Shame and the Captives (42 page)

When they considered they had enough grain, they climbed through the wire again and joined Domen, who still held the carcass upwards by its hind legs. Then they crossed the sheep pasture and dealt with further wire and so began to ascend their ridge, where their cooking fire should surely serve as a beacon for their enemies.

They placed the grain on a long stone, and Hirano and Omura pounded it with alternate blows of rocks, and threatened each other with vengeance if either hit his companion's thumb. Goda descended from his high status and gathered wood, which was not hard with these abnormal trees that shed branches and bark summer and winter and, like everything else here, without reason. He piled the tinder branches and interspersed them with sheets and twists of bark and began the fire. “If it brings a search party in,” he dared to say to his set of diehards, “I hope it's not before the lamb's cooked.”

The wood burned fast and settled to the earth, radiating a robust heat that stung his eyes with its pungent smoke even as the cold of the day bit at his back. They should perhaps keep this blaze going later, after dark, when fire glow could be seen an even further distance than by day. They put the ground-up grain on a flat stone on top of the coals and waited for it to roast. Then, with one sheet of bark, they scraped the cracked wheat off its rudimentary dish of rock onto another platterlike sheet. They sat around this, reaching in and eating the wheat one ear at a time, while their nostrils flared at the acute
savor of the lamb haunch Domen was roasting and turning now and then on the glowing bed of eucalyptus tree coals. There was no time, sadly, Domen apologized, to dig a pit and set up a spit, but the lamb would be good even with ash on it.

Lamb was a questionable dish—to prepare it like this was barbarous—but Goda and the others were willing to excuse the indelicacy of this last meal. They would be welcomed by the spirits of men who had—in their last campaigns—eaten snakes and insects and even human flesh for want of a supply line.

When the haunch was ready, Domen, yelping at the heat of the joint, hauled it onto a wide basin of stone. They all behaved with less elegance now, and tried to tear the meat too early, and laughed, and shook the burn out of their fingers. Domen began to cut the meat in long strips from the bone, and to give one to each of his comrades, but they still found it hot, moving it from hand to hand—as if in a day's time having a blister would matter one way or another.

Goda asked Domen to keep the fire up as they gorged themselves. The meal passed, the ultras were surfeited, and no soldiers arrived. They drank from a canteen one of them had somehow decided to bring. Torpor set in. Goda watched a sated Isao stretch himself by the fire. Soon he was asleep.

“Good way to spend the afternoon, Sergeant,” Domen suggested, nodding at Isao, after Goda and the others had thanked him for the banquet.

Goda watched the fine-featured Isao, the mask of his strict young soul, as his breathing became that of tranquil sleep. It was peculiar, but also somehow rational, to rest before death. Goda asked Hirano and Omura to heap more wood on the fire, for the sun was beginning its descent.

•  •  •

Goda awoke in late afternoon. He was cold and needed to shit. Like all of them, he was surprised and even alarmed by how Gawell Camp
life had softened him. Shivering, he went behind one of the trees. He suddenly knew this was one of those fitful hours when the Chinese came to haunt him. Without knowing it, he was like Aoki in accepting that his self-destruction must atone for them as well. By day he deserved his death for failing ancestors and his emperor. But in odd hours the Chinese intervened between him and the cleanliness of all that. No one expressed repentance for China. It was left unsaid, and—in terms of conquest—rightly so. For it could be argued, when seen with the eye of a god, that these punishments were required as a tribute paid to history.

When he was finished, he wiped himself clean with forest debris. He rubbed his hand on the rough bark of the tree and got out his rag and went to the canteen, emptying some water on the cloth. Then he took the eucalyptus leaves and split them open to rub their pungency on his fingers. From their strong vapor, tears stung his lids but very correctly refused to fall. He was a little cheered to think that hygiene did not matter as much as the actual indignity of shitty hands. He was certain he did not have enough time left to develop gastroenteritis.

In China they had rounded up hiding soldiers, including ones who had changed into street clothes and pleaded they had never served, and they'd tied them together in batches of fifty and shot into the tethered mass of curs—bad soldiers from a crumbling army. This was not an act for which Goda accepted any guilt. He would have expected the same if he'd been them.

But things he had done with liquor in him were distorted in his memory and shivered apart like a painting on a vase, a very large one that is dropped and shatters, so that only a fragment of the tale reproduced on the glaze can be seen. Officers, severe in battle, had quite rightly given their soldiers free play in captured cities, as a motive for men to capture more cities still, and to allow them to prove their ruthlessness to the enemy.

But had he really selected a quaking Chinese porter, a stunted, ageless little man, and loaded him up with scrolls and silk robes and a
chest of drawers and mats, and then had him carry them all to the regimental trucks—where they would never have fitted anyhow? And when this stunted man had successfully delivered the load, had he really, in the madness of plum brandy and eminent power, plunged his bayonet up under the little man's ribs and lifted him off his feet with it, exulting in the applause of fellow soldiers and in the cascade of the Chinese heart's blood flowing down over him? Had he actually and in the fullness of fact been the first to find a woman in a shop and drag her away from the door into the light to see that she was handsome, and then covered her mouth and flooded her with the force of their military triumph? And when other men arrived—figures in his crazed dreams, shards from his shattered urn—had one soldier, perhaps the eighth, distracted by the screaming of her baby indoors, gone and dealt with it at the cost of a last animal child scream at which none of them was shocked? Kill the enemy in the womb, and if that is not possible, then kill it in its cradle. It was her face, flat but well made, that remained through all the shattering fumes of the plundered liquor. Features seen in the heat of inebriation he remembered better than he did the features of those to whom he was connected by blood and affection. It was this woman and her infant's ghost who waited also in the shadow world. She, too, must be appeased.

Now, leaning against a tree trunk, he surrendered his crimes up to the gods, under whose aegis he had not extended pity. For this was the war of the world, and he had been a force in it, an arm of the warrior god, in whose name he had been blessed before taking to the transports sailing from Rabaul. His crimes were his crimes but were also the harsh-edged whispers and the declarations of the gods. On these grounds he suppressed his occasional pulses of torment.

Above them, a search plane with the enemy's rondelles on its wings appeared. What did it think of the smoke of their fire? They were fully woken by its engine and waved and roared at it, but the pilot seemed blind to them. When the plane passed, it passed like the day's last offer of extinction.

So it was clear, at last, they had better stop dallying. Hirano, who wished to wash before the end, went downhill looking for fresh water. He came back up and reported a stream down there. They went down and stripped naked. When they entered the water it took their breath. Each washed himself with his rag or undershirt.

They emerged from the water and put their loincloths on again. Isao was a handsome kid, Goda noticed academically, and there was still a sort of unsullied quality to him despite all his fervor. He had done barely more than garrison duty, supervising native bearers. His sins were few. The erection that had just appeared was probably an unexpected reaction to nakedness, the stinging water, a remembered girl. Others found the innocence of the thing was nearly an affront.

“Someone pull him off!” said Domen, the country boy. Goda stared at him for debasing the moment.

Back up on the ridge, they saw the countryside was still vacant and thus even more so the fiasco could not be permitted to continue. The day was going. The young men knelt to compose themselves and recite a final prayer. While still standing, Goda mentally recited what he had been taught at home.

“For heaven and earth are yet separated, and the purer and clearer part has not yet lifted from the squalid and fleshly part. But the brave passage of a soul will unite them. Thereafter a man becomes a venerated ancestor . . .”

Omura stood up and removed his prepared belt and asked if they would help him.

“Are you sure you want to do this right now?” asked Isao. “You might just be being impetuous.”

“Well, I can be pretty impetuous,” Omura admitted, as he finished putting on his uniform. “But not in this case.” Beneath a thick branch of a river gum, Hirano and Domen lifted him, one leg each, and he tied the belt to the branch and knotted it hard. Then he adjusted the buckle.

“Are you ready?” asked Hirano.

“Yes, let me go at the count of three. And after a few more seconds, haul on my legs.” That was how it was done. Hirano and Domen jumped aside. Omura kicked in the air. Hirano and Domen pulled on his legs with sudden and ferocious intent and heard the neck go. They kept pulling as if to squeeze the soul from him and then let him hang.

And so Omura was safe, had led the way as an aviator should, and certified their own purpose.

Hirano, panting a little, asked, “Me next, Senior Sergeant?” The river gum was abundant with branches, and Hirano chose one on the far side of the tree from Omura. Isao joined Domen in lifting Hirano so he could tie and adjust his belt exactly as Omura had.

“When I say ‘Yes,' ” he told them, and then took only a second to say it. This time the crack was instantaneous with the fall, but they dragged and dragged on him until they were certain his spirit must have vacated him.

Domen then came back to the knife with which he'd killed the sheep, bowed to Goda, and knelt and drove it into himself, all without speaking, making of it a private act.

“Well now, my young friend?” Goda asked Isao amidst the dangling bodies and fallen Domen.

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.

H
undreds 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.