“Not ‘Giovanezza,’ ” he continued. “No Blackshirt rubbish.”
“No Blackshirt rubbish!” said Duncan, echoing Giancarlo and enjoying himself intensely and raising his beer glass like a carouser.
“This one, ‘Tiempi Belli.’ ‘The Beautiful Times.’ ”
Giancarlo had a pleasant tenor, which he directed in considerable part to Duncan, but, being a performer, he smiled at Alice, too, as if at an audience member. You could tell this lively and sometimes wistful song was one he had learned in a time before soldierhood, prisonerhood. It was more comic than tragic, more bouncy than mournful. Giancarlo waved his head from side to side as verse upon verse rolled unhesitatingly from his mouth. Occasionally, for a line or two, he would clap his hands. Duncan followed his example.
With his song Giancarlo weaved a skin of innocence over the day. Duncan’s beery innocence, Giancarlo’s innocence infected her and promised to give her back the calm, charted world.
But by night the calmness evaporated, though this time she left her room and then the house by the saner means of the front door, skirted the house on the side removed from Duncan’s bedroom, and arrived at Giancarlo’s in a broad flanking movement by way of the farmhouse outskirts.
15
A Korean prisoner, Cheong, happened to be amongst those from his compound enlisted to load bags of harvested wheat onto trucks at farms around Gawell in the high days of the summer. They had been the best days Cheong had had since he had been taken prisoner. They had given him a chance through willing labor to show the authorities that he was not at one with the sullen occupants of Compound C, and such a demonstration was important to him. For Cheong was a nationalist, a Korean separatist. He’d been given a Japanese name—Kagome—but he tried to insist other Korean prisoners call him by his real family name.
Alice noticed how energetically the Koreans who came to the Hermans’ farm worked under Giancarlo’s supervision. These broad-faced men laughed genially at the Italian’s commands, which were uttered in a wild combination of Japanese and English. She was relieved for Duncan’s sake that over the previous weeks rain had not turned up to harm the crop, that the harvest was in, and in a good year, in a war market.
Cheong was aware of the crinkled old farmer’s pleasure, and it enriched his own. The beautiful dark-headed woman—how sad if she were the old man’s wife—would bring them a lunch of bread and canned meat, delivering it by bike over rutty tracks. Cheong thought the woman’s arrival, her placing of the tray on a table improvised of hay bales, the removal of the cloth from the tray to reveal food were rituals that outweighed greatly the near tastelessness of the bread and the salt of the briny meats.
He had not been long captured at that time. He had been pleased to assert his right to surrender following a charge by his sergeant and the section to which he was servant. In his compound, and even amongst the temporary wheat-bag haulers, many of his Korean compatriots who were young and of short service in the army had not fully lost their Japanese martial gloss. He was a member of a small group of rebels who dissented from the general acceptance of the imperial aims. But those others of his race at least pretended to have shamed themselves by surrender. They had not been bullied by their NCOs in Java and Rabaul and New Guinea for as long as Cheong had been there. Besides, a Korean nationalist and secret rebel as was Cheong thought of his own coming war—one not against Britain and America and their white armies, but against those pseudo-Asians of Japan who had recruited and used him; against this empire so eloquent about their fraternity towards Asia that they were willing to kill Asians to prove it. He had also by the time of his surrender seen so many Japanese officers gut themselves and soldiers clutch unpinned grenades to their breasts that he knew their cause was absurdly lost, and he was pleased to know it.
Cheong, when captured, had without compunction or shame given the American intelligence officers his Japanese and Korean names as vengeance for the bullying of his regimental sergeant major. From that day he considered himself an insurgent who intended to drive his Asian masters out of the occupied peninsula that was his homeland by loading wheat, felling occasional trees, making and repairing roads. The garrison only rarely had a problem with the Korean work parties, and Cheong was gratified to hear the camp garrison’s NCOs report that fact to the officers in command of the prison camp.
When he and his friend Rhim, a Korean military cook, had first arrived at Gawell, they had seemed slated to be sent to Compound C, until their “military standing had been verified,” the translator said (whatever that meant). But, in fact, after one night they were moved to join their countrymen in the perhaps less dangerous and certainly more mixed Compound B.
In Compound B Cheong and Rhim met others of their countrymen. This was not like a homecoming. Not all of them were Korean nationalists by any means; some were proud of their part in Japanese military operations. There were occasional vicious brawls, but Cheong and Rhim saved weeks of cigarette rations to acquire knuckle-dusters manufactured in a small illegal workshop under the stage of the recreation hall and were considered hard targets by the Korean loyalists.
They all worked on that farm together, though, and the appearance of the woman with the tray seemed to Cheong a pledge of their coming unity, for they had all studied her with the same intensity, and all their blood had stiffened with hopeless temptation.
He was disappointed when in the Gawell autumn his time working on farms was foreshortened—a blister on his hand from loading hay bales grew septic. He was sent to a doctor inside the Japanese camp who drained the pus. Then, with his hand sulfa sprinkled and bandaged as a certificate of his helplessness and a guarantee against bullying, Cheong set out to reconnoiter his masters’ compound in a way he had not felt confident enough to do in his first visit there.
He walked around the huts depending on a well-rehearsed hangdog gait, which had been one of his staple answers to beatings and other chastisements from bawling Japanese officers or noncoms. Thus, close to invisible—or at least he hoped so—he passed with a seemingly naïve face amongst the prisoners of Compound C. He observed them sitting and standing in clumps by the steps of their huts. He observed some men at wrestling practice, some playing baseball, and some working—according to a roster drawn up by the hut commanders—in the vegetable plot.
As he walked along with his stupidest face and bandaged hand, Cheong heard and saw an older man, a sergeant, lead a section of recently arrived men around the corner of a hut, so that they were on the blind side of the gate that led into Main Road. Because it was his nature, Cheong settled himself around the corner of the hut in morning sun and, obscured thus by the angle of the building, listened to the discussion while he fiddled with his bandages as a pretext for lingering.
The sergeant began by discussing the regiment the newcomers belonged to, because, as he said, he’d served under their colonel in Manchukuo. The colonel was gone? he surmised.
There was the usual shamed silence. Compound C men did not like to reminisce. The new prisoners declared the normal story: The colonel had led them against a machine gun, waving them along with his empty pistol. Machine-gun bullets had cut him in two. None of the bastards, Cheong noticed, ever mentioned fright or kneeling weeping or pissing themselves as the enemy surged on and left them behind to be captured by a later wave.
Now Cheong heard the senior man say, “Don’t despair, then. You won’t be here forever. There will be a night, believe me! And very soon, after the moon wanes. It’s a certainty. We can get through that wire—we have the means to do it.”
They asked a few questions. Wire cutters? they asked. Living ladders made of men willing to impale themselves? The senior man waved aside these matters of detail. They had no need for this information yet, he said. “The garrison troops are older men and toothless old bats. They won’t get all of us, and then, if we overran them, we could get their arms magazine. And then we could really do some damage. Because over there, we know, nearer to the town, is a traini
ng camp full of young boys, great lumps of mutton-fed idiots being trained to invade our homeland. They’re virgin yokels and their souls are unformed.”
Cheong wondered how the fellow knew that—about their souls.
“So those of us who don’t fall in the outbreak can fight a final battle outside, against those oafs, old and young.”
The new prisoners made joyous noises of assent, which Cheong did not fully believe in. They thanked the old prisoner for this message of hope. But Cheong was sure some of them, however willing they asserted themselves to be, must retain an appetite for a reasonable life, and must ask themselves why, if the senior man was so avid for death, he didn’t slice himself up tonight with the cutlery in the mess.
The senior men told the newcomers that in preparation they should do their best not to be lackeys but to be cooperative with the prison guards, to give off an air of having submitted, and to amuse themselves visibly with baseball, wrestling, badminton, and theatricals.
Cheong finished his fake business with the bandage. Nothing further was happening to gratify his interest. The wind nudged at the corner of the hut, gusting him along, and so he presented himself at the gate into Main Road, to be taken back into a compound which, for all its fistfights between Formosans and Koreans, and Koreans and Koreans, was less plagued with lip service to the glories of self-destruction.
PART II
AUSTRALIAN AUTUMN 1944
16
Tengan’s position on baseball had not been utterly opportunistic. He was the champion of wrestling in two senses—his undented belief that it was appropriately individual, appropriately martial; and that it required for victory not only physical force but spiritual preparation. It required a warrior, not a sportive cast of mind. He kept himself to a stern regimen, not smoking, avoiding the camp liquor they called “bombo.” He was not unhappy that it gave him respect. To be the Compound C wrestling champion was a useful enhancement of the moral standing he wished to maintain until the culmination.
The camp wrestling championship had been spread over the last weeks of summer and into early autumn, and Tengan had with some ease defeated all old and new hands who’d presented themselves. In half his matches the referee did not have a chance to wave his fan at Tengan’s opponent, to yell the formal encouragement, “You are still in it!” before Tengan had managed to hustle the other wrestler from the square. These opponents exuded self-doubt from the time they presented themselves, seemed at some level of their spirits to beg for an early humiliation, and thus deserved only a few seconds’ tussle.
Others demanded, by the wounds they had received in battle and recovered from, to be treated more tenderly and technically. He could sense, but was unwilling in some cases to exploit too suddenly, an imbalance between the elements of strength within a mind and the unchosen weakness of a body. He who had suffered only face wounds, of which he carried barely a scar, could not help but respect the more serious approach to death these men, recovered from severe wounds, had made, and which had left them impaired. He let them grapple with him and sway him past his apparent point of balance. He smelled their sweat, blended of camp ennui, memory of defeat, of insignificance on the face of the earth, that a successful wrestling move might allay. He allowed them to try to haul him over their shoulders by an arm drag, an act of ambition that was beyond their means, and then flattered them by stretching his arm in the direction of the ground as if he would soon need it for support. He’d do all that a few times, and then, as if he had tapped an unsuspected well of new strength, would pitch them slowly over, yaw their shoulder down, and make them reach for the steadying and forbidden earth, as the umpire waved his wooden quasi fan and yelled, “You are still in it!”—even though they weren’t. The opponent would grasp the gravel, at which the referee would scream, “You have done it!” and raise his fan to signify Tengan’s victory.
The winner of the B pool, whom Tengan must now face, was a husky young man named Oka. Oka had suffered no battle wounds, other than from malarial mosquitoes. He was in prime health and possessed the sort of mental strength enjoyed not by deep thinkers but by men of simple elements.
Behind the main assembly hall some months before, Tengan had begun a utilitarian affair with Oka during a performance of The Reed Cutter, in which they had both had minor roles. Oka delivered his lines woodenly but had a pleasant voice. Tengan himself was only a middling singer but knew he had feminine looks, something he needed to rise above as a pilot but which, when they were made up for theatrical purposes, he could rather enhance.
It had somehow been all the more erotic, having organized the meeting on the less lit end of the recreation hall, to grasp each other in the dark and, with the noise of the play and the audience behind them, to locate each other under the heavy costumes. This affair of convenience lasted a few weeks because Tengan went through phases of fastidiousness when he could not convince himself of the appropriateness of sex between soldiers. Despite Oka’s enthusiasm, sometimes bolstered by bombo intake, Tengan would not have chosen his company had he been a free man. Oka had, for one thing, called him “pretty”—that forbidden term—and this large man-child was doing more than just neutering a need—within the limits of his imagination, he was making a serious alliance of the flesh. Whereas, were Tengan given the chance to marry, he would never have troubled a male again.
Hundreds had watched the elimination rounds, and the entire camp—except those in hospital with a recurrence of malaria, colds, and aftereffects of wounds—turned out for the final, which took place around a square drawn in dust and four-and-a-half meters long on each side. It was contested on a late-autumn Sunday amongst an audience that seemed at peace with itself. Almost directly north of Gawell, but thousands of miles removed from it, an island named Saipan, in the Marianas, considered to be the doorstep of their nation, was preparing itself for a massive enemy attack, but Compound C was not aware of this, and would have considered, in any case, that America was engaged in a fatal overreach in trying to strike so far north.
Before meeting Oka and the crowd outside, Tengan, in his now-empty hut, took off his deliberately bleached jacket and pants, his sweater and woollen underwear and, still wearing his shirt, tied on his wrestling loincloth. Hearing the crowd milling by the wrestling arena, he knelt in the middle of the hut to meditate. To allow the wrestler to perform well, the mind needed to be cleared of fear and ambition. The ferocities later to be directed at the opponent should not be anticipated, but be retained for later release. Tengan now muttered the invocation to his forebears so that they might imbue him with their strength—the same strength they had given him to become an aviator rather than a mere infantryman or sailor. His father, an ironworks manager and well-liked fellow, arose randomly to mind. A wrestling aficionado himself, in a small way, more a spectator who drank rather than an athlete who fought. That the father would approve of the coming encounter distracted him. Tengan soothed that irrelevance away and reached for the necessary null, unitary thought out of which strength arose. Then, settled in soul, he emerged barefoot from his hut.
Around the square, men stepped back as soon as they saw his arrival and made a channel down which he passed towards the referee. In the center, he made a respectful bow to this officiator, a man of nearly sixty years who had come in from the civilian compound to adjudicate the match. He had been, until the outbreak of hostilities, a merchant in Samoa and a wrestling aficionado, even if a provincial one. To fail to show him supreme respect was to create a weakness in oneself, a germ of defeat.
Through another avenue of men, Oka came, shedding his shirt. His chest muscles were pronounced, and his thighs—familiar to Tengan as opponent and lover both—were like tree trunks. He certainly resembled a victor, but in a facile, merely muscular way, and Tengan knew that Oka had no gift for meditation, and that he could not have prayed very eloquently. Oka made his bow to the referee but, Tengan saw with hope, he had a near grin on his lips, a betrayal of nervousness.
The referee
announced their wrestling names (Wolf and Bear), and they both bowed to him before taking the ends he pointed out to them. He carried the usual wooden fan and, gesturing with it, had them approach each other from outside the opposite ends of the ring. They stepped over the markings in the dust to be sure not to obscure them. Reaching each other, they crouched and flexed their leg muscles right and left, then pumped their legs up and down before retreating out of the ring yet again. Then, at the next wave of the referee’s fan, they again advanced and crouched, facing each other at spots in the dust indicated by the official.
As the referee retired to the corner of the square, Oka yelped piercingly and then let his utterance turn into an ursine growl. Tengan uttered a breathy howl. They contemplated each other eye to eye, and made openhanded feints towards each other. Then the slaps and attempts at grasping began.
Some matches were fast to begin, in that one could get an early hold on the opponent’s shoulders after a few slaps and writhings. But that was not the case with Oka. He countered every raid by Tengan, who wanted early contact and could feel in turn the force of his opponent’s buffeting attempts to grasp him by the arm, all with the exploratory purpose on Oka’s part of finding if it was really possible to drag Tengan over a shoulder and try to propel him down to the dust. Yet Oka could not manage that, and so they went on for minutes, arms tucked under each other’s armpits, trying to force the other out towards the margins. One of them would break off suddenly to confuse, and then attempt to lift the other by the loincloth, or to get his left arm around his opponent’s neck and his right between the legs, in the hope of a smackdown.
They could both counter like lightning and Oka still had the breath to growl to excite his followers. The skills of both men ensured that they circled and eyed each other for periods of time. Tengan found, however, that his opponent’s arms, in reaching for him, sacrificed force for speed.
Shame and the Captives Page 14
