The Caprices

by Sabina Murray

  “Of course you do,” said Sean. “Shoulda been on duty for this one, Paul. Your friend the doctor, he’s not bad, y’know? Anyway, this Jap guard comes up to him. He’s all squirmy, y’know, wriggling around and all that, and he tells old Dutchy that he’s caught something from the last round of Korean hookers that passed through here, right? And he wants Dutchy to do something about it. And so Dutchy gives him something, tells him to rub it all over his dick. Next thing you know, the Jap’s screaming like a madman, running around like someone lit a fire in his shorts. And we’re all surprised, but it’s so bloody funny, and we can’t laugh ’cause we’re scared he’ll bash our heads in, right? But the doctor’s telling him that it’s supposed to feel that way, but we know something’s up, y’know? So when he’s gone, we go up to Dutchy and we ask him, ‘What’d you give him?’ and Dutchy says, ‘The Japanese soldier should not put the penis where the penis is not wanted.’”

  Which was a funny story; Bob knew it. He smiled along with Sean and Paul, but somewhere, along the railroad, he had forgotten how to laugh. Laughter was strange music.

  The romusha introduced the inconceivable—that there was a level of hell below the one that Bob haunted. These villagers, Thais and Burmese, understood nothing, labored in ignorance. They died in huge numbers out of seeming confusion, as if they didn’t realize that one needed to struggle to survive, as if it didn’t occur to them. The Japanese didn’t seem to think that the villagers needed food or doctors; they didn’t seem to think that the railroad constituted a significant change from village life, and they miscalculated the romusha’s ability to survive. The romusha were even more expendable than the whites. In the end they got their revenge. They introduced the only worthy opponent to the Japanese—cholera. Cholera was not racist, nor did it have any respect for rank. Cholera cast its lot with the winners and the losers in equal numbers and won most of the time. It tore through the camp, taking most of the romusha, and as it raced down the river it took Paul and Sean along with it. When there was bamboo for fuel, the cholera dead were burned in huge pyres. Bob helped build these monuments, doused them with gasoline, lit them. As the bodies sizzled and seized they would sit up with mouths open in a silent scream until the flames left nothing. Bob learned quickly to burn the bodies face down.

  Paul was one of the first to go. Bob sat up with Sean that night. He listened to him crying, a sound that was answered by the monkeys and night birds. Sean’s crying was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. One week later, Sean was dead. The night he carried Sean to the pyre, as he lay in dreamlike sleeplessness, Bob returned home. He was in the kitchen and Noreen Grey was washing up in his mother’s sink.

  “Where’s your brother?” she asked as her pale, freckled arms dipped into the sudsy water. “He’s supposed to take me into town tonight.”

  Bob had looked down at his hat, which he held in his hands. “He’s over at the Carvers’ fixing a tractor. He said he’d be a little late.”

  “A little late? He’ll be drunk by the time he gets back here.” She shook her head in disbelief.

  “Noreen, you don’t have to do that.”

  “And who’s going to do it? Your mum? Doesn’t she have enough to do around here? I can just see you and Mark in Germany face to face with Hitler. You’ve got your rifles aimed straight at his head and you’re both saying, ‘Where’s mum? Shouldn’t she do this?’”

  “We’re not going to Germany, Noreen.”

  “Oh, you’ll clean the Japs up in a couple of weeks. Just you see. I’ve got a mind to go to Indonesia myself. I’d show them.”

  “Yeah, you would, but then who’d give us hell when we got home?”

  Noreen had a temperament to match her red hair; she was a good match for Mark, didn’t let him outshine her. Bob remembered Noreen’s arms best of all, pale and freckled, strong and slim. Her beautiful, empty arms.

  The sky broke open one day, as though a fissure ran along the endless heaving gray, a crack the length of the railroad. The Japanese were not perturbed by the start of the monsoon. The will of the emperor was to be obeyed, even as entire chunks of the mountainside slid into the river, which was already choked with bloated carabao, and huts, and once-buried POWs who found themselves making a hasty postmortem retreat down the Mekhong. Standing in the river, dragging a huge teak pillar, Bob had only peripheral vision. The water poured out of the sky in a steady stream, not a drop to be discerned, registering everything amorphously. The river was full of coconuts. Maybe some unfortunate barge had overturned, but Bob felt lucky. Hidden from the guards by the trunk of the tree, he surreptitiously reached for one of the coconuts, grabbed at it, but all he came up with was a handful of hair bound together by some rotted skin.

  Most of the floating heads and the accompanying bodies belonged to the romusha, since many of their dead hadn’t been buried in the first place. Bob and Sean had worked together on burial duty (there were too many romusha to burn) for the first part of the cholera epidemic. Then Bob had buried the bodies, working alone. One time, when he was dragging a man toward the pit, face down as was his preference, he was accosted by the recently departed’s wife. The woman held a two-year-old girl by the wrist and was madly trying to communicate. She started fluttering her hands in butterfly motions, constantly looking to the jungle ceiling. Bob did not understand. His mind had been full of thoughts of the unfortunately small size of the man’s feet and the decent sandals, which were now protecting soles whose contact with dirt would no longer require them. The woman went on and on, then finally wrested her husband’s ankles out of Bob’s hands and began slowly dragging the man away. Watching her reminded Bob of an ant struggling with a bloated grain of rice. Later, Bob learned that most of the romusha were of the opinion that if you buried bodies, their souls could not escape.

  The first question Bob asked Tom Reilly when he learned that he had a radio was “How old am I?”

  “Oh, I dunno. It’s July 1944.”

  “I’m twenty-one.” And Mark, wherever he was, was twenty-four. Now the news was that the war was ending. An odd tension filled the camp then. Bob felt consumed with an unfamiliar pain. It took him a while to figure out it was hope. He was hauling a body to the pit for burial, a wet beriberi. Wet beriberis didn’t burn. He had the arms of the bloated man and was struggling up a muddy slope when the body burst, drenching him and his companion with the stagnant juices. For a moment he thought he would cry, but it passed. What was he hoping for? The long road that wound its way through the flat bush toward his family home would only bring the war back to a place that he had hoped to protect from it. He would no longer be a person but a reminder of absences—Mark’s and his own. He was now an ugly thing, a sore upon the landscape, a battered body which told a story that no one wished to hear.

  Bob’s survival was incomprehensible. The wedding was an odd affair. Bob’s jacket was now too big; he worried that people would think it was Mark’s. Noreen wore a dress that she’d ordered during the war to keep her spirits up—something to distract her from Mark’s agonizing silence. Her eyes were red around the edges as she walked to stand before the minister. Bob felt like a ghost darkening what should have been a happy event, even though everyone agreed that he was doing the right thing. He stared at the bowls of coleslaw, steaks, and pineapple chicken on the checkered tablecloth in complete noncomprehension; he regarded the cake—fruitcake with plastic icing as demanded by tradition—which looked more like an enameled tooth than anything else. The day was punctuated with uncomfortable silence. Bob and Noreen circled each other in close, awkward orbits, never touching. She smiled bravely and her strength was admirable. No one mentioned Mark, which made it obvious that all were thinking of him. Few people danced to the violin’s entreaties; few people sang. As evening settled over the gathering, the beer began to take hold on Bob’s father. He rubbed tears from his eyes and he set his mouth in a bitter, clenched way. Bob went to sit across from him—silent and comforting, but his father looked away.

&nb
sp; Noreen accepted the situation. She seemed to remember Bob talking more than he did, but wasn’t altogether sure. The expanse of red land that stretched in a never-ending flatness had a way of sucking the sounds out of the house. The land swallowed all conversation, and replaced it with a thin film of dust that coated everything—fresh puddings, eyeballs, sheets. Besides, if Bob had a lot to say, he probably wouldn’t have the time to say it.

  Bob worked long hours riding out to the far corners of the station. Usually he was with Stan, an aborigine, who seldom spoke. Stan had thoughts of his own that he never shared and the two enjoyed a mutual, comfortable silence; they only discussed what was essential—sheep, dogs, and drought. Even during lunch, while Bob sprawled up against a tree and Stan squatted completely still, only moving to swat the flies that crawled near his eyes, they never conversed. Sometimes, Stan would squint hard at the barren landscape and Bob would look, but see nothing but the baked land or an occasional lizard, and Stan would say “dingo” or “rain” or “stray.” Although Bob could never see the evidence of what inspired these words, Stan was never wrong. He was more a part of the bush than a part of the sheep business. Even Stan’s features echoed the landscape: a flattened nose that flared into nostrils, like the eroded rock protrusions with their mysterious caves; wiry hair, which reminded Bob of the toughest, drought-surviving grass; brilliant white teeth that gleamed as pure and indestructible as polished limestone; limbs as thin and supple as a gum tree. When one day Stan disappeared, Bob was not altogether surprised. Noreen, who was eight months along at the time, thought the situation to be intolerable.

  “Noreen, let it go,” Bob had said. “There’s a guy out at Coon-awarra says he’s looking for something. I’ll drive over there later.”

  “Where’d Stan go? You’ve been working with him a whole year and then he just up and leaves?”

  Bob just shook his head.

  “You’re out there twelve bloody hours a day. He must have said something.”

  “He didn’t have to. He’s on walkabout, Noreen.”

  Walkabout. Strange. The black workers did that, one day in the routine and seemingly happy, the next stricken with the need to leave all behind. Sometimes it was over in a matter of days. Sometimes they showed up months later. Or they never came back at all. A few people had a respect for the spiritual aspect, but the majority of the station owners found the walkabout thing damned inconvenient. Noreen returned from the kitchen with a beer. At first Bob thought it was for him, but she drank half the bottle in quick silent gulps. She looked over at Bob with her head cocked to one side.

  “This guy over at Coonawarra, is he black?”

  Some people claimed that Stan was still in the area. They saw him every now and then, but it was a big area, and at any rate, Stan had done nothing about getting his old job back.

  A couple of weeks later, Bob got an invitation in the mail. He looked at the tasteful cream-colored envelope for a good five minutes before he opened it. A reunion was incomprehensible. All those years of longing to see other faces and people who had not been reduced to sinewy specters . . . And now they were talking about renting a banquet room at the Sheraton in Perth. Did Bob want to make a donation? Was he going to bring his wife? He let his hand that still held the letter dangle off the side of the chair. Noreen, who was now enormous, took his wrist and read the letter sideways.

  “I’m telling you, Bob, you should go. It’ll be good for you.”

  “Noreen, don’t be daft.”

  “It’s time to put the past where it belongs.”

  “Noreen, I’m warning you. This is none of your business.”

  “None of my business? Two more weeks and you’ll be a father. What then?”

  “What does that have to do with—”

  “Everything, Bob. It has everything to do with everything.”

  Bob crumpled up the invitation and sent it flying across the room. He went into the kitchen for a beer. Now that Noreen was very pregnant she could no longer race him for the fridge where she would fling herself in front of it, barring access until she’d had her say. The invitation had been signed by Graham Watt. Bob had no idea who Graham Watt was. Was Graham Watt leading a good life? Were Thailand and the railroad things that Graham Watt wanted to remember?

  Bob got insomnia that night. Noreen had learned to sleep through his late-night peregrinations and no longer questioned sleepily from her side of the bed. Bob wandered out the back door—stepping carefully over the dog, who twitched and whined in a dream about a particularly stubborn ewe—onto the back veranda. The sky stretched in an immense blackness across the land and the stars glowed through it fiercely. Bob thought that night was a threadbare cloak pulled across the white heat of day. The darkness was comforting. He looked out in the direction of the shed, where a gentle breeze rattled the corrugated iron in a rhythmic way. Possums shook the branches overhead and the smell of wattle drifted in from the creek. Bob was thinking of walking over to the bottlebrush tree, where he’d seen a wombat earlier that week, when he noticed a figure standing in the gloom. He had his right foot resting against his left knee and was leaning on a stick. Bob watched, his heart pounding, because the stick seemed to resemble the long arm of the shovel. And he, whoever he was, was staring out protectively in the direction of the flock. Bob shuddered, then drew himself up and began to walk in the direction of the man. He was about to call to him, when he realized that he was not supposed to speak. Instead, he whistled the first few notes of “The Drover’s Dream.” Bob waited for the response, and the wind carried it back to him, mournful and strange. Mark had returned. That was all. Bob turned in silence and headed back to the house. But if he’d listened carefully, he would have recognized that the notes belonged to a magpie heralding the coming day. And if he’d only taken a few more steps, he would have realized that the figure was Stan, lost in meditation of his last night in the area, studying the stars that would dictate his wandering.

  The next morning, Bob awoke early with the events of the previous night weighing heavily on him. This cloudy frame of mind was not lifted by the thick black coffee. What was Bob supposed to do now that Mark had returned? Bob heard Noreen stirring in the next room and decided to head out to the feed store before she got out of bed.

  Norm Burnside was in town that day. He was carrying a sack of oats and at first it seemed that the bandy legs and battered hat belonged to the sack rather than the man who was struggling along beneath it, but the hat was Norm’s. Norm was one of the old fellows who still kept corks bobbing around the brim of the hat, attached by fishing line, to keep the flies out of his eyes. Bob hadn’t seen him in years, not since before the war. That was not uncommon in a place where the stations were huge kingdoms unto themselves. You saw your neighbors at shearing time or at the rare social gatherings, which were usually at shearing time anyway. People often limited their sorties into town to a few times a year and running into someone was more of the exception. Norm heaved the sack of oats into the back of his truck and looked over at Bob with the same squinty-eyed expression that he used when tallying up the casualties of the latest drought. Norm didn’t recognize him at first; Bob took his hat off to give Norm a good look before they even greeted each other.

  “Hello, Bob.”

  “Good to see you, Norm. How’s your wife?”

  “She died last week. Wasn’t in good health the last few years.”

  “I’m sorry, Norm. She was a good woman.”

  “That she was.”

  They looked down at the dusty street in a moment of respectful silence.

  “Terrible about Mark,” Norm finally ventured. “Now there was a good lad. Handsome and strong. Best sheep shearer I ever saw . . .”

  Bob nodded in agreement.

  “Hear you married Noreen Grey . . .”

  Bob nodded again. “Is there gonna be a funeral?”

  “Funeral? I’m afraid not. It’s been too hot . . .”

  “Well, it’s been good seeing you, Norm. I�
�ll pass the sad news along to my mother. She always liked . . .”

  “Margaret.”

  Bob nodded and returned his hat, lowering the brim across his forehead. He watched Norm’s pickup, followed by a cloud of dust, as it edged toward the line of the horizon. Bob looked down the road that led back to his house. Somewhere back there was Mark; he could hear him laughing. The laugh echoed in his head, but Bob could no longer conjure up Mark’s features. His face wavered in false memories; his likeness was recalled in the framed photographs that littered mantels all the way to Perth. Mark with a trophy. Mark in uniform. Mark holding a merino in an awkward embrace, shears poised. Mark with his arm around his little brother—two-dimensional memories that seemed far removed from truth. They were not his recollections but the legends of his townspeople.

  Bob picked up the sack of feed and put it in the back of his truck. With a red handkerchief, he wiped the sweat from his brow. The sun was still high in the sky. Bob squinted up until the yellow glare bathed all in a cleansing white, erasing the feed store, the road, his truck. He knelt down to his shoelaces and tied them in firm knots. He stood, pulling himself straight until the two tricky joints in his back snapped into alignment, and then he began to walk.

  Folly

  KEES BOUMAN stood alone in the sala of his house. The breeze, which had earlier bowed the tops of the palms, was suddenly quiet and the only sound was the clock as it shuddered to each tick. Middle age was making him contemplative, he thought, because with each forward step of the clock, second by second into a modern future, Bouman felt the jungle struggle forcefully against it. Here in the tropics there was one endless season that cycled on and on, then circled back onto itself like a serpent eating its tail. He felt like the first, or maybe the last, man on earth. His evening tea was not waiting on the table and his daughter, Katrina, was not ready to serve it.