by David Malouf
The house itself, in Bon Accord Avenue, Digger could see as if he had lived his whole life there.
Mac slept on the side verandah in a room he had closed in himself with the help of a mate, another trammie. It was floor to ceiling books and there were more books in stacks under the wire frame of the bed and along both sides of the hall. Mac had not read these books, or not all of them; they were for his retirement. But the majority of them he had at least dipped into. How could you resist? On the way home, last thing Friday nights, when he had just picked up a new lot, he would take a good long look and be content then to have the rest of it stored up and waiting for him.
Technical manuals on everything from book-binding to telegraphy, novels, journals, books of travel, psychology, history – that’s what he liked. He’d been reading since he was a kid, like Digger – anything he could lay his hands on: Shakespeare, Shaw, Dickens, Jack London, Victor Hugo. They swapped favourite characters, told over incidents, laughing, and Digger, a bit shyly at first, recited out of his head from Hamlet or Henry the Fifth. They were Mac’s favourites.
‘Amazing, that is,’ Mac would say. ‘Ruddy amazing. Honest, Digger, you oughta be in a sideshow. What I wouldn’ do with your gift!’
‘What?’ Digger wondered.
It had become clear to him, even before any of this happened, that his ‘gift’, as Mac called it, even if it turned out to be the one thing that was special to him, was not to be the source of any fame or fortune. It would never be useful in that way. It had some other significance, or so he thought, that was related to the image his mother had put into his head, that room where all the things were gathered that made up your life. He was a collector, as she was. He hung on to things. But his room was of another kind, and so were the things he stored there.
Mac had been married – still was, in fact. Two years it lasted. The girl left him; not for another bloke, as it happened, but to live her own life and run a nursery in the Blue Mountains.
‘She got fed up with me,’ Mac told him, and put on a humorous look; but Mac’s humour, Digger knew by now, was a way of protecting himself, and you too sometimes, from the pain of things, ‘I never understood what she wanted, really. I reckoned I did, like most blokes, on’y I never had a clue really. She had a bad time, poor girl. Me too.’ When his brother died in a shipping accident in the Islands he had moved in with his sister-in-law, who was glad of the extra money and to have a man’s help with the boys. Mac got letters from her and had a pile, five in all, that he read over almost every night.
‘If anything happens to me, Digger,’ he said once. ‘I’d like you to have ’em.’
It was a solemn offer, and Digger, who felt the weight of it, was moved. ‘OK,’ he said.
He had had only one letter himself, from his mother, an angry one. His father had got himself wounded in Crete.
But more important to Digger in the end than Mac’s yarns, and the passionate and sometimes pedantic flights that put him pretty firmly, as Doug said, in ‘the ratbag brigade’, were the times when they just sat cleaning their gear or doing a bit of mending; saying nothing much, just quietly enjoying the company.
Self-possession. That was the quality in Mac that drew Digger. It was rare, and seemed, the more he thought about it, to be the one true ground of manliness. It was a quality he had never attained himself, and he wondered sometimes if he ever would. He had ants in his pants. That’s what his mother would have told him. Everything grabbed his attention and led him away from himself. He was always in a turmoil, never steady or still. The world was too full of interest. He got lost in it.
One of the things Mac introduced him to was music. It stood, for Mac, in some sort of middle position between talk and silence, with similarities, if you could imagine such a contradiction, to both, and it was this, Digger thought, that explained the link he felt between music and Mac’s particular brand of self-possession. If you understood the one, perhaps you would get a clear sight of the other.
He encouraged Mac to talk about the pieces he liked. Mac, who was a born teacher, was only too pleased to introduce him to bits of opera and things by Chopin and Fritz Kreisler.
‘Nessun dorma’, ‘none shall sleep’; that was a good one. They heard that one night during their first week in Malaya, in the early days before the Japs landed. Digger was amazed. It was in the open, under the stars, and almost a thousand of them had been sprawled there on the grass. But there was a lot of music to be heard at Changi, too. Fellows who had carried their records with them would bring their favourites along, and dozens of men, hundreds sometimes, would come in out of the dark to listen. Digger would sit back a little and take his cue from Mac.
Mac’s characteristic expression was a long-faced, half-woeful, half-comic look that went with his being, as Doug said, a ‘black-stump philosopher’.
‘The big trouble with you, mate,’ Doug would tell him, ‘is that you know too much fer yer own good. All it does is make ya mournful. Now, I ask you, what’s the use a’ that?’
‘I’m not mournful,’ Mac would insist.
‘A’ course you are. You’re about the mournfullest bloke I ever laid eyes on. Honest, Mac, you oughta take a dekko at yerself. I tell ya, mate, you look as if the world ended last Mondee and you just got news of it.’
These sallies were pure affection. They took in a side of Mac that in Doug’s opinion was excessive. He needed to be jollied out of it. It was his ratbag side, the side of all those failed, unforgotten utopias that blokes like Mac, dyed-in-the-wool idealists, would give their lives for – and other people’s lives as well if they could get them, all in the name of some future that most fellers didn’t want and couldn’t use and weren’t fit for, and couldn’t be made fit for either, unless you wrenched them this way and that till there was nothing left that was human in them.
Mac defended himself, lost his temper, became just the sort of angelic storm-trooper Doug accused him of being, then laughed and put on his self-deprecating, comic-suffering look, but refused to admit defeat.
Doug’s rough cynicism beat him every time, but somehow, when it was over, he was not beaten. He was self-possessed, Mac, but he was also passionate, and contradictory too. Only when he was leaning forward into the music and utterly absorbed by it were the different sides of him resolved. What you saw then – what Digger saw – was the absolute purity of him.
‘I’ll never be like that,’ Digger thought. ‘Not in a million years.’
Then Mac would catch him looking and wink, and what you saw then was the odd humour of the man.
When the chance came to move out of the camp and do some real work they leapt at it. The work was coolies’ work, hard labour at the docks, but they wanted the exercise. There was nothing dishonourable in it, if you didn’t see it that way. Besides, there would be good pickings among the piled-up stores in the godowns. Best of all, they would be on their own again, away from the sickness of spirit and irregular violence and filth of the camp. Nearly three hundred strong, they were to set up quarters in the abandoned booths and tea-gardens of the Great World, an amusement park where in the early days they had gone to drink Chinese beer, dance with taxi-dancers and have their pictures taken. From there they would march, each morning, in parties to the docks.
‘This is all right, eh?’ Digger said when he saw it. A fairground. It was like coming home.
They spent the first night cleaning the place up a bit and fixing showers. There was plenty of running water. Then, all washed and spruced up, they went for a walk through the alleys and lanes between the stalls. A real maze, it was, of lathe and crumbling plaster, with sketchy paintings, half-faded, of horses and misty-looking mountains and clouds, and avenues of bulls with bulging eyes and miniature pagodas. It seemed unreal with no crowd to fill it, none of the noise and sweat and cooking smells from food stalls or the smell of charcoal from smoky stoves.
They wandered in groups and kept meeting other groups at the end of alleys. Very odd they looked too, in thei
r boots and baggy shorts and nothing else. Like kids, Digger thought, who’d got locked in after the store keepers had shut up shop and the taxi-dancers, the actors in the Chinese theatre and the sellers of potency pills and balms had all gone home.
They greeted one another shyly and had to make themselves small to get past in the narrow lanes, their skylarking self-conscious in so quiet a place. There was a moon. Everything looked blue. The walls were mostly blue anyway, ‘celestial’ blue. The reflections from them gave men’s faces, from a distance, a luminous, rather ghostly look. It was weird though not scary.
It was an interlude of pure play, but they were so subdued by the emptiness of the place, its peeling vistas and derelict squares, that it became dreamlike. At last they went whispering through the alleys like quiet drunks, still full of high spirits but afraid to wake someone.
Ourselves, Digger thought, as their boots echoed on the gravel and laughter came through the walls.
2
THEY HAD BEEN working all morning, a small party inside a larger, mixed contingent of Australians, British and Dutch, in one of the biggest godowns on the docks. It was an immense place like a cathedral, a hundred and fifty yards long and sixty wide, all slatted walls where the light that beat in was dazzling, and, high up in the gloom under the rafters, sunshafts swarming with dust.
The dust was from the chaff bags they were lumping, or that others had lumped before them. They were choking with it. Their eyes were raw, their hair thick with it, they were powdered to the navel with a layer of fine dust that streaked where the sweat ran and where it got into their shorts, and went sodden round their balls, painfully itched and rubbed. It was a kind of madness they moved in. Half-naked, and barefoot mostly, they stumbled through a storm in which they were shadows bent low and tottering under the hundredweight sacks.
The guards too suffered. They had swathed their mouths and nostrils in knotted scarves, but the dust got in under the collars of their uniforms, clogged their lashes, and hung on their brows with an eerie whiteness. They wore heavy boots and leggings, the sign that they were masters here, but sweated for it.
Generations of coolies, Chinese for the most part, but Tamils too, had worked to unload ships and stock these godowns with bales of rubber, wool and cotton; sacks of flour, salt, sugar, rice; and cartons of corned meat, condensed milk, apricot halves and pineapple chunks in cans. A new sort of coolie, they were clearing it now to be shipped as spoils of war to the new masters of this corner of the earth.
Vic humped his sack with the rest. It was an animal’s work though a man could do it, and the dust was a torment, but none of that worried him. Neither did the weight, the two hundred pounds laid on his neck, which he had to trot a hundred yards with. He could do it. He was strong enough. And there was something in him that these things could not touch. He was lit up with the assurance of his own invulnerability. Had been all morning. There was no reason for it.
He knew the danger of such moods. They had dogged him all his life. In the drunkenness of his own power and youth he would lose track of things, grow reckless, and out of sheer physical exuberance say something sooner or later that he did not mean to say, or blindly strike out. That was the danger. He knew this. He was watching himself.
What hurt him, and in the most sensitive part of himself, was that somewhere not so very far away, fiery battles must be taking place, fought by fellows no older than himself, and no more daring either – part of a war that would be talked of for all the rest of his life, and which he would have no share in; no campaign ribbons, no medals, no stories to tell except this shameful one. He would live through this stretch of history and be denied even the smallest role in it.
He was sufficiently certain of his own courage to believe that in the ordinary circumstances of the soldier’s life he would, given the chance, have acquitted himself in a quite superlative way. He had spent his youth studying to be noble. But the world he was in now was a mystery to him. You do not prepare yourself for shame.
The guards were edgy. All this dust and the heat of the place maddened them. They too were young. They resented having to stand guard over coolies. To restore their own sense of honour they would suddenly strike out, and there was no way of knowing when the blow was coming or where from. Out of the storm of dust, that’s all, whack! and you took it.
But for all that, he could not convince himself that the conditions he was under held force. All morning his spirit was light and he swaggered. In brute fact his back was bent and he was tottering like the others in a dense haze, choking, streaming with sweat, feeling every ounce of the two-hundred-pound sack on his neck, but his spirit was coltish. Nothing could touch him.
After a time a rage of frustrated power began to build in him. If there was a girl here his energy might have been taken up in some other way; but there wasn’t. Each time he straightened he felt a surge of exultation and the bitterness of having to rein it in. This was one of his moments – every nerve in his body told him that – and he would miss it for no other reason than that the timing was wrong. That’s what hurt him. The moment, and with it the event – whatever it was – that belonged to it, would be lost and would not recur. The unfairness of it maddened him.
He could never be sure what happened next. As he passed, the most bad-tempered of the guards, a smart young corporal, out of boredom it might have been, or the idle spite of those who have been given power for a moment but no scope to use it, or more likely because, in his own youthfulness, he had caught from the mere look of him the state of rebellious excitement Vic was in – this guard, idly, almost indifferently, leaned out and jabbed at him very lightly with a cane. There was no contact. But Vic, with the load still on his back, stopped, turned, and his spirit acted in spite of him.
Even when he saw it happen he was not dismayed. Some part of him was, and he went cold at the enormity of it; but in the other part, in a kind of triumph, he was exultant. Time stopped dead while he hovered with the two-hundred-pound sack on his back and he and the guard faced one another across a distance of perhaps two feet. He was aware of the hair on his scalp as a dense forest, of his body soaring up from where his feet touched the earth. The moment released itself from the flow of things, expanded and was absolute. He spat in the guard’s face.
He ought to have been a dead man then. That was the logic of the thing. But as the guard hurled himself forward, Mac, who was next in line, stumbled against him, was knocked off balance, and his sack went. There was a soft explosion and they were immediately, all three, swallowed up in a storm of white.
In a moment Japs had rushed in from all directions, and when the others in the party swung round to see what it was, they were using their rifle-butts, their bayonets too, all screaming and out of control.
Vic, his own sack still heavy on his neck, stood at the centre of an absolute fury in which boots and heads and rifle-butts and steel went everywhere. The bayonet blows were synchronised grunts and screams. He too had his mouth open screaming, but it was Mac they were going for.
For Digger it was a moment that for as long as he lived would remain apart and absolute, its real seconds swelling till he felt as if his body had been suspended over a gap where the sun was stopped and chronology had ceased to operate. Duration was measured now only by the mind’s capacity to grasp all that was taking place in it.
He had turned at the first hint of trouble (Vic, that would be, it had to be), slewing on one foot. Heard shouts. Saw the rush of guards, and then, in a storm of dust, saw that someone had gone down. He was thirty feet away and still had the sack on his shoulders. He could see nothing clearly.
Madness was loose, that’s all he knew. From a time, just seconds back, when they were in a world, however harsh their lot in it, that was familiar and human, they were hurled into a place where anything could be done and was done, in animal fury and darkness, in blood, din and a thick-throated roaring before words. They were all in it, all shouting.
It would pass. It had to. But unt
il it did, for what seemed an age, they were outside all order and rule, in a place of primal savagery.
Digger had risen on one foot. He did not come to earth. That’s how he saw it. He hung there as from hooks in his shoulder blades, weighed down by the blood that was being pumped into his hands and the big-veined muscles in his neck; by the weight of the sack he was carrying too. But his limbs, no longer attached or subject to gravity, were flinging about in a passion like nothing he had ever known, that took him right out of himself, over horizons he had never conceived of.
It was a kind of dance, in which he shouted ecstatic syllables that passed right through him, lungs, mouth, consciousness, as if he were no more than the dumb agency of the rhythm he was pounding out in the dust of the godown, beyond smashed bones and the gushing of blood. The cries that came heaving out of him belonged to a tongue he did not recognise, and for all his gift (he who knew whole plays by heart), when his foot came back to earth at last, and the seconds linked, he could not recall a single one of them. They were in a language that his mind, once the moment was gone, no longer had the shape to receive.
His foot came down; he took the full weight of the sack again, and found himself gasping for breath. Like a man who had run miles bearing a message he was too breathless now to deliver – and anyway, it had gone clean out of his head.
Still in a panic, shouting and slapping now even at one another in their recriminations over what had occurred, the guards forced them into a mass, drove them with canes, battens, a wall of rifles, till they were huddled in a close heap on the floor of the godown, hands locked behind their heads, heads hard down between their kneecaps.
