Shame and the Captives (41 page)

He came on two neat groups of three, each set squatting in natural groins of rock. They had been talking quietly, but with an urgency of a peculiar kind, as if they'd been waiting to be found.

“I'm here,” he yelled for his father's sake.

The alien men looked up. They seemed even to him to be stupefied. Escape had not left much in them. They were ready to be dominated by his small-bore rabbit-killing gun.

“Look up!” he told them, gesturing, and they clearly saw above him Beefy atop the rock, with his shotgun pointed. Martin was gratified to see that his father resembled a figure of some power.

“Get back a bit, son,” Beefy nonetheless advised. “Don't get too close to them.”

Martin took a delight in asking, “So what now, gentlemen?” For he had become a figure from a noble play or a Saturday film, and he loved it—the chance for oration.

“And what of all the men you shot in Malaya and the Indies?” he asked. “What did you think when their blood incarnadined the oceans of Asia? Tell me!”

His rifle designed for banal bush purposes now empowered him in front of the six men, who all stood up. They had been surprised but were not cowed. One called to the others in a hacking, commanding voice. Another of them made a motion with his hands, like a man explaining a dance move.

“Watch out, Martin,” called Beefy.

The escapee who had first spoken stepped forward now, ripping the front of his tunic and his shirt and trying to tear open the woollen singlet beneath. From the top of the granite, Beefy continued to yell warnings. The Japanese advanced on Martin, screaming at him in gutturals. The huge ear-ringing blast of his father's shotgun split the argument apart, but no pellet seemed to enter this man striding towards Martin with such a fixity. In the stunned air the man was still mouthing and growling. Mr. Cullen's shot had torn apart the upper body of one of the others beyond the men advancing on Martin. After doing such damage Beefy would need to reload. Four ran forwards as if replacing their riddled comrade in a line of battle.

The fellow unhit by Beefy, his shirt open, his demands gusting in hot breath, carried on advancing towards Martin and, though wearing
a grotesque face as if he were theatrical, could not redeem himself in the language of Shakespeare. His threats were outrageously remote from Martin's powers of interpretation. When he was seven paces away, Martin shot him in the throat. Martin judged that to use his poor weaponry on the man's trunk would not serve the purpose. He was awed to see the Polonius-like volumes of blood surging from the wound and over the man's lips. It was shocking to see, but he did not repent of the act.

Above him, his father and comrade had reloaded. He, too, was ready to stand, to defend Macintosh's stony hill against the enemies of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Two of the four men still left alive opened their jackets with more pleas to be shot, yet after a time sank on their knees to the ground as if expecting nothing. The other two began to engross themselves in disposing the limbs of the man killed by Beefy. Martin's enemy had sunk back into the stones of the ridge. He was gone. As for the others, father and son owned them now and need not threaten them further.

“Better go down now to Macintosh's,” called Beefy, “and get them to call the military people.”

Martin, however, was determined not to let the power revert to his father.

“No,” he said, “I've got them under control.”

“But I've got the shotgun. Give me the rifle, too, and hop along, son.”

His father, for whom Martin now pulsed with love, had indeed issued thunder to the enemy of his people, and, Martin saw, wasn't afraid at all now it had happened. He could see no vainglory in Beefy. The four Japanese were all tearing at their jackets again and crying on the Cullen men to fire. A sudden revelation for Martin was that these fellows were not enemies in the Elizabethan play. They were enemies of themselves. At that revelation, the fever began to die in him.

“Kill,” pleaded the men, the ones with faces that had come from a different poetry.

“Shut up!” Beefy yelled at the escapees. “We're not fucking barbarians, you know!”

Martin had begun to shiver for some reason. He reached the rifle up to his father so that on top of the granite Beefy Cullen possessed an arsenal. The prisoners still pleaded.

“Go to buggery!” Beefy called at them. “Get on with it, Martin.” Martin looked a second at the corpse of that guttural and demanding fellow whom he'd finished and shawled in blood, and who now lay as if he had been placed there by a third party as a surprise and a parable. He lost all his vanity in an instant. He felt the map of the world he carried in his head could not be read anymore. His own self, so dominant in the version he'd possessed until now, had vanished amongst the parallels. How could he invent the remainder of his hours and years?

“Go on, Martin,” called Beefy in paternal pride and determination. “Cut along now.”

Martin consoled himself that he would never again be mocked for knowing cos and sine and the Hittite Empire or Tennyson's “In Memoriam.” He ran downhill, bounding and adhering by skill to that line between sprinting and falling. He ran for the sake of his father's safety and to honor the savagery they had been forced to in an attempt to protect the holiness of the iambic pentameter.

As he reached the farmhouse and told Macintosh what had happened, he began weeping from this sense of being lost in his own geography. Macintosh held him by the shoulders and assured him it was all right. He sat him down with sturdy Mrs. Macintosh in the kitchen, where that good lady had a firearm of her own in the corner, and the woman comforted him, not knowing that he had paid himself over to save their rimes from the yellow horde. Macintosh himself rang the police and then set off on horseback with his own high-powered rifle, and, by some counsel of mercy, a canister of water for the prisoners. As soon as he saw Beefy dominant on top of that boulder, he cried, “Why in the bloody hell did you take your boy out today, Beefy? Of all days? You're a total bloody idiot!”

Soon after, Macintosh and Beefy, who was chastened but refused to appear so, saw army trucks mill at the main farm gate, and the troops left the bodies behind for collection and drove the four recaptured prisoners down the slope in front of them. Beefy was anxious to see Martin, and wondered if the army might think more of him than Macintosh did.

This was not Aoki's group. Aoki and his polite companions were on another ridgeline to the north. And so, though separated by some miles, was a party led by Goda. But Goda and his squad of harder-line young men had heard the shots and moved with a new enthusiasm in their direction.

O
n another spur of the low ranges outside Gawell, Aoki and his party were descending into the pastures. The grass was rough and tussocky and they were surrounded by cattle who seemed indifferent to them. “Here's meat,” said one of the avowedly younger men.

Another asked derisively, “And so you want us to slaughter and bleed it, make a fire, and cook fillets? It'll be morning by then.”

They came to a reservoir dug into the earth with a bank of soil on the far side to protect the water from the prevailing wind. From it an electric pump drew water into a concrete tank with a tap. They drank from the tap and then sat by it to hold council. They saw beyond reddish, gnarled trees a light come on in the farmhouse that was then muffled by a briskly drawn curtain. “The house,” said one of the younger men with yearning. The light was a huge, mothering temptation.

“Will we go there, Senior Sergeant?” one of the young privates pathetically asked Aoki.

“We should have a look to begin with,” Aoki decided.

Advancing towards it, they saw chickens pecking, and somewhere dogs began barking. These homely signs seemed absolutely to seduce the thirsty and hungry. The three younger men turned their
tormented eyes on Aoki. He felt a surge of brotherly affection for them. They had charged machine guns. They would have charged one now if it had only presented itself. But for the dispiriting lack of one, they wanted to go in there. They wanted to be given their food, even if it were bread. And—when it came to it—why not? It was up to them.

“You all go,” he said. “And don't hurt the farmer or his wife. We've got no lesson to teach them. They're unteachable.”

He saw relief and doubt on the three young faces. But they lingered. They could not understand why he could not commute his own case.

“You've all done your best,” he told them. “Go, that's my order.” His leg howled and vibrated with pain.

One said, “With your permission, Senior Sergeant . . .”

Aoki said, “No, you're not excluded from the order. You go too.”

Allowed to relax their determination, their spirits eased and rose; it was almost like looking at birds freed. Aoki found that he was somewhere beyond warmth or refreshment. He had worked far enough through his history of appetites to be beyond them now. But the men still looked at him. They knew he intended to end it by his own hand. They knew it was unsoldierly to leave him too quickly. One by one they came up, the hungry one first, and extended their hands solemnly. The last said, as if he intended simply to have a sandwich and then seek death, “I shall see you amongst the heroes, Senior Sergeant.”

The three privates saluted and walked off, continuing with a decent show of reluctance. Left alone, Aoki flopped to the earth to thrust out his tormented limb. He felt the throbbing and the agonizing numbness release itself a little. Then he hauled himself up. With them gone, he could limp more frankly. He retreated amongst the cattle and back into the hill of rocks towards the crooked-limbed trees. He stopped a little way up the slope and could see the three young men nearing the house and its radiance. Somewhere in there
the inscrutable wife would at least be an identifiable being, the eternal provider of meals.

He watched from a height. When the trucks appeared, soldiers surrounded the farmhouse and advanced on it, but a young woman came out on its veranda waving handkerchiefs to them, and quickly behind her the three young soldiers came out, hands raised. This was it, the test by which they would live or die. The young men dropped on their knees by the farmhouse gate, inviting execution, but were raised up by the armpits and dragged to the vehicles. Would they be shot out of sight of the woman? He suspected they would not be; as the trucks drove off and made their way up the dirt road beyond the farm, he listened. Nothing was heard except the last mournful predictions of the birds at dusk and the steady grind of the trucks. Whether it was strange politics or strange mercy that seemed to be delivering the young men, whole and breathing, back to Compound C, he could no longer take an interest in.

Like others, Aoki had created a special belt, sewing together two lengths of leather, sufficient to provide a noose and appropriate hanging material. He took the belt off his waist now, let his trousers drop, took off his jacket and boots, and stood there in his shirt and woollen underwear. At some cost in pain he began to climb a tree, using near-forgotten rules of ascent for snipers. He reached a branch that was far above his height. He made a noose of the buckle end and tied the other end of the belt to the branch. He put the noose around his neck and placed the buckle in the recommended position by his right ear. There was no delaying. He threw himself off the branch. He descended through the air and felt a vast, hopeful jolt, which then insidiously released its force on him. He landed on his arse. He looked up at the broken noose, stitching rotted by sweat, the buckle broken asunder from the rest, the split ends dangling.

Had there been a noise as he fell? There had certainly been. A
horse stood above him with a farmer on it, a man his age, holding a rifle.

The farmer spoke like a crow, in purest mockery. “Give it up, sport!” he said.

•  •  •

Unlike Aoki's party, whose followers after all had been fairly anonymous and unremarkable soldiers, Goda's group seemed to consist of a pack of young ultras. Goda himself was sick of the question—to live or to die? At this stage, he was willing to die to escape the debate. Their deep-dyed uniforms were designed to make them stand out in this country innocent of the color maroon. Yet by Sunday afternoon they had still not been tracked down.

Goda's traveling party included the zealous boy-soldier Isao; the excellent tenor from Aoki's hut named Domen; the marine and hut leader Hirano; and Omura, the bomber wireless operator. Despite their rigor of soul, these men were also in a state of moral bewilderment. Like Aoki's group they were famished, and had begun to doubt the proposition about keeping to ridges. Their morale revived when they heard the shots and went looking for their source but, arriving, they found nothing except some blood-soaked stones. To varying degrees they were exhilarated—whoever's the blood was—at this sign of resolution, but disappointed in equal measure that they had not been here at the essential moment.

From here they saw a wheat field, the characteristic mark of all farms except the largest in this region. They could also see sheep, and Domen suggested the possibility of a final feast. It would be marked by a fire the enemy could surely see and approach, perhaps even before the food was cooked. If they were permitted to dine before dying, then so much the better.

It had been hard to cross the three wire fences carrying weapons, though some had succeeded. Domen, who still carried a knife, approached the sheep and caused them to run, but he was a farmer's
son and knew how to catch animals. He had a lamb all at once sitting up, seemingly quite tranquil, between his knees. He cut the throat smoothly with one swipe, then raised the animal by its back legs as its blood went flowing onto the grass.

In the meantime, Goda and the others found their way through a nearby wire fence, an exercise evoking memory of other wire. With impunity, they collected the ears of wheat nearly ready for harvest and filled their pockets with them. The exercise cheered them, Goda noticed. It cheered him too. Gathering the grain gave them a taste of purpose on this aimless Sunday.