Shame and the Captives

by Thomas Keneally

  Dr. Delaney had a passion for church music. His congregation thought it an eccentricity in him. The question for many of the Catholic men was, “If you can get to heaven by attending a short Mass, why attend a bloody long one?”

  But Emily had joined the choir because that sort of thing was to her taste also. Delaney could not get the farming tenors and basses to swell like those of Italian monks, so he must depend largely upon the voices of their wives. The choir were rehearsing “Ave Verum Corpus” on a Thursday night in the cold church, and the colonel sat in the back pew as a visiting Protestant witness while the clarity of the music lanced the dimness. It was a very simple and pure melody that Mozart had pursued here. It was beyond flamboyance and showmanship. Dr. Delaney was not interested in approximations to perfection either. Occasionally he would mention Roman choirs he had heard, and the Roman pronunciation was to prevail in Gawell. It was “Ah-vay vay-rum,” and then the trailing off of sound at the edge of each phrase, so that “verum” died and from its glorious remains arose “corpus natum,” and “natum” died and in its turn gave birth to “de Maria Virgine.” He was aiming for the standards of that distant independent and eternal city which, thankfully, the Germans had just now abandoned before it had become rubble and its choirs had been stifled.

  Mrs. Cullen had tramped into town three miles from her husband and her clever son to learn to sing like a nun of Rome. Listening, the colonel understood the peculiar seduction of Romanism and the mortgage it seemed to have on plainchant and even on Mozart. He saw Emily’s pale face shining in a row just behind Mrs. Cullen’s gypsy-brown one. His affections soared on “cuius latus perforatum,” soared higher than the modestly vaulted ceiling of Dr. Delaney’s church, spiraled into Australia’s enormous but unpraised night.

  It was here, in the Catholic church, under the flutings of Mozart, that the intelligence officer Captain Champion and Sergeant Nevski found Abercare. They had failed to reach him by phone and so had gone to Parkes Street and been advised by a neighbor that the colonel and his lady were at choir practice. Their arrival at the church was exceptional, because it portended some emergency. But they felt the colonel should be advised as soon as possible of some new information that had come their way.

  • • •

  Cheong, the Korean, hand healed, was back clipping grass along the ditch at either side of Main Road and cutting it from around the uprights of each compound, thus preventing it from concealing the lower strands of wire that might then be cut open by enterprising prisoners. On the other side of the inner fence where Cheong worked, parties of Italians in their own compound were engaged in similar work. Some Italian groups raked the earth, for the camp commandant did not want his compounds to look like so much rubble. Sometimes the Italians would call out to the Koreans, “Hello, Japan!”

  “Good-bye, Japan,” Cheong would cry when the spirit took him—a small utterance of Korean independence.

  There was a handsome Italian boy who worked a little separately from his comrades and who, as he moved closer to Cheong, smelled more than them of sweat, as if he were a peasant unused to water.

  “Name, Japan?” asked the Italian in English.

  “Cheong,” said Cheong. “Korea. No Japan. Japan stink.”

  The young Italian accepted this assessment of Italy’s former ally. He told Cheong his name was Franco, and Cheong used the name and they smiled at each other. The primitive conversation had bored Cheong’s companions, and they had gone back to grass cutting. Franco got talking at greater length. He was proud of the scatter of English words he possessed. He pointed to the barracks and said, “Hut.” He pounded an upright of the fence. “Wood,” he said. He touched the barbed wire and uttered its name. “Wire.”

  Cheong tried to say it—a most difficult word—but Franco nodded and nodded to ease it from him. This boy is simpleminded, thought Cheong, but likeable.

  “Come under,” said Franco. He dropped to his knees and opened a little wire gate someone—not the garrison, of course—had constructed in an area where the grass at the side of Main Road generally grew highest. By attaching cut wires to little wooden jambs—one dug into the ground, one swinging free like a door—they had been able to make this surreptitious gateway. It was the way some Italians got into Main Road and sold grappa to the men in Compound C for cigarettes. A thin man could imagine scraping on his stomach through the little opening. Cheong did not know afterwards why, apart from amiability and curiosity, he’d obeyed the boy and had separated the strands and rolled clumsily between them into the Italian side of things. This was playing at escape, of course, and to enter another compound, particularly one as neutral of threat and as different as that of the Italians, was itself a small and stimulating exploit.

  Franco had been wearing a nondescript canvas hat and, smiling, he took off Cheong’s cap and put his own sunhat on Cheong’s head so that from a distance Cheong would pass as Italian. They walked across the gravel compound amidst its occasional clumps of grass. A man who had been excused duties sat on a step in the sun and was playing an accordion—their kind of instrument.

  Franco, after looking around the compound, led him up into a particular hut. The accordionist called after either the boy or Cheong, “Cretino!” But Cheong did not know what that meant.

  “No problems,” cried Franco cheerily, in the English of the guards.

  Inside the hut Cheong encountered, as in his own compound, a smell of creosote overlaid with another smell he was getting used to—some dull exhalation that was peculiar to huts full of imprisoned, thwarted, spiritually foreshortened men. Franco came to his bunk and sat and patted it as a sign that Cheong should sit beside him. Cheong was now deep inside the hut and making ready to sit on an Italian’s bunk for politeness’ sake. But his enjoyment of the adventure was waning. The plain-minded Franco was unconscious of this and leaned down and brought from under his bed a book. Cheong could not read the text. Perhaps it was one of their scriptures or, by the looks of the heavy print, a dictionary. Franco placed it on his rough bedside table, which he pulled square on to the two of them.

  Next, the Italian pulled out a small notebook and showed him photographs held inside it. An older woman frowned at the camera as if it were her first acquaintance with it. A picture of Franco with four girls, all of them quite handsome. “Sisters,” he said. “Sorelle. Sisters, me.”

  He pumped his chest proudly. He put all that aside reverently now. Then he winked and leaned down and flexed up a floorboard from which the nails were missing. From the space beneath he extracted, as if it had been lying on a joist, a magazine. A girl with huge flowery bare breasts looked at him from its cover. “Good, no? Che seni, no?” said Franco and laughed not like a man, thought Cheong, but a boy.

  Then Franco stood for a few seconds, unbuttoned his trousers, and pulled out his pale penis. Sitting down again, he put the magazine picture of the girl across his lap. He indicated that Cheong should follow his actions, but Cheong was little tempted and chose not to engage in such a juvenile scene.

  However, he was still sitting there when the sergeant of the compound guards appeared, meaty faced, in the doorway. He yelled a question and a profanation in his harsh English, and advanced across the floorboards on his thunderous steel-tipped boots and waving a baton.

  Cheong hurled his Italian cap down on the bed while Franco dropped the magazine to the floor and began rebuttoning himself in a way he absurdly thought was surreptitious.

  • • •

  The remote-seeming Captain Champion, although Australian born, had taught English at an institute of technology in Nagoya. He came to Gawell from Sydney at unpredictable but regular intervals to interview prisoners randomly and see how their self-explanations now compared with the ones they had given in interrogation in the first days of their lives as prisoners. For there were men who did not remember precisely what they had said last time, and who changed their stories subtly. Champion also depended heavily on observation, common sense, and what Sergeant Ne
vski told him. Abercare and Suttor both noticed that the captain treated Nevski with respect, as if Nevski’s academic repute were higher than his own. Champion and Nevski discussed between them the results of new interrogations and passed on their observation to Suttor and the colonel.

  Nevski told Champion that there happened to be a Korean in the hoosegow in Compound B who had declared himself to an NCO a Korean patriot and a despiser of the inhabitants of Compound C, and thus defined himself as an ally, not an enemy. Captain Champion thought that it might be worth interviewing this man, and had guards go into the lockup and take Cheong out with roughness and shouts, enough to alarm him. Even so, when Cheong was brought into the office in the administration hut where the interview was to occur, far from being distressed, he was smiling. He saw Nevski, who was at least familiar, and beheld the urbane captain from Sydney. The encounter seemed to delight him thoroughly.

  The captain said in Japanese, “We know you were discovered in that hut in the Italian compound. Can you explain why you were there?”

  “I was curious,” said Cheong. “I had never seen Italians up close before . . . Well, apart from the one we loaded wheat with. I wanted to see what their huts were like and how they lived.”

  “A cultural tour,” said the captain and smiled across at Nevski, who shook his head a little in a way that said, “They’ll tell you anything!”

  “You see,” said the captain, “we think we know why you were there. We think you were there to buy wine or grappa or dirty books to sell to the men in your compound.”

  Cheong struck a pose of probity and denied he was a dealer.

  “I am more a student,” he said. “I am inquisitive.”

  “But we’ve found bottles of rough Italian grappa amongst the Formosans and some of the civilian internees. You were looking for grappa, weren’t you?”

  “No. It must be one of the old Japanese merchants in there who buys it. Nothing could have been further from my mind.” He beamed. There was something endearing about him; about what Champion would describe to Nevski as “his frank bullshit.” It was obvious, meanwhile, to Cheong that they would declare him a black marketeer rather than a mere inquirer. He became concerned now, for the hoosegow was not pleasant, and the cold, with no animal warmth around him and only three blankets to encase him, prevented him from sleeping for more than an hour at a time.

  He watched the officer and Nevski talk to each other awhile in English. He hoped that they were agreeing that the idiot boy was not a likely source of commerce and transactions. Why didn’t they speak to the ordinary guards, who had a sense of who was up to what in each compound? He said in a rush of inspiration, “There are far more important things than grappa that I know about.”

  Nevski and Champion exchanged glances. “What could those possibly be?” said the captain, trying to sneer with a sort of Basil Rathbone broadness.

  “You must know we Koreans are different from your true enemy. You separate us from them, you put us in with civilians and Formosans and Tamils. We are like the Formosans but more so. We wear the uniform of a power that is our enemy, the same as it is yours.”

  He decided to assume an authoritative tone.

  “I hope you understand all that, sir. Otherwise there’s very little sense in my going on.”

  “So you pretend you hate your former comrades now?”

  “Not only now. I have always hated them. They did me some good by teaching me how to use weapons, that’s all. But one day the weapons will be turned on them. That’s what I’m interested in. I’m not interested in any black market.”

  At last Champion conceded that since Cheong had mentioned “more important matters,” they might be interested.

  “Enough to get me out of the lockup, please, sir?”

  And so he told them about the conversation between the senior men and the newcomers—the way the veteran of Compound C had advised them not to be fretful and to be assured that they would all at some time very soon, on a dark night, assault the wire without firearms but with the purpose of suicide and then of taking the garrison’s arms and magazine, which they thought of as ultimately the same thing. The sergeant had told the newcomers that in preparation they should do their best to show that their minds were fixed on baseball, wrestling, badminton, and theatricals.

  “They are willing to attack those three barriers of wire?” Captain Champion asked, and adopted an air of professional scepticism.

  “It is all benefit to them,” Cheong insisted. “Given the way they think, if you kill them, it is benefit. If they kill your men and are killed in turn, it is benefit. In killing you they are winning what they want. In letting you kill them, they are winning what they want. That is what you must understand. May I say so, sir?”

  It was, he knew, a well-expressed analysis.

  Cheong was now let out of the hoosegow and taken back to his hut without anyone in Compound C, or even amongst the Korean demizealots, noticing. “This is good,” he told the sentry who escorted him into the open air, and the sentry laughed.

  The general idea of an outbreak was a commonplace of Gawell gossip. But the garrison knew better. Once outside the wire, an inhabitant of that compound would be both too visible and too surrounded by vastness to make any genuine escape, however temporarily, a reasonable idea. As well as that, amongst the goods Major Suttor permitted into Compound C were copies of the Sydney Morning Herald with translations of key articles into Japanese. From 1943, and more so this year, the leaders of Compound C and their fellow inmates must have been aware—even if the alien papers could only be partially believed—that the war was at least in the balance for the forces they had belonged to, if not facing defeat.

  Champion and Nevski had already told Suttor and Abercare that the men of Compound C expected to be killed at the war’s end. But this was the first concrete news from within the compound of some active gesture being proposed, and that was why Captain Champion and Sergeant Nevski went into town to find the colonel. Because beyond this full phase of the moon, the outbreak might occur, and that gave the garrison only a few weeks of preparation.

  • • •

  Abercare was on the phone to Sydney that evening of the choir practice and was ordered to drive overnight to the city—an indication of medium urgency—and attend a conference to be convened on the matter. He took what sleep he could in the back of the car while the driver negotiated the clear night and the empty country roads and weaved his way over the Blue Mountains and down into the basin where Sydney lay.

  The next morning in a bare room at the back side of the army barracks near the Sydney Cricket Ground, the meeting was presided over by General McGregor, a man who had been a British regular like Abercare himself. Once, McGregor had led a brigade against the Italians in Libya. And had the enemy invaded the southeast of this country, as had once seemed very likely, General McGregor might, as might Abercare, have had a great role in resisting the invasion force.

  But the thrust never came, and now he was commander of the lines of communication in a tranquil and inviolate New South Wales. He seemed interested in an energetic way, however, when he asked Abercare what the colonel thought of the report from Champion and Nevski. Abercare said he could not see how it could be dismissed. There was a party amongst the prisoners who sought something more decisive—an active death instead of a passive one. Colonel Abercare said he did not wish to imply the active/passive parties were divided down the middle like a parliament. If the general would tolerate a comparison, said Abercare, it seemed many of those in the compound were like Christians who wanted to go to heaven, but not yet.

  The general asked, “And are you pleased with the defenses you have in place and the armaments you have at hand?”

  Abercare knew the military realities—that generals took no notice if officers beneath them overstated demands. It was more so in this country, which had begun the great conflict undersupplied with martial goods and had never caught up on their lack.

  “To begin w
ith, sir,” he told the general, “we need two machine guns sited to cover the compound.” Because of the contours of the camp fences, these two weapons, he explained, could enfilade both the area within the fences and then, if prisoners managed to get so far, the outer ground beyond. (As he said it, he did not really believe in such an eventuality.) He asked, too, for weapons acclaimed for their impact in the jungle—Bren and Owen guns. And then perhaps, he asked, risking appearing a military Oliver Twist, could each man be equipped with a rifle, since the cooks, the medical orderlies, and the clerks had not been supplied with them?

  As he returned to Gawell, starting that afternoon and continuing into the night, he was gratified that the general had ensured the armaments for which Abercare had asked, especially the machine guns, which were being loaded onto the night train and would travel under the care of sentries. As the night deepened, however, he wondered if he should have asked for a further machine gun to place opposite the middle strands of Compound C. But he traced the outer fence in his mind and concluded that a gun so sited and manned by inexperienced gunners could well kill other gunners and garrison members. But should he have asked to be reinforced by another company? Should he have asked for heavier weapons still, and for younger men?

  In the car on the long way over the mountains and across the Western Plains, he saw his desire not to be considered panicky by his superiors was the merest vanity. The best soldiers he had known were men who were utterly frank with their seniors, even with those normally affronted by frank juniors. But once in Ceylon he had overheard himself called “a solid chap” by two older officers, and though he knew they thought that because he had done nothing to challenge the even temper of their days, it had been enough to fortify his conceit for a lifetime.

  Two days later, an alarm siren was erected near one of the gates into the Main Road and was connected to electricity and tried out—its manic, penetrating howl projecting into the camp from a pole outside the north gate of Main Road. Abercare, who had ordered this trial, watched the arrested faces of Compound C turn in its direction and surmise what it meant. He fancied he could see Tengan contemptuously wondering if this was meant to intimidate the inmates. He and others perhaps felt provoked by it.