Nakamura spoke quietly. Fukuhara translated for the Australian colonel, saying that the guard had been punished for his insolence to the Australian colonel, and now the punishment of the prisoner could continue.
In front of them, the Goanna got back on his feet, grabbed the pick handle, staggered the few steps to Darky Gardiner, steadied himself, then raised the pick handle high before bringing it down on the prisoner’s back with a new-found zeal. Darky Gardiner fell to his knees and was gathering himself to stand back up when the Goanna kicked him full in the face.
As the Australian colonel began remonstrating again, Nakamura waved his translator away.
It’s not a question of guilt, he said wearily.
Darky Gardiner’s movements were no longer graceful as his wasted, naked body tried to recover, coordinate and move again in time to defend itself from the next blow. His timing was growing jagged. As he got back up, a blow of a guard’s bamboo pole caught him in the side of the face. His head snapped sideways, he gasped and reeled backwards, trying not to fall, but his body had grown clumsy. He tripped and fell to the ground.
As the guards took turns kicking Gardiner, Nakamura murmured a haiku by Basho. Fukuhara looked at him queryingly.
Yes, Nakamura said. Tell him.
Fukuhara continued staring.
He likes poetry, Nakamura said.
It is very beautiful in Japanese, Fukuhara replied.
Tell him.
In English I think not.
Tell him.
Smoothing the side of his pants with his hand, Fukuhara turned to the Australian. He drew himself up straight, so that his neck seemed even longer, and recited his own translation:
A world of pain—
if the cherry blossoms,
it blossoms.
22
DORRIGO EVANS LOOKED at Nakamura, who was scratching violently at his thigh. And Dorrigo Evans understood that for the railway to be built, that railway that was the only reason for the immense suffering of hundreds of thousands of human beings at that very moment—for that senseless line of embankments and cuttings and corpses, of gouged earth and massed dirt and blasted rock and more corpses, of bamboo trestling and teetering bridges and teak sleepers and ever more corpses, of innumerable dog spikes and inexorable iron lines, of corpse after corpse after corpse after corpse—for that railway to exist, he understood that Darky Gardiner must be punished. At that moment he admired the terrible will of Nakamura—admired it more even than he despaired of the beating of Darky Gardiner—the grim strength, the righteous obedience to codes of honour that allowed no doubt. For Dorrigo Evans could find in himself no equivalent life force that might challenge it.
With his fixed face and ascetic’s ragged tunic, in his thrashing of the Goanna, in the bark of orders he had just given, Nakamura no longer seemed to Dorrigo Evans the strange but human officer he had played cards with the night before, not the harsh but pragmatic commander he had bartered lives with that morning, but the terrifying force that takes hold of individuals, groups, nations, and bends and warps them against their natures, against their judgements, and destroys all before it with a careless fatalism.
The Goanna had stooped down and scooped Darky Gardiner up in a fireman’s lift. He threw him onto his shoulder and then back up to a standing position. There was an odd pause, as though the beating was over, but once Darky had his balance the three guards started once more with the bamboo poles and pick handle until he fell again. And so began a pattern of beating, falling, kicking and dragging back up to beat again.
And watching this—as the Goanna yet again stood Darky Gardiner up in order to beat him down again, as he quickly backhanded him twice—Dorrigo Evans felt as if some terrible vibration was shaking the earth, and that all their beings could not help but drum with it. And that ominous drumming was the truth of this life.
This must stop, Dorrigo Evans was saying. It’s wrong. He’s sick. He’s a very sick man.
It wasn’t even an argument, though, and Nakamura just raised a hand and talked over him in a new, kindly voice.
Major Nakamura say he have some extra quinine, Fukuhara said. To help sick men work. The Emperor’s will decrees it, the railway needs it.
And the drumming went on, louder and louder.