Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally Page B

a young graduate, he had adapted himself to the new educational reality when the Japanese had marched into the region. Nevski had advanced within the university but had become a target for Japanese security police at the height of the last summer of world peace, after the Russians had invaded Manchukuo from Mongolia, fighting some successful engagements. Even though Nevski and his late father had originally fled to Manchukuo to escape the detested Stalin, Nevski found himself now treated as the enemy. After his flat had been smashed by Japanese police searching for suspicious materials, of the kind they hoped might prove him an enemy agent, he had acquired false papers, which identified him as a Pole, and traveled by train to Shanghai.
    He had lived in that exquisite city in an apartment in Little Vienna, a largely Jewish sector in the International Settlement, working as a Japanese tutor for wealthy Chinese and Americans, who knew they would soon need to do business in that language. He left on an American steamer bound for Australia two days before the Japanese marched into the streets of the settlement.
    Nevski had been given a temporary lectureship in both Slavonic and Japanese at the University of Melbourne and had almost certainly foreseen his future as tranquilly involved with the small groups of students who were interested in these disciplines. Then he had been conscripted into the Australian military forces.
    Now, Suttor thought, Nevski was probably the best educated man in the Gawell garrison. He certainly bore an air of having descended toa menial job, and harbored that common Russian demeanor of intense and dolorous disinheritance, which Suttor had also seen in the Muscovites who ran those coffeehouses in Kings Cross that were popular with the actors and writers he knew from his radio days. And that’s what the irreplaceable Nevski had now diagnosed in the captives in Compound C: a burden of mortification. This explained why, unlike the Italians, and even the Koreans, neither of whom were Nevski’s business, the prisoners of Compound C always showed an aggressive laziness when taken out on work parties. They would not let themselves be accused of doing anything to improve the fabric of their captors’ world.
    Colonel Abercare and his headquarters were wondering by the end of 1943 whether it was worth going through the paces of exacting labor from them at all. After all, most of the other prisoners were said to welcome the chance to get beyond the fences. But apparently not these jokers! Not these men whose army had advanced close enough to take their tens of thousands of prisoners, to be repelled in the last of the Pacific’s archipelagos, and to be prevented thus from taking on the arid steppes or the lush southeast of Australia, in whose wheat belt sat Gawell. If it were decided to suspend their work parties, it could save a lot of trouble and be presented as a punishment, an imposition of well-earned boredom.
    In the meantime, if humane tradition and the Geneva Convention did not require the continuing good treatment of the prisoners in Compound C, wisdom did. In that spirit, Major Suttor had supervised the delivery of netting and timber poles for a structure like an Olympic hammer-throw enclosure, but in this case to enable baseball to be played. Baseball bats, gloves, and balls were delivered in cases of two dozen, procured from the American supply base in Sydney. Suttor, who had been until a year or so ago a serviceable early order batsman in the Crows Nest Second XI, had never seen this kind of equipment in his life, except in American films about miraculous triumphs by low-rated teams. The rules of the game his prisonersbegan to play in the compound, in teams applauded by hundreds of their brethren, were as opaque to him as Sanskrit. But so be it. It puzzled him that the inhabitants of Compound C should be so keen on the great summer passion of their chief enemy, of the America they had