Shame and the Captives (12 page)

Mrs. Cathcart called the meeting to order. She and her regulars quickly disposed of apologies and the last meeting's minutes. The child slept on, a pleasant, honeyed weight in Alice's arms. Older children played hide-and-seek around the sandwich table, or galloped round the outskirts of the chairs set out for the women.

Today there were about eighteen wives and mothers, because rumors of prisoner exchanges were in the air. Mrs. Cathcart read a report from the Red Cross journal that told of a meeting in Geneva between German and British officials. The Red Cross had also made approaches to the Japanese Foreign Office and Ministry of War. The talk thus far between the various enemies had been about the exchange of civilian internees rather than captured troops, but—said Mrs. Cathcart cheerily—the proposition of exchanging military prisoners was an item on the agenda for the next meeting in January.

Bunny stirred in Alice's arms. There was again a corresponding movement within Alice. But the image that was evoked at the mention of these negotiations in unimaginable Switzerland was not entirely that of Neville but, more prominently, of the Italian. He might be exchanged too. Neville for Giancarlo?—now that should be a delight for her. Yet she found she couldn't be sure it was. Her mind was distracted by this impropriety of choice as she heard, as barely more
than background, Mrs. Cathcart comfort the womenfolk of prisoners-of-war of Japan with news that, through the Red Cross once more, Japanese civilian internees were indeed to be exchanged forthwith for British and American detainees in Japan. Yea, even the gates of Gawell might be opened to let the Japanese civilians go home under some flag of exchange.

There was tea after the meeting. Women thanked Mrs. Cathcart in brittle excitement. Bunny woke and started chasing after older girls. After one quickly drunk cup, Alice excused herself. She had more errands about town. She strode off to Oxley Street, where the newsstand sold schoolbooks. Here, she acquired two readers for children:
Don and Jane Go Shopping
and
Don and Jane Go to the Country
. Full of pedagogic fervor, she bore them home with the grocery shopping.

The following Monday, when Duncan Herman came into the house at the end of the day, Alice went down to the shearers' quarters and sat with Giancarlo at the pine table outside his window and gave a forty-minute lesson. She was conscious of the time allotted, and determined, for the maintenance of some instinctive standard, that it should not be longer than that time. She sat at his shoulder, a little to the rear of him, with the books on the table, and pointed at words as he read: “After they came home from school, Don and Jane went shopping for their mother.”

This came out with all sorts of added vowels—the mystery of Italian pronunciation recurred again and again as he paused for a moment or two over sentences.

Don—obviously so named to honor the great Australian batsman Don Bradman—sounded in Giancarlo's mouth like Doan. That was to be expected, she knew. She did not try to correct him unnecessarily. For though she was there to teach him English, she was also
not
there to teach him English, but to learn from him something she still could not define. After two, nearly three years of her father-in-law's company, she had a hunger for the company of a man, someone who
had not resigned yet from the business of being one. Not a spent force of a fellow like Duncan, as decent a chap as he was.

She sensed that she required conversation with a young male, even if it did involve negotiating a wall of language. But even given that, now and then a handclasp of shared understanding could be achieved—relief from the fully shared but dead-plain discourse with Duncan and from the hours of servitude.

“Is this of any use to you?” she asked, pointing to the school reader. “Is it all too simple?”

She could not help suspecting all the time that he was more subtle in a way she would have had to come from his world to gauge.

He assured her with a doleful face. “Is all good to know,” he insisted. “Is
all
good.”

“But are Italian towns,” she asked helplessly, scrambling for detailed news, “like our towns? And Italian children?”

“All the same,” he assured her softly. “All the same Don and Jane.”

But she could somehow tell there were broad differences he could or would not describe. She would have been delighted to comprehend what they were. He could sense disappointment.

“No footpath,” he contributed. “The road.” He laid his left hand flat, palm down. Then he made his other palm vertical beside it. “And then the wall. No good for Don and Jane.”

He made a sound like an approaching car.
“Barp! Barp!”

Altogether, she'd learned next to nothing from this, except that he was willing to try to placate her. Once she realized she could not get very far with her kind of direct and even childish quizzing, that she would hear from him in better form what he desired to tell her on his own account, the lesson began to improve.

Leaning forwards, she could see that Giancarlo approached the labor with an unseamed brow and without a learner's frown. She was easily convinced, given his finer features, that it was not the uncreased nature of stupidity. It couldn't be . . . Could it? . . . That he was patronising her, and did not need the class?
Don and Jane Go
Shopping
was quickly dispensed with. In the second book, Don and Jane went to the chemist for medicine for their sick uncle, the farmer. Until now Giancarlo had managed the names of all the animals, the horse with the ghost of an “a” at the end, the goat, and the rest.

“Chee-mist?” he asked with that earnestness of his.

“Keh-mist,” she said. “Medicines.”

“Medico,”
he said.

“No, a shop. The chemist makes the medicines for people.”

“Farmacia,”
he said. “
Farmacia
. Keh-mist.”

“Pharmacy, yes. A chemist's.”

She had seen Americans call it “drugstore” in the motion pictures.

“My father—
mio padre
 . . . he is a
farmacista
. He has a
farmacia
in Frattamaggiore.”

She had read that town name in his papers.

“Is it a big town?” she asked slowly in children's reader–like words.

“It's—how to say?—the whole
distretto
? Twenty thousand . . .” The word “thousand” sounded lyrical in his pronunciation.

A song dedicated to the constituent hundreds.

“My father,” he said, “a man with education.”

“Were you
forced
into the army?” she wanted to know. “By Mussolini? Or did you join because you wanted to?”

In an early letter from the desert, Neville had said they were conscripts. That's why they weren't so interested in dying.

Giancarlo said, “If a man healthy, he can't say, ‘Mussolini, I don' wanna.' So . . . Libya. In Benghazi I repair the Breda guns.”

“Brayda?” asked Alice.

“Breda. Machine gun.
Rat-a-tat
.”

He put his head apologetically to one side and seemed to know that his part in preparing these life-reaping machines might not be popular with her, and indeed she asked, “But you didn't like Mussolini?”

“
Abbasso il Duce!
I am
anarchico. Mio padre
 . . . father. He's
socialdemocratico
. Come Labor Party! Mr. Curtin!”

“You know about Mr. Curtin?”

The much-loved prime minister of the Commonwealth, with his soft, weary features and his frown of endeavor.

“From the
Herald
. They give us
Herald
to show us bad news from Italia. I know this Mr. Curtin. Good fellow.
Socialdemocratico
. As my daddy.”

“Your father,” she insisted. “Children say ‘daddy,' grown-ups say ‘father.' ”

“My father,” he said obediently, making a wry mouth. “Mussolini don't like
Socialdemocratico
. But up in camp there now they all say they hate Benito. You go into the Compound B and the Compound D and they all tell you they done never like Mussolini. But they much lie. They some still like him. Not the same as before. When Benghazi fall . . . the
Fascisti
say to us, you are disgrace to surrender . . . they like Mussolini a lot then! They think then he still win the war, and
l'Impero italiano
and all that horsefeathers.”

“Where did you learn a word like ‘horsefeathers'?”

“
Cinema.
Marx Brothers.”

And he made an elegant gesture with his right hand, clearing that issue out of the way.

“Your English is coming on,” she said.

“Coming on?” he murmured doubtfully.

“Getting better,” said Alice.

“No, not so good,” he said with his half-committed smile.

“Well,” she said, “Rome wasn't built in a day.”

She realized the dictum was absurd to his ears and shook her head. “That's just a saying,” she assured him.

“Roma wassa not built in a day,” he repeated twice. The laughter between them was confident. She knew it was something like this, reaching over the line of language to find another person, not a student. Besides, Alice knew she'd been naïve with her Don and Jane primers. It was a wonder he hadn't been offended by them. She removed them from the table and placed them beside her on the
chair. His command of the language seemed at least as serviceable as that of the Italians who'd run the fruit shops in town before the war started—the ones who had been briefly interned and who had then returned to take up business again. Duncan thought Giancarlo needed English classes. Yet now the prisoner seemed to be unveiling the range of his English to Alice. Might he have done it innocently, speaking in one or two words to try to please Duncan, attempting not to be considered a smart aleck, or—more than that—trying not to break the unspoken compact by which it was assumed in the bush that Italians
could
manage only one or two words of English at a time.

“So,” she pursued, “you mentioned something elsewhere. Something between Curtin and Mussolini? You said that's what you are. Like John Curtin.”

“No. I am
anarco-sindacalista
. You know
anarco-sindacalista
?”

“No, I don't have the foggiest idea what that is.”

“The ‘one big union,' ” he said. “All men and women together. The state . . . it'sa no good for the real people.”

She wondered if he really meant this—that the state was no good to anyone. She'd never heard anyone ever propose it wasn't. “You're messing around with me, aren't you? There's no such thing as this one big union? If there were no state, we wouldn't be able to fight the Japanese.”

He smiled mildly and his eyes glimmered. “If there is no
stato giapponese
, no need to fight the Japanese.”

“But you fought for the state of Italy?”

“Because I don' wanna go to prison.” He laughed outright now and shook his head. “So . . . I am a
prigioniero
anyhow. But better here than a Mussolini gaol. Signor Duncan better than Benito.” She knew guiltily that wherever Neville was, he wasn't smiling as complacently as this Italian, and that the contradictions would not be sitting as easily with him as they seemed to with Giancarlo. She did not like to think this Italian was having an easier time of it than Neville. “We are well treated,” Neville had written in one rare letter earlier in the
year. But was he required to? And did he enjoy the ease of soul that Molisano did at this moment?

“Do you know what?” she asked. “I think you are a cunning man.”

The frown that came on was chiefly in his eyes; his brow remained smooth and seamless. It was as if he was trying at that moment to prove that what people said about Italians was true. That they tried things on, saw how far they could confuse people.

“Do you know what ‘cunning' means?” she asked. “It means deceitful . . . telling lies.”

He raised his hands palms up as a protest.

She said, “You are telling us stories to suit your case.”

He seemed mildly offended, but there came no grin of repentance, of a man caught out in a lie. In fact, he bowed his head a little and looked at her from beneath his brows, to assess whether she was playing with him or not. He was affronted so subtly that no reasonable person could have called it insolence and rung the Control Center with complaints. His mild but complicated pique fascinated her, sent a pulse of curiosity that urged her to press her case against him.

She said, “It suits you to talk about how there should be no state now that Mussolini's on the way out. But did you say anything about that when you were in Benghazi? Before the war really got going?”

She laughed then, not totally indulgent. His concern at being found suspect made her recognize that she had power over him, and how odd that was, since in a lifetime she had never had power over any other man. She wondered what to do with it. She wanted to be moderate. She thought so, anyhow. It was the decent thing to be.

But other undefined impulses, ones she thought of as beyond her nature, but powerful ones anyway, crowded in. To somehow impress herself on him from above, without proving any “niceness” first, without painfully and by the long rigmarole of bush etiquette proving her fitness. To be more blatant and casual with him than in her accustomed world, where women presented themselves like job applicants. To be blunt, as men were with each other, and if he didn't like
that, to find some alternate path of brisk contact, something candid beyond anything she'd ever done.

How could she tell what that was?

“I'm just mucking around,” she explained quickly to Giancarlo, doing her best to get back to known ground. “Teasing.”