Shame and the Captives

by Thomas Keneally

  “Here I am,” he said, “two big sections of pasture for sheep, and three paddocks for wheat and cereals. Just under three thousand acres. My daughter-in-law’s done a lot, a real brick, and I have to hire others when I can. But to have a man full-time . . .”

  He was so conscientious about this negotiation that he had placed a fountain pen and a bottle of ink, ready for use, on the table at which he had been sitting. The men handed him their two sets of papers, the government’s and those of the Red Cross, for his study. He invited both of them to sit while he studied the papers page by page, the sergeant explaining Control Center clauses, and then the elderly gentleman speaking of the Red Cross’s concerns.

  The prisoner had by now been ordered by the driver to jump down, and was standing with his knapsack on the packed earth outside the gate. The men still on the truck and bound for other farms yelled their Italian badinage in Duncan’s prisoner’s direction, and the prisoner, carrying his jacket and wearing maroon shirt and pants, smiled briefly, and briefly again, making a gesture that signaled he preferred they should keep things down and not make trouble for him.

  Alice, meanwhile, unseen, confirmed by further study that the man was angular and fairly tall by the standards Gawell imagined Italians to be. So the idea of short, compact peasant power was gone. A belt around his waist gave some style and shape to his slim hips. She knew his labor would earn him a certain number of pounds sterling per month, but the government, not Duncan, paid that. As for Duncan, she knew he got a small extra ration of petrol to take the Italian to Mass on Sundays.

  At last Duncan completed his man-to-man transactions with the sergeant, who said that Duncan should always call the Control Center, not the camp, if there was a problem with the dago. The Swiss doctor made a final explanation of the obligations Duncan took on in employing the Italian. Everyone stood, and Duncan shook hands again with both men. Beyond the garden gate, the elderly doctor spoke earnestly to the prisoner, shook hands with him, went back to his car, and followed the truck out of the farm onto the Gawell Road.

  Alice saw Duncan go out and introduce himself to the prisoner, saying loudly, “Herman. Mr. Herman.” And then in basic and emphatic English, “You work on farm before?”

  She heard the young Italian say, “Si, I work on farm. But meccanico . . . mechanic . . . I do it most.”

  “Mechanic’ll be handy,” said Duncan, and proposed he show him his quarters. “Follow,” Duncan said. The young man, perhaps around the same age as her, Alice could see now by advancing undetected up the hall to the doorway, picked up his knapsack and carried his jacket slung over his shoulder, moving casually behind Duncan in a way that was brisk and yet rhythmic. His gait was in a style somehow removed from Australian modes of walking. She would come to think that he moved as if he were aware of the labor that had been required of his ancestors, and was keeping a private amount of it in store for his successors.

  Duncan meanwhile looked less comfortable about the whole business, and more eager to please, than the prisoner was. But that was Duncan for you. Both men moved towards a screen of lemon-scented gums.

  The absorbing sight of the Italian revived at once the question pushed on her at get-togethers of POWs’ wives, mothers, and fiancées: would there be a swap of prisoners between the enemies? It was a hope raised in occasional circulars she received. There seemed always, whether at the Gawell meetings or in the circulars, to be Red Cross reports of promising debates between the German and the British governments through what were called “Swiss intermediaries.”

  She had been hearing about it for more than a year now. And if the Swiss were successful, she felt she would need to relearn who her husband was, this enthusiastic boy and returning ghost. She seemed at times to know only a few strands of his nature—the dancer, the tennis player, the man of average, well-meant jokes, and oiler of hair. Sometimes she was more angry than admiring of his sacrifice on Chios—“Listen, mate, put him aboard, and I’ll catch the next one. Come on, I’ll be jake.” She was bound to the man of that gesture by the three-year-old echo of vows she had uttered in the Presbyterian Church in Gawell, in a time when she seemed to herself now to have been vain and shallow, and before there were wars and reckless campaigns, and any Italians and Japanese in the camp near town.

  She returned down the hallway to the kitchen. Since the prisoner did not look like she had assumed he would, she was more stimulated than she expected by the question of who this young man might be, and whether he might be useful or passive, clever or a dullard.

  It was half an hour before Duncan came back from settling his Italian into his accommodation in the shearers’ quarters. For a great deal of that time she had been able to see her father-in-law through the kitchen window, strolling about between the hut and the fruit trees as a kind of unarmed sentry, undecided as to whether to leave the prisoner to his own devices or not. She could not see, of course, if the Italian stayed inside his room or sat on the shearers’ quarters’ veranda, watching Duncan watch him. Now, coming back to the house, Duncan stopped at the veranda where Alice was hanging tea towels.

  “By the way,” he said, “I showed him the shearers’ long-drop lavatory out the back there. He’ll be using it, not ours.”

  She ignored this remarkable detail of Duncan’s attempt to create a regime.

  “I’ve got your afternoon tea ready, Duncan.”

  She called him “Duncan” at his insistence, but rarely, because it offended some sense she had that he should merit more reverence. “Do you think I should take him some tea now?”

  “Well,” said Duncan after measured consideration, “I reckon you could. I’d come with you, but . . .”

  She said, “No, you sit and enjoy yours. I’ll handle it. They say the Italians are harmless.”

  She went inside with Duncan, poured boiling water into the teapot, and cut fruitcake for him. Then she fetched the same tray she’d served the lemonade on and considered it a second, wondering whether to put the Italian prisoner’s tea in a pannikin or a china cup. She grabbed a china cup in the end. She wondered whether Duncan might think this was too premature a kindness.

  She said, “I always hope that some German or Italian woman on a farm will give Neville a china cup to show him he’s human. That’s all.”

  “Fair enough,” said Duncan, easily persuaded to be lenient. She put cake on a plate and added that to the tray, and started out from the back door carrying it. She felt she was engaged in a great inquiry. She was about to encounter and weigh strangeness.

  When she got down to the shearers’ quarters she saw the man in the burgundy shirt and pants busy inside, disposing his clothes in a doorless cupboard; hanging up the overcoat and jacket it was still too warm for him to need; and placing on a pine table, made from a butter box and set by the window, an Italian–English dictionary and a book in Italian entitled I Promessi Sposi.

  Alice announced herself from the doorway. “Tea!” she called. She stepped into the room, into the same shadows as he occupied. This was a further adventure for her, as everything is in the first meeting with novel people. She peered around. No smell of sweat from him yet. He had washed to come here, she thought. There was a vegetable and benign musk emerging from him when she’d expected something ranker, hungrier, and tigerish. Duncan would make him sweat soon enough, though. Out in the paddocks.

  She made to place the tea down on the primitive table, and he moved both books and put them on his bed.

  “Well,” said Alice, who had no practice in remembering non-British names, “what is your name again?”

  “Giancarlo Molisano,” he told her too quickly for her to get it. Yet it sounded a melodic name on his lips. He clicked his boots in a way suited to a ballet, not like the Nazis in the pictures, softer and with less invasive intention. Then he stood to attention and saluted for just a second.

  “Could you say it slowly please?” she asked. “Slow-ly. And louder.”

  “Gian-car-lo Mo-li-sa-no,” he repeated. Alice
said, “John-Carlo.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Sound like John, Missus ’Erman.” He was content with the approximation.

  She said, “I’m sure we can get you a little table and chair for the veranda so you could sit out there if you want. For the moment there’s tea and some cake here.”

  “Kike?” he asked. The manner of his confusion interested her—the concerted seriousness of the face, the way the arched black-brown eyebrows set themselves in interrogative lines above his large, active eyes. His mouth, too, was long enough to allow the lips to express a knot of puzzlement at the center.

  “No, no. Ca-a-ake!”

  It became apparent what she was saying and he nodded.

  “The stupid question,” he said, condemning himself.

  “No, it isn’t. It’s accents, that’s all. Let me pour you some tea.”

  She did it as they both stood. He didn’t want milk or sugar when she asked him about them. Strange, he didn’t want sugar. But a welcome response, given the stuff was rationed. She slid fruitcake from a dish on the tray to his saucer and handed him the lot.

  “Wife of boss?” he asked, nodding at her.

  “No. I’m Mr. Herman’s daughter. Daughter-in-law, in fact.”

  “Daughter?”

  “In-law. I am married to his son, Neville.”

  He understood and showed it by saying, “Missus ’Erman” softly, nodding.

  She thought he had a measured voice compared to hers. Compared to everyone she knew. It seemed to move in meters, like Shakespeare.

  “You have what you need in here?” she asked.

  “All A-1,” he assured her. “All sweet.”

  He must have learned those terms from the guards, she thought. But still he did not touch either the cup or cake, and seemed to wait for permission.

  “Go ahead,” she told him firmly.

  He nodded to the tray she had already put down.

  “For you, signora?”

  “No, I’ve had some.”

  But he seemed still to wait for instructions. “Look,” she said, “I’ll leave you, and when you’re finished, bring the tray . . . the tray there . . . up to the house. To the back door there. Gate’s always open.”

  She edged out of the door and indicated the direction of the back door. He nodded again, and she noticed how the bones showed through the flesh of the tops of his hands when he flexed them for the small task of lifting the cup.

  “Grazie,” he called to her, “Missus ’Erman.”

  “And don’t forget,” she said, enjoying giving him orders. “Bring it back to the kitchen door. The other side of the break of gums and through the fruit trees.”

  “Sure thing, signora,” he murmured.

  An Americanism. She could bet he got “all sweet” from the garrison and “sure thing” from the American films shown up there at the compound.

  She couldn’t stay any longer and still maintain her hauteur and her authority.

  Later, without ceremony, when he’d moved his chair and table outside onto the shearers’ quarters’ veranda, she delivered his evening meal, which Australians—without any sense of contradiction—also called tea. She did it without ceremony and with just a few words.

  The next morning, a hot one again, Alice found Giancarlo Molisano already milking the cow, Dotty. Duncan must have told him to. He brought the full bucket to the door and she took it, with no more than a thank-you, and poured it into the separator and began to crank the handle. It became obvious, though she did not yet say so to Duncan, that it would be most convenient if the Italian had his breakfast on the veranda, instead of her having to take his porridge and cream and his bread down to the shearers’ quarters. But it was somehow not time for such a suggestion yet. Things were not to be rushed.

  So she carried another tray down to him this morning, and found him sitting on the veranda by his pine table. Although he stood in a courtly manner, she put down the breakfast with barely a word and went away. She was making up, of course, for having talked at length yesterday. She thought if she began a conversation, it would run on too long, and there was the question of what Duncan might think. She also enjoyed making her own mysteries to keep the Italian wondering. She didn’t know who he really was yet, and she should work him out before he worked out Duncan and her.

  6

  By 1943 Ewan Abercare had few illusions left that this war was going to elevate him to general rank. He realized by now that he was one of those men of limited gifts who might be asked to make a stand somewhere; to go down with a battalion or company whose faces he knew. Or else he could be charged with administering some distantly placed garrison. He had never been to the Royal Staff College, after all. Yet commanding Gawell Camp, which had turned out to be his military inheritance, had not been part of his revived if modestly hopeful imaginings when the crisis in the Pacific had first begun.

  Abercare’s orders and instincts at Gawell were to keep the inmates if not in a state of happiness, at least in a state of dull acceptance, occupation, or languor. Indeed, their languor was desirable. The Geneva Convention—so he was told—was to be his bible and text. As with the true Bible, like many of the faithful, Abercare felt one careful reading sufficed. After that, largely familiar with its clauses, he put it on the shelf beside the unread texts on military law. The Convention, after all, was merely applied decency.

  Visits from the Red Cross delegates, most commonly from the immigrant Swiss general practitioner from Bowral, and from officials at Sydney’s Swiss consulate general who worked for the Japanese bureau of the Swiss, never found serious flaws in his management of Gawell, or in his subordinate Suttor’s administration of Compound C. Abercare received regular delegations of committees elected from amongst prisoners, compound by compound, and generally was able to agree with their requests or reach a compromise. His job was thus a matter of maintaining stability. It had nothing to do with the normal military issues of advance or retreat.

  A little Department of the Army booklet on the Oriental enemy’s military culture and another on their culture in the broader sense, along with directives from garrison headquarters in Sydney, were Abercare and Suttor’s chief guides to Compound C. Abercare was issued with a similar book on the Italians, but they did not mystify him as much. For example, the booklet from the Department of the Army counseled that “the Japanese have been trained from childhood to spit on any mercy extended to them by white hands. Though our own code of decency compels us to act with moderation and even to extend treatment to their wounded, in their mind all such niceties are contemptible.” But if that was the case, then why were his written orders, repeated in many directives from Lines of Communication Headquarters in Sydney, to extend not only neutral treatment but every leniency to the inhabitants of Compound C? The army seemed to want them cosseted. He liked to think that as a civilized officer he would have behaved in that manner in any case, but as so often with Compound C, all official advice came to contradict itself in the end.

  Abercare, ruling the camp with a light hand as instructed, explained with marginal honesty to others, “My wife’s health is such that she cannot stand the extremes of weather of a place like Gawell.” Hence he lived in camp at one end of a hut in the officers’ quarters, which allowed him a sitting room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. He found it all soulless, and as hot as the bedroom was in summer, it was bone freezing in winter. This bachelor’s accommodation lay in the lines of his headquarters’ company. He had three companies all spread around the perimeter. From the side windows of his office in the north-end administration hut he could look down a gentle slope to the seemingly unbreachable and lacerating fences of Compound C.

  • • •

  Colonel Abercare, his officers, and the garrison were fortified by the knowledge that down the road, three miles north in a direct line, lay an infantry training camp. It possessed its core of veterans who had fought battles both in deserts and jungles, and eighteen-year-olds innocently anxious—with that anxiety witho
ut which wars could not be fought—to taste the conflict before it was resolved. There was an arrangement in place, early prepared and now in filing cabinets in either camp, which decreed that should there be an outbreak at Gawell prisoner-of-war camp, two rifle shots and three red flares would be fired into an atmosphere generally noted for clarity rather than fog. The young infantry novices from the training camp, and the warriors who taught them, would then be deployed to help the garrison contain the attempted escape or to search out escapees.

  This plan, as all such arrangements, had become blurred with the passage of time. Officers had forgotten whether it was three red flares or two. And they’d also forgotten where exactly the flare pistol and the flares were kept.

  Between them, the three companies who guarded the camp, and the young men and battle veterans of the training brigade, were extremely welcome to the cinema owners, the pubs, the sly grog shops, the starting-price bookmakers, the ministers of religion—whose congregations were pleasingly enlarged—the milk-bar owners, and even the jewelers of Gawell. To get to the Saturday-evening pictures reservations had to be made, and for some actors, including Merle Oberon and Errol Flynn, you’d better make your bookings on the Monday morning or you stood no chance of getting in the following Saturday.

  The garrison was warned about spreading any gossip about the prison, or any other speculation, when they were in town on leave. Two factors, as Abercare knew by instinct, made this naïve advice. One was that the men of the prison garrison lived a tedious existence and, even before they had properly begun to sip their schooners, sought to build up their own importance with tales of the surliness and danger of the prisoners, particularly those of Compound C. Similarly, the young men from the training establishment, who were insulted all day by their instructors, could be heroes only at the bars of the Royal, Hibernian, Commercial, and Federal hotels.