Read Online Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally - Free Book Online Page B

think of women? You’re not dealing with ghosts here yet. You’re dealing with men with cocks. Have you seen them hang round that balladeer character Sakura, the one they call Blossom? Do you think that’s because his costumes are so well made?”
    Sakura was a sapper, and a professional female impersonator accordingto the comic-erotic tradition. He, or as the men usually said, “she,” was a great favorite as a performer, and in other ways, in Compound C.
    â€œSo just stop glowering,” Aoki continued, “and live until it’s time to die. They haven’t had enough provocation to turn on us yet. The savage spirit is there in them, and events will bring it out in the end.”

5
    A week after the recalcitrant Japanese had made a show of shoveling gravel, Alice watched as a truck delivered Duncan’s Italian to the Hermans. Since she expected to see a short, swart peasant with variable agricultural skills, her interest was not at the peak it had been in her previous encounter with prisoners.
    Duncan had received a telephone call only the day before from the Control Center to tell him of the prisoner’s imminent arrival. Since then the idea had grown in Alice that she might learn something useful from an Italian laborer. You could talk to an Italian. The axiom was common in the town. “The dagos are no problem.” They were Europeans. Close enough, anyhow.
    Now Duncan sat on the veranda, smoking and waiting for the truck, and as he watched the gate, Alice observed him. When the camouflaged two-tonner came in through the front gate of the farm and pulled up outside the farmhouse, its canopy was off and Alice could see half a dozen prisoners sitting in the back. A two-door black Ford, with a pointed grille that seemed sharp as a knife, came onto the farm behind the truck and also pulled up. The sergeant from the Control Center got down from the front seat and met up with an elderly but vigorous man in a dark suit who had disembarked fromthe Ford. They advanced through the garden gate towards the farmhouse. The civilian was the Swiss general practitioner from Bowral, who had been given the job by the Red Cross of occasionally escorting prisoners to the farms to which they were assigned. His duty was to ensure that the farmer maintained certain standards of treatment of the laborer he was receiving. Duncan warmly shook both men’s hands as they reached the veranda. Duncan said he’d be grateful for the fellow.
    â€œHere I am,” he said, “two big sections of pasture for sheep, and three paddocks for wheat and cereals. Just under three thousand acres. My daughter-in-law’s done a lot, a real brick, and I have to hire others when I can. But to have a man full-time . . .”
    He was so conscientious about this negotiation that he had placed a fountain pen and a bottle of ink, ready for use, on the table at which he had been sitting. The men handed him their two sets of papers, the government’s and those of the Red Cross, for his study. He invited both of them to sit while he studied the papers page by page, the sergeant explaining Control Center clauses, and then the elderly gentleman speaking of the Red Cross’s concerns.
    The prisoner had by now been ordered by the driver to jump down, and was standing with his knapsack on the packed earth outside the gate. The men still on the truck and bound for other farms yelled their Italian badinage in Duncan’s prisoner’s direction, and the prisoner, carrying his jacket and wearing maroon shirt and pants, smiled briefly, and briefly again, making a gesture that signaled he preferred they should keep things down and not make trouble for him.
    Alice, meanwhile, unseen, confirmed by further study that the man was angular and fairly tall by the standards Gawell imagined Italians to be. So the idea of short, compact peasant power was gone. A belt around his waist gave some style and shape to his