Shame and the Captives Read online

  He had come through China unmarked in any way considered serious, and to him that prompt current sweeping them to the island was the continuation of a glut of good fortune. There, a little offshore, they holed and sank their lifeboat, and slept.

  Still resting behind the beach in early light, they saw an enemy patrol arrive by amphibious craft with the apparent intention to hunt survivors. They believed the enemy was not interested in shooting to wound and did not take prisoners. There must have been an instinct in some of the survivors from the boat to hide deeper in the island, but the place was small and could be easily scoured. Better to go down showing some spirit.

  As the enemy, once landed, divided their tasks and took their first purposeful steps in three directions across the wide beach, Aoki and his companions in the fringes of the jungle divided into two parties, and he—in whispers—assumed command of one of them. All his fellows whom the sea had cast up were enthusiastic for the demonstration that the presence of alien patrols offered them. Other issues were overshadowed by their purpose of exonerating themselves and avoiding seizure. At a count of ten, they charged out of the undergrowth in their two screaming phalanxes with sharpened bamboo stakes in their hands. Aoki himself, leading, shrieked as he ran, and felt subsumed by the combined severe purpose of his men, and exultant in the way he had sometimes felt in earlier campaigns.

  The enemy reacted inevitably with their small automatic guns and their rifles. Around him other survivors of the sinking fell down, silenced. He ran on unscathed and neared one of the others, a man so close that Aoki could see the sweat on his young face. This soldier deliberately shot him twice in the leg. In the enemy soldier’s mind, Aoki knew this was an exercise of mercy and contrary to the rules, and he deplored and despised it. He was kneeling, half-keeled sideways, in the hope the youth might decide to do better work, as others of them had done with their targets. But the alien soldier assured him, “Doctor! Hospital!” He believed Aoki’s gush of tears and tormented face had to do with pain, as if Aoki had not undergone such a long tutelage in dealing with it.

  “You runny shit!” he called the soldier, through tears.

  He had left his hair and finger clippings back in Rabaul to be sent to his wife if he did not return. They would confirm his death, and they committed him to it. But he had run into a child who would not grant the extra bullet. “You huge runny shit!” he cried out, weakened by loss of blood.

  Four lethally wounded men of Aoki’s party implored other enemy soldiers to finish them off, and those soldiers, more reliable members of the enemy army, did it. But where was the consistency in that? A true army could be depended on to conclude their work. These men were unpredictable, as capable of fury as he was, but without any pattern of resolve. Contrary to the assurances his officers in Rabaul had given him, some shot to kill, some to wound. They lacked a spiritual pattern and a defined military purpose. They were despicable.

  Three captured and undamaged survivors were required to dig ten graves, and no more chances of martyrdom were offered, no matter what insulting or imploring gestures Aoki, from his position on the sand, and the gravediggers made. As Aoki watched them, his wound was inexpertly dressed and he was dragged across the beach onto the steel floor of the landing craft as a prize for intelligence officers. He was now malignly immortal, he felt. The odds had cursed him. The enemy planes had obliterated his convoy and shot nearly all the survivors floating in the Bismarck Sea. Except those in his boatful. And now the pattern had been repeated on land.

  • • •

  Traveling in the well of the landing craft back to some main island, he was taken thrashing and struggling into a tent and etherized by force, orderlies with their sour sweat holding him down by arms and chest. He woke at night in a shrilling of frogs and insects to find his wound dressed and painful, and by his bed an enemy officer and a Chinese translator. They would be, he knew as he fought the ether nausea, very interested in his name and place of birth and his unit. He chose the names of two dead friends, gave one as patronymic and the other as personal name. So he became Aoki. The officer had his own form of cunning, though, and wanted to talk through his Chinese interpreter about the crop cycles where Aoki came from and then asked about rice-planting rituals. It was a way they thought they had of finding out your province. The first of June, rice planting started, said Aoki to satisfy him. With women wearing straw hats and decorated kimonos, dressed like princesses and ankle deep in water.

  The officer then said assuredly, “So your village is near Hiroshima?”

  Aoki managed a face of contempt stoked by the pain of his wounds. “I am from Etajima Island, you idiot!” he falsely informed the Chinese translator. “Tell him!”

  The intelligence officer and his translator visited Aoki a number of times, and Aoki came to respect both of them a little. The officer even went walking with Aoki as his wounds healed, and they seemed—as far as they could manage—to talk about normal things. The officer had a child. Aoki had not been blessed with one, but said brusquely he had two. Slowly Aoki’s defiance transmuted itself into something subtler, more subterranean, more appropriate to his essentially genial nature and his purpose. You didn’t need to confront these people all the time. You could deceive them better by a neutral or even half-polite tone.

  • • •

  They sent Aoki on a southward-bound train with fifty others who had turned up from the wreckage of the destroyed Bismarck Sea armada, and when they reached a city they locked them in a closed hospital ward. One day, he looked in the mirror and found that he was sleek as a neutered tomcat. It was their bread—it contained a different starch from that in rice. It loosened the muscles of men’s bodies, weighed down and muted them.

  Now, in the beginning of the southern hemisphere summer, the party was sent further south, in carriages with unopened windows. One flask of water lay at either end of the compartment. There were four guards at either end, too, as if protecting the water from those who would try to seize it. A young marine named Hirano had vomited and seemed to suffer from heat exhaustion and an embarrassment at this apparent weakness. Aoki found the sentries did not maintain any appropriate policy of preventing him going to fetch water for the boy by reaching down the glass decanter and pouring the fluid into a small metal cup. He took it to the young man and told him to sip it, and although at first the marine resisted, he gave way to Aoki’s rank in the end. When the cup was empty, returning to the decanter Aoki quenched his own thirst.

  Immediately the carriage divided into two camps—those willing to drink and those who would not do it for stoicism’s sake, or because they despised mercy, or from a belief that the guards had put a sedative in the water to make their charges more tractable on the journey. Aoki’s reassurance after an hour or so that he still felt wide awake did nothing to dent the resolve of the stoic party. He understood that to go thirsty by an exercise of will was for some of them a way of striking back. It made them more cheerful. Wherever they send us, he thought, there will always be this division between us. Two ways of negotiating the phenomenon of capture, accepting occasional comfort on the way to one’s extermination, as most men would, or engaging oneself in relentless rejection of every minor solace, which he knew would be the choice of some.

  • • •

  On arrival at Gawell Camp, Aoki and his fellow captives were greeted by an enemy sergeant who, Aoki observed, had the soulful, unrequited look Russians have. Indeed, as they left their bus from the railway station and stood in a drizzle of rain, the man greeted them in faintly Russian-accented Japanese. He had, he said, studied the roll of names that had come with them. He immediately recognized two of the false names the prisoners were using as being those of generals who had humiliated the Russian Empire in the war of 1905. “That’s been tried before,” he told them.

  He had them marched to the office of the commandant, a square-faced officer who had once been handsome. They were made to stand to attention while he inspected them, a process that seemed t
o have more to do with assessing their hygiene than with any military purpose.

  Now, in Colonel Abercare’s office, they heard through the mouth of the Russian émigré in his ill-cut uniform that the commandant had some excellent advice to give them that he would translate. The colonel spoke for a time and then stopped. The Russian took no notes, perhaps because he was familiar with the content, and began when the colonel stopped. He identified himself as Sergeant Nevski.

  “The colonel wants me to say,” said Nevski, “that he is well aware your nation used to frown upon soldiers who became prisoners. By now, however, there have been so very many of your fellow countrymen taken prisoner that the old warrior rules have been revised. Imprisonment is no longer considered, either on our side or on yours, to be shameful. And self-harm would these days be seen by your captors as cowardly, the act of men who cannot deal with living in Compound C. There are thousands of our people in your prisons, and we on this side are proud of them, not ashamed. Because we know they used every endeavor to fight before yielding.”

  The colonel peered and nodded as if he understood the Russian.

  “The same can be said for you,” the Russian continued. “You should be proud of having done your duty, not ashamed. There is a new world coming, and those extreme military codes are now obsolete and do not serve as a useful guide. You will be well fed, your complaints will be sought and acted upon, and when the war ends you can return to your people with honor. In the meantime, do your best to pass the time. Find a hobby. For time will pass one way or another, tediously or well used.”

  Then the commandant turned to the guards who were with Aoki’s party and told them to march away the prisoners. It is easy, Aoki thought, for those who lack any military code to speak of honor as extreme.

  • • •

  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.”

  5

  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.