by Cory Taylor
He took hold of my hand and squeezed hard on it. ‘Poor Arthur.’
We sat like that for ten minutes while a few people openly stared at us and others cast furtive glances in our direction. When Stanley could tolerate it no longer he shouted something at the old lady standing closest to us and she scuttled away. After that nobody looked at us again until Stanley stood up. He bowed to me twice, very low, making noises about needing to get back to work and, before I could stand up myself, he was already walking away down the platform towards the exit. At the top of the stairs he paused to wave, his back still facing me and his head turned away, as if he was taking his final leave from the stage at the end of a performance. And then he vanished.
I opened his present as soon as my train pulled out of the station. It was a handsome hardcover edition of stories by Akutagawa, translated into English. Inside, Stanley had written a note directing me to read ‘The Spider Thread’. It isn’t a long story, just a few pages. I recalled that Stanley had crammed it into three sheets of a rough exercise book. I finished it quickly, put the book away and watched the darkness spread like a stain over the towns and villages on the outskirts of the city. I was disappointed that Stanley hadn’t written me a letter or enclosed something more personal with his gift, and then I remembered how typical it was for him to frustrate my expectations in this way, to tease me with gestures that were intimate and impersonal at the same time. It was only hours later, in the middle of the night that I understood why the story had such a hold over him. It is about a career thief who goes to hell for his sins, then is offered a lifeline by the Buddha, a chance to atone. What happens and how is not as important as the story’s theme, which is compassion. The thief has none. He is out for himself. At the end of the story, the Buddha breaks the thread and the thief tumbles back down into the river of blood to join all the other sinners. I have read the story many times since then and am always confused by it, mainly because my sympathies tend to be with the thief and never with the Buddha.
25
I didn’t hear from Stanley for some months after my visit to Japan, even though I wrote to thank him for the book and for seeing me to my train. And then I received the first of a series of New Year cards from him that all said the same thing. To dear Arthur, Happy New Year from your good friend Saburo. I still have five of them, four earlier ones posted from Nagasaki and a later one postmarked New York. This last one also contained a photograph of Stanley taken on a New York street—he is surrounded by young American sailors, about six or seven of them, all wearing their crisp white sailor suits and all smiling broadly for the camera. Stanley has his arms around the two in the middle and he is also smiling. On the back of the picture is a note from him which reads I’m dreaming of a white Christmas! After that I received no more cards.
I continued to write Stanley the occasional letter, telling him about my work and my son, inviting him to visit me in Brisbane. You will always be welcome, I wrote. It was my habit to sign these letters with love. Not that I imagine Stanley ever took much notice. I never even knew if he received my letters or read them, because he never replied. To be honest, I didn’t really mind. The real reason I wrote to him and signed the letters the way I did is because for the few moments it took to compose them I could give myself up to longings that I knew to be futile and self-defeating. I was so unused to this sweet sensation that it never failed to take me by surprise. And then I’d remember how I first came upon it.
Sometimes I drove up to Tatura from Melbourne if I was in town visiting Stuart. Of course there was nothing left of the camp by that time, and no obvious sign that it had ever been there. Apart from a few ruined walls and rolls of wire, the whole place had reverted to paddock. On my last visit I took some pictures of the countryside around where I estimated the infirmary had stood, and of the concrete foundations, which are all that remained of the kitchens. I also took a photograph of the hillside where I calculated the graveyard must have been, and where I imagined Baba-san had been buried. I sat for a while on the grass where the back steps of the infirmary had been and stared out at the scene. Without the perimeter fence interrupting the view, it was very different, of course, but the hills were unchanged, and the same sheep followed each other in single file through the same long grass.
I took the photographs with me when I visited Matron Conlon before she died in 1977. She was in a nursing home by then, unable to remember the day of the week. But she remembered me. As soon as I came into view she smiled and tried to sit up in her bed.
‘Why aren’t you in uniform?’ she said.
‘I left the army.’
‘So you did. You found a girl.’
The photographs unfortunately meant nothing to her. She stared at them for a long time, then handed them back to me. ‘I think it was a terrible mistake,’ she said.
I asked her what she meant but she simply gazed at me out of her watery eyes and shook her head as if she was sworn to secrecy.
26
A short time after Matron Conlon’s death, I received an invitation from McMaster to attend a gathering organised in Sydney. A former internee by the name of Kobayashi and his wife were now living in North Ryde, he wrote, with their eldest son Stephen.
Kobayashi was in Hay during the war so you wouldn’t remember him, but you might remember the wife. She was one of the group from the Dutch East Indies, half-Indonesian, half-Japanese.
According to McMaster the couple had managed to send Stephen to Australia to study before they themselves had finally settled here.
I wrote back that I’d be very pleased to attend, but as the time approached for me to make arrangements to travel down to Sydney, I became less and less inclined to go and in the end I called McMaster to apologise for my absence, citing work commitments. He made me promise to keep in touch. He was writing a book, he said, based on his wartime diaries. He might want to talk to me at some stage about what I remembered.
‘Now that we’re all losing our faculties,’ he said, ‘I think it’s important to write this stuff down.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Whenever you’re in Brisbane.’
The next week he was at my door, briefcase in hand, a wild look in his eye that told me he had no time to waste. Now in his late seventies, McMaster was smaller than I remembered, and completely white-haired. I was moved to see him. I think I regarded him as my one remaining link with the war, the only living soul I knew, apart from May, who had any inkling about my life at Tatura or about the events of that time as they related to me.
I made us some coffee and took him out onto the back verandah where the winter sun warms that side of the house. We sat across from each other with all his papers spread out on the table in front of us.
‘You missed a good lunch,’ he told me. ‘There were quite a few turned up that I thought I’d never see again.’
He reeled off a few names that I remembered from the school roll, even if I couldn’t immediately picture the faces that went with them. All except for Sophie, whom I instantly recalled, particularly my last glimpse of her retreating down the corridor of the infirmary with her arms swinging and the huge weight of her belly threatening to overbalance her.
‘Wonder of wonders,’ said McMaster, ‘if she doesn’t show up with Bryant. Married to him for thirty-something years. Six kids.’
I said nothing. He fished out an old photograph, a gift from Bryant, and pushed it across the table to me. It showed the happy couple with their children lined up beside them, all plump and smiling, like a football team.
‘He came back for her after she gave birth at the camp,’ said McMaster. ‘Married her to keep her from getting deported.’
I stared at the photograph for a long time then handed it back, while at the same time a great groundswell of indignation rose up inside me, a fit of pique at the injustice in allowing someone like Bryant any measure of satisfaction at all.
‘He asked after you,’ said McMaster. ‘He said he had a theory about you.’ He smiled
at me and slipped the photograph back into its file.
‘Are you going to tell me what it was?’
‘He said he thought you had a secret life at Tatura that nobody knew anything about.’
Now it was my turn to smile.
‘Did you?’ he said.
‘If I told you, I’d have to kill you,’ I said.
McMaster laughed and sipped his coffee. He gazed out at the garden where the sun was making everything silvery.
‘I must say I was surprised to see you at the docks that day. I never figured out what you were trying to prove.’
‘Neither did I,’ I said. ‘But it was probably my finest hour.’
McMaster stayed for a couple of hours telling me all about his correspondence with former internees and guards. And then he asked me a question that I still find hard to answer.
‘Do you think what the government did to the internees at Tatura was wrong? I mean morally.’
‘I’m probably the wrong person to ask. Morality was never my strong suit.’
McMaster chortled in his deep-throated way. Apparently Bryant had said something similar when McMaster had asked him the same question. And then Bryant had gathered one of his pretty daughters up into his arms and told McMaster that it couldn’t have been all bad if something as lovely as this had been the result.
After McMaster left that day I remained on the verandah lost in a fog of self-pity. It seemed to me that Bryant had somehow succeeded where I had failed, that he had exercised some superior will or had demonstrated some extra audacity, and that as a result he had walked away with the prize.
I must have stayed there for hours; by the time I finally came out of my reverie it was evening and a chill had descended over the garden. It was the time of year when the temperature plunges as soon as the sun goes down and my limbs had stiffened in the cooling air. I caught sight of myself in the glass of the kitchen window and saw an old man, hunched over and pale in the cold light, a dry husk where there had once been firm flesh and blood.
It struck me at that moment that May had been right to insist the war had taken some incalculable toll on me. And not only the war but also the secret life to which Bryant had referred, the burden of which I’d carried alone for so many years. I wanted to talk to May straight away, I wanted to tell her why I’d left her so suddenly that day and how I wasn’t in my right mind then, and never had been. But by the time I found my way through the gloomy house to the telephone, my nerve had faltered. Instead I went to the kitchen and poured myself a fortifying mugful of whisky, then stood at the window nursing it while the darkness descended.
By about my fourth drink I had plucked up enough courage to sit down at my desk and write the letter to Stuart that I’d known for some time I owed him. In it I told him more or less coherently that I’d hidden my sexuality all my life in the mistaken belief that no other course of action was available to me. I now see, I wrote, that this was not proof of my strength as I used to think, but a sign of weakness. I then wrote four or five action-packed pages describing the events that had taken place in Tatura and afterwards, so that he would know the truth. At the end of the letter I wrote that my intention was not to hurt him with this new information. On the contrary, I said, I hope you will see this as a belated gesture of the love I feel for you. Yours sincerely, Dad.
When I finished writing I folded the pages away in an envelope and sealed it. On the front I wrote Stuart’s name, then I filed the envelope with my birth certificate and my will in a manila folder I keep in the top drawer of my desk. The folder is marked Official and I’ve explained to Stuart what it contains in case he ever needs to find my papers in a hurry.
I would like to be able to tell you that this is where the letter remained. However, within a week I’d already moved it twice—the first time to a lower drawer in which I keep my photographs of Stanley and his postcards, along with old tax returns and certificates for shares I no longer own—the second time to my bookcase where I slipped it between the pages of a faded paperback history of Japan that I bought on my trip to see Stanley in 1963. About a month after that, in another whisky-fuelled fit of inspiration, I took the letter and the book down from the bookcase and burned them both outside in a bucket until they were reduced to ashes. I had by then decided that only a coward would write such a letter to his son and that the honest thing to do would be to tell my story to his face at a time when I judged he was ready to hear it. Which of course I prayed may be never.
As I doused the smoking ashes with water from the garden hose and threw the whole mess onto the hibiscus bushes at the back of the kitchen I told myself that this was an end to it. I vowed to disallow visions of Stanley before they had a chance to take hold in my head, to give him no conscious thought or speculation. In this way, I decided, I would free myself from the memory of that time, in the manner of a cure. And I’m pleased to report that, for a couple of years, I was reasonably successful. I conducted myself much as a recovering alcoholic might, counting the days off one by one. I threw myself into new hobbies: social tennis and golf, volunteering at the local soup kitchen, where every single man I laid eyes on reminded me of my father.
Nevertheless, I continued to feel, as many people do, that my real life had somehow evaded me, branched off at a crucial juncture and carried on without me in a more rewarding direction. I didn’t need any proof that I’d missed out on something better than I had, but it came anyway, completely unannounced and, to my mind, unassailable. I arrived home from work one summer evening in 1981 to find a parcel on my front doorstep wrapped in brown paper and postmarked Nagasaki. Inside the parcel I discovered Stanley’s suitcase, the old one from the camp, containing all of his books and travel souvenirs. Stuck on the outside of the suitcase was a sheet of yellowing paper on which Stanley had written my name and address and a note: If I die please send to the above.
The parcel also contained a letter, not from Stanley, but from a certain William Lewisham. He had thoughtfully enclosed a photograph of himself at Stanley’s side. The two of them were posed in front of a restaurant called Huck Finn’s. William, a tall rangy blond, had his finger pointing to a sign above the doorway that read Nagasaki, Japan. Est. 1978. His letter was friendly, almost intimate.
It’s so fucking inconceivable. I kissed him goodbye when he left for his walk and that was the last time I saw him alive. The only good thing is that it was quick. The woman who found him told me that her dog started howling so she came out of her house and found Stanley on his knees in the street. The next thing his heart stopped. It’s like a light has gone out and left the rest of us to stumble around in the dark. He’s buried up on a hillside looking over the city because I can’t bear to think of him anywhere that doesn’t have a view. Yours in sorrow, Will.
For days I left the suitcase untouched. I was unable to decide whether to simply close it up and store it in a cupboard, or sort through its contents. Finally I took Stanley’s books and placed them on a bookshelf in my living room, and the rest I bundled together in an envelope, intending to send copies to McMaster in case he could use them in his memoir. I placed the suitcase itself underneath a side table inside my front door. It comforted me to see it there every time I came home, likewise the books. I never looked at their pages without remembering how Stanley had read aloud to me in the infirmary. I hadn’t understood his Japanese then, and the script remained incomprehensible to me now, a secret code that I would never crack.
This didn’t stop me trying. I would stare at a single character and will its meaning to come to me. When that failed I would move my eye to the next character and the next one after that. I even invested in a character dictionary and began to copy the characters one by one into an exercise book. I didn’t imagine I would learn the language by this method, but it was a soothing pastime, one I still practise on a regular basis in order to calm my nerves.
If I failed to banish Stanley from my waking thoughts, I was even less successful at eradicating him from my dreams. He
would show up uninvited while I was sleeping, mostly in all the old familiar places. He would be outside the Tatura schoolroom wearing his tennis whites, or standing on the parade ground in his funeral suit and charity shoes. Sometimes he was an older man trotting along a railway-station platform, waving to my departing train and trying at the same time to tell me something through the inch-thick glass that separated us.
The dream that I found hardest to wake from, and still do to this day, is the one where he is standing in the doorway of the infirmary at Tatura holding onto his suitcase and smiling straight at me. I always experience this smile in the same way, as emitting a sort of radiant warmth that I feel on the inside rather than on the surface of my skin. And then it is as if hot tears are welling up behind my eyes, although I have no way of knowing whether they are tears of gratitude or tears of grief.
While I wouldn’t claim to know the meaning of the dream I am certain of one thing, which is that over time this spectre of Stanley has lost none of its power to rouse in me the most unreasonable feeling of joy. I’m persuaded for a moment that Stanley is in the room and that the next thing I will hear will be the sound of his miraculous voice. If I wake at that point in the dream, which I invariably do, it is with jubilation, as if in the course of the night some long-awaited reversal of fortune had restored to me everything that I’ve lost.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to: Barbara Masel, Benjamin Law, Krissy Kneen, Caro Cooper and the extraordinary Penny Hueston.
This book would not have been possible without Yuriko Nagata who did all the groundwork and was constantly on hand to take my questions.
Many thanks to the Australia Council for their financial support during the writing of this book.
And thanks to my family as ever.
