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.
35
On 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.
When they considered they had enough grain, they climbed through the wire again and joined Domen, who still held the carcass upwards by its hind legs. Then they crossed the sheep pasture and dealt with further wire and so began to ascend their ridge, where their cooking fire should surely serve as a beacon for their enemies.
They placed the grain on a long stone, and Hirano and Omura pounded it with alternate blows of rocks, and threatened each other with vengeanc
e if either hit his companion’s thumb. Goda descended from his high status and gathered wood, which was not hard with these abnormal trees that shed branches and bark summer and winter and, like everything else here, without reason. He piled the tinder branches and interspersed them with sheets and twists of bark and began the fire. “If it brings a search party in,” he dared to say to his set of diehards, “I hope it’s not before the lamb’s cooked.”
The wood burned fast and settled to the earth, radiating a robust heat that stung his eyes with its pungent smoke even as the cold of the day bit at his back. They should perhaps keep this blaze going later, after dark, when fire glow could be seen an even further distance than by day. They put the ground-up grain on a flat stone on top of the coals and waited for it to roast. Then, with one sheet of bark, they scraped the cracked wheat off its rudimentary dish of rock onto another platterlike sheet. They sat around this, reaching in and eating the wheat one ear at a time, while their nostrils flared at the acute savor of the lamb haunch Domen was roasting and turning now and then on the glowing bed of eucalyptus tree coals. There was no time, sadly, Domen apologized, to dig a pit and set up a spit, but the lamb would be good even with ash on it.
Lamb was a questionable dish—to prepare it like this was barbarous—but Goda and the others were willing to excuse the indelicacy of this last meal. They would be welcomed by the spirits of men who had—in their last campaigns—eaten snakes and insects and even human flesh for want of a supply line.
When the haunch was ready, Domen, yelping at the heat of the joint, hauled it onto a wide basin of stone. They all behaved with less elegance now, and tried to tear the meat too early, and laughed, and shook the burn out of their fingers. Domen began to cut the meat in long strips from the bone, and to give one to each of his comrades, but they still found it hot, moving it from hand to hand—as if in a day’s time having a blister would matter one way or another.
Goda asked Domen to keep the fire up as they gorged themselves. The meal passed, the ultras were surfeited, and no soldiers arrived. They drank from a canteen one of them had somehow decided to bring. Torpor set in. Goda watched a sated Isao stretch himself by the fire. Soon he was asleep.
“Good way to spend the afternoon, Sergeant,” Domen suggested, nodding at Isao, after Goda and the others had thanked him for the banquet.
Goda watched the fine-featured Isao, the mask of his strict young soul, as his breathing became that of tranquil sleep. It was peculiar, but also somehow rational, to rest before death. Goda asked Hirano and Omura to heap more wood on the fire, for the sun was beginning its descent.
• • •
Goda awoke in late afternoon. He was cold and needed to shit. Like all of them, he was surprised and even alarmed by how Gawell Camp life had softened him. Shivering, he went behind one of the trees. He suddenly knew this was one of those fitful hours when the Chinese came to haunt him. Without knowing it, he was like Aoki in accepting that his self-destruction must atone for them as well. By day he deserved his death for failing ancestors and his emperor. But in odd hours the Chinese intervened between him and the cleanliness of all that. No one expressed repentance for China. It was left unsaid, and—in terms of conquest—rightly so. For it could be argued, when seen with the eye of a god, that these punishments were required as a tribute paid to history.
When he was finished, he wiped himself clean with forest debris. He rubbed his hand on the rough bark of the tree and got out his rag and went to the canteen, emptying some water on the cloth. Then he took the eucalyptus leaves and split them open to rub their pungency on his fingers. From their strong vapor, tears stung his lids but very correctly refused to fall. He was a little cheered to think that hygiene did not matter as much as the actual indignity of shitty hands. He was certain he did not have enough time left to develop gastroenteritis.
In China they had rounded up hiding soldiers, including ones who had changed into street clothes and pleaded they had never served, and they’d tied them together in batches of fifty and shot into the tethered mass of curs—bad soldiers from a crumbling army. This was not an act for which Goda accepted any guilt. He would have expected the same if he’d been them.
But things he had done with liquor in him were distorted in his memory and shivered apart like a painting on a vase, a very large one that is dropped and shatters, so that only a fragment of the tale reproduced on the glaze can be seen. Officers, severe in battle, had quite rightly given their soldiers free play in captured cities, as a motive for men to capture more cities still, and to allow them to prove their ruthlessness to the enemy.
But had he really selected a quaking Chinese porter, a stunted, ageless little man, and loaded him up with scrolls and silk robes and a chest of drawers and mats, and then had him carry them all to the regimental trucks—where they would never have fitted anyhow? And when this stunted man had successfully delivered the load, had he really, in the madness of plum brandy and eminent power, plunged his bayonet up under the little man’s ribs and lifted him off his feet with it, exulting in the applause of fellow soldiers and in the cascade of the Chinese heart’s blood flowing down over him? Had he actually and in the fullness of fact been the first to find a woman in a shop and drag her away from the door into the light to see that she was handsome, and then covered her mouth and flooded her with the force of their military triumph? And when other men arrived—figures in his crazed dreams, shards from his shattered urn—had one soldier, perhaps the eighth, distracted by the screaming of her baby indoors, gone and dealt with it at the cost of a last animal child scream at which none of them was shocked? Kill the enemy in the womb, and if that is not possible, then kill it in its cradle. It was her face, flat but well made, that remained through all the shattering fumes of the plundered liquor. Features seen in the heat of inebriation he remembered better than he did the features of those to whom he was connected by blood and affection. It was this woman and her infant’s ghost who waited also in the shadow world. She, too, must be appeased.
Now, leaning against a tree trunk, he surrendered his crimes up to the gods, under whose aegis he had not extended pity. For this was the war of the world, and he had been a force in it, an arm of the warrior god, in whose name he had been blessed before taking to the transports sailing from Rabaul. His crimes were his crimes but were also the harsh-edged whispers and the declarations of the gods. On these grounds he suppressed his occasional pulses of torment.
Above them, a search plane with the enemy’s rondelles on its wings appeared. What did it think of the smoke of their fire? They were fully woken by its engine and waved and roared at it, but the pilot seemed blind to them. When the plane passed, it passed like the day’s last offer of extinction.
So it was clear, at last, they had better stop dallying. Hirano, who wished to wash before the end, went downhill looking for fresh water. He came back up and reported a stream down there. They went down and stripped naked. When they entered the water it took their breath. Each washed himself with his rag or undershirt.
They emerged from the water and put their loincloths on again. Isao was a handsome kid, Goda noticed academically, and there was still a sort of unsullied quality to him despite all his fervor. He had done barely more than garrison duty, supervising native bearers. His sins were few. The erection that had just appeared was probably an unexpected reaction to nakedness, the stinging water, a remembered girl. Others found the innocence of the thing was nearly an affront.
“Someone pull him off!” said Domen, the country boy. Goda stared at him for debasing the moment.
Back up on the ridge, they saw the countryside was still vacant and thus even more so the fiasco could not be permitted to continue. The day was going. The young men knelt to compose themselves and recite a final prayer. While still standing, Goda mentally recited what he had been taught at home.
“For heaven and earth are yet separated, and the purer and clearer part has not yet lifted from the squalid and fleshly part. But the br
ave passage of a soul will unite them. Thereafter a man becomes a venerated ancestor . . .”
Omura stood up and removed his prepared belt and asked if they would help him.
“Are you sure you want to do this right now?” asked Isao. “You might just be being impetuous.”
“Well, I can be pretty impetuous,” Omura admitted, as he finished putting on his uniform. “But not in this case.” Beneath a thick branch of a river gum, Hirano and Domen lifted him, one leg each, and he tied the belt to the branch and knotted it hard. Then he adjusted the buckle.
“Are you ready?” asked Hirano.
“Yes, let me go at the count of three. And after a few more seconds, haul on my legs.” That was how it was done. Hirano and Domen jumped aside. Omura kicked in the air. Hirano and Domen pulled on his legs with sudden and ferocious intent and heard the neck go. They kept pulling as if to squeeze the soul from him and then let him hang.
And so Omura was safe, had led the way as an aviator should, and certified their own purpose.
Hirano, panting a little, asked, “Me next, Senior Sergeant?” The river gum was abundant with branches, and Hirano chose one on the far side of the tree from Omura. Isao joined Domen in lifting Hirano so he could tie and adjust his belt exactly as Omura had.
“When I say ‘Yes,’ ” he told them, and then took only a second to say it. This time the crack was instantaneous with the fall, but they dragged and dragged on him until they were certain his spirit must have vacated him.
Domen then came back to the knife with which he’d killed the sheep, bowed to Goda, and knelt and drove it into himself, all without speaking, making of it a private act.
“Well now, my young friend?” Goda asked Isao amidst the dangling bodies and fallen Domen.