Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally

this reality or the imperative duty it placed on him; as if he had not uttered it before; as if his old-soldier idea of waiting for the end in whatever social and physical comfort he could manage made his principles shaky. He felt like saying to Hirano, “Don’t glare at me, Private. I’ve got it under control.” But they knew he had talked it all over with taciturn Goda, as if there were anything to discuss, as if there were some softer, unwise option the two older men would settle on. In fact, Goda had similar plans as Aoki for dealing with theunwelcome letters. That was to answer every one of them in terms that denied the son’s or husband’s presence there, to cancel a clan’s cheap hope but reaffirm its more substantial honor. That was in the end the best thing.
    Nevski was not surprised that the letter should be unwelcome. The nihilism of Compound C had been clear from the beginning, even if it did seem to take Abercare and Suttor by surprise every time. Each man was given Red Cross postcards when he was brought to Gawell, according to Article 36 of the Geneva Convention, to allow him to send his family the news of his capture and state of health by ticking certain boxes. In the middle of the previous winter Serge Nevski had told Major Suttor that all these postcards were falsely addressed, to streets and towns that he knew, from his Japanese gazetteer, were fictional. They included addresses such as “Triumphant Monkey Hole in the Wall” and “Shitdrip Alley.”
    Abercare asked headquarters whether Sergeant Nevski should himself answer the inquirers and tell them the truth. Headquarters, however, declared that this might have unexpected results—that accusations could come back that mail from Japan had been tampered with.
    There were a few prisoners, as Nevski and Suttor discovered, who managed to keep their letters and did reply to them: one was exotically a Presbyterian and a widower. There were a handful who wrote letters secretly and slipped them to guards. Nevski would read the pathetic confessions of such men. “I am a prisoner and alive, and was captured all unknowing while suffering from wounds/beriberi/malaria/scrub typhus.”
    It was rare, though, that a clandestine message emerged from Compound C. Nevski did not send on the false letters written by Aoki and other hut commanders. He let them accumulate in his office. One misty Tuesday when he needed to go to town to buy a birthday present for an émigré friend working in Sydney, he took the letters with him and climbed through barbed wire into someone’s paddock,and burned them under a gray sky, beneath which the smoke of these incinerated lies could be mistaken for a mere vapor. For Nevski the ashes were a small sacrifice to honor those earnest kin still seeking their lost ones. With the hut commanders’ lies consumed, modest and unsated faith could go on keeping its corner at Japanese hearths.

8
    M ajor Suttor wrote chiefly in the evenings in his small living room, off his bedroom, in the officers’ quarters within the garrison lines of Gawell Camp. On still nights or when the wind was right, he could often hear the music from the Japanese and Italian compounds. The Japanese were closer and he had become accustomed to the more plaintive airs, suited to life behind wire, that they often played. Instruments had come to Compound C by way of a Japanese cultural group that had been formed in Sydney before the war. There was a sort of guitar, a rectangular board with a set of strings stretched across it. There was also a haunting flute, a sinister-sounding drum, a kind of lute, bamboo pipes, and a bugle. Not all was plaintive. Some of the music from Compound C could sound very jazzy—or jazu, the prisoners called it—but tending to the blues. They played songs you could tell were more ancient, too, some of them doleful, and these, to Suttor’s ear, emerged like an unintended