The Narrow Road to the Deep North (10 page)

Well, young, yes. But so are you.

Ageing. I’ll tell Keith you called.

She began wiping the bar. A drinker tilted an empty froth-rimed glass in her direction.

Coming, she said.

He left, drove the truck back to the city, found a bar and determinedly drank himself into oblivion and couldn’t remember where he had parked the Studebaker. But when he awoke there was no annihilation of the memory of her. His pounding head, the pain in every movement and act and thought, seemed to have as its cause and remedy her, and only her and only her and only her.

For several weeks after, he tried to lose himself by joining with an infantry company’s endless route marches as a medical officer, marching up to twenty miles a day—from valley vineyards, where they filled their canteens with muscat and red wine, to coastal beaches where they swam, and then marched back, and then back again—through heat so intense it felt like a foe. He would help carry the packs of men who collapsed with fatigue, he drove himself beyond any sense. Finally, the company commander ordered him to back off a little so that he not seem a fool to the men.

Of a night he wrote letters to Ella, in which he tried to lose himself in the forms and tropes of love that he had learnt from literature. The letters were long, dull and false. His mind was tormented by thoughts and feelings that he had never read. Accordingly, he understood that they could not be love. He felt a swirling of hatred and lust for Keith’s wife. He wanted to seize her body. He wanted never to see her again. He felt a contempt and strange distance, he felt a complicity—as though he knew something he should not know—and he felt, strangely, that she knew it too. He reasoned that once his corps embarked for overseas, he would happily never think of her again. And yet he could not stop thinking of her.

He ate little, lost weight and seemed so oddly preoccupied that the company commander, both impressed and slightly concerned by Dorrigo’s extraordinary zeal, gave him a special twenty-four-hour furlough. Ella had said that she would come to Adelaide if he received a short-leave pass and lacked the time to travel to Melbourne. And though he fully intended to spend the leave with her, having even picked out a restaurant he would take her to, he somehow never got around to mentioning in any of his many letters and cards to Ella that he was about to go on leave. When the date grew close he reasoned that it would be unfair to tell her, as it would be too late for her to make any arrangements and she would be left only with a crushing disappointment. Having decided on this course of silence, and after solemnly vowing he would never return to the King of Cornwall, he rang his Uncle Keith, who invited him down to stay the night, saying that ‘my Amy’, as he called his wife, would be as pleased to see him as Keith himself.

My Amy, thought Dorrigo Evans when he hung up the receiver. My Amy.

AFTER PLAYING CARDS
with the Australian officers, Major Nakamura had fallen into a deep, alcoholic slumber. In his strange dreams he was lost in a dark room and was feeling an elephant’s leg, trying to imagine what room such pillars might support. There was an immense maw of shooting tendrils and smothering leaves that formed a blindfold around his eyes, leaving him unseeing. Everywhere around him he felt life, but nowhere did it seem to him was life intelligible. All things in this room were unexpected and uncivilised—be it the endless jungle or the near-naked Australian prisoners, who, he knew, surrounded him like a troop of huge, hairy, threatening apes.

What was this room? How could he get out? The green blindfold was now wrapping around his throat, choking him. His heart was pounding. He could taste a copper spoon in his dry mouth, stale sweat larded his back in a clammy chill, his ribs itched badly and he smelt rancid even to himself. He was trembling, shuddering, when he realised he was being shaken awake.

What? Nakamura yelled.

He slept badly these days, and to be woken abruptly from sleep in the middle of the night left him confused and angry. He smelt the monsoon rain before he heard it slapping the ground outside, and threading through it the irritating voice of Lieutenant Fukuhara, who was calling his name.

What is it? Nakamura yelled again.

He opened his eyes to leaping shadows and shudders of light and began scratching himself. A wet, rubberised cape formed a black, glistening cone that rose from its base to Fukuhara’s darkened face, neat as always, even in the most difficult situations, and adorned with his cropped hair, water-beaded horn-rimmed glasses and moustache. Behind him, holding out a kerosene lantern, was Tomokawa, a soggy campaign cap and neck flaps highlighting the corporal’s daikon-like head.

Corporal Tomokawa was on sentry duty, sir, Fukuhara said, when a truck driver and a colonel of the Ninth Railway Regiment walked into camp.

Nakamura rubbed his eyes, then scratched his elbow so hard that he knocked off a scab and his elbow began to bleed. Though he could not see them, he knew he was covered in ticks. Biting ticks. The ticks were biting under his arms, his back, his ribs, crotch, everywhere. He kept scratching but the ticks just burrowed deeper. They were very small ticks. The ticks were so small they somehow got under the skin and bit away there.

Tomokawa! he yelled. Can you see them? Can you!

He held up an arm.

Tomokawa stole a glance at Fukuhara, stepped forward, raised his lantern and inspected Nakamura’s arm. He stepped back.

No, sir.

Ticks!

No, sir.

They were so small that no one else could see them. That was part of their hellish nature. He wasn’t sure how they got under his skin but suspected they laid their eggs in his pores and they incubated under the skin, to be born and grow and die there. One had to scratch them out. Siamese ticks, unknown to science.

He had had Corporal Tomokawa inspect his body before with a magnifying glass, and still the fool had said he couldn’t see them. Nakamura knew he was lying. Fukuhara said the ticks didn’t exist, that the sensation was a side-effect of the Philopon. What the hell would he know? There was so much in this jungle that no one had ever seen or experienced before. One day science would discover and name the tick, but he just had to endure them for now, like he had to endure so much else.

Colonel Kota has brought fresh orders from Railway Command Group to give you before proceeding to Three Pagoda Pass, Fukuhara continued. He is in the mess being fed. His orders are to brief you at the earliest convenience.

Nakamura waved an unsteady index finger at a small field table next to his cot.

Shabu, he muttered.

Tomokawa swung the kerosene lamp away from his commanding officer’s face and searched the sooty shadows that swept back and forth over the technical drawings, reports and work sheets that sat on the tabletop, many of them spotted with blooms of dark mould.

Fukuhara, eager, young, gannet-necked Fukuhara, whom Nakamura found increasingly oppressive in his zeal, continued on about how it was the first truck up the near impassable road in ten days, and how, with the rains, it was likely to be the last for—

Yes, yes, Nakamura said. Shabu!

The truck is bogged three kilometres away, and Colonel Kota is worried that natives might loot the truck of the supplies it carries, Lieutenant Fukuhara finished.

Shabu! Nakamura hissed.
Shabu!

Tomokawa spotted the Philopon bottle on a chair next to the table. He handed it to Nakamura, who these days survived on the army-issue methamphetamine and little else. Nakamura tipped the bottle and shook it. Nothing came out. Nakamura sat on his army cot, staring at the empty bottle in his hand.

To inspire fighting spirits, said Nakamura dully, reading the army’s inscription on the Philopon bottle’s label. Nakamura knew he needed sleep above all things, and he knew that now it would not be possible, that he must stay up the rest of the night, meeting with Kota and organising the rescue of the truck, and still somehow get his section of the railway finished in the impossible time headquarters now demanded. He needed shabu.

With a sudden, violent action he threw the Philopon bottle out of the hut’s open doorway, where, like so much else, it disappeared without a sound into that void of mud and jungle and infinite night.

Corporal Tomokawa!

Sir! said the corporal, and without anything else being said by either, he headed out of the tent into the darkness, his short body limping slightly. Nakamura rubbed his forehead.

He thought of the will that he had to muster every day to continue to make the necessary advances in the railway’s construction. At the beginning—when the High Command had decreed that the railway joining Siam and Burma be built—it had been different. Nakamura, as an officer of the IJA’s Fifth Railway Regiment, had been excited by the prospect. Before the war, the English and the Americans had both investigated the idea of just such a railway and declared it impossible. The Japanese High Command had decreed that it be built in the shortest time possible. Nakamura’s pleasure in his small but significant role in this historic mission, his pride in joining his life with a national and imperial destiny, was immense.

But when, in March 1943, Nakamura had made his way into the heart of this mysterious country, he found himself for the first time beyond the crowds and cities that had shaped him to that point, far from the strange codes of conformity that men in such places live by. They were engineers and soldiers and guards, they were the army code they carried with them, they were the Emperor’s wishes incarnate, they were the Japanese spirit made plans and dreams and will. They were Japan. But they were few and the coolies and POWs were many, and the jungle closed in on them a little more every day.

From and of the crowd, Nakamura increasingly found that here his life had taken on a strange and unexpected solitude. And this solitude troubled him more and more. To put an end to these unsettling feelings he threw himself into his work, yet the harder he worked, the more the work became an insane equation. With the monsoon having come, the river was flooded, running high and fast, full of trees and too dangerous to bring heavy loads upriver, while the road—as Colonel Kota had seen for himself—was mostly impassable and supplies had dwindled away to almost nothing. There was no machinery, only hand tools, and these were of the poorest quality. There weren’t anywhere near enough prisoners for the job at the beginning, and now the prisoners not dead or dying were in bad shape. To top everything else off, the cholera had arrived a week ago, and even disposing of the dead bodies was becoming a problem, draining fit men away from the railway work. There was ever less food and almost no medicines, yet Railway Command Group expected him to do ever more.

Nakamura worked with Japanese maps, Japanese plans, Japanese charts and Japanese technical drawings to impose Japanese order and Japanese meaning on the meaningless and aimless jungle, on the sick and dying POWs, a vortex seemingly without cause and effect, a growing green maelstrom that spun faster and faster. And in and out of that maelstrom came orders, endless streams of appearing and disappearing romusha and prisoners of war, as undivinable and as unknowable as the river Kwai or the cholera bacillus. The occasional Japanese officer might stay over for an evening of drink, gossip and news, and the men would fortify each other with tales of Japanese honour and the indomitable Japanese spirit and the imminent Japanese victory. Then they too would disappear to their own hell somewhere else on that ever lengthening railway line of madness.

A wet wind swept through the hut, ruffling the damp papers on the field table. Nakamura looked at the luminous hands of his watch. Three hundred hours. Two and a half hours till reveille. He was feeling anxious, the ticks were getting worse, and he began scratching his chest with a growing ferocity while Fukuhara waited for his orders. Nakamura said nothing until Corporal Tomokawa, with the same fawning reverence he showed in all his actions undertaken for his superiors, returned, bowed and held out a full bottle of Philopon.

Grabbing the bottle, Nakamura gulped down four pills. After his second attack of malaria, when he was still exhausted but had to carry on working, he had taken a few shabu pills to keep him going. Now the shabu was more necessary to him than food. To build such a railway—with no machinery and through a wilderness—was a superhuman task. Fired by shabu, he was able to return to it day after debilitating day with a redoubled fervour. He put the bottle down and looked up to see both men looking at him.

Philopon helps me through this fever, Nakamura said, feeling suddenly awkward. It’s very good. And it stops the damn ticks biting.

Already feeling his early morning stupour magically dissolving into a renewed alertness and vigour, Nakamura stared intently at the two men until they dropped their eyes.

Philopon is anything but an opiate, Nakamura said. Only inferior races like the Chinese, Europeans and Indians are addicted to opiates.

Fukuhara agreed. Fukuhara was such a bore.

We invented Philopon, said Fukuhara.

Yes, Nakamura said.

Philopon is an expression of the Japanese spirit.

Yes, Nakamura said.

He stood up and realised he hadn’t bothered undressing for bed. Even his muddy puttees remained tightly bound around his calves, though the cross tape on one leg had come undone.

The Imperial Japanese Army gives us shabu to help with the work of the Empire, Tomokawa added.

Yes, yes, Nakamura said. He turned to Fukuhara. Take twenty prisoners back down the track and rescue the truck.

Now?

Of course,
now
, Nakamura said. Push it all the way to the camp, if necessary.

And after? Fukuhara asked. Do we give them the day off?

After, they go and do their day’s work on the railway, said Nakamura. You’re up, I’m up, we continue.

Nakamura’s need to scratch was fading. His cock was swelling inside his trousers. It was a pleasant feeling of strength. Fukuhara had turned to leave when Nakamura called his name.

You’re an engineer, Nakamura said. You understand that you must treat all men as machines in service of the Emperor.