Томас Кенэлли: The Widow and Her Hero

Not a lifetime of ambitious imagining, dreams, obsession and terror has managed to recreate that journey definitively for me. Hidaka says he heard from the guards that the men sang. Not hymns. They just sang. Studiedly casual songs. There’s a track winding back to an old fashioned shack … or Coming in on a wing and a prayer , a hit of the time – I know Leo liked that. Though we’ve one engine gone/ we can still carry on/ coming in on a wing and a prayer.

The guards got them off their bus, and they stood on waste ground, and since they were not blindfolded they must have been able to see other burial mounds around the place, and certainly would have seen three freshly dug pits. So, their deaths became established in their minds. There was a considerable crowd of Japanese officers and men there, General Okimasa and at least two of the judges. The prison governor of Outram Road told them in English that they were to be beheaded. According to Hidaka, he himself was not there, he had hidden by the cars on the road, but he claimed he saw through the stunted trees that Leo and the others had now been released from their bonds and were smoking cigarettes, and shaking hands. I hope he’s telling the truth.

He probably is, because even Hidaka doesn’t pretend it was nice. He came close to the site, he fled, he came back again. Three at a time, the men were made to kneel, one at either pit. They were offered blindfolds, but some did not take it.

It is all very well for men to strut with swords and invoke Bushido, as it is all very well for mass-murdering generals to invoke chivalry amongst the shrapnel and napalm. But Bushido, like chivalry, required purity of heart and was beyond the reach of most narrow men. The NCOs of Judicial Section might each have owned a sword, but they had debased its meaning and its edge by beating and executing too many prisoners, and following that with too epicene a life, good Singapore food, blunting drafts of liquor. Had they been true warriors of ascetic and muscular leaning, the beheadings would not have been botched. Even Hidaka says it took half an hour, with breaks in between, while the fat judicial sergeants recovered their stability and their breath, and again took up their lean swords in their thick and inefficient hands. When the thing was done, the body of my beloved lay gracelessly and headless in its pit. Having been promised a death fit for heroes he was given a death barely fit for oxen. I know it. After the executions, Korean witnesses told the War Crimes investigators, the NCOs in the squad room at Outram Road teased Judicial Sergeant Abukara about his messy work during the beheadings. Abukara would later suicide, impaling himself on his sword to avoid punishment for his Outram Road brutalities.

But enough. Enough now.

I sit where I like to sit in the mornings, having crossed the minefield of carpet edges and chair legs which is my living room to reach the sunroom and look out my window through the august North Head to the Pacific which connects us to all peoples and all cultures. There is an absolute purity out there that transcends the slogans: King and Country, Banzai, Blood and Fatherland, Semper Fidelis, Who Dares Wins . These are the mere trellises upon which men uncertain about their weakness grow their peculiar and imperfect intentions. Doucette and Rufus and the incompetent NCOs who struck the head from my husband’s body were all in the same game. The truth is, heroism and its codes take you only so far, as it took Eddie Frampton only so far, and then he bit the capsule.

I didn’t want a hero. A person is never married to a hero – the heroic pose is not designed for ultimate domesticity. Ulysses on his return found not a wife to charm but suitors to fight. Nothing is learned, and everything is learned.

And at last Judicial Sergeant Abukara got it right, and Leo was liberated.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by Thomas Keneally

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3869-0

Distributed in 2017 by Open Road Distribution

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New York, NY 10038

www.openroadmedia.com

‘Keneally may have done something better, but it’s hard to believe… It is a love story, a war story, a study of grief and heroism… daringly and beautifully structured’ Allan Massie, Scotsman

‘Beautifully written… a timely and disquieting book from a master storyteller’ Joseph O’Connor, Irish Times

‘A strong human story in which the gap between male and female perceptions of the world yawns gapingly wide. The courtship between Grace and Leo, in the prim and proper 1940s, is beautifully done: volcanic passions lurking beneath simple words and gestures’ David Robson, Sunday Telegraph

‘Poignant and touching and wonderfully written’ Angela Cooke, Daily Express

‘A haunting, elegiac work that reveals universal truths about the horrors of warfare… Grace’s grief and confused desire for the truth are beautifully judged, and her occasional explosions of bitterness utterly believable’ Will Gore, Time Out

‘A beautifully written, deeply moving work that… has the pace and verve of a thriller. Keneally’s back catalogue is extensive and impressive, but this book must rank among the finest in that body of work.’ Barclay McBain, Herald (Scotland)

‘Keneally at his best, telling a story of political and personal betrayal, interweaving fact and fiction while teasing out the truth and posing many questions about war to which there are no easy answers.’ Good Book Guide

‘More completely than in Schindler’s Ark , his best known book, Keneally merges historical veracity with psychologically convincing fiction… This is a dignified and thoughtful account of a generation obliged to be valiant.’ Charlotte Moore, Spectator

‘His best in many years… accomplished and highly readable’ Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald

Thomas Keneally began his writing career in 1964 and has published twenty-five novels since. They include Schindler’s Ark , which won the Booker Prize in 1982 and was subsequently made into the film Schindler’s List , and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Confederates and Gossip from the Forest , each of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written several works of non-fiction, including his latest, Commonwealth of Thieves . He is married with two daughters and lives in Sydney.