Shame and the Captives (24 page)

But before that pulse of reassurance ended, it was followed instantly by something immensely bitter. While idling her mind in church and being put in a sudden sweat by the idea of a satanic Duncan, even she had thought of an end to the Giancarlo business. It was the first time her mind had alluded to a limit to all that. She was suddenly and sharply conscious of a finish that was part of the unchangeable order, but also that she was the one who must finish it. This did not seem a duty. It seemed something she would do, independently of what she wanted, sooner or later. Bleakness possessed her as she crawled up into the truck. She wanted the end to be later, not sooner. But her crimes, as she envisaged them now, had something like a piece of fuse attached. She knew it spat fire, but she did not know its length.

They drove into town, back to the other, larger church behind the town hall. Incomprehensible Catholic singing could be heard from inside. Duncan left the truck and stood in the shade of the tree where the prisoners had earlier gathered and smoked a roll-your-own cigarette. She got out herself after a while and went to join him.

“I'm going inside,” she said. And to anticipate his question, she declared, “To see what it's like.”

She wasn't looking for his good advice on the matter. Her going inside and seeing for herself what Giancarlo had believed in before he'd lost his soul to anarchism was the reigning proposition. She felt nervous but was determined not to be tentative while mounting the steps of the strange cult and entering the shadow of the vestibule. She passed the marble font full of water in which people dipped their hands before making their sign, and saw the racks of pamphlets—“The Plain Truth”; “Catholicism—the True Faith?”; “The Papacy and the Faithful”; “The Blessed Virgin and the True Faith”—and advanced into the sinister smell of incense, like the reek of paganism itself, that reached even to the backseat, where a number of thick-necked farmers
knelt on one knee. Across from them, on the other side of the crowded church, were the Italian prisoners, in whose numbers she could not see Giancarlo.

She must have arrived at a pause in the ritual. Organ music crescendoed and ceased, the choir stopped singing, and the congregation began hauling themselves from their knees and sitting. She found herself a place to sit. This church is a space like any other space, she reassured herself. Even though it doesn't feel like it, it is part of Australia, and to prove it, all those prisoners our nation has captured are there in their dyed uniforms. Amongst them somewhere the familiar flesh of Giancarlo.

At the front of the church, she saw people milling to receive the wafers of bread in their mouths, and some of the Italian prisoners, when it was their turn, going up to the altar to fetch the snow-white sacrament. As those who had been given it returned to their seats and their queues thinned, she saw Giancarlo, sitting back in his pew, dissenting, and felt no longer threatened by the abnormality of the space with its strange scents and Latin utterances. The choir began to sing again, and she was not alarmed. Other and more important matters swamped the incense.

As Catholics whose faces she knew from around the town, townspeople and farming families, knelt with the wafers in their mouths, the choir sawed on with a repetitive and ancient-sounding chant. Giancarlo was again invisible in the press of his fellow Italians. She rose and left. She did not try that strange bobbing that Catholics managed so negligently.

After the Mass the Italians were allowed to socialize for a little while outside. From the truck, Alice saw they were passing around a newspaper and discussing it excitedly, some laughing as if it were good news. An Italian officer, apparently trusted by the authorities, soon told them to break up and depart, either to walk back to their allocated farms or to the trucks of their allocated farmers.

Duncan, who had shown no interest in her adventure inside, now
took to the front seat of the truck and so did she. They watched without a word as Giancarlo separated himself from the vocal group, arrived, and prepared to launch himself into the tray of the truck. Alice looked through the rear window to observe the imminent grace of the vault, but Duncan called, “Hang on! Tell us what all the excitement's about, Johnny.”

Giancarlo canceled his jump and moved respectfully to Duncan's window. From her side of the truck Alice could see his face—a liveliness there. He had got it from mixing with his own kind. It made her anxious. “It is a
Corriere di Campo
—a prisoner newspaper made in another camp and sent us.
Antifascismo
. It say in print the British want use Italian mechanic—in factory—and send the young back in the war. Maybe, too, the Australia want that same thing.
Italia antifascismo
now.”

He said it so lightly. But the story had not only increased her anxiety but brought out something close to anger. For he was thinking of the end, too, and it wasn't—in her mind—his business to do that.

“But you weren't on our side when you were taken prisoner,” she said. He stood, instantly chastened, in the Sabbath light. Within a few seconds she regretted that meanness. It had been there, too, in the supposed honesty with which she'd told off Mrs. Cathcart. She was by some lights proud of that encounter, by others frightened she had somehow become an acid woman. She could feel his confusion too. That she'd so randomly reminded him that she had all the power.

“Well,” said benign and stupid Duncan, “we'll face up to losing you when it happens, Johnny. Hop in the back.” She heard him leap, one hand on the truck, onto the rear tray. She looked back through the glass behind her and saw his well-made and bemused face and his profound eyes, both young and aged at the same time, and puzzled. She could not continue inspecting him much longer with her head turned—pretense was back, and she wanted her interest to appear casual to Duncan.

The news from the camps rendered her skittish—as she would
have acknowledged to a confidante, if she'd had one. But, if she took a respite from her certainty that he would put a closure to things, the earth, in occasionally allowed mad spates of imagination, had also expanded with new chances—a shift in hemisphere, the contour of foreign earth and new terrain, Italian towns, the taking in of a new language through the pores of her delight. Wife of the
meccanico anarchico
.

The spoilsport within convinced her at most hours of the absurdity of these delusions, but there were also hours on end during which they seemed ordained and definite. In the coming days, which were days of painful abstinence mutually embarked upon by her and Giancarlo, she studied more intently the copies of the
Herald
Duncan got, and scoured the maps of the Allied line in southern Italy, its flanks and its center, looking for that mass of Allied victory that might mean the repatriation of Giancarlo.

Naples had fallen, Giancarlo's parents were safe, she knew, though he rarely mentioned them. The line had advanced to the south of Rome. In its wake, Frattamaggiore and a thousand other places were repairing themselves and looking for nourishment.

The armies of the right side had not yet liberated Neville. But would the whole affair resolve itself into a race between Neville's repatriation and Giancarlo's? Could she let poor Neville be victim of some kind of race? When she was halfway undeluded, she knew matters wouldn't resolve themselves in such a theatrical way.

D
r. Delaney had a passion for church music. His congregation thought it an eccentricity in him. The question for many of the Catholic men was, “If you can get to heaven by attending a short Mass, why attend a bloody long one?”

But Emily had joined the choir because that sort of thing was to her taste also. Delaney could not get the farming tenors and basses to swell like those of Italian monks, so he must depend largely upon the voices of their wives. The choir were rehearsing “Ave Verum Corpus” on a Thursday night in the cold church, and the colonel sat in the back pew as a visiting Protestant witness while the clarity of the music lanced the dimness. It was a very simple and pure melody that Mozart had pursued here. It was beyond flamboyance and showmanship. Dr. Delaney was not interested in approximations to perfection either. Occasionally he would mention Roman choirs he had heard, and the Roman pronunciation was to prevail in Gawell. It was “Ah-vay vay-rum,” and then the trailing off of sound at the edge of each phrase, so that “verum” died and from its glorious remains arose “corpus natum,” and “natum” died and in its turn gave birth to “de Maria Virgine.” He was aiming for the standards of that distant independent and eternal city which, thankfully, the Germans had
just now abandoned before it had become rubble and its choirs had been stifled.

Mrs. Cullen had tramped into town three miles from her husband and her clever son to learn to sing like a nun of Rome. Listening, the colonel understood the peculiar seduction of Romanism and the mortgage it seemed to have on plainchant and even on Mozart. He saw Emily's pale face shining in a row just behind Mrs. Cullen's gypsy-brown one. His affections soared on “cuius latus perforatum,” soared higher than the modestly vaulted ceiling of Dr. Delaney's church, spiraled into Australia's enormous but unpraised night.

It was here, in the Catholic church, under the flutings of Mozart, that the intelligence officer Captain Champion and Sergeant Nevski found Abercare. They had failed to reach him by phone and so had gone to Parkes Street and been advised by a neighbor that the colonel and his lady were at choir practice. Their arrival at the church was exceptional, because it portended some emergency. But they felt the colonel should be advised as soon as possible of some new information that had come their way.

•  •  •

Cheong, the Korean, hand healed, was back clipping grass along the ditch at either side of Main Road and cutting it from around the uprights of each compound, thus preventing it from concealing the lower strands of wire that might then be cut open by enterprising prisoners. On the other side of the inner fence where Cheong worked, parties of Italians in their own compound were engaged in similar work. Some Italian groups raked the earth, for the camp commandant did not want his compounds to look like so much rubble. Sometimes the Italians would call out to the Koreans, “Hello, Japan!”

“Good-bye, Japan,” Cheong would cry when the spirit took him—a small utterance of Korean independence.

There was a handsome Italian boy who worked a little separately
from his comrades and who, as he moved closer to Cheong, smelled more than them of sweat, as if he were a peasant unused to water.

“Name, Japan?” asked the Italian in English.

“Cheong,” said Cheong. “Korea. No Japan. Japan stink.”

The young Italian accepted this assessment of Italy's former ally. He told Cheong his name was Franco, and Cheong used the name and they smiled at each other. The primitive conversation had bored Cheong's companions, and they had gone back to grass cutting. Franco got talking at greater length. He was proud of the scatter of English words he possessed. He pointed to the barracks and said, “Hut.” He pounded an upright of the fence. “Wood,” he said. He touched the barbed wire and uttered its name. “Wire.”

Cheong tried to say it—a most difficult word—but Franco nodded and nodded to ease it from him. This boy is simpleminded, thought Cheong, but likeable.

“Come under,” said Franco. He dropped to his knees and opened a little wire gate someone—not the garrison, of course—had constructed in an area where the grass at the side of Main Road generally grew highest. By attaching cut wires to little wooden jambs—one dug into the ground, one swinging free like a door—they had been able to make this surreptitious gateway. It was the way some Italians got into Main Road and sold grappa to the men in Compound C for cigarettes. A thin man could imagine scraping on his stomach through the little opening. Cheong did not know afterwards why, apart from amiability and curiosity, he'd obeyed the boy and had separated the strands and rolled clumsily between them into the Italian side of things. This was playing at escape, of course, and to enter another compound, particularly one as neutral of threat and as different as that of the Italians, was itself a small and stimulating exploit.

Franco had been wearing a nondescript canvas hat and, smiling, he took off Cheong's cap and put his own sunhat on Cheong's head so that from a distance Cheong would pass as Italian. They walked across the gravel compound amidst its occasional clumps of grass. A
man who had been excused duties sat on a step in the sun and was playing an accordion—their kind of instrument.

Franco, after looking around the compound, led him up into a particular hut. The accordionist called after either the boy or Cheong,
“Cretino!”
But Cheong did not know what that meant.

“No problems,” cried Franco cheerily, in the English of the guards.

Inside the hut Cheong encountered, as in his own compound, a smell of creosote overlaid with another smell he was getting used to—some dull exhalation that was peculiar to huts full of imprisoned, thwarted, spiritually foreshortened men. Franco came to his bunk and sat and patted it as a sign that Cheong should sit beside him. Cheong was now deep inside the hut and making ready to sit on an Italian's bunk for politeness' sake. But his enjoyment of the adventure was waning. The plain-minded Franco was unconscious of this and leaned down and brought from under his bed a book. Cheong could not read the text. Perhaps it was one of their scriptures or, by the looks of the heavy print, a dictionary. Franco placed it on his rough bedside table, which he pulled square on to the two of them.

Next, the Italian pulled out a small notebook and showed him photographs held inside it. An older woman frowned at the camera as if it were her first acquaintance with it. A picture of Franco with four girls, all of them quite handsome. “Sisters,” he said. “
Sorelle
. Sisters, me.”