Colonel Kota ordered the Goanna to manhandle Darky Gardiner into a kneeling position, with his head bowed. He examined the Australian prisoner’s neck more closely. It was skinny, filth in its folds.
Yes, Colonel Kota thought. The flesh was muddy, grey, like dirt you piss on. Yes, yes, Colonel Kota thought. Something in its strangely reptilian wrinkling and dark patterning rumpled a memory in him that craved repetition. Yes! Yes! Colonel Kota knew he was in the power of something demented, inhuman, that had left a trail of endings through Asia. And the more he killed, so casually, so joyfully, the more he realised his own ending would be the one death beyond his own control. To control the deaths of others—when, where, the craft of ensuring it was a cleanly sliced ending—that was possible. And in some strange way, such killing felt like controlling whatever remained of his own life.
In any case, Colonel Kota now reasoned, it would just waste the other prisoner’s precious energy carrying the sick man back to the camp, and at the camp precious food would be wasted on him when he was likely to die soon anyway.
Unsheathing his sword, he gestured to the Goanna to give him his water bottle. Colonel Kota could see his own hands were trembling, which was strange. He felt no fear or conscience.
Only the moon
and I, on our meeting-bridge,
alone, growing cold.
Colonel Kota recited Kikusha-ni’s haiku twice. But he had to stop his hands trembling. He took the cap off the water canteen and, as it shuddered in the air before him, poured water onto his sword. He watched the water beads rolling together on its bright surface, wet whip snakes slithering away. The beauty of it steadied him.
Raising his head, he concentrated on slowing his breath before carefully lowering the sword blade until it rested on Darky’s neck. He held it there, making his intention clear, readying his own body.
Eye shut! the Goanna yelled at Darky Gardiner. Eye shut!
And as he lit a cigarette, the Goanna blinked twice to illustrate his meaning.
Colonel Kota spread his legs, got his balance, with a scream raised the sword high into the air, and went to recite Kikusha-ni’s haiku one last time. But he could not remember the correct sequence of the middle syllables. In his mind, he kept muddling the poem.
All waited—Colonel Kota with the sword poised above the kneeling POW, the Goanna holding a cigarette next to his lips, Gallipoli von Kessler watching transfixed. Alone unable to see, Darky Gardiner knew only the wet heat like a blanket and the sweat on his closed eyes. All he could feel with his wretched rag of a body, twisted with terror, was the sword poised between him and the sun.
He didn’t dare gulp.
He could smell Colonel Kota, an overwhelming odour of rotting fish. He could feel the sword blade hunger in the air above. He could hear blood. His. Theirs. Growing louder.
And Colonel Kota, a man who believed in symmetry and order in all things, grew confused as his mind railed against its own weakness. He was bewildered. He had lost control of the sequence of things—and in losing that, he had lost control of this ending and, in some strange way that was to him also perfectly logical, of his own life. And that he could not allow.
Darky Gardiner’s neck seemed to him to be screaming. He longed for the blow of the sword so that it might be over. He wondered if the sword was already falling, if his head were already—
He’s gone, he heard Kes say.
There were sounds of someone walking away, a short silence, and the same footsteps coming back.
He’s fucked off, Kes said. I’ve checked. You can look, Darky.
And Darky Gardiner opened his eyes.
Kota and his sword had disappeared. The Goanna was gone. Only Kes remained, apple-pip eyes staring down at him. Darky looked around at the black line of the bamboos at the top of a nearby cliff and, beyond, the silhouette of teak.
Jeepers creepers, Kes said, look at those peepers.
He heard the screech of monkeys.
He smelt the reeking mud of the jungle.
And in all this life around him, Darky Gardiner for the first time sensed his own death. He understood that all this would go on, and of him nothing would remain, that even his memory, though held by a few family and friends for a few years, perhaps decades, would ultimately be forgotten and mean no more than a fallen bamboo, than the inescapable mud. As Darky Gardiner looked up and down the track, as he thought of the naked slaves only a mile distant toiling away, he felt the most terrible rage seize him. All this would go on and on, and only he would be gone. Everywhere he looked, he could see the most vibrant world of life that had no need of him, that would not think for a moment of his vanishing, and it would have no memory of him. The world would go on without him.