The Narrow Road to the Deep North (30 page)

The three men were now intensely focused on the operation. Dorrigo Evans set to work sewing up the femoral artery with a gut twine Van Der Woude had improvised out of a pig’s intestine casings. These had been cleaned, boiled and pared into threads, then cleaned and boiled again, then boiled a third time before the operation. Compared to surgical ligatures, they were coarse, but they held. But this time he was sewing into nothing, wetness, a blur of tissue and blood. The torchlight was dimming, and he concentrated with all his being on getting each suture in exactly the right place.

And then the bleeding stopped.

He had done it. He had managed to suture the artery, and Jack Rainbow would live. He realised he was breathing heavily. He smiled. He began to prepare the rest of the muscles and skin flap for binding over the bone stump. He looked up at Squizzy.

Spoon away, Major. Gently.

Squizzy Taylor lifted the spoon. Dorrigo Evans kept working, more slowly now, more carefully. Jack would live. He would save this man’s life. There was the recuperation to get through, the chance of infection. But his chances were now good. Not great, perhaps, but still good. He concentrated on doing the best job he could now, imagining a middle-aged Jack Rainbow with children, his stump on a cushion. Alive. Loved. And he knew that what he did was not pointless, without reason; that he had not failed.

Torch off, he said.

He was finished.

He stood up straight, rubbed his back, winked at Jimmy Bigelow and looked back down at the stump. It was a surprisingly neat job. He felt proud of his handiwork. He noticed a small seep of blood where he had just stitched the flaps of flesh together, but the orderly was cleaning the stump and wiped it away.

Dorrigo lit a cigarette, breathed in the welcome smoke deeply, and laughed.

A spoon, he said.

A bloody bent spoon, said Squizzy.

That’s one for
The Lancet
.

When he glanced back at Jack, a few fresh beads of blood had appeared on the stump.

Why aren’t you dressing and bandaging the stump? Dorrigo asked Wat Cooney, as he wiped away the blood a second time.

As if in answer, the blood almost as quickly reappeared. The stitched flaps were swelling, the small seepage was transforming into a persistent oozing, and then blood began to drip from every part of the wound. Wat Cooney looked up at Dorrigo in horror.

The stitches holding the femoral artery together must have given way, Squizzy Taylor said, giving words to a thought Dorrigo did not wish to have. For a moment he was frozen.

Spoon! he suddenly yelled.

What? asked Jimmy Bigelow, who was on the other side of the hut.

The ligatures are gone on the femoral artery. We’ve got to open it back up.

Squizzy Taylor ran back with the spoon.

Torch! Jimmy, torch! We’ve got half a minute.

For after half a minute, he knew, Jack Rainbow’s heart would have emptied his body of blood. Before he could get the spoon back in position Jack Rainbow’s body jolted.

Spoon!

Jack Rainbow’s body had gone into convulsions.

Spoon!
Dorrigo Evans yelled.

Squizzy Taylor went to push the spoon down but couldn’t keep it pressed against the bucking body. Jimmy Bigelow switched the torch on and got back in position, but the torch dimmed further and then died altogether.

Torch! Dorrigo Evans was yelling. Where’s the fucking light?

The body was jumping wildly.

Hold him! Hold him down! Hard. Spoon! Hard! Hold the fucker!

I’m pushing as hard as I fucking can but the fucker won’t stop, yelled Squizzy Taylor.

Blood was everywhere, blood over the bamboo, blood over them, blood dripping oily lines in the dark mud below. It took a few more moments for Jimmy Bigelow and Wat Cooney to get a good grip of Jack Rainbow and hold him, but still that emaciated tiny body jolted up and down as if electricity were coursing through it, and their grips slipped in the blood that now seemed to grease everything.

The leg, said Dorrigo Evans. Get the leg!

But there was really no leg left to get, only a weirdly moving and bloody thing that seemed just to want to be left alone. The tiny piece of thigh that remained was now so slippery with blood that it was very difficult to work on, and in the dim light and the confusion of blood Dorrigo Evans was having trouble seeing anything clearly. The tremors eased then stopped, and he managed to find the sutures holding the flesh together so that he could get back to the femoral artery, but when he snipped them Jack Rainbow jolted again. Squizzy’s spoon slipped in the bloody slime, and blood spurted in a wild arc that reached as far as the foot of Jack Rainbow’s good leg.

He was frantically searching the muck of Jack’s stump with his fingers, trying to find something to stitch, pinching vaulting slime, groping pitching slop, there was nothing, nothing to stitch into,
nothing
that might hold the thread. The artery walls were wet blotting paper. There was, realised Dorrigo Evans, with a rising horror as the blood continued to pump out, as Jack Rainbow’s body went into a terrible series of violent fits, nothing he could do. But there must be, he told himself. Think! Think! Look!

With each galvanic jolt blood was spewing out in a small fountain. It was as if Jack Rainbow’s body were willingly pumping itself dry. Dorrigo Evans was trying to stitch as far up the artery as he could go, the blood was still galloping out, Squizzy Taylor was unable to staunch the flow, blood was everywhere, he was desperately trying to think of something that might buy some time but there was nothing. He was stitching, the blood was pumping, there was no light, the stitches kept ripping, nothing held.

Push harder, he was yelling to Squizzy Taylor. Stop the fucking flow.

But no matter how hard Squizzy Taylor pushed, still the blood kept surging, spilling over Dorrigo Evans’ hand and arm, running down into the Asian mud and the Asian morass that they could not escape, that Asian hell that was dragging them all ever closer to itself.

The convulsions gave way to shivering. Dorrigo Evans was pushing deeper into the stump, the flesh was tearing and falling away as he worked; his needle at one point hit the bone. He was trying to think, he was trying to find some way, he was trying not to give up hope when he heard Jack speak a few low words that were not much more than gasps and cracks of breath.

Big Fella?

Jack?

Will I die?

I think so.

Cold, he said. So fucken cold.

Dorrigo Evans kept steadily working on Jack’s stump, his bare feet ankle-deep in the bloody mud below the makeshift bamboo operating table, his outer calm a strange thing he knew he preserved at the moments of greatest inner turmoil. He kept looking for that piece of artery, trying to find something in his work to hold on to, unconsciously clawing at the mud with his toes.

And then finally he had it, and he worked with the utmost care and delicacy to make sure his work would hold and Jack live, and when it was done and he lifted his head he knew Jack had been dead for some minutes and no one had known how to tell him.

COLONEL KOTA FOUND
the Korean sergeant ever more irritating. Everything about the guard seemed untrustworthy and unreliable. Even his affected way of walking and his exceedingly slow way of turning seemed somehow false. As he looked up and down the tangle of sleepers, rock, dirt, irons and naked slaves working like cockroaches, Colonel Kota understood why Koreans could never be used as frontline troops.

While he inspected the railway works—the embankments and sidings, the great cuttings through rocky hills, grey limestone cliffs holding up black clouds, and the magnificent teak trestle bridges over jungle gorges, bowing like rainbows in the monsoon deluge—all he could think of was how he had not killed the prisoner back along the track, and how the Korean sergeant had witnessed his strange behaviour. And yet, even now, he could not remember the exact order of the haiku’s syllables. The Korean sergeant annoyed him immensely, seeking to please him with his affected smile, his ridiculous agreement with every comment Kota made, his boasting of the efficiency of their operation. Colonel Kota was convinced that behind every compliment was contempt, behind every agreement mockery, beneath every boast insolent superiority. On a hunch that he thought at best might embarrass the Korean and at worst annoy him, he ordered a head count of the prisoners for no reason other than that he could.

To the guards’ astonishment, the count came up nine short—nine prisoners missing. Alerted to this discovery, eight men mysteriously appeared at the second head count, held half an hour later. The hatchet-faced Japanese colonel demanded the eight men who had been hiding come forward to be punished, and that they reveal the identity and whereabouts of the ninth missing man.

When no one came forward, he ordered that the POW sergeant responsible for the gang be found and severely punished as an example. After some confusion, it was established that the ninth man
was
the sergeant, and that he was not on the Line but back in camp.

On returning to the camp late that afternoon, Colonel Kota gave Nakamura a dressing down, his rage driven by his own shame at having forgotten a haiku and thus having been unable to behead a prisoner—and this in front of a Korean guard. In turn deeply ashamed, the Japanese major found the Korean sergeant whose name he could never remember, slapped him hard a few times, got the name of the prisoner who was apparently—of all things—hiding out in the hospital, and ordered a parade to be called and the prisoner to be punished in front of the assembled POWs.

For his part, the Goanna was unconcerned by his slapping, but he was less than thrilled with the order: he did good business with the prisoner Gardiner, and the charge was to his mind even more pointless than most. While Gardiner annoyed him with the way he sometimes sang and whistled, the prisoner occasionally proved useful. Only a few days before, the Goanna had scored fresh beef from Gardiner for all the NCOs. But so it went. It was a shame, but he supposed that, after the beating, Gardiner would still need him and he Gardiner. So it went on and it never stopped. You could go to war with the world, but the world would always win. What could he do?

And so Gardiner was found where the Goanna had sent him, in the hospital. As he was unable to walk, the Goanna ordered the two guards who were with him to drag the prisoner to the parade ground to be punished.

THE DAY WAS
passing, it was cooling down, and the men were thinking how, here at least, they did not have to work. For a few minutes or however long it took, they could rest, and rest was always welcome, the most welcome thing in their world other than food. But they did not want to be here.

They stood in the middle of the parade ground, a hundred or so prisoners who had been on light duties and who had, that early evening, been assembled in the monsoon rain to witness Darky Gardiner, a man who pitied wet monkeys, being beaten by the Goanna for a crime he had not committed. Their number slowly swelled as prisoners returning from the Line were made by guards to join this desolate gathering.

When the Goanna tired, two other guards stepped forward to continue his work. A fruity, wet fragrance momentarily swept in from the jungle, and it reminded some of sherry and made them think of Christmas with the family and the trifle their mothers used to make. While one of the guards slapped Darky’s face back and forth and a second punched him in the torso, some of the prisoners tried to be happy in their memories of roast pumpkin and roast lamb and plum pudding with beer washing it all down. And though they would carry the memory of Darky’s beating to their own deaths six days or seventy years later, at the time the event seemed no more within their control, and therefore no more within their consciousness, than a rock falling or a storm breaking. It simply was, and it was best dealt with by finding other things to think of.

Sheephead Morton—slowly, carefully, so as not to draw attention to his forbidden movement—speared mud beneath his toes and was once more concreting, as he had sometimes as a labourer before the war, laying a house foundation. Jimmy Bigelow rolled the tip of his thumb along the side of his index finger, and this gentlest of touches took him to a bed where a woman’s fingers whispered a line along his hip. He remembered the marvel of her faint down moustache as she drew him in to kiss.

After a further ten minutes the Goanna, finished resting and perhaps sensing the absence of their attention, ordered that the prisoners all take six steps forward. Now the very sound of the hits and slaps and punches, dull and muted as they were, could be felt by the assembled men. Now there was no way not to look at the near-naked man being beaten by the uniformed guards. His wet, swelling face wore a strange look of astonishment each time the guards hit him with their fists or bamboo poles.

Help! Darky Gardiner moaned. Help me!

Or perhaps his punctured cries just sounded that way. Every strange, laboured breath of Darky’s—part wheeze, part bloody gargle, occasional grunt, as his body worked at this, too, the very surviving of the beating—every sound could not now be entirely blocked out. And yet they did block them out.

Lizard Brancussi was trying to see his Maisie’s face. Daily, he looked lovingly at Rabbit Hendricks’ pencil sketch, but when he tried to look beyond it—when he tried to recall her—everything grew hazy. The fantasy of Mae West was growing ever stronger, and Maisie, as she was, growing ever weaker. Still, as the beating went on, he kept trying, for he understood the measure of his life now to be his capacity to believe in something—anything—other than what was happening in front of him.

So they saw, but they did not see; so they heard, but they did not hear; and they knew, they knew it all, but still they tried not to know. At times, though, the prisoners were tricked back into seeing the beating by some novelty, such as a small teak log the Goanna found and threw at Darky Gardiner’s head, or when he thrashed Darky Gardiner’s body with a bamboo pole as thick as his arm, as if the prisoner were a particularly filthy carpet. Blow after blow—on the monster’s face, a monster’s mask.