Shame and the Captives Page 3

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  The young man, led by desire for the farmer’s wife and by what he was sure was witchery to drink lemonade rather than defy thirst, went in the camp by the name Tengan. He had been a prisoner for more than two years. As he remembered it years past, in blue dawn, far to the northwest of the target, all their cowlings and propellers had been blessed by a priest and, insofar as it counted, deities were called down to loose their favors on fliers and machines. Tengan, a city boy, was sceptical of religion but was conservative enough to feel that to ignore the ritual might bring misfortune.

  The first light had promised the finest of tropic mornings, like a day three months before when the aircraft from his carrier had cracked open the sky on the enemy’s holy day, and descended towards hapless airfields and ships, dominating the air and flaying the earth which—until then—another empire, the hubristic American one, had assumed was their own. That day had been just short of a jaunt. One of them had said so in the crew room after a jubilant return.

  But—as they had been frankly told in flying school—they must realize they rode through the sky propelled by a fallible engine, and sitting in a barrel of volatile fuel with two temporary bombs and a permanent cannon strapped to it. So, though in the past months their missions had proved favorable, and had included unopposed strikes against the Dutch in their supposed Indies, it was appropriate to welcome any ceremony, any cry of good luck, whether from priests or deck crew.

  Tengan had not flown in China or acquired the languor and seen-it-all coolness the older fliers had. He needed to compensate, too, for his slightly girlish eyes, fine-drawn features, and sensitively wide lips, so difficult to maneuver into the ferocious slit most could manage for photographs sent home. Some severity of gaze was, however, not hard for him to adopt, because he did have a streak of zealotry in his temperament, quite irrespective of any training. He was also squadron wrestling champion. Without his knowing it, the aircraft commander on his carrier wondered whether Tengan’s earnestness would survive exposure to the fallibility of some of his officers. The young pilot had not yet seen much fallibility.

  This morning he lifted his plane off the deck in a state of ecstatic fervor. In a bright corner of the air, five thousand meters above a smooth sea, the aircraft of their fleet began to assemble in a series of large Vs. Tengan took his place by his officer’s wing. For two hours, they flew an uninterrupted course through skeins of clouds, which might later assemble to make an afternoon storm, and over a brilliant ocean. Then they crossed a blue slot of sea separating the two large islands that served as a marker to the target. Soon enough the mangrove coast came up beneath them and they began their descent. They swung to starboard over a great lagoon, and then banked over immense vacancies of yellow and red clay on which spaced trees made shadowings like a scatter of commas. They would sweep in a semicircle over this scrubby, inner terrain and then, unforeseen, take the port from the south, inland side.

  The low-slung town and angled harbor emerged as if from the earth ahead. It was—at first sight—an objective lacking in grandeur. But according to the pronouncement of both Tengan’s captain and admiral, it was a key to the expanding world they sought. Darwin shared this with Shanghai and Manila, Honolulu and Singapore.

  Flights of heavier aircraft stayed high, while other squadrons like Tengan’s came down to less than five hundred meters. Tengan followed his officer to that lower altitude, and then lower still. The port with ships was sighted ahead and this side of it, the airfield Tengan’s squadron was to assault. Breaking from the surface of the airfield were a few gusts of antiaircraft fire in sparse and futile black vapor. Tengan saw hangars and, wheeling on tarmac, planes intending to rise to the combat. Two hundred meters above the field he released one bomb and could see the upturned faces of men serving a small gun with almost piteous purpose. Ahead of and below him, an enemy pilot in an opened cockpit raced his plane down the field, determined to come up and make some answer to the interlopers. Very nearly as a cure for the man’s innocence Tengan fired his cannons on him, and as the pilot, doomed and honorable, eked his plane a few meters into the air, both he and it were consumed by a frightful orb of fire.

  Through the rim of its smoke, the vapors of the incinerated hero, Tengan climbed a little now to skim along the town’s main avenue and its modest official structures. These were to be left to the late-comers. He and his fellows had a further assigned task related to the port. Tengan saw that an earlier bomb had cut the pier in two. Men ran on hectic tasks or in frenzy on either section of it, and he fired his cannon at them. A moored ship was burning and now edging away from the wharf. He did not feel exultant but merely a calm, professional, and almost religious gratification as his cannon splintered the wharf and terrorized men hunched by the railway lines that ran along it, some being driven to jump into burning water.

  A few seconds later, past the wharf and above the harbor, he was all at once not as easy at heart as his godly situation should have allowed him to be. In the noise and rage and columns of flame lay some dissonance or sudden handicap. It preyed on the part of his mind that was not already taken up with a last duty—to attack one of the enemy’s warships, which was beginning to move in the harbor but too slowly to fulfill its ambition for the open sea. The release of his second bomb caused him to bounce upwards, and he pulled casually on his controls to see what good he’d done and believed he saw that one of the projectiles had entered the ship’s afterdeck and might destroy its steerage.

  However, he couldn’t know, and now he had a new urgency to reach a more reflective quarter of the sky, in which he might have time to consider his instruments. But low to the water still, a further enemy fighter presented itself to him, a less pliant machine than his, straining for height too steeply, its pilot so ill trained that he offered his entire flank. Would it continue to be so easy; would the enemy always present themselves like lambs? He suffered a further background disquiet because of a vaguely heard difference from the normal register of his own engine. He hoped on that basis that he was not himself a lamb. It took three seconds to transform the sacrificial aircraft ahead into a sphere of flame through whose edges he rode unscorched.

  He was able to reach a thousand meters, but something in the mechanism prevented him from more than that. Nonetheless, now he had leisure to regard his instruments. They gave grounds for his suppressed concern. Oil and manifold pressure had risen to an undesirable level. His oil was overheating. Yet he had felt nothing—no shock in the plane’s structure to explain what he was reading. The contemptibles at one of the aerodrome machine guns! Under the governance not of their own skill but of some malicious and ironic spirit, with their ill-aimed and antique weapons, they had lodged a small round somewhere critical in his engine.

  The rule for such unsatisfactory instrument readings was that he must attempt at once to reach any of the fleet’s carriers. A desire to turn and expend a portion of his fuel on assessing the scope of the damage done to the port couldn’t be entertained.

  It became clear to him that he was not ordained to reach his carrier, and there arose the question that would never allow him peace. Why was it he, out of an entire air fleet, who must be so humiliated in this bright segment of the limitless sky? He observed the embargo on radio transmissions, even had he been able to inform his mother vessel. The two large islands barely separated by a channel, which had served as a marker on the way in, presented themselves again to him. From his faltering altitude he could see a low area between hills at the western end of the bigger one. On that ground only occasional scrubby trees grew. It provided a credible landing place. Even such a dedicated flier has his preferences for death, and Tengan preferred to be incinerated with his aircraft rather than sink down with it, or float unobserved and abandoned in the sea. So he would land on that low ground.

  He brought his fighter in a broad turn to align it with the geography. He lacked the hydraulic pressure to lower his wheels. Otherwise he was able to land perfectly, nose up, tail down, as in the manual.
The force was ferocious, nonetheless, and he could not prevent his face from smashing again and again against his gun sight. But the punishment did come to an end and left him conscious. His impulse when the facial wounds began to throb was to leave the plane according to orders, to separate himself from it in the hope it would not easily be found, this sophisticated machine whose secrets of range, weight, composition, and armament would fascinate the enemy.

  In a haze of concussion, clearing his face of blood to enable vision, he climbed a hill and came down its more wooded side and found a stream from which he drank deeply before vomiting. He was hot and sweating a great deal, and became aware he still wore his flying suit. He shed it and tried to cover it with stones and branches. He retained his holster and pistol but now he was dressed in shirt and pants of tropic weight.

  The coastal passage and the further island could be seen from here. He moved towards the coast, where a reconnaissance float plane might see him. It proved, of course, a longer walk than he thought and the coastal thickets held him up. The stream he followed ran down into tangles of estuary mangroves, which did not offer a passage onto the beach. He sat and vomited again and lost consciousness while leaning against a rock. He had time before oblivion to extract his pistol and cradle it between his thighs.

  He woke in the night with his facial cuts stinging, but he was not a young man who expected mercy, and he rose up by moonlight and continued his descent towards the beach. He found himself instead in another sump of earth and facing further mangroves, and weariness overcame him again amongst crooked trees. He slept more and was roused in early daylight by the shrilling of some species of women. He reached for his pistol but it was not there.

  He had dropped it, he realized, at his last resting place. He walked away, and in a small opening amidst the trees saw an elderly savage woman minding three baby savages, while their mothers were off amongst the trees gathering something, he could tell, and laughing and squealing.

  The elderly woman stood with one of the infants in her arms and the two others around her feet, playing with roots and pebbles. Tengan saluted her and understood that to do so was not utterly rational. He put his hands out for the baby, which struck him as an exquisite, small anthracite artifact. The elderly woman, eyes wide, let him take it from her. But she wailed at a great volume and a young woman appeared, fearless, and snatched the infant back from him. He bowed to her, saluted, and turned away.

  Now that the women savages knew he was in their vicinity, he was impelled to walk as far as he could. He met another watercourse. Hours were consumed fighting through it, and then withdrawing and trying to penetrate from another point. Night found him still wrestling the coastal mangroves, and when he paused he heard the savage voices and a song again. He drank some brackish water from a pool in the ground and gave up and turned back into saner country, where there were clearer streams and more negotiable forest. When he saw a campfire in a clearing, he lay down within sight of it and yet again fell asleep, but on dry earth and lulled by the tribe’s conversation.

  He woke both thirsty and needing to urinate. While he was attending to that he felt a prod in his back so fierce he was nearly toppled. He turned and saw that one of the savages had his pistol. There were a number of young males with him, carrying long, thin clubs that looked weighty. They escorted him through the bush away from the channel he had wanted to reach, and came within a half hour to a building in which a white man in a half-military uniform was eating a plate of porridge. The man picked up a rifle, pointed it at Tengan one-handedly. Tengan bared his chest, inviting the man to shoot him, but was ignored. The man with the rifle went to a radio at one end of his hut to make a transmission. Then the savages gave Tengan water and tied him by the hands and the ankles, using a thin but dense-fibered rope. Eventually, a launch arrived with soldiers in their wide-brimmed hats. So they took him back by water to the port he had bombed.

  He told his captors there that his name was Tengan—the name of a classmate he had admired and even envied—and kept his real name, Okabe, a secret. That way it was harder for them to tell what prefecture he came from, and what unit, and who his family really were. Tengan, with its reference to the tiger, suited his attitude, which was to try to compensate by ferocity for his bad luck and obloquy.

  Then came a plane journey, during which his two guards made motions that they might throw him from the transport aircraft in which he sat wearing cuffs and anklets. He encouraged them to do so by smiling at them. He was in principle willing them to do it. His father, an accountant; his mother; his elder brother, a civil engineer working on fortifications; his elder sister, the schoolteacher—all would mourn him as much as if his crash had been fatal. They would be advised by the military to despair of him, and he did not wish to dishonor their tears by turning up at a future time of liberation.

  His face was dressed in a hospital, and two intelligence officers—both of them seemingly philosophic souls—took him for strolls inside a compound, trying with their small gift for language to get information from him. One even played him at badminton.

  After two long railway journeys, the second in a train full of Italians, from whom he was segregated with guards in his own compartment, he reached Gawell. It was late in the year. He and a handful of other captured airmen were permitted to live amongst the Italians, who called him Numero Uno and observed that he was impressively austere and churlish. He tried to ignore the guards’ and sundry Italians’ sexual endearments, mainly fake and derisive, but sometimes grounded in authentic lust, and came to communicate with some of them in a halting patois of Italian and English and Japanese. He spent time with one of them—an amiable fellow—exchanging cultural information and trading this or that word. This Italian’s name was the near-unpronounceable Giancarlo Molisano. Giancarlo seemed amused by Tengan’s air of melancholy and disdain. Tengan, said Giancarlo, reminded him of Dostoyevsky’s relentlessly gloomy brothers, the Karamazov boys. It was clear that nothing could be given to the Japanese pilot to appease his aloofness and nihilism.

  “War end,” Molisano told him, “you go home.”

  “No,” Tengan asserted. “War end, they shoot us all.” Surely they could be depended on for that much. Tengan restated his conviction. “Japan win, they shoot us all.”

  “I ain’t think so,” Molisano told him and shook his head and was amused. Amused! He was sanguine about living on unsoured by the repute of having been a captive.

  Ultimately, there could be no true meeting of souls between Tengan and the Italians. He harbored despair at any idea of a future homecoming, while the Italians spoke endlessly of theirs. Some of them seemed not to care if their army must be defeated along the way.

  Later, as more of his nation was rounded up in New Guinea—in Buna and Gona, in Salamaua and Wewak and Hollandia—Compound C at Gawell was built and filled with Tengan’s compatriots. Tengan, as a former pilot, asserted status amongst the compound’s population of Japanese. His spiky behavior, admired by some, grew from the very circumstances he kept secret from others—that he had been taken prisoner by savages, towards whom his feeling of repulsion grew as he recovered from his concussion. He had not charged either the revolver or the rifle. His being taken by savages and by the man with the radio and then by the launchful of soldiers could be explained by someone merciful as the result of shock and brain bruising. But he was not willing to be merciful to himself, and so had to adopt this strict attitude in Compound C to counter his fear that his fellow prisoners would hear he had been captured by people marginally human.

  3

  The site chosen to house the Gawell Prisoner of War Camp was a sloping plateau east of the town, screened from it to the west by grassy hills and congregations of granite boulders and outcrops, and fringed by wide-spaced white and red gums and other eccentric, angular, sharp-elbowed, erratically designed, continuously bark- and leaf-shedding antipodean trees, reminiscent of no other vegetation the inmates would have seen where they came from. The trick of releas
ing a potent eucalyptus smell by crushing the leaves of these trees became a recourse for prisoners with colds but soon lost its novelty. The subtle pungency of the native pepper tree was notable at first but soon taken for granted. For the vegetation was not considered to meet the aesthetic requirements of flora. From occasional angles, some of the farmland around the town could be seen from the place, the pastures often brown from lack of moisture in summer and because of the frosts of winter. But it was by design that the camp would not be able to see the town itself, nor the town itself the camp.

  Gawell Camp had begun as one large compound, a one-quarter slice of what was envisaged to become eventually a giant pie. Soon enough, though, with more Italians arriving by way of camps in India, and a continuous trickle of Japanese from advances made by the forces of light in New Guinea and the Solomons, it grew to four compounds, four equal slices of the pie, within a perimeter that was circular, or close enough to it—subtly twelve-sided to aid supervision and to facilitate lines of fire in the unlikely event of an outbreak.

  The location was spacious. There were nearly thirty sleeping barracks in each, placed as far as could be managed from the outer strands of wire. An orderly hut, a recreation hall, a mess hall, a bakery, latrines and shower blocks, and in two of them a large clinic or small hospital tended to make each compound is own self-contained planet. There was room for sport to be played, or for men to congregate if they chose, within good sight of the garrison for formal or informal meetings, for open-air lectures and concerts.

  The camp was bisected down the middle by a road called Main Road, with strong, tall gates at either end. Main Road, for example, separated the Japanese warriors of Compound C from the Italians in Compound A. Halfway down, Main Street was crossed by a laneway, similarly diametric, named Kelly’s Lane—to honor a famous Australian bandit from the last century. Across Kelly’s Lane from the Japanese prison lay the second Italian compound, D. The fourth slice was Compound B with its Japanese officers and former, aged Japanese merchants from the South Seas or Australian ports, along with Taiwanese and Koreans, and Indonesians, who hated the Dutch and might connive therefore with the Japanese who occupied their country. Compound B was a place of internecine assaults, the Koreans fighting each other or fighting the Taiwanese. More twenty-eight-day detentions were earned there than in any of the other quarters.