The Great World by David Malouf

Author:David Malouf
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409042358
Publisher: Random House

13

DIGGER, IN THE methodical way that was habitual to him, kept track of each day that passed. He could tell you, if you were bothered to know such a thing, what day of the week it was, in which month; how long it was now till Christmas (how many weeks and days), how long since they had left Changi, how many days and nights they had taken on the road up, how many they had been at work on the line. It mattered to Digger that this bit of order should be maintained in his life. In a place where so much had been taken from them, perhaps permanently, this business of time-keeping, which was after all something the Japs had no control over (it was between you and the sun) represented a last area of freedom to him, a last reminder too of what had been essential to the way they had lived back home.

It was no small thing, this capacity to place yourself accurately in time, this bit of science it had taken so many centuries to get right. It was worth holding on to, gave a form to what otherwise might run right through your hands.

So in his monkish way, which Doug teased him over, Digger could be relied on, when any question of times or dates came up, to deliver an answer on the spot.

The surrender? That had been Sunday, 15 February 1942. Not long after, third week in April, they left Changi for the Great World – Mac had died on 7 June. (This was a date in Digger’s personal calendar. He did not mention it; but three times now he had kept the anniversary.) In October, the 4th to be exact, they had gone back to Changi, and on 22 April the next year, 1943, had begun the long journey into Thailand: five days and nights on the train, crowded into cattle wagons, then a series of night-marches through jungle camps where cholera was raging, twenty nights in all. From then till the day they started back down the line and crossed the border again into Malaya was a hundred and eighty-nine days. Eighteen months it was since then. Just on.

Other things, big and small, had been happening in the world. Most of it they knew nothing of. The dates Digger recorded, the periods – Changi, the Great World, Thailand, Changi again – that was their war. It was three years and six months since they had become prisoners.

He knew well enough how little these measurements told. The days were not equal. Nor were the hours. Nor were the minutes, even.

That minute and a half in the godown, for instance, in which Mac had been killed – there was no way of fitting that into a system that needed sixty minutes to an hour and twenty-four hours to a single revolution of the earth. Some of those days they had worked up there, speedo, as the body recorded them, had been centuries, strung out in an agony for which there were no terms of measurement at all.

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