The Narrow Road to the Deep North (12 page)

Dorrigo found himself dancing with Amy, and as the dance floor slowly descended into darkness, she somehow came to rest her head on his shoulder. Her body seemed to be inviting his into a supple, shared swaying. As his body cautiously melded into hers, he again told himself it was nothing, that it meant nothing, that it could lead to nothing.

What are you mumbling? she asked.

Nothing, he whispered.

As they circled, their bodies found a strange peace in resting on each other that was also the most terrible anticipation and tension. He could feel her breath, the slightest breeze on his neck.

The last candle was snuffed, there was a bar of darkness, the curtains suddenly dropped from the windows and—to gasps of wonder—a full moon flooded the room. The waltz now circled to its finale, and he understood the whole event as a strange nostalgia for a future that everyone feared would never belong to them, a sense of tomorrow already foretold and only tonight capable of change.

In the quicksilver light and blue ink shadow, couples slowly separated and clapped. For a moment they were looking at each other and he knew he could kiss her, that he only had to lean slightly forward into her shadow and he would fall forever. But then he remembered who they were and instead asked if she wanted another drink.

Take me home, she said.

AT THE HOTEL
she took him to the rooms where she lived with Keith. He sat down in a russet armchair. He could smell Keith’s brilliantine on the antimacassar, his pipe tobacco in the brocade upholstery. Amy wound the gramophone, put on a record she said she wanted him to hear, placed the needle and sat on the arm of Dorrigo’s chair. The piano shuffled, the sax swept in and out with the breeze off the ocean that ruffled the lace curtains, and a voice began to sing.

It’s Leslie Hutchinson, she said. Apparently he is, you know,
familiar
with the ladies of the Royal family.

Familiar?

She smiled.

Yes, she said very softly, looking across at him.
Familiar
.

She laughed again, from her throat, and he thought how much he liked the full-bodied, large-souled feel of it.

The song ended. He stood up and went to go. She put the record on again. He said goodbye. At the door he leant in, kissed her politely on the cheek, and when he went to pull away, she leant her face in against his neck. He waited for her to pull her head away.

You’ve got to go, he heard her whisper. But she kept her face against his.

The gramophone needle was ch-ch-ing as it circled the record’s end.

Yes, he said.

He waited but nothing happened.

The needle remained stuck in its groove, scratching circles of sand into the night.

Yes, he said.

He waited but she did not move. After a time, he put one arm lightly around her. She did not pull away.

Soon, he said.

He held his breath until he felt her ever so slightly press into him. He did not move.

Amy?

Yes?

He did not dare answer. He breathed out. He shuffled his feet to better get his balance. He had no idea what to say, worrying that to say anything more might upset this delicate equation. He let his hand drop and shape her waist, expecting her to push it away. But instead she whispered:

Amie
. French for friend.

His other hand found the wondrous curve of her buttocks.

My mother, she said, taught me that when I was little.

She did not push that hand away either.

Amy, amie, amour, she used to call me. Amy, friend, love.

A winning trifecta, Dorrigo said.

She turned her lips onto his neck. He could feel her breath on his skin. He could feel her body with his, now hard, and he was embarrassed to realise that she must be able to feel him. He did not dare move in any direction in case it broke this spell. It was not clear to him what this meant or what he should do. He did not dare kiss her.

DORRIGO FELT A
warm hand creeping up his legs and jolted awake. It took him some moments to realise it was the early-morning sun stepping across his room. He found a note from Amy under his door saying that she would be busy until mid-afternoon with hotel business—there was to be a lunchtime wedding reception—so she would not be able to say goodbye.

He wrapped a towel around himself, and went out on the deep balcony, lit a cigarette, sat down, and looked out through the Victorian arches to where the Southern Ocean, ceaseless and open, rippled in front of him.

Nothing has happened, she had said when he left her rooms. Those were her exact words. They had held each other, but she had said it was nothing. How could it be anything to him? Beyond a hug, nothing had happened. That much was true. Nothing had happened at the bookshop. A hug? People did more than that at funerals.

Amy, amie, amour, he whispered under his breath.

Nothing had happened, yet everything had changed.

He was falling.

He listened to the waves break and shimmer sand and he was falling. A slight breeze rose from the long shadows of early morning and he still was falling. He was falling and falling, and it felt a wild freedom. Whatever it might be was as unknowable and perplexing as she was. He understood that much. He did not know where it would end.

He stood up, excited, confused, determined. He threw his cigarette away, and went inside to get dressed. Nothing had happened and yet he knew something had begun.

HE RETURNED TO
the army camp and a life of order and discipline. But that life, for Dorrigo, no longer had substance. It hardly seemed real. People came, people talked, people said many things, and not one was interesting. They talked of Hitler, Stalin, North Africa, the Blitz. Not one talked of Amy. They talked of matériel, strategy, maps, timetables, morale, Mussolini, Churchill, Himmler. He longed to cry out Amy! Amie! Amour! He wished to scruff them and tell them what had happened, how he longed for her, how she made him feel.

But much as he wanted everyone to hear, he could afford to have none know. Their dreary conversation, their ignorance of Amy and the passion she had for him and he had for her, was his insurance against his indiscretion. The day their talk turned to him and Amy was the day their private passion would have transformed into public tragedy.

He read books. He liked none of them. He searched their pages for Amy. She was not there. He went to parties. They bored him. He walked the streets, gazing into strangers’ faces. Amy was not there. The world, in all its infinite wonder, bored him. He searched every room of his life for Amy. But Amy was not anywhere to be found. And he realised Amy was married to his uncle, that his passion was a madness, that it had no future, that whatever it was must end, and that he must end it. He reasoned that, as there was nothing he could do about his feelings, he must avoid acting on them. If he did not see her, he could not do anything wrong. And so he resolved never to visit Amy again.

When his next leave—a six-day furlough—arose, he did not return to his uncle’s hotel but took the overnight train to Melbourne, where he spent all his money on outings and presents for Ella, trying to lose himself in her, seeking to exorcise all memory of his strange encounter with Amy. Ella, for her part, would look greedily into his face, his eyes, and—with a growing concern in his heart which at moments approached terror—he could see her face straining to discover in his face and his eyes the same hunger. And what had been a beautiful, exotic face to Dorrigo Evans now simply seemed dull beyond imagining. Her dark eyes—which at first he had found bewitching—now appeared to him as credulous, even cow-like in their trust, though he tried very hard not to think it, and loathed himself all the more for thinking it anyway. And so he poured himself with renewed determination into her arms, into her conversations, into her fears and jokes and stories, hoping that this intimacy would finally smother all memory of Amy Mulvaney.

On his last night they went for dinner at her father’s club. A RAAF major whom they met there made Ella laugh over and over with his jokes and stories. When the major announced he was leaving to go to a nearby nightclub, Ella begged Dorrigo that they go with him because
he was such a hoot
. Dorrigo felt a strange emotion that was neither jealousy nor gratitude but a strange mingling of both.

I love being with people, Ella said.

The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.

NOW THE DAY
began before the prisoners were awake, before the main body of guards and engineers were up, some hours before even the sun had risen; now, as Nakamura strode through the mud, breathing the wet night air, as his nightmares dissolved, as the methamphetamines cranked his heart and mind, he felt a pleasant anticipation. This day, this camp, this world, was his to shape. He found Colonel Kota, as Fukuhara had said, in an empty mess, sitting at a bamboo bench table eating tinned fish.

The colonel was a well-built man almost the height of an Australian, his physique belying a face that seemed to Nakamura to sag and fall away from either side of a shark-fin nose to ripples that trailed down his wrinkled cheeks.

Kota did not bother with small talk but got straight to business, saying he would be leaving in the morning as soon as transport could be arranged. From a soggy leather satchel the colonel produced an oiled japara folder, out of which he took a single sheet of typewritten orders and several pages of technical drawings so damp that they wrapped around Nakamura’s fingers as he read them. The orders were no more complex than they were welcome.

The first order was technical: even though the major railway cutting was already half-completed, the Railway Command Group had altered Nakamura’s original plans. They now wanted the cutting enlarged by a third to help with gradient issues in the next sector. The new cutting would entail a further three-thousand cubic metres of rock to be cut and carried away.

As Tomokawa poured sour tea for them both, Nakamura bent down and retied the tapes of his puttee. They didn’t have enough saws or axes to clear the jungle. The prisoners cut the rock by hand with a hammer and chisel. He didn’t even have proper chisels for the prisoners to use, and when what they did have blunted, there wasn’t enough coke for their forge to resharpen them. Nakamura sat back up.

Drilling machines with compressors would help, he said.

Colonel Kota stroked his sagging cheek.

Machinery?

He let the word hang in the air, leaving Nakamura to finish it off in his own mind—with the knowledge that there was no machinery, with the shame of having begged, the sense of being mocked. Nakamura lowered his head. Kota once more spoke.

There is nothing to spare. It can’t be helped.

Nakamura knew he had been wrong to raise this matter, but was grateful that Colonel Kota seemed understanding. He read the second order. The deadline for the completion of the railway had been brought forward from December to October. Nakamura was overcome with despair. His task was now impossible.

I know you can make it possible, Colonel Kota said.

It’s no longer April, Nakamura said in what he hoped would be understood as an oblique reference to when headquarters had approved the final plans. It’s August.

Colonel Kota’s eyes remained fixed on Nakamura’s.

We will redouble our efforts, a chastened Nakamura finally said.

I cannot lie to you, Colonel Kota said. I very much doubt there will be a corresponding increase in either machinery or tools. Maybe more coolies. But even that I can’t say. We have over a quarter of a million coolies and sixty thousand prisoners working on this railway. I know the English and Australians are lazy. I know they complain they are too tired or too hungry to work. That they take one small spadeful and stop for a rest. One blow of the hammer, then they halt. That they complain about insubstantial matters such as being slapped. If a Japanese soldier neglects his work he expects to be beaten. What gives cowards the right not to be slapped? The Burmese and Chinese coolies that are sent here keep running away or dying. The Tamils, thankfully, have too far to run back to Malaya, but now they are dying everywhere from cholera, and even with the thousands more now arriving there is still not enough manpower. I don’t know. None of it can be helped.

Nakamura returned to reading the typed letter. The third order was that one hundred prisoners were to be seconded from his camp for work at a camp near Three Pagoda Pass, some one hundred and fifty kilometres to the north on the Burmese border.

I don’t have one hundred prisoners to spare, thought Nakamura. I need another thousand prisoners to complete this section in the time I have been given, not lose even more. He looked up at Colonel Kota.

The hundred men are to march there?

There is no other way in the monsoon. That can’t be helped either.

Nakamura knew many would die trying to get there. Perhaps most. But the railway demanded it, the Emperor had ordered the railway, and this was the way it had been decided that the railway would be made. And he could see that, in reality—this reality of dreams and nightmares that he had to live in every day—there was no other way for the railway to be built. Still he persisted.

Understand me, Nakamura said. My problem is practical. With no tools, and fewer men every day, how do I build the railway?

Even if most die of exhaustion you are to complete the work, Colonel Kota said, shrugging his shoulders. Even if everybody dies.

And Nakamura could see that, in this sacrifice too, there was no other way for the Emperor’s wishes to be realised. What was a prisoner of war anyway? Less than a man, just material to be used to make the railway, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes. If he, a Japanese officer, allowed himself to be captured, he would be executed on his ultimate return to the home islands anyway.