David Malouf - The Great World

Some fellows said no, it couldn’t be. It wouldn’t end. If it did the Japs had orders to kill the lot of them. They knew too much of what had gone on. They would be herded into the tunnels and machine-gunned or walled up there. That sort of talk, Digger argued, was madness. They couldn’t have got this far, come through so much, those hundred and eighty-nine days for instance, to be gunned down like dogs.

He was used to the wild speculations that spread among them. For years now they had been living on them. Like the great sea battle they had got so excited about just after they arrived in Thailand, which had raged for days and days with terrible casualties and would certainly now bring an armistice. Off the north coast of Western Australia, that was supposed to have been, near Broome; the whole Jap navy done for. Only it must have taken place nowhere at all, or in some bloke’s head, because nothing more was heard of it.

Sydney was wiped out by incendiary bombs. The Japs were at Coff’s Harbour, and Menzies, pig-iron Bob, had flown to Manila to sue for peace. That was another bit of news. What had come of that?

The Japs had set up a puppet government at Townsville. Artie Fadden was at the head of it. Artie Fadden!

The Russians had moved into Manchuria. The Yanks had invaded Japan from mainland China and were in the suburbs of Tokyo. It was a matter of days now — two weeks at the most.

This phantom war, whose triumphs and defeats they clung to because their lives depended on it, would in some ways remain more vivid to them than the real one, when at last they learned of it; or they would go on confusing the two, uncertain which was which.

It was an odd thing to have lived and died a little in a history that had never actually occurred; to have survived, as some of them had, on the bit of hope they had been given by the fall of Yokohama at Christmas 1943, or succumbed, as others did, in the gloom that descended when a few weeks later Churchill died and New Zealand surrendered, both on the same day.

Occasionally, by accident, some fact out of a quite different set of occurrences would get through to them and they would be utterly bamboozled. What were the Japs doing in New Guinea if the Americans were already swarming over the home islands?

They lived off rumour, and rumour, often enough, sprang out of some man’s sleep. So what could you believe?

This latest thing, for instance, that it was already over. Best to take it with a grain of salt — that was Digger’s view. Let it get your hopes up, if that’s what you needed, but don’t put money on it.

Still, it affected them as everything did, and in different ways.

Some men who had hung on till now, bad cases of malnutrition or beriberi, just gave up and died. It was good news as often as not that finished a man.

Others seemed dazed. The prospect of going home again scared them. They couldn’t imagine how they could ever settle to it. How they could just walk around the streets and pretend to be normal, look women in the eye again after what they had done and seen, ride on trams, sit at a table with a white cloth, and control their hands and just slowly eat. It was the little things that scared them. The big things you could hide in. It was little ones that gave a man away.

Vic was one who thought like this. The more the rumours spread and the closer it got, the more fiercely he rejected the possibility.

‘They’re fooling themselves,’ he told Digger. ‘They’re mugs.’ He was vehement about it. The optimism of some people infuriated him.

‘We’ve heard all this before. It won’t end . Not like this, it won’t. It can’t end.’

The truth was he didn’t want it to, that’s what Digger thought. He’s a difficult cuss. You never knew which way he was going to jump — he didn’t himself half the time.

They began to draw apart now that they no longer needed one another. Digger shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, if that’s what he wants.’

Vic kept away from Doug too, and from all their former mates; turned sulky, drew into himself.

‘He’s a bastard. I knew that all along,’ Digger told himself, but was hurt just the same. He owed a lot to this fellow. His life, maybe. Certainly a leg. These were things that Digger could not easily forget. There were times, up there, when they might have known all there was to know about one another, things you’d never find out about a man, never have to, in the ordinary run of things. It meant something, that. But back here, at the edge of normality, these were matters that could not be alluded to.

‘He’s ashamed of all that,’ Digger thought. ‘It’s something he doesn’t want to know about.’

What surprised him was that Vic seemed closer to breaking down now than in any of their worst moments in Thailand.

It was time that troubled Vic. The opening up of a line into the future would take him back now into the life he left four years ago.

So long as he had been able to hold a view of things in which time was just moments, then days, each one destroying itself in the next; so long, that is, as it was a process without sequence, he could face himself and hang on. Living was vertical. You stood up new in each moment of it, and if you were strong, and luck was with you, you got from one moment to the next. It was all moments and leaps. But now he had to take on again the notion of a self that was continuous, that belonged to the past and was to have a life again in the future. That’s what scared him — the need to carry forward into the ordinariness that was coming a view of time, and of your whole life in it, that he had had to suppress in himself simply to stay alive.

He was twenty-two, just turned. Years, he would have, if the vision that had come to him, back there, was a true one, and his body told him it was.

He had done better than some others. Digger had lost all his teeth. He was gummy. Doug had lost an arm. He himself looked whole but felt that he had lost everything.

He had had no word from the Warrenders for more than two years. They had written often in the early days, Pa had anyway, and there was always an added word or two from the girls or Ma, but they had had no mail at all in Thailand, and he had got nothing in the hand-outs since they got to Malaya.

In his years with the Warrenders he had never spoken of the life he had known before he came to them, of his parents and all that world up the coast. He had buried that, kept it to himself.

Of course Pa had got a glimpse of it. But then Pa, amazingly, had known his father, though he couldn’t imagine what he had known. Pa, understanding by instinct how he might feel about it, and in accordance with his own manly principles, had never alluded to it. So he had kept all that to himself, hoarding it up in the most secret part of him as a thing he would not speak of or let anyone see.

He would not speak of this either, once it was over; since it was pretty certain now that it soon would be. He would push it deep down into himself, face it on his own, and deny, if asked, that he had ever been here: ‘No, mate — not me .’

That’s how it would be for him, and how it had to be. Strange? Is that strange? It’s the way I am .

Maybe he wouldn’t go back at all, that’s what he had begun to think. He was too changed. He didn’t want them to see ( them least of all) what had been done to him, and he knew only too well what that was because he could see it in others. It would kill him if he had to see himself through their eyes. Lucille’s for instance.

He had (he couldn’t help it) a kind of contempt for what he had become that was the last resort of his wounded pride. The mere sight of other men sickened him. Their necks all vein and gristle, the tottering walk they had, like old blokes you saw going home just on closing time with a bottle of cheap plonk in a brown-paper bag; the silly, hopeful chatter they went in for, the rumours, the schemes — chicken farms were what they were all for running when they got back; most of all the smell they carried, which wasn’t just sweat or shit or green vomit but of what four years of slavery had done to them, sickness of the spirit. It marked you forever, that. There was no way you could get rid of it.