Shame and the Captives

by Thomas Keneally

  Abercare asked headquarters whether Sergeant Nevski should himself answer the inquirers and tell them the truth. Headquarters, however, declared that this might have unexpected results—that accusations could come back that mail from Japan had been tampered with.

  There were a few prisoners, as Nevski and Suttor discovered, who managed to keep their letters and did reply to them: one was exotically a Presbyterian and a widower. There were a handful who wrote letters secretly and slipped them to guards. Nevski would read the pathetic confessions of such men. “I am a prisoner and alive, and was captured all unknowing while suffering from wounds/beriberi/malaria/scrub typhus.”

  It was rare, though, that a clandestine message emerged from Compound C. Nevski did not send on the false letters written by Aoki and other hut commanders. He let them accumulate in his office. One misty Tuesday when he needed to go to town to buy a birthday present for an émigré friend working in Sydney, he took the letters with him and climbed through barbed wire into someone’s paddock, and burned them under a gray sky, beneath which the smoke of these incinerated lies could be mistaken for a mere vapor. For Nevski the ashes were a small sacrifice to honor those earnest kin still seeking their lost ones. With the hut commanders’ lies consumed, modest and unsated faith could go on keeping its corner at Japanese hearths.

  8

  Major Suttor wrote chiefly in the evenings in his small living room, off his bedroom, in the officers’ quarters within the garrison lines of Gawell Camp. On still nights or when the wind was right, he could often hear the music from the Japanese and Italian compounds. The Japanese were closer and he had become accustomed to the more plaintive airs, suited to life behind wire, that they often played. Instruments had come to Compound C by way of a Japanese cultural group that had been formed in Sydney before the war. There was a sort of guitar, a rectangular board with a set of strings stretched across it. There was also a haunting flute, a sinister-sounding drum, a kind of lute, bamboo pipes, and a bugle. Not all was plaintive. Some of the music from Compound C could sound very jazzy—or jazu, the prisoners called it—but tending to the blues. They played songs you could tell were more ancient, too, some of them doleful, and these, to Suttor’s ear, emerged like an unintended confession of the folly of the war.

  It was not all grim stuff, though. There were nights when the recreation hall in Compound C rocked with laughter.

  Someone was being satirized—General MacArthur, Colonel Abercare, he himself, Nevski. Then there were nights when Compound C went quiet after dark, emitting only an occasional yelp or shout, or short spates of laughter or fury. It was then that the further-off Italian songs could be heard, sometimes accompanied by a full band—jaunty stuff convinced either of the hilarity of life or of the total validity of love. The Italians sang every night, and their music provided the accompaniment to Suttor’s devotion to The Mortons.

  His life in Gawell would seem to some people lonely. He, like Colonel Abercare, lived all the time in camp, except for leave. It was said the colonel was looking at houses to rent in town in the expectation his wife would join him soon, but Suttor knew his would not. Eva Suttor had been an actress in Raymond Longford’s early silent films, and adored for a time. She’d continued acting for the screen after their son was born, and was still a yearning virgin in the eyes of picturegoers. Australians said that her longing and blazing eyes were better than Lillian Gish’s, thus indulging the national myth that Australians could outdo Americans, whether it came to racehorses, boxers, or actors, but that they were willfully ignored by the world because they were at its end.

  Eva and Bernard Suttor had married in 1923, and it had not been easy since. During their life together, she accused him of coldness, and, as time went on, he recognized the validity of the charge. He was a cold man at core. But he also came to see in her what he could not believe he had not seen when they’d first met—the influence of her alcoholic father, the melancholy of the mother. She had frequently threatened him with knives, even with the boy, David, the infant who was the future prisoner, in the kitchen doorway watching. When he thought of his son now, he saw that spectating waif.

  It was an omen of his child’s imprisonment, since a small boy cannot escape from a household, however questionable the elements out of which it is constructed might be.

  Eva had found herself unsuited to motherhood and had doused her misery and fueled both her depression and her occasional peaks of manic and unreliable affection for the child with any liquor she could find. Interestingly, she had an especial appetite for rum, the drink of farmers and shearers and stevedores, but she added milk to it as if that endowed it with innocence. It couldn’t be said that she did not love the child, but unevenly—sometimes with an intense and proud indulgence, sometimes with a blazing petulance which might even be called cruelty.

  Years ago she had gone to a hospital in Sydney and been given shock treatment, and when Suttor visited her she would beg him to rescue her from it. He worried now that there had been vengefulness in his insistence, echoing the doctor’s, that staying there was essential for her health. Later, she was moved to a sanatorium down the coast.

  Then he had taken what some might have thought of as further revenge by going to work in America for a time. But she had remained ill and became markedly worse after the capture of her son. Suttor dutifully and cautiously visited her as irregularly as he could get away with while maintaining some passing repute as a husband. His excuse was that he was likely to be blamed for indifference whether he went there weekly or monthly. Even the nurses took a vaguely chastising air with him, though that had softened a little now in view of his military duties. The word had got around, too, that he was still doing service to the nation as writer of that national favorite and cultural glory The Mortons.

  For two years he had pursued an affair with Marcia, the girl who did the voice of Nellie Morton. At the start of his infatuation, he would turn up to recordings and stand in the booth with the producer simply to listen to Marcia’s velvety voice. She was an amiable, earthy, practical girl, and ever afterwards, when he thought of her and of arriving at her flat on summer evenings with the glint of the harbor stinging his eyes, the memory of her was associated with blatant sunlight. Inevitably, their affection and hunger for each other diminished over two-and-a-half years. He wondered now if she had kept the affair going because she feared she would lose lines if she ended it.

  When a friend invited him to New York in the year of the Munich Crisis to write a nationally broadcast serial named White Man of the Congo, both Marcia and he knew that this was a natural close to their affair. He had made a lot of money in New York, but there was David, just finishing boarding school, who could not be required to live alone and like a freestanding bachelor yet. His son wanted to stay close to his flawed mother, but then contradictorily wrote to neutral New York that he had enlisted in the great struggle, and Suttor feared David would be consumed in another European war.

  Suttor came back across the as-yet-unthreatened Pacific early in 1941, and himself enlisted—out of patriotism, of course, but also to find a new life. He was shunted into a garrison battalion, and—given that the enemy failed to invade as some men, including himself, had silently hoped they would—thus to the witheringly tedious military business that garrison life involved, until he was offered his position at Gawell.

  After the novelty of his outlandish prisoners in Compound C had worn off, the major found that he was stuck with paperwork and routine. In fact, the only drama in his situation was provided by the idiosyncrasy of his prisoners and his attempts to read their motives. But familiarity with this chore, and their determined churlishness and muteness in his presence, eventually seemed to complement the rote work of administration. He wrote reports for Abercare and for Sydney headquarters, and requisitions for equipment and supplies. He issued detentions for grosser acts of rebellion, insult, or assault upon authority. He needed to attend a daily meeting of the colonel and the other compound commanders, and
of course receive delegations from the three Compound C leaders, whose ways, expressions, and postures he got to know well. There were also issues to do with the company of the Australian garrison he commanded—drunkenness, insubordination, neglect. He did not like to be a schoolmaster and depended on his orderly sergeant, an old regular, for advice, and on Nevski. He attended roll call at 1600 hours after making an inspection of the compound from outside the fence. All this made a busy day, two-thirds of which was repetition and fuss.

  It was a pathetic boast, and he made it purely to himself, that his most enthusiastic hours were invested in the utterly fictional The Mortons. The Mortons were Suttor’s forte and his vocation, but they also allowed him to visit a more kindly planet with a better climate. It was in his characters that he transformed himself into the dutiful husband and the warm soul. It was in them that he was solaced. He had created them himself and had been writing them into being since 1933 with a while off when he was in New York.

  The period in which he’d begotten them had been a time of bad and risky days, when there was a chance of a civil war being waged by the not-so-secret secret armies of the pastoral and commercial gentry against the “Communists”—anyone who was actively discontented. None of this shadow had, however, fallen across the Mortons. There had been a reference to the Depression in one episode, when Mr. Morton’s job was under threat, but Mr. Morton had sympathized with his boss’s struggle to keep the stock and station agency, for which Morton was accountant, going. There was no class warfare. Boss and hired man were fellow passengers in the one boat heading in the one brave direction. The agency had been saved by an emporium owner from Sydney. Capital to the rescue! A proposition that could not be believed outside a serial.

  At Kings Cross parties in Sydney, when challenged by leftist friends in the radio business who wanted him to admit through his prodigiously popular characters that capitalism was the problem, Suttor argued that such friendships as those between Morton and his boss were more common in bush towns than in a mass industry in the city. But the truth was he wanted it that way. The Mortons’ world was one in which no laissez-faire indifference to the masses (such as the masses were in the fictional town of Gundabah) existed.

  In that world, too, men became soldiers to save the Empire and precious Australian things—wattle; cricket; dinky-di, honest women. Men enlisted early in the war, too—they weren’t cynical leftists who waited for Hitler to invade Russia. The Morton son, Trevor, late of the Gundabah butter factory, had been a Spitfire pilot in North Africa, and then Britain.

  In The Mortons of Gundabah, betrothals might be unwisely entered into, but they were called off in time. No one ever married the wrong person. Falls of livestock prices would be remedied in the next few episodes by an unexpected rise. Failure of rain was followed by splendid downpours within little more than a week’s worth of writing. In The Mortons, no one ever had adulterous affairs or visited prostitutes. The oldest profession, like Marxism, had no place in Gundabah. The Mortons’ daughter, Nellie, was, of course, a virgin, and had been since 1933. The passage of time affected only the wider world, making it older and older, and more and more vicious.

  The serial, like all such entertainment, was subject to an advisory code. The Morton women, for example, mother and daughter, discussed how to design and wear austerity dresses, which fully satisfied their desires for fashion and which they wore with the awareness that the silk they were sacrificing would go to make Trevor’s parachute, or the parachute of some other noble youth. They loudly disapproved of women who bought hosiery on the black market. Under the urgings of the code, Suttor made Mr. Morton use his petrol sparingly.

  In his other and staler reality, Suttor had become now, without too much guilt, a man of casual encounters, restricted to leave in Sydney and gin-struck evenings with old flames from the Fellowship of Australian Writers, who, being Depression-era leftists, often ended up at the close of their lovemaking chastising him for his total lack of political insight. He didn’t go to the radio studio anymore when he was in Sydney. He had lost interest in the recording process, and long since found radio producers to be annoying filters of his work. One of them, a youngish, shortsighted but unassuming sort of fellow, blithely changed lines. If Suttor ever challenged him, he would tell the actors to change them back, while muttering, “No offense, Sutts. No offense.”

  In the end, Major Suttor decided that listeners enjoyed the thing no matter what was done with it, as long as it was not totally usurped, which the management would not allow to happen. In any case, these days his visits to Sydney were too intermittent to guarantee his supervision would make much difference. He never listened to episodes himself. His comfort was totally in writing it. And if this was propaganda, he wished he could be allowed to write it full-time. For, after all, this was not like Dr. Goebbels’s propaganda. This was holy propaganda. The mother of the child with the rash was Suttor’s wife, perfected. The soothed child was his son, now saved by calamine and blessed with an invulnerable future. And all the others—the father, the cop, the alderman—were the wise he wished he were numbered amongst.

  Some stringed instrument would peter out in Compound C; some Italian song parodying love would end with a mandolin twang. He would hear the boots and gruff commands associated with changing the sentries. Sedated by The Mortons, Suttor slept.

  9

  Eventually Alice had the chance to read the documents Duncan had signed when the Italian had first arrived. Copies of them stood in a place of solemnity—the polished table in the lounge room. The prisoner’s number was 411729. His name was Molisano, Giancarlo Benedetto. His place of birth was an unimaginable town named Frattamaggiore in the province of Naples, and the date of his birth was June 18, 1922. His marital status was single, and his next of kin was his father, whose address was Sant’arpino. The date of his capture was March 5, 1941 (hence, she presumed, the “41” with which his number began), and his “place of arrest,” to use the same quaint term his papers did, was Benghazi, Libya. His military service was recorded as having been with the 86th Regiment of Infantry (Abruzzi). She would discover in the end that Abruzzi was not his home region, but she knew by now there was no rationality to the military. He had been held in Africa and elsewhere until he’d arrived in Australia on the ship Brazil eighteen months past. His civil occupation was mechanic, and his religion was listed as Catholic with a question mark beside it.

  Further, his personal description gave his height as 5 feet 8 and his weight as 135 pounds. His eyes were brown—though Alice had thought them darker—his hair dark brown and his complexion fair but tanned. He had no distinguishing marks. Thus he came to Duncan’s farm as intact as he had been at birth.

  When she undertook to sweep his room while he was out with Duncan, she came across his prisoner-of-war identity card, and within it his thumbprints and his description again, and a full-face and profile picture. She found herself studying this young profile. For some reason, it occurred to her abstractedly—not, she could swear, as a thought connected to that particular Italian—that she had not been held by a clear-faced young man for three years, and everyone, the whole of her known world, considered that this was as it should be. She absorbed the fresh yet knowing face; its combination of willingness and steadfastness and wariness. Yet, as everyone would have said, not steadfast in battle, this Giancarlo. Because he had surrendered at Benghazi, as had some thousands of others of the garrison. Neville had been there, victorious. Before the stupid Greek campaign.

  • • •

  At the breakfast table Duncan said to her, “I’ve got fifty lambs to load up. I’ll get the Italian to help. That’ll show me what he’s made of. Then you’d better make up a few sandwiches.” As an afterthought he said, “And a sandwich for me to give Mussolini too. He can eat it after we’ve finished the muster. Then you’d better come into the saleyards with me. We can leave him here and try out how trustworthy the blighter is. Before we take too many risks.”

  She would ha
ve preferred to stay and go down to the shearers’ quarters to investigate further the otherness that had entered their lives. It was of immensely more interest than the sheep-stinking saleyards. But that would have been out of order and untoward. She began to get the evening meal ready, since she’d be gone that afternoon. Meanwhile Duncan fetched his dogs and the Italian, and they mustered the lambs from the past season. Duncan was wonderful with dogs and at the subtleties of commanding them by varieties of whistling. And with that help and that of the Italian, he would drive them to the mustering yard and up a ramp leading into a large cage, exactly measured, which sat on the back of his truck. When the lambs were loaded, Duncan waved good-bye to the Italian and collected Alice from the farmhouse for the journey to town.

  Duncan declared on the way to town that this fellow seemed a fairly able sort of bloke. But then he said, “We’ll see. We’ll see.”

  • • •

  Alice continued to take the prisoner his evening meal on a tray at dusk, for Duncan—tolerant boss though he was—was still making up his mind about Giancarlo’s suitability for the farmhouse table. Giancarlo was generally sitting outside, by his door, smoking the same sort of thin, self-rolled cigarettes Duncan himself smoked. He would rise to bow and then receive the tray with formal thanks. She liked this ceremonial acceptance of the tray. It added an element of grace to her plain and torpid days.

  At the table one night with her father-in-law, Alice suggested it might be useful to teach Giancarlo some further rudimentary English.