Shame and the Captives

by Thomas Keneally

  The contest went on in that way for ten minutes, with the prisoners shouting and roaring with gratitude for such a long-running challenge. But the pernicious instant came when Oka got a grip of both Tengan’s shoulders and tripped him from behind. It was so sudden that it seemed to have been done by hypnosis or enchantment. Tengan, on his heels or backpedaling, and trying to find anchorages for his feet, could see the referee circling around them with his fan raised, expecting that this time he might be forced from the ring. However, Tengan managed to achieve a hold under Oka’s armpit and slowed Oka down. He realized now, dizzy, gasping from the energy he had used, that he had just escaped the possibility of humiliation—of being forced not only from the ring but deep into the crowd.

  But Tengan brought his mind back from indulgence in the fantasy of defeat, and held Oka by the elbow and uttered another howl while he had a remnant of air inside him. He felt Oka trying to lift him and undermine his stability by inserting both hands under his loincloth. Oka’s iron knuckles gouged his hips, but Tengan hugged him beneath the armpits and raised him a centimeter into the air. It did Tengan a great deal of mental good to find he could manage such a lift, modest as it was, and as much energy as it used.

  It was important for Tengan to show now that he could do what Oka had shown. Tengan moved his own hands and hooked them on either side of Oka’s loincloth and lifted, creating the possibility of twisting the hulking soldier onto his back. He felt Oka’s arms, suddenly endowed with a new lung-crushing force, attempt to roll him sideways. Neither succeeded in their purpose. Then Tengan felt a great pressure around his shoulders, and the risk was that it might crush him. I can lift him again, he thought.

  In fact, as he did it, the pressure eased. From his crouch position he might move Oka suddenly off-balance and out of the zone—this was the way Tengan would assert himself. He owed his forebears this much skill.

  He had Oka under the armpit and unbalanced him now, and began to guide him to the edge of the zone. Oka’s right hand, however, went under the rim of Tengan’s loincloth and lifted Tengan’s right leg off the dust, leaving it dangling like that of an unwillingly hoisted child. Tengan spent so much energy trying to retrieve his dignity and his leverage that Oka was now able to take him by the shoulders a last time. Tengan himself slapped resonantly at the big man’s ribs, and tried to find solid ground again with his feet.

  Now it became apparent that Oka had been doing what Tengan had with some of his opponents—putting on a show for the audience and awarding Tengan a decent time of survival in the ring. Tengan’s strength and will were depleted. He had expended all his breath on his earlier lift of this huge animal, and now he felt himself lowered by Oka at an angle that gave him no purchase; and then raised again and lowered closer to the limit of the zone, and again lifted and lowered and, finally, hurled over the line.

  He saw the smear of shouting faces as if they, not he, were spinning from Oka’s force. Some were hooting. A soldier had made a flier fly. Tengan felt his shoulder strike one spectator. By a massive refusal to land amongst the bystanders like a rejected fragment, he fell to one knee and arrested his momentum. He looked up and saw the pro-baseball hut leader Kure smiling down at him with something worse than scorn—paternal pity. Then he stood in the midst of the howling and cheering spectators.

  The rules required that he be expressionless, and having heard the referee shout irrevocably, “Bear’s victory!” he knew that he must return to the square. He did it, bile and shame in his mouth. Oka seemed appropriately solemn and humble as Tengan returned, and there was between them a new contest of impassivity. They bowed, side by side, to the crowd. Both of them made a ritual gesture of thanks to the referee. Both left in opposite directions without comment.

  They walked towards the showers, the plumbing the enemy had imposed on them, a comfortless cement hut with a row of metal water sprays above head level. They took their sweat- and dust-drenched loincloths off and in a silence that continued the augustness of their duel, they stood side by side. The water came down cold on their shoulders and stung the places on Tengan’s body where Oka’s heavier slaps had landed and where his hold had tortured Tengan’s ribs. Without looking at each other, they washed themselves and rinsed the soap off. Shaking the water from his eyes, Tengan looked up and saw Oka direct an intense yet strangely casual stare straight at him. It was an assertion of dominance—the dominance he had earned. It was also an argument that the pain and energy they had inflicted on each other was part of their private association.

  The rumor was that the Australian guards watching the wrestling got erections, excited by the lithe bodies—less hairy and less gross than their own—grappling with each other. Maybe. But what was certain was that some of the prisoners became excited, too, and Tengan himself had secretly felt that excitement. So he knew in what terms he must now pay for his defeat. It was fair, and Oka deserved reward. When the victor took one small step closer, Tengan could see the man’s long penis engorged before him. He knelt at once, the water still falling on his shoulders, and took Oka in his mouth. He thought that it would be a wonderful thing to bite into this thong of flesh and not to yield. But the subsequent story would be a humiliation to him, not to Oka, and even worse than failing in the wrestle. He began to apply his mouth with intent.

  17

  The first cold days arrived, the bush iciness noticeable at dusk and night and dawn, though the days remained as shirtsleeved as summer. By the last days of March, Alice had renounced her Giancarlo mania three times, and relished how natural she could be at table in the evenings with him there and Duncan jabbering away. Should his mood coincide with hers, Giancarlo enjoyed being resolved and calm. But sometimes their spates of appetite overlapped, and her manner or his would become a message, and they would quickly reenter a new season of delirium.

  So there were days she blazed, and was once again delighted with this blight, this fever, which attracted somehow the applause of the unthinking sky.

  The cooler weather gave them, one afternoon, every excuse to be inside Giancarlo’s room. There they took risks of discovery which were in some senses massive in scale, tearing at each other and equal in the contest, no pallid carefulness in Giancarlo’s hands but a desire to take and breathe her all in. They operated in a democracy of hunger, though the hunger seemed to belong to another woman—that ferocity, that strange alacrity, that lack of discomfort. This was worth exile or death, or being pointed out in some plain street.

  Nothing could have saved them from an acute humbling, had Duncan visited them. Yet they both knew Duncan was a man of severe privacies. His timid entry was not to be expected as they fell on each other. As well as that, he did not seem to belong to their hours, but to be pottering about beneath an alternative shower of trite seconds, different from their enlarged ones, which rendered him and them parallel and nonintersecting.

  That day she was careful of the time—the good sense of her Scottish ancestry came into play in this area, if not across the entire folly. At the close of the visit she managed to leave the room and the shelter of the shearers’ quarters with utter and delightful hypocrisy, like a nurse leaving a ward, a teacher leaving a class.

  Sometimes, when longing rose in her, an angry contempt for Duncan emerged. Couldn’t the old fool see what was happening? Was all that mute signaling, going on with the passing of a knife or a condiment, so hard to interpret? Couldn’t Duncan also guess that Giancarlo spoke one grade of English to him and another to her, an improper vocabulary of arousal, sanctified on Giancarlo’s lips but originally acquired through the profanity of guards and by way of earnest application in the prison compound to the study of such terms?

  She knew, too, at these moments, that she had put Giancarlo himself in a hard situation in many ways, but not least because he felt he had to work himself to the point of near exhaustion—she had seen him laboring like that on the summer wheat, sweating and distracting himself—as if to make it all up to Duncan.

  Yes, he w
ould agree solemnly with her, they must try to make an end to it. Resolve might take them through a week of abstinence, perhaps through ten self-congratulatory days. And then evaporate.

  Though Duncan praised Giancarlo’s mechanical skills, when autumn came it was obvious that, though apparently a townsman’s son, he had done some lambing in the past. He required very little instruction. He could lift ewes felled by the gravity of giving birth, could deliver the lambs if necessary, could mark and dock them, and delicately castrate them with a knife. The bravado of using teeth for the purpose seemed far from his earnest style. Sheepdogs seemed to hang around him now for orders, though he was not yet as expert as Duncan was at directing them.

  Since Duncan forwent his heavy midday meal at times of demanding activity, Alice beheld Giancarlo’s competence when she cycled down with their lunchtime sandwiches and tea thermos. The lambing coincided with one of their periods of mutually resolved abstinence, and Alice was relieved by the self-imposed lie that what was a mere pause was an entire end to the lunacy between her and Giancarlo. So the three of them sat down at the edge of the pasture to hold a brief and primitive picnic, and after a little conversation with Duncan and Giancarlo, in which Giancarlo virtuously avoided transmitting signals, as she did, too, she would ride back along the track to the homestead, occasionally stopping to look at the men resuming work and the movements and energy of Giancarlo. He had turned a plain rural task into a sequence of captivating novelties.

  • • •

  In late April, Colonel Abercare finally took some leave to visit his wife, Emily, at her sister and brother-in-law’s property in Tathra on the south coast. Leaving Gawell, he traveled as a husband and private citizen, but his rank made it an easier journey, first class and with a sleeping compartment overnight to Sydney. There he would need to change trains and travel south along a beautiful and seemingly illimitable coastline with notable escarpments crowding in, blocking the afternoon sun and bringing an earlier dusk.

  According to Emily’s letters, she seemed content there in Cecil’s verdant pastures. She got on well with Florence, who never made her feel like a relative who was endured simply because there was nowhere else for her to go.

  As for going to pay court to Emily again—its subtleties were such as to interrupt his sleep. During the invasion scare of ’41, when he had commanded the militia battalion, he had half hoped for the great intrusion by the enemy to take place and absolve him of his sins by death or heroism. But now that he was a pure bureaucrat, he had no mitigating military perils of the here-today, gone-tomorrow variety to shield him. Demanding forms of truthfulness, diplomacy, penitence were incumbent on him. And indeed he could exercise them with sincerity. Reconciliation was his total ambition.

  He had, in barracks in India and elsewhere, seen the faces of men such as he going sour for a telltale second at balls and mess dinners. Men who knew they were sidelined now, that the great military river would never pick them up again, that they would need hereafter to be content, no matter what talents burned unquenched within them, with middling rank and the title it might give them for mild respect in some limited place in England or the dominions.

  His own fatuity had not directly altered his military career, as it had altered and destroyed the careers of other officers. He could not blame his never having been given brigade or divisional command, with a major-general’s double crown at his shoulders and red lapels, on the fact he’d gone after a senior officer’s wife. On the other hand, those who weighed promotions might have sensed in him the possibility of losing proportion. Those submerged tendencies were sometimes instinctively read by the wise. So he had grown out of military vanities. His one ambition was to get Emily back: marriage mending was the supreme task. Occasionally, during the day around the camp, Abercare would be shifted about like seaweed by a wave of grief for his wife; for her orphaned childhood after her parents had died in a truck on some perilous road in Rhodesia, and then her failure—which might well be his failure too—to bear children. Parentless and childless, she’d had only him.

  Still, women did not want pity; they wanted the other—the deathless love. He was always puzzled about which of the two operated in him, and did not see them as poles but as two sides of the one entity, one of which underwrote the other. That might have explained his folly back there—that he’d tired of the pity and the politeness and wary tenderness they had somehow come to treat each other with. Now, pity and politeness and wary tenderness looked pretty desirable to him.

  Cecil told him in a letter that he’d overheard Emily tell a dinner guest that she must join poor Ewan in Gawell soon, and she gave as an excuse for not having gone earlier the fact that the seasons were so severe out there. He hoped this excuse would give way to another soon—to her excuse for going to Gawell after all. So Ewan Abercare’s ambitions ran.

  • • •

  For him, part of the pain of going to Tathra was the surmise as to whether Emily had told her sister about it. He imagined that her sister knew something was not right, but would have made no fuss about it. Surely the brother-in-law, Cecil, who was a decent enough fellow and who had in the past sat up with him whisky-bibbing and exchanging anecdotes, and mentioning nothing of marriage, would have suspicions, too, but, Abercare hoped, no exact knowledge.

  The slow overnight train to Sydney then, the Western Mail! That title “Mail” stated a priority for envelopes over passengers and meant mailbags must be dropped off at and dragged along the gravel of every larger station throughout the night journey. Even without that, he would have slept badly. He woke frequently to locomotive brakes applied or released, or to carriage doors banging and the inconsiderate shouts of railway yokels. In the sour dawn he was served a cup of tea and an arrowroot biscuit by the porter, and disembarked at Sydney Central, where a military porter carried his bag and took him to the officers’ section of the tearoom. Here he read the Herald. He had a novel with him, too, but could not read it for more than three minutes at a time. Nothing stuck. Print didn’t stick. So come back, Emily, and save me from this fretfulness and from the stupidity of envisaging a fling with a certain Mrs. Galloway, the solicitor’s wife, who had glimmered in his direction at a civic reception at the Council Chambers at Gawell.

  Mrs. Galloway was extremely pretty in a waspish, disappointed way. What they were beginning to call “neurotic”—a slightly kinder word than “mad” but one he couldn’t have defined. One thing he knew: I attract the sick, and the sick attract me.

  Now, on the south coast train on a lovely autumn afternoon, he saw the empty Pacific Ocean the Allies were slowly reclaiming. So immediate to the railway line, the sea did its glittering utmost to charm him, and only an occasional marring waft of coal dust from the engine came between it and him. He felt a spell of nausea as the train pulled in at the country station, which lay between the blatant azure of the beach and Tathra’s lush, shadowy hills.

  Cecil met him in his Buick with a rectangular coal gas bladder in a wooden frame on top of it, an imperfect means of dealing with petrol rationing, and drove him away from the sea through the somnolent town and up the valley of steep, luxurious pastures and fifteen miles inland, where he bred beef and sheep so profitably. Abercare asked after Florence and was told she had had some women’s problems but was altogether in good health. “Still a perky talker,” said Cecil. “Natter, natter, natter. Emily’s company’s very good for her.”

  Cecil’s great-grandparents had owned these amiable coastal acreages, and he had met Emily’s younger sister on a steamer to England—he had been making his Grand Tour. Florence had seemed pretty and somewhat pathetic after the simultaneous death of her parents. It was true that from the start of Abercare’s own courtship with Emily, her orphan condition—even though she had been seventeen when it happened and was thirty when Abercare had first met her—had sharpened his feelings for her.

  “And what about Emily?” Abercare asked, blushing beneath his tan. “I mean, I get letters from her. But . . . your as
sessment. Good health, would you say?”

  “Oh, Emily’s in great spirits, old fellow. I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”

  Cecil spoke quickly, to get past that giant fact that Emily and Abercare weren’t living together. Cecil seemed to prefer to pretend Emily was on a fairly long holiday.

  “For sisters,” he told Abercare, “they like each other’s company pretty well. There’s a link between sisters who like each other. You and I don’t have a chance of understanding or disrupting it.”

  “Oh,” said Abercare, “I wouldn’t want to.”

  They talked awhile about cattle prices, the world’s hunger for wool—in neither of which Abercare was much interested. The drought was years over and there had always been rain here on the coast anyhow. And the war drove up demand. The colonel knew his brother-in-law was minting money.

  Abercare got out and opened the gate into the property. Beyond its screen of poplars, the house was long, low, deep-veranda’d, graced in front with a garden full of winter-enduring purple, white, violet, and scarlet. He walked to the house, and his brother-in-law parked the car and got out.

  With an uncertain face, Emily appeared with her sister at the door. They had heard the Buick turn up. Her lean, handsome looks immediately roused desire in him and hope of contentment.

  “Hello, Ewan,” she called.

  That was hopeful, thought Abercare. Her sister came out all the way to within feet of him, chattering about how well he looked in his uniform. But was that some weight he’d put on? she asked.

  “Not enough soldierly exercise out there,” Abercare apologized. “The desk is our only obstacle course.”

  He smiled across Florence’s shoulder at Emily, who nodded. When he went up to her, she let herself be chastely kissed.