Shame and the Captives

by Thomas Keneally

  “Eat your meal at a separate table from me, and then wander off and I’ll meet you on the far side of the recreation hall. Like two friends saying good-bye.”

  Ban had noticed that, despite the searchlights which had now come on, there was a little triangle of darkness there, not sufficient to protect them from the gaze of the garrison but enough to make them, in all the movements going on around the camp, an unremarkable pair in contrast to far better-lit groupings. Men obeyed the dinner bell as their hut leader urged them. Many were loud, singing couplets of some song or other and breaking off out of ignorance of the lines that followed.

  The meal presented to them by the men on mess duty was served, as usual, on china plates, a concession of respect by the commandant, but was the same old stodge of mutton, polished rice, corn, and carrots—unappetizing even by the standards of a normal evening. The hut leaders passed amongst their men quietly urging them to swallow—they must complete this exercise of consumption to make their captors, the enemy lieutenant and his section keeping guard at one end of the mess, think that all was normal.

  The tinsmith sat at a far table from Ban but within sight of him. No one spoke to Ban during the meal except for the routine business of asking for condiments to make the dismal meal halfway swallowable. From the kitchen, the enemy cooks and their guards, both of whom would soon be able to withdraw from the compound for the night, casually watched them digest the stuff, and the prisoners at the tables, in the irrelevance of their hunger, acted their part. Prisoner stewards, who served according to a roster that applied to all but senior NCOs, cleared plates and took them to the kitchen counter, and, since many plates were only half-finished, uttered the habitual words of the enemy orderlies. “Ungrateful bastards!”

  The men began to rise from the tables and leave. Across the room, Ban saw the tinsmith get up. Ban did the same, wished those around him good night, was largely ignored, and went outside. It was cold already in this country of bony earth where it never snowed.

  When he got to the triangle of dimness he had earlier nominated, he was astonished to see Nonake already there, smoking a cigarette. He had not expected the tinsmith’s conflict of intentions would allow him to move so fast.

  Nonake said, “I just want to hear what you’ve got to say, that’s all.”

  “Do you need to use the latrines first?” asked Ban.

  “What has that got to do with it? Do you?”

  “No,” said Ban. “I suffer from constipation. I believe it’s the camp curse.”

  “Well, I’ve got it too.”

  Ban was delighted to be about the business of garnering this one soul. It might well be the reason he was put in Gawell by God.

  “Come with me then,” he told the tinsmith. “Just come with me. You can make up your mind when you get there.”

  Ban led him away amidst knots of men in discussion on a night of understandable after-dinner movement in the compound, which the garrison would interpret as the business of farewell. Other men made for the shower block or latrines. Nonake walked at a distance behind Ban, as if ashamed of the company he found himself in.

  From the path they trod, Ban could see the draped machine guns, essential implements in the rite his fellow soldiers sought, shining with night moisture on their trailers. He could see enough to delineate separately the wheels on the trailers that supported them. He led the tinsmith to a shed near the hospital. This building was known to Nonake, and he balked. “This is the incinerator shed,” he said in distaste.

  “Yes. Have you seen the incinerator?”

  They went inside, Nonake following with reluctance. They did not turn on a light but could see from the all-drenching searchlight beyond the wire, which entered by a window in the door of the thing. There was the stench of cold embers, the cooled remains of the compound’s detritus.

  “You expect me to climb into the cursed incinerator?” asked No-nake.

  “You shouldn’t dismiss it,” said Ban. “It’s perfect. No one will come here tonight. And don’t worry. It’s not lit till four o’clock each afternoon. Some of the ashes in there, by the way, will still have warmth, which should make you comfortable. See, the rake’s there.” Ban reached out and touched the iron implement leaning against the side of the incinerator.

  The tinsmith churlishly admitted that he saw it. “They burn all sorts of muck in there. Dressings from the hospital . . . I don’t know what.”

  “You’ve lived in muck before. Shit and blood and rotting flesh. You know this is nothing. Besides, I didn’t offer you a hotel. And look, you can close the door partway and use the rake as a doorjamb. Then you can’t get locked in. But no one’s going to come in here tonight.”

  Nonake felt he needed to manufacture more arguments against taking this admirable chance of salvation. He did not choose to seem a man too anxious to preserve himself.

  “Are you going to join me?”

  “Perhaps later in the night.”

  By now, totally won over, Nonake grunted and asked, “When do you suggest I enter the bridal chamber?”

  “Now,” said Ban.

  “But I need to piss,” he complained.

  “Then do it in the corner. Stop behaving like a child. Anyhow, I must go.”

  “But I’ll see you later.”

  “I hope so.”

  The tinsmith, complaining as if Ban were responsible for the fullness of his bladder, went into one of the back corners of the incinerator shed and let go a stream of urine. “You’re not thinking of anything ridiculous, are you?” he called over his shoulder. “Making a fool of yourself?”

  “Nothing ridiculous.”

  Ban waited until his friend had climbed into the incinerator, with plenty of groaning because of old wounds. As he settled, swearing, into the thick ash bed, Ban leaned the rake diagonally across the huge door and then eased the door part closed, sufficiently to shield the old soldier from vision. Ban heard him start into a fury of coughing, which then stilled. In a choked voice from the interior he called, “Thank you, then.”

  After consigning Nonake to his hiding place, Ban went not into hiding himself but back to his own hut. Lights were out but no one was sleeping. There was a musk of frenzy in the hut. Palliasses had been stripped from beds and were heaped on the corners, ready for burning. Ban could see a knot of animated men further along what had once been, until the bedding was heaped, the aisle. He sat to wait on his tatami. His hour had not come and he was left alone by everybody, except a notorious, sometimes amusing, and now drunken incompetent they all called the Clown. The Clown shook his hand dolorously, and Ban could see even by the shifting, sweeping, erratic light the heretical glint in the man’s eyes that said death might not be easy and, from its far side, mightn’t seem as desirable as it had previously to the more oratorical section of Compound C. He heard his name at one stage and knew that they were discussing briefly his otherness and whether to finish him before they charged the wire. Their retrieved weapons, which lay under the mattresses not needed for tinder, were available for the task. But then they moved on to other issues. Even so, to judge the moment he should slip away was difficult. Some of the men drank more of the bombo and were blessedly distracted by it, and conversations were held with fellow drinkers.

  “Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither rest nor sleep,” Ban recited and tried to fight a drowsiness inappropriate to such a high hour.

  Time to go, he decided. He grabbed his maroon overcoat and rose and left the hut as if for the latrines, and was not stopped. He walked to the neighboring hut and stooped and crawled in between foundations onto the mud-smelling earth beneath the floorboards. Here was the only music of the evening—he heard the men above him singing to the plaintiveness of the samisen, on which someone was working with a thumb-lacerating ardor that made Ban want to weep for him.

  He spread the overcoat he had brought and lay under the boards and bearers on freezing ground. He decided it was futile for him to try to combat the extra cold of this s
pace, so he decided to embrace it for a while, in the spirit of Christ embracing the leper. Above him the bombo flowed, and he could hear toasts being drunk by men caught in a vast necrophilia. An entire ocean and all its archipelagos had been captured by a cult of death, and he lay shivering on the earth, a dissenter from it all. Yet its soldier as well.

  And when should he go? He must wait at least until the traffic around the camp, hut to hut, was at an end. Two o’clock, he decided. He prayed a ready-made prayer about perseverance, which he had known since childhood, before he knew what exactly that virtue consisted of. Lying as a mere insect on the earth he was grateful to feel a strange serenity and resolve grow in him. This was his most solitary moment since his capture a year and a half past. A memory of his wife was like a visitation at that dismal hour. It was a visit of God’s own redeemed flower. Her soul had been cultivated and generous and her presence endowed him, at this huge distance of space from her grave, with acceptance. He hoped his daughters would not be destroyed by their orphan status. Surely other members of the church would take them in. But even his uncertainty on that issue became something acceptable and part of the broader plan that is the comfort of Christians.

  Though it continued to be awfully cold down where he was, he distracted himself by praying awhile for an unlikely revolution in the souls of the prisoners to halt the coming stampede, and begged that if willfully caught by machine-gun fire, they would die in Christ and not in some vacant boast. One thing he knew as a soldier—there was rarely arrogance after the bullet had gone in. There was the humility of terror, the reduction of the soul to childhood fears and the realization that monsters exist, and then the reflex cry for the mother who was not there to succor or give rebirth.

  But they wouldn’t need a revelation of that kind as long as his ploy was successful. At this hour, after midnight, he was the loneliest but most soothed man on the planet.

  27

  Mrs. Garner, the doctor’s wife, had promised Colonel Abercare long ago that if his wife came to Gawell she would put on a Saturday-night dinner to welcome Mrs. Abercare. It had taken two months—the Garners had engagements in town and invitations to go to dinner at pastoral properties whose magnates felt they owed a debt to the doctor, and Abercare himself had a mess dinner to which he’d needed to invite the boring mayor. But an evening had finally been arranged. There was always an outside risk, Ann Garner told Abercare, that Dr. Garner would be called out for a medical emergency. “But at the least I’ll be here.”

  Indeed, Dr. Garner frequently enough complained that in the old days you could send out the young practitioners on a Saturday night, but now the young practitioners were in uniform somewhere. He looked forward devoutly to their return.

  Emily told her husband she was very grateful to be welcomed by Ewan’s friends, who were also numbered, not that it mattered to Emily, amongst the town’s potentates. It was only after he had accepted, though, that Mrs. Garner told him, “I’ve asked the Galloways as well. We all know Thelma can be a bit strange. But Roy is good fun and keeps her in check.”

  It was at that mayoral reception eighteen months past, when the women drank sherry and the men beer, that he had first seen Thelma Galloway and knew that she had more than seen him—she had seen through him. She was a smallish, well-made woman, with honey-colored hair. He could not deny that she roused habitual appetites. He did not deny that his first thought was, “Here’s a goer!” Beautiful, hungry, and endowed with a serious, cosmic petulance.

  His reaction must have been enough that night to allow her to think that some compact of possibilities had been established. She had called the camp soon after to tell him that the ladies of the district would welcome the chance to meet him at morning tea at her place and hear him say a few words on the running of the camp. It would be very kind of him if he would consider it. He made excuses, but she called back twice, and had been a little chagrined he hadn’t jumped at the chance. When he’d next seen her at a party at the Garners’, he was embarrassed, for she exercised a cold politeness which by the end of the evening had almost transformed itself into a chiding amity.

  He worried that tonight Thelma Galloway might assert the air of implication she had in the past, and was so good at. The implication, that is, of a small history of private discourse between her and Ewan Abercare. He assured himself he simply wouldn’t play the game for Mrs. Galloway’s satisfaction.

  The Garners lived in a vast corner house raised up on granite foundations and greatly endowed with verandas. It was capable of holding two surgeries in the front rooms, and Dr. Garner had recently recruited an honorably discharged middle-aged doctor from the medical corps to come and share the practice with him.

  When the Abercares arrived, Ann Garner met them at the front door and brought them into a living room, where her husband leaned on the mantelpiece and Thelma and Roy Galloway occupied separate lounge chairs. Thelma was drinking gin and Roy had a beer on an occasional table by his elbow. Roy stood up but, Abercare noticed, there emanated from Thelma a suggestion of disdain as she eyed the noncoquettish Emily. It was as if she expected Emily to say something childish at which she could laugh acidly.

  Roy Galloway said straight off, “Well, congratulations, Colonel. You’ll soon have the troublemakers out of the camp.”

  “You know about that, do you?” Abercare asked, a little bemused and overtaken by a sudden anxiety. He certainly didn’t want the town to be apprised about what was to happen on Monday. It was as if news of the prisoners’ removal to Wye were in the air like influenza and the knowledge had been caught like an infection. Garrison soldiers drinking in the pubs, of course; the filament between the town and the camp being so porous.

  Abercare’s sense of the appropriate was affronted. It was bad taste for Galloway to hit him on the head with this during the introductions. As well, that evening Suttor had phoned through a report that there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in Compound C, which could be entirely explained by farewell taking, but which was nonetheless obviously putting Suttor on edge.

  The colonel answered Roy Galloway with a banal question about how the law was treating him. He kept his eyes on Galloway, though he could feel the pull of Thelma’s, like the cliff you couldn’t help looking over.

  Dr. Garner held up a whisky in his hand, which also clutched a cigarette, as if he wanted to combine a large swathe of the pleasures of the earth in one fist. “Look what we have,” he told Abercare. “Johnnie Walker Black. It’s a gift from a publican. Supposedly for curing his wife’s lumbago, which would have cured itself.”

  “Just one,” said Abercare.

  “Terrible thing is,” said Dr. Garner, “I am restricted myself to one or two weak ones, in case I have to go forth into the night.”

  When Emily was introduced enthusiastically to Thelma by Ann Garner, a moment the colonel had feared, nothing unwanted occurred. No snide message was sent. There was a slight indifference on Thelma’s part, which a reasonable person might consider to be due to the level of tipsiness she’d already achieved.

  Emily and Thelma began to talk amiably about Parkes Street, and Thelma ventured to say that it was a well-made house. The slightest slip and hesitation in her voice, and a perhaps too-frequent blinking, showed again that this was not her first drink of the day.

  “The biggest question people ask when your name comes up,” Galloway said in the men’s corner of the room, “is whether you will stay on here in town when the peace comes.”

  “That’s jumping the gun a bit, isn’t it?” asked Abercare. He could not imagine, without ill-defined fear, what he would do when the war ended and the compounds emptied and he gave up his uniform for the last time and received the pro forma thanks of the authorities. People at home, in Britain, talked about genteel poverty, and there was something about the indoors climate of Britain that allowed people to hide shame and decline better than here, where all seemed exposed under brightness.

  “Well, you’re liked around here, you know,” said
Dr. Garner. “You’d be very welcome.”

  Abercare nodded his appreciation. But his postwar occupations would be unlikely to put him in the company of the Garners or their circle. He had thought intermittently and with some dread of the necessity to parlay his rank into a suburban insurance brokerage, but it remained to be seen whether his separation pay from the army would permit that. Or he could run a little real-estate office somewhere. But a colonel did not necessarily have the liberty to do that. If he expected soldiers to honor his rank, he must honor his rank too. Perhaps it was better to live in obscure poverty in a city than to become a visible struggler in a country town.

  “The liking mightn’t last if I settled in,” he told the solicitor. “Anyhow, sometimes it seems the end might be a long way off, doesn’t it?”

  “We’ve got them both beaten,” Galloway assured him. “Japan and Germany. Just that they won’t lie down and admit it.”

  Sometimes Abercare considered what might happen when Malaya was invaded—Japan, for that matter. Would his prisoners abound, thousands upon thousands?

  The women were still conversing very easily, he noticed with relief. In fact, it was as if Thelma were enlisting them in some grievance against her husband. But Abercare’s peace of soul had been disturbed by Roy Galloway, and it struck him again that if the town, or at least Galloway, knew all about Compound C, then that somehow added a volatility to the whole business and meant that he must go up to the camp tonight. And tomorrow night. Just to be on top of things between the knowing town and the knowing Compound C.

  The telephone rang in the hallway. Abercare had left the number at the camp. If it were from there, he would have no option but to be gone. It proved to be a medical call. There was a farmer way out at Reids Flat whose wife couldn’t breathe, Dr. Garner announced to the company. Ann groaned, but the groan had a habitual quality to it, an acceptance. Reids Flat lay at the end of dirt roads, set by a creek with some notable hills beyond it.