Shame and the Captives (19 page)

Hundreds had watched the elimination rounds, and the entire camp—except those in hospital with a recurrence of malaria, colds, and aftereffects of wounds—turned out for the final, which took place around a square drawn in dust and four-and-a-half meters long on each side. It was contested on a late-autumn Sunday amongst an audience that seemed at peace with itself. Almost directly north of Gawell, but thousands of miles removed from it, an island named Saipan, in the Marianas, considered to be the doorstep of their nation, was preparing itself for a massive enemy attack, but Compound C was not aware of this, and would have considered, in any case, that America was engaged in a fatal overreach in trying to strike so far north.

Before meeting Oka and the crowd outside, Tengan, in his now-empty hut, took off his deliberately bleached jacket and pants, his sweater and woollen underwear and, still wearing his shirt, tied on his wrestling loincloth. Hearing the crowd milling by the wrestling arena, he knelt in the middle of the hut to meditate. To allow the wrestler to perform well, the mind needed to be cleared of fear and ambition. The ferocities later to be directed at the opponent should not be anticipated, but be retained for later release. Tengan now muttered
the invocation to his forebears so that they might imbue him with their strength—the same strength they had given him to become an aviator rather than a mere infantryman or sailor. His father, an ironworks manager and well-liked fellow, arose randomly to mind. A wrestling aficionado himself, in a small way, more a spectator who drank rather than an athlete who fought. That the father would approve of the coming encounter distracted him. Tengan soothed that irrelevance away and reached for the necessary null, unitary thought out of which strength arose. Then, settled in soul, he emerged barefoot from his hut.

Around the square, men stepped back as soon as they saw his arrival and made a channel down which he passed towards the referee. In the center, he made a respectful bow to this officiator, a man of nearly sixty years who had come in from the civilian compound to adjudicate the match. He had been, until the outbreak of hostilities, a merchant in Samoa and a wrestling aficionado, even if a provincial one. To fail to show him supreme respect was to create a weakness in oneself, a germ of defeat.

Through another avenue of men, Oka came, shedding his shirt. His chest muscles were pronounced, and his thighs—familiar to Tengan as opponent and lover both—were like tree trunks. He certainly resembled a victor, but in a facile, merely muscular way, and Tengan knew that Oka had no gift for meditation, and that he could not have prayed very eloquently. Oka made his bow to the referee but, Tengan saw with hope, he had a near grin on his lips, a betrayal of nervousness.

The referee announced their wrestling names (Wolf and Bear), and they both bowed to him before taking the ends he pointed out to them. He carried the usual wooden fan and, gesturing with it, had them approach each other from outside the opposite ends of the ring. They stepped over the markings in the dust to be sure not to obscure them. Reaching each other, they crouched and flexed their leg muscles right and left, then pumped their legs up and down
before retreating out of the ring yet again. Then, at the next wave of the referee's fan, they again advanced and crouched, facing each other at spots in the dust indicated by the official.

As the referee retired to the corner of the square, Oka yelped piercingly and then let his utterance turn into an ursine growl. Tengan uttered a breathy howl. They contemplated each other eye to eye, and made openhanded feints towards each other. Then the slaps and attempts at grasping began.

Some matches were fast to begin, in that one could get an early hold on the opponent's shoulders after a few slaps and writhings. But that was not the case with Oka. He countered every raid by Tengan, who wanted early contact and could feel in turn the force of his opponent's buffeting attempts to grasp him by the arm, all with the exploratory purpose on Oka's part of finding if it was really possible to drag Tengan over a shoulder and try to propel him down to the dust. Yet Oka could not manage that, and so they went on for minutes, arms tucked under each other's armpits, trying to force the other out towards the margins. One of them would break off suddenly to confuse, and then attempt to lift the other by the loincloth, or to get his left arm around his opponent's neck and his right between the legs, in the hope of a smackdown.

They could both counter like lightning and Oka still had the breath to growl to excite his followers. The skills of both men ensured that they circled and eyed each other for periods of time. Tengan found, however, that his opponent's arms, in reaching for him, sacrificed force for speed.

The contest went on in that way for ten minutes, with the prisoners shouting and roaring with gratitude for such a long-running challenge. But the pernicious instant came when Oka got a grip of both Tengan's shoulders and tripped him from behind. It was so sudden that it seemed to have been done by hypnosis or enchantment. Tengan, on his heels or backpedaling, and trying to find anchorages for his feet, could see the referee circling around them with his fan
raised, expecting that this time he might be forced from the ring. However, Tengan managed to achieve a hold under Oka's armpit and slowed Oka down. He realized now, dizzy, gasping from the energy he had used, that he had just escaped the possibility of humiliation—of being forced not only from the ring but deep into the crowd.

But Tengan brought his mind back from indulgence in the fantasy of defeat, and held Oka by the elbow and uttered another howl while he had a remnant of air inside him. He felt Oka trying to lift him and undermine his stability by inserting both hands under his loincloth. Oka's iron knuckles gouged his hips, but Tengan hugged him beneath the armpits and raised him a centimeter into the air. It did Tengan a great deal of mental good to find he could manage such a lift, modest as it was, and as much energy as it used.

It was important for Tengan to show now that he could do what Oka had shown. Tengan moved his own hands and hooked them on either side of Oka's loincloth and lifted, creating the possibility of twisting the hulking soldier onto his back. He felt Oka's arms, suddenly endowed with a new lung-crushing force, attempt to roll him sideways. Neither succeeded in their purpose. Then Tengan felt a great pressure around his shoulders, and the risk was that it might crush him. I can lift him again, he thought.

In fact, as he did it, the pressure eased. From his crouch position he might move Oka suddenly off-balance and out of the zone—this was the way Tengan would assert himself. He owed his forebears this much skill.

He had Oka under the armpit and unbalanced him now, and began to guide him to the edge of the zone. Oka's right hand, however, went under the rim of Tengan's loincloth and lifted Tengan's right leg off the dust, leaving it dangling like that of an unwillingly hoisted child. Tengan spent so much energy trying to retrieve his dignity and his leverage that Oka was now able to take him by the shoulders a last time. Tengan himself slapped resonantly at the big man's ribs, and tried to find solid ground again with his feet.

Now it became apparent that Oka had been doing what Tengan had with some of his opponents—putting on a show for the audience and awarding Tengan a decent time of survival in the ring. Tengan's strength and will were depleted. He had expended all his breath on his earlier lift of this huge animal, and now he felt himself lowered by Oka at an angle that gave him no purchase; and then raised again and lowered closer to the limit of the zone, and again lifted and lowered and, finally, hurled over the line.

He saw the smear of shouting faces as if they, not he, were spinning from Oka's force. Some were hooting. A soldier had made a flier fly. Tengan felt his shoulder strike one spectator. By a massive refusal to land amongst the bystanders like a rejected fragment, he fell to one knee and arrested his momentum. He looked up and saw the pro-baseball hut leader Kure smiling down at him with something worse than scorn—paternal pity. Then he stood in the midst of the howling and cheering spectators.

The rules required that he be expressionless, and having heard the referee shout irrevocably, “Bear's victory!” he knew that he must return to the square. He did it, bile and shame in his mouth. Oka seemed appropriately solemn and humble as Tengan returned, and there was between them a new contest of impassivity. They bowed, side by side, to the crowd. Both of them made a ritual gesture of thanks to the referee. Both left in opposite directions without comment.

They walked towards the showers, the plumbing the enemy had imposed on them, a comfortless cement hut with a row of metal water sprays above head level. They took their sweat- and dust-drenched loincloths off and in a silence that continued the augustness of their duel, they stood side by side. The water came down cold on their shoulders and stung the places on Tengan's body where Oka's heavier slaps had landed and where his hold had tortured Tengan's ribs. Without looking at each other, they washed themselves and rinsed the soap off. Shaking the water from his eyes, Tengan looked up and
saw Oka direct an intense yet strangely casual stare straight at him. It was an assertion of dominance—the dominance he had earned. It was also an argument that the pain and energy they had inflicted on each other was part of their private association.

The rumor was that the Australian guards watching the wrestling got erections, excited by the lithe bodies—less hairy and less gross than their own—grappling with each other. Maybe. But what was certain was that some of the prisoners became excited, too, and Tengan himself had secretly felt that excitement. So he knew in what terms he must now pay for his defeat. It was fair, and Oka deserved reward. When the victor took one small step closer, Tengan could see the man's long penis engorged before him. He knelt at once, the water still falling on his shoulders, and took Oka in his mouth. He thought that it would be a wonderful thing to bite into this thong of flesh and not to yield. But the subsequent story would be a humiliation to him, not to Oka, and even worse than failing in the wrestle. He began to apply his mouth with intent.

T
he first cold days arrived, the bush iciness noticeable at dusk and night and dawn, though the days remained as shirtsleeved as summer. By the last days of March, Alice had renounced her Giancarlo mania three times, and relished how natural she could be at table in the evenings with him there and Duncan jabbering away. Should his mood coincide with hers, Giancarlo enjoyed being resolved and calm. But sometimes their spates of appetite overlapped, and her manner or his would become a message, and they would quickly reenter a new season of delirium.

So there were days she blazed, and was once again delighted with this blight, this fever, which attracted somehow the applause of the unthinking sky.

The cooler weather gave them, one afternoon, every excuse to be inside Giancarlo's room. There they took risks of discovery which were in some senses massive in scale, tearing at each other and equal in the contest, no pallid carefulness in Giancarlo's hands but a desire to take and breathe her all in. They operated in a democracy of hunger, though the hunger seemed to belong to another woman—that ferocity, that strange alacrity, that lack of discomfort.
This was worth exile or death, or being pointed out in some plain street.

Nothing could have saved them from an acute humbling, had Duncan visited them. Yet they both knew Duncan was a man of severe privacies. His timid entry was not to be expected as they fell on each other. As well as that, he did not seem to belong to their hours, but to be pottering about beneath an alternative shower of trite seconds, different from their enlarged ones, which rendered him and them parallel and nonintersecting.

That day she was careful of the time—the good sense of her Scottish ancestry came into play in this area, if not across the entire folly. At the close of the visit she managed to leave the room and the shelter of the shearers' quarters with utter and delightful hypocrisy, like a nurse leaving a ward, a teacher leaving a class.

Sometimes, when longing rose in her, an angry contempt for Duncan emerged. Couldn't the old fool see what was happening? Was all that mute signaling, going on with the passing of a knife or a condiment, so hard to interpret? Couldn't Duncan also guess that Giancarlo spoke one grade of English to him and another to her, an improper vocabulary of arousal, sanctified on Giancarlo's lips but originally acquired through the profanity of guards and by way of earnest application in the prison compound to the study of such terms?

She knew, too, at these moments, that she had put Giancarlo himself in a hard situation in many ways, but not least because he felt he had to work himself to the point of near exhaustion—she had seen him laboring like that on the summer wheat, sweating and distracting himself—as if to make it all up to Duncan.

Yes, he would agree solemnly with her, they must try to make an end to it. Resolve might take them through a week of abstinence, perhaps through ten self-congratulatory days. And then evaporate.

Though Duncan praised Giancarlo's mechanical skills, when autumn came it was obvious that, though apparently a townsman's son,
he had done some lambing in the past. He required very little instruction. He could lift ewes felled by the gravity of giving birth, could deliver the lambs if necessary, could mark and dock them, and delicately castrate them with a knife. The bravado of using teeth for the purpose seemed far from his earnest style. Sheepdogs seemed to hang around him now for orders, though he was not yet as expert as Duncan was at directing them.

Since Duncan forwent his heavy midday meal at times of demanding activity, Alice beheld Giancarlo's competence when she cycled down with their lunchtime sandwiches and tea thermos. The lambing coincided with one of their periods of mutually resolved abstinence, and Alice was relieved by the self-imposed lie that what was a mere pause was an entire end to the lunacy between her and Giancarlo. So the three of them sat down at the edge of the pasture to hold a brief and primitive picnic, and after a little conversation with Duncan and Giancarlo, in which Giancarlo virtuously avoided transmitting signals, as she did, too, she would ride back along the track to the homestead, occasionally stopping to look at the men resuming work and the movements and energy of Giancarlo. He had turned a plain rural task into a sequence of captivating novelties.