by David Malouf
They kept their eyes lowered, not daring to look up. To show the guards something as alive and jelly-like as an eyeball might be to set them off again. They were still shouting and shoving at one another, entirely out of control.
Digger forced his head down, his fingers so tightly knuckled that he felt he might never get them unstuck. His heart hammered. He was rigid but quaking. The guards were all round them, kicking up dust, dancing about in a rage at one another, uttering gutturals and shrill howls.
On one side incomprehensible crazy activity. On the other this heart-pounding, frozen immobility in which they sat squeezed into a single mass just where they had fallen.
Digger had Vic’s mouth at his ear. He could smell the foulness – terror was it? – of his breath. The sweat was pouring off him, off all of them. What he had thought at first must be Vic’s arm twisted and caught between them was another man’s altogether. It hardly mattered.
He saw very clearly then what they were at this moment: meat, very nearly meat. One flash second this side of it.
‘There is a line,’ he thought. ‘On one side of it you’re what we are, all nerve and sweat. On the other, you’re meat.’
All herded together and with the breath knocked out of them, they were right on the line. Things could go either way with them. Only when the Japs stopped yelling at one another, and rushing about in a panic, and began to move again at a human pace, and they were allowed to unlock themselves from one another and lift their heads, would they be back again on the right side of things.
For Mac it was too late. He had already been pitched across, and was lying over there somewhere – even Digger did not dare shift his head to see where it might be, but it was unnervingly close. Back in the half-dark of the godown, in a scrabble of wet dust; but further than that too, in a dimension, close as they all were to it, that was already beyond reach.
Vic too sat hunched and painfully twisted, in a silence he thought must be a kind of deafness – one of the guards must have deafened him – since all round he could see them shouting. There was an invisible membrane between him and the world. Inside it he was choking for breath.
They were jam-packed together in a heap, no space between them, hard bone against bone; but he felt himself entirely cut off; at an immense distance from the shouting, the panic, the hot presence of the others as they pressed against him. It was as if space now had developed the capacity to expand that just a moment back had belonged to time. He tried to make the laws of time and space operative again in his body, to get himself back into the world the others were in. If there was a price to pay for that he would pay it. He had no illusions about what they must think of him.
Everything that came to his senses had a ghostly quality, yet he had never been so aware of his own physical presence, the sensitivity of his lips which when he ran his dry tongue over them were all puffed with blood, the lightness of his belly, the terrible flexibility of his wrists.
Whenever, in flashes, his mind worked, all that had happened came back to him, and he was flooded with shame. But always it was his body that had the final word, and his body thought differently. It lived for itself and did not care.
‘How could I let it happen?’ he asked himself, ‘how could I?’ When the moment for action came and he should have moved into the gap he had opened, he had hung back and done nothing. He had stood there, too slow to move, too astonished that the moment he had been waiting for had actually come. Or this body he was lumbered with, always slower than the spirit, or cannier, or more cowardly, had acted in its own interests, and while it hovered there – it could only have been a second or two – the world had moved on, pushing him away to one side. The blades had come down and missed him. His body saved itself, and him, but shamefully, leaving him with a lifetime to face of the life it had bought for him. And the most shameful thing of all was that he could live with it. He was breathing hard. All his blood was pumping. He was full of the smell of himself.
His body was driving it home to him. You won’t die, son. Not of this.
The guards, themselves shocked to silence now at what had been done, began to get them to their feet, urging them gently, like children. No one among them, guard or prisoner, was ready yet to meet another man’s eye.
Vic too got to his feet. No one looked at him, and he felt a little rush of defiance come over him, like a child who has been unjustly accused. He began to find arguments in his own defence. He hadn’t asked Mac to step in between him and whatever fatality he had provoked. ‘I didn’t ask him to!’
They formed a line again and went quietly to their work, and when they came back through the godown with their load Mac’s body was no longer there.
They moved quietly, scarcely daring to breathe. As if sound, any sound at all, might set something off again. When one man jostled a chain and a length of it fell and rattled, they jumped like frogs, all of them, as if even the clank of iron against iron could send out ripples and break a head.
When he got his meal Vic did not know how to act, whether or not he could sit with them. He was still tense and close to tears, but determined now to tough it out. He took his dixie and sat a little way away from where Digger and another fellow, Ernie Webber, were already eating.
But when Doug came in he saw immediately how things were and came without fuss and sat at Vic’s side, but did not look at him.
Digger did. He looked up, noted what had happened, then looked away and went on chewing.
Seeing it, Vic put his head down, animal-like, and plunged his spoon into the mush. He ate. He was ravenous – that was the body again. He was ashamed but he couldn’t get enough of the sticky mess he was shoving into his mouth. He could have eaten pounds of the stuff, and still it wouldn’t have satisfied the craving he felt. He ate fast, with his head down like an animal, and the tears that welled up in him were tears of rage.
Slowly in the days that followed his life came back and began once again to be ordinary and his own.
His wound was still raw in him, and when his mind moved back to that fraction of a second before Mac went down, his blood quickened, he stepped forward, and his youthful spirit did what it had to do to save his honour. He died happy.
The awakening from this dream sent a wave of new shame over him. He would flush to the roots of his hair and look about quickly to see if any of the others had seen it.
He went out on the usual work parties and in the same group; taking the weight of the sack on his bent back and trotting with it to the place where it could be dumped, welcoming the opportunity it offered to lose himself in the exhaustion that extinguished thought. The young guard was there each day and acted as if nothing had happened. They ate their meal in a group just as before, shared what they scavenged, and Vic got his share. When he scavenged something he offered it round and even Digger took it. The lump in his throat began to melt.
‘I am nineteen,’ he told himself. He did not offer this as an excuse. His youth, if anything, was an affliction. It made things hard for him. What he meant was, ‘Nineteen is all I’ve got.’ It seemed, as the sum of what he had experienced, a large thing. But what he was thinking of was the future. ‘All this,’ he thought, ‘can be made good in time, if I get it. All I need now is time.’ Putting his head down in an animal way and getting on with it was the first step.
It wasn’t simply a matter of outliving his shame and the blood on his hands; but of proving to them, whoever they might be, that this life of his that had got itself saved, by whatever means, had been worth saving.
Meanwhile he dealt with the others as they dealt with him. He was prepared for the hostility Digger showed him.
They had never been close, but there was in Digger’s avoidance of him now a harder quality, a kind of contempt. What it said was: for me you are not there, you’re dead; you died back there where you ought to have done, instead of him. And in his old way, while deeply resenting this, he also, in another part of his nature, accepted it. Digger became the one among
them whose good opinion he most cared for – because he knew Digger would not give it.
He deliberately put out of his mind the Warrenders and his old life, feeling that in betraying himself he had betrayed them, too. It hurt him to look at what he had done through their eyes, even more through Lucille’s. He set himself to live in the present. That is where he would remake his life. But once, in a dream, his father came to him. It was something he had dreaded. He shrank into himself.
He was drunk, of course, and there was a smirk on his face. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘fancy meetin’ you here. Fancy you an’ me bein’ in the same boat, eh?’ He was delighted that Vic had been brought so low. ‘We’re the same kind after all.’
‘No we’re not,’ Vic told him. ‘You might think we are.’
‘Oh? Why don’t we ask yer mates?’
He laughed at that, a dribbling laugh, and Vic thought again of all those hours he had sat out in the dark of the woodpile in a trance of blood.
‘So how does it feel, eh? Still think yer better’n the rest ’v us? I s’pose you’ll be askin’ now fer a second chance.’ He paused, and Vic quaked. ‘Well, good luck t’ ya! – But did you ever give me one?’
It haunted him, that, but he put it out of his mind with all the other things he had decided to turn his back on. He had his life to save.
3
DIGGER TOO WAS in turmoil. It shook him that he could feel so much hostility, and to one of their own blokes too, not even a Jap. The thoughts that came to him, the wish to see Vic pay or for the events in the godown to take a different turn and for him to be the one, scared Digger. He wouldn’t have believed he was capable of that sort of vindictiveness. But the loss he had suffered was too raw in him to be amenable to reason. There were things, he decided, that you couldn’t be reasonable about – and oughtn’t to be, either. But then he thought: ‘Where was I when Mac needed me? What did I do?’
He and Mac had crossed for the last time at the loading point. Mac had been next in line behind Vic, and as he took the load on his neck and tottered past he had caught the look Mac flashed him, just the tail of it, through the sweat and his lank hair which was streaming.
It was nothing special. One of those little gestures of easy, affectionate contact that keep you going, that’s all: that make the ground firmer, that’s all. But in that moment they had been just twenty, maybe thirty seconds away from it. Would he have seen something if he had been more alert? That’s what stumped him. Mac was just thirty seconds from death. They had been looking straight into one another’s eyes.
Fifty feet further on, trotting now with his neck bowed under the weight of the sack, he had heard a ruckus and turned awkwardly on one foot to see what it was.
It was Vic. He had known that immediately. Who else would it be? A sack had burst, and figures were struggling in a storm of white, one of them, from the bulky shape of him, a guard.
Could he have glimpsed Mac’s face then, in the confusion of the moment, through the cloud of floury dust? He thought he had; the image of it was so clear in his head.
A face wiped of all expression is what he saw. Or maybe that was just the flour Mac had been showered with in the exploding storm. But what Digger thought he saw was the look that might come over a man who is on the brink of extinction, and knows it, and has already let the knowledge of it possess and change him. An impersonal look of neither panic nor despair; which was the certainty of his own death passing physically from head to foot through him, a kind of pallor, and changing him as it went.
It was Mac’s sad-faced mournful look, as Doug would have put it, which they had seen him wear on a thousand occasions, only raised now to the highest pitch, so that everything that was personal in it was gone, and yet it was utterly his own look that you would have known anywhere.
Had he really seen that, or was it what his mind had pictured to fill some need of its own? He could never be certain now. But as time went on the image stayed clear, if anything, grew sharper. So in the end it was what he might never have seen at all that meant most to him.
He also had the pile of letters Mac had left him. When, months later, they were organised into forces and sent to Thailand, the letters went with him.
4
THEY WERE AT a place called Hintock River Camp, one of dozens of such work-camps that stretched for three hundred miles between the Malay and the Burmese borders. The map of it was not clear to them, because their knowledge of these countries was limited to the patch of jungle that shut them in, and because the line they were on was as yet an imaginary one.
It ran in a provisional fashion from Bangkok to Rangoon, and their job, under the direction of a Japanese engineer and several thousand Japanese and Korean guards, was to make it real: to bring it into existence by laying it down, in the form of rails and sleepers, through mountain passes, across rivers, and even, when the line met them, through walls of rock. Eventually all the bits of it would link up. Till then, they were concerned only with their own section, with bamboo, rock, rain and the rivers of mud it created, the individual temperament of their guards, the hours of work the Japs demanded of them (which kept increasing), the length of rail the authorities decided should be laid each day or the length of tunnel completed, and their own dwindling strength. The limits of their world were the twenty or so attap huts that made each encampment – one of which was set apart as a hospital, or rather, a place for the dying – and the site, off in the jungle, where their daily torment took place.
They had come up here from the railhead at the Malayan border in a series of night marches, since it was too hot to move by day, and had passed many such camps, some better than the one they were in, one or two of them a lot worse. These camps either had native names like Nakam Patam, Kanburi, Nan Tok, or they had been given the sort of name you might have used for a creek or a camping spot at home: Rin Tin Tin Camp, Whalemeat Camp. One, however, was called Cholera Camp.
The work was killing. So was the heat. So, once they started, were the rains.
Back where they came from they had belonged, even the slowest country boy among them, to a world of machines. Learning to drive was the second goal of manhood – the first for some. Fooling about under trucks and cars, tinkering with motorbikes and boat engines, rigging up crystal sets – all this had become second nature to them, a form of dream-work in which they recognised (or their hands did) an extension of their own brains. It had created between them and the machines they cared for a kind of communion that was different from the one they shared with cattle and horses, but not significantly so. For most of them machines were as essential to the world they moved in as rocks or trees. Tractors, combine harvesters, steamrollers, cranes – even the tamest pen-pusher among them had dawdled at a street corner to look over the wire in front of a building site to see the big steamhammers at work driving piles. It had changed their vision of themselves. Once you have learned certain skills, and taken them into yourself, you are a new species. There’s no way back.
Well, that was the theory.
Only they found themselves now in a place, and with a job in hand, that made nothing of all that. It might never have been. They had fallen out of that world. Muscle and bone, that was all they had to work with now. An eight-pound hammer, a length of steel, and whatever innovative technology they could come up with on the spot for breaking stone.
Some of these men had been storemen and book-keepers. Others were shearers, lawyers’ clerks, wine-tasters, bootmakers, plumbers’ mates, or had travelled in kitchenware or ladies’ lingerie. They had had spelling drummed into them, the thirteen-times table, avoirdupois and troy weight. ‘You’ll need this one day, son. That’s why I’m caning you,’ a lady teacher had told more than one of them, when, after getting up at four-thirty to milk a herd, they had dozed off at their desk. They were all labourers now. Someone else would do the calculations. So much for Mental! The number of inches a pair of drillers, working closely together with hammer and steel, could drive through sheer rock
in ten or twelve hours a day. The amount of rubble, so many cubic feet, that could be loaded, lifted and borne by a man who had once weighed thirteen stone, now weighed eight and was two days out of a bout of malaria. All this to be balanced precisely against the smallest amount of rice a man could work on before he was no longer worth feeding and could be scrapped.
The work was killing. So was the heat. So, once they started, were the rains. But they also suffered from amoebic dysentery, malaria, including the cardiac variety, typhoid, beriberi, pellagra and cholera.
The doctors among them diagnosed these diseases, but that didn’t help because they had none of the medicines they needed to cure them, and it didn’t help a man to know that the disease he was dying of was pellagra, any more than it helped to know that the place he was dying in was called Sonkurai. The name, however exotic, in no way matched the extraordinary world his body had now entered, or the things it got up to, as if what it had discovered up here was a freedom to go crazy in any way it pleased.
Only one thing set them apart from the other coolies who for centuries had done this sort of work for one empire and then the next. They knew what it was they were constructing because it belonged to the world they came from: the future.
It was as if someone, in a visionary moment, had seen a machine out of the distant time to come, a steam engine, and had set out with only the most primitive tools and a hundred thousand slaves to build the line it would need to move on if it were to appear. If you could only get the line down, then the machine would follow – that was the logic. It was true, too. In this case it would happen.
So, if they could only finish the line and link up all the sectional bits of it, they would have made a way back out of here to where they had come from: the future. When the engine came steaming round the bend, its heavy wheels perfectly fitted to the track, the sleepers taking its weight, its funnels pouring out soot, they would know that time too had been linked up and was one again, and that the world they had been at home with was real, not an unattainable dream.