Shame and the Captives (6 page)

Suttor snorted. “But that hasn't made the buggers more tractable.”

Abercare knew he would not be permitted to win.

He said, “I suppose we'd have to be one of them to know what their convictions are now. As distinct from playing a role. Excuse me, Suttor.”

And he went, according to the spirit of his normal duties as senior officer, to visit the other table, where someone happened to be telling a story about Yanks and Kings Cross harlots.

T
he pilot sergeants such as Tengan who arrived early at Gawell were small in number, like any aristocracy. As well as Tengan, in its early days the camp held four members of a reconnaissance plane's crew who were found floating near Timor and had passed themselves off at first as merchant seamen; also two fighter pilots who had been found at sea near the Solomons. Amongst them Tengan behaved in his lordly manner because he felt he had most to hide and, publicly, most to expiate, given that humiliating number of his, 42001—the year he had been taken prisoner, and the fact he was the first to have been captured.

The men who could best resist the arrogance of the fliers were the other two members of the compound's council—the triumvirate, as Colonel Abercare called them—elected by the compound population. They were older men, accustomed to composure, and they called themselves Aoki and Goda. As senior sergeants in the infantry, they had both learned to be taciturn. Aoki was tall and bowlegged and rather stooping—perhaps congenitally, perhaps from two unextracted bullets in his upper leg. Anyone watching him would not necessarily have guessed their influence on his gait, attributing it perhaps to arthritis. He was aware of his wound, however, and of the limits it
put on the time he could stand in comfort and his capacity to move promptly. Aoki's careful movement helped to endow him with what the young thought of as an air of sagacity. He had joined the army for a span of three years after a bad farming season in 1930—he foresaw it as a brief and financially necessary interlude in his marriage and career. He expected to be stationed somewhere from which he could visit home. But then came the invasion of Manchukuo (which the world at large knew as Manchuria) and he was designated a permanent soldier.

Aoki believed the lanky Goda, a China veteran like himself, to be a man of excellent counsel. Goda was about the same age as Aoki, somewhere in his midthirties, maybe even forty. Goda, like most of the inmates, avoided talking about his family. But Aoki got the sense somehow that his comrade was something of a patriarch, with an indefinable number of children. Goda had let slip that he'd had a job as an insurance clerk once, but he admitted little other than that. He had never gone to the trouble most of the others did of explaining how they had been taken by the enemy; how it had been beyond their power to resist, or had occurred when they were not conscious it was happening. No explanation from the insurance assessor. Generally he had a reserve most men did not broach. In peacetime he would have cast a calm, judicious eye over building collapse and flood and fire. Goda was like a rudder, Aoki felt, between the polarities of Tengan and himself, between Tengan's positive hunger for ultimate elimination and his own more regretful acceptance of it as a mere duty. Goda did not seem frightened of Tengan's handsome young ferocity. There was something, however minor an impulse, in Aoki that sought Tengan's approval. It seemed unlikely there was anything like that in Goda.

Aoki's capture had occurred when his ship had exploded nearly two years earlier, and he was hurled on a high trajectory into the Bismarck Sea. No steel fragments had entered him, and he'd landed in the sea with as much vigor left as he'd had before the blast. He
saw the enemy's planes machine-gunning lifeboats, and clumps of men in the water, and expected the same himself. But no. He was pulled aboard an untouched lifeboat, which drifted with thirteen men through the night and up past a reef onto the shelving beach of an island.

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 to 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.