Shame and the Captives (7 page)

•  •  •

The party first met Tengan in the orderly hut inside Compound C. They had entered the gate warily, fearful that by malign chance there might be someone there they knew, and thus they would be more acutely judged by eyes accustomed to the same landscapes and nuances of language as their own. Aoki would see the same caution in other, later-arriving men who turned up in the bus with the painted-out windows from Gawell railway station. Men with similar accents were particularly edgy with each other, since they were sure that each of them knew the same units, and in some cases the same dead men, and that those men, once evoked, would be a judgment on their captive condition.

Tengan, his flier's insignia attached to his makeshift hat, saluted them, but exercised what he considered his duty as an aviator of being cold to them. One of Tengan's assistants, a loud, jovial sapper, handed out their deep-dyed clothing with a black “PW” imprinted on the back, and did not himself seem driven by any duty of hauteur. He issued them a heap of five blankets each.

“Take the blankets,” Tengan growled at them. “You'll need them for the colder nights.”

So it seemed that this aviator had already experienced a winter here. Aoki also observed that the prison uniforms he and his party received were much darker in color than Tengan's. In the mess he would dare, on the strength of his superior rank, to approach the table occupied by the fliers and raise the issue. Tengan told him, “There are ways of making them much paler over time. Undoing the work the enemy put into them.” With an almost boyish enthusiasm, he told Aoki to instruct his party to launder their uniforms with a mixture of soap and ashes to bring about a bleaching process. It was apparent he saw the job of lightening the color of the uniform as an arm of warfare, an antidote to the passivity and opprobrium of imprisonment.

In his time in Compound C, Aoki would encounter many such gestures. In the first place no one who possessed an infantry cap wore it. Instead, men spent a lot of time cutting out the canvas from their sport shoes to make replicas of a campaign cap—a symbolic gesture in that they refused to wear their own hats in front of such a pathetic enemy, at the same time as they dented the enemy's supply of canvas.

Men would rip their blankets and wear holes in them by rubbing them against cement floors in the shower block and cook house, all with the same manic purpose of being able to ask for a replacement and thus dig a little deeper into their foe's wool supplies. They snapped their toothbrushes in two for the same motive. They scraped their safety razors, supplied by their captors with the intention to thwart use of the blade for self-harm, up and down walls to render them blunt and make their replacement necessary. Aoki wondered whether this was a kind of group madness, substituting the true battle against enemy flesh for one against lesser fabrics.

•  •  •

Aoki, because he was a veteran of many years' service and was amiable, was quickly elected hut leader, as was Goda of another hut. One
of Aoki's hut mates was the young marine named Hirano, who was characteristic of what could be called the “ultras,” the dogmatists or the party of certainty, the unflinching group of which the aviator Tengan was the high priest. That is, they were the ones who at the least pretended that dying at the hands of the enemy was their constant thought and their chief agenda item.

Other men were more ambiguous and could accept that some secretly wanted to survive. But Hirano was typical of the party of certainty in that he had been much influenced by his captain's behavior when things had become hopeless at Buna, on the north coast of New Guinea. Trapped in a small pocket near the beach and about to be driven out onto the open sand, they had heard an enemy officer call on them to surrender. He shouted that he would count to ten to allow the captain time. The captain stepped out of the palms and into the waist-high grass, carrying a small flag above his heart and clamped on top of his unit patch and held it there as a target while the officer counted. When the officer was close to ten the captain cried out, “Here!” and drew a pistol. So they shot him through the heart, and the other men rushed to his flanks, without rifles since they were without ammunition, and exposed their own chests. But that day, since they were victorious now, it was the way of the enemy to take prisoners, out of a sort of contempt for how withered and segmented their opponent's front was. Hirano, kneeling beside his captain's body, from whose back wound a fistful of flesh and bone and membrane had been ripped by the bullet's exit, became a prisoner.

Hirano was excited now by a further intake of prisoners into Gawell Camp. A serious mass of men was being assembled in Compound C, he earnestly told Aoki one day in the mess. As if the new inmates were in fact reinforcements. Compound C was a force now, said Hirano, a full-strength regiment. At a suitable moment, he said, the regiment might be unleashed.

Aoki had heard similar, overly simplified sentiments from others and he became fed up with their stridency, even if he had reconciled
himself to the idea that he must not survive to take home to his wife and family his crimes and his shame.

“Look,” he told Hirano, “we're prisoners, but that
doesn't
mean we're nothing when it comes to simple enjoyments. Even a nothing must live till the end—as well as can be managed. Trying to be warm in winter, cool in summer, even feeling joy in a show of color in the sky. We know they'll probably shoot us when it suits them. So wait for that.”

It was a common and comforting belief in Compound C. The garrison would shoot them all when Japanese forces landed on the coast. As a corollary to that doctrine, the inhabitants of Compound C would not go quietly but resist with staves and baseball bats and knives. The only blot on the dogma was Aoki's own experience—the youth who'd shot him
in the leg
. In the end, could the garrison also take such halfhearted options?

“Play a bit of baseball and badminton,” he advised Hirano, “and relish what's left. No one says you can't have a bit of fun. That's my advice. There are enough misery faces around the compound.”

Hirano said, again too fervently, “If they won't end things for me on the day we win the war, I'll hang myself. I'll join the shadows where all the other victors wait, because there aren't any misery faces there.”

Aoki got unreasonably annoyed by the raw child-infantrymen like Hirano who hadn't been in China. To him, China was the test, and the islands of the South Pacific an arena for latecomers and amateurs and the partially informed.

“Until that time,” said Aoki, “there are all your living comrades wandering around in the dust here who aren't shades. Do you ever think of women? You're not dealing with ghosts here yet. You're dealing with men with cocks. Have you seen them hang round that balladeer character Sakura, the one they call Blossom? Do you think that's because his costumes are so well made?”

Sakura was a sapper, and a professional female impersonator according
to the comic-erotic tradition. He, or as the men usually said, “she,” was a great favorite as a performer, and in other ways, in Compound C.

“So just stop glowering,” Aoki continued, “and live until it's time to die. They haven't had enough provocation to turn on us yet. The savage spirit is there in them, and events will bring it out in the end.”

A
week after the recalcitrant Japanese had made a show of shoveling gravel, Alice watched as a truck delivered Duncan's Italian to the Hermans. Since she expected to see a short, swart peasant with variable agricultural skills, her interest was not at the peak it had been in her previous encounter with prisoners.

Duncan had received a telephone call only the day before from the Control Center to tell him of the prisoner's imminent arrival. Since then the idea had grown in Alice that she might learn something useful from an Italian laborer. You could talk to an Italian. The axiom was common in the town. “The dagos are no problem.” They were Europeans. Close enough, anyhow.

Now Duncan sat on the veranda, smoking and waiting for the truck, and as he watched the gate, Alice observed him. When the camouflaged two-tonner came in through the front gate of the farm and pulled up outside the farmhouse, its canopy was off and Alice could see half a dozen prisoners sitting in the back. A two-door black Ford, with a pointed grille that seemed sharp as a knife, came onto the farm behind the truck and also pulled up. The sergeant from the Control Center got down from the front seat and met up with an elderly but vigorous man in a dark suit who had disembarked from
the Ford. They advanced through the garden gate towards the farmhouse. The civilian was the Swiss general practitioner from Bowral, who had been given the job by the Red Cross of occasionally escorting prisoners to the farms to which they were assigned. His duty was to ensure that the farmer maintained certain standards of treatment of the laborer he was receiving. Duncan warmly shook both men's hands as they reached the veranda. Duncan said he'd be grateful for the fellow.

“Here I am,” he said, “two big sections of pasture for sheep, and three paddocks for wheat and cereals. Just under three thousand acres. My daughter-in-law's done a lot, a real brick, and I have to hire others when I can. But to have a man full-time . . .”

He was so conscientious about this negotiation that he had placed a fountain pen and a bottle of ink, ready for use, on the table at which he had been sitting. The men handed him their two sets of papers, the government's and those of the Red Cross, for his study. He invited both of them to sit while he studied the papers page by page, the sergeant explaining Control Center clauses, and then the elderly gentleman speaking of the Red Cross's concerns.

The prisoner had by now been ordered by the driver to jump down, and was standing with his knapsack on the packed earth outside the gate. The men still on the truck and bound for other farms yelled their Italian badinage in Duncan's prisoner's direction, and the prisoner, carrying his jacket and wearing maroon shirt and pants, smiled briefly, and briefly again, making a gesture that signaled he preferred they should keep things down and not make trouble for him.

Alice, meanwhile, unseen, confirmed by further study that the man was angular and fairly tall by the standards Gawell imagined Italians to be. So the idea of short, compact peasant power was gone. A belt around his waist gave some style and shape to his slim hips. She knew his labor would earn him a certain number of pounds sterling per month, but the government, not Duncan, paid that. As for
Duncan, she knew he got a small extra ration of petrol to take the Italian to Mass on Sundays.

At last Duncan completed his man-to-man transactions with the sergeant, who said that Duncan should always call the Control Center, not the camp, if there was a problem with the dago. The Swiss doctor made a final explanation of the obligations Duncan took on in employing the Italian. Everyone stood, and Duncan shook hands again with both men. Beyond the garden gate, the elderly doctor spoke earnestly to the prisoner, shook hands with him, went back to his car, and followed the truck out of the farm onto the Gawell Road.

Alice saw Duncan go out and introduce himself to the prisoner, saying loudly, “Herman. Mr. Herman.” And then in basic and emphatic English, “You work on farm before?”

She heard the young Italian say, “
Si
, I work on farm. But
meccanico
 . . . mechanic . . . I do it most.”

“Mechanic'll be handy,” said Duncan, and proposed he show him his quarters. “Follow,” Duncan said. The young man, perhaps around the same age as her, Alice could see now by advancing undetected up the hall to the doorway, picked up his knapsack and carried his jacket slung over his shoulder, moving casually behind Duncan in a way that was brisk and yet rhythmic. His gait was in a style somehow removed from Australian modes of walking. She would come to think that he moved as if he were aware of the labor that had been required of his ancestors, and was keeping a private amount of it in store for his successors.

Duncan meanwhile looked less comfortable about the whole business, and more eager to please, than the prisoner was. But that was Duncan for you. Both men moved towards a screen of lemon-scented gums.

The absorbing sight of the Italian revived at once the question pushed on her at get-togethers of POWs' wives, mothers, and fiancées: would there be a swap of prisoners between the enemies? It was a hope raised in occasional circulars she received. There seemed
always, whether at the Gawell meetings or in the circulars, to be Red Cross reports of promising debates between the German and the British governments through what were called “Swiss intermediaries.”

She had been hearing about it for more than a year now. And if the Swiss were successful, she felt she would need to relearn who her husband was, this enthusiastic boy and returning ghost. She seemed at times to know only a few strands of his nature—the dancer, the tennis player, the man of average, well-meant jokes, and oiler of hair. Sometimes she was more angry than admiring of his sacrifice on Chios—“Listen, mate, put him aboard, and I'll catch the next one. Come on, I'll be jake.” She was bound to the man of that gesture by the three-year-old echo of vows she had uttered in the Presbyterian Church in Gawell, in a time when she seemed to herself now to have been vain and shallow, and before there were wars and reckless campaigns, and any Italians and Japanese in the camp near town.

She returned down the hallway to the kitchen. Since the prisoner did not look like she had assumed he would, she was more stimulated than she expected by the question of who this young man might be, and whether he might be useful or passive, clever or a dullard.

It was half an hour before Duncan came back from settling his Italian into his accommodation in the shearers' quarters. For a great deal of that time she had been able to see her father-in-law through the kitchen window, strolling about between the hut and the fruit trees as a kind of unarmed sentry, undecided as to whether to leave the prisoner to his own devices or not. She could not see, of course, if the Italian stayed inside his room or sat on the shearers' quarters' veranda, watching Duncan watch him. Now, coming back to the house, Duncan stopped at the veranda where Alice was hanging tea towels.