Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally

Author:Thomas Keneally [Keneally, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Literary, Retail, WWII
ISBN: 9781476734644
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Atria
Published: 2015-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

21

Dr. Delaney had a passion for church music. His congregation thought it an eccentricity in him. The question for many of the Catholic men was, “If you can get to heaven by attending a short Mass, why attend a bloody long one?”

But Emily had joined the choir because that sort of thing was to her taste also. Delaney could not get the farming tenors and basses to swell like those of Italian monks, so he must depend largely upon the voices of their wives. The choir were rehearsing “Ave Verum Corpus” on a Thursday night in the cold church, and the colonel sat in the back pew as a visiting Protestant witness while the clarity of the music lanced the dimness. It was a very simple and pure melody that Mozart had pursued here. It was beyond flamboyance and showmanship. Dr. Delaney was not interested in approximations to perfection either. Occasionally he would mention Roman choirs he had heard, and the Roman pronunciation was to prevail in Gawell. It was “Ah-vay vay-rum,” and then the trailing off of sound at the edge of each phrase, so that “verum” died and from its glorious remains arose “corpus natum,” and “natum” died and in its turn gave birth to “de Maria Virgine.” He was aiming for the standards of that distant independent and eternal city which, thankfully, the Germans had just now abandoned before it had become rubble and its choirs had been stifled.

Mrs. Cullen had tramped into town three miles from her husband and her clever son to learn to sing like a nun of Rome. Listening, the colonel understood the peculiar seduction of Romanism and the mortgage it seemed to have on plainchant and even on Mozart. He saw Emily’s pale face shining in a row just behind Mrs. Cullen’s gypsy-brown one. His affections soared on “cuius latus perforatum,” soared higher than the modestly vaulted ceiling of Dr. Delaney’s church, spiraled into Australia’s enormous but unpraised night.

It was here, in the Catholic church, under the flutings of Mozart, that the intelligence officer Captain Champion and Sergeant Nevski found Abercare. They had failed to reach him by phone and so had gone to Parkes Street and been advised by a neighbor that the colonel and his lady were at choir practice. Their arrival at the church was exceptional, because it portended some emergency. But they felt the colonel should be advised as soon as possible of some new information that had come their way.

• • •

Cheong, the Korean, hand healed, was back clipping grass along the ditch at either side of Main Road and cutting it from around the uprights of each compound, thus preventing it from concealing the lower strands of wire that might then be cut open by enterprising prisoners. On the other side of the inner fence where Cheong worked, parties of Italians in their own compound were engaged in similar work. Some Italian groups raked the earth, for the camp commandant did not want his compounds to look like so much rubble.

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