As they made their way out of that home of the damned, Lenny’s corpse kept slipping down. To stop it falling off the stretcher they had to roll the corpse over onto its stomach and spreadeagle the scrawny legs so that they hung over the bamboo poles. The shanks were so wasted that the anus protruded obscenely.
Hope Lenny don’t feel a final squirt coming on, said Shugs, who was bringing up the back of the stretcher.
12
SINCE THE CHOLERA began, Jimmy Bigelow had been put on camp duties so that he would be able to perform his duty as bugler at the now daily funerals. He had been summoned and was waiting on the perimeter of the cholera compound when they came out with the stretchers. The last of these was being carried by Dorrigo Evans with his jaunty cap and red bandana, and Bonox Baker, in his ridiculous shoes that always reminded Jimmy Bigelow of Mickey Mouse, at the front, with Shugs at the rear, walking with his head held at an odd backwards slant.
Jimmy followed this pitiful funeral cortège through the dark, dripping jungle, his bugle strung over his shoulder with a knotted rag with which he had replaced its leather strap when that had rotted. He was thinking of how he loved his bugle, because of all things in the jungle—bamboo, clothes, leather, food and flesh—it was the only one that seemed impervious to decay and rot. A prosaic man, he nevertheless felt there was something immortal about his simple brass horn, which had already transcended so many deaths.
The POW pyre makers awaiting them in a dank clearing had learnt it took a lot to burn a man. Their pyre was a great rectangular mound of bamboo chest-high. One cholera corpse was already arranged on the top, along with his few meagre possessions and blanket. Jimmy Bigelow recognised it as Rabbit Hendricks. He was always surprised to feel how little he felt.
Anything a cholera had touched could not be touched by another—other than the pyre makers—and everything a cholera possessed had to be burnt to control the contagion. As the rest of his gang lifted the three new corpses and their possessions onto the pyre, one of the pyre makers walked up to Dorrigo Evans with Rabbit Hendricks’ sketchbook.
Burn it, Dorrigo Evans said, waving it away.
The pyre maker coughed.
We weren’t sure, sir.
Why?
It’s a record, Bonox Baker said. His record. So people in the future would, well, know. Remember. That’s what Rabbit wanted. That people will remember what happened here. To us.
Remember?
Yes, sir.
Everything’s forgotten in the end, Bonox. Better we live now.
Bonox Baker seemed unpersuaded.
Lest we forget, we say, Bonox Baker said. Isn’t that what we say, sir?
We do, Bonox. Or incant. Perhaps it’s not quite the same thing.
So that’s why it should be saved. So it’s not forgotten.
Do you know the poem, Bonox? It’s by Kipling. It’s not about remembering. It’s about forgetting—how everything gets forgotten.
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Dorrigo Evans nodded to a pyre maker to set the bamboo alight.
Nineveh, Tyre, a God-forsaken railway in Siam, Dorrigo Evans said, flame shadows tiger-striping his face. If we can’t remember that Kipling’s poem was about how everything gets forgotten, how are we going to remember anything else?
A poem is not a law. It’s not fate. Sir.
No, Dorrigo Evans said, though for him, he realised with a shock, it more or less was.
The pictures, Bonox Baker said, the pictures, sir.
What about them, Bonox?
Rabbit Hendricks was convinced that, no matter what happened to him, the pictures would survive, Bonox Baker said. And that the world would know.
Really?
Memory is the true justice, sir.
Or the creator of new horrors. Memory’s only like justice, Bonox, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.
Bonox Baker had a pyre maker open the book to a page that showed an Indian ink drawing of a row of severed Chinese heads on spikes in Singapore after the Japanese occupation.
There’s the atrocities in here, see?
Dorrigo Evans turned and looked at Bonox Baker. But all Dorrigo Evans could see was smoke, flames. He could not see her face. There were severed heads that looked alive through the smoke but they were dead and gone. The fire was rising at their back, its flames the only living thing, and he thought of her head and her face and her body, the red camellia in her hair, but as hard as he tried now, he could not remember her face.
Nothing endures. Don’t you see, Bonox? That’s what Kipling meant. Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.
There’s the tortures here too, see? Bonox Baker said.