Shame and the Captives Page 10

  “Do you know what?” she asked. “I think you are a cunning man.”

  The frown that came on was chiefly in his eyes; his brow remained smooth and seamless. It was as if he was trying at that moment to prove that what people said about Italians was true. That they tried things on, saw how far they could confuse people.

  “Do you know what ‘cunning’ means?” she asked. “It means deceitful . . . telling lies.”

  He raised his hands palms up as a protest.

  She said, “You are telling us stories to suit your case.”

  He seemed mildly offended, but there came no grin of repentance, of a man caught out in a lie. In fact, he bowed his head a little and looked at her from beneath his brows, to assess whether she was playing with him or not. He was affronted so subtly that no reasonable person could have called it insolence and rung the Control Center with complaints. His mild but complicated pique fascinated her, sent a pulse of curiosity that urged her to press her case against him.

  She said, “It suits you to talk about how there should be no state now that Mussolini’s on the way out. But did you say anything about that when you were in Benghazi? Before the war really got going?”

  She laughed then, not totally indulgent. His concern at being found suspect made her recognize that she had power over him, and how odd that was, since in a lifetime she had never had power over any other man. She wondered what to do with it. She wanted to be moderate. She thought so, anyhow. It was the decent thing to be.

  But other undefined impulses, ones she thought of as beyond her nature, but powerful ones anyway, crowded in. To somehow impress herself on him from above, without proving any “niceness” first, without painfully and by the long rigmarole of bush etiquette proving her fitness. To be more blatant and casual with him than in her accustomed world, where women presented themselves like job applicants. To be blunt, as men were with each other, and if he didn’t like that, to find some alternate path of brisk contact, something candid beyond anything she’d ever done.

  How could she tell what that was?

  “I’m just mucking around,” she explained quickly to Giancarlo, doing her best to get back to known ground. “Teasing.”

  “Teasing,” he nodded. He waved his head from one side to another, as if to gauge whether teasing was safe.

  10

  Tengan, the naval aviator, the first prisoner of all and so a figure of ambiguous authority, moved like a man of martial purpose. His zeal had been dented by his ill fortune; nonetheless he maintained it and sought means to let Compound C know his vigor was still in place. Aoki thought Tengan wasn’t a bad fellow and even had the capacity to be flexible, but he seemed to feel bound to manifest his unyielding esprit.

  At a meeting of the council of three in Aoki’s hut, the mats and mattresses on which men slept now rolled up against the unlined timber walls, Tengan, for example, declared that he was against baseball and wanted it banned. Not, he said, that he had anything against the game itself. It was baseball within Compound C that took on a malignant character.

  “I played badminton,” he told Aoki and Goda, as if that proved what a jovial man he was. “In Brisbane, when they held me there. But only so I could watch my enemy. The baseball they let us play here is designed to make us content when we shouldn’t be content. So that the camp officers can look down from the towers and say, ‘There they are, happy with themselves. What a consolation!’ Baseball makes it possible for the enemy to gratify himself with our behavior.”

  Goda, who had become, as much as it was in his nature to be, Aoki’s familiar, clinically and with a citified confidence raised the issue of mental and physical vigor, and the way both could be revived on the baseball diamond. “The boys can’t just sit in their huts sulking and wasting away,” Goda grumbled as he accepted a small gift from Aoki, a thin-rolled cigarette, packed into the Zig-Zag brand of papers they were happy to receive from the captors.

  Tengan declared he wasn’t saying that. There were other pursuits. For example, wrestling was a different matter, said Tengan. “Men can exercise their bodies and souls in wrestling. Brother to brother, man to man. And it’s not like baseball—it’s not some kind of communal drug.”

  Goda cried out from his place that he respected Tengan’s argument in principle, but a decree outlawing baseball would be bitterly resented. Aoki was surprised that Goda cared about the resentment of men, but he might fear it more as something that frayed their souls rather than a factor that might see him fall as a member of the council. Tengan and his stridency seemed potentially dangerous. Goda moved that they should put it to a vote by the hut and section leaders. For this accorded with the spirit of democratic process.

  Tengan’s proposition would get some support, Goda and Aoki knew. One part of it would come from the strict logic of his case. Some of it would come from his authority as a flier, and the respect that aviators garnered from the young ultras, even the army men. Tengan had thundered through the sky, and reduced to submission the earth ahead of the infantry. He had done this before their enemies had even understood the winning equation between the armies of the air and the armies of the earth. Tengan might have fallen from the sky, and so be a fallen god.

  The hut commanders were notified to meet in Tengan’s hut to decide whether the issue should be submitted to the prisoners as a body. When they gathered, sitting at card tables or on mats, Tengan spoke first and explained the false balance of soul deriving from baseball. This time he seemed to be a margin more nervous, plucking once or twice at his maroon-dyed tunic. He mentioned that solidarity was torn into fragments by distracting men into baseball’s internal groups—the northern half of the compound, for example, against the southern half. When the game was over, and one team yelped and the other sloped away, what had been proven, except disunity? And then it was an opiate and a distraction, designed to drug the prisoners into accepting their condition.

  Still he explained himself with some primness and delicacy, like a junior headmaster, and a man trying out ideas rather than wed to them. He was not making a killjoy denunciation of baseball as if it were some evil in itself, he declared. If played, for example, by the army in the field, that would be a different matter.

  There were occasional groans and grunts at all this rectitude of his, but he was not speaking to the groaners and the grunters. He was speaking to the more clear-thinking of the young men, and he knew that he was exactly right on this issue.

  And he had a further argument not yet unveiled with Aoki and Goda.

  “Our guards fancy they are being very benevolent to us,” he said, “letting us play baseball. I have seen them point it out to the visiting Swiss. “Look, we’ve gone to that trouble for them. Please mention in your report how earnest we’ve been.” Should we allow them to preen like that? Wouldn’t they be confused if we returned all the equipment to them? And confusing them . . . isn’t that one of our chief interim tasks?”

  His tone was moderate but his eye gleamed as he made this last point, so appealing to some of the young intractables. Yet once more he managed to sound more questioning than dogmatic or fanatical. As Aoki and Goda did not want to oppose him or this group of young men too frontally, he also understood that he could not afford to alienate the two older men of the other hut commanders—as muddled as their consciousness seemed—without risking his place in the council.

  The discussion began. Omura, who belonged to Tengan’s elite bloc, declared he could see Tengan’s point. Just the same, couldn’t it be argued that their captors were trying to make them content and forgetful in other ways as well, by supplying them with musical instruments, by allowing plays to be performed, even by the scale of rations? Omura thought that at least in part the captors treated them well not just because they wanted to sedate them but also because the prisoners made them uneasy and that the duty to keep them uneasy was not dependent on refusing to play baseball.

  With Omura (who, in turn, despite respect for Tengan, wished to remain hut c
ommander) respectfully adjusting but in reality rebuffing Tengan’s argument, Tengan could see the prestige of his premise beginning to collapse, and a little more quickly than he had expected. He had expected to lose to woolly minded infantrymen, but not to receive the first dainty blow from one of his fellow aviators.

  A crusty hut commander named Kure, who had led a determined-to-die unit in a breakout charge at Buna and—the usual story—had been concussed and wounded by the burst of a grenade, didn’t like Tengan and spoke more dismissively.

  “It’s not the fault of the men in my hut that they’re prisoners,” he said. “Let the poor kids have a game of baseball! An hour or two of relief from the reality of their situation.” Besides that, he argued, the divisions created by baseball weren’t real—they were felt only for an hour or so, and then the game and the score faded in memory.

  And then Kure put the knife in. The infantry were used to trusting each other in mind and body, he said pointedly. Maybe someone used to the solitude of a cockpit didn’t have the same sense of his fellow men.

  That was it. The hut leaders were so quickly convinced of the mental and physical value of baseball that all but two of them voted for it to continue in the compound. Tengan had prepared himself for defeat, but not to this extent or so promptly. To shore up his stature, he announced, “I accept that the majority has spoken, and as I am not a fanatic, I concede the ground.”

  He knew that he must do something to restore himself and hoped he could achieve that by some extent through wrestling. For he was, in all senses, a champion of wrestling. This Kure fellow—he wouldn’t waste time resenting him.

  11

  Alice would sometimes see Giancarlo from the kitchen window, especially when he went scouting amongst the peach and nectarine trees outside the garden fence. He seemed to love the fruit, and Duncan had given him permission to pick it. He would part the leaves with patience, and tenderly feel whatever was attached.

  He had made a difference to her laborious routines. He locked the calf away at night and continued to be up to milk Dotty in the morning, when, from the long habits of early rising, she came out to the shed and watched the process as if inspecting it for technique, but still saying nothing. He collected the eggs as well and took them in a bucket to the back door, knocking to say what was obvious—“I have eggs, Missus ’Erman.”

  The first time she got back from her afternoon lesson and tea party with Giancarlo, she had gone at once and looked up the meaning of the word “anarchist” in the dictionary beside the Bible in the rarely used lounge room of the Herman farmhouse. There was a confident definition there and yet she had never known there were such people. Surely there were none of them in Australia. She put out her hand to the upright piano as if the world had shifted a degree or two off axis. States make war. Therefore, no states, no war. Absolute rubbish. Yet it was somehow a decorative credo in Giancarlo’s case and made him larger in her imagination.

  The lessons continued. In the kitchen one night, Duncan Herman was still studying yesterday’s Herald as she came in, but then he got up with an uncharacteristic suddenness to wash his hands at the kitchen sink.

  “Spending a bit of time with young Johnny, were you?” he asked, frowning, but concentrating on the soap in his hands.

  “Another English lesson,” she said quickly. “You know, he’s better at it than we thought.”

  Since, thank God, he was too uncomfortable about having challenged her to raise his eyes, Duncan did not see the blood in her face.

  “Do you reckon you ought to give it a rest?” asked Duncan. He began wiping his hands thoroughly and this action, too, commanded his full gaze. “Seems to me he can manage to hear what I say all right.”

  “I lent him one of Mrs. Herman’s novels,” she admitted, as if zeal to instruct the Italian was thus proven. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he manages to read it. I agree with you, Duncan. He’s speaks English better than we thought he would.”

  Duncan looked up at last. She was pleased that she had by her tone appeased him. “That’s right,” he admitted. “Is he coming up to tea tonight?”

  “Well,” she said, “it’s Wednesday. Didn’t you invite him for Wednesdays?”

  “That’s right,” Duncan admitted again, and finished drying his hands and returned to his newspaper.

  And when it was time, she went outside and clanged the bell that hung from the upper part of the veranda, to signal Giancarlo.

  “Have you finished that bottle of red plonk I gave you, Johnny?” asked Duncan genially at the table. Duncan had bought the bottle of red wine from a pub in Gawell as a reward for good work. And clearly he expected a bottle of wine to last as long as one of whisky.

  “I finish her, Mr. ’Erman,” said Giancarlo, smiling. “I don’ want she turn to vinegar.”

  Alice decided not to correct his pronouns.

  Duncan laughed, without ill feeling. “Well, I’ve got to say, you’re pretty good at excuses, Johnny.”

  She wondered whether this was, by some accident of wisdom on Duncan’s part, a knowing gibe. But his face now crinkled in innocent delight at his own gift for teasing, and she saw at once what Duncan had been worried about—not that she was beguiled by Giancarlo, but that Giancarlo might learn more English than would suit Duncan as the boss; that giving Giancarlo an equality of grammar would somehow undermine Duncan. It was the upper hand Duncan desired to keep, and Giancarlo knew it. It was why by instinct his speech became more halting, more confused, with Duncan.

  Giancarlo’s eyes, moving about in answer to Duncan’s sally about wine and excuses, hooked onto Alice’s. Duncan went on stuttering with laughter over his lamb chops and doing difficult surgery on them, excising the maximum from the bones. It was frugality, not gluttony, that made him do it. But Duncan’s application to this work allowed Alice and Giancarlo to gaze more directly than they had ever before had a chance or the bravery to. It seemed to her that a mass of news of a kind she had not received or transmitted before flowed out as if on some sort of radio beam: her uncertainty, her fidelity, her loss of wifehood, her sense of command over Duncan and over him. And by the same apparatus was returned her way his political doubts, his hatred of imprisonment, his sense of being Duncan’s subject and friend and never quite either, his fear of her and his want of her and his fear for his parents living amidst Italian battle fronts. It took perhaps twenty seconds as measured in metered time.

  Giancarlo showed signs of discomfort for the rest of the night. He was distracted when Duncan spoke to him about the differential on the truck and questioned him about the quirks of engines. Giancarlo’s knowledge, uttered however haltingly, did seem considerable. The benefit of the liceo scientifico he’d mentioned to her.

  “What’s the problem, Johnny? You’re looking pretty down.”

  “Down, Mr. ’Erman?”

  “Sad, maybe. Worried.”

  “I don’ like say . . . Your son is in prison. So you worry for him. I worry something else.”

  Alice was transfixed. She hoped Duncan would blunder on.

  “Yeah?” asked Duncan. “What’s that, then, Johnny?”

  “It’s in Herald. The enemy give up Napoli. The fighting in my country now. My father, mother, brother—all there. But maybe i tedeschi, the Germans, all run through Frattamaggiore. No fight.” He gestured with his hand to signify a withdrawal. “Back and back to new line, I hope.”

  “We hope too,” Alice told him. Hope was in fact ardent in her. “We hope your family’s all right, Giancarlo.”

  The meal ended. Giancarlo, anxious about straining his welcome, rose and wished them a good night, carefully enunciated in English. Duncan, in his slippers, went into the lounge room to listen to the news on his big, mahogany cabinet of a wireless. Alice washed dishes abstractly, in a ferment of anticipation. For the first time in her life, she had entered that unpredicted state where there is no history, and in which even the succulent, breathable air seemed to reassure her that her fever would be understoo
d by those who knew the truth, and even applauded. Her intoxication glittered with its own morality so much higher than any accustomed commandment.

  She also understood instantly that she could not wait on a word from Giancarlo. He was the prisoner. She was not a prisoner. She was not on any probation; no language was barred to her; she had the space and the sudden, unexpected ability to act. She had not ever been encouraged to feel such authority, this prerogative that seemed larger than pastures and more significant than all the palaver of sheep, wheat, superphosphate. Her authority in the matter, she was sure, had already been established at the table, and not least in the twenty-second spate between the two of them, while Duncan looked elsewhere, benumbed. And Giancarlo feared for his parents and must be consoled for their peril.

  Before going to bed, however, she recognized herself as the victim of a malady and tried to give the images she retained of Neville a chance to reassert themselves. She had a sense of flailing at something impossibly remote—a hook could not be attached to it or a familiarity reestablished. She found with fear and bewilderment and a lot of exhilaration that her sense of what was ridiculous had utterly gone. It was not ridiculous to wear a nightdress, a man’s plaid dressing gown, and gumboots at three in the morning, to drop from a windowsill, and flank the house in a night on which only the most insomniac insects still chirped. A mild southwesterly evoked a few seconds of lazy movement in the garden shrubs. She moved through the fruit trees, around the screen of eucalypts, to the shadow of the shearers’ quarters’ veranda. It was a few seconds from the place of her drudgery and daily boredom, but now of a different order of things. She felt the entitlement to turn the plain door handle. Then she was inside, closing out the night. She was not in total darkness—starlight and the moon, she saw, gave a small luminescence to the rough curtain over the window.