Shame and the Captives

by Thomas Keneally

  Once Nevski had said good-bye to them and begun to leave with his escort, he noticed that they seemed uncertain what first step to take. Aoki bent down and massaged his upper thigh, as if it had been paining him throughout the interview, but he had not wanted to demonstrate that to Abercare and Suttor. Watching from the Main Road outside the compound, Nevski saw them at last strike on an objective, and turn towards the hut in which Aoki was leader. Aoki collected two young prisoners on the way—one was the wrestler, Oka—and set them as sentries at either end of his hut. The three leaders would first summon together their parliament of other hut and section leaders, Nevski concluded. Their parliament, their prisoners’ soviet.

  • • •

  Giancarlo’s escape from the Herman farm, forgive it or not, continued to have its influence on Alice, and an impulse arose to do what she had condemned in Giancarlo. She wanted to escape the farm and the question of Giancarlo. It struck her that she had every means to do so, at least for a few days. She could leave dutiful stews for Duncan and Giancarlo to heat, and she would visit her girlhood friend Esther Sutcliffe, who was married to an engine driver named Ronnie and lived in Carcoar. Recently she and Esther had not been as close—the things that had drawn them together in childhood, shared grudges against teachers and a sort of enchantment with each other’s company, had vanished. But she wanted her girlhood back now, and at the same time had a suspicion there was something fruitful or curative to be learned from Esther about marriage.

  Alice had written to Esther earlier that week. Esther wrote back a come-as-you-choose letter, and Alice sent a telegram announcing her arrival time. Then she packed her bag and decided she’d let Duncan tell Giancarlo that she had gone away for a few days. Facing Giancarlo might have changed her mind.

  It was the Blayney train she caught, criticized for its snaillike pace and satirized by young travelers, who often jumped off and jogged beside it. With its number of unhurried stops along the way, it took nearly three hours to reach Carcoar. But she enjoyed the fallow time it gave her and even read coherently a few articles from the Women’s Weekly. When she walked with her suitcase up the road to Esther’s little railway cottage of plum-colored brick, she was pleased to see straight off that Esther could not be mistaken for an unmarried woman. She was still good-looking but somehow more solid in a way that did not have to do with physical weight. The established planes on her face and an enhancement of the hips bespoke her as being settled for life, embayed in marriage, in Ronnie Sutcliffe—a pleasant man no more inspiring than Neville.

  Alice discovered that Esther lived amongst noise and mess, since she had three children under the age of six. She attended to them with casual efficiency, not letting any of them interrupt her sentences, many of which were devoted to what had befallen other girls they’d been to school with. This is what Alice wanted. Her idea had been to go and more or less take a bath in the normality of that squalling little house in Carcoar. She wanted to calm herself down, get over thinking of herself and Giancarlo as if he and she were characters in some great drama, instead of laughable figures on a plain mixed farm outside Gawell.

  In her two days’ break with Esther she drank a great deal of tea while, almost as a side thought, looking after the three children. She was especially aware of the heavier and more settled nature of Esther’s body, its fullness and its gravity, when they took the five-year-old to school. Alice held the hand of the three-year-old girl while Esther pushed the younger boy in a stroller. Alice wanted a body like that, one that had got safely home and was beyond madness and didn’t have to fret itself. She would get one from having children. Surely, given what she knew now about sex, she could achieve them eventually with Neville. Indeed, Esther took it for granted that the only reason Alice didn’t have a child was Neville’s absence. But Giancarlo had taught her how to achieve a state of delight without necessarily risking pregnancy. With Neville, properly tutored by her, the trick of conception might be completed.

  The cottage was somehow not as cold as the Herman homestead—Ronnie could always get coal for the fire, and if not coal then wood, and the rooms were smaller. But Alice’s assigned bedroom, very small, grew much colder at night, since nights were, in every way, a different story. During the day she could drench herself in the normality of Ronnie and Esther’s house and drink tea to the limit of her bladder. Ronnie got it from an uncle who was a grocer in Bathurst. When billeted in Bathurst railway barracks, he always made a respectful visit and came away with a little more of everything than rationing allowed others.

  Esther wanted to know about Neville. Alice told her about his camp in Austria, unless he’d been recently moved. And everyone had already heard, said Esther, of how he’d reached the island named Chios—way over near Turkey—in a Greek boat and had nearly got away from there before the enemy had arrived. “He was game as Ned Kelly,” Esther asserted reverently. “And unlucky, poor bloke.”

  As she spoon-fed the baby boy some arrowroot, Alice thought, This is life—a spoonful of arrowroot. Giancarlo is something else. He’s over there, in a dangerous sphere where no sane girl would want to live for long.

  When Alice left the warm kitchen for her bedroom to get the book and the magazine she had brought with her, and discovered her inner cold in the corridor, she would pass the open door of Esther and Ronnie’s bedroom. There emerged even in the cold hallway a heavy scent of fertility, and plain but endless affection. There was no scent of frenzy. It was a companionable smell—of the accustomed, the regular, and the unpunished. As she stood there, inhaling, she thought, There it is, I’m cured. I’ll take that home.

  But she lost her grasp on all that at night. It was disgraceful. Giancarlo still called her “missus” in public and even in private only occasionally said “Alice,” to be safe, to make a slip less likely in front of Duncan. She heard his particular ways of uttering the word, in nuances of deception and friendship and lust, and rehearsed them mentally and for hours during the night. At those times it seemed nothing was healed in her, and no lessons had been learned.

  25

  The lack of normal time-killing activities taking place in Compound C that afternoon was explained by the rumors the senior NCOs had, by their very solemnity, sparked in the compound. Baseball practice or competition was futile now that the teams would vanish overnight. Card games were abandoned, all musical rehearsals, instrumental and vocal, went mute.

  The council of three sat cross-legged on two mattresses, dividing almost as they always had: Tengan the flier on one, and Aoki and Goda the commoners on another, but old enough to feel amused rather than outraged by Tengan’s assumptions.

  “Well,” Aoki murmured, “I have to admit, we couldn’t get a clearer indication than this.”

  The two infantrymen lit and began to smoke their thin cigarettes. Tengan made a murmuring and threatening sound to overbear the unease of Oka’s nearness as guard at the door, of his defeat by the huge young idiot, and of his sexual submission. “Yes, it has been long enough,” he said. “I knew something like this was going to come. I can’t deny that sunlight under any sky is sweet. But I’ve been a prisoner for more than two years, so a neutral party might accuse me of being a delayer.”

  The extraordinary admission silenced the two older men awhile. This sudden, admitted rawness. It was in its way a preparation for the end—as if Tengan did not care about the accusations and slurs. Because now he was taking action.

  “This is why you snarl at newcomers?” asked Goda. “To stop them accusing you of delay?”

  “Do I snarl?” he asked, returned to his old severity. He sniffed at their tobacco fumes.

  It was characteristic of Tengan, though, to measure the intentions of the whole compound by his personal need, his number one prisonerhood—and thus to declare that this was the ordained hour for everyone else.

  Goda said, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We have to tell the other hut leaders first. The men should vote, even if we believe we know what their decision will
be. I think we ought to have a drink, too, while we all discuss things. It might be the last chance. Get that great lump outside . . . Bear, is it? . . . Oka? . . . Get him to fetch some bombo.”

  Aoki was a little amazed that the suggestion would come from the apparently dour Goda, though he knew by now that to read Goda as lacking any taste for solace was a mistake.

  “Do you think we need liquor to help us reach a decision?” asked Tengan.

  “No,” said Goda. “But it would be brotherly, and a toast to seal the issue. It will also be, one way or another, the last time the hut leaders meet. Besides, what’s it matter if some of us get a bit tanked? It’ll create a fiery sentiment.”

  Goda went to the door to give Oka instructions, and to recruit another guard to replace him. Then he ordered two men playing flower cards outside to go and notify the hut and section leaders.

  As they waited, the three counselors couldn’t help but continue predebating the outcome. So, returning to his palliasse and dropping to his haunches, Aoki said, “It’s hard to get around to carrying out one’s obligations here. They put us in a daze by jamming us together and feeding us better than we ever were in China and the islands. We’re like neutered cats. But I think they’ve given us back our balls now.”

  “I certainly refuse to be sent away,” the admirable Goda declared. “But others might be willing to be sent. In my opinion, that should not be a matter on which we point fingers, mainly because it is an individual duty. If some men don’t face up to it, they have to consider what this will mean for the remainder of their lives.”

  “They’ll all be executed at the end,” Tengan asserted, but without dogmatism.

  “I don’t know that we all believe that anymore,” said Aoki. “We must understand, too, that many of the men will want to go along with any suggested action, not because they choose it for themselves, but because they don’t want to let us down, or their hut leaders or their brothers inside here. But I know there might be others who will back away despite all that. I’m in accord with my friend Goda. Men should make their free choice. Otherwise, what is suicide worth?”

  “Free choice?” asked Tengan. “Have they resigned from the army?”

  “I haven’t,” said Aoki. “But even I feel the world beyond us here is changing, and that under their flesh men’s opinions might be changing too. In this matter, I can speak only for myself. I can address only my own obligation. A coerced sacrifice isn’t worth a lot here. A voluntary one is a different matter. In any case, let’s wait now and talk to the others.”

  The memory of China rose in him, as it always did when he contemplated death by his own volition.

  “There are a few riders to be raised as well,” Aoki went on. “An important issue for those of us who survive and get to the outside is what to do with civilians. They presume that we are savage towards civilians. But the purpose is to take their soldiers with us, not women and children and old men.”

  The others both said they were willing to agree to that. The civilian population was an irrelevance, said Tengan.

  • • •

  Around the time Colonel Abercare went to collect his wife to go to dinner with the Garners, the guards in the tower and those in the tent and on the gates of Main Road noticed considerable groups of men going from one hut to another. This was understandable in view of the coming separation, and was considered to prefigure nothing remarkable.

  In Aoki’s hut, the triumvirate stood at one end with their backs against the wall that sectioned the hut in two. They bowed to the assemblage, who bowed in turn, and then seated themselves on tatami mats and low beds. As Aoki broke the news to the assembled leaders, a few junior men passed around bottles and jars of rice liquor. It seemed to Aoki that some of the hut leaders had already enjoyed a pannikin or two of bombo since roll call and that perhaps Goda’s idea that sociable drink should be offered here was a mistake. But if men were fueled by the stuff, they would be more inflamed and ready to commit themselves to the charge.

  Whether solaced by rice and potato distillations or not, the hut commanders listened to Aoki assuring them that Abercare’s mind could not be changed, and that he claimed to lack the authority to alter the arrangements. The fact that he was pleased not to have the authority was obvious, said Aoki, but any further appeal to the man would put him on his guard.

  “So, here we are,” he concluded, “and what do we do now?” He declared that men in their various huts must be consulted on any motion passed here. He also spoke of the pressure for an outbreak and declared that would come from men’s military selves rather than their shakier private selves. There were men who would do it, even if dubious as individuals, because hut leaders and NCOs—the remaining forms of command under which they had served—voted for it.

  All this passed for now without argument. Hut leaders seemed calm. The air filled with accustomed cigarette smoke. “But,” he warned, “the decision about whether to plan an outbreak will need to be made quickly, and action must quickly follow. For if it’s delayed, all our plans could seep out through the wire, and might become apparent to the camp commander.” Or even on prisoners’ faces, he thought, some of which, in a new morning, might be hungover. If the long-spoken-of break was decided on, he declared further (and that was what they were to discuss here), it was time to produce their hidden and crude weaponry—the baseball bats, which had from the day of their entry into the compound recommended themselves as bludgeons, and which now were to be studded with nails; the honed knives stolen from the kitchens. All must be brought out ready for the charge.

  It was curious to Aoki that when men were faced with this, the ultimate and the unpredictable, they often mentioned something minor, something pebble sized, as a great obstacle. One of the hut leaders said, “But they haven’t even manned the machine guns yet.”

  “They will,” Goda assured him. “Once we start. I wouldn’t be worried about that.”

  The marine Hirano, leader of his own hut by now, cheered all souls by raising the germane point that the bored garrison got paid on Saturdays and then a third of them were allowed to go to town. They would drink beer and play cards and reel back to camp utterly unprepared. Best, therefore, for those such as him, who had decided to go, to move in the small hours. For it would be more opportune to attack confused men suffering from headaches. By choosing the right hour, the prisoners might not solely achieve their purpose within the wire, but those who were still upright could seize the garrison arms depot.

  One of the older hut leaders, Kure—the one whose demeanor had offended Tengan at the end of the wrestling match with Oka—declared that though he would consult the men in his hut, and would do whatever was decided, he did not think he would encourage the hope of overthrowing the garrison or seizing armaments. There would be no cloud tonight and no fog, and the drench of light would favor the machine guns and self-atonement far more than it would any ambition to capture arms and wage a campaign.

  Tengan was allowed to rise and state the basic principle: it did not matter if they overthrew the garrison or not. “But to show them we know how to run at their fire—that’s the thing. Above all, getting to the immortal shrine where the dead are waiting for us—that’s definitely the number one objective.”

  Again, guttural sounds of assent echoed around the hut and nearly all forty-nine men seemed to be preparing to explode in noisy unanimity.

  “I suggest,” Goda continued, “you don’t yell your agreement or objection. That will be noticeable to the garrison. Let’s have a show of hands.”

  But here their careening intentions were for a moment blocked. “Wait, wait,” said a voice. “We haven’t been allowed to speak on the motion.” It was a hut leader who could not be accused of prevarication since he was a holder of the rare and cherished Order of the Golden Kite. “I don’t know if we can achieve much,” he said. “It’s all such a rush. I think that, purely so we don’t make fools of ourselves, we compose ourselves, make plans appropriate to a military ope
ration, and go tomorrow night.”

  The all-at-once surly Hirano seemed the one most angered by the proposition of delay. He rose to his feet. Even so, he did not direct his fury too specifically at the holder of the Order of the Golden Kite.

  “Can’t you hear, all of you, daily, our fallen ones,” he called, “even those who might sometimes have been tyrannous bastards, calling out to us, singing the regimental songs? I don’t see them, but I certainly hear them. Because what else is there to listen to through all the time filling we do here? We’ve been asked to embroider nothingness here. As well as that, I am in the common situation of knowing that my wife and parents have installed my memorial tablet in the family shrine, and so absorbed my death. Those ashes can’t be revived into the shape of a living return. We are caught between heaven and hell, and, I tell you, now this plan of separation has been foisted on us, I know more sharply than ever that we must be released from this state of neither life nor death. I feel sorry for those who cannot run against the wire and the guns. Yes, I know many have valid wounds. But that’s where honor lies—to absorb an enemy bullet. And—by the way—to reduce his resources by at least those few ounces. And I know there are many who feel this way. I believe that those who oppose this have let themselves become foreigners in this camp. They are nothing more than vagrants in this middle zone we’ve let ourselves be stuck in. If we could see our own souls, what would we see? We would see those of baboons with bulging arses. Apes who live for the next banana.”

  As much as Aoki intended to run—or at least hobble—along with the others, he was somehow annoyed at the flamboyant ardor of this speech, even if it had been much applauded.

  “Please,” said Aoki, holding a hand up, even though he was aware Hirano’s oratory had swept the floor. “We applaud your sentiments. But it is not a time to talk about baboon’s arses. If we do this, it is to reward ourselves. And, again, if we do it—”