The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

  14

  THE OLD ARE filled with remorse, Jodie Bigelow’s father once told her. Her father. Jimmy Bigelow was never quite Jodie’s dad. He seemed absent through not only her life, but much of his own. He worked as a mail sorter and never seemed interested in rising beyond it. One day in high school she had to do a project on Anzac Day, and she had asked her father to tell her what the war had been like for him. He said there wasn’t really that much to tell. This and that. When she grew insistent, he went into his bedroom and returned with an old bugle. He wiped the mouthpiece and made a few farting noises with it to make her laugh. Then he found some real notes. He dropped the bugle, coughed, swelled up, raised his head in a martial manner entirely unfamiliar to his daughter and played the ‘Last Post’.

  That’s it?

  That’s all I know, he said. That’s about all anyone needs to know.

  That’s not a school project, Dad.

  No.

  It’s sort of lonely, Jodie said.

  Jimmy Bigelow thought on this, and then said he guessed it was, but it had never felt that way. It felt the opposite.

  Jodie had browsed some books about the POWs.

  It must have been hard, she said.

  Hard? he replied. Not really. We only had to suffer. We were lucky.

  What does that music mean? she asked.

  It’s a mystery, he said after a while. The bigger the mystery, the more it means.

  Jodie’s mother died of leukaemia when Jodie was nineteen. Jimmy Bigelow survived her for another twenty-eight years. He did not take himself seriously and came to believe the world was essentially comic. He enjoyed the company of others and found in his life—or in this way of looking at life—much at which he and others marvelled. There was a growing industry of memory all around him, yet he recalled less and less. Some jokes, some stories, the taste of a duck egg Darky Gardiner gave him, the hope. The goodness. He remembered when they went to bury little Wat Cooney. He remembered how Wat loved everyone; how he was always waiting at the cookhouse until the last man made it in, no matter how late, keeping some food for him, making sure, no matter how little there was, every man was fed something. Looking over his grave, no one had wanted to be the first to throw a sod. He did not remember that Wat Cooney had died during the march north to Three Pagoda Pass, nor any of the march’s attendant cruelties. For him, such things were not the truth of it.

  His sons corrected his memories more and more. What the hell did they know? Apparently a lot more than him. Historians, journalists, documentary makers, even his own bloody family pointing out errors, inconsistencies, lapses, and straight-out contradictions in his varying accounts. Who was he meant to be? The Encyclopaedia bloody Britannica? He was there. That was all. When he played ‘Without a Song’ on his cassette player that too was a mystery, because for a moment he saw a man standing on a tree stump singing, and he felt all those things he otherwise didn’t feel; he understood all those things he otherwise didn’t understand. His words and memories were nothing. Everything was in him. Could they not see that? Could they not just let him be?

  His mind slowly distilled his memory of the POW camps into something beautiful. It was as if he were squeezing out the humiliation of being a slave, drop by drop. First he forgot the horror of it all, later the violence done to them by the Japanese. In his old age he could honestly say he could recall no acts of violence. The things that might bring it back—books, documentaries, historians—he avoided. Then his memory of the sickness and the wretched deaths, the cholera and the beri-beri and the pellagra, that too went; even the mud went, and later so too the memory of the hunger. And finally one afternoon he realised he could remember none of his time as a POW at all. His mind was still good; he knew he had once been a POW as he knew he had once been a foetus. But of that experience nothing remained. What did was an irrevocable idea of human goodness, as undeniable as it was beautiful. At the age of ninety-four he was finally a free man.

  Thereafter he took great pleasure in wind, in the sound of rain. He marvelled at the feeling of dawn on a hot day. He exalted in the smiles of strangers. He worked at habits and friendship, seeing in them the only alternative to what he felt the alternative was. He cultivated a flock of vivid green, blue and red rosella parrots that came to his yard for the food and water he laid out for them. Then came the wrens and the bullying honeyeaters, the gossiping firetails and the occasional scarlet robin, the bright blue wrens with their dun-coloured harems, the shimmering cranky fantail, the cuckoo shrikes and silvereyes and chirruping pardalotes. He would sometimes sit on a bench seat on his verandah for hours watching the birds feed, bathe, rest, preen and play. And in the mystery of their flight and beauty, in their inexplicable arrivals and departures, he felt he saw his life.

  After he died at the old-age home, falling off the top of a flight of stairs from where he was feeding birds, Jodie found her father’s bugle in his wardrobe. It was old and filthy and badly dented. Instead of a proper cord there was a knotted piece of red rag. She sold it in a garage sale.

  Sometimes his laugh would come back to her at an unexpected moment—in a supermarket aisle as she looked for dishwashing powder, as she browsed a celebrity magazine in a dentist’s waiting room. At such times she would remember him unable to smack her, hand trembling above her, and hear him saying—

  That’s all I know. That’s about all anyone needs to know.

  And her once more asking, What does that music mean?

  And the world around her, the supermarket aisle and its shelves, the dentist’s waiting room and its tub chairs, the garage sale and her father’s bric-a-brac on two trestle tables in front of her and a voice saying, You take five for it? And, as she passed it over, the battered bugle trembling with no answer.

  Rightio, she thought she heard it say, as a stranger took hold of it. Or was it her? Rightio.

  15

  DORRIGO EVANS WAS driving through an intersection in Parramatta at three in the morning—a place and a time subsequently never publicly explained, along with the small matter of an alcohol reading—when he first found himself flying, being suddenly thrown into the air, never to return to earth. A carload of drunken kids fleeing the police in a stolen Subaru Impreza had crashed a red light and run straight into Dorrigo Evans’ ageing Bentley, totalling both vehicles, killing two of them and critically injuring one of Australia’s greatest war heroes, who had hurtled through his car’s windscreen.

  He was three days in dying, and in that time possessed of the most extraordinary dreams of his life. Light was flooding a church hall in which he sat with Amy. Blinding, beautiful light, and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent oblivion and into the arms of women. He was flying and he was smelling Amy’s naked back and he was soaring ever higher. Whilst around him the nation prepared itself to mourn while simultaneously debating the decline of youth, contrasting the noble heroics of one generation with the vile and murderous criminality of another, he was stunned to realise that his life was only just beginning, and in a faraway teak jungle that had long since been cleared, in a country called Siam that no longer existed, a man who no longer lived had finally fallen asleep.

  16

  DORRIGO EVANS AWOKE from a terrible dream of death. He realised he was so exhausted that he had momentarily nodded off while the parade was assembling. It was almost midnight. He turned back to the seven hundred men assembled in front of him, and explained that it was his task to pick one hundred men to march to another camp one hundred miles deeper into the jungle of Siam. They would be leaving immediately after the morning parade. The men were counted and then counted again, and somehow the numbers didn’t tally. More men staggered in from the Line, confusing matters further. Sergeants sought to explain who was there and who wasn’t and why they weren’t. There was some heated discussion between Fukuhara—immaculately uniformed, even at this late hour—and the guards, one of the Australian sergeants was slapped around, and after some confusion the counting began aga
in.

  Major Nakamura had come to him an hour earlier with Fukuhara and given him the order that one hundred men were to be selected to march to a camp near Three Pagoda Pass.

  None of these men should be asked to do any more, argued Dorrigo Evans. There is not one prisoner in this camp capable of such a march.

  Major Nakamura insisted that a hundred were to be found.

  Unless you change your treatment of prisoners they will all die, said Dorrigo Evans.

  Major Nakamura indicated that he would choose if the Australian colonel would not.

  They’ll all die, said Dorrigo Evans.

  Again Lieutenant Fukuhara translated; Major Nakamura listened and then spoke. The lieutenant turned to Dorrigo Evans.

  Major Nakamura say that very good thing, Lieutenant Fukuhara said. It save Japanese army much rice.

  Evans understood that if Nakamura chose, it would be indiscriminately and their number would include the sickest—and perhaps most likely the sickest, because they were of least use to Nakamura—and that all of them would die. If, on the other hand, he, Dorrigo, chose, he could pick the fittest, the ones he thought had the best chance of living. And most would die anyway. That was his choice: to refuse to help the agent of death, or to be his servant.

  As the parade went on, as additional men on light duties or cooking or in the hospital were rounded up and brought in, as they stood there sick and starving, as the occasional man collapsed from exhaustion and was just left lying in the mud, the prisoners watched a long column of Japanese soldiers appear, marching along the rough track that ran along the far side of the parade ground, which, when not impassable from the monsoon, served as the supply road for the railway.

  The Japanese soldiers were on their way to the Burmese front, hundreds of miles of weary jungle away. They were filthy and exhausted but still they pressed on into the night, with no more than grunts and groans, pushing and pulling artillery axle-deep through the mud. Some seemed ill, many so young that they might still have been in school, and all looked miserable.

  Dorrigo Evans had not seen any Japanese troops up close for several months. In Java he had come to respect them not as the short-sighted buffoons the Australians had been told by their intelligence officers to expect, but as formidable soldiers. But these Japanese soldiers, who had clearly been marching all day and long into the night on their way to the horror of another front, looked as much the wretched of war as the POWs themselves, broken, bedraggled, exhausted. Dorrigo caught the eyes of one soldier who carried a hurricane lamp. They loomed large on his child-like face, and looked soft and vulnerable. He could not have been more than seventeen years old. What he saw in the Australian officer, Dorrigo Evans had no idea, but it was not hate or the devil. He stumbled, then halted, still staring at the Australian. Perhaps he saw something; perhaps he was too tired to see anything. Dorrigo Evans felt an overwhelming urge to put his arm around him.

  Suddenly, a Japanese sergeant—seeing the soldier gawking—strode over and thrashed him brutally around the face with a bamboo cane. The soldier immediately drew himself erect, barked some word of apology and focused his gaze back on the jungle ahead. It was clear to Dorrigo Evans that this soldier no more understood his beating or purpose than the POWs did their miserable fate. How far away was his home? wondered Dorrigo. Was it a farm? Was it a city? Some place, some valley, some street, a lane, an alley, that he perhaps dreamt of, a place of sun and winds that caressed and rains that refreshed, of people who cared for him and laughed with him, a place far away from this stink of decay, the smothering green, the pain and brutal people who simply hated and taught hate, who made the world hate. As the boy soldier trudged away, Dorrigo could see he was bleeding about the face where he’d been whipped, that his simple uniform was filthy, torn and mildewed, and that he had no heart for any of this. And yet, when called upon, he—this soft-eyed boy with the lamp—he too would kill brutally and in turn be killed.

  The Japanese sergeant who had so savagely beaten him now took a break. Watching the column file past into the blackness of the jungle, he lit a cigarette and took a puff. When another NCO approached, he handed the smoke to him with a smile and a joke. And as the column of children was swallowed by the darkness, Dorrigo Evans felt as if the whole war was passing before his eyes.

  After the column had vanished into the jungle, the rain came in a deluge. The sky was black, and other than the few kerosene lanterns and guards’ torches, there was no light. The only sound was that of the rain rolling down from the nearby teak trees in gushes, the rain sweeping back and forth, and the rain felt to Dorrigo Evans a solid, moving, living thing, and the rain and the great teak jungle in which their camp sat in that small clearing seemed to form a prison that was endless, unknowable, and slowly killing them all.

  Finally, it was established that all the prisoners were there. Dorrigo Evans lifted his lantern and his gaze, worried that he might be giving the impression that he was downcast, his spirit broken by all that they had suffered. He could not do that to them. He had to do far worse. He looked at the seven hundred men, whom he had held, nursed, cajoled, begged, hoodwinked and organised into surviving, whose needs he always put before his own. Most wore only a Jap happy or wretched rags that masqueraded as shorts, and in the greasy, sliding lantern light their skeletal bodies for a moment horrified him. Many shook with malaria, some shat themselves as they stood there, and it was his task to find among them one hundred men to march one hundred miles further into the jungle, towards the unknown, into the passage of death.

  Dorrigo Evans looked downwards, and though he could see nothing, it reminded him that few had that one key to survival, boots. Holding a lantern at ankle height, he walked slowly along the first row, looking at the bare feet, some badly infected, some swollen with beri-beri, some with stinking ulcers so large and vile that they were like angry craters eating almost to the bone.

  He stopped at one: a severe, untreated ulcer that had left a thin strip of intact skin down the outer side of the calf, the rest of the leg being a huge ulcer from which poured offensive, greyish pus. Sloughing tendons and fasciae were exposed, the muscles were tunnelled and separated by gaping sinuses, between which he could glimpse a raw tibial bone that looked as if a dog had gnawed it. The bone, too, was starting to rot and break off into flakes. He lifted his gaze to see a pale, wasted child. No, Chum Fahey could not go.

  Report to hospital when parade has ended, said Dorrigo Evans.

  The next man was Harry Dowling. Dorrigo had successfully removed his appendix three months ago, a triumph in such circumstances of which he was proud. And now Dowling seemed in not the worst shape. He had shoes and his ulcers were only mild. Dorrigo looked up at him, put his hand on his shoulder.

  Harry, he said, as gently as he could, as though waking a child.

  I am become a carrion monster.

  The next in line was Ray Hale, whom they had managed to bring through cholera. He too Dorrigo touched on the shoulder.

  Ray, he said.

  Thou art come unto a feast of death.

  Ray, he said.

  Dread Charon, frightful and foul.

  And so Dorrigo continued on, up and down the lines of those he had tried to save and now had to pick, touching, naming, condemning those men he thought might best cope, the men who had the best chance of not dying, who would most likely die nevertheless.

  At its end, Dorrigo Evans stepped back and dropped his head in shame. He thought of Jack Rainbow, whom he had made to suffer so, Darky Gardiner, whose prolonged death he could only watch. And now these hundred men.

  And when he looked up, there stood around him a circle of the men he had condemned. He expected the men to curse him, to turn away and revile him, for everyone understood it was to be a death march. Jimmy Bigelow stepped forward.

  Look after yourself, Colonel, he said, and put out his hand to shake Dorrigo’s. Thanks for everything.

  You too, Jimmy, Dorrigo Evans said.

  And, one by on
e, the rest of the hundred men shook his hand and thanked him.

  When it was done, he walked off into the jungle at the side of the parade ground and wept.

  17

  WE’RE NOT SURE what he knows, a nurse said. She had seen his dog-black eyes glistening with a life of their own under the neon tubes of the ward. I think he hears me, though, she said. I do.

  Broken as he was, he could recognise that it was a fine room he had been given, looking out on giant fig trees with their flying roots and lush greenery. But he did not feel at home. It did not feel his place. It was not the island of his birth. The birds cried differently at dawn, harsh, happy calls of green parrots and gang-gang parrots. Not the soft, smaller, more complex trilling of birdsong, of the wrens and honeyeaters and silvereyes of his island home, the fetching return call of the jo-witty, all the birds he now wished to fly and sing with. It was not a road rolling from the cup of a woman’s waist over a pewter sea to a rising moon.

  For my purpose holds, he whispered—

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the western stars until I die.

  What’s he saying? asked one nurse.

  He’s raving, said a second. Better get a doctor. It’s the morphine or the end, one or the other, or both. Some say nothing, some give up on breathing, some rave.

  As politicians, journalists and shock jocks competed in their ever wilder panegyrics of a man they had never understood, he was dreaming of just one day: of Darky Gardiner and Jack Rainbow, of Tiny Middleton. Mick Green. Jackie Mirorski and Gyppo Nolan. Little Lenny going home to Mum in the Mallee. Of one hundred men shaking his hand. One thousand others, names recalled, names forgotten, a sea of faces. Amie, amante, amour.

  Life piled on life, he mumbled, every word now a revelation, as if it had been written for him, a poem his life and his life a poem.