The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You have to stop this circus.” He used words which, he sensed, had barbs to them, knowing himself within range of hurting a widow whom, until two minutes before, he had considered invulnerable.

  “Shut up,” she told him. “If you ruin this, Alec.… Shut up!”

  She sat hunched and intense as a mother cat.

  “God,” he complained, “you were never like this.…”

  But, with a snort, he gave up reasoning.

  Even so, he stood composed by Belle’s side, though it came to him as more and more viable that he could make the officer call off the retrieval.

  Sailors were lowering a stretcher with the petrol-driven winch.

  “Aren’t they premature?” Ramsey asked of no one.

  “Please be quiet, Alec. They’re the experts.”

  The officer came to Belle’s side. “They’ve practically dislodged the mass. I should have told you this: my orders are not to interfere with the remains. We have a large canister here.…”

  “The insides of those aircraft are so hot, Lieutenant,” Belle said. “Have you thought of the effect of melting …?”

  Ramsey silently laughed at this funerary nicety.

  The lieutenant murmured, “We have been instructed to pack the canister with ice.”

  She appeared grateful to have her husband’s frozen flesh at the mercy of their capabilities, their forethought.

  Again the wondrous boy made for the pit, and both cameramen placed themselves to record the descent. Ramsey stumbled at speed behind him.

  “Lieutenant!”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t you think it’s time to stop this lunacy?”

  The lieutenant pulled his features into a fast frown that meant not that he hadn’t heard but that he was extending to Ramsey a chance to revoke.

  “Come again, sir?”

  A sailor intervened. “They say do you want it held, sir?”

  “Didn’t I say so? Tell them I’m coming down.”

  “No,” said Ramsey. “Listen. You can’t go any further with this stunt.”

  The lieutenant stared diagnostically at Ramsey. Ramsey went on.

  “For one thing, have you considered what he’ll look like?”

  He had borrowed the question from Hammond, and realized it. As well, he knew it to be dangerous, the very question that had brought on a catalepsy of the imagination in the southbound aircraft.

  His belly pounded. He had never been so actively afraid.

  “All the experts seem to suggest that he should be quite tolerable to look at, reminiscent of the Dr Leeming you knew. Excuse me.”

  As the lieutenant turned away to business, Ramsey’s mind fumbled with the image the young man had provoked in him. For the second time his imagination seized, constricted like a windpipe. So that again there was, yet seemed not to be, breath; again he suffered the terror of smothering yet could speak. At the same time, he felt the new and final statement of the truth bound epileptically from his belly into his throat and chest and arms. Believing himself, then, to be strangling, and jerking like a convulsive, he was still able to reach out for the lieutenant’s elbow and say, “Wait there! I think I ought to tell you.…”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, perhaps not in Mrs Leeming’s hearing.… Could I speak to you in private?”

  “You must realize, Mr Ramsey, how inopportune this is.”

  Belle had come up. There were remarkable signs of impotence about her. Her jaws trembled.

  “I’ve warned you, Alec,” she pleaded. “Can’t you …?”

  “Perhaps if Mrs Leeming could go back to the mess?” Ramsey suggested.

  “You can’t be serious, sir. Abrams. Take Mr Ramsey back to the mess. Just relax, Mr Ramsey. Get Abrams to pour you coffee with a shot—ask the cook, Abrams. What about you, Mrs Leeming? Are you cold?”

  Belle explained that she wasn’t. The lieutenant smiled at her.

  “It won’t be long.”

  Large and pitted-faced beneath his furred hood, Abrams neared Ramsey and played at being solicitous.

  “Let’s go, Mr Ramsey sir.”

  Abrams’ mitted hand was an offered insult. Ramsey pushed it aside. He called to the lieutenant, “You can’t wait, can you, to round out the little sideshow?”

  “I don’t understand.” The officer glanced over his shoulder, and saw that Ramsey was all fever and resistance. As a result he stood still.

  “Look, you need to go in and have a rest, sir. Abrams, go on.”

  Abrams put giant mitts around Ramsey’s arm.

  “Keep your hands off me,” said Ramsey. “I’m not some bloody Asian peasant to be pushed round.”

  “I never pushed round no Asian peasants, sir.”

  “You’ve got to pull yourself together,” the officer firmly called, and still did not move.

  “I keep together well enough. But I want to talk to you about Leeming.”

  “For God’s sake move him, Abrams.”

  “Ah, the crack in the Emily Post etiquette! I warn you, I’ll make trouble if you don’t call him off.”

  When they had heard the substantial, the truest truth, they would fill in the pit.

  “The truest truth!” he wanted to shout at the young man as an incentive, but what would the words mean to a capable and busy officer?

  When Abrams tried to take firmer hold of him Ramsey threw a punch at the hooded face. It was one way of impressing the lieutenant that an interview was urgently sought. Abrams hugged him with both arms. Composedly enough, he became aware that the officer had snatched the radio and was calling a Slavonic name into it. Then he, too, moved close to hold the madman. Two large bodies smothered Ramsey’s violence.

  “God Almighty,” he said crazily. “These aren’t the right circumstances for talk.”

  Hampered by his gloves, he worked hard to dislodge Abrams’ arm and Abrams’ concerted good temper. But a third man came up, pondering what part of the foreigner to grab. Ramsey saw Belle standing back with a neutral face.

  “Don’t shoot this!” yelled the lieutenant to two cameramen who were recording the unlooked-for, intrusive event.

  Ramsey found himself being carried away in a professional manner. Meanwhile the essential truth chafed in him. “Hammond,” he called as they passed the huddle of journalists, people for whom he had a surprise. “Come wherever they’re taking me.”

  Hammond made hesitant steps.

  “No, come on. It’s going to be worth it.”

  All the journalists made the beginnings of avid movements, as if they had forgotten sentiment and thought they might have one of those delicious cases of service brutality. “No,” he told them. “Hammond. You!”

  Though toted like a marble pedestal, he was for some reason obeyed.

  “I think it’s just that I’m a fellow-countryman,” Hammond explained to the officer.

  “How well do you know him?” the lieutenant, still burdened, grunted.

  “Only the last few days, but we became pretty close.”

  “That’s a damned lie,” said Ramsey.

  Hammond opened the clapboard door onto the mess porch and the further one through into the fuggy warmth of the mess itself. Ramsey was conveyed through and placed in a chair. Coffee was called for.

  “Stay here, both of you,” the lieutenant told Abrams and Hammond. The two men glanced at each other, ill-met jailers. “Have yourself a rest, sir.”

  “Listen,” Ramsey insisted and closed his eyes. Four strangers, he thought, three of them foreign sailors, the fourth with nothing to recommend him. Not the audience he had dreaded in dreams in which he had made ultimate confessions. “We ate Leeming, Lloyd and I. You can’t dig him up. For that reason.”

  Ramsey shut his eyes and listened to their four long silences, the judgment of foreigners. He let tears squeeze out through tight lids. He heard the lieutenant say, “I want to speak to Mr Ramsey. This is not to get round. If I hear any talk of this.…
”

  Ramsey did not open his eyes. “You stay, Hammond. Scoop.…”

  “We’ll see about that, Mr Hammond,” said the officer. “We have a public-relations man in Christchurch.”

  As always, Hammond rushed to prove himself a man governed by ethics, no intransigent newshound. “I assure you, Lieutenant, it isn’t the sort of news I revel in writing.”

  “Mr Ramsey, does the widow know?”

  “You tell her if you like. But now you can’t haul the poor bastard up, can you?”

  Without warning he opened his eyes in order to catch them abhorring him discreetly. They seemed to stand relaxedly as he sat. They could not know his sense of release at having spoken most truthfully.

  “Are you telling me you actually … you were forced to eat Leeming?”

  “I’ve already said it. We ate of Leeming.” But he had not meant to intrude that of, an echo of the drunken poet and of communion services.

  “Of Leeming? What in the name of suffering Christ is the difference?”

  “I’m sorry. We ate him.” How hollow it sounded to repeat. “I won’t ruin the simplicity by restating or giving details.”

  “Pshew!” the lieutenant softly emitted. He thought talk of ruining the simplicity of a statement quaint beside what had been done to Leeming.

  “Now you’d better fill in the pit, confess Leeming unfound. You’d better.”

  “To save your embarrassment?”

  Ramsey was delighted; the lieutenant was gloriously unsympathetic towards cannibals.

  “To save yours. I’ve got this instinct that your people will want to be discreet. Think of the danger for Mrs Leeming, who’s seventy-nine.”

  “And who is actually waiting out there,” the lieutenant reminded himself.

  “This holds things up, doesn’t it?” Ramsey wanted to verify.

  “Come now,” said Hammond.

  “Hammond, stay with Mr Ramsey. I’ll leave Abrams outside.”

  Almost gone, the officer poked his head back round the jamb of the inner door. “But they’ve found something there. You didn’t eat all of him?”

  “I won’t descend to details,” said Ramsey.

  The lieutenant’s revulsed brown face vanished.

  For a start, Hammond sat opposite Ramsey and avoided his eyes. His responses to the confession were far more ambiguous than the lieutenant’s.

  Ramsey spoke first. “Thank God,” he said, “that when I came to say what had to be said I wasn’t among friends.”

  “We’re your friends, Alec,” Hammond muttered, to humour the patient.

  “My point is that friends are mentally lazy. They’re used to considering you the way they’re used to considering you. They fight news such as this. They’d rather risk being robbed—or eaten—by you than make the mental adjustment necessary to believe you were a thief or … the other.”

  Again Hammond rushed to assent. Friends were often mentally lazy.

  Then there was silence, succeeded by Hammond humming a few bars of grand opera.

  “They won’t bring him up now,” Ramsey interjected. “I can tell by instinct. I can tell they don’t want any dubious relics of the classic era.” He added with irony, “To which Leeming and Lloyd and I belong.”

  “You’d be in a better position than I am,” Hammond conceded, “to decide what they’ll do.”

  “You’re welcome to print that, incidentally. Print what I told you. Once the news is out, the width of circulation won’t particularly worry me.”

  Puzzling it out, Hammond shook his head.

  “I don’t understand that. You’ve told the lieutenant this dreadful thing to ensure he’ll fill the pit in, so that no one will know how Leeming has been … treated. Yet you tell me to feel free to print the facts.”

  “It would be hard for an outsider to understand,” Ramsey agreed. “You see, I don’t want him brought up, exposed. To those silly cameras, for example.”

  “But what you tell me to print exposes him.”

  “Does it? I don’t know. I don’t want him dragged up, that’s all. I don’t want him vulgarly displayed.”

  “Are you sure you’re right, that they won’t vulgarly display him in any case. They don’t have to tell anyone about the actual state of what they find.”

  “Except it would get out. Via Sailmaker’s Mate Class III Kaminsky. Or me. I’d tell even your friends outside. Didn’t I make that clear to the lieutenant?”

  “So if they do as you say, the safe thing, to avoid a scandal and to save the widow pain—”

  “The widow feels as much pain as a gasometer.”

  “—you still want me to cause pain and scandal?”

  “Who do you feel responsible to? The U.S. press officer in Christchurch or your vast, warm-hearted public? All I said was, you’re free to.” But, in exaltation, he felt how his well-being would be increased beyond measure by hearing a clinical edge of judgment in the voices of broadcasters he had never met.

  Meanwhile, Hammond still seemed bent on catering to Ramsey’s madness with debate.

  “Alec, I consider that sort of thing professionally very odious.”

  “You must do what you think is right.”

  “I don’t think it’s right to say that sort of thing. Not after all this time.”

  Ramsey laughed. He could tease without bitterness now. He said, “I was raised on cautionary tales about the way journalists welcomed reports of depravity. Are all of them soulful like you? Or am I simply unlucky?”

  “Unlucky?”

  “Yes. To be landed with a rare moral newshound.”

  Hammond blinked and said with a disturbing dignity, “I know as well as you do how little good is served by telling news like this to a world already glutted with the morbid and the grotesque.”

  “You think I told you out of philanthropy? It belongs to the class of things that have to be said.”

  “To us, perhaps. But not the whole damned world.”

  “To anyone who’ll listen.”

  Ramsey continued placid and alleviated by means of this triumphant transference of truth from his guts to the public media. A quiet need of Ella’s presence rose in him.

  Telepathically, Hammond asked, “Does your wife know? She’d be badly affected if this got out.”

  “Not much. She’s a kind of primitive. An absolutist, I’m always calling her. She’ll say something like, ‘So that’s what’s been fretting you?’ You see, she thinks it’s herself that has been the source of my angst. She’ll be relieved, and she’s built for loyalty. She’ll no more question or judge me than the womb questions whether it’s carrying a thief or a rapist, a monster or gallows-fruit.”

  He saw Hammond blink in a way that hinted how the confession had begun to spur his imagination. A wary excitement had arisen.

  “Have you said this to make fools of us?”

  There was suddenly toughness behind the man’s finicking lack of humour. The potential newsworthiness of Ramsey’s confession had made him advert to the hard facts of his trade. “It isn’t my sort of material. Oh, I could get away with printing it. Even if you were certified a week later, I could still plead the public interest. But to what extent are you what is called a reliable source?” Hammond raised and laid down a hand, as if passing the hideous scoop back to Ramsey. “I’ve told you the sort of work I specialize in. I don’t need this to make me feel professional.”

  Alec mauled his jaw, the tip of which still felt like a tiny capsule of polar cold. “Too many Adelaide Festivals have made a humanist out of you. NPA would give you a good swift kick for thinking the way you do.”

  Above clasped hands, his eyes lowered, Hammond undertook to order their intentions. “Think very seriously about this, Alec. If what you say is true, and if you still want what you say you do, write out a statement, sign and date it.”

  “What date would you like? Today’s?”

  “Any, any,” Hammond told him. He seemed to feel a shamed urgency to quit the subject.
r />   There was a long silence. Hammond read the label on a bottle of sauce. The exercise seemed to take a long time.

  “I’m going back to the pit,” said Ramsey in the end.

  “They won’t let you.”

  “But we’re not subject to them,” He began to pull his mitts on, and his hood about his ears.

  “Alec, for God’s sake …!”

  Ramsey walked out, Hammond trailing him uncertainly along the far side of the table. Abrams had vanished from the glare outside. Perhaps his large tender hands were needed at the pit. But then, Ramsey thought, why should that be so? Unless that fool of an officer had a lifting job on hand.

  He walked across the uneven ice. He could see four red pennants, apparently disembodied, flapping on a white ground. As he hurried, brown figures shook off the ice-dazzle and were visible. The winch pulsed. From the ice it drew a burden strapped to a stretcher. When clear of the pit, the load began to spin crazily, four or five turns one way, three or four the other, and then lay still, though twisting in a slow arc.

  Ramsey shaded his eyes, saying, “There it is. There it actually is. On the end of a hook.”

  It was not a large bundle, and swung absolutely passive on a hook, a concrete, a veritable hook. Ramsey’s head hissed like a hive. But all he could think of was the passivity of the corpse, the tawdry quality of its resurrection. “What did you expect, after all?” he asked himself. His mind had expected nothing more than the sad resurgence he now saw. His belly had always expected grandeur and an active rising. And with this verification of mind over belly, he received further insights. He remembered what the poet had said, some days before: that he had needed a wronged and majestic god and had made one, to his soul’s balance, out of Leeming.

  As the bundle eked a slow semi-circle above the heads of the people Ramsey saw how he had based his world on guilt for the quite transcendent wrongs done against Leeming. But now the ordinariness of the bundle spurred him to acknowledge the ordinariness of Leeming and the pedestrian nature of his sins against Leeming. Ramsey was so angered at the years he had wasted on shame that a demand rose in him to tear his own flesh. Because of this compulsion, he turned to Hammond.

  “Help me,” he said. “I think I’m going mad.”

  Yet he did not wait for help, but ran to the pit. He wished to be sure, at close range, of the pitiable nature of that brown burden. In its harrowed brown texture and its utter passivity lay an absolution for Ramsey.