David Malouf - The Great World

Whatever indignities that fellow’s people might have suffered — mine too, Digger thought — at the hands of bosses or schoolteachers or bank managers or ladies, all those who had the power to humiliate or deny, there was always this last shred of dignity to chew on: I’m not a coolie, I can choose. Whatever you could be deprived of, by bad luck or injustice or the rough contrariety of things, there was this one last thing that could not be taken. That’s what they had believed. Only they knew differently now. It could be taken just like that. Easy.

That fellow would be here somewhere, in one of the other camps up or down the line; if he hadn’t been clubbed or kicked to death by one of the Koreans, or fallen on one of the murderous night marches that had brought them here from the rail-head at the Thai border, or succumbed to beriberi or dysentery, or to cerebral malaria, or died of blood poisoning or gangrene from an ulcer; or, like so many of the youngest among them, simply from exhaustion and despair. Wearing a lap-lap and filthy shorts, barefoot, covered in sores, he would be stooping to take the basket on his back, pouring with sweat and chewing on the bitterness of it.

‘This,’ Digger said to no one in particular, to the part of himself that stood apart a little and observed from a distance still, ‘is what happened to us in the world. Maybe it wasn’t meant to. It was meant for those others, those coolies. It happened to them too, and now it’s happened to us. So what do you make of that?’

It was part of an argument he had been having, for weeks now, with Doug; except that it seldom got put into more than a few words. They were too exhausted to argue. But the words went on arguing in their heads, and some of it got across; they got the drift of it. It was an argument, really, that Mac ought to have been making. He would have done it better. Digger was doing it for him, the best he could.

There were fellows now who had begun to take a religious view — that was understandable, Digger could see that — and one of them, astonishingly, after he came through the beriberi, was Doug.

They could hardly believe it at first. They thought he was putting it on and making a mock. But he was dead serious. In the horror of what was happening to them, some teaching had come back to him out of his hellfire youth. Some grim Presbyterian view that had been opened up in his head in the days before he asserted himself and said ‘Stuff it’ and refused to go to church — half-heard on hot Sunday mornings while he was gazing out a window, his mind a slingshot loosing itself after a sparrow, or his own dick, hard as iron, working its way up a girl’s thigh — struck him now, ten years later, as an incontrovertible truth. ‘Look about you, lad, and mock if you can. Isn’t this what they were trying to make you see? Isn’t it?’

‘Isn’t it what ?’ Digger wanted to know. ‘Hell? Is that what you think it is?’

He thought of his father and those Sundays when they had been out on the line. Hell was just a name people had for the worst thing they could think of, the worst thing that could ever happen to them. Well, it happens, that’s all. Nobody deserves what they get. You better believe that, son, because every other sort of belief is madness. We don’t deserve this. Nobody does. We haven’t done anything that bad, even the worst of us, even you, Douggy, you old bastard! But it’s what we’ve got. Thailand is just a place. Some people spend their whole lives here. It’s normal. These coolies, for instance. For them it’s normal, it’s all they’ll ever have — not for any sin they’ve committed. It rains a lot, that’s all. The jungle’s as thick as a wall. Things rot. Flies breed maggots in everything. Us too, if we get a bit of a nick. We weren’t meant to be here, but we are. Eight hours a day and time off for smokos — that’s one sort of justice, a pretty rough one; but it’s not for everyone, and it’s not for us now either, maybe ever again. Oh, it’s unfair all right. But who ever said it would be fair? And who can you complain to, anyhow?

‘I’m not complaining,’ Doug said.

‘But you should be,’ Digger told him fiercely. He hated to see Doug, of all people, so meek.

Doug just looked at him, half-smiling, and it was true, Digger had hanged himself on his own argument.

But he stuck to it just the same. He had to.

It was so hard to keep your head in all this. It was a kind of madness, but there was a thread of sanity in it, there had to be; in all the twists and turns, a clear straight line into life. He was determined to hang on to it. Sometimes he could.

Later, half-asleep, he sat in the stink of himself and spooned up gruel. He had something fresh to brood over. Coming back from the embankment he had stepped on a thorn. It would fester, blow up and ulcerate. Bound to. That was enough to worry anyone.

Down on the track a new lot were passing, you could hear their feet scuffing the leaves; and a new rumour was being passed among them. ‘Cholera. They’re Tamils. They’ll be carrying cholera!’ That whisper on the track.

‘As if we didn’t have enough on our plate already,’ Digger thought bitterly, using a phrase that had lost all meaning up here.

But what really worried him, right now, was his foot. Each time he got up in the dark and trotted to the borehole (four or five times it was, in less than an hour) he could hear them, still passing. Thousands, it must be.

Cholera wasn’t just bad, it was the worst. They had seen a bit of it in one of the camps on the way up and had been eager to get out and away. As if they didn’t have –

But immediately his foot touched the ground his mind went there , to the immediate sore place where the thorn had gone in, and worried and worried.

It was a new eye, this opening in his flesh, and had its own point of view. Darkness was what it was obsessed with. It loved the dark. When he lay down and tried to sleep again he saw nothing but what it saw: the road it would take, dragging the rest of him (what was left of him) into bruise-blackness, till his whole body began to drink darkness from the hungry mouth that had opened there — mouth or eye, whichever way you saw it, both hungry for something other than the flesh, but also for the flesh.

The trouble is, he thought, they never tell you anything that’s of any real use. Even the books. Even the great ones. You have to learn it for yourself, just as it comes.

Well, he was learning all right; so were they all. Some of it their bellies were teaching them; like how little a man can live on and still drag himself from one day to the next. The history of empires, that lesson was, and what it costs to build them. Top grades he had been getting. Now it was his foot that was beginning to instruct him. God knows what lesson that would be.

It was swelling with the illuminating darkness of an ultimate wisdom . First principles. The original chemistry of things. Flashing it throb after throb to the furthest galaxies at the limits of his system. ‘This is how it starts,’ he thought, ‘this is genesis. This is the truth now, spreading fast, beginning as just a pinprick and eating its way through flesh to the very bone. Nothing abstract about this. You can see it if you want, you can scoop it out with a hot spoon. That’s real enough surely for any man.’

TO TOP IT all they gave them the glass-rod test and Digger was discovered, along with about eighty others, to be a cholera carrier. Sent to the isolation ward across the yard, he discovered a little deeper hell inside the larger one. It had been there all the time but he had known nothing of it. New cases were brought in each day, and in the morning, two or three of them, sometimes more, would be dead. Fellows who only hours before had been able to whisper at least, with a fleshy tongue and lips, would be mummies, their skin as dry and yellow on their bones as if they had been laid out like that for centuries. Dried-up twigs, their fingers were. Their feet were wood. You could only tell one man from another by the tag he wore.