Spirit House Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  SIAM DIARY MAY 1944

  BONDI WEDNESDAY 18 APRIL 1990

  BONDI THURSDAY 19 APRIL 1990

  BONDI FRIDAY 20 APRIL 1990

  BONDI SUNDAY 22 APRIL 1990

  BONDI TUESDAY 24 APRIL 1990

  SYDNEY DIARY DECEMBER 1941

  BONDI WEDNESDAY 25 APRIL 1990

  BONDI THURSDAY 26 APRIL 1990

  BONDI FRIDAY 27 APRIL 1990

  CHANGI DIARY MAY 1942

  BONDI FRIDAY 27 APRIL 1990

  BONDI SATURDAY 28 APRIL 1990

  BONDI SATURDAY 28 APRIL 1990

  BONDI SUNDAY 29 APRIL 1990

  BONDI MONDAY 30 APRIL 1990

  SIAM DIARY 1944

  BONDI TUESDAY 1 MAY 1990

  BONDI WEDNESDAY 2 MAY 1990

  BONDI THURSDAY 3 MAY 1990

  BONDI SATURDAY 5 MAY 1990

  BONDI SATURDAY 12 MAY 1990

  BONDI TUESDAY 15 MAY 1990

  BONDI SUNDAY 20 MAY 1990

  BOTANY CEMETERY WEDNESDAY 23 MAY 1990

  SYDNEY DIARY APRIL 1949

  REDFERN SATURDAY 26 MAY 1990

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Mark Dapin is the author of the novels King of the Cross, Spirit House and R&R. King of the Cross won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction, and Spirit House was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year and the Royal Society for Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. His recent work of military history, The Nashos’ War, has been widely acclaimed. He is a PhD candidate at UNSW@ADFA.

  markdapin.com

  ALSO BY MARK DAPIN

  King of the Cross

  The Nashos’ War

  R&R

  EDITED BY MARK DAPIN

  The Penguin Book of Australian War Writing

  From the Trenches: the Best ANZAC Writing of World War One

  To Jimmy and Freda Benjamin

  ava ashalom

  SIAM DIARY

  MAY 1944

  There are ways of escape without tunnels or disguises, boatmen or barges, partisans or guns. On torpid afternoons, when the work is slow and futile, and our guards lie in the webbed shade of trees – sleeping children with flat mustard faces, rifles propped against their thighs like toys in the nursery – the spirits of the heat haze dance in puddles in the air, beckoning me up the hill.

  They only sing when the path is safe and I can pad past the Koreans into the jungle, grappling the vines and arching through the undergrowth, my soles and toes hardened to jagged rocks and thorns. I keep my own private name for the mountain – I hide a secret word for everything – and the various stages where I rest on my way to the peak. I have lost the energy of the days before the war. This squat hill is my Everest, but also my Olympus. I never understood Norman Lindsay back home in Sydney, among the paperbarks and gums. To me, he was a pornographer and worse. But here I can almost see the country through his heathen eyes. There are souls in the soil, older than man, and they spell out the names of God in the petals of hibiscus and the shadows of the sun.

  Beneath the brow of the cliff face is the mouth of a cave. Its palate is cool and dry, watched over by a painted idol carved from hardwood. I visit the Buddha to remind myself that man can put his imagination to some other purpose than war. Beyond the lips of the cave, and behind its gums, sits a craftsman’s shrine, a timber house on legs of knotted bamboo. Its roof follows the curves of the temples we saw from the rice trains that carried us from Singapore. Inside the shrine sits a tiny altar planted with incense and decked with gifts to placate the spirits of the cave. There are no Siamese in the camp, and the peasants in the native village are starving, but somebody climbs here before dawn each day to freshen the offerings, to leave the ghosts a segment of jackfruit, the stub of a coarse cigarette, a thimble of green tea. And although my stomach, a beehive, begs for food, and my bamboo fingers tremble for tobacco, I never disturb the setting because the cave is my escape. When I’m here with the Buddha, I’m no longer in jail. It is the only time I think of women.

  The first girl I bedded had fallen fair hair, like the model for Lindsay’s Desire, and her breath tasted of hot milk. She grasped my hand tightly, crushed it against her own magpie bones. I loved her for her generosity, her carelessness. The others I remember for their grace or their carriage, their breasts or their drinking, their laughter or their thighs.

  I recall old schoolfriends, and the kind of love I once felt for boys with downy lips and crackling voices, young muscles tautened by sport, strong wills hardened by the strap. And I wonder how many of them are dead.

  This afternoon there was no gunso to supervise the Korean guards. He left at lunch, when we had thirty minutes crouched like coolies to eat half a pint of rice. His men were at first wary, then they began to relax. They like to sleep, to dream of their grandfathers’ fields, of bull carts and oxen and a good year’s harvest. They don’t care if we never build anything in this jungle. It doesn’t matter to them who wins the war, as long as they get back to the farmyard shacks where they were born, to torture their pigs and behead their chickens and beat their wives like dogs and mount their dogs like women.

  I heard the call of the spirits – one day, when I get back to my studio, I’d like to paint their song – and they led me in safety past the brutish swain, through the garden of bush graves and up the pathway to my cave. I knelt before the Buddha in his garland of flowering jasmine, and prostrated myself like a Mohammedan then crossed my legs, peered up past his rounded chin and gazed on his nigger smile.

  The mountains crumbled, the jungle canopy collapsed, Siam slipped back into the sea and the Japs and Koreans drowned screaming, and all that was left were we prisoners – free men now – floating on the Horae’s clouds, watching whirlpools suck away the land.

  Pagan legend holds that the Buddha lived for weeks without food or sleep. I have seen statues of the fasting Bodhisattva: his knees, like mine, the heads of hammers, his ribs a corset of chopsticks. I could look at my body and see only abrasions, wounds and scars, but I contemplated instead the grandeur in the contours of our cave, the arabesques cut by oceans into the walls. I breathed low and deep, bloating my lungs with air to slow my pulse, closed my eyes and melted away.

  I felt filled with God. His glow was inside me and radiating like sunshine from my tortured skin. I walked lightly, unburdened, down the track back to the worksite. I stood for a moment on a lower ridge, saw butterflies quake in the air, a sky by Botticelli, a sun by Turner, a heaven by Fra Angelico. I looked down on the Koreans and felt a kind of love for them because they, like everything else, were a part of this perfect world. I saw the gunso – the one they called ‘Lucy’, for Lucifer – parading up from the camp, followed by two uniformed men and another in rags, walking taller than the rest. The big man was joking with the soldiers; I could tell by the loose, friendly way he moved. He seemed relaxed, untroubled, a sportsman out for his afternoon stroll. I imagined him exercising a greyhound, whistling a popular song.

  When the men laying the foundations noticed the gunso, they began lifting rocks that need not have been moved and carrying them to places where they would serve no purpose. The Koreans barked and growled. The brute with the drooping eye, the closest man to a beast, lashed out with his cane and felled a blameless prisoner with a blow to the spine. The enemy have a theory that the way to make a man work harder is to beat him until he can work no longer.

  I crouched behind a bush, close enough to hear the Japs. My command of Japanese is limited – it is limited to commands – but I understood when the gunso called for volunteers, and the Korean beast stepped forward with two of his attendants, and then other damned souls abandoned their sentry duties to whi
sper and plot and slap their bamboo canes against their palms.

  The tall man stood apart from it all and smiled. I saw his hands were tied behind his back. Another Australian approached him and tried to pass over a gift from the world of the living, but a Korean batted him aside. I did not know it was supposed to happen now. They never told me it would be today.

  The gunso motioned the tall man to his knees, and the tall man laughed and shook his head. He would not bow, he would not kneel. They would have to take his legs from under him. I started to pray.

  The gunso marched behind the tall man and kicked him with his split-toed boot in the back of the knee. The prisoner buckled but held. The gunso struck him again, and the tall man grunted, only grunted, then dropped. Now his head was level with the weapons of his guards. His eyes were aligned with their canes. His lips were moving furiously. I wondered if he, too, were praying, then I understood he was swearing.

  He was cursing them, shaming them, goading them.

  The gunso beat him first, smashing him across the back of the neck, then Lucy stepped back and kicked him in the face, a drop punt, aimed to meet the head as it came down.

  There was only one victim, so each executioner had to take his turn. The valley was silent but for the sounds of the beating, deliberate and ordered, like the labour of a team on the hammer and tap, lining up to drive in the stakes. The tall man shook and sometimes jerked. He shied from blows when he saw them coming, tried to roll with kicks when he could, but he would not call out. Blood oozed from his mouth, from his ears, from his eyes. His body went into spasms, as if he were possessed. His movements, even bound, became unpredictable, and they had to hold him to hit him. One man grabbed his hair to pull him back and part of the scalp came away in his hand. The Koreans laughed, because they had never before seen a piece of skin and hair peel from a head. The others wanted to tear him too, so they could boast around their campfire, tell the story about how they had each played their part. But the gunso thought this a distraction. He screamed they should knock out the tall man’s teeth, leave them scattered like pebbles.

  The gunso commanded the prisoners to watch, and they did, at first, with courage and strength, but they began to feel complicit, as if their witness implied consent, and one by one they turned their backs. The gunso yelled at them to face the punishment squad, but instead they stared up at the trees, away into the hills, through the clouds in the sky, searching for a way of escape without compasses or scythes, hideouts or bribes, or longtail boats navigated by night.

  BONDI

  WEDNESDAY 18 APRIL 1990

  A glass bead curtain hung like frozen rainfall from the front door of my grandmother’s house in Bondi. I sat on the doorstep in the cold sunshine, waiting for Jimmy to stumble back from the RSL, watching the frummers hurry to the yeshiva and Maori women glide by with bags of pork bones and potatoes.

  Grandma called me into the kitchen and told me about the Christmas Day in 1949 when Jimmy had not come home from the Club. The house was dark because my grandparents didn’t like to use electricity. Their mantelpiece and sideboard were crowded with Kiddush cups and candlesticks, and photographs of children and grandchildren, birthdays and weddings. I felt like I belonged here, in the weatherboard cottage where Mum and her three sisters had grown up after the war, when men wore suits and hats and the world was black and white.

  Grandma peeled potatoes over the big iron sink. The chicken for tomorrow’s baked dinner floated in a bucket of saltwater, to draw out the blood. Grandma was small and round with a flattened nose. She had dark and beautiful eyes that peered at me through spectacles smeared with grease.

  ‘Your mother phoned this morning,’ she said. ‘She wants you to stay the whole week.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘She told me to give you five dollars,’ said Grandma, ‘from her.’

  My eyes followed the patterns on the lino.

  ‘Five dollars is five dollars,’ said Grandma. ‘It’s nothing to be sneezed at.’

  ‘I’m not sneezing,’ I told her.

  I was crying.

  Day after day, Mum chose the Dark Man over me.

  The glass beads jingled as Jimmy tumbled into the living room, flooding the house with the smells of beer and smoke. He wore a cream shirt and white shorts, and a white cap to keep off the sun. He smiled false teeth at me, and banged his knee into the sideboard. Photographs of my aunties’ weddings shuddered.

  ‘Well,’ said Grandma, ‘look what the Club threw out.’

  Jimmy danced across the room and into the kitchen, took her in his arms and pushed his purple nose into her ear.

  ‘Daisy, Daisy,’ sang Jimmy, ‘give me your answer, do . . .’

  He waltzed over the lino, with Grandma hanging from his arm like a dishcloth.

  ‘Let me go,’ she said. ‘I’ll burn your dinner.’

  Jimmy was hungry. He rubbed his belly.

  ‘Have we got any challah?’ he asked.

  ‘Have you got any eyes?’ asked Grandma. ‘Look for yourself.’

  He stumbled around, opening boxes, lids and cupboard doors.

  ‘Why is there matzo in the bread bin,’ asked Jimmy, ‘but no bread?’

  ‘Why is there hair in your ears,’ snapped Grandma, ‘but none on your head?’

  Jimmy lifted his cap and patted his scalp.

  ‘There’s younger men than me with a damn sight less hair,’ he said.

  ‘And a damn sight more brains,’ said Grandma.

  ‘Pesach is out,’ said Jimmy. ‘We can have chametz in the house again.’

  Grandma showed him her sharp yellow teeth.

  ‘I bought a challah from Stark’s,’ she said. ‘Last night, you buried it in the yard, like a dog hides his bone.’

  Jimmy hunched his shoulders and withdrew to his armchair in the living room. Jimmy had been a cabinet maker at work and an infantryman in the war. He did not know what to do with his retirement. He studied the newspaper, read history, drank beer for lunch and dinner, and buried things in holes in the yard. He had always worked with wood and had begun to look like a tree, with deep lines and twisted branches, and a feeling of age and sadness. I could see now that he wouldn’t always be here, smiling and swearing and banging on machinery with the side of his fist.

  I’d always called him ‘Jimmy’. He hated rank, and any title – even ‘grandad’ – reminded him of captains and kings.

  He picked up the Daily Telegraph and folded it open at the racing pages, but in a moment he was snoring like a leaf blower.

  Grandma looked over her shoulder at him, then creaked to her knees. She coaxed the challah out of its hiding place under the sink, where it sat, safe from Jimmy, with the scouring pads and bleaches.

  Grandma had a small fridge with a rounded door and a freezer compartment the size of a shoebox. She reached in and pulled out a bag of flathead fillets, then beat an egg in a bowl to make batter.

  ‘The Jews invented fish and chips,’ she told me.

  ‘Nobody invented fish,’ I said.

  ‘The Jews invented frying it,’ said Grandma.

  She rolled a white fillet in salted flour and dipped it into the egg mix.

  ‘Jimmy doesn’t like my fish any more,’ said Grandma, ‘but he eats fish at the Club, and it’s rectangular. What kind of fish is rectangular?’

  ‘A hammerhead shark,’ I said.

  Grandma fried the fish in one pan of waxy dripping, and the chips in another, while I set the table with fish knifes and forks, around doilies for placemats. Jimmy had built the furniture in his workshop and Grandma had knitted the doilies for Brievermann’s House of Lace, which was now a Chinese gambling club. Many of the things they had in their home, my grandparents had made for themselves.

  Grandma carried the plates into the living room on a tray painted with roses. She stroked Jimmy’s arm and whispered, ‘Wake up, you drunken sod.’

  He looked around carefully, then climbed out of his armchair and groped along the TV cabinet to his se
at.

  ‘Food, glorious food,’ he said. ‘A yiddisher fella wrote that song.’

  Jimmy showered his lunch in malt vinegar and ate it methodically, starting at the top of the plate and working his way down. When he’d finished all the fish, he wrapped the leftover chips in slices of challah and ate it as a sandwich.

  ‘You’ve left your peas,’ he said to me.

  I gave him my plate. He speared each pea with his fork and popped it into his mouth like a lolly.

  Jimmy went to the bathroom and didn’t come back. I found him standing outside the door.

  ‘He’s in there again,’ said Jimmy. ‘He’s always got to get the jump on everyone else.’

  I tried to push past and turn the door handle. Jimmy gripped my shoulder.

  ‘They say he’ll be out by Christmas,’ he said, and laughed.

  ‘I have to pee,’ I told Jimmy.

  ‘Go on the vegetable patch,’ he said.

  ‘You haven’t got one,’ I said.

  I squeezed my legs together.

  ‘Have you heard any furphies?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘I don’t know what they are,’ I said.

  He looked down at me, as I held onto my pants.

  ‘Rice balls,’ he said, and he scratched himself.

  I hopped out of the house and emptied myself against the back fence.

  *

  At five o’clock Jimmy and I went to the RSL to meet Solomon the tailor, Myer the optician, and Katz, who was once a war artist. When I was very young, I used to think the three were one person, Sollykatzanmyer. Solomon, big and red, like a fat plastic tomato, gave him the belly. Katz, a sad Shabbes candle with his features melted down his face, lent his long, bony nose. Myer, small and neat, with slicked-back hair and yellow teeth, provided the eyebrows and the hedges in his ears.

  Grandma called Jimmy’s friends ‘the Three Stooges’ or, when she talked about the Christmas Day in 1953, ‘that Pack of Drunken Bums’.