting, checking saline levels, fixing drips, sometimes moving the lucky few into the much smaller shelter used for recovery. All seemed less than men when Dorrigo Evans came close to them, the terrible disease having wasted away much of their bodies in the few hours it took to strike and often kill. Some moaned in agony with the cramps that were dissolving their bodies and eating up their lives, others begged for water in a low monotonous drone, some stared like stones out of sunken and shadowed eye sockets. When they reached the man with the monkey face who was going home to his mum and dad, he was dead.

  They do that sometimes, said Bonox Baker. Get happy. Want to catch the bus home or go and see Mum. And that’s when you know it’s the end.

  I’ll give you a hand, said Dorrigo Evans when an orderly nurse known to one and all only as Shugs—famed for having carried into the heart of the Siamese jungle a battered and now mouldy copy of Mrs Beeton’s cookery book—arrived with a stretcher. It was a makeshift affair of two large bamboo poles, between which was stretched some old rice bags.

  His work now done, Dorrigo Evans helped Shugs and Bonox Baker with Lenny’s desiccated body. He seemed to weigh, Dorrigo thought, little more than a dead bird. Nothing. Still, it felt like it helped, it felt like he was doing something. There were not enough rice bags to run the length of the stretcher—Was there enough of anything here? wondered Dorrigo Evans—and Lenny’s legs dragged.

  As they made their way out of that home of the damned, Lenny’s corpse kept slipping down. To stop it falling off the stretcher they had to roll the corpse over onto its stomach and spreadeagle the scrawny legs so that they hung over the bamboo poles. The shanks were so wasted that the anus protruded obscenely.

  Hope Lenny don’t feel a final squirt coming on, said Shugs, who was bringing up the back of the stretcher.

  12

  SINCE THE CHOLERA began, Jimmy Bigelow had been put on camp duties so that he would be able to perform his duty as bugler at the now daily funerals. He had been summoned and was waiting on the perimeter of the cholera compound when they came out with the stretchers. The last of these was being carried by Dorrigo Evans with his jaunty cap and red bandana, and Bonox Baker, in his ridiculous shoes that always reminded Jimmy Bigelow of Mickey Mouse, at the front, with Shugs at the rear, walking with his head held at an odd backwards slant.

  Jimmy followed this pitiful funeral cortège through the dark, dripping jungle, his bugle strung over his shoulder with a knotted rag with which he had replaced its leather strap when that had rotted. He was thinking of how he loved his bugle, because of all things in the jungle—bamboo, clothes, leather, food and flesh—it was the only one that seemed impervious to decay and rot. A prosaic man, he nevertheless felt there was something immortal about his simple brass horn, which had already transcended so many deaths.

  The POW pyre makers awaiting them in a dank clearing had learnt it took a lot to burn a man. Their pyre was a great rectangular mound of bamboo chest-high. One cholera corpse was already arranged on the top, along with his few meagre possessions and blanket. Jimmy Bigelow recognised it as Rabbit Hendricks. He was always surprised to feel how little he felt.

  Anything a cholera had touched could not be touched by another—other than the pyre makers—and everything a cholera possessed had to be burnt to control the contagion. As the rest of his gang lifted the three new corpses and their possessions onto the pyre, one of the pyre makers walked up to Dorrigo Evans with Rabbit Hendricks’ sketchbook.

  Burn it, Dorrigo Evans said, waving it away.

  The pyre maker coughed.

  We weren’t sure, sir.

  Why?

  It’s a record, Bonox Baker said. His record. So people in the future would, well, know. Remember. That’s what Rabbit wanted. That people will remember what happened here. To us.

  Remember?

  Yes, sir.

  Everything’s forgotten in the end, Bonox. Better we live now.

  Bonox Baker seemed unpersuaded.

  Lest we forget, we say, Bonox Baker said. Isn’t that what we say, sir?

  We do, Bonox. Or incant. Perhaps it’s not quite the same thing.

  So that’s why it should be saved. So it’s not forgotten.

  Do you know the poem, Bonox? It’s by Kipling. It’s not about remembering. It’s about forgetting—how everything gets forgotten.

  Far-called, our navies melt away;

  On dune and headland sinks the fire:

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

  Lest we forget—lest we forget!

  Dorrigo Evans nodded to a pyre maker to set the bamboo alight.

  Nineveh, Tyre, a God-forsaken railway in Siam, Dorrigo Evans said, flame shadows tiger-striping his face. If we can’t remember that Kipling’s poem was about how everything gets forgotten, how are we going to remember anything else?

  A poem is not a law. It’s not fate. Sir.

  No, Dorrigo Evans said, though for him, he realised with a shock, it more or less was.

  The pictures, Bonox Baker said, the pictures, sir.

  What about them, Bonox?

  Rabbit Hendricks was convinced that, no matter what happened to him, the pictures would survive, Bonox Baker said. And that the world would know.

  Really?

  Memory is the true justice, sir.

  Or the creator of new horrors. Memory’s only like justice, Bonox, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.

  Bonox Baker had a pyre maker open the book to a page that showed an Indian ink drawing of a row of severed Chinese heads on spikes in Singapore after the Japanese occupation.

  There’s the atrocities in here, see?

  Dorrigo Evans turned and looked at Bonox Baker. But all Dorrigo Evans could see was smoke, flames. He could not see her face. There were severed heads that looked alive through the smoke but they were dead and gone. The fire was rising at their back, its flames the only living thing, and he thought of her head and her face and her body, the red camellia in her hair, but as hard as he tried now, he could not remember her face.

  Nothing endures. Don’t you see, Bonox? That’s what Kipling meant. Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.

  There’s the tortures here too, see? Bonox Baker said.

  He had turned the page to a pen-and-ink sketch of an Australian being beaten by two guards. To a watercolour of the ulcer ward. To a pencil drawing of skeletal men labouring, breaking rock on the cutting. Dorrigo Evans found himself growing irritated.

  Better than a Box Brownie camera, old Rabbit was, Bonox Baker smiled. How the hell he got hold of the paints I’ll never know.

  Who’ll know what these pictures will mean? Dorrigo Evans said tersely. Who’ll say what they’re of? One man might interpret them as evidence of slavery, another as propaganda. What do the hieroglyphs tell us of what it was like to live under the lash, building the pyramids? Do we talk of that? Do we? No, we talk of the magnificence and majesty of the Egyptians. Of the Romans. Of Saint Petersburg, and nothing of the bones of the hundred thousand slaves that it is built on. Maybe that’s how they’ll remember the Japs. Maybe that’s all his pictures would end up being used for—to justify the magnificence of these monsters.

  Even if we die, Bonox Baker said, it shows what became of us.

  You’ll need to live, then, Dorrigo Evans said.

  He was angry now, and angrier yet that he had allowed one of the men to see him lose his temper. For, as the flames began to build, he knew he was forgetting her already, that even at
that moment he was having trouble trying to reconstruct her face, her hair, the beauty mark above her lip. He could remember pieces, bright embers, dancing sparks, but not her—her laughter, her earlobes, her smile sweeping up to a red camellia—

  Come on, Dorrigo Evans said, let’s get him on before the fire takes hold.

  13

  THEY LIFTED RABBIT Hendricks with his filthy, shit-smeared blanket and laid him alongside the other corpses, placing his kitbag—which contained nothing more than a dixie, a spoon, three paintbrushes, several pencils, a child’s watercolour set, his dentures and some stale native tobacco—at his side, and put the sketchbook with it. The choleras were always eerily light. Since Padre Bob died, the funeral services had been conducted by Lindsay Tuffin, a former Anglican pastor who had been defrocked for some unspecified moral turpitude. But there was no sign of him and the fire was starting to scorch the corpses.

  Colonel? said Shugs.

  And so, because time pressed and duty called and rank obliged, Dorrigo Evans improvised a funeral service. He had no real memory of the official service because it had always bored him, and he performed what he hoped would prove an adequate piece of theatre. Before he began he had to ask the names of the other two corpses.

  Mick Green. Gunner. West Australian, Shugs said. Jackie Mirorski. Stoker from the Newcastle.

  Dorrigo Evans committed the names to an inviolable memory that recalled them only twice, the two occasions that mattered: the service he then conducted, and a reverie at the moment of his own death many years later. He concluded the funeral service by saying that these were four good men whom they commended to God. But he didn’t really know what God had to do with it. No one spoke much about Him anymore, not even Lindsay Tuffin.

  As Dorrigo Evans bowed his head and stepped away from the flames, Jimmy Bigelow stepped forward, shook his bugle to dislodge whatever scorpions or centipedes might have taken shelter there, and raised it to his lips. His mouth was a mess, the palate having shed its skin in rags. His lips had swollen up as well, and his tongue—so swollen and so sore that rice tasted like hot grapeshot—sat in his mouth like some terrible plank of wood that would not properly do its work. The Big Fella had told him it was pellagra brought on by the lack of vitamins in their food. All he knew was that his tongue now obstructed the air the bellows of his mouth had to pump into the bugle.