Shame and the Captives (44 page)

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.

T
engan, alone by the second morning, unaware of the demonstration Goda had made on the Carcoar line that same morning, was still traveling the ridges, from which he could watch the country and the roads. Earlier he had seen two of the enemy's aircraft creeping across the sky; underpowered craft, looking for such as him but unable to perceive him, though he waved his jacket. Earlier still, he had encountered and left behind two small groups of men who seemed to have lost their spirit and who lingered amongst the trees on the slopes within reach of farmhouses and roads, ready for surrender. Amongst these men, there was such an air of acceptance that it was likely the enemy, when they came, would take them in with an abominable, forgiving disregard.

Certainly they must be hungry, he acknowledged, but the creeks between the ridges and the dams down in the pastures on the farms would provide them ample water, and with the right spirit, even given the cold nights, they could have gone on for days. But they had lost the right spirit. One young man had asked him, without naming him by rank, whether he was fed up with the farce yet? The farce! Disciplining him, even had one the means, was pointless, but Tengan stared at him as if he were diseased, and then kept on his way.

Tengan met up with food soon after leaving them—a large lizard planted vertically on a tree, waiting as if part not of the animal but of the vegetable reality of the place. At noon he made a small fire and roasted it. The infantrymen had told him stories of the nourishing, almost succulent meat of the more muscular lizards of the jungle, and he adjudged this meat—possibly his last—very superior to the tedious mutton of Compound C.

In the wake of his lizard meal, a sharper understanding arose in him that he had been on the loose for a day and a half now, and that it was an absolutely unsatisfactory span by the standards of the plans laid out in Aoki's hut before the breakout. Could he also believe that in this huge, indifferent landscape he was undermining the enemy's fiber and causing them discomfiture? He did not feel himself to be the inconvenience he had expected to become. He understood that this was a factor that had dispirited the two parties he had separated himself from. It was hard to resist the concept that he could wander this rind of barbarous earth eternally. He wanted to force the issue, but in such supine country he could not find the elements to bring it about. He must go looking actively for trouble, but could not be sure he would find it.

Below him were all the same wheat and fodder crops, the same grass-guzzling beasts, but beyond a track of red and yellow clay within the limits of a farm lay a long white building. Here he could see a man sitting on a wicker chair in a sunny segment of the veranda that ran along the side of the structure. He appeared as young as Tengan, raw looking and sinewy, in a frayed khaki sweater that looked like the ones issued in camp, and old gray pants. The man he saw was the most hopeful omen he had encountered on this second day out of Compound C. The place was a farm utterly according to the pattern of their uncouth agriculture. But the man amidst it excited him. For this might be his man. From a distance the fellow did not look ferocious, and the hour was not good, an hour when the bush and the bright day began to turn violet and serene.

Tengan decided to reconnoiter the man he saw below, who—after putting his book down a number of times and as if distracted—stood up and went to a wood heap near some fruit trees at the corner of the building. He picked up an ax and, having been a scholar a few minutes before, now became a menial.

The clean sound of the ax made Tengan exultant. He is my man! When the fellow had finished, he fetched a barrow from a shed, loaded it with wood, and took it through the fruit trees to the farmhouse. Here he stacked it an armful at a time against the back door. He returned then to his table outside his room and picked up his book. He was in reach of the ax even as he sat back at the outdoor table and began to read again, lifting and lowering the book.

An ax seemed promising. Two days ago, Tengan would not have chosen the crudity of such an instrument as desirable for his purpose. But the passage of the empty hours since he'd broken the outer wire and impaled the colonel had reduced his chances of more conventional death wounds. Tengan also decided that this figure—servant and reader at once—was a contradictory one. This paradox further justified a hopeful investigation.

So he descended the side of the hill where the faded tint of his uniform suited the shade of trees and the tone of granite rocks. Soon he was out of the line of sight of the woodchopper. He was hidden by the winter wheat crop and—climbing through fences, approaching by way of the flank—worked round it to near the barracks from its rear. He passed through a screen of trees and edged along the side of the barracks and took a glance around the corner. He saw the man was again distractedly reading his book, raising his head regularly as if dissatisfied and searching the afternoon—still golden down here—in expectation of something, perhaps someone arriving. Me, Tengan thought.

Tengan estimated that he and the reader were the same distance from the wood heap, and Tengan knew he could run and take up the ax before the man drew breath. So he simply sprinted across
powdery earth to the heap and grabbed the labor-smoothed handle. Then, under the duty of directing his own death and impressing his killer by emphatic action, he jumped forward into a stagey stance—legs bent, ax raised—and howled.

The woodchopper stood up and dropped his book so that its first half lay on the veranda planks and the second half hung over the yard's earth. And then all the choreography went out of Tengan. He knew this man. The Italian he'd swapped words with and shared a small pool of English terms. His name escaped Tengan's memory, but this was the sourest climax to his absurd life as Number 42001. His plan had flowered into a most noxious accident—this man would not wrestle him for the ax or use it on him. Tengan's stance slackened under the confusion of the instant. The man was a little shocked but smiling. His mouth assumed a smooth, long-lipped smile of recognition.

“Numero Uno!”
he cried. “You escape? You bugger off, is it, my friend? Bugger me! You are hungry?”

“Not hungry,” yelled Tengan. “No tucker,” he pleaded. He advanced to Giancarlo and pushed the shaft of the ax towards him so that the Italian's hands rose by reflex to receive it.
“Morte, ti prego,”
he pleaded. “Do me the death,
Italia
.”

Giancarlo frowned and would not take the thing. “
Uno,
I get you bread. Then maybe you go back . . .”

“No!” Tengan begged at such a volume that it sounded like a threat. “Do me the death!”

In almost playful mood, Giancarlo received the ax and studied it as if Tengan were selling it to him.

“What you mean?” asked Giancarlo. “All this ax bulldust?”

Tengan said, with pride in his more exacting English, “You are my enemy and I will kill you.”

Giancarlo laughed and shook his head. “You kid me,” he said. He fell back on a phrase of Duncan's. “You act the goat, mate.”

But Tengan ran towards Giancarlo again, and the Italian raised
the handle of the ax to block him. Giancarlo was strangely submissive even in doing this. No wonder there were two thousand of them in Gawell Camp. Giancarlo dropped the ax and tried a half embrace, a playful hug. They tussled. When Giancarlo pushed him off again, Tengan was breathless. Two years of captivity, two days of hunger, two nights in the open. He felt a weak vessel now.

“If we are friends,” gasped Tengan, “then you give me the death. They thank you for it! They send you home!”

Giancarlo still wore an appalling smile, more residual, though, and half-fearful. “You tell me bloody pig's arse,” he said.

So Tengan, gathering strength, reached out and struck Giancarlo on the left of his jaw. Surely fury lay somewhere inside that body.

“Bastardo!”
yelled Giancarlo and struck Tengan a blow that stunned him and made his head ring.

“Now you stop the horsefeathers!” yelled Giancarlo. “Now no more!” A hundred yards off in the kitchen Alice heard the noise—a foreign battle, not one like a yelling match between local men, its cadence somehow different. She felt an electric expectation, not unpleasant, and utterly engrossing. Duncan had said that Giancarlo wasn't worried about the Japanese. Now there was an edge of worry in the intonations she heard.

She was not yet too concerned for Giancarlo, but got the heavy rifle Duncan had left in the pantry corner and, while still in the kitchen, leveled it and worked the bolt and brought a bullet up into the chamber. She left the safety lock on and went quickly out into the late afternoon, carrying the gun by its strap over her right shoulder. It pulled her gait crooked. The day was burning itself out brilliantly over the ridges. She heard further shouting and began to stumble forward.

Then the possibility struck her. What if a rouseabout or a manager of one of the other farms had somehow found out about her and the Italian, and was now seeking to punish Giancarlo as if for woman theft? Or what about another Italian with a grudge? The escapees
had owned her imagination since this morning's decapitations, but it might not at all be them.

These new possibilities made her faster. She tripped in the back garden and felt the shock and pain of landing sharply on her knees. She hoped she had not been heard and rejoiced that the safety had not been released and let the gun fire by accident. Once she reached a screen of bushes, she followed them in stealth, emerged into open ground, and ran towards the shearers' quarters.

A fight was on. It had moved inside Giancarlo's room, the former center of all hope. An escapee in burgundy pants and jacket came reeling out of the interior of the room and across the rudimentary veranda, just like a nameless cowboy in a film scene of a barroom brawl. Except that he was Japanese.

Giancarlo appeared from inside, advancing on the man, hands up, palms forward. It was a gesture not of surrender, but of pleading—for moderation. The escapee stood still, his head lowered, and half ran against Giancarlo's chest, half blundered into him.

“Now,” said Giancarlo, calmingly. “Stop it and we have tea.” His tenor of appeasement all at once sickened her. He is a weak man, she decided. Whereas Neville had given up his place on a caïque to a sick comrade.

The Japanese escapee had suddenly got hold of Giancarlo's throat, and apparently with a measure of success. It would have been clear to anyone that Giancarlo could break the hold. It was, however, Giancarlo's neck. It was the neck of the Hermans' Italian. She raised the rifle to her shoulder.

“Hey,” she yelled. “Let go!”

The escapee saw her for the first time and let go of Giancarlo's throat. He hadn't expected that cry. Giancarlo stepped back, shrugged, smiled at her beneath his messed-up hair and over the assailant's shoulder, and spread his hands again like a man saying, “Don't human beings amaze you?”

She would have liked to have yelled, “They don't bloody amaze me!”

The attitude of the escapee as he turned to Alice—gasping, yet his face locked into an unkindly purpose—was very different from Giancarlo's. Here was a fellow to reckon with, a sweat-stained and harrowed young man, furious on one hand and presenting, on the other, large familiar eyes.

The day of the lemonade! An unforgettable man. No pleading hands in his case. Though he gulped air, no doubt was visible in his face. He spread the neck of his jacket open. His flesh was not bare beneath. He wore a khaki sweater. He seemed greatly to admire her rifle.

“Shoot me!” he ordered her and at the same time pleaded.

“Give me the death or I give you.”

Alice took the safety off. Her blood itched. No human had offered himself to her in such a way. These people who had started it all. All the madness. The madness had been contained within the wire fences of Gawell, but it had by its force and insistence broken the bounds, and stained the bush with its dangerous expectations. And now it wanted to be shot, and the temptation was close to engulfing her. She trembled on the edge, a fury working up her body towards her shoulders.

“No, no,” Giancarlo kept on saying with that reasonable voice. All the children of the earth, he implied. All holding hands in their march to the brotherly resolution some mad teacher at a technical college had called up in his mind. Some of her anger at the escapee therefore spilled in Giancarlo's direction again. His crowd had started it too. His crowd had invaded Greece but been incompetent, and that had brought their masters in, and their masters hadn't been incompetent and had bombed their way southwards and then trapped Neville, the man she'd swapped her vows with, in an island without even a caïque to take him to Egypt.

“I'll shoot you all right!” she called to the handsome foe, like a reassurance.

It was the wrong thing to say. He ran a few steps and picked up
the ax. There was a distinct joy in his eyes as he came forward slowly, like a butcher with a particular cut in mind.

Alice was not afraid. She knew Giancarlo could catch him from behind and drag him into a hold. She knew that the prisoner was trying to force her hand. Otherwise he would have come at a rush. Thus she ought to wait for Giancarlo to clamp him. The man should not be accommodated.

But she possessed also a primal hatred and respect for the prisoner. He had not thought of the railway lines, as his two resolute brothers had, but he was resolute just the same. He continued to come forward with the ax. His face was frightful—he had composed a mask for it, a mask of provocation. Without him, she believed, there would be none of this world that had taken Neville away and none of this tearing of her soul and none of this unleashed and merciless hunger in her. So when he was some ten paces away, advancing at a measured but threatening pace, and Giancarlo was moving from the side to grab him yet again, she shot the prisoner through the chest and saw him fly backwards. As she recovered from the recoil, she saw he left a mist of his blood in the air.