Shame and the Captives

by Thomas Keneally

  Cries of, “We’ll do it, we’ll do it!” arose from the floor.

  Aoki held up his hand. “If we do it, that itself will shame those who backslide.”

  Hirano wanted to say more but yielded to Aoki’s seniority and sat down.

  One further hut leader got to his feet and said that there were practical issues as well as poetic and religious ones, and he would like to propose a motion. Men who could not charge the wire should be told that in hanging oneself, the belt buckle was meant to be behind the ear. There were other methods, too, of course. There were knives. “Cutting of the carotid is a good method.”

  The holder of the Order of the Golden Kite, as he alone could, asked, “But what if only a small group wish to attack the wire?”

  Aoki looked at the other members of the troika. Almost involuntarily he regarded Tengan, in his way the prophet of self-obliteration, and now strangely withdrawn. No one else knew it, but Tengan was reprising within his own head the changes of engine pitch that had brought him down from the sky and the black party of plant gatherers who had captured him, and the self-amazed issue of his having been here so long.

  Goda took up the slack, which would normally have been Tengan’s pleasure to address. “If there is no majority for the breakout,” he said, “I assume that those of us who still wish to go forward will do it. The vote in the huts does not take away that individual option in our cases.”

  The unassailable holder of the Order asked, “How are the men to vote—secretly, or before their peers?”

  This point about the possibility of secret ballots seemed to annoy many, and some asked satirically what would be used for ballot boxes. Hats? Pisspots? And it was laughable to treat this as some sort of municipal election, said one.

  Tengan, revived, now suggested they vote to put the motion to their men, and the assent seemed unanimous. Aoki proposed a further motion should be put to the men about leaving the civilian population alone. There was no dissenter amongst the leaders. For they had no imperial warning to impart to the town of Gawell anymore, no message about the folly of resistance. And there existed the ambition to make an immaculate sacrifice, one that could not be explained away by the enemy as a desire for plunder and savagery.

  Aoki therefore concluded the meeting by declaring the vote in the huts should be taken before the bell for dinner sounded. Yes, there might be the remote problem of something being overheard by somebody such as Nevski, but that was a small chance compared to the imperative that men have time that evening to bathe for death and prepare themselves in ways of their choosing.

  And so with a few further informal motions and ad hoc amendments, they were the parliament of death, even if their arguments seemed so full of the impulse of life and sagacity and compassion. Not all were vocal on these matters, and—Aoki sensed—there was still some scepticism that the ragtag garrison would oblige them; that it would get around to manning the machine guns.

  The hut leaders finished off their rice spirit and moved out, pannikins in hand, in sudden silence, except for the clump of hard-tipped infantry boots the enemy had imposed on them, and went to their huts to institute the lethal voting process.

  The committee of three themselves also moved out to conduct a vote, each in his own hut. Aoki’s men reduced the enemy’s stocks of toilet paper by voting in a secret ballot on scraps of it they had stolen from the latrines, the environs of the hated upright porcelain seats. He saw some men’s eyes widen with terror at their own decision. But they all said yes. They sensed his wishes and would not vote against them.

  Aoki told the dwellers of his hut to disperse again so that he could now receive the votes from elsewhere in Compound C. Tengan came back first with results—Tengan’s vote had been open and all men agreed. Goda had the same result. “The fact it was put to them made them feel they had to say yes,” muttered Goda percipiently, as if he, too, had seen the widening eyes.

  Waiting for other results, they discussed tactical arrangements. The huts should be set fire to at the instant the outbreak began. Since there was so much light directed at the compound, so much moon above it, the prisoners had nothing to gain by not adding their own light. Tengan ran through the assigned tasks—which hut numbers would do what, based on their geography within the compound. He would lead the rush towards the Main Road gate, and so into open ground.

  Goda agreed to wait ten minutes in the orderly room while a series of appointed runners came back—if still living—to inform him of the progress of things and then follow up the charge with any remaining men, calling out to those who might have been initially cowed and still sheltered on the ground to take on the fences and join themselves with the aspirations of Aoki’s group to turn the weapons of the garrison against them.

  In the case of those who attacked the outer wire—or, in Tengan’s case, who led men into Main Road and tried to break through its outer gates—the men who reached the machine guns were to turn them on the garrison, and in their last hour take these old and imperfect enemy soldiers with them into the darkness. Yet should these battles make it possible for prisoners to reach the company magazines, these were certainly to be plundered and a last battle fought along more conventional infantry lines but with the same sacrificial objectives as the original rush.

  It had to be faced, said Goda, the steady mind, that machine guns and magazines might not be taken. In that case, it was decided, it behooved any survivors to make off into the bush; to keep to the rocky, forested ridges, rather than the lowland pastures and roads. They could do more damage from these positions, and hide until patrols were close to them, and appear and startle them, perhaps harming some before themselves being shot by the ever-growing parties that would be sent forth against them. The enemy’s reserves of men and weaponry would need to be expended in the process of finding and executing them, and thus they would not die without having eroded the strength of their adversary.

  Aoki contemplated the end of his world, the affirmed widowhood of a wife whose face he scarcely remembered. There was an impulse to take more of the raw liquor as if he deserved a reward. He resisted it. There had been too much liquor in China. Tobacco would be his companion, then. To the limit of things.

  26

  The family of the prisoner named Ban had been Presbyterian for the past fifty years—his grandfather had led them into the church founded by Americans on the edge of the prefecture’s capital in which the whole clan lived. As the war began Ban was serving in Indochina and he heard that these American pastors had been placed in prison camps, but also that the congregation in the suburb still functioned under the care of one of their own Japanese leaders. Faith endured.

  Today he had stood mute in his hut, this hut of second-class people, when others had raged and voted, fists raised, with the battle cry on their lips, oblivious—it seemed—to the fact that as well as “Hurrah” it meant “Long life.” Ban knew that not all the young men, and certainly not all the older ones, wanted to die so soon. Yet they were captured by a communal enthusiasm larger than their individual consent, and compelled not solely by the rice-liquor-fueled voices of some, but—as ever—by their sense of the homage of the muted yet perpetually remembered spirits of the inescapable dead, and the fact they must honor the memorial rites no doubt already carried out in their honor by their family, rites from which some thought there was no possible return. In the minds of the mothers who bore them and of the fathers who begot them, they were already gone.

  Ban had thought as the meeting proceeded that he must stand up and profess to his faith now, not that the inhabitants of the hut were uninformed of this eccentricity of his. He struggled, through cowardice and genuine issues of stratagem, with the question of whether this would be an empty gesture, to be communicated later to his relatives as proof of his cowardice. Yet another matter as well was delaying Ban. There would have been no memorial service for him, or if there had been he was not permitted to abide by it. The letters from people in Japan that Nevski had brought into th
e compound might have been seen to throw doubt over the idea that their return would incommode and shame their families. Yet in a few hours, they were determined to make return impossible.

  The hut voted yes with an open show of hands. One older man, considered a little touched by having encountered too many close-up explosions in his life, found the courage or contrariness to vote no with a fully, earnestly extended arm. Ban had half abstained and half extended his arm. His apparent assent after the mass of men had already thrust hands in the air was cowardice. A number of them knew he had done enough as a machine gunner in the log-fortified fighting at Buna for them to take him for granted, a strange but unthreatening phenomenon, if not quite one of them.

  Ban despised himself for his timid, bent-armed vote. But he chose to believe that his tentative arm would be simply a saving of energy to allow him to invest and summon up all moral rigor and fortitude for a genuine duty of salvation, which he would rather not be faced with.

  Discussion began about setting fire to the hut in the moment of escape—they were for it. Now each one of the men grew so intent on his destiny that some of those enduring Compound C under false names wrote their true names to carry in the pockets of their uniforms and to enable those who buried them to do so to a body correctly identified. As the rejected soldiers of Ban’s hut worked with ink and paper, they believed they would be transformed into the mass of the perfected dead by the next morning.

  Queues formed outside the showers as men went to clean their bodies for death. NCOs began to arrange things so that the lines did not become noticeably long. Others, in fatalistic groups around card tables in the huts, poured themselves more bombo to celebrate or reinforce their decision. They did not give Ban a thought as he sat cross-legged on his bed, a figure irrelevant to the great imperatives of the hour.

  He remembered a verse from Ecclesiastes which, curiously, the men around him would have agreed with. “A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one’s birth. It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting.” He had two daughters who would now be six and four years of age and he remembered them more sharply than his late wife, victim to a brain tumor. For their sake he found the choice Christ presented him to be a dismal and unutterably painful thing, something too frightful to shiver at; something vast enough to render mere sorrow a side issue. He was as desperate as Christ had been in Gethsemane. It was all wormwood, and should he succeed he must barely expect to survive the night.

  “I greet my sure redeemer and my king,” he declared under his breath as the hut leader appeared and reiterated that the evening meal must be taken and be consumed with apparent appetite, just as on any normal night. “My only trust and savior of my heart.”

  There had been a deal brokered at one stage between the Presbyterian church in Gawell and the camp authorities for Ban to receive a discreet visit from the Reverend Ian Finlay in a room at one end of the camp hospital, with Sergeant Nevski present to interpret. It would be too much for Mr. Finlay’s congregation, as Ban himself could see, for the good man to bring Ban, in his strange and offputtingly colored uniform, down to Gawell to the Presbyterian congregation, even had the commandant permitted it. The faithful, said the Reverend Finlay without apology, are not ready yet for universal brotherhood—some of their sons are prisoners. He placed a brotherly hand on Ban’s forearm and said, “Although the Christian standard is to avoid making cruel judgments, it is a standard that most of Eve’s fallen children find it difficult to achieve.” Ban knew some of the accustomed prayers in English. “Let all mortal flesh keep silence / And with fear and trembling stand . . .” It was only through these that he could commune directly with the Reverend Finlay, without intervention by the Russian interpreter, the suspect presence towards whom Ban held the usual prejudice of his nation.

  Ban could not avoid thinking now, with an edge of futile vanity, that the Reverend Mr. Finlay’s congregation, if they knew of it, could feel a fraternal solidarity with his dangerous purpose tonight. It was important to Ban that in the end the Reverend, inquiring into Ban’s survival or death, should know that he had stood in the way of the proposed havoc. He might then even pass on the word to Ban’s daughters.

  “Gather not my soul with sinners,” prayed Ban, “nor my life with bloody men . . .”

  But a machine gunner such as he had been was, of the nature of his craft, a bloody man, and would exult as he saw the enemy reaped in an enfilading sweep. “Deliver me from the workers of iniquity, and save me from bloody men . . . depart from me therefore, ye bloody men.” Depart from me myself!

  One man who had often found time to speak with Ban was a tinsmith named Nonake from a prefecture south of the capital—not a friend Ban would have chosen as an intimate himself, but one who had chosen Ban, and who did not feel that the strangeness of Ban’s sect disqualified him from all friendship. Nonake was a man of more than forty years of age and he now came up with eyes Ban would have described as bloodshot with doubt. He was walking proof that it is fairly easy to drill young minds—who have not yet invested in extensions of their lives by way of children. It was harder to compel an older man.

  Nonake got down on his haunches by Ban’s bed. “So what do you think a fellow ought to do?” he asked Ban.

  Amidst all the preparations and clumping about, and shouts and laughter from the drinkers, and amidst the bringing of baseball bats and spiked crowbars, knives, and sharpened lengths of wood out of cavities in the floor, and the further hiding of them, for the time being, under palliasses, Ban had liberty to speak to Nonake almost in a normal voice.

  “You want my advice?” Ban asked him. “You really want it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what my advice is. Men have a duty to live. To tell ourselves we’re washing away all our weakness by dying isn’t the path of learning. Anyhow, it’s all very well for these unmarried men, isn’t it? To shout, ‘Death! Death!’ ”

  “Why didn’t you say that when they were debating?”

  “Because I would have been beaten up,” Ban admitted. “And to no purpose.” But there were other reasons, too, which he didn’t tell the tinsmith about.

  “No one would’ve killed you. The hut leader wouldn’t have allowed it.”

  “Still,” said Ban.

  “Anyhow,” said Nonake, losing interest. “This was damned strange. Half the men here who have pledged for death have done it because they don’t want the others to think badly of them. Me? Well, I just didn’t put my hand up. And I’m an old man the fire-eaters don’t notice.”

  Ban whispered, “When it all happens, why don’t you just fall down into the ditch beside the fence and lie there until it’s all over?”

  “Because at the end of the day I must be a man,” said the tinsmith. “And I abide by the majority rule. Even if half the hut are crazies.”

  “That’s a strange case of democracy in a man your age,” Ban declared. “But I know you can see through it. Please. You have a family.”

  “All that,” said Nonake, with tears glimmering awhile on the lower rims of his eyes, “is over. It ended the day I was inducted. I knew then, I knew it in my water, that it was the end of my life. That I’d become something else—already a different sort of spirit. A dangerous one. I intended as a soldier to become dangerous. And the more I managed it, the more I forgot the town and the home. It’s better that way. A man in that situation has to become something else again, otherwise it is too painful. My wife’s voice is very far off for me now. The voices here are close and they move me more. I know you belong to a sect, but you’re a good chap, and I wish you would join me. We could race shoulder to shoulder across the compound.”

  Despite the invitation, Ban could tell the tinsmith didn’t want to do it himself.

  Ban said, “My religion prohibits me from suicide. That’s how it is.”

  “But you nearly sacrificed yourself at Buna. You stayed at your post raving with dengue feve
r. You were raving when they dragged you out from behind your gun. I saw it. I was there . . . Anyhow, for tonight . . . we’re all pretty much locked in. And I can’t deny that for me there’s a sense of relief and peace in it that’s worth something.”

  But Ban felt the man was arguing too long to believe what he was saying.

  Ban said, “You can’t tell me you’re at peace. I just don’t believe it.”

  “Let’s give it a break,” said Nonake. “All our palaver isn’t doing much good.”

  He must be saved, Ban thought.

  • • •

  By early evening, the hut leaders had reported back one at a time to Tengan, Aoki, and Goda. There had been abstentions in some huts. But no hut had voted outright against the proposition. Two had voted instead to abide by the camp majority. A number of the more doctrinaire hut leaders warned the triumvirate that they suspected some would not run at the wire and instead would hide. Should special squads be formed to hunt out the backsliders before they themselves went running at the wire? Even Tengan thought this impracticable and perhaps not to be desired.

  So it was decided the outbreak would occur at three in the morning, at the deepest hour of the garrison’s sleep. It would be signaled by a bugle call played by one of the prisoners. Each hut leader was to be vigilant in the unlikely case some dissident tried to warn the garrison.

  The bell call for mess time sounded out across the compound. The last supper unforeseen, Ban thought, by the Reverend Finlay and by my Presbyterian brethren in the garrison and in Gawell! Nonake began to get up, groaning, from his cross-legged posture by Ban’s bed, where he had continued to sit after their conversation. Ban, also rising, grabbed the tinsmith’s arm.

  “I can save you,” he murmured. “I don’t believe for a moment you want to go charging out at the wire and be shot down.”

  “You’re just making it harder,” Nonake told him.