David Malouf - The Great World

He and Mac had crossed for the last time at the loading point. Mac had been next in line behind Vic, and as he took the load on his neck and tottered past he had caught the look Mac flashed him, just the tail of it, through the sweat and his lank hair which was streaming.

It was nothing special. One of those little gestures of easy, affectionate contact that keep you going, that’s all: that make the ground firmer, that’s all. But in that moment they had been just twenty, maybe thirty seconds away from it. Would he have seen something if he had been more alert? That’s what stumped him. Mac was just thirty seconds from death. They had been looking straight into one another’s eyes.

Fifty feet further on, trotting now with his neck bowed under the weight of the sack, he had heard a ruckus and turned awkwardly on one foot to see what it was.

It was Vic. He had known that immediately. Who else would it be? A sack had burst, and figures were struggling in a storm of white, one of them, from the bulky shape of him, a guard.

Could he have glimpsed Mac’s face then, in the confusion of the moment, through the cloud of floury dust? He thought he had; the image of it was so clear in his head.

A face wiped of all expression is what he saw. Or maybe that was just the flour Mac had been showered with in the exploding storm. But what Digger thought he saw was the look that might come over a man who is on the brink of extinction, and knows it, and has already let the knowledge of it possess and change him. An impersonal look of neither panic nor despair; which was the certainty of his own death passing physically from head to foot through him, a kind of pallor, and changing him as it went.

It was Mac’s sad-faced mournful look, as Doug would have put it, which they had seen him wear on a thousand occasions, only raised now to the highest pitch, so that everything that was personal in it was gone, and yet it was utterly his own look that you would have known anywhere.

Had he really seen that, or was it what his mind had pictured to fill some need of its own? He could never be certain now. But as time went on the image stayed clear, if anything, grew sharper. So in the end it was what he might never have seen at all that meant most to him.

He also had the pile of letters Mac had left him. When, months later, they were organised into forces and sent to Thailand, the letters went with him.

THEY WERE AT a place called Hintock River Camp, one of dozens of such work-camps that stretched for three hundred miles between the Malay and the Burmese borders. The map of it was not clear to them, because their knowledge of these countries was limited to the patch of jungle that shut them in, and because the line they were on was as yet an imaginary one.

It ran in a provisional fashion from Bangkok to Rangoon, and their job, under the direction of a Japanese engineer and several thousand Japanese and Korean guards, was to make it real: to bring it into existence by laying it down, in the form of rails and sleepers, through mountain passes, across rivers, and even, when the line met them, through walls of rock. Eventually all the bits of it would link up. Till then, they were concerned only with their own section, with bamboo, rock, rain and the rivers of mud it created, the individual temperament of their guards, the hours of work the Japs demanded of them (which kept increasing), the length of rail the authorities decided should be laid each day or the length of tunnel completed, and their own dwindling strength. The limits of their world were the twenty or so attap huts that made each encampment — one of which was set apart as a hospital, or rather, a place for the dying — and the site, off in the jungle, where their daily torment took place.

They had come up here from the railhead at the Malayan border in a series of night marches, since it was too hot to move by day, and had passed many such camps, some better than the one they were in, one or two of them a lot worse. These camps either had native names like Nakam Patam, Kanburi, Nan Tok, or they had been given the sort of name you might have used for a creek or a camping spot at home: Rin Tin Tin Camp, Whalemeat Camp. One, however, was called Cholera Camp.

The work was killing. So was the heat. So, once they started, were the rains.

Back where they came from they had belonged, even the slowest country boy among them, to a world of machines. Learning to drive was the second goal of manhood — the first for some. Fooling about under trucks and cars, tinkering with motorbikes and boat engines, rigging up crystal sets — all this had become second nature to them, a form of dream-work in which they recognised (or their hands did) an extension of their own brains. It had created between them and the machines they cared for a kind of communion that was different from the one they shared with cattle and horses, but not significantly so. For most of them machines were as essential to the world they moved in as rocks or trees. Tractors, combine harvesters, steamrollers, cranes — even the tamest pen-pusher among them had dawdled at a street corner to look over the wire in front of a building site to see the big steamhammers at work driving piles. It had changed their vision of themselves. Once you have learned certain skills, and taken them into yourself, you are a new species. There’s no way back.

Well, that was the theory.

Only they found themselves now in a place, and with a job in hand, that made nothing of all that. It might never have been. They had fallen out of that world. Muscle and bone, that was all they had to work with now. An eight-pound hammer, a length of steel, and whatever innovative technology they could come up with on the spot for breaking stone.

Some of these men had been storemen and book-keepers. Others were shearers, lawyers’ clerks, wine-tasters, bootmakers, plumbers’ mates, or had travelled in kitchenware or ladies’ lingerie. They had had spelling drummed into them, the thirteen-times table, avoirdupois and troy weight. ‘You’ll need this one day, son. That’s why I’m caning you,’ a lady teacher had told more than one of them, when, after getting up at four-thirty to milk a herd, they had dozed off at their desk. They were all labourers now. Someone else would do the calculations. So much for Mental! The number of inches a pair of drillers, working closely together with hammer and steel, could drive through sheer rock in ten or twelve hours a day. The amount of rubble, so many cubic feet, that could be loaded, lifted and borne by a man who had once weighed thirteen stone, now weighed eight and was two days out of a bout of malaria. All this to be balanced precisely against the smallest amount of rice a man could work on before he was no longer worth feeding and could be scrapped.

The work was killing. So was the heat. So, once they started, were the rains. But they also suffered from amoebic dysentery, malaria, including the cardiac variety, typhoid, beriberi, pellagra and cholera.

The doctors among them diagnosed these diseases, but that didn’t help because they had none of the medicines they needed to cure them, and it didn’t help a man to know that the disease he was dying of was pellagra, any more than it helped to know that the place he was dying in was called Sonkurai. The name, however exotic, in no way matched the extraordinary world his body had now entered, or the things it got up to, as if what it had discovered up here was a freedom to go crazy in any way it pleased.

Only one thing set them apart from the other coolies who for centuries had done this sort of work for one empire and then the next. They knew what it was they were constructing because it belonged to the world they came from: the future.