The Narrow Road to the Deep North (32 page)

But these feelings were too strange and overwhelming to hold on to, they floundered for a moment in Dorrigo Evans’ mind, and then vanished. Behind him, Nakamura was walking away. The Japanese officer’s thoughts were also confused and too disturbing to make sense of, far less hold on to. Other, more reassuring, comforting ideas of duty and the Emperor and the Japanese nation and the immediate practical worries of tomorrow’s railway building took their place, and, again, as a mouse in a wheel, Nakamura’s mind returned to obediently fulfil that role which had been assigned to him.

Within ten minutes he had completely forgotten the beating, and it was only an hour later, when he walked back past the parade ground and saw the prisoners still at attention, that he realised it had not ended. Two extra guards held hurricane lamps to light the scene now it was night, the prisoner had somehow lost what rags he had and was naked, and the uniforms of the three guards administering the punishment were dark with rain, mud and blood. The prisoner no longer sought to resist or evade his beating but absorbed it as passively as a bag of chaff. When the guards weren’t hitting him with their sticks, they kicked him around like an old ball. But then he no longer looked like a man, but something wrong and unnatural.

Nakamura would have preferred that the beating had stopped some time ago, but it seemed best not to interfere. Fortified by three tablets of shabu, he was on his way to find Corporal Tomokawa and have him head over to the river camp to buy a bottle of Mekhong whisky from a Thai river trader. Some shabu and whisky, thought Nakamura, that was what was needed.

And the drumming went on and when the other guards had tired and stopped, still the Goanna went on, diligently, obediently, rhythmically beating Darky Gardiner with the pick handle.

And to his drumming there could be only one end.

DARKY GARDINER OPENED
his eyes and blinked. Raindrops fell on his face. He pushed his hands into the mud but they kept sinking. He was swimming in shit. He tried to get back to his feet. It was impossible. He was swimming in ever more shit. He tried to curl up to protect himself. It did no good and he only sank back into the foul hole. If he closed his eyes he was back there being beaten. If he opened his eyes he was drowning in shit, trying to stay afloat, trying to climb out. But it was so slippery and so dark and he could not find a hold, and when he did he had no strength to climb out. His body could not help him. It answered only to the kicks and blows that twisted him wherever they wished. He had no idea how long he had been there. Sometimes he thought it seemed forever. At other times it seemed no time at all. At one point he heard his mother. He was having difficulty breathing. He felt more soft raindrops, saw bright-red oil against the brown mud, heard his mother calling again, but it was unclear what she was saying, was she calling him home or was it the sea? There was a world and there was him and the thread joining the two was stretching and stretching, he was trying to pull himself up that thread, he was desperately trying to haul himself back home to where his mother was calling. He tried calling to her but his mind was running out of his mouth in a long, long river towards the sea. He blinked again. A monkey shrieked, its teeth white. Above the ridge, the smiling moon. Nothing held and he was sinking. He heard the sea. No, he said, or thought he said. No, not the sea. No! No!

THEY FOUND HIM
late that night. He was floating head-down in the benjo, the long, deep trench of rain-churned shit that served as the communal toilet. Somehow he had dragged himself there from the hospital, where they had carried his broken body when the beating had finally ended. It was presumed that, on squatting, he had lost his balance and toppled in. With no strength to pull himself out, he had drowned.

Always shit in the shitter, said Jimmy Bigelow, who volunteered to be lowered on a rope into the hole of shitty water to manhandle the corpse out. Rightio, he yelled to those holding the rope at the top when he was up to his thighs in the filth. Rightio!

And as he tied a second rope around the corpse, he spoke to it.

Oh, you fucking stupid bastard, Darky. Couldn’t you just have shat yourself on the bunk like every other dopey bugger? Couldn’t you just have folded their fucking blanket the right way out?

As they raised Darky Gardiner’s body, Jimmy Bigelow glimpsed it by the light of the kerosene lantern. Coated in maggots, it was something so oddly bruised, crushed, filthy, so dirty and broken, that for a moment he thought it could not be him.

They carried the body to the hospital. With a kerosene tin of water and his miner’s hands, so violent, so gentle, Sheephead Morton cleaned the filth off the blackened body and prepared it to be buried the next day.

It had been a day to die, not because it was a special day but because it wasn’t, and every day was a day to die now, and the only question that pressed on them, as to who might be next, had been answered. And the feeling of gratitude that it had been someone else gnawed in their guts, along with the hunger and the fear and the loneliness, until the question returned, refreshed, renewed, undeniable. And the only answer they could make to it was this: they had each other. For them, forever after, there could be no I or me, only we and us.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING
Rooster MacNeice rummaged deep in his kitbag for his copy of
Mein Kampf
to begin the day with his ten minutes of memorisation. He had woken in the middle of the night, harrowed by just one thought—that if he had stepped forward to say it had been his idea to hide from work, Gardiner would not have died. But, he reasoned, if he had done that, perhaps he would have died instead. Or not. Or maybe both of them would have died. He told himself it was impossible to know with the Japanese. He reassured himself that Gardiner was doomed in any case, as sergeant in charge of their gang, as a sick man.

When Rooster MacNeice had stood there in the cutting the day before, as the Japanese had demanded the guilty prisoners step forward, what had been loudest in his mind was not the Japanese roaring but Gardiner’s laughter after he had been caught with his hand around the eggshell. At the moment when Rooster could have stepped forward, all he could think of was the blackened duck egg Gardiner had stolen from him, the eggshell of which he had then used to mock him. The humiliation of the previous morning at Gardiner’s hands remained with him as a more painful emotion than the later memory of Gardiner being beaten. No, Rooster MacNeice had thought, he would not help such a man. But he had not meant to kill him.

No. I did not mean it, he muttered to himself. No, I did not.

As he sucked on his ginger beard, he could feel at the bottom of his kitbag his dixie, then the damp, cupped clapboards of his copy of
Mein Kampf
. Just as he was about to pull it out, his hand brushed against a dress uniform shirt he had somehow kept through all his travails. He always had it neatly folded and flat, but it was now bulging. He let go of his book, felt around and pulled out of his kitbag a duck egg. His lower lip dropped out of his mouth. His feeling of relief at finding the egg was almost immediately overtaken by a horror beyond words. He quickly placed the duck egg back in the kitbag as if it were some gigantic shame that needed to be hidden, and got out
Mein Kampf
.

Much as he tried, he could memorise none of it.

DECADES LATER, JIMMY
Bigelow would insist that his kids always fold their clothes so, fold ever outwards. He would open the drawers of the chest of drawers in their suburban weatherboard home in Hobart to make sure they were safe and the fold was out. He would never hit or smack them for not folding their clothes with the fold out. He would beg and plead, he would order and demand and, in the end, exasperated, he would refold and restack their clothes himself as they stood by nervously waiting. He would feel some nameless terror that was beyond him to explain—a confusion they too would carry with them for the rest of their lives that was both love and fear, that was beyond the drawers opening and closing, beyond their father’s frustration and mumbling. He knew they didn’t understand. But could they not
see
? How could they not
know
? It should have been so obvious what had to be understood. You could never know when everything might change—a mood, a decision, a blanket.

A life.

They knew none of it. They only knew that, whatever they did, he would never hurt them. At the very worst, he would throw them over his knee, bring his hand up and then hold it there, hovering, over their bottom. Sometimes they would feel him shaking through his knees and thighs. They would steal a look upwards and see his hand trembling, his eyes watery. How could they know that their father was desperately trying to protect them from the unexpected smash of a rifle butt into their soft child’s cheeks, to warn them of what horrors this hard world had ready for the unwary, the unwise and the unprepared—to prepare them for all those things for which no one could ever be readied? They knew only this one thing: that he would never hurt them.

As his body trembled back and forth through time, they knew what he meant when he said, Rightio, and suddenly threw them off his lap and back onto their feet. Averting his eyes, he would wave them away with an extended hand.

That’s it. Rightio? Just. Just put the fold out next time. Out. Always out. Rightio?

And they would run outside into the sun.

Perhaps, he wondered, he didn’t make the time or space he should for love. He fitted it in, and it flitted away. Perhaps he somehow chose—why, he couldn’t say—the predictable lines of work over love’s wild circling, the folding of a blanket over the unfolding of locked arms.

But sometimes it was just there: staring out an open window to see little Jodie look up and wave to him with the biggest smile, he was shocked to see love playing in a backyard of brown grass under a sprinkler’s diamond spill—shocked to know he had been lucky enough to live and know it, to love and be loved. And he would watch his children playing outside in the sun. Ashamed. Amazed. It was always sunny.

AND WHAT OF
the Line? With the dream of a global Japanese Empire lost to radioactive dust, the railway no longer had either purpose or support. The Japanese engineers and guards whose responsibility it was were imprisoned or repatriated, the slaves that had remained to maintain the Line were freed. Within weeks of the end of the war the Line began welcoming its own end. It was abandoned by the Thais, it was dismantled by the English, it was pulled up and sold off by tribespeople.

After a further time, the Line began to bend and warp. Its banks broke, its embankments and bridges washed away, and its cuttings filled in. Abandonment ceded to metamorphosis. Where once death stalked, life returned.

The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs.

The Line welcomed weeds into the embankments the slaves had carried as dirt and rock in their tankas, it welcomed termites into the fallen bridge timbers the slaves had cut and carried and raised, it welcomed rust over the railway irons the slaves had shouldered in long rows, it welcomed rot and ruin.

In the end all that was left was the heat and the clouds of rain, and insects and birds and animals and vegetation that neither knew nor cared. Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo.

Decades would pass. A few short sections would be cleared by those who thought memory mattered, transformed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs—tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites.

For the Line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was all for nothing, and of it nothing remained. People kept on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only.

And of that colossal ruin, boundless and buried, the lone and level jungle stretched far away. Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass.

This world of dew
is only a world of dew—and yet.

Issa

SCATTERED LIKE SESAME
seeds along the Shinjuku Rashomon’s ragged crest, the crows—startled by a rock thrown at them—rose up over a Tokyo yet to concrete over the ash of its past. Beneath their beating wings the city scarcely existed. Not so very long ago the same crows had thrived on the black corpses that had been so common in the fire-stormed city. Now they flew over a vast and charred, churned-up plain, in the weird warrens and labyrinths of which wandered widows and orphans, broken and crippled ex-soldiers, the mad and the dying and the despairing, their paths occasionally crossed by a jeep of American GIs. In that bitter winter of 1946 reconstruction amounted to little more than tents, lean-tos and tin shelters, in which the more fortunate huddled, while the rest made do with the subways, railway stations or burrows and caves in the rubble.

The man who had thrown the rock, Tenji Nakamura, formerly a major in the Imperial Japanese Army’s 2nd Railway Regiment, was sheltering from the bitter rain in an erratic archway made of the fallen beams and debris of fire-bombed buildings that had, by chance destruction and some judicious burrowing, formed over a back street. As though this pile of rubble was a grand gate to their great city, those locals who had to pass through this chaotic tunnel to and from the devastated pleasure district of Shinjuku called it the Shinjuku Rashomon. Foxes, rats, whores and thieves were the Shinjuku Rashomon’s most common inhabitants, living in its burrows, nests and the half-collapsed rooms. Mount Fuji, which Nakamura could glimpse even from this ramshackle gateway, again stood above their world, as it had a century and a half before for the great Hokusai to paint, once more fully visible, ever-changing and immutable, still and immortal.