The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Darky Gardiner thought about it, but not a lot.

I can’t stand five hundred, Darky Gardiner said.

Kes said that, to be honest, there wasn’t that much else to do. Five hundred or sleep. Maybe patience, but who ever saw the point of that?

Fuck it, said Darky Gardiner, to whom sleep sounded good and whose head was once more throbbing. I’m too buggered to argue. But it’s an order. I don’t mind you skiving, but I do mind if others suffer for it.

No one’s going to suffer, said Rooster MacNeice.

You will, said Darky, if you disobey me. Let’s go.

But when he picked up the rope, furled and shouldered it once more, and resumed his hapless march to the railway cutting, only Gallipoli von Kessler went on with him.

Gardiner’s too weak a sergeant to ever say anything, said Rooster MacNeice to the other men as they turned and headed away from the path and into the jungle. Not a leader like the old leaders.

15

COLONEL KOTA WAS less than surprised that his fears had been realised. The Thais were not to be trusted in the mass and were spectacular thieves in the individual. In the four hours of night between him and his driver leaving their truck in the middle of the jungle and a rescue crew of POWs arriving to push it into camp, some Thai bandits had stolen several hoses, rendering the truck undriveable. He was forced to stay at the camp until a guard—expected by dusk—returned from the closest camp with some new hoses.

Having been delayed for the day, Colonel Kota decided on an inspection of the work on the railway line. With the Goanna as his guide, he was making his way to the Line when they came upon two prisoners, one sitting, the other lying in the mud. The sitting prisoner leapt to his feet, but the one lying across the track did nothing. He seemed unaware of anything. They thought he was dead, but after the Goanna rolled him over with his foot they realised their error and yelled at him. When that did no good, the Goanna gave him a good kick, but the man only moaned. They could see that he was beyond threats and blows.

Colonel Kota found it despairing. How can we build a railway, he thought, when they can’t even walk to the job? And then he noticed Darky Gardiner’s neck.

Colonel Kota ordered the Goanna to manhandle Darky Gardiner into a kneeling position, with his head bowed. He examined the Australian prisoner’s neck more closely. It was skinny, filth in its folds.

Yes, Colonel Kota thought. The flesh was muddy, grey, like dirt you piss on. Yes, yes, Colonel Kota thought. Something in its strangely reptilian wrinkling and dark patterning rumpled a memory in him that craved repetition. Yes! Yes! Colonel Kota knew he was in the power of something demented, inhuman, that had left a trail of endings through Asia. And the more he killed, so casually, so joyfully, the more he realised his own ending would be the one death beyond his own control. To control the deaths of others—when, where, the craft of ensuring it was a cleanly sliced ending—that was possible. And in some strange way, such killing felt like controlling whatever remained of his own life.

In any case, Colonel Kota now reasoned, it would just waste the other prisoner’s precious energy carrying the sick man back to the camp, and at the camp precious food would be wasted on him when he was likely to die soon anyway.

Unsheathing his sword, he gestured to the Goanna to give him his water bottle. Colonel Kota could see his own hands were trembling, which was strange. He felt no fear or conscience.

Only the moon

and I, on our meeting-bridge,

alone, growing cold.

Colonel Kota recited Kikusha-ni’s haiku twice. But he had to stop his hands trembling. He took the cap off the water canteen and, as it shuddered in the air before him, poured water onto his sword. He watched the water beads rolling together on its bright surface, wet whip snakes slithering away. The beauty of it steadied him.

Raising his head, he concentrated on slowing his breath before carefully lowering the sword blade until it rested on Darky’s neck. He held it there, making his intention clear, readying his own body.

Eye shut! the Goanna yelled at Darky Gardiner. Eye shut!

And as he lit a cigarette, the Goanna blinked twice to illustrate his meaning.

Colonel Kota spread his legs, got his balance, with a scream raised the sword high into the air, and went to recite Kikusha-ni’s haiku one last time. But he could not remember the correct sequence of the middle syllables. In his mind, he kept muddling the poem.

All waited—Colonel Kota with the sword poised above the kneeling POW, the Goanna holding a cigarette next to his lips, Gallipoli von Kessler watching transfixed. Alone unable to see, Darky Gardiner knew only the wet heat like a blanket and the sweat on his closed eyes. All he could feel with his wretched rag of a body, twisted with terror, was the sword poised between him and the sun.

He didn’t dare gulp.

He could smell Colonel Kota, an overwhelming odour of rotting fish. He could feel the sword blade hunger in the air above. He could hear blood. His. Theirs. Growing louder.

And Colonel Kota, a man who believed in symmetry and order in all things, grew confused as his mind railed against its own weakness. He was bewildered. He had lost control of the sequence of things—and in losing that, he had lost control of this ending and, in some strange way that was to him also perfectly logical, of his own life. And that he could not allow.

Darky Gardiner’s neck seemed to him to be screaming. He longed for the blow of the sword so that it might be over. He wondered if the sword was already falling, if his head were already—

He’s gone, he heard Kes say.

There were sounds of someone walking away, a short silence, and the same footsteps coming back.

He’s fucked off, Kes said. I’ve checked. You can look, Darky.

And Darky Gardiner opened his eyes.

Kota and his sword had disappeared. The Goanna was gone. Only Kes remained, apple-pip eyes staring down at him. Darky looked around at the black line of the bamboos at the top of a nearby cliff and, beyond, the silhouette of teak.

Jeepers creepers, Kes said, look at those peepers.

He heard the screech of monkeys.

He smelt the reeking mud of the jungle.

And in all this life around him, Darky Gardiner for the first time sensed his own death. He understood that all this would go on, and of him nothing would remain, that even his memory, though held by a few family and friends for a few years, perhaps decades, would ultimately be forgotten and mean no more than a fallen bamboo, than the inescapable mud. As Darky Gardiner looked up and down the track, as he thought of the naked slaves only a mile distant toiling away, he felt the most terrible rage seize him. All this would go on and on, and only he would be gone. Everywhere he looked, he could see the most vibrant world of life that had no need of him, that would not think for a moment of his vanishing, and it would have no memory of him. The world would go on without him.

You all right, mate? Kes asked.

Darky Gardiner’s eyes were darting everywhere, and everywhere all he could see was a world to which he was meaningless, nothing, that had no need of him. They would toss him on a fire of bamboo, say something or say nothing, Jimmy Bigelow would play the ‘Last Post’, and in ten years or twenty years perhaps those who survived would all be slaves in some new Japanese empire. And after fifty or a hundred years everyone would accept it as perfectly copyright, and none of it would be better or worse than anything now, and the only difference would be that he would not be there. Suddenly he needed sleep. He just had to sleep. He rolled onto his back and lay there. His body felt as if it were dissolving back into the mud.

We gotta move on, Kes said. They’ll kill you if you stay.

As he leant down to drag Darky Gardiner to his feet, Kes heard a guttural cry and to his horror saw the Goanna striding quickly back down the path. The guard shoved Kes aside, kicked Gardiner again and, yelling, Byoki house, byoki house, pointed down the track in the direction of the camp. Even in his delirious state, the prisoner seemed to find it hard to believe such a thing.

Byoki house? Darky Gardiner gasped, disbelieving, repeating the camp pidgin for hospital.

Byoki house! the Goanna yelled again and gave him another kick to emphasise the point.

With what energy he could summon, Darky Gardiner pulled himself to his knees and hands, and like a weary dog turned around and started to crawl back to camp before the guard changed his mind. Kes began quickly marching in the opposite direction, heading to the railway cutting. The Goanna sprinted past him to catch up with the visiting colonel. When he disappeared out of sight, Kes halted.

He watched in wonderment as his left leg went into a violent spasm for no reason, jumping about as if wired into a power line. And then his body shuddered uncontrollably for some minutes, a violent and wild shaking. Finally it ceased, and he was able to resume walking to the Line.

16

IT WAS JUST after midday, Shugs had eaten his filthy grey rice ball for lunch and was on his way to the cookhouse in order to scrounge another kerosene tin boiler to fit into the broken still. He was also hoping that a cook might give him some peelings or rice scrapings.

Shugs was a lot older than most, maybe close to thirty even, and his eyes, which reminded everyone of overflowing ash trays, coupled to his odd, taciturn nature, made some suspect he was touched. He had been a trapper before the war, a nomad of the Tasmanian high country, and he carried nothing, not even a kitbag. The first time he had worn underwear was when he enlisted and received two pairs as part of his uniform issue. He had never got over the luxury of army life, the exoticism of which was summed up by the recipe book he had won in a game of pontoon in Java. Shugs said he’d been dreaming of a recipe of Mrs Beeton’s for pork roulade when he came upon Darky Gardiner, collapsed in mud in the middle of the parade ground.

Christ knows how he made it back down the Dolly, Shugs told some of the other POWs later. But he did.

They wondered too how Darky Gardiner did it on his hands and knees, up and over the rocks and roots, through the mud and the puddles, down the cliff, and they feigned astonishment, which was really fear, because next day, next week it might be one of them, and they would just have to find within themselves whatever Darky Gardiner had.

His guts had gone on him completely and he was covered in shit, poor bugger, Shugs told them. I guess he just crawled up and down that miserable fucken track squirting away shit everywhere.

Shugs had their attention.

Poor fucken bugger, bugger me, you wouldn’t know how bloody long he had bloody well been there. He was all away with fever like a wormy leaf on a windy day. I thought he was dead. He looked that fucken awful. Then I could see he was breathing. I thought, I just want to get him out of sight of any Jap, because even if you’re dead you’re still skiving to a Jap if you’re not on the bloody sick lists. I got him up, this shitty skeleton, and he’s leaning on me and me him, half-staggering, half-dragging Darky like a dirty old busted broom over to the bamboo showers. Got some water, got some rag, washed him down, cleaned him up, I washed his face, I cleaned his filthy arse.

They could see Shugs standing Darky up under the bamboo shower. They knew how awkward it would have been, the two naked men like two trees collapsed on each other. They could see that stream of water falling from the bamboo piping they had run back from the creek, Shugs saying, It’s good to be clean, cobs. They could see Darky flopping around in Shugs’ arms everywhere. They could see the water running like roots over the holes of Darky’s shoulders and his chicken-ribbed chest, Shugs saying, Get that fucken stink off you and out of you. And they wondered if any of them had half the decency of the foul-mouthed, half-mad Shugs.

Shugs told them how Darky came-to a bit when the Big Fella’s 2IC, Squizzy Taylor, with his gangster dash and not a touch of the hard man about him, arrived, and Darky told him about how the Jap officer went to behead him but didn’t, and how the Goanna then sent him back.

You can never accuse the Japs of consistency, Squizzy Taylor says, shaking his big gangster head, and he holds out his gangster hands and begins to examine him. By this time Darky’s making no sense, Shugs went on, and he’s rabbiting on about how before the war he used to take his missus to Nikitaris’s fish shop in North Hobart for a feed of fish and chips. Goes on about how he can’t stop thinking about the fish that used to swim around in the big tank in the shop window. Flathead and mullet and blackback salmon. Nothing special, says Darky, as Squizzy prods him a bit, lifts his eyelid a tadge, taps his chest, all the doctor bizzo.

Just fish? Squizzy asks.

Yeah, Darky says, just fish. Poor bloody things, locked up in that glass box looking out.

Poke your tongue out, Darky, Squizzy says.

After the matinee at the Avalon, Darky goes on rambling. Always, Nikitaris’s fish shop. Two couta—chips—battered scallops—buttered bread.

First they demand everyone on death’s door work, Squizzy says, then they send this poor bastard back. Get your tongue out, Darky.

And Darky kept going on about how Edie loved that. A flick then a feed of fish.

And then? I wanted to ask, Shugs said. But he’s going on about how he can’t stop thinking about all those fish swimming about in Nikitaris’s tank. How it’s not natural. How they’re POWs too. How when he gets back he’s going to Nikitaris’s fish shop. How he’s gonna scoop all them fish up and take ’em down to the docks and set them free. I don’t care what old Nikitaris thinks, says Darky. I’ll buy ’em, I’ll rob the fucking joint, I’ll do whatever and get those fish out and put them back in the sea where they belong.

Squizzy tells him not to get so excited, how he’s got every disease going and he’s going into the hospital for as long as it takes, and after he gets out neither the fish nor his missus will be safe.

Darky was swaying like a grass stalk, Shugs said. It was hard to know what he was thinking or even if he knew where he was. Maybe he was imagining him and Edie there for a feed after an evening at the Avalon, Shugs said, maybe he was laughing at the fish in the tank. Maybe he doesn’t really notice them at all, maybe he is just looking at Edie’s breasts, maybe Edie is telling him to stop looking at the fish and pay more attention to her. Or maybe not. Maybe she is saying, What are you looking at? and Darky goes all shy and looks at the fish, thinking maybe he is one of the fish swimming in the tank, maybe he is a naked prisoner of war in the jungle with his arm around me, as Squizzy Taylor tells me to take him up to the hospital.

Have them dose him up on whatever quinine they can scrounge, he says, and some emetine for the dysentery. He turns to me with his big gangster eyes looking at me and he says under his breath, There is no quinine, there is no emetine, there is next to no food. But at least he can rest.

And then, Shugs said, you won’t believe me, but Darky starts laughing and it was like he wasn’t with us here in the middle of the bloody jungle but had headed back to Nikitaris’s fish shop before the war. No quinine, he says, no emetine. Two couta, a dozen battered scallops and some buttered bread. Squizzy says, What’d he say? And I say, Two couta, a dozen battered scallops and some buttered fucken bread. Sir.

And Squizzy starts laughing, Shugs said. And me too. And Darky laughs. Couldn’t stop laughing. Two couta, Darky says, a dozen battered scallops and some buttered bread. Just holding on to each other, in the middle of that fucking mud, laughing our heads off. I don’t have a clue what pork roulade tastes like. But hot, salty, greasy battered fish? No bugger forgets that.

17

AS HE CAME close to the ulcer hut, Dorrigo was enveloped by the stench of rotting flesh. The stink of foul meat was so bad that Jimmy Bigelow—who accompanied Evans on his rounds outside of the cholera compound to help as an orderly nurse—would on occasion have to leave, go outside and vomit.

Once they were inside the ulcer hut, the stench grew stronger. Dorrigo Evans brought a hand to his nose, then quickly took it away, considering it one further affront to men who had already suffered too much. He headed down an aisle that ran between two bamboo platforms, which were full of his ulcer patients. The stench was now different, once more growing stronger and also sharper, so foully pungent that Dorrigo’s eyes were watering. Rows of naked men lay like stick insects dying after some strange swarming, so many cicada husks rising and falling on the woven bamboo, lying not parallel but at strange angles to one another, dulled bug eyes wide and vacant, chicken carcass chests rising and falling the only outward sign of life. Occasionally he felt he did see something in their eyes but they were terrible things—envy or a terrifying fatalism, or a dizzying terror into which they were falling ever deeper. It was hard to look, harder not to. Many were oblivious and most paid no attention; some were silent; some were delirious, their heads rolled side to side; some mumbled and muttered; some groaned incessantly as pain coursed through them as rain through bamboo.

Dorrigo Evans made his way between the platforms, as chatty as if it were a country pub on a Saturday afternoon and he was meeting old mates, but his good spirits fled and he felt his stomach cramp when he saw two orderlies carry Jack Rainbow in. One orderly was holding some filthy rags, trying to staunch the blood that was seeping out of the little stump that was all that was left of Jack Rainbow’s right leg. Dorrigo Evans had operated on him twice before, the first time amputating the leg below the knee when the ulcer there had eaten through to his shin and anklebone. The second time gangrene had set in around the stump and he had had to amputate high up the thigh. And that had been three weeks ago, and here he was again. The orderlies placed him on a bamboo table used for patients when their ulcers were cleaned out with sharpened spoons. Dorrigo Evans came across to inspect the leg.

But before he looked, he smelt.

It was all he could do not to vomit.

The same thing had happened again, and where there should have been healing there was just black rot and infection, and blood pulsing out of the little stick-like stump. Dorrigo Evans realised the stitches he had used on the femoral artery must have sloughed off.

Gangrene, he said to no one in particular, because everyone with a nose already knew. Tourniquet.

Nobody responded.

Tourniquet? Oh, Christ, no, said Dorrigo Evans, realising he was in the ulcer tent and there were no tourniquets or any such equipment. He hastily unbuckled his belt, drew it out of his shorts and wrapped it around what remained of Jack Rainbow’s thigh, a thin thing not much thicker than a drainpipe. It looked like a paper cup made of foul bitumen. He gently cinched the belt tight. Jack Rainbow gave a low moan. The bleeding slowed.

Get him up.

The orderlies pulled Jack Rainbow up to a sitting position in their arms. One of them offered him water in a tin can but he could not catch the rim of it with his shaking mouth and the water spilt.

We’re taking you to the operating theatre, Corporal Rainbow, said Dorrigo Evans. And when one of the orderlies halted momentarily to scratch his nose, Dorrigo Evans said quietly, Quickly.

The orderlies knew the more quietly he spoke, the more pressing and urgent the order. They hurried away with the stretcher, as Evans turned to another orderly.

Find Major Taylor. Say I need him now in the operating theatre. And can you get me some string or rope or something for my shorts?

Together the colonel and his orderly ran to the operating theatre, Jimmy Bigelow doing his best to keep up with the colonel, whose speed seemed unaffected by having to use one hand to hold up his shorts as his long legs loped through the mud.

The operating theatre was a small hut. Its chief virtue was its situation: halfway between the hospital hut and ulcer ward, and thus separate from the sick and the near insuperable problems of hygiene that went with them. It had an attap rather than a canvas roof, which meant it was more or less dry. Such equipment it possessed resembled a child’s idea of an operating theatre. Contrived out of bamboo, empty food and kerosene tins, and bric-a-brac stolen from the Japanese—bottles, knives and tubes out of trucks—it was a triumph of magical thinking. There were candles set in reflectors made out of shaped tin cans, a steriliser made out of kerosene tins, a bamboo operating table, surgical instruments made out of honed steel stolen from engines and kept in a suitcase that sat on a table so the rats and mice and whatever else couldn’t crawl over them.

What could he do? wondered Dorrigo, as he began readying his instruments for sterilising. He had no idea. What on earth comes into your head? Squizzy Taylor had asked him after Dorrigo once played cards for a prisoner whom Nakamura wanted to punish. My only idea ever, Dorrigo had confessed, is to advance forward and charge the windmill. Taylor had laughed, but Dorrigo had meant it. It’s only our faith in illusions that makes life possible, Squizzy, he had explained, in as close to an explanation of himself as he ever offered. It’s believing in reality that does us in every time.

He made life up every day, and the more he trusted in his fancy, the more it seemed to work. But how now to advance forward? At the far end of the hut, away from the operating table, he began scrubbing his hands, washing the greasy blood off under the steady stream of water that ran out of a bamboo pipe, another makeshift piece of plumbing the men had rigged up to bring water from a nearby stream, which he now suspected might carry cholera. Everything seemed poisoned, and sometimes every effort seemed to do nothing other than worsen the situation, to lead to ever more deaths. Dorrigo Evans called Jimmy Bigelow over to the table with a kerosene tin of precious distilled water and had him slowly pour it over his hands.

As he rinsed, Dorrigo Evans tried to steady himself, to compose his mind and body.

He was panicking. He knew it, and he steadied himself, trying to settle into his pre-op routine of cleaning. Make sure each finger is thoroughly clean. He could do this, he told himself. Nails—make sure nothing is under the nails. He had no belief he could do it, but others believed he could do it. And if he believed in them believing in him, maybe he could hold on to himself. Wrists—don’t forget wrists. It was all ridiculous, and yet to live, he told himself, demanded above all else a ridiculous belief that you could live.

The orderlies arrived with Jack Rainbow, who was now quiet. As they laid him on the operating table, Squizzy Taylor came in. The orderly who had found him had procured some pieces of coloured rag that were knotted together into a crude rope. He proffered them to the colonel.

That’s my belt?

Saris. Apparently. Some time ago.

The colonel smiled.

It’s good that they help keep my pants on for a change. Here, he said, indicating his shorts with his elbows as he kept washing his hands.

The orderly ran the makeshift rope around his shorts and knotted it on one side, giving the tall surgeon’s narrow hips a buccaneering dash.

Named after the noted Melbourne gangster, because of both his surname and a dark charm—emphasised by damp marsupial eyes, at once alert and vulnerable, and underlined by a pencil moustache—the once sleek Squizzy Taylor was now very thin, a form that lent him a villainous look he had never before had, further adding to the aptness of his nickname. His background as a suburban doctor in Adelaide was as plain as his looks were exotic. Other than what he had learnt assisting Evans, he knew surgery only from his medical training and anecdote.

Colonel?

Amputate, Dorrigo Evans said without looking up from his hands. Again.

Dorrigo, Squizzy Taylor said. You’ve looked at the stump?

I know.

There’s nothing left to cut off.

Dorrigo felt his hands crushing each other. They had to be clean.

I know. You can—Dorrigo Evans began, and then hesitated.

He wrung his hands harder. Could he?

For Christ’s sake, Jimmy, he snapped, this fucking water’s more precious than single malt. It’s not for irrigation. Go slowly with it, I said.

He’ll die from the shock, Dorrigo.

He’ll die if we don’t. It’s gangrene. There’s . . . There is a chance if we amputate at the hip.

Is there? Squizzy Taylor said. Even in the most modern hospitals hip disarticulation only kills people. You’re just cutting through too much of the body. Out here, it’s pointless.

How much anaesthetic have we got?

Enough.

I assisted on a hip disarticulation once, Dorrigo said. In Sydney, back in thirty-six. Old Angus MacNamee did the job. The best.

Did he live?

She. An Aboriginal woman. For a day. Maybe two. I can’t recall exactly.

Why don’t you just go for a very high thigh amputation? There’s a chance then.

The gangrene is too high.

I am not a surgeon. But it’s not that high. Take the leg off where the tourniquet is.

Either way, high up on the thigh or at the hip, there’s nowhere left to put any tourniquet and he bleeds to death. There’s no fucking leg left, Squizzy. That’s the problem.

If I can push down hard with something round and flat about here, said Taylor, prodding around his own groin with his fingers, feeling the arteries, the flesh, the span of the dilemma. Here, he said, pushing two fingers into his groin. Here—on the femoral artery, that might stop the blood enough.

It might not.

It might not.

Maybe something like a spoon with the handle bent around? That might.

Might.

Might.

That’d do the job. And hopefully staunch the flow enough that you can work. He’ll still bleed. But you get the stump off, clamp the arteries and then sew up. He’ll still be bleeding but not so badly he’ll die.

I’ll have to go quickly.

You were never a man to dawdle.

Jack Rainbow’s wasted body was trembling slightly. A low hiss pulsed in and out of his mouth.

Okay, said Dorrigo Evans, shaking his hands dry. He sent Jimmy Bigelow for a tablespoon and went back to the bamboo table.

We’re just going to whittle that leg back a bit more, Jack, cut that stinking gangrene away and—

I’m cold, said Jack Rainbow.

18

DORRIGO EVANS LOOKED at the gaunt face, grey as beef dripping, with white stubble stiff as fuse wire, the large possum eyes, the snub nose and dirty freckles.

Get a blanket, Dorrigo Evans said.

You got a Pall Mall, doc?

I’m afraid not, Jack. But after, I’ll make sure you get a good smoke.

Nothing like a Pall Mall to warm you up, doc.

And Jack laughed and coughed and shook once more.

Van Der Woude arrived with his homemade anaesthetic. Jimmy Bigelow returned with a tablespoon from the kitchen and a soup ladle as backup. The candles and two kerosene lamps were lit, but the mass of them only seemed to accentuate the darkness of the hut. An orderly switched on a torch.

Not yet, Dorrigo Evans said. We’ve got no spare batteries. Wait till I ask.

He motioned Jimmy Bigelow and Squizzy Taylor to stand with him alongside the table and slide their hands under Jack Rainbow.

On the count of three, gentlemen.

They rolled Jack Rainbow over. When Squizzy Taylor slid the needle into Jack’s spine, Jack made a plunging noise like a drain being suddenly emptied. They began drip-feeding him the anaesthetic. Wat Cooney, a cook of impossibly small proportions with ears that looked as if stolen from a bag of brussel sprouts, arrived with the meat saw from the kitchen.

Van Der Woude’s concoction was good but variable in strength. Jack Rainbow lost feeling quickly and they prepared for the amputation, boiling the kitchen saw and the few surgical instruments they had. When all was finally ready, Dorrigo Evans gave the signal they were about to begin. The drip was removed and Jack Rainbow was rolled back around.

We will be as quick as we can, Dorrigo Evans said. copyright procedure. The key here is to keep bleeding to an absolute minimum. Hold him, he said, turning to Jimmy Bigelow and Wat Cooney. Spoon ready? he asked Squizzy Taylor. Taylor raised the now bent spoon in a mock salute.

Charge the windmill, Dorrigo Evans said.

He took a deep breath. Taylor pushed the spoon head gently but with growing firmness into the base of Jack Rainbow’s wasted belly.

Torch, Dorrigo Evans said. Jimmy Bigelow came forward and shone the torch on the stump.

There was noise from the general hospital huts but it was almost immediately drowned out by Jack’s screaming as Dorrigo Evans began cutting away his leg stump. The stench of the dead flesh was so powerful it was all he could do not to vomit. But Jack Rainbow’s screams confirmed to Dorrigo Evans that he was doing what he had to do: cut into living flesh.

An orderly came running into the operating hut.

What do you want? Dorrigo Evans asked, not looking up.

The Goanna’s taken Darky Gardiner out of the hospital.

What?

We couldn’t stop him. They dragged him out by his arms. Something about men missing up on the Line. There’s a tenko happening now. They’re going to punish him.

Later, Dorrigo Evans said, his face down almost at the level of Jack Rainbow’s stinking remnant of leg, concentrating on the job at hand.

Major Menadue said only you can stop them.

Later.

When he severed the femoral artery it bled badly, but not wildly.

Clamps, Dorrigo Evans said. Nothing I can do about it at the moment. Fucking yellow bastards. Clamps? Bastards. Clamps!

He clamped the femoral artery but the tissue just broke away and the fleshy tube spat blood out over the table and then continued pumping blood.

Push harder, he said to Taylor. He was thinking how he should have been there to stop such an outrage. He thought also of the broken still, the need to buy more anaesthetic from the Thai traders, and how in future he must always make the first amputation as low as possible to allow for such future horrors as this.

He clamped the femoral artery a second time, and for a second time it fell away, and he had to push up into the stinking dead flesh and clamp again. He stopped, waited. This time it held.

Okay, he said, okay.

He cut away more flesh. Within a minute he had cut off the rest of the rotting meat. There was bleeding, but Taylor was right, it was not too much, there had been enough leg left, just enough to amputate. For the first time in an hour he relaxed a little.

Spoon away? Taylor asked.

Not yet, Dorrigo Evans said. Pointing to the rotting meat on the table, he said to Jimmy Bigelow, Get rid of it, for Christ’s sake.

Next Evans flensed enough skin to form a flap to cover the final wound. Then he neatly filleted the living leg muscles back from the bone, so that he could remove the bone higher up and the flesh could in time heal below and around it to form a tolerable stump.

Saw, he said.

An orderly handed him the kitchen meat saw. It was hard to get the traction he needed, so he worked with gentle small strokes, scoring the upper thighbone, seeking to avoid splinters and any further damage to the flesh. And soon enough a piece of bone the length of a finger dropped away.

The three men were now intensely focused on the operation. Dorrigo Evans set to work sewing up the femoral artery with a gut twine Van Der Woude had improvised out of a pig’s intestine casings. These had been cleaned, boiled and pared into threads, then cleaned and boiled again, then boiled a third time before the operation. Compared to surgical ligatures, they were coarse, but they held. But this time he was sewing into nothing, wetness, a blur of tissue and blood. The torchlight was dimming, and he concentrated with all his being on getting each suture in exactly the right place.

And then the bleeding stopped.

He had done it. He had managed to suture the artery, and Jack Rainbow would live. He realised he was breathing heavily. He smiled. He began to prepare the rest of the muscles and skin flap for binding over the bone stump. He looked up at Squizzy.

Spoon away, Major. Gently.

Squizzy Taylor lifted the spoon. Dorrigo Evans kept working, more slowly now, more carefully. Jack would live. He would save this man’s life. There was the recuperation to get through, the chance of infection. But his chances were now good. Not great, perhaps, but still good. He concentrated on doing the best job he could now, imagining a middle-aged Jack Rainbow with children, his stump on a cushion. Alive. Loved. And he knew that what he did was not pointless, without reason; that he had not failed.

Torch off, he said.

He was finished.

He stood up straight, rubbed his back, winked at Jimmy Bigelow and looked back down at the stump. It was a surprisingly neat job. He felt proud of his handiwork. He noticed a small seep of blood where he had just stitched the flaps of flesh together, but the orderly was cleaning the stump and wiped it away.

Dorrigo lit a cigarette, breathed in the welcome smoke deeply, and laughed.

A spoon, he said.

A bloody bent spoon, said Squizzy.

That’s one for The Lancet.

When he glanced back at Jack, a few fresh beads of blood had appeared on the stump.

Why aren’t you dressing and bandaging the stump? Dorrigo asked Wat Cooney, as he wiped away the blood a second time.

As if in answer, the blood almost as quickly reappeared. The stitched flaps were swelling, the small seepage was transforming into a persistent oozing, and then blood began to drip from every part of the wound. Wat Cooney looked up at Dorrigo in horror.

The stitches holding the femoral artery together must have given way, Squizzy Taylor said, giving words to a thought Dorrigo did not wish to have. For a moment he was frozen.

Spoon! he suddenly yelled.

What? asked Jimmy Bigelow, who was on the other side of the hut.

The ligatures are gone on the femoral artery. We’ve got to open it back up.

Squizzy Taylor ran back with the spoon.

Torch! Jimmy, torch! We’ve got half a minute.

For after half a minute, he knew, Jack Rainbow’s heart would have emptied his body of blood. Before he could get the spoon back in position Jack Rainbow’s body jolted.

Spoon!

Jack Rainbow’s body had gone into convulsions.

Spoon! Dorrigo Evans yelled.

Squizzy Taylor went to push the spoon down but couldn’t keep it pressed against the bucking body. Jimmy Bigelow switched the torch on and got back in position, but the torch dimmed further and then died altogether.

Torch! Dorrigo Evans was yelling. Where’s the fucking light?

The body was jumping wildly.

Hold him! Hold him down! Hard. Spoon! Hard! Hold the fucker!

I’m pushing as hard as I fucking can but the fucker won’t stop, yelled Squizzy Taylor.

Blood was everywhere, blood over the bamboo, blood over them, blood dripping oily lines in the dark mud below. It took a few more moments for Jimmy Bigelow and Wat Cooney to get a good grip of Jack Rainbow and hold him, but still that emaciated tiny body jolted up and down as if electricity were coursing through it, and their grips slipped in the blood that now seemed to grease everything.

The leg, said Dorrigo Evans. Get the leg!

But there was really no leg left to get, only a weirdly moving and bloody thing that seemed just to want to be left alone. The tiny piece of thigh that remained was now so slippery with blood that it was very difficult to work on, and in the dim light and the confusion of blood Dorrigo Evans was having trouble seeing anything clearly. The tremors eased then stopped, and he managed to find the sutures holding the flesh together so that he could get back to the femoral artery, but when he snipped them Jack Rainbow jolted again. Squizzy’s spoon slipped in the bloody slime, and blood spurted in a wild arc that reached as far as the foot of Jack Rainbow’s good leg.

He was frantically searching the muck of Jack’s stump with his fingers, trying to find something to stitch, pinching vaulting slime, groping pitching slop, there was nothing, nothing to stitch into, nothing that might hold the thread. The artery walls were wet blotting paper. There was, realised Dorrigo Evans, with a rising horror as the blood continued to pump out, as Jack Rainbow’s body went into a terrible series of violent fits, nothing he could do. But there must be, he told himself. Think! Think! Look!

With each galvanic jolt blood was spewing out in a small fountain. It was as if Jack Rainbow’s body were willingly pumping itself dry. Dorrigo Evans was trying to stitch as far up the artery as he could go, the blood was still galloping out, Squizzy Taylor was unable to staunch the flow, blood was everywhere, he was desperately trying to think of something that might buy some time but there was nothing. He was stitching, the blood was pumping, there was no light, the stitches kept ripping, nothing held.

Push harder, he was yelling to Squizzy Taylor. Stop the fucking flow.

But no matter how hard Squizzy Taylor pushed, still the blood kept surging, spilling over Dorrigo Evans’ hand and arm, running down into the Asian mud and the Asian morass that they could not escape, that Asian hell that was dragging them all ever closer to itself.

The convulsions gave way to shivering. Dorrigo Evans was pushing deeper into the stump, the flesh was tearing and falling away as he worked; his needle at one point hit the bone. He was trying to think, he was trying to find some way, he was trying not to give up hope when he heard Jack speak a few low words that were not much more than gasps and cracks of breath.

Big Fella?

Jack?

Will I die?

I think so.

Cold, he said. So fucken cold.

Dorrigo Evans kept steadily working on Jack’s stump, his bare feet ankle-deep in the bloody mud below the makeshift bamboo operating table, his outer calm a strange thing he knew he preserved at the moments of greatest inner turmoil. He kept looking for that piece of artery, trying to find something in his work to hold on to, unconsciously clawing at the mud with his toes.

And then finally he had it, and he worked with the utmost care and delicacy to make sure his work would hold and Jack live, and when it was done and he lifted his head he knew Jack had been dead for some minutes and no one had known how to tell him.

19

COLONEL KOTA FOUND the Korean sergeant ever more irritating. Everything about the guard seemed untrustworthy and unreliable. Even his affected way of walking and his exceedingly slow way of turning seemed somehow false. As he looked up and down the tangle of sleepers, rock, dirt, irons and naked slaves working like cockroaches, Colonel Kota understood why Koreans could never be used as frontline troops.

While he inspected the railway works—the embankments and sidings, the great cuttings through rocky hills, grey limestone cliffs holding up black clouds, and the magnificent teak trestle bridges over jungle gorges, bowing like rainbows in the monsoon deluge—all he could think of was how he had not killed the prisoner back along the track, and how the Korean sergeant had witnessed his strange behaviour. And yet, even now, he could not remember the exact order of the haiku’s syllables. The Korean sergeant annoyed him immensely, seeking to please him with his affected smile, his ridiculous agreement with every comment Kota made, his boasting of the efficiency of their operation. Colonel Kota was convinced that behind every compliment was contempt, behind every agreement mockery, beneath every boast insolent superiority. On a hunch that he thought at best might embarrass the Korean and at worst annoy him, he ordered a head count of the prisoners for no reason other than that he could.

To the guards’ astonishment, the count came up nine short—nine prisoners missing. Alerted to this discovery, eight men mysteriously appeared at the second head count, held half an hour later. The hatchet-faced Japanese colonel demanded the eight men who had been hiding come forward to be punished, and that they reveal the identity and whereabouts of the ninth missing man.

When no one came forward, he ordered that the POW sergeant responsible for the gang be found and severely punished as an example. After some confusion, it was established that the ninth man was the sergeant, and that he was not on the Line but back in camp.

On returning to the camp late that afternoon, Colonel Kota gave Nakamura a dressing down, his rage driven by his own shame at having forgotten a haiku and thus having been unable to behead a prisoner—and this in front of a Korean guard. In turn deeply ashamed, the Japanese major found the Korean sergeant whose name he could never remember, slapped him hard a few times, got the name of the prisoner who was apparently—of all things—hiding out in the hospital, and ordered a parade to be called and the prisoner to be punished in front of the assembled POWs.

For his part, the Goanna was unconcerned by his slapping, but he was less than thrilled with the order: he did good business with the prisoner Gardiner, and the charge was to his mind even more pointless than most. While Gardiner annoyed him with the way he sometimes sang and whistled, the prisoner occasionally proved useful. Only a few days before, the Goanna had scored fresh beef from Gardiner for all the NCOs. But so it went. It was a shame, but he supposed that, after the beating, Gardiner would still need him and he Gardiner. So it went on and it never stopped. You could go to war with the world, but the world would always win. What could he do?

And so Gardiner was found where the Goanna had sent him, in the hospital. As he was unable to walk, the Goanna ordered the two guards who were with him to drag the prisoner to the parade ground to be punished.

20

THE DAY WAS passing, it was cooling down, and the men were thinking how, here at least, they did not have to work. For a few minutes or however long it took, they could rest, and rest was always welcome, the most welcome thing in their world other than food. But they did not want to be here.

They stood in the middle of the parade ground, a hundred or so prisoners who had been on light duties and who had, that early evening, been assembled in the monsoon rain to witness Darky Gardiner, a man who pitied wet monkeys, being beaten by the Goanna for a crime he had not committed. Their number slowly swelled as prisoners returning from the Line were made by guards to join this desolate gathering.

When the Goanna tired, two other guards stepped forward to continue his work. A fruity, wet fragrance momentarily swept in from the jungle, and it reminded some of sherry and made them think of Christmas with the family and the trifle their mothers used to make. While one of the guards slapped Darky’s face back and forth and a second punched him in the torso, some of the prisoners tried to be happy in their memories of roast pumpkin and roast lamb and plum pudding with beer washing it all down. And though they would carry the memory of Darky’s beating to their own deaths six days or seventy years later, at the time the event seemed no more within their control, and therefore no more within their consciousness, than a rock falling or a storm breaking. It simply was, and it was best dealt with by finding other things to think of.

Sheephead Morton—slowly, carefully, so as not to draw attention to his forbidden movement—speared mud beneath his toes and was once more concreting, as he had sometimes as a labourer before the war, laying a house foundation. Jimmy Bigelow rolled the tip of his thumb along the side of his index finger, and this gentlest of touches took him to a bed where a woman’s fingers whispered a line along his hip. He remembered the marvel of her faint down moustache as she drew him in to kiss.

After a further ten minutes the Goanna, finished resting and perhaps sensing the absence of their attention, ordered that the prisoners all take six steps forward. Now the very sound of the hits and slaps and punches, dull and muted as they were, could be felt by the assembled men. Now there was no way not to look at the near-naked man being beaten by the uniformed guards. His wet, swelling face wore a strange look of astonishment each time the guards hit him with their fists or bamboo poles.

Help! Darky Gardiner moaned. Help me!

Or perhaps his punctured cries just sounded that way. Every strange, laboured breath of Darky’s—part wheeze, part bloody gargle, occasional grunt, as his body worked at this, too, the very surviving of the beating—every sound could not now be entirely blocked out. And yet they did block them out.

Lizard Brancussi was trying to see his Maisie’s face. Daily, he looked lovingly at Rabbit Hendricks’ pencil sketch, but when he tried to look beyond it—when he tried to recall her—everything grew hazy. The fantasy of Mae West was growing ever stronger, and Maisie, as she was, growing ever weaker. Still, as the beating went on, he kept trying, for he understood the measure of his life now to be his capacity to believe in something—anything—other than what was happening in front of him.

So they saw, but they did not see; so they heard, but they did not hear; and they knew, they knew it all, but still they tried not to know. At times, though, the prisoners were tricked back into seeing the beating by some novelty, such as a small teak log the Goanna found and threw at Darky Gardiner’s head, or when he thrashed Darky Gardiner’s body with a bamboo pole as thick as his arm, as if the prisoner were a particularly filthy carpet. Blow after blow—on the monster’s face, a monster’s mask.

The prisoners were starving, and increasingly their thoughts were of their evening meal, which, however meagre it was, was still real and still waiting for them; the beating was denying them the pleasure of eating it. They had been at work all day with nothing more to sustain them than a small ball of sticky rice. They had laboured in the heat and the rain. They had broken rock, carried dirt, cut and hauled giant teak and bamboo. They had walked seven miles to and from work. And they could not eat until the beating was done or Darky was dead, and their one secret hope was that, either way, the affair would be over with sooner rather than later.

More men staggered in from the Line, the number of prisoners grew to two hundred and then over three hundred. And they had to keep watching other men breaking in the mud a man like other men, and none of them could say or do anything to change this unchangeable course of events.

They wanted to rush the guards, seize the Goanna and the two others, beat them senseless, smash their skulls in until watery grey matter dribbled out, tie them to a tree and run their bayonets in and out of their guts, drape their heads with necklaces of their blue and red intestines while they were still alive so the guards might know a small measure of their hate. The prisoners thought that and then they thought they could not think that. Their emaciated and empty faces grew only more emaciated and empty the longer the beating went on. Then these men who were not men, humans unable to be human, heard a familiar voice cry out—

Byoki!

And their spirits momentarily rose as they turned to see Dorrigo Evans running towards them. When his ulcerated ankle brushed a slashed bamboo clump, Dorrigo Evans yelled harder—

Byoki! Byoki!

But the Goanna ignored the Australians’ commanding officer completely. Another guard shoved him into the front row of the prisoners as across the parade ground Major Nakamura came striding towards them with Lieutenant Fukuhara in tow, come to inspect the punishment.

Stepping out of the line, Dorrigo Evans pleaded with the Japanese officers to stop the punishment. Some men noticed how Nakamura bowed slightly, respectfully acknowledging the colonel’s superior rank, and how their colonel, rather irritatingly for the Japanese, did not return the bow.

They heard him say: This man is severely ill. He needs rest and medicine, not a beating.

And, behind him, the beating went on.

21

NAKAMURA WAS ROCKING on his heels as he listened. He was itching, his mouth was dry, and he felt angry and agitated. He needed shabu, just one pill. Watching the prisoner being beaten gave him no pleasure. But what could you do with such people as these? What? Good and gentle parents had raised him as a good and gentle man. And the pain brought on in him by such suffering as he had ordered proved to him how deeply he was a good and gentle man. For, otherwise, why would he feel so pained? But precisely because he was a good man—who understood his goodness as obedience, as reverence, as painful duty—he was able to order this punishment.

For the beating served a greater good. Overnight, the task of completing their section of the railway line had increased immeasurably. And because the prisoners had today been particularly difficult, and because the guards sensed that and were in turn uneasy, the punishment of a prisoner offered a way for the guards to reassert their authority and for all the prisoners to be reminded of their sacred duty.

There was the other matter of Colonel Kota having been the one who discovered the missing POWs—thereby shaming him, Nakamura, and all the engineers and guards under his command. The punishment wasn’t about guilt, but honour. There was no choice in any of this: one existed for the Emperor and for the railway—which was, after all, the embodiment of the Emperor’s will—or one had no reason to live or even die.

Fukuhara told him the Australian colonel was going on yet again about medicine. What medicine? thought Nakamura. The central command sent them nothing—not machinery, not food, certainly not medicine, just a few old broken hand tools and impossible orders to build a miracle out of nothing in this green desert. And Koreans. Useless Koreans. No wonder they didn’t use them as front-line troops. You couldn’t even trust them to guard Australian prisoners. He needed medicine too. He needed shabu. Because if he failed to complete his section of the railway on time, he would have no choice but to kill himself out of shame. He did not want to kill himself, but he could not return to the Home Islands having failed the Emperor. He was a better man than that. And to get done what had to be done over the next few hours, he just needed a little shabu.

As the beating went on, Nakamura noticed that the Korean sergeant seemed to be putting less force into his blows, a lack of purpose that annoyed Nakamura immensely. The Koreans were, well, Koreans, and he was simply not doing the job properly. Perhaps he was weary, but it was no excuse. Nakamura had ordered the punishment, the order was necessary and justified, yet the guard seemed not to be taking the order seriously.

As Fukuhara continued translating the Australian colonel’s claims that the prisoner was guilty of nothing and had been sent back to the hospital by one of the guards because he was so sick, Nakamura continued standing there, itching badly, wasting his time, watching the Korean featherdusting the prisoner. The prisoner appeared groggy but was still managing to ride the guard’s weak blows with his body. When the prisoner staggered, it seemed to Nakamura that he was using the stagger to sway and roll with the blows of the bamboo pole and the guard was doing nothing to end this farce. The prisoner was making a joke of the punishment. It maddened Nakamura, it made his skin even itchier—he just needed to get that shabu pill, but how much longer did he have to wait, watching such ineptitude, such stupidity?

The Australian colonel had changed tack and seemed to be fashioning an argument of offended authority to stop the beating. Fukuhara told Nakamura that the Australian colonel claimed that the Korean sergeant had completely ignored him—a colonel and commanding officer—when he had spoken to him, demeaning his rank and honour.

Nakamura swung around to Fukuhara. He would end the punishment now and they could all be done with it—poor show as it had been, it had served its purpose. But as Nakamura turned, his left foot trod on his perennially trailing puttee tape, his right boot corkscrewed around, and somehow, as he tried to pick up his left foot, he tripped over his right boot and fell sprawling in the mud.

No one said anything. The beating momentarily stopped, then hastily resumed as the Japanese major got back to his feet. One side of a trouser leg was smeared with mud and his shirt was filthy.

As he scanned the faces of enemy and ally alike, Nakamura was acutely aware that everyone had seen his humiliating fall. Prisoners. Koreans. Fellow Japanese officers. He had had enough. He was tired. He had been up since three a.m. He had much yet to do, the day was already dying, and the railway was further behind schedule than ever. Nakamura—humiliated, enraged, muddy—saw a pile of tools that the prisoners had dumped. His mind was abruptly clear. He understood the intolerable Australian colonel’s issue—as an officer he felt he had been insulted. And he saw how he could resolve both the Australian colonel’s problem and his own.

He went over to the tools, chose a pick handle, weighed it in his hands and, brandishing it like a baseball bat, walked straight past the Australian colonel to where the Korean sergeant was thrashing the prisoner. He called the guard to order. Nakamura planted his feet, drew the pick handle back and, wielding it like a samurai’s sword, hit him hard across his left kidney.

The Korean groaned, swayed and almost toppled, and only with some difficulty drew himself back to attention. Nakamura raised the pick handle above his head and with a powerful swing drove it into the Korean’s neck. He finished with a backhanded sweep of the pick handle into the side of his head, and the Goanna dropped to one knee. Nakamura yelled at him in Japanese, threw the pick handle at his head, walked back to Dorrigo Evans and bowed. Without meaning to, Dorrigo Evans bowed in return.

Nakamura spoke quietly. Fukuhara translated for the Australian colonel, saying that the guard had been punished for his insolence to the Australian colonel, and now the punishment of the prisoner could continue.

In front of them, the Goanna got back on his feet, grabbed the pick handle, staggered the few steps to Darky Gardiner, steadied himself, then raised the pick handle high before bringing it down on the prisoner’s back with a new-found zeal. Darky Gardiner fell to his knees and was gathering himself to stand back up when the Goanna kicked him full in the face.

As the Australian colonel began remonstrating again, Nakamura waved his translator away.

It’s not a question of guilt, he said wearily.

Darky Gardiner’s movements were no longer graceful as his wasted, naked body tried to recover, coordinate and move again in time to defend itself from the next blow. His timing was growing jagged. As he got back up, a blow of a guard’s bamboo pole caught him in the side of the face. His head snapped sideways, he gasped and reeled backwards, trying not to fall, but his body had grown clumsy. He tripped and fell to the ground.

As the guards took turns kicking Gardiner, Nakamura murmured a haiku by Basho. Fukuhara looked at him queryingly.

Yes, Nakamura said. Tell him.

Fukuhara continued staring.

He likes poetry, Nakamura said.

It is very beautiful in Japanese, Fukuhara replied.

Tell him.

In English I think not.

Tell him.

Smoothing the side of his pants with his hand, Fukuhara turned to the Australian. He drew himself up straight, so that his neck seemed even longer, and recited his own translation:

A world of pain—

if the cherry blossoms,

it blossoms.

22

DORRIGO EVANS LOOKED at Nakamura, who was scratching violently at his thigh. And Dorrigo Evans understood that for the railway to be built, that railway that was the only reason for the immense suffering of hundreds of thousands of human beings at that very moment—for that senseless line of embankments and cuttings and corpses, of gouged earth and massed dirt and blasted rock and more corpses, of bamboo trestling and teetering bridges and teak sleepers and ever more corpses, of innumerable dog spikes and inexorable iron lines, of corpse after corpse after corpse after corpse—for that railway to exist, he understood that Darky Gardiner must be punished. At that moment he admired the terrible will of Nakamura—admired it more even than he despaired of the beating of Darky Gardiner—the grim strength, the righteous obedience to codes of honour that allowed no doubt. For Dorrigo Evans could find in himself no equivalent life force that might challenge it.

With his fixed face and ascetic’s ragged tunic, in his thrashing of the Goanna, in the bark of orders he had just given, Nakamura no longer seemed to Dorrigo Evans the strange but human officer he had played cards with the night before, not the harsh but pragmatic commander he had bartered lives with that morning, but the terrifying force that takes hold of individuals, groups, nations, and bends and warps them against their natures, against their judgements, and destroys all before it with a careless fatalism.

The Goanna had stooped down and scooped Darky Gardiner up in a fireman’s lift. He threw him onto his shoulder and then back up to a standing position. There was an odd pause, as though the beating was over, but once Darky had his balance the three guards started once more with the bamboo poles and pick handle until he fell again. And so began a pattern of beating, falling, kicking and dragging back up to beat again.

And watching this—as the Goanna yet again stood Darky Gardiner up in order to beat him down again, as he quickly backhanded him twice—Dorrigo Evans felt as if some terrible vibration was shaking the earth, and that all their beings could not help but drum with it. And that ominous drumming was the truth of this life.

This must stop, Dorrigo Evans was saying. It’s wrong. He’s sick. He’s a very sick man.

It wasn’t even an argument, though, and Nakamura just raised a hand and talked over him in a new, kindly voice.

Major Nakamura say he have some extra quinine, Fukuhara said. To help sick men work. The Emperor’s will decrees it, the railway needs it.

And the drumming went on, louder and louder.

Dorrigo Evans understood that Nakamura was trying to help, but that he could do nothing about the beating he had ordered. Quinine would help others. Nakamura could help whom he could help, and quinine would help him help them. But he could not stop the drumming. He could not help Darky Gardiner. The railway demanded it. Nakamura understood that. Dorrigo Evans had to accept it. He too had a part in the railway. Nakamura had a part. Darky Gardiner had a part, and his part was to be brutally beaten, and all of them—each one in his own way—had to answer to the terrible drumming.

The jerking movements of Darky Gardiner’s body and arms and legs as he tried to protect himself—all these were for the guards now just natural obstacles, like rain or bamboo or rock, to be ignored or cut or broken. Only when he ceased to struggle did they stop standing him up, and his cries gave way to a long, slow wheezing, like a torn fire bellows, and their grim work slowed to a more moderate tempo, taking on the nature of manual labour.

Something was happening inside Dorrigo Evans as he watched. Here were three hundred men watching three men destroying a man whom they knew, and yet they did nothing. And they would continue to watch and they would continue to do nothing. Somehow, they had assented to what was happening, they were keeping time with the drumming, and Dorrigo was first among them, the one who had arrived too late and done too little and now somehow agreed with what was happening. He did not understand how this had come to be, only that it had.

For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any god man worshipped, for it was the only true god. It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal. For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence.

But these feelings were too strange and overwhelming to hold on to, they floundered for a moment in Dorrigo Evans’ mind, and then vanished. Behind him, Nakamura was walking away. The Japanese officer’s thoughts were also confused and too disturbing to make sense of, far less hold on to. Other, more reassuring, comforting ideas of duty and the Emperor and the Japanese nation and the immediate practical worries of tomorrow’s railway building took their place, and, again, as a mouse in a wheel, Nakamura’s mind returned to obediently fulfil that role which had been assigned to him.

Within ten minutes he had completely forgotten the beating, and it was only an hour later, when he walked back past the parade ground and saw the prisoners still at attention, that he realised it had not ended. Two extra guards held hurricane lamps to light the scene now it was night, the prisoner had somehow lost what rags he had and was naked, and the uniforms of the three guards administering the punishment were dark with rain, mud and blood. The prisoner no longer sought to resist or evade his beating but absorbed it as passively as a bag of chaff. When the guards weren’t hitting him with their sticks, they kicked him around like an old ball. But then he no longer looked like a man, but something wrong and unnatural.

Nakamura would have preferred that the beating had stopped some time ago, but it seemed best not to interfere. Fortified by three tablets of shabu, he was on his way to find Corporal Tomokawa and have him head over to the river camp to buy a bottle of Mekhong whisky from a Thai river trader. Some shabu and whisky, thought Nakamura, that was what was needed.

And the drumming went on and when the other guards had tired and stopped, still the Goanna went on, diligently, obediently, rhythmically beating Darky Gardiner with the pick handle.

And to his drumming there could be only one end.

23

DARKY GARDINER OPENED his eyes and blinked. Raindrops fell on his face. He pushed his hands into the mud but they kept sinking. He was swimming in shit. He tried to get back to his feet. It was impossible. He was swimming in ever more shit. He tried to curl up to protect himself. It did no good and he only sank back into the foul hole. If he closed his eyes he was back there being beaten. If he opened his eyes he was drowning in shit, trying to stay afloat, trying to climb out. But it was so slippery and so dark and he could not find a hold, and when he did he had no strength to climb out. His body could not help him. It answered only to the kicks and blows that twisted him wherever they wished. He had no idea how long he had been there. Sometimes he thought it seemed forever. At other times it seemed no time at all. At one point he heard his mother. He was having difficulty breathing. He felt more soft raindrops, saw bright-red oil against the brown mud, heard his mother calling again, but it was unclear what she was saying, was she calling him home or was it the sea? There was a world and there was him and the thread joining the two was stretching and stretching, he was trying to pull himself up that thread, he was desperately trying to haul himself back home to where his mother was calling. He tried calling to her but his mind was running out of his mouth in a long, long river towards the sea. He blinked again. A monkey shrieked, its teeth white. Above the ridge, the smiling moon. Nothing held and he was sinking. He heard the sea. No, he said, or thought he said. No, not the sea. No! No!

24

THEY FOUND HIM late that night. He was floating head-down in the benjo, the long, deep trench of rain-churned shit that served as the communal toilet. Somehow he had dragged himself there from the hospital, where they had carried his broken body when the beating had finally ended. It was presumed that, on squatting, he had lost his balance and toppled in. With no strength to pull himself out, he had drowned.

Always shit in the shitter, said Jimmy Bigelow, who volunteered to be lowered on a rope into the hole of shitty water to manhandle the corpse out. Rightio, he yelled to those holding the rope at the top when he was up to his thighs in the filth. Rightio!

And as he tied a second rope around the corpse, he spoke to it.

Oh, you fucking stupid bastard, Darky. Couldn’t you just have shat yourself on the bunk like every other dopey bugger? Couldn’t you just have folded their fucking blanket the right way out?

As they raised Darky Gardiner’s body, Jimmy Bigelow glimpsed it by the light of the kerosene lantern. Coated in maggots, it was something so oddly bruised, crushed, filthy, so dirty and broken, that for a moment he thought it could not be him.

They carried the body to the hospital. With a kerosene tin of water and his miner’s hands, so violent, so gentle, Sheephead Morton cleaned the filth off the blackened body and prepared it to be buried the next day.

It had been a day to die, not because it was a special day but because it wasn’t, and every day was a day to die now, and the only question that pressed on them, as to who might be next, had been answered. And the feeling of gratitude that it had been someone else gnawed in their guts, along with the hunger and the fear and the loneliness, until the question returned, refreshed, renewed, undeniable. And the only answer they could make to it was this: they had each other. For them, forever after, there could be no I or me, only we and us.

25

THE FOLLOWING MORNING Rooster MacNeice rummaged deep in his kitbag for his copy of Mein Kampf to begin the day with his ten minutes of memorisation. He had woken in the middle of the night, harrowed by just one thought—that if he had stepped forward to say it had been his idea to hide from work, Gardiner would not have died. But, he reasoned, if he had done that, perhaps he would have died instead. Or not. Or maybe both of them would have died. He told himself it was impossible to know with the Japanese. He reassured himself that Gardiner was doomed in any case, as sergeant in charge of their gang, as a sick man.

When Rooster MacNeice had stood there in the cutting the day before, as the Japanese had demanded the guilty prisoners step forward, what had been loudest in his mind was not the Japanese roaring but Gardiner’s laughter after he had been caught with his hand around the eggshell. At the moment when Rooster could have stepped forward, all he could think of was the blackened duck egg Gardiner had stolen from him, the eggshell of which he had then used to mock him. The humiliation of the previous morning at Gardiner’s hands remained with him as a more painful emotion than the later memory of Gardiner being beaten. No, Rooster MacNeice had thought, he would not help such a man. But he had not meant to kill him.

No. I did not mean it, he muttered to himself. No, I did not.

As he sucked on his ginger beard, he could feel at the bottom of his kitbag his dixie, then the damp, cupped clapboards of his copy of Mein Kampf. Just as he was about to pull it out, his hand brushed against a dress uniform shirt he had somehow kept through all his travails. He always had it neatly folded and flat, but it was now bulging. He let go of his book, felt around and pulled out of his kitbag a duck egg. His lower lip dropped out of his mouth. His feeling of relief at finding the egg was almost immediately overtaken by a horror beyond words. He quickly placed the duck egg back in the kitbag as if it were some gigantic shame that needed to be hidden, and got out Mein Kampf.

Much as he tried, he could memorise none of it.

26

DECADES LATER, JIMMY Bigelow would insist that his kids always fold their clothes so, fold ever outwards. He would open the drawers of the chest of drawers in their suburban weatherboard home in Hobart to make sure they were safe and the fold was out. He would never hit or smack them for not folding their clothes with the fold out. He would beg and plead, he would order and demand and, in the end, exasperated, he would refold and restack their clothes himself as they stood by nervously waiting. He would feel some nameless terror that was beyond him to explain—a confusion they too would carry with them for the rest of their lives that was both love and fear, that was beyond the drawers opening and closing, beyond their father’s frustration and mumbling. He knew they didn’t understand. But could they not see? How could they not know? It should have been so obvious what had to be understood. You could never know when everything might change—a mood, a decision, a blanket.

A life.

They knew none of it. They only knew that, whatever they did, he would never hurt them. At the very worst, he would throw them over his knee, bring his hand up and then hold it there, hovering, over their bottom. Sometimes they would feel him shaking through his knees and thighs. They would steal a look upwards and see his hand trembling, his eyes watery. How could they know that their father was desperately trying to protect them from the unexpected smash of a rifle butt into their soft child’s cheeks, to warn them of what horrors this hard world had ready for the unwary, the unwise and the unprepared—to prepare them for all those things for which no one could ever be readied? They knew only this one thing: that he would never hurt them.

As his body trembled back and forth through time, they knew what he meant when he said, Rightio, and suddenly threw them off his lap and back onto their feet. Averting his eyes, he would wave them away with an extended hand.

That’s it. Rightio? Just. Just put the fold out next time. Out. Always out. Rightio?

And they would run outside into the sun.

Perhaps, he wondered, he didn’t make the time or space he should for love. He fitted it in, and it flitted away. Perhaps he somehow chose—why, he couldn’t say—the predictable lines of work over love’s wild circling, the folding of a blanket over the unfolding of locked arms.

But sometimes it was just there: staring out an open window to see little Jodie look up and wave to him with the biggest smile, he was shocked to see love playing in a backyard of brown grass under a sprinkler’s diamond spill—shocked to know he had been lucky enough to live and know it, to love and be loved. And he would watch his children playing outside in the sun. Ashamed. Amazed. It was always sunny.

27

AND WHAT OF the Line? With the dream of a global Japanese Empire lost to radioactive dust, the railway no longer had either purpose or support. The Japanese engineers and guards whose responsibility it was were imprisoned or repatriated, the slaves that had remained to maintain the Line were freed. Within weeks of the end of the war the Line began welcoming its own end. It was abandoned by the Thais, it was dismantled by the English, it was pulled up and sold off by tribespeople.

After a further time, the Line began to bend and warp. Its banks broke, its embankments and bridges washed away, and its cuttings filled in. Abandonment ceded to metamorphosis. Where once death stalked, life returned.

The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs.

The Line welcomed weeds into the embankments the slaves had carried as dirt and rock in their tankas, it welcomed termites into the fallen bridge timbers the slaves had cut and carried and raised, it welcomed rust over the railway irons the slaves had shouldered in long rows, it welcomed rot and ruin.

In the end all that was left was the heat and the clouds of rain, and insects and birds and animals and vegetation that neither knew nor cared. Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo.

Decades would pass. A few short sections would be cleared by those who thought memory mattered, transformed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs—tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites.

For the Line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was all for nothing, and of it nothing remained. People kept on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only.

And of that colossal ruin, boundless and buried, the lone and level jungle stretched far away. Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass.

This world of dew

is only a world of dew—and yet.

Issa

1

SCATTERED LIKE SESAME seeds along the Shinjuku Rashomon’s ragged crest, the crows—startled by a rock thrown at them—rose up over a Tokyo yet to concrete over the ash of its past. Beneath their beating wings the city scarcely existed. Not so very long ago the same crows had thrived on the black corpses that had been so common in the fire-stormed city. Now they flew over a vast and charred, churned-up plain, in the weird warrens and labyrinths of which wandered widows and orphans, broken and crippled ex-soldiers, the mad and the dying and the despairing, their paths occasionally crossed by a jeep of American GIs. In that bitter winter of 1946 reconstruction amounted to little more than tents, lean-tos and tin shelters, in which the more fortunate huddled, while the rest made do with the subways, railway stations or burrows and caves in the rubble.

The man who had thrown the rock, Tenji Nakamura, formerly a major in the Imperial Japanese Army’s 2nd Railway Regiment, was sheltering from the bitter rain in an erratic archway made of the fallen beams and debris of fire-bombed buildings that had, by chance destruction and some judicious burrowing, formed over a back street. As though this pile of rubble was a grand gate to their great city, those locals who had to pass through this chaotic tunnel to and from the devastated pleasure district of Shinjuku called it the Shinjuku Rashomon. Foxes, rats, whores and thieves were the Shinjuku Rashomon’s most common inhabitants, living in its burrows, nests and the half-collapsed rooms. Mount Fuji, which Nakamura could glimpse even from this ramshackle gateway, again stood above their world, as it had a century and a half before for the great Hokusai to paint, once more fully visible, ever-changing and immutable, still and immortal.

Yet the world Mount Fuji now presided over was ferociously mortal, and in it people died every day but had to continue living. The streets were full of people senseless on kasutori, the cheap, lethal drink of choice for the starving and despairing, or shabu stolen from army warehouses, or both. Nakamura’s poverty had broken Nakamura of his own shabu habit and he was determined not to return to it. Hungry dogs roamed the sunken lanes that had once been roads in large and threatening packs, and hungrier children would appear to work the streets as pickpockets and beggars and pimps.

Wolves, all of them, thought Nakamura.

With their slow eyes and sudden movements, there was about them something Nakamura found eerie, at once vulnerable and threatening. They looked an emaciated six or seven years of age but were often already teenagers. Women sold themselves everywhere, a few finding a curious honour and reduced income in refusing to service the American devils. Most, however, revelled in the affluence being a pan pan girl brought. One night, after he had been with such a woman, he grew angry at her trade, in which he now saw his own life reflected, and he asked her how she could go with the Americans. A freshly lit Lucky Strike on her smiling red lips, she asked him—

Aren’t we all pan pan girls now?

Since being demobilised two and a half months earlier, Nakamura had lived amidst such ruins of people and place, and among their number he was nothing and glad of it. He was armed only with a crowbar that served both as the means by which he procured a precarious living and as a weapon of self-defence on the spine of which every few minutes he crushed some more lice ripped from his itching body. With it, he extricated broken pieces of timber framing from destroyed buildings, from the silt and mud and ash of what had once been Tokyo, pulled them apart as best he could and then sold the pieces to a charcoal burner. As he turned over the charred remnants of the once great capital of the Empire, Nakamura’s thoughts tended to turn to where he might be able to get some miso soup or a bowl of rice. Occasionally, such scrounging yielded unexpected rewards: the day before, he had unearthed some stale acorns that even the rats had missed, buried deep in the rubble. Since eating them, though, he had had nothing.

To divert his thoughts from hunger, he picked up a newspaper that lay trampled on the ground. It was several days old, and he managed to read a few stories without taking in a word, until one suddenly brought his mind to white-hot attention. He read carefully, desperately. It was about warrants being issued by the Americans for the arrest of more ex-POW camp staff in relation to possible war crimes. The article ended with a list of the wanted suspects’ names, and halfway down the list he found what he had for so long dreaded—his name mentioned as a possible Class B war criminal.

Nakamura began again to itch. He was no war criminal, yet the Americans who were the real war criminals would kill him if they could and make a lie out of his life. Rage began to rise within him. But underlying his anger, punctuating his day-to-day thoughts of survival, was the dull but ever-present fear of an animal that knows destiny is searching for it. For Nakamura had heard how the Americans, whose hulking, loud bodies seemed to him to be everywhere, were hunting down those they believed to be war criminals with a grim efficiency, and high on their list were those who had had anything to do with POWs. He was determined to survive, to not be caught and not be executed, because his honour demanded it. His itching grew violent, and he reached inside his pants and tore at his crotch. He pulled out a scabby mix of skin, hair and lice and threw it on the ground.

As he waited for the weather to improve, Nakamura ran his finger up and down the weary green paint of the crowbar, crushing the few lice that still remained on his hand between his fingernail and the iron. He thought on his situation: scrounging timber was no way to survive; his crowbar had lost half a tooth from its nail pull, and the side of his face throbbed from a gouge made by a jagged beam that had fallen unexpectedly across his body two days before; the terrible, inescapable cold only made him hungrier and now the Americans were after him. As he again looked at his name on the newspaper list Nakamura realised with horror that for several days at least now the Americans had been hunting him—methodically pursuing leads, eliminating false trails, homing in on others—and every hour drawing closer to him, and he to his death at the end of a gallows-rope. To survive, Nakamura realised, he had to do something, and that meant he would now have to contemplate doing anything. But then this feeling of defiance gave way to one of utter hopelessness and defeat. What could he do? What? The honourable thing, Nakamura thought, would be to do as others had done and kill himself.

And at the moment he resolved to take his destiny into his own hands and die honourably, Nakamura heard some muffled shouts from above. He found his whole being filled with an insatiable curiosity as to what those shouts were, as though doing something, anything, was better than contemplating his wretched fate.

He crawled out of the hollow, stood up in the rain and slowly turned his head, listening intently. Then he heard a woman hissing. The sound came from somewhere above, in a pile of rubble that formed the left-hand side of the Rashomon.

As quietly as was possible on rubble, Nakamura crept up the large mound of loose masonry and broken buildings that formed the left wing of the archway, hand gripping his crowbar tightly. He came upon a small hole in the rubble, the size of a fist. Looking through it he saw into the remains of a bombed-out room, lit from an opening where the top half of the far wall ought to have been. Nakamura could see that the room had perhaps once been a neat and pleasant place, but now the chrysanthemum wallpaper was only just visible through a thick smear of dust and soot, and it seemed to Nakamura that it had been turned into a sort of animal den. The remnants of a rotting tatami mat and some cushions formed a bed, and by it was a three-legged table, propped up with broken bricks, on top of which sat a dirty mirror.

The woman’s hissing began again, very close now, and by twisting his body in the direction of the woman’s voice, Nakamura was able to see into a far corner of the room. There stood a pan pan girl and a young boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, holding a long kitchen knife. Below them lay the uniformed body of an American serviceman whose throat had been so recently cut that it was still weakly spurting blood. The pan pan girl was remonstrating with the boy, asking why he had killed the American, but she was not sad, only angry.

Hidden from their view, Nakamura quickly took all this in, but what caught his eye was not this drama—about which he couldn’t have cared less—but what sat on the makeshift dressing table: two gyoza dumplings and a bar of American chocolate.

2

NAKAMURA CAREFULLY AND quietly crawled down from his peephole and crept over the top of the Rashomon and around to the opening in the wall. As he slowly raised his head over a loose sheet of roofing iron, the pan pan girl was rifling through the dead man’s pockets. When she rolled the American’s body over onto its side, it gave a low murmur. She jumped back up, but, realising it was just air being forced out of his lungs, she went back to searching his clothes. From a back pocket she pulled a roll of American dollars.

But it was the gyoza dumplings that Nakamura was focused on. He was remembering how they ate them all the time when he had served in Manchukuo and thought nothing of it. He felt his mouth filling with saliva at the memory of them then, and the possibility of them now.

Unable to think of anything other than how much he wanted those gyoza dumplings, Nakamura braced himself and threw himself through the hole. He rolled into the room and jumped to his feet, brandishing the crowbar. For a moment all stared at each other over the body of the dead American—the pan pan girl in an expensive floral print shirt, wide slacks and glossy black geta sandals holding the wad of American dollars, the boy with the knife, and Nakamura with his crowbar.

With a roar the boy leapt at Nakamura with his knife, and Nakamura, feeling some heightened sense of himself that was at once terror and calm experience, dropped to a slight squat to balance better, and swung the crowbar as if it were a sword. It passed through the air in a wide upward arc that ended with the soft, sloppy sound of it hitting the boy’s head. That sound—of a hammer burying itself in a watermelon—seemed to Nakamura to stay in the air for a long, long time. And in that same odd eternity that was also only an instant, all the boy’s violent forward momentum ended. There seemed to Nakamura to be a strange break in time before the boy dropped noiselessly to the floor.

Both Nakamura and the pan pan girl said nothing. Though the boy’s body spasmed violently, they knew he was dead. As blood began to appear, the spasms slowed, then stopped, and Nakamura noticed lice swarming in seeming sudden panic around the boy’s filthy long hair. He became acutely conscious of the chill odour of damp dust that filled the room.

The pan pan girl began to whimper. Nakamura took two steps over to the three-legged table and stuffed both gyoza dumplings into his wet mouth. As he gobbled them down, he kept his eyes firmly fixed on her. A new idea came to him.

Using the crowbar to talk, he pointed at the wad of dollars in her hand. With a shaking hand she passed it to him. He pocketed the cash, and then with the tip of his outstretched crowbar lifted the edge of her floral print shirt. Slowly, she raised her eyes from the crowbar to his eyes, and then she bowed and took a step backwards. She began to strip.

Naked, she was bowlegged. Her unpleasantly thin thighs were covered with little sores, buttercup-yellow. The silky hair of her crotch contrasted with the scaly white skin underneath. Her breasts were still more swellings than breasts, and her skin was sickly in colour. Nakamura could smell her now, unwashed and sweaty, like a stabled cow at the end of winter.

She went over to the three-legged dressing table and lay down on the filthy tatami mat, feet pointing towards him. He could hear her breathing, short pants. She disgusted him, selling herself to the American devils and now offering her filthy, sullied body to him. He picked up the pan pan’s clothes, pocketed the chocolate bar and went to climb out of the cave. For a moment he halted and looked at the two corpses.

The American was already nothing. The Japanese boy had a badly pimpled face. Too much was made of killing, thought Nakamura. Maybe one should feel remorse, guilt, and at first in Manchukuo he had. But the dead soon ceased to be faces. He struggled to remember any of them. The dead are dead, he thought, and that’s it. Still, two corpses and one of them American . . . it would mean trouble for him if he wasn’t careful, and he was a wanted man already.

Avoiding stepping in the large puddle of dark blood, Nakamura knelt down over the American. He smelt of the DDT they had deloused Nakamura with when he had been demobilised. He felt the American belonged to some other species, so oversized and strange did he look. The Australians had not looked anything like this in the jungle, like this large and too-dead American.

Making sure he never touched the corpse, he artfully wormed one end of the crowbar into the American’s half-closed fist and laid it across his chest. Then, thinking on it, he rubbed the bar around in the man’s hand, pushing it hard on his fingers, then dropped it in the puddle of blood. As long as the pan pan disappeared and kept her mouth shut, the Americans and the police would draw the obvious conclusion: a pimp tried to roll the American, a fight ensued and both lost their lives.

And with that he turned and went to pull himself up into the chest-high hole that served as this den’s entrance, when behind him he heard the pan pan get to her feet. Nakamura paid her no heed till he felt her trying to clutch at his ankles. To free himself, he had to give her two good kicks that sent her sprawling back onto the American’s corpse.

As he slid down the rubble outside, he could hear a yelling behind him. He turned to see the pan pan girl, arm over her little blood-slicked breasts, leaning out of the hole, saying something about how the American raped her and her brother arrived and was just trying to protect her. Nakamura didn’t really follow her story and wasn’t interested in trying. He scrambled back up to the hole, grabbed her by the shoulder and held a brick near her whimpering head.

Forget it, said Nakamura. Forget him, forget your brother and forget me.

The pan pan girl wailed more loudly. He shoved the brick against her mouth.

You survive if you forget, he said angrily.

He pushed her back into her hole, scrambled down the Shinjuku Rashomon and headed into the city.

With the fifty American dollars he stole from the pan pan girl he was able to buy false identity papers. With the money he made from selling her clothes to another pan pan, he bought a train ticket to Kobe. In a third-class carriage with all its windows blown out, he now travelled through a brutal winter’s night, away from his past as ex-railway regiment major Tenji Nakamura and into his future as ex-IJA private Yoshio Kimura.

Things were no better in Kobe than they had been in Tokyo. That city, too, was just craters and mud, hills of bricks and steel twisted like wire, with Japanese crawling around like cockroaches in the mess. But Nakamura felt he had put the distance he needed between him and the dead American and the dead boy. For several months he made a hand-to-mouth living from such petty thieving and black marketeering as was possible. But he never felt safe. On one occasion he thought he had recognised at a distance a tall Australian officer from one of the POW camps. Such was Nakamura’s fear that, for a week after, he only ventured out on the streets of a night.

He began following the war crimes trials closely. He read how one Japanese soldier who had beaten a POW who had escaped several times was found guilty as a war criminal and hanged. Nakamura found this impossible to fathom.

One beating?

He had been beaten all the time in the Japanese Army, and it had been his duty to beat other soldiers. Why, when he was training he had been knocked out twice, and once suffered a ruptured eardrum. He had been beaten with a baseball bat on his buttocks for showing ‘insufficient enthusiasm’ when washing his superior’s underwear. He had been beaten senseless by three officers when, as a recruit, he had misheard an order. He had been made to stand-to all day on the parade ground, and when he had collapsed they had fallen on him for disobeying the order and beaten him unconscious.

So how did one beating make one a war criminal? And what was a prisoner of war? Did not the Field Service Code specifically state that a captured officer was to kill himself? What was a prisoner of war? Nothing, that’s what. A man without shame, a man with no honour. A no man.

One beating?

He had been a good officer, and some of the other officers had chided him for dealing with most infringements of discipline just with face slapping.

You’re too warm-hearted, he recalled Colonel Kota telling him after Nakamura had slapped Corporal Tomokawa for some misdemeanour. Just slapping a man for that? I would have thrashed him so hard he never forgot.

And after that, Nakamura wanted to scream to the clear Kobe sky, what was a prisoner of war? What?

3

CHOI SANG-MIN was sitting in the dark on a bamboo stool, a luxury he had been allowed as a condemned man. He had heard that some ex-POWs had simply tossed Kim Lee from the top floor of a brothel in Bangkok when they had found him there. That seemed to him reasonable and sensible. He hoped Kim Lee had spat on them as they threw him to his death. Kim Lee had been a guard like him, he had killed POWs, and when the war was ended they had killed him. It seemed perfectly understandable, unlike his own situation, which did not. He despised the Australians’ hypocrisy, dressing up their vengeance with rituals of justice. In his heart he knew they had always wanted to kill him too, so why all this pretence?

He had neither watch nor clock. Other than his intuition, he had no way of knowing how much longer the night might go on. But his intuition no longer seemed to work. The night was never-ending and yet it was already racing away from him. The Changi prison had been locked down for the evening, perhaps two hours earlier. If he had thought about it, he may have reasoned it was somewhere near midnight. But he did not think about it or anything, really. Choi Sang-min was lost in a place beyond thought. His mind beat time between two emotions. One was a panic that would come on him like a mad, nagging cough and have him once more frantically pacing his Changi prison cell trying to discover a way of escaping, only to discover there was no escape possible, either from the cell or from his imminent death.

And then his mind would pitch to anger, not at his fate or the impossibility of escaping, but at a fact he found tormenting. As he was imprisoned as a member of the Japanese military, he must surely still be owed his fifty yen monthly pay, none of which he had seen since before the war’s end, two years earlier. His anger arose not out of arithmetic or greed, but an idea of motivation that was also a sense of injustice. Fifty yen was the only reason he was there. Why, then, was he not receiving it?

And because in his heart he knew he would never receive any money ever again, that the fifty yen was an absurdity and yet he had somehow been robbed of it, his mind would abruptly swing back to panic, and he would once more begin pacing his cell, running his fingers over the walls, his hands over the cell window bars, the door, pushing, touching, searching for a way out, until he once again realised no escape was possible and his mind swung back to the anger he felt at being denied his fifty yen.

His trial had been held in an Australian military court and had lasted two days. Other than when he was being directly questioned, the proceedings were all in English and he understood almost none of it. At its end, the judge—a man with the face of a windswept candle and the voice of a gravedigger—for the first time looked directly at Choi Sang-min and spoke. An interpreter, his gaze fixed resolutely on the judge’s lips, whispered in Choi Sang-min’s ear broken branches of Japanese sentences.

Because of—of the contradictory nature, said the interpreter, evidence presented—form of written testimonies—the charge of having participated in the murder—Australian Imperial Force Sergeant Frank Gardiner—is dismissed. The translator switched to a more informal tone to add, This is very good news, very good.

And then he returned to his fragmented translation.

The charges—of having ordered the murder of Private Wat Cooney—these are upheld—as are several other lesser charges of—ill-treatment, including the withholding of food and medical supplies leading to avoidable suffering and death. Having—having been found guilty of being a Class B war criminal—you will—be—be executed by hanging.

The translator this time added no gloss of his own.

There were more words but Choi Sang-min was no longer hearing anything. When he had been questioned in court, Choi Sang-min had tried to explain how, as a Korean sergeant, he could never have ordered the death of a prisoner, but the Australian lawyers quoted from the interrogation of a Japanese officer called Colonel Kota saying he had. Kota’s evidence had already helped convict several Korean and Formosan guards and, Choi Sang-min had also heard, he had later been released without charge. Choi Sang-min had pointed out that Cooney was no longer in the camp when the order to execute him was supposedly given. But the camp records, confused and incomplete, offered no proof that this was so.

After his sentencing, his Australian defence counsel, a flabby man with wet, glistening eyes that reminded the condemned Korean of scalpel blades, pleaded with him to lodge a petition for clemency. Choi Sang-min was resolved to dying in a foreign land and could not see the point in drawing out the agony. It had not escaped the notice of Choi Sang-min, along with the other Koreans and Formosans held at Changi as Class B and Class C war criminals, that the Allied victors often seemed to free officers who had links to the Japanese nobility and let others more lowly, like themselves, be the scapegoats whom they hanged. Choi Sang-min thought of Major Nakamura, who had never been arrested and no doubt never would be; of Colonel Kota, who was once more free. Both were probably working for the Americans somewhere.

All the same, said Choi Sang-min.

What? asked his counsel, wet eyes cutting back and forth.

All the same, said Choi Sang-min, a comment he made to demonstrate his fatalistic acceptance of life, but which his counsel understood as an assent to his attempt to prevent his execution and have the sentence commuted. The lawyer submitted the petition, and Choi Sang-min’s life and torment were extended by another four months.

Choi Sang-min noticed how every man at Changi conceived of his destiny differently and invented his past accordingly. Some men had point-blank denied the charges, but they were hanged or were imprisoned for lengthy periods anyway. Some had accepted responsibility but refused to recognise the authority of the Australian trials. They too were hanged or were jailed for greater or lesser periods. Others denied responsibility, pointing out the impossibility of a lowly guard or soldier refusing to recognise the authority of the Japanese military system, far less refusing to do the Emperor’s will. In private they asked a simple question. If they and all their actions were simply expressions of the Emperor’s will, why then was the Emperor still free? Why did the Americans support the Emperor but hang them, who had only ever been the Emperor’s tools?

But in their hearts they all knew that the Emperor would never hang and that they would. Just as surely as they had beaten and tortured and killed for the Emperor, the men who didn’t accept responsibility were now to hang for the Emperor. They hanged as well and as badly as the men who accepted responsibility or the men who said they never did any of it, for as they jiggled about beneath the trapdoor one after another, their legs jerked all the same and their arses shat all the same and their suddenly swollen penises spurted piss and semen all the same.

During his trial, Choi Sang-min became aware of many things—the Geneva convention, chains of command, Japanese military structure and so on—about which he had hitherto only the vaguest idea. He discovered that the Australians he had feared and hated had, in a strange way, respected him as one who was different: a monster they called the Goanna. And Choi Sang-min wasn’t displeased to learn that he loomed so large in their hate.

For he sensed in the Australians the same contempt for him that he had known in the Japanese. He understood that he was once more nothing, as he had been in Korea as a child, standing at the back of his class after being caught whispering in Korean instead of speaking in Japanese; as he had been when working for the Japanese family, where his position was worse than that of the family pet; as he was in the Japanese army, a guard, lower than the lowliest Japanese soldier. Better Kim Lee’s fate than his now. And yet some men who he knew had done far worse things than him or Kim Lee had their lives spared. How? Why? None of it made any sense.

Beating the Australian prisoners, on the other hand, had made a lot of sense. However briefly, he felt he was somebody while he was beating the Australian soldiers who were so much larger than him, knowing he could slap them as much as he wanted, that he could hit them with his fists, with canes and pick handles and steel bars. That had made him something and someone, if only for as long as the Australians crumpled and moaned. He was vaguely aware that some had died because of his beatings. They probably would have died anyway. It was that sort of place and that sort of time, and no amount of thinking made any more or less sense of what had happened. Now his only regret was that he had not killed many more. And he wished he had taken more pleasure in the killing, and in the living that was so much part of the killing.

As the Australians talked to each other during the trial, it dawned on Choi Sang-min that this was something beyond hate. It was a certainty about life that he had never had but that the Japanese above him had always had. And when he had been given power over the life and death of the Australians, he had at first beaten them only because it was the Japanese way that he had been brought up with, and he saw nothing remarkable about thrashing a man who you felt was too slow or shirking work.

At Pusan he had undergone the same strict military training as that for Imperial Japanese Army privates. Only they were not Japanese, they were all Koreans and were never to be soldiers: their job was to be guarding enemy soldiers who had surrendered because they were too cowardly to kill themselves. As well as marching and shooting and bayoneting, he had been taught binta, the face slapping that the Japanese insisted on for even the most minor error. Even if only one person made a mistake, everyone had to be slapped. Every day they had all the trainee Korean guards line up in two rows facing each other, and each trainee had to slap the trainee opposite him, right hand on left cheek, left hand on right cheek, taking it in turns and only stopping when the face of the one being hit was badly swollen. All orders had to be obeyed. Binta and obeying orders, that was now Choi Sang-min’s life—right hand on left cheek, left hand on right cheek. He longed to run away and go home, but he knew there would be trouble for his family with the Japanese authorities if he did. And besides, he would shortly be earning fifty yen a month.

He remembered how he had whispered to the trainee opposite him that he would go easy on him if he returned the favour. Their ruse was quickly spotted by their Japanese officer. He was a fine-looking man whom the recruits admired. Choi Sang-min even imitated his way of walking and his slow, precise way of turning when spoken to. Now the officer was shouting in Choi Sang-min’s ear.

Want to pretend? he yelled. Pretend this doesn’t hurt.

And with a short steel rod he hit Choi Sang-min in the kidneys on both sides so hard that he pissed blood for several days afterwards. The next morning, when the recruits were once more lined up in rows to slap each other, Choi Sang-min beat his counterpart with a desperate rage that never quite left him, right hand on left cheek, left hand on right cheek.

And, at first, when he—a small, skinny Korean kid of sixteen—had been sent to the jungle in a distant land, he had been frightened of the larger, taller and older Australian men, orang-utangs with their wide-set backs, thick arms and hairy thighs. They were always whistling and singing. In his experience, Koreans and Japanese didn’t do much of either in public, and he hated this strange cheerfulness. And so he went further than he strictly needed to with his punishments—to impress upon them that he was more man than they were, to make clear that their cheerfulness should end. And after a time the men began to shrink and shrivel, their arms withering and legs wasting; they whistled less and only sang sometimes.

And in truth the prisoners deserved what they got. They tried to avoid work, and when they couldn’t avoid it they did it badly and lazily. Though they did it much less, they would still sometimes whistle or sing when he was about. They stole anything and everything—food, tools and money. If they could do a job badly they saw it as a triumph. They were skin and bones, and they’d just give up while they were working and die there on the railway. They’d die walking to work and they’d die walking back from work. They’d die sleeping, they’d die waiting for food. Sometimes they died when you beat them.

It made Choi Sang-min angry with the world and with them when they died. It made him angry because it wasn’t his fault that there was no food or medicine. It wasn’t his fault that there was malaria and cholera. It wasn’t his fault that they were slaves. There was fate, and it was their fate and his fate to be there, it was their fate to die there and his fate to die here. He just had to provide whatever number of men the Japanese engineers needed each day, make sure they got to work and kept at the work the Japanese engineers wanted done. And he did his job. There was no food and no medicine and the line had to be built and the job had to be done and things ended up as they were always going to end up for them and for him. But he did these things, he did his job and their section of line got built. And Choi Sang-min was proud of that achievement, the only achievement he had ever known in his short life. He did these things, and these things felt good.

The moments when he completely lost his temper were the most euphoric to him. In his world of darkness and ignorance, he felt free—and more, he felt alive for the first time in his life. All his hate and his fear, his anger and his pride, his triumph and his glory, came together when he hurt others, or so it seemed to him now, and his life had for that short time meant something. And at such moments he escaped his hate.

Though the pressure was on from the engineers to get the railroad built, there was a pleasure and interest too in watching how the more he bashed them the less of men they became, how little they now whistled or sang, and how much more of a man he knew he was. For as long as he kept kicking and punching and beating, he was liberated. He had heard the stories of the IJA eating Australians and Americans in New Guinea, and he understood it was about something more than just starvation. And he knew none of this was a defence, and none of it would mean anything to the Australians, to their scalpel-eyed lawyers or candle-dripping judges. For when he was a guard, he lived like an animal, he behaved as an animal, he understood as an animal, he thought as an animal. And he understood that such an animal was the only human thing he had ever been allowed to be.

He was not ashamed at his discovery of his humanity in being an animal, only perplexed as to where it had led him. When his sentence of death by hanging was translated for him, he bore it like an animal, without understanding but with a dull awareness that he had had his freedom and now his end had come.

The judge’s candle-wick eyes had looked down at him with flickering flames, and he had looked up with eyes he knew were dead already; and he had shaken his head back and forth and he had felt something large and terrible come down on him. He had wanted to ask about his fifty yen, but said nothing, and now he once more found himself pacing his cell, looking for a way he might escape. But there was none, and there never had been.

4

THEY DIED OFF quickly, strangely, in car smashes and suicides and creeping diseases. Too many of their children seemed born with problems and troubles, handicapped or backward or plain odd. Too many of their marriages faltered and staggered, and if they lasted it was sometimes more due to the codes and customs of the day than to their own capacity to make right all that was wrong; and what was wrong was too large for some of them. They went bush by themselves; they stayed in town with others and drank too much; they went a bit crazy like Bull Herbert, who lost his licence drunk and took to riding a horse into town when he wanted a drink, and he wanted a drink a lot after he made a suicide pact with his wife, shared poison with her and woke up to her dead and himself alive. They went silent or they talked too much, like Rooster MacNeice, run to fat and showing off his appendix scar and carrying on about the Japs bayoneting him. Like fuck they did, Rooster, said Gallipoli von Kessler, walking in on the performance one day in the Broadmeadows RSL.

Don’t worry, Rooster MacNeice said. That’s just Kes. He always was a commie but he’s okay. It was a guard they called the Mountain Lion; I testified about the bastard after the war.

They drank though. They drank and they drank, and they couldn’t get drunk no matter how much they drank. When they were demobbed the army quacks told them and their families not to talk about it, that talk was no good. It was hardly a hero’s tale in the first place. It wasn’t Kokoda or a Lancaster over the Ruhr Valley. It wasn’t the Tirpitz or Colditz or Tobruk. What was it, then? It was being the slave of the yellow man. That’s what Chum Fahey said when they met up at the Hope and Anchor.

Isn’t exactly something to boast about, Sheephead Morton said.

Blokes were funny. Some disappeared. Ronnie Owen married an Italian woman, and she told Sheephead Morton’s missus, Sally, that it was two years before she even knew he’d been a soldier. It was like that.

Bonox Baker said nothing for years, then one night took a shotgun to his oven, Jimmy Bigelow said. Shot the shit out of it. Looked like the back of a bloody cheese grater. Then he went quiet again. It was like that too.

Poor old Lizard Brancussi, Sheephead Morton said. And that story was too sad for anyone to repeat. He had carried the pencil sketch of his wife through the camps, on the hellship to Japan, held on to it when the Mitsubishi shipworks in Nagasaki, where he was slave labouring, vanished in the A-bomb and he somehow survived. He made it to safety in the hills, walking past the dead who filled the river like floating firewood, and the living fleeing with skin falling away in long ribbons like seaweed; he’d stumbled on past carbon sculptures of human beings walking, cycling, or running; past all those Japanese in agony in that roiling hell of blue fire and black rain, who, like the POWs he remembered, called for their mother as they were dying. And all the time he tried to see Maisie as Rabbit Hendricks had sketched her that morning in a Syrian village that smelt of human beings in trouble.

He tried to imagine her as the one thing in the world that was not this, and as long as she was there, he would not die or go mad, that as long as she was there, the world was good. On his way to Manila on a US aircraft carrier he had shown the postcard to the American sailors, who agreed he was a very lucky man. He finally got to Fremantle on a ship that was going through to Melbourne, and there he had telephoned home.

Dave and Maisie’s phone, a man’s voice answered. Dave speaking.

Lizard Brancussi had hung up. When his ship steamed out of Fremantle he was spotted slipping over the side on the first night and was never found.

Suddenly the beer was like fuel for a fire. They drank to make themselves feel as they should feel when they didn’t drink, that way they had felt when they hadn’t drunk before the war. For that night they felt ferocious and whole and not yet undone, and they would laugh at all that had happened. And when they laughed the war was nothing, and everybody dead was alive in them, and everything that had happened to them was just this vibrating jumping thing beating inside them so hard they needed another drink quickly to slow the feeling.

And that night Lizard Brancussi was alive in them, and little Wat Cooney was alive in them, and Yabby Burrows and Jack Rainbow and Tiny Middleton were alive in them, all the many dead, and Sheephead Morton said he even sometimes remembered fondly that dirty miserable bastard Rooster MacNeice who should have been dead. And Gallipoli von Kessler—who had turned up in an old pair of worsted trousers so frayed around the cuffs they looked as if he had bought them from a scarecrow—mentioned Darky Gardiner, and then Jimmy Bigelow started singing—

Every day in every way it’s getting a little bit better.

They were standing around the pub fire at the Hope and Anchor that night, until the backs of their trousers got so hot they pushed them forward into another beer. It was forty-eight or maybe forty-seven. Whenever it was, it wasn’t much of a night, and it felt good to be inside, warm. They hadn’t all got together since being demobbed. Jimmy Bigelow wasn’t saying much. The marriage he had come back to wasn’t the marriage he had left. Or he had come back different.

I’m doing the best I can, he said at one point.

There were kids. He had four of them in the end and was called a family man. He wasn’t. He was a man who had four kids. No one said anything much more about Darky Gardiner, except for Gallipoli von Kessler who said, Nikitaris’s.

Yeah, said Sheephead Morton. Bloody Nikitaris’s fish shop. Never shut up about it, did he?

5

JIMMY BIGELOW SAID nothing. He was trying, that was the point, surely? But he didn’t speak. His hopes of becoming a musician, somebody, something, hadn’t worked out. He worked at the zinc works as a storeman. The big-band music he loved was no longer in fashion. The new music, the bebop and modern jazz, wasn’t music to him. It was choppy noise pretending to make music out of traffic jams. You couldn’t dance or fall in love with it, thought Jimmy. It wasn’t Al Bowlly. It wasn’t Benny Goodman or the Duke. It was the end of music. And the end of hope for someone like Jimmy Bigelow. The big bands were all folding, if not gone.

The things he believed in were heading out to sea, vanishing, lost forever. The things he thought he was coming home to. The things that he had hoped to become and make his life. It turned out that they weren’t worth a brass razoo. He didn’t fit with his own life anymore, his own life was breaking down, and all that did fit—his job, his family—seemed to be coming apart. He wanted to set things right with Dulcie, with his life, with bebop and swing, but it was over. He’d like to set things right, he thought, but it wasn’t possible.

But that wasn’t why they left the pub and headed up Elizabeth Street towards Nikitaris’s fish shop. To make all the wrong right. They left because it was near midnight, way past closing, and they were drunk and thrown out and they had nothing better to do.

It was one of those Hobart spring nights, cold as charity, snow coming down hard on the mountain, the harbour a lather, sleet slapping and scratching at windows and tin roofs like a wild drunk who’s been locked out.

They tramped up Elizabeth Street to Nikitaris’s fish shop, following the frayed trousers of Gallipoli von Kessler as he strode out the front. You could have fired a mortar down the street and hit no one. The fish shop wasn’t how they had imagined it in the camps, with people everywhere and steam and the smell of frying food and Darky’s girlfriend sitting up there waiting for them to walk in and do what they had to do. No, it was nothing like that.

As closed as a nun’s proverbial, Sheephead Morton said when they arrived.

Nikitaris’s was shut—the doors were locked, the shop interior lifeless, the lights all off save for those that illuminated the long fish tank at the front of the shop. The fish swam round and round in the window. A couple of flatheads, a trumpeter, two silver trevally and a leatherjacket. Other than them staring in at an aquarium, the night-slicked street was empty.

Well, Sheephead Morton said. You can’t say they look exactly unhappy.

Maybe in the camps we didn’t either at any given moment, Jimmy Bigelow said.

They stood around, hands in pockets, shrugging shoulders for warmth, hopping leg to leg, as if waiting for a midnight train to arrive. Or leave.

Nothing as clueless as a mob of drunks, Gallipoli von Kessler said. Even chooks do something.

Jimmy Bigelow felt himself all appearance with nothing inside. He had trouble feeling. He wished to feel, but it was not something one could have by wishing for it. He picked up a rock and rolled it around in his palm. He looked up at the shop window. It was a big plate glass number, all beautifully painted with NIKITARIS’S FISH SHOP on it, very flash and fancy. He brought his hand back past his shoulder and, without warning, threw the rock as hard as he could at the window.

They heard the glass crack. Not all at once. But, like time, a long fracture slowly opened with a sigh. Jimmy Bigelow was smiling as if someone had sliced his mouth at the corners.

Then they were all throwing rocks, the window broke apart and fell away, and they were in. Gallipoli von Kessler, with an orchardist’s gift for improvisation, grabbed a chip fryer and used it to scoop the fish out. After a few mishaps they had all the fish in two mop buckets, and they walked back down to the docks, trying not to slop the water away.

There were some cray and couta boats rocking in the long swell that penetrated even this far into the harbour, and a cruel wind beyond the cove. Standing at the edge of Constitution Dock, Sheephead Morton put his head into a bucket and yelled:

You’re fucking free!

And tipped the bucket.

The fish fell into the sound of water.

6

AT THE HOPE and Anchor the next night, the story was told with gusto, albeit beset by a growing shame. Finally, Jimmy Bigelow said they had to go and see Nikitaris and fix him up for the window. It was still early and the shop lights were on. The window had already been replaced, though it was not yet painted.

Inside there were some old women working the fryers and a boy in the fishmonger’s part of the shop, scrubbing the display stand. Sheephead Morton asked if Mr Nikitaris might be about. The strap disappeared and returned from out the back with a small, old man, whose wizened body preserved intact the quiet resolution of the stonemason he had been as a young man. His hair was silver and his skin had the colour of a stain someone had tried to bleach out and failed. There was about his dark eyes a damp emptiness. He smelt of tobacco and aniseed.

Mr Nikitaris, said Jimmy Bigelow.

What you boys up to? the old man said. His accent was heavy. He sounded weary and annoyed. I’ve had a shocking day. What do you want?

Mr Nikitaris, said Jimmy Bigelow, we—

Just place your order with the lady over there.

We—

Mrs Pafitis there, he said, pointing with a knobbly finger. She’ll fix you up.

We’ve come to say sorry, said Jimmy Bigelow.

We had a mate, began Sheephead Morton. And this time the old Greek said nothing. He was so stooped it was hard to see his eyes, which roamed the black and white tiled floor as Sheephead Morton told him their tale.

When it was done, Jimmy Bigelow said that they wished to pay old man Nikitaris for the broken window, for the fish and any other damage.

The old Greek was a time in replying. His eyes looked up and around, and as his head roamed, taking in each man in turn, it nodded slightly.

He was your cobber?

Like all immigrants, he seemed to have an unerring instinct for the oldest, truest words in his new language. The way he said the word, it felt free of the treacherous weight of mate.

He was, said Sheephead Morton. Our cobber.

Sheephead Morton took out his wallet. How much do we owe you, Mr Nikitaris?

My name is Markos, he said. But call me Marco.

Mr Nikitaris. It was your window and we broke it.

He put out a shuddery old hand and shook it.

No, he said, put it away.

He asked if they were hungry and without waiting for an answer said they must eat as his guests.

Sit down and eat, said the old Greek. It’s good to eat, boys.

The men looked at each other, uncertain about what to do.

You are my guests, he said, pulling out a seat and putting a hand on Jimmy Bigelow’s shoulder. Please, he said. Sit down. You must eat.

And so the men sat down.

You like wine? I have some red wine you might like. I am not supposed to serve it so don’t make a show of it, but have as much as you want, boys.

He went over to the fryers, filled a mesh strainer with chips, and then turned back.

Do you like flake or do you like couta? Some people prefer the shark, but trust me; the couta is bony, sure, but sweet. Very sweet. You must eat, he said. It’s good to eat.

He brought the fish and chips to their table, then filled some small glass tumblers behind the counter with red wine and brought them out too. Then he sat with them. As they ate, he let them talk. When they flagged he talked of how such a winter meant it would be a good summer for apricots, yes. Then he started up about his own life, of the island of Lipsos he came from, the beautiful but harsh life there, of his dead wife, of how they, as young men, had a life before them. A rich life. A good life. Yes. How people told him coming to his fish shop made them happy. He hoped that was true.

I really do, he said. That’s a life.

Do you have children? Jimmy Bigelow asked.

Three daughters, he replied. Good girls. Good families. And the boy. Good boy. Good—

And the old Greek stammered for a moment, something unintelligible, and his face seemed to wobble off its awkward axis. He brought a hand of knobbly fingers up to his face, like old pruned apricot branches shaking in an autumn gale. As if trying to prop his face back into a picture of certainty.

He was killed in New Guinea in 1943, he said. Bougainville.

The shop slowly emptied, the staff cleaned up, locked up and left, and outside the street died away to the very occasional car slashing a puddle. Inside, they just kept talking to the old Greek about many things until it was so late that not a pub was left open. But they didn’t care. They sat on. They talked about fishing, food, winds and stonework; about growing tomatoes, keeping poultry and roasting lamb, catching crayfish and scallops; telling tales, jokes; the meaning of their stories nothing, the drift of them everything; the brittle and beautiful dream itself.

It was hard to explain how good that fried fish and chips and cheap red wine felt inside them. It tasted right. The old Greek made his own coffee for them—little cups, thick, black and sweet—and he gave them walnut pastries his daughter had made. Everything was strange and welcoming at the same time. The simple chairs felt easy, and the place, too, felt right, and the people felt good, and, for as long as that night lasted, thought Jimmy Bigelow, there was nowhere else in the world he wished to be.

7

STEPPING DOWN FROM the Douglas DC-3 at Sydney in the autumn of 1948, Dorrigo Evans was both horrified and impressed to see her waiting for him. The Japanese and the Germans may have surrendered in 1945, but Dorrigo Evans hadn’t and wouldn’t for some time. He valiantly tried to keep his war going, lapping up any opportunities for adversity and intrigue and brinkmanship and adventure that presented themselves. Inevitably, they presented less and less. Many years later he found it hard to admit that during the war, though a POW for three and a half years, he had in some fundamental way been free.

And so Dorrigo Evans had put off returning for as long as he could, but after nineteen months working around various army instrumentalities throughout south-east Asia—dealing with everything from repatriation to war graves to post-war reconstruction—he had run out of cover and faced either a conventional career in the army or the possibilities of civilian life. He had no sense of what these possibilities might be, but they suddenly seemed attractive, and the army no longer the wild jaunt it had been with its defeats and victories and the living—the living!—constantly tearing anything established into ribbons, melting everything solid into air. Wealth, fame, success, adulation—all that came later seemed only to compound the sense of meaninglessness he was to find in civilian life. He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning.

Adversity brings out the best in us, the podgy War Graves Commission officer sitting next to him had said when the DC-3 had bounced around rather disturbingly as they circled down through a squall into Sydney. It’s everyday living that does us in.

As he walked across the tarmac towards a small crowd of people he didn’t know, he resolved to meet his new civilian life as he had met and overcome so many other obstacles over the seven years since they had last met—with charm and daring, and with the knowledge that time would soon wash over the follies of long ago, as it seemed to do, or so it seemed to him, with almost all things.

Forward, he whispered to himself, gathering his face into a smile that he understood was thought charming. Charge the windmill.

A conventionally pretty woman was waving a gloved hand in a conventional gesture that he knew was meant to convey a conventional glory chest of emotion: joy, ecstasy, relief—love, he supposed; fidelity vindicated, he feared. None of them meant much to him, for he was outside of it all. Though after the first few words he recognised her voice, the summer air seemed mild and empty and somehow disappointing after the steamy must of Asia, and even after they kissed he still couldn’t remember her name. Her lips seemed dry and disappointing—like kissing dust—and finally, thankfully, it came to him.

Ella, he said.

Yes, he thought, that was it. It felt more than rusty.

Oh—Ella.

Oh, Ella, he said more softly, hoping some other words that made sense of that name and him and them might stumble onto his tongue if he just said her name enough. They didn’t. Ella Lansbury just smiled.

Don’t say anything, darling, she said. Just don’t say anything bogus. I can’t stand bogus men.

But I am, he said, completely bogus. That’s all I am.

She was already smiling, that dull, all-knowing, knowing-nothing smile he was to find ever more unpleasant, those unexpectedly dry lips telling him that everything was arranged, that he was to worry about none of it. He recalled now that he had proposed to her in 1941 as a way of kissing her breasts. In as much as he could remember, it had been the final night of what would transpire to be his last leave with Ella before embarkation, and he could not stop thinking of Amy. To gain some relief from Ella’s constant questioning him as to why he had not proposed, to escape from his incessant thoughts about Amy and the guilt he felt in consequence, he sought to find his way through the complex maze that led into Ella’s cleavage and that demanded he put to her the ultimate riddle: Ella, will you marry me?

Hadn’t she known what he was really thinking? Hadn’t she?

There had been no oblivion in her breasts. Everything about Ella only reminded him ever more painfully of Amy. He had felt ashamed then, and worse now.

That’s why I love you, Alwyn, she said.

Alwyn? For a moment he had no idea who she meant. And then he remembered it was him. That too felt more than rusty.

Because you’re anything but bogus.

And in the way she had then embraced him, in a smother that was inescapable, all the people he met in the next few days similarly and unquestioningly embraced the idea that they were to marry—that there could be no question that an engagement made hastily in the looming shadows of war seven years earlier and his imminent departure overseas was now to be rushed to a conclusion that did not bear any reflection or second thoughts. In the intervening years he had lived several lives, while her only life—or so it appeared to Dorrigo Evans—had been devoted to an idea of him that he scarcely recognised. Occasionally he felt something within him angry and defiant, but he was weary in a way he had never known, and it seemed far easier to allow his life to be arranged by a much broader general will than by his own individual, irrational and no doubt misplaced terrors. His mind, in any case, he felt was a prison camp of horrors. He did not wish to give it any more weight than was necessary. He recognised the many people around him who were excited by his impending marriage as far more sober and sane than he, and he gave himself up to their sobriety and their sanity—so at odds with his ever-stranger thoughts—in the hope that they might draw him to a new and better place. In that childish way that was also part of his nature, he was inevitably attracted to the excitement of anything new and unknown, particularly when it was frightening. And because nothing frightened him more than the prospect of marrying Ella Lansbury, that is what he did three weeks later, in an alcoholic haze and a new suit that she chose and he forever after felt looked as affected as their wedding at Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

Even before they kissed, he once more forgot his name—he felt lost in her smell of powder—and then finally it came to him. Alwyn, yes, that was it—I, Alwyn, he said. He turned and looked at her, all made up and framed in lace and orange blossom, but he could see only the narrow face and that strange nose he had always found slightly repugnant and the high-arched, thin eyebrows, and he could find nothing attractive in her. Take you, Ella, he said more softly, and Ella Lansbury, soon to be Ella Evans, just smiled, lips slightly parting but saying nothing.

I am not Alwyn, he wished to say at the reception, and I am entirely bogus. But he instead lied and spoke of a love that had survived seven years of a separation, a mythical amount of time worthy of Ulysses and his men. And though the only classical hero he really resembled was the ram—much laughter—Ella truly was his Penelope, and he was glad to have finally arrived at his Ithaca—much applause.

For the rest of his life he would yield to circumstance and expectation, coming to call these strange weights duty. The guiltier he felt about his marriage, about his failure first as a husband and later as a father, the more desperately he tried to do only what was good in his public life. And what was good, what was duty, what was ever that most convenient escape that was conveniently inescapable, was what other people expected. What was bad and wicked was himself, he thought the first time he slept with someone other than his wife, her best friend, Joan Newstead, a woman with mesmerising damp lips and a sly smile, a month after his honeymoon. It was at a shack in Sorrento in the mid-afternoon when everyone else had conveniently gone everywhere else.

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world . . .

he whispered to her after, running a finger up and down the mosquito net before turning back to her, dropping his head and catching her dark nipple with the edge of his lower lip as he continued reciting Tennyson with soft breaths on her breast:

. . . whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

That evening there was a barbeque because the meat, left to hang in a Coolgardie safe, was beginning to spoil in the heat, and although meat rationing had only just ended, they still felt bad that good meat might be wasted. Perhaps he drank too much, perhaps he didn’t drink enough, he thought after, but his head spun, his stomach was full of nails. He felt bloated and taut with something large and wrong and hidden that came between him and Ella, Ella from whom he henceforth wanted to have nothing hidden, while Joan Newstead was now jealous of the attention Dorrigo was paying to her best friend, his wife. What was he doing? he wondered. Did he hope to be found out?

The porterhouse steak was grilled over a ferociously hot bed of redgum coals, but when he cut into it the meat was still not right and for a moment he was back there, heading across the camp towards the second part of his daily rounds on that day in the middle of the monsoon and the Speedo. As he came close to the ulcer hut, Dorrigo was enveloped by the stench of rotting flesh. And he remembered how the stink of foul meat was so bad that Jimmy Bigelow would on occasion have to go outside to vomit.

8

AFTER BEING CONVICTED, Choi Sang-min was transferred to Changi’s P Hall in which all the condemned men lived together as equals, Japanese and Koreans and Formosans. He was given a dirt-brown uniform marked with the English letters ‘CD’. The letters, he was told, signified that he was convicted to die. Choi Sang-min noticed that every CD there desperately tried to fill in his days with some sort of activity, and every man seemed to be neither depressed nor overly concerned by what the future might hold. And he himself felt something lift from him, as surely as something else was slowly enshrouding him, as though some lifelong feeling of fear and inferiority had evaporated. None of those things any longer meant anything. And that was because it was now his turn to be killed.

Each morning they were turned out of their cells, made to wash, and began another day of occupied nothingness. They sat shirtless in the baking gallery at the centre of the cells, playing go or shogi or rereading one of the few books or magazines available, or just sitting alone. Every few weeks an Indian captain, with silver spectacles behind which his glistening tadpole eyes swam slowly back and forth, would arrive with a notice of execution. The prisoners would wait silently, frozen with dread, wondering who was to die, every man intensely relieved when it was not himself but the man next to him.

On the third such visit, Choi Sang-min realised he was going to die, but not because his own feelings told him so, for at that moment his feelings seemed not to exist. Nor did he know it from the piece of paper he was handed. He held that piece of paper, but he could not connect himself and his life with what he was told that piece of paper said.

He looked up and around P Hall. It was paper—nothing—and he was a man. A man, Choi Sang-min reasoned, was something. A man, Choi Sang-min wished to say, was full of so many things, so many changes. A man, good or bad, was magnificent. It was not possible that this thing that was nothing and would never change could mean the end of everything that moved and changed within him—the good, the bad, the magnificent.

Yet it did.

And it was from the terrible relief the other men showed, relief that he felt like a burning flame, that he finally understood he was to be executed the following morning.

For the four men who were to die, a Japanese meal and cigarettes were provided. A Buddhist monk attended. Choi Sang-min, who had never thought much about religion, remembered that his father, about whom he had also never thought much, had once said he was Chongdoist, and so the presence of the Buddhist monk made him angry.

Choi Sang-min looked down at his rice, miso soup and tempura. He longed for his mother’s spicy kimchi and hated the bland Japanese food. But hate and anger were no good to him now. He could not eat his last meal. If he ate his last meal, it would be his last meal. If he did not eat his last meal, he could not die until he had. Perhaps there would be other meals until he agreed which one would be his last. But he did not agree with this last meal. A last meal was an agreement with the inevitability of his death. And he did not agree with his death.

He smoked his cigarettes and said nothing as the other condemned men talked of loved ones. He did not agree with their talk, with a piece of paper against which his life seemed a cosmic force.

He said nothing after the meal as the guards carried the scales in, placed them down and gestured for him to mount them. They weighed Choi Sang-min. They measured his height. He knew why because the others had told him. How they knew was a mystery. They told him as if their knowledge of the gallows had come to them with their mother’s milk.

The hangman, they said, would set his hemp rope at the right length for a man of his height and weight in order to get the correct drop and maximum force to snap his neck as he fell. Then he would fill a sandbag to the same weight as Choi Sang-min and tie it to his hemp rope and leave it dangling overnight in order to stretch it, so that when tomorrow Choi Sang-min fell through the trapdoor there would be no bounce in the rope. With no bounce, his neck ought to snap immediately.

He remembered a Japanese officer who had shown remarkable poise the night before he was executed. When the guards came to weigh him, he told them in broken English that he was dying for Japan, that he was not ashamed of having made the POWs work hard for the Emperor, and that as a military man, he understood he was to die simply because his country had been defeated.

Choi Sang-min longed for such clarity and certainty. The Japanese had it—at least, he had always felt that the Japanese had it. And now he could see what he had sensed as he had tried to smash it out of the POWs with his fists and boots—that the Australians had it too. Everyone had it; everyone in the world had it. Except perhaps him.

The gallows were behind the gallery in which Choi Sang-min and the three other men now sat waiting for their last ever lock-up. On the days of executions the CDs yet to have their date of execution confirmed waited inside this hall in silence, able to hear the condemned’s steps up the scaffold and his final words. The Japanese officer had shouted, Long live the Emperor! The trapdoor had slapped open and a dull thud followed almost immediately.

But what good was such an attitude for him, a Korean? thought Choi Sang-min. He had not done anything for his country and his country had done nothing for him. He had no particular beliefs. He thought of his parents, imagined their anguish on hearing of his death, and he realised he could offer them not one good reason as to why he died, other than fifty yen a month.

As they waited in this anteroom of death, a condemned guard called Kenji Mogami sang songs. They had briefly worked together in the same POW camp. They called him the Mountain Lion, but he, who had never hurt anyone, was also to die. Choi Sang-min remembered an Australian singing and how he had stopped him singing, but about Kenji Mogami’s singing he could do nothing. A Japanese officer waltzed alone. Then they were taken to their cells.

He was unable to sleep. He felt almost painfully alive and awake and now wanted to taste and know every second of his life. To stop his mind wildly pitching between panic at not being able to escape and anger at not getting his fifty yen he tried to remember how some of the others had met their executions.

Hurrah for the Great Korean country! cried out one Korean as he walked the fateful thirteen steps.

What great Korean country? wondered Choi Sang-min. What about my fifty yen? I am not Korean, he thought to himself. I am not Japanese. I am a man of a colony. Where’s my fifty yen? he wanted to know. Where?

His father, a peasant, had wanted him to have an education, but times had been hard and after three years at elementary school learning some Japanese myths and history, he left to work for a Korean family as a servant. They gave him his board, two yen a month and regular beatings. He was eight years old. At twelve he went to work for a Japanese family, who gave him board, six yen a month and an occasional thrashing. At the age of fifteen he heard the Japanese were hiring guards to work in prisoner-of-war camps elsewhere in the empire. The pay was fifty yen a month. His thirteen-year-old sister had signed up with the Japanese to go to Manchukuo to work as a comfort woman for similar pay. She told him she would be helping soldiers in hospitals and, like him, was very excited. As she could neither read nor write, he had never heard from her again, and now that he knew what comfort women did, he tried not to think about her, and when he did, he hoped for her sake that she was dead.

Though he had many names—his Korean name, Choi Sang-min; the Japanese name he had been given and made to answer to in Pusan, Akira Sanya; his Australian name that the guards now called him, the Goanna—he realised he had no idea who he was. Some of the other condemned had strong ideas about Korea and Japan, the war, history, religion, justice. Choi Sang-min realised he had no ideas about anything. But the ideas the others had seemed no better to him than having no idea. Because they were not their ideas, but the ideas of slogans, wireless broadcasts, speeches, army manuals, the same ideas they had absorbed with the same endless beatings they too had endured in their Japanese military training. In Pusan they had slapped him because his voice was too low or his posture wrong, they had slapped him for being too Korean, they had slapped him to show how to slap others—as hard as he could. Choi Sang-min hated it. He wanted to run away, back to his home. But he knew that if he did he would be punished, and, worse, his family would be punished. They slapped him, they said, so he would be a strong Japanese soldier, but he knew that he would never be a Japanese soldier. He would be a prison guard, guarding men who were less than men—those who had chosen surrender before death.

Sitting on death row, Choi Sang-min desperately wanted to have an idea of his own. He hoped that long night that an idea would finally come to him, open him up, an idea that would allow him to understand and at the same time to know peace. He hoped to be like the Japanese officer who believed in the Emperor, or the Korean guard who believed in Korea. Perhaps he should have asked for more than fifty yen. But no idea came, and far too quickly morning did.

As the cell began lightening, he wanted calm, he needed that feeling he had first known as a child working for the Japanese family. The Japanese father was an engineer who had trained in Scotland. He wore tweeds and, like the British, had a pet dog that used to eat far better than Choi Sang-min, being fed all the choice bits from the Japanese family’s table. The family loved the dog, and one of Choi Sang-min’s daily tasks was to walk it. The dog had large eyes and a head that jerked when it looked at Choi Sang-min, waiting for him to throw another stick. One day the dog went with Choi Sang-min on an errand to the market. Choi Sang-min took a short cut through some back streets and stubbed his toe on an old brick that lay in his way. He picked it up in a fury, and the dog gave him its look of complete trust and affection, jerked its head side to side, and waited for Choi Sang-min to throw the brick as if it were a ball or stick. And Choi Sang-min brought the brick down hard on the dog’s head, again and again, until his hands were dark and sticky with its blood and gristle.

He had sold the dog’s body to a butcher for ten yen and then walked back to his Japanese family. The air smelt sweet, a soft wind felt cool and good on his face, every person he passed seemed to be smiling and friendly, and he felt an enormous sense of tranquillity and fulfilment. How he longed for that feeling again, to again know that exhilarating moment of strange power and freedom that had come with the killing of another living thing. But there was nothing in his cell that he could kill to recover that feeling, and it was others who would soon take pleasure in his death, as he once had in his killing of the Japanese engineer’s dog. As his cell lit up ever more brightly—as he could see clearly first his hands and next his thighs and then his feet—he felt a sudden terror gather inside his stomach. For Choi Sang-min knew he would never again see himself in the morning light.

He fought the guards when they came to take him to the gallows. He had seen a cockroach and wanted to kill it. There wasn’t time. After they had strapped his wrists together behind his back, a doctor was called for, and through a translator Choi Sang-min was asked if he wished for drugs to calm him. Choi Sang-min screamed. He could still see the cockroach. He was given four phenobarbital tablets to steady his nerves, but his body was too excited and he vomited the pills straight back. Before the doctor gave him an injection of morphine, he managed to crush the cockroach beneath his boot heel. Feeling nauseous and slightly dizzy, he walked the short distance out of P Hall and across to the gallows with a soldier supporting him on either side. Everything was happening very quickly now. He saw two sandbags leaning up against a wall as they entered the courtyard. There were perhaps a dozen men, perhaps more, six on the scaffold, most below. They walked him up a ramp covered in straw matting to the top of the scaffold. He was struck by how the rope was far thicker than he had expected. It reminded him of a ship’s hawser. He sensed a joyous brutality about the large, powerful knot. I understand, he wished to say to the rope. You long for me. His thinking was calm, even vaguely pleasant, but his face was twitching. So many people and no one was talking and his face would not stop twitching. To his side, perhaps five metres away, a second trapdoor lay open, spent, and rising out of it a taut rope. He realised at its end, out of sight, dangled Kenji Mogami.

He was asked if he wished to say anything. He looked up. A bell somewhere tolled some hour. He wanted to say he had an idea. Someone laughed quietly. He looked down at the soldiers and pressmen. He had no idea. He had been paid fifty yen, and fifty yen was not even a good deal, far less an idea. Fifty yen was nothing. On the trapdoor in front of him he saw chalk lines marking what he knew were the correct places for his feet. Fifty yen! he wanted to say. The soldiers continued to hold his arms. He could see the chalk dust as if they were white boulders. He bowed his head and a hood was dropped over it. He closed his eyes, then opened them. After months that had passed by interminably slowly, everything was now happening too fast. He could feel the canvas, and its blackness seemed somehow more frightening than the night of his own eyes, so he closed them again. The morning was already hot. It was stuffy in the hood. He felt the noose dropping over his head, and at the same time he realised his ankles were being bound together. He went to ask them to slow down, to wait, but with a hard, decisive shove he felt the noose tighten hard around his neck and the only sound he made was an involuntary gasp. He was finding it hard to breathe. His face was jumping wildly. He could not even spit on them, as he hoped Kim Lee had done when they killed him. The soldiers holding either arm frogmarched him two steps forward, and he knew he was now standing on the chalk lines on the trapdoor. His last thought was that he needed to scratch his nose as he felt the floor beneath him suddenly vanish and heard the crashing noise of the trapdoor slamming down. Stop! he went to yell. What about my fifty—

9

THE YEARS PASSED. He met a nurse called Ikuko Kawabata, a young woman whose parents had been killed in the firebombing of Kobe in the final months of the war. After the peace her brother had died of starvation. That city, too, was a wasteland of rubble and ruins, and Ikuko’s story was so commonplace that she, like so many others, found it better not to talk about it.

Ikuko had lustrous skin and a large birthmark on her right cheek, both of which inexplicably moved Nakamura more than he wished to admit. She also had a lazy smile, which he found both erotic and irritating. She would seek to end any disagreement between them with it, something that was at once agreeable to him but also suggested, he sometimes felt, stupidity and weakness of character.

Through Ikuko, Nakamura found work in a hospital, first as an orderly and then as a storeroom clerk. He was glad to leave behind his black-market work, as it was neither overly lucrative nor particularly safe, and he worried at all times about being exposed and handed over to the Americans. Even in his new work he avoided others—but then there were many doing the same, and it seemed to Nakamura that everyone seemed to understand why so many wanted no one to either know or understand them. He moved in with Ikuko, as much to preserve his solitude as for any wish for human company. She was healthy and a good housekeeper, and he was grateful to have found a woman with such virtues.

In spite of his solitary ways, he grew into the habit of playing go with a doctor at the hospital by the name of Kameya Sato, and over several years the habit grew into a trust, and the trust in turn grew into a quiet friendship. Sato, who came from Oita, was devoted to his patients and was a quiet and humble man, and unlike other doctors had the eccentric habit of never wearing a white jacket. Sato was a far better go player than Nakamura, and one evening the ex-soldier asked the surgeon what the secret of playing go well was.

It’s like this, Mr Kimura, said Sato. There is a pattern and structure to all things. Only we can’t see it. Our job is to discover that pattern and structure and work within it, as part of it.

It was evident to Sato that his answer didn’t make much sense to the old soldier. And so, pushing two fingers gently into one side of Nakamura’s belly, he continued.

If I am to remove an appendix, I will proceed in here, separate the muscles according to the pattern and structure that I was taught at Kyushu, and there be able to remove the inflamed appendix with the least danger and stress for the patient.

This led them to talking about Kyushu, one of Japan’s great universities for training doctors. Nakamura remembered reading a story in a newspaper about some doctors who were tried and jailed for what the Americans claimed was the vivisection of live American airmen, without the use of anaesthetics. The reports and convictions had angered Nakamura at the time, and he now brought the subject up with some fury, concluding vehemently—

American lies!

Sato looked up from the go table, then back, placing a black stone down.

I was there, Mr Kimura, said Sato.

Nakamura stared at Sato, till the humble surgeon raised his eyes and stared back with strange intensity.

I was an intern there near the war’s end, under Professor Fukujori Ishiyama. One day I was asked to fetch a US airman from a ward where he was under guard. He was so tall, with a very narrow nose and red curly hair. He had a wound from where he had been shot by a soldier who had helped capture him, but he trusted me. I showed him the gurney and he got himself on it. I had been told to take him not to the operating theatre but to a dissection room in the anatomy department.

Nakamura was intrigued.

And there?

And there he trusted me again. I pointed to the dissection table. The room was crowded with several doctors, nurses and other interns, as well as some army officers. Professor Ishiyama hadn’t yet arrived. The American actually stood up and then laid himself down on the dissection table. And winked at me. You know how the Americans wink. Winked and smiled. As if I was in on a joke with him.

And then, said Nakamura, he was anaesthetised, and Professor Ishiyama operated on his wound.

Sato held another go stone in the palm of his hand, rubbing his thumb back and forth over its polished, lens-shaped sphere, as if massaging a blind black eye.

No, said Sato. Two orderlies bound his limbs, torso and head to the table with leather belts. Professor Ishiyama arrived while this was going on and began addressing the others. He spoke of how the dissection of subjects before death helped obtain important scientific data that would help our soldiers in the great battles to come. Such work was not easy, but all great scientific achievement required sacrifice and commitment. In this way, as doctors and scientists, they were able to prove themselves worthy servants of the Emperor.

Nakamura looked at the go board but his thoughts were no longer with the game.

I remember feeling proud to be there, said Sato.

All that Sato was saying made perfect sense to Nakamura—after all, the same argument, formulated differently for different circumstances, had determined his entire adult life, and though he did not think this, the familiar patterns and rhythms of Sato’s story reassured Nakamura that Professor Ishiyama, even if he didn’t use anaesthetic, was acting correctly and ethically.

And still the American didn’t struggle, continued Sato. He couldn’t dream of what was about to happen to him. Before Professor Ishiyama began we all bowed towards the patient, as though it were a copyright operation. Maybe that reassured him. Professor Ishiyama first cut into his abdomen and cut away part of his liver, then sewed the wound up. Next he removed the gall bladder and a section of his stomach. The American, who looked an intelligent and vital young man at the beginning, now looked old and weak. His mouth was gagged but he was quickly beyond any screaming. Finally, Professor Ishiyama removed his heart. It was still beating. When he put it on the scales the weights trembled.

Sato’s story ran over Nakamura like a rising river over a boulder outcrop. It trickled around him, then it flushed over him, and finally it covered him. But nothing in him moved. And while it meant that all that the Americans said was true, and that he, Nakamura, had been wrong, the reasons for which it had been done made such complete sense to Nakamura that he felt there was nothing remarkable about this story of a man being cut up while alive and fully conscious.

It felt strange, but at first I didn’t think so much about it, continued Sato. It was war, after all. And then over the next few days there were other operations on other airmen—opening up the mediastinum of one, severing the facial nerve roots on another. At the last I attended they made four holes in the serviceman’s skull, then inserted a knife into the brain to see what would happen.

They were playing go in a small garden that had been made for the staff. It was spring, and when Sato halted, Nakamura could hear early evening birdsong. There was a maple tree that turned the last long rays of sunlight into shimmering threads of dark and light.

After the war Professor Ishiyama hanged himself in prison, Sato said. They got some others, sentenced them to death, then commuted their sentences and finally let them all go free. I thought for a time I might be tried too, but now that time is long past. The Americans want it forgotten, and so do we.

Sato pushed the paper he had been reading across to Nakamura.

Look at this, he said.

He pointed to a small article accompanying a photo. It was about the charitable work of Mr Ryoichi Naito, the founder of the Japan Blood Bank, a successful company that bought and sold blood.

I have colleagues who worked with Mr Naito in Manchukuo. Mr Naito was one of the leaders of our very best scientists in similar work there. Vivisection. And many other things. Testing biological weapons on prisoners. Anthrax. Bubonic plague, too, I am told. Testing flamethrowers and grenades on prisoners. It was a large operation with support at the highest levels. Today Mr Naito is a well-respected figure. And why? Because neither our government nor the Americans want to dig up the past. The Americans are interested in our biological warfare work; it helps them prepare for war against the Soviets. We tested these weapons on the Chinese; they want to use them on the Koreans. I mean, you got hanged if you were unlucky or unimportant. Or Korean. But the Americans want to do business now.

We, too, are victims of the war, said Nakamura.

Sato said nothing. Nakamura felt in the deepest part of his being that he, like the Japanese people, was an honourable, good man falsely accused. A victim, yes—him, Ikuko, his executed comrades, Japan itself. This sentiment explained to him all that had befallen him, even lent a certain grandeur to his miserable life of secrets and evasions, of false identities and growing distance from other people. But he felt excited by Sato’s story. A distant prospect of some divine liberation seemed to exist within it.

You know that strange sound near an earthquake’s end? Sato asked. In the dying light his weary face was growing dim. After the shaking and wild swaying is done, Sato went on, and all things—hung paintings, mirrors, windows in their frames, keys on hooks—all things shudder and make this strange sound? And outside, everything you know may have vanished forever?

Of course, Nakamura said.

As if the world is making this shimmering sound?

Yes, Nakamura said.

When the stainless-steel pan of the dissection room scales was being rattled by the American’s heart, that’s what it was like. As if the world was trembling.

Sato pulled his face into a strange smile.

You know why he trusted me?

Professor Ishiyama?

No, the American airman.

No.

Because he thought my white coat meant I would help him.

10

NAKAMURA AND SATO never spoke of Sato’s past again. But something in his story began to trouble Nakamura. Over the following months their games of go grew less frequent. Nakamura now found the surgeon—who had formerly seemed to him such an interesting and genial companion—somehow dull and tedious, and the games became a burden to be endured rather than a pleasure to be enjoyed. And he sensed the feeling was, in some strange, inexplicable way, becoming mutual. Sato stopped turning up in the storeroom office to have a smoke with Nakamura, and Nakamura found himself avoiding those parts of the hospital where Sato might be found. Finally, they stopped playing go altogether.

As he grew distant with Sato, Nakamura drew closer to other people, found the strength within himself to somehow be more truthful as a human being. He came to understand that there were many men like him—proud, good men who had done their duty and were determined not to be ashamed—who also saw themselves as victims of the war. And he realised that the period of no one being who they said they were and no one being what they seemed and everyone remembering only the things that could be spoken about had now ended. As the last of the remaining imprisoned war criminals were released, Nakamura gave up any pretence of subterfuge, and, resolving that it was best to live a life of honour by acknowledging the truth, he reverted to his real name. The following year he married Ikuko.

They had two daughters, healthy children who, as they grew up, came to deeply love their gentle father. At the age of six, their younger daughter, Fuyuko, nearly died after being hit by a school bus. Fuyuko’s overriding memory of that time was of her father by her bedside day and night, head bowed. He almost seemed to his daughters to be of another world, misbuttoning shirts, forgetting to wear a belt, and concerned not to hurt spiders, which he would catch and take outside, or mosquitoes, which he would refuse to swat.

He alone sensed the strangeness at the heart of his transformation into his idea of a good man. Was it hypocrisy? Was it atonement? Guilt? Shame? Was it deliberate or unconscious? Was it a lie or was it the truth? He had, after all, overseen many deaths—perhaps, he sometimes felt, with an almost savage pride that he found undeniable and not in the least contradictory, he had even been party to some deaths. But he felt no responsibility, and time eroded his memory of his crimes and allowed his memory instead to nurture stories of goodness and extenuating circumstance. As the years passed, he found he was haunted only by the way he was haunted by so little of it.

More out of curiosity than optimism, Nakamura applied for a position with the Japan Blood Bank in the spring of 1959. To his surprise, he got an interview. He took the train to Osaka early on a winter morning. At the Japan Blood Bank’s headquarters he was made to wait till almost lunchtime, when he was finally ushered not into a meeting room as he had expected, but a large executive’s office. He was seated and again told to wait. There was no one there. After a quarter of an hour, the door behind him opened and a voice told him not to turn around and look but to stay seated. He felt fingers trace a crescent across the back of his neck. And then, behind him, a man’s voice began reciting:

Across the sea, corpses in the water,

Across the mountains, corpses upon the grass . . .

Of course, Nakamura knew Umi Yukaba, the ancient poem that had become so popular during the war that every radio announcement of a battle—in which it was invariably announced that Japanese soldiers had met with honourable deaths rather than the dishonour of surrender—began with it. Nakamura recited the last two lines as if they were a password:

We die by the side of our Emperor,

We never look back.

He felt the hand on his neck once more.

Such a good neck, a great neck, said the man behind him.

Nakamura turned and looked up. The hair had grown white and spiky, the body burlier, but the face, albeit sagging a little more and now smiling, remained a shark fin.

I had to see your neck. I just had to be sure you were the man I thought you were. You see, I never forget.

When he caught Nakamura’s querying look, Kota explained.

Some old Manchukuo comrades felt I might do some good work here.

The rest of Nakamura’s interview was perfunctory, as though everything was long ago settled. As he went to leave, Kota congratulated him on his new position. On returning home that evening, Nakamura almost sobbed when he told Ikuko what had happened.

What, he asked Ikuko, can prepare you for such kindness?

Many decades later, a young Japanese nationalist journalist, Taro Ootomo, who wished to rectify the many misunderstandings that had grown about Japan’s role in the Greater East Asia War, went to interview the distinguished soldier, Shiro Kota, who was now one hundred and five. He had read some articles Kota had published in some Zen magazines in the late 1950s that spoke of the deep spiritual basis of Japanese bushido. Kota had argued that it was the way the Japanese—inspired by Zen—had been able to recognise that there was ultimately no distinction between life and death that had rendered them such a formidable military power, in spite of their material shortcomings. But when Taro Ootomo went with ward officials and a local TV crew to congratulate Kota on his one hundred and fifth birthday, there was no one home.

Taro Ootomo was young and keen, and he persisted, going to the length of visiting Kota’s elderly daughter, Ryoko, to reassure her of his good intentions, hoping through her some entree to the old veteran. But Ryoko discouraged Taro Ootomo, saying her father was not up to talking to strangers, particularly about the war and his service, which was so easily misrepresented. He was attempting in his great old age to become a living Buddha, she told Taro Ootomo.

It was clear to Ootomo that Ryoko had little interest in her father. Deciding it was best to ignore her, he began to organise a celebration of Kota’s one hundred and fifth birthday with some nationalist friends. It would be respectful and dignified, and would seek to honour war veterans as well as to publicise the misunderstood spiritual basis of Japan’s twentieth-century wars. But each time Ootomo went to visit Kota, no one seemed to be at home.

Something in Ryoko’s manner and Kota’s strange refusal to answer his door began to disturb Taro Ootomo, and he said as much while drinking with his old schoolfriend and now police lieutenant Takeshi Hashimoto one night.

Hashimoto smelled a rat. With some difficulty, he managed to check welfare records and noticed that Ryoko had power of attorney over her father’s affairs. Two months earlier, two million yen had been withdrawn from Kota’s account. Hashimoto obtained permission for a search of Kota’s apartment. It was in a formerly favoured part of the city, but the block of units, once fashionable, had in recent years fallen into disrepair. There were roughly assembled wire cages bolted on the exterior walls above the first floor to catch falling render. As the lift doors refused to open, Hashimoto and his three men had to climb the stairs to the seventh floor.

In an apartment lined with bookshelves of poetry, Hashimoto found the mummified body of an ancient man lying in bed. There was no smell. He had been dead for years, perhaps, thought Hashimoto, decades. Reaching down with his left hand, Takeshi Hashimoto very slowly lifted the flowery bedspread. The fluids of the slowly decomposing body had left a thick, dark stain on the sheets. At the centre of this halo, skin stretched like parchment over his bones, lay Shiro Kota.

On the bedside table by the living Buddha, now dead, was an old copy of Basho’s great travel journal The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Hashimoto opened it to a page marked with a dry blade of grass.

Days and months are travellers of eternity, he read. So too the years that pass by.

11

AS HIS COMMANDING officer, it ought to have been John Menadue’s job, but John Menadue had no heart for it; he had never had a heart for anything, not up on the Line, not back in Australia. Dorrigo Evans had received a letter from Bonox Baker telling him that he had heard no one had been to see Jack Rainbow’s widow, that John Menadue had his medals to give her but just never seemed to get round to it. And so, some months after he had returned from his honeymoon and as it became clear to him that his marriage was what it was, and that what it was wasn’t anything worth wanting, Dorrigo Evans took an ANA flight to Hobart. He found John Menadue in a pub two doors down from Nikitaris’s fish shop.

Up in the jungle John Menadue had found he was no leader at all. Some people, like the Big Fella, it came to, thought John Menadue. But not him, which was strange—because John Menadue had been told by his father that he was a leader, and that leadership had nothing to do with anything other than character. At the Hutchins School he was told that he was a leader because only leaders were admitted into the Hutchins School. Leadership, he was told, was his natural destiny because it was the natural destiny of all people born leaders, who were all the boys at Hutchins. And so the world went on telling him, and so John Menadue—because of his schooling and his connections, because of his undeniable character and his irrevocable destiny—went straight into officer school. John Menadue had believed it all to be true and self-evident and himself a leader until he had arrived on the Line. Then he came to see that his primary interest was not in helping others but in saving his own life, and that his father had been right about character but wrong about his son.

John Menadue understood authority. And that day as he sat in the pub two doors down from Nikitaris’s fish shop with a pound of couta fillets and his good looks intact, his life intact, John Menadue knew he had none. He wondered what it was that allowed it to exist in such a man as Dorrigo Evans—a despicable womaniser close to ugly, a loner who hid in crowds, a man oblivious to any sort of authority except that which he commanded by some insulting grace of God—who made the favour he was doing John Menadue look like a trivial act of no great consequence.

I’m sorry, John Menadue said to Dorrigo Evans. I went to see Mrs Les Whittle. I couldn’t do it again after that. Do you remember Les?

I do. He was a rather marvellous Robert Taylor in Waterloo Bridge. It was opposite Jack Rainbow, of all people, wasn’t it?

I don’t remember. You heard about his death?

No.

He ended up in a camp in Japan. Slave labourer in a coal mine under the Inland Sea for the Japs. They were starving. When the war ended the Yanks parachuted supplies into the POW camps there. US Liberators dropping forty-four-gallon steel drums chockers with food. They’re fluttering down—gentle as dandelions in summer, one bloke said. Blokes everywhere, excited. Then the forty-fours start landing, crashing through roofs, smashing up whatever they fell on. And a forty-four full of Hershey bars landed on Les. Crushed him to death.

He passed over a shoebox to Dorrigo Evans in which a few ribbons and medals rolled around. On the lid was sticky-taped the name and address of Mrs Jack Rainbow.

What sort of death is that? John Menadue said, his gaze fixed on the shoebox. A starving man killed by food? By our side? By Hershey bars. For God’s sake, Dorrigo, bloody Hershey bars. What do you say?

What did you say?

The right things. Lies. She was a very dignified woman. Small, chunky thing. But dignified. And she listened to me lie. And for a long time she didn’t say anything. Then she said, I never really knew him, you know. That’s the sadness of it. I would have liked to have known him.

Mrs Jack Rainbow lived near Neika, a few miles beyond the small village that sat in forest halfway up the mountain above Hobart. Overhearing Dorrigo Evans asking for directions, the barman introduced him to a small man who drove the Cascade brewery truck and was heading that way with a delivery. He could drop Dorrigo off and pick him up on his return home, two hours later.

A little out of Hobart, it began to snow. The truck had one shuddering windscreen wiper that cleared a small cone into a winter world where eucalypts and great man ferns heavy with fresh fallen snow leant over the road. The rest disappeared into white, and Dorrigo Evans found his thoughts following. He held a hand out and pushed his fingers into the air, trying to see if there was some other way he had not known of stopping that femoral artery emptying. His fingers pushed and shoved emptiness, coldness, whiteness, nothing.

Nippy, eh? said the brewery driver, noticing him moving his fingers. That’s why I have these, he said, lifting a wool-gloved hand from the steering wheel. Bloody well die of frigging frostbite otherwise. Scott of the bloody Antarctic, that’s me, mate.

They made their way up the mountain, through Fern Tree and past Neika. As they came down on the range’s far side, the brewery driver dropped Dorrigo Evans off at a farm entrance composed of two green lichen-bearded posts and a broken gate, which lay on the side of a snow-covered path. The farm looked dilapidated, and the whiteness and the intense hush that went with the snow made the place feel abandoned. Fences and hop frames were leaning, and in places fallen down. The sheds seemed weary; a little vertical-board oast house sagged.

He found her in a small concrete dairy shed, churning butter. She wore a cotton skirt decorated with swirling red hibiscuses and an old home-knitted woollen jumper that was unravelling at one elbow. Her bare legs were unshaved and bruised. Her face seemed to him only to hold broken hope, the line of her mouth a wobble that fell away at each end into thin lines.

He gave his name and his regiment number, and before he could say anything more she took him through her kitchen, which was warm from a fuel range crackling at its centre, into her parlour, which was cold and dark. She called him sir. When he said that wasn’t at all necessary, she called him Mr Evans. He sat in an overstuffed armchair that felt damp.

Across the hall and through an open doorway he could see beaded wainscoting painted bright cream enamel rising to the ceiling, and in front an iron bed. He hoped she had known some happiness in it with Jack. He imagined them together on such a winter night as would come in a few short hours, and them together warm, perhaps watching a bedroom fire dying into embers, Jack puffing on his Pall Malls.

12

WE HAVE FIVE children, she said. Two boys, three girls. Little Gwennie, she’s the dead spit of her father. The youngest, Terry, was born after Jack left and has never seen his dad.

There was a long silence. Dorrigo Evans had learnt in his surgery to wait for people to say what they really wished to say.

I couldn’t bear to be alone, she said finally. I have a terrible fear of being lonely. When he was away at the war I slept with all the kids. She smiled at the memory. Bloody six of us in the bed. Ridiculous, eh?

A kettle whistled and she disappeared to the kitchen. He regretted letting her take his army greatcoat. She returned with tea in a chipped green enamel pot and the remnants of a large cream cake.

It’s very quiet, she said, on account of the snow falling. Like a great big blanket. That’s why I like the kids round. But the little ones are at Jack’s sister’s today and the big kids are at school. She paused. Jack loves the snow but, Lord, I feel it sometimes.

She offered him some cake and he declined. She put the cake plate down on a side table, swept the crumbs at its edge inwards with her index finger for a few moments, then, without looking up, said—

Do you believe in love, Mr Evans?

It was an unexpected question. He understood he did not need to answer.

Because I think you make it. You don’t get it given to you. You make it.

She halted, waiting perhaps for a comment or judgement, but when Dorrigo Evans made neither she seemed emboldened and went on.

That’s what I think, Mr Evans.

Dorrigo. Please.

Dorrigo. That really is what I think, Dorrigo. And I thought Jack and me, we were going to make it.

She sat down and asked if he minded if she lit up. She never did when Jack was about and puffing like a steam train, she said, but now, well, it was sort of him and it sort of helped—him not being here and that.

Pall Malls, eh? she said, taking a cigarette out of the bright-red pack. Not Woodbines for Jack. Something a little posh to make up for all that cursing. He always was quarterflash, Jack. Quarterflash and half-cut with a fulsome woman, he used to say, what fool isn’t happy?

She took a puff, put the cigarette in the ashtray and stared at it. Without looking up, she said, But do you believe in love, Mr Evans?

She rolled the cigarette end around in the ashtray.

Do you?

Outside, he thought, beyond this mountain and its snow, there was a world of countless millions of people. He could see them in their cities, in the heat and the light. And he could see this house, so remote and isolated, so far away, and he had a feeling that it once must have seemed to her and Jack, if only for a short time, like the universe with the two of them at its centre. And for a moment he was at the King of Cornwall with Amy in the room they thought of as theirs—with the sea and the sun and the shadows, with the white paint flaking off the French doors and with their rusty lock, with the breezes late of an afternoon and of a night the sound of the waves breaking—and he remembered how that too had once seemed the centre of the universe.

I don’t, she said. No, I don’t. It’s too small a word, don’t you think, Mr Evans? I have a friend in Fern Tree who teaches piano. Very musical, she is. I’m tone-deaf myself. But one day she was telling me how every room has a note. You just have to find it. She started warbling away, up and down. And suddenly one note came back to us, just bounced back off the walls and rose from the floor and filled the place with this perfect hum. This beautiful sound. Like you’ve thrown a plum and an orchard comes back at you. You wouldn’t believe it, Mr Evans. These two completely different things, a note and a room, finding each other. It sounded . . . right. Am I being ridiculous? Do you think that’s what we mean by love, Mr Evans? The note that comes back to you? That finds you even when you don’t want to be found? That one day you find someone, and everything they are comes back to you in a strange way that hums? That fits. That’s beautiful. I’m not explaining myself at all well, am I? she said. I’m not very good with words. But that’s what we were. Jack and me. We didn’t really know each other. I’m not sure if I liked everything about him. I suppose some things about me annoyed him. But I was that room and he was that note and now he’s gone. And everything is silent.

I was with Jack, he began. At the end. He was keen for a Pall Mall.

13

THE MATTRESS WAS lumpy and had a small crater at its centre unsatisfactorily padded out with an old North Hobart football jumper. He turned onto his side, manoeuvred his body around its contours, its wadis and plains, its inclines and depressions and ravines. Having formed himself into the shape of the mattress, he leant into her, pushing his knees up under her knees, his thighs under her thighs, and, resting an elbow on her hip, brought his hand around her, and in this way he held her. There seemed to be a deep relief to speak of so many things that troubled both of them without confusing any of them with words. She couldn’t bear to be alone. Perhaps they lay together for warmth. Perhaps they held each other against the silence. Hoping for that sound to come back. Both knowing the person lying next to them understood it never would. He could hear sleet beginning to brush the tin roof. It was enough to be warm with her. Perhaps that’s all there was. He felt an immense age. He would be thirty-four come July. They held each other without words until he heard the horn of the brewery truck at the top of the drive.

After he left she tipped the medals into the range fire. A few days later she raked out the ash, and for a moment was unsure what the melted slag in her hearth pan was as she threw it into the chook yard. Nineteen years later the great fire of ’67 swept through, taking all before it. The hop farm, now run by her son, her timber home and his newer brick home, the photos of her and Jack, all went in the flames. And over half-buried slag that had once been medals in what had once been a chicken pen a new layer of ash deposited itself. After more years passed, there grew out of it water ferns and dogwood and myrtles, until what had been the dream of Jack’s life was a forest and the forest dropped leaves and bark and branches, and over more time the ash disappeared under more layers of rot and peat and new life.

She married a younger man who was good to her and she to him, but it was not the same thing as Jack Rainbow and she had been. He died in a tractor accident and so she outlived him too.

Near the end of her life, she realised she could no longer remember what Jack looked like. Nor what he sounded like, or smelt like, or how he had held her and caressed her, slowly puffing on his Pall Malls while the snow fell outside. Sometimes she thought she smelt the smoke of his Pall Malls as she fell into sleep. Sometimes she remembered a room humming. But she could not hold the smell or the thought or the sound, and sleep was taking her somewhere deeper, ever further away. She was trying but she could remember nothing except that for a time, a short time, she had not been lonely and cold.

As the truck made its way back down the mountain, Dorrigo Evans talked with the brewery driver as strangers sometimes do, explaining a little why he was there.

They had something, he said. He’s dead and I am alive, but he had something I’ve never known.

What’s that?

He was a couple, said Dorrigo Evans.

A couple, said the brewery driver. My mum and dad, they were a couple. Me, the missus, well, we’re D-day. Every day.

He double-declutched, almost standing up on the brakes to drop the truck back to a crawl to take one of the many hairpin bends that formed the writhing road through the forest. When the road straightened out, he got the truck back into second and continued talking.

But a couple? I mean, no. She’s a good woman. But love?

Love, said Dorrigo Evans. Yes, I guess love.

The brewery truck driver pondered on it for a mile or two. And then he said:

Maybe a lot of people never know love.

The idea had never occurred to Dorrigo Evans.

Maybe not.

Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fates, our happiness and unhappiness. Some get a lot, some bugger all. And love the same. Like different glass sizes for beer. You get a lot, you get bugger all, you drink it and it’s gone. You know it and then you don’t know it. Maybe we don’t control any of it. No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pretending otherwise is the road to hell.

That’s it?

So she goes, said the truck driver. Where did you say you’re from?

The mainland.

Thought so, said the truck driver, for whom this revelation seemed both to explain and end an overly personal conversation.

As the afternoon flight to Melbourne banked around and levelled out, Dorrigo Evans could see the snowy mountain backdropped by a perfect blue sky through the plane porthole. The world is, he thought. It just is. Then it disappeared into white and he found his thoughts following. He held a hand out and he pushed his fingers into air, as though he might yet find that femoral artery in time.

You can feel the chill coming through from here, said a pleasant voice in the cocoon of intimacy that existed within the deafening throb of the great propellor engines. Dorrigo Evans turned and for the first time realised that there was an attractive woman sitting next to him. Her corn-blue jacquard blouse revealed the beginnings of a cleavage defined by the swelling cusp of very white breasts.

You can, he said.

And where are you heading? she asked.

He smiled.

Your hands look freezing, she said.

So she goes, he said, suddenly conscious of his fingers held outwards, pushing and shoving emptiness, coldness, whiteness, nothing.

In this world

we walk on the roof of hell

gazing at flowers.

Issa

1

TENJI NAKAMURA’S THROAT had been oddly hoarse for some weeks when, after a long interview for the position of deputy accounts manager he had sat in on, he rubbed his stiff neck and felt a strange swelling. He paid no heed—indeed, he could afford to pay no heed because his job in the personnel department was busier than ever, and he was in line for a senior manager’s position and couldn’t afford to give in to ideas of sickness.

But his throat grew sorer. When he began to find swallowing food painful, he reduced his eating to a minimum and lived on a diet consisting in the main of miso soup. Only after he began coughing up blood did he relent and go to the doctor. The diagnosis was unequivocal: Nakamura had throat cancer.

The tumour was removed, and though his speaking voice was somewhat affected by the surgery, Nakamura took this blow with grace. He had come to view himself as a survivor, and wore his new, thin, reedy voice as a badge of honour. He felt blessed beyond belief. But three months later, when he ran his finger along his neck, he felt a small bump, taut and strange. He put it out of his mind. But the bump grew and there was more surgery, along with radiotherapy that left him feeble and aged far beyond his years. His saliva glands were burnt out, and he now could swallow only wet food, and even that with difficulty. And through this ordeal he came to recognise what an extraordinary woman Ikuko was. For she devoted herself to his care, was unfailingly light and pleasant, and seemed not to mind his dry and reeking body. When he was recovering from the ravages of his treatment he grew very conscious of how fresh and pleasant she always smelt, of how lustrous her skin remained, as though her very body was the sum of goodness. Sometimes he felt overwhelmed by the health she radiated, which seemed best caught in her seemingly ceaseless lazy smile.

Every morning before she left for work, she would rise an extra two hours early in order to attend to all his needs. He admired her practical nature, but what he loved was simply her presence and touch. After a time he would do anything to have her sit next to him and gently run the backs of her fingers down the side of his face. And though she thought that doing nothing—as she put it—was a complete waste of her time, that same nothing was the most important thing in Nakamura’s life. Then he felt no fear, his pain was again for a short time bearable, and he wondered how he could have been oblivious to his wife’s goodness for so long.

And more, moreover: for his wife’s goodness brought out so much that was good in him. He bore his illness with stoicism and humour. He made time to see others who were even sicker than he; and even did some work with a charity that took meals to the old. He was kinder and more thoughtful about one and all: his family, his friends, his neighbours, even strangers. Tenji Nakamura was stunned by this discovery of such goodness in himself. I am, he decided, a good man. And this thought gave him immense comfort and a tranquillity in the face of his cancer that amazed all who knew him.

2

IT WAS AT this time, when Tenji Nakamura was frail but regaining his strength, when he had come to realise how blessed he was in his life, that a letter found him from Aki Tomokawa, who had been part of his platoon on the railway. His old corporal had been searching for his commander for some years and wrote that he hoped that this letter might finally have found him.

Tomokawa had always irritated Nakamura with his narrowness and obsequiousness, but he now saw his old corporal in an entirely different light—as a noble and good man with whom he had shared much. And Nakamura was touched by Tomokawa’s loyalty, which seemed to him of a piece with the goodness of his wife, with the kindness of his daughters, who every evening sat and talked with him, and which demanded of him some reciprocal act of goodness. Ever since that day at the Shinjuku Rashomon when he had read his name among the list of suspected war criminals, Nakamura had made it a rule to avoid any contact with his old comrades, and—other than the accident of his having ended up working for Kota—he had stuck by it.

But now this attitude struck him as both selfish and absurd. The time for retribution on the part of the Allies was long past. Tomokawa, who had ended up on the northern island of Hokkaido, seemed to have tracked down many of their old comrades and to know of their various and varied fates. Not only that, but a group of railway engineers from their old regiment had even been back to Thailand—as Siam was now known—and had found the rusting hulk of the first locomotive to have made its way along the full length of the Siam–Burma railway in 1944. They were in the process of restoring it, with the ultimate aim of bringing it back to Japan, where it might be displayed at the Yasukuni Shrine in honour of their great achievement.

Hearing of this marvellous work, Tenji Nakamura realised that, among the other blessings he was accumulating with age, he no longer had to fear. And with fear gone, he now wished to be proud, and to share in the pride of others. Tomokawa’s letter marked in his mind the moment when he finally escaped the yoke of fear that he had lived under since that day at the Shinjuku Rashomon. Nakamura decided that, in spite of his illness, he would travel to the frigid town of Sapporo in the far north to once more meet with his old comrade.

It was midwinter when he arrived, and preparations for the city’s annual snow festival were in full swing. Nakamura had seen on television how the snow festival’s theme for 1966 was to be the monsters that had become so popular in Japanese movies and on Japanese television. As he travelled in a taxi from the Sapporo airport to the Tomokawas’ apartment, he saw soldiers from the Japanese Self-Defence Force helping make gigantic ice sculptures.

The driver insisted on naming them as they drove by: Gamera, the fire-breathing turtle, Godzilla, Giant Robo, Red Cobra with his huge forehead and protruding upper teeth, Mothra, the giant caterpillar, and Guillotine the Emperor with his huge head and tentacles. None of the names meant anything to Nakamura, but he admired the exquisite Japanese workmanship, the indomitable Japanese spirit such an endeavour represented.

Tomokawa lived in a high-rise government housing unit and Nakamura got lost in the complex. By the time he found the right unit, he was exhausted from the search and the cold. Still—Tomokawa! How good it was to see him again! He was fatter, balder and, thought Nakamura, even shorter, but the same old daikon-headed Tomokawa—even if the daikon was a little blemished from the liver spots that mottled his face, putting Nakamura in mind of something vaguely reptilian. And if he was still somewhat annoying, Tomokawa was so delighted to see his old commander, so frank and unaffected, that what Nakamura had once found irritating he was now determined to find endearing and even charming.

Tomokawa’s wife was even shorter than her husband, with an unfortunate underbite that meant she sometimes gave the impression of eating her words rather than speaking them. In spite of this, or because of it, she was a confident woman—a little too much so for Nakamura’s liking, but he chose to find her over-familiarity with him as evidence of warmth and kindness, and as such being qualities that marked Mrs Tomokawa out as a special woman.

Such a man of talents, Commander, said Mrs Tomokawa, showing him into their living room, done up in the western style, complete with two very large soft armchairs. A soldier, a businessman and our very own Hokusai!

Tenji Nakamura hid his confusion with a smile, unsure whether she had confused him with the immortal painter or just eaten half a word. But there was no confusion.

Do you still paint, Commander?

She was holding a military postcard and passed it to Nakamura. It bore a small painting of Tomokawa as he had been on the railway in 1943. It was clear Mrs Tomokawa thought Nakamura had painted it, for on the back of the card Nakamura had written a greeting and a short note saying Tomokawa was in the best of health.

Outside the day was black with snow clouds.

Forgive me, said Nakamura, but I must rest for a moment.

He asked to sit down. The western armchair he found spiritually coarse and physically unpleasant; sitting in it felt like being embraced and smothered by something monstrous. The trip had wearied him far more than he could have believed possible and the morphine medication, which he had tried to minimise for the trip so he wouldn’t appear stupefied, seemed nevertheless to be affecting him more than usual.

He felt a strange sense of drift and separation that was not entirely unpleasant and at the same time he became intensely aware of every sound in the room, every odour and even the movement of the air. The furnishings were living things, even the wretched armchairs were alive to him, and he felt he understood all things, but every time he tried to put this understanding into words it ran away from him. Suddenly he wanted to go home, and he knew that would not be possible until the formalities of his visit to the Tomokawas were ended. He kept his eyes closed, conscious that all around him the world lived as he had never known it had lived, and, just as he finally opened himself up to this joy, he also realised that he was dying.

3

AS DORRIGO EVANS filled out in middle age, his looks grew to be outsized and quixotic, as though he was overdone and overwrought in every sense, as if, Ella was fond of saying, the volume was turned up to eleven: formidable in presence but with an odd remove and strange, inquiring eyes. For his admirers it added up to charm, elegance even. For his detractors it was one more element of his infuriating difference. His masculine resolve remained. Aided by his height and a middle-aged stoop, he understood that it was often misunderstood as gravitas, and he was not ungrateful for the mask such confusion afforded.

Through the decades following the war he felt his spirit sleeping, and though he tried hard to rouse it with the shocks and dangers of consecutive and sometimes concurrent adulteries, outbursts, and acts of pointless compassion and reckless surgery it did no good. It slumbered on. He admired reality, as a doctor, he preached it and tried to practise it. In truth, he doubted its existence. To have been part of a Pharaonic slave system that had at its apex a divine sun king led him to understand unreality as the greatest force in life. And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter—professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space—was vested with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter—pleasure, joy, friendship, love—was deemed somehow peripheral. It made for dullness mostly and weirdness generally.

He found himself no longer afraid of enclosed places, crowds, trams, trains—all the things that pressed him inwards and cut out the light—but he saw many other things now as an evasion of that light. He had seen too much to be frightened any longer of the rest of the filler that packs out evenings, days, years, sometimes the best part of a life, but he did find it dull. Still, he could do boring, and boring he did at countless memorial dinners, fundraising breakfasts, charity events, sherry parties and the vertiginous horror of dinner parties, and later at the meetings of hospital and college boards, of the numerous charities, clubs, and societies that prevailed on him to be a patron.