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was to try to compensate by ferocity for his bad luck and obloquy.
    Then came a plane journey, during which his two guards made motions that they might throw him from the transport aircraft in which he sat wearing cuffs and anklets. He encouraged them to do so by smiling at them. He was in principle willing them to do it. His father, an accountant; his mother; his elder brother, a civil engineer working on fortifications; his elder sister, the schoolteacher—all would mourn him as much as if his crash had been fatal. They would be advised by the military to despair of him, and he did not wish to dishonor their tears by turning up at a future time of liberation.
    His face was dressed in a hospital, and two intelligenceofficers—both of them seemingly philosophic souls—took him for strolls inside a compound, trying with their small gift for language to get information from him. One even played him at badminton.
    After two long railway journeys, the second in a train full of Italians, from whom he was segregated with guards in his own compartment, he reached Gawell. It was late in the year. He and a handful of other captured airmen were permitted to live amongst the Italians, who called him Numero Uno and observed that he was impressively austere and churlish. He tried to ignore the guards’ and sundry Italians’ sexual endearments, mainly fake and derisive, but sometimes grounded in authentic lust, and came to communicate with some of them in a halting patois of Italian and English and Japanese. He spent time with one of them—an amiable fellow—exchanging cultural information and trading this or that word. This Italian’s name was the near-unpronounceable Giancarlo Molisano. Giancarlo seemed amused by Tengan’s air of melancholy and disdain. Tengan, said Giancarlo, reminded him of Dostoyevsky’s relentlessly gloomy brothers, the Karamazov boys. It was clear that nothing could be given to the Japanese pilot to appease his aloofness and nihilism.
    â€œWar end,” Molisano told him, “you go home.”
    â€œNo,” Tengan asserted. “War end, they shoot us all.” Surely they could be depended on for that much. Tengan restated his conviction. “Japan win, they shoot us all.”
    â€œI ain’t think so,” Molisano told him and shook his head and was amused. Amused! He was sanguine about living on unsoured by the repute of having been a captive.
    Ultimately, there could be no true meeting of souls between Tengan and the Italians. He harbored despair at any idea of a future homecoming, while the Italians spoke endlessly of theirs. Some of them seemed not to care if their army must be defeated along the way.
    Later, as more of his nation was rounded up in New Guinea—inBuna and Gona, in Salamaua and Wewak and Hollandia—Compound C at Gawell was built and filled with Tengan’s compatriots. Tengan, as a former pilot, asserted status amongst the compound’s population of Japanese. His spiky behavior, admired by some, grew from the very circumstances he kept secret from others—that he had been taken prisoner by savages, towards whom his feeling of repulsion grew as he recovered from his concussion. He had not charged either the revolver or the rifle. His being taken by savages and by the man with the radio and then by the launchful of soldiers could be explained by someone merciful as the result of shock and brain bruising. But he was not willing to be merciful to himself, and so had to adopt this strict attitude in Compound C to counter his fear that his fellow prisoners would hear he had been captured by people marginally human.

3
    T he site chosen to house the Gawell Prisoner of War Camp was a sloping plateau east of the town, screened from it to the west by grassy hills and congregations of granite boulders and outcrops, and fringed by wide-spaced white and red gums and other eccentric, angular, sharp-elbowed, erratically designed,