Shame and the Captives (28 page)

In the same spirit, Abercare had decided that it would create great suspicion if the captives saw the machine guns permanently manned. It was enough to mount them on trailers with belts of bullets in tin cans arrayed plentifully around their bases. The nights abetted this policy—even apart from the searchlights that drenched the compound with yellow, migraine-inducing light, they were bright, and the moon rose fuller every night. With the searchlights beating down from the outer camp and from within the Main Road, and beneath the vertical eye of the moon, every timber of every hut was delineated.

Nevski, Suttor noticed whenever he entered the compound with him, walked through with his chin high. It had always been thought that the Russian might be able to cultivate some of the Japanese as sources, or at least friends. This hope took no account of the previous war between Russia and Japan, which had destroyed Nevski's life at the university in Harbin. Suttor saw that there existed a special hostility directed by the inhabitants of Compound C towards Russians.
Nevski's clinical and careful behavior had failed to make him a favorite there. He was a true scholar and had a true scholar's pedagogic reserve. He was a good, but not winning, soul.

“ ‘Shitdrip,' ” Nevski told Suttor they sometimes called him.

“And, ‘fart voice.' And yet,” he said, defending them, “they are not a very foul-mouthed people. They are surprisingly fastidious.”

The prisoners did not seem to react to the company of new guards that had been introduced, a few truckloads at a time, into the camp. These transfer guards, a little excited to have a break from the arid plains out there at Wye, settled into the mess, and discussed and compared the camp they came from and the one, less monotonous in terrain, they now found themselves in. In the meantime, in the railway yards, which could not be seen from Gawell Camp, the train with the blinded and barred windows had arrived and been located on a siding.

S
ergeant Nevski and an escort of guards appeared in the Compound C mess hut at lunchtime on Saturday.

“Present yourself at the gate in Main Road at two o'clock,” Nevski told Aoki. “Bring Mr. Goda and pompous young Mr. Tengan. There is something of significance you must discuss with the colonel.”

“Significance?” asked Aoki.

Nevski declared axiomatically, a little like an annoying scholar, “If I told you the significance now, it wouldn't be significant, would it? Just be punctual.”

The three men were at the gate at the nominated time, and were marched up Main Road, through the huts of Suttor's company and so to Abercare's office a little beyond. There Abercare had had chairs placed around the room to accommodate them in the manner of a conference, and he invited them to sit. He offered them some of his Navy-cut cigarettes. Aoki would have accepted if judgmental Tengan had not been there with his automatic and universal rejection of mercy.

For translation by Nevski, Abercare declared that the subject he was about to broach with them was fixed in place and was not open for discussion by them or him. They must accept it, it came from
superior authorities, and there was no way out of it. They and other men of rank from Compound C were to be separated from the NCOs and sent west to the camp at Wye.

“It will occur on Monday morning,” he explained. “I have told you today purely out of courtesy and based on the recommendation of the Red Cross. I hope this courtesy will be respected. It is granted so that you can say good-bye to your men and to your friends, and attend to whatever possessions you choose to take with you.”

The prisoners said nothing. Each of them was astonished, and it was news on a scale one needed to weigh over time. The announcement hung in the room and exerted its weight on Abercare as well.

Aoki gestured for Tengan to speak first, as the first of the prisoners to know Compound C and the one who reached certainty very quickly. Tengan turned to Nevski as if to demand a fair translation, and then spoke in a voice whose level of threat was not remarkable, since it was his normal tone. “This will not be a good thing,” Nevski translated him as saying. “Your army might be different. But in ours the bond between NCOs and the men is unbreakable.”

Abercare studied them but as ever learned not a great amount, except that the older men, Aoki and Goda, had shown a marked respect for the aviator in letting him state their case. Aoki said then, “Senior Sergeant Goda and I agree with the sergeant that the men will be very angry.” Goda made an assenting gurgle in his throat.

“Well,” said Abercare, depending on Nevski's translation, “there is no point in anger. It is your duty as one of their leaders to reconcile the men to what cannot be avoided.
This
cannot be avoided and, after all, by the standards of all you've been through in your military lives, it is a small rearrangement. The war will soon be finished and then reunions can occur. You'll have a long sea voyage home to become reacquainted with each other.”

All three of them rose and, as they did each morning, bowed to him—performing the respectful concession to his rank even within his army of clowns and savages. It was all so solemn that it could have
passed as satire, Abercare thought. He had a sense that the meeting was ending perhaps too promptly, even if everything that could be said had been.

Nevski was appointed by Abercare to escort Tengan, Aoki, and Goda as they marched in a severely dignified file back to Compound C. The sun seemed to be benign at this hour and beneath it men were sitting at pine tables in the open playing cards or Go and mah-jongg. There was some baseball practice in progress, and that satisfying
bock!
when bat struck ball full-on. From the recreation hall came the plaint of stringed instruments and Sakura's complaining, ironic voice rehearsing some ballad.

There had been a supposition by Abercare and Suttor that the three might discuss their situation with Nevski and thus give some illumination on their true feelings, their degree of cooperative sentiment. But they said nothing, so Nevski asked before he left them, “How do you feel about all that, gentlemen?” But he knew it was a clumsy question. They did not answer. There was a guttural belch—he could not have said from which one.

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.

T
he 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.