Shame and the Captives (29 page)

“This is why you snarl at newcomers?” asked Goda. “To stop them accusing you of delay?”

“Do I snarl?” he asked, returned to his old severity. He sniffed at their tobacco fumes.

It was characteristic of Tengan, though, to measure the intentions of the whole compound by his personal need, his number one prisonerhood—and thus to declare that this was the ordained hour for everyone else.

Goda said, “Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We have to tell the other hut leaders first. The men should vote, even if we believe we know what their decision will be. I think we ought to have a drink, too, while we all discuss things. It might be the last chance. Get that great lump outside . . . Bear, is it? . . . Oka? . . . Get him to fetch some bombo.”

Aoki was a little amazed that the suggestion would come from the apparently dour Goda, though he knew by now that to read Goda as lacking any taste for solace was a mistake.

“Do you think we need liquor to help us reach a decision?” asked Tengan.

“No,” said Goda. “But it would be brotherly, and a toast to seal the issue. It will also be, one way or another, the last time the hut leaders meet. Besides, what's it matter if some of us get a bit tanked? It'll create a fiery sentiment.”

Goda went to the door to give Oka instructions, and to recruit another guard to replace him. Then he ordered two men playing flower cards outside to go and notify the hut and section leaders.

As they waited, the three counselors couldn't help but continue predebating the outcome. So, returning to his palliasse and dropping to his haunches, Aoki said, “It's hard to get around to carrying out
one's obligations here. They put us in a daze by jamming us together and feeding us better than we ever were in China and the islands. We're like neutered cats. But I think they've given us back our balls now.”

“
I
certainly refuse to be sent away,” the admirable Goda declared. “But others might be willing to be sent. In my opinion, that should not be a matter on which we point fingers, mainly because it is an individual duty. If some men don't face up to it, they have to consider what this will mean for the remainder of their lives.”

“They'll all be executed at the end,” Tengan asserted, but without dogmatism.

“I don't know that we all believe that anymore,” said Aoki. “We must understand, too, that many of the men will want to go along with any suggested action, not because they choose it for themselves, but because they don't want to let us down, or their hut leaders or their brothers inside here. But I know there might be others who will back away despite all that. I'm in accord with my friend Goda. Men should make their free choice. Otherwise, what is suicide worth?”

“Free choice?” asked Tengan. “Have they resigned from the army?”

“I haven't,” said Aoki. “But even I feel the world beyond us here is changing, and that under their flesh men's opinions might be changing too. In this matter, I can speak only for myself. I can address only my own obligation. A coerced sacrifice isn't worth a lot here. A voluntary one is a different matter. In any case, let's wait now and talk to the others.”

The memory of China rose in him, as it always did when he contemplated death by his own volition.

“There are a few riders to be raised as well,” Aoki went on. “An important issue for those of us who survive and get to the outside is what to do with civilians.
They
presume that we are savage towards civilians. But the purpose is to take their soldiers with us, not women and children and old men.”

The others both said they were willing to agree to that. The civilian population was an irrelevance, said Tengan.

•  •  •

Around the time Colonel Abercare went to collect his wife to go to dinner with the Garners, the guards in the tower and those in the tent and on the gates of Main Road noticed considerable groups of men going from one hut to another. This was understandable in view of the coming separation, and was considered to prefigure nothing remarkable.

In Aoki's hut, the triumvirate stood at one end with their backs against the wall that sectioned the hut in two. They bowed to the assemblage, who bowed in turn, and then seated themselves on tatami mats and low beds. As Aoki broke the news to the assembled leaders, a few junior men passed around bottles and jars of rice liquor. It seemed to Aoki that some of the hut leaders had already enjoyed a pannikin or two of bombo since roll call and that perhaps Goda's idea that sociable drink should be offered here was a mistake. But if men were fueled by the stuff, they would be more inflamed and ready to commit themselves to the charge.

Whether solaced by rice and potato distillations or not, the hut commanders listened to Aoki assuring them that Abercare's mind could not be changed, and that he claimed to lack the authority to alter the arrangements. The fact that he was pleased not to have the authority was obvious, said Aoki, but any further appeal to the man would put him on his guard.

“So, here we are,” he concluded, “and what do we do now?” He declared that men in their various huts must be consulted on any motion passed here. He also spoke of the pressure for an outbreak and declared that would come from men's military selves rather than their shakier private selves. There were men who would do it, even if dubious as individuals, because hut leaders and NCOs—the
remaining forms of command under which they had served—voted for it.

All this passed for now without argument. Hut leaders seemed calm. The air filled with accustomed cigarette smoke. “But,” he warned, “the decision about whether to plan an outbreak will need to be made quickly, and action must quickly follow. For if it's delayed, all our plans could seep out through the wire, and might become apparent to the camp commander.” Or even on prisoners' faces, he thought, some of which, in a new morning, might be hungover. If the long-spoken-of break was decided on, he declared further (and that was what they were to discuss here), it was time to produce their hidden and crude weaponry—the baseball bats, which had from the day of their entry into the compound recommended themselves as bludgeons, and which now were to be studded with nails; the honed knives stolen from the kitchens. All must be brought out ready for the charge.

It was curious to Aoki that when men were faced with this, the ultimate and the unpredictable, they often mentioned something minor, something pebble sized, as a great obstacle. One of the hut leaders said, “But
they
haven't even manned the machine guns yet.”

“They will,” Goda assured him. “Once we start. I wouldn't be worried about that.”

The marine Hirano, leader of his own hut by now, cheered all souls by raising the germane point that the bored garrison got paid on Saturdays and then a third of them were allowed to go to town. They would drink beer and play cards and reel back to camp utterly unprepared. Best, therefore, for those such as him, who had decided to go, to move in the small hours. For it would be more opportune to attack confused men suffering from headaches. By choosing the right hour, the prisoners might not solely achieve their purpose within the wire, but those who were still upright could seize the garrison arms depot.

One of the older hut leaders, Kure—the one whose demeanor had offended Tengan at the end of the wrestling match with Oka—declared that though he would consult the men in his hut, and would do whatever was decided, he did not think he would encourage the hope of overthrowing the garrison or seizing armaments. There would be no cloud tonight and no fog, and the drench of light would favor the machine guns and self-atonement far more than it would any ambition to capture arms and wage a campaign.

Tengan was allowed to rise and state the basic principle: it did not matter if they overthrew the garrison or not. “But to show them we know how to run at their fire—that's the thing. Above all, getting to the immortal shrine where the dead are waiting for us—that's definitely the number one objective.”

Again, guttural sounds of assent echoed around the hut and nearly all forty-nine men seemed to be preparing to explode in noisy unanimity.

“I suggest,” Goda continued, “you don't yell your agreement or objection. That will be noticeable to the garrison. Let's have a show of hands.”

But here their careening intentions were for a moment blocked. “Wait, wait,” said a voice. “We haven't been allowed to speak on the motion.” It was a hut leader who could not be accused of prevarication since he was a holder of the rare and cherished Order of the Golden Kite. “I don't know if we can achieve much,” he said. “It's all such a rush. I think that, purely so we don't make fools of ourselves, we compose ourselves, make plans appropriate to a military operation, and go tomorrow night.”

The all-at-once surly Hirano seemed the one most angered by the proposition of delay. He rose to his feet. Even so, he did not direct his fury too specifically at the holder of the Order of the Golden Kite.

“Can't you hear, all of you, daily, our fallen ones,” he called, “even those who might sometimes have been tyrannous bastards, calling out to us, singing the regimental songs? I don't see them, but I certainly
hear them. Because what else is there to listen to through all the time filling we do here? We've been asked to embroider nothingness here. As well as that, I am in the common situation of knowing that my wife and parents have installed my memorial tablet in the family shrine, and so absorbed my death. Those ashes can't be revived into the shape of a living return. We are caught between heaven and hell, and, I tell you, now this plan of separation has been foisted on us, I know more sharply than ever that we must be released from this state of neither life nor death. I feel sorry for those who cannot run against the wire and the guns. Yes, I know many have valid wounds. But that's where honor lies—to absorb an enemy bullet. And—by the way—to reduce his resources by at least those few ounces. And I know there are many who feel this way. I believe that those who oppose this have let themselves become foreigners in this camp. They are nothing more than vagrants in this middle zone we've let ourselves be stuck in. If we could see our own souls, what would we see? We would see those of baboons with bulging arses. Apes who live for the next banana.”

As much as Aoki intended to run—or at least hobble—along with the others, he was somehow annoyed at the flamboyant ardor of this speech, even if it had been much applauded.

“Please,” said Aoki, holding a hand up, even though he was aware Hirano's oratory had swept the floor. “We applaud your sentiments. But it is not a time to talk about baboon's arses. If we do this, it is to reward ourselves. And, again, if we do it—”

Cries of, “We'll do it, we'll do it!” arose from the floor.

Aoki held up his hand. “If we do it, that itself will shame those who backslide.”

Hirano wanted to say more but yielded to Aoki's seniority and sat down.

One further hut leader got to his feet and said that there were practical issues as well as poetic and religious ones, and he would like to propose a motion. Men who could not charge the wire should be
told that in hanging oneself, the belt buckle was meant to be behind the ear. There were other methods, too, of course. There were knives. “Cutting of the carotid is a good method.”

The holder of the Order of the Golden Kite, as he alone could, asked, “But what if only a small group wish to attack the wire?”

Aoki looked at the other members of the troika. Almost involuntarily he regarded Tengan, in his way the prophet of self-obliteration, and now strangely withdrawn. No one else knew it, but Tengan was reprising within his own head the changes of engine pitch that had brought him down from the sky and the black party of plant gatherers who had captured him, and the self-amazed issue of his having been here so long.

Goda took up the slack, which would normally have been Tengan's pleasure to address. “If there is no majority for the breakout,” he said, “I assume that those of us who still wish to go forward will do it. The vote in the huts does not take away that individual option in our cases.”

The unassailable holder of the Order asked, “How are the men to vote—secretly, or before their peers?”

This point about the possibility of secret ballots seemed to annoy many, and some asked satirically what would be used for ballot boxes. Hats? Pisspots? And it was laughable to treat this as some sort of municipal election, said one.

Tengan, revived, now suggested they vote to put the motion to their men, and the assent seemed unanimous. Aoki proposed a further motion should be put to the men about leaving the civilian population alone. There was no dissenter amongst the leaders. For they had no imperial warning to impart to the town of Gawell anymore, no message about the folly of resistance. And there existed the ambition to make an immaculate sacrifice, one that could not be explained away by the enemy as a desire for plunder and savagery.

Aoki therefore concluded the meeting by declaring the vote in the huts should be taken before the bell for dinner sounded. Yes, there might be the remote problem of something being overheard by somebody such as Nevski, but that was a small chance compared to the imperative that men have time that evening to bathe for death and prepare themselves in ways of their choosing.

And so with a few further informal motions and ad hoc amendments, they were the parliament of death, even if their arguments seemed so full of the impulse of life and sagacity and compassion. Not all were vocal on these matters, and—Aoki sensed—there was still some scepticism that the ragtag garrison would oblige them; that it would get around to manning the machine guns.

The hut leaders finished off their rice spirit and moved out, pannikins in hand, in sudden silence, except for the clump of hard-tipped infantry boots the enemy had imposed on them, and went to their huts to institute the lethal voting process.