The Caprices (11 page)

Of the three in their group that were left, Paul was the sickliest. His battles with amebic dysentery were bloody and hard fought. Sean watched over him like a mother. He would sit by Paul’s bedside, filled with fear and worry.

“You know, Bob, this is all right for us, but not for Paul. He was at the university. He studied physics,” Sean said.

“Still doesn’t make it right for anyone,” said Bob.

“No, listen. He signed up with me because he thought I was too bloody stupid to make it alone.”

“What’d he think we’d be doing out here? Solving problems?”

“Oh, I dunno. Paul shouldn’t be here.”

Which made it seem to Bob as though Sean found the situation tolerable for the rest. Paul took a turn for the worse and was delirious much of the time. Bob found it strange when he entered the hut one evening and found Paul alone, without his usual nurse.

“How’re you doing, Paul?” asked Bob.

“Debloodylightful,” said Paul. Profanity put Bob’s mind at ease. Sean appeared at the door of the hut. At first he revealed himself in silhouette, but after he stepped out of the shadow, Bob saw that Sean’s shorts were gone and in their place was a kind of G-string—a loose swatch of cloth that draped around his loins like a diaper.

“Now there’s one the midwife should have strangled,” said Paul.

Sean was smiling. He made his way over quickly and produced two small bricks wrapped in banana leaves. “One for Paul, and one for Bob and me to split. It’s sugar.”

“And where are your shorts?” asked Paul.

“Covering some Burmese backside,” he replied.

Paul struggled onto one elbow. He looked over at Sean and managed a smile. “Out of gratitude for your generosity, I will recover.” And he lived.

Paul looked terrible, sicker than the sick, emaciated to the point that it was almost comic that he wasn’t dead. Paul had one tooth left, sticking up from his lower gum like a tombstone. His shorts had rotted off his body and he too, like Sean, was now in a diaper, which showed off every protrusion and hollow. He became the object of envy, since he no longer did hard labor. Rumor had it that the Japanese soldiers were scared of him, that they couldn’t figure out which dimension he belonged to; he was a constant memento mori, a specter that wouldn’t quit. Paul worked with the doctor when he could, and lay down when he couldn’t. Sean was pleased at the state of affairs. He had always been a little simple, but as time progressed, he seemed downright loony. He seemed to think that Paul had left the study of physics in Australia for medical school in Thailand.

Bob continued shoveling ten hours a day, seven days a week. Each day someone died and he found himself scanning the gang’s faces in the morning, trying to figure out who it would be. He saw the same searching eyes focus on him. He was now about ninety five pounds and looked downright skeletal. Bob marveled at Paul, wondering how anyone could make him look good. Sixty pounds was missing and where was it? Lost in the mud below the pillars that pressed the railroad into the sky. Lost with the bodies that they’d buried in yesterday’s embankment, handy filler when one couldn’t place a call to a quarry for stone.

One evening Sean came running up to where Bob and Paul sat. Sean was laughing hysterically and at first Bob thought he’d gone off, like the rice that he was eating.

“Want to hear something really funny?” Sean said.

A couple of months had passed since someone had said that, and Bob and Paul were at a loss as to how to respond.

“Of course you do,” said Sean. “Shoulda been on duty for this one, Paul. Your friend the doctor, he’s not bad, y’know? Anyway, this Jap guard comes up to him. He’s all squirmy, y’know, wriggling around and all that, and he tells old Dutchy that he’s caught something from the last round of Korean hookers that passed through here, right? And he wants Dutchy to do something about it. And so Dutchy gives him something, tells him to rub it all over his dick. Next thing you know, the Jap’s screaming like a madman, running around like someone lit a fire in his shorts. And we’re all surprised, but it’s so bloody funny, and we can’t laugh ’cause we’re scared he’ll bash our heads in, right? But the doctor’s telling him that it’s supposed to feel that way, but we know something’s up, y’know? So when he’s gone, we go up to Dutchy and we ask him, ‘What’d you give him?’ and Dutchy says, ‘The Japanese soldier should not put the penis where the penis is not wanted.’”

Which was a funny story; Bob knew it. He smiled along with Sean and Paul, but somewhere, along the railroad, he had forgotten how to laugh. Laughter was strange music.

The romusha introduced the inconceivable—that there was a level of hell below the one that Bob haunted. These villagers, Thais and Burmese, understood nothing, labored in ignorance. They died in huge numbers out of seeming confusion, as if they didn’t realize that one needed to struggle to survive, as if it didn’t occur to them. The Japanese didn’t seem to think that the villagers needed food or doctors; they didn’t seem to think that the railroad constituted a significant change from village life, and they miscalculated the romusha’s ability to survive. The romusha were even more expendable than the whites. In the end they got their revenge. They introduced the only worthy opponent to the Japanese—cholera. Cholera was not racist, nor did it have any respect for rank. Cholera cast its lot with the winners and the losers in equal numbers and won most of the time. It tore through the camp, taking most of the romusha, and as it raced down the river
it took Paul and Sean along with it. When there was bamboo for fuel, the cholera dead were burned in huge pyres. Bob helped build these monuments, doused them with gasoline, lit them. As the bodies sizzled and seized they would sit up with mouths open in a silent scream until the flames left nothing. Bob learned quickly to burn the bodies face down.

Paul was one of the first to go. Bob sat up with Sean that night. He listened to him crying, a sound that was answered by the monkeys and night birds. Sean’s crying was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. One week later, Sean was dead. The night he carried Sean to the pyre, as he lay in dreamlike sleeplessness, Bob returned home. He was in the kitchen and Noreen Grey was washing up in his mother’s sink.

“Where’s your brother?” she asked as her pale, freckled arms dipped into the sudsy water. “He’s supposed to take me into town tonight.”

Bob had looked down at his hat, which he held in his hands. “He’s over at the Carvers’ fixing a tractor. He said he’d be a little late.”

“A little late? He’ll be drunk by the time he gets back here.” She shook her head in disbelief.

“Noreen, you don’t have to do that.”

“And who’s going to do it? Your mum? Doesn’t she have enough to do around here? I can just see you and Mark in Germany face to face with Hitler. You’ve got your rifles aimed straight at his head and you’re both saying, ‘Where’s mum? Shouldn’t she do this?’”

“We’re not going to Germany, Noreen.”

“Oh, you’ll clean the Japs up in a couple of weeks. Just you see. I’ve got a mind to go to Indonesia myself. I’d show them.”

“Yeah, you would, but then who’d give us hell when we got home?”

Noreen had a temperament to match her red hair; she was a good match for Mark, didn’t let him outshine her. Bob remembered
Noreen’s arms best of all, pale and freckled, strong and slim. Her beautiful, empty arms.

The sky broke open one day, as though a fissure ran along the endless heaving gray, a crack the length of the railroad. The Japanese were not perturbed by the start of the monsoon. The will of the emperor was to be obeyed, even as entire chunks of the mountainside slid into the river, which was already choked with bloated carabao, and huts, and once-buried POWs who found themselves making a hasty postmortem retreat down the Mekhong. Standing in the river, dragging a huge teak pillar, Bob had only peripheral vision. The water poured out of the sky in a steady stream, not a drop to be discerned, registering everything amorphously. The river was full of coconuts. Maybe some unfortunate barge had overturned, but Bob felt lucky. Hidden from the guards by the trunk of the tree, he surreptitiously reached for one of the coconuts, grabbed at it, but all he came up with was a handful of hair bound together by some rotted skin.

Most of the floating heads and the accompanying bodies belonged to the romusha, since many of their dead hadn’t been buried in the first place. Bob and Sean had worked together on burial duty (there were too many romusha to burn) for the first part of the cholera epidemic. Then Bob had buried the bodies, working alone. One time, when he was dragging a man toward the pit, face down as was his preference, he was accosted by the recently departed’s wife. The woman held a two-year-old girl by the wrist and was madly trying to communicate. She started fluttering her hands in butterfly motions, constantly looking to the jungle ceiling. Bob did not understand. His mind had been full of thoughts of the unfortunately small size of the man’s feet and the decent sandals, which were now protecting soles whose contact with dirt would no longer require them. The woman went on and on, then finally wrested her husband’s ankles out of Bob’s hands and began slowly dragging the man away. Watching her reminded Bob of an ant struggling with a bloated grain of rice.
Later, Bob learned that most of the romusha were of the opinion that if you buried bodies, their souls could not escape.

The first question Bob asked Tom Reilly when he learned that he had a radio was “How old am I?”

“Oh, I dunno. It’s July 1944.”

“I’m twenty-one.” And Mark, wherever he was, was twenty-four. Now the news was that the war was ending. An odd tension filled the camp then. Bob felt consumed with an unfamiliar pain. It took him a while to figure out it was hope. He was hauling a body to the pit for burial, a wet beriberi. Wet beriberis didn’t burn. He had the arms of the bloated man and was struggling up a muddy slope when the body burst, drenching him and his companion with the stagnant juices. For a moment he thought he would cry, but it passed. What was he hoping for? The long road that wound its way through the flat bush toward his family home would only bring the war back to a place that he had hoped to protect from it. He would no longer be a person but a reminder of absences—Mark’s and his own. He was now an ugly thing, a sore upon the landscape, a battered body which told a story that no one wished to hear.

Bob’s survival was incomprehensible. The wedding was an odd affair. Bob’s jacket was now too big; he worried that people would think it was Mark’s. Noreen wore a dress that she’d ordered during the war to keep her spirits up—something to distract her from Mark’s agonizing silence. Her eyes were red around the edges as she walked to stand before the minister. Bob felt like a ghost darkening what should have been a happy event, even though everyone agreed that he was doing the right thing. He stared at the bowls of coleslaw, steaks, and pineapple chicken on the checkered tablecloth in complete noncomprehension; he regarded the cake—fruitcake with plastic icing as demanded by tradition—which looked more like an enameled tooth than anything
else. The day was punctuated with uncomfortable silence. Bob and Noreen circled each other in close, awkward orbits, never touching. She smiled bravely and her strength was admirable. No one mentioned Mark, which made it obvious that all were thinking of him. Few people danced to the violin’s entreaties; few people sang. As evening settled over the gathering, the beer began to take hold on Bob’s father. He rubbed tears from his eyes and he set his mouth in a bitter, clenched way. Bob went to sit across from him—silent and comforting, but his father looked away.

Noreen accepted the situation. She seemed to remember Bob talking more than he did, but wasn’t altogether sure. The expanse of red land that stretched in a never-ending flatness had a way of sucking the sounds out of the house. The land swallowed all conversation, and replaced it with a thin film of dust that coated everything—fresh puddings, eyeballs, sheets. Besides, if Bob had a lot to say, he probably wouldn’t have the time to say it.

Bob worked long hours riding out to the far corners of the station. Usually he was with Stan, an aborigine, who seldom spoke. Stan had thoughts of his own that he never shared and the two enjoyed a mutual, comfortable silence; they only discussed what was essential—sheep, dogs, and drought. Even during lunch, while Bob sprawled up against a tree and Stan squatted completely still, only moving to swat the flies that crawled near his eyes, they never conversed. Sometimes, Stan would squint hard at the barren landscape and Bob would look, but see nothing but the baked land or an occasional lizard, and Stan would say “dingo” or “rain” or “stray.” Although Bob could never see the evidence of what inspired these words, Stan was never wrong. He was more a part of the bush than a part of the sheep business. Even Stan’s features echoed the landscape: a flattened nose that flared into nostrils, like the eroded rock protrusions with their mysterious caves; wiry hair, which reminded Bob of the toughest, drought-surviving grass; brilliant white teeth that gleamed as
pure and indestructible as polished limestone; limbs as thin and supple as a gum tree. When one day Stan disappeared, Bob was not altogether surprised. Noreen, who was eight months along at the time, thought the situation to be intolerable.

“Noreen, let it go,” Bob had said. “There’s a guy out at Coon-awarra says he’s looking for something. I’ll drive over there later.”

“Where’d Stan go? You’ve been working with him a whole year and then he just up and leaves?”

Bob just shook his head.

“You’re out there twelve bloody hours a day. He must have said something.”

“He didn’t have to. He’s on walkabout, Noreen.”

Walkabout. Strange. The black workers did that, one day in the routine and seemingly happy, the next stricken with the need to leave all behind. Sometimes it was over in a matter of days. Sometimes they showed up months later. Or they never came back at all. A few people had a respect for the spiritual aspect, but the majority of the station owners found the walkabout thing damned inconvenient. Noreen returned from the kitchen with a beer. At first Bob thought it was for him, but she drank half the bottle in quick silent gulps. She looked over at Bob with her head cocked to one side.