Shame and the Captives

T
he outbreak of Japanese prisoners from a camp on the edge of the New South Wales Central West town of Cowra occurred when I was nine years old and while my father was absent, serving overseas. Without him to stand on the threshold of our house and repel this outburst, it seemed, even in the suburbs of Sydney, a terrifying business—an invasion from within the heartland. We did not understand its motives, which lay beyond the horizons of our culture and imagination. We judged them to include the intent to do unspeakable damage to women, children, and men, in that order.

To thwart such malice, people armed themselves. A great-aunt of mine, her menfolk away, shared her bed with an ax in a town near Cowra. Farmers, if they needed to go briefly away from their farmhouses, left behind a rifle for their wives to protect the hearth and their own person.

Over time, a more accurate picture of the motives of those who broke loose would emerge, and can be garnered from the experts, books, and documents I acknowledge at the end of this narrative.

The truth is, though, that I have not created exactly the set of events that occurred in Cowra during the outbreak of August 4–5, 1944. I did not want to offend those who lived through that night,
and the days before and after, and though—above all—I have tried to read as exactly as I can the cultures of both sides to the calamity, this is not what is called a roman à clef, a novel in which every character is meant to stand for and reflect on a real human, living or dead. My characters are not designed to reflect any virtues, sins, follies, fevers, and acts of courage evident in any of the real actors in the Cowra outbreak. The details we have are not sufficient to fill out all the characters, in any case. And combining and enlarging details is something the novelist has to do—it's part of the job. It can be apologized for, but not avoided.

Yet, using the context of a prison camp set on the edge of an Australian country town, I have tried to write a parallel account, or a tale provoked by the events that unfolded in Cowra in 1944. I have placed similar events in a fictional location named Gawell, for which I ask the pardon of the citizens of Cowra and the spirits of those obliterated in the fury of that night. My story is like a sibling version of the Cowra one—related strongly by DNA, and the same in many regards, but in others bearing different names and features.

For example, the full moon plays its part in the Gawell outbreak, as it did in that of Cowra; the climactic night was one of fierce cold in the case of the real and the fictional towns. Yet Alice Herman is a creation and did not exist outside this narrative's limits. The same can be said for the Italian prisoner Giancarlo Molisano. (We know, however, that relationships similar to theirs occurred at the time.) A novelist, Major E. V. Timms, was in command of an Italian compound at Cowra. But the fictional Major Suttor, who writes morale-boosting radio serials and commands Compound C of Gawell Camp, is not meant in any way to mirror E. V. Timms's life, actions, motivations, and preoccupations. Nor is my commandant, Colonel Abercare, crafted to reproduce the character and events of the actual commandant's life. There
was
a Korean informer inside Cowra, but he was not the Cheong of my account. There was a Japanese prisoner who sought to warn the garrison, but he was not the man named Ban in the tale as I tell it.

Yet I hope there's a
truth in this fiction, in its imagining of motives, and in the actions of these characters—that they do represent in feeling what happened in those times. Fiction has always tried to tell the truth by telling lies, by fabrication. Through fictional Gawell, I am in my own way trying to interpret the phenomenon of Cowra and the great forces of intent and contrasting views that were let loose and illuminated by the outbreak.

These sorts of disclaimers often accompany novels, and the novelist can be fairly accused of claiming the best of both worlds. If so, I hope that readers of this novel feel they are getting the best of both worlds too. For whatever the liberties that have been taken, this is a great story, made only in part by me but, above all, by the events that took place in August 1944, in a township far from the battlefronts and from the main discourse of the earth.

W
hen Aoki got down from the truck and presented himself at his mother's house, he was pleased to have the village that now lay around him validate his memory of it, to have his childhood and youth reabsorb him, altered and limping as he was. He did not make a noise but waited by the door. Here he was all at once outflanked by a terrified shrilling from his wife, who happened to be coming up the path from the fields. Turning, he saw the screaming, instantly familiar woman, her mouth livid amidst the shade of a conical straw hat. There were flecks of mud on the hands and wrists she raised and on her hempen overskirt. His mother appeared at the door now, summoned by the screams. She looked aged yet, like the village, continuous with all he had once known, and almost intolerably and too-suddenly present. His similarly too-real wife flung herself at him from the side, his mother, howling now his wife had ceased, from the front.

“I must bathe,” he told them.

“Your father is dead,” his mother told him.

The women tested out his substance and could not stop exclaiming at his resurrection but seemed to want to prevent him from entering the house. His wife rushed inside. His mother hushed him and held him back from following. His wife emerged with an engraved
stone tablet, the death memorial tablet from the house shrine. His return could be confirmed only by evicting it. He saw his name marked out in red paint on black stone. She dropped the tablet to the damp ground before the house and went to the side of the garden for a mattock and, with this implement, began work on his memorial, splitting and then fragmenting the stone, howling with each stroke. When that was done she threw the mattock away and rushed to embrace him forcefully again. He felt revivification surge in him.

His family and his wife's were summoned, and had all gathered by late afternoon. His wife now produced a tall funerary urn sent her by the government. It purported to hold his ashy bone fragments. But obviously, she said, it must contain another man's. A cousin had brought shochu, which he brewed himself, and had drunk a few cups of it, and declared, “At least we should look inside.”

Aoki's wife asked, “Why disturb the urn?”

“Well,” said the cousin, “they might have put a slip of paper, or some other clue to identity in there. His uncle, his mother's elder brother, was voted the proper person to intrude, and reverently and solemnly opened the urn, cracking the hardened wax that sealed it. The lid removed, he peered inside. He then shook the thing. It rattled. Bone fragments? He reached in and extracted a handful of gravel. He held his hand up with the stones visible in his palm. He invited his father's brother to feel inside. His paternal uncle, frowning, brought out gravel, too, and now delved deep inside and still found only small chips of stone. The uncles looked at each other with a fierce, indefinable grievance in their eyes. Then the maternal uncle began to laugh, close to hysterics. “They sent gravel,” he hooted, and laughter became general, and a few cousins said dark things about authorities who would treat mothers and widows with such deceit.

The two uncles took the urn to the door and flung its gravel, a handful at a time, into the garden, dispersing it like all the other lies of failed government.

This act was the cue for him to explain himself to his clan, and so
he began. Veteran cousins could have posed a challenge to credibility, but those who had served outside the country were dead, except for one young man struck dumb on Saipan and dependent on his parents to guide his movements.

Waiting for shipping to become available to take him home, Aoki had rehearsed this tale for more than a year, and he could not deviate from it, since it had in a way now become as true as himself. As a solitary soldier, with an abiding wound in his lower leg, and survivor of a slaughtered section of men, he had been bypassed by a fluid jungle battle in New Guinea and found himself amongst the savages. These were people, he explained, who wore headdresses of the more vivid feathers, but also tusks of pigs implanted in their septums. Amongst them he prepared for his final resistance. But he waited and waited. The war had moved thoroughly on, and months and longer passed, and he was lucky that, reconnoitering a track one day, he ran into a handful of other holdouts. They made their way with native guides, by way of the tracks not used by the enemy, down into the kunai grass coastal plain and through swamps to the coast. The country was full of battle wreckage, but even its dead were already buried, and from there the holdout party took a native boat and so fetched up on the coast of New Britain. Found by an officer in a small truck, they were told that sadly the Emperor had ordered surrender. Hence, amongst them, Aoki came to Rabaul, to wait for a ship home. The wait was very, very long.

•  •  •

When they were alone, she said to Aoki, “You were surrounded by those black savages . . . All that time you had in the jungle . . .”

Her voice fluted uncertainly, and she did not want—after such a length of separation—to offend him or start an argument. He knew she was asking him about jungle women, though, and wondering, had he succumbed to them?

“I was still a soldier,” he declared softly, deflecting the inquiry.

She said nothing. She wore a blue silk nightgown, and he the green, high-necked pyjamas she had bought when she'd first heard of his survival. They were fabrics unfamiliar to him. A hateful silence threatened to break out. He heard her silk gown moving with a whisper, like barely heard surf, and he knew he should not let the silence grow. He addressed the issue obliquely. “And I was outside their life—like a ghost. They were terrified of me. They still pursued their own grudges against each other as if I weren't there. They fed me purely for the sake of their superstition.” His belly was liquid with desire. She was still so beautiful with her slightly wasted face—the woman who had succeeded the girl he'd met before they had sent him to China. He had been lucky to find her, to have been chosen by her, given that awkward ancestral stoop he had, even as a young man, and his taciturn ways. A lot of people had told him that at the time.

“You have to remember,” he said to fill the void, “that the women of New Guinea chewed betel nut and it stained their teeth dreadfully. They gave off a smell no one civilized could have tolerated. They coated themselves with pig fat to ward off malaria, and let it stay there, no matter how rancid it got.”

He lay still and tense and let the details settle in her mind. It was mainly true, he believed, from what he had observed of natives during his last campaigns. The native women did coat themselves with pig fat, he had seen it on the hillsides behind the beaches. And so now he lay in green cotton exaggerating the native women's repulsiveness. In any case, after the soldiers had rounded up their men as porters, the women had vanished into mountains on unguessed-at paths into great, misty thickets of jungle.

“No,” he told her softly. “I was true to my vow.” He sounded to himself like a liar. There had, in fact, been a Chinese woman in Rabaul, but that had been more than four years ago. There had been China itself—better forgotten.

And yet somehow and with merciful suddenness, it worked a wonder. She undid a sash and unleashed from her nightdress her
breasts. And though he had poisoned the air of the room with his fictions, he could not prevent himself from answering her gesture, from turning his eyes full on her. Within the limits of his everlasting deceit, he answered the unnegotiable kindness of her breasts.