Shame and the Captives (10 page)

And though he was an older man, considered by all to command his own soul, and though he and Goda had privately traded jokes about Tengan's reaction to the farm-woman who had recently offered them the lemonade, Aoki found he was not immune to the opinion of these stringent young men. They sat and watched him, with the greatest grave respect, as he sat, in turn, at a card table and answered the requests for information. Aoki felt it was correct to make an offer to all men that they could accept the letters from home, taking them to themselves for a while and cherishing them. But even that was more painful than comforting for the individual. And as for any individual answering a letter—it would be a false mercy to incommode and disgrace their families with the news that the child whom the family had ceremonially mourned, lived on in disgrace.

The eyes of young militants like Hirano watched Aoki as if he were not aware of this reality or the imperative duty it placed on him; as if he had not uttered it before; as if his old-soldier idea of waiting for the end in whatever social and physical comfort he could manage made his principles shaky. He felt like saying to Hirano, “Don't glare at me, Private. I've got it under control.” But they knew he had talked it all over with taciturn Goda, as if there were anything to discuss, as if there were some softer, unwise option the two older men would settle on. In fact, Goda had similar plans as Aoki for dealing with the
unwelcome letters. That was to answer every one of them in terms that denied the son's or husband's presence there, to cancel a clan's cheap hope but reaffirm its more substantial honor. That was in the end the best thing.

Nevski was not surprised that the letter should be unwelcome. The nihilism of Compound C had been clear from the beginning, even if it did seem to take Abercare and Suttor by surprise every time. Each man was given Red Cross postcards when he was brought to Gawell, according to Article 36 of the Geneva Convention, to allow him to send his family the news of his capture and state of health by ticking certain boxes. In the middle of the previous winter Serge Nevski had told Major Suttor that all these postcards were falsely addressed, to streets and towns that he knew, from his Japanese gazetteer, were fictional. They included addresses such as “Triumphant Monkey Hole in the Wall” and “Shitdrip Alley.”

Abercare asked headquarters whether Sergeant Nevski should himself answer the inquirers and tell them the truth. Headquarters, however, declared that this might have unexpected results—that accusations could come back that mail from Japan had been tampered with.

There were a few prisoners, as Nevski and Suttor discovered, who managed to keep their letters and did reply to them: one was exotically a Presbyterian and a widower. There were a handful who wrote letters secretly and slipped them to guards. Nevski would read the pathetic confessions of such men. “I am a prisoner and alive, and was captured all unknowing while suffering from wounds/beriberi/malaria/scrub typhus.”

It was rare, though, that a clandestine message emerged from Compound C. Nevski did not send on the false letters written by Aoki and other hut commanders. He let them accumulate in his office. One misty Tuesday when he needed to go to town to buy a birthday present for an émigré friend working in Sydney, he took the letters with him and climbed through barbed wire into someone's paddock,
and burned them under a gray sky, beneath which the smoke of these incinerated lies could be mistaken for a mere vapor. For Nevski the ashes were a small sacrifice to honor those earnest kin still seeking their lost ones. With the hut commanders' lies consumed, modest and unsated faith could go on keeping its corner at Japanese hearths.

M
ajor Suttor wrote chiefly in the evenings in his small living room, off his bedroom, in the officers' quarters within the garrison lines of Gawell Camp. On still nights or when the wind was right, he could often hear the music from the Japanese and Italian compounds. The Japanese were closer and he had become accustomed to the more plaintive airs, suited to life behind wire, that they often played. Instruments had come to Compound C by way of a Japanese cultural group that had been formed in Sydney before the war. There was a sort of guitar, a rectangular board with a set of strings stretched across it. There was also a haunting flute, a sinister-sounding drum, a kind of lute, bamboo pipes, and a bugle. Not all was plaintive. Some of the music from Compound C could sound very jazzy—or jazu, the prisoners called it—but tending to the blues. They played songs you could tell were more ancient, too, some of them doleful, and these, to Suttor's ear, emerged like an unintended confession of the folly of the war.

It was not all grim stuff, though. There were nights when the recreation hall in Compound C rocked with laughter.

Someone was being satirized—General MacArthur, Colonel Abercare, he himself, Nevski. Then there were nights when
Compound C went quiet after dark, emitting only an occasional yelp or shout, or short spates of laughter or fury. It was then that the further-off Italian songs could be heard, sometimes accompanied by a full band—jaunty stuff convinced either of the hilarity of life or of the total validity of love. The Italians sang every night, and their music provided the accompaniment to Suttor's devotion to
The Mortons
.

His life in Gawell would seem to some people lonely. He, like Colonel Abercare, lived all the time in camp, except for leave. It was said the colonel was looking at houses to rent in town in the expectation his wife would join him soon, but Suttor knew his would not. Eva Suttor had been an actress in Raymond Longford's early silent films, and adored for a time. She'd continued acting for the screen after their son was born, and was still a yearning virgin in the eyes of picturegoers. Australians said that her longing and blazing eyes were better than Lillian Gish's, thus indulging the national myth that Australians could outdo Americans, whether it came to racehorses, boxers, or actors, but that they were willfully ignored by the world because they were at its end.

Eva and Bernard Suttor had married in 1923, and it had not been easy since. During their life together, she accused him of coldness, and, as time went on, he recognized the validity of the charge. He was a cold man at core. But he also came to see in her what he could not believe he had not seen when they'd first met—the influence of her alcoholic father, the melancholy of the mother. She had frequently threatened him with knives, even with the boy, David, the infant who was the future prisoner, in the kitchen doorway watching. When he thought of his son now, he saw that spectating waif.

It was an omen of his child's imprisonment, since a small boy cannot escape from a household, however questionable the elements out of which it is constructed might be.

Eva had found herself unsuited to motherhood and had doused her misery and fueled both her depression and her occasional peaks of manic and unreliable affection for the child with any liquor she
could find. Interestingly, she had an especial appetite for rum, the drink of farmers and shearers and stevedores, but she added milk to it as if that endowed it with innocence. It couldn't be said that she did not love the child, but unevenly—sometimes with an intense and proud indulgence, sometimes with a blazing petulance which might even be called cruelty.

Years ago she had gone to a hospital in Sydney and been given shock treatment, and when Suttor visited her she would beg him to rescue her from it. He worried now that there had been vengefulness in his insistence, echoing the doctor's, that staying there was essential for her health. Later, she was moved to a sanatorium down the coast.

Then he had taken what some might have thought of as further revenge by going to work in America for a time. But she had remained ill and became markedly worse after the capture of her son. Suttor dutifully and cautiously visited her as irregularly as he could get away with while maintaining some passing repute as a husband. His excuse was that he was likely to be blamed for indifference whether he went there weekly or monthly. Even the nurses took a vaguely chastising air with him, though that had softened a little now in view of his military duties. The word had got around, too, that he was still doing service to the nation as writer of that national favorite and cultural glory
The Mortons
.

For two years he had pursued an affair with Marcia, the girl who did the voice of Nellie Morton. At the start of his infatuation, he would turn up to recordings and stand in the booth with the producer simply to listen to Marcia's velvety voice. She was an amiable, earthy, practical girl, and ever afterwards, when he thought of her and of arriving at her flat on summer evenings with the glint of the harbor stinging his eyes, the memory of her was associated with blatant sunlight. Inevitably, their affection and hunger for each other diminished over two-and-a-half years. He wondered now if she had kept the affair going because she feared she would lose lines if she ended it.

When a friend invited him to New York in the year of the Munich Crisis to write a nationally broadcast serial named
White Man of the Congo
, both Marcia and he knew that this was a natural close to their affair. He had made a lot of money in New York, but there was David, just finishing boarding school, who could not be required to live alone and like a freestanding bachelor yet. His son wanted to stay close to his flawed mother, but then contradictorily wrote to neutral New York that he had enlisted in the great struggle, and Suttor feared David would be consumed in another European war.

Suttor came back across the as-yet-unthreatened Pacific early in 1941, and himself enlisted—out of patriotism, of course, but also to find a new life. He was shunted into a garrison battalion, and—given that the enemy failed to invade as some men, including himself, had silently hoped they would—thus to the witheringly tedious military business that garrison life involved, until he was offered his position at Gawell.

After the novelty of his outlandish prisoners in Compound C had worn off, the major found that he was stuck with paperwork and routine. In fact, the only drama in his situation was provided by the idiosyncrasy of his prisoners and his attempts to read their motives. But familiarity with this chore, and their determined churlishness and muteness in his presence, eventually seemed to complement the rote work of administration. He wrote reports for Abercare and for Sydney headquarters, and requisitions for equipment and supplies. He issued detentions for grosser acts of rebellion, insult, or assault upon authority. He needed to attend a daily meeting of the colonel and the other compound commanders, and of course receive delegations from the three Compound C leaders, whose ways, expressions, and postures he got to know well. There were also issues to do with the company of the Australian garrison he commanded—drunkenness, insubordination, neglect. He did not like to be a schoolmaster and depended on his orderly sergeant, an old regular, for advice, and on Nevski. He attended roll call at 1600 hours after making an inspection
of the compound from outside the fence. All this made a busy day, two-thirds of which was repetition and fuss.

It was a pathetic boast, and he made it purely to himself, that his most enthusiastic hours were invested in the utterly fictional
The Mortons
. The Mortons were Suttor's forte and his vocation, but they also allowed him to visit a more kindly planet with a better climate. It was in his characters that he transformed himself into the dutiful husband and the warm soul. It was in them that he was solaced. He had created them himself and had been writing them into being since 1933 with a while off when he was in New York.

The period in which he'd begotten them had been a time of bad and risky days, when there was a chance of a civil war being waged by the not-so-secret secret armies of the pastoral and commercial gentry against the “Communists”—anyone who was actively discontented. None of this shadow had, however, fallen across the Mortons. There had been a reference to the Depression in one episode, when Mr. Morton's job was under threat, but Mr. Morton had sympathized with his boss's struggle to keep the stock and station agency, for which Morton was accountant, going. There was no class warfare. Boss and hired man were fellow passengers in the one boat heading in the one brave direction. The agency had been saved by an emporium owner from Sydney. Capital to the rescue! A proposition that could not be believed outside a serial.

At Kings Cross parties in Sydney, when challenged by leftist friends in the radio business who wanted him to admit through his prodigiously popular characters that capitalism was the problem, Suttor argued that such friendships as those between Morton and his boss were more common in bush towns than in a mass industry in the city. But the truth was he wanted it that way. The Mortons' world was one in which no laissez-faire indifference to the masses (such as the masses were in the fictional town of Gundabah) existed.

In that world, too, men became soldiers to save the Empire and precious Australian things—wattle; cricket; dinky-di, honest women.
Men enlisted early in the war, too—they weren't cynical leftists who waited for Hitler to invade Russia. The Morton son, Trevor, late of the Gundabah butter factory, had been a Spitfire pilot in North Africa, and then Britain.

In
The Mortons of Gundabah
, betrothals might be unwisely entered into, but they were called off in time. No one ever married the wrong person. Falls of livestock prices would be remedied in the next few episodes by an unexpected rise. Failure of rain was followed by splendid downpours within little more than a week's worth of writing. In
The Mortons
, no one ever had adulterous affairs or visited prostitutes. The oldest profession, like Marxism, had no place in Gundabah. The Mortons' daughter, Nellie, was, of course, a virgin, and had been since 1933. The passage of time affected only the wider world, making it older and older, and more and more vicious.