by David Malouf
Through the sweat in his eyes, and the hanging dust, Digger saw them on the track: Indians, Tamils probably, half-naked in lap-laps (like us, he thought) and carrying little bundles of next to nothing, a water bottle, sometimes a stove or lamp. For nearly an hour they passed, and every two or three minutes, stretching upright and keeping an eye out for the guard, he dragged his wrists across the sweat of his brow and got a quick look.
Here and there among them were families, women with babies on their hip, but they were men mostly, and mostly young men, though a few of them were old.
He had seen them working along the railroads up country and in road gangs in the towns, camping just off the pavement in orange tents or stretched out on a bedroll in the dirt. Now they were here. They had changed masters, that’s all. Another empire to build.
He thought of the look on that fellow’s face who had told him once, ‘They wanna make coolies of us’: the savage indignation of it, at the violation of all that was natural in the world, their unquestionable superiority as white men; but there was also the age-old fear in it of falling back and becoming serfs again.
Whatever indignities that fellow’s people might have suffered – mine too, Digger thought – at the hands of bosses or schoolteachers or bank managers or ladies, all those who had the power to humiliate or deny, there was always this last shred of dignity to chew on: I’m not a coolie, I can choose. Whatever you could be deprived of, by bad luck or injustice or the rough contrariety of things, there was this one last thing that could not be taken. That’s what they had believed. Only they knew differently now. It could be taken just like that. Easy.
That fellow would be here somewhere, in one of the other camps up or down the line; if he hadn’t been clubbed or kicked to death by one of the Koreans, or fallen on one of the murderous night marches that had brought them here from the rail-head at the Thai border, or succumbed to beriberi or dysentery, or to cerebral malaria, or died of blood poisoning or gangrene from an ulcer; or, like so many of the youngest among them, simply from exhaustion and despair. Wearing a lap-lap and filthy shorts, barefoot, covered in sores, he would be stooping to take the basket on his back, pouring with sweat and chewing on the bitterness of it.
‘This,’ Digger said to no one in particular, to the part of himself that stood apart a little and observed from a distance still, ‘is what happened to us in the world. Maybe it wasn’t meant to. It was meant for those others, those coolies. It happened to them too, and now it’s happened to us. So what do you make of that?’
It was part of an argument he had been having, for weeks now, with Doug; except that it seldom got put into more than a few words. They were too exhausted to argue. But the words went on arguing in their heads, and some of it got across; they got the drift of it. It was an argument, really, that Mac ought to have been making. He would have done it better. Digger was doing it for him, the best he could.
There were fellows now who had begun to take a religious view – that was understandable, Digger could see that – and one of them, astonishingly, after he came through the beriberi, was Doug.
They could hardly believe it at first. They thought he was putting it on and making a mock. But he was dead serious. In the horror of what was happening to them, some teaching had come back to him out of his hellfire youth. Some grim Presbyterian view that had been opened up in his head in the days before he asserted himself and said ‘Stuff it’ and refused to go to church – half-heard on hot Sunday mornings while he was gazing out a window, his mind a slingshot loosing itself after a sparrow, or his own dick, hard as iron, working its way up a girl’s thigh – struck him now, ten years later, as an incontrovertible truth. ‘Look about you, lad, and mock if you can. Isn’t this what they were trying to make you see? Isn’t it?’
‘Isn’t it what?’ Digger wanted to know. ‘Hell? Is that what you think it is?’
He thought of his father and those Sundays when they had been out on the line. Hell was just a name people had for the worst thing they could think of, the worst thing that could ever happen to them. Well, it happens, that’s all. Nobody deserves what they get. You better believe that, son, because every other sort of belief is madness. We don’t deserve this. Nobody does. We haven’t done anything that bad, even the worst of us, even you, Douggy, you old bastard! But it’s what we’ve got. Thailand is just a place. Some people spend their whole lives here. It’s normal. These coolies, for instance. For them it’s normal, it’s all they’ll ever have – not for any sin they’ve committed. It rains a lot, that’s all. The jungle’s as thick as a wall. Things rot. Flies breed maggots in everything. Us too, if we get a bit of a nick. We weren’t meant to be here, but we are. Eight hours a day and time off for smokos – that’s one sort of justice, a pretty rough one; but it’s not for everyone, and it’s not for us now either, maybe ever again. Oh, it’s unfair all right. But who ever said it would be fair? And who can you complain to, anyhow?
‘I’m not complaining,’ Doug said.
‘But you should be,’ Digger told him fiercely. He hated to see Doug, of all people, so meek.
Doug just looked at him, half-smiling, and it was true, Digger had hanged himself on his own argument.
But he stuck to it just the same. He had to.
It was so hard to keep your head in all this. It was a kind of madness, but there was a thread of sanity in it, there had to be; in all the twists and turns, a clear straight line into life. He was determined to hang on to it. Sometimes he could.
Later, half-asleep, he sat in the stink of himself and spooned up gruel. He had something fresh to brood over. Coming back from the embankment he had stepped on a thorn. It would fester, blow up and ulcerate. Bound to. That was enough to worry anyone.
Down on the track a new lot were passing, you could hear their feet scuffing the leaves; and a new rumour was being passed among them. ‘Cholera. They’re Tamils. They’ll be carrying cholera!’ That whisper on the track.
‘As if we didn’t have enough on our plate already,’ Digger thought bitterly, using a phrase that had lost all meaning up here.
But what really worried him, right now, was his foot. Each time he got up in the dark and trotted to the borehole (four or five times it was, in less than an hour) he could hear them, still passing. Thousands, it must be.
Cholera wasn’t just bad, it was the worst. They had seen a bit of it in one of the camps on the way up and had been eager to get out and away. As if they didn’t have –
But immediately his foot touched the ground his mind went there, to the immediate sore place where the thorn had gone in, and worried and worried.
It was a new eye, this opening in his flesh, and had its own point of view. Darkness was what it was obsessed with. It loved the dark. When he lay down and tried to sleep again he saw nothing but what it saw: the road it would take, dragging the rest of him (what was left of him) into bruise-blackness, till his whole body began to drink darkness from the hungry mouth that had opened there – mouth or eye, whichever way you saw it, both hungry for something other than the flesh, but also for the flesh.
The trouble is, he thought, they never tell you anything that’s of any real use. Even the books. Even the great ones. You have to learn it for yourself, just as it comes.
Well, he was learning all right; so were they all. Some of it their bellies were teaching them; like how little a man can live on and still drag himself from one day to the next. The history of empires, that lesson was, and what it costs to build them. Top grades he had been getting. Now it was his foot that was beginning to instruct him. God knows what lesson that would be.
It was swelling with the illuminating darkness of an ultimate wisdom. First principles. The original chemistry of things. Flashing it throb after throb to the furthest galaxies at the limits of his system. ‘This is how it starts,’ he thought, ‘this is genesis. This is the truth now, spreading fast, beginning as just a pinprick and eating its way through flesh to the very bone. Nothing abstract about t
his. You can see it if you want, you can scoop it out with a hot spoon. That’s real enough surely for any man.’
11
TO TOP IT all they gave them the glass-rod test and Digger was discovered, along with about eighty others, to be a cholera carrier. Sent to the isolation ward across the yard, he discovered a little deeper hell inside the larger one. It had been there all the time but he had known nothing of it. New cases were brought in each day, and in the morning, two or three of them, sometimes more, would be dead. Fellows who only hours before had been able to whisper at least, with a fleshy tongue and lips, would be mummies, their skin as dry and yellow on their bones as if they had been laid out like that for centuries. Dried-up twigs, their fingers were. Their feet were wood. You could only tell one man from another by the tag he wore.
A little away from the camp, in a jungle clearing, they had their burning-place. Each day there were new dead to be cremated, and because he was in reasonable shape, except for his ulcer, Digger did it. The wood had to be chopped the day before. The bodies were carried on rice sacks on bamboo poles.
Entering the place Digger felt a sleepiness come over him. It began the moment you stepped off the common path that the work parties used and took this one that led sharply away from it and then a hundred yards or more, in impenetrable gloom, into the forest. Only the dead came this way, except for those who carried them. To enter here you too had to become one of the dead, at least in spirit – the place demanded it. A sleepiness came over you, a torpor of the mind, though your limbs worked well enough.
You were in the antechamber here of the next world – that’s what the perpetual blue-grey gloom and the external dampness of the place told you; and the stillness, the suspension of all activity, including the fall of the ever-falling bamboo leaves.
You were at the furthest point now from where you had come from, wherever it was, and could bring no human qualities with you. The place did not recognise them, had never known them from the beginning of time. It was a primeval place of a vegetable dampness where nothing human had yet been conceived.
The air was blueish and so cold that your breath went always before you, as if spirit here had more substance man flesh.
The leaves kept up a slow drizzle, and long streamers of mist floated through just at head level. More breath.
The slowness of the blood that overcame you belonged to lizard life, reptile life. To stand upright and take on the sensations of men might be fatal here; no space had been prepared for it. You preserved yourself by letting a reptile sleepiness come over you and your spirit sink down towards the earth.
There were no ceremonies. The words would have blown back damp against your mouth.
All the more terrifying then that the dead, who after twenty-four hours were no more than the driest sticks, should suddenly, when the teak logs under them roared into flame, sigh and sit upright, start bolt upright in the midst of the flames. This recovery, and the heat that came from it, was too much. You found your limbs and hobbled away as fast as breath would take you. You fled.
12
‘LISTEN MATE,’ VIC whispered. What was he doing here? ‘I heard about something. One of the other blokes tried it and it worked on him. Can you hear me Digger? I’m gunna get you up. Sorry about this.’
The place was full of voices. In the attap roof where rain dripped continuously small lives were on the move, lizards, mice, scorpions, cockroaches – occasionally one of them fell and you would hear a man cry out in alarm and claw at himself to drive it off.
The other hospital inmates, if they could drag themselves to their feet, were never still – that’s how it seemed to Digger. They were forever trotting off to the boreholes, five or six times a night some of them, or restlessly wandering up and down between the bunks, in violent conversation with themselves.
Bugs rattled in the folds of his rags, he could hear them. They clattered against one another in the joints of the rack. Sighs, groans, a burst of shouting out of some man’s nightmare.
Get up? He would never get up, that’s what they had told him. Not on two legs anyway; one maybe. He had begun a light-headed descent towards a place of light, and had decided to go with it. He was letting his body have its own way now. That was the best thing.
‘Digger? C’mon. I’m going to get you up, right? It’ll hurt, I know. I’m sorry. But it’s our only shot. You don’t want t’ lose ya leg, do you?’
It was Vic’s voice but the tone was his mother’s. He wondered what Vic had been tuning into that allowed him to get it off so perfectly, but was not surprised. The walls between things had been breaking down for a while now.
‘Digger?’
He was being hauled up, away from the light. When his eyes opened it was dark. The hospital hut was all shadows of men moving against the light outside.
‘What are you doing?’ he complained, feeling Vic’s arm hooked under his own and hauling him up. He was light enough, but was surprised just the same that Vic could manage it. ‘I can’t walk.’
Vic ignored this. He had him up and hanging. Digger could hear Vic panting and could smell his breath. He began to drag him out under the overlap of the attap roof into starlight. Other men, ghostlike, were wandering about out here but took no notice of them.
‘Where are we goin’?’ he asked when they had crossed the open space in front of the huts and entered a thicket.
Vic was grunting. He did not reply. ‘This is the hard bit now,’ he said at last, after they had come some way into the thickening forest. ‘Hang on, eh Dig? Digger? Dig?’
They were at the edge of a muddy bank that sloped steeply to a glint of water where blackness swirled. Digger looked out across the wide expanse of it. The river.
‘Listen,’ Vic was telling him. ‘I’m gunna put you down on your backside, right? You gotta slide. It’ll hurt, Dig, I know that. I’m sorry. But it’s the only way. You ready now?’
He had no power to resist. He felt himself settled with his legs over the edge of the bank, then he was sliding. His bones wrenched. They would break, they must; he was waiting to hear what he had heard often enough in the hospital hut, the unspeakable sound of a legbone snapping, crack! where some bloke turned in the dark. But there was only a shock of pain that he blacked out on, and he was in thick mud. It was oozing all round him. It was in his mouth and eyes, stinking. But he did not have enough weight for it to take him down. No pack, no boots, and there was no meat on him. So in his own case gravity did not function. He floated on top of it, floundering, and the mud was grey-black river-slime with roots in it.
‘Digger? Are you OK, Dig?’
That was that Vic again. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Digger thought, ‘doesn’ ’e know any other name? Why doesn’ ’e torment some other bastard?’
‘All right,’ Vic said, ‘all right, we can rest a bit, no hurry, Dig. You have a rest.’
Vic lay with his face in the mud. It stank, he thought, like an old slate-rag at school. He was sweating. ‘No, there’s no hurry,’ he thought.
He was light-headed. That was the pain. But more than that it was the revulsion he felt that part of him stank worse even than this river-slime, and had the stink of a dead body. He was carrying the beginnings of a dead body along with his live one.
There was no hurry, but he couldn’t wait just the same. Another moment of this death touch on him and he’d go crazy now that the cure was so near. But Digger couldn’t move again. Not just yet.
‘I can wait,’ he told himself. ‘There’s no hurry. The fishes’ll wait. If I can just get my ear out of the mud’ (he lifted his head) ‘I’ll be able to hear them.’ The tiddlers, he meant, in their shoals at the edge of the river; swishing their tails, waving their gills to breathe, and smelling them: flesh. He reached out and touched the edge of the water. Very gently it tripped over his fingers. It was going somewhere. It would clean them, even if it was itself thick with mud.
‘Digger?’
He pulled himself up, put his face close t
o Digger, who was all mud, and, as if he could by sheer willpower breathe life into him, said, ‘Listen, mate, I’m gunna get you up again, right? Digger? Dig?’
Digger rolled his head a little. There were stars, big ones, very close, and so bright that it hurt. They were heavy, he knew that. Tons and tons of gas and luminous minerals burning, rolling, travelling fast but managing to stay up. The weight of them, that light balancing act, was an encouragement.
‘Right? Now,’ the voice said, ‘this is it. Right, mate? I’m gunna get you up. Upsadaisy! Right?’
Vic was astonished. Digger was just skin and bone but the weight of him was enormous. It must be the mud he was coated in. No, he thought, it’s something else. It’s the weight of death, heavy as lead in him. So heavy maybe I can’t do it. He struggled and the sweat began to stream faster on him.
‘That’s good, that was good, Digger. We’re there now. We’ve made it.’ He stood still, supporting Digger who also supported him. He could hear the mad activity there on the surface of the water, where the stars touched it and you could see them beginning to swarm.
‘Don’t worry, fishies,’ he said, in a voice he recognised as his own from when he was maybe three years old, ‘we’re coming. Only a little while now.’
‘Now,’ the voice said, and half-supporting, half-dragging him where he hung under the stars (what was supporting them?), led him forward.
It was a river. Digger saw the gleaming surface of it, coal-black and churning. ‘What is this?’ he thought. ‘What does he think he’s doing? This won’t help.’ The word that had come into his head – it was a word he had never used as far as he could recall – was baptism. But all Vic did was lead him a little way in: one pace, another. He felt the warmth of it rising to just below his knees. It was alive. He could feel the life of it.
