One last look out over the plain. In this dimming light Isao saw what he had not seen before. Steel tracks far off—three miles perhaps—shone with the exactly angled late sun. The intervening country was vacant of all but sheep and cattle and the drowsy fields of grain.
“Anyone can slit their throats, Senior Sergeant,” said Isao, and he turned eyes brimming with ambition and certainty towards Goda.
“Can they?” asked Goda. But the parallel tracks drew him, too, the straightest and purest and most demonstrative of things in a chaotic emptiness. Isao had obviously caught fire at the idea of an eminent demonstration.
It took them an hour, tangling with a number of farm fences, to get down to the railway line and shelter in the culvert awaiting a train.
But when they made it, and hid in a log-buttressed ditch beneath the line, no train came in the last light or throughout the entire freezing night. In the camp, they had dressed to die rather than spend an inglorious night in a culvert like this. Once again they endured sporadic, dismal sleep. All night the rails above them ached and ticked in the cold which, they noticed when light came, had put a crust of ice over small pools of water nearby.
In early light, young Isao wondered aloud why the tracks had been built if they were to remain untroubled by traffic.
36
Hundreds of prisoners remained in Compound C, which meant that some had chosen to hug the ground or lie in ditches rather than complete their charge. Yet it seemed all blame and accusation had been purged from the air, except in one case. Men were astounded to see the wrestler Oka brought in on the Sunday morning, from a truck that had delivered a scatter of other recaptured survivors. Most of them wore their obvious shame, but Oka’s attitude was hard to read and could have been interpreted as blithe, even though that had always been his manner.
The word was passed around that he had slit a man’s throat during the escape, a man who had fallen and needed a brisk end. Those of the survivors who still promised themselves another attempt at self-obliteration, another charge against the wire at some as-yet-unappointed time, began to assure themselves of the improper nature of this behavior. If Oka believed that death was appropriate in the case of a wounded man, why did he now choose to walk back into camp like a man who had suffered a defeat, certainly, but in an apparently unrepentant mode? His appetite at the rudimentary table in the mess hall on the first night of his return would be cited as a cause why men should look askance at him and concentrate their anger at their own failed attempt at self-eradication upon this hulking, brazen remnant. There were rumors that Aoki had done a similar service for a fallen comrade, yet himself survived and vanished into the bush. But, unlike Oka, Aoki could be trusted to court his own end out there.
It was Oka’s bulk, apparent appetite in the mess, supposed lack of self-disappointment, unnatural easiness of soul, and (at least as those who disliked him chose to see it) jauntiness that grew so offensive to the small minority of reimprisoned zealots. No one chastised him directly—his size and a reaction from him could reduce a great question of propriety to the level of a brawl. He conversed with some about the charge, and he did at least reflect on the perversity of the odds that had left him and them untouched through all that. The true believers would not speak to him, however.
When Aoki was brought back through the gate into Main Road on Monday at dusk, he fell to his knees and wept, and kissed the earth for the blood that had been offered up. His escort of guards were at the time completing some paperwork at the gate so for the moment he knelt without molestation from them. The black timbers of Compound C were, he thought, a reflection of his burned-out soul—the soul, as he saw it, of a man the odds had made both a clown and a murderer.
News that he was there spread through the remnants of the compound, and an instantly formed deputation of the party of certainty approached him from within Compound C and spoke to him through the wire. Their attitude was respectful since many had seen him advancing over the fences in his slower gait but with the correct ambition. They called out to him, but he had little to say. He could not tell them that the leather of his belt had let him down. He was a buffoon, and it a comic excuse. It was a skit appropriate to the now-burned recreation hall in the days it had heaved with laughter.
They were complaining to him not about his own unscathed return, but Oka’s. That the man had come back and settled in just as if he had not executed one of his fellow escapees. Aoki groaned—to the limits of the groan, just before it passed into a howl. “Leave him alone now,” he said. “If you are right about him, then being left alone is what he deserves.”
At least Oka’s buckle hadn’t broken and made an ass of him.
“You’ll be tried as leader of the outbreak, Senior Sergeant,” one of them consoled him, “and be shot. But he’s just a dumb ox and will live.”
They were, he was certain, correct about his coming execution. Even they, that army of irrationals and fools, couldn’t leave him untouched now. But that would require a wearying delay and a formal death, which in fact, in the privacy of his soul, he found more frightening a prospect than the haphazard and more familiar nature of a charge against machine guns.
Aoki was collected by guards and frog-marched down Main Road into the hoosegow in Compound B. Cheong saw him pass, and Koreans of the imperial party saluted him as he went by. Cheong yelled after him, “Idiot!” For the balance had tipped his way he felt—the balance in Gawell, in the world—over the last few days.
At an informal meeting in a corner of the canteen in Compound C, Aoki’s advice was discussed, and two of the firmer souls argued it should be respectfully rejected. “Aoki’s just exhausted,” one said indulgently. Others of the group began to be persuaded, and so a small liquidation squad developed. That night, as the wrestler slept on the canteen floor, they grabbed him, six men to one, and dragged him towards a noose they had already prepared and fixed to a rafter in the remnants of the showers. They lifted him to a bench they intended to knock out from below him.
“Your opponent, Tengan—he’s gone,” one of them said, in an offhand version of reading the prisoner his rights. (In fact, they did not know whether Tengan was living or dead. But they were certain of his principles.) “He did the right thing, we can guarantee. But as for you, you great beast, you took a life—you took a life and didn’t have the rigor to take your own.” Oka argued he had asked the soldiers who retrieved him to shoot him. Still, for their own obscure but convinced purpose, the party wrestled him to the scaffold. He went limp now, like a child resisting its parents. But they were powerful enough to hold him up and, as he grunted and spat, the noose was fitted, and then they kicked out the bench and dragged on his robust legs until the thing had been settled and the balance restored and the most blatant survival punished.
Some of them would have confessed they then felt the hollowness of men who had slain the demon and found a tribe of others emerging, not from the outer air but from within themselves. They left him dangling, and guards, on regular patrol, found him early the next morning. Another apparent suicide to go with the ones that had preceded the outbreak, Suttor declared in his report. He was nonetheless frightened by this death as by all of them. Even one like this seemed slated to his account, and thus to that of his own poor David, who had known no normal home, found happiness briefly in a barracks of young men, and lost it in a heinous defeat.
• • •
The sun invaded the long line of trees and glimmered on a fence of barbed wire, from which condensation soon dripped, and on the wet flanks of two cows with whom—unknowingly—Goda and Isao had shared the night. The pastures all around, Goda saw, remained malignly empty of searchers. Go a few miles from Gawell, and you were a lonely figure in a ghastly and disordered landscape in which only steel lines had a direction and a rational straightness, though not yet a sufficiently meaningful one. While squatting in the culvert, Isao almost comically moved, still crouched, from one foot to another, warming up like a midget wrestler. Goda
said, “In an hour—no, two hours—we should move on and try something else. The bastard train will never come. I think this is a spur line. There must be a main line somewhere and a train on it.” As if manufactured by light and the debate about moving on, there was a minor steel vibration in the rails above their heads. Soon the full, though in this case modest and rustic, voice of a locomotive could be heard. Minor as it might be, and sluggish in sound, it made music adequate to their purpose. In the culvert’s shadow, Goda took the time to take out and study his wife’s photograph awhile, something sentimental he had not risked doing in the purgatory of Compound C. It was easy to confront her features now that she was not a reproach. Isao squatted beside him and glanced across his shoulder to see a pleasant-faced girl in a secretarial college uniform. He felt a last futile pulse of blood. The cry of his loins was a whisper from a ghost.
As the sound of the train began to swell and reveal itself as indeed a slowly moving branch-line machine, Goda said, “We mustn’t go up there to the lines too soon.”
He rose, though, to snatch a look around the flank of the culvert. “A kilometer still,” he told Isao and went down again on his haunches in the culvert’s shadow.
When Goda gave the signal, and nudged Isao’s upper arm, they ran up out of the culvert. This itself was an escape from squalor, from shelter worthy of animals. The locomotive was seventy meters away. They could feel its coming heat as they knelt and laid their necks down on the cold rail, which throbbed against their throats.
• • •
The train carrying Alice Herman on Monday morning to what she called “home” had left before five, and had now reached the country around Gawell and its paddocks and crops owned by people whose names she knew. There, after too-eking a journey, the engine took on for the first time dramatic movement. It was not one of speed but of a frantic reach for deceleration. Yet in its urgency and strenuousness it all seemed faster somehow than any pace the engine had achieved that morning. She could hear shouting even before the skidding, shrieking wheels achieved an eventual stop.
She reached the window, which in these trains was—as the girls had said in her childhood—like a guillotine. Once pushed up, it could thunder down on your neck or knuckles again at any second. She opened it upwards and looked out into the bright air. The train was a few feet above the surrounding countryside—the earth sloped away on either side—but she could see soldiers jumping down onto the graveled flank of the embankment and one man lowering a rifle from a carriage door to give it to another.
The train moved again, but backwards from the point to which the soldiers and civilians who had alighted were running. Then the engine gave a hiss and sound of reduced power, which meant it intended to stand where it was awhile. So she opened her compartment door and jumped down to the ground herself. She landed crookedly. She was wearing flat-heeled shoes and happily did not turn an ankle. She made her way unevenly along the sloped embankment. The cold sniped at her bare legs beneath the skirt. When she got close to the front of the engine she saw the driver standing by the track vomiting while the fireman held his shoulders.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“We hit two Japs, miss,” said the fireman. “You ought to go back to your carriage.”
“I’ve seen accidents,” she argued, a bit like a schoolgirl. She had seen Mr. Archer when his tractor had fallen on him and Mrs. Archer had come screaming to their place asking for their help. Men had lifted the tractor off Archer’s body and out of politeness for Mrs. Archer’s furniture they’d put him on the sorting table in his modest shearing shed. So she’d seen accidents.
The fireman lost his fragile temper at her. “Go back, for Christ’s sake, miss. They put their necks down on the line.”
A sergeant major appeared from the front of the engine with the same but politer advice. Awed by their male consensus, and after a delay in which she contemplated the extreme Japanese intentions, she obeyed them.
The train was delayed an hour by those men who had insisted on decapitation. She waited in her carriage, her mind licking like a small hungry flame around what they had done, their utter resolve. She had never thought like them before. Now she could imagine each step they took to the glittering, smooth rail. How they would have bent themselves to its steel, and endured the intervening time full of the shriek and grind of the train. It seemed apparent to her that the hardihood of that act meant she could adopt a similar steeliness and finalize her mess of appetite for Giancarlo. The reasonable and genial single-mindedness of Esther, unblighted by any excess, fortified her and seemed to her the state in which from now on she would manage life.
Duncan met her train at Gawell station, and she sat upright in the truck and explained the delay.
“Must be just about the last of the blighters then,” Duncan murmured.
“Then there aren’t any more of them wandering around?” She wondered what other gestures of iron determination she might see. “The radio says if there are, they’re nothing to worry about. Now, the thing is, I’ve got to take some fat lambs into the sales this afternoon. The sales wait for no one. Maybe you’d better come with me, just in case.”
She remembered her earlier journey for the lamb sales, just after Giancarlo’s arrival. She’d gone because Duncan didn’t know his Johnny yet. This Giancarlo, who now had the hide to try to escape the two of them.
But the suggestion—Duncan and the saleyard auction of lambs to slaughter; the dust and bush tedium of it—shook her, and she said she believed she was safe to be left alone on the farm. And, she thought, it was in any case a good test of what she had learned from Esther and the train incident.
“I’ve got a lot of cooking to do,” she added.
“Well,” Duncan conceded, “I can leave you the rifle and tell Johnny to be on the old qui vive, eh.”
“I think that’s best. He can stay down there at the shearers’ quarters and read.”
Giancarlo, captive to a book. She sounded offhand, but hoped offhandedness could become her true style—indifference to all that had compelled her a week back.
She opened the gate for Duncan to drive onto his land and up to the farmhouse. Inside, the news on the radio informed Duncan and Alice that the prisoners guilty of the outbreak were all but accounted for. Alice had of course seen two of them account for themselves.
So, in case of any unexpected apparition—a last wandering prisoner of war—before he went out to the fields with Giancarlo, Duncan left an old but favorite rifle with her, a heavy one with a big brown stock, designed to fire bullets of a very robust caliber and to kick like a mule.
At lunchtime Alice left it at the farmhouse, this defense against phantasmal Japanese, and loaded up her bike and took the men their thick-crusted beef and pickle sandwiches and black tea. There was no sense in the air that weapons might fall into the hands of the rumored enemy. In view of Giancarlo’s recent escape and her period of reflection and calm life with Esther, she decided what her face might signify to him—caution or annoyance, which she was tempted by. Certainly not limitless desire, anyhow. She wanted her look to be similar to the one Esther took shopping—a comfortable look that said this was a woman whose contentment filled out her body; that she wasn’t an arena for gusts of anger and peevishness and hunger.
Down in the paddocks, she saw Duncan letting Giancarlo whistle up the wheeling sheepdogs, intervening himself only when they failed to respond to the Italian’s signals. As she got nearer, it was Giancarlo who first turned and saw her. Duncan then noticed her and moved forward. Giancarlo remained where he was, one eye on her, one on the activities of the dogs harrying fat lambs into a raceway that led to the truck; letting the ewes into another that presented them with a dead end and eternal separation from their weaned young. Giancarlo frowned, unable to give the required brotherly grin, unable to know what her recent absence from him meant, and not knowing what he wanted it to mean.
Duncan suggested she lay out the lunch on the back of the truck and
launched himself up quite youthfully to sit on the right-hand side of the cloth. Giancarlo easily hoisted himself, hip first, in a way that teased all resolve in her. It was as if he had declared, “Find someone who can move better than that and you’re welcome to him.” He continued to study her closely. She knew he was wondering if she showed a sign of renewed welcome, or was terminating all that secret trading of breath and flesh. Alice, meanwhile, felt both strengthened and forlorn, but the strengthening would do her for now.
“So I’m giving Johnny the afternoon off, like I said,” Duncan informed her. “You stick close to the house and the rifle.”
“Won’t you need to take the rifle yourself?” she asked Duncan.
“If I see one of the blighters,” Duncan said in an unlikely boast, “I’ll grab him and put him in the back.”
“Why would he stay there?”
“Because I’ve got lengths of bailing wire I can use on him.”
“No,” said Alice. “Drive past him and tell the coppers in town.”
Weighing this proposition, Duncan inspected the meat in his sandwich. He turned to Giancarlo.
“So you can read all afternoon if you like, Johnny. You’re a beggar for the books.”
“I might take some reading,” murmured Giancarlo almost sullenly.
“Do some reading,” Alice suggested neutrally. And then, to show she could give a normal compliment between acquaintances, she said, “Yes, you are really doing well at novels, Giancarlo.”
She did not dwell on it. They were finished, and she gathered the leavings, the pannikins, the thermos, and the cloth. She loaded the bike basket up, seated herself on the saddle, and rode away with a casual wave. The impulse was to stop and turn back towards the truck. But she consoled herself that the more normal mere politeness became with her, the more it would become the tenor of the extended if dismal days.
Shame and the Captives Page 33
