“How’re you doing, Paul?” asked Bob.
“Debloodylightful,” said Paul. Profanity put Bob’s mind at ease. Sean appeared at the door of the hut. At first he revealed himself in silhouette, but after he stepped out of the shadow, Bob saw that Sean’s shorts were gone and in their place was a kind of G-string — a loose swatch of cloth that draped around his loins like a diaper.
“Now there’s one the midwife should have strangled,” said Paul.
Sean was smiling. He made his way over quickly and produced two small bricks wrapped in banana leaves. “One for Paul, and one for Bob and me to split. It’s sugar.”
“And where are your shorts?” asked Paul.
“Covering some Burmese backside,” he replied.
Paul struggled onto one elbow. He looked over at Sean and managed a smile. “Out of gratitude for your generosity, I will recover.” And he lived.
Paul looked terrible, sicker than the sick, emaciated to the point that it was almost comic that he wasn’t dead. Paul had one tooth left, sticking up from his lower gum like a tombstone. His shorts had rotted off his body and he too, like Sean, was now in a diaper, which showed off every protrusion and hollow. He became the object of envy, since he no longer did hard labor. Rumor had it that the Japanese soldiers were scared of him, that they couldn’t figure out which dimension he belonged to; he was a constant memento mori, a specter that wouldn’t quit. Paul worked with the doctor when he could, and lay down when he couldn’t. Sean was pleased at the state of affairs. He had always been a little simple, but as time progressed, he seemed downright loony. He seemed to think that Paul had left the study of physics in Australia for medical school in Thailand.
Bob continued shoveling ten hours a day, seven days a week. Each day someone died and he found himself scanning the gang’s faces in the morning, trying to figure out who it would be. He saw the same searching eyes focus on him. He was now about ninety five pounds and looked downright skeletal. Bob marveled at Paul, wondering how anyone could make him look good. Sixty pounds was missing and where was it? Lost in the mud below the pillars that pressed the railroad into the sky. Lost with the bodies that they’d buried in yesterday’s embankment, handy filler when one couldn’t place a call to a quarry for stone.
One evening Sean came running up to where Bob and Paul sat. Sean was laughing hysterically and at first Bob thought he’d gone off, like the rice that he was eating.
“Want to hear something really funny?” Sean said.
A couple of months had passed since someone had said that, and Bob and Paul were at a loss as to how to respond.
“Of course you do,” said Sean. “Shoulda been on duty for this one, Paul. Your friend the doctor, he’s not bad, y’know? Anyway, this Jap guard comes up to him. He’s all squirmy, y’know, wriggling around and all that, and he tells old Dutchy that he’s caught something from the last round of Korean hookers that passed through here, right? And he wants Dutchy to do something about it. And so Dutchy gives him something, tells him to rub it all over his dick. Next thing you know, the Jap’s screaming like a madman, running around like someone lit a fire in his shorts. And we’re all surprised, but it’s so bloody funny, and we can’t laugh ’cause we’re scared he’ll bash our heads in, right? But the doctor’s telling him that it’s supposed to feel that way, but we know something’s up, y’know? So when he’s gone, we go up to Dutchy and we ask him, ‘What’d you give him?’ and Dutchy says, ‘The Japanese soldier should not put the penis where the penis is not wanted.’”
Which was a funny story; Bob knew it. He smiled along with Sean and Paul, but somewhere, along the railroad, he had forgotten how to laugh. Laughter was strange music.
The romusha introduced the inconceivable — that there was a level of hell below the one that Bob haunted. These villagers, Thais and Burmese, understood nothing, labored in ignorance. They died in huge numbers out of seeming confusion, as if they didn’t realize that one needed to struggle to survive, as if it didn’t occur to them. The Japanese didn’t seem to think that the villagers needed food or doctors; they didn’t seem to think that the railroad constituted a significant change from village life, and they miscalculated the romusha’s ability to survive. The romusha were even more expendable than the whites. In the end they got their revenge. They introduced the only worthy opponent to the Japanese — cholera. Cholera was not racist, nor did it have any respect for rank. Cholera cast its lot with the winners and the losers in equal numbers and won most of the time. It tore through the camp, taking most of the romusha, and as it raced down the river it took Paul and Sean along with it. When there was bamboo for fuel, the cholera dead were burned in huge pyres. Bob helped build these monuments, doused them with gasoline, lit them. As the bodies sizzled and seized they would sit up with mouths open in a silent scream until the flames left nothing. Bob learned quickly to burn the bodies face down.
Paul was one of the first to go. Bob sat up with Sean that night. He listened to him crying, a sound that was answered by the monkeys and night birds. Sean’s crying was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. One week later, Sean was dead. The night he carried Sean to the pyre, as he lay in dreamlike sleeplessness, Bob returned home. He was in the kitchen and Noreen Grey was washing up in his mother’s sink.
“Where’s your brother?” she asked as her pale, freckled arms dipped into the sudsy water. “He’s supposed to take me into town tonight.”
Bob had looked down at his hat, which he held in his hands. “He’s over at the Carvers’ fixing a tractor. He said he’d be a little late.”
“A little late? He’ll be drunk by the time he gets back here.” She shook her head in disbelief.
“Noreen, you don’t have to do that.”
“And who’s going to do it? Your mum? Doesn’t she have enough to do around here? I can just see you and Mark in Germany face to face with Hitler. You’ve got your rifles aimed straight at his head and you’re both saying, ‘Where’s mum? Shouldn’t she do this?’”
“We’re not going to Germany, Noreen.”
“Oh, you’ll clean the Japs up in a couple of weeks. Just you see. I’ve got a mind to go to Indonesia myself. I’d show them.”
“Yeah, you would, but then who’d give us hell when we got home?”
Noreen had a temperament to match her red hair; she was a good match for Mark, didn’t let him outshine her. Bob remembered Noreen’s arms best of all, pale and freckled, strong and slim. Her beautiful, empty arms.
The sky broke open one day, as though a fissure ran along the endless heaving gray, a crack the length of the railroad. The Japanese were not perturbed by the start of the monsoon. The will of the emperor was to be obeyed, even as entire chunks of the mountainside slid into the river, which was already choked with bloated carabao, and huts, and once-buried POWs who found themselves making a hasty postmortem retreat down the Mekhong. Standing in the river, dragging a huge teak pillar, Bob had only peripheral vision. The water poured out of the sky in a steady stream, not a drop to be discerned, registering everything amorphously. The river was full of coconuts. Maybe some unfortunate barge had overturned, but Bob felt lucky. Hidden from the guards by the trunk of the tree, he surreptitiously reached for one of the coconuts, grabbed at it, but all he came up with was a handful of hair bound together by some rotted skin.
Most of the floating heads and the accompanying bodies belonged to the romusha, since many of their dead hadn’t been buried in the first place. Bob and Sean had worked together on burial duty (there were too many romusha to burn) for the first part of the cholera epidemic. Then Bob had buried the bodies, working alone. One time, when he was dragging a man toward the pit, face down as was his preference, he was accosted by the recently departed’s wife. The woman held a two-year-old girl by the wrist and was madly trying to communicate. She started fluttering her hands in butterfly motions, constantly looking to the jungle ceiling. Bob did not understand. His mind had been full of thoughts of the unfortunately small size of the man’s feet and the decent sandals, which were now protecting soles whose contact with dirt would no longer require them. The woman went on and on, then finally wrested her husband’s ankles out of Bob’s hands and began slowly dragging the man away. Watching her reminded Bob of an ant struggling with a bloated grain of rice. Later, Bob learned that most of the romusha were of the opinion that if you buried bodies, their souls could not escape.