“I could get him a school reader,” she said, as if the purchase were hypothetical and she weren’t utterly determined to do it. “I could get him one of those kid’s primers from the bookstore.”
“You reckon he can read to begin with?” asked Duncan.
“I reckon he can if their school system’s anything like ours.”
“Fair enough, then,” said Duncan. “It’ll make it easier for me to talk to him anyway.”
“I’ll just read with him for half an hour,” said Alice, as if she wanted to guard her own time from intrusive and lesser duties and might have trouble finding the time. “After knock-off.”
“Listen, I’ll shout the book,” Duncan said. “You shouldn’t have to pay for it out of your POW allowance.” The government sent it to her with sparing gratitude, a month at a time. But in the light of this offer, it had to be said Duncan was not as tight-fisted as many farmers—as her own father was, for that matter. Frugality and meanness were not the same thing. Duncan had a reputation for being a man who would invest for a return and had the intelligence to see that Giancarlo’s improved English would help the running of the farm. And the running of the farm was Duncan’s entire world.
“Another thing,” he said, as if he had been waiting for a pretext. “We could invite him to dinner. Say on Wednesdays. That might teach him something too. Maybe just to use a knife and fork.”
She suspected Giancarlo had much to teach Duncan and her, rather than the opposite. But in any case, both prospects—lessons and Wednesday dinners—filled her with a pleasant feeling that utter monotony had ended.
Duncan claimed he was slowly improving Giancarlo, or assimilating him. To fit him out for work around the farm, Duncan had given the Italian a larger hat and one of his own sweaters. Some days later Duncan awarded the man some pants, and from that day Giancarlo did not wear burgundy on the farm and could not be distinguished by sight from an average farmhand working on his own behalf. Neville Herman’s farm clothes, of course, lay untouched in Alice’s bedroom. It seemed a blasphemy to give the Italian any of those.
Duncan’s friendliness towards Giancarlo was a result of the Italian’s industriousness. When the cutting of the cereal hay and wheat began, she brought the men their noontime sandwiches carried in the basket of her old bike. She had seen Giancarlo on the running board of the tractor Duncan drove, looking back like an old hand at the hay baler rolling behind and dropping its square packages of fodder across the paddock. He continued to attend to the milking of the Jersey, Dotty. Looking up from the stool, he would give Alice his long-lipped smile. “The bucket, she’s full.” She would have liked to have been in a position to give advice on his method with Dotty, to create a distance of instruction and authority and so protect herself. But there was nothing she could manage to say.
So teaching him English seemed a most sensible thing. On the Friday just two weeks after the beginning of Giancarlo’s service at the Herman farm, Duncan and Alice left the farm again in the Italian’s care, this time with more confidence. They drove to the stock and station agent’s, where Duncan intended to top up his depleted superphosphate fertilizer at a time of year when it generally got cheaper, which—along with the government bounty on the stuff—made it a good deal indeed. Alice left him to his business of purchasing and loading and walked down William Street to March’s Western Stores to buy new ribbon for trimming one of her perfectly good old hats whose brim had become frayed.
Then, at three, for Neville’s sake and for the sake of her marriage as undernourished and spectral as it had been rendered by absence, its substance being all in the future, and an honest hope of hearing some news or of extending solace to other women, not least those with children, who seemed each to have an acuter sense of the man she was missing than Alice had of Neville, she attended the Friday meeting for wives and mothers of prisoners of war at the School of Arts. One of the other motives for attending involved a sense of obligation to the indomitable Mrs. Cathcart, who had founded the group. The purposes of these meetings were said to be to fortify the souls of the women who were afflicted by their men’s absence, to revivify memory, which was in the process of eroding, and to share any news that came by way of governments or the Red Cross—letter or postcard. Those who attended were invited—but only if they wished—to place in a box silver coins or even ten-shilling notes for wives who were having a hard time, and that, too, was why Alice came now and then, to make appropriate contributions.
She had been a loyal attendee of these events for the first two years but, like others, recently had begun to lose faith. Early on, there had been all manner of hopeful rumors. They had all evaporated. Alice occasionally pleaded the demands of the farm. Mrs. Cathcart, though, was different. She could not be stopped. Her husband had been a notable fighter pilot who had been shot down near Brussels, and she had the qualities of an ace herself. She administered the Cathcart property, which was larger than the Herman place by some thousands of acres. She had also what many of the women perceived as an advantage in that her husband was a prisoner of Europeans, not of the unreadable Orientals. For many of the wives and mothers of those held by the Japanese had received, the better part of a year after capture, only the most rudimentary cards from their men, of the ilk: “I am well and a prisoner. I am in good health and well-treated but a bit busy but thinking of you.” There was too little to discuss in such messages to shed light.
Early in the existence of the group, women had been encouraged to read out edited sections of their husbands’ letters from German prison camps. But the letters from Europe, intermittent though they might be, were so much more numerous than the ones reaching women from Asia, and remained so proportionally numerous as the months passed, that the practice was abandoned as too painful. Wives like Alice, whose souls were wavering as 1943 neared its end, were shamed by Mrs. Cathcart’s cheerfulness, and temporarily exhilarated by her ceaseless questioning of governments and agencies, and her ferreting out of new information about the kindly involvement of the Red Cross and Swiss legations in camps throughout the world, though that always seemed less significant after you’d left the meeting than it did during it. It was hard to fly the flag for months on end if you had to live on a wives-of-prisoners’ allowance. It was even harder to fly it with sufficient conviction when you were the as-yet-childless wife of a dimly remembered and briefly held husband.
There were a scattering of children around the meeting room on this occasion. Alice was drawn to a three-year-old named Bunny and praised her dress and bounced her on her knee. Bunny’s father had been shot down just three months before, on one of his first missions, in a bomber over Europe. Holding the child—indeed, before she even had begun to hold her—she felt a movement in her own stomach for all the world like some kindly, warm animal turning itself about there. It was pleasant, it was doleful, to hold the child so intimately, and a delight when the infant fell into afternoon sleep in Alice’s arms, which continued to harbor the girl. In the child’s trustful limpness, she felt a foretaste of her own motherhood. It seemed to her inevitable, and with that inevitability Neville’s presence seemed more palpable. She could hear him whistling a dog and dropping boots on the back veranda and preparing to enter his kitchen and say something habitual. That was the problem. She did not know what that habitual utterance would be. Habit had not had time to form.
Mrs. Cathcart called the meeting to order. She and her regulars quickly disposed of apologies and the last meeting’s minutes. The child slept on, a pleasant, honeyed weight in Alice’s arms. Older children played hide-and-seek around the sandwich table, or galloped round the outskirts of the chairs set out for the women.
Today there were about eighteen wives and mothers, because rumors of prisoner exchanges were in the air. Mrs. Cathcart read a report from the Red Cross journal that told of a meeting in Geneva between German and British officials. The Red Cross had also made approaches to the Japanese Foreign Office and Ministry of War. The talk thus far between the v
arious enemies had been about the exchange of civilian internees rather than captured troops, but—said Mrs. Cathcart cheerily—the proposition of exchanging military prisoners was an item on the agenda for the next meeting in January.
Bunny stirred in Alice’s arms. There was again a corresponding movement within Alice. But the image that was evoked at the mention of these negotiations in unimaginable Switzerland was not entirely that of Neville but, more prominently, of the Italian. He might be exchanged too. Neville for Giancarlo?—now that should be a delight for her. Yet she found she couldn’t be sure it was. Her mind was distracted by this impropriety of choice as she heard, as barely more than background, Mrs. Cathcart comfort the womenfolk of prisoners-of-war of Japan with news that, through the Red Cross once more, Japanese civilian internees were indeed to be exchanged forthwith for British and American detainees in Japan. Yea, even the gates of Gawell might be opened to let the Japanese civilians go home under some flag of exchange.
There was tea after the meeting. Women thanked Mrs. Cathcart in brittle excitement. Bunny woke and started chasing after older girls. After one quickly drunk cup, Alice excused herself. She had more errands about town. She strode off to Oxley Street, where the newsstand sold schoolbooks. Here, she acquired two readers for children: Don and Jane Go Shopping and Don and Jane Go to the Country. Full of pedagogic fervor, she bore them home with the grocery shopping.
The following Monday, when Duncan Herman came into the house at the end of the day, Alice went down to the shearers’ quarters and sat with Giancarlo at the pine table outside his window and gave a forty-minute lesson. She was conscious of the time allotted, and determined, for the maintenance of some instinctive standard, that it should not be longer than that time. She sat at his shoulder, a little to the rear of him, with the books on the table, and pointed at words as he read: “After they came home from school, Don and Jane went shopping for their mother.”
This came out with all sorts of added vowels—the mystery of Italian pronunciation recurred again and again as he paused for a moment or two over sentences.
Don—obviously so named to honor the great Australian batsman Don Bradman—sounded in Giancarlo’s mouth like Doan. That was to be expected, she knew. She did not try to correct him unnecessarily. For though she was there to teach him English, she was also not there to teach him English, but to learn from him something she still could not define. After two, nearly three years of her father-in-law’s company, she had a hunger for the company of a man, someone who had not resigned yet from the business of being one. Not a spent force of a fellow like Duncan, as decent a chap as he was.
She sensed that she required conversation with a young male, even if it did involve negotiating a wall of language. But even given that, now and then a handclasp of shared understanding could be achieved—relief from the fully shared but dead-plain discourse with Duncan and from the hours of servitude.
“Is this of any use to you?” she asked, pointing to the school reader. “Is it all too simple?”
She could not help suspecting all the time that he was more subtle in a way she would have had to come from his world to gauge.
He assured her with a doleful face. “Is all good to know,” he insisted. “Is all good.”
“But are Italian towns,” she asked helplessly, scrambling for detailed news, “like our towns? And Italian children?”
“All the same,” he assured her softly. “All the same Don and Jane.”
But she could somehow tell there were broad differences he could or would not describe. She would have been delighted to comprehend what they were. He could sense disappointment.
“No footpath,” he contributed. “The road.” He laid his left hand flat, palm down. Then he made his other palm vertical beside it. “And then the wall. No good for Don and Jane.”
He made a sound like an approaching car. “Barp! Barp!”
Altogether, she’d learned next to nothing from this, except that he was willing to try to placate her. Once she realized she could not get very far with her kind of direct and even childish quizzing, that she would hear from him in better form what he desired to tell her on his own account, the lesson began to improve.
Leaning forwards, she could see that Giancarlo approached the labor with an unseamed brow and without a learner’s frown. She was easily convinced, given his finer features, that it was not the uncreased nature of stupidity. It couldn’t be . . . Could it? . . . That he was patronising her, and did not need the class? Don and Jane Go Shopping was quickly dispensed with. In the second book, Don and Jane went to the chemist for medicine for their sick uncle, the farmer. Until now Giancarlo had managed the names of all the animals, the horse with the ghost of an “a” at the end, the goat, and the rest.
“Chee-mist?” he asked with that earnestness of his.
“Keh-mist,” she said. “Medicines.”
“Medico,” he said.
“No, a shop. The chemist makes the medicines for people.”
“Farmacia,” he said. “Farmacia. Keh-mist.”
“Pharmacy, yes. A chemist’s.”
She had seen Americans call it “drugstore” in the motion pictures.
“My father—mio padre . . . he is a farmacista. He has a farmacia in Frattamaggiore.”
She had read that town name in his papers.
“Is it a big town?” she asked slowly in children’s reader–like words.
“It’s—how to say?—the whole distretto? Twenty thousand . . .” The word “thousand” sounded lyrical in his pronunciation.
A song dedicated to the constituent hundreds.
“My father,” he said, “a man with education.”
“Were you forced into the army?” she wanted to know. “By Mussolini? Or did you join because you wanted to?”
In an early letter from the desert, Neville had said they were conscripts. That’s why they weren’t so interested in dying.
Giancarlo said, “If a man healthy, he can’t say, ‘Mussolini, I don’ wanna.’ So . . . Libya. In Benghazi I repair the Breda guns.”
“Brayda?” asked Alice.
“Breda. Machine gun. Rat-a-tat.”
He put his head apologetically to one side and seemed to know that his part in preparing these life-reaping machines might not be popular with her, and indeed she asked, “But you didn’t like Mussolini?”
“Abbasso il Duce! I am anarchico. Mio padre . . . father. He’s socialdemocratico. Come Labor Party! Mr. Curtin!”
“You know about Mr. Curtin?”
The much-loved prime minister of the Commonwealth, with his soft, weary features and his frown of endeavor.
“From the Herald. They give us Herald to show us bad news from Italia. I know this Mr. Curtin. Good fellow. Socialdemocratico. As my daddy.”
“Your father,” she insisted. “Children say ‘daddy,’ grown-ups say ‘father.’ ”
“My father,” he said obediently, making a wry mouth. “Mussolini don’t like Socialdemocratico. But up in camp there now they all say they hate Benito. You go into the Compound B and the Compound D and they all tell you they done never like Mussolini. But they much lie. They some still like him. Not the same as before. When Benghazi fall . . . the Fascisti say to us, you are disgrace to surrender . . . they like Mussolini a lot then! They think then he still win the war, and l’Impero italiano and all that horsefeathers.”
“Where did you learn a word like ‘horsefeathers’?”
“Cinema. Marx Brothers.”
And he made an elegant gesture with his right hand, clearing that issue out of the way.
“Your English is coming on,” she said.
“Coming on?” he murmured doubtfully.
“Getting better,” said Alice.
“No, not so good,” he said with his half-committed smile.
“Well,” she said, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
She realized the dictum was absurd to his ears and shook her head. “That’s just a saying,” she
assured him.
“Roma wassa not built in a day,” he repeated twice. The laughter between them was confident. She knew it was something like this, reaching over the line of language to find another person, not a student. Besides, Alice knew she’d been naïve with her Don and Jane primers. It was a wonder he hadn’t been offended by them. She removed them from the table and placed them beside her on the chair. His command of the language seemed at least as serviceable as that of the Italians who’d run the fruit shops in town before the war started—the ones who had been briefly interned and who had then returned to take up business again. Duncan thought Giancarlo needed English classes. Yet now the prisoner seemed to be unveiling the range of his English to Alice. Might he have done it innocently, speaking in one or two words to try to please Duncan, attempting not to be considered a smart aleck, or—more than that—trying not to break the unspoken compact by which it was assumed in the bush that Italians could manage only one or two words of English at a time.
“So,” she pursued, “you mentioned something elsewhere. Something between Curtin and Mussolini? You said that’s what you are. Like John Curtin.”
“No. I am anarco-sindacalista. You know anarco-sindacalista?”
“No, I don’t have the foggiest idea what that is.”
“The ‘one big union,’ ” he said. “All men and women together. The state . . . it’sa no good for the real people.”
She wondered if he really meant this—that the state was no good to anyone. She’d never heard anyone ever propose it wasn’t. “You’re messing around with me, aren’t you? There’s no such thing as this one big union? If there were no state, we wouldn’t be able to fight the Japanese.”
He smiled mildly and his eyes glimmered. “If there is no stato giapponese, no need to fight the Japanese.”
“But you fought for the state of Italy?”
“Because I don’ wanna go to prison.” He laughed outright now and shook his head. “So . . . I am a prigioniero anyhow. But better here than a Mussolini gaol. Signor Duncan better than Benito.” She knew guiltily that wherever Neville was, he wasn’t smiling as complacently as this Italian, and that the contradictions would not be sitting as easily with him as they seemed to with Giancarlo. She did not like to think this Italian was having an easier time of it than Neville. “We are well treated,” Neville had written in one rare letter earlier in the year. But was he required to? And did he enjoy the ease of soul that Molisano did at this moment?